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 )
- 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
- Semester Results came and I managed to again get just above 9 (thanks to shivshankar )
- 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
- 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
- TOEFL was another big thing. Managed to score a 108.
- Writing SOP s shortlisting Univ s . The ROTGAD stuff ..
- 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 )
- 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.
- Friends getting placed, Placement treats, Boycotting mess for non-veg food in the name of insects. The newyr at bombay plans.
- 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 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 !!! ( )
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 .
Go Back
If you have come this far , then it means you are wrong . Now Go Back , take a deep breath and start thinking again
PS : For those who have no clue what this is all about , this is a clue for the online treasure hunt Klueless for Vortex Check it out here
Life and the paradox
It so happens that we are never sure of what we actually want . When I’am so free , I used to think , why is life so boring , can’t I have a busy day . And when I have my hands full , I think why am I doing all this work . Can’t I just be free for a moment . I am never sure of what I wanted . I still dunno why i am posting this , but you see , something tingled my brain to stop thinking about debugging a code i wrote for the “Pete Mitrichev Contest 3 “ and start writing on some thing . I still can’t figure out why i have been so dull for the past few days or why my mom keeps saying that ” Nowadays you talk to people only when you dont have your laptop around !! ” ( That includes when i watch some TV Series on the comp too ) .Life has changed . In my childhood days , I used to talk a lot to my parents. I used to tell them things that I found funny , things that I found mysterious and things that made an evening with a cup of tea pleasurable . I wish I was a child again . But then , there were lots of other things that I wish I got rid off then . Missing things make them special to you .
Things that are very significant and important to us may very well be worth not even a mention to others . I was walking by yesterday and could see a group of people organizing a culturals in a local govt college . To them what they were doing at the moment , meant a lot to them . But to some one who just gazes at them for a moment , its yet another insignificant thing compared to plenty other things happening around him . Its just like the view of variables in a block of code . Two blocks that don’t share a common variable are useless interacting with each other . But then should we be selfish enough to just keep thinking of things that only concern us or can we just lend an ear to some one who is virtually jumping to tell you something very special to him ? You never know the exact answer to such questions .
Perhaps this post will look silly to you or to me at some other point of time .:)
A Wednesday
This post was supposed to be a big one telling the wednesday story of mine.. I even wrote half a page .. but changed my mind and scrapped it all off..I am gonna put it in a nut shell
1. Working in sun lab in the early hours of day ( like 3.30 in the morning) is totally fun .
2. There are few things that can get classes cancelled and one of them is ” no water in hostels” ( got the whole morning hours cancelled !! ) .
3. I am to some extent good at carrom and I love playing the joker ( to knw more about the fun of being a joker in carrom ask venki and vi )
4. Never try to cross the first year fence by taking the cycle over it .. You can get oil spilled on your clothes … 
5. Writing in latex is fun after the initial hiccups.
6. Never give yourself to something that you dont plan to do in any case.. Now I am struck up with a prog contest that would run only on IE and has no description of any sort.
7 . And whn the time is 7 in the evening and u have an event to manage at pragyan , its time to get settled in sun lab with laptop
Now go back to step 1
I never thought I could stay for a week without watching a movie or tv series.
Using “at” command to schedule jobs in Linux
Everything has a strong motivation behind it and the reason i am writing on this is because it made downloading from torrents easy for me during the off-charge hours. I usually had to stay awake till 2 am in the morning and put it for download and then have to get up again at morning 8 to switch it off.I was too lazy to do something and at came to my rescue.And last month i usually dont get up by 8 in the morning and i used to overshoot my 1.5GB download limit.
You can always do the following using cron, but again at has its own speciality. While in case of cron , the job runs at the scheduled frame of time on everyday , at can be used to schedule jobs which dont happen regularly. Like my case, i didnt want to download everyday so had to put the download only whn i am at home .
So at command works like this
sathya@Phoenix:~$ at 11:30AMwarning: commands will be executed using /bin/shat> echo "I was executed at 11:30AM" > ~/Desktop/tempat> <EOT>job 30 at Sun Jan 18 11:30:00 2009sathya@Phoenix:~$
All the above command does is ,it prints the line “”I was executed at 11:30AM” at 11:30 AM . Since the command is run with a shell of its own, to see any sort of output displayed to the stdout , i redirect it to a file of my choice (~/Desktop/temp).There are many ways to specify the time for the at command . For a complete list on the date day , time formats chk /usr/share/doc/at-3.1.8/timespec which contains the exact definition of the time specifications.
You can now do a simple cat ~/Desktop/temp to read the output after 11:30 AM .
Now coming to options for at .
Use atq to know the current jobs in queue. Jobs that are running have a status as” =” and jobs to be scheduled have a status “a” .The displayed output is the format <job-id> <Time > <jobstatus> <user>. Each scheduled job has a unique ID usually numbered from 0
sathya@sathya@Phoenix:~$ atq 30 Sun Jan 18 11:30:00 2009 a sathya sathya@Phoenix:~$ Phoenix:~$
To know the command to be executed corresponding to a job id , use the following option of at -c <job-ID> . This displays all the details for the job including the variables used for the shell to be invoked for this job . And hence wht u see mostlty would be junk except for the last line which has the command to be executed. So use a tail option to read tht one alone.
sathya@Phoenix:~$ at -c 30 | tail -2 echo "I was executed at 11:30AM" > ~/Desktop/temp sathya@Phoenix:~$
To delete a job use atrm <job-ID> .
Now for ex ,sathya@Phoenix:~$ at 11:58AM warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh at> gnome-terminal at> <EOT> job 31 at Sun Jan 18 11:58:00 2009 sathya@Phoenix:~$
The above command as expected is supposed to open a terminal for u at 11:58 . But it doesnt . Because at by default does only console applications. To make GUI apps , all u need to do is a small modification ( thanks to akhil for pointing this out ).
sathya@Phoenix:~$ at 11:59AM warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh at> DISPLAY=:0 gnome-terminal at> <EOT>job 32 at Sun Jan 18 11:59:00 2009 sathya@Phoenix:~$
At command reads usually the commands from stdin but using the -f option allows us to read from a file.All variables except the $DISPLAY and $TERM are retained from the time the command was put into queue. All these variables and their associated values can be viewed using at -c <job-ID>.In case of using non console applications , u need to specify the $DISPLAY manually as shown above .
Ok so the final thing i ll be doing to start my “transmission bit torrent” at 2.00 am and stop it at 8.00 am is the following
sathya@Phoenix:~$ at 2.00AM warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh at> DISPLAY=:0 transmission at> <EOT> job 35 at Mon Jan 19 02:00:00 2009 sathya@Phoenix:~$ at 8.00AM warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh at> killall -r transmission at> <EOT> job 36 at Mon Jan 19 08:00:00 2009 sathya@Phoenix:~$
This solves the job of taking care of my downloads.And for a GUI version of this, use Ktimer. But u will have to kill yourself if u r gonna use it after having something cool “at” you . Any suggestions or improvements or new approaches can be put in comments
New Year at Theoretical Comp-Sci Lab
2008 ended with a bang for me . With results declared on new year eve , i was delighted to see a 9.64 GPA with all the efforts i put in ( refer this ) .Lots of guys were actually not happy with results coming out on new year eve .The next thing i was happy was succesfully downloading the Ubuntu 8.10 repository using deb mirror from the IIT M Mirror . I had downloaded some 24.8 GB of data in some 2 hours . I am planning to set up the repository back at coll so that we have a local mirror (seperate post on using debmirror coming up ) . With this the new year eve ended on a high and i had made some working solutions for the research problem at hand. It was a overwhleming farewell gift of 2008 .
2009 had a great beginning too.It was much of a surprise . After wishing everybody a happy new year , i was off to lab . I hadnt been doing much of work this winter , so i thought of not wasting the new year day. Also there was supposed to be a class on randomised algorithms by Prof C. Pandurangan which i didnt want to miss . So I reached lab around 10 in the morning . And then I discussed my solution for Private Matching with Prof and Phd students and finally i had some meaningful outcome for my brief winter stay at Theoretical Comp Sci Lab ( i think i have been to lab only for some 10 days in total ).So I finally got a green signal to write my kutti results and i should soon be sending it for a journal publication soon . Hope it goes on well . I was exited with the new year beginning on a good note .
More fun came when the guys here at lab decided to cut a cake and celebrate new year. So they got 2 cakes ( eggless becos prof is strictly vegetarian) , some snacks and two big bottles of Cool Drinks to lab and soon prof joined us for the celebrations , giving his wishes .We put the camera to a good use and also took pics group wise ( perfect security , provable security , graph theory , game theory ) with professor. It was all fun. The atmosphere was unbeleivable .Something i cant get back in my coll and i enjoyed it completely here . Suddenly people started asking prof for his birthday treat. The guys here actually celebrate 4 birthdays of prof . One his actual birthday , his star birthday , the one in his pass port, and the one in his official records . And apart from this they also celebrate all transitive closure events of each other’s birthday . (Looks like its more fun doing research ) .
Soon we were headed to Cafe Coffee Day (yeah CCD ) here, with prof and we were around 20 people . Formed a big circle over there in CCD and the rest is all wht usually happens in any treat . After the treat we again took pics . In all it was a memorable new year . It was followed by a lecture on Randomised algorithms ( which i am planning to blog on soon ) . No one who sits in Pandurangan sir’s class leaves without getting inspired by the subject that he takes. And so was I.
In all this new year was entirely opposite previous one. On the eve of the 2008 new year , me and my dad met with an accident and we were in CMC Hospital . My dad had a minor fracture in his right shoulder and we came back home only on Jan 1st morning after spending the whole night at hospital .So i am really thrilled with this new year beginning on a high .
