June 5, 2008 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.

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.

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 🙂