Evening extravaganza

For people who failed to notice or didn't know, I became health conscious a few months back. I have since then stopped having fried snacks, chips, biscuits, cold drinks, ice creams, puddings, cakes, my once favorite mango shake and anything which I feel is high on calories. And of course I have become fitter, so to speak.
But today... today all that was swept away in a sea of temptation (or rather oil). The culprit was something which we call "Bread Roll", Rahul calls it "Bread Chops" and some god fearing people have even named it "The Bomb". Tagging along with it was the good old "Bread Pakoda" and the evil bottle of Coca-Cola. The idea was to replay what was done by Rahul, Addy, Anshul and Bhattu during Vishu. The result, though, was much better.

I leave you with a few pictures and the credits, for my head is getting a bit heavy and it is telling me to go and sleep.

The temptation "Bread Roll".


The start of the attack.


Giving into temptation.

Credits:

Main idea and concept:
Sujit Nair.

Chief King Chef:
Rahul Sharma.

Deep fryer:
Rohit Krishna Kumar.

Auxillary deep fryer:
Sourav Bhattacharya.

Mixer and general crowd support:
Aditya Raman.

Transporter and logistics:
Anshul Krishna.

Garnishing and decoration:
Sujit Nair and Anshul Krishna.

Technical Support:
Rohit Krishna Kumar.

Chief Camerapersons:
Sourav Bhattacharya and Rahul Sharma.

General Nonsense and no-help:
Auto Rickshaw.





The END

A few things to be happy about

The company which I'm planning to join (Subex Systems) recently acquired Azure Solutions . This is the biggest overseas acquisition by an Indian IT company. So... yay!!!!

I hope a lot of people took note and not give me these blank stares when I tell them that "I'm going to join Subex Systems in Bangalore.", from now on.
Now, before I got a job in Subex (which was actually a big, but pleasant, accident) I had gotten placed in Wipro. Wipro being a household name for like a century, was recognisable by everyone. Most importantly by my parents and my relatives.
I mean for a few days, I would just go here and there and happily answer queries as to where I was placed:

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "Where did you get placed?"

Me: "Yo!! Wipro."

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "Wow!!!"

End of story.

Now though, its a different story all together.

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "Where did you get placed?"

Me: "err.. um.. I got placed first in Wipro and then in Subex Systems. I'm planning to join the latter."

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "Oh, so when are you planning to join Wipro? Where will you be joining?"

Me: "Subex Systems.. err.. not Wipro.."

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "Oh what is that?"

Me: "Its a software products company doing business in the telecom sector and based in Bangalore."

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "And how is it related to Wipro?"

Me: *pulls my hair out*

Me: "Err.. nothing, I'm joining Wipro."

Arbitary relative/friend/well-wisher: "Wow!!!"

End of story.

But then this isn't something which is new for me. I have always been associated with institutions having weird/unheard-of names. For example the name of my school was "Ahlcon (not alcohol) Public School", the name of my coaching center was "TOCAB", and last, but by no means the least, the name of my college is: "CUSAT". My dad, for some reason, still calls it "Cochin Institute of Technology". I mean its been 4 years and I have relentlessly corrected him, but he still persists.
But I don't need to worry, because in a few months our college will become IIT-Cochin and we will be like the masters of the universe ... yeah right.

Among other things, Anubhav started writing a blog because he got bored of studying for exams. I would like to welcome him to the blogosphere.

Beered

Just to tease Rahul.

He is still the best biker I know :)

Update: In his defense Rahul says: " I will show you a video, when i will buy the yamaha R6." I will be waiting for that day buddy :P

My new and customized home page :D

Wheelie

Of the many stunts which Rahul performs on his bike, few have been recorded. He remains a phantom to most of his admirers, showing his class only when he has enough adrenaline (or enough alcohol) inside him.
This one is a short and, I would say, not the very best of his wheelies, but the only one which has been caught on camera.

Determination.

Must... *cough* *splatter* *cough* *cough* .. Must start... studying.

I hate this stalemate kind of situation. The exams are not too far off, but they are not too near also. If I were in a hindi movie, I would say something like "Tum door ho kar bhi mere paas ho" and sing some shitty romantic song. But then I'm not in a Hindi movie and neither can I be romantic or sing a song.
The only time when I used to sing regularly was when we were getting ragged. At that time I would sing without a worry and the seniors would ask me to stop after like 5 seconds and I would be like "Hey, I just started..".
My favorite song at that time was Shaan's "Tanha Dil". That was mainly because I knew the lyrics of the song and also because it was a nice song. I used to sing it whenever I was asked to sing. I hate it now.

Err... so where was I? Right.. exams.

So, I should start to at least hold the books in my hand, but I can't even do that. Rest of my activities are going on like clockwork.. i.e if you call eating and sleeping, activities. And now I have this half cold-cough kinda thing, which has given me an excuse not to study till I'm fit. So I will go and take rest now.

A must read

Ladies and gentlemen I bring to you "Passing in the test" from "Lightning Strikes Everyday".

What the .... ??

I hate mosquitoes. I don't say that just because they bite me and leave some itchy rashes on my arms and legs, but because, in the true sense, they are my righteous enemies.
The time when I had dengue was when I was in 12th standard. The doctor didn't know what had happened to me, but after a few blood tests and other similar stunts, he got to know, and so did I and my parents. On hindsight, maybe he already knew but didn't tell, so that my parents didn't get worried. But, whatever, that was the first time I got to know what leukocytes were and what their average count should be. Platelets were a term which I knew about, but that didn't really help. Fortunately it didn't have me in bed for more than 3 weeks and the disease caused by Aedes Aegypti vanished away.
But wait, for there is more. Within a week of my respite, a female anopeheles thought: "Let's take a bite." and that was the beginning of my malaria. Shivering sucks and all that and I was in bed for another 2 weeks. My highest recorded temperature was 106 ° F (yay!! although I still believe it went higher than that.).
When I got out of bed, I was faced with the IIT-JEE screening test and only god knows how I cleared it. My parents had their hopes high, but I knew what I was made of. Or rather, I knew "Ki main kis mitti ka bana hun". IIT mains saw me using my creativity in somehow filling up the sheets, so as to not get a sense of inferiority complex and I just chimed whatever the others said about the papers i.e "physics was tough", "maths and chemistry were easy", "cutoffs will be low" etc. I was confident that IIT won't be in my reach.
DCE (Delhi College of Engineering + NSIT) was another hope which I had. And it hit me pretty badly when its results came out and I couldn't get through that either.
I had gotten mediocre ranks in AIEEE, IP university and Karnataka CET. I was, pretty much, down and out.
536 was the rank which I got in the CUSAT Common Admission Test . It was a university which I had heard, as Rakesh's brother had written its entrance test three years back. Most people asked me to keep it as the last resort (for obvious reasons), but I guess I just wanted to run away from my failures when I decided that I will join CUSAT.

Project presentation

After keeping me and my pc waiting for one hour, my project presentation finally began. It consisted of 25 powerpoint slides and two demo programs. Thank godfully™ it went fine.
I leave for Palakkad today, to meet my dad and grandparents. So it is tata from me for a few days.

Just another rant

I'm totally jobless and, more importantly, so are you :P
Anyway, everything in this city seems to be closed for the past few days. First it was Vishu and now the Easter holidays. Everything from the restaraunts, to the cd-shop, to the gym, to the swimming pool is closed. That just leaves me, my evil mind and my classy fast typing fingers in front of my PC; alone, bored and tired of sleeping. And this is actually when I have my project presentation on Monday. I wonder what my condition will be after that gets over and I have like another 20 days before the exams begin. Needless to say is that studies for the exams won't start till maybe a week before the D-day or even later.
The one thing which does keep me occupied these days is, peering into other people's life with the help of Orkut. And I mean how can anyone get tired of doing that. After all the whole world depends on the breach of privacy. I'm sure I'm making a lot of sense right now, so I will get back to seeing the scrapbook of someone who had scrapped someone else somewhere. And here I would like to say what the great Einstein said after delivering a masterly crafted speech, to a jam packed hall in Kathmandu on the special theory of relative bullshit: "My brain hurts.".

Coffee

I'm sure you must have seen the guys who hang out in Barista for like half their life, playing chess, scrabble or guitar, after just ordering one drink. The ones whom you look at and wonder: "Don't they have anything else to do in life?".
Well today, I just became one of them :D and its not that bad

Last internals

Tomorrow will be the last day of my internals ever. And me being in the last and final semester am not studying for it, but, on the contrary, am writing a blog post for I have lost all hope.
I still remember the time when I was in my first year and was faced with the daunting task of facing the first internal exams of college life. It was a never felt before experience. We all had to give 10 exams in five days continuously. Which translates to 2 exams per day on a five day stretch !!
Being in the first semester and all, we had a "we can become good engineers and make the world a better place" attitude. I used to write 10 page assignments on A4 sheets. Now, I didn't have the experience of writing on blank sheets of paper, so invariably the text would go zig-zag. To counter that, I used to draw equally spaced parallel lines with the help of my drafter on each of those 10 sheets. Yes I sucked (to some extent), but then I didn't know what engineering was all about. (Engineering is actually 4 years of watching movies, eating, sleeping and boozing)
But coming back to the internal exam thingie. I remember we had a short preparatory holiday before the internal and we had smartly decided to go back to Delhi. (On a side note, that was the only trip when we were blessed with the babes of Manipal in our train). I had carried an air-bag full of books, notes and what not just for the exams. If there was one thing which I learnt from that trip was that you can't study at home (and also that the Manipal crowd boards the Mangla express from Kankanadi and Udupi).
After returning what followed were the five most gruelling days of my life. And yes that sucked.
The internals which followed over the years have never been taken too seriously by me or most of my fellow mates. I also stopped drawing those silly lines with the drafter and my assignments were no longer than 4 pages.
But the one thing which hasn't changed over the years is that, I don't cheat in exams. This is one of the few (only??) principles which I have and I don't know why? It is not because of the "You are after all cheating yourself" thingie. It is just one of those crazy stupid things which you believe in and end up regretting.
God knows what is going to happen tomorrow :(
Update: No more principles for me. Exams went fine ;D

What a taunt !! (Courtesy PA)

Farewell

Lots of photos, speeches by faculty and friends, truth and dare, whiskey, vodka, beer, more photos, dance and back home.
I will write something more sensible once I get some sense. Cheerios.

Epilogue

Lost in space II

Nah, this is not about my project. This is about astronomers making useless discoveries. It seems that astronomers have found an alcohol cloud in space measuring 463 billion kilometers !!! Now, before you start packing your bags, bottles, glasses, ice, peanuts and re-fuelling your state of the art space craft, listen to this:

"The vast bridge-shaped cloud of methyl alcohol has been spotted in a region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, that is called W3(OH)"

Yes you heard right: "Methyl Alcohol", not ethanol. So, unless you want to go blind, don't attempt the heroic journey into outer space.

Damn.. I should find something better to do. I mean its that time of the year when people are all nostalgic and shit, about college coming to an end. But here I'm talking nonsense about stuff which no one cares. So, I guess I will write the next post about how college has changed me mentally, physically, financially and made me a new person , or maybe I will just go and sleep the next 12 hours and eat a watermelon in the morning.

Lost in space

While most of my other batchmates have already completed their projects, and are preponing (!!!!) their presentation dates, I'm still tinkering along with mine.
Now the graphics engine has the ability to load 3ds models (ie models made in 3d studio max). It is not complete and is still a bit buggy, but I do have a video to show off :D
Mission to mars anyone ? ( I hate that movie, by the way)

Touching the void

The closer you are to death. The more you realize you are alive.

If you want to know what real guts are, watch this movie.
It is a true story of two mountaineers (Simon Yates & Joe Simpson), who decide to climb the peak of Siula Grande in Peru, how one of them is left alone to face death, when things go horribly wrong and his eventual fight back.
More about it on wikipedia.

Double trouble

I have been partaking in many a misadventure in the past few days.
Firstly, I joined the gym after a long long break of around 1 year. My gym schedules , till now, have usually lasted for around 3 weeks after which I give up due to some excuse or the other. Anyway after half an hour of gym, I came to realize why I had given up gym for so long: It pained !!

When I reached home 2 DSPs were waiting. And the resulting party resulted in the worst hangover I have ever had in my life.

And today I combined swimming and gym together. As in, I swam for an hour and then went to the gym. Interestingly, basketball is more strenuous than the two combined and I would have stuck with that if I hadn't torn my shoes (again).

"All things must pass none of life's strings last. So, I must be on my way and face another day"

- Beatles

Flickr pro

My brother bought me a Flickr pro account when I was in Delhi, and it rocks. So, these days when I'm not wasting my time watching ridiculous movies, I organize my photos.

The weekend continues

I seem to be laying my hands only on really pathetic movies these days. Yesterday I got "Teesri Aankh", Sunny Deol's latest flick, not because I expected a great story, but because I wanted to see some of Sunny Deol's trademark stunts. Like, for example in "Gadar" he stops a bunch of goons just by shouting out loudly. In "Hero" he manages to kill Amrish Puri by breaking a test tube of plutonium in his mouth, which causes nuclear fission. Sunny Deol, who was in close proximity to the explosion, is unhurt and only suffers from mild cold and cough.
"Teesri Aankh" though is a great dissappointment. There is only one stunt which impressed me, where Sunny praji kicks a SUV, which then flies into the bad guys. Amisha Patel is dumb (as in she can't speak) and dumb (as in she is really idiotic) in the whole movie. Her antics made me stop fast forwarding the movie. I just stopped watching it. Another 20 bucks down the drain.
But wait, I'm not done yet. I also watched "Skeleton Key", which is supposed to be a horror movie. The first CD dragged on for quite some time. By the time I started watching the second one, I fell asleep. Maybe I will just go watch "Crash" a third time.

Another weekend

and I rushed to the CD shop to get some movies.
"15th Park Avenue" is a tragic movie on two counts. Tragic because it depicts the life of a girl who is suffering from schizophrenia and also because the movie is a genuine waste of time (not that my time is valuable or anything, but still). It is a painstakingly slow movie with an open ending. And I hate open endings. Given that I would like to see intelligently made movies, but I'm not intelligent enough to work out some obscure ending all by myself. I don't have that much intellect. But I guess such movies will get (or has already gotten) critical acclaim in the same way that modern artists get to sell their paintings for a fortune. Most people don't understand them, but the rich ones pay a real big amount for them, just to show off (it is obvious that they too don't understand them). Bloody rich people. I hate them too, along with open endings !!

The second one, Pink Panther, is what we call a "Khaali" movie. Full of nonsense and it sure made me laugh. The only dissappointment being that *the Pink Panther* is not in the movie.

Weird coincidences

I have not been updating this blog for the past few days, due to some really lame reasons, one of which is internal exams. But exams got over yesterday and I'm all relieved that another pain is off my back.
I saw "crash" yesterday and it is a really good movie, just couldn't understand its motive.
Attendance was again the reason for me to go drag myself to class in this really hot and humid day. The 7th semester results were announced when we were in class and I came to know that I weigh as much as my percentage. And I'm happy about both.
Update: The overall good results resulted in us landing at Cherai beach at 1 a.m and trying to imitate the white mischief advertisment. I have sand all over me ... dammit.

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The author you are looking for might have moved, had his name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

On other no-nonsense notes, I took the grand risk and endured the two days, two nights in a surprisingly chilling sleeper coach to reach back home. College is reopening tomorrow (according to the most recent confirmed rumor), and internals will be from Monday. So, I will be making my grand entry on Sunday morning, to face the tropical heat of the land of coconuts.

Water water everywhere

I'm sorry to bore everyone with videos of my project, but I have nothing else to do.
The scrolling texture at the bottom is supposed to be water. It doesn't look real, but I'm a beginner in this.

Another video

I combined a few things on which I had been working on separately and came up with this:

Now a video

I just signed up on youtube and uploaded a video of my project in action. The video is a walkthrough of a terrain. At the beginning fog has been enabled. The fog is disabled halfway through the video. And at last the terrain is displayed as a wire mesh.
I'm tempted to embed it here itself ...

and I give in to temptation.

News at 11

-Rumors and some newspapers are claiming that CUSAT has been in fact given IIT status. I still maintain my cynical pessimism.

-The tickets for Delhi have been cancelled, leading to a loss of Rs 150/-. No news of the suspension being withdrawn though.

-E-mails and SMSs still continue to be boring. Consisting of messages from lawyers of deceased kings in Nigeria, who want to make me rich and "Exciting offers !!!!!!" from airtel, respectively.

-Orkut records massive traffic from Cochin as most B.Tech students from CUSAT suddenly feel the need to view the profiles of a thousand people, their friends and their friend's friends.

-Our yahoo group bombards the unsuspecting subscribers with viruses, hair pulling forwards, and other subtle forms of torture, leading to mass hysteria.

-In sports news, India fielded like they were trained by Bishan Singh Bedi and lost many an opportunity. The third umpire was without doubt an ISI agent for not giving Pietersen out.

-In weather, Cochin experienced mild showers with some lightning yesterday, which distruped most of the internet service in the campus. This left most B.Tech students aimless, as their sole source of entertainment was gone for hours.

Confusion prevails..

Delhi is a near and dear place to us all. So when the (malayalam) newspapers announced today that our college has been suspended till March 17th, it was a reflex action to plan the trip to Delhi. For some inexplicable reason, I was deliberating whether to go or not. Don't ask me why I did something like that? Sometimes I surprise myself with my stupidity. So after a lot of thought I decided that I will go.... and then after some more thought I decided that I won't go.. that was final... yes, final.
Anshul was going to the station to book the tickets for himself and Ashish, when I told him that I won't be coming. So he left and as soon as he reached the station, as the gods would have it, my mom telephoned me and convinced me that I should be coming to Delhi. So, I chased after Anshul to the station and booked the tickets for tomorrow evening (confirmed, no waiting list/RAC hanky panky).
Finally, at least something was decided... or maybe not.
The latest news (rumor) has it that the strikes and the suspension will be withdrawn by wednesday. Now this is the point where I want to strike myself with a hammer, because as soon as the college reopens we will be having our internal exams.
The next logical step is to cancel the tickets for tomorrow and lose 25% of the money spent on it. I'm sure as soon as I do it, all hell will break lose in campus and the college won't reopen till a month.

I propose a toast to CUSAT where, as Ashish once said to his HOD at her house, "anything is possible".

Taxi no 9211

Worth the watch. Thumbs up!! I liked all of Nana Patekar's recent movies and this one is right amongst the top.
All four actors have equally substantial roles. The story is also good and well paced with a retro style ending. Go watch it!!

A few snaps from yesterday.

 

Munnar revisited

We had the audacity to repeat the stunt of yesteryear. Same old story: Bunch of guys get a holiday and plan to make good use of it: We went to Munnar (the Darjeeling of Kerala)... once more.
This time we were 7 instead of 5. Because of some mystical reasons Rahul planned to stay back, otherwise we would have been 8. There was one more difference ala I carried my x-ray vision glasses (I will post some photos to make things more clear).

The drive consisted of carefully navigating the blind curves and the f*ckers who kept their lights on high beam, all the while being sure you don't land up 3000 ft downhill in some tea farm . The drive was repetitive (honk horn, turn left, honk horn, turn right and repeat), but I enjoyed it anyway.
We again went to Top station (which is like ... umm welll.. at the top) . Nothing much happened there, as most of the awesome scenery which is visible from there was covered in a dense fog.

We then went for boating. Sujit, Anshul and Sourav, learning from their past experience opted for the pedal boat. Whereas I, in a hope to relive my past heroics, opted for the row boat along with Ashish, Arun and Addy (who were doing the row boat thing for the first time). I wish I hadn't. It was more tiring than enjoyable. I guess I never learn.

Basically we visited the same places again and did the same things again... the reason being: We didn't have enough money to go to Goa :(
I'm sure I'm making very less sense right now, but in my defense I haven't slept for 36 hours straight. Maybe I will write something more sensible when I regain my sleep. ... till then Good night.

Saved by the strike

Strike on, and internals postponed indefinitely. Thank god, for I hadn't studied anything.
Among other things I have started swimming at a nearby pool. Also, I registered for the Google India Codejam. Registrations opened today only. I guess I will give it a shot this time.

Final game: The farewell gift.

The setting was not new. In fact for the past four years I have spent in this college, it has always been the same. They would crush their opponents as ruthlessly as we did. They were always as strong as we were (if not more). And they would always reach the finals as we would. Last year though, they beat us. They beat us real bad.

My day had started with me cramming up the portions of the dreaded internals. Distributed computing and Security in computing to be precise. Till the clock showed 5:45 pm, I was always near a text book. It was time for the finals. B.Tech, CUSAT vs Rest of CUSAT.

The match started on a high note for us: Praveen scored the first points by scoring a 3 pointer. But, after those first points, ROC came roaring back into the game. At the end of the first quarter we were down 7 points.
We didn't give up. Our playing five fought like hell and tied the score by the end of the second quarter at 15-15.
The third quarter saw the same ups and downs. At one point they would score at the other point we would do well. At the end of the third we had a small lead of 3 points.
The fourth quarter started with a bang for us. We managed to extend the 3 point lead to 7 points. The time left on the clock was somewhere around 2 minutes, and the game was a wrap .... or so it seemed.
Thomas is undoubtely the best player in the university. Be it ball control, shooting or passing. He is literally a one man army. And he was in the opposing team. He shot a 3 pointer and followed it up with another excellent 2 pointer. And we became nervous..
The clock had counted down to 45 seconds. Thomas had the ball. The B.tech crowd was shouting their lungs hoarse, for they though t the match was over, while the ROC crowd waited patiently for a miracle. He slowed the game down. Waiting for the clock to count down further. And then came the screen. Bipin came and blocked Praveen who was guarding Thomas. Thomas went to his right, looked down at the 3 point line and let one loose. The ball had a perfect arch and it fell into the basket. ROC lead by 1 point. Clock showed 10 seconds. We were in dismay.
The throw was taken, the ball passed to Praveen, which was then quickly passed onto Pylee, who was standing at the ROC three shot line. Pylee fumbles the ball... Freddy gathers it tries to drive in and gets fouled !!! Two free throws granted.
Now that is what you call pressure. But, we all had confidence in Freddy. He shot the first free throw, in front of a crowd which was trying their level best to distract him, and it fell !! What a relief, the scores were tied. The second one didn't fall and the whistle was blown.
The game was tied and we were to have 5 minutes of over time. The playing 5 played their hearts out and in the end we managed to win the game by 6 points !!!
It was the perfect goodbye gift.

PS : I was a substitute player in the team, and didn't get a chance to play. The first five played the whole game and no one could have done better than them. I'm just really happy to be a part of this team.
There were a few fights and unfair decisions in the game. But those all are a part of it, I guess.

Another textured terrain

This time around, no wastage of time or effort and the texture is 2D. The results are for you to judge :D I'm satisfied though...

Terrain textured with a high resolution texture.

The terrain textured with a low resolution texture.

The wire mesh.

I beome cooler by the clock ;)

A textured terrain

I spend a lot of time (time, not effort) getting the terrain textured by a 1D texture. The main problem which I faced was making a texture in Photoshop which looked natural enough. After a lot of hit and trial with the gradient tool I got it somewhat right. End result, the wire mesh looks much cooler than the textured terrain :(

The textured terrain.


The good old wire mesh.

And now I can't concentrate on studies.

Skybox

After much lazying around, I finally managed to get one skybox demo running (although I haven't made the skybox class as of yet). It is actually pretty easy to make and really no big deal.
A skybox is basically a cube which is textured on all six sides by seamless images, so that when you look around it seems like you are in a real world. But, actually you are just in a painted box.

I hope that made sense. If it didn't just look at the pretty pictures.

Venom ??

To all the spiderman movie fans, it seems that Spiderman 3 will not have 1, but 2 villains. There is a lot of speculation over the photo below, that the person in the photo is not spiderman, but Venom.
If you are thinking that this is a Black and White image, then listen to the official sony announcement. Here is another pic to show the similarity in the costumes of the two (i.e Spiderman and Venom).

I really don't think that Sony Pictures would actually risk changing the costume of Spiderman from red and blue, to black.
One thing is sure though, Spiderman 3 will be having Sandman as one of the villains. IMDB has the cast listing, and only person (Topher Grace) is there without a specified role. So looks like he will be the one who will play Venom.

Match 2

Model engineering college thrashed by B.Tech, CUSAT 46-24. We are back !!!

Google pages

It seems that Google has finally come up with a web page hosting + online web page editing (WYSIWYG) tool. At first look, it seems that Google has beaten Yahoo (Geocities) once again.
The editing interface is pretty cool, uses AJAX, the works. Best part, they are giving out 100MB and no ads. Also there are a lot of designs and layouts to choose from. The domain name is also easy to remember. It is of the format: http://username.googlepages.com
The bad part is that, I don't think that you can edit all HTML by hand online. But, you can upload any HTML page, from your computer, to your account.
I had to test it out, right ;)
Update: You can edit the HTML online !! I just couldn't see the option on my browser, as there was no scroll bar and the "Edit HTML" link was at the bottom left. If you can't see the link, hit F11.

Another day in the calendar...

which saw another mass bunk from our class. It has now become a well revered practise. Whenever we don't see any faculty in the staff room, it is assumed that he/she is absent and what follows is one thing which our whole class is good at: walking out of the class really fast.
The day also saw our basketball team (that includes me) getting our spanking new red and black jerseys for the sports meet. Our game was against College of engineering, Munnar. We played very badly in the first three quarters, but still managed to beat them by a margin of around 20 points. The game also saw some really bad intentional fouls, which in my opinion were not required.

Inzy winzy spider

The most awaited moment for me during each of the India-Pakistan ODIs was: the presentation ceremony. Especially Inzy's speech.
Now, Inzamam Ul Haq has matured to be a really nice person and I would go as far as to say that he has reduced the amount of in-game rivalry which existed in India-Pakistan matches. He is also a caring person who has built a free hospital in Multan, his home town. But, his presentation speeches are a bit .... well funny.
Here are two forwards which I got. One from Sarvesh and the other one from my brother.

1. Inzy's interview: What he wants to say.

This is Inzy'S interview after the third ODI

*Rameez*: So Inzy, disappointed with your performance today?

*Inzy*: Bismilla-e-rehman-e-rahim. Thank you allah.ya the indian batsman
is play very good today. we is try very hard but is not win the game.

*Rameez*: Any words for Dhoni?
*Inzy*: Ya dhoni is play very well. He is hit his shot very hard in our
gaps. In start, we is protect our gaps very well. the grass is also
thick.. but dhoni is split our gaps with his bat.

*Rameez*: Another ordinary bowling performance?
*Inzy*: Ya our balls is loose. the bowler is went for many run. Asif is
bowled well. Also, after some shots the ball is out of shape. umpire is
not give another ball.. it is tough to play with one ball

*Rameez*: Dropped catches.. did that prove costly?
*Inzy*: ya the ball is not stick to our hands. we is practice a lot
sticking our bat in our hands.. but now we is more practice sticking
balls in our hands.

*Rameez*: Any plans for the next match?
*Inzy*: ya India is on top but we is try to bounce on our back. Insha
allah we is play better.

*Rameez*: All the best Inzy
*Inzy*: Thank is you

2. Inzamam's interview.

Most cricketers, who are not comfortable in conversing in English, go prepared for some standard questions that are asked from them when commentators chat with them during the awards ceremony.

Inzamam was once asked a different question after Pakistan won the match, for which he was not prepared. He always had a standard response to the first question. But this time.....

Tony Greig: So Inzi, that's fantastic, your wife is pregnant for the second time!

Inzamam: Bismillah-e-Rehman-e-Rahim! All credit goes to the boys. Everyone work hard for it, especially Afridi. It was tight situation when he went in. Without his strokes it not have been possible. He was pulling the
good balls. Also Bob Woolmer keeping close watch on progress and giving instructions. It's all team effort which pulled us out of big hole. Insha Allah, we all will work together as team, put in big effort and
deliver good result all the time.

Random musings

So after the mixed reaction which I got for my previous post, which left me in a lot of self doubt, I will ramble about my life just to distract you from what I had written previously.
There are more basketball matches in store for me. The University sports meet has already started and basketball starts from tomorrow. Our first match though is only day after tomorrow. The special thing being that this time we will be getting jerseys with our names on the back. This does make a difference, because first it cost me Rs 200/- (and I may have to give another Rs 40, they say) and second the crowd will know my name. This is, in one sense, BAD !! Now the abuses from the crowd won't be directed to a number 5, but to my name. And civilized crowds in CUSAT are as elusive as the IIT status, which we were about to get. But other than that, it is the first jersey which will bear my name and it would be a nice goodbye gift.
Talking about basketball, you have to see this: The Top 10 slam dunks of NBA (5.04 MB wmv). Even if you don't play or watch basketball, you will find this awesome.

Satya ki khoj

I'm still trying to search the real me. The meaning of my name, according to some people, in Sanskrit is: "The First Rays of the Sun". As I had barely managed to pass Sanskrit in my 8th standard (needless to say I didn't take it in 9th & 10th), I really can't confirm that. Anyway, I can confirm one thing though, that the meaning holds no significance in my case. I wake up maybe with the last rays of the sun, or may be with the first rays of the tubelight. Talking of tubelights, yes I'm a bit slow in my mental department, but that is a topic I only discuss with my neurosurgeons. So, coming back to the meaning of my name, the other meaning which I have come across is: the color red. The only place where, as we have been taught since childhood, the color red holds any significance is: the traffic light. To reiterate what you sang in chorus when you were in nursery: "Red means stop.". So whenever you see me, STOP, and honk your horn. Or whenever you are at a traffic light cursing the other driver, remember me, for I will always be there, above you and looking at you. Amen.

P.S: The above was an attempt at revamping my dull and boring "about me" section at numerous profiles. On second thought, maybe I shouldn't have. It now looks to me as a lame attempt at humor, which was maybe *inspired* by reading the two blogs which I mentioned yesterday.

LMAO

Two blogs which crack me up:
Mostly thoughtless.
Domain Maximus.

My advanced weight loss tactics

I have never fasted a whole day. So, I thought that it will be an experience and also help in the reduction of "you know what". I had one glass of milk in the morning and continued to starve the rest of the day, until now. I gave up, and bought a pack of sunfeast (the poor man's biscuit costs only Rs 3/-). I will have my dinner, to hell with the fast.
P.S: This doesn't mean that I have given up trying to reduce, it just means that I won't starve the whole day anymore.

Presenting another distraction

It has to be the India, Pakistan matches which tempted us into taking this decision. The decision being that of buying a TV tuner card. If you are still wondering what the heck I'm talking about: We got CABLE TELEVISION !!!!
God save my final semester.

1 + 1 = 4

Today's dinner was at Pizza Hut. Us being fairly well endowed physically (read as over weight and hungry), consider a personal pan pizza a waste of money. A medium pizza, which according to pizza hut serves two (yeah right !!), is filling..... for one of us. What we ordered today was a combo: meal for 4. The catch being that two people were having a meal for four (we were eight in total). So what was my dinner like?
Here:


-Two pieces of cheese garlic bread.
-1 Glass of Pepsi (well a little more than one glass).
-Half a plate of Pista Mint Salad.
-1 Tomato Basil soup.
-One medium sized pizza
-Tid bits from left and right

Our other accomplishment, was that we managed to finish 4 bottles of tomato sauce. The oregano, though, was still standing.
The good part was that we ate so much that the pizza hut guys didn't bill us for 3 extra pepsis and 1 tomato basil soup, which we had even after our grand dinner.

Sierpinski triangle

Saw this on someone's slashdot signature. Copy, paste, compile and run.

main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}

This post is dedicated...

to BC suttah.
(I know that the song is now pretty old, but I was treated to it only a few days ago. TGMD is also a classic on the same lines.)

I yum back

I'm not in a mood to write anything so I will just type whatever comes to my mind.
We came, we saw and we ate. The food at SRM college was free, good and unlimited. So that's that.
We lost the first match itself against mysore university by 5 points and got knocked out. We were leading by 1 point in the final quarter, but couldn't capitalize in the end. And as they say "In the end it doesn't even matter" (forgiveness please.. )
Roamed around Chennai that evening and the next morning. Verdict: 5/10 .

Tornado cup and more basketball

Tornado cup is a homebrewn cricket event organized by our juniors. There are around 150 players participating. The teams have been formed mainly on the basis of location. Ours being called "Yuva". The rules of the game are same as that of the standard ODI game, except for the fact that there are no LBWs, leg byes and the number of overs has been reduced to 20, with a maximum of 4 overs for each bowler.
We had our first match today. We lost the toss and were put in to bowl. In our twenty overs we conceded 161 runs, which was really bad as at one point of time their team was 90/8 . I bowled fairly well, but didn't manage to get any wickets. As soon as we finished our quota of overs, we were asked to leave as we didn't have permission to play in the ground (it was not our university ground). Our batting innings should take place in the evening, hope we manage to chase well.
I will be leaving for Chennai tomorrow for the south zone inter-university basketball tournament, so I won't be able to stay back for rest of the cricket matches. The team shall miss their star left arm pacer ;)

CS vs IT

This match was supposed to be the second semi final, after the first one between Civil and Mechanical got over. Civil beat mechanical in the first semis by a massive margin of around 20 points.
The general impression about our match was that we will lose, because IT had a good team and Pylee (the guy who can dunk) was back after completing his project. I was given the job of guarding him.
In my opinion this game was the best fight which any team has given to IT in the past 3 years (IT has won the basketball tournament all 3 years.). We defended well, passed well and played a really commited game of basketball. But, Pylee with his reach and jump took the game away from us. He scored 27 points of the 41 which the team scored. The final score was 32-41 favoring IT.
Although Pylee scored 27 points, I think I guarded him well.
This was one of the games where, though we lost, I feel content for giving a good fight.
At the end of the game I was bruised on my shoulders, knees etc, but didn't feel the pain (well not until the after-shave lotion was applied on it.).
Tomorrow the basketball finals is there between IT and Civil/Safety, it will be a good match.

CS vs Mech

We weren't expected to win this match, but due to some excellent play by Arun Thomas and Afzal we managed to beat them. Final score 41-39. Looking at the final score it may seem that it was a tight match, but it wasn't. There wasn't a single moment when the mech guys had the lead. I wasn't at the best of my forms today (contrary to yesterday), and only scored a meagre 8 points. There was some trouble, with the mech guys saying that they were not satisfied with the referees, but nothing untoward happened.
Tomorrow we face IT. Our old unbeatable rivals. It's the third time we are facing them. Hope we can pull off something extraordinary.

This one just in.

A notice outside our SOE office read as follows:

Lost & Found

A purse that someone might have lost has been found in the SOE premises. The loser may claim back the same with proper identification to the principal.

I think the person who posted this notice is being a bit too harsh on the person who misplaced his/her purse ;-)

CS vs Marine

We now have a reputation of making those matches which we are expected to win, really tight (but winning in the end... oh did I spoil the suspense, if there was any ;) ).
This time around CS has lost almost every match in every sport by an embarassing margin. We were the last hope to save face, so to speak. We were expected to win this match as the Marine team only had one (really) good player: Josemon (who had captained the junior Kerala team when he was in ninth standard).
This match was quite dramatic, but not as dramatic as the one which we played against mech last year.
Looking at the final score in the first quarter, some people started having their doubts. But, a margin of just 6 points so early in the game is no margin at all. By the third quarter both teams were playing neck and neck. Josemon (of marine) doing the majority of the scoring. The marine team also had a massive crowd support compared to the feeble turnout which CS offered (but thanks a lot to all those who came).
Then in the final fourth quarter we charged ahead and took a comfortable lead. The final score: CS-48 Marine-32 . I scored 23 points. Guess it was my day today !!

P.S: My dad has just messaged me to go and try out for NBA. I really hope he is joking.

Also check out this cartoon (Penny-arcade). Now evil has the power.

Rang de Basanti

Happy republic day !!! Before I go on and discuss the storyline (of "Rang de Basanti" the movie, if you are wondering), here is my verdict: The first half of the movie is fun. If you loved "Dil Chahta Hai", you will like the first half. The second half is, in short, blown out of proportions.

Spoiler warning: If you don't want to know about the storyline, turn around now.

Now on with the story. The story talks about a firang girl, Sue, who is a person who makes documentaries. She is inspired by the Indian freedom fighters (the extremists, not the moderates) and wants to make a documentary on them. Her idea gets shot down by her superiors and she decides that she will make the documentary anyway. So, she travels all the way to India (saddi dilli, to be specific) in search of actors suitable for the roles of the freedom fighters. There she meets Aamir Khan (DJ) and gang, and the fun begins. This is the better part of the movie, with lots of comedy, and brief interludes into the freedom movement of India. Sue, finally manages to complete her movie and also starts to fall for Aamir (one kissing scene is there :drool: ).
So all is going well, when suddenly Madhavan (who is part of the happy go lucky gang), who is a pilot in the air force, gets killed due to a MIG-21 crash (the defence ministry saw this movie and cut 3 scenes).
This incident saddens the group of friends. When the group hears the defence minister (who has a striking similarity to George Fernandes) saying that the crash was due to the pilot being an amateur, they get very pissed off, as they believe that the crash was due to the corrupt defence minister's actions. This is where the film takes off in a totally insane direction. They decide to exact revenge by killing the minister. And how do they do it? They get on a bike take a gun and kill him on the footpath as he is going for his morning walk. This is where I lost interest in the movie. Too darn improbable, but well I was in a theatre so I had to watch the rest of the drama unfold. Sue, the firang girl, is forgotten in the second half of the movie and she is reduced to a running, crying girl looking for her friends/actors. In the end all of Aamir and his friends are killed by Black cat commandos as they confess, on radio, as to why they killed the minister.

All in all the film is a genuine effort to try and awaken the youth of india to come forward and fight. I think that they have overdone the revolutionary thing, but it is worth watching at least once. The film will do well though, as most of the people in India want to kill the politicians.

Two things worth considering:

1. I wonder whether this movie would have made it to the halls with the same storyline, if BJP was in power and not congress.
2. Aamir Khan's past three movies (including this one) had a "India's freedom struggle" angle to it. What will the next one be like?

Oh yes, I watched the 9 pm -12 am show. The movie is a good 3 hours long.

Windows in HTML !!

Check this out (open with IE and enable popups) it is pretty cool. The guy has made a strikingly similar UI to the one found in Windows 2000, without using flash/java/activex, as his webpage. Pretty impressive.
The booting process although looks like Linux.

Another screenshot

This time on Linux. I had to see if it worked !!!

My world is a mesh !!!

I was trying to get terrain rendering using height maps right, and lo behold I have a screenshot :D
It kinda looks cool, although it is not the final product. Combined with the 3D camera which I made in the morning, one can walk through these hills (read as terrain). Understanding heightmaps was pretty easy and I could get this demo running quickly. I still have to figure out texture mapping, only then will I be able to change this into something more realistic.

The project revisited

After a lot of lazying around I finally put on my thinking cap and sat down to start my project. I had thought that I had almost done the 3D camera part, but I was wrong. So, after a lot of reading about vectors and 3D geometry, I came up with the 3D camera. It does the things which a standard FPS camera would do i.e look up/down, look left/right, strafe left/right, move forward/backward. At least I made some progress.

Ubuntu

A few days back my system crashed mysteriously. Windows just would not boot up, whatever I tried. I thought it was about time that I formatted my drive and re-installed windows. But in the process I said "What the heck" and re-partitioned my whole drive and thus lost my hard earned Gentoo system.
The good part was that I got a chance to try out my "Free" Ubuntu CDs. The installation process was a breeze and everything got setup properly. I had to download and install the nvidia drivers, but that is a given in any Linux installation. Internet is working and I got internet sharing configured right now by following this. Installing apps is also pretty simple (the advantages of having the Debian pacakge manager). Just like everyone else who has used Ubuntu, I also give it a thumbs up.

Update: Looks like I spoke too soon. Surprisingly, Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution, which I have seen, where you will have to install gcc, g++ etc yourself (I mean it is not in the base system by default). Not only that you will have to install the standard header files too. What this means is, if you have a newly setup Ubuntu system and want to run a simple "Hello world" C program, it won't even compile.

Cinderella man

There are times when a movie inspires you so much that you get charged up (hence I had a nice game of basketball today). This was one of those movies i.e Cinderella man. Starring Russel Crowe and Renee Zellweger, it talks how a boxer comes back from the bad times of the great American depression to become the world heavy weight champion. If you are a Rocky fan you will surely love this one.
Among other things B.Tech sports has been delayed to 25th, so we will get some more time to practise.

Yeh hai meri kahani

Of the things which I enjoy in Cochin, spontaneity and freedom will be the ones on the top of the list. If I were to start narrating the events of this day (16-1-06) from midnight, it will be somethingl like this.

Crabs are not an aggresive species. In fact even if you are the aggresor they still would rather step away than try and bite you. A fact which was clearly demonstarted by Ashish, who was trying to catch a crab, in vain, with his bare hands!!!! Yes, he has nothing better to do in life, but that could be said for any one of us.
We were at Cherai beach on a full moon. The beach was empty except for the five of us and the crabs. It was the result of staying at home on a rather long weekend and the availability of conveyance. We returned back home drenched (by rain and the sea) around 1 am.

I had been reading "One night @ the call center" by Chetan Bhagat (his second book, after his much successfull "Five point someone.") the past day, and I thought that I will as well finish it off.

In my opinion the book is nice although it is not filled with adventure and humor, as his first book was, but is surely worth the read. Some people may find it hard to stomach certain details in the book, as they may not seem to be rational, but that was not the case with me. All in all you can read it and not be bored, but don't expect another "Five point someone." By the time I finished, it was 2:30 am. Time to sleep.

B.Tech sports is about to come and the inter branch basketball matches start from 20th of this month. I came to know about this yesterday evening, when I went to the court in an attempt to shed the extra kilos gained by sitting at home and being tempted with all kinds of sweets around me. That was obviously not great news as we (CS) hadn't practised for a while. The good news though, is that others are not practising as well. Today's practise was cut short by heavy showers and lightning. I returned home (drenched) to find that it was not just our practise session, but also the power which had been cut short.

We lay in darkness when we decided that we will as well go for a movie, rather than let the mosquitoes suck our high cholestrol blood. We had to choose between "King Kong" and "Zinda". We chose "Zinda" (surprise!!!!). We had our dinner and left for the 9:00 pm show. Just when the movie was about to start, I got a message from Arun: "Power was back up." Life was playing games again.

About the movie, let me just say that bollywood has finally progressed in depicting sex and violence, the two things which make a good formula movie. Zinda has both in a controlled dose and that's why I say it is worth the watch (not for girls though :P ). It has gore, foul language and the sizzlers. Oh and by the way, Sourav said that "Zinda" had more gore than "Hannibal". I beg to differ. Zinda has quite a few of these scenes, but Hannibal has just one and that one compensates. Those who have seen both movies will understand. I leave the details, as I don't want to spoil your appetite.

This was my first day of the 8th semester, which was in fact our so called "Project day", hence no class. I wish for more such days !!

Freezer to furnace

I left Delhi in a winter which was going to be the coldest one in 70 years, to Bombay. It had been 4 years since I had seen the face of the city and there was little I could recollect except the rush in the local trains. So how does Bombay differ from Delhi? Here are some things which I noticed :

• The auto drivers charge by the meter !!! If someone in Delhi charges you by the meter you can be sure that the meter has been rigged.
  
• Auto rickshaws have music systems which will put a rich kid's hip hop system to shame. No kidding.
  
• People drive on low beam. In Delhi driving on high beam is considered "shaan ki baat" (matter of pride).
• Vada pao :)

I stayed at my uncle's place for a few days, did some shopping and general loitering (Juhu beach and In-orbit mall) with my brother. I returned back to the world of coconuts today afternoon. It was a nice long vacation. Oh wait there are 4 more days of it left !!!

Time to lose some adipose

After a long break of over 2 months, due to exams, monsoon rains, pending assignments and general laziness, I finally got to play basketball. It all started day before yesterday when the plan was made. Yesterday morning (8 am) we drove down to Jawaharlal Nehru stadium (yes, the one with the really big lights and all) and did a lateral entry (through a wall) into the stadium court. Except for the wet court (due to an overnight drizzle), chilly winter and lack of stamina, we had a nice 2 and a 1/2 hours of basketball. The drill was repeated again today morning and most of my body parts are aching till now. Given the fact that I will be leaving for Bombay day after tomorrow, this is all I will get to play, back here.

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

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