Its the time to disco

Well .. well .. well.. its that time of the year again when the newspapers make me realize that not only am I broke, but single as well. I look at the newspaper and all I see are ads which ask me to party (unlimited drinks and food), but the fine print holds all my misery: "Rs 3500/- per couple." or something of that drift.
My party today was a visit to the temple followed by a burger and a coffee. Now, maybe I will watch a crap load of television.
A new year also brings with it "The new year resolution thingies". So, what are my new year resolution thingies? Here :

1. Eat and drink as much as I can.
2. Sleep in my free time, unless I'm doing resolution number 1.
3. Procastrinate all activities except 1 and 2.

Like this I won't be breaking my new year resolutions. Ooooh I'm sooo clever..

Anyway, have a ravishingly cool dude ishtyle happy new year !!

7 x 3 = 21

I turned 21 today. I now am legally eligible to get married .... what the heck am I writing ?
Coming back to the normal world, I roamed the afternoon, I roamed the evening and I roamed the whole night, and today, even the cold was out of sight. Wow !! That rhymed. I'm getting distracted too much.
So what was my birthday like? Just like most of my recent previous ones, but who gets bored of enjoying with friends ?? Not me ;)

The passport..

was finally taken, in all its 60 page glory. This whole episode did leave a bad taste in my mouth, but I guess that goes along with all government authorities.
I need coffee.

Merry Christmas !!

9:00 am : Wake up
9-10 am: Brush, loo, watch random programmes on the idiot box, think about taking bath and then decide its too early.
10:12 am: Phone call from Anshul inviting me for lunch to his place.
10:15 - 12:30 pm: Breakfast, more random TV shows, finally take bath, ask money for petrol :D
12:30-3:30 pm: Sunny Deol movie on TV, grand lunch at Anshul's place followed by more Sunny Deol.
4:00 - 4:30 pm: Roamed CSM, decided that we would be better off playing pool.
5:00 - 6:15 pm: Pool :)

Now when I start to look at this itinerary, I can't even find a remote mention of my project. Engineers at work :)

The passport ordeal - III

Today was supposed to be the day when I finally was to receive my passport. I drove down all the way from here to the passport office along with Harman in the evening. I waited for around 45 minutes before my name was announced. At that time I thought that finally the job was finished. How wrong was I !!
The person who called out my name took out my form and said that, the name of my father was too long to fit in the database !!! I'm like: "What the f*ck!!" . This was despite the fact that the name fit in the boxes provided in the passport form. That person took me to another, who asked me to cut off some portion of my father's name. I was obviously against that and suggested to write the initials instead of the whole name. They wouldn't agree to that. The only solution, they said, was to pay another Rs 500/- and get a passport with 60 pages. How does that help in fitting the name in the database? I really have no idea.
I have another date with the passport office on Monday and god knows when I will get the elusive passport.
By the way it was a bad day all together. There was no power till the afternoon. Then I didn't get my passport. While returning I was stuck in a huge traffic jam. When I went to meet one of my friends, after coming back, the route was blocked and when I did reach his house, he was not there.
Some days truly suck :(

How beautiful are thy feet with shoes

My feet seem to be outgrowing everything else. They now stand at a record high of UK 13 1/2 (US 14). This fact was discovered at an adidas showroom in CP, where I had gone to buy shoes (duh..). The resulting shoe cost my dad 4 grand and I realized that if my feet grew any bigger I would be shoeless (or get my shoes imported, but won't my dad love it if I tell him that).

The passport ordeal - II

After my rather unsuccessful attempt at submitting the passport form , I went again to the passport office. But this time around I was much well prepared. I had the documents: the originals, the verification certificate, some more originals (which weren't even required), and a whole lot of will power. I knew which queue moved faster (the queue on the right hand side, if you are curious). All in all, this time around I was as deadly as a ninja.......mwhaahahahahahaahahah
In short everything got over rather smoothly and I am back home and stuffing myself with food.

Handwriting Personality Quiz

I got this from some place. Interestingly it only speaks of the good, or rather harmless qualities.

The results of your analysis say:

You plan ahead, and are interested in beauty, design, outward appearance, and symmetry.
You are a social person who likes to talk and meet others.
You are diplomatic, objective, and live in the present.
You are a talkative person, maybe even a busybody!
You are self-confident and like to bring attention to yourself.

Mostly accurate except, maybe the "planning ahead" part.

Wham bam body slam

Our Folding@Home team : Via Agra just sky rocketed to rank 9015. We are now an united force of 8 super heroes. Stop wasting your idle processor time!! Do something good: join our team!!! :D And be just like one of us (or maybe not).
Ahhhh food is ready, I should go now. Till then why don't you try and understand proteins.

The passport ordeal - I

I don't have a passport, but I require one as the company in which I'm about to join has asked me to produce it at the time of joining (hopefully I will get to see another country in the near future). I had been planning on getting one as soon as I had received my offer letter (in my 6th semester) and I had even taken the passport form in Cochin, but never had gotten around to completing the formalities.
Now, I have finished my 7th semester and I still don't have the passport in my hands. A toast to my laziness.
Dad had been kind enough to get the passport form for me, here in Delhi. Yesterday evening, after getting all the certificates in place, I started filling up the form. Surprisingly I took care of that pretty efficiently and had everything ready (or maybe not) by the night.
Today morning me and dad left for the Geeta colony passport office. On reaching there I came to know that they didn't accept payment in cash (I had bought cash), but only DD. Also they didn't issue passports under the Tatkal scheme (which lets you get a passport within 10 days). So I had to go all the way from Geeta colony to Bhikaji Cama Place, to the main passport office. The rush hour traffic didn't help the long drive.
After reaching there and finding out the queue for Tatkal passports, I had to wait wait and wait for a very very very long time (11 am - 1 pm), in a short but extremely slow moving queue. Just before my turn was about to come (I was 3 shy) I heard the lady in front of me talk about a verification certificate. On further enquiry I realized that I didn't have it, and without it the passport wouldn't be made (under Tatkal scheme)... arghhhhhhhhh.
I returned home empty handed, tired, frustrated, and very hungry.

The college fest

Today was Miranda house's college fest: Tempest '05. Me and Sam left for the fest from my house at around 11:30 am. We took a bus to Kashmeree gate and then from there we took the grand Delhi metro to Delhi university.
Although it has been a few years since the metro started functioning, it was my first ride in it. It is pretty cool. The station was clean and well maintained. You have escalators, air conditioning and the works. It seriously doesn't feel like India.
After meeting some of Sam's friends we left for Miranda house. When we reached there the inter college rock competition was going on. Except two bands I found the remaining lacking. To be frank I couldn't understand a single word they were shouting.
After that got over, there were performances from Prestorika (another rock band which did a lot of harm to my ears) and Tantra. Tantra was the better of the two, because they were playing popular hindi/english songs while using the guitar, drums and keyboard to good effect. At least I could sing along ;-P
After that got over we had coffee and returned home (metro and bus again).
Among other things I received my shiny new 5 free Ubuntu cds from Schiphol Triport, Netherlands. Those guys are so cool to sends free cds to anyone anywhere in this world.
Oh and I almost forgot the number of girls who turned up were quite nice ;-) Mini skirts in winters are enough proof for me that god does exist.

The 3D camera

In the past few days, while I was not sleeping or watching TV, I had been reading a bit more of OpenGL and trying my hand at making some demos (which are supposed to help me in my over ambitious project). My first goal was to make a camera through which you will be viewing the 3D world. The reason being : It is the easiest thing to make :)
So after a bit of looking up SDL and OpenGL manuals/books, I managed to come up with this:

Yes it is something like a pyramid, and yes it does look as if someone threw up on it.
The program actually lets you rotate the pyramid on its x, y or z axis, and also lets you control your viewpoint (aka the camera) with the help of the keyboard. I haven't figured a way, till now, how to use the mouse to adjust the camera, as can be usually found in games. That should be my next task.

Lazying around

Winter is that time of the year when you really don't like to get up from your bed, even if you are not feeling sleepy (at least in my case). The razhai is, was, and always will be the most comfortable thing in these times. So, when my mom tries to wake me to drop her to the school (she is a teacher), I'm torn between the comfortable warmth inside and the car, which lies in the wintery cold outside. Invariably I chose the car because I really love driving, and Delhi is the only place where I can fulfill this desire every day. The car is the usual Maruti 800, but I still haven't gotten bored of driving it. It didn't even have a music system until yesterday. Now it is even more dear to me.
Today I got drive it around quite a lot. Dad likes to hand me the job of chauffeur (not driver) whenever he is around. So, we (Me, mom and dad)went to malai mandir, my grandfather's sister's place, CP and then back home. A nice long drive.
I spent the evening with Sam and Rakesh. Sam said that he will arrange for passes to some of the DU fests (*droool*), which are just round the corner. That should be fun..

And I'm rich

My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?

Broadband bonanza

Two days have passed since I landed in Delhi, and I have met some of my friends. I haven't even thought of starting the project work, but I did manage to convince my parents that I needed a good internet connection for my project (the MTNL dial-up just won't do). So here I'm with my brand new Sify broadband 24x7 connection. Now I have one more way to kill time.

Sabrimala II: The endless journey

Unperturbed by the disaster with the HOD, I proceeded to my 2nd grand trip to Sabrimala. (The first trip was exactly one year back) We (Me, Sujit and Addy) took a bus from here to Kollam (Sujit's homeground) at around 3 in the afternoon. We had to cover the whole 4 hour journey in a rickety KSRTC red bus. By the time we reached Sujit's place it was around 8 p.m. After taking bath and doing puja, we started our jeep trip towards Sabrimala. We were pretty sleepy after the bus journey and the heavy dinner, but found it hard to sleep in the jeep, as our heads kept hitting its sides.
So, after another 4 hours in another rickety automobile, we finally reached the banks of the Pamba river at 3 am. We took bath in the cold water of the Pamba river and started our barefoot journey to the top of the hill.
The trek to the top of the hill (where the temple is situated) is around 4KMs, but the steep ascent along with the rocks and pebbles really test your legs, your patience, your stamina and your endurance. We completed the whole trek in a matter of half an hour. A new world record for us.. :)
On reaching the top there was a long but fast moving queue for the darshan. After a bit of waiting and a bit of jumping the queue we reached the sacred 18 steps of Sabrimala. Out came the coconuts. We broke the coconuts at the start of the steps and climbed the steps into the main temple (which is made of gold). We prayed there for some time and got ourselves paysam, before proceeding downhill. That was tiring too. We reached the bottom of the hill at around 7 am.
The parking was a good 15KM away from the temple. So, we had to take a bus and then walk another 1 KM to reach the parking. The ride back to Sujit's home was again a bumpy one, in which, despite our best efforts, we couldn't sleep. We reached there at around 1 p.m, had lunch and slept like a rock (I didn't watch the match after Sachin got out.) . At 4 in the evening I was awakened and we started another leg of our journey: back to cochin. After another 4 hour long journey in a train we reached our home at 10 p.m. We had practically been travelling for over 24 hours without any rest.
But then the journey still hasn't ended for me. I leave for Delhi in another 5 hours from now....

Freedom of speech

Today we were supposed to go meet our class coordinator and find out the approval status of our projects, as well as our project guides. My project was approved and I was asked to meet my project guide then itself. So, I endured the long climb to reach the top floor of DOE just to find that my project guide was not there..darn..That meant I had to wait.
As I had spare time I started walking in the corridoor when my eyes fell upon this poster on the notice board. It was about some college under MG University offering MBA. Hmmm... I thought lets write something smart on this. I borrowed a pen from Ashish and asked him to watch my back. I wrote:

"Why should I go here, when I have SMS?"

(SMS is the School of Management Studies here in CUSAT)
I finished writing turned around and there stood the HOD!!! Busted!! Uh oh...Rest was not too memorable.

Sliding through time

Today was my last and final exam of the 7th semester : Graphics lab. Its over and so is my 7th semester (hopefully). Should be missing this place in about 6 months time.
We started our own graffiti wall yesterday. You know, the place where you write smart things about anything. We had some spare "stick mes" lying around in the house, so I took some, drew a few things and stuck them up on the wall. Others followed soon. Its a pretty neat idea.

Lab exams, 87.2 and other stories

So after a lot of sleeping and playing Counter Strike, I woke up to realize that I had my networks and operating systems external lab exam today. It was fine and I could do the program conveniently. The program had to do with IPC (pipes, shared memory blah blah). The viva went fine too.
After coming home I was really hungry (mainly because we don't have breakfast), so me and Sujit went to the ATM (you need cash for food) and then to a restaurant and had a nice masala dosa there. While coming out we saw a weighing machine. Although I was a bit apprehensive to stand on it, but I said "Ok, why not?". I shouldn't have. After 3 seconds and Rs 1/- later, it showed: 87.2 :-( Why god ? Why me? Even after not having breakfast for so many days, I get to see this. Damn it... I shall now run everyday and start playing basketball.
After every successful man there is a woman (*supposedly*, but not verified), similarly behind every piece of art there is a beautiful story. The first one being that of Konfabulator and the other being that of the Graphing calculator. Interestingly both come from an Apple Mac background and a lot of other similarities too.

Knoppix rediscovered

I had a Knoppix CD, but I had never gotten it work completely. I mean, I could go into the text mode, but not into the graphical mode. Reason: the monitor was going out of sync when it tried to get into X. Now, I really didn't care for this, as I had Gentoo on my hard drive, until yesterday.
Knoppix helped me in fixing the GRUB problem which I recently had. From then on I had been thinking of getting everything up and running.
The solution to the problem was a pretty simple one: pass the desired hsync and vsync frequencies as an argument during the boot up screen. I wanted to kick myself for being so ignorant.
Anyway, right now I'm posting this from Knoppix. So, (obviously) net works, so do the mp3s and the videos. Its pretty cool.
3 days, 3 differently flavored OSes.. should do something else.

More breaking my PC

So here I am sitting in front of my computer after successfully completing my networks lab exam, when I get this idea of downloading FreeDOS. Ya it is exactly what it says: Free MS-DOS. There is an interesting story as to how FreeDOS was actually made.
Anyway, I downloaded the iso file, burned the cd and then booted with that. I was greeted with a menu followed by the familiar DOS prompt of old. But I really didn't want to run it from the CD all the time, and as I had extra space on my HDD, I said: "Why not create a small partition and keep FreeDOS on that?". That was the point where I made the mistake of going into windows and trying to partition the drive, result: BSOD :(
System rebooted and GRUB shows me an error 17.
Enter Knoppix. I booted the liveCD and tried reconfiguring GRUB some 3-4 times, but to no avail. So I had to fix the master boot record using the Windows XP CD itself.
The good side is that at least I now get the chance of cleaning up whole of my system and trying out Ubuntu (I was getting a bit tired of Gentoo anyway).
On a side note, I won't say that it was Windows which messed up my partition table. It was my fault, I should have kept it more tidy.
Update:
I was not going to give up so soon, so I tried again and it worked. GRUB is back up and Knoppix rules. Now time to get FreeDOS installed :) Back to the breaking...

Through the Looking Glass

Ankur had posted earlier about his attempt at getting Sun's 3D desktop: Looking Glass running. So I said why don't I give it a shot.
I took the easier route of downloading the liveCD version of lg3d. It is based on slackware.
So, I booted up the liveCD and it detected everything pretty easily, but when it came to showing the desktop it just hung up. I could see the wallpaper (some shot of grand canyon I think), the icons and the items on the taksbar. The mouse moved a little and then it just got stuck. So, I tried running it not in fullscreen, but it had the same effect.
Now, I have an onboard graphics card (GeForce 2 with 32MB video RAM), so I thought that it was the problem. I moved to Sujit's PC which has a GeForce 5200 FX with 128MB of video RAM. Nothing changed, it still hung up. So the only test which the liveCD has left, to stay in my CD rack, is on Rahul's PC . If it doesn't work on that monster, then I really don't see it working on anything else.
Update:
It worked on Rahul's PC and is in fact pretty cool. You get to play a small 3D Pong game, then there are browsers (Firefox and mozilla both), you have mp3 players etc. But those are not the interesting things. You can rotate the windows in 3D (you will have to see it to believe it). The menus are 3D, when you move any window it gets a tilt etc. Its pretty nice to play around. The sad part is that it needed a really good graphics card and processor to run. Although this won't be a problem a few years from now, but still.
Anyway, I give it a thumbs up :) Mission accomplished.

The Unbreakable ?

Had my final exam today: Artificial Neural Networks, it being an elective and having very less amount of portions to study, was supposed to be a walk in the park. It came out totally the opposite. No expected questions and lots of never seen before numericals ruined what was supposed to be the easiest subject of the lot. My answers were ...creative vague. I did a lot of beating around the bush and the "I will write the same sentence in flowery language at different portions of the same answer. " thing. I hope to pass though :)
Other than that, I have a lab exam tomorrow and more labs coming up in the next week. Isn't that fun..
My roomies (the EC people) have their 8th semester classes starting from December 5, which is pretty sad. Ours should start in January.

He giveth and he taketh away

"A bolt of lightning from up the sky,
vaporized our modem,
and the LAN card was a fry.
But, our spirits didn't die,
and after the exam we got something new to buy."

-Rohit
(Based on a true life incident)

How to crash your computer using Folding@Home

This one courtesy Sourav, who crashed my computer (grrrrr). Works in Windows XP.

• Go task manager ala Ctrl+Alt+Del.
  
• Go in to the processes tab
  
• Right click on FahCore_65.exe and winFAH.exe, and change their priority to Realtime
  
• Witness the fireworks.
  

My friend Sujit just completed the first work unit for our Folding@Home team. Undoubtedly, he is very proud of this :P 

Well, I usually don't post cartoons in here, but this penny-arcade strip was truly hilarious.  

Two to go

Had my "Analysis and design of algorithms" exam today. Fortunately, it also went well. I have another two days before the next exam so I can relax a bit. I should also be booking my ticket for Delhi, because I have a long vacation ahead and this could be my last one as a student !! Who knows when I will get a holiday once I start working.
I was just checking out the the stats at uselesspython.com and I'm happy to announce that my Sudoku solver now stands as the tenth most downloaded file over there. It has been downloaded a total of 873 times.
Slowly we progress.

2 Down

Had my second exam today: Artificial Intelligence. Fortunately the question paper wasn't as tough as the previous ones, so it went well. After a sleepless night and lots of coffee I'm happy that it went well. Next one, Analysis and Design of algorithms, is on Friday.
Coming to other things RSA-640 has been factored. Now only 6 are left in the factoring challenge.
Well, according to RSA's estimates of today's machines, to factor a 1620 Bit number would require 1.6 x 10¹⁵ Pentium class machines, each having 120 Tb of RAM. So, I guess RSA-2048 is a long way away.
I will go catch up on some sleep.

Folding @ Home team

In a spur of pure spontaneity we decided to create our own Folding@Home team. Its called Via Agra, mainly because we couldn't think of anything and Anshul's highly orange shirt had this written on it. If you are interested in joining, download the client and give the team number as 47354.
The things which we do during exams.. sheesh.

Distributed Computing

A long long time ago I had participated in a certain distribtued computing project called distributed.net which used the distributed PCs to crack cryptograms such as RC5, Blowfish etc. At that time I was on a dialup and an archaic computer (166 Mhz 32 MB RAM 1GB HDD), so I really don't think that I did anything useful. It was an interesting experience though, as it was the first time I was introduced to anything like that.
Now with a decent system and a decent internet connection, I'm back. But not at the same place. I downloaded the Folding@Home client because it is for a good cause and also because there are very few people from india involved in this. Also my PC is online at most times and is doing nothing other than the NAT work.
Till now my CPU is being utilized 100 %, but I don't see any noticeable delays in other appilcations. So, thats good !
Talking about distributed applications, I found a nice read about distributed computing a few days back.

One night before the exam

The Checklist

Studied for exam ? Err ummm skip the question.

Got the admit card? Check

Got the pen, pencil, sharpner, stuff you put in a pencil box? Check

Prayed to god? Check

Talked to parents? Check

Drank coffee? Check

Played CS with 20 bots on one map (it was a bloodbath)? Check

Drank some more coffee? Check

.
.
.
.
.
I guess that's it. Hope all goes well.

Rahul's Birthday

I don't know whats with us and PLs. I mean, everytime before exams we do crazy things. Like during the last 6th semester PL we went to Munnar. The trip was planned, cancelled and replanned in a duration of one hour, and that hour being from 12 a.m to 1 a.m. Today, roughly 3 days away from our first exam, we went all the way from our house to Cocoa Tree just to have a cup of coffee (did I mention that this was also around midnight). The sad part is whenever we end up planning things in detail, it never works out.
Today was Rahul's 22nd Birthday. Due to some misunderstanding we ended up with 2 cakes instead of one. But, who am I to complain about extra cakes. The more the merrier.

Pretty candles

Pretty candles
Originally uploaded by [Rohit].

Our extremely well lit porch.

The auxillary slashdot effect

I had made a comment on slashdot about Rahul's HDR enabled screenshots of Farcry. In a few hours the views for those photos went from around 10-12 to around 900 each. A small but fullfilling slashdot effect. He sure was surprised :)

The color of lights

This has to go down as the best Diwali ever.
We all contributed in 200 bucks and got us a lot of sweets, lots of crackers and lots of food (well we were 7 people so it totalled to Rs 1400/-). We started bursting crackers at around 7:30 pm and continued up till 9pm. There were the usual "Anar", rockets, "gola bomb", "lakshmi bomb" and also the ethnic Kerala based crackers (which are basically something like the "bijli bomb" but in wrapped in coconut leaves.). Had a gala dinner (lots of it is still left) and then had an entertaining game of cards. A major portion of the sweets and food is still left, I guess that will be our midnight snack.
We have taken lots of pictures. Will upload them as soon as Sujit gets Rahul's bluetooth dongle.

Garbage collection

Well I was reading about shared memory in my parallel processing text. Interestingly shared memory is *not* deallocated when the program terminates. I didn't know that and unfortunately all of my programs which use shared memory don't explicitly deallocate it :(
The interesting thing is that shared memory and heap allocated memory are similar in the extent that both need to be explicitly allocated and deallocated. So I asked to myself, if that is the case can garbage collection be applied to shared memory? As in, the shared memory gets deallocated automatically when all the processes using that shared memory die. There is no need to explicitly deallocate the shared memory. If there needs to be this kind of a GC then I guess it should be built right into the operating system, so that it can conveniently keep track of the processes and the references to the shared memory.
Aw well I don't know why I wrote all this. Don't know if this is practical or of any use.

One year of blogging

All of a sudden I realized that it has been one year since I posted my first entry on this blog. So, Errr.. Happy Birthday Blog (????). With over 1200 hits, 180 entries and a whole lot of Ninjutsu this should make other blogs turn a shade of green (or maybe not). This would have to be the most memorable entry for me.
The blog started as a log of my day to day activities and things which I found interesting on the web. It still remains like that although I have decreased reporting *everything* I do on each day.
Anyway other than that, Happy Diwali to everyone and I guess the best Diwali gift we all received was Dhoni's marvellous innings against Sri-Lanka. This series will surely revive the interest in cricket, which was lost due to all the politics and the Indian team not performing.
Exams are closing by and studies seem to be balanced by an equal dose of Counter Strike.

Code blog

I started a code blog (yawn) for I had nothing else to do during my exam holidays. I should start studying more seriously :(

The (computer) gods must be crazy

So, here I am reading my text on analysis and design of algorithms (I have exams :( )when I see a mention of Donald E. Knuth's paper on "The complexity of Songs" (PDF). Whether it is supposed to be humorous or a mathematical description of songs, I couldn't decide because I suck at analysis. God help me.

Battlefield

After doing a lot of sleeping in the afternoon and evening we all went outside to have dinner in South Star. We had a more than a filling meal and came back. After coming back I went to Rahul's place (who is now the proud owner of a GeForce 7800 GTX. Yep, he has a SLI enabled motherboard.) to play Battlefield 2 Demo. Now Battlefield 2 is a team deathmatch/domination kind of game. The scenario being that of war. The demo has only one map: Gulf of Omaha.
Now the best part of the game is that you get to do all kind ofthings which you would do in a war (that is other than killing people). You get to drive tanks, drive boats, fly fighter jets (my favorite) etc. Today I had a nice time flying the F-16. The dog fighting experience was pretty cool. Me and another guy were hell bent on blowing up each others aircraft. The only thing which sucked was the damned slow net connection which was causing lag at some times. Other than that the experience was pretty entertaining.

The Google key chain which I was talking about. The results for the written test have not come out yet :( 

One hot Cappuccino (before)

One hot Cappuccino (before)
Originally uploaded by [Rohit].

Me and Rahul had gone to Cocoa tree (yesterday) to get RK's birthday cake. Had a nice cup of coffee followed by a high speed bike race. Did I mention that Rahul is an extremely fast (yet safe) biker. One poor Unicorn guy got his ass kicked by a CBZ and I had front row seats to the action.

Poor Nishant forgot to #include <math.h> in his graphics lab internal and didn't get output. Followed by the humilation on the net (see pic below), my heart really goes out for him (mwhwahahaaha).

7th semester almost over

All our classes are over and so are our internal exams. Now what is left is the university exam which is coming up on Novemeber 7th. With a preparatory leave of just about 12 days its going to be an uphill task.
Had my graphics lab internal today. We got a pretty simple program to make and animate a planetary system consisting of a star, three planets and some randomly moving rocks (asteroids??). Given that the lab was conducted in TurboC (yuck!), there were no eye catching effects. They were all plain circles going around one another. The viva also went smoothly.

The game on Linux

As I had previously said the Pacman game which I had made ran very slowly on Linux. So I made some posts on forums and got to know of the cause. Now it runs pretty nicely on both windows and linux. I have updated the sources and included a makefile for Linux also.
Update: I had my demonstration today and it went pretty well :) The faculty was impressed. I would like to thank all those people who have played the game and/or given me feedback. Thanks a ton !!

Pacman aftermath

So, I completed Pacman and the demo is to be tomorrow. I don't care how it goes. But there are a few things which I learnt while making this project and which I do care about.

First of all: designing before you actually code helps later. While making this project I never layed pen to paper. Everything was directly typed onto the computer without actually thinking it through. That is the reason why at some parts the collision detection doesn't work. I don't think that I will be able to rectify that without doing a total overhaul of the code.

Secondly, making tools which aid some part of the program are not only cool but also an excellent saviour of time. I made the pacman map editor because I was lazy to actually put in all of the coordinates of the maze into the program. In the end it was a big convenience in testing the program.

Thirdly, something which works fine on your computer may not work the same, somewhere else. The game ran smoothly on my windows machine. It ran extremely fast on my friend (Rakesh's) P.C (maybe because of a better graphics card) and extremely slowly on my Linux box. I'm still trying to figure out why it is running slowly on Linux. By the way did I mention that the game was portable :D

And finally the only tough part in doing any project is .... starting the project. Once you have started it doesn't take much time to finish it..

Pacman finished

Pacman finished !!! Well ya you could say it is "finished", because it is not exactly same as the original pacman. The monsters don't look the same and they move randomly in the maze. But thats not the main point. You have only one life and you can't eat the monsters. If you eat the super pill you will just be able to pass through them (disguised as one of them). And there is no score, the reason being I didn't want to go into the trouble of setting up fonts in OpenGL. The windows executables can be found here and the source code can be found here. I haven't commented it too much, at the moment. This project has been done in OpenGL , SDL compiled using Bloodshed Dev C++ (I don't like the IDE part of it that much) and edited using good old xemacs. Should run on Linux through wine but I guess it can also be built for Linux.  

Pacman continued

Well I'm back working on Pacman again. I did the collision detection part, but it is not working everywhere :( I don't think that I will be able to correct that before the deadline (which is monday). I did the sounds also and they are working fine. The only remaining part being the monsters. One real bad thing which I noticed about OpenGL is that to write some text on the screen is not that straightforward. The common ways are not cross platform and the other ways (like using SDL_ttf) are...well, a bit complex (at least right now). 

Fork bomb

Ever since I had heard about fork bombs (last semester Operating Systems course), I wanted to create one for myself and see its effect. Please don't try this if you don't want to waste your *nix system.

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main() {
  while(1)
     fork();
  return 0;
}

I ran it on my Gentoo system and it was brought to its knees in a few seconds. I couldn't open any new processes or even login in another terminal (well login is again a process, so I guess that was redundant). Couldn't even terminate the fork bomb by Ctrl+C. Ctrl+Alt+Del (reboot) also didn't work. So had to push the power off button.
It was pretty cool :D

Google 2084

 

This will surely increase my job prospects :))

The Big G

Google was in campus today for recruitment today. The presentation was followed by a written round consisting of objective questions and one programming problem. It was ok. The results will take around one week to be announced :( We got Google key chains after the whole thing got over.

This is a screenshot of a maze (created by the map editor) loaded by the pacman game. A few things are still missing at the moment. There is no collision detection (meaning pacman can roam through and out of the boundaries) and no monsters. With my internal exams coming up I don't think I will get to work on this, this week.

Pacman map editor

I was working on creating the maze for my Pacman project. To do that I divided the screen into cells of dimensions 40x40. Each cell can either be a boundary entity, a pill , a super pill or empty. The boundary entities are the ones which actually form the maze (the blue thingies).

Now I had done all the coding for the Cell class, but I was really not in the mood to type in all the values (namely the x,y coordinates and the type) for all the cells to make the maze (I hate magic numbers in a program). So I made a map editor which is basically a WYSIWYG editor with which you can create mazes for my pacman game. It is very basic at the moment. You just hover the mouse on to a region and click. The cell's type, in which the region belongs, is changed with each mouse click. The map can then be saved into a file which is read by the Pacman game.

I think it is pretty neat :D

Obfuscated code

I was tempted many times to make one. Here is the first one in my life:

main      (U

,C

)    { 

scanf("    %s",

C);sscanf(

			 C,"%x    ",&

U

)                             ;

printf   (     "%d ",U)       ;

}

Runs in gcc and converts hex (input) to decimal(output).

I hate myself

Two days back (the day before the "last date of submission" of our major project abstract), I was getting frustrated scouting for ideas for the major project. I was not liking the topics suggested by the sites. The reason being: I like making projects which are technical but can be understood and appreciated by everyone.
So, coming back to my deranged state of mind, while scouting I came across this article on linuxdevcenter.com . It was basically an interview with the lead developer of an open source 3-D graphics engine called Irrlicht. Anyway a 3-D graphics engine fit my "reason for making projects". So, in a fit of inspiration I typed out an abstract and submitted it today (it seems the "last date" was flexible).
The only problem being: my relative inexperience in graphics programming. Yes, I'm doom(ed). And yes I'm doing this alone..

Among other things we went to play a match (basketball) in UC College (Aluva) against MCC, Calicut on the same day. Given the fact that we had not practised and MCC was a sports college we were bound to lose. And yes we did, but by a reasonable margin :D Everyone was being cycled through the fives as no one had enough stamina.

Pacman started...

I had decided to make a Pacman clone as a part of the graphics (micro) mini project. The project should have started (ended??) a long time ago, but we lazy people like to keep things for the last moment.
Anyway I finally started coding a few things for the project. I basically have three entities of the game almost ready i.e Pacman, the pills and the super pills. The monsters and the maze are yet to be taken care of. The bigger pill is the super pill and the smaller one is the normal one. The yellow thingie is Pacman. I have the keyboard controls working and animations for pacman and the super pill too.

Shed skin

I first came to know about shed skin when Mark Dufour (the guy who is making shed skin ) mailed me. He said that he wanted to use one of my python programs to use as a unit test case for a python-to-c++ compiler he was working on (that is what shed skin is). I did a little more research on the project and I find out that it is actually one of the projects funded by the "Google summer of code" thingie. The project is pretty cool and shed skin can effectively convert a lot of python programs into C++ code.
Today while I was trying to compile a program with shed skin I got an error which had something to do with "dlopen". So I googled for it and got a lot of interesting stuff.
dlopen, along with a few other functions, is used to dynamically load in libraries. Basically it is used so that you can make your program more "plugin friendly". You can find a lot of interesting reads on this topic.
Among other things, I still don't have any bright ideas for my major project :(

The day after

Today was the last day of Inspire '05. We had events like programming, web designing etc taking place today. Followed by the grand finale the DJ show. I couldn't attend the DJ show as I was busy munching pizzas courtesy my cousin Neethu (who got placed in Infosys).
Among other things I'm wondering if this is an year of disasters, with the latest being the quake in north India/Pakistan.

Inspire '05 Hackathon

Today was the first day of our computer science fest : Inspire '05. I was helping out in an event titled "Hackathon" which had to do with cracking and cryptography. We didn't expect much participation for our event but a healthy number of 8 teams turned up. There were two parts to the event: cracking and cryptography. In the cracking part the participants were given three executables (which I downloaded from various sites and was able to crack myself) which they had to crack. The tools provided were ollydbg, w32dasm and xvi32.
For the cryptography part they were given three simple ciphers designed by me, which they had to decipher. The three were something like this:

Cryptography challenge 1 - More than Caesar

guvf xvaq bs pvcure vf xabja nf gur ebgngvba pvcure. gur nafjre gb guvf ceboyrz vf ebgngvba


Cryptography challenge 2 - Bad numbers

69 66 20 79 6f 75 20 64 69 64 20 74 68 69 73 20 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 77 69 74 68 6f 75 74 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 6c 70 20 6f 66 20 61 20 70 72 6f 67 72 61 6d 20 74 68 65 6e 20 79 6f 75 20 6d 75 73 74 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 68 65 20 61 73 63 69 69 20 74 61 62 6c 65 20 69 6e 20 79 6f 75 72 20 68 65 61 64 2e 20 74 68 65 20 61 6e 73 77 65 72 20 74 6f 20 74 68 69 73 20 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 69 73 20 68 65 78 63 6f 64 65 7a

Cryptography challenge 3 - A nice compliment

10011101
10010110
10010001
10011110
10001101
10000110
10001100
10001011
10001101
10010110
10010001
10011000


All these were generated by programs written by me and are pretty simple.

Solution for Cryptography 1

The cipher is a simple shift cipher also known as ROT-13. The letters a-z are translated to n-za-m. A simple PERL program solves it.

$a="guvf xvaq bs pvcure vf xabja nf gur ebgngvba pvcure. gur nafjre gb guvf ceboyrz vf ebgngvba";
$a=~tr/n-za-m/a-z/;
print $a;

Which reveals:
this kind of cipher is known as the rotation cipher. the answer to this problem is rotation

Solution for Cryptography 2

The cipher is basically ASCII codes written in hex. Here is a simple python program to solve it:

s="""69 66 20 79 6f 75 20 64 69 64 20 74 68 69 73 20 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 77 69 74 68 6f 75 74 20 74 68 65 20 68 65 6c 70 20 6f 66 20 61 20 70 72 6f 67 72 61 6d 20 74 68 65 6e 20 79 6f 75 20 6d 75 73 74 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 68 65 20 61 73 63 69 69 20 74 61 62 6c 65 20 69 6e 20 79 6f 75 72 20 68 65 61 64 2e 20 74 68 65 20 61 6e 73 77 65 72 20 74 6f 20 74 68 69 73 20 63 68 61 6c 6c 65 6e 67 65 20 69 73 20 68 65 78 63 6f 64 65 7a """
l=s.split()
m=""
for k in l:m+=chr(int(k,16))
print m

Which reveals:

if you did this challenge without the help of a program then you must have the ascii table in your head. the answer to this challenge is hexcodez

Solution to cryptography 3

This was basically ASCII code changed to binary and complimented by 1. Again python does the job for us :)

s="""10011101 10010110 10010001 10011110 10001101 10000110 10001100 10001011 10001101 10010110 10010001 10011000"""
l=s.split()
m=""
for k in l:m+=chr(~int(k,2)+256)
print m

Which reveals
binarystring

The event went of pretty smoothly and I'm happy that it got a good response. The winners were from MCA CUSAT. Thanks to Chandan, Saurav and all the other juniors who ran around for this event :)

A Python one liner

I was just fiddling around with IDLE, when I made up this one line program to reverse a string and display it.

print (raw_input()[::-1])

Well it is not too clever, but what the heck it is my blog and I put in whatever I want to.

Quake 2 Nostalgia

With the last date for the submission of the major project abstract drawing closer, I was scouting the web for ideas. When I was making my chess engine (6th semester mini project), I was intrigued by the idea of making a bot for a FPS like quake 3, UT etc. Although we take these bots for granted while playing the game, a lot of effort actually goes into making these bots life like. The majority of information on bot programming available on the web seems to be restricted to quake 2. After reading through a few of these sites I decided against making one. The reason being 1) It won't seem too academic. 2) The information is confined to quake 2 (I was hoping at least quake 3)
Anyway looking at all that info about quake 2 made me download the demo. That being one of the first games I ever played (I guess at that time I was in 10th standard). Surprisingly I could remember most of the things and the demo lasted for a fiery 20 minutes of gameplay (no saves). It is still fun playing it :) Come to think of it I have been playing on the quake 2 engine all these days. Counter strike condition zero is built on the Half life engine. The half life engine is actually a highly tweaked quake 2 engine which was brought by valve from id software.
Among other things I again got hit on the nose by the basketball.

Harvey Danger

Well, there was this article on slashdot which said that a Seattle based rock band called Harvey Danger had released their newest album Little by little for free download. So, I went right ahead and downloaded the album.
The verdict: It is pretty good and even better because it is free.
Among other things, I got hit right on the nose by the basketball while playing. It is not a nice feeling.

Permutation

Well, there was this sample google question on the notice board which went something like this: "How will you find whether string A is a permutation of string B?" . One method will be to actually make all the permutations and keep on comparing them with the other string. This is obviously inefficient as it takes O(N!) time. I did something else which takes O((N)^3) time (I think. I am not too good at analysis.). You just check whether all the characters in one string are there in the other string and their lengths are equal (obviously).

The Anatomy of a Search Engine

With google coming here and all I have been trying to dig up stuff related to the way search engines crawl and index web pages. I stumbled upon Sergey Brin and Larry Page's paper on google. Should be an interesting read.

The lone rider

I woke up to a nice morning. I had my breakfast as today was a holiday (usually I don't). We had an Inspire meeting today at 10 in the morning. After taking care of that I went to see the EC fest which was taking place. Some of my friends suggested that I keep my project in the project presentation. So, as I had nothing better to do, I brought my project (a chess engine) over there.
I was surrounded by Electronics projects on all sides. Half of the projects had something to do with robots on wheels. I being the only CS guy over there. Also my team had only one member: me. Other teams had 2-4 people. The good thing was as the judges were from electronics background they couldn't ask too many tricky questions.
The results are not out yet, but at least I got lunch and tea so I'm happy.

The Big Bang

I walked into the college building expecting the same boring schedule to repeat itself. My eyes went to the notice board when I saw those 6 letters. On top of the letters was written "Are you feeling lucky today?" . I couldn't believe my eyes: Google was going to come to our campus!!!! Let's see what happens. Fingers and toes crossed and yes I do feel lucky ;)

Back again.

The moment you set foot on the station you get the same feeling: "Back to the same damned place again." The feeling hasn't changed since the first time I returned from Delhi, after my first year was over. Three and a half years gone by like the wind blows.

A late update

It's been quite a while since I put up anything here. Reason being that I'm having a ball in Delhi. The past one week has been a blur.
Everyday its like : get up, drop mom to school, have breakfast and then zoooom away with friends for rest of the day. I went to places which I always wanted to go (like cafe mocha). Best part is I'm now getting the car more easily (yahoooo).
I made mom watch Swades and she was pretty impressed by it. I also wanted to make her see Iqbal and we did go to wave noida, but unfortunately they had stopped showing it.
I hope the remaining week is even better than the week which just went by.

Exmas over !!!

My internal exams are finally over. Fortunately all of them went fine. I leave for Delhi tomorrow.

Confusion confusion

We have two internal exams scheduled for tomorrow (Networks and Neural networks). While reading the newspaper in the afternoon we noticed at one corner that PDP was going to call a hartal tomorrow. This started the panic wave (which is soo famous in CUSAT). A rapid exchange of messages over messengers, phone, word of mouth started. More people wanted the Hartal not to happen as this would jeopardize their (Onam) vacation plans. The 8' O clock evening news confirmed that the Hartal will be there tomorrow, which meant that the exams will be postponed. One hour later we get another flash news that the hartal had in fact been called off. So back to the books.
Among other things I feel very weak although no one believes me.

A week back we had nothing to do so we decided to do some stunts. This is just one of them.
The bottom tier of the "Human pyramid" is made up by Anshul, Rahul and myself. Sujit and Sourav are enjoying their stay on the top at our expense.
This stunt was preceded by me carrying Anshul (weighs over a ton) and Sujit together. I'm sooo strong :)
We even had two rounds of piggy back fighting, both of which my team won.

Note: These stunts were carried out by professionals. Do not try them at home.  

Another logo. This one for the quiz. Pretty simple enough I guess. The lightning is a bit Harry Potterish. 

Site statistics

One of my favorite passtimes is to keep track of who all are visiting my site(s). This lets me see how many hits I'm getting and from where all. My home page received the most number of hits (164) this month. My blog also received the most number of hits (300) this month. You can check out the stats for my site here. The site stats of this blog can be accessed by clicking at the counter on the bottom of this page :)

Programming event logo. Hurried up effort. This one deviates from the white background thing. 

Logo for the paper presentation. Among other things we have street lights outside our house yahoooo!!!!! We now have the power of sight in the dark.  

Another logo

Surprise surprise!! I made another logo. This one now adorns the make shift ACES site, courtesy myself. 

Growth in Indian Offshoring Slowing

Slashdot had an article on "Growth in Indian Offshoring Slowing". An interesting read. With companies opting out for places like Eastern Euprope, Latin America, China this was bound to happen.

More on Google talk

Google talk has a nice clean UI. The installation is very small (900K) and very fast. I did make a PC to PC call and it sounds very clear. The downsides are quite a few though.
No emoticons. When you try some of the emoticon combos like :) or :D etc they turn blue but you don't get any smileys. Font face and color cannot be changed. No avatars or buddy icons. No "buzzes", "nudges", "audibles" etc. All in all if google wants to stay in the IM race they will have to improve. I still like Yahoo messenger the most.

Google Talk

Google Talk is Google's newest offering. It is an instant messaging service based on the jabber protocol. I haven't tried it out yet, but I soon will :)

Dooba Dooba

doobadooba
Originally uploaded by zadeus.

My brother is in TCS Bombay. He was busy clicking pictures in the recent flood. This one shows the scale of destruction which happened there.

Another logo. This one is for the web site designing event. It is a blend of the previous two ideas. The e is from Internet explorer and the background is from Firefox. I'm a fair person. 

This one I made for the gaming event. The name of the event hasn't been finalized yet so I gave it a name: "Headshot". :) 

I guess logo designing is getting to be the latest fashion these days (especially with Inspire and a lot of other fests coming up). So I said why not try my hand at this thing.

This one being a logo for an event which I shall be handling. The event is a set of progressive hacking challenges.

4 KM

I got my shoe repaired after 5 days (so now I don't have to play basketball barefoot anymore). Unfortunately nobody turned up to play in the evening. So, I ran. I first took a few rounds alone then I had Rahul Bhai for company. He took some 15 rounds and I took some 10. We had a sprint for the last round. I won the sprint in seabiscuit style. But, yes, I had the "I ran 5 rounds less" advantage. It was fun. I got completely dehydrated after that.

Heli attack

Who says you can't make good games in flash. Heli attack 3 is a game on miniclip. The game is a side scrolling 2-D flash game. Basic objective is to shoot at helicopters and other things that try to piss you off. The best part of the game, which I liked, is that you get to choose from a lot of weapons like the rail gun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, chain gun etc (seems to be inspired by quake). Also the game has quite a few levels. Pretty interesting.

My good friend Rakesh managed to make this wonderful logo for our annual Computer Science fest: Inspire. It looks pretty cool. I just hope that others like it too. 

We had a virus attack on our systems by the W32.Pinfi virus. Till now we have detected it on 3 computers out of 4, on our LAN. It infected over 550 files on my system. The impressive fact was that it was able to do all this in one day. Fortunately Norton Antivirus was able to detect and remove it from my system. Although it is gone I would like to format the drive. 

Back from Trivandrum

I had left for Trivandrum day before yesterday for my uncle's housewarming. I had Sunu with me for the train journey to Trivandrum so I didn't get bored.
The housewarming took place yesterday. We had the usual stuff, which take place in a Hindu Brahmin ceremony. I was mostly involved in taking snaps and doing some small help work (when needed). I spent some nice time with my cousin brothers and sisters. I returned today morning at around 10:30 am. Fortunately my friends had taken care of my attendance :) while I was away. So, no worries.

Sarovar.org

Sarovar is an Indian site where you can upload your projects something like sourceforge. The good thing is that almost all of sourceforge's facilities are provided and it is easier, than sourceforge, to get your project approved. Check out my page at Sarovar.org.

Brother crossing a river.

DSCN0892,
originally uploaded by zadeus.

This is my brother crossing a "river" (which apparently doesn't have any water, duh!). This was in his "Outbound learning module". I don't know why these companies use such complex terms for a simple thing called "picnic".

Second revision to Pong

I made a few cosmetic changes to my game: Pong. The game pauses when the ball hits the ground and then plays a "smash" sound. The computer now does get defeated, although I was unable to remove the to and fro motion. The controls are the same and the bat still moves at its usual "fast" pace. Source and executables.

Happy Independence day

India turns 58 today. Salutes to all those who helped us gain our freedom. We are truly indebted to them and their sacrifice towards the country. Jai Hind !

Addy gets placed

Addy finally got placed in Hexaware. He had worked hard for it and I'm happy that he cleared it. Hard work finally pays its dividend. Time to party.

Black and White

Spoiler warning: Certain plot details of the movie Mangal Pandey: The rising, follow. Do not read if you don't want to.

Today was one day after the release of the much awaited movie : "Mangal Pandey: The rising". After a long wait of 4 years we finally had a movie starring Aamir Khan. We had done the bookings in advance at Sridhar. Sourav had booked 10 tickets for us all but unfortunately not everyone could make it. So it was just me, Anshul, Sujit and Sourav along with some juniors who went to see the movie. Two of my classmates had asked Sourav to book tickets for them too, but they couldn't make it on time. So we were left with two spare tickets. The movie was about to start and we needed to get rid of them fast. So, we started asking other people if they needed two balcony tickets. Now, we did this at a great risk, because we were surrounded with a lot people who were selling tickets in black. There was a pretty good chance of us getting beaten up. Even though we were selling the tickets at the same rate at which we brought them, there were no takers.
When there were 5 minutes to the start we went to the people who were selling tickets in black and asked them if they needed two balcony tickets !!! Two of them said "No", when suddenly one of them came and brought the tickets at Rs 100/-. We earned a profit of Rs 10/- Hurray!!!
Mangal Pandey as a movie doesn't live up to it's hype. It is a nice movie all right, but it is not something of the scale of Lagaan. The songs are not too great and seem to be inserted forcefully into the movie. The title song is good though. The movie rolls along smoothly in the first half and the final thirty minutes are good. The scene where you have Mangal Pandey firing shots alone at the whole Rangoon regiment is quite awesome. As expected Rani Mukherjee's role is confined to just the songs. Amisha Patel's role is not even that much. The English actor who plays the role of "Captain Gordon" has done a good job. Aamir Khan is obviously good.
All in all I would say you should see this movie at least once.

Another day in my life.

Today was special, because the day started of with me falling into the wet mud outside our house. I was planning to distribute the lab records today. So I asked Bhupen to give me lift on his bike. The bike hadn't gone two feet when the bike slipped and we fell along with the bike. I was more dirty than hurt. So I had to cleanup before going to class. I arrived a full 40 minutes late *big grin* to class and got away with it.
Today was special also because it was the first day in our 7th semester when we had full day class. We have faculty shortage and two of our subjects didn't have a faculty until recently. We had all 3 hours in the morning and lab in the afternoon.
Evening was spent in playing basketball. We had players from Sacred hearts and we had a nice 3 hours of full court action. During the game I also managed to destroy the sole of one of my shoes (which, by the way, costed 5 grand).
I now have a good long weekend in front of me. Hope to sleep right through it.

My second game

Well I am supposed to be making Pac-man for my graphics micro-mini project. Instead I made a game of pong (It would be surprising if you haven't played it). No idea why I made it.
Anyway the controls are the usual "LEFT" to move left, "RIGHT" to move right and "SPACE" to stop the bat. Why does one need "SPACE" to stop? Well, because the bat moves really fast. Right now it is very tough to play the game, forget winning. The computer near about plays a perfect game and I haven't scored a single point against it. The reason being the algorithm driving the game of the computer is stupidly written.
If you want to play the game you can get the executables. You can also get the source code. It has been written in xemacs and compiled using Bloodshed Dev C++. You will be needing the SDL libraries to compile the program. They are provided with the executables.
It took me two nights to finish this program and thus it has not been well commented. I will soon take care of that.

5 point someone

I was reading the book "5 point someone" for the past 3 days. Although it is supposed to be "unputdownable" it took me some days to finish the book, as I had other work (lab / basketball) to do.
The story is pretty good and relates pretty well to our lives. It is a nice joy ride and I really liked it.
Among other things the weather has become hot for the past two days. But right now it has started pouring again. I wonder if I will be able to go and play.

Sudoku solver getting popular?

I had made a sudoku solver a few days back in python. I had submitted it to uselesspython.com. Quite surprisingly it has become pretty popular and at the moment it is at the top of this week's most downloaded programs at uselesspython. Check out its statistics.

Loungevity

We (Me, Sujit, Rahul and Bhatta) had been to Loungevity yesterday. It is a one of a kind lounge in Cochin. You really don't expect to see such plush interiors and a nice crowd. It was a fun evening.