by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Google, GSOC, Hacking, LAN, Life, Linux

Whats keeping me busy lately

Previous week was a bit more busier than I actually expected. I wonder why I have to attend a lot of meetings. There were 3-4 of them last week.

Constant complaints about wireless are killing and sometime frustrating. As rishabh pionted out “Become a sysAdmin at IIIT” as a never do thing. I don’t agree completely. But sometimes you get frustrated enough by the complaints and incompetence of your colleagues to say that. Keeping that apart, being a sysAdmin is real fun. You get to play with most critical servers at the place. You learn things that you will never learn in a course or project. (I wonder what we actually learn in a course 😛 One thing I can immediately point out is the attendence management.)

Apart from above, I have been working on IntelligentMirror, my GSOC project and its sister project Youtube Caching using squid. I have achieved 100% youtube caching without altering the refresh patterns in squid. That means your squid will not malfunction and will cache youtube videos successfully and in a browsable fashion 🙂 Going to release version 0.2 very soon. Working on caching Google and metacafe videos as well.

And last but not the least, sleep time has increased from 6-8 hrs to 12-16 hrs/day 😛

PS1 : This is the funniest post, I have ever seen. A must see for MS by research people 😛

PS2 : Also maruti has posted some nice crap 😛

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Will SKP and ORB get their MS?

It seems to me that right now entire IIIT is worried about just two guyz. And the two guyz are SKP and ORB. Why??? Because they are going to get their MS soon. :O Yes!!!! This is an event which will never happen again ever in history of mankind. And I am one of those guyz who are are waiting for the heavenly event to happen. But I am not the only one who is waiting for this. From bloggers, it includes Pati himself, Rama, Shark etc.. and thousands of non-bloggers. In reaction to shark’s blog, after struggling for hours I made these 😛 Click on the image and read clearly in higher resolution.

SKP ORB MS Comic

SKP ORB MS Comic

No offense to anyone … this is just for fun 🙂

PS : @SKP, ORB don’t kill me sir jee….

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Hacking, Life, Yum

Sudden affinity for conferences

I never liked to attend any conferences irrespective of the theme and goal of the conference for the past three years. But after attending two-three conferences in recent months and coming across new people with matching interests, I am suddenly looking forward to attend any open source/linux/entrepreneurship conference in hyderabad or nearby cities. BTW, are you planning to attend Eclipse Demo Camp 2008 – Ganymede Edition in Hyderabad on 25th June?

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Google, Internet, Review, Tips n Tricks

Mouse gestures in Gmail

Did you checkout the gmail labs thingy on the settings page in gmail? They have introduced many features to enhance the email experience.  One of the features is mouse gestures which looks pretty cool and makes browsing in between mails very easy 🙂 To enable, go to setting page in Gmail and then to Labs tab in there and enable ‘Mouse Gestures’. Now go to any of the email folder. Open a message. Right click and hold. Now moving your mouse to left will take you to the next message in folder. Similarly, moving the mouse to right will take you to the previous message and moving the mouse upwards will take you back to the folder 😀 Thats just awesome. Hopefully this will save some of my time while browsing the all time flooded gsoc list 🙂

Here is a pic of the gesture.

Gmail Mouse Gestures

Here is a video as well 🙂

PS : I didn’t even realize that the previous post was my 50th post 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on LAN, Life

I want reservation

Well, enough has been said about reservation by millions of bloggers and other people who express their views on Internet either by blogging or forums or any other medium. And most of the people ( the ones who fall in the non-reserved categories and the ones who think its not a good idea) have opposed it. FYI, I fall in OBC (other backward classes), but I never used this because I had enough talent to defeat the problems myself.

We (the IIITians), time and again boast of no reservation at this holy place. And I am also proud of this as this brings THE talent to our institute which makes it THE place that it is. You might be wondering why the heck I want reservation??

Well, recent happenings have forced me to think in a tangential direction. The increasing number of non-IIITians at IIIT is one of them. Right now at IIIT, ratio non-IIITians/IIITians is more than 2. Here, I count IIITians as all the students who came to IIIT under UG, PG (excluding MSIT, check this. It doesn’t list MSIT in IIIT’s PG curriculum) and PhD programs. My friends’ requests for rooms in OBH have been denied because there are no rooms left. Rooms allotted to my friends (they were about to shift in a few days) have been given to outsiders without even informing them. One fine day they came with their luggage to OBH and found out that their rooms have been given to some other people (non-IIITians). All BC spots (Coffee Shop, NBH main gate, playgrounds etc.etc…) are now over-populated. These are just a few things to mention. The people living in the campus right now, know them much better. All resources (bandwidth is the one about which I am worrying the most) are now shared.

All this said, I want some reservation in IIIT for IIITians. May be I am being a bit paranoid, but I am serious about whatever I said.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Internet, Life, Linux

I am fedora’ed

Ever since I joined IIIT, I was getting closer and closer to Fedora. For almost the first two and a half years, I was a user and explorer (not the internet one 😛 ). I learnt to use and hack many things as I kept climbing up. Few months ago, I stepped up one more stair and started participating in development channels (mainly #yum).

Though I was not really developing anything, I was reading the source code and was constantly trying to break things. Whenever I happened break something successfully, I discussed it over the mailing list or irc and get it fixed. It was like a prerequisite to get started with the actual development.

Then my project was accepted for GSOC and I knew that this will really be a huge breakthrough to get started with actual development for open source. I was damn excited as I saw the time coming when I will give back to the open source community.

These days, I am feeling fedora in everything I do. Being a developer, you get surrounded by Fedora too much that you see Fedora everywhere. I use Fedora all the time. Whatever I code get pushed to Fedora Hosted. Whatever I write, again gets reflected at Planet Fedora. I am now addicted to reading blogs from Planet Fedora. They give you a nice place to host open source stuff, as in Fedora People 🙂 You get an email address [kulbirsaini AT fedoraproject DOT org] , which you can show off in your friend circle 😛 And thats all my routine these days.

🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Google, GSOC, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Yum

Recent Happenings

  1. Entire wifi was down for almost two hours today. Emergency situation. I called whoever I could but just wasted time and money. Wifi admin would have felt totally surprised after getting 25-30 missed calls from my number 😛 Pinged back after an hour and things were back in tune. Thank god!!
  2. Celebrated Yum Bug Day today. We fixed and closed a lot of bugs. Was a very good experience.
  3. GSOC project is going fine.
  4. IntelligentMirror is now hosted on fedorahosted.org 🙂 Checkout the source code here.
  5. Hooked to Gossip Girls 🙂
  6. Playing cricket at 6AM after night out is now becoming a habit. Will post about it sometime 🙂
  7. Duration and frequency of BC sessions is on the rise. OBH really rocks 🙂
  8. Intake of caffeine is on the rise as well. Thanks to OBH coffee machine 🙂
  9. Chatting a lot these days. Don’t ask why ? 😛
  10. Blogged a lot this month 🙂

🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, LAN, Linux, Servers, Success

Students Lab Comittee Meet – 1

Students Lab Comittee had a few meetings with Rawat sir before he joined IIIT. A lot of things were discussed and things finally started moving when he joined IIIT.

Past week we had a meeting with Rawat sir where a lot of things were discussed. We finally decided to pick up problems one by one and kill them to restore the system health. We picked up proxy for this week. Our task was to analyze the hardware, software, load, performance and configuration files on the machine and suggest improvements. Well, I did that and have already submitted a report to Rawat sir. The details are beyond the scope of this post. Once approved, these improvements will be deployed this Sunday.

I am pretty much excited about the near future 🙂 Hope the system will be in good health soon.

 
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 🙁

 
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 🙂