Life

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 😀

 
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…

 
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.

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Back to Life

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-(

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Tips n Tricks

Relax

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!!!

 
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.

Dual Monitors

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.

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.

Processors Cabinets Front Processors Cabinets Back

BTW, the new cabinet has this awesome small LCD display for displaying temperature and other system activities.

LCD Display Temperature

My room now looks like this …

Two Desktop Computers

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 😀

Two monitors Display

Adios,

Kulbir Saini aka General Bordeaux 🙂

 
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 😀

 
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.

  1. Squid Documentation/Tutorials  – Status : DONE
  2. IPTables Tutorial – Status : In progress.
  3. Firewall And Proxy Server Tutorial – Status : Todo
  4. Policy Routing with Linux – Status : Todo
  5. IPRoute2 Howto – Status : Todo
  6. Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control Howto – Status : Todo
  7. 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 😀

 
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.

 
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 😛