Life

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 🙂

 
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 🙂

 
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 🙂

 
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 😉

 
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.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Life, Tips n Tricks

Morning Walk

Its 7 am again 🙂 and I am back with something new. But this time its different. This time its not the case that I want to sleep but I am not able to. I have come up with a solution to the problem. Because only 2 working days (today and tomorrow) are left for this semester, I need not sleep early (6AM) anymore and wake up early (1PM) for classes. Now I can sleep late and wake up whenever I want.

Since I have been skipping breakfasts and lunches since long, I’ll have breakfast daily from now on. I’ll go to bed at around 8:30am after having breakfast and will wake up at around 3:00pm and then I’ll run for coffee shop 😛 This routine will be followed strictly starting today with no exceptions except the exams 🙂

But there is one interesting addition to the daily schedule now. And that is Morning Walk. Since I will be up around 7am, I’ll regularly go for a morning walk. I was reading some documentation stuff and suddenly got attracted by the weather outside. I immediately locked my room and left for the walk. The wind was cool and soothing outside. I realized that the hostel is horribly hot 🙁 You can’t really have such a peaceful environment in day time. I walked down to the main gate. Now I think I have a badly screwed up vocabulary and I am not able to come up with words (how can I, I don’t even know the words) to express my feeling about that awesome morning walk. Ok.. enough .. you imagine the rest like birds were chirping and sky was clear and blah blah blah… But it was a nice experience 🙂

PS1 : Writing too much these days.

PS2 : End sems are approaching fast 🙁

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Life, Linux

Last Week Report

Its 7 am and again its the same raga. I can’t sleep 😛 I was trying to sleep since an hour now. I got up and thought of posting some more crap on the Internet. It was a very busy week for me. I wrote a lot of text which includes noting down the minutes of meetings, writing and replying to RFCs, writing wiki pages, writing blog post and replying to a lot of mails.

Last week students lab committee met network security audit team. The meeting went for 3 long hours, but we had a lot of discussions. Most of the discussions were positive and I am really optimistic about the improvements in performance of network in near future. I volunteered for writing down the minutes of meeting for such a long meeting 🙁 It took me more than 40minutes to write down the minutes of meeting.

As a part of my BTP, I am thinking of adopting an open source project and thinking of developing it during forthcoming summer. It would be real fun. For this I wrote my first ever RFC. It here if you wanna read it.

After that I created a wiki page on fedoraproject.org for the same. Its here.

I prepared a BTP report of 9 long pages. It took me around 3-4 hours. I still don’t believe I did it myself 🙂 Prepared a BTP presentation and that too myself. It consumed 2 hours of my time. I don’t know why we have to submit 10 page long BTP report. Every BTP may not be same and for some projects you can’t really write that long report. I could not really figure out what to write and wrote about a lot of related stuff to make it 9 page long. I think I could never understand some academic rules.

I wrote this “how to make a hollow iron sphere” blog post. I wrote it just for fun. But people got emotional and started proposing the solutions. And it turned out to be a patent :-O

2-3 Days back I met Dr. PJN regarding some of the network issues. We had a long discussion on some of the issues which includes setting up caches for proxy, deploying proxy authentication, mail forwarding issue and some other. It was a long meeting again. I wrote down the minutes of the meeting for this one as well. It took me around 30 minutes.

Day before yesterday, we had a students lab committee meeting for coming up with some solution to improve network performance. Again the same discussion. Meeting went on for more than one hour. This time also, I wrote down the minutes of the meeting. Again the same things with changed opinions.

And right now I am writing this blog since last 20 minutes 🙂

PS1 : Getting busy. Trying to cut down time wastage.

PS2 : Somebody please help me to get rid of checking mails every 1 minute 🙁 Its a real obstacle in production.

PS3 : Thanks smr for sharing this on google reader 🙂

PS4 : Guyz checkout this. ORB is going wild 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

How to make a perfect hollow iron sphere

Don’t just think that this is another howto where I am going to tell you people how to install/configure something so that after reading this you will be able to make a hollow iron sphere 😛 Actually, a lot of discussion has gone on how to really come up with a hollow iron sphere that is perfect.

We all went to SE class as usual. After 20-30 minutes, I got bored and was in a frustrating situation. I need not stay in the class but I could not come across a better way to kill time. Suddenly, this question came to mind “How one can really make a perfect hollow sphere?”. Pankaj was sitting next to me and I fired this question at him thinking that it would kill some time and may be in the meantime lecturer can catch us talking and throw both of us out of the class 😛 (didn’t really mean it, but for the sake of writing one can exaggerate).

Definition of perfect hollow iron sphere

A perfect hollow iron sphere is a sphere which is hollow from inside and there should be no hole through which air can pass from the core to the outer space and vice versa. The inner surface should be perfect with no deformations. The constraint is that you can’t join two hollow hemi spheres and make a hollow sphere out of it. After you have the hollow sphere, there should be absolutely nothing inside the hollow part (e.g. some material or whatever. air is permitted.).

Solutions

Pankaj tried really hard and proposed different solutions for making a hollow sphere. But none of them could really convince me and he can’t come up with an idea to make a hollow iron sphere. Sambhav and Ankush was sitting just in front of us. Pankaj shared the *million dollar problem* with them and asked them to come up with a solution. Pankaj thought that these guyz are nine pointers and may help him. But it was really disappointing that even they could not come up with an idea that can help us build a hollow iron sphere. Then the question was forwarded to Kiran, Deepak and Rishi as well. But everyone was equally disappointing. Below are some solutions proposed.

1. First solution was proposed by Pankaj that we somehow make two hollow hemispheres and then join them to make a hollow iron sphere. But this solution violates the definition of a perfect hollow iron sphere. So rejected.

2. Second solution was proposed by Pankaj again that we make a thin hollow sphere by beating an iron sheet and later deposit layers of iron on it. But this is practically impossible because when you will try to deposit the molten iron on the thin sheet, then the sheet itself will melt. So rejected.

3. Third solution was proposed by Sambhav that we make a ball of wax and put it in a container containing molten iron. We will leave a hole in the iron part so that wax can come out on heating to high temperatures. Now, I really doubt these guyz with high CGPAs. Can you ever think of this idea? This is like committing a suicide if inteviewer happened to ask that quesiton in your job interview. How can you think that wax will be solid at melting point of iron 🙂 So rejected.

4. Fourth solution was proposed by Ankush that we make a ball of clay and then we deposit iron layers on it and then we again cover it will a layer of clay. Now, I don’t really get what he was trying. Again a high CGPA victim. I think he was trying to make a hollow sphere of clay(?). So rejected.

Hint

You can’t use a material for the core whose melting point is higher that iron because you will not be able to remove it from the core once you deposited iron layers over it. You can’t even use a material for the core whose melting point is lower than iron because when you put molten iron over it, the core will melt and you’ll never have a hollow sphere. Just keep thinking.

While these people were putting forward there solutions, I was cursing them. I said that you people are now studying at undergraduate level and still you don’t know how to make a hollow iron sphere. This discussion lasted till the end of SE class and they could not come up with a solution. And if you are still reading this post, I think you are also curious about this question and dying to know the solution.

I have to say that this question is still mystery for all of us. Even I don’t know how to make a perfect hollow iron sphere. And by any chance or coincidence if you know the solution, please please leave the solution in the comments or give me a link.

PS1 : BTP report and presentation went fine. Profs were impressed 😛

PS2: Looking forward for summer vacations as an opportunity to get into a new world 🙂

PS3: Writing crap these days.

PS4: My earning on Google adsense crossed $10. So, I have got the money back that I spent on buying this domain 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Life

Random BC

I am trying to sleep since three hours now but I think I should give up now 😛 and do something creative like writing this post about random BC we had last night. One thing that everyone will agree is that we (IIITians) have excelled in doing BC after joining the institute. We sometimes do things as a part of BC which we can’t even think of doing if everybody is in normal mood. The following incident is an example of that.

I was writing this post when some one knocked my door hard enough to scare me. I immediately rushed to open the door. I openned it and saw Panakj in an excited state as if he is not virgin anymore 😛 He asked me to come to his room immediately. Me, poor soul uninformed about the actual happenings, rushed to his room and found that these guyz (Sambhav and Pankaj) were listening to ‘Achcha Sila Diya Tune Mere Pyar Ka‘ by ‘Attaullah Khan‘ at full volume on speakers at 3AM. I was like wtf?? Then Sambhav explained that he just found this f***ing awesome classical(?) song on dc and thought that everyone would like it 😛

And then started the BC session. Sambhav fired up dc++ again and started a search for ‘Altaf Raja‘. OMG!! It was like a session for paying tributes to these legendary singers. The songs followed were ‘Tum To Thahre Pardesi‘ by ‘Altaf Raja‘, ‘Pahle To Kabhi Kabhi Gam Tha‘ by ‘Altaf Raja‘, ‘Doli Uthi Hai Uski Shahnaiyon Ke Saath‘ by ‘Attaullah Khan‘ etc… Sachin was also with us. And later Alok also joined us. We were singing the songs in chorus with the singer as if we have gone mad. And we were laughing as if we have gone crazy.

Though nobody would ever like to listen to any of those songs, when it comes to BC everything is legal and we really enjoyed the BC session.

PS1 : 4 months vacations is a boon.

PS2 : BTP report and presentation this week 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Life

Afraid

Long time no see!!! After a long wait, I finally gathered the courage to write a blog post. I love to write blog posts but still I am not able to do so. I have so many things/events to blog about, but some of the things have gone really wrong. Wrong to an extent that I couldn’t even gather enough courage to write a blog post.

I am simple boy brought up in a village environment. When I was a child, I used to dream of being a teacher or professor. When I was in 8th standard, we moved to district headquarters and I continued my studies there. In 10th class, I heard about IIT for the first time and being a brilliant student, I started dreaming about getting into one of the IITs. I couldn’t get into IIT, but I landed here at IIIT-H. I used computer (day to day use) for the first time after I joined IIIT. I came here with the dreams that I’ll excel in studies and will land in some company with a handsome salary. Will pay back my loans and live a life full of happiness etc. etc…

Everything was going fine till the end of the first semester. But then I got hooked to this fu**ing awesome thing called Linux. Since then, I never looked back and ignored everything from studies to health to relations (except parental). I kinda become a Linux geek while exploring it day n night. I started writing blogs about Linux which eventually became quite popular. At the same time, I sucked in studies. Got 2 D grades in the same semester and there is only one semester in which I didn’t get a D.

Everything was again going fine and I didn’t care about studies anymore. But then they offered this fu**ing awesome course ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Management’ as HSSM. I don’t know why I opted for that course. I think because friends were opting for that and thinking that they’ll probably teach me for the mid sems and end sem. The professor showed some serious videos of evolution of some social entrepreneurs ( including Mohd. Yunus). I got too much hooked to this idea of entrepreneurship and developed a different point of view. I started reading about the startups and how people actually start startups. I read tons of text about them and realized that its not really a big deal to really get started. But there are train load of risks involved. Its probably the easiest way to go bankrupt. But what if you succeed!!!

After reading a lot I have thought that I’ll give it a shot. Being a guy with open source thinking and having no money to spend on crazy stuff like a startup, I started exploring open source ways of starting startups with no money involved. Current status is that I am working really hard get something DONE. I think I am ignoring other things more than one should. Didn’t have breakfast in Feb so far except Feb 18th, 19th. Didn’t have lunch in Feb so far except Feb 18th. Got fever since last 4 days. But I won’t give up. I got to do it.

Somebody may think that why the hell are you doing all this? Just study and get placed in a company with a very good salary. But my only concern is my thinking. Nobody is going to pay me for sitting in their luxurious office and exploring open source and participating in open source development. I am not after money, I am after satisfaction. I can’t just work for a company which develops shitty softwares which don’t work when you need them the most.

Right now, I am pretty nervous and afraid of doing anything. I am concentrating more on work. I almost read every blog post written by bloggers from IIIT just to digg how people really view this world. I want to thank smr for sharing wonderful stuff on google reader about the emerging startups.

I tag smr for writing a post about this entrepreneurship thingy. I think he is the most experienced person in this field whom I know personally.

PS: Got one of my recommendations noticed in Official Fedora Weekly Newsletter. Search for kulbirsaini in that newsletter 🙂