Wassup !!

Its been a while since I posted and I sort of feel guilty (gulti ) when my blog gets hits without any new posts. So here it goes . Me sitting here, bunking AI class to search for my cycle which miraculously moved 50 meters all by itself . The last post I made here was before my grueling GRE exam in july I guess. So whats been happening since then ??(at least for me to remember sometime when I look back )

1. Got a 1330 in GRE after I thought I almost screwed up my verbal. Was very happy to see some 1300ish score after almost considering to cancel reporting my scores
2. Semester Results came and I managed to again get just above 9 (thanks to shivshankar )
3. Placements begin and I became a regular visiting student  of the department of  TP, getting shortlisted for all interviews and getting kicked out for higher studies or some arbit reason or lack of preparation.. (:P) . In this process, I won an iPod ( direct i contest at coll), couple of t-shirts and goodies which amounted to more than my registration fee I paid for my placements
4. Final year comp sci is so much fun though we have loads of classes. Bunked a cycle test for the first time and my I got an official less than 10 score in cycle test finally
5. TOEFL was another big thing. Managed to score a 108.
6. Writing SOP s shortlisting Univ s . The ROTGAD stuff ..
7. Hell lot of chatting and planning of trips during vacations with friends. Especially the placed ones at the helm of planning commission . Regular carrom at sports center and OC shots . The increasing crowd under the Love tree of garnet (latest addition nami aka rishi hari )
8. Got a paper accepted in 8th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security. Got scholarship for attending the conference in Japan this December. Really excited about it.
9. Friends getting placed, Placement treats, Boycotting mess for non-veg food in the name of insects. The  newyr at bombay plans.
10. Spending  Diwali with friends in Trichy. The bangalore trip for DRDO, watching “Wake up Sid” after the interview. The night out in trichy after watching peranmai with shriram,venki , archit, archana ,jd and RK. ROFL at jenny’s coffee shops at 2 in the night

This is what comes to mind when I think about whats been happening for the last 4 months.

The V-intro from V for Vendetta

This is one of the my most favourite ones. I remember watching it in Hyderabad I-MAX big screen with a big gang of friends after my JEE.  I was then, so drawn to this dialogue that had a flurry of words with v’s. I googled for the dialogue but couldn’t find it anywhere. So downloaded the subtitles and stripped the text off and here it is. The dialogue of V introducing himself to Evey after ambushing the virulent and venal officers trying to molest her.

In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate.This visage, no mere veneer of vanity is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance, a vendetta held as a votive not in vain,for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose. So let me simply add that it’s my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.

Now, with GRE impending,  I can comprehend to it to some extent but  the bizarre effect  enthralling me after reading those words is very much  extant.

The Coorgh Trip

I had a wonderful week end at Coorgh with Shanky, Shriram, Sab, Prem and RK. Me and Shriram had come to banglore the previous night and stayed at Shanky’s place. The next day morning at around 5.30, we were all geared up to begin our journey.  We had hired a Chevrolet for our trip and the first thing that we were happy about was that the driver  knew tamil and he was very  gregarious. He was pretty much our age and looked like a Kanada hero.

Mc Donald’s :

The first place we stopped en route to Coorgh was at this petrol bunk which incidentally had a Mc Donalds in its premises. And it had been long time since any of us went to Mc D, so we had our early breakfast at around 7 here at Mc D.

Tibet Camp :

This place was like a mini Tibet in India. This was the first place en route our journey to Coorgh. The place was a Buddhist monastery. It was calm except for all the noise that we made. The place was serene with Buddhist monks glorifying their traditions. I particularly was amazed at the way they had decorated the deity. But one surprising thing that I noticed was that, they served Mirinda and Pepsi as holy water!!!. There were also piles of lays and maaza packets stacked in front of the altar, that we were curious as to when they would be distributed. We spent about forty minutes at this place and started clicking pictures. The Bird Sanctuary : We actually didn’t cover this because we thought we were getting late and were more interested in watching the other “birds” up hill .

The Water Rafting :

This was our next stop after the Buddhist monastery. We got to see our first “birds” and they were awesome . This place is meant for adventurous rafting, but since the water stream wasn’t great, they were only offering a mild still water rafting(though actually the water was flowing slowly). Costs about 100 per head. We soon got ourselves prepared for rafting. Oars on hands and life jackets on, we were all set for a forty five minute rafting. Should have been around a kilometer. The guide who came with us was equally interested in experimenting with different stunts on rafting. We took all possible routes and drove under close branches that were hanging down from the banks. Not to forget about the debate that me, rk and shanky got into before starting the ride ( censored but the result was evident ).

Coorgh:

The next stop was at Coorgh. It was already 12 in the afternoon and we resumed our journey to Coorgh. It was about half an hour travel from the rafting spot. And this time, wild bamboos on either side of the road greeted us with memories that would stay etched evergreen. All through the time, we had a really nice time teasing either sab or shanky. Occasionally I got entangled in the course of fun-making but managed to remain impalpable. We reached Coorgh at about 2 in the afternoon. We had booked a room at Rajdarshan. Cost us 1600+tax for a 4 member room which six of us shared. We spent about ten fifteen minutes refreshing in the room. The room was commodious. It even had a bathtub. We watched TV for a while and settled down for lunch at a local hotel. Our bird watching continued and we were now like syncing with a flock.

Abbey Falls :

I remember coming to this place when I was in my eighth standard. It was a steep walk down from the entrance to the main falls. Unfortunately, we were only allowed to watch the water falls from a distance, which shattered our hopes of wetting our feet. Next we proceeded to the view point. There was in fact no actual view point. We even saw a nice location for viewing the crevices that we named it a “new view point”. And then we were off to Rajas Seat.

Raja’s Seat :

This was supposed to be a small park with musical fountain, but turned out to be a trekking for us. With bird watching at the peaks, we first filled our quench for snacks with few stops at the bhel-puri shops and then went on inside the park. But then, we saw quite a few people trekking down the slope from the park. This wasn’t supposed to be a trek, but it sort of turned out to be a short one. We went up and down the hilly slopes and clicked lots of pictures. Finally we returned to the park after about one and half hours of mild trekking and were on time for the musical fountain. Once this got over, we were off to some shopping and finally dinner, back at the restaurant. Had a sumptuous dinner and returned back to room. (In between convo with nami on phone to be discussed later in a diff blog post ). Finally we were back in room, transferred the picks to comp and took few more pics and started watching X-men movie. In all it was a nice enjoyable day 1 .

Day 2 was more of travelling. At Coorgh there aren’t much places to visit for a 2-day trip. The only place left for us was “Thala Cauvery”. So we were headed there the next day morning at around 7  in the morning. We had a nice breakfast in the Udupi hotel ( Not to forget shriram telling us that there is a Sangeetas in Coorgh also :P )

Thala Cauveri :

This according to myths is the origin of the river Cauvery. I had been to this place in my childhood. The journey to this place from Coorgh was awesome. It was totally misty and it was raining intermittently.  Finally when we reached the place, the visibility was almost like 10 feet, beyond which u can see no more. Some of my friends had built up a mental picture of this place as some cave from which cauvery would be emanating with a sprout. I had warned them about this place being not to what they had in mind. And it so happened that there was a big pond sort of thing in which, there was a small marked spot, meant for worship. This they called was where cauvery originated. But we noticed that the water kept coming out at a good rate by looking at the water coming out constantly from the pond. But this place was really worth visiting for two things. One the climate,being the highest altitude  in the vicinity and second the place is well maintained as u can evidently see from the pictures.

After this, we pretty much had nothing left to visit at Coorgh and started our journey downhill. We planned to touch upon Mysore on our way back, but we had to reach Bangalore early enough to visit a friend’s house and catch the train back to Chennai at 10.45 pm. So we decided to just visit the palace and return as soon as possible from Mysore. And this was when we really got bored listening to the Hindi songs the driver had. So we got down, brought an empty CD and burnt it with AR R’s Tamil songs ( yes we carried not one but three laptops )

Mysore Palace :

Due to time constraints, we didn’t have time to go inside the palace. We roamed around in the outskirts of palace and clicked pictures. Birds were there aplenty here too . Stayed here for about half an hour and started our journey back to Bangalore.

Mc Donald’s Revisited :

Now this was totally because we ran out of charge in our laptops and had to transfer pics from cam to laptops. So we planned to charge our laptops in Mc D and also have a something to eat before reaching Bangalore.  We finally reached Bangalore at around 7 in the evening. Dropped off Shanky, Sab and Prem in a local bus stop and we headed on to Archana’s home. She had invited us for dinner. Had a nice time at her place and at around 9.30, Shriram, Me and RK got into an auto and left for the railway station.

In all it was an awesome time. We had been planning such trips for a long time and each and every time, some thing or the other would come up and we would have to call it off. This time it went on well except that, Bur couldn’t make it. We all missed him in the trip.

Crazy Dreams…

I dont remember my dreams. Never could I recollect what I had dreamt about  in the last night. A few exceptions are this and the one that woke me up this morning. They would rather come under the category of nightmares.  For the past few days, I have been trying really hard to read this big book (Barrons) of hundreds of words that even makes a month a small time for an exam. I dont reckon preparing for any exam like this in a very long long time.

So here goes the dream and I was so terrified that I totally remember the details. It was a sandy beach. In fact lots of sand … and then there were couple of  my friends and we were all happily playing and chit chatting. And suddenly this guy starts talking about GRE and  he gave me the following shocking news

1. GRE from now on is for a score of 2200

2. No math in GRE and its only  the verbal section completely

3. And a new edition of barrons with 103 word lists is newly released .

And then he went on to tell me that some guy wrote it in a jiffy and got some 2188 .. I have no idea how I remember so much from a dream ..  I just got up with a shock, messaged two ppl who were giving GRE today and then slept  back.  May be all these happened because I was trying to do 4 word lists yesterday  to compensate for my slow pace of current preps.

In all, I just wanna be done with it and move on to other things. I have been battered since the day, I had planned to give GRE. First it was with getting a passport which almost took me 2  visits to chennai passport office and finally one visit to trichy pass port office and now I get awkward dreams of the examination. On one side, I am having an awesome summer, on the other side, I am really getting abused by these GRE preps. The only thing that I am sharpening in this process is the pencil that I use to keep track of the words

The two ways of life !!

I believe there are two ways to live the life. Rather, I should say, I have convinced myself that there are only two ways to live a life. One way is to follow the wise advices of people, like your parents, your well-wishers who have seen it through in their life. The other way is to not listen to them, make mistakes of your own, and then realise the importance of those words that were rendered at you earlier in your life to which u never bothered to heed.

I believe eventually everybody gets to learn this. That, whatever you choose, if u are yearning for a success, you need to follow those golden words sometime or other. The interesting part is when you choose the second option in your life, you are anyway gonna end up joining the roads of people who have chosen the first path. But what makes you different and advantageous is that, you have learned it all by yourself and convinced yourself of the things that you have become.

I believe, I chose the second option a couple of years ago, and slowly planning to join the road I would have been into if I had not made the choice. So coincidental that I was recently reminded of this

“You dont change when you are shown a better option. You only change when you dont have any other option.”

But I have learnt a lot. Things that can’t be expressed through words and can only be understood. And then the vicious circle continues. You may then understand why you were being advised on the first place and how much people had cared about you.

PS : You know you are a topcoder when you get so philosophical after losing your rating !!! ( )

Jaunty Jackalope Review

Ever since jaunty released , I had cleared made up my mind not to try it out. I thought 6 months was too little time to spend with intrepid . I was completely configured and running smoothly on intrepid that I never felt the need for upgrading to the next version though I heard about the new notification system or the awesome boot up time . But yesterday night , I was crazy and wanted to do something and installed jaunty . So this is sort of my review. Now what made me so crazy was that , I had failed in all my attempts to install amarok 2.1 in intrepid . It just wouldn’t install . All it did was install amarok 2.0.1 and i downloaded the source of 2.1 and compiled and tried to install. Still failure . So I was determined to do something successful and was convincing myself about the upgrade . So then came the confusion of whether to go for kubuntu or ubuntu . Because some of the kubuntu plasma screen shots were just awesome and inviting . I some how settled with ubuntu and gnome .

At first , the Live CD itself was fast . I couldnt see any lag and I tried to see if it had the latest drivers for my nvidia graphics card ( this sort of screwed the first boot after my installation ) . It downloaded the drivers succesfully and thinking it was a normal install , had asked me to restart . I chucked it and went along to install jaunty and the installation was also quick . Using Ext4 now . And then the first boot struck the panic .

Since I had downloaded the nvidia drivers in my live session to check if drivers do exist, it had downloaded it on to the RAM and marked it to be used on the next boot which happens to be my first boot after installing . But sadly the downloaded drivers are no more because it was temporarily on RAM and the Xorg crashed saying not able to find the nvidia driver modules.I recovered from that and then went on to configure the system ( first update in FB that I am into jaunty now ) . Then I went on to download the proper nvidia drivers this time on to my / and enabled it . Installed compiz , and transferred all the config files from intrepid that I had taken back up to jaunty  . All my themes and Icons , fonts , splash screens , GDM s from intrepid are now on jaunty . In about 2 hours , I was totally settled with Jaunty . This is what I really liked about Ubuntu when compared to Fedora . If I was doing the same process in Fedora , it would have taken me easily about a day or more . I got everything installed in Jaunty in a Jiffy from realplayer , texmaker , vlc , amarok , php5 , falsh players and stuff . Did all changes to bashrc , fstab , etc etc .

In general , I was really happy to have switched to Jaunty for the following

1. Awesome boot up time . It booted off in some 20-25 secs .
2. The system was a bit fast now .
3. Ext 4 is something new
4. The new notifications
5. The new usplash and GDM .
6. Was surprised to see the new Xorg server work fine without any of the so called reported probs .

I don’t think I had any probs apart from the initial nvidia screw up and one pidgin screw up . I had added a buddy pounce in my pidgin to shut down pidgin when this somebody@gmail.com comes online . And looks like the pounce was activated each time I tried starting pidgin and that “somebody” was online . Gave some segmentation fault because I was trying to kill pidgin from itself I guess .  Apart from all these jaunty looks new and exiting and yeah , I finally had amarok 2.1 in my jaunty and it was making good progress towards to a stable release with all features of amarok 1.4 . From now on , I guess all that is between upgrading from one ubuntu release to another is just 4 hours of work and a really fast internet connection

And I am mirroring the repos for jaunty from IIT M tomoro . So ppl who need it can get it from me .. or I ll put it up in coll when I am back
Any reviews or followups , leave it in comments please .

Now I am Sleep Lifting !!!

Things in my house are as old as me . Things like TV , refridgerator , cot etc . There was this refridgerator which my  parents were planning to get replaced with a new one . It was a Voltas one .. been used for 19 yrs and I actually remember breaking the door handle couple of times.

Suddenly I get up this morning and I was surprised to see a brand new refridgerator in place. So I felt a bit nostalgic and enquired where the old fridge was . My mom was like freaked out ..

I hadnt slept properly for the past few days and I was off  to bed early ( I mean around 10.30 in the night )  . And the new refridgerator had come at around 11 in the night . And my mom tells me that it was I who helped the delivery guy bring the new refridgerator into the house and take the old one  out . And she also told me I almost missed dropping the fridge and the delivery guy shouted at me for a moment . I helped them move the things and went and slept off again   .

Yeah guess that was my first sleep lifting job . Thank  God I didnt drop  anything . May be I shouldnt go to bed that early

Making a Screencast in Linux !!

Making small utilities in Linux is fun . There are a hell lot of small tools in linux that when you put together , make cool things. I made a few this week when I was bored after watching “House” continuosly.
There are three things I am gonna put up here .

• Making a screencast of your desktop .
• Making a recursive video
• Opening a man page in a pdf viewer  .

1. Making screencast of your desktop :

The main motivation behind this is Topcoder and Petr(yeah the target red coder … he is an Alien too ) . Petr used to screencast his topcoder matches to the world .  So I started looking into the net for tools to capture my desktop as a video file ( not that I wanted to screencast my topcoder matches . Would be pathetic )  .  So I came across a couple of GUI’s for windows and then Abhilash was out looking for the same thing ( may be his screencast would be interesting . He types at an amazing 90 wpm ) . By this time I had got my hands on this tool ffmpeg which had the option to grab the video from anything . So little bit of googling lead me to a site which gave me this

 ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq ~/Desktop/out.mpg

But sadly this didnt work for me . And then  I went on to read the man pages of ffmpeg and this is when i found it buggy to read the man page of a big command in terminal and  I went on to create a small utility to open man pages in evince (later on this ) . But this command didnt work for me and gave some error in the input format.  Reading the man pages, -f is for forcing  the source format  which is “grabbing the X11 display ” ( the desktop of X actually ) . The -s argument is for the output video resolution size and found that setting it to wxga was the mistake  . I changed it to suit my resolution which is xga . -r is for the frame rate in fps .  -i gives the input file which in our case is the :0.0 display . -sameq says the ffmpeg to use the same video quality as produced by the source. You might wanna remove this incase you want a video file of small size. And finally this command worked .

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s xga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq ~/Desktop/1.mpg

Now , this is not an easy command to write and I wont be needing it often . So , I thought why not make a script out of it .  So put the following in a file and named it as “capturevideo” and changed the command to

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s xga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq ~/Desktop/$1.mpg

so that I can get the output file name from the command line . Now all I had to do was  export my PATH variable to make it search my /home/Sathya/Tools folder where I have kept all these small tools . Opened my .bashrc file and added

export PATH=$PATH:/home/Sathya/Tools

and then finally did a

chmod u+x /home/Sathya/Tools/capturevideo .

And Bingo !!! capturevideo sample  created a sample video of my desktop operations . I actually made a recursive video out of it .

2. Making a Recursive video using Step 1 :

Actually I stumbled upon this by mistake . Follow the following steps to make a recursive video .

1. Run the above capturevideo command .
2. Open the video file that is being created while the command is still running and put it to full screen
3. Keep watching till you feel you have recursed enough in the video .

Now press a ‘q’ in the prompt of capturevideo and enjoy watching the recursive video . Here is a screen shot of my recursive video  . This will create a linear recursion . In case you wanna double up, open it in two players and capture .

3. Opening a man page directly in your pdf viewer.

I  had already blogged about a part of this here on how to convert  a man page to pdf here . Basically man has a -t option which creates the ps form of  the man pages . I redirect that to a file and store it as a post script file and use the ps2pdf utlity to convert the file to pdf. Till now is what i usually used to do . But this was getting irritating since each time I had to delete the files created after I am done viewing the page.  Hence this is what I did .

man -t $1 > /tmp/$1.ps
ps2pdf /tmp/$1.ps /tmp/$1.pdf
evince /tmp/$1.pdf
rm -rf /tmp/$1.ps /tmp/$1.pdf

Now we  store this in a file called manpdf and then do the following to give it permissions to execute .

chmod u+x /home/Sathya/Tools/manpdf

And from now on , doing a manpdf ls would directly open the man page in evince and after you are done reading the man page , it  will delete the temporary files created in the /tmp folder. Is’nt that really simple

Any more easy utilities are welcome as comments .

Klueless – Online Treasure Hunt

People interested in treasure hunt can check out this . I had a really great time working on the questions with nutty . And ofcourse a big one to Abhilash .  It was his code for labyrinth that i had reused  ( On the lines of good coders code and great coders reuse ) .  The treasure hunt is still on. I guess i ll keep the database active for few more weeks atleast since I see people play it daily .

The Private Magic Show at Sun Lab

Today was one of my lucky days . I was in sun lab with my laptop , and had gone out for dinner . When I came back , was  surprised to see abhilash with a set of cards and AJ sitting in front of him . I went shouting “Hey me too , for the magic trick ” . And hence the private magic show of AJ began in the sun lab , with abhilash ,me and srinivas watching him do amazing things with cards .

I was a bit late , had missed a trick . So i  pulled a chair and sat down and the next half an hour was breath-taking . I have watched  lots of videos of David  Blaine’s Street magic . I was amazed at those tricks at first but was convinced at times that they were all fake . But this one by AJ totally blew my minds off. I happened to see abt 7-8 of his card tricks and i was really amazed to see how a couple of hands , a mouth and a pack of cards could take you out for an awesome entertaining journey. And then finally , he made me do all the magic. I am gonna explain this .

AJ  : So you wanna do some magic ?

Me :  Ofcourse yeah .

He then gave me a deck of cards and then,

AJ : Now you are the magician . As a magician what would you want me to do ?

Me : Pick a card ( I couldnt think of anything else )

AJ Picked a card randomly , I was holding the deck all the time . And then he asked me to shuffle the cards . Now I did all possible shuffling to make sure he was not cheating . And then he asked me do deal  a set of cards  of my own choice . So i arbitly cut a  few of cards . While he still had the card which he originally chose , I divided the cards I dealt into two sets .

AJ : Now the first deck gives me the  value and the second card gives me the suit.

And then voila !! He opened the first card of first deck . Turned out to be  Queen of Spades. Opened the first card of the other deck , which turned out to be Six Dice . And then he opened the card that he had initally taken . Believe me or not , it was a Queen of dice . I was like OMG . He had not touched the entire deck of cards except for choosing the first card. I dealt all the cards, shuffled them all up myself. And still this guy pulls off a beautiful trick and amazes me ( and still says I ‘am the magician ) .

I feel really lucky to have been the one of very few to get his private magic show . I have seen some of my friends do magic tricks , but this one just blew me off. Totally entertaining.

Hats off AJ . You totally rock !!! .

PS : AJ you are “deeeeee”  magician