I am just shocked when I happened to know the bandwidth rates in United States and India.
India
United States
We pay $62000/$1100 ~ 50 times more and that too for less resources. What a world we live in 🙂
I have been spending time on IRC since a few months ( 8-9 months) now. For those who don’t know what IRC is, check wiki. This is also a kinda social network but a bit different. This is more or less like yahoo chat rooms. Freenode is one of the most famous networks on IRC. Here I am talking about the techie part of it. Almost every open source project has a development and support channel on Freenode.
I came across IRC in my first summer vacations. Back then, I used to hang out in #fedora (anything prefixed with a # denotes a channel … like a chat room) as a newbie to see what people talk about. And used to ask any questions that came my way. BTW, I use Xchat as an IRC client. I started answering to people’s questions as I gathered experience and expertise. The regular journey with IRC started in 6th sem. I came in contact with a lot of people via IRC. I came across Seth Vidal on #yum. And we discussed a lot about local yum mirror management. IntelligentMirror is an outcome of the discussions that went on for almost two months in #yum.
My activity slowed down on IRC after I got busy with projects. After the GSOC result announcement, Ajay Kumar, a GSOC participant from India, created a channel (##gsoc-india) for selected Indians for GSOC’08. I am a regular in that channel now. There are a lot of people from all over the country, from different streams (CS, ECE, Civil etc..), from different institutes (IITs, DCE, DU, NITs, IIIT, PEC etc..) and from different places 🙂 I have got a lot of new friends. We have a lot of fun doing bc, sometimes discussing issues of national interest 😛 and sometimes projects if time allows 😛 Its really addictive and I tend to respond to every single message.
BTW, it may interest you to know that India is #2 in accepted students for GSOC after US. And next time we’ll probably beat them.
PS1 : Fedora 9 is out. Bandwidth sucking big time even in vacations 🙁 It’ll take almost 15 hours for Fedora 9 to be in. I am eager to check it out.
PS2 : Getting a lot of ideas to post about.
PS3 : We are hoping have a meetup for GSOC participants at Google Delhi and Bangalore Office. It would be REAL fun if it happens 🙂
PS4 : This is probably the best blog post I have ever seen.
Sometimes it happens that you get too much used to unusual things that even usual things looks madness to you. I always loved to work at night and found it much more productive as compared to working in day-time. But this crossed limits with the beginning of the 6th semester. I selected all the courses with the intention that none of them should have a class in the forenoon ( the earliest class I had was at 3:00PM 😛 ). The obvious outcome, I never slept at night and night out became as usual as a day for others. For months, I followed the same routine. I didn’t face any problems with the schedule except exam days etc. My biological clocks got synchronized to GMT+1000.
Everything was going fine until recently. I had these meetings with people in the administration who for some reasons are not used to work at night. And those meetings really destroyed my routines. Since a week or so I am feeling totally helpless. I sleep throughout the night and wake up around 8AM. And for the rest of the day, I just look at my computer screen searching for something to work on. I pick up some task and it leads nowhere due to lack of concentration.
As I am a self employed man and need not answer anyone, I have decided to chill out for a week or so. I’ll not work on anything related to hardcore computing and will NOT code even a single line. For time pass, I’ll watch movies and read Paul Graham’s essays. Those essays are a very good method to utilize your free time. Chill out!!!
I have been equally passionate about computer hardware and open source ever since I joined IIIT. Friends usually tease me by saying “Hey dude, you didn’t by any IT product this month :D”. I always keep dreaming of a better machine and a lot of machines in my room. And the worst part is that I spend whatever I earn in buying new hardware ( I hardly spend on other things like buying flashy clothes, shoes etc.. looks crap to me.. a wastage of money to be precise :P).
I bought my first personal computer in May, 2006. I used it as much as possible. Then there was a puase for a very long time because I didn’t have cash to buy new hardware. In November 2006, I got RAship in BIRC and hence I got cash 😀 I bought another 160GB hard disk in June 2007 because that was the craze at that time. And because I had to support more upload space on Bordeaux’s FTP 😀 Few months later in August 2007, I bought a new 19″ ViewSonic LCD monitor by spending all the cash I earned till then from RAship and other contract works 😀 Again it was like no cash, no new hardware.
So, by that time I had two monitors and a single cabinet which was not capable of supporting dual display 🙁 As I was out of cash, I had to work harder to get more cash. I did so. And earlier this month I bought new Altec Lancing 2.1 Speakers.
And following them, I bought this monstrous brand new computer. Here is the configuration for the new desktop.
Processor
As I am an AMD fan, so there is no question of going for Intel. I was thinking of buying Quad core initially but then gave up the idea because the cost was increasing beyond my budget. So I decided to go for AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz dual core, 2MB L2 cache). This was the first one with 2MB L2 cache with the lowest price 😀
Motherboard
Selecting the motherboard was a really tedious task. Because AMD released its latest 780G chipset recently. A few bugs were reported in forums and I was a bit paranoid while selecting this mobo. But ignoring everything, I decided to go for Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G chipset because this motherboard is currently carrying the best onboard graphics card in the world. ATI Radeon HD 3200 is the onboard graphics card for the mobo. The other reason for going with this mobo was the damn HDMI port 😀 May be it will come handy when I’ll have my LCD TV 😀
RAM
The easiest part to select. I went with Transcend DDR-II 800MHz 2GB x 2 ( total 4GB). I think thats enough for the coming year.
My room has become messy and its really really becoming hot due the heat emissions from the two damn processors.
BTW, the new cabinet has this awesome small LCD display for displaying temperature and other system activities.
My room now looks like this …
So, I have my own small LAN here where I do all the testing stuff with different servers and firewall configuration. I have got a new platform for exploring the world of computer networks. Its fun to work on two machines 🙂 Ok. Here is the last image with Antitrust on one machine and I Robot on the other 😀
Adios,
Kulbir Saini aka General Bordeaux 🙂
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.
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 😀
I was living without speakers since one and a half years. Actually, the speakers are not allowed in labs @ IIIT 😛 I moved to BIRC lab to work as a research associate in December 2006. After that I never enjoyed music on speaker except on my neighbors speakers. I am a hardcore fan of punjabi songs and listen to them whenever I am up and sometime I keep them on while sleeping 😛
As the speakers that I had previously (Intex 2.1) was not of any use to me, I took them home so that they can be put into use. I moved back to my room in mid February. I was missing the speakers like hell. I have small speakers in my monitor but they are not good enough. I finally bought these Altec Lancing 2.1 speakers and now my neighbors will soon run away or die of the 24×7 full volume songs in a language that they can’t even understand 😛
PS : Going to buy a monster soon 🙂 Keep checking 😛
I was proud to know that IIIT was the only academic institute in India to have wifi campus when I joined IIIT. Back then wifi offered good connectivity and bandwidth on Intranet and it was a feel good that you don’t have to look for wires to go online. Sit anywhere with your laptop and you are ready to go online.
As time passed, the no. of students using wifi increased due to huge intake of students in different branches. The wifi infrastructure which provided a speed of 20MBps per user at some point of time is now like a 56kbps modem line which you won’t prefer if you are not out of options. Apart from the decreased bandwidth per user, other problems arose in course of time like the switches grew older, UPSs lost their efficiency etc.
The funniest part of wifi infrastructure currently are these UPSs. They are attached to each and every switch in hostels. Whenever power goes down, the UPS also goes down and start screaming as if they are designed to kill everyone in the vicinity. The backup they provide is hardly a minute or so (not more than two minutes surely). These UPSs are so intelligent that whenever power comes, they can’t sense it and they need to be restarted. I would like to congratulate the designer to make such high class UPSs to make our life miserable. So, we have UPSs that goes down immediately on power cut and needs to be restarted when power is back. The only advantage of having these UPSs is that our life is miserable.
Another fun part is NBH(New Boys Hostel, one of the hostels at IIIT campus) switch. This 3Com switch is too old to sustain the peak data transfers. This switch goes down every 3-4 hours and needs to be restarted manually using a hard reboot ( hard reboot means cutting the power supply and then restoring it.). This switch is kept in a locked room and whenever one has to restart it, he has to look around for the key in cellar.
I am afraid that due to the continuously increasing load, some day entire wifi will collapse and we will have serious wireless crisis at IIIT. Students Lab Committee is trying hard to convince people around to come up with alternate solutions. I hope we will have some solutions soon.
PS : No PSs this time 🙂
I have been writing blog posts about linux since last two and a half years now. I wrote most of them because I faced difficulties in installing or configuring or using open source softwares and keeping in mind that others may be facing the same problems. And it has come a long way now. My linux blog gets more than 5000 hits a month and 75% of the visitors come via google search(src. google analytics) who are searching for howtos on different topics.
Sometime people write me asking questions about configurations and related things. I received a mail from a guy in uk who read some post on my linux blog and felt like helping me in some way. While I received his mail, I was in panic mode. Because I broke a module on one of my production servers and I was not able to fix it even after trying for hours continuously. IRC and google didn’t help and at the same time a guy in IRC really frustrated me with his behavior while helping. So, I didn’t care about the mail from the guy from uk and replied in really hurry and in a really bad manner. I didn’t even consider what I was writing. I usually reply to a mail whenever I get it. I don’t like to wait for replying.
After sometime I got the reply saying that he was trying to help me and I had been very rude in my reply. I just read the sent mail again and found it really hard to believe that I sent it. I replied with apologies and everything was fine after wards. It was embarrasing to know that I hurt stranger at a remote place. Now onwards, don’t reply to a mail while in panic mode 🙂
PS : Tough night. It took a really long time to fix a small problem 🙂
People may be wondering or cursing me for injecting crap into the Internet at a very fast rate but I got some reasons for blogging this frequently. It so happened that I didn’t blog for some months last year. I had a lot of topics to blog about but I didn’t. The ideas accumulated over time and I started feeling very uncomfortable because I didn’t really write what I was feeling for few months. Then I wrote this post. After writing that post I felt very good and comfortable with life. What I deduced from that incidence and what people say is writing down your thought or sharing them with others makes you feel better 🙂
So, I thought I’ll exercise this and recently started posting frequently and believe me I really feel good when I write a post whether it be crap or some useful information. I have decided to write very frequently but write short posts. So thats it for today 🙂
PS1 : My submission appeared on slashdot yesterday.
PS2 : Its fun hanging out with developers in #yum on freenode. Have been testing and sending small patches since a week now 🙂
PS3 : Cultural night was *REAL* fun 🙂 thanks to all the people who were a part of it 🙂
PS4 : Hooked to Boy Meets World 🙂 Nice show 😛
PS5 : Wasting less time on checking mails. This habit is seriously driving me nuts.
I was observing this since a week now, so thought of posting about it 🙂
Software: Gmail Beta
Bug Description:
Mail which is deleted forever re-appears in the spam folder in Gmail.
How to reproduce:
Very easy. Keep your Gmail spam folder open in a window. Wait for a spam to arrive or send a spam mail from your another email account to your Gmail account. Let Gmail show automatically that there is a mail in Spam folder. Don’t click on Spam in Index. Now click “Delete all spam messages now” and then click Ok when it says that the messages will be deleted forever. After you click Ok, the page will reload and the *SAME* mail will be there 🙂
Proof:
If you think I have gone mad and talking in air. Here is a *video* proof 😛 Checkout the timestamp for the mail and the running clock in the top right corner.
Download above video in High Resolution