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.

Trussed like a Chicken on seat no 43

It is the passenger's most avoidable seat, that too on a Worldclass A/C Volvo bus and evidently i fell for the trap last weekend.To make ppl understand the location of the seat, it is located in the middle of the last row in the bus ie, the seat at the end of the pathway.

Here is how the plot unfolds :)
The conductor paid a personal visit to my seat to ensure that i have strapped the seat belt(exclusive for seat no 43 passengers) properly. By having this seat belt around i could not even budge a little.My neighbour understood my plight and made the best use of it by conquering my seat little by little.All night i had to wage a war to keep a small part of my hands on the handrest.it is a pity that i had to share the handrest on both sides :( The A/C slits are available only for the two ppl on either side and a cool breeze would hardly make it to the passenger on seat 43. Being a volvo, where the engines would be on the rear side and i became the prestigious person to sit over the whooooooooooring engine all night with the heat waves flowing in.Hot sauna bath for free!!!! Added to that is the glaring headlights of the vehicles coming in the opposite side peeping through the gaps in the curtain.And at situation such as these you would be blessed with a stinking snooring neighbour falling over you all the time!!!!!!!

The HP way

This book was handed over to all the new recruits when we joined HP. This is written by David Packard, one of the founding fathers of the Company. The HP way is a set of ideologies which was framed by the founding fathers as early as 1957 when no other company had even thought of it.hp way considers both the employees and customers as equally important and one of the speeches given by Bill Hewlett in 1960 to a set of new joiners states exactly that.

The book starts of with David Packard recounting his childhood days and his friendship with Bill Hewlett during their college days at stanford.The group consisting of Bill, Dave, Ed porter and barney registered for the class by fred terman which eventually turned out to be a turning point in life. After the college days Packard joined GE for a short stint while Hewlett did his masters in MIT and both started their company officially in 1939 in a small garage in Palo Alto.This garage now has become a historical monument and is called as the birthplace of the silicon valley.


HP initially concentrated on oscillators, High frequency counters, video/audio parts and microwave products. The HP desktop calculator marked the beginning of the digital era and later it plunged into the computer industry. Some of the path breaking HP's invention at that time includes the usage of caesium for accurate measurement of time pulses,LED's, very High frequency counters, etc.Since this book is written way back in 1995 not much information about computer development is given.


When the company grew the founding fathers came up with many management styles which have become the benchmark of many companies these days. Some of them like sharing the profit with the employees, Management by walking around, Management by objective are a path-ahead in the 1950s. HP's Open door policy resonates even today as even the Managers or VP sits in open cubicles without any door like every other employee in HP.It is said that the Legacy, the founding fathers left behind is not just the 100 billion dollar company but the HP way.

SRK's Magnum Opus

Add Chakde India to Shahrukh Khan's best performance list and believe me it would top it all.Though he had a variety of roles round his buckle from a romantic romeo to vicious villian, the NRI and the Kabir Khan character suited him the best in Swadesh and Chak de India respectively.Many wouldn't have imagined that this baadshah would ascend to the top when he first showed up in Fauji, a serial in Doordarshan long time back.

These two film's baseline or the underlying story were pretty strong which added gravity to the lead role.Chak De India is a neatly compiled flawless picturing of how a disgraced hockey captain after a gap of 7 years comes back with a sole aim of coaching the undisciplined and egoistic women's hockey team to win the world cup thereby to redeem his pride.Some say that the story is similar to Miracle, a Hollywood film but i don't mind as long as i could watch some worthwhile films like this.The director's skill lies in clearly evading any romance or song sequence from the film thereby keeping the tempo on the go without any disturbance.The matches that are played are damn real

The film also delineates the sorry state of the affairs in the sports authority board and also the mindless cooking-up of stories by the media people. SRK's acting touches the heart when he leaves the home with a heavy heart and also in the end when his team wins. It would be great if other actors too tries something different like this rather than playing the same monotonous roles.After a long time i am seeing a film that is both gripping and inspiring till the end.I came out of the theatre wondering why SRK didn't coach the Men's team, only then it struck me that if he had done that perhaps his team would have won but this film would not have been a blockbuster!!!

Naanum Nalla Paiyan than

This weekend i turned out to be good boy and started visiting temples (Plural because i went to 2 temples :) Saturday evening i went to the Maha Shiva Mandir in Kemp fort(Airport Road). The walk from 100 ft road through domulur to the temple was pleasing in the evening.The forest cover inside NAL, HAL, ISRO which could be seen from the road on one side and IT parks like Diamond District on another side strikes a contrast.

The entrance to the temple is very small and one would find it hard to believe that a huge statue of Shiva is inside that. For any tourist or a resident of Bangalore it is a must watch.There is a small cave kind of setup through which one could find all the Famous Shiva lingas and also stories about them.

Next day morning i went to the Iskon temple in Yeswanthapur. Instead of taking the straight route i went through hebbal with the BMTC daily pass tucked away in my pocket.The serene and clean surrounding speaks high of the temple.The grandeur of the structure makes one spellbound.Inside the Iskon there are sweets stall, Hotel, book store & Art emporium kind of. It is heartening to know that Iskon temple feeds 42000 children everyday. Iskon temple is one of the places which requires regular attendance.

South Indies - truly South Indian

This time i happened to chip in to this restaurant (south Indies - 100 feet road, Indiranagar, Bangalore) with Vineet and sarit to experience new things. If the receptionists in sarees are surprizing you in bangalore wait till the waiter pops in with a cool HP iPaQ to take orders from you. Then one of them hands over wet scented towels to clean your face and hands. What thoughfulness!!

The Menu card would stike you with awe because its nothing like anywhere else. The exotic thing with this is everything has been designed with some creativity from dishes to menu card to interior decor. Here you could have foods from all the 4 south indian states (Thats why its south indies!!!). we started of with the murungai charu(Drumstick leaves) soup with fried onions ( really nice combination!!!). Then we went on to kal dosai with karuverpilai poondu kuzambhu. This combination is smashing. Then we ordered neer dosa which is yet another delicacy. We finished off with besi bela bath. Infact the waiter told us that there is some 8 - 9 course treat for 500. since we did not have that much appetite we ordered individually. Surely i would go for that one day.

Comin to the wallet part, the bill was around 650 which is really worth. The hospitality of the waiters would amaze you. I would surely recommend people to this restaurant. This provides not just food but rich experience. GO Xperience it!!! For more details visit http://www.thesouthindies.com

Non-Stop Film Festival

If you are thinking that i am going to blog about Cannes film festival or something similar you are wrong. This is about a group of 4 guys who ended up watching 5 films non-stop on a Saturday night. Dont make guesses, its just me,sen,subbi and musi who did that inevitable feat.

It all started by 9 after our dinner at amirtham@ koramangala. after the first film which i am not supposed to name,me and subramani "veerappoda" thoongalammnu ninachoom,but we moved on to the next film starring ajith during which i slept.Then i got up to see the next film by 3:00 which is normally the time when the "flowers used to unfurl" its petals.Then by 5 i thought ppl would atleast consider to have a small nap. To my astonishment some were washing their faces to prepare themselves for the next show!!! Then we watched the madhavan starring film. Atlast ppl went to bed and i saw a part of Indiana jones "The raiders of the Lost ark" After that i had a nice sleep and got up by 10 only to see another film which remained us of our "school".

What a night it was!!! Thanks to Subbi and Prabu anna for providing us this entertainment gala and also for patiently getting the scoldings from their neighbours for we had kept them from sleeping too :)

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What a welcome for new employees!!!

This video is a must see for every software professional in India where a software guy is highly revered and respected. But this company took a step further and made these new joinees cherish the moment forever.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GpPcMVbmtw

Geeks of india you rule the world.Give yourselves a pat.

Solaris to be shipped in IBM blades

A strategic alliance is what Sun tells about this deal with IBM. IBM has accepted to ship Solaris OEM with their blades. So what is going to be the impact in the market? If you have a look at the market share of lower-end x86(blades, Proliants) servers its the HP which leads there followed by DELL and IBM. In an attempt to raise through the ranking IBM has accepted this strategy which might help Sun in promoting Solaris. I do not want to speculate much on this but going through the some analysis reveals that there wont be much change in the rankings.Perhaps the deal might affect the GNU/Linux market especially Red Hat's Enterprise editions as Sun is slowly trying to penetrate the GNU/Linux deployments in the internet arena where x86 & GNU/Linux combination rules.

For IBM its an optional offering with their hardware. For Sun its a new arena where their solaris has not penetrated much.Keeping my fingers crossed i am watching what is going to be the impact of it in both the hardware and OS Market share world!!

It happened in India

One thing that strikes you is this person's inspiration to setup Big Bazaar, Bangalore central and other establishments are not after looking into walmart but after paying a visit to the infamous saravana stores in Ranganathan street,T-nagar, chennai. This Book by Kishore Biyani along with Dipayan Bhaisya takes one into the life of Kishore Biyani, the Rajah of Retail. Though the excerpts by different people who are part of the retail conglomerate are filled up with praise for Kishore which normally irritates you the rest written by him are the ones which pulls you into the vortex.

He recounts how from being an ordinary cloth seller he evolved to such heights. though he was from Mumbai his initial stunt was in calcutta where he setup his first pantaloon store. Later he moved on to mumbai and other cities. Later he went on to setup the Big Bazaar hypermarket customized to Indian style. His attempt to attract the tier-2 people of India (middle-class) was an instant success added to the lucrative offers his retail gives.No Big Bazaar remains the same, because it is customized to the regional taste. His foresight in procuring large enough real estates for building his malls are seen when he setup the 1.4 lakh sq ft Big Bazaar in Noida(The largest in india). He made some bold stunts in bollywood too by producing Na Tum Jaano Na Hum & Chura Liyaa Hai Tumne. His future group is aiming at various prospective areas where they could step into, to channelize the people's spending into their stores. Central is an idea born out of here.

Certain brands like John miller,Scullers, and Indigo nation are owned by them and by obtaining legal rights they are the dealers for puma, mark & Spencers in india. Just a three day offer(sabse saste din) in Big Bazaar during this year attracted people to spend 125 Cr in this shop.His separate unit for churning out new creative ideas lies in the Joseph chemmanur hall, Indira nagar Bangalore. These designers look into people's activities and behavior to understand more about people's need and tapping them. so next time if someone stares at you near indira nagar it could be one among them :)

he palns to own 30 million lakh sq ft of shopping paradise by 2011 with an annual turnover of 30,000 Cr. with the giants like walmart and Reliance stepping into retail business only time would tell whether he achieves his goal.

Trip to Sivasamudra (Bharachukki) Falls

On August 15th we had been to Bharachukki falls which was not a planned one. This is 140 Kms from Bangalore on the mysore road ( not exactly). we got down at anapost and then caught an auto to this falls. We missed the ganganachukki which is some 8 kms from that place.we survived solely on cucumbers and bhelpoori that whole day.Later in the afternoon we suddenly thought of going to somnath temple which we heard was some 30 kms from there. but due to non-availability of Straight bus we abandoned that. we didn't go to talakkad ( the point where cauvery is huge) due to the same reason. Probably a detailed surrounding information before the next trip would suffice to end such dissapointments.

By 7 we reached bangalore totally famished and this prompted us to visit the Maharaja Hotel @ Koramangala where we dined pretty well along with Prabu anna.very soon we all departed in all directions to reach our home.

Visit http://picasaweb.google.com/kpraveen85/BharachukkiWaterfalls
for more pics

A better Xperience

yesterday i went to the HSBC ATM center @ indira nagar. I came to know that the ATM machine is having some problems and i came out of the ATM center without taking the money.I was in for a surprise.The way i had walked through was fitted with granites and marble flooring which was unique in its own way and i easily missed the highlight of it when i came in.
Now i sat down and starting analyzing what design it was. Some architect or the owner of the building seems to have a good taste for the Zodiac signs and it showed off in the flooring. The floor was studded with a patterned granite slabs with the Zodiac signs too impregnated on it. Since i know the difficulty in cutting a marble slab the perfection in the cutting of the granites in various shapes including intricate curves amazed me. The design was somewhat similar to a sundial in the side and the flooring was like the sun flares.

I managed to take a closeup snap of my English Zodiacal sign Leo :) if you pass by the CMH road near the KFC you have this ATM and it is worth peeping in.

It is the creativity of the one and ability of the another to make it into reality, made me to enjoy this art in serenity

The Alchemist

This book by Paulo Coelho is for those who are in pursuance of a goal in life but getting held up in the middle and for those who feel contented with the present state of affairs.Though it has a illogical happenings near the climax like the boy talking with the wind, sun etc the story line keeps you hooked till you reach the end. I read the whole book within a night.

--Spoiler starts here--

Santiago being a shepherd is content with his life until he comes across a gypsy lady who interprets his dream and from then on our boy undertakes an task of unearthing a treasure near the pyramids of Egypt who is helped by the king of salem initially.on his way he meets the englishman and then the Alchemist who guides him to his dreams.The story is written excellently by paulo coelho.

--Spoiler ends here--

Apart from the above lying story the author makes us to understand the way of life and some lines are sure to have an effect on one

"Every search begins with beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested."

"If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it."

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."

"The darkest hour of the night came just before dawn."

Power of Itanium 2 (Montecito)

Itanium has been the most talked about processor even before it hit the market in 2001. it competes with the enterprise server processors like IBM's Power and Sun's UltraSparc. But when it hit the stands its sales didn't soar up as it was expected.This is mainly because of the ignorance of many people about its architecture and how to get the best out of it. some time back when in college some people had sarcastically pointed out for our college going for a itanium processor based Symmetric Multi Processor system(SMP). Now i would like to clear out those dirt out of the Byte-crunching Itanium processor.


Itanium is designed using the Explicitly Parallel Intruction Code (EPIC) architecture which is a completely new design neither near to RISC nor to CISC. EPIC means the that Itanium processor does not have the hardware in its chip for identifying instruction dependencies for parallel execution. By doing so some amount of chip space is vacuumed which could be used for accommodating additional registers.All the parallelism has to be decided by the compiler itself during compiling. The resulting binary could be made to run on the Itanium processor at mind boggling speeds. Imagine having 128 (64 bit)General purpose registers, 128 (82 bit) Floating point register, 64 branch and predicate register, 64 application register etc working on your data. really stupendous!!! Therefore if your compiler doesn't parallelize the code just like for other processors you would find itanium lagging, leading to people doubting its capacity.Itanium is best suited for places where the applications are fine tuned for it and then would one realize its sheer speed in computation.

Itanium could theoritically execute 6 instructions per cycle and practically known to execute 3 instructions per cycle while x86 architecture could do only one instruction at a time.Itanium's latest release Montecito has 2 cores each with 2 threads(coarse multithreading - doesn't run concurrently, one thread chips in when other does memory lookup ) emulating to 4 processor. Thunder and NASA's Columbia supercomputer's secret lies with Itanium !!! Apart from this Itanium has built-in capability to handle virtualization which means it can run multiple operating system concurrently. its huge 24 MB L3 on-die (internal) cache adds to its efficiency in fetching data as quickly as possible.The speculative execution in Itanium is very robust adds to its performance. Itanium 2 has improved a lot in power consumption and in price/performance arena. Itanium's sales is picking up and latest survey has indicated that its revenue is over 63% of SPARC system revenue and over 54% of Power system revenue.

As Tukwila (Itanium's next generation)is round the corner packed with quad core, Simultaneous MultiThreading(SMT- Intel's next Lethal weapon) and Common system interface and other features up its sleeve, i could smell out a competition brewing in the processor arena with IBM's Power7, Sun's Ultrasparc Rock(16 cores with yet to be decided on number of threads) and from AMD's Fusion

ping --duration 2 days Chennai

For the weekend i had been to chennai and the onward journey was by KSRTC mayura which i enjoyed the most. They took the chittoor route and in the midway they stopped at the cool A1 plaza owned by reliance. A1 plaza had a neat parking lot and the traveling facilities provided by them were many and was very clean too.The lightings and the spacious restaurant were worth noting. Reliance have their own knack of attracting people to their bunks by providing such facilities.

For the rest of the two days i had to stay back in my paternal uncle's house except for a quiet stroll to Priyadharshan's. With the glittering hoardings all over the place i got a quick update of the happenings in Tamil nadu. Madhavan and bhavana starring Arya got released the day before and the deserted satyam theatre is enough to tell about its success. Kalaignar Tv is all set to be launched by september 15th as per one of the huge hoardings in the city. Kalaignar Tv actually owned by Raj Tv became the talk of the town as they bagged the rights to air the films Shivaji , Guru, pokkiri and varalaru after three years of release.

i had to miss the class reunion planned at spencer plaza due to one good reason. On sunday night i caught the Corona which was very spacious. Though they put Dhoom in the bus i resorted to peer through the window to have a look at Vestas, Nokia, Motorola, saint Gobian and samsung industries in the sriperumbuthur area. Later by early morning 3:30 i reached my home. These people drive pretty fast and that helped me up for a cosy 3 hour sleep before starting to office.

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.

Starting a new Thread

This is nothing to do with POSIX thread or kernel threads. As the days go by i find myself in a similar situation as i was some 4 years back. that is when i joined my college in madurai & i used to go far and wide to try out new hotels out there and sometimes i used to recommend people about which recipe is good at which place. similarly after been here in bangalore for some one and half months i have been to quite a lot of hotels and more joints are yet to come.Therefore i thought of recording my new discoveries right here.

Three Quarter Chinese
This fully chinese style restaurant is in the AMOEBA complex off brigade road.Though the entrance to it is not grand, once you are inside it strikes you with awe. The service is at its best. I was offered a non-smoking zone with two menu books(liquor & food) of which the first one i clearly evaded.I ordered for a LAT-CHE noodles veg and it puntured my purse by 170 (145 + VAT + all TAX) Though expensive its worth the experience and i would recommend it for atleast once.

Ambience : good
Service : Excellent
Taste : good
Bottomline : not exactly one of the places to throw a grand party.

50% off ? total crap

My father used to tell me "Dont fall for any discount offer" hmmph, just now i fell for one. It was a saturday morning and i had no plans for the day. sitting with the Bangalore mirror is the best thing in life i would say. An advertisement in that attracted me immediately . Woodlands offers "50 % discount on outdoor gears" hurry i was planning to buy a woodlands for myself and this offer really made me jubiliant.

In the evening i ended up in the Woodlands store @ commercial street and browsed through the collections. cool man i found a perfect pair for me. it was love at first sight as it was exactly the way i wanted. Enquiring the cost made me to know that it would take away 2290 from my purse. And there was no discounts on it as the product on which discounts applied were kept separately in which i could not find anything similar to my pair. Deciding to go forward with it, i bought it.

The shopkeeper twitched a smile of satisfaction as i got down from the shop with a pair of shoes + woodlands shoe polish spray(175) + a brush (45) exclusively designed for my woodlands. Though i fell for the offer i would say that the shoe is worth the price :)

Rummaging thro others playlist

I dont know how many people have this habit but i find this pretty enjoyable when i start looking into people's music CD collections. It has been quite a long time since i got an excellent candidate for this. Last week i had been to subbi's house and i faced a stacked up CD collections of Ekanth,SAP,Prabu and all. I was pretty engrossed in that and least noticed what others were doing. I started playing them in the philips boom box they had.

The interesting aspect of this habit is you tend to know about new albums and new singers.The two albums that struck me are Guitar prasanna's "Be The Change" and ARR's "Bose, the Forgotten Hero". Bose had some 10 songs and 10 themes. It is really great to hear those songs.Then i also had my hands on "Pray for me Brother" DVD and CD.After those enconters i watched the Raiders of the Last Ark, an Indiana Jones Trivia.

With the Harry potter's "Order of the Phoenix " film out in the theatres we are planning to watch it next weekend. COming to the "Deathly Hollows" i have not yet decided as whether to proceed on to buy a book or to wait a little longer. only time would tell.

Emacs vs Vi

Oh god!!!! not another flame war. Today as a part of training session seminar i took emacs and as usual it ended in a flame war. very particular in not degrading any other editors during my session and giving out the salient features of Emacs itself lead to this.

Once started would i leave it so easily??? no way man. its a crusade from the chruch of emacs headed by me. I started of protesting vehemently. The moderators atlast put an end to it and asked us to come up with a list of differences between them some time later.

many links speaks in volume about the differences. but the below one is really funny.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/04/0326236

An anecdote in my life

Accustoming myself to the new city has been the chore that i have been doing for the second time in my life. i am almost settled after some 3 weeks in Bangalore. i like the Bangalore times and Bangalore mirror newspaper.It has the right mix of stuffs i need. The night lights in Residency, brigade and MG road would attract anyone.

After many bumps with autowallahs who cheating me, i memorized the map of Bangalore so that i know the route that i am taken through in auto. These days i am even showing directions to the autowallahs :)

Yesterday one thing happened.i was in majestic to board the bus back to home.I was on the 17th platform waiting for any 300 and above number buses which passes through my house. to my dismay only two digit number buses whizzed past me(basically 2 dig buses are internal buses and 300+ are sub urban buses) normally those buses wont come on 17th platform. i made sure i was on the right platform. i waited for some 15 minutes only to realize later that i have to turn around to view the predominant 333 HAL bus waiting in the bay for someone to get in. what a fool i have been to miss all the buses just behind my back. Then i boarded a 317 and reached home. Such errors are part of human and are never to leave.

Two inspiring films

With the people and even Ad-film makers paying little attention to the Indian Cricket Stars after the fall of the so called Goliath batting lineup of the indian team to the david bowling queue of the Bangladesh cheaply in the infamous World Cup 2007, There is an upbeat enthusiasam in the dressing rooms of other sports in india.People of the cricket crazy nation have turned their heads to other sports these days. The Indian tour to Bangladesh attracted very few and the Afro- Asian cup is being conducted in india with unbelievable quarter to half filled stands.

This being the situation around i saw two sport centric films which are worth mentioning here."The Greatest Game ever Played" is a film about Golf.This is a real life incident in the early 1900. Harry vardon considered to be the best golfer of all times is overthrown by Francis Ouimet in the US open in 1913, an amateur in Golf. Insults, humiliation and discouragement in the family circle doesnt deter Francis from winning the game. The story is woven around the theme that family linearage doesnt play a part in one's success and upliftment. In those days and even now Golf is the game of the elite society and Harry vardon and Francis Ouimet break these rules. The sportiveness of Harry strikes the pulses. The plot enlivens from the day the US open begins and Francis atlast makes it into the tournament with his puny caddie Larry.His loyalty till the end to his caddie touches the soul though he was offered paid better caddie near the end.The background score really tantalizes the tournament.

The Film #2 "Goal" is about soccer.These films are not much heard of in India. Santiago a street kid masters the game right from his childhood days and a glimpse of his game is tasted by an agent to NewCastle, an English League.Amidst protests from his father and through his grandmother's benevolence Santiago hardly makes the trip from california to London. In the Testing session Santiago fails to impress the league manager but in his second and final attempt he does that. Though he makes it into the team he is really made to sweat it out in the training and practice sessions without being given a chance to play. Finally chance comes and he plays a vital role in the games one and only goal thus taking the league to the final match against liverpool.As usual disaster strikes and his father dies and decides to play the game than to travel as nothing could be done.In the match against liverpool NC strikes early with one goal and liverpool strikes back with 2 goals.Santiago and his teammate works out a strategy and scores one goal each in the final minutes to get past liverpool thus qualifying for the next biggest tournament. NC hasnt made that before.Santiago changes his life path and the way the film is taken really speaks in volume about the research done by the director to exactly portray the match as it is.

The Field,the crowd,the jersy,the dressing room and each and every thing makes one feel that we are watching a game than a film.i wonder how they made it. The appearance of David Becham, Zinedine Zidane and two other colossus of soccer really takes one with surprise.Believe me these two films kept me in tenderhooks till the end not because of the action or animation or grandeur but because of the solid suspenseful storyline. Wish i know to play these two games.Dont miss these films for anything.

Travel quelled the Tantrums

I had not vacated my room in madurai by june 1st so before doing that myself and my parents went to kodaikanal, palani and while returning came to madurai and vacated the room. The ascend to Kodaikanal by the road devised by the Englishmen with just two hair pin bends was smooth. I searched the net for info about kodaikanal and got quite a few.Kodaikanal history dates back to 14th century. By the 18th century the people fled to kodai hills from palani to thwart Tipu sultan from conquering. It was in 1845 that the U.S missionaries and Englishmen actually thought of setting this place as a hill station. The Britishers could not tolerate the heat in madurai during summer hence they searched for a cooler place and they found this abode 2200 metres above sea level. At that time it was just a mountain it is they who set up the artificial lake that we use for boating.Then they setup the Bryant park.It was one of the Major who brought the pine and Eucalyptus tree here. An English Enthusiast climbed the 112 metre pillar rock and planted the Cross on its top. Berijam lake was a swamp some 80 to 100 years back. They used it as a catchment area which now provides water to Periyakulam.Coakers walk along the hillside edge was found by coaker a sergeant in British army. (The pics to the right and above is that of the lake)

So much to the history of Kodaikanal. The present state of the affairs is quite different. The Princess of hills or perhaps the infrastructure could not handle the amount of people during summer. The falls view tower on the edge would give a good view of rat tail falls(dum dum).i dont know why the silver cascade din have a neat and clean base though visitors are not allowed to take bath. The Parking lot is very small and not properly setup with the municipality people charging Rs 20 without even giving a receipt evidently to hide the fact that the parking cost would be much lower.i never thought that i would travel some 180 kms to see the small Bryant park where they charged Rs 5 for nothing.Then the Pine forest was nice(pic to left). I didnot go to the Devil's kitchen (Gunna cave) as i din have much time left. The pillar rock is where the scenic beauty is great(pic below). The green valley or suicide point has a sheer drop of 500 metres which obviously one cant see as its thankfully barricated near the edge. The shops on the way to green valley is worth noting which contains stuffs ranging from yummy home made chocolates to eucalyptus oil. The Kodaikanal golf club looks great from outside especially because Trespassers are not allowed :) The really fresh carrots with leaves is what i enjoyed the most. It was raining heavily out there in the afternoon while there was scorching heat in the plains below.

My kind of advice is its not a place to just visit the important spots. Just book up with Carltons or other such high end hotels and resorts up there during july or august. It is during this time that there wont be any crowd and though the temperature would be quite low you can watch the fog hovering over the lake and below you near the coakers walk. Then doing some expedition sort of stuff with your pals would be more interesting than anything else. Especially you would not see the litter rampage done by the tourist during this time. The lake and the Park needs to be expanded cos they are designed for the small crowd that it attracted in the early 1900. A massive transformation has to take place to make it attractive in the years to come.

thanks to the highway people for devising the road from kodaikanal to palani with loads of hairpin bends also the road being in dilapidated condition for most part of the year hence its virtually untakable. what could have been just a 55 kms trip from kodai to palani through that road turned out to be a 120 Km trip through kodaikanal - Bathalagundu - sempatti - Palani.

Opal Mehta - fully algorithmic

not more than 3 minutes have passed since i finished reading the book "how opal mehta got kissed got wild and got a life". since some part of it sounds familiar in my life i wanted to make a note of it here before it gets erased from my mind by tomorrow morning. how many of my school mates would have believed that praveen would transform himself into a "take life easy" guy from being the ever studying class topper in school. surely the part of the plans that Opal does to transform is what i dont like in the story. how could i forget the day when my geography sir(Mr.Solomon) whom i regard as the best teacher that i have come across forgot his best pupil(i.e me got 98 in the geography paper that noone in the history of our school has ever obtained) but remembered the all-rounder in the school during the alumni meet. it was this incident that made me to consider marks as just yet another part of life and not on what the whole life depends upon.
The other place where the story strikes chord is in the science scholarship award. Balaji Viswanathan, Heronimous Pandian, Navanetha krishnan were the Best outgoing students in the college level. Yogaesh, Balamurugan, Senthil kumaran were the BOS for the computer science dept in the last three years.Though i had an eye on this prestigious award from the day Balaji viswanathan got it and it was me who did not even apply for the award due to one very good reason.

HairCut creates a flutter

Day before Yesterday i had my haircut at the usual joint -Galaxy Saloon - Kamarajapuram. This time i asked that guy to do a Mushroom cut. That guy dutifully did his own version of it. To be true he did a nice job. Things started falling apart when i came home. There was a clear upheavel from both my mom and dad and i tried in vain to convince them. Last time when i bought my new jeans i faced a similar situation but that time it was only from my mom. The news spread like wild fire and reached even my sister in virginia within 24 hours. Hmmm stuck up in my house i could not get a proper comment from any of my pals even. i dont think next time i would go for this mushroom as this has already created a much higher hype than i have expected.

Then comin to the films that i saw this week, its "paycheck" which has been tailormade into Krrish in Hindi. Then i saw enemy of the state.

lighter hollywood film stories finds its way thro kollywood

When murugadoss could churn up a ghazini from memento, Gowtham could make a frame by frame PachaiKili Muthucharam from Derailed & Selvaraghavan could brew up a puthupettai from city of Gods, wait!! where is the originality in storyline going?? These last 4 months of college life went especially great because my DVD librarian arun dutifully supplied me with his bundles and bundles of lighter hollywood movies from his collections. After watching those, i understood that the tamil directors prying eyes are on such films which could be made in Tamil with Tailor-made customizations for the Tamil Viewers

Not only the storylines are being remade but bits and pieces from the hollywood movies too are being inserted here and there.The fight sequence in Transporter I is cleverly simulated in Ghilli by Dharani. Even the Debutant PrabhuDeva skillfully copied the fight in B13(picture to the left) to Pokkiri. This trend is not a new one in the industry the film Vettri Vizha was inspired by the book Bourne Identity. I could not assess whether this is a healthy trend or not. But not all films are not like that. Some directors really put in their work which needs special mention.

Apart from these some really good movies like phonebooth, cellular, in pursuit of happiness doesn't get the needed acclaim in India while Spiderman and other things are Box office hits.

Nokia 5300 and ipod Nano gizmos serves the purpose

I am one among the fortunate idiot in this world to clutch my hands around two hotsellers in the market at the same time.well it was in January 15 that i swapped my 3 year old nokia 1100 for the Nokia 5300 with 256 MB microSD memory. Thanks to my pops for buying me that without even a word of giving a second thought to it. 5300 serves all the purpose that an youth expects from a phone. its sleek and trendy with its slider model though not slim. The display is cool and outwits all other similar slider models like samsung 250. due to my greed of storing more songs i had to bit compress the mp3 songs using ease audio converter :(

it was during this time my sister and brother-in-law dropped me the ipod Nano - 2 GB gizmo. i started loving it. how many of you have faced a problem that end up in cycles? here goes one. ipod needs itunes version 7 for transfering music. itunes needs Windoz sp2 edition which i dont have. i started with the sp2 patch. no use, the same old problem that every average indian would face. i gave up the idea of transfering music from my system fully.i started transfering music from my friend's system. beware of ipods they sync with only one system at a time. if you join with a new system you end up formatting the earlier songs :(

Now am using my 5300 for taking pictures.it has got a 1.3 MP camera. though not a great one it serves the purpose. Am now thinking of people who could drop me a Laptop with all these sp2 patches fixed so that i could transfer the music from my laptop to my ipod and another person who could buy me a BOSE speaker system so that i could connect my ipod to BOSE system to hear the music lavishly. could you be one of the two samaritans who could get me those?????

bade adieu to Cafe Coffee Day - Madurai

This is the place which knows both my ups and downs. this is where i hang out all alone most of the times. This heaven was introduced to me by Joe. Later myself and senior sen used to come here. last year i had to manage myself all alone. The songs that they play using BOSE speakers would be in sync with the ambience.

Yesterday i went there by catching a bus.i could not place myself in my favourite spot(in the picture to the left) then i ordered my favourite combination - Veg Pizza and Lemon an Ice Tea. The CCD magazine is the one i love the most. This issue contained materials as how to easily breakup relationships. The citations of some people and their experiences of breaking up really made me to laugh at their pathetic situation. Thank God i din have any such relationships. Once i ended up with that i managed for a Cheese Sandwich and Cool Blue. Nostalgically shot up some pictures with my 5300 mobile. After that i bade goodbye to the CCD-Madurai.

I started walking to the bus stop thinking of the days when i walked all the way from there to periyar in the middle of the night.

Changing resolution to 1024x768 in solaris

As i have started fiddling with solaris these days, i am trying to make certain things perfect in my system.After installing the solaris i borrowed the perl script from Pradhap devarajan'blog and used it to set certain initial settings like having my home mapped to root directory etc...( yeah i am yet to create a normal user, again because of procastination :( ) after that i still had some problems withe the GUI.it had options only for a 800x600 resolution so again i mailed in the mailing list and got help from pradhap. i first ran kdmconfig to select Xorg to be used instead of Xsun.then i ran the xorgconfig to create a xorg.conf in /etc/X11 which would not be created by default.then it started asking the details od mouse,keyboard,video card,moniter etc.then it eventually wrote the xorg.conf.then i looked for something like /etc/init.d/gdm restart but could not. so CTRL+ALT+Backspace did the trick.i rebooted and then changed the screen resoultion to 1024x768 which was not available before.and hey presto i got the thing what i wanted.but only one problem i did not specify the keyboard properly cos of this it echoed some other alphabets while typing. hence i reconfigured from start and specified the correct keyboard and there i got the perfect looking and working system.

I still have some questions why is that no console appears when CTRL+ALT+F1....F6 is pressed.should i have to setup something to enable it.also my audio driver needs some GStreamer plugin it seems.should configure that thing soon.i am yet to figure out how to start and stop services here in solaris.cos in init.d i could not find many of the services starting and stoping scripts.The mailing list ug-madosug is the place where i would be discovering these answers :)

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.

Solaris in my Grub atlast

Eventhough i had installed solaris on more than 5 systems in the lab the attempt that i did on my system proved to be very tough.my hard disk was not properly partitioned right from the day i got it. (2 hard disk with 20GB + 40 GB hard disk) I left that work for later day but this procastination is the villian.lazily i just cleared one partition for solaris and tried installing but i had problems with the boot_archive.so i tried once again by around 3 am and i slept leaving the installation to happen.i dont know what was wrong with my system but when i got up a mere 800 MB was installed out of 4120MB. i switched it off and started to college. that night again i sat and started installing, everything went on well till the last 10 MB was about to be installed power went off and my screen went blank. i got wild with rage cos of the fate and went to bed. Next day evening i fully formatted my 20GB disk and used 10 GB for debian GNU/Linux(which i installed again) and 10 GB for Solaris.now my 40 GB has got 5 partitions for Windows XP. Atlast i succeeded in installing solaris in my system.i copied the splash image from belenix and is using that in my GRUB :) My friends on seeing my system booting with that Splash image and also the three OS available in my system could not prevent from letting out the words "oh my my"

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.

Solaris - An Odyssey to take

on August 17th and 18th Mr.Ananth Shrinivas and Mr.Prathap Devarajan from Sun microsytems were in our college to educate the students about Opensolaris.Though i knew that x86 version of Solaris existed before itself i saw two such for the first time in reality on their laptops."solaris is always synonymous with the SPARC[a ruthless bytecrunching monster]" has been my view in the past.Only a few times had i ever heard of people speaking about solaris and i was waiting for an opportunity to have hands on experience in Solaris.

i first installed Solaris on one hard disk with both of them nearby and the installation was similar to the debian installation in terms of the range of the information it asked but different in terms of the environment and keys used.The partition naming terminologies were different and i crossed that level with ease as i used one of the 2 hard disks fully.then the installation were over and it binded to the NIS server of our lab properly and booted correctly.The Gnome had been customised by the people at sun and after seeing that did i believe that gnome could be used effectively to produce a really stuning look..DTrace is an amazing tool which involves a "simple idea but complex implementation" .Though i could not understand the syntax of the D language i could make out from the results it dumped what could have been the question possed at it.But never even once could i tell at what places it could be used and how the script should be framed before, ananth ran the eg scripts.

Then on the 18th of August due to some delay we started the session by 10:30 and the history of unix and solaris was handled by ananth.Then followed the session on Zones by Pratap.He gave the some insight on Branded zones too.After which ZFS was handled and then we shifted to the CS Conference hall.here we had some normal discussion on the whole thing and the people possed their questions.After the session we got the DVD and CDs from them and then i accompanied Pratap to the temple and from there to the Bus Stand.

The Session made us to understand the cool technologies available only in Solaris and not in any other Operating Systems.The Third year students too felt the same.But for the Second years(who had not yet studied OS concepts) and also for the people who had no clue about Unix based systems, there were in NO MAN's LAND.But the number of People who were really profitted by this would count to some 35-40 people.Had i come across this session quite some time back i would have based my project in this.now it is too late :( Atleast the junior people got some insight and exposure on these technologies.The coolest thing was the customized Gnome GUI.

Some of the areas where i flinched was when Linux kernel was rebuked badly.True, solaris is a OS which is generation ahead but the purpose with which it started and also concentrated on are on servers and not on ordinary PC's.while Linux is aimed at to be used as a desktop system and later it evolved and it started dominating the servers market.Both are different and could not be compared.Linux is young and was started only in the 90's while Solaris is old and its history dates back to the early 80's.While solaris has got some cooool features for administering, Linux has got many drivers for all kinds of systems.True some of the features in solaris cant be implemented in Linux cos it is meant to be that way.

kudos for the two people from Sun Microsystems for their initiative in taking this seminar.We have decided to create a mailing list called MOSUG -Madurai OpenSolaris UserGroup and also we are going to install OpenSolaris in all the client systems in Unix lab so that people can start using it.The point is solaris is a great OS with great innovations and it should be learnt by the CS people.To conclude Solaris has bagged a spot in my GRUB after GNU/Linux :)

Dual placement Debut - Placed at HP

nearly a month has passed since i got placed in Hewlett Packard(HP) and i am making an entry only today in blog.I didnot attend Honeywell and Motorola since i was in chennai.Then on the eventual day i came in perfect formals for the HP apti but i had a shock in store everyone came in uniform and others in casuals.as usual my buddies started teasing me as the one with confidence blah.blah.Then we all wrote the AT. it was very tough but my instinct told me i would clear that.also my question number when summed, i got the value as 7 my lucky number.and eventually they announced the result and i cleared it.

Then i got ready quickly for the Tech interview.The interview was smooth and then i was directed to HR interview.That too was smooth.Following that was the most toughest part. we waited for the result for some 2 hours.Then they announced it.My name came 3rd but it was in no order.i was quite balanced but inwardly i have never been so excited. They gave us a T-Shirt and they departed.our guys gave us the traditional podhu Matthu and left me.Then i called virtually all people in this world and informed them.Then i went CAfe coffee day andcame back late and slept believeing that i have a bright prospectus ahead of me....

Placed at TCS(From TCE to TCS)

The first company which came to our college was TATA consultancy services and took 287 people and i was one among the group.Our Team Senthil,Sriram,Subramani too cleared and secured a seat at TCS.My friend Priyan at Sri Sairam Engg college cleared cariter. yesterday CTS came and took 100. total number of CSE students placed clocked 61 out of 108.Tomorrow WIPRO is coming :)

Another Adieu & parting

Quite long time after which am writing.Proj,Exams, et all prevented me from writing one.This time i bid adieu to senthil,ranju,Smartsara,vichu,Vasanth,shyam,Sriram from Comp sci dept and raga from civil.it is terrible to bid farewell than to be in their position parting.around next year this time i would be in the same position.campus Placements are about to start and i should start preparing for them.

Weird xperience at Photoshop

Last evening i had given the film roll for development and printing and they asked me come later and collect it as i had asked them to take a digital copy of it in a CD.This wish of mine proved to be disastrous as i assumed that the digital image is created as a part of their process.they never told me that they scan the photos after printing.next day i went at 7 to collect the photos as usual it was not ready and they asked me to return back in half hour later and i did so.as it was not ready even by then i showed them how impatient i am getting on and how hot i am under the collar and then i had my photos in my hand.

On seeing the photos i knew that i have made a terrible mistake of giving them the roll.i had used the kodak 400 premium roll the best & the costliest roll available in the market.what is the use of crying over spilled milk?The chain of unfortunateness didnot end there.they gave me the CD and then the bill.whew 545 bucks just for developing 2 rolls and printing.for putting in the CD they charged some 170 (inclusive in the 545).after paying the money i demanded atleast a album for keeping these photos which would normally be given at free of cost at almost any place on earth.again they turned down the request.with some 60 photos kept together without a album i returned home.Another shock came in when had a look at the so called scanned photos in the CD.dreadful indeed. it had everything except for the clarity.

my 545 + 240(roll cost) totally went down the drain along with the fond memories of the industrial visit since because these maniacs messed up with my precious poccessions.From this on i decided to go all the way to trichy and give away the film rolls to be developed in my usual developing centre out there.Boohoo my precious photos of the kerela IV !!!!!!!!

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.

Impressive diagnosis

found this link in one of the senior's blog.very impressive that they could say this much from just 3 questions.

Your Personality Is
Guardian (SJ)

You are sensible, down to earth, and goal oriented.
Bottom line, you are good at playing by the rules.

You tend to be dominant - and you are a natural leader.
You are interested in rules and order. Morals are important to you.

A hard worker, you give your all at whatever you do.
You're very serious, and people often tell you to lighten up.

In love, you tend to take things carefully and slowly.

At work, you are suited to almost any career - but you excel in leadership positions.

With others, you tend to be polite and formal.

As far as looks go, you are traditionally attractive. You take good care of yourself.

On weekends, you tend to like to do organized activities. In fact, you often organize them!

The Three Question Personality Test

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.

What does u r birthday means?

Your Birthdate: August 7

You are an island. You don't need anyone else to make you happy.And though you see yourself as a loner, people are drawn to you.Deep and sensitive, you tend to impress others with your insights.You also tend to be psychic - so listen to that inner voice!

Your strength: Your self sufficiency
Your weakness: You despise authority
Your power color: Maroon
Your power symbol: Hammer
Your power month: July

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.....

Blog given a Facelit

Atlast after working on the templates and other small services i have mastered the art of changing the blog styles & Templates.This time i have added some links to my pals & seniors blogs.then took some time to add the map to find out the no of people having the look at my blog and also their geographical location depending on the IP. Tehn added the tagboard to make people to add tags.Think this would go on a long way...........

Who am i?

Your results:
You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 95% Hulk 70% Superman 65% Spider-Man 60% Wonder Woman 50% The Flash 50% Batman 40% Iron Man 30% Catwoman 30% Supergirl 30% Robin 25%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

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

Seniors turnsup

Last sunday senior subramanian(HCL-Chennai) turned up in madurai.He had already informed us that he would be coming and asked us to plan for a treat somewhere.After some discussion we decided to have our treat at Bell - simmakkal which was ok for veggies like sriram,ranjani & myself.so on that eventful day we wrapped up our session at the Lab and started to periyar.The party-thrower turned up soon after and we all made our way to the hotel.It was already 2.30 and the stocks were running low so we could have just one round of serving. with that we stopped and then we went to the fast food @ jayaram bakery.

By the time we came out of the jayaram's it was 5.30 and then we went to Kodal Azhagar perumal temple where we had a nice little chat till it was 8.00 He explained about his experiences at the company and so on.He also asked us to concentrate on coding some thing great rather than fully concentrating on administering and configuring systems or networks.His advice made a impact on us and we parallely started concentrating on Loquacity along with CAS.

It was thursday night and Balamurugan(Wipro-Bangalore) came to college.He gave us a treat at Aarthy,my usual dining hotel.Then SAP (Trilogy-Bangalore) phoned and we talked with him(pity i missed his treat when he was here).Then i stayed at senior Sen's along with Bamu and went on chatting for hours together.Next day i got up late & could not attend first two periods to have breakfast with them.Then in the evening we stayed with Bamu till he boarded the bus.