Cleared the next step to enter TCS

Two days back (on 29th) I went for TCS pre-employment medical checkup at Coimbatore. I have cleared the test successfully. It was a general master medical checkup.

Tsunami hits Asia

Today morning Tsunami waves have hit the coastal areas of India, Srilanka, Indonesia, Thailand and few asian countries. It is a great diaster here and many people have died in this hit. It seems the waves were originated from the Sumatra islands where there was an earthquake measuring 8.5 on ritcher scale. It is really sad here. More details on the Tsunami hit updates is on..

http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

A day to forget. God, let this don't happen again, atleast with no people dying.

It was movie time for me now

In the past two days I saw two movies, "Desam" and "Kadhal". Desam was pretty good and it was on the track like that of Lagaan. The director and Sharuk has done a good job. The music needs no comments, as it was of AR Rahman. The songs that I humm nowadays are from this movie (the hindi version). The movie Kadhal, it was a good time in the theater with by classmates (20 odd ppl). The first half of the movie was really time passing and the director has tried really hard to pull the second half to an end (really slow). After the movie we went to the dinner. The veg and non-veg people were separated to their favorite hotels. We veg people went to Mohan Bojnalaya Bombay Meals center. That was good with unlimited rotis and rice. When you are hunger you can go over there and have a good amount of food. The final year attam seems to have started :-)

Programming always rocks

This weekend I was reading a pdf titled 'Programming from the Ground Up' by Jonathan Bartlett. It was on Intel assembly programming, GNU Assembler (as) and GNU Linker (ld). I have been to assembly programming already during my fourth semester as part of my curriculum. But working on assembly in a GNU/Linux box is cool and interesting. The 'as' supports only AT&T format of assembly. This is new for me coz., we used MASM that had the normal intel syntax. Whatever it may be, programming always ROCKS.

PThreads session on GLUG meeting

Today me and Bala Murugan gave a talk on POSIX threads in the GLUG Madurai meeting. Asusual there were around ten members or odd. The session was fine and we could discuss lot of good and informative stuffs.

pthreads Programming

http://www.llnl.gov/computing/tutorials/pthreads/

Kulal Puttu @ Thiruparankundram

Few days back once Balamurugan told that there will be Kulal puttu available near Thiruparankundram. We thought of eating that one day and last saturday we went there. But since it was too early we returned back cheerless. But today we planned it right and five of we people (myself, Joe, BalaMurugan, keyan and Senthil) went there. It was fun being there having rice kulal puttu with my guys after a long time. Joe could not stop him, he ate around two to two-and-a-half plates. You cannot get this cuisine anywhere in the big holtels/restaurants in Madurai. It costs Rs.5 per plate. Yaar.. its cheap and good.

GCC inline asm (for x86)

http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9804.2/0953.html

Seriously looking out for a start

For the past two days, I'm little bored with my compiler book (for GATE). I thought of starting to study for GOATEE (http://sigos.blogspot.com/). Yesterday I read few pages on Brey, it is interesting with the Intel architecture. Just now myself and Balamurugan were discussing with Joe on his proceeding and came out with a clear picture of what is going on and what need to do. It seems (is) to be challenging and interesting. Think I've started seriously and need to gear up my mates for GOATEE.

My cute system is now with Debian Sarge

Few days back I cleaned my system, formatted the harddisk, created new partitions and now it is loaded with Windows 98 (with minimal softwares like Office, Winamp and few) and Debian Sarge (2.6 kernel). I thought of doing this for a long time. Now my system is really fast (even with my 64 MB memory), comparing to the past days. Debian Sarge looks great, every night I'm exploring Sarge for the new softwares, trying with few configuration files. It is cool when I do something new ;-).

Real meaning of Hacking

http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

Queer grading system

My results are out, I've got 8.43 (667 out of 800). No one is able to predict TCE exam results, a puzzling one for decades. The results this time is good for everyone, I suppose.

The grading system in TCE is strange. Lemme try to explain. The one whose total score is higher than someone else gets (most of the times) a lesser grade than the other one. This time it happened to me and has hit me down. The grading system goes like this,

Marks	Grade	Points
90 - 100	S	10
80 - 89	A	09
70 - 79	B	08
60 - 69	C	07
.. goes on ..

That is, for example, if one gets his mark in the range (60 to 69) the grade will be C and so on for others. The serious point to note here is that, there is no difference shown between the students whose socre lies in the range 60 and 69. Both of them gets the same grade. Consider a situation, where the student A get his marks as 79 and 79 in two papers and student B gets 70 and 80 in the same respective papers. The total of student A will be 158 and that of student B will be 150. But when compared under the grade system students B (17 points) gets a higher grade than student A (16 points). This should not be the case and it seems to undergrade some students. This has happened to me this time and has happened to many of my friends (myself too) in the last few semesters. I donno whether the grading system is taken from Anna University. Who should be blamed for this ?? Has the officials not noticed abt this and no actions were taken ??

Two day trip to Trichy

Me and my friend Aravind Baalaaji went to Trichy, the last sunday. It was actaully like a pilgrimage, coz., we went to three temples : Srirangam temple, Malai Kottai Pillayar temple and the Iyappan temple. We had a comfortable stay in Mahesh's house. It was nice being there with him (and his family) and having taken the food cooked by him. He is cooking great!! The only mistake we did there was watching the film 'Attagasam'. We stood thrilled on how could Charan go this much bad. Ajit is again down.

While in Trichy we met Muthu Kumar, Suba Siva and Prasanth. Went to Prasanth's house (which is in Srirangam agragaram), he accompanied with us to Malai Kottai temple. The tuesday afternoon we returned back to Madurai. The three temples were really superb. Notably the Iyappan temple is maintained great (a place to peace your mind). Srirangam and Malai Kottai need no mention of its fame. Nice trip after my sucking exams.

Few links (GATE)

http://sudarshan.ai-edu.com/gate/list.html
http://www.gateforum.com
http://www.gateguru.org
http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/avi/os-book/osc/slide-dir/

Decided not to use pirated VCDs

Few days back, I saw during an interview director Dharani saying abt this. He was saying abt the difficulties they have in the film industry. I felt bad for using the pirated VCDs. Its a work from a large crew of people and I want to respect their work.

Seventh Semester Exams - a review

I'm back after my exams. A review on my exam papers and a little retrospect of how I prepared for them.

The papers I had:

(0) Client Server Technologies
(1) Operations Research
(2) Simulation and Modelling
(3) Artificial Intelligence
(4) Neural Networks (E)
(5) Wireless Networks (E)
(6) Internet Programming Lab
(7) Computer Graphics Lab

A small review...

(0) The syllabus was from a reference guide. One can never really study all the units. Every chapter had lot of Class names, methods and operations contained in it, and the parameters passed to them. If you are a person who can mug things easilly, you too will feel hard to study this paper. Then what for me ?? I somehow tried to keep in my mind all the names. I really know nothing abt the Class, but I will write on that in the exams. This is what everyone has did in the exam. The syllabus must be changed, its of no use reading books on the current syllabus. The real fun is that, still we don't know the real details/meanings of ORB, CORBA and all.

(1) OR is the one which I liked the most in this semester. A superb paper indeed that involves simplification, logic, calculations and real math. I prepared well for this exam, but didn't do to my satisfaction in the exam. The paper was little tough and I too did some silly careless mistakes.

(2) Simulation is pretty easy one for all. The first three units were the last two units of Numerical Methods of the last semester. Since I have already read this, it was an easy one for me. I don't know where from the fourth unit came. There was no introduction and don't know how people inserted this to the syllabus. The unit had full of eqns and you can understand nothing from them. The fifth one was interesting and it was on GPSS. I really enjoyed reading that unit.

(3) AI too was good and interesting. Lot of algorithms to read, but the third unit was little big. I left some few topics in that unit. Good paper to read and that new way solving problems is amazing.

(4) When I saw Neural the first time, I felt like dying. But when I started to read, it was not like that. Topics were are dependent on the previous ones and interesting too. There were totally 10 main topics (algorithms) which were arranged in five units. I felt hard to remember the equations it had. But somehow I managed to study 4 to 4-1/2 units. Wrote the exam pretty well too.

(5) Wireless is hard always. A big bulk of contents were in the material. I had three days leave before the exam, but asusual I started to read seriously one day before the exam. Had a bad time.

(6) IP lab, a piece of cake for me. I have been working in this technology for the past three years. Sure of getting 'S' grade.

(7) Oh my God!!, the lab exam I felt scared for the first time was this one. I didn't actually like this lab, coz I'm nowhere going to use this graphics (in Turbo C) in industry. But atlast I tried some few programs (line clipping, 2D transformation, ellipse generation) and came out with a confidence that I could do well. I got 2D transformation in the exam and will get 'S' surely. The real satisfacion I have is that, I'm gonna get 'S' grade in all the lab exams in my college life.

The hard days have passed away...

Decided for appearing GATE

Finally decided to write GATE 2005. Bought the application form today. Need to put my efforts in, really.

Woke till 06:00 am, achieved!!

Since my study holidays has started I was trying to woke till the morning (06:00 am). But somehow daily I get dried down at around 03:00 to 04:00 am. But today I am awake till now. The secret behind, may be, is that I started listening to music from 03:00 am and for an hour. I feel like achieving something. For the whole night i was also thinking whether I need to write GATE this year. I have to talk to my mates about this. The thing I have decided is that if I decide to take up GATE, I will have to work hard (really not like the last year).

Met Ananth after a long time

Today I met my senior Ananth Srinivas who is back home after his TCS training at Trivandrum. He says he enjoyed his life over there with a varied people from different parts of India. Had a nice time chatting with him. The fun there was, for the first time I heard, he said "I didn't perform well there"...!! stunning man..!!! He is gonna join in Digital Zone center, Chennai on tuesday.

Hard at study holidays ;-(

Trying hard with my study holidays. Its been months that I have been with my books for a long time. I'm really confused on which one to study first. OR and Neural (except the eqns) are pretty good. Need to start AI. God save me.