Challenge

by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Internet, Life, Servers

Are we doomed

The life of a computer science students revolves around emails, social networking, reading blogs, writing blogs, searching www, managing his/her domains and related things. Today, Google has provided all these facilities under one account namely GMail, Orkut, Google Reader, Blogspot, Google Search, Google Apps respectively.

Today, it was the second time that services provided by Google was not accessible inside IIIT campus. The reason may be system outage at Google or problem with our ISP. Other website were working fine.

I was working on something and thought of taking a break to check my mail. Openned Gmail. Err. Not working. Connection failed. Ok. No problem. Lemme check what others have written or shared in Google Reader. Err. Not working. Connection failed. Still not a problem. Lets go ahead and socialize a bit. Hit orkut.com. Err. Connection failed. My GOD. Relax. Lets read shiben new web comic. Err. Connection failed. A bit of frustration is occupying my mind.

After that I thought of writing this blog. For writing this, I needed to know the services provided by google. So, googled for the same. Err 😛 Connection failed 😀

I am wondering that its not we who governs our lives. Its google who is governing the entire universe now. We are too much dependent on Google 🙁 Are we doomed? Do we have any alternatives?

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Internet, Life

IIIT – A Village

When I joined IIIT in 2005, it used to be a place loaded with all basic facilities right from a strong IT infrastructure to a very calm and peaceful environment with a few people on the campus. I hardly saw two or three power cuts and system outage 2-3 times in first year of my stay at IIIT. When I went to my home land in my very first summer vacations, I used to boast of the computing facilities and the peaceful environment and freedom students had at this very institute. At that time this institute was like Tokyo, London to me where there were no power cuts and no system outages.

With time, the infrastructure got older and population increased. And this went on for two years. This is summer vacation time and if I am not wrong the number of people in the campus right now is actually more than the total number of people there were, when I was in first year.

The problems in day to day life started increasing right from wireless crisis to shortage of space for living of students. IIIT built two extension blocks to Old Boys Hostel. A bit of relief for a year or so. If you witness the ongoing war for getting rooms in OBH on the ground and first floor, you will probably realize the severity of the problem. I can’t just imagine the patience that the hostel administration have that actually handles all the queries from the students who don’t actually want to listen to anyone and just want a room on the ground floor.

Next is power supply. Power supply is not consistent since a month or so. Sometime power cuts are as long as 1 hour. Today there has been 6 power cuts in the day so far and there are a few hours to go before the day ends. Here neither I am saying that IIIT is responsible for power cuts nor I am asking IIIT to build a power station in Hyderabad for solving the problem. But I am afraid that the increasing population would cause some serious problems down the road. May be like power and water crisis.

Enough. You might be wondering about the title. So don’t you think we are a village now with pretty frequent power cuts 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Fun, Hacking, Linux, Success, Victory

Got IIIT Website Redesign Project

Hi all!

This is Kulbir Saini, back with a bang. Here is another success story. I am pleased to inform you all that we, a team of three UG3 students ( Kulbir Saini, M Bhargava, Vamshi) have been selected for IIIT Website Redesign Project. And the good thing is that its neither a summer project, nor a semester project for a few credits. Its business. On may 1st, we presented our templates and a working prototype of the new IIIT website to the concerned committee ( which consists of people from administration) along with five other companies (I don’t have details and its not even good to mention them). And finally our team has been selected for redesigning the entire website along with websites for all the research centers. Our team is basically a kind of venture with me as a technical partner and Bhargava and Vamshi as design partners. Believe me these guyz are awesome designers. They design things as if they are made for designing them. Mind blowing.

Adios,

Kulbir Saini aka General Bordeaux 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Fedora, Hacking, Internet, Programming, Success, Yum

Accepted for Google Summer of Code

Hi all!

This is my second post of the day but I can’t resit my to write it. I will just say that I am “Accepted For Google Summer of Code”. No its not something propritiery, its “Open Source”. Google Summer of Code is a program sponsored by Google where students write code for Open Source Organizations and Google funds them for the summer.To know more about GSOC, go here.

I submitted my proposal on IntelligentMirror which will be a package for Yum Local Repository Management to Fedora Project. You can browse the breif details of my project here, and for detailed proposal, go here. Seth Vidal, who originally developed Yum, will be mentoring me throughout the project. It will be a wonderful and exciting experience to work with Yum developers.

Adios,

Kulbir Saini aKa General Bordeaux 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Computers, Fedora, Fun, Hacking, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Servers, Yum

Task List this summer

Though almost 25% of vacations are already gone, I thought of writing down my task list this summer. Maybe somebody out there have any suggestions.

  1. Squid Documentation/Tutorials  – Status : DONE
  2. IPTables Tutorial – Status : In progress.
  3. Firewall And Proxy Server Tutorial – Status : Todo
  4. Policy Routing with Linux – Status : Todo
  5. IPRoute2 Howto – Status : Todo
  6. Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control Howto – Status : Todo
  7. IntelligentMirror Development – Status : In progress.

Though I didn’t opt for a project or btp in networks, I am trying to focus on real life networking which I can use to make my life easier with the damn wireless. Like learning squid was a wonderful experience and now I get 25% of the stuff I browse from my own cache 🙂

Happy Summer Vacations,

Bordeaux 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Fun, Life, Victory

Madness !!!!!

Sometimes you do something, which you can’t even imagine. It will not be something new if I curse mess food for its quality. But what if I suffer overeating in mess, people will think that I have lost my mind. But thats what happened yesterday.

We, alok, somani, deepak, ankush, dharmeet and me of course, went to Yuktaahar at 12:30pm for having lunch as usual. As usual, I didn’t like the food and was eating rotis with some pickle I brought from home. I ate about 8 rotis and alok said that lets see who will eat the largest no. of rotis. Everyone except me and somani quit immediately, which was pretty obvious. At a later stage, somani also quit because he had a nice breakfast and was not in a situation to take the challenge. So, only me and alok left. Then started a counter which was increasing as if it got stuck in a while(true) loop. We were eating as if we never had food.

Kulbir – 10 Alok – 09

Kulbir – 12 Alok – 13

Kulbir – 16 Alok – 15

The queue for rotis was getting longer and longer and there was almost no probability that the competition will proceed. Then we gave a chance to alok that if he ask her (she was standing in the queue) for the rotis, then I will accept that I lost the challenge. But he refused as expected. So, the counter went on and on …

Kulbir – 18 Alok – 19

Kulbir – 21 Alok – 20

Kulbir – 23 Alok – 21

We went to Yuktaahar at 12:30pm and up to 2:00pm we were eating rotis. A lot of people came and left after having lunch. But we, alok, somani and me were there fighting for survival.

So, finally I won eating 23 rotis in mess. hell ?????? How did I manage to eat 23 rotis in the mess? Have I lost my mind ? Anyway I defeated alok. But surprise is that I, Kulbir Saini defeated alok even in eating competition. I know nobody is going to believe this, but it is the TRUTH.

Alok was not well at physical as well as mental level after showing his madness to invite me for the challenge. It was a fatal mistake by alok, but on my part eating 23 rotis was just a pure act of MADNESS !!!!

Don Kulbir

DO NOT CHALLENGE ME !!!