The world, how it works, surroundings, myself, etc.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

And the anticipated happened.

After being spared of bumps for 3 years of my existence in IIIT now, I lost the bumping virginity when yesterday night I was given the thrashing in the air. Strong people holding me from both sides, and even stronger people hitting hard at my butt with their legs, and all I could do was shout, scream... And it is still aching. It had become hot that time, and kept vibrating for long. It's hard to sit straight. :((

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Anticipating b'day bumps.

It's my birthday tomorrow. Tradition in the institute proclaims that the birthday boy should get bumps wherein all others make him feel sorry for have taken birth. For long, I've been known for getting over this, and dodging the bumps (thanks to my nature), but this time I feel I won't be spared. I've opened up a lot this year (as per my new year resolution) and this is gonna hit me back literally at the stroke of the mid-night hour. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the whole world sleeps, my batch would be awake to hit me. Let's see!

Booting to windows back..for a few minutes.

I booted to Windows (my grub screen shows it's option as "Virus") today, after a long time. There was a VC++ code that I needed to run, and don't know what fantasy lighted upon me when I thought the machine would work safely and securely. This indeed did not happen. I was almost hoping against hope when the machine started behaving as if it had no RAM at all. A sizable part of my 256 MB and 1.6 GHz P-IV are always taken up by the Norton (yes, it's not foolproof, of course, but still, something is better than nver, and I feel without it, I won't even complete my booting--the network starts before you login :(( )
After a threatening experience for my pc, I gave it relief and reverted it back to it's Linux.

Seriously, some things such so real-time!

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

The day with the apathy with Windows...again.


My faith towards use of Linux further strengthened yesteray with Windows performing horribly, if not hopelessly, on every quarter. The situation was something like this:



My institute admits students based on the results of the AIEEE exam, for which the results were out some days back. Our placements officer had retured from Delhi with a CD containing the scanned labels of addresses of the first 5000 all-india-rank holders. The institute intended to send the brochure to the first 2000 or something students, and since there needed to be some preprocessing done to get the material in the right order before printing, the matter was redirected to the server room of which my sys-admin colleague Sunil Mohan Ranta and I are a part. The address-labels were arranged in several directories based on the region of the applicant. We needed to bring all of them in a single folder, with a minor manipulation with the filename (needed to remove an unnecessary 'A' from the filename). The thrill begins now. We began wondering how much it'd cost if Microsoft made such a software to do this sort of a manipulation of filenames and locations (If such a thing already exists, it means that they've not marketed it well-enought, for otherwise I'd have known it for sure). Rightfully enough, I turned to Linux and the job was done withing a few minutes of juggling with the shell commands (We have poor memory and often make syntax mistakes).




The bigger excitement, however, was yet to come. Each of the address labels were such that we could have four of them on one A4 sheet before printing. (Why?.. shall I say--To save paper!) We began huting for the printing preferences on the Windows machine and many a test-pages went martyr to the gesture, but to no avail. Photoshop, Painshop, MSPaint, etc proved no better. We had in mind that we could hunt for some Windows-printing formatting software which could do our job. However, we decided to give a second lease to Linux and Ranta played around with some image manipulation commands (convert, montage, mogrify, to name a few) and in a few minutes we were able to devise a command (yes a single command) by which to get the labels in the right format on a single page. In fact, we were even able to sharpen the image a bit (we didn't want to overdo it). That being done, we were using the Windows system back again to send each page to the printer for printing. After some time, the machine showed its colors againa and we realized that the laser printer was being given a lot of rest between successive prints as the Windows was slogging hard to pump data to it. We promptly added 2 and 2 together and shifted all printing to be done from the Linux system instead. This worked the required magic for us and we were able to finish the herculean work (the work was exhaustive) in no time thereafter.

Monday, June 21, 2004

Configuring a nameserver

Since the last few days my sys-admin colleague (Sunil Mohan Ranta) and I have been working together to setup a nameserver for our institute. After about a complete evening of slogging (including the time we spent on installing Linux - Fedora Core 2, and learning about DNS's) we finally got it working by the evening. We are using named and configuring it was a breeze (not much to do actually). We had to configure it for the new domain www.iiit.ac.in that the institute is getting.

However, after some days now I find that when I compare the host query results of our newly setup nameserver with the ISP's nameserver we were originally using, the MX entries are missing. Actually, it's only the NS and A entries that figure out with our nameserver. I wonder whether it'd create problems if we use this nameserver for resolving on the mail-server. The nameservers obtained by the root nameservers for .net and .com actually give the same results (as the new NS), nevertheless. The best method, I guess, is hit-and-try. :-)

HR training.

Here it's 3:22 AM and i'm sitting over here in the lab, and portraying (rather pretending) as if I'm helping this girl Priyanka with answering the HR questions for the upcoming campus placements. Of course, I'm also appearing for the campus placements (i'm in the same batch) but don't know why she wants _me_ to help her out (yes..she seems a bit confused with the gamut of questions our placements officer has showered us with, but so what?..so am I).

Feeling cold.

I'm sitting in CVIT, my computer lab and I presently confess I'm feeling cold. In this country, this has more or less become a natural tendency to keep the AC temperature a bit below the normal comfortable temperature, coz I can feel a bit of a shiver in my bones (I assume I am normal in perceiving temperatures). This has occurred to me on several occasions; in trains, offices, banks, though the degree varies from one place to the other. I suggest these AC companies should start sporting a suggestion saying that having an AC is for your comfort in hot days and it does not in any way imply that you have to bear your shivers with benign serenity.

Friday, June 18, 2004

Pankaj getting frustrated.

I started bloggin today, and Pankaj here is gettting frustrated by seeing the wonderful web-interface provided by the site, and yes it's fast too. They've done some serious good work, he says.

First

Don't know what to write.