Disclaimer : Old post. coming out of my drafts.

Yet another weekend,planning to go home on friday.This time 5 of us booked ticket.(Naanga onne sendhaale nalladhu nadakkathu)Till tuesday morning it was peacefull,it turned ugly when cinema halls were attacked in bangalore.From that day, i constantly kept watch in thatstamil to get updates.It became worser day by day.Thursday night it was clear that people had to suffer.All TN bound buses started from Hosur only.We were lucky to board a private bus in madiwala to hosur which went in some rural route and dint go via the Hosur road after electronic city and somehow reached hosur by 2100. But bus was rescheduled to 2330 so that people can reach hosur by that time.Heard from one my friend that buses are blocked on hosur road by ‘activists’ and that he had walked from Attibele to TN border.Had horrible time in hosur to find a decent hotel(All were worse than the muniyandi vilas types).I must say onward journey dint give much of discomfort for us though it would not have been the case for many. After MKs statement, one hoped everything came back to normal and i cancelled my KSRTC ticket on sunday(i repent now) and booked SETC on monday from my place.

Monday :

1930 : Bus started but the conductor gave tickets only till hosur and did not assure bus would goto bangalore.

0245 : Bus reached hosur and after 5 minutes conductor told buses wont go beyond hosur. S**t.Came to road there are hundreds and hundreds of people standing like us.None of the KSRTC bus stopped, no means of transportation.

0300 : Finally some auto drivers started cashing in.For a 6 km distance to the border the fare was 50 Per person.Got one by 0315 and reached border by 0345.Then started walking till Attibele bus stand which was roughly 3-4 km.

0400 : Got a city bus going to KR market and then got a bus to my place and reached room by 6 am.

Horrible journey from 0200 to 0600.

Well all this is experienced by lots of people who went home for 3 day holiday.Reason was the act by few morons who even reported that the problem is as related to power projects initially.

I am not supporting either side. Violence should be handled strictly  whoever is doing.Its like the little brother of terrorism.I dont know what is going to happen as now the elections are over.

One good outcome personally was that i learnt train is little comfortable for return journey starting 2315 at chennai and reaching at 0530 and can be booked (horribly) via irctc. I hope the APIs reach out soon and private websites give booking facilities.

Self tagging from Niranj after i couldnt write his previous tag.

Last movie seen in a theatre:
Vellithirai

What book are you reading?
Seldom read.While travelling i think it was “Fundamentals of Technical Analysis”

Favourite board game:
Chess (if that is considered as one)

Favourite magazine:
Thuglak (Tamil)

Favourite smells:
Petrol, Ghee

Favourite sound:
Few good horns

Worst feeling in the world:
Feeling alone in difficult times

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?
What’s the time? and sleep again

Favourite fast food place:
Not very specific, more specific on what i have

Future child’s name:
Excuse me! ( Naa petha magane Excuse me!! LOL)

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…”
know how much is “lot of money” and probably ask for me

Do you drive fast?
I seldom drive(No bike)

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?
Well, NO!

Storms - Cool or Scary?
Cool

Do you eat the stems on broccoli?
No

If you could dye your hair any colour, what would be your choice?
No colors please. Black or white(when i get aged)

Name all the different cities/towns you have lived in:
Kalpakkam, Bangalore

Favourite sports to watch:
Table tennis

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you:
Nice friend with a good guy image

What’s under your bed?
Carpet

Would you like to be born as yourself again?
Yes

Morning person or night owl?
More of night owl

Over easy or sunny side up?
I dont eat eggs (If its related to eggs–Thats what i got when i googled for the phrase)

Favourite place to relax:
Beach.. ( I have a long pending draft on beach.. hope one day it comes out)

Favourite pie:
Choco pie

Favourite ice cream flavour:
Butterscotch,Pista

You pass this tag to –
Alagu Jegadesh Ravikumar Revathi Sanjeev (If you can tag yourself that will be great too)

Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?
If i tell to my roomie, he will do it. But I wont, Lets wait and watch.

Crazy title, well im writing this for the sake of it,cant think of a better title.Im just thinking why i havent blogged for 2 months now.That too when i got internet connection a month back.Yes cable net provided by youtelecom,speeds are Okay,unlimited 192 kbps so just downloading movies.For a week i can excuse myself for being having a hectic schedule. i had “graduated” sometime back and am an ‘ingineer‘.Met few of my friends after a long time, dont know if i will be able to meet them next time.The next week after that went for travel as i travelled from Bangalore-Kalpakkam-Chennai-Kolkatta-Bangalore in 4 days. And Cleartrip had a great offer, 10 movie tickets free @ INOX!!(I never knew the offer existed when i booked, i just booked the cheapest ticket in cleartrip).

Due to worst mistake done by dear pal sanjeev (he read reviews of all movies for 2 hours and booked the worst rated,he says its the problem with the site) during online booking,first movie was worst one “Thotta” on Mar 2.Then back to work and had the “hectic” 10 days release period.Since i had to exhaust remaining 8 tickets, went to 10000 BC and “Black and White” with colleagues in bangalore.Yes the second one being a hindi movie,but now able to understand normal conversions,so movie wasnt so hard to understand.Last week back to chennai for cousin’s marriage and went to movie called Vantage point.It was interesting in first half,then it was more like Gaptain’s movie with all sort of unimaginable stunts.Met few friends on sunday and went to a good movie atlast in the 10 tickets.Vellithirai was a good flick.

Travelling to and fro to chennai by bus on weekends is pathetic.I wonder why trains are always full.There will be 10 buses lined up and you never know which one you booked for.For 11 clock bus, i came to know that my bus is cancelled and i had to board another bus(1045) only at 1050 and the bus left at 1055 though i was in bus stand at 930 itself and whenever asked about my bus,got a casual reply,it will come and even the conductor doesnt know properly what is the timing.When asked my friend that is it the case only with SETC,he said its with every bus service(even the private fellows).

Meantime i started my hands at cooking also,starting from milk,noodles to ready to eat are now common things.Once a week ‘trying’ to cook rice also But washing vessels is a major pain.

Meanwhile me using windoz, as im unable to(not finding time to) configure my cable internet in ubuntu.Initial googling gave very little results.So if any of you know to connect cable modem in ubuntu,please ping.Expecting some change in Ubuntu 8.04 due next month.Its nice to internet at home.Am almost back to college days, catching up online with friends,(now started blogging also :P),orkutting,watching lollu sabha by downloading,browsing freely.

I have started liking this game tribalwars and playing it for 2 weeks like mad. I dont know when my next post will be, Untill then keep visiting

Bought this book last week and its fascinating.Revisiting NFA, DFA etc. Had i learnt the concepts properly in college, this book wouldnt be needed.Unfortunately that dint happen,so now this helps. Enoying reading it.

I just made my hands dirty on these tiny but useful productivity tools and made them working on Ubuntu Server.

Environment : LAMP

Tools

• OpenFire - Chat Server based on XMPP (Jabber)
• PHPBB3 - Php based forum software
• Trac - Web based Project management Software  and Issue Tracker
• SVN - Subversion repository system
• OpenGrok - Source Searching utility

Openfire

• Download the tar.gz from igniterealtime ,untar and put the directory into /usr/bin
• Give Execute permissions to the openfire script file in bin using chmod
• Start the server using /usr/bin/openfire/bin/openfire start
• Run http://localhost:9090/ from browser
• Select EmbeddedDB & Give LDAP auth info.Create groups and add all users in one LDAP Group as mutual friends

      Troubleshooting

• /usr/bin/openfire/bin/openfire start | stop | status for checking the status/starting/stoping the server
• Check the permissions of the openfire.xml file
• view the stack trace in nohup.out

PHPBB3

• Download PHPBB3 tar.gz from web.
• Extract into /var/www folder and give write permissions for others so installer can write the config file
• Create database in mysql
• Give MySql settings while installing,login to ACP and create the forum.
• Use LDAP settings for making it LDAP and chose auth type as LDAP
• For migration give the old database name and table prefix name and migrate

Trac

• Use Easy_install and install from the latest svn source.
• Create environment using tracadmin command.
• On a standalone trac system user the createUser Python script to generate the user.passwd file.

  $python trac-digest.py -u username -p password >> /path/to/users.passwd

• And edit the trac.ini file with path info and Source control locations

SVN

• Do an apt-get installation of SVN
• edit the apache.conf and make a alias for svn and give auth info
•  Create the password file using htpasswd

  $htpasswd /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd -n username

• Give write permissions for the SVN Parent Dir

OpenGrok

• Download the tar from here
• Untar, Host on tomcat
• Edit the SRC_ROOT attribute in the web.xml
• Run the indexer periodically.

Things i learnt from this excercise :

• Brushed back my mysql basics
• Learnt CronTab and wrote few shell scripts  to do daily backup.
• Learnt little bit of Python.(Still learning!)And am finding it more and more interesting.
• Shell access is way to heaven. cPanel,Webmin is for kids

And a great news is my system is up and gotto install Ubuntu Gutsy today after having installed Windoz yesterday(for my TV Tuner) and try learning some python daily.Got to have some form of internet(Have relaxed this from Broadband) as its getting difficult to have a system without net and feeling the pain.

I have launched a moblog at LogicMobile. Its in alpha stage . Hope it will be up soon and i will start posting frequently short text from my Mobile Nokia 6021. Will currently use http://m.wordpress.com suggested by Jnarin, but looking for a J2ME client.I also got interest in J2ME, may start reading and developing small apps.Do anyone use Kablog client.It seems to be fine,but im unable to get a valid jar.I have one which throws exceptions.

Catch you often @ LogicMobile too..

Test post from m.WordPress.com thanks to jnarin for pointing this..

First Excuses to my feed subscribers. They may have got spammed by this time. Im analyzing different moblogging clients.

JWordPress doesnt seem to work and development is not active (and no developer doc in english).

Testing a Photo Moblogging client by blogplanet. Its posting but without Titles for the posts. Seeing all this, im seriously thinking of writing a moblogging client in J2ME (Though i dont know J2ME, development shouldnt take more than a couple of weeks.) XMLRPC rocks!!

And I found twibble for mobile, and guess i will start twittering often.

Using the full power of my Nokia 6021 bought 2 years back with GPRS,J2ME support for 7k that time.Now that GPRS is cheap(15p for 10KB is cheap and with no rentals) ,i browse occasionally on Opera Mini,using MoneyManager to track expenses, and started exploring on Mo(micro)blogging. Have to look into lot of other interesting apps. I gotto get one dictionary too.

Once again apologies to feed subscribers.You may recieve some more in the days to come.

BCB5 Winter edition is coming!!

Be there on Nov 17,18 2007.Register Now

I have been learning quite a lot of things. Started some 3 weeks back on installing a wiki over Xampp.

XamppLite is a cool “double click run xampp server”.The first choice of wiki was Moinmoin and learnt how to setup one after spending lot of time(thanks to my 0 knowledge of python). Then tried WUBI - Windows based Ubuntu Installer. Pretty straight forward and neat installation(very much needed for novices but further improvements can be done).Tried installing and configuring phpBB, mantis.

Reading about LDAP / MSMQ / openGrok / lucene. Have to read mono, python and lots more to do.

best site seen off late –  www.YourBillBuddy.com — Analyse your mobile bills.

Well this post is to let people reading me know that im actually alive and this blog exists. Life is going on pretty much faster and no time(?) to blog.There were days few months back i would login to my blog several times a day and just stare at my stats page/ read all my posts in my reader and comment blogs, chatting 24 hours(yeah i have done that continously too) none of which i do now.YahooChat/GTalk has become alien thing to me which i log in once a month(or more than that?).I just realised that i too had a blog and i had loved it so much only after reading “my blog will always be my first love” it in revathi’s blog.My routine would be going to office by 9-10 and coming home by 10-11, sleep and on alternate weekends going home. I almost had a full week off from work, where in i came to bangalore just for one day office and the next day we had this awesome team outing, and then went back home again.And yeah i got my passport!!!(but have no intentions as of now to fly away :D).One activity which has increased is calling up (old?) friends and talking atleast one hour a day as a result of which my mobile bill is reaching new heights.

BCB5 is on its way and very much interested to go for the first preparation meet this weekend.I just kept asking this question to myself on do i need to close the blog? Its probably the one of those times where the blogger is suffering from no posts syndrome due to busy/lazy status. People give your views.God give me time to blog

Lots in mind to write about it, but sans time. Exactly a year back, we toiled a lot for making it big. We started OPC in Paradigm2k6. We spent sleepness nights for accomplishing whatever we did. Though its not a great thing which one can be proud of, college memories are great and will stay forever.

This year guys have come up big with Paradigm’07, and let me wish them a huge success.

Paradigm — Revolutions begin here.

I dont know for good or not, Im currently moving around with mostly hindi guys.My roommate is a Rajasthani,90% of colleagues speak hindi, so when Im with them I try to understand hindi.There was this conversion which made everyone laugh, but when i questioned(the logic?), none of them were able to answer.

I was having tiffin in canteen,

Guy : Kaisa Hai

Me : Achi Hai.

Guy : You must say Acha Hai, its masculine gender.

Me : Crap, Gender for thing? explain me why achi hai is wrong.

After several attempts he fails to convince me.I asked the same thing to many mates,everyone was laughing but none of them could convince me.

One guy tried by saying,

If he asks Kaisa Hai, You must answer Acha Hai,

If he asks Kaisi Hai, You must answer Achi Hai,

Now I replied, then how should i start asking. We spoke for almost an hour about this. In English & in Tamil AFAIK there is no gender for non living things(objects). We ask How is it? Epdi Irukku? et al. How / Epdi doesnt have gender.

Can any hindi speaking person convince me on this. The answer may change my thoughts on learning hindi and can motivate/demotivate my learning desire.

OTH, We had a nice laughing session and that guy will never talk to me in Hindi.. lol..

PS: I tag this post with Tamil lol

For those who think that JDBC is an acronym for Java Database Connectivity, get the facts right.JDBC is actually a trademark and is not an acronym.

Sun says, “…. JDBC is the trademarked name and is not an acronym; nevertheless, JDBC is often thought of as standing for “Java Database Connectivity.”  ….”

I knew the above fact a long back but couple of days back when i googled about the same for getting a link which states this fact , i got this link through which i also came to know about AJAX.

AJAX != Async JavaScript And XML. Its a lot more than that.I knew that to, but was surprised to see the list of other acronyms for ajax with similar pronunciation with better sense from Bye Bye “AJAX,” The Age of “Ajax” Is Nigh which says

If AJAX is indeed an acronym (which it’s not) then a comment on the article points out some others as:
AJACX: Asynchronous JavaScript, CSS and XMLHttpRequest
ADJACS: Asynchronous DOM, JavaScript and CSS
ADHJACS: Asynchronous DOM, HTML, JavaScript and CSS
AJACHS: Asynchronous JavaScript, HTML and CSS
AJACS: Asynchronous JavaScript, HTML and CSS

Any networking guys who are clear about TCP/IP. I vaguely remember someone saying TCP/IP is not an acronym by itself(i couldn’t get a link while googling) , where as TCP & IP are seperate acronym. Any other acronyms(?) like these which people often use unknowingly??(Both tech and non tech welcome )

I recently tried facebook and found it cool (though i dint have many people there)[Orkut still rules India].One of the best feature in facebook is installing user apps and connecting to other social networks or any site for that matter. I just got back to twittering after the seeing the popularity of it in Microblogging session at BCB4(post to be written soon, after uploading pics).So I thought of installing twitter app on my facebook,To my shock i found this screen in which twitter password field was a plain text box and displayed my password.So be careful if you going to install this app on your facebook.Twitter guys what happened to you??

Yet Another Diary Entry.

Lot of things happening and time is flying. Got struck with Bangalore rains and just learnt that life in Bangalore is not too cool when it rains.Had to clear the mess caused by rains and then travel on the same night last week which was hectic.Consolation - met few old(?) buddies in a small getto in chennai.This week again flied away,moving to new house again within a month[:)][:(] because of the havoc by rains.I’m just thinking of writing some post or the other.I have been writing diary entries for long time now.[[cries]].Guess BCB4 tomorrow will be a nice experience.Looking forward to it.

For the first time i plan to attend a barcamp, I intended to go for wikicamp, Blogcamp which were held sometime back at chennai , but couldnt make it finally on the day.

Barcamp Bangalore 4 (BCB4) ,is an Unconference which provides a platform for like minded people on various interests to meet up and network.BCB4 is slated to be held @ IIM Bangalore on 28th,29th July. Just check out the various collectives and edit the wiki to register(Registration is Free). I have registered for Internet Collective & Blogging Collective. Waiting to meet few old friends and make new ones. Sad part is I would be able to attend only on sunday as i have office on saturday too

Update ::

I have registered for BOJUG Collective too and may go on Saturday also. Yippee !!

Reason behind Name ‘Bar’Camp :: (Nothing do with drinks )

“Foobar” is a common placeholder name used in computer programming or computer related documentation. When US-based tech publisher O’Reilly invited some friends to a “Foo Camp”, for “Friends of O’Reilly”, it was but natural that others responded with their own version, dubbed the “Bar Camp”, the twist being that anyone who wanted to come could feel invited. Barcamps have since grown into a worldwide movement of such ad hoc, participant driven events. Anyone can organise a Barcamp. In Bangalore, the first and second events were organised by completely different teams, while the third is the result of their combined efforts.

Hope to see you there.

Its been 3 weeks im away from home.First time staying away for such a long time.I found the first 2 weeks easy as i was staying in a guest house with all facilities.Life just got tougher after i moved into new house.After roaming for a week and lots of difficulties we found accomadation. My usual routine would be Office –> Eat –> Sleep. Thank god for the net at office, im able to keep in touch with my friends atleast by mail.No orkut,No yahoo messenger, Missing my home very much,so much so that im planning to travel 14 hours to spend just 12 hours next weekend.6 days a work doesnt give much room to travel around Bangalore. But still met few buddies here.Few pics taken @ office are here.

Waiting for 5 day week schedule, so that i can relax on weekends.Friends please check and update my new mobile @ my orkut profile (Cant even link here )

Im moving to bangalore tonight.In a few minutes I will be on the move. New life awaits. New place,people, have to make friends.Next phase of life.For the first time i will be missing home, offline for days together without a PC,trying to be independent,wash my clothes,etc. On the positive side a great city,a good job, and bachelor life is waiting for me.

Hard to leave my home and friends with whom i spent the most part of 20 years.The beach(i wrote a draft yest abt it) which i will miss badly,will miss all my school, college buddies most of whom will be settling in chennai. I planning to start write diary regularly if not daily.So even when im offline, i will have some content to post from my diary when am online.

Till then.. Keep bustling and keep in touch

UPDATE :: 18/06/2007

Thanks to sumit’s laptop and free net @ room, im back online.Atleast for coming week i will be online.Its awesome to browsing sitting on the bed at this cool place.Entered ‘corporate’ world today.

May 31 ::

Have to prepare for interview, update resume.None of which i did. Kept alarm at 430 am and planned to do them on the D day.Thought of catching 6am ECR bus.

June 1 ::

Failed to wake up to alarm.It was ringing from 430am every ten minutes. 5:21 am Alarm ringing.. woke up. Preparing resume with few corrections, Took printouts by 6 am. Went to bath by 6:05. Dressed and started from home by 6:20 thinking of boarding 118 EXP @ 620.Realized just before leaving that scooty was punctured last night. Yikes.. Have to walk all the way. the 118 EXP left earlier. So had to walk 3km all the way to ECR. reached ECR @ 630. No bus. Finally got a SETC bus @ 640.No place to sit but boarded it thinking he would go fast as it doesnt stop at hotel/go inside mahabs. But the bus was not in great condition either,was going @ mere 55 - 60 kmph. To add salt to injury,the driver stopped for 10 minutes at a place to buy mangoes in the countryside.Came to guindy by 815 am.Skipped breakfast, Waited for the Ponnamalle bus.the one which came was crowded and its not best choice to board when you are going for an interview.Boarded a share auto to Porur.Then boarded a deluxe bus from there to Ponnamalle. On the way @ 840am i called Raj and he said he is in seminar hall. Oops, i thought am already late to this interview too like i-flex which i missed for the same reason. Without asking a question i boarded an auto and paid 40 Rs for a distance of 3-4 km.(I never knew coll will be near,ended up paying heavily )

Test started only by 10. I was nervous initially, took too much time to solve basic quantz problems(i never had practised solving those RS agarwals in last 6 months).Went section by section.It was over by 1115. Then was chitchatting and went to lunch by 12.Came back,finally results were announced by 2 pm. When they said 17 / 200 odd are shortlisted i kept my fingers crossed. My name was the last to be called out.Deep Breath!! Interview @ 3 pm.

I was called first as i chose JAVA in the test and tech interview was around for 25 mins.Took it easy and maintained cool even when i didnt knew the answer,Did it decently,within 5 minutes i was told, was shortlisted for HR. Its my first HR interview, just went in and had a chat with HR for about 15 minutes,again i was told to wait.Another round of tech for 10 minutes, at the end of which they were satisfied.Huge Sigh of relief!!

Had to wait for an hour till 530 to get the offer letter.Then completed formalities and left the place @ 6pm.The long walk was a much needed one, and was recollecting things i did from the morning.Boarded a deluxe bus fare ticket costed just Rs.5 but i was ready to even shell out 50 Rs for it given the state of mind i was in.(Just then found out i was cheated heavily in the morning).Went to ponnamalle bus stand and took ordinary bus to guindy from where again i took another ordinary bus to home(Usually i wont travel in these buses and travel on express even on footboard to reach home faster). All i needed was a seat in bus and lots of time to inform all my well wishers.Those 2 hours my eyes and ears were glued to cellphone I didnt do anything special for this interview,(remember i prepared/updated the resume just hours before in the day) its all the prayers and wishes of best buddies which got this offer.May be it was god’s will.Thank god

Last one week was very hectic.For the first time I was offline when sem results came and I breathed heavily after hearing the word “pass” from Karthi.Mission AU accomplished after lots of pain. Coming 5 days will be even more hectic.Have lots of things to do before i can pack off to bangalore. Just editing few of the many drafts to make some post before i hibernate completely.My posting freq will be arnd 2 posts/ month from now on i guess,Considering i will have complete net access only when i come home.

Orkut has added feeds into it. One can now add their blog/photo album/video channel or even news  feeds into their profiles with ease.This will increase the number of people who view those sites.Here is my profile

So go and add yours!!!

PS : Lot of orkut related posts coming soon.watch out.Im just lazy to edit and post.

While i was stumbling i came across these links which covered about the hackers in hollywood, servers in movies, coding in hollywood . Well quite a few of them were really funny like

Code is only in green text on a black background

code is inherently cross platform : In independence day, whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership?

Man those guys are million times better.

Cut the shot.Back to Kollywood TamilNadu, India. Lets see the relationship between computers and heros here.

Though directors havent ventured much with computers, the preliminary (read  only) purpose to use computer is to search a criminal from records.Let me give you few examples.

1)Captain Vijaykanth’s comedy is endless.Let it even be one of the best movies by him,he never fails to entertain.In the movie Ramana he gets a floppy disk from his student.Puts in his PC, Windows media player opens(a video plays) and he tries to enter something(trying to query for criminal) and gets the info and decides to nab him.Wow awesome.Only captain can run a 3 minute video from a floppy disk,Only he can type something and get results in a windows media player.

2) Anniyan tried to use the web much like 4 Students did but Anniyan was worse and 4 Students was better.One must watch the anniyan website scene.No words to describe it. lol

3)Citizen was another great comedy.Ajith would be a serial killer killing people with a fake identities that no one would ever know.When CBI suspects him and raids his place,they find an astonishing evidence in his PC. It will have a presentation of all his identities and the list of persons he is going to kill/already killed.Why in a world would a secret serial killer make such a presentation and keep in his system.Is he a CEO and ppts are his day in & day out?

God knows when these crazy filmi people catch up with computers!!

For the sequel readers/puzzled buddies, thats the answer.I will mention about it at the end,It happened during 5th sem.

Disclaimer :: Long post on college life..

My circle was expanding, 5th sem was the most enjoyable sem.The AJP class comedy,Classroom games starting with Dias Tennis,then squash in the new block.We even had a seperate room for squash.Symposium which gave me first sense of team work,movement with seniors.The “Debugging” which we organised bought premkumar and me closer.The 5th sem tour to bangalore and get-together did gave us a break from routine.Online activity increased among everyone.I would be starting the “mokka conf” as and when i find more people and things will be total fun.The most memorable conf was building story based on boogaji’s creative works.There were also few flame wars in yahoogroups and yours truly had always been part of every war .Late night chats with fellow nocturnals like Achu, HOD niggy, Ragesh brought us even close.The exam hall tension was even more great fun.More than 10 of us sitting near the class,those 2 hours we study and still have fun.Yogi’s tension,LIC narasimhan’s gethu, Dicha Library’s (sure!) questions which made me pass most of the times.One the whole 5th sem was the evergreen sem of our class.The postponement effect of CSE ‘B’ reached annauniv and sem was also postponed due to rains.Klueless 1 solving was at peek during those days when me and ooba worked together online after long time after a OPC in 3rd sem.

Sixth sem was even better.Classes seldom happened.Me and “machi” premanand shared great rapport during this period.The “mini” project and maxi experiences from it are sweet memoirs when looked back now.Fellow geek and a caring buddy,my first linux guru.His words “machi ..” will be fresh in my ears.Few staffs got some cool insults from cool dudes deepu, hostel prasanna.Then the C# comedy project which me and vikki did.The compiler lab comedy which me and VK did.Had nice time going to guys houses.The Sun Tech days experience,tragic death of vasanth all seem to have happened within seconds.
Orkut had given us an extra space to hang out and fake profile episodes by pandiya and deepu provided us awesome fun.Instincts was another awesome time,had nice moments for 2 days on informalz stage.SSNLUG was formed after a LDD by ilugc people.Elections which never happened,What an awesome week.We the mod squad(Merchants of death..lol, we moderators, achu,aswath,sanjay,me) were trying to help organize things.As individuals we learnt what is what in politics better.We had great time.The treat at anjappar followed by cricket @ vinod’s place just before 6 sem exams was one of the best get-together apart from joe’s treat,dicha’s sis marriage i had attended.

Those one night stands before the exam and phone study(story listening/telling) all through night with CRK.

Seventh sem started with a pain of missing few seniors,then the work for symposium Paradigm2k6 started.and i was also trying my best to make things happen @ SSNLUG. Jakku became close during this time.Classroom football, 5 cards which i taught to guys became hot favorite and a day isnt complete without it from then on.The OPC experiences,the night before paradigm(deserves one post,will write later),had many experiences to share which will make this post endless.Met some really cool juniors during this time.The comprehension comedy which me and prem did in 5 mins over phone,solving klueless2 again as a team,the status message war between me and mokkapair- rb hotted up before each UT on the preparation(Though only vikki,sanjay,only a few more know how i write my UTs ),the night at hostel with raj before the arrear which made me all clear. The tour was awesome to say in a word on which sanjeev has written all the posts.Me and sanjay shared almost everything in those 10 days.Last few days inside classrooms were pleasent initially.Blogging became hot among mates and new bloggers thala whose part timejob is to kalaai me & sanjay have been making few great stories .College Day and Farewell was enjoyed well.The last few days when i was undergoing trauma,my friends stood for me as pillars to make me what i am today.

Will miss all the OA !sure!,weight ra nee,maar thaar,guhuhu, juniors and all you people who somehow or other made an impact on me.May the future show us all the doors and let us be together forever. BackseatBoys will always be there.

Well many moments might have not been covered.Cricket was one thing i had never been(probably once) along with backseat boys

4 kilometers of a journey which passed through bumpy rides,super highways,how many ever kilometer im destined to ride,this 4 will have the best lap timing

The most cherishable day:

When you ask any college student,the most obvious thing would be cutting classes and going to a movie.But this movie we watched comes in the most cherishable moment for an all together different reason.Since our college is in remote place,watching movies in theater cutting classes is too difficult with no means of transport to go outside.So it was a typical ordinary day in 4th or 5th sem.(My mind says 4th sem, but release date of the movie is June 2005[but tat movie came after a long delay and possibilities that we might have seen before release on theater on PC,ok leave that.]) We all went to vinod ram’s room @ Gents hostel-I.Since nothing was happening in class, almost everyone(even 100% attendance ‘fruity’ was there) came to his room.Though few of us already watched the movie,we decided to watch the movie ULLAM KETKUME.20 guys on a room,we dint had proper space to sit back but we enjoyed to the core.Whats special about the movie was, the story was tailor made for our class.We had each character of the movie in our class.Each scene was “localized” and it was one ‘heaven’ of a time.Shyam — Sam, Arya — Ramprasad, Parthasarathy ,Venkatadhiri(Palam) — Fruity library so on.. Im not going on further, guys i guess you can recollect the other chars and the stories.

College Life — Ullam Ketkume More!!

And the prize goes to Kadhal Doctor for guessing it right.He gets a moser baer DVD of ullam ketkume. Lets not indulge in piracy.(ahem ahem).Sorry if you are angry with too many outgoing links,was just visiting each page of the college life through those pages

Last but not least.Apart from commenting on the post, If you like Feel scribbling anything on my slambook,please do it here

As college life is towards its last days, let me travel sometime back to relish some best moments.First Sem was totally fun, meeting knowing strange people like me.E-Mech terror,workshop which makes us feel sick, getting ragged @ sports complex,nirmal’s classes(total fun),thalaivar selvaraj’s classes,shared lunch with alan, varun , hari, rada et al A sec buddies,playing with aju’s cellphone(those days cellphone was rare in college campus).’A’ section had personalities of all sorts.Studying was the last priority,though it was the only sem in which most of people got highest % and we considered writing unit tests close to writing exams.4 months was too short to know all and some acquitances turned into lost contacts, but still met quite a few buddies who will remain forever.Overall it was a wonderful time.

Second sem was again meeting new people,but this time we know we are going to stay with the group for next 3.5 years.Being a short sem,just had time to make acquintances with people around and had laughing/sleeping sessions in classes where one lecturer says only 7/35 of them passed in this subject last year while another blessed half of us to gracefully fail in exams.Had a rocking subject called Engg Drawing.(School friends know once i even failed in ART in 8th standard, such was my acquitance with pencils and charts).Intellectual discussions with Ragesh was side dish for every lunch.I was still an introvert owing to my not so bright acad-life.

Most part of 2nd year went like this(pic above).sitting in the free space outside the class and chit-chatting.Occasional visits to hostel to write CDs.It was during this time “logic” was born.I still dont remember the exact reason for the name,though many things come close and people often say thats the reason.My bond with Anna strengthened.Hope he remains my anna forever.I was also seeing the outside world quite a bit.Went to symps,then the year long Java @ NIIT where me and nitin learnt lot of things other than java.We had a great time together and there was no hotel/fast food in adyar locality which we dint taste.Hope we cherish atleast a few more moments like those in future. I was also slowly becoming online junta(in dialup days).Yahoo Chat helped me in creating strong bonds like Joe, CRK, RK and my circle was slowly growing.Symposium,College Day,Bus day were fun filled unlike ever.

One of the most cherishable moments in 4 years happened in this period.(4th or 5th sem, im confused,dont remember exactly, mind says 4th ,but facts say it must be in 5th,anyway try guessing.)’Backseat boys’ guess and comment.I will keep it suspense for now,let it be climax,i will reveal in part 2.

Clue : It was just an ordinary day, all of us(more than 20 of us for sure,few unlucky ones might have missed) enjoyed the moment to the core. The answer will be title of the next post and winner gets a ‘memorable’ gift from me. You can comment any number of times with any amount of guesses

And please make guesses because even if its wrong(not matching with my choice) at the end of it we will have a collection of best moments we had together.

Still to come:: Weight ra nee,Oh Soltaar da, Guhuhu, Surree… Letter, Naalaikku,Maar Thaar — Story of 3rd, 4 th year.Keep watching this space.

The much awaited Ubuntu release feisty fawn rolled over and its time to upgrade.When edgy eft came i dint have a reason to shift and decided will move to feisty straight away.so i tested feisty installation on a test hdd which had ubuntu drapper,FC6,SuSE.I found a cool thing during installation.It detected all three OS and asked me which home directory to backup.Now this is one great feature.Especially gaim(should i call pidgin?) chat logs,firefox preferences,bookmarks are always lost during upgrades.Unfortunately i couldnt test the feature out as it said my hdd had errors and the installation struck in the middle.After long hurdle(writing 6 DVDs to make free space,so that i can format each drive and fix errors) i installed Ubuntu Feisty in my main hdd.But i made a foolish mistake.Instead of formatting my / of Ubuntu drapper and installing in that,i formatted /home partition of old ubuntu.Lost 8 GB of data

Some of the positives are more n00b friendly.Add/Remove programs will really make things easy for windows users to migrate.Universe repos added by default.Better support for my ATI card through proprietary driver.But still 3D Desktop isnt working . It just took me 4 hours to set things back to normal settings and installing all required things.Sudoku and Chess added to games Feisty is all set to give tougher fight to windows.

To download goto — http://releases.ubuntu.com/feisty/

To request free feisty CDs — https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

Nice comedy!!. Posted this from youtube!! Waw (Youtube + WP) rocks!! Hope to post more comedies as and when i watch them.

One of most memorable days in my life. The day when we managed to successfully organise the first ever OPC for our symposium Paradigm2k6.

Disclaimer : A loooong post….

Buildup to the event :

Having participated in several OPCs(though i had never won), those 4-5 hours on a sunday would be mindboggling and while i try to code atleast 1 or 2, the race of programming prodigies will be hot in whichever OPC it may.The thrill of leading the scoreboard can be relished only by participating in one.I was desperate to have OPC as part of Paradigm2k6 when the first meeting(somewhere in July 20th) for the symposium was held i insisted, explained everyone about OPC and took incharge of conducting the OPC event along with Siddharth(Ooba). None in my set had web programming experience,so was very tensed about developing the system untill i met junior coolgoodfriend - JeyaGeethan(g10). He sounded pretty confident of getting the site ready.We decided to have it on Sep 10th, sunday before the symposium scheduled on Sep 15th.

August 20th, registrations started.I started publicising a bit on orkut and we got good response.Towards the end we even feared how we could manage such a crowd using our system(Manual Testing of all submissions).Around Sep 8th,we had almost 250 teams registered.The system was ready and we tested it in lab.Since stubs and questions weren’t ready we just tested the web interface and thought it would be easy task on sunday.The system was good,we just asked g10 to make additional facility of a leaderboard and he said will make it soon.The question hunt was done by junior vettiarvind & his team.They indeed rocked. I took care of all administrative hassles of lab permissions,transport arrangement on sunday,uninterruptable power,high speed net(this is the highlight comedy).Since saturday and sunday were holidays i took extra care to make things ready on friday itself.I reminded SA of our college about the high speed net and asked him to block all connections to hostel for the next 2 days(Yes our college has 4Mbps shared connection and hostel guys download movies when connection is up and its highly impossible even to log into messenger leave alone browsing).Having trusted him, i went home and was planning to come saturday morning to install the test stubs,compilers and conduct a mock simulating the real one in every sense.

9th September :

I reach college by 11 am and walk all the way to dept and open the lab.Upon opening firefox, i was shocked.It took 300 seconds to load the default firefox google page.OMG college connection sucked.I thought we are screwed.Arjun(aju) always warned me about it and asked to hire an iway so that we can conduct the event smoothly.Curse me i dint take those words seriously.Adopted the wait-n-watch plan.Enquired one assistant in SA room and he said network is using 3.5 Mbps. How the hell when none in hostel nor anyone in depts except us have net.He asked to wait till SoMCA labs were closed at 8pm. 830 pm No respite. Connection still sucks big time. My planB was to have it in 4-5 people home(Sridharan