Levels of Insanity

I feel that I have crossed all levels of insanity... lemme expand upon that.

I have been working 40 hrs this week and was really looking forward to the weekend.... well u know people always say "chill out at weekend"... but the notion of *chilling out* is a bit different to me. Well i spend most of my friday night to monday evening watching movies and tv shows... lemme enumerate:whole of friends 2nd season (25 episodes i guess) + season one's last 5 episodes+ 2 movies....I AM INSANE...
well i cant help if I am a movie freak, i dont have a girl friend, have a great internet connectivity and google has all the new movies in google videos. Being an Indian myself, i can say that Indians have no regards for copyright laws. I too think that it is a bunch of crap. Copyright should me more like LGPL licences, u can use it but not make profit out of it.... in any sense. Well its a touchy issue and have recieved flaks from lots of people against piracy....

bottomline is I still have 70GB of new video in my home plus all the new bollywood movies uploaded on google videos... GOD save me

UNFAIR!!!

Well my avatar/photo icon should tell you that I am a dexter fan. Infact I can relate to him. I am not saying that I am really geeky like him... just that i terribly suck at anything except computers.
So something that proves that I am pretty bad at it shakes me up. If u r still wondering what i am upto...well i got my grades...and one of then was crappy. I was hoping for a A+ in OS and so in algos...I got an A in OS and a Big B!!! in algorithms....
I kindda got the highest in OS exam but since I had screwed the midterms (by solving the previous years paper... one of the possible mishaps in an open book exam) so i ended up having the second rank in the class.... Life stinks!! I hate when I lose to someone because of my stupidity (well that's why you lose :( )

Algos was a shock to me. I was expecting 45/45 in the exam and all i got was 18. I dunno what went wrong... but i dont think i should have got less marks (given that the prof din cut marks for my ugly handwriting), Will see if he rechecks it or not...I have my fingers crossed but am not hopeful. Pray for me.

BTW i got a raise .....yupeeee..... atleast something to cheer about.

Tech update...

woah ... what a semester and it is finallly over. Actually got over on 16th. I ran back home to cure my bloggy itch which i get if i dont blog :D.
I wrote a long entry...but it got deleted, i got freaked out and decided not to blog...
neway exams went well... actually great.
But there is something i wanna tell u guys abt. I have fallen in love.... with Firefox. yeah who cud have thot that i would fall for a browser... neway as they say browsers are made in heaven...well some in hell. In case u guys are still using IE ar any other browser...do send me your photographs, i always wanted to see how stone age men look like.

I am a sucker for tabs which got us really closer, but i decided to take our relation to the next level when I got a hang of her extensions. I explained them in my earlier entry(which got deleted...), so i'll just enumerate few which i use and are a part of my browsing experience.

• ForeCastFox- realtime time display of temperature... great here as temp varies from -30 to 0 any time.
  
• Google toolbar- for spellcheck and autofill.
• Google Webaccelerator: great customized caching properties.
• FoxClock: displays the current time and time in india.
• LiveLines: directly adds rss feeds of a site to my bloglines.
• ReminderFox: generic reminder application ... very light and no sheBang.
• Nightly tester tool: makes all the firefox 1.07 extensions compatible with 1.5
• Vitamin FoxPose : for tiling tabs... really cool and a must have.
• SessionSaver2: awesome utility to snapback closed tabs and restore session.
• GmailSpace: Another kewl widget for providing ftp like interface to ur GmailDrive.
• del.icio.us: for tagging and stuff.... am a del.icio.us freak so use it extensively.
• BugMeNot: for automagically filling info in form for sites u wont care to visit twice... it fills everything frm passwords to address.
• Google Safe Browsing: avoid phishing attacks.

I use the IFox theme... its got a mac type look and is vey minimalistic and kewl.

Secondly I read about Singularity OS by Microsoft. It has a new design. I guess its the first OS that was built taking Dependability as its main focus rather than performance (as if windoze performed well... damn me ... am blogging from windoze and bitching abt it). It has just 2% code in trusted C and 1% in assembly, rest is in C#!! no OS that i know of is written in that much abstract language. Really kewl stuff. Check out the videos and see for ur self (u may get them from MS site)

Blog addict

Well one thing is for sure that I am addicted to blogging. I have 3 blogs... well i do maintain only this regularly though. Since all of you know that I got a camera and have gone into a clicking spree... I thot it was now time for a new blog.

One thing that am always running short of is time so I was looking for the most easy way to accomodate photoblogging into my schedule. I tried photo blogging with picasssa and it didnt quite click on the time factor. Live journal was again something similar ..so i tried using flickr. I used it earlier for photo sharing now i'll use it for one liner photo blogs. The flickr uploader works great and all I have to do is to right click the file and do "send to flickr" (on windows ofcourse... nothing there on linux :( ).
This is the RSS feed and this is the link to the photostream... do take a look at it.

Also I was meddling with my camera on linux. Kodak EasyShare software simply sucks on windows. I had really no hope as its a new model. I plugged in my camera and fired Kaboo (i guess that is the name... but not quite sure)... FC4 detected it gracefully, asked me which photos to transfer and transffered the required files... thats all I want from a camera software. Although I was a bit frustated... I like when things are cryptic... I wanted to mount /dev/sda1 and open the camera card... I hate it when my FC4 detects my flash drive and places an icon on my desktop :P. Anyway linux rulz.

Winter....

Winter is approaching.... well technically it is not yet winter here although the temperature dropped to a wicked -7 C. The scenic beauty is awesome, but the chill restrains me from spending my time outdoors and appreciating mother nature... good for me.

Well now that I have got a cam, and a figity person that I am, I could not resist tinkering with some of the pics I took. Above you are seeing a collage of photos created using picassa. All the photos are of my immediate neighbourhood.

Shoot 'em down ...

I am now the proud owner of Kodak c360. The retail price is $239 and i got it for $129.9... I also purchased a 512 mb mem card for just $19.

I love Black fridays... I went to Best Buy at around 2 am , only to find that people were standing there since 7 pm ...that is insane!! But it paid off anyway. The camera is a powerpacked pony, despite its small size, it has slr features plus manual focus option... i am loving it. It is a 5 Mp cam and is the latest C series Kodak camera. 3x optical +5x digital zoom... slick!!. I wanted to go for the camcorder but it was a bit outside my budget... panasonic 26x/1000x for just $249. Either these guys are trying sell their goods at a big loss or they are thugging us during normal days.

To top it all I got a pack of 25 CDR+75 DVD-R for just $2.9 .... incredible!! 

Nothing is impossible....

Check out this story:
Zubbles
I found it while following a slashdot story... It is 10 pages long but its worth it. I would say its a great story of a man chasing his dreams... well a bit geeky too. It really feels great to be a scientist.

look before u leap... design before u code

I spent past 5 midnights in college, doing my projects... I really screwed one up. There r certain things you learn the hard way. Designing is one such thing. The other is bias.

Bias...hmmm... anyone who talk for me for hour can easily infer that I hate Windows and am in love with Linux. Well that should be pretty normal , infact people do love something and hate others... but for a technologist the sense of objectivity is really important. Windows may be badly designed and Linux might be extraordinarily great but loving or hating them is insanity. It creates a mental block. How did bias ruin my nights??? well i procrastinated abt c# proj and ....

Designing, for me is like girl friend/sex/drama... is always there on books not in my life. But my software modelling and analysis class has really taught me alot. I started designing ... that is like a monkey writing sonnets of shakespere. I was really strugglling with a requirement and that was consuming my whole time ,well past the deadline. The application that i had put up was not even the bare minimum. In my frustation I mailed the prof that I had spaghettised my code... and i dont know what to do... I really needed a B to maintain my scholarship. He agreed to meet me and sort the matter out.

In a really short meeting he said a sentence which changed the dimension of my cosmos. He said The Hardest requirement is not the most important requirement ... I met him at 3 pm... found out that the feature that i wanted to implement could be implemented using a so called cross domain delegate, which ofcourse had a low ROI(return on interest)... so i dumped that part and finished the code by 8 pm.... the same code which was teasing me for the past whole damned week. I think if the lights were switched off, u could have seen a halo of enlightment around me :) ...
(btw he also told me that I can easily aim for A/A-) yayyyy...


PS: I really hate norton AV/IS.... I had removed VX2.look2me trojan/malware/adware.... but its still there on my n/w and norton does not stop it form entering my pc again. They ceratinly designs viruses better than the scanners...

Life... File Not Found

From my earlier posts you could have imagined that my life is really going the way I always wanted... Highly techie type, but today I felt my brain getting fried. Not that I was doing something hightly demanding, just the fact that I had been working out too much lately drained me out.

Well for the past couple of days I was working with FreeBSD kernel... a job that I love to do... so finished it before the deadline and started adding elegant features and test modules which were way beyond the requirement. Now that the project is over, I have another project at hand... this one is a C# project and is quite a biggie... I was given 5 weeks time to finish it...the deadline is this wednesday and I started it yesterday. I will have to satisfy all the requirements according to spec sheet before the deadline. Man ...only if I liked Windows like *niX... The fact that anyone can write a program easily in .NET makes the whole work of writing C#.NET code unexciting. Well yeah then you only use C# and java to implement business logic.

I have written few great tools on languages like Java and C# and there is no way I could do the same thing with C like language. But for reasons unknown to me, they dont excite me a bit. I tend to get bored writing code in those language. Implementation is so trivial that if u know the logic, there's no way you cannot write an application unless you are extraordinarily stupid.
If u use these languages then u only need to figure out what to do instead of how to do. The problem being that once you know what to do, doing it becomes simple and boring. These facts make them superb language for commercial application development.... which makes me wonder if I will ever be happy settling for a regular job where engineers are like machines ... who are just thinking mechanically and doing nothing more than a blue collared worker. The only difference being that they get to sit in an air conditioned chamber and get paid more. The work is almost similar with CS engg using components to make up a bigger system.

I kindda like putting my feet in uncharted waters, hacking the kernel, learn some fancy languages like C#,Jave, php ...write one or two great applications using them and then forget about them. The more obscure the thing is the more I like it.... I loved to crack windows applications and snoop the network but that too got boring after a while. I guess am on my way to be a scientist...but i dont think that i'll be doing Phd...My Dream: Being the CTO of a multinational Software company or better start a company and be its CTO/President.

PS: my pc is adware infested...ne one knows how to remove them. I tried spy doctor & norton but no avail :(.... i hate when my webpage changes automatically to some cell phone vendor site and flash animation cover my screen when i am online(which accounts for 15/24 of my day)

Virtual Memory Hacks...

Today I finished my mods on FreeBSD's VM subsystem. I changed the page replacement algorithm from LRU to FIFO. I also changed the prefetching scheme to make it fetch a single page ahead of it instead of traditionally fetching out a few pages from the front and the back of it.

Now this obviously was an effort to improve our understanding of the existing kernel. We hoped that FIFO with new preloading will really be pathetic in all the cases. But this wasnt the case. The original scheme was consistent in most of the cases but failed by almost 20% when i accessed an insanely large linked list. I ofcourse could not use stack as there is a serious size limitation associated with it... also I was not sure whether the stack frame associated with a process resident in the memory is paged out.... i think it wont be... but thats the logical implication... i needed empirical data to assert somethings for the experiment...

Any way FIFO was way better than LRU for that particular case. The graphs for all the different cases proved a lot of theories which I had read and broke many myths and assumption I had about the system. The best one is this...

struct node{
   struct node *next;
   int info[4096]; //page size in FreeBSD4.1
   };

.
.
.
struct node *first,*curr,*temp;
first=(struct node *)malloc(sizeof(struct node));
do{
add temp to first...extend the linked list .//too lazy to type
}while(there is still space in the heap);

Now guess the amount of page faults....just 400. And as soon as you write to it the pf shoots up to 45000. My best bet is that the system implements some kind of copy on write. The memory is allocated on heap only when something is written onto it or read from it...not before.

There were plenty of obscure facts that never failed to baffle me. All the budding kernel hackers should definitely take a look at BSD kernel. Simple yet powerful...

My experiments with truth...

For the past two days I have been trying desperately to get my own VM page replacement scheme to work on FreeBSD, but all in vain. I am implementing FIFO and the version I am using supports LRU (infact any OS does). So of course i was expecting a clear increase in the number of pagefaults or perhaps a system crash due to excessive thrashing. My two test programs gave me the fault count of 15636 and 6 for LRU and FIFO. The results were quite opposite to what i had expected. I was using a combination of both LRU and FIFO. FIFO for active list and LRU for the inactive, cached and free list. I thought that I would have hit onto something really great. I was so overjoyed that i called my project mate Jorge at midnight!! later inspection of the code revealed that i had made a programatical mistake and the damned thing was just spittin out garbage.aaah...
After fixing the code the two algorithms for some divine reason were giving me almost the same results. One other grp too was getting that result.... i decided to give it a break.

As usual I started watching tech videos/podcasts/vodcasts. One of them involved ARP poisoning using the man in the middle attack. I have been browsing for stuff for ages now, so didn't give it a second thought. But since I was on Linux that time, i gave it a try. I used a simple utility called ettercap (am not going to give you the links, if u r smart u r gonna get them anyway... otherwise think that i did u a favour... most funny stuffs u can do with it are illegal). I added a filter that just sniffed the incomming packets for images and replaced them with my photograph. I did not care to switch that thing off. Actually it was really funny to see my photo plastered all over my roomy's browser. Then the bitter truth came to me. Instead of scanning my subnet, i had left the sniffer lose onto the whole network.
I just hope nobody else is online at midnight and the cops understand the humor :P

System call in FreeBSD

Kernel programming is considered a dark art, but writing a system call is in FreeBSD is incredibly simpler than Linux. So here's my quick and dirty, 5 minutes to fame, system call implementation on FreeBSD 4.1. This system call just print Pico Rocks on the terminal :)

Edit /usr/src/sys/kern/syscall.master: I wont explain why i am doing certain things... cuz the code does a wonderful job in doing that. So just go to the end of the file. You will see a lot of system call defined. The first column gives you the system call number. The last sys call on my machine had a syscall number of 363. So add the following line at the end

364     STD    POSIX        { int sys_pico(void); }

STD means that your system call will always be included in the kernel, which was necessary in my case as I had to enter asynchonously from the top half of the kernel. The function within the curly brackets give you the syscall signature. Also if you system call is named pico(), the signature here has to be sys_pico(). POSIX means that its is POSIX option, well i din really care abt that I just wanted it on my PC and not ported to others... u cud have used BSD or any other options available.

Next run

#make init_sysent.c

in /usr/src/sys/kern directory. This automatically updates init_sysent.c, syscalls.c and syscalls.h.

Now add the following file in /usr/src/sys/kern directory under the name of sys_pico.c:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <sys/systm.h>
#include <sys/kernel.h>
#include <sys/proc.h>
#include <sys/mount.h>

/*
*The whole BSD kernel is littered with K&R type formatting.
* so i used it too just for uniformity sake...
*/
int
sys_pico(p, v, retval)
  struct proc *p;
  void        *v;
  register_t  *retval;
{

  printf("Pico Rocks\n");
  return (0);
}

Now go to /usr/src/sys/conf/files and add the line

kern/sys_pico.c   standard

anywhere u like... since the whole file was arranged in alphabetical order so I inserted it in its correct ordered position. Now recompile the kernel and reboot the machine.

Now the following code snippet calls our sysetm call:

/*test.c*/
#include <sys/syscall.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
  syscall(364);
  return(0);
}

compile the above program using gcc -I /usr/src/sys/sys.
o/p: Pico Rulz ....hoooray
Now of course you might be thinking that why cant i call pico() normally like other system calls. well for that u have to modify a syscall.mk file(or whatever way ur libc's Makefile.inc includes them) and recompile libc. I tried to do it but my libc crashed and I had to reinstall the whole damn thing. The result of reinstallation was so gross that i ended up re-installing my BSD.

Update: Sorry i almost forgot.... dont forget to remake the config file too in the i386/conf directory

 #config GENERIC

FOSS.IN/2005

One thing that made life really kewl in Bangalore was the abundance of like minded engineers and scientists. By that I mean I knew a lot of people who were or wanted to be Linux geeks. The BLUG, although was politics infested like any other large group but those who were not involved always enjoyed the rich flow of intellectual material at the BoFs (birds of a feather meetups) and the annual LBA meet. Especially this annual event never fails to excite me. I totally went nut for linux and broke my association with Windows in 2003 when i attended the talk by Herald welte (author of netfilters), Miguel and Nat (Mono), Brian (Apache ofcourse) and Rasmus(php's dad) (of course i do code a teeny weeny bit on windows when the situation demands).
This year they have come yet again with a big bang. They have even roped in Alan Cox (those of u who dont know who he is...go kill urself) to give a couple of talks. Now the number of talks are around 185 and include everything from BSD to desktop to embedded development. Check out this tallk list. It is as great as Linux Kongress meet. I am missing Bangalore :(

Ya and BTW i did well on the SMA mid term. Got 94.4/100 ... it was the 3rd highest i think. It counts for 1/3 of the gpa and was really a refreshing change after getting scores which were 3rd lowest. Somehow I only show my mettle in exams?? even in algorithm... and i know why... i simply dont work hard for assignments.... but come on no one is perfect. (Agent Smith said: You r still only human :P)

Feel My presence :)

So finally i m glad to release my own website... was waiting for years to this. check this out:
http://web.syr.edu/~siyer02/

Do tell me if any of you guys reading this find an error of a silly mistake... Jorge already pointed out that the w3c validator gives 7 standard errors... i'll fix them as soon as google fixes its 40 errors :)...

and yes am blogging after a week or so... i was really busy last few weeks with my mid terms. I went through the whole of Jeff Prosise and am pretty comfortable with C#.Net now.... though i have a million reasons to hate it. As all you guys would me knowing that C# is a derivative of Java, MS have crossed all the limits to make it look better. I call that over engineering.
They have introduced a feature called Boxing. People who have used java would be knowing that you cant simply use primitive datatype in conjunction with collections. eg. u cannot put an int in a HashMap, one needs to box int to Integer before doing the required stuff. C# has a work-around. It automatically boxes the primitive datatypes into objects.

Now for total newbies that might seem like a wonderful stuff but the consequences of this thing are really wicked. Now suppose i am making a multithreaded application and i want to give shared access to some stuff, say i want to lock on a variable

int i;
lock(i){
am doing stuffs really kewl;
}

this mechanism in C# is really easy and awesome, anyone who has worked with barebones C would agree to that. Now under the hood the CLR (common language runtime...just like jvm for java) is creating an object which boxes i. If the code was locking on some object like a System.Collection.Queue object then there wouldn't have been any problem. Now in above case if another thread tries to do the same thing the CLR reboxes i into a different object. So there will be no run time or compile time errors. Undercovers the threads are blocking on different objects but developer thinks that they are locked on same object. Java 1.4 with no autoboxing would have given me an error if i would have tried to lock on datatype but C# thinks that it is a lot intelligent than the coders. In short a slight mistake and there will be no synchronization between the threads.... resulting in hard to debug code and crappy race conditions which show up magically at sometime. Ya and by the way i can tell u about delegates too, which are hell lot similar to Qt signal and slots....aaah but i wont explain its pitholes...go learn C# urself :)

Jorge told me that Java5 is incorporating autoboxing!!! what is the world comming to???

Cant a Monkey be sane???

Okay i know i am intelligent, i use intelligence to get around problems in a nifty way. I hate cook book recipes. This also implies that i am not more intelligent myself. That is if i use my max intelligence to screw something then there is no possible way I myself can correct it (without heavy doses of caffiene :). Cook book comes to the rescue, u do something in the most boring way and if something screws up, u can almost always rectify the errors.

The above rant is with respect to software design/analysis/specs blah...
So if you follow a train of thought, your process almost always works and the chances of errors are minimized. I had written an entry early on about me being a monkey coder. I almost never read the specs (ok i read it ... but in the end made something more wonderful... but out of spec). The problem is I always rely on intutive stuff which is WRONG. I can design a nifty little algorithm and make great applications which I have done in the past, just because I have a brain... But thats the wrong thing to do for an engineer. An engineer almost never uses intution and always does things empirically. I took the SMA(software modelling and Analysis) course to just help me with that. And mind you it has helped me a great deal in that.

It is surely having catastrophic effect on my ego though. Earlier in class in bangalore "no one was above me" ...now "no one's below me". My design sucks, my specification are crappy, and the fun part is I always get mature enough to understand about a subtle part in a concept document or a software after it has been evaluated. So thats the only thing that is keeping me going in that class. I seem to be the only fresher there and most of my colleagues have loads of experience in Software Engg. People from Infosys like company are doing great cuz they are good at cook book methods.

As i mentioned before I was working as a system administrator for the psychology dept at my college. I have started a teeny weeny bit of research on Computational Neuroscience, although am not going great in it cuz it requires a lot of DSP based stuff but am catching on. But ya am awesome on the software they work on and that keeps me in business. I am working under Dr. Marc Howard, he told me a scientist just explores a subject and an engineer makes it useful for the mankind. I am starting to feel that I am more of a scientist than an engineer. I cannot work on the same thing at a stretch.... I worked on java... did a pretty good job at it but kindda got bored, then i shifted to inserting DProbes on some application on solaris... did well but the thirst to do something new was always there. I though cracking stuffs will be kewl, but ah so boring once u know it.

So here is my profile, give me any strange technology and I'll make the first great application that ever existed on it (I wrote small applications on matlab and vhdl without even seeing the docs, just once... i mean how difficult is it to write something which is srtuctured)... and dont bother to gimme the same thing again cuz i will do a really crummy job later on. I would love code in something which give crazy errors and has a lot of pointers hanging on, but if you gimme a language that has error handling and all those "oh so coool" features, i'll probably get bored.

Specs are great, without them there is no possible way to build an application. The applications am talking about needs atleast 400 programmers coding relentlessly for a period of 2 years... a minor design fault can have terrible consequences. Am a budding system analyst so I wont like to think what would happen if all 400 of them think intutively...CHAOS...Godamn we need 400 machines to fit everythink into its place. I HEERBY RESOLVE TO DESIGN BEFORE I CODE...

Hack-a-doodle-do

I am really feeling exuberant today.
The past few days were really crappy... partly cuz i was missing my friends on my bday(which was on 12th)

That brings me back to the point about my happiness. Well today i made my first working scheduler for FreeBSD. I wrote a scheduler which allocates fair share to each process, i.e. suppose a process asks a kernel for 10% of cpu time then my kernel ensures that it gets it. 2 weeks of messing with the process queues, strange priorities and deadly decays, and twitchy context switches eventually bore fruit. I am now a kernel hacker :D. I really love system coding.

Secondly I have discovered a few benifits of High speed internet that I had never experienced before. I got a new version of iTunes. Its incredible.

You can subsribe to podcasts and vodcasts like you subscribe to rss feeds. And you get new radio shows and TV shows. Its amazing!!! I mean who can imagine this in India with a puny bandwidth (max 128kbps Vs 11/54 Mpbs wireless). Moreover I will soon be getting a wireless router and will be converting my home to a wireless hotspot :) (psst...not that i m a rich bugger but its really cheap here and evrybody has it)... How many wireless hotspots are there in India?? The few available in IIMs and other institutes are publicised as if its something great.

And ya regarding those shows...they r absolutely free, just like rss feeds as i said. You can select the shows you want to download. I subscribed to a bollywood and a channel called system... downloaded a couple of countdown shows, and learned how to hack a iPod Nano, build a opensource HDTV capture tool. It really breaks my heart that there is no open source equivalent of iTunes though.

Sys Admin Woes :(

Well Sys admin is supposed to be *The Geek* in a company. Specially in a non-IT firm, whatever he does is magic... even if he changes permission of a file :P or something seemingly naive for the *CS* guys....

But when you have a geekier employer life becomes difficult. Specially if all the system you maintain are really old ones and the corporate website is maintained by a bash shell!!... no jazzy OO, no hi-fi script... just u, me, html and bash.

So what happens when a poor soul tries to run a jazzy script ?? Chaos....

My experience in Debian here makes me wonder as to why on earth was i using Red Hat/ Fedora!!! I can hereby safely assert that Debian rules... guess why??? simple apt-get and aptitude.... the kewlest tool i've ever seen.

PS: If you think this entry is too cryptic... then it probably is.

Bee aS Dee

Want a perfect recipe for spoiling a day..????
Ans: Try installing FreeBSD.

So we have 4.4 BSD for Operating System course and have to do kernel programming on FreeBSD 4.1 because it is somewhat similar to 4.4 BSD. I was a contended soul with WinXP and FC4 dual boot. Life was smooth.... sigh!!!

I partitioned my windows drive using partition magic (Of course NOBODY touches MY LINUX BOX)...
but the damn thing wont recogonize extended partitions and wants to play GOD and partition the whole thing it self. AAArghhh. wasted 12 hrs doing this chasing a wild goose.

Today afternoon thought of vmware. downloaded ver 5.00 ,downloaded the crack and tried to install BSD on it but now the *THING* wants IRQ number of devices!!! sooo shweeet....sooo user friendly.... i almost loved it (pun intended). Took me two damn hrs to figure a way for it to work.

Life is wonderful

A full timer Huh :D

Well i'm really elated for two reason...
This is my 51st post. I truly dedicate it to Rohith - The One, :P, who helped me into the wonderful world of blogging.

Secondly I am now a full time system administrator. Yup that means that i can finally get rid of the food court and RSA jobs... Although the pay is the same and probably takes more mental work, but i love this job.
I came here pennyless( OK had my dad's money), was searching for a job, got food court and security jobs instead. I degraded myself every single second i worked in food court and spoilt my body clock working as a security guard from 1am-7am. In about a month I finally found a job ( a full time ) that suits me and i love doing it. I SRIDHAR VISHWANATHAN, :P, MARK THIS DAY AS PICO DAY, THE DAY I BROKE THE BONDAGE OF A JOB WHICH I HATED TO DO AND IN WHICH I SUCKED AT AND MARK IT AS A BEGINNING OF NEW ERA :The PICO ERA...........HURRRRRRRRRAAAH

Hail the Sys Admin!!!

After much ado i finally got a job i love. I am now the sys admin of a psychology lab in my university. I will probably also be working with Dr Marc Howard. He has done a terrific job of developing Temporal Context Model (TCM). In a nutshell its a mathematical model of how human memory works, how distant memory gets weaker and stuffs like that. It involves a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge and his two research assistants are from electrical engg and bio engg dept. I really do hope i m gonna get involved in it in a big way.

Well Marc is really kewl, perhaps the only linux evangelist/geek i saw in the college (Mr fawcett is an all rounder... he seems to know about every field that exists on earth and work on them... but he prefers micosoft technologies in his classes). He is a hardcore Debian user. so finally i was pushed to install debian :) instead of my favourite fc4. So now I have worked on all of RH/fedora, solaris 10, Deb and a teeny weeny bit of SuSe.

deb is a totally different distro than fedora. For one thing its definitely slimmer than fc4 and somehow faster than it. As a sys admin I had to install debian on one of the systems, piece of cake, yeah !! but the X kept on crashing...
XF86config asked me all kind of ugly questions about the hardware, nobody knew about it as it was a closed box PC( Dell dimension 360...I can write another blog to describe it though).. I went to the dell site using the username i got when i got my laptop, got the service tag from the cpu tower and got all the specs...
But still XF86Config was not helping... on top of it the wireless conked out and had to use the wired internet on the laptop to google things out...

Some obscure posting in a blog told me that XF86config sucks on debian and i should use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-common xserver-blahblah ... great!!
tried it and it worked like a baby... mouse was the next problem child as it wanted to know the device filename explicity. The list was small so got that working in 3 tries (randomized search algorithm based on heuristics :) ...

All u reading this entry Hail the sys admin.

Dhatu!!

After using spanish in my Titles... here's a recourse to hindi. Dhatu means METAL...

I finally started listening to Heavy Metal. And all you folks who know that i din listen to ne thing other than slow rock, pop and indian songs... would surely be surprised.
Well I had two weeks to finish writing a concept document for a code generator that i'll be making over a period of next two weeks (in C#). The bad me was busy doing everything else when the situation became necessary to handle. I started writing the document yesterday. But doing a 2 weeks job in 2 days is no joke.

So i borrowed my friends head phones, switched on yahoo's metal radio channel, and started typing. I typed continuously on Monday from 1:30 to 6:30 am and 3:00 to 5:00pm and today from 4:00 to 9:30 pm... i worked like a machine, finished the project and uploaded it. All the time Metal was with me, it helped me concentrate.... but i dont remember any of the lyrics except someone insanely shouting f* and m*....
I got a message from yahoo that i have listened to 200 songs this month and need to pay for listening to new songs. Since I dont listen to Yahoo radio => I listened to more than 200 metal songs (or noises) while doing my project.

I dont care if i corrode my ears, but now while studying the only thing that goes into my ears will be METAL

Metamorphosis of a Hacker!!!

Before i go any further, I want u all to correct the definition of who a hacker is...(If at all u got it wrong)

Now u guys following my blog (including me... yep i do read my blog as a third person and introspect), would surely have noticed a change in me. And my friends in Bangalore, who have been with me for 4 years have also seen me change in those four years. So i thought a change a change in the blog title will be apt.

When I look back ... i see a totally different person who passed high school, a different person who cleared class 12th, a different one when i became, Sridhar Vishwanathan,B.E. CS and i have really changed a lot in this 1 month in ... Well people here know me as Sridhar.V.Iyer ... I had to do with the Iyer part as my father had put my name as Sridhar Vishwanathan Iyer in my passport and I did not get time to change it. Am now kindda used to it. Some people call me kutti (cuz my yahoo id is sridhar_kutti)... so the nomenclature has changed a lot... BTW my employer in food court calls me Shrek cuz she finds "sridhar" hard to pronounce!!! am cool with it

I really started off as a guy who loved computers and quizzez and stuff like that... but i guess got lost in schooling (as the saying goes...was born intelligent..education ruined me... pun intended :)
Tried hard..really hard for IIT...got complacent and BAM!!! missed it... i thought i was a living rot... but when i see it now, thats the best thing that happend to me. I got into SJCIT... a non descript college... became topper without much hardwork... did the thing i loved to do most (computer!!!) and became instantly popular... (modesty died the day i was born)

But am that kind of guy who gets itchy when the things go smooth... I left for Syracuse... chasing my destiny... left 5 job offers... could have lived the rest of the life easily... but i crave for something... something beyong destiny, knowledge or power, ... i want to give Microsoft and Google a run for their money. Though I am not a enterpeneur like Bill Gates, nor do i think i am a genius like Linus, Stallings or Larry Page, but i guess i think am hard willed like them.

Am in SU now with lots of Bill Gates/Torvalds and i feel the fear of mediocrity creeping again. Lets see what happens after 2 years. I guess i've been hacking my life a lot. I resolve to SUCCEED.

Back Home!!

Well today I felt that I was back in bangalore... working with my friends in Aztec. But you might ask why???

Well those of you who do know me ... know that I am a die hard Linux supporter... for me life starts when the computer boots. So I got my laptop... running WinXp and some of the most ridiculous and outrageous softwares of all times that Dell ships with it. My university portal support only Macs and Windows so linux is a big no no.

Finally took the cds from Jorge... partitioned and installed XP and FC4( have to put FreeBSD too). But now i hit bottom again as no support for wireless here. Hours of googling i came to know that i needed to install/make a few file... got something from sourceforge... tried installing it but did not install. Later i discovered that the damn thing was already installed in the machine. Man i was pissed off. But somehow the internet started working using the GUI (some interface... i hate them... looks too normal... i really like if something screws up and i correct it... really hate if something goes on smooth...). Then i had a problem with the sound module too. Usually i used to reinstall the sound module. But Jorge pointed out that even the activation part was hiddden in some kind of wierd Interface.

Gaim was kewl. Yahoo and google talk have no problems. So now my linux machine is fully customized (although the mail client needs to be tweaked a bit)... i was really hit by a bout of nostalgia. So this is my first post from syracuse written on FC4....

But somebody got to spoil this ultraCool interface thing..... Dont u think???? (pun intented)

A Great Day

All right amigos....
Ya I know you guys are wondering why am acting as such a smart a* and using spanish in my recent posts....My project mate is from Costa Rica and I find spanish really interesting.

So i saw a mail in one of my yahoo groups informing that there will be free salsa classes. And of course Indians are known for not missing freebies :)

I was expecting mexican/latino beauties (Salma hayeks and penelope cruzes and the lopezes :)
but I knew that finally i knew that we would be dancing with guys only but still that the thought that i'll be learning something new gave me a kick. It turned out to be better than that. There were few latino girls and they did pair up with us.

The instructor was overwhelmed too. After teaching salsa for an hour he taught us merengue too. Next week he'll be teaching us some advanced steps and might introduce cha cha cha. Overall it was a really satisfying experience.

BTW my tai chi is really improving now. I can walk flawlessly :D.

Earlier that day I got my exemption exam marks. It turned out that I was one of the three guys who passed the test and was allowed to drop the subject. Whew what a relief!! Had taken 4 subjects against my senior and professor advice. Of course I could not drop subjects as there was too much to learn and only 24 hrs in a day. Clearing MBC( MAthematical basis for computing) really made my schedule less hectic. (though its still crammed... thanks to my thirst for learning new stuff... have started playing squash... so have lot on my platter to eat).

After the classes I went to Alex Thevarajan's house for a get together for international students.Alex is really a great guy. He likes to have a multinational family. He has family members from 13 countries. He himself is a Sri Lankan and seemed like the epitome of courage. Brandon stays with him too (i wrote about him in my earlier post). Brandon too is an awesome dude. He has 1 undergrad degree(BS), 3 masters degrees and is doing a Phd along with 2 more undergrad courses... and has also served in the army for 2 years. He is only 26!!! Ask him what he plans to do next and he replies... "I want to do some work for the development of India"... Its hard to find people like him.

Alex had a pool table and a ping pong(table tennis) table in his house. I picked up pool pretty fast. Played 8 ball and lost by a cinch...overall i was quite contented about my performance. Then i played table tennis. I only played it in Aztec and I sucked in it... Shyam, Jeet, Rohith, Asit were far superior players than me... but man outta 46 people present there I was one of the few who could play the game...

Finally after all the escapades I came back home at midnight and started browsing... but had no energy to blog about it. So am blogging about it now. Just came from my on post RSA training ... Its kind of watchman like job where I have to check the Ids of people and log the people entering the dorms.

It was really a fulfilling day. Went to sleep at 4 in the morning... what a great day!!

BAGELS!!!!

All the Indians who have never heard of Bagels... Hail The Bagel!!

Ya I know, u think whats this post is all about. The answer is simple. Its about bagel. Its like a bun with a hole.

So my first job in Syracuse was with Blinker's Bagels. Crazy me thought Bagels would be the name of a guy. Then came the tough part.

Had to remember all the different types of bagles...asigo, dried tomato,blueberry.. the list is huge plus the different toppings and garnish. Also the different beverages and what not. Somehow managed through it.

So next time you see me with a black cap and a T Shirt, i'll probably ask you: Blinker's bagel, How may i help you :)

Tai Chi

Today was my first Tai Chi class. Yi had agreed to coach me. I thought it would be quite easy but man it really is difficult. I just learnt how to walk naturally. He also told me to do a WANG which is a gesture like pushing with outstreched palm... but doing it naturally with the flow.
It was awesome, although it was tiring but feeling the blood flow through your limbs is a great experience and it is unlike anything I had experienced before.

Although he agreed to teach me twice a week I suspended the class until i practiced walking perfectly. Well it wud really be kewl to add Tai Chi in my resume.

BTW Syracuse is what i call a global village... i have made many friends from other countries. My project mate is Jorge (its pronounced as Josh). He's from Costa Rica and is a geek in real sense.

Niagra Impresionante

www.flickr.com

Went to Niagra this saturday.... Man it was great.

Uploaded a few fotos in flickr ..just click the above picture to see all of them...
Niagra was really a spectacle. The whole environment was so wonderful. Apart from savouring the sheer beauty and vastness of mother nature I made some great friends. One of them is Brandon. If I write anything about him now it wouldn't be fair... i will dedicate one whole entry to him... we discussed lot of theology and philosophy.

Another good friend i made was Yi (though we became friends before this trip...met him at the dean's reception). He is another great guy doing his Phd in electronics. He is teaching me Tai Chi :)

The cultural diversity here is great. I am starting to love Syracuse.

Fear of mediocrity

Last year i had posted about Google's Topcoder competition...
this post is dedicated to the same thing.

I kindda thot it wud be good to give my best shot to this contest again... but somehow it gives me more creeps than my regular exams (i didn't get scared even when i was coming here at Syracuse...)

So i started coding right away at 12:00 EDT... and everything started falling apart. I opted for Java instead of my favorite C/C++ cuz had kindda lost touch with them (had been doing J2EE for the last 6 months... followed by a brief period of programming on C/D on Solaris)...
To start with the app hanged... the browser closed itself... i fired firefox... and started coding again... i was longing for eclipse... I wanted my programs to auto complete.. now u wud ask why???? Because I DID NOT KNOW THE METHODS OF SOME CLASSES...
so i fired javaalmanac.com and started lookin out and coding the 250 pointer (the easiest one)...
but alas in the confusion I lost track of time and i pressed the submit button after my time got expired. I did not even look at the 750 pointer.

I hate my self for the mess.... i hate not succeeding at something i know i am good at.... my performance shook my soul... If there is anything i fear in this world apart from God... it is mediocrity, of losing out...
I HEREBY RESOLVE TO SHOW MY METTLE IN THE NEXT TOPCODER.... HERE I COME GOOGLE ....YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

My First Notebook

Finally got my first laptop...
www.deals2buy.com
Its Dell Inspiron 600m (customized)... closed the deal for $1061 only including the delivery & carry bag. (after a discount of $600)

Well Dell is kind of official laptop of all Indian student as it is the cheapest (hey we r not cheap... just less spendthrift)... the other junta goes for macs (kewl dudes..), sony vios( rich guys) or hp/toshibas (different ;)

Man i'm in love with it and really cant wait for it to get delivered. I just ordered it so will probably be getting it next week sometime.
It has PM 1.6 GHz, 1 Gb RAM, 80 GB hard disk, wifi b/g, bluetooth enabled and really cool. I got a printer free with it... and of course i'll be sellin it out on amazon or ebay. :-)

I cant really wait for it....

Sloppy Sundays!!

So here i am this is me... ya ya am givin u another crap from Bryan Adam's ( the song is not crap though)

well the US surely is a stickler for rules and most of my time has in Syracuse has gone completing the formalities... but like India weekends are free :)

I was looking forward to salsa classes on saturdays only to realise that the only thing that was going on was Indian dance and Cricket/badminton. I kindda dont like both of them. The pesumed classes were scheduled at midnight so i slept while waiting... woke up...got my self together ..walked around 3 miles to the spot only to realise that i had made a total fool outta myself. now i came back and slept ... i was really lookin forward to a Great Sunday (sundae wud have been cool)

I got up at around 0630 hrs... finished my breakfast by 0730 and started watchng a movie... the movie finished and i started watching friends ... by the time i got bored watching them i realised it was already 1820 and my whole sunday was ruined....

I thot i will share this with u and go and take bath... I SUCK

finalmente en Syracuse

u guys r wondering wat language is the Title in???
Its spanish, meaning "finally in Syracuse".... nah havent been learning spanish..just added from google language for the effect. :D

so am finally in syracuse. The city although a popular city in US is devoid of any crowd. I mean we went to the nearby cofee shop to see find some people... the only things u see here are cars and buildings. Thot i'll just have a coffee ($1.5) :( ... i got it without sugar or milk... after putting some 6 packets it still wasnt sweet enough (i mean the desi flavour...) . The crowd is really friendly. People just say "Hi" or "Whats up" or just wink at u or give a welcoming smile whenever they see u (Strangely working Indians are too bored to accept that they r Indians). know what happened in Syracuse airport!!! the trolley vending machine needed credit card to operate so i asked a resident accept $2 from me and lemme use his credit card. He got me a trolley but refused to accept the cash, no matter how hard i tried. When i pressed him a bit he told me to keep it as a christmas gift... i am really bowled over by their hospitality.

The scene in my college regarding Open Source technology is really dismal. Well since i dont wanna be a lab rat so i didn't choose a college that was givin me AI/NN or any supposedly high fundoo topic. But people here dont relly give a damn to linux... my wud be prof worked for 16 years with Microsoft and ofcourse Microsoft technologies dominate the scene here. People arent really enthusiastic abt anythin here...
I guess where other people search oppotunities..I create them... planning to start a LUG here... wish me best of luck with my linux aspirations.

Have to search for an accomodation.

All sad that ends well....Part 2

Well today's my last day at Aztec.

I believe in the philosophy that To be smart, be with smart people.... this place is an overflowing cornucopia of geeks and ultrasmart people. Every single day in Aztec had been enjoyable (except the weekends). Learnt loads of stuff...
But now the time has come to move on....

I'll never forget Aztec for what it gave me... the experince was exhilerating... Now am going to name a few people who made Aztec a haven for my ficle, finicky soul.

Ramesh Sir: If you are a fan of Hermione Granger then you will surely like Ramesh S. There wasnt a topic under the sun that he didn't know about. Not a single technology or a peice of code that he has not worked on. He is a know it all... He is the greatest geek i've ever known( then R & D head is supposed to be :))
I really look up to him for everything... where ever i go, i will take the values he taught me. Sir u r the greatest.

Jyothi Ma'am: Well she was my first PM. She was surely what i call KEWL... She is the first lady who had the professional air around her in a no non sense way. And she was the first ( and till now only female) who knows loads more about computers than playing solitaire. She really helped me climbed the enoromous learning curve. Ma'am I'm really greatful to you.

Abhai Sir: Another cool guy from Kanpur :). What really shocked me is his carrer graph and the way he lead his life according to his own condition. I can really write loads about him.. but i guess that's personal. Hats off to u sir.

Rohit : Well when i joined Aztec he was the subject of all the talks... people used to look upon him as a God of Linux ( spiced it a bit Rohit ;)) . So since we shared a common passion towards Linux friendship was inevitable. We walked me through various technologies like blogging, rss, ajax, bloglines, delicious etc. He made my stay in Aztec really worthwhile. Cheerz to him.

All sad that ends well....Part 1

Well like all good things in life college life ended (B.E... although it will start soon but still...)
College was cool enough... despite S.J.C.I.T being a non descript college, not so hyped up as RV or PESIT, we learned loads of stuff... Forget technology.. we learned the value of friendship, relations and blah..blahh..
Well not to be boasting or anything.. i got the gold medal for topping in college :)
Am not a great book worm... but still i guess just knew how to play within the rules.
Well i got a new philosophy of life...Aim for things larger than life and you will get something which is 60% is what you wanted but is still good enough.

I always aimed for 95% + in first two years but always got app 85%. Then i aimed for a VTU rank.... way to much of a hope but still ended up topping the college.

Gee... I'm not complaining :-)

I hope I remain the same and do the same thing in Syracuse Univ... where i'll be going this fall.

Pray for me guys!!

Water Wonder...

So was just browsing through few links given by hack-a-day . I came across a particularly interesting site.

The setup you see above is to make a normal motor run on water. Of course the basic principle involved is breaking water into its constituent 2H+O but there's something new to it. Now there is no need to employ Browne's process to electrolytically breakdown water. The same can be done via a cheap metal alloy and salt water. Just add some alloy piece to the container containing salt water and voila!! we have hydrogen produced at an accelerating rate.
Sometimes i wonder why thigs like this dont get reported in Times.
There r plenty of new information i'd like to share but am too lazy to write everything down here... read the Water Karma. It is really worth reading.

Too Much....

We r going at break neck speed towards a so called technological utopia. But I have started to feel everything is meaningless and crappy.
Somehow we are just finding new problems to solve without solving the existing ones. I recently ran into a highly placed software professional who explained me how the whole process worked. Here is what he said :
"We are a service based company... We r paid to maintain a code somebody else has written... We debug the errors but in the process introduce new errors.... then somebody else comes to do the maintenance job... this is philanthropy...we r generating jobs for the unemployed" ...of course he was joking. But consider the statement on its face value.

In computer terminology we r doing too much of throw away prototyping but are too happy with our creation that we keep it as an application. We spent hours or probably days writing the killer App, only to later realize that nobody needs it. That sixth sense to detect a non sense should be there in a software engineer. For eg. If your PM says that the code u wrote is not of much use... What he actually means is that the code you wrote is completely crap..Throw the damn thing away and produce something better. As programmers we all have some kindda emotional attatchment with our application, but HEY!!! Will it do good to anybody. The answer is probably no...(well it would be prudent to open source such code...some one might use it)

The afore mentioned syndrome is not only true for individual programmers but also software biggies like google. On the 37th anniversary of the first lunar landing they have released the google Moon Map. Great thing dude!! But get real ...who will check the map of moon (for the next 50 years atleast) ?? it would be great if they would have added Indian map or any other country's on earth, atleast it can be used by somebody.

Tech rocks..

Well am once again overwhelmed by the how pervasive technology is becoming in our life. Some of the latest inventions have made me nostalgic... well am just 22.5 but still i worked on pc's during the era when having a PC XT/AT was considered a luxury, when you had to put 750 kb/1.2 kb floppy into the floppy drive, turn the knob ...start the pc and wait for MSDOS to load. Stinking rich people wud have 2 drives to copy one floppy into another...
Forget past..the future is bright.
I was browsing through some etch news ..came across the following stuffs:

3D viewing LCD
a new planet
Google Videos

I wont say anything about them...only one thing.If u have not checked these links u r not a techie, and u r definitely missing something

The real picture!!

So I was having a talk with my uncle.. (he's placed at a high position in the banking industry..., and a gold medalist in MSc,electronics.... why am i telling u this?? read on....)

He was telling me about how bad Infy's finnacle was in terms of usability. He was also groaning about the usage of oracle in banks for data storage. The whole setup of the data centers was cumbersome and meant serious money. I like any other techie and open source evangelist suggested him better, cheaper and more secure open source products.

He replied with a simple but stunning question... CAN U BRIBE THE BANK BIGGIES???

man i was stunned... i was also told by lots of people that microsoft bribes to retain its market share... but this was too much....

I wont opine much on the matter... i'll leave it to u all to construe whatever u want.

I guess thats the way business works... Earlier i thought corruption was only there in India... but after chatting with people from aus,us, carribean, cambodia etc i think its there everywhere...
What i feel now is that something which is so prevelant should become the industry standard.... Companies shud start playing dirty... no point hiding behind that good boy image.

What do u think??

now just in case someone has an objection to the above post:

DISCLAIMER :
Whatever i have written above is a work of fiction. Any similarities with real life should only be considered as purely co-incidental ;-)

Google calculator

Google guys are really a bunch of supermen when it comes to innnovation and intellect.
Google has introduced currency conversion in their calc module. For those who dont know about it give a mathematical expression where u give a search string and search for it. It will actually give u the result.

Now type the following string "100 USD in INR" .... and BINGO!!! u'll get the perfect conversion according to current exchange rates. Try it out with other currency codes like GBP ( great britain pound i guess) etc. I am really starting to love google( no man i was already in love with it for its searching capabilities.... in that case i'm loving it more :-) )

Solaris...

So there, all u guys cribbing over linux's unusability, check out solaris

Shifted to solaris... and now when i work on linux, it is like when i went back on windows when i had shifted to linux initially. Windows now look too fancy to be good for any development work ( no offence meant.. just my current frame of mind).

the grep is totally different, doesnt search recursively and vi creates a havoc on solaris.

But the Dtrace utility that am working on solaris is light years ahead in technology than linux and makes for its incompetencies. Kprobe is avl for linux but is too crude and programming Kprobe is more difficult than the D language used to check D probes.

Something to add on the CV anyway ;)

HashMap maladies...

been working with hashmaps for quite a long time now... but one thing escapes me...Consider the following snippet to display the contemts of a HashMap in a sequential manner.

 //temp2 is a hashmap
 Set set2=temp2.entrySet();
       Iterator iHash2=set2.iterator();
     
       while(iHash2.hasNext()){
           Map.Entry me2= (Map.Entry) iHash2.next();
           System.out.println(me2.getKey());
           }

well if u understand the code ...( i dont see any issues here)..read on
I printed the order in which the elements were entered in the HashMap and later printed the hashMap using the above algorithm... both are different.... Any idea why??

I M a Monkey Coder

Yup i m a monkey coder..... i have to admit it much to my disgust.

My PM told me to do the designing before the coding, my teachers/proffesors told me exactly the same thing. But no... i was too happy with my coding skills. Damn success is really a lousy teacher... history is a good one. From today onwards i swear to design any program i decide to code.

I lost track of all the data structures i have used. Even an elegant language like java looks crappy...
when u see my code, a perl code will look more readable than mine. God save me...

Engineer :)

So finally am an engineer...
Somehow managed to go through the exam.. survived it....
Not that am bad at studies.. it was just that i did not feel like studying this time or write the exam.
I still think i can make it to 80% marks.. but thats too low for 8th sem exam. Now comes the sickest part... leaving the college... the niche u made for yourself and start it all over again...

Best of luck to me

Modafinil....

Well am on a writing spree.....
Read Readers Digest and saw the article on provigil ( sold as modalert in India... components: modafinil) ... It is given for sleeplessness... I mean person wont feel sleepy after that.

According to RD, the wonder drug has been used by students, professionals and others to acheive extra ordinary level of efficiency.

If any one reads somethin new abt it or knows where to find that drug in Bangalore do tell me...( although i know i dont have audience :))

And ya its not a steroid... so chill .. dont flame me... just want to try it out ... just live in god mode for a few days....( Sridhar Almighty ;)

Melancholy of Monotony...

I have been at my home for over 4 days now... Well project is over, documentation is being done by Ravi and Shilpa ( god bless them)... but am really missing my company's environment.

Although my Visa processing for MS, tit bit studies and cue club tournaments with my roomies consume most of my time, my mind still craves for that excitement. I got a hang of reading/writing blog/rss feeds when i was there in the company... I was overwhelmed by the amount of info i used to get and the amount of visibility i got on the net...

Now since i have no broadband at my place ( my roomies are not net savvy .... E&C guys :( ...)
i frequent my friend's place who has it.

Well i guess i've to pucker up and get back to my peek and puke studies for the VTU ....
This time i really have a goal set. My avg for the first 4 sems was 84% but for the next 3 sems it was arnd 76%... mostly cuz i payed less attn on theories and was always busy tweaking and making my semester projects better than anybody else...no regrets. Now my avg is 79.67% ... i really want an avg percentage of 80% .... Am keepin my fingers crossed.

Pray for me :)

Project Over...Waah... :-(

Finally we gave the presentation for our project in the company. Well it was quite cool, our pm, internal guide, R&D Head, System architects and some cool guys from R&D ( that includes Rohit) attended the presentation.... It went on properly... we all were quite happy at the end ( i mean because we were lauded for our effort ) ... but an unfathomable gloom descended on me... i dont want to leave this place.

I DONT WANT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE

Well once you come to industry ( that too a supercool one making profits @1266 %) and think of going back to academia... u have to be hercules to stop a overwhelming temptation to wail... or shout loudly. Its creepy when u do it actually. 3 weeks back i was writing JDBC wrappers for postgresql and now i go back to the college just to learn how to write a sql query!! That's outrageous.

I mean people might think i have an attitude problem or something but come on guys ... i am not up for any shit. Imagine yourself in my position ... its really a painful waste of time... The time i could have spent blogging, writing some cool code, hacking some stuff or if i'm bored write some MBeans :)
If people think i have attitude... to hell with it... i dont care

I had read somewhere that "Learn to like things that need to be done".... I guess i have to work a lot to like that thing .... to top it all i'm going for MS.... so my tie up with the academia will be for atleast two more years.... I just hope that education in US wont be as dull as in India. Ya... I know ...grass is always greener on the other side... but hope is the only thing that keeps a man going.

Life here was fun ... and guys who dont know me... my idea of fun is sitting infront of a computer.. fully loaded... a high speed net connection... and a steep learning curve... I tend to get bored if any of these conditions are not met. This place was like a heaven... i came here on saturdays and sundays too ( no i am not suffering from hyperactivity syndrome.... just that i love working on the comp).

All good things do come to an end... Hope future holds something for me

When the going gets weird.. the weird turns pro

Well Java is not as bad as i had imagined. Its a bliss for lazy programmers.I mean i can use different datatypes, objects within an array, linked list etc.... that makes it really cool.
But then u dont use java to write programs that cud be easily written by C/C++. Java efficiently hides all the trivialities of a programming language leaving one free to implement the business logic. For those of u who thought that coding is the hardest part of development cycle are sadly mistaken. I realized today when i had trouble making the control flow through the logic. Java never stopped me from doing anything. Pointers may not be there.. but i dont see any place where u need them. Some places where i desperately felt the need of pointers, there was always a substitute...a workaround... sometimes more efficient.

C/C++ is still my favourite...may because the programs i coded did not have a complex business logic ( although they had a complex logic... a bit more on the system side).

I am really feeling like a java pro... though all those settings really kill me ... Programming a program meant to be programmed in java, in java is really like solving a jigsaw puzzle. U really burn out the brains doing it... i dont think that one need to be a software proffessional to use it as long as he has the understanding of the system.

Enough back to my programming now

Java Woes...

Well I've been working on java... its not that i hate that language but i do prefer C/C++ over it. What i dislike about java is there are more settings to do than program (dude... am not telling abt hello world programs... but abt the ones we write in a production environment).

I am a bit corky when it comes to name variables and files ( my pm is always upset over it). I read a lot so named my files whose working have resemblance with something i have read.. be it history, biology or any thing existing under the sun. Today my pm told me to rename all the files and make the directory structure proper so that code can be reused even after i leave the firm after two months. Thus began the series of unfortunate events.

I changed everything ... from the names of the files to the directories having them ( changing variable names wud have been a overkill... touchwood my pm didn't ask me to change that). Then came the fun part. The directory structure was severely mutilated, the package structure ruptured and the "ant" file rendered useless. I lost it big time....

He heh... I got conked.. didn't even try repairing the damage done... Simply called my pm to fix it. GOD BLESS MY PM. I seriously hope every pm should be like her. she kindda fixed it, though some errors still remain... i'll be calling her tommorrow to fix it up again. Dont get me wrong... any intervention from my side will only convert the problem from a disaster to a catastrophe.

Night Out :-)

It so happened that we had a presentation yesterday (i.e few hours back) . We had to give demo to an American client at around 11 pm... although my presence was not strictly required, i simply pitched in cuz i was curious abt it..i.e. a web conference in a more formal setting. Me and shyam came for this presentation along with jyothi ma'am and girish sir. By the time we finished it..it was to late to go back, so me and shyam decided to do a night out at A2 office...

It's really cool to stay alone at night at this place. Lets see when do i feel asleep. well shyam has a record of working for 22 hrs straight in the office. I came in 8.50 morning today... lets see whether i'll be able to break his record or not.

strange test

Your brain: 40% interpersonal, 80% visual, 60% verbal, and 220% mathematical!

Congratulations on being 400% smart! Actually, on my test, everyone is. The above score breaks down what kind of thinking you most enjoy doing. A score above 100% means you use that kind of thinking more than average, and a score below 100% means you use it less. It says nothing about how good you are at any one, just how interested you are in each, relatively. A substantial difference in scores between two people means, conclusively, that they are different kinds of thinkers. Matching Summary: Each of us has different tastes. Still, I offer the following advice, which I think is obvious: Don't date someone if your interpersonal percentages differ by more than 80%. Don't be friends with someone if your verbal percentages differ by more than 100%. Don't have sex with someone if their math percentage is over 200%.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 57% on interpersonal You scored higher than 64% on visual You scored higher than 68% on verbal You scored higher than 94% on mathematical

Link: The 4-Variable IQ Test written by chriscoyne on Ok Cupid

I'm scared .... does that mean i'm not fit to have sex.

Guys dont Cry!!!!

Well this is surely a strange post. Normally it is to prove that guys do cry. I dont remember crying for as long as 5 years. I cried yesterday night, it wasn't a loud wail or something( i always want to do that...really makes you feel lighter)... just a silent sob.

I think by now curiousity would surely have got the better half of you, so without wasting any time I'd tell you what happened. Yesterday i was damn tired ... there was some function in the college, Infosys campus connect...whatever it was i was least interested. The HR guy boasted as usual and as usual the non IT guys listened to it as he was teaching some magical spells( i dont know why the SDLC captivates the non IT guys so much).. so I got damn tired by the time i reached home , i slept early at around 9 pm( its afternoon according to my standard).

Got up at 2 am.. all my room mates were sleeping. I saw that one of my room mates, Abhishek, had slept with an open book, Eric Segal's LOVE STORY. Since i was bored and had nothing to do at that point of time i decided to read that book. Finished it within 5 am. But i didn't realize that i had started crying by the time i finished it. Abhishek, heard me sobbing and to my disgust told me to sleep ( i dont know why but i felt kindda disgusted..not much and a bit embarrased)....

I closed the book and went to sleep...got up at 7:30 am

That's it....

I hate Websense

Every good thing does come to an end.... so did the internet connection at my office.

Today my NA installed websense net filter.... i dont have access to any news/media/mail site...
Man i surely feel like i have been quarantined. I seriously hope this software crashes.
Meanwhile i will try bypassing this filter(sshhh...dont tell my collegues)

Any help for cracking this thing is welcomed....

post haste!!

Today i was writing a program to monitor a database. Since my scripting skills are still underdeveloped so i took the entire day to get the number of connections(using bash).
End of the day i realised that there existed a sql statement that could have given me the same value.

Moral: Scripting really sucks.....just kidding
I guess i overlooked that thing in order to polish my scripting skills( atleast unconsiously).

Kerala Trip II

This weakend i went to a trip to kerala with my classmates.... we went to Kochi and munnar. We left on friday night and came back on monday morning at 7....

As soon as i came i went to college at abt 9(College is 1.5 hrs away).... i got a call from my friend in aztec that there was an important meeting in the office so rushed back to the office(3.5 hrs) and left the place at 2100 hrs.... then at night i chatted my way to glory till abt 0000 hrs...

I got up in the morning, went to college again for a presentation, rushed back to the office again....
I am now the ghost that walks :(

KSRTC ...shrewd enough

we (our college mates) were planning to go to goa... so we were deciding whether to book a bus or a train. We checked out indianrail.gov.in and then thought may be we cud find something similar for ksrtc ..so we googled for it.
And guess what ...much to our surprise we found KSRTC site. it was www.ksrtc.org

They have one thing cool in there.....
They didn't care to put the database i guess ;)

but they have all searching facility in place... how?? whenever u check for a schedule u'll be provided with 2 combo boxes. one for the source station and one for the destination station. The problem is that it wont allow u to select anything for the destination combo box and when u click on submit button, the java script pops an error that destination not selected. Well...i guess Indian janta cannot be fooled by gimmicks anymore now( at least in tech savvy bangalore)

cool code....

check this code out....(go to the basics of c to find the answer).. someone asked it on blug-prog:


#include"iostream"
#include"sys/types.h"
#include"unistd.h"
using namespace ::std;

int main()
{
pid_t child_pid;
printf(" hello world !! \n");
child_pid = fork();
}

(i have used "" instead of greater than sign as my blog editor had trouble workin with them... thats why cout was changed to printf)

if u put the "\n", u'll get one "hello world !!" as output but if u remove the endl u'll get two "hello world!!" as output... reason being that the programs are not flushing the buffers and the child is inheriting unflushed buffer...causing it to print it twice( as told by Imidi kiran on blug)....

this stuff was cool...

Eclipse is GREAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!

Note: All characters in this story are real and any similarities to the non existent are purely co-incidental :)

I'm one of the few programmers who are crazy about C/C++ and think java is too similar to these languages to be learned in its entirety. I started coding in java an year earlier. I used eclipse IDE and still use it. So yesterday I went to A3 office( for those who don't know what's A3.. its a branch of Aztec.. I work in A2) .. had some thing to integrate some applications using java. I fired up my vi (eclipse wasn't there.. and am ok with vi, use it for c/c++ coding) and started coding.
First thing that happened was I typed something, typed a '.' and waited for the field to autocomplete.... I soon realised what I was doing.. it was hilarious....
Next I compiled my code... and unexpectedly I got a million errors( classpath dependencies...) ..and I was surely not in a mood nor did I have the proper experience to resolve them... Fortunately my PM had an Ant file ready...
The process went smoothly ..but I learnt one thing... LEARN JAVA BEFORE JUMPING TO ECLIPSE or any other IDE.

Now am back at my box.. working on Eclipse...Of course industrial productivity comes before personal learning.... (and eclipse is doing a good job teaching the syntax)

Industry experience!!

So here I am, working on a supercool project, but working in the industry in a typical office environment has its own pitfalls although there are innumerable perks.... ( The pitfalls are clearer if u r intelligent, PS:Modesty died the day i was born)

Here's what generally happens: I finish the job assigned to me,quite ahead of the schedule, and ask my PM for more job. It happens so frequently that my PM probably feels that i'm bugging him/her. So i thought why not take it easy and surf the net and give my reports at some intervals( atleast that way i wont feel the guilt over bugging him/her)... so i open my blog or start chatting and someone stops by my cubicle, looks at my computer, and says that i'm more interested in chatting than doing work!!!! I guess i'll take some time to adjust!!!

Some cool updates

Well yahoo is introducing a weblog with content sharing and internetworking... in a nutshell that is flickr+lj+blogger.... seems its going to give other blogs a run for their money. check out this link:

Yahoo Blogs

Well check out Microsoft's latest attempt to strenghten their losing market position in India:

Microsoft sucks

;-)

Scripting is GREAAAAAAAT

Yup....
so I learned the hard way today that one cannot stay without scripting...
I always used to avoid it for its inefficiency. Whatever be the case I used to parse using C/C++ (my first love)... Now that I was coding in java I thought to use it since it had better constructs than C/C++.

But Rohit, the Linux geek & resident of my neighboring cubicle, kindda motivated me to just give scripting a try... now I was left with the choice of perl or shell....
I had already been pissed of by perl's inadequacy of throwing error messages( or rather my inefficiency to code in it) so I thought to give shell a try....and guess what...IT WAS WONDERFUL

Since the question of inefficiency was overshadowed by the supercool machine I was working on so I used it. I called it from a java program and BINGO.... 1 hour work done in 5 minutes flat.

Will be writing a lot more scripts now .. I guess!!

Links to Ponder!!

Well today is a great day for India... not because Shiv ratri and women's day have coincided on this very day ;)

We have reached a new milestone in this nuclear age... check this link to find out
ARTICLE on this accompalishment

Well i wud also like to bring into notice something microsoft is doing these days( ofcourse they r jobless to design something that futuristic) ..check this link out too.
Microsoft?? check it out

Was I wrong??

Well something happened which made me introspect. It all started on Thursday morning... I got a call from TCS for an interview... I was overjoyed at the prospect... didn't care much for the job but for the tech interview. The fact that I had offers from three software firms without even going through a proper tech interview bored me....
I'm the kindda guy who love being reminded that I lack somethin... its my belief that having knowledge means knowing what you dont know...uuuh enough of this crap..now i'll tell exactly what happened.

yup so I got a call and went to SJM towers( in bangalore obv).. filled a form and just for the heck of it wrote 6 lacs as my expectation for the starting salary.( the pursuit was followed by my colleagues Ravi and Shyam)...

So cutting the long story short... I went in to give my first tech interview... and he asked me "what is the diff b/w c and c++, wats polymorphism" ... I felt sick... he expected that I cram the book and vomit out the rehearsed excerpts.... I didn't fare well... not even when he asked me an example of dynamic overloading... cursing myself I went thru the ordeal... next was HR round.... my turn was last and Ravi and Shyam had already pissed him a lot so the HR personnel directly asked me if my expectation were the same... I said yes... my pitch was high.. almost aggressive... actually I was quite frustated by the work environment there... it was like some government office in UP minus the pan spit spots...

I asked the Hr what kindda job I might be doing if I make it through... he said nothing for the first 3 years.. may be testing, documentation and or customer support... and if luck I might work on the code after that... It was outrageous.... I had written research as my preference so he told me that the Company's req doesn't match my prolfile ... I gave him a "I Dont Give a Sh** Look" and walked out...

I dont know whether I was being a snob or what... but I really dont like the idea of letting my brain decay...
And for all the TCS people reading this.. I pity u guys..

Atlast someone read this blog

I must admit that when i sarted blogging i felt that no one wud ever read it... but still i added the link to my signature and just prayed for someone to read and comment on my blog and my photos.

I had lost hope completely but liked the idea of jotting down my experience on the site. Atleast i will have a part of me preserved in this form. It felt like a frozen snapshot of a moment articulated. I posted the links to my groups and spammed my friends to read my blog and comment on it.

Finally my efforts paid of. Mansi, a friend of mine read my blog and has asked me to enable anonymous comments. Of course i'll do that, she's the first person to read my blog (actually second ..rohithv was the first).... In case u r reading this Mansi, thanks.

Google Code Jam..... jammed!!! damned!!!

shit man... how do u feel when u see Rs 3 lac slip outta ur hands.

I enrolled for code jam thing and took the practice ... man it looked like a real piece of cake ... although i just saw the problem( well.. didn't care to work it out there). since i'm more comfy with c++ so i chose c++ as the lang (though .. i did try it in java initially but kinndda not thorough with the libraries).

I took the 400 point problem and there was a question on vector. whole funda was to perform some easy computation and return the output in a crapy format. i thought k.. this is easy will come tomorrow and solve for the real moolah( i.e. today... )

but lookwat happened... i thought the competition closes at 9 pm so went to write the exam on 6 pm.... and guess wat the site is jammed man( Murphy's law: if a thing can go wrong it will go go wrong)....

Guess am destined for the greater good. :-(

******************************
added later
*****************************

Man i really suck!!
managed to connect to code jam applet.... i now realize i shudn't
I really suck ... i thought i was a great programmer since i am programming since more than half of my life(am 22 now)... but after taking this contest i realized that i really suck as a global programmer..( i guess i didn't work for it cuz the progs were silly simple)
I cud only submit the 200 point program and scored a meager 83.xyz... now I WILL PROGRAM HARDER AND BETTER.....

hey am not that wierd after all...

Reinstallation spree.....

Ok so my computer crashed...dont ask how...

I have a meager 13 GB harddisk where i work and i did complete installation oc FC2(i have 512 MB ram...so no pig speed)

Yesterday i hit bottom..reached the maximum limit...the X Server failed ...nothing was documented about this and if it is i did not RTFM.

Dejected, and frustated i copied all my data into a collegues PC and tried installing ubuntu.
installation was fast and cool...i thought i had attained panacea.
I fired it and guess what it was a supercool superfast desktop... WITHOUT any programming tool... not even gcc.

Finally i formatted the whole syaytem again and am reloading FC2 with limited functionalities.
I hope i finally do some productive work today.

Check out my nerd score!!

Aviator

Hey ....
saw aviator yesterday... leo has acted marvellously in that.
he has become my new inspiration.... the whole story revolves around chasing ur dreams ... crossing all limits of madness.

Home Alone!!

Well call me workaholic, obsessive or mad.... i'm the only person sitting alone in my company writing this blog on vibrant sunday morning.
It so happened that i thought that this might be better than watching some sick movie at home. My friends and my flatmates said i was crazy... never listened to them.
Now that i'm alone i'll do something. I'm working on a project called "On Demand Business Scaling" ..(that's the only info i can give u now) and was desperately in search of a supercool algorithm. I took saturday off..but time just flew by and i did nothing. So i thought that my mind might work in a working environment...but man this place is haunting me....

I guess i'll leave in the afternoon after lunch. Till then i think i'll install my gmail drive on my linux box....

Sridhar