Sanjeev Gopinath V

Swimming in Bangalore

2011-09-26T12:10:00.000+05:30

Its such a pain to find out about swimming pools in Bangalore. Most of them are being maintained by Clubs who charge around 2-3 Lakhs for membership! WTH? For a one day/week swim, do I need to pay that much? Nope! Here I have 2 awesome swimming pools listed out! They charge minimum and you can have a very good time swimming. :-)

Bangalore BBMP Swimming Pool - PM Swimming Center
Location : Jayanagar
For 40 Mins : 16 INR.
The swimming pool looks clean. It has a good length and depth. For pro swimmers, this place would be an awesome practice ground.
But personally I didn't prefer this pool cause of the crowd that comes in here!

National Games Village Swimming Pool
Location : Koramangala
For 1 Hour : 100 INR.
Awesome Swimming Pool. Length : 25 Mts. Max Depth : 5 1/2 feet. Very decent crowd.
Open to all from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. I think they use Ozone. There's a separate pool for children. The pool is Unisex, so there's no specific timings for ladies and gents. Since, the crowd is decent, there shouldn't be any problem as such!!

Happy Swimming!!!

Trekking in Bangalore - Skandagiri

2011-05-02T14:56:00.001+05:30

Thinking of Bangalore, the first thing that comes to one's mind is the shopping malls, pubs, etc. Its indeed a very painful process to search for weekend hangouts in Bangalore if you are obsessed with the malls and the same old restaurants. Also, when you have your friends coming to Bangalore for a weekend, you'll have to end up visiting the same coffee shops and hangout spots everytime. It gets very boring after quite a few months (Atleast for me it was!!)

Last week I was on a search for a completely new place to visit near Bangalore and spend my weekend there. I Bing-ed extensively and found this place, Skandagiri, a hill close to Nandi Hills. Skandagiri is famous for the view during sunrise and the clouds that surround the hill by that time. Besides that, its a good trekking spot. You've to be a real enthusiast to climb the rocky & damp terrain. And the whole trek is an amazing experience. Let me share on how to plan for a trek and reach this place.

What can you expect to see at Skandagiri?

The sunrise is awesome and the clouds that surround the hill during the morning. More than anything else, the trekking experience itself is far worth the bucks spent!

What's the minimum budget per person?

It generally depends on how you plan the trip. Exclusive of the conveyance charges, I'd say around 500 INR, should be quite good.

Right time to visit Skandagiri?

Weekends! If it rains, kindly avoid. Other than that it should be totally fine. Its generally preferred as a late night trekking spot. For the sunrise view, 6:00 a.m. is preferred. You need to be at the base at around 3:30 a.m. to make sure you are up the hill by 6:00 a.m. If trekking is what you are looking for, you can do it by late morning. It is generally not famous in here, but trust me, around 400 people visit early morning, and it might be a little cluttered there during sunrise.

Where is skandagiri? How to reach it?

This question is just a Bing Maps search away. Anyways, this place is around 70 Kms away from Bangalore. Its quite close to a place known as Chikballapur. There are many non stop buses that ply from Kempegowda Bus Station in Bangalore to this place through out the daytime. The rate is around ~40 INR per person. You can also get train to Chikballapur by around 8:40 a.m. from Majestic Railway station. The train has around 10 stops while the bus stops nowhere. The travel time from Bangalore to Chikballapur in both means is around 2 Hrs, sometimes the train is ~20 mins late. If you are travelling by own vehichle, its well and good. Just have a Map Service with you. From Chikballapur to Skandagiri base (distance of 4 Km), you can take an auto. The auto fare is 100 INR.

Reaching the top of the hill :

Its a mandatory rule that you need to take a guide to reach to the top. There are many guides who will be available near the start point of the Skandagiri trek. They charge around 100 INR for each person in your group. If you want to bargain, you can offer them for a day's pay which is around 500-700 INR. If you are planning not to take a guide, be sure to lose your way in the middle of your trek! Having said that, if you are visiting Skandagiri by morning, you can take a guide till half of the distance and do the rest of trekking by yourself. It's easy that way as you get more time to spend time with your group than listening to the guide's personal life tragedies and stories.

The trek is a little tiresome one and make sure you've enough water with you so that you don't run out of them at any point of time.

After Reaching the top?

You may be very hungry and tired. You can order for a noodles/bread omlette/simple bread with a guy there! You can even buy water bottles, but the cost is just 50 INR ;)

Top of the hill, you can also visit the temple, take a lot of pics and enjoy the beauty of nature. People who trek by night, take some bed spreads, etc to sleep there itself. In this case, you have to take some shawls, etc too. It might be a little cold out there. Night treks can be more fun cause of the campfires you can do. You can buy sticks for the campfire at a nominal rate from the villagers there. If you are trekking by late morning, you can stay at the top for around 2 hrs, take snaps, etc. You won't get much of things to do there. But, even then, its simply awesome as the view throughout is too good.

Make sure that you :

carry three or more water bottles per person.
have towel, bed spreads, shawls.
take some snacks to munch after reaching the top.
have good trekking shoes to get a good grip. As it may be slippery with normal ones!
charge your mobile phones well before the journey.
have around atleast 150 INR per person while trekking. Cause, if you run out of water, you may have to buy it at the top.
carry torch lights to trek during night time. Its mandatory too.

Also, please don't throw away anything on the way or after reaching the top of Skandagiri. It feels really bad to see the plastic stuff in a very green environment.

If you have any comments/suggestions regarding this article or any information that I missed out, please write it as a comment or send a mail to sanjeevsince90@gmail.com

Compiling your first Linux Kernel

2011-04-26T10:46:00.001+05:30

I'm going to explain you on how to compile the linux kernel and get it running on your system. First time experience of Kernel compilation is always an exciting one. Here, I'm sharing on how I compiled my first kernel (and this.. I did it long time ago. But to help you folks, I'm starting afresh so that you'll understand better from a beginners point of view) :-) Sometimes, beginners like you and me tend to get distracted, feel out of place when compiling the kernel. Many feel that we are just not so much of a geek to handle the Kernel level development stuff. Also, as there is simply many fundamental processes to learn before the actual compilation, it may even put you off. But, don't panic. Compilation of Linux Kernel can be done by beginners like you and me too. Please follow this instruction set carefully and if you have any doubts, do let me know!

------

First things First - Checklist :

1. You should have a linux system. In my case I use, Ubuntu 10.10

2. Make sure you've free space well above 1.5 GB to make sure you don't end up with less hard disk space in the middle of the process

------

1. Getting the linux Kernel Source

The first steps in compiling the source is obtaining the source. It's always a wise decision to opt for the latest stable kernel. Hence, go to www.kernel.org and download the latest stable kernel. It should be weighing around ~71 MB.

2. Extracting the Source

The source comes as a tar.bz2 file. Extract it to a proper location. I've extracted the linux kernel in the following path. /home/sanjeev/development/

3. Exploring the Kernel Source (Optional)

It's such a wonderful feel to check out the Kernel source. Being one of the most popular and powerful operating system, seeing its source code is such a bliss. If you are a beginner, it'll make you go ga-ga over it! Just check out the basic directory structure followed, open couple of files, try following the code.

4. Making the Kernel

This is one of the most important steps in the whole process, and this is what that makes compiling the Linux kernel such an easy process. Its whole a lot of complicated stuff, which is available for us in a very simplified manner. Being beginner, lets not get into the depth of which modules we need and which we don't. There is an easy way to just make the default modules only.

So, open terminal and use cd command to navigate to the directory where you extracted Linux source, in my case, it is cd /home/sanjeev/linux-2.6.38.4

now, type make defconfig in the terminal. This command is to create a configuration based on the defaults for your architecture. Configuring this way is the most easiest way and is recommended for beginners. During this configuration process, there are many modules in the kernel which are turned ON and OFF so that you compile just what is required for your machine. If you want to play some more, try make gconfig. But while writing this, I used make defconfig only!

Once the configuration is set in place, we need to Make the kernel. Make of Kernel is so powerful that we can even have multiple threads doing the job for us. This significantly reduces the time of build. You'll have your two cores in a dual core to run in 100% CPU utilization. So, you may want to give the command,

make -jN where N stands for the number of threads you want to spawn. In a dual core case, just type make -j4

This is a time consuming process. Go grab some nap.

After few hours, you'll get the message, Build Successful and a path information about where you can find the Kernel Image.

5. Installing the Kernel

We are almost done with 80% of our job, this step will be the last mile. The general path, where you can find the Kernel image is, /arch/i386/boot/bzImage, in my case, I found it in, /arch/x86/boot/bzImage.

Copy this Image file into your /boot directory. You can achieve this by using

cp /arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot

You may want to rename the Kernel image to a different name. So, try mv /boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-

Now, we need to get our Grub find our latest Kernel. So, type in the Terminal the following command, update-grub and then type grub-mkconfig.

The first command, helps you find your kernel and add it to the template files that generate the grub.cfg file. The next command helps you generate the new grub.cfg file with your Kernel updated in it.

Now, restart the system and let me know your experience! :-)

Hope you found it a real pleasant way to build your first Kernel!

The New Era of Social Technologies...

2010-11-24T03:38:00.001+05:30

I was so impressed with the Facebook Careers video wherein the CEO, CTO, VP of Facebook explain how cool it is to work there. Especially, Mark's opinions about why social networking is fun and how Facebook is looking at it, was simply awesome.

He said something very similar to this... Everything around us can be broken down into simpler things and with every other day, we tend to make our lives less complicated. For example, we have invented very simpler forms of communications. We send e-mails, smss and what not. We keep exploring avenues to get ourselves engaged in a productive way, yet keep things so simple and fun to use. Whatever humans do, there’s a very simple ideology behind it, and it is what is studied and is imitated by (social) technology.

This blog post is going to explain, how I look at things, how important it is to get your apps and products the social way, etc.

Today, we are in an internet era, where we talk about the cloud technology, PDAs and things way beyond that. Increasingly, we feel the necessity, simplicity, reliability and security behind moving ourselves over to the cloud, as in, internet. As every one of us started feeling internet a part and parcel of our lives, it is increasingly becoming a hang out place too.

Getting back to 199X to 2004, i.e. before the arrival of internet or computers to the common junta of India, I have seen many children playing in the street, housewives gossiping sitting in circles and as usual family heads discussing on key issues ranging from office politics to where India is lagging :P ,etc. There was always a social thingy involved in whatever happened. It was mostly fun and everyone felt good to share things with others.

But with the advent of affordable personal computers and pirated games, children started moving towards playing single player games on their PCs. Since those games grabbed the complete involvement of kids, none of ‘em ever felt the need of getting back to the playground or play indoor games. Slowly, I feel this started percolating into the grownups but in a different way. Television occupied most of their time and they started feeling, it is more of fun to watch it than going to someone’s home and chatting. The social nature of things changed and people never realised it.

Technology got into everyone’s day-to-day activities. But that never meant that people forgot about how they used to enjoy the company of their family friends and neighbours. It all burns down to the fact that people love to get involved more with TV and PCs rather than meeting friends. This was a great advantage for the technology. It got into our lives and we started adapting soon too.

With Internet and related service’s coming, life became even simpler. From now on, you needn’t go to shops, banks, post offices, government offices and other places. Every single thing has got automated and they all have shifted to a new address. The WWW! What can be more fun than to reserving tickets of your train right from your home? Tomorrow, may be you needn’t even move a little, there might be yet another service that might offer you to do the same job but from home, and at your convenience. Out of this fact, there are two things that are evident. One is, either people are very lazy to do things or they want to achieve something really big in a shorter span of time with less energy usage, i.e. they want to make a productive use of their time.

As most of our time is involved in playing with technology things around, we don’t get much of time to socialize. Here comes the advantage of social networking. What if technology could give you a platform for socializing, giving you freedom to share things of your interest and connecting to people of similar interests around the world? It’ll fulfil your innate need of socialising at your comforts right? More like a non blocking type of communication, where you send information and let the receiver read it when he/she wants to.

Interestingly, people love to get themselves involved in socializing aspects of the web. They find it more collaborative, informative, simple and fun. There are other reasons to get involved in socializing in web too. Web gives you a complete freedom to showcase yourself to the whole world without any discrimination. Hence you needn’t ice break or feel shy about sharing things. Having said this, the socializing part, has started playing a major role upfront.

This has completely revolutionized today’s market. Now, you have more chances of finding your customers in Internet than anywhere else. Products or services that were not even thought to exist or wanted by a person in the year 2005, are now ruling the world. Everyone has started getting involved more with internet and technology as such. To iterate again, the lifestyle of people changed on a different scale, but when you break things into simpler stuff, they do the same things they would do if technology never existed. Today, you want to talk to your friend, you opt to chat or text him/her. Right?

Though the choices keep changing, but the first part of it, i.e. talking to friend can never change. Social apps give you a platform to do it. Not just this, say, you want to buy a product, and you visit an online shopping site, you take a look at the product and there is a small widget that says, there are totally 190 buyers out of which 35 are your friends. Naturally, you are motivated to buy the product. To say, even a small chat room in an online shopping can change the way buyers buy. It is how society functioned when there was no technology. On the other hand, the services that are driven with socializing phenomenon always get the edge, as they can get enough insights about the demographics and needs of their customers instantly. It is a simple win-win situation for both the sides.

Even multiplayer games that can be played intermittently, has taken off in a great manner. Again, socializing aspects is the one and only factor that keeps people engaged in it.

By what I’ve said so far, you understood the logic or not, just get this right in your mind. It is important to keep applications consistent the way people used to transact when there existed no technology. Hence it is very important to keep it simple and straightforward. To add to it, give your application a way of socializing which can promote a good user-user interaction and sharing info. Cause, people always love to be in a place where they have their interest groups, family members and friends. They love to play, shop, eat, hangout with their friends and loved ones. Hence, if you are able to analyse how social aspects of your product can work out for you, it might turn out to be very advantageous. It’ll keep your users engaged with your product on a very higher scale. So, I say, give them what they want, a way of socializing. In this regard, I’d say, Facebook is doing only one part of it, i.e. hanging out with your friends and stuff. There are much bigger things in social networking such as a social shopping to social learning. See, you always feel confident in a place where there is some human existence right? Also, you never want to explore a spooky or a new place all alone, you take one or more friends with you there. So, make this simple logic built inside your application model. People, i.e. users should be able to effectively socialize through your application. Cause, if you don’t provide such a service, the junta will start moving towards a service that provides that. You can have a superior technology, a really great market, but you can miserably fail if you don’t understand the importance and dynamics of socialization. To summarize, create a superior technology, a superior market. Add social strategies to connect both of these.

Technology <-----> Social Aspects <---> People / Market

When there existed no technology, people loved to get together and have fun. With advent of technology, people started having more fun. Now, they had enough of simple technologies and want the technology to give them more. So, they are increasingly moving towards technologies that can satisfy their socializing needs. Hence forming a proper spiral model of the way technologies and people work. In days to come, we might increasingly see apps that are built with the social aspects to take off better than the ones that don’t provide it. Dot. :P

Software Freedom Week Celebrations @ GLOSS, SASTRA

2010-10-12T01:57:00.000+05:30

Hello Readers,

I'm really sorry for not posting for so many days. I've been busy lately on many things like looking out for final year project internships and things like that. Anyways, the news is that, 3rd and 2nd year folks of GLOSS are organising Software Freedom week at SASTRA University. Software Freedom Week is celebrated inorder to emphasize the importance of open source to everyone. And, being at college, students and faculty members take immense pleasure in getting to know about what open source can do for them. Last year, we had conducted many competitions during the open source week, but this time, I'm not quite sure about the kind of surprises our juniors are gonna give us. I've got high hopes on them and I must say, the publicity thingies have been going quite well. Especially the posters are quite attractive. I sincerely appreciate the enthusiasm that they have been showing towards the community.

To tell a few lines about how open source can help you, I've got a small experience to share with. Recently I've been working on linux kernel development. It’s been going quite good and I seriously can’t express the kind of thrill I feel when I compile the code of Linux Kernel by myself and when I go through the source code of scheduler and stuff. I feel that may be, sky is the limit for the joy that you get when you’ve got some real cool operating system like Linux’s kernel source to play with. If not for open source, you might not be able to play with an OS’s source code like what you can do right now.

It’s like this... everyone cannot focus on reinventing the same wheel and releasing it as a new technology or product. It is always good to make use of already invented things and yet make something real cool.

Let me stop with this for now, it’s already late 1:40 a.m., I might start blabbering in the post if I don’t.

Till my next post, C’ya guys n’ don’t forget to attend the SFW celebrations at SASTRA :)

Lex and Yacc

2010-05-05T01:25:00.001+05:30

Its been long since I've blogged about anything. I wanted to share lots of things, but unfortunately I couldn't find enough time to write on a topic. A few days back, I completed my lab exams successfully. I had a great time learning new concepts such as Lex and Yacc. Lex and Yacc are powerful tools through which we can design complex programs such as a compiler with very less effort. Most of the programming is done by Lex itself. Let me explain how it works!
Basically, we have got to write a lex program which has an extension ".l". The lex file contains lex specifications which are mainly regular expressions and their corresponding C response code. Once we write a regular expression, we can specify a C language function that will execute the necessary actions that are to be taken if input matches to one of the regular expressions. The lex can also return values to other programs. Lexers are written to analyse the syntax of anything. For e.g. a decimal number can be of form 90.34 or 1232e10.
Yacc is a tool to write parsers. Parsers are grammar analysers. We can specify grammars as we do in writing grammar for CFGs and other automata concepts. If yacc finds the input to be matching to the grammar, it finds the action to be taken and executes it.
According to me, they form a really powerful tool and a must learn for any developer/student of CSE. I just loved when I wrote shorter and simpler regular expressions for solving my lab exercises. I should thank Mr.Sai Ram for giving us an insight into the world of regular expressions,grammars and their implementations.
May be if time permits, I'm willing to do a spelling and grammar checking program and embed it into my own text editor.

Bunk Bazaar (Attendance Manager) - a mobile application for students

2009-10-26T01:55:00.001+05:30

Bunk Bazaar is a mobile application that helps every student manage his/her own attendance in a very easy and efficient way. The Bunk Bazaar application in addition, also gives alerts and other utilities. In short, its a complete software which any student would require!

Being a mobile application, its very handy and easy to use it. It can save a lot of time for every student and make them more cautious about attending classes and being regular to class. On the same line, it also gives the count of number of classes that you can bunk so that you don't cross below the threshold percentage.
Specifications :
Name : Bunk Bazaar
Version : 1.1
Details : CLDC 1.1,1.0 and MIDP 2.1,2.0

Attendance Register : Attendance register is a module that allows you enter your daily attendance. The intuitive way provides those hours(i.e. classes) that you've on a specified day. You can easily run through the check boxes and tick mark the absent hours. That's it.!
You can also find a modify option which will help you correct the mistakes made during the attendance entry.

Check Zone : Allows you to check your attendance.
This provides you with a short summary to a full statistics about your attendance. You can check alert meters, overall percentages and couple of other things too.

Quick Alerts : To those who want to know things quick! you've got Quick Alerts. This module will alert you about those courses in which you've to make sure that you attend classes regularly. It's a very intuitive alarm interface that will make you go gaga when it says! "Enjoy your day!".

Forecaster : Intense computations through a lot of equations, this module helps a student know how many classes he has to attend to make up the threshold attendance percentage level and how many he can afford to skip. The software has an inbuilt intelligence capability and prompts you when in need.

Time table : Time table gives you a few options like viewing and modifying a time table. This is provided so that, you can add up a few more classes, in case you get a special class on weekends or during some other day.

Roll Back : Roll back allows you to reinstall your software to its factory settings.

All these options provide a complete attendance suite for a college/university going student who carries a mobile :). The interface is as simple and doesn't even require you to spend lots of MBs of your precious phone's memory card.

The application was developed by me (Sanjeev Gopinath V) and my fellow friends Anurag Jain and Sudha Rani. In case if you're interested to use it, you can mail us at : sanjeevsince90@gmail.com. We'll provide you with the .jar file at the earliest :)

GATE 2010 Exam - Application Forms and other rules...

2009-10-16T15:39:00.003+05:30

Hi there,
It was very tough to Google out the GATE 2010 application form and other procedures. Anyways, after sometime I found the official GATE site.

Try this link : http://gate.iitg.ernet.in/index.php

Uninstalling NetBeans in Linux (fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuse)

2009-10-16T06:13:00.004+05:30

Hello there,
Recently I wanted to upgrade from NetBeans 6.5 to 6.7.1 in Fedora 11. I didn't know how exactly to go about it. So tried NetBeans > Help > Check for updates. It gave option to migrate from 1.5.1 to 1.5.2. Went in vain. Next, I tried checking the Add/Remove software to find some clue of uninstalling NetBeans. It didn't show up any of the Installed S/W.
Hence made up my mind to search manually for any uninstalling mechanism. I found this one working in Linux.

Goto Root > USR > Local > netbeans-6.5

Open your terminal and type sh

Now drag the Uninstall.sh to the terminal.

The address would have got pasted.

Click Yes and follow the Uninstallation Wizard's instructions.

Hope this helps. Comment if any query.

Desktop Effects problem

2009-09-28T06:54:00.002+05:30

Yet another day with linux...
I was playing with the windows (not MS Windows) effects of KDE in Fedora. In the wobbling effect, I set weird values and finally all my windows, menus and everything started to move randomly and quickly. I thot, omg! Do I need to reinstall everything again? Is there no solution?! Then slowly I tried understanding the window behaviour and chose the resize option. Tada! The window stopped moving here and there. Then I changed the effects..! :)

Moral of the story is : Linux is user friendly.

Fedora 11 Boot Problem (disk checking)

2009-08-29T19:27:00.003+05:30

Oh my god! After having a complete system update and Electronic Lab installation, I did a reboot. I do not know what exactly happened, the white stuff loaded only to some extent. Then suddenly a black screen turned out saying
"Press Ctrl + D to continue or enter password to do a manual disk check". Gawd! It scared everything out of me..! Last time I had similar kind of problem and I ended up Reinstalling the whole Fedora 11. But this time, I thought of making things myself. Remembered this command, fsck.
But when I gave it just as "fsck"... It started asking me weird questions like... "Do you want to move this block, actually it was supposed to be at this place and stuff". I didn't have any clue about the moving of disks. But I tried understanding the inner stuff of what was exactly going on behind the scene. Then, I brutally rebooted the system, and I gave

fsck -A -y

and things turned out to be Real GOOD! It asked me to reboot at the end of this filesystem checking process. And Cool..! The white stuff loaded well and the system started. Thanks to the stability of Fedora. No wonder why Linux is mainly focussed on developers, but when I was able to solve the problem, I really loved it..! No matter, I love fedora and love to be as an Ambassador throughout..!

Fedora ROX big time..!

p.s. All the companies and related stuff which I have used here belongs to the company. I put my head into no licensing issues. ( This statement is meant for geeks who actually peep into everything around and check for licenses..!)

Page ranking of my blog..!

2009-08-21T04:53:00.002+05:30

Hey there!

The concept of page rank is really cool..! I don't know how exactly it works after the improvements over the previous algorithms, but anyways it has done one major thing..!
It has given the same page rank for both yahoo (http://in.yahoo.com/?p=us) and my blog..! Means that both have the same importance according to Google..!
Interesting...

Sending mails using PHP through a GMAIL account...

2009-07-04T00:55:00.007+05:30

Hi,
This post will explain how to send mails using your Gmail account by using PHP script.
I use XAMPP, so the tutorial will be based on that... Modify if you use some other service! It'd work...

* Download the phpmailer from http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net .
* Extract the folder in htdocs of xampp.
* Now navigate to \_acp-ml\phpmailer\ and create a php page with the name you desire.
* In the section, paste the following code...!

include("class.phpmailer.php");
include("class.smtp.php");
$send_mail=new PHPMailer();
$send_mail->IsSMTP();
$send_mail->SMTPAuth = true;
$send_mail->Username = "someone@gmail.com"; // your gmail username
$send_mail->Password = "passwd"; // your gmail password
$webmaster_email = "someone1@gmail.com"; //Reply to this email ID
$email="someone@aaa.com"; // Recipients email ID
$name="Cool Dude"; // Recipient's name
$send_mail->From = $webmaster_email;
$send_mail->FromName = "Webmaster";
$send_mail->AddAddress($email,$name);
$send_mail->AddReplyTo($webmaster_email,"Webmaster");
$send_mail->WordWrap = 50; // set word wrap
//$send_mail->AddAttachment("/var/tmp/file.tar.gz"); // attachment
//$send_mail->AddAttachment("/tmp/image.jpg", "new.jpg"); // attachment
$send_mail->IsHTML(true); // send as HTML
$send_mail->Subject = "Test E-mail";
$send_mail->Body = "Hello there,
This is a test message..."; // Write your email body here!!!
$send_mail->AltBody = "This is a plain test message..."; //Text to be visible in Plain text mode..!
if(!$send_mail->Send())
{
echo "Error : " . $send_mail->ErrorInfo;
}
else
{
echo "The Message sending was successful...";
}
?>

Once you do this,
* Try accessing the file from localhost thru your browser.
* If this doesn't work,
* Find out the php.ini file from xampp folder, open it and uncomment extension=php_openssl.dll" by removing semicolon.
* Now, find the "#connect to the smtp server" line in class.smtp.php in phpmailer folder and add $host = "ssl://smtp.gmail.com"; $port = 465; before it.
* Now restart XAMPP by stopping and starting Apache once!

Try executing the php script, and you'd find this working...

Comment if any changes are to be made or if you found this useful...

Creating a website in 10 minutes

2009-06-28T19:51:00.001+05:30

Hi all,
Lets deploy a website made with PHP and a MySQL database. Follow these steps carefully...

Installing the business tier
1. Download XAMPP by clicking http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
2. Install XAMPP by selecting Apache, MySQL and FileZilla AS SERVICE.
3. Click next for all other windows that appear.
4. Start XAMPP and start Apache, MySQL and FileZilla.
5. Disable your windows firewall by navigating to control panel.
6. Type localhost in your browser and see if XAMPP site is opening.

Installing Access tier
1. Download MySQL Gui tools from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
2. Pick a mirror based on your platform type. Its generally x86.
3. Either register or, click on No thanks! Generally i prefer the second one! ;)
4. Choose a location and click https.
5. Download it.
6. Install it by clicking Next to all that follows.
7. Your Back end is ready.

Create your first web-coding (name it index.php) by following the instructions in the link,
http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

and put your file in a Newfolder (Give it a name) in C:\xampp\htdocs.
Now open your browser and type, localhost/NewFolder(the folder name that you gave) and press enter. Tada! the html file appears...
Now try some php coding by using this link,
http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp
Now try combining MySQL queries by following the appropriate links that appear in the above mentioned link.

XAMPP didn't work - solution

2009-06-27T21:03:00.002+05:30

Hi ppl,
I had installed my xampp and deployed my website in the htdocs! I was able to access it by typing localhost/website-name but not using the ip or website address... I worked on that for a few hours and found out that windows firewall was blocking it. If you get the same problem, disable the windows firewall and try testing your ip...
It works

Clearing screen using GCC or G++

2009-06-22T11:53:00.002+05:30

When you use the conventional compilers such as TurboC, you can use the conio.h function clrscr(). But when you're using GCC or G++, we can't go with clrscr(). Hence try theses

for windows - system("cls");
for unix, linux and others - system("clear");

Time change between Linux Fedora and XP / Vista

2009-06-06T03:53:00.002+05:30

Hello guys,
For visitors from some Search Engine : You're so punctual hm? Tending to synchronise time, technology, etc,etc!!! Great man! Anyways! You can find the necessary solution here! Take sometime to read it!

Fedora has been doing really great these days and many of my friends have started moving towards fedora! After quite a few days of our consistent use, we found that the time was not synchronised in many of the laptops running dual boot between Vista/XP with Linux Fedora/Ubuntu. We were trying to find a solution for this and here it is!!

Goto your linux system.
Goto System > Administration > Date and Time > Time Zone.
Below this, you may see a check box telling about some UTC and stuff!
Uncheck it. Close and reset your system time and date! Tada! Everything will work fine from now!

Finding out the number of Zeroes at the end of Factorial for a number

2009-06-03T22:47:00.002+05:30

There is a unique formula to find out the number of zeroes at the end of a factorial of a given number.
Divide the number by power of 5s and add the sum.
For eg.
Take the number 60.
= (60/5) + (60/25 ) + (60/125) + ...
= 12 + 2 + 0 + ..
= 14.

you can stop the series once the power of 5 exceeds the number.

C++ program for the logic:

#include
#include
using namespace std;

int main()
{
int tc,i;
long int count,num5,inp;
vector output;
cin>>tc;
for(i=0;i>inp;
num5=5;
count=0;
while(inp >= num5)
{
count += inp / num5;
num5*=5;
}
output.push_back(count);
}
for(i=0;i
cout<<
//system("pause");
return 0;
}

Wifi at SASTRA

2009-06-03T21:42:00.002+05:30

Its 9:40 p.m. and Oh my GOD!!!, I'm browsing internet at the speed of my thoughts! Pages are opening faster than my explorer. Morning, I had my Gmail showing the mails even before the booting was complete! Man! this is the real power of an 18mbps internet! Thank you SASTRA! Such a great initiative!

Writing a wiki page

2009-06-03T21:10:00.002+05:30

I started learning quite a while about the wiki pages and the commands used for various functions! Its actually a fun to script in the wikis. This link should do the magic for you! Since only a limited number of tutorials are available on the net, its a little difficult for a beginner like me to understand the core completely. For instance, I was stuck up with creating an infobox, which has a very limited or less information on the net!
Try my wiki - mywiki.

Multinational companies and their Interviews

2009-05-31T02:08:00.005+05:30

Hey Guys,
www.placementsindia.blogspot.com is a great link to find about the ways of preparing for interview of various software MNCs. It also gives a huge collection of tips and puzzles that might be useful to many of us who are thriving to get into google, ms and other big daddy's of s/w.

Young Coders Forum

2009-05-31T01:49:00.002+05:30

Hola ppl!

Hmmm all set! Many of my friends have left to their home for the semester hols. And I am really big time peaceful with the silence around here! Hmmm... late yesterday night, when I was googling to find out a good coders forum, I found this! Though, I now can't give a review about it... I can just say enough that it rox!

try this link: www.youngcoders.com
You ppl can also try my fav. site! Its absolutely cool: www.spoj.pl
and this too... www.topcoders.com/tc

the archives in topcoder about solving problem is worth readin'.

Lets try Linux Season 1

2009-05-16T03:54:00.003+05:30

Last month, we planned to come up with some session for GLOSS and finally decided to go with my idea of having a seminar series on linux and troubleshooting. To have a strong impact with the student community, I suggested the name to be Lets Try Linux season 1. The daily agenda contained a 50 min of seminar on a particular topic about linux and also a ten minute talk by a regular member on a technical community website. The sessions went as per plan and the participation of students was decent. The ones who came the first day, attended till the end of the series. Lets try Linux season 1, showed the power of Linux and made people get cleared with their caches that Linux is not user friendly. It made people find Linux an interesting operating system to use and work with. We offered a complete insight to everyone about linux and in the process, we in the team learnt a lot too. Dwarak gave the introductory session about Lets try Linux followed by community talk on OSUM website by Alagu Nachal. The next day, it was my turn to talk about the installations of various Linux flavors and I explained in detail the ways of partitioning hard disks and installing linux without affecting other operating systems installed previously. I explained most of them using Virtual Box and also about installing Linux (ubuntu) inside windows. When my seminar was going on, volunteers helped to install linux in their system based on my explanations. They sorted out their problems and we installed Linux as a native boot to many systems. My seminar was followed by a community talk by Sudha Rani about Javapassion.com . The next day to add spice, Anurag had showed a lot of customisation that would make the appearance of linux more appealing than its counterparts. He also explained about configuring wifi drivers (biggest problem in SASTRA) in an easy way. He told about the mad wifi drivers and various other drivers such as the ndiswrapper. Following him was Gayathri's talk on another community website. The next day, seminar was about wine emulator and Dwarak showed how easy it is to play age of empires and counter strike in Linux. The next day, it was Vikas's turn and he spoke about LAN and networking using Linux. He explained about SAMBA and stuff. Followed by his seminar was Komal's community talk. This ended the season 1 successfully. Hope the next season would rock too.

OSUM Pizza Party

2009-05-16T03:42:00.005+05:30

Hey there,

I'm sorry to come up with a blog post this late. I had to settle a lot of issues with my previous post about my visit to Goa. I was also engaged in a few other stuffs which I'll be blogging about sooner or later.

Coming to the topic of discussion...

OSUM is a social networking website which offers a lot of features exclusively for students who belong to a technical university. It allows one to create forums and discuss about various technologies related to open source and Sun Microsystems.

A few of SASTRA students belonging to GLOSS, the open source community of SASTRA, are a part of this website. According to a recently declared contest, colleges that make more than 100 registrations in the OSUM website will get a free pizza party. And we were more than 200 before the last date of the contest. After long time then, we planned for the pizza party and Dwarak, the Sun Campus Ambassador of SU arranged one for GLOSS members at Krishna Canteen. Since pizza was not available at our campus, we had to go with sandwiches and samosas. It was completely organized right from the beginning to the end by Dwarak. Myself and Anurag voluanteered for distributing the sandwiches and stuff to all. Almost 90 of them attended OSUM party and were happy to the zenith. We gave chocolate cakes, samosas, mango drink, sandwich and much more. Everyone just loved it. We took a lot of pics and had a group photo too.

At this happy occassion, I felt a little sad too. I found members of GLOSS standing in their own gangs, for instance, the first year folks, second year ICT students, Hindi speaking students, third year girls and third year boys. They were all upto there own stories and chit chats. Good to see that, but these days since there is no proper unity, GLOSS is getting smaller and smaller day-by-day. People have started losing their interest in technologies of tomorrow. Also most of the important members of GLOSS have started moving towards various other activities and clubs. A few give reasons and blame their internals and other exams but the main reason being lethargic.

GLOSS is a great platform for learning and it has a very good base and is well structured too. The open source lab is also a great gift which makes GLOSS, a real technical community, far ahead and different from others. GLOSS is nothing but the outcome of sheer hardwork and sufferings of Kumar Abhisek who is presently the Student Co-ordinator of Sun Microsystems. Also Dwarakanath, Sun Ambassador of SU, has taken GLOSS to a great height by helping the developers at GLOSS, get projects to work on. He also made a lot of other contributions. He helped people to get involved in international contests organised by Sun, like the CodeJavafx, Code for freedom, etc. But sadly, not many of them are making use of GLOSS to a good extent. Even the number of mails in the mailing alias has gone down drastically. If this is the case today, tomorrow the situation might even get worst. And so, a few of us have decided to come up with a series of measures and events for GLOSS next year. Hope that would not let it vanish in the mid air even without the participation of main members of GLOSS.

Disclaimer : I don't know if this post would create any controversy, but be it anything, these are my views and is not meant to hurt anyone.

Statistics on my internet usage

2009-05-05T00:56:00.006+05:30

Some Statistics about my internet usage! I used many other internet applications such as gtalk, avg updates, etc. My main use was to explore second world. I started using right from 3rd and you can see and increase in graph!

Start Time

Stop Time

Send[KB]

Receive[KB]

Total[KB]

Duration[second]

Traffic(KB)

2009/05/04 22:00:19	2009/05/04 23:24:19	15280	173213	188493	5040	188493
2009/05/04 19:41:03	2009/05/04 20:41:03	6468	81370	87838	3600	87838
2009/05/04 14:17:33	2009/05/04 14:23:33	17	1	18	360	18
2009/05/04 11:29:06	2009/05/04 14:17:28	14263	110055	124318	10102	124318
2009/05/03 23:03:45	2009/05/04 02:10:45	27313	178175	205488	11220	197081
2009/05/03 20:52:12	2009/05/03 21:17:12	5318	44191	49509	1500	49509
2009/05/03 18:16:39	2009/05/03 20:52:07	35132	316244	351376	9328	351376
2009/05/03 17:56:16	2009/05/03 18:16:34	526	5588	6114	1218	6114
2009/05/03 11:43:44	2009/05/03 12:53:44	3455	28862	32317	4200	32317
2009/05/03 11:23:01	2009/05/03 11:33:01	0	2	2	600	2
2009/05/03 10:39:34	2009/05/03 11:22:52	1	7	8	2598	8
2009/05/03 09:51:52	2009/05/03 10:39:25	1220	9453	10673	2853	10673
2009/05/02 18:31:29	2009/05/02 18:33:59	28	182	210	150	210
2009/05/02 18:29:55	2009/05/02 18:31:24	24	31	55	89	55
2009/05/02 18:19:17	2009/05/02 18:29:50	329	1882	2211	633	2211

So ppl, use secondlife, but be sure that Internet costs less or is free. Its actually good to explore the Second life technology. A lot of lecture series, the great languagelab, Princeton University etc rock. I wished I had unlimited connection for this sake!

Internet Usage by Second life...

2009-05-05T00:48:00.003+05:30

Heya guys? addicted to second life. Though its an unbelievable creation, please know that it might eat up a lot of bytes by receiving and transferring. Though I didn't cross my limits, a two to three days of intermittent Second life usage, has already crossed 1 GB limit. Thanks to the plan that I use, I have free access upto 2.5 GB. So be careful with your pennies, that might go out of you pockets without your knowledge. Use second life during the free hours that the internet service providers allot. It'd be economical, else you'll end up using tera bytes..!

p.s. In no way, I mean to say that Second life is bad. Its actually good! Compared to any other service, I feel that SL eats less. I am just giving a warning that broadband internet newbies might burn out the internet service and money in SL unknowingly! :(

396 Visits Yesterday...

2009-03-12T18:45:00.002+05:30

Hi ppl,
Glad to tell you all that, I had almost 400 ppl to visit my blog just yesterday. Cool.
Most of the visits were from Chennai, Goa and Seattle.

Travel with me to Andaman...

2008-12-15T03:40:00.015+05:30

I would like to share with you people about my journey to the islands. Lets get to it straight.

It was late night, almost 1 a.m when we started from our home to the Chennai Kamaraj domestic airport. Since there were several rumours saying that the flight is gonna be hijacked and that airports were targetted, we started early. Our flight was scheduled to departure by 5:55 a.m. But due to some problem it was later re-scheduled to depart at 7:55. It was our first time flight and I was highly excited. Anxeity marked my face. When it was 6:00, my dad asked me to get ready for check in. It was a decently big queue and we saw many celebrities there. Since the flight was delayed, we were offered snacks (yuck!). We waited at the lounge there and moved on for security check. When we were standing in the big queue, we saw Daniel Balaji – Kaaka Kaaka co-actor. He was short and was very casual. Fine, it was then time for security check! I knew that the alarm would beep when I pass thru, and guess what? It happened too... The alarm started ringing and I was re-checked! It was my purse, who was the culprit. Anyways later, I was allowed. We moved near the glass doors from where we could clearly see the landings and take-offs of flights. We took a lot of photos there and the awesome air-hostess who were making announcements exchanged looks with me ;) ..! We were looking out and suddenly a known face was glancing at us! Ooh! It was Prakash Raj – the well known actor of T & Kollywood. Once he recognised that we were looking at him, he waved his hands and boarded into the Paramount airways's bus. When it was just fifteen minutes to go, we even saw Pokiri-telugu's villain (The Police officer).

It was very boring by then and time was moving very slow. We played word building game for time pass there... and once the IC 549 Air India to Port Blair call came, we ran and completed the remaining procedure. We were taken near the aircraft by a very old bus. I took as many as 45 photos in the airport itself.

The flight looked very much like a volvo bus with deep blue coloured seats. Thank god! We got one window seat, and I sat there! Yipee!!! When everyone were there, the air-hostessess explained us how to wear all those safety stuff when in danger. Out of the three air hostess, one was absolutely mind blowing. She was very beautiful. Ok. Lets continue, the plane was then taken to some location and was kept there for some 5 min. Then the call came, “This is your Captain S.Reddy ordering for a Take Off...”. Then, I could sense the real inertia, the plane started and moved with a great pace and took off. Wow! Chennai was looking very beautiful. Though the city was not a well planned one, it looked extremely fine. We then got vanished between the clouds and I could sense the pressure difference in my ears later as the altitude was increasing steadily. We were offered idly and coffee. The packing was neat and clean. The food was fresh too. Fruits were also given. After having a nice breakfast, I allowed my sister to sit in the window seat (after all giving and taking is a part and parcel of our life). K... Then, we got the sight of small small islands which were characterised by a very shallow shore. The altitude was steadily decreasing and then, we took a small video of the landing. When we successfully landed, we felt it like a piece of cake. Then, I asked to the air hostess to allow me to have a peep at the cockpit. She refused but the pilots called me in. I went there and thanked them for a great journey. I introduced myself and they too. They were well dressed in white and wore cooling glasses. They were happy to note that we were on a holiday trip and wished us a good luck. We were not allowed to take any pics of the cockpit, so came off. Listen, the Port Blair Veer Savarkar airport was nothing but just a small building of a floor height and was looking very primitive. We picked our luggages and moved out and our guide, Mr.Arun was standing right there with a relatively new Maruti Omni E(ight seater). He was well versed in Tamil, Hindi and a little Bengali. He was infact a tamilian born and brought up in Andaman.

We were offered stay at the Hotel Blair. The room was not so good but fine for a 4 days stay. We were very tired due to the delay of flight and slept for a couple of hours or more. We left our room to eat lunch in Anand V/NV hotel. We were not able to tolerate the smell of fish and somehow adjusted to complete our meal. Then it was time for us to go to the ROSS Island.

We were taken to place called Water Sports Park in Port Blair from where we could get ships to navigate to the nearby islands. We four, then started to ROSS Island, a twenty minutes ship journey from the capital. The ROSS island was a great spot and I loved it a lot. It was a lovely sight to see, the red coloured British buildings. We moved in and saw the nature's toll over those buildings... Trees had grown all over the structure and we felt like, how did we miss such things in life! We were very astonished by the way how britishers had established a colony in the ROSS island. They had every stuff; bakery, church, officers' club, barracks, etc. Peacock and Deer marked their presence in this island and were available in huge numbers in and around the place. We had to climb to get to the old church and then got down to the Ferrar Beach. It was a good sight there, as the water was very clear. It was greatly affected by tsunami which made a lot of coconut trees to fall off. We sat in one of them and enjoyed the tides that touched our feets.

It was already 4:15 and by 4:30 we had the return journey from the ROSS Island back to Port Blair. We then had some coconut drink and left to the ship. It was good to move in the waters. You feel an up and down motion throughout and even after that ;).

Then we left to the Light and Sound show in the cellular jail. The sun was already set by 5 p.m. The show started and made us all go emotional by the low and crying voices of the freedom fighters who lost their lives in Cellular jail. Light effects gave the feel of the voices that were played and special attention was given to a tree which marked its presence during the early britishers and even now. I'll explain about the cellular jail later.

It was 7:30 by then and we felt that, it was time for our dinner. We went to a pure vegetarian hotel – Annapurna. It was a decent hotel and the food tasted good but the serving took a lot of time. Anyways that was a blessing in disguise cause, we felt that it was much better than eating in the smell of fried fish. We slept and got up by around 5 a.m. The sun was already there in the sky which marked a two hours difference between India's main land. We boarded the Ramanujam Ship which sailed us to the Havelock islands.The main attraction in Havelock island is Radhanagar beach. The beach is very well known for having a shallow depth and clear shore with a beautiful vista around. It was a boring four hours journey. The ship was completely packed with Bengali honeymooners and Punjabis. Out of these, one of the Punjabi family which sat behind us, behaved in an awkward manner and earned a LOL award from everyone. The ship was equipped with a small pantry service and time to time I ate Lays and other eatables. Generally stuffs available there were atleast 5 Rs. more than the MRP. We thought Havelock to be a no man's land but after the four and half hours of sea journey we came to know that, our assumptions were wrong. It was a complete town. It contained vehichles esp. Sumos, jeeps; great bulidings and resorts. A twenty minutes journey further to Radhanagar, reached us to the beach. It welcomed us with a small note saying welcome to Radhanagar Beach. It is a place which we should never miss in our life. It was like a paradise in earth. I soon changed my clothe and jumped into the sea. I swam there and later my dad, mom and my sis joined me. Me and my sister took my mom far away into the sea where it was just enough to drown us. My mom was afraid a little but since we were there, she felt a bit better. When the sea waves passed through us, we felt that, we were floating in air or something... he he he... We felt hungry and ate our lunch there in a very very small hotel. Ladies finger curry, Rice, Dal were served and it tasted good too... Again a boring 4 hrs journey to Port Blair gave us all headache...

The next day's program was to start as early as 3 a.m to reach a place called Baratang to have a look at the limestone caves. We then had our dinner at the same hotel Annapurna and left for our room for a small nap. We started around 3:25 am the next day and a bus came to pick us up. The bus roamed in and around the streets & boarded a few more passengers who had booked for visiting Baratang. The bus went through forests and mountains and suddenly stopped at some place. My dad, mom and sis got down to eat breakfast and since I was in deep sleep they left me in the bus itself. Later, when I woke up, dad gave me the breakfast parcel and still the traffic was not clear.

When it got cleared, one guy came and announced in Hindi that the area which we'll be crossing further belonged to Jarwas – Tribals of Andaman. He also made it clear that, none should feed them or take snaps. He added that a fine of Rs. 5000 will be levied for the offence.

The Bus then passed through the trees covered by high raised mountains and rugged roads at a great pace. It never stopped anywhere as the Jarwas are well known for their poisoned arrows. We reached some intermediate place which separated the lands. We had to board a ship and the best part in that was, even the bus was allowed to board the ship. It was a twenty minute journey and we got down in the other end. From there to the Limestone cave we had to take a small ferry boat again. This time the travel was through backwaters. It was looking green and marshy. The area was prone to crocodiles too... Oooh! Scary...

Fine, we travelled for some half an hour and reached a place ;) ... From there, we had to take motorboats to reach the land. I thought that it was a very normal journey but Oh My God! It was through the thick forest, the water was very swampy and marshy. Brown Brown all over. Yuck! If you fall none can save you. Anyways the scary journey came to an end and we had to walk through a bamboo bridge. Then we had to trek down to reach the limestone caves. Soon the trekking came to an end and we were exposed to the living limestone caves. Wow!!! The beautiful limestone caves gave an extraordinary look and were amazing. Amidst the darkness surrounded, two sink holes were found on the top of the caves, which fed the growing limestones with sunlight and rain water. We could see different formations of the limestones viz Lord Shiv, elephant, jelly fish, tulip, etc. Silica's presence gave the limestone a glittering appearance. The trek was very tiring to my mom and hence I walked slowly with her, helping her to climb up. We then moved to the ship through the motor boat and returned our way back to Baratang. On our way, we met a visitor!!! Can you guess who was he??? A crocodile..!!! It vanished soon after our ship passed by it... Then we went to take a look at the mud volcano site at Baratang. It looked as if it's a child's play. It was just looking like a heap of sand which throws cement like stuff as lava. It gave sounds like blug-glug-glog etc and was active. I used a stick and took a small sample. The lava was very cold. It was 3 p.m. already and we went to have our lunch. Note that, 3 p.m is equivalent to almost 5 p.m in the evening when refering sun as the time keeper... ;)

The food tasted the same even in Baratang, I mean similar to the one we had in Radhanagar beach. This time we had potato and curd too. We went back to Port Blair. As usual that night, we ate at Annapurna and reached Hotel Blair. That day morning I had broken one lampshade in my room.

The next day's trip was to North bay island to witness the corals. We got up by 5 in the morning with the sun and were ready by 7. We had a nice breakfast in a Tamilnadu hotel and left to the Water Sports Park. From there the ship to North Bay was by 9'o clock and so we waited there. Then we were taken to the Island and were stopped at a distance. The guides in the ship Silver Jet explained us about snorkeling ( a beta version of Scuba Diving where we can see corals and fishes just from the surface of the water). We were provided with goggles and a breather. It was a great experience. We payed 500 bucks to have a complete journey through the seven levels of corals. Me and my sister were the first ones to go and with us were a couple. They were real time cracks as they tapped their legs scaring the fishes away. We saw many corals, living shells, water anemones, parrot fishes, brain coral, clam shells. The clam shells were looking violet with a small opening which closed on themselves, when someone tried to touch them. The coral flowers were excellent. They too dissappeared once when someone tried to touch them. The sight undewater was picturesque though it was disgusting to keep legs down. The taste of the sea water was very different and chee!!! We returned to Port Blair. While having lunch, I rushed to the nearest internet cafe` for online registration of my 4^th sem class. Then, after having lunch, my mom and sis went back to the hotel and me and my dad to visit Cellular Jail.

Cellular Jail:

An emotional and a must see place for every Indian citizen. It clearly gives us the picture of the sufferings that were met with by our freedom fighters. The structure contains seven wings attached to a single common tower. It contains 3 floors including the ground floor. Out of the seven, only 3 are remaining. Others have been removed, and they have been converted to hospital facilitating even tele-medicine. First, we entered a gallery where we could find the pictures of our freedom fighters who were residents of the cellular jail. The punishments have been portrayed by the statues there. Once done with this we went to see the jail and the cells. Veer Savarkar's cell marked its own importance there. The most saddening part of this cellular jail visit was, the place where our fighters were hanged to death. I felt very emotional and hence left the jail soon.

We then made our shopping and, listen! if you are planning to do the same in Port Blair, make it before 6:30 p.m cause, most of the shops are closed after that. I don't know why they do this crap but generally it is the procedure. The darkness of 6:30 is the same as 8:30 of our India's mainland and so on. So there arises a compulsion to close the shops early. Even people who work there come from the neighbouring islands and hence need to leave early. We left by IC 550 from Veer Savarkar airport. Hmm... the journey was pleasant but contained only one air hostess. That was bad anyways I adjusted for the situation ;) he he he...

Thanks for your pleasant journey with me guys.!!!

The Andaman and Nicobar trip...

2008-12-11T17:15:00.002+05:30

Will update you guys on how my Andaman trip was... Till then just stay tuned. I will turn up within a day or two...
I have written too. Please check my blog once.

It's a carrot world around me...

2008-11-29T01:16:00.010+05:30

Let me make this clear to you all, I don't like carrot at all. I generally like vegetables which give a sour taste and carrot huh! never tastes good even if you add spices and make a curry with it!

Ok Ok, I accept that, its good for one's eyes but you can't force me to eat it just like these ppl have done..!

Let me explain:

The day started like this, I completed my exam and went for lunch. It was tuesday and as usual we had carrot curry (yuck!) and carrot salad. I ate though I didn't like it. Then I felt very hungry by the evening and went down to get some snacks and guess what, it was sundal. But it was not just sundal, they had mixed carrot slices in it! Oooh man! It was very bad! I just threw it off...

To eat our caterer's sundal itself is a tough job! and mixed with carrot? huh! never ask me...

Then by night I went for the dinner... They gave me kofta curry which they call it... and not to get surprised now... it just contained the flour and carrot!!! Hurray... I enjoyed throwing it away!

Fine, I got a few biscuits had some fruits and coffee. The next day, I had exams and I was very hungry. I went to mess for my breakfast and it was noodles... The only thing which tastes good in our mess! Fine with that, but as soon as I started... I found carrots even in those! Oh my god! can someone not save these ppl from using carrot???

Just think, half carrot, half noodles..!!! cha, it tasted worst you know? and that too it was only half cooked as usual..! But still, i managed. I went to exam, did it well and then started to my mess for my lunch. Guess what, my mess welcomed me with carrot sambar, carrot kuttu and I just missed carrot curd..! Come on! I can expect that atleast for even the pickle contained carrot!! he he he...

By night it was none other than carrot rice.! hurray! ppl, right from the start till today, carrot dominates our mess's so called food..! and, Now I can say,

I eat carrot... do you??? ha ha ha...!

Anyways adjustment to any bad condition is one such thing which our mess manager is teaching me ;). And afterall, our mess could have been one such another HR subject...

And pl. don't come to a wrong conclusion that, I don't eat much!

I eat a lot and lot... you can't just stop me...

Note:

Please ones who don't know what is sundal... Sundal is just one such dish which is prepared by soaking cereals in water and then later cooking them with spices... if you want more info. just google it up... it's as easy as that...

Celebrating Deepavali with OpenSolaris...

2008-11-27T04:48:00.015+05:30

Heya Guys!

This time, I had a wonderful deepavali. I took with me 4 of my friends and roamed around our township, Spencers and the beautiful Mahabalipuram. And you know, the other day when we went to Mahabalipuram, me and Anurag wore the OpenSolaris t-shirt - Our Uniform @ GLOSS. It was great fun and with an 8 Mega Pixel camera we came up with great photos. At GLOSS, it had always been our dreams to reach open source to both the student and general community and so, we thought of wearing the OpenSolaris T-Shirt which would in-turn propagate the great Sun's OS too. Not just this, wearing the OpenSolaris t-shirt, gives us, the GLOSS members a sense of pride and attachment in working towards the success of open source. We came up with a lot of good photos and believe me, they looked as though we were modelling for OpenSolaris. Anyways, when we had ppl turn around to see us with Sun's logo, we felt proud and happy.

1. I'm on the left..!

2. Feeling great to be powered by Sun.

3. OpenSolaris - Reaching Everywhere

Greatest mishap of my life...

2008-10-04T10:43:00.002+05:30

It was a very usual day. I got up by 8:00 a.m. and was ready by 8:35 for my college. The first hour was data structures (one of my fav.). Though I was able to get the most part of the class into my brain, I felt something unusual to happen this day! The other hours were Digital Electronics and Microprocessor. Hence I left the class and went off to canteen to have some breakfast. Then I came to the hostel to check internet..! But the wifi was disconnected following the power cuts in the morning. Hence I walked back to the sitting benches, completed my lab works. I was having a mild headache that day due to the sleepless night which I had the other day! Fine with this, I then walked back to my Electronics Lab and due to the power failure, we were asked to leave by 1:20 p.m. I was happy with the green signal which came right from the wifi hot spot located opposite to my room. When i entered the room! I saw everything in a mess. My clothes were off my bed, Suitcases open and my laptop bag lying down and I ... ...found my laptop missing...

All these happened just after my roommate had left the door opened for my sake. I had messaged him to keep the door open as I was coming from the lab an hour before...

Please do not comment on this!

I never used to be without my laptop..! I used to keep it very safe! God only knows why he has given me such a punishment! Not only mine, also my friend's Dell XPS was lost...

I had made posters to make people aware that something of this sort has happened in the premises... But the other day, 2 seniors lost their laptop and they didn't even mind in making the hostellers aware that Laptops are being stolen...! Do not know why people lack social responsibility. If he'd have atleast made an attempt to pass over the information, our laptops would have been saved...!

God! Please get me back my Acer again... can't be without it..! I'm ruining myself...!

Sending SMS throughout India using E-Mail...

2008-09-14T20:09:00.003+05:30

www.160by2.com has come up with a wonderful idea of sending SMS using e-mail.

All you need to do is register yourself for free in this website.

Inorder to send your SMSs you can use this website or either send an e-mail of the following format...

To : reciever-mobile-number.user-name@160by2.com

Message : .... upto 80 characters...

This is a very good idea. For those people for whom, instant messaging has been blocked this facility can be used...

C and C++ programming - Configuring NetBeans (C/C++ support) (Updated to support 6.7.1)

2008-09-14T20:04:00.006+05:30

norder to configure CYGWIN (C, C++ compiler) with NetBeans you need to do the following...

Phase 1: Installation
---------------------------------------------
1. Install NetBeans from www.netbeans.org by clicking on "Download NetBeans IDE"

Note:
You need to install even install JDK which will be informed to you while you install NetBeans. Hence select the All-Download option in the website. Size : 219 MB...

2. Select C, C++ from the given options...
3. After Installing Successfully
4. You need to now install a C,C++ compiler.

Note: Have your compiler installed in "C:" drive.

5. Cygwin is a very good GCC compiler which can be downloaded from www.cygwin.com
6. Run the setup file and it asks you an internet connection. Wifi users of SASTRA University may specify Use proxy option and enter 172.16.1.4/5 8080 as usual.
7. You need to now select the package.
8. This is generally very complicated but can be understood of we put some logic.
9. At a minimum, select gcc-core: C compiler, gcc-g++: C++ compiler, gdb: The GNU Debugger, and make: the GNU version of the 'make' utility.
10. Now proceed to install.

Phase II : Testing your compiler..
-----------------------------------------------------
1. Inorder to check that you've installed your cygwin properly, you need to do certain things.
2. Check if your destination folder contains all the required files of cygwin.
3. Check if your start menu > programs contains a folder named cygwin.
4. This means that you've installed it properly.
5. Now inorder to verify some more go to cygwin bash shell found in the cygwin folder of Start menu > programs.
6. Type cygcheck -c cygwin
7. also these gcc --version
g++ --version
make --version
gdb --version
8. Once you get them all right, you can feel proud that you've done 97.5% of the job.

Phase III : Configuring cygwin with Netbeans.
-----------------------------------------------------------
1. Goto control panel > System or My Computer Icon right click > properties.
2. Choose Advanced tab.
3. Click on Environment Variables.
4. In system variables' frame choose "path" and click "edit" button.
5. Now in the variable value textbox give the path of your cygwin/bin directory. (i.e. probably c:\cygwin\bin)
6. Click OK
7. Congratulations. You have taken a great step towards your better programming.

Now creating your first Cpp program... (Hello World.cpp)

1. Start your NetBeans IDE.
2. Goto File > New Project.
3. In Categories Pane select C/C++
4. In Projects pane select C/C++ Application
5. Click Next.
6. Enter your Project Name. ("Helloworld" here)
7. Choose your Project Location (if at all...)
8. Click on Finish.
9. Now you can see the Projects Tab of your right side containing lots of folders such as Header Files, Source Files, Resource Files, Important Files.
10. Now Right Click on Source Files and Choose...
Empty C++ file...
11. Give it a name...
12. Type the code.
13. Goto Build (Can find it in the Menu Bar) and click on Compile.
14. Once you compile, click on the green arrow button for running the program or By Choosing Run > Run Main Project.
15. Congrats. You've done a splendid job...!!!

Thanks for configuring your NetBeans for C, C++ with me patiently...
if you have any queries about installing NetBeans and Cygwin or be it anything reg. these,
Please do not hesitate to contact me...
sanjeevsince90@gmail.com (or)
sanjeevgopinath@ymail.com (or)

Please note that once your NetBeans is configured, your tools > C++ contains the following things according to your installation.

Update for Netbeans 6.7.1 :

Download Cygwin. Choose the Following by clicking on the arrow kind of buttons.

Choose Devel...

1. GCC 2. G++ 3. GDB 4. NASM 5. G77 6. Make

After this, allow Cygwin to install the downloaded components.

Now open NetBeans 6.7.1 and Create a C/C++ project. Now, goto Tools and C/C++.

Click on add button and specify the location of Cygwin/bin directory. Its mostly in C drive.

Now, the cygwin will automatically be selected by Netbeans.

All you got to do now is delete the project and create a new one.! Things will work fine then..!

Adding Clock Gadget in your Blog...

2008-09-07T04:31:00.003+05:30

If you'd like to add the clock gadget even in your blog follow these steps...!

1. Click on Get Widget which is present in the bottom of the clock gadget.

2. A widget box will appear with a Javascript code.

3. Copy it.

4. Open your blog and goto layout.

5. Click on Add a Gadget.

6. Now select HTML or Javascript in that.

7. Give the title and paste the code.

8. Save the gadget.

9. Save the Layout.

10. Your Gadget is ready.

If your internet connection is very slow, it might take time.

To Robert Reagan : Sir, If you have noted this, please comment...! Thanks for your compliments about the blog...

Unfortunate...

2008-09-07T03:32:00.002+05:30

Hello all,

Since blogger has been blocked in our wifi, I'm not able to keep in touch with you all. Once my internal exams are over I'll come up with my posts on the following topics...

1. Varalakshmi Nombu @ Home

2. Avni Avitam

3. Ganesh Chaturthi

4. Nudukkam Thirtha Vinayagar

5. and more to come...

Stay tuned...

GLOSS session on PHP and MySql

2008-08-09T23:47:00.003+05:30

Programming in php has always been a passion for me. HTML alone is not useful. You cannot feel enough power with HTML. So I really hated to switch or even learn web-languages. But, now its not so... website designing using php is something that can give you opportunity to take over the world. Amazing is its features!
Let me slowly brief about it...

Php is a server side scripting language. This means that all the execution are basically done in the server side and not by the one executing it. Why should we go for a server side scripting?
Basically, lets take this scenario where I use Solaris Operating system, you use Windows Vista and someone uses a Linux. If I program for a page which works fine with Solaris, I can't be sure that it works as fine as it did for me (There's a change in platform right???)! Hence it becomes necessary for us to write pages that use server side scripting. Did you know? Almost 75% of the webpages are made using php. Even the wikipedia uses php. Try opening a tab and giving it a try. But don't bounce directly now...!
Fine, coming to the part...
Php is a scripting language right? You can just embed it in a normal HTML and the awesome part is that, if you give a tag for bold, underline or something, it even works and modifies your php output.
There is a very close relationship between php and MySql. Whats MySql?
Its a Relational Datanbase Management System. Its very very easy to start with MySql. All you need is just an e-book which helps you out fine. MySql Query Browser is a good choice.
Not much to tell about MySql. The giant Google also uses it! All your searches are done using MySql.
If you need to maintain such a database, you need to maintain an apache server inside your system and access your pages using local host.
I'll talk about this in a detailed manner soon.

GLOSS Website Launched

2008-08-02T01:34:00.002+05:30

The official website of GLOSS was launched last week. It was created using Drupal. The website boasts a variety of features such as forums, blogs and stuff which GLOSS members can use. The looks and feel of the website is also good. This is seriously a milestone in the history of GLOSS. The website was initially decided to be prepared in php, but we had a change of plans to make it in Drupal. The website was prepared by Abhishek alone. This website can act as an interactive medium and can help us better contribute to the community as well as to open source.

GLOSS has been rocking and will be as well. Dwaraknath Mahathi the new campus ambassador of Sun Microsystems is very keen to take up initiatives and work for GLOSS. All the best for his success.

My blog's becoming popular...

2008-07-16T05:30:00.003+05:30

I used google analytics to track the traffic to my blog. I was really surprised to find that I've been having consistent people from many countries to view this...
Lots of countries such as US, Canada, Germany, Saudi Arabia, UK, Sweden, Japan and obviously India. US has given me a decent amount of traffic and states such as California, Maryland, Texas, Minnesota, Rhodes Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc. I feel very good to know that someone from such a far country has spent time in going through my blog for as long as 16 mins and 49 secs. There are even visitors who have read my Blog from Santa Clara, which means that someone should have tracked my blog from Sun Microsystems as I am a part of GLOSS.
The average statistics predict that I've a "direct traffic" predominating than being tracked through a search engine. Also not to mention that at a particular point of time when people had searched for "Mechanical at SASTRA" my blog enjoyed the I'm feeling lucky spot. The average time spent by the visitors in my blog is 2 min 29 secs till this moment. Will update you, when a nearest milestone is achieved.

Younger ones dominate, or is it the other way? You decide!

2008-07-16T04:58:00.002+05:30

Hello all,

Let me directly come to the point. It’s always a feeling when one is in first year to get afraid of seniors. But as time goes on and we come to the second year, we recognize ourselves in a better position and try to dominate the juniors. This is a tradition always followed to whichever college we go!

This is more or like an elder child’s feeling towards a new born younger one! This is a very basic happening and most likely results in unwanted such as ragging, etc. But now it’s not like that…

Listen!

I’m going to tell you a story based on a true life incident which happened earlier this month in the girls’ hostel to a very calm III yr. senior;

A junior passing by her asked: Excuse me, Please wait!

Which year are you in?

IIIyr.

Oh! That’s ok! Which branch did you opt?

CSE

Did you not get ECE when you attended the counseling?

Argh!!!

Ok, Shall I call you ma’am or akka? Which one are you comfortable with?

….!!!???!!!!

Hmmm… not to tell these people! It’s very true that we’ve to struggle for existence!

Leave this; even in the GLOSS session which was conducted for the juniors, there were people who dominatingly asked hello senior! Were you able to find at least one girl friend in these 3 years??

Oops… can’t comment!

Registration Website For GLOSS

2008-07-13T04:25:00.001+05:30

It was all a hurry, as the orientation session for the first year was nearing. We people in the GLOSS developers' team had split the jobs between us. One group took care of the videos and other took care of publicity. Harish had done a marvelous job working on the posters. They were really stunning!
I took up the registration website designing. Initially I thought of going with the Microsoft Visual Studio's Web Developer kit. I even had some hands on the tools but I found that connecting to database and deploying the website in a server was a tough job. So I had asked for help from Dwarak and Abhishek. Abhishek helped me with xampp and MySQL query browser software. The xampp software allows one to establish a server within their system! He also asked me to drop the plan of making the webpage in Visual Studio and asked me to try a hand on php.
To my surprise, I found php very easy. It was all the same old syntax of C and C++ combined with some spl database features. I felt as though php and MySQL were cousins when trying to link them. Though a part of the core MySQL codings were given by Abhishek, I struggled hard to later develop it into a stable one. The first "distro" (theme) that I had designed for the site was just of the colour combination which Harish had provided in his 2nd poster. When we approved the theme and started working on the wifi, I felt that the site was taking a lot of time to load.

Then sitting late night with Adobe Photoshop, I came up with a blue-white theme for the site. It was far appealing than the previous one. The menus were neat and good looking. People tested my site and I felt so happy that I had reached mount everest.

And one more thing which I felt the most happy was that, Google uses MySQL as the backend and even my site uses MySQL as the backend! As I always used to say Open Source Rox..!!

"Huh!!! Sanjeev! I'm really proud of you..!"

GLOSS session on Open High Availability Cluster

2008-06-30T22:04:00.001+05:30

Today we had a session on OHAC. It was a brainstorming session in fact! Till today I had a different view point about clusters and parallel processing. But now Abhishek had explained asymptotic strategies that were involved in clusters. He started off from scratch, explaining even the basics. He started his lecture by playing an “open” video which was designed using Blender software with the help of super computers’ service provided by network.com. I could understand that there would be a heavy loss of data and currency when we have a crash in servers or say, when a disaster strikes.
Interrupt received!!!
Oops! No donut for you! Wait…
For the non techies reading this I’d like to define some of these concepts as I’m eager to let everybody know how things are working in big companies such as Sun, Google (Gmail), Yahoo and others. Actually clusters are two or more systems that execute a applications given to them.In case of a failure to one cluster, the other cluster tolerates and gives a fail safe execution for the application.
Take this situation, when you are making a money transaction through an internet service provided by a bank and suddenly the server which provided you the service failed! Boom!! You won’t know what the consequences may be, right? Again, think of a situation when your mail service provider’s server has crashed once for all. Are you gonna make use of his services from then on? In the same manner think that you want to upload a video and you don’t have youtube functioning, would be very disgraceful right? In such situations you can have high availability clusters. When an application running and some misbehavior occurs in that cluster, it can be transferred with a great ease to the other cluster without making the end user feel that there had been a crash or a change of a cluster.
In this regard, you’ve operating system talking to the hardware and over it, the cluster infrastructure in order to distribute the work properly. The applications are safely distributed into the clusters during a failover by special applications called as Agents.
The most exciting part of the session was the simulation of this architecture into the opensolaris machine. Abhishek had worked to create zones. These zones are nothing but an instance of the operating system’s kernel. He launched a song using real player in one zone and ordered it shutdown. To everybody’s surprise, the real player failed over to another zone and started running successfully.
I was really on this topic even after the session had ended. And now I’ve got a few pdf’s on it. Very eager to go through them! So, rest is next...
To the techies, if you wish to have a view of the presentation, do mail me. I’ll send a copy of it to you.

Nokia is not to be Blamed

2008-06-29T17:43:00.006+05:30

With the introduction of Nokia's low cost mobiles, the number of mobile phone users has drastically increased in the past two years. It has become an important tool for communication. People have realized the importance of quick communication after the Tsunami disaster. But this is not all. It was just one time when people thought that cell phones could be useful at emergency situations but, now cell phones are a tool of entertainment and just that. 10 p calling boosters, 22500 message booster, 49p call booster, STD booster, etc are the common offers which make anyone go ga-ga over mobile phones. A good example is the person in this picture!

I was on my way to Trichy. I found my bus driver making some zigzag and stunts while driving. When went near, I could find him talking in his mobile. The road was actually a busy highway which is under construction and the driver was pretty cool calling the end user “chellam, kutti, kanna”. And when I took this picture, the conductor noticed me and got afraid. To add to it, the passengers saw me just as a journalist landing from “The Hindu”.
There are something in this world which we can’t buy such as our life. For everything else there’s mastercard. Hope the driver hasn’t heard this! He He…;) lol!

Baby's day out....

2008-06-11T16:22:00.001+05:30

Can’t really accept that I’m 18, now! I got my learner’s license by last month and today I went to the Chengalpattu R.T.O office to get my test done. My morning started exactly by 6:40 a.m. and I had a good bath and then noodles, an easy and light breakfast. My father having noticed the 100 INR in my purse and gave me 50 more INR to spend. I started my journey with my T-Shirt on, quoting “Some people call it laziness, but I call it deep thinking”. I missed my first bus but didn’t miss the second. The bus was quite full and I had to stand. The bus conductor came late to me and so, I had enough time to plug my ear phones to my 5600 Xpress mobile and listen to the same old Mungaru Male and 50 cent’s songs. Later, I got my tickets to Thirukalkundram, a small town near by, where the driving school had one of its main branch offices. I got down there and took attestation in their office and started towards Chengalpattu. This time the bus was crowded, but I had no other option than traveling in it. I had a 10 INR, but the conductor wanted me to give exactly 4.50 INR. Finally he came to a compromise and gave me back only 5 INR in the end. I didn’t mind for that 0.50 INR cause, it could at least help him with a tea if he did the same with 4 more people like me. I got down by the railway gate and went straight down the road connecting the R.T.O office. 8:00 a.m. was not so early. I didn’t see any shop open by the road side. I was quite surprised and continued with my long walk. Going further I could see a lot of men standing and crowding like the housefly does! Never mind, that was the R.T.O office. The representatives of my driving school approached a dozen of their clients (includes me too…) and checked for the correct details in the learners’ license. After checking, they asked us to stand by the ‘second left’ where the test for two wheelers would ‘commence’, ooh! It was like a circus but people had wet faces as though they were attending some public exam. Even I was afraid too as I had not known to drive a geared two wheeler. I pretended to be cool headed but. Then there was one such man, a representative from another driving school. He gave practice to his clients with the Kinetic Honda which he had. Seeing people doing miserable job with that Kinetic Honda, even I asked my driving school representatives to give their vehicle for my practice. But they had their own reasons to deny it. Later then, it was like the Park Sheraton’s fashion show. The judge – R.T.O was in one end and we candidates in the side. The co-ordination and the time keeping were very perfect with that of the “name callers” and “senders”. We were asked to make a U turn in front of them without keeping legs on the road. Some made it perfect. But some others didn’t mind having their legs down for balance. There were some people too, who fell on the ground without even being able to balance the two-wheeler. After some time, loud came the noise calling, “Sanjeev Gopinath”. I took the kinetic Honda, raised the accelerator and made a big U turn to end up with a perfect drive. After then, I sat in the TATA Indica which they provided and made a perfect start. The R.T.O sitting near me asked me to stop. That ended my tests. Now I’m a tested citizen of India to drive on any roads across our country with any two-wheeler or four-wheeler. But this didn’t end the game. I was asked to wait behind the R.T.O office in order to check my details and give them a “cheese-smile” for my license. I came to the spot and to my negative surprise; I saw the whole of Indian population waiting there. There were different sets of people, rich-poor, literate-illiterate, male-female, young-old, bathed-not bathed, etc. The license officers took around 3 hrs to call me. Meanwhile I had no place to sit. So I was wandering over there and somehow had a time pass with my counterparts. To the heat waves of the sun thrashing me, even my cell had got switched off. I discussed politics, corruption and things of that sort with some minds there. There was a big well just outside the office where there were lots of fishes. I even watched them to pass away my time and can’t say, there were many photos and gum bottles in the well. I thought, oh! God, hopefully Sanjeev is only the best citizen; he doesn’t do such things. I was called by around 1:10 and I completed my processing there. I was asked to sign using a pen connected to an input device which directly displayed the handwritings on screen. I thought, oh! One day I could program for the updated device drivers for this hardware! Huh, readers! Where will my mind go? After all, I’m a computer Engineering student.

I started to home and reached by 3:00 p.m. My day, though very tiresome was exposure giving. I could understand the underground works going on in many of the state government offices. I came across different sets of people and I could understand the population explosion of India. Being in a township, I never had any difficulties of standing in a queue, hearing words of the frustrated under-treating officers. Around me I had only seen a developed India, but today I had an eye opener. Hence, it was a very different day.

My Computer Life

2008-06-09T14:34:00.000+05:30

It was a day when my dad was asking me a few questions when I was playing ‘Age of Empires’. He had asked me, how can one program such brilliant computer games???
Suddenly a spark struck in my mind on programming. I found the pleasure that one could get from programming something. When you could get the output of a complex problem quickly; I thought, oh! This could be the best area in which we can develop our skills on.
I started programming as early as when I was in 6th. That led me to the strongest foundation that one could never imagine on. I started of with QBASIC and then slowly went to website development through the Yahoo! Geocities. That helped me to learn much of the tricks and tips in various branches of computer science and commerce. With the ideas of QBASIC I had gone to a coaching center to learn C-language. But the lady there, ordered me to finish MS-Office and the continue with C. Hence I had to continue with MS-Office. Then I finished my C and completed my C++ too. This happened by the end of 10th as I had got 75% scholarship for a Diploma in C, C++ and UNIX in CSC. I had promised my teachers there to complete 6-10 projects by the end of the course. But when I saw the project catalogue, I was off! They were quite tough. But I had kept my promise. I submitted around 4 projects which included…
• Calendar
• Calculator
• File Manager
• Database Manager

Then with the introduction of Operating Systems in my +1, I started off with a DOS based cross platform called as Entrada Emission. This could help for a text processing, file management, database management, presentation management and much more across different machines. I made this version portable when I was in my I yr. B.Tech. I had created many applications such as Natter Man for having a chat via the school LAN.
The turning point of my computer life came when I was in 12th std., my principal madam had called me while talking with the software engineers. She wanted to have a question paper generator for one word answering. The software engineers had asked her for a great time. I promised her that I’ll make one for her within a week time or even less than that. This made the software engineers envy the regards and the pride that my princi., had on me. Then with my entering into the college I had joined GLOSS and my life has been pretty interesting from then on.

People I would like to thank in this regard:
• Mr. Mohan Kumar (My 6-8th Computer Teacher)
• Mr. Narayan Balaji (My 9th Computer Teacher)
• Mr. Dharmarajan (My 11th Computer Teacher)
• Mrs. Bhuvaneshwari (My 12th Computer Teacher)

Life's so mechanical at SASTRA...

2008-05-12T22:40:00.003+05:30

Hmmm... it's a mechanical world. I thought of being a computer engineer but I think that things are not going in proper way these days. We get up as early as 8:00 a.m. in the morning and manage to go to our classes by 8:40 a.m. Then we sit in the class very much glued to our seats. Then we've a beak at 11:10 and we go to the canteen to have something to eat. We again return to our classes and glue up ourselves again. We wait for the lunch hour and then somehow pass the period off. We go to our hostel and have our food. Though not too good, we eat much, such that we can't even move a bit. Then inorder to change the books for the coming periods, we go to our room and our most welcoming bed calls for a good sleep. By the time we get up, already we'd have missed one period. Rushing late to the next class we'll make sure that we have got the attendance. Then we reach the hostel dragging ourselves. If it's 4:00 p.m. we'd wait for the snacks and tea which would be available by 5. Then we'd take a small nap and get up by 8:25 p.m. We'd have to rush to the mess by now. After that with the name of giving roll call, we'd sit silently in our room until it's 9:20 p.m. Oops!!! it's time for our night coffee. So we take our glasses and buy instant coffee from the shop and have a very relaxing drink until it's 10:20 p.m. We'd go to the lawn in front of our SPS and sit there for a great meeting. Then it's mail checking time... So it'd be better to switch on our laptops but play counter strike instead. By the time we finish, it'd be 2:00 p.m. already. We'd go for a sleep again!!!
Cha, what a hectic life!!!

Being Proud - GLOSS

2008-04-19T21:11:00.006+05:30

Hello ppl,
Today, I'm very proud to feel that I'm part of one of the fastest growing team of this world. Nevertheless I mean our GLOSS developers' team. It had always been my dream to work in a team. I usually feel jealous when one of those guys from infosys comment in every wednesday's opportunity paper about the team work that happens in their company. And this time I'm very much surprised to see me working as a part and parcel for GLOSS. It's always amazing and innovative to spend time with GLOSS Dev. team. You can really feel the uniqueness of every single person here. The timely jokes, sentiments, brotherhood that we get are priceless and the thoughts that we share with the cutting edge ideas, we come up with give us a great go...

Sooner we are going to take up projects in OpenSolaris and add to it a series of educational softwares and make it enough for students to use and get benefitted from.

Everyday the signs of development of GLOSS shows me the better part of it for being the No 1 contributor in the open source field. The young team of ours in the first year coming up with a lot of enthusiasm shows that we could reach GLOSS to greater heights.

Cheers to GLOSS that it keeps us engaged with lots of techie stuff and makes our IQ in every sphere sharper. We as in a team promise that we'd never let GLOSS lose its identity and vanish away into the dark...

It usually happens this way...

2008-04-17T23:26:00.000+05:30

Now-a-days it's becoming a very usual thing for us, the GLOSS dev. team to sit together, discuss and have fun. This day started off when it was already about 4 in the evening when Abhishek had invited us for a cup of coffee outside the SASTRA campus. We all had a very splendid time discussing topics that could brighten up our life and the way it goes. We were really inspired and quite after that we started to frame the constitution of GLOSS. For nothing to stop us, we had a pen and found a 'JK copier' paper to write upon. We created the cutting edge preamble of gloss that could sustain it for generations and spread it's work of greatness to every world possible. It was really proud when we people signed it and took a few decisions for the immediate future of GLOSS. Now a newsletter is yet to be released. Will make you all guys aware when that happens.

It usually happens this way... we start with a cup of coffee and end up creating something innovative everytime. No matter why we are called as MyJavaGuys by Abhishek...

The Gloss Sunday - The Sun University Day Celebrations...

2008-04-13T23:54:00.003+05:30

The Sun University Day celebrations at SASTRA was really unforgettable for me. I was in the organising part of the workshop that was conducted by GLOSS and it was all fun and enjoyment. It gave me and my fellow people a great Sunday. The day started off with the registrations which simply made us feel the pleasure of being as an organising team. The morning session gave the ideas about OpenSolaris and introduced us to the concepts of Operating Systems, Hardware, Interface, etc. It was really mind boggling to see the power of OpenSolaris and it's cool distro. The whole of the participants present over there were deeply involved into Abhishek's seminar. With the announcement of a short bio-break, I thought that the crowd level would become really down since anything sounding Non-Windows could prove them boring. But the case was not that. People were really impressed and wanted to know about the potential of OpenSolaris and it's further features. The seminar ran upto 1:10 almost and it was time for the lunch. The lunch was arranged at the SASTRA - Krishna Canteen and the menu was Veg. Pulav and Paneer Butter Masala. The taste was so exotic and I felt very hard to drag myself to the conference hall. But having no other option than being there, I went to attend and organise the rest of the workshop, i.e. the second session. In second session half of the members were asked to assemble at the CAD/CAM lab to get a hands on experience of working with VitualBox and OpenSolaris. The other half were given a seminar about how they could reap the maximum out of NetBeans IDE 6.0. Abhishek proved his potential to all of them by explaining even tougher things in a light and easily understandible way. His proper quoting of examples from various sources made people get inspired by him, a lot!!! He proved to be a proper hero, a Antonio of the day in convincing people to move towards the emerging open source applications with focus towards OpenSolaris and NetBeans IDE. It was really good. His pleasant words, proper answers for the questions raised would have really made any equals of him feel jealous about him. Throughout he worked hard with his throat and mind. People like me and other associated volunteers of GLOSS took various pictures of this marked day as we didn't want to miss any of the moments there. The day was smoothly fuctioning without any nuisance till the end. The participants were interviwed and were asked to give their feedbacks about their opinion and stuff. It was all great going...
More to be added... ;)

Homesick...

2008-04-10T10:23:00.000+05:30

I'm used to hostel but this time, I'm really homesick.
It's been so long since I had been to home.
Because of this, I'm almost screwing up every exam of mine.
I feel that I should have a supersonic Jet...
For I'd be a dayscholar travelling 600kms daily... ;)
Anyways I'd be landing my home this 22nd. So no prob!!!
I can enjoy 15 days there...

Hi People

2008-04-10T10:07:00.000+05:30

This is my BLOG. Everyone of you can be updated with me in here.
I'll share with you all my experiences in each and every thing
that's happening around me. Hope to create better goodies for
you ppl to read about...
Bye for now.