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 🙂

April 22, 2008 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 😀

April 21, 2008 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.

Squid Documentation/Tutorials – Status : DONE
IPTables Tutorial – Status : In progress.
Firewall And Proxy Server Tutorial – Status : Todo
Policy Routing with Linux – Status : Todo
IPRoute2 Howto – Status : Todo
Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control Howto – Status : Todo
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 😀

April 17, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Life, Linux, Windows

Live and Let Live

Long time no see!!! Well, I was really busy learning some new things and managing my new desktopS. Yes desktops. You read it right. Next post is going to be on my two desktops. Ok. Now I’ll concentrate on the motive of writing this post.

Three years ago, I joined IIIT with a blank mind in Computer Science. Me and few others tried to excell in using/managing/hacking/cracking/breaking computers while others tried to do their best in academics. Sounds good. By burning midnight oil almost everyday since the very first semester, I learnt a bit of tricks to fix certain hardware/software problems. People used to ask me to fix problems for them related to all this stuff. Back then it was fun and I really liked helping others. Be it a windows or a linux problem, if I knew the crack, I never denied someone asking for help.

But as time passed, more and more people started coming with more problems. Even hardware problems. And the traffic was highest in the beginning of the third semester when almost everyone bought a laptop in my batch and making wifi work in linux at that point of time was a bit tricky. Even then I never mind because I didn’t have any commitments to work on back then. I was free all the time and loved to help people.

I think I can say that buying a cellphone just with the intention that I would be in contact with my family was the biggest mistake of my life at IIIT. I have 3 freaking projects to work on and people don’t let me concentrate on them. If I don’t reply to mails or IMs, they shamelessly start calling me. I mean wtf, at times I may be trying to get the hang of something really important related to my work and the FUCKING call damages all the spirit. It still looks somewhat justified when someone asks me about some problem related to Linux. Dudes are coming with problems related to Windows Vista. I never used the fucking OS. I HATE WINDOWS. I hope you can feel the heat and my concern regarding my commitments.

Please for god sake don’t ask me for help at least related to windows. Though I would love to help you fixing any problem with your Linux system, but sometime I may be busy with other things that are more important to me. If I don’t reply to your mail or IM, please for God sake don’t call!!! And moreover, if you want to call, please don’t call between 08:00AM – 05:00PM and let me sleep peacefully. Its a request.

April 2, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hardware, Speakers

My new Altec Lancing 2.1 Speakers

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 😛

March 23, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Internet, LAN, Life

Wireless Crisis

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 🙂

March 22, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Life, Linux, Yum

I Feel Good

I have been posting a lot recently. But I am just doing all this to remember all these things few years down the line 🙂 To remember the things that makes me feel good.

I have been working on Yum and Drupal since 3 months now. I have learnt a lot about drupal in these three months. I am a drupal module developer now and also have written a new module which is inspired from a couple of existing modules but make things really simple 🙂 I also submitted a patch for one of the contributed modules.

As knowledge of Yum is necessary for my BTP, I am quite involved in testing the latest release and trying to get started with yum development. I am trying to learn the yum internals and the yum plugin development. To get started with yum plugin development, I picked up an existing plugin fastestmirror and wrote documentation for it. Few days back I submitted the documentation patch on yum-devel list and it is included in the latest release of fastestmirror. Here is the changelog. Apart from this I have also sent 2-3 small patches on yum-devel.

I have come a long way this semester. This semester was almost free. Only 6 classes and a tutorial per week. I was able to focus more on open source and now I feel good that I have finally started contributing to open source 🙂

March 21, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Life, Linux

Panic Mode

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 🙂

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.