World Champions!! Atlast!!

1983 is quite a long time back, and all that I know about India lifting the Cricket World Cup is from the iconic still in which Kapil Dev holds the trophy in Lords. Fast-forwarding 20 years, I was in the cross-roads of writing the MOST_IMPORTANT_EXAM of my life, the 12th standard public exam. In spite of that, I saw all the matches that India played. India had an humiliating defeat vs Australia in the qualifying round and went on to win everyone(England, Pakistan, New Zealand, Sri lanka to name some) else convincingly.

Some of the most memorable matches were played in that world cup series, The hook shot from sachin in shoib's over(India vs Pakistan) etched in the minds of the people forever. It is comparable to the Aamir Sohail's wicket taken by Venkatesh Prasad in the 1996 world cup!! We were basically cruising in that world cup, only to meet Australia in the finals. I had my Computer Science public exam the next day and to my horror saw India getting pelted by Ponting and his men!! I could see India loosing their hold on the World cup and myself on the computer science exam.

Heart-broken, Literally everybody was in tears. I gave my best shot in the Exam and stopped watching Cricket from then on. Now and then I would just check the scores in The Hindu and come to know who won what. In 2007 world cup India had to face crushing defeat in the hands of Srilanka and Bangladesh eventually getting kicked out in the qualifying rounds itself. Towards the end of that year, I got the chance to watch IPL Ist Edition in bangalore between Chennai Super Kings & Royal Challengers, Bangalore. The crowd was crazy(that means us) and the cheer was maddening. We supported CSK and it was a crucial win for CSK, in the end

Under Dhoni, India lifted the 20-20 world cup in 2007, CSK lifted IPL - 3rd edition. Again it was the time for the World Cup in 2011 and initially, India tied/lost 2 matches but qualified easily for the quarter finals against Australia. Till then, I followed the world-cup only from the newspapers. Now the heat was on, though it was tempting, I resisted and followed only in Cricinfo that too the second half of the second Innings. Yuvaraj and Raina took India safely and knocked Australia out of the series. It was a sweet revenge for the the loss we had in 2003. I was more than happy and the next hurdle was Pakistan in Semi-finals.

The media and the politics involved took the match between India and Pakistan to the next level and inadvertently created unwanted pressure on the players on both the sides. Being Superstitious esp in cricket, I followed this match too in cricinfo and it was real fun to see the status updates in FB and Twitter. And so we moved to the finals, the celebration back in India knew no bounds, and I dutifully saw them in youtube, what else I could do? Our generation never knew how India celebrated in 1983, but I am sure it would not be anywhere close to this.

The venue for the final clash between India and Sri Lanka was Mumbai and SriLanka played first and possed a formidable score of 274!! India lost sehwag and sachin by 32 and the future looked bleak. Thankfully I didn't follow this and was sleeping peacefully paying heed to my superstitious beliefs. And when I got up and checked cricinfo, Gambhir and Dhoni was slowly but steadily closing in the gap. I knew that India is making history this time and I couldn't suppress my curiousity anymore. I started watching the match in some streaming channel. Inch by Inch we were closing on, though we lost Gambhir. Yuvraj kept the required run rate low while Dhoni was rotating the strike. When we had 11 balls and 4 runs to win, Voila!! Dhoni's finished the match with a SIX!! He scripted the masterstroke with his infamous Helicopter shot and made History!! India is now the World Champions and lifted the 2011 World Cup!!

The stadium/celebration was electrifying. The 28 year wait finally paid off and we lifted the cup in India, happiness and excitement knew no bounds. Sachin's resume is complete and Dhoni is the best Indian captian of all times. Kapil Dev's 1983 world cup trophy brought the passion for cricket into this country, Sachin's 22 year crusade in Indian cricket made young/old, rich/poor, men/women to closely follow the sport. Dhoni's 2011 world cup is a dedication to the 1.2 billion hearts which beat together irrespective of the differences in language/custom/religion, whenever India played. Never before in the whole history of mankind would one-sixth of the world population would have completely forgot everything and jumped up in joy and celebrated. The celebration was not confined to India alone, the NRIs across the world celebrated and took to the streets. The whole world felt a lot lighter that day!!

It is quite a privilege to be in this era and watch this, it is one moment to cherish and recall back in posterity to the future generation....

Goodies!! Goodies!!

* 1GB USB stick from Vmware
* T-Shirt from Bloomberg,
* Laptop keyboard Night lighter from Morgan Stanley
* Rucksack from Computer Associates (CA)
* Radium ball with built-in LED Circuitry from Riverbed
* Key chain from Falconstar
* Wall board + writer from Vmware
* Soda bottle opener from Acoustics concepts
* Unlimited Tasty Veg Pizza hosted by Microsoft and yummy dinner hosted by Vmware,

Thats all I could muster in a two and half hour job fair drive that happened in our college :) While this year gonna_be_pass-outs were trying hard to push-in their resumes down the stack, we freshers took this opportunity to grab them all. Because I was naive(curse my shyness and what_would_she_think_mentality), I missed out on some company T-shirts and backpacks :(

Some machakaarans like KB laid hands on Nikon CoolPix cameras too!! இப்படிக்கு அடுத்த ஸ்ப்ரிங் ஜாப் பாயர் இனாமிற்காக (கூட்டிஎஸ்) காக்கா போல் காத்துக்கொண்டிருக்கும் மாணவன்!!!

Headset gear adds to my arsenal

Yesterday i attended the PCQuest Best IT Implementation awards ceremony @ Hotel Grande Ashok, Bangalore as TCENet Bagged the best innovative product award. Attendees include Mrs.Shalinie Mam, Stylesen, Ranjani, smartsara, Senthil, subbi and myself. while myself and stylesen were wearing jazzy jeans and T-shirt, every other person in the conference hall were in Formals and some in suit :( Our jubiliant nature made many to turn their heads.

The Master of the ceremony kept the function on the roll by asking GK questions in between the awards distribution. After my 2 year winning streak in quizzes during my school days i maintained a low profile by not participating in any of the quizzes during my college days. For two questions the opportunity evaded me. Atlast the finale moment arrived and the MC quoted "Name the other countries that have their independence day on August 15th apart from India" Though i was not sure my basic instinct made me to raise my hand and my mouth squeaked "South Korea" The MC asked my name and congratulated me and very soon a ramp walk model walked her way through to hand over the "Logitech Mobile Express Headset" worth around 3000 :)

I finished my dinner at the same place and returned home holding the headset which has entered my sophisticated gadgets arsenal. I realized that luck sometime favours me too.kudos to those old GK books that i read during my school days which made this happen.

Getting older year after year

yeah today is my birthday. It was a smooth one as far as birthday bumps are concerned. I did nothing great or special today. But it is really surprising to see so many of my collegemates and schoolmates ringing me up and wishing.I was never a good guy in remembering these important days in others life. probably i have to be more careful next time.Nothing more to pen down for the day.

looking through the pensieve

Happy Birthday Harry Potter!!!! i saved up my blog on you for this special occasion. "To buy or not to Buy" was the dilemma which i had for the "Deathly Hallows", the last book in the Harry Potter sequel. Harry Potter series is the best book that gripped the hearts of the people of this era. It is hard to come across such treasure in ones lifetime with the last being TINTIN. Saying all these i pre-ordered this book for just 633 @ indiaplaza.in while the book on the stands was about to cost 975.

Though i ordered this book i went to my native for the weekend and got the book in my hands only on monday morning. It was followed by a two sleepless nights and atlast i finished reading the climax of the gripping story which encompassed 7 books across 10 years. I have no words to explain my experience with it. Never had i read any story so very engrossed all through the night and sometimes dodging my mom's call to sleep and sometimes leaving the studies behind in 12th standard :)

It all started like this. i never knew what it is some 10 years back. it was my good pal Bharathi who handed over the philosophers stone book. it made me feel as though its all realistic and i started living in the potter's world from that day on.Then i got the chamber of secrets game on my PC which thrilled me to read the second book. From then on there is no stopping me, i jumped straight to the Goblet of fire which as per to me is the best of all classics. Then i read Askaban courtesied from Bharathi again. similarly i laid hands on the 5th and 6th book during my college days.

Atlast when the final book was released i made up my mind to buy the book on the day of release itself.The deathly Hallows ended on a happy note.Truely J.K rowling made a difference in the literary arena which created an impact on many including me. With the 7 years of Harry's school days over now i wish that he had not passed the O.W.Ls at all so that there could have been two or more books on him :) Really i miss Harry and the Hogwarts. Ending this post with a hope that Rowling continues to write such magical adventures.

Fame is the part of the game

Another great thing happened this week in my life which needs special mention here.i had earlier recounted the opensolaris day at TCE and it attracted the view of many icons in the OpenSolaris world.Thanks to Ananth who had provided a link to mine in his blog.The people who commented on that particular article was poker (joe) and Jim Grisanzio, Engineering Community Manager for OpenSolaris.we exchanged some mails between us and we agreed to create Mad-OSUG (MADurai - OpenSolaris User Group) in the opensolaris.org itself.Soon i created the website at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/mad-osug/ and a mailing list at http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/ug-madosug is ready too. i heard from ananth that i am the 11th non-Sun leader to coordinate a Open-Solaris UserGroup.one of the people above me (the 10 people) is Peter Baer Galvin the person who wrote the Operating Systems book which i read :) and i have been mentioned in Jim Grisanzio's blog too.

My Article in Linux for U journal

Someday in the month of june or july i received a forward mail in one of the Glug mailing list. it was a casual letter requesting people in the community to provide information about the GNU/Linux in educational institutions.i saw that and promptly replied back detailing all that we have done in our college using FOSS ie Centralized Authentication System using Heimdal Kerberos,OpenLDAP,Samba(Single Sign On for all unix based and windows platform Systems and for other services in college like intranet portal,mailserver,shell server and all services to come in the future he he), TCENet web portal(using Python,Cheetah,Postgresql),TCE MailServer (Exim,cyrus,squirrelmail) etc... with that i forgot all about it until my cell phone rang on August 5th..

It was stylesen from Bangalore & he informed that my article has been published in Linux for U journal.With him was Sap,Keyankay too..imagine the amount of excitement i would have had,a simple unknowing work of gesture has rewarded me a lot.i bought that journal and showed that to all. A xerox copy of it still finds a place in my department notice board.This is one of the things which i would not forget in my life.

Technozion - Land of the Scion

when i heard that my paper has been selected for presentation at NIT - Warangal i was out of bounds and soon after i returned back from kerela i arranged for the trip to warangal ie got the papers printed out and so on.Then i proceeded to warangal staying at the house at trichy and chennai for quite a little time.As i travelled in the tamilnadu express i was eager about the outcome of the competitions.Then as i landedin warangal i saw some representatives of technoscions and they directed me to a autowallah and he took me to the college.

At the registration desk i was asked to attend the inauguration which i did eventually and this thing gave mea outline about the college and then i registered with them and stayed in G block which was literally outside the college.The roomates were all from Andhra.after having a chat with them i started to college again for first session of LE DOSSIER SECRETS ie the paper presentation.all the papers of that session were just generic papers and this brewed a lot of confidence in me.That day i met keshav a NITW product and from him i learnt about dinesh, my schoolmate that he was not available for he had come to trichy.he introduced to some tamil guys and we enjoyed together in the INFORMALS ,the rockin night which had some cine comperers for the shows and competitions.

Next day i had a small talk with joydeep paul(finalyear) the CSE organiser about the opensolaris usergroup and so on.in the morning session Ramanathan a NITT product presented his paper on search technique using DCOM and i knew atonce that he is a sureshot candidate in the prize list.in the afternoon i presented my paper.from the way the people looked at me i understood that i had made a mark to some extent.That night at the informals we had some DJ from a metro and i need not tell how the we would have enjoyed that night.

Next day i chatted from the morning till afternoon with Ramanathan & Kasturi Rangan NITT products and the probables in the prize list and in the atfernoon joydeep hinted on the good news that i would hear soon.that comforted me and in the valedictory my third place in paper presentation was confirmed and i got a cert and a shield kind of and a cash prize of 2000.soon after it ended i met joydeep and parted.In the railway station i waited for some 4 hours till 1 AM as the train was late and then boarded it and came to chennai at 2 PM next day.

when i look back, i am indeed happy that my first attempt in paper presentation that too in a highly esteemed institution has come out with good results.probably should make this as a starting for a streak of laurels to be won.

Industrial visit to Trivandrum

Thanks to the coordinators for this IV who made the arrangements so fast in just one week and also it turned out to be a nice one.Jus before we started i came to know that my paper has been selected in NIT warangal.the bus came to coll by 1 and we started with a hype and we were at kanyakumari by 6 for the sunrise.nice scenary indeed.

Then by 10 we were at trivandrum and we stayed in the cottage. we had our so called breakfast at 12 and we went to BSNL.Then we played dumbcharates for some time and retired to bed.In the morning myself and prabakaran started to temple wearing dhoti.then we had our breakfast and then we went to US technology and then to velli beach and had a nice ride on peddle boats.

Then after some sport and visiting other place we returned back to coll by 6.

Yet Another High-time Occasion On-stage (YAHOO!!!!)

When Mr.Anthony Wasserman from Carnegie Mellon west and Murugan Pal CTO spikesource came to the college this saturday it was me who did the compering.As far as i know there was no flaws.but the presence of emminent people on stage put me in a very tensed position till the event came to the end.Then we had some discussion with them reg open-source and abt our plans for future and so on.Then Mr.Sen gave a presentation to the delegates about the CAS & Migrated TCENET in python.it was much appreciated.i could not give a presentation on cluster setup in PPlab due to lack of time. Then as soon as they departed we went to Aarthy for the lunch.Then we returned back and then had a chat with everyone till it was getting dark.this is how we spend the weekend.

Pragyan - Celebrating Technology to its apogee & the workshop Hacked by Ankit Fadia.

somewhat around this time last year i had the chance to visit a college well known for its poshness(already blogged giving a full account of it).But this time,call it luck or whatever u want because i had no plans to go to my home this weekend but my last minute decision to spend this weekend at my house at trichy proved to be futile and fortunate for i visited the NIT when it was showcasing its extravagant truly international Tech Fiesta PRAGYAN-06 with its caption "Let's celebrate Technology".Added feature to this is NIT trichy's 30th anniversary(what else one would need?).



when i got down from the bus at the REC stop to reach my home on friday night it was around 11.30 and there was not much crowd around.hey presto where am i? surely not in Las Vegas the city of lights. The college buildings,roads, trees and the fence was dazzling with decoration lights. Voila !! what a sight to watch!!! Eventhough i knew about Pragyan except for the dates i could not figure out the reason for the lightings.. after gaping at the decoration for sometime i went home.



It was only in the morning on seeing the newspaper i remembered regarding Pragyan which was scheduled for that day and continues for 3 more days.myself along with Bharathi mohan set out to the sify iway to know about the schedule for that day. Hurray !!! how lucky we were....That day ie on saturday there was a workshop Hacked by a 20 year old network guru by name Ankit Fadia(Whew!!!! what a profile he has got for his age)... we registered online for that workshop. i rang up Ashok and he was more than happy to join us.



when the clock struck 4 o'clock we(myself,bharathi & ashok) were at the entrance of the prestigious institution.The massive Flexi banners(he he this thing makes me remember my experience with it) for pragyan dutifully welcomed us.We went to the sports ground(to while away the time till 6.30) where there was stalls for each competition and yummy food courts too with recent film songs from Rang de basandi & other hindi films being played at full volume which filled the air with festivity & importance.In one of the stalls we met Kaadi(Karthikeyan) our schoolmate who is presently doing civil at NIT.From him i learnt that some people from our college too had come there to attend some workshops like robovigyan.In fact we later saw some two of them.Kaadi too then joined us.



When we slowly made our way towards the Barn hall where the workshop was supposed to start by 6.30. myself & Bharathi recounted the no of days that we had travelled thro those roads in all sorts of weather that too quite early in the morning to attend the maths tution conducted by Mr.Karuppan chetty (HOD Mathematics,NIT) in 12th std. Finally we went to the barn hall which is of historical importance to us for this where we had our counseling some 3 years back.The whole college was there along with some participants and some foreign delegates.Then the inauguration took place. TCS being the sponsor for pragyan the chief guests were the vice president and the head of chennai operations both being NIT's alumni. the multimedia presentation also needs a special mention here.



Then came the much awaited hour of importance the stage was given to Ankit....(This guy during one of his visits to one of the presitigious institutions in india (at that time he was doing 11th std) had a very few turnabouts, doubting his ability, so he officially cracked that college's mail server and changed the password during his lecture and this made people pouring in instantly(heard this from a friend)). this guy has even helped the international secret agency,Symantec and so on)it was an absolutely Impeccable lecture.he elaborated on how to hack the internet in particular about email forging,proxies and so on.his case studies combined with online demos took everyone to the edge of the seats.Then he briefed about trojans and showed the infamous subseven trojan.he even answered queries on how to perfectly hack a system without being caught...he gave more importance to multiproxy jumping in this regard.he sited many websites where one could learn more and how to prevent themselves from being cracked.



Then he dealt with the Queries during which we went out to have food. Since computer hacking itself took some 2 1/2 hours during the next 1 hour he dealt with queries and then with mobile phones hacking.due to lack of time he left out ATM hacking :( This guy has published so many books which have become the standard books in many universities ( this guy is doing BS at stanford ). one notable book is ethical hacking blah blah...( ethical?) by 10 PM it came to end. what a time we had those 4 hours... fully packed with contents.... never had i been with such a informative & intelligent crowd which was kept electric by a celebrated personality.with this our adventure for that day ended.



It is a pity that we could could not attend all the workshops scheduled for the next 3 days. there were other entertainments like laser shows,3D gaming arena and lectures of many eminent people like prof.yashpal sharma.Pragyan showed the mettle of the nittians and their organising skills needs a special mention.On sunday evening i came to the REC bus stop to board the bus to madurai.I saw prof.yashpal going in to deliver the lecture and the banners & decoration lights beckoning people to enter the world of intellects to celebrate technology.



The rendezvous with Ankit Fadia & the extravagant Pragyan would be in my memory forever. Hats off to the nittians.....

Yeah........It is 2006.

had plans to go home for the new year but couldnot. so i stayed at the house alone on Dec 31st. after returning for coll thought of going to some hotel and then to cafe coffee day, my usual hangout. thought somone would give me company but could not find one. determined to go to cafe i thought of starting by 7. but call it fate or whatever i slept by 6 and got up only by 9.30 Totally baffled i had my dinner at Aarthy's and then had dilemma like whether to go to Cafe or not but due to lack of company and due to lack night service buses from anna nagar i had too ditch my plans.

Some people stayed at home and some hanged out and enjoyed to the Xtreme in their own way when the clock struck 12 while i was made to stay back in which is neither fully my home nor a hostel room.quite uneventfully and with boredom the new year eve passed. from this on i learnt a lot and made it sure that to go home for any important day associated with some festivity. Its hard to stay back here alone and tamper with the keyboard for composing this blog when the year 2006 dawns and so many SMSes pouring in from all sides.....Yeah it is 2006

A Day with RMS

Feb 6th turned out to be the luckiest day for all FSF guys in TN.i too was one among them.I travelled all alone for nearly 450 kms ie to Vellore a city where i had never been before.There i somehow managed to get to VIT (Vellore institute of technology) .I was there at 8 am nearly one hour before the guest of the day was scheduled to arrive. i just had a look around whew! what a college? it seemed like as though i had entered a college at US. Then the speech given by RMS was same as the GNU/Linux advocacy given already by joe.That day was indeed a day to be noted in the diary as i was with the person who was very famous