IIIT

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 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 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 Computers, Internet

shocked

I am just shocked when I happened to know the bandwidth rates in United States and India.

India

  • We pay something around $62000 for 8mbps (upload + download) per year.

United States

  • 8mbps upload + 3mbps download is easily available for $1100 per year.

We pay $62000/$1100 ~ 50 times more and that too for less resources. What a world we live in 🙂

 
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 🙂

 
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 😀