May 21, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Best day spent this summer

This day started exactly 30 minutes after yesterday midnight when rain god showed *some* interest in Hyderabad after a month or so. With rains came a lot of power cuts at midnight ( almost 4-5 in a period of less than two hours). My desktops became totally unusable with those frequent power cuts. Me and Sambhav decided to stand in the corridor and enjoy the fragrance of sand that was spread all over the place by rain 🙂 After standing there for almost 15 minutes, we went downstairs to grab a cup of tea. Thanks a *millions* to the coffee machine at OBH.

We went to the square platform between OBH and OBH new extension block and enjoyed the tea while it was drizzling 😀 It felt like heaven. I enjoyed rain this way after a lifetime, I suppose 🙂 Around 2AM rain stopped and weather became awesome. It was cool feeling after a really hot day. Then started the BC session. We were only two but BC can be done when you are in mood. We talked about *everything* that happened in last three years right from joining IIIT, ragging period and then how people went crazy about the stuff they liked (open source, programming, robotics, cgpa 😛 ). We discussed how people met each other and how we became friends. Ohh yeah. Not to forget, some issues of institute interest were also discussed 😛 How our institute is making progress in every possible field. We also exchanged thoughts and feelings from pre-IIIT life as well. How not getting into IIT proved to be a lucky chance. We also planned how we are going to visit each others’ (everyone in friend circle) home. While discussing all this, I just asked sambhav about time. And OMG!!! It was 4:50AM … we did all this from 3 hours !!!! Time to rush back to work.

We came back and got back to work. Well at 6AM, we woke Mahaveer up for cricket. Now we three, went to play cricket and we found Prashant Singh (PK) on our way. Now we four, went and sit on the stairs in the felicity ground. The air was really fresh and was blowing at a damn fast speed that it could have blown me away if I would have tried to move in its direction 😛 After 20-30 minutes, few M.Tech and MS guys came with cricket stuff and we started playing cricket.

While the match was on, it started raining again. It felt so cool that we were playing cricket in rain while the entire IIIT was in deep sleep -cum- computer labs. It was an awesome experience to get wet in rain 🙂 After cricket match, we had breakfast and returned to our rooms. I took a bath and went to bed. 😛

Probably this was the best day of my summer’08 🙂

PS1 : Do read this post by Himank. IIIT is RISING.

PS2 : @Pati,Shiben,Paresh whats the hurry to get MS yaar. One more year plzzzzz 😛 There are few good people left at the insti 🙁

May 19, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Google, GSOC, Life, Programming

The first gift from Google

People were wondering about my status messages on GTalk for a few days. It took around a week to ship things. Well, finally I have recieved the first gift from Google as a part of Google Summer of Code Program. Its a beautiful book named “Beautiful Code”. For more information about the book, click here and here. A brief description of the book

How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.

Though I don’t like books pretty much, I am looking forward to read it out of excitement and due to the fact that it has contributions from more than 30 world class programmers 😀

Thank you Google 🙂

May 14, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life

IRC is addictive, I am hooked

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.

May 12, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Life, Windows

A trip to Micro$oft Hyderabad campus

I hope you guyz know that Randeep Singh Banga ( my batchmate and a very good friend ) is interning at Micro$oft IDC, Hyderabad. Today, he offered all of us a visit to Micro$oft campus. I felt a bit hesitated at first, but then I thought its a good idea to go out and have fun with friends. We ( me, banga, mahaveer, deepak, kapil, sambhav) reached the campus at around 7:00PM. A lot of IIITians (visitors) were already there. I was wondering if its M$’s India Development Center or a picnic spot for IIITians 😛

Anyway after having bit of cool drinks, we started exploring the campus. The place is good. We enjoyed pool for sometime. It was the first time I played pool. In fact all of us played pool for the first time 🙂 We played really bad but its ok when everyone is equally bad 😛 Then we headed over to checkout banga’s cabin. Had more cool drinks and hot coffee. I managed to have a look at some server farms at that place. The glowing LEDs were just more than fascinating.

Then we moved on to the new building where we enjoyed foosball, table tennis. And finally the food. The food was good but limited 🙁 After having food, we had some more caffiene and cool drinks. And finally the pool for another one hour.

It was really an enjoyable trip. A lot of free cool drinks, caffiene and games. I realized that how much does it cost a company like M$ or Google to keep their employees with them.

PS1 : I am not infected. It was just a trip.

PS2 : Thanks Banga for being a wonderful guide 🙂

May 9, 2008 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?

May 6, 2008 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 😀

May 6, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Internet, LAN, Life, Wireless

Shifted to OBH

Finally after a lot of mess and competition, I shifted to OBH yesterday. Finally, I am free from the job of a UPS restarter every few hours. And the damn job was not paid 😛 Kaidi(prisoner) number 200501043 has been shifted from NBH-C-8 to OBH-117 😀

I am expecting a lot of benefits from OBH to make my techie life easier and happier. The wireless here goes down at last after NBH and GH. And if wireless is down here, then its down everywhere 😀 There are more access points per person in OBH. The wireless works consistently. No break ups. The UPS here doesn’t suck.

Apart from technological advantages, there are other benefits as well. My room faces the newest OBH extension block and there are tress all over the place. Its cool even in the hottest part of the day. And night is a pleasure here. I wake up in the morning, open my door and what I see is really an eye candy. Only trees. Nothing else is visible here. I am loving this place.

Its a law of nature. With advantages come disavantages ( I don’t know why I suck so much in framing sentences 🙁 ). Room and bathRooms are a bit smaller here as compared to NBH and all my friends are in still NBH 🙁 I miss you guyz. Make if fast to OBH… please…

May 4, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Internet, LAN, Life, Servers, Wireless

Things are moving finally

After a struggle of months if not years, I can see things moving finally. A big big credit goes to Rishabh Mukherjee, who was always there to offer his help whenever I had a problem with administration ( specific to IT infrastructure at IIIT). Yesterday, there was a meeting in which a test plan was worked out for the newly arrived access points for the OBH extension block. For a few weeks, they’ll be tested in one of the OBH wings and the performance will be logged. Also, a lot of changes will be seen in IT infrastructure at IIIT in near future. Now plans are coming out of meeting rooms and they are not limited to papers and emails anymore. A big thanks for Shatrunjay Sir for this.

May 1, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Back to Life

Vacations have become much more enjoyable since a few days .. 2-3 days to be precise … atul and mahaveer is back and sambhav will be back in a few days … coffee shop @ IIIT is THE place that I’ll never forget throughout my life. there are a LOT of memories related to THE place 😀 Its one of the spots where we friends socialize 😛 Since last three days we are spending a lot of time out there … two days before yesterday 3 hours ( 9PM – 12AM)… day before yesterday 2 hours ( 10PM – 12AM) and yesterday 4 hours ( 9:30PM – 1:30AM) .. OMG .. it feels so good sitting out there and breathing fresh/cool air …

PS : Sachin is leaving today … a$$hole X-(

April 29, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Graphics, Hardware, Internet, LAN, Life, Monitors, Motherboards, Servers, Speakers

My New Computer

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 🙂