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.
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 🙂
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?
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 😀
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…
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.
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 🙂
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-(
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!!!