March 20, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Farewell & Cultural Night 2008

We had Cultural Night and Farewell this Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. Organizers faced huge troubles in making things go smooth. How can you organize something without a stage? Still the organizer showed there talent and came up with ad-hoc arrangements. The events started late by more than an hour on cultural night. Classical dances were boring except the one. Vipul danced really well on ‘Nain Jab Ladi Hain To’ 🙂 After classicals everything was fine. As all people from our group except Alok (he was busy with his DDBMS stuff) and guyz from OBH were present, BC started immediately after the classical dances. People were raised high in air with their chairs whenever someone directly/indirectly related to them came on stage. I was also one of them and I was raised three f***ing times 🙂 We had helluva fun teasing the performers.

Apart from all this, reinventing the lyrics of songs that were being played was REAL fun 🙂 For some reasons I can’t write the lyrics here. I hope you can understand 😛 We all sang them loud in chorus. Commenting on the performers was also fun. But one thing I found bad about cultural night that dances were not sensored 😛

Farewell started with lectures from well known personalities from senior most batches. This guy, Prashant Gopal delivered a great lecture which should be remembered long. I hope somebody or Prashant Gopal will write that down word to word and put at a publically accessible place. That would be an inspiration for the juniors 🙂 Lectures were followed by different awards for people who excelled in different spheres of life or academics if possible 😛

After dinner started the real thing. The informals session 🙂 This was way better this year as compared to the informals session this year. I really don’t remember all the things happened. But this guy Sandeep Saini really rocked the audience with his PJs (phatte). This guy is king of PJs. People were exposed through different activities on stage. Some were given titles, some faced the rapid fire questions etc… All in all it was a great event and I felt lucky being a part of it 😉

PS : End sems are coming soon 🙂 Should start looking if people who are with me in courses started preparing 😉

March 19, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Life, Tips n Tricks

Blogging

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.

March 18, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life

Gmail Bug

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

March 17, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Life, Tips n Tricks

Morning Walk

Its 7 am again 🙂 and I am back with something new. But this time its different. This time its not the case that I want to sleep but I am not able to. I have come up with a solution to the problem. Because only 2 working days (today and tomorrow) are left for this semester, I need not sleep early (6AM) anymore and wake up early (1PM) for classes. Now I can sleep late and wake up whenever I want.

Since I have been skipping breakfasts and lunches since long, I’ll have breakfast daily from now on. I’ll go to bed at around 8:30am after having breakfast and will wake up at around 3:00pm and then I’ll run for coffee shop 😛 This routine will be followed strictly starting today with no exceptions except the exams 🙂

But there is one interesting addition to the daily schedule now. And that is Morning Walk. Since I will be up around 7am, I’ll regularly go for a morning walk. I was reading some documentation stuff and suddenly got attracted by the weather outside. I immediately locked my room and left for the walk. The wind was cool and soothing outside. I realized that the hostel is horribly hot 🙁 You can’t really have such a peaceful environment in day time. I walked down to the main gate. Now I think I have a badly screwed up vocabulary and I am not able to come up with words (how can I, I don’t even know the words) to express my feeling about that awesome morning walk. Ok.. enough .. you imagine the rest like birds were chirping and sky was clear and blah blah blah… But it was a nice experience 🙂

PS1 : Writing too much these days.

PS2 : End sems are approaching fast 🙁

March 15, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Life, Linux

Last Week Report

Its 7 am and again its the same raga. I can’t sleep 😛 I was trying to sleep since an hour now. I got up and thought of posting some more crap on the Internet. It was a very busy week for me. I wrote a lot of text which includes noting down the minutes of meetings, writing and replying to RFCs, writing wiki pages, writing blog post and replying to a lot of mails.

Last week students lab committee met network security audit team. The meeting went for 3 long hours, but we had a lot of discussions. Most of the discussions were positive and I am really optimistic about the improvements in performance of network in near future. I volunteered for writing down the minutes of meeting for such a long meeting 🙁 It took me more than 40minutes to write down the minutes of meeting.

As a part of my BTP, I am thinking of adopting an open source project and thinking of developing it during forthcoming summer. It would be real fun. For this I wrote my first ever RFC. It here if you wanna read it.

After that I created a wiki page on fedoraproject.org for the same. Its here.

I prepared a BTP report of 9 long pages. It took me around 3-4 hours. I still don’t believe I did it myself 🙂 Prepared a BTP presentation and that too myself. It consumed 2 hours of my time. I don’t know why we have to submit 10 page long BTP report. Every BTP may not be same and for some projects you can’t really write that long report. I could not really figure out what to write and wrote about a lot of related stuff to make it 9 page long. I think I could never understand some academic rules.

I wrote this “how to make a hollow iron sphere” blog post. I wrote it just for fun. But people got emotional and started proposing the solutions. And it turned out to be a patent :-O

2-3 Days back I met Dr. PJN regarding some of the network issues. We had a long discussion on some of the issues which includes setting up caches for proxy, deploying proxy authentication, mail forwarding issue and some other. It was a long meeting again. I wrote down the minutes of the meeting for this one as well. It took me around 30 minutes.

Day before yesterday, we had a students lab committee meeting for coming up with some solution to improve network performance. Again the same discussion. Meeting went on for more than one hour. This time also, I wrote down the minutes of the meeting. Again the same things with changed opinions.

And right now I am writing this blog since last 20 minutes 🙂

PS1 : Getting busy. Trying to cut down time wastage.

PS2 : Somebody please help me to get rid of checking mails every 1 minute 🙁 Its a real obstacle in production.

PS3 : Thanks smr for sharing this on google reader 🙂

PS4 : Guyz checkout this. ORB is going wild 🙂

March 11, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

How to make a perfect hollow iron sphere

Don’t just think that this is another howto where I am going to tell you people how to install/configure something so that after reading this you will be able to make a hollow iron sphere 😛 Actually, a lot of discussion has gone on how to really come up with a hollow iron sphere that is perfect.

We all went to SE class as usual. After 20-30 minutes, I got bored and was in a frustrating situation. I need not stay in the class but I could not come across a better way to kill time. Suddenly, this question came to mind “How one can really make a perfect hollow sphere?”. Pankaj was sitting next to me and I fired this question at him thinking that it would kill some time and may be in the meantime lecturer can catch us talking and throw both of us out of the class 😛 (didn’t really mean it, but for the sake of writing one can exaggerate).

Definition of perfect hollow iron sphere

A perfect hollow iron sphere is a sphere which is hollow from inside and there should be no hole through which air can pass from the core to the outer space and vice versa. The inner surface should be perfect with no deformations. The constraint is that you can’t join two hollow hemi spheres and make a hollow sphere out of it. After you have the hollow sphere, there should be absolutely nothing inside the hollow part (e.g. some material or whatever. air is permitted.).

Solutions

Pankaj tried really hard and proposed different solutions for making a hollow sphere. But none of them could really convince me and he can’t come up with an idea to make a hollow iron sphere. Sambhav and Ankush was sitting just in front of us. Pankaj shared the *million dollar problem* with them and asked them to come up with a solution. Pankaj thought that these guyz are nine pointers and may help him. But it was really disappointing that even they could not come up with an idea that can help us build a hollow iron sphere. Then the question was forwarded to Kiran, Deepak and Rishi as well. But everyone was equally disappointing. Below are some solutions proposed.

1. First solution was proposed by Pankaj that we somehow make two hollow hemispheres and then join them to make a hollow iron sphere. But this solution violates the definition of a perfect hollow iron sphere. So rejected.

2. Second solution was proposed by Pankaj again that we make a thin hollow sphere by beating an iron sheet and later deposit layers of iron on it. But this is practically impossible because when you will try to deposit the molten iron on the thin sheet, then the sheet itself will melt. So rejected.

3. Third solution was proposed by Sambhav that we make a ball of wax and put it in a container containing molten iron. We will leave a hole in the iron part so that wax can come out on heating to high temperatures. Now, I really doubt these guyz with high CGPAs. Can you ever think of this idea? This is like committing a suicide if inteviewer happened to ask that quesiton in your job interview. How can you think that wax will be solid at melting point of iron 🙂 So rejected.

4. Fourth solution was proposed by Ankush that we make a ball of clay and then we deposit iron layers on it and then we again cover it will a layer of clay. Now, I don’t really get what he was trying. Again a high CGPA victim. I think he was trying to make a hollow sphere of clay(?). So rejected.

Hint

You can’t use a material for the core whose melting point is higher that iron because you will not be able to remove it from the core once you deposited iron layers over it. You can’t even use a material for the core whose melting point is lower than iron because when you put molten iron over it, the core will melt and you’ll never have a hollow sphere. Just keep thinking.

While these people were putting forward there solutions, I was cursing them. I said that you people are now studying at undergraduate level and still you don’t know how to make a hollow iron sphere. This discussion lasted till the end of SE class and they could not come up with a solution. And if you are still reading this post, I think you are also curious about this question and dying to know the solution.

I have to say that this question is still mystery for all of us. Even I don’t know how to make a perfect hollow iron sphere. And by any chance or coincidence if you know the solution, please please leave the solution in the comments or give me a link.

PS1 : BTP report and presentation went fine. Profs were impressed 😛

PS2: Looking forward for summer vacations as an opportunity to get into a new world 🙂

PS3: Writing crap these days.

PS4: My earning on Google adsense crossed $10. So, I have got the money back that I spent on buying this domain 🙂

March 6, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Random BC

I am trying to sleep since three hours now but I think I should give up now 😛 and do something creative like writing this post about random BC we had last night. One thing that everyone will agree is that we (IIITians) have excelled in doing BC after joining the institute. We sometimes do things as a part of BC which we can’t even think of doing if everybody is in normal mood. The following incident is an example of that.

I was writing this post when some one knocked my door hard enough to scare me. I immediately rushed to open the door. I openned it and saw Panakj in an excited state as if he is not virgin anymore 😛 He asked me to come to his room immediately. Me, poor soul uninformed about the actual happenings, rushed to his room and found that these guyz (Sambhav and Pankaj) were listening to ‘Achcha Sila Diya Tune Mere Pyar Ka‘ by ‘Attaullah Khan‘ at full volume on speakers at 3AM. I was like wtf?? Then Sambhav explained that he just found this f***ing awesome classical(?) song on dc and thought that everyone would like it 😛

And then started the BC session. Sambhav fired up dc++ again and started a search for ‘Altaf Raja‘. OMG!! It was like a session for paying tributes to these legendary singers. The songs followed were ‘Tum To Thahre Pardesi‘ by ‘Altaf Raja‘, ‘Pahle To Kabhi Kabhi Gam Tha‘ by ‘Altaf Raja‘, ‘Doli Uthi Hai Uski Shahnaiyon Ke Saath‘ by ‘Attaullah Khan‘ etc… Sachin was also with us. And later Alok also joined us. We were singing the songs in chorus with the singer as if we have gone mad. And we were laughing as if we have gone crazy.

Though nobody would ever like to listen to any of those songs, when it comes to BC everything is legal and we really enjoyed the BC session.

PS1 : 4 months vacations is a boon.

PS2 : BTP report and presentation this week 🙂

November 11, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Graphics, Internet, Life, orkut

Google cum Orkut Rocks !!!

I was just killing time on IRC and was browsing some random sites. I opened my orkut account to check if somebody has written a scrap or not. The layout was as usual but there was written Happy Diwali before my email address at the top. I took my mouse to it and I just realized that it was a link to some javascript. I just clicked on it thinking that it would help me kill time easily as it would waste another 2-3 minutes browsing some more crap on orkut. But … after clicking on that link, I was presented with a brand new layout with a diwali theme. The theme was just awesome. I captured it before the feature goes away. Here is a snapshot, if you are late to check that out. Really, google does everything out of the box !!!

September 29, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life, orkut, Tips n Tricks

Funny Orkut Bug

Everybody was so happy with the new orkut design that it was looking like Google is really on the way to knock out all other social networking sites. But this new design brought some crap with it. The homepage notifications which included daily updates on profile, photo, video updates from friends was really irritating. It turned out to be very annoying for a lot of people to see all that info on you orkut home-page.

Though orkut provided an option to hide updates from your friends. But it never worked out and even after updating the option many times, I couldn’t manage ( or I should say orkut couldn’t manage) to hide updates from my friends.

Today, I just got crazy and set the option to show updates and what I saw when I returned to that page was surprising. OMGWTF, there are not updates from my friends. And even if they are there they are not shown at all. This is really funny when you want to see something you are not allowed to and when you kick something outa your home-page, it is enforced on you 🙂

So, if you wanna hide updates from your friends, checkout show updates and have fun.

Here the pic proof …

PS : Coming soon, a post on social entrepreneurship and mgmt class.

August 29, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Graphics, Hardware, Life, Monitors, Movies, Success, Windows

My new ViewSonic VG1930WM 19″ WideScreen LCD monitor

Finally after stumbling for almost 2 months, I have got my brand new ViewSonic VG1930WM 19″ WideScreen LCD monitor. I gathered the money almost 2 – 3 months ago, but was not able to decide which monitor should be purchased. For last two months, I stumbled on Samsung SyncMaster 940NW which was a bit costlier for the features, AOC 199S which was also costlier, ViewSonic VG1930WM which provided the same features, but the price was a bit attractive. I browsed through enormous monitor reviews, huge price lists on the internet and what not. Then in the beginning of this month when I was about to go to buy the monitor, I was told that the Paradise market remains closed on Sundays. Then, we have hectic schedule throughout the week, so could not go. Then these hyderabad serial blasts went off, again a hurdle.

Finally, today ignoring everything else, we, me and ajay somani went to paradise computer market. I got my ViewSonic and ajay bought a Seagate Sata II 500GB external hard disk with Seagate casing. I bought the monitor for Rs. 10200/- and ajay bought the HDD for Rs. 8700/- .

The monitor is really wide and its looks are just awesome. I can’t express my happiness and monitor’s beauty in words. The monitor support a 1440×900 resolution and has a fantastic response time of 5ms. It also has the inbuilt speakers. The complete technical specs of the monitor is here.

Here are the pics …

Here is a video as well.

PS0 : I am very happy today … of course I have reasons 😀

PS1 : We will have a data center with ajay’s 500GB HDD 😉

PS2 : I am planning to get either a XFX nVidia GeForce 8600GT or I’ll go for mobo and processor upgrade so that I can use my old Samsung SyncMaster 793S 17″ CRT monitor with this LCD monitor in dual display mode. Now, that would be the coolest(?) thing 😀

PS3 : I am a bit showing off 😉