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.