To Chandu's

While returning back from Chilly and Peppers on this weekend evening, we  (Poppy, Paro, Pankaj, Majji & I) leisurely walked into Chandna (and Dixit & Pappu & TinTin)'s flat; and a hilarious time we had there. The flat's good (looked good even at the night time that we had entered). Boxes strewn all over in the main lobby greeted us (looked a lot like TinTin's room in the hostel).

We began with the Sutta na Mila song. These IIT guys have done a fun job with their band and we made the fullest out of it.

Pappu has grown his hair neck-long. Heard about his amorous successes due to this while he puffed in the balcony (they don't allow him into the rooms with his cig on). TinTin denied that he was overworked (as were the rumors); but did not let out any internal M$ secrets. I anyway rubbed salt by (falsely) announcing that M$ was to release a Linux distro in some time. He didn't argue much, though. Dixit was mostly quiet and chubbily laughing as ever. And Chandu -- wait, I notice it just now -- Chandu too was quiet. Perhaps his 24x7 workday is a reality. Oh God, give the boy some more hours in the day -- so that he can have like 25x7 or 30 x7 or make it 48x7! :-)

By 12:30 at night when we started to leave, it was sure that we wouldn't get any conveyance back to campus. A truck carrying bricks formed our voyage. We sat on the bricks -- ephemerally stood upright on it in "Chaiyya Chaiyya" mode; the weather was good. Hyderabad is always wow! in the evenings no matter how the day is.

SCO's prime business?

www.SCO.com claims it to be a provider of software solutions for small-to-medium-sized-businesses (SMBs) and ... but I feel that it's primary business (or expertise) lies in suing. With bigwigs like IBM, Novell, RedHat, AutoZone,Terent in its sue-list it did not fail to sue even Daimler-Chrysler! I'm not surprised that they maintain a dedicated portion on their site as "The Right Place for SCO Intellectual Property Information" where they put to proud display the organisations against which they are engaged in mortal combat with.  In fact, what actually surprises me is that they don't keep all this on their first page itself! Even though SCO owns the rights for the UNIX operating systems, a google search for SCO reports groklaw as the second result, next only to SCO's own site and before everything else. Groklaw, by the way, is a site which maintains a listing of all such legal expeditions. I'll recommend my little brother (he's studying law) to seek placements opportunities with SCO. And now I'm afraid SCO might sue me for writing all this.

The drenching pizzas

It was a drenching excursion yesterday evening to Pizza Corner, HiTech.
It was my second time with Pizzas, for having not quite liked them the
first time, I had to be coaxed to budge this time. On the upstream way
we discussed Harry Potter. Parry (Parry Potter), at his enthusiastic
best, leaded the Potter club hullabaloo with ever-stupid Amal and
vicious Majji. Ranta & Rawat however were on the outer side of the
Potter ring and were cheesily muttering mischievous verdicts about this
community, much to the frown of Parry (and me). But the best experience
of the evening was yet to come.

Thanks to Manjeet (or was it Bansi?) for the pizza treat we took turns
with several of them. I, for one, didn't quite dislike them -- they were
good :-) . The departing bell at the Pizza corner is amusing. With every
ring, the waiters would sonorously burst with a "Thank You". Whatever be
the business mischief in this, it is remarkable. But now the rains were
out from the clouds, and heavily so. Standing for some time outside the
shop, we realize that the rains were in no mood to give in; so we did.
Amiable Ranta crusaded into the rains to get an auto and six of us (me
not included) left away in it. The rains were torrential now. Now it was
our turn. With no other way with the temptingly delicious rain, Amal and
I barged into it for another auto and by the time we got one, we were
dripping. The auto had to delineate towards the Petrol pump. The petrol
pump guy, though standing in the rain with an umbrella wasn't ready to
give any fuel. He needed some coaxing and then yielded, amusingly. The
auto, thereafter, was wading through the torrents. Water washed the
front glass and we were getting wet from both sides in the auto. Amal
continued with his stupid smiles, Manjeet with his cheesy remarks, Ketan
with his seduction and Rawat with his thoughts. I am happy I don't keep
a cellphone anymore. This is just one of the reasons.

The pizza excursion was a truly dripping one. Everyone of us was drenched.

Tech features, etc explained in a lawsuit!

That AMD has recently filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Intel is common knowledge now but I was rather amused to find some technical description about processor architectures in the actual legal complaint that was filed. The 48 page pdf complaint even cites the benefits of a 64 bit processor architecture as against the traditional 32 bit one. The complaint begins with a hardcore and stoic legal lingo on the first page but graduates to a nice reading about the historical evolution of AMD with growing harshness from Intel orderly detailed to bring out the reasons/motivations for Intel's coercion towards large and small clients to maintain undue and society-unfriendly monopoly in the x86 processor market; journalistic lingo including terms like "economic muscle" are not nearly phrases I expected in anything of the semblence of a legal complaint!

Near-technical description being so flamboyantly detailed, I was finally surprised that they didn't draft this document in LaTeX (The pdf text reveals that it was converted to pdf from Complaint.doc with Adobe Distiller by joni!)

Forced to blog

I see Ranta blogging, reading blogs and commenting to blogs for so long now that I've seriously taken to supposing my life a waste without blogging. Falling in line with what I carelessly comment about him: "Talk him about something and he'll blog it", he actually blogged this after I had a small discussion with him about Einstein marrying his cousin. I understand that this news means more to him than plain curiosity about consanguineous marriages, but today enough was enough. I mean, for how long can you really watch a guy on your left blog-involved, before you actually get across the "To blog or not to blog" frame of mind and jump into the fray? And I blame it all on Ranta.

So, to begin with, I started going through some blogs on the IIIT blogroll and God! people have become so interesting at writing. I landed myself to this How to Blog blog. It's a blog every blogger should read and understand well before getting to real-time serious blogging (if that means anything). And who knows, someday one might be offered a job for blogging ingenuity.

Reservations and its irony

The AP state government has given the GO for 5% reservations for Muslims
in government jobs. Though the decision was taken a few days back, some
hopeful soul had challenged it in the High Court which did what it does
most often -- refer the matter to a committee, AP commission on backward
classes to be specific.

I don't understand what charm the so-called secular Congress govt finds in
effecting such quotas. When will they understand that such measures only
tend to widen the gap, even if it is assumed that all this was done out of
sheer public upliftment and benefit and not for filthy vote-bank politics?
For the past 55 years, India has had reservations for SC/ST/OBC and god
knows how many other classes. Wherein a temporary initiative helps in some
cases (perhaps most effectively in only so far as breaking a tie), a
prolonged benefit illusion such as this only hollows the core of the
social fabric. They talk of reservations for SCs, they talk of
reservations for STs, they talk of reservations for every damn wooable
minority. When will they even think about reservations for the general
class?
With precious little leftover, I think it's high time they contemplate
reservations for the general masses as well -- for God's sake, they
comprise the bulk, dont they?

Add to it the irony that people think (or are made to think) that such
efforts actually help. By keeping the demarcation of castes, creed, etc
alive in all such excercises from birth ceritificate to death ceritificate
the govt has nothing but kept the flame of non-unity alight -- after all
it provides vote support! The core theme of democracy, which is supposed
to correct anti-welfare measures, is crippled, baseless and unrealistic
(more on this democracy crap later).

British, the history books said, divided India along religious lines --
the "Divide and Rule" policy which we always hated and considered the
outsiders as shrewedly talking advantage of the divide. But here what are
WE doing? At least the Britishers were outsiders. No damage can be more
irrecoverable than politically-motivated division in the garb of
democracy.

It's black and white everywhere

I don't have to find myself alone anymore with the 32 black and white
pieces. The chess bug has bitten more people in my wing, inspired by
infamous me. Today, Manjeet and Pushpam were having a match in my room
while Ketan was onlooking. Tintin, exhausted after being back from M$
was busy on freechess.org. And he actually won a suicide match! He was
lucky to get someone other than the computer bots seeking for suicide
matches. Amal too came walking in a moment and joined the troop. The
whole point is that the excitement of chess (esp. the online chess
servers) has infused itself into a lot of people (not just me).

Since the freechess port 5000 is blocked by the firewall, we have to
connect to it via the students server.

xboard -ics -icshost students.iiit.ac.in -icsport 23

This needs one to login to students.iiit.ac.in first and then one can
"telnet freechess.org" to unleash the doors open for all the blitz,
standard, suicide, crazyhouse, bughouse, lightning, and tourney matches.
It's black and white squares and chess pieces everywhere.

Obsession

Sometimes it happens that the mind gets preoccupied so intensely that you
cannot think of anything else. This can be due to reasons of affection or
equally plausibly due to reasons of detestation from some other thing. In
my case it's the latter.

Well, I need to admit, I'm overly obsessed with Chess these days. I play
it online continuously for long hours. Yes, I've improved. Now I can't be
beaten by absolute idiots :-) But I can't call myself a good player yet.
But I will one day.

When prolonged, malafice determination,
Or hapless, hopeless detestation,
Makes a presentation,
Of the mind's imagination,

Outpours the manifestation,
Loaded with frustration,
In the garb of passion,
And the moves of addiction.

We call it obsession.

Installing FC3 on Athlon x86_64, SATA hard disks

We wanted to install Fedora Core 3 (actually even FC2 would do) for the
ACCV server. The system was a 64bit Athlon on a K8S MX ASUS motherboard.
Now here starts the trouble. I knew it wasn't overly trivial to get the
SATA hard disks working on the 64bit systems with FC3, and this
motherboard was all the more too new (and sophisticated) to have working
drivers in the FC3.

Meticulous fooling around with my head inside the open cabinet showed me
that it had a SiS 965L onboard SATA controllers. Luckily, I was able to
find the driver at http://download.sis.com, but that needed me to compile
the module, and that required a working FC3. With the promise RAID card, I
knew, the drivers would be found and the hard disks would be detected, but
the PCI bus would force sluggishness to the server which, of course, is
undesirable. Just to be able to compile the sata_sis.ko kernel module, I
installed FC3 with the Promise RAID card on. I needed RAID, but not with
the PCI RAID card. Having compiled the hard disk's kernel module
(sata_sis.ko), now I was to carry out the actual install. I got this
driver on a floppy (somehow found a floppy!).

I started the installtion with:

linux expert text askmethod noselinux selinux=0

I disabled selinux coz it's more of a painful paranoia than anything else.
When I was warned that the drives hadn't been detected (as expected) and I
had the option of choosing the drivers, I loaded ata_piix coz this would
load libata. sata_sis was mentioned as one of the options but it didn't
work for my Seagate 80GB SATA disk(s). With the libata loaded (with
ata_piix), on tty2, I had to mount the floppy and insmod sata_sis.ko.
dmesg just confirmed that the module was loaded properly and showed the
disks. Now the installation would proceed as usual.

However, the first boot was another problem. Surely enough, since I had
chosen ata_piix, this was used for installation, and not sata_sis. The
/etc/modprobe.conf had an alias entry for ata_piix as scsi_hostadapter. I
had to rescue the system (again the HD driver disk was required) and
change this alias to use sata_sis instead. This done, I copied my
sata_sis.ko to /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/scsi/ and the system
was ready for a normal boot now.

All this messing around, finding the drivers, forgetting something or the
other, trying to figure out things, etc took me a day and a half. RAID too
was to be configured. Hardware RAID would have been great but I settled
down to software RAID with the handy mdadm tool. I still don't know if the
Hardware RAID is supported on this motherboard or not. Even though I had
enabled RAID 1 in the BIOS and had mirrored the disks, I could still see
two disks in my linux. Even the software RAID for the whole disks
(/dev/sda & /dev/sdb) wouldn't be done coz the disks were in use and busy
when booted. Finally, I was happy with raid on two unused partitions
/dev/sda5 & /dev/sdb5.

My second job offer

I had been to Bangalore on 3rd last to solve a problem relating to a
video-streaming project with Trianz. Though I had planned the trip for 2
days, I had to linger on for no lesser than 5 days. I worked at
Dexcel Electronics Designs. Fortunately, the trip did not go vestigial, as was a very large possibility. We were able to demarcate the memory leak in the streaming application on the Zaurus PDA.

On the last day, before leaving, the CEO of Dexcel Electronics Designs, Amit Sinha, gave me a always-welcome job offer at his company.

The trip was amply useful. I learnt with the help of Amit how to solve
memory leak problems. With the ARM architecture of the Zaurus, I was
having a tough time since no memory leak detection tools like valgrind,
dmalloc, etc could not be run on the PDA.

My first job refusal

Lately, I too joined the ranks of people who can claim to have the honors of refusing at least one job in their career. Trianz, the Bangalore company for which my "Video streaming to a PDA" was going on, offered me a position in their company, which of course I refused. I have to complete my MS at my institute. But it feels good!

3 things my batchmates will miss terribly

There remains a mere 5 days before the end-sem exams end and my batch people start leaving, many of them forever. I try to enlist 3 things @ IIIT that people will miss terribly. But the good thing about life is that it goes on; people forget things, adapt to changing situtations and woes or otherwise, most things are forgotten.

1. Internet & Computer Services
A reasonably fast 24x7 internet connection. Even though an internet connection is perceived as a do-or-die necessity for a computer institute, there still are so many institutes that don't have a browseable internet and workable computing services. Besides, every user generally has near-to-nobody privileges on his/her system so that all that one might be able to do without interacting with the sysadmin is chat, browse, etc. But at IIIT, a student is the master of his lab system, and it's no surprise that all experiments of formatting, partitioning, OS-ventures are done on lab systems with illustrative efficacy.

The habits of pine, w, talk, write won't be forgotten easily as will the habit of being online on 200, the number which has a meaning quite different from just a double-century. It's our primary mail server (the IP actually) and every soul in IIIT beats with the same resonance when mentioned of 200.

2. DigLib and other collections
Want a software, song, or document/documentary? The idea of \\ will take time to evaporate from the minds. Apart from the ghostly gigantic DigLib, the numerous local collection have so much an integral part of life at IIIT that one doesn't realize the necessity of copying things onto one's own system before viewing. For most, such distributed access of docs/videos will remain forlorn sweet memories to sigh upon.

Starting with windows simple sharing and moving to advanced NFS file sharing and versatile samba sharing graduating over to the DC++ sharing, the network provides an ocean of its own timbre.

3. Hostels
Our hostel is remarkably different from those in other institutes. We have no warden. Even the one who would answer to the call of a warden isn't exactly what one expects from wardens: he isn't involved in dictating terms or even framing unecessary curbing rules. The hostel doors welcome round the clock (I've never seen it closed ever). A 24x7 unlimited supply of electricity and water is more than enough for ANY political party to claim victory. For long after coming to IIIT, I used to notice that even on the rare occasions when electricity used to blink off, it invariably came back before the fan hopelessly ceased its turns.

As the ticks of the clock grazes forward, it leaves behind some bitter, some sweet memories. Life doesn't stop. Nostalgic memories of college life will forever be related as one of the most exciting times where the mind is without fear and the head is held high.

Farewell '05

It was my batch's (UG2k1's) farewell on March 30th. The gaudy atmosphere was dazzling with the suits and sarees that my batch mates put on. Aditya Maheshwari, with his speech, went like:
I'm Aditya Maheshwari, Roll number 200101xxx. Very soon, this roll number will no longer be called out during attendance....
The already nostalgic air around gripped with intense feelings of the realization of separation after 4 years of company. Every human, however rough-hearted would have got sentimental at the occasion.

Then followed Imran, a bit nervous, but with the hefty personality of his, his speech worked a charm of its own, as he carried on with his characteristic tapori style talk.

The speech from the students were followed by speech from the Director and PJN sir's speech was filled with characteristic sarcasm and it lightened the atmosphere after the hefty nostalgic-mesmerization that had preceded: "Aditya Maheshwari spoke as if someone was dying," began sir, "but every weekend I see hoards of alumni in our campus; so they'll always keep coming..."

The formal stuff lightened to an informal students-only gathering, which had the quiver and provocation of an occasion such as a farewell and also forms an interesting part.

Basanti Hawa

"Basanti Hawa" by Kedarnath Agrawal

Blog: from the horse's mouth

The google and blogger developers blog about the development and status
if their services.

Status: http://blogger-status.blogspot.com/
Buzz: http://buzz.blogger.com/

Thunderbird ideal to use gmail for mail storage

Since long I had been eying gmail as a perfect repository for all mails
I receive, even those I delete. However, the catch was that my official
id is nirnimesh_AT_students.iiit.net and I receive mails on this id. I
can forward all my mails and retain a local copy but then I'd have to
visit the same mail twice and forwarding to gmail each time I receive a
mail doesn't seem very nice. I can forward without retaining a local
copy (to avoid repeated checking) but this still necessitates me to
check my mails on gmail, which for reasons obvious enough, I don't want.

Now, however, I've found this feature in Thunderbird which keeps a local
copy of my mails in "Trash" whenever I delete them. So I don't consume a
lot of space on my mail server. Periodically, I can now bounce all my
Trash-ed mails to gmail and that makes my backing up possible too. I use
pine for bouncing these mails, however. I wish Thunderbird provided me
the feature to bounce a mail as well.

Misremembering Kunal's b'day.

A funny thing happened today. Since 4-5 days now I had marked in my mind
that today (18th March) was Kunal Kant's birthday and that I needed to
post him his present. However, I didn't seem to have his address,
luckily. I say "luckily" coz when I called him up and started hinting
about bumps, et al, he added two and two together to decipher that I had
obviously misremembered 18th March to be his birthday instead of the
actual 18th May. Now what a chop it was! Teri googly ho gayi..he mused
and I acquisced (couldn't do anything else). I always wanted to be able
to remember a lot of dates but to mis-remember...well, that wasn't the
idea, I guess.

Nostalgic, the air around.

My batch (UG2k1) is to leave the institute in about a month's time now.
I have to stay back since I switched to the dual-degree MS/R programme
(with B.Tech, of course). The air in the ground floor of OBH is
nostalgic these days. Every now and then you can overhear someone
saying.. only 20 days left.. only 25 days more. Excited about their
future life that anyway they might be, everyone is nostalgic about the
almost 4-years now that they've spent here. Time passes and eats away
most of these feelings, but still the process has to be passed through.
Soon there'll be time when all these people will be packing their
luggage and be gone. Some won't be seen for the rest of the life. Some
will be in touch. However, the thing called UG2k1 will move to the
sacred ranks of alumni.

Friends part with heavy hearts, foes part with unconcerned looks.
Everyone wants to live every moment of one's college life before it
comes to a final end, forever. Of course, these days will be remembered
as one of the most liveliest days when there's complete freedom in most
respects (more so in our campus). The joy of proudly missing classes,
the sleepless nights watching movies in succession, the nights spent
studying, the days spent sleeping, the good things in life, the bad
things in life, this congregation.... we sure will miss things and miss
some people... A LOT.

R & D Schocase '05 @ IIIT

My Institute's R & D showcase
concluded today. For several souls in campus, it was a two-day sleep and
fun bonanza with nothing bothersome to do -- no classes, no assignments,
nothing, whereas for others it was the D-day of hours of toil and burning,
counts of sleepless nights, and more. This time there was quite an
increase in the number of projects that were showcased. Severl corportate
representatives and students from several colleges arrive in campus to
have a look at the demons and interact with the people.

First Love

For many, First Love is a phenomenon the realization of which takes too
long a time but for some others, it takes as much a time as it takes a
pair of eyes to meet another pair of them. In whatever sweet or sour way
the proceedings at heart in such a juncture be, an innate sweet feeling
always lingers in the heart. From dawn to dusk, from noon to night, a
constant longing always immerses the heart in thoughts for your beloved.

Very few things in life appear as personal to as the First Love. It's at
this stage that one begins to realize how deep the meaning of love is and
how it glues two people together with vows for unity for ever and ever. At
times, these hopes materializes, while at other times it doesn't. In
several cases, the channel of love becomes two-way whereas in others it
remains a one-way. The feeling, however, doesn't mitigate; it lives with
you all your life.

When the realization of being in love dawns one's mind, suddenly the world
gets a lot sweeter. You start noticing the drops of rain pattering on the
window panes. You start noticing them making sinous ripples on the water
surface. You start hearing the distant cukoo sounding whereas at other
times you'd not heed even the blares of a sounding horn. All of a sudden
the smell of the first rain doesn't go unnoticed, and you can see the
rainbow stretching it's arms from heaven to the earth as if inviting you
to climb over it. When these things happen, realizing that one's in love
isn't rocket science.