Sen's Blog

Stylesen.org is up and running :)

2006-09-06T02:43:00.000-07:00

Now I have my own web site http://www.stylesen.org with all the information about me gathered together in a single place. I ll no longer update blogs in my blogger or wordpress account. Having my own website was a dream for me from my college days, and it came true today :) So if you want to read my blogs go here http://blog.stylesen.org

GPL'ing stuff out from my brain from GPLv3 Conference

2006-08-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended GPLv3 conference at IIM Bangalore, which is the fourth international conference. It is a great news to fellow Indian's that India is catching up in pace with the Free Software philosophy. I make the above statement because, some time back when I saw a movie named "The Code" in that one of the press person from India asked a question about "Involvement of developers in India for free software development" to Linus Torvalds. His reply was "Not much contrbution from Indians". But today I would rather say that Indians have convinced the Free Software community to make them understand that Indians are really contributing a _lot_ to this community. Though it is bad to introduce Linus Torvalds when I want to explain about GPLv3, this was the first thing came into my mind when I heard that 4th International Conference of GPLv3 is gonna be hosted in India.
Being a Free software geek/enthusiast/et.al., I felt really great to hear Free Software philosophy from the man who gave the philosophy.
It was around 8:30 am in the morning when myself and Arun Ponniah (Sap) left our room from Koramangala to attend the GPLv3 conference in Sap's Pulsar. We managed Bangalore traffic and reached IIMB at around 9:15 am. Then in the gate we were asked to show our id card and tick against our name in a sheet, which consisted of only _registered_ participants.
When we entered the auditorium a guy (Chineese/Japaneese not sure) was displaying his hardware which had a small electronic display and scrolled information about GPLv3. He said it is his creation and it is GPLed.
At around 9:50 the hero of the event Richard M Stallman (RMS) popped into the auditorium. Dr. Nagarjuna, who is the chairman of Free Software Foundation India gave the schedule of the days events. Then RMS took over and he appeared slightly upset on the crowd which turned up. The first thing he told was "There are so many seats unoccupied, dont ever say people not to attend since we have less number of seats", and he asked the people who were there, to message to their friends whom they know to invite them to the event.
Then he went into the topic GPLv3. When he started he forgot two important terms "Propagate and Convey" which the key terms for GPLv3. He jokingly remarked "See I ve forgot the terms which I shouldn have, which shows am getting old". He started explaining the some of the most important changes in GPLv3 from GPLv2.
RMS says that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an evil and it can pose a very big threat in the future. He uses the term Digital Restriction Management to refer DRM. Refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management to get an insight about DRM. When somebody raised a question about whats your opinion about Linus not supporting GPLv3 he responded that Linus had never supported Free Software Movement in the past and he wont in the future too. There is something known as "Tivolization" which is the part which Linus is against. Tivolizing is a process in which a box (an hardware entity) captures all the TV programs and makes it available to the user, whenever he wants to use it. Some vedors makes such kinds of boxes and most of them have GNU/Linux inside it, on top which they run their applications. The problem here is most of the companies which provide these hardware put some checksum on these boxes which restricts the user from modifying the underlying software's source code and run it again. They will allow particular copies of software which the company provides and not the modified ones by the user to run, though it is technically feasible on the hardware which is a violation according to GPL. RMS says that if the vendor wants the user not to change it then let him burn it in a ROM or flash memory and give the box, at which point it becomes a hardware and GPL has nothing to do with that. But those companies dont burn it in ROM but only put these nasty checksum at the software level and keep the right to modify the software with them, which violates the principles of Free Software philosophy (refer http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
Another thing which GPLv3 wants to insist is minimize the threat by imposing software patents. The painful part in the conference is most of the people who attended considered it as a local Glug meeting and posted silly questions, but RMS who is a straight forward person just pointed out that your question is not worth to be asked in this conference. RMS answered to a lot of questions. RMS was very careful in using the words he spoke. The thing which I admired a lot was whenever a person said Linux OS he said it is GNU/Linux system, it is true and required to make people understand that it is GNU who gave us all these facilities which we leverage today and shouldn put a wrapper and say Linux. Also RMS gave a huge explanation why we shouldn call it as Linux and call the Operating system as GNU/Linux, I was very proud to say that the same explanation I ve given n number of times to people to whom I ve preached GNU philosophy.
RMS said in India, Kerala is the only state which has accepted and adopted Free Software for school education and gradually implying it to students of grade 8 and extending it to the upper grade students too.
I was unable to attend the afternoon session due to some personal reasons. Anyway had a nice time there :)
After returning I had a lot of discussions about Free software with my friends and room mates. I was a bit worried about why people are not accepting Free Software philosopy and say we are speaking communism if we speak Free Software? and to get cleared I consulted my guru who preached and GPLed my brain, he said once in near future when people lose their Freedom to use software then they realize the need for this philosophy, and again start joining the community, which will take another 30 years if they lost this feeling of Free Software. My guru quoted a phrase which was the one even I was thinking for a long time,
"If speaking of freedom is communism., so be it., I'll be a communist"
This feeling of Freedom should be in everyone's mind and we need to get our freedom, for which we need to sync with Free Software Philosophy and be a part of the "Real Movement" :)
"Free the Code, Free the user"

Travelling is a pain now :(

2006-07-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

Today morning I returned from Arupukkotai. I came in a nice air bus, but before getting tickets for that gosh!!! Last week also the same thing happened. I ve never booked or reserved tickets in advance for bus before. The same way I thoguht I can travel from Blore to Trichy easily last week without booking, but that was the end and I got to the peaks before I could make the trip. The return journey from Trichy was a bit painful, I had to switch two buses one from Trichy to Salem and then from Salem to Blore. I was there in Salem bus stand at around 12:00 am and I missed 3 buses since I was unable to get on any of them since there was so much rush (this is the scenario on all weekends I suppose). The more worst thing was nearly three people lost their mobile in the rush before getting a seat in the bus. Even when I got into the bus after stamping on so many people toes I could feel soem idiots keeping their hands in my pocket and trying to take my mobile or whatver they find profitable. Thank gawd!! I usually put very tight trousers (my girl friend use to scold me for that :)) so before those idiots could get my purse or mobile I got in :) Yesterday even a worse thing happened before getting a ticket back to blore from Arupukkotai. I think things are getting worse day by day, for getting a token for a seat in the bus I was forced to bribe a private agent. A pathetic thing I noticed is today black marketting has crept even in travel agencies. Even when they have tickets for the trips, these travel agents are refusing to sell those unless they are paid more, also they are very confident that all the tickets will sell if it is a weekend. This applies even for some big head guys in this industry. Then some how I got a ticket and came to Blore :) and blogging.

Joined SpikeSource India!!!

2006-07-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

I joined SpikeSource Software on June 19th 2006. Its an open source based company and its really cool to work here. I got a laptop (HP compaq nx6110). Am in Bangalore and getting adapted to the people an the custom here. But I don't find much difference here. Last weekend I went to Trichy and had a nice time :)

Got my final sem results

2006-06-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

I got my final semester results. Not bad this time and this is the highest score I ve got in the college. GPA is 8.93. Subject External Internal Total Grade Parallel Processing 44 18 62 C Multimedia 60 22 82 A Operating System 59 24 83 A Engineering Economics 59 25 84 A Advanced Networking 69 25 94 S Wireless Technology 53 25 78 B Project 146 50 196 S Hmmm. With this I ve completed my UG :)

My Bike is back to Trichy!

2006-05-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Hmmm, I brought my bike back to Trichy from Madurai yesterday. Yesterday I drove my bike all the way from Madurai to Trichy (This is the eight time am doing it :)). I was accompanied by my junior Praveen, he gave a nice company. I took the bike at 6:00am from my room after watching a nice and interesting movie and then reached Trichy at 10:00am sharp (to my home). It took nearly 45 minutes for me to cross Matuthavani because we had the Algar Thiruvizha which I didn anticipated and a lot of Traffic jams, road redirections,etc. But we were fortunate enough to reach home before the hot sun came above our head and start burning us (Yeah!!! its too hot both in Madurai and Trichy :( ). This was time I was extemely fast on the roads and I drove at the speed of 80-85kmph continuously for more than fifteen minutes and enjoyed it. I thought of even increasing the speed but unfortunately my bike cried to me not to pain it toooooo much :)(so my average speed was about 65kmph). I stopped at Kottampatti and Viralimalai for half an hour each to allow my bike to take a breath and also I needed a break in between. Today I gave my bike for a complete service in a TVS service station and got it back just now (its cool and my bike runs smooth, and takes back to the time when I first touched it three years back). Have to start studying for Wireless Technologies :(.

Busy with exams :(

2006-05-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah this is my final semester and am doing well. Still one more exam to go and the final review of my project (viva voce) is pending. Hope everything goes fine. Already people got the mood of going to jobs and so do I :) Waiting to join the company. Shall blog regularly after my exams :)

Launched the alpha release of TCENet

2006-02-14T18:06:00.000-08:00

The migration of TCENet to Free Open Source Software is my final year project. TCENet is more than a intranet portal to our college. It also provides with central authentication, ERP solution and many more to the users. We have completed the basic module of TCENet and its alpha release was made. We were very happy to have Professor Tony Wasserman from Carniege Mellon University West and Mr.Murugan Pal CTO, Spike Source. Tony and Murugan launched our project on 04-02-2006. Also I had an opportunity to be with Tony and Murugan for the whole day. We had lunch at the Taj Coramendal that day, which was my first lunch at Taj :) I had a very good discussion with both of them both technical and some non-technical stuff. Tony was a very cool guy and he is very close to Andrew Tanenbaum (Ande). We went to different places in Madurai on that day. It was a nice time I had with them and I feel proud to be a part of the project which we launched :)

It was a long night for me :)

2006-02-02T16:46:00.000-08:00

Hmmm... till my yesterday is not over. What a wonderful thing, I have my yesterday still with me. I didn't had a chance to sleep tonight, hmmm yesterday night. We are very close to our deadline in our project. Coming saturday we are launching the alpha version of TCENet, inaugurated by Dr.Antony Wasserman from Carnigie Mellon University. Just now I finished my work and still am not dozing of :) Today I must give a presentation before our college Prinicpal, I hope everything should go well today and I should'nt get tired.

Relaxing after Internals

2006-01-19T05:20:00.000-08:00

These days I forget to update my blog. Shall do it regularly here after :) Just today my internal exams got over. I wrote my internal exams on my own(Whats this???), everybody does the same... but there are people who doesnt do that. I dont know how much I ll score, but I ll be happy even if I fail in one or two subjects, because I ve put the maximum effort I can. Usually its during internals when thoughts pour in to me, not related to what I study but on the other improvements and other things which I can do. This time also I have a lot of plans, shall do one by one :) I must start concentrating on my project sincerely from today, what I ve been doing last week. Still I didn receive my Intel Contest resutls :( Another important thing is I ve brought my bike to Madurai. This is what I planned for quite a few days in the past. Here after it wont be a problem for me to wander all the day in the streets of Madurai, and I ll discover new places in here. It is a old TVS-Suzuki Max 100 R, which is my uncle's bike. Since we exchanged our bikes last year, this bike was there in my house at Trichy standing all day long for months together. It became worse and hard to drive. So I took it here to rejuvante it. I drove the bike from Trichy to Madurai (this is my sixth long journey in this route), I ve did this many time in the past. It was really cool to drive for such a long distance, but I faced the consequences (body pain) for the rest of the day. Hmmm... hoping to enjoy life to the fullest :)

Intel India Poster Presentation

2005-12-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

On 16th November, 2005 we started to Bangalore for a Poster presentation on our research project at the Intel India Student Research Contest. We took the Mysore Express from Madurai Jn in a two tier AC coach (since Intel gave us reimbursement for the forward and onward journey we spent less time to worry about our travelling cost :)). Sri Ranjani and myself went for the presentation on the topic "Security in LAN through Autonomic Computing". On 17th NOv,2005 we reached Bangalore and were given accomodation in Hotel Ashoka Residency. Since our college had the maximum number (13 teams) of teams in the presentation, we were given shared accomodation with our college mates. Shanker Vinay Arul(BE,Mechatronics), Naganathan(ME,Production), VijayKumar(ME,CommSystems) and myself were given a double bedroom room in the hotel. On the same day we went to the Intel India Office which was in the Outer ring road at Bangalore and there we attended many seminars. We had a chance to listen to a lecture by Frank Jones, President Intel India. In the afternoon after lunch we were given separate display boards in which we placed our posters for display. These posters illustrated the idea of our project and the entire design of what we are proposing. It was a big competiton with teams from almost all the IITs, NITs, BITS and almost all the well known universities. We stood at our stalls and the employees of Intel came to our stalls and interested people were enquiring about the projects description. Each team was assigned a Intel mentor. For our team the Intel Mentor is Mr.Kothandaraman Rengarajan who is a very dynamic person, and helped us in coming out with ideas of how to design our posters and improve our projects scope. He conducted telephone conferences before we made to this presentation at Bangalore. On the second day also we had many sessions by prominent Intel personalities and in the afternoon again we were asked to display our posters. We had a chance to explain our project to Mr.Vadivel who is working at Intel who is an aluminus of our college (2000 passed out). I just recognised him, since I ve met him only once, that too when he came for a technical talk a year back to our college when he was associated with IBM. Felt proud to be a TCEian when I saw one of our aluminus in Intel. Some of the names which I shouldn forget to mention are Manav Subodh, Jagan J, Lisha who are the core people who worked for such an event to happen. On 19th Nov,2005 we didn had any appointment with the Intel Contest. We had plans to party with our seniors Balamurugan(WIPRO) and Arun Ponniah(TRILOGY), but unfortunately they had a very tight schedule and our plans were in vain. But we had a chance to meet our senior K.N.Karthick(WIPRO) who was free on that day. He came with us and we went to various places in Bangalore and a nice snacks session at McDonalds in Forum. In the afternoon at around 4pm we went to his house and chatted with him and his family members. Then at 6pm we started to the railway station to catch our train which arrives at 9pm, since we feared Bangalore traffic(terrific) :). Keyan's mother prepared us nice Lemon rice and curd rice to have for our dinner. Then in the railway station we met Shankar Vinay and Naganathan and got in our berths in the train and had a nice sleep :) That was a nice experience for us to be a part of such a great event at Intel. It gave us an exposure to new industrial trends and also built confidence in us to participate in such events in the near future.

It happens Occassionally

2005-11-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

Hmmm, I remember November 2nd, 2005. Sivaprakash, Selvamurugan, Muruga Prasad (these 3 guys are my friends) and myself were just having a bike ride in the Tanjore NH, near NIT (National Institute of Technology) Trichy at around 7:30 pm. I was sitting behind Siva in his bike (splendor), the other two guys were going in front of us (Muruga was driving) in a CRUX. When we were in front of NIT there were two buses in front of us trying to overtake each other. In order to be safe Siva made his way out of the road. Thats it, the road was full of small pebbles there... then the bike skidded and within a fraction of a second we were lying with the bike above us :) We fell to our right and I got scratches all over my left hand and leg (am still wondering how it happened). I got up from that road after a delay of about 5 seconds and I could feel the breeze of a fast moving bus in front of me (if I were a bit late, say a second to get up then the wheels of the bus would have used my head as speed breaker :) ). Hearing the sound of the crash, the 2 guys riding before us stopped the bike and came shouting, asking me to get up, since the bus was advancing. Then after I got up, they asked me whether I was acting in Matrix (movie), since I was moving in slow motion when the bus was advancing. Thank GOD am alive and typing now. Then we went to a tea shop nearby and washed the wound, a second year NIT guy went along with Muruga Prasad and took some Dettol for us from his hostel... Then the plan we had was wasted that night and we returned home. Still a scratch in my elbow is not cured and its slightly paining (hope it ll get cured soon). I was in complete rest all these days, ie., from the day when my study hols started and I ve planned to start my semester preparation from today onwards :(

Pleasant place Karunya

2005-09-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

On 25-08-2005 and 26-08-2005, I had an opportunity to stay at Karunya Institute of Technology. It is really very pleasant and cool to be there. Sri Ranjani and myself went to participate in various competitons in Opzione'05. Opzione is the symposium organised by Association of Computer Engineers (ACE as they call). We went to participate in Paper and software presentation, fortunately we cleared the prelims for quiz and we had an opportunity to take the quiz also. One interesting thing which urged us to put our efforts to go for Karunya was their poster, which laid emphasis on Open Source Technologies ("May the source be with U" this was their caption). On 25th we went to Coimbatore. Dheepan took us to Karunya and I was given a room at Hepzibah block (no:30). It was very nice to be in that room, very silent and pleasant. Two guys from Sona College of Engg. were at the room next to me and gave me good company. We both went to the auditorium and there we had a slight disappointment. Their theme was open source, but nothing was in accordance with their theme. They had a presentation about Free software on a Propritary OS :) We didnt get any prize in the Paper presentation event. The following day we had software presentation and quiz. On that evening I was a bit upset over not getting a prize for our paper and also I feared that there wont be any recognition for our software, since I coudnt figure out any soul cared about free softwares. But before I could give up, I met Johnny Jacob and Swen George, two cool guyz who were so passionate about GNU/Linux and the free software philosophy. Hmmm... then I got pretty interested in participating in the following day events. In the evening Johnny, Swen and myself had a discussion on bringing awareness on GNU/Linux to the students of Karunya. They had plans of starting a GNU/Linux user groups in their college. They showed me the stuff they had prepared for that and I gave my suggestions. It was a nice talk we had and I enjoyed it. A third year guy Vamsi Krishna was also there with us during the discussion. Next day we got second place for our software and third place in quiz. In the evening we had prize distribution and recieved the cash :) After a small delay guyz in Karunya have started their own Kits Linux Club in their campus. Am very glad about it. I wish all success for their new initiative and I hope this Club is gonna rock Coimbatore GNU/Linux Users :)

A Day At Sethu Institute of Technology [SIT]

2005-08-17T00:54:00.000-07:00

It became one of the unforgettable moments in my life, my visit to Sethu Institute of Technology [SIT]. The reason behind this is simple, I was honoured as one of the delegates in SIT. I got a call from Joe Steeve the previous day ie., on Sunday night asking me to join with the team which comes to SIT the following day to give a talk on GNU/Linux. On Monday [08-08-2005], I went to hotel Supreme, Madurai to meet Joe and the team. I could see four people there, discussing something seriously about GNU/Linux in Madurai. I went inside and joined the discussion. Sometime later we were taken in a car to SIT campus. I couldn beleive that I was made a delegate in the talk that followed. We were four people who were about to give the talk. 1) Mr. Hari Ram Athreya [Scientist, AUKBC] 2) Mr. Chandrasekar.T.V [Project Engineer, AUKBC] 3) Mr. Amalan Joe Steeve [Software Engineer, TGS] 4) Myself :) They came as a part of NRCF, from Anna University KB Chandrasekar [AUKBC] research center. These guyz are responsible for framing the syllabus for the elective on FOSS to the sixth semester students of Anna University. I represented as the Moderator of GNU/Linux User Groups of Madurai [glug-madurai], and spoke about the activities which are going on in this user group. It was an experience for me to talk in front of the students and staffs of around eleven engineering colleges [in and around madurai]. I feel that this was a great opportunity for me. Hope this may continue :)

Algorithms link

2005-08-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi

Velammal a nice Tech Experience

2005-08-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

We went for a paper presentation at Velammal, conducted as a part of the symposium of Department of Computer Science and Engineering. They have named it as "Pegasus'05" (what a nice name). The very attractive thing in this name is not just this, the logo which they have designed for it, they say it as a "Unicorn Horse" (the second logo which I admired the most in my life). This college is situated some where near Redhills road, near Ambattur in Chennai. We were allowed to use their college bus. Sri Ranjani and myself went for participating in the paper presentation. We also had plans in participating in Spiders (a web designing contest) but due to my laziness to sit and code and lack of time we couldn go for that. The hospitality which they gave was nice. To add to this we had another familiar person to us there, he none other than our Ex-HOD Dr.N.Ramraj. He welcomed us and spoke with us recognising that we came from his previous work place. He held the post of Vice Principal there. Hmmm, we were given the eighth slot to present our paper in "Papyrus" (this was the name they gave to Paper Presentation). We had our presentation in PDF. We were slightly different from others who presented it. We were'nt worried to have less number of slides in our presentation. There were four judges. The HOD/CSE of MIT (Anna University), Asst. Professor of CSE from Sri Venkateswara Engineering College, and two other persons were from Tata Consultancy Services. There was not any quetions from the judges and even from the audience as soon as we finished our presentation, except for one which we managed to answer. Then we were given the "First Prize", which took us to the heights of achieving something, since this was our attempt to present a paper. We also didnt had much experience in presenting papers since we were concentrating much on our projects :) After getting such a victory we have decided to put more papers and we have started working on Autonomic computing, OS, Networks and such related areas :) Oh!!! I forgot the prize money was 2000 bugs...

IBM DB2 ID

2005-07-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

Prometric ID : PR0325762

Samsung link

2005-07-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

http://in.samsungmobile.com/en/phone/manual_software/manual_software.jsp?page=3

Note it

2005-06-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7336

Got an offer from Cognizant

2005-06-21T00:57:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time since I was preparing very seriously for getting an offer from a reputed company of my choice. I couldn forget June 7th, 2005 coz I got a job. It was on June 6th, 2005 we had Cognizant Technology Solutuions at our campus, on the same day we had a wonderful presentation by the Cognizant team and the toughest part came i.e, the Aptitude Test. There was negative marks and I managed to solve 25 questions out of the 40 questions. We got the short listed candidates on the same afternoon. Next day (June 7th,2005) I had my interview. It was a very easy, nice and pleasant interview. I remember I got into the room at 9:07 am and as soon as I got inside the interview there was a power failure and the room became dark. Then Mr.Renga a smart young chap who was my interviewer asked me to help him in opening the windows. I immediately went to one of the windows and started opening also he did the same, in the meanwhile the power came. Then he introduced himself as Renga and I did the same. Then I made myself ease in the chair in front of Renga (It is a custom in Cognizant to call all the associates by their first name). Then he asked me for the form which we filled with most of our personnel details and skills. The first question he shooted was to introduce my self introduction. After introducing he asked for my college mark statement. He had a glance and asked me why dont we start with Microprocessors. Without hesitation I said yes. He asked some basic questions from that. Then he switched to Datastructures and then to Object Oriented Programming. At last he ended the technical talk with Sofware Development practices. While I was explaining the various steps for developing a software I missed the important point i.e, review. Then he reminded me about that and he gave a small talk for a minute about review. He mentioned that review must be in between testing and delivery. I added that it must be between each and every phase of the software development cycle, he was very much pleased and appreciated me for coming with a valid point. Then after 15 minutes of technical talk he moved to an informal talk. He asked who is my favorite poet, since I have mentioned in my resume that I have a passion towards tamil poetry. Immediately I replied, "Vairamuthu". He asked whether I had read "Thaneer Desam" of Vairamuthu. How could I forget that wonderful work of him, the best poetic novel I've read thus far, so I said yes and we chatted for about five minutes on that. We both were talking about the great man Vairamuthu in which both of us were pretty interested (Like minded people, identify them easily :) ). At last he said with a smile the "You will be shortly hearing from Cognizant, to get placed". On hearing these words I was very confident that I got an offer even before the results were read. This was a pleasant experience of mine in my interview. All my efforts in my college helped me to achieve this. Immediately after the results were announced I rang my mother and said that I got placed in Cognizant, she started crying with joy, thats the greatest moment in my life, since I proved I didnt wasted the efforts which my parents took to make me successful in life. And I alwalys remember that this is not the end, this is just the starting for some big deal awaiting in my future endevours (Since I remember the words of Spencer Johnson in his book "Who Moved My Cheese", its just my cheese has been moved). I would work hard and try to explore more in my field and give the best of mine where ever I work. Today am back into the Parallel Processing Lab after a short leave, with the regular hackers of the lab (my juniors). But this time its slightly different since there wont be any seniors :( . And the new HP Prolion server is waiting for me... cooooool :) .

Linux Tutorials

2005-05-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.chinalinuxpub.com/doc/www.siliconvalleyccie.com/#Linux

Getting ready for Final Year

2005-05-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

At last I got my results for the sixth semester. This time also I got 8.57 as my GPA. Am qualified to get into the Final year completing my Pre-Final year. When I think back it seems to be a very short time, its like just now we got into college but three years had gone. Another important thing is by passing the sixth semester am also eligible for attending the placements in all the companies visiting our campus with the added advantage of not having any arrears thus far, I must thank the Almighty for giving me this gift and this must continue till I finish my career. Last semester also I ve got 8.57. But before getting my resutlts this semester I was really scared coz I thought I didnt do my exams well. The only subject I was very much worried was Object Oriented Analysis and Design(OOAD), this was because I didnt do my internals very well. I was a bit playfull with this subject since I thought it as an easy subject. But after the results only I realized that it was a very easy subject and even I can secure 73% in this subject which gave a B grade. I thought after getting 8.57 int his semester my CGPA will shoot up to great heights but, it was not so it raised only to 0.05. Thus my CGPA now at the end of sixth semester is 8.30. My Marks are as follows:

SUBJECTS	GRADE	MARKS
Numerical Methods and Simulation	A	66+16=82
Object Oriented Analysis and Design(OOAD)	B	56+17=73
Internet Programming	B	57+19=76
Software Engineering	A	58+22=80
Computer Graphics	B	49+24=73
Computer Networks	B	52+24=76
RDBMS Lab	S	69+25=94
Network Programming Lab	S	73+22=95
Total		649

Am very happy to get this result and I will still work hard to maintain this tempo and to get to greater heights. Am very greatfull for all my college staffs and my friends who helped me to get such a result. This semester as I already had blogged, I had many activities to do inlcuding my two major projects and the Internship programme with Virtusa. Inspite of this schedule I managed to pass this sixth semester exams.

Its been Long back

2005-05-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time i ve blogged.. Last month i had my semester and i did the exams fine. Now in May am preparing for my placements and also working to give a good deliverable to our Virtusa Project. Last month (April 14) i had a really bad time my system got crashed. My hard disk went to hell and it was replaced by HCL since i had warranty at the cost of my data being lost. I was very upset over that, even till today my system is giving problem, all my devices started failing one by one. Today i spoke to the company people about my system problems and they have assured me that it will be fixed surely on coming Monday. And another sad news is our technical repository Joe Steeve had left our college. But am happy that he got a nice job (the job which he wished for, Yup its a job based on GNU/Linux). I wish all the best for his career. He has promised to start a software firm in another five years time (tats cool and we ppl shall have fun there). After the exams in April end I really had a hectic time with our college database server. We actually changed our database machine from a PIII IBM NetVista machine to another ACER PIV machine also this time we shifted from Oracle8i to Oracle9i. There began the problem and at last we got rid of all those difficulties and now our college database server is up and is running :) Ranjani was with me all that time and its the joint venture of us which made this possible. And now am BUSY PREPARING for my placements. Last week we had our seniors handling classes for us. They really did a great job. They took pains to make us aware of the difficulties in getting through the placements. Next week in our college they have decided to arrange people from TIME to handle classes for us in Soft Skills. I think that will be even very interesting and usefull for us. Still am not getting better with my aptitiude skills, yeah I need to concentrate more :) I would like to thank my seniors for all the work they did especially: S Arun Ponnaiah, S Karthick, Meenakshi Sundaram, HAri Shankar, Harish, Balamurugan, Mani Balan and even more (forgive me if I had left ur name).

"LPC" First Place

2005-02-25T23:37:00.000-08:00

The first place in Linux Programming Contest(LPC) was bagged by our team. Sri Ranjani and Myself did a small software for LPC, which is a programming contest conducted by our CSE association. It is an interface for the wget tool in GNU/Linux. At first when we cleared prilms, we thought that we were to implement wget ( it involves a lot of stuff, ie. implementing http, ftp and all that crap), but one day when we had a discussion my senior Balamurugan made it clear that our job is to just make use of the existing tool in GNU/Linux and provide an interface for that. Then things were made easy. Ranjani and myself worked for one day fully dedicated, for that and we almost finished it on that day. Then we were waiting for the results for a long time. At last we got the first place. There were ten teams participating in this contest. We did this using Glade, gtk+ and a lot more of C coding. It was a nice experience working for this small project. The second prize was bagged by our juniors Praveen and Subramani. My seniors were asking for a treat for this, I think I will take them to "Aarthy Drive Inn" next week :-).

==Seminar on Microkernel Development Basics==

2005-02-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

I took a seminar on Microkernel Development Basics in the GLUGOT,Glug-Madurai meeting. I was talking about Paging, booting process, GDT, etc. There were many guyz from KLN, from our college and one guy was from NITT, also there was a member of glug-madurai who is working in southern railways. I prepared a presentation on the topic (using OpenOffice). Had a nice time giving a talk. Arpit is one of the guy from ECE who attended this meeting, he was the first on to shoot questions to me. He asked about enabling the A-20 pin. I explained him, and Joe Steeve gave an insight about this address pin. And there were many questions on GDT, segmentation and Multiboot kernel. Hey have a look at: http://cepserver.tce.edu/~glugot NOTE: GLUGOT - GNU/Linux User Group Of TCE GLUG-Madurai - GNU/Linux User Groups Madurai

Me and ^^^^^^^VIRTUSA^^^^^^^^

2005-01-13T09:50:00.000-08:00

Virtusa is a WonderLand.I would like to narrate the moments which I cherished during my stay at Virtusa. My Association with Virtusa started somewhere in the middle of August, when we had Fstival in our college. Dr.Shalini told us our sponsors for Fstival are Virtusa and the chief guest is coming from this company. At that time I had no idea of what is Virtusa. Then we recevied two posters from Virtusa, quoting some PIRL values. I felt very great about the company on seeing those posters, it was so professional. One important thing to note here is Virtusans also had sent a rope for tieing these posters; this shows how consious these corporate people are even with very minute things. On the Fstival day Ganesan came as our chief guest. He spoke very well about Virtusa and he also said that Virtusa is ready to offer some projects to us. Then one fine day on December we received a letter saying that ten students are invited for an “Open Source Training Programme” at Virtusa. Then ten of us were seleted and there started our journey to explore the corporate world. We started preparing our Resumes which took several phases and finally it was ready. We sent our resumes and waited for a long time to get a positive reply, and we also got it. We were amazed to hear from the Virtusa team that they were ready to provide us accomodation and things like that. But unfortunately we had already made arrangements regarding our accomodation. After coming to Virtusa we were given a very good welcome by Gowri. Her broad smile and the way she welcomed us to Virtusa was really very soothing. Then the second person I met was Sukumaran. At first I don’t know what work he was doing in Virtusa then he introduced himself as a HR. He took us to the “Small talk” room were we had our first and long meeting in Virtusa. There Srinath briefed us on the way Virtusa works. Then I met a very cool and effective speaker, whom I admired a lot, he is none other than Raghu. He explained about a very good group which is a good custom to be appreciated in Virtusa, it is the “Individual Support Group” (ISG). His speech was very interesting. At first I thought that “Training in Open Source” as quoted in the letter we received is most of just sessions i.e. we will have to sit hours together like we do in our colleges and listen to the preaching. But what was given was really different. We were asked to select the projects which we were interested to work upon. At first our technical skills were studied by the Vitusa team. We were talking more about application programming. Virtusa team had some projects on systems programming. Actually I wanted to work on systems programming, but I didn’t get a chance to work during the past five semesters of my college. Systems programming was the one which I wanted to switch to and I was longing for, then Virtusa team agreed to give us a Project on OS Kernel Development, and it was cool. I felt more comfortable in Virtusa on that afternoon when Ganesan came to our cubical and chatted with us. We were chating over our college life, and he was also sharing most of his college gestures. It was really a very good chat, which made me to come closer to Virtusa. I was very much impressed by the technical skills of Ramnathan. And was very happy to know that he was from my place. Ram was speaking so technically that, it helped me a lot to think over my technical skills and the areas which I must improve on. The Virtusa team which included Vishwac, Uma, Jeenendra (sorry if there is a spelling mistake) and Umesh was very cool. And I enjoyed being with these guyz in Virtusa. They treated us as one among them. The important thing I learnt from VIRTUSA is “Coding is not the only thing a Software Engineer must do”, there is lots more in developing a software. The training which I had in Virtusa really made me to understand how to approach in building a project and gave a very good exposure to the current IT trends. I think this would help me to improve a lot in my career. The hospitality and the way in which the Virtusans treated us was really nice. I felt happy to see our posters pasted on the walls of Virtusa, which I shall say a privilege granted to us. I can go to my college with pride saying that I was in Virtusa, which is “The Place” I wanted to be in.

Registered for C-Surf

2005-01-03T18:26:00.000-08:00

Its long time i made a post for in this blog... Today i registered our team for the C-Surf event which is conducted as a part of the symposium of nitt cse department. Our team comprises of three members SriRanjani, Vasanth and myself. The contest is on 16 th Jan,2005. I ll go there from chennai at that time. Our team members are preparing hard to get throught the contest including myself. Lets hope for the best.

Am in "Virtusa"

2005-01-03T18:20:00.000-08:00

I am in Chennai.. I am in Virtusa today. We a group of ten people came here for internship in this company. Its really very nice to be here. We had many sessions in the morning. Those sessions were like an Orientation of the company. Afternoon we were given separate cubicals and machines to work with. We were given stationaries and T-Shirts. Hope this will be memorable one in my life.

Second Place in Project Management

2004-12-31T18:30:00.000-08:00

Hey folks !!! am very happy that our team got the second place in Project Management this time. It was conduted as a part of our department association activities. Last time we worked as a team of four and got the second place, in which the topic was "Prevention of Road Accidents". Last time the team members were Saravanan, Shyam Prasad, Rebecca Lavanya and myself. This time it was really cool.The topic was "Underground Airport" for prelims and "Collision Detection" in the finals. At first Shyam didnt want to get into it, since the penguins ie the girls of tt joined as a separate team and contested. But we convinced Shyam to get through and we managed to get second place. The first place went ot the girls of tt. In our team we were five members and each one of were assigned a separate module. We named our pm as SCACS (Surveillance and Collision Avoidance Control Systems). 1.Shyam Prasad - Neural Networks 2.Senthil Kumaran - Fuzzy Logic in Scacs 3.Vasanth - Algorithms 4.Vishwanathan - Track Switching 5.Saravanan - Security and stuff It was a nice experience for we people to work together and succeed.

Attended GLUGOT Meeting on Pthreads

2004-12-11T02:05:00.000-08:00

Today i attended the GLUGOT (GNU/Linux User Groups of TCE) meeting. My seniors took a very good seminar on PThreads. Balamurugan my senior gave an introduction on Pthreads and explained abt all the functions to create threads and all the fundas. Arun Ponnaih gave a talk on other functions in handling a thread. This gave me an oppotunity to know more abt Thread Handling. My junior Sriram was shooting up questions during the session and the two speakers along with joe were explaining the concepts to him.

After the session got over Sap thought me to program in gtk+ and glade. I had some doubts in glade i clarified those things with him. Then we all went to our hostel mess to have our lunch.

Gtk 2.0 Reference

2004-12-08T03:51:00.000-08:00

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/index.html

Signed Up with *Orkut.com***

2004-09-29T17:20:00.000-07:00

I signed up with orkut.com. My senior Arun Ponniah gave me a request to join this group. First thing i did after signing up was adding Arun Ponniah as my Friend. Then I sent request to all my friends to join orkut.com . Also i created a new community called "Thirteens". Do you know thirteens are we people who will always be together in the class and chat... chat... n chat... sometimes usefully. (Note all the people in thirteens are good in some area,they have their own talents). I shall say we are like minded people binded together. Another thing i did was joining the community of my school. there were 28 members in that community and i added the 29th entry.I felt really happy to join that community. I didnt find any classmates of mine in that community, but i hope that they will flood this community in another few days. Also i joined many communities related to GNU/LINUX. We had a very good night lab. I was all the time in front of a machine in the corner of the parallel processing lab, browsing and downloading some tutorials. My seniors were very happy enjoying to the core, in which i joined in the first half and left to work in the late hours. I also studied some interesting things in internet, about GNU/LINUX. I visited www.gnu.org and read about the free software foundation and about the GNU project. I think i utilised the night lab... the first time in my life did a useful thing.

Night Lab in our Department :-D

2004-09-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

I am gonna enjoy in the night lab today. First i said i wont stay back but my seniors Arun Ponniah and Balamurugan convinced me to stay back. I am eagerly waiting for my nanban(Saravanan), since he went to the press for giving the sovenier for cyber'04 for printing. When he returns i think along with my other friends Vasanth, Vichu, Sriram and Shyam Prasad tonight will become a memorable one in my life. Also my seniors are in a form to make all of us to dance. Lets see what happens...

ISTE Symposium

2004-09-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

On behalf of The Indian Society for Technical Education(ISTE) Students Chapter a National Level symposium was conducted in our college. I am an ISTE member. Last year i was in the certificates committee and i worked for ISTE Symposium. But Unfortunately this time i couldn't work for ISTE Symposium since i had to work for Cyber'04 our Dept Symposium. Today my friends were there in that symposium. Shyam was roaming here and there and at times he worked for preparing the sovenier for Cyber'04. Geethu(SriVidhya) was sincerely preparing the sovenier. My friend Ranju was there with me all the day but she was unhappy over something which i dont know...

First Place in Technical Quiz

2004-09-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

We had a technical quiz as a part of our computer Science Department Association activities. Myself and my friend Shyam Prasad attended it and secured the first place. Actually there were three rounds in OS , microprocessor and networking. We got 3 points and we won the first place. The second place was given to two teams and they got 1 points each. We will be given certificates on the day when we have our association validictory.

Cyber online events Results

2004-09-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

Today we published the results for Online Events. This was conducted as a part of our symposium Cyber'04 in Thiagarajar College of Engineering. www.cyber-tce.org

Third Place in Hardware Contest

2004-09-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

Ranju (Ranjani) thats how i call her, and myself attended a hardware contest, organised by our department association. We secured the third place in that event. Our project was an InfraRed transmitter and reciever gadget. We didnt get the output on that day. Our friends in E&I Dept. Suchindran and Prathusha helped us a lot for doing this project. Eventhough we didnt get the output we were given marks for our component knowledge, circuit design, and the idea.

Third Place in Online Programming Contest

2004-09-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

Ranjani , Vasanth and myself attended an Online Programming Contest conducted in our department and secured the third place. My friend SriRam got second place in this event with 20 points. We got 10 points in that contest. Our seniors Arun Ponniah and BalaMurugan conducted this contest and the interface which they did in php was really nice. Hats off to our seniors...