Sen Speaks

Bye to Blogger

2006-09-22T06:34:00.000+05:30

Now it is time to bid adieu to Blogger. I have switched from blogger to wordpress. Blogger has remained the same for almost two years and there has not been any change or innovation. Wordpress looks like a cool choice to me. Wordpress has a lot of features when compared to blogger. One more reason is restriction of blogger in college . Anyway i am switching over to wordpress and my wordpress blog is http://senthilkumaran.wordpress.com .

High Adrenaline Action

2006-09-03T19:53:00.000+05:30

My 50th post is going to be something about me and snakes. May prove to be a interesting story also. Since it is sunday i was off for a casual walk near my home with my pet Tommy. About 100 feet from my home i sited a snake about 6 feet long and considerably large in diameter waiting to catch a frog that was in front of it. I did not notice it at first but on seeing me it went inside a large bush near that. A snake that has caught my attention has never managed to live more than 10 minutes. The count of snakes killed by me is already in double digit and i thought of adding one more to it. So i spent the next 10 minutes beating the bush with the intent of bringing the snake out. The bush was a little large to search and there was no sign of the snake but i was sure that it was still there. After about 30 minutes i went to the same spot with a little large and of course with my pet.

Still the frog was there in the same position where i saw it first. I started the same old job, beating the bush with the hope of getting the snake out. At one point i found the snake moving inside the bush and whacked it with my stick. One more blow after that i started hearing hissing sounds. The sounds became strong and i realised the breed of snake. Ofcourse it was KING COBRA. It was there with its body raised to about 2feet and it has streched its hood and is making strong hissing sounds. The hood and hissing sound did wat it was supposed to do. I dont know where half of my courage went once i saw that snake. (summa saadha pambuntu nenachein, anna naaga pambuntu yaaruku theriyum)

An awesome and fearful sight it was. I backed off but my pet kept advancing and started barking. It was just 1 to 2 feet away. I thought it is going to be the last evening for my pet. Somehow managed to collect him and returned home. After tat still went there this time armed with some bricks and stones, still alone. I stayed a little away and threw some stones. But i could not find anything. So i returned home.

Encounters with snake is not something new to me. I started killing snakes right from my 4th standard and had killed all sorts of snakes. I remember killing a snake when i was 11 by stamping with my shoes. But this is the first encounter with cobra and this is the first time i have seen a snake standing against its opponent and this is the first time i felt some fear for a snake. Legends say that if you beat a cobra and dont kill, it remembers and take revenge on you even after years. Lets see. Already this incident has become a hot news for my nieghbours. I am hearing all sorts of stories now. Ok enough of the COBRA story i have CORBA exam tomorrow to study.

Drupal Again

2006-08-30T06:11:00.000+05:30

Yesterday a website was created and launched in just two to three hours. Thanks to Drupal. Drupal is really making our work a lot easier. The first time we worked in Drupal was when we redesigned the college website, now it is the glugot site. We had been thinking about moving the glugot site running in mediawiki to some other CMS for a very long time. Yesterday we decided to work on the site and decided on Drupal to finish the Job. Within three hours the work was completed and the site is up and running. We have turned into very fast workers indeed :). Now the site is perfect and looks great. Still there are a lot more modules to be added in Drupal and the contents in website should also be modified. Click here to take a loot at the new website.

Testing Dapper Drake

2006-08-27T16:12:00.000+05:30

Got a feel of Dapper drake atlast. Waited for the oppurtunity to test Dapper Drake for a long time after it was released. I could not get it installed in my system as the live CD was not running in my 128MB ram. The oppurtunity to try out Dapper Drake came in the form of my friend vanniaperumal. On saturday we went to his home to install Debian, but the same old problem of debian installer and SATA harddisk spoiled it all. So it was time to test try out the new version of Ubuntu.

The installation proceeded smoothly and there were just 6 easy steps to be done by the user after which the installer does all stuff while we sit back and relax. The GUI or GNOME looks good. But all the efforts seemed to be a waste when we were not able to find EMACS or gcc installed. This is my first experience with Ubuntu Dapper Drake. The next step would be to enable XGL and to test it. Heard that XGL rocks so eager to look how it looks. Though Drape drake looks good, has a good GUI and lot many features it is Debian that rocks. Waiting for the official release of Debian etch on December.

A Tech Feast

2006-08-23T06:33:00.000+05:30

Opensolaris day was conducted in college on Aug 18th. It was a technical feast to any programmer with a little unix background. Two great minds of SUN Microsystems Mr.Ananth Shrinivas and Mr.Pratap Devarajan were the speakers. They introduced a plethora of tools available in Solaris that would make the life of unix programmer easy. It was amazing to hear about bleeding edge technologies like Dtrace, ZFS, Zones and SMF etc. I also had a feel of Solaris after it was installed in a system in lab. The desktop is the same old GNOME with some customizations but the commands seem to differ a bit from GNU/Linux.

Dtrace was amazing and how the results were interpreted was little more amazing. Both the speakers had unique way of interpreting the bits and addresses thrown out by Dtrace. Zones & ZFS was interesting and are technologies for the future. Pratap who was one of the creators of Belenix also talked about the problems he encountered and the steps in creation of Belenix livecd. There were also instances where GNU/Linux was belittled while comparing it with Solaris. For guys like me who have great passion for GNU/Linux those facts were hard to digest. Except for that it was a great meeting with a lot of mind boggling stuff and introduced us to some great technologies. The opensolaris community has born in our madurai with the creation of Opensolaris user group called MOSUG which is an acronym of Madurai open solaris user group.

Something Something Unakum Enakum - Has Something in it

2006-08-06T13:38:00.000+05:30

A lot of hype by my friends led me to the doors of Jeyam theatre to watch SSUE. As usual the cost of the ticket was increased due to the good name the movie managed to gain. Something Something had something to watch in the first half and nothing in the second half. But it had attracted a lot of family crowd and may interest some if it is the first time.

Ravi has done his part well under his brother direction. Santhanam has managed to evoke some laughter from the crowd. It seems that Trisha has realised that it is important for an actress to show some actions and reactions and has tried hard to produce some also looks a little beautiful when compared to other movies. The film had a light doze of comedy throughout. The songs in the first half are gr8. Prabhu is serious throughtout the movie and shows a lot of emotions. Bhagyaraj impresses but does not have a great role to play. Richaa, Manivannan, kalabavan mani just come and go and do nothing.

But it was the sentiments that irritates at lot. Hero risking his life for a toy horse, hero eating rice mixed with chili powder, hero sleeping in the dung den etc etc irritates us a lot. Slightly over doze of sentiments and emotions. SSUE seems to be a film that can be seen together with the family. I could see a lot of crowd getting too involved with the movie and one guy was shouting something like "Oh god the villain has arrived". It may turn out to be a hit for Jeyam ravi.

Removing "Edit Primary Link" in Drupal

2006-07-25T17:23:00.000+05:30

Renovation of our college website gave me an oppurtuity to work in Drupal. Did a lot of tweaking and little editing in CSS and just got the feel of Drupal. Drupal rocks with a plethora of features, plugins and modules. It was a great experience to work in a cool CMS like Drupal. One thing in which we got stuck up with was removing "Edit primary links" thing that appeared in all pages. So here comes some of my experience which may help some

1) To remove the "Edit primary links" u have to edit menu.inc files in the include directory. In Drupal 4.7.2 u have to comment lines 814 to 817. The lines could be easily identified.

2) To upload image in a page image module and img_assist modules available in Drupal is used. Drupal image icon can also be added to the Tinymce WYSIWYG editor for easy use. But even after doing all this image may not upload correctly. The problem may be because of the webserver. Apache2 should be configured with --enable-gd-imgstrttf --enable-gd-native-ttf for them to work correctly.

Fascinating FLOSS

2006-07-20T00:35:00.000+05:30

I was just searching the various FLOSS softwares that are available for Windoze as a part of preparation for SFD 2006. It was surprising to see the abundance of free softwares for windoze platform. What is more interesting is that they have great functionalities when compared to the original proprietary ones. Free softwares like Emacs, Gaim, GIMP, Blender, Openoffice, Notepad2, NVU, Apache, Inkscape, PHP Triad and of course the gr8 gr8 firefox have started replacing the proprietary tools. There are also a very good and interesting games available like cube, mario,super tux, sudoku and sokoban. I have replaced my windoze environment fully with the FLOSS software and whatever little work i do in M$ OS is done using FLOSS softwares. It is gr8 to enjoy a lot of freedom and work on good, cool, gr8 softwares when compared to the proprietary ACME products.

A dream comes true

2006-07-14T07:02:00.000+05:30

A great moment to cherish and to remember in life. Got a job offer from the fortune 11 company whose name was decided based on a toss of coin. This week has been quite busy due to the unfortunate selection for the interview process in the well company. Fortunately or unfortunately i got rejected and got the oppurtunity to attend HP. By god's grace i was one among the 25 who cleared AT out of 287 who attended it. After that all went fine in the technical interview. The HR interview was a bit difficult but all ended fine and by god's grace | miracle | ability | luck i got an offer from the global gaint but the wait for the result was something unbearable. Looking forward to the joining date. So what next, sit back and relax.

Breaking the code

2006-07-07T07:11:00.000+05:30

Atlast i found time to see "DaVinci Code" a good movie which raised a lot of controversy in the recent days. It was not released here but there are a lot more ways of doing things. After seeing the movie i got a little interested in cryptanalysis. The "Network Security" classes in college increased the enthu. So i thought of representing my view about the movie in the form of cipher text. So if u are interested in Ciphers, go ahead decipher the simple and stupid cipher and let me know what u have found out. If not leave it as some stupid crap. So here comes the cipher

NOWUK PIXJW JNPCP XGCFI AKXCZ PLQKO PAEWD KADGJ WJHKW APPPE AOIOA
KBEHK

Hint: It involves two steps with two standard encryption algorithms. In the first step remember the numbers 3,4,5. If deciphered it gives a meaningless text. The text can further be deciphered using the following example. If 'ATWILHA' represents the word "EXAMPLE" what would the resulting text represent. With these hints it would just take seconds to solve. Let me see who solves it. This is my first try with ciphers so i do not know about the quality of question.

Back to normal

2006-06-24T06:30:00.000+05:30

Three to four weeks of tension, trepidation, alacrity .... Now it is all over. Atlast offer from a company which is a part of India's largest business conglomerate. The selection process was simple and good, starting with aptitude which was online. It was followed by the technical and HR interview which tested the communication skills and little of prudence. Following this was the one day wait for the results. That proved to be a long wait with anxiety increasing every single moment. And finally it is all over and the result was positive for me. So now back to normal work and normal life which is proving out to be more monotonous and mechanical.

Interesting C Question

2006-06-09T07:09:00.000+05:30

A simple C question, What is the maximum size occupied by a structure? This question was asked by R* after reading some C books as a part of his placement preperation. The question is very very simple still i wanted to check how many are like me.

#include
int
main ()
{
struct simple
{
int a,b,d;
char c[2];
}tmpob;

int size;
size = sizeof (tmpob);
printf ("Total size of structure : %d\n",size);
return 0;
}

Predict the answer and give some explanation so that i may know the answer.

Consistent team ever

2006-06-07T06:25:00.000+05:30

Just five more days to go for the FIFA world cup. With all the warm up matches over, the whole world is waiting for the great event to unfold. Wonder where India is ? They are in a very formidable 117th position. They have successfully retained their 117th position for the second year. No one to challenge them for their position. They should have done a lot of work to stay in that position. Hats of to them. Waiting to see who is going to win the contest. Too many contenders b razil, england, germany, france etc.... but my support goes to brazil and france.

Stepping into Final year

2006-06-04T20:42:00.000+05:30

The VI semester exams came to an end on may27 and with that ended the eventful third year. The third year went fine except for the marks which continued the same decreasing trend. A lot happened in the last year like gr8 gr8 CAS, department symposium which still remains fresh in my memories, fabulous FStival '05, interesting intra and inter department contests, spicy industrial visit, numerous night labs, fun with seniors, thiki thenarum seminars, delicious treats (delicious till u dont spend) and a lot more. Fun and work constituted third year. All that has ended and now its time to take up the new role, the final year and senior most students of the college. A lot more may come this year results,placements,fun etc etc etc ........

Virus....Virus...Virus

2006-05-30T06:55:00.000+05:30

Thats how my windoze desktop looked when i connected to net when my system was under the attack of viruses. All because of some new viruses with names win32host.exe, smss.exe, lsass.exe etc. Googling said they are called Trojan.systemposer and are capable of sending mass spams, modifying the registry runkey to start them when system is rebooted, spying on keystrokes and exploring the vulnerabilities of other running processes. They seem to do a lot of work than all other processes running in my system. There were around 23 infected files, and with antivirus updates and GNU/Linux i was able to remove some. Still some remain and continue to disturb me. Silly to spend more time and resource to guard the OS than working on it.

Fighting for a good cause

2006-05-23T00:17:00.000+05:30

A good move by the medical college students in the northern states. It is good to see students voicing out their view against the government, which sticks on to the old customs that no longer exist. For example in TN when an OC candidate with 280 cutoff mark struggles to get a seat in a good Engg. college some get it easily with 270,260 or even 240. What is to be pitied here is that the student with 240 is socially and economically well established and has more oppurtunities than the poor OC guy. This is how quotas are used or to be more apt misused. Today everyone has equal oppurtunity. Reservation policy looks like an attempt to lure poor people and to maintain their support. If at all the government wants to help them they may find a method to provide all with good education so that they could get the seat by themselves rather than relying on the idiotic schemes which are to be rendered obsolete. I think students will understand that it is talent that will help the country's growth and not all these craps. The students will surely succeed as long as politics doesnot play spoilsport.

Words of Wisdom

2006-05-06T07:17:00.000+05:30

From Robert Langdon's thoughts in Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons"

"Faith does not protect you. Medicine and airbags.... those are the things that protect you. God does not protect you. Intelligence protects you. Enlightenment. Put your faith in something with tangible results. How long has it been since someone walked on water? Modern miracles belong to science....computer, vaccines, space stations...........who needs god? No! Science is god.

Seems to be true.

Internals Schedule

2006-04-22T05:08:00.000+05:30

Third internals started on Monday keeping all busy for six days. The schedule has been quite tight the whole week. This was my schedule for the third internals

Afternoon & Evening : Come back from college at around 2:00pm. Too tired to start studying. Better sleep after a heavy lunch. Wake up at around 5:00 pm. All work and no play makes sen a dull boy. So better play for around 1/2 hrs. It would not be nice to shutdown the system without listening to songs. So listen to songs for 1/2 hrs.Now the time is 6.00pm. The evening looks pleasant. Go for a walk and come back by around 6:30pm.Call Nirmal and ask for the important questions. Spend the next 30 minutes creating the schedule. It turns out to be an optimistic schedule, 3 units for the night and two to be completed in the morning.

Night: Start studying the first question by around 7:15pm and continue till 8:15pm. The subjects are like rocket science. Mom and Dad arrive from office so spend some time with them. Suddenly the time becomes 9.00pm.Its time for dinner. Hmm the dinner also tastes good. So have a good dinner watching songs or serials in TV. Now the time is around 10.00pm, lot of portion to complete. Try studying the units sincerely, unfortunately end up sleeping in the chair. Dad asks to go to sleep(with a little anger). Obey him immediately. Set the alarm at 2.00am and go to sleep at around 10.30pm with just only one question completed.

Next Day morning : Wake up at around 5.00am. Wonder why the alarm did not strike and who switched it off at 2.00am. Too sleepy to study. Forgot to check mails yesterday so check mails,orkut and blogs for 1/2 hour. The time is around 5.30am. Still 4 and 1/2 units to complete. Start studying intensively. Newspaper boy comes at around 6.30am. Not knowing what is happening around the world would be bad. Spend 15 Min for sports and cinema news. Oops time is 7.00am. Got to catch A5 so that i could get a seat and use the 30 minutes in the bus effectively :), so it is time get started. Manage to catch B5 at the last minute that means it is not possible to open the book in the bus. Somehow manage to complete around 2 units in the bus and in between 9 and 9.30.

In the Exam Hall : Get the question paper. The first look of the question paper gives an impression that the question paper does not belong to us. Look at it keenly and laugh (looks to me like greek and latin). See praveen and musi, thank god they are also laughing. Start putting margins to all pages since that is going to be the only good thing in the answer sheets. Oh God ! the two marks are a little tough, compulsory question is not the expected one, no hope of touching questions from 4th and 5th unit. Write something in the paper for 3hours and get prepared to repeat all this for the next exam.

Net result : The internal marks may get a little lower. The probability of continuing the bad run in the externals gets a little higher.

Entitled to Elect

2006-03-26T07:39:00.000+05:30

Last week i got my voter's identification card and from now on my vote may play a vital role in determining the fate of India :) provided someone doesnot use it before i go to the polling station. I was asked to come to take photo for the identification card on March 8. My second internal exams started on 9th so i had time on wednesday afternoon to take the photo. The way in which the photo was taken is something unforgetable. The photographer came so close and he might have kissed me i he had been a little more closer. Finaly the photo was taken with the digicam just a centimeter or so away from the tip of my nose. I expected the photo to be beautiful considering the way the photo was taken. I received the identification card two days later as the lamination material was not available on that day. What i thought didnot go wrong, the photo was too good that even i could not take a second look of my picture there. So beautifully taken. I learnt from the card that i could use the card as identification card for other government purposes. But i dont think it would serve to identify me as most of the information seem to belong to some sen and surely they dont belong to me.

I lost track of what is going on in the politics of TamilNadu in the recent days. No clue about which all parties have formed what alliance. It is surprising to see how politicians could change sides so quickly. They keep talking about party's policy and kolgai always but when elections are announced all seem to evaporate so suddenly. Adding to all these are the new parties formed by actors. It is interesting to watch the campaigns of the actors, their talk is filled with punch dialogues and uncountable number of promises. Amidst all these i heard that 5 IIT graduates are going to contest. This is a good news and it would be much better if every contestant is well learned.

CAS in Action

2006-03-12T08:52:00.000+05:30

Hurray!! After a tiresome work on saturday CAS-Central Authentication System popularly called Single Sign On came into effect. We have been working on this for about three months starting from December. We started this on December without a single hint about what we are supposed to do. It was like walking in the dark forest, knowing nothing about our next step. But all went fine under seniors guidance and here we are, at the edge of a finishing it. Still a lot of loose ends to be tied up and everything would be fine once all are done. Lot of problems are sure to occur. Hope everything goes fine without problem.

Staying in touch with TVSLMHSS

2006-03-07T00:48:00.000+05:30

This is all about the community for TVSLMHSS in orkut. For those who donot know about TVSLMHSS, it is a well known school in Tamilnadu and it was there i did my schooling. I was not aware of what was happening there in the school and how is it going after i left. Thanks to orkut, it has linked me again with the school or atleast with the students and alumni of my old school. Orkut has an active community for TVSLMHSS with 199 members and the owner is Guruguhan Meenakshisundaram. The discussions going on there reminded me about the classes. One such discussion was about their favourite teacher. It was interesting to read the replies. Most of them quoted Mr.Balu,our english teacher as their favourite and their replies contained a number of his famous and interesting dialogues. I felt like sitting in my class on reading thosee replies. I enjoyed the seven years i studied there. It was something great, the teachers were cool and understanding, the whole environment rocked. My memories are still fresh and i could go on talking about that for one full day but i have no intention of doing that.

And about the recent developments in the school, Mr.Sudhakaran has left the school so it is the turn of Mrs.Uma Ramesh of Maths department to act as the principal of the school. And Mr.Ramesh sir of Biology department is the vice principal. My favourite teacher Nagarajan sir of the physics department is the assistant principal. Mr.Rajkumar of biology department has left the school and is working as the vice principal in chethana school in Madurai. This is what i got from orkut and i am not sure how much of it is true. And i think they have purchased some more buses increasing the count further.

My Google Page

2006-02-27T19:10:00.000+05:30

I got my google home page. Just created a simple page today. Contains nothing other than two links to this page and to my gnuget site. It has a lot of templates to choose from and all look good satisfying the tastes of wide variety of people. Lot to explore . Will continue this post after a bit of exploration. If u want to see the page i created today, visit

http://sens2003.googlepages.com

Disappointing Performance by Indian U/19 Team

2006-02-20T00:28:00.000+05:30

It was a very disappointing performance by the indian U/19 team in the finals of U/19 world cup. I thought they would continue their unbeaten streak and return home with the cup. They bowled well to restrict Pak to 110 but Indian batting was something unexpected. I saw them trying desparately at 10-6 in 3.2 overs to save the match and lost all my hopes of India winning the cup. I didnot see the full match so no idea of what went wrong. Anyway 10-6 that to with 5 extras is something which i didnot expect. i think they lost the match finaly.

Team India In Great Form

2006-02-20T00:26:00.000+05:30

Congrats to the Indian cricket team for their absolutely mesmerizing performance in Pakistan. India thrashed Pak 4-1 to win the series comfortably. India showed brilliance in all areas. The morale of the whole team would be very high after the series. The most important aspect in the win is the role played by the young players. The youngsters occupied the centre stage and senior players like Dravid and Sachin backed them up and provided the neccessary encouragement. The strategy followed by Indian team was realy amazing and the credit goes to the captain and the coach.

I had the oppurtunity to see the a part of the final match of the series. I came back in time to see the batting of Dravid, yuvraj and Dhoni. Yuvi and Dhoni were in great form through out the series. Their batting proved to be a cynosure to all eyes throughout the series. Yuvraj has been pretty consistent in this series. Yuvraj took the responsiblity and saw to that India won the final match comfortably. Though he was limping with cramps he made sure that India walk through the match with ease. Dhoni provided a excellent finish to the match with some thunderous sixes. Yuvraj and Dhoni's batting were absolute feast to the eyes. Dravid's role should not be underestimated. Because it was he who along with Yuvraj laid a very foundation preserving the wickets and making it easy for Dhoni at the end to go on with shots. On the whole India showed great confidence and temperment. The youngster took up the challenge and performed whenever needed. It was great to see youngsters like RP Singh and Sreesanth rising up to the occasion with some great performances.

On the other hand Pak though they were able to put up high targets they lacked depth in their bowling without Akthar. I was not able to see the other matches but in the final match their fielding was a little worse. They missed some catches and too many runouts. There were also some overthrows which in the end reduced pressure on India and made it easy for them. Pak batsmen and bowlers have a lot of work to be done.

Godfather Song Release

2006-02-18T01:42:00.000+05:30

Godfather songs had a grand release today morning in the city with the ultimate star's fans gathering around keestukaanam shop and i heard that there were also paal abhishekams performed to the hero's cutout. I heard all this from my friend Vanniaperumal, a great fan of Ajith. He managed to wake up at 5am and went to the shop to buy the CD. He waited till 7:30 for the arrival of CD and it was he who witnessed all this.

Then coming to the songs in the movie ARR has scored again. The movie has around nine songs and the songs rock. Work of a great maestro, it is sure to rock . I heard the songs around 8 times yesterday and are wonderful. Vanni managed to download two demo video songs from some site. The quality of the video was not good but viewable. Both are duet songs and i managed to catch a glimpse of Asin. Asin looks great in both the songs. She looks slim, young and beautiful, set to steal the hearts of youth. "Thinanthorum Deepavali" song created serious doubts about the character of Asin in the movie. But smartsara cleared my doubts. Sara is really smart when it comes to movies. And after listening to the song many times now i am convinced. The trailor of Godfather also looks good. I saw it in Vijay tv and it runs for about 5 minutes. I feel Godfather will be the film that will help Ajith regain his lost glory. Hope it does.

Trip to Kerala

2006-02-18T01:30:00.000+05:30

Relieved from normal work and the college for two days, thanks to the industrial visit to Trivandrum. The IV was on Monday and Tuesday that is on 13th and 14th of February. It turned out to be a great tour which is to be remembered throughout. We started at around 1am on Monday morning in two buses one for each section. It was where the fun started. All were on their feet dancing and rocked the whole bus with their dances and slogans. As usual there were a number of Ohs and Salabula Salabula Gumthalakaa during the journey. There were also guys like me who stayed calm and enjoyed watching the dance of others. Some guys even managed to sleep amidst all this excitement.

Our first stop was at Kanyakumari to see the sunrise. We were on time and were hoping to see the beautiful sight of sun spreading it wings over the blue waters of the Kanyakumari. But as usual the clouds were there to hide everything and disappoint us. We managed to take some good snaps there and continued our journey to Trivandrum. We reached the place at around 10am. Our stay was at a superb cottage called as Rajmahal. The rooms were neat and the whole place looked cool. We visited BSNL on that day. One thing that deserves special mention is the food and hotels in kerala. We had our breakfast at Udipi hotel. The food was good and cheap. But something that still puzzles me is the way food were served in hotels. When we order a single dosa the served us with two dosas and a vada. Probably they thought we were hungry and needed more food than what we ordered. In the afternoon we were late for lunch and were not able to find any hotels. We were hungry so we decided to eat NV for dinner. We managed to find a small NV hotel. The dishes were cheap but too spicy that it brought tears in eyes. My friend Shanoof went to the extent of pouring water on chicken before eating it. Finally we left the hotel with stomachs burning. We had a great sleep after the dumb sherades in the cottage.

The next day schedule consisted of visit to Padhmanabapuram samy temple, US technology. US Technology is a company in Technopark and it is basically a IT service company. They explained us about their company practices and we had an opportunity to visit their office. After that we started our journey back to Madurai after dinner at Nagerkovil. We reached Mdu at around 5:30 in Wednesday morning and i reached home at around 7.

More snaps at http://www.flickr.com/photos/senthilkumaran

Back with a Bang

2006-02-12T09:20:00.000+05:30

The indian team is back into the series with a comprehensive win in the second ODI against their arch rivals. It was a decent performance by the indian team both in batting and in bowling. Men in blue showed their class through out the game leaving the opponents gasping for runs during their batting and for wickets when India batted. Sehwag started the chase with some thunderous shots and sent the ball all over the field and played a major role in shattering the confidence of the opponents.. Tendulkar played with patience and did his part well. Later Yuvraj and Dravid made it possible for India to win the match comfortably. Indian batsmen never allowed the opponent bowlers to take advantage. Atleast they will not have disturbing comments after this match.

The performance of Indian team in the first ODI was really gr8. If sachin had not been given out to a silly appeal the score would have been much higher. Much to my annoyance the topic that was much discussed after the match was the dismissal of the captain of the opponent team. If at all there is something to be discussed then it is the dismissal of Sachin. And someone criticized Dravid stating that it was not sportsmanship to appeal like that. I would say that the true sportsmanship is to leave the field when the umpires give him out and not to comment about it further. The worst comment that i read in newspaper was "India wanted to win the match desperately either by hook or crook" which was said by a famous cricketer. When we look at the history of cricket we can easily determine the team which has the habit of tampering the ball and using crooky technicques to win the match and surely it was not India. So far Indians have played the game in a way how it is to be played, that is with true sportsmanship and like gentlemen. When we look at the end of first match we can easily find the team which was desperate to leave the field. The weather condition was the same through out the match. Probably if the score was three eleven for five they would have continued till the end of match. Probably i was a bit tensed after seeing the comments about the indian team. Anyway the match is over and i am not a great player to comment about the match.

One more information I started typing this post last night and i slept leaving the computer on. I woke up in the morning startled to see my computer still running. I switched on my computer at around 10 in night and i slept leaving the computer on and i woke up around 7 in the morning. This is not the first time that i am doing this. Should not repeat this again.

All praise for Google

2006-02-11T06:56:00.000+05:30

Google has started to rule the world of internet. Google programmers add something new to their product everyday. It could be noticed if one uses gmail from the begining. One of the impressive feature added to gmail is the integration of google chat inside gmail user inbox. So one would be able to chat with his friends once he enters gmail. There are many other features which i am still exploring. One such option is saving the gtalk converstations in our inbox. The chat window can be made to pop out of the mailbox or can be inside the mailbox while we browse our mails. The whole thing looks gr8 . I think google has made the option available for some of the users and soon it would be available for all. I got it in one of my five gmail accounts probably the one which i use often. With all these features Google is set to rock the world of internet. Hats off to Google

Life is not short

2006-02-08T18:32:00.000+05:30

Finally i found out when i am going to die. ha ha ha

Interesting Death Facts!

Interesting Fact #1: Eunuchs are MOST likely to be threatened by the mafia.

Interesting Fact #2: Guys are 10% MORE likely than gals to answer random math questions.

Interesting Fact #3: Guys are 8% MORE likely than gals to answer random math questions CORRECTLY.

Interesting Fact #4: Those who claim to "use to have guy parts, but now have gal parts" are predicted to die the soonest at 40; next are eunuchs at 42.

Interesting Fact #5: Approximately 3,500 people take this quiz DAILY

My Geek Score

2006-01-28T16:29:00.000+05:30

Overall, you scored as follows:

29% scored higher (more computer geeky),
1% scored the same, and
70% scored lower (less geeky).

Compared to those in the same age group as you:

31% scored higher (more computer geeky),
1% scored the same, and
68% scored lower (less geeky).

Test Facts:

The average score for the gals is 38, while the guy average is 56.

Of the Computer Geek Quiz Takers:
17% are scared of links
17% of Windows users curse it
4% of Linux users selected Bill Gates as their hero

Harry Potter : Is Snape a Hero

2005-12-24T09:24:00.000+05:30

Once i finished reading the six books of Harry Potter, i was eager to know about the latest developments in the Potter arena. I was searching for details about the seventh book and my friend Praveen showed me an article about Harry Potter. I think he found the article in a site called davekopel.com. I don't remember the exact link but a little googling will take to the essay. It can be taken as some sort of report and it contains some predictions based on the details given in the six books which may be overlooked in normal reading. I think the title is "Is Snape the unlikely hero of Harry Potter 7".The details given in the article are amazing and are sure to be overlooked by a normal reader. The essay predicts that Snape is still loyal to Dumbledore and may come back to kill the Darklord in the final book. It also predicts that harry may be the final Horcrux and he may be the heir of Godric Gryffindor. These predictions are supported with a number of points from the book. There are a lot more predictions and explanations. It may be interesting for harry's fans who are yet to read the essay.I also came across a series of comments by a number of harry potter fans about the story and about Snape in the archives of volokh.com. There were a number of predictions about the fake Horcrux of the sixth book and about R.A.B. It was interesting to see ideas and predictions of different people.

Ganguly's Exclusion

2005-12-17T09:25:00.000+05:30

I was shocked to see Ganguly being dropped from the final test against Srilanka in Ahmedabad despite his reasonably good performance in the Delhi test. Ganguly's contributions to the team should not be underestimated. He is the one who resurrected the team when it was weak and formed the team India. Ganguly deserved better treatment and this is not the way to send off a national hero. It was under his captaincy India won matches, gained confidence and it was under his captaincy younger players like Yuvraj and Kaif were given oppurtunities and were recogonised. Every cricketer has ups and downs in his career and i strongly feel that Ganguly is regaining his touch with the willow. Senior players like Ganguly are assets to the team and they should not be excluded just like that.Hope Ganguly gets another chance to contribute to Indian team.

Aaru

2005-12-11T09:23:00.000+05:30

Yesterday i went to the movie Aaru with a lot of expectation, and returned back with a headache. Praveen, Sriram, Subramani, Senthil Kumaran senior, his friend and myself went to Manicka Vinayagar theatre in Madurai for the evening show of Aaru. First we were entangled in the traffic near Palanganatham but the eagerness kept us moving and we walked the whole way from Paikara to Palanganatham. We reached the theatre by around 5:50pm and we got the ticket easily as there was not much crowd. We settled down in the theatre around 6:00pm and waited till around 7:00 for the show to start. There was nothing in the movie in the first half. The songs were good and they came at position when one would not expect the song to come. Vadivelu comedy didnot provoke any laughter. Trisha had a very little part to play except for the song and the chasing scene. The second half was little interesting but the whole movie itself is predictable and was not much intresting . Surya as usual has done justice to his role.Though there are 6 villians in the movie, except Kalabavan Mani all others fail to impress. I felt like this after watching the movie but there are some guys who said they enjoyed the movie.

Nerd's Test Score

2005-12-01T15:51:00.000+05:30

Stupidity Test Score

2005-12-01T15:43:00.000+05:30

Harry in Pogo

2005-10-30T00:19:00.000+05:30

Pogo's list of films for diwali has added delight to my diwali celebrations. Pogo is telecasting films under the name "diwali jadoo mantar" starting from oct 27 to Nov 1. Pogo has started with "Baby's Day Out" on oct 27 and is continuing with "Home Alone", "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", "Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets" and ends with "Richie Rich" on Oct 31.

Being a great fan of the boy wizard i was particularly interested in the Harry Potter movies. I have already seen the three Harry Potter movies two to three times. Still i wanted to see the first movie today and i enjoyed it. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", the fourth film is set for a grand release on Nov 18 in our country when i am in the middle of my semester exams. The book was awesome with the storyline moving on with the triwizard championship filled with suspense till the end. The trailors of the fourth movie looks good and i can't wait to see how the various events of the triwizard tournament have been depicted in the film. I am sure about seeing the movie but i have'nt decided about the date and time. As of now i have started reading the fifth book "Harry Potter and the order of Phoenix" and as usual it is mesmerising like the previous books.

Heavy Downpour in Madurai

2005-10-25T07:32:00.000+05:30

Good to see heavy rain in Madurai after quite a long time. Today it has been raining from evening 7.00 and slight drizzling continued till 12 and it kept me waiting in Mattuthavani Busstand for around one hour from 7:30 to 8:30. It has been raining hard in Madurai for the past two weeks and today it was little high when compared to the other days. Already the kalvai(canal) near my house has started to overflow and water has started entering our area. Now our area looks like venice with houses surrounded fully by water. Almost all parts of Tamilnadu has received good rainfall and Mettur dam is already overflowing and most of the low lying villages of cauvery delta areashave been inundated. Last year Mettur dam was empty owing to lack of rain during monsoon season and this year it has reached its maximum limit within two weeks of rain. Last year the farmers were affected because of lack of rain and were fighting for release of water from Mettur and this year Mettur is full and water is going to the sea without any use. After some years Tamilnadu has received heavy rainfall and it has resulted in floods in many parts probably due to the lack of proper plan. Something needs to be done about this.

GNUGet Website Modified

2005-10-17T22:34:00.000+05:30

Atlast i modified the GNUGet website on last weekend. I had been thinking about changing the website design for many months and i did it in the last weekend. I started it on saturday morning and i did it slowly starting with the design of the header picture for the website using GIMP. After sometime i was engaged in HomeAlone-3 in HBO and qualifying race of the final grand prix of the year - the chinese grand prix. After spending 2 - 3 hours on TV i started the website work again and it continued for the next day. So on sunday i finished the work with taking screenshotsof GNUGet for the screenshots page and finally uploaded the pages on Geocities on sunday night. The link is www.gnuget.tk. Check out the link and send feedbacks about the software and the website.

Local Channels Again

2005-10-12T23:52:00.000+05:30

It may be a happy moment for many in madurai. The local channels have started their service again. On tuesday when i switched on the TV i was happy to see Media Television (looks like the old Madura TV). Then i spent about 30 minutes searching for the other channels. Soon i found Krishna and Vaigai. The local channels stopped their service around july 2003 when i was waiting to join my college. After two years they have started it again and now i can enjoy watching new songs, new films and good action hollywood movies. Except for the advertisements which run for around 15minutes everything is good. What is so good about the local channels is, there are no serials and they donot talk for 15 minutes before a song. Previosly there were around six or seven local channels like MCC, AMN etc. Now there only three channels. As of now they seem to have a very small collection of songs and the same songs keep repeating again and again and there are no movies. Waiting for other channels also. Hope they start it soon.

Night lab in college

2005-09-24T15:30:00.000+05:30

Yesterday we had night lab in our college. It went well and i enjoyed a lot in the company of Subramani, Musi, Sen, Sara and vasanth. After the DAA seminar i returned to the lab at around 6:30pm and i am still in the lab and Now the time is 2:30 in the morning. We had a lot of fun here with the prefinal years(us) teasing the seniors and the seniors teasing us in turn. Probably sara was the most affected person. He left the lab like a guy running away from Tsunami and the Tsunami, i mean the reason was us. We teased him like anything and we were rolling on the floor laughing ==)) seeing the way he was trying to escape . Hope Sara did not get offended by the silly comments.

And after some time each of us proceeded with our work. The seniors were doing something related to their project. Subramani and myself were studying about PVM and were trying to correct a matrix multiplication program written using PVM. It took a lot of time and finally we found the solution to the problem at around 5:00am in the morning. Other guys were burning CD's for souvenir. Atlast we left the lab at 6:00am in the morning. It was a pleasant experience to spend whole night in the college along with other guys and seniors.

DAA seminar

2005-09-24T14:50:00.000+05:30

Today we had the DAA seminar by Mr.Pandurangan. He gave an intersting talk on basics of algorithms. As it was the first session he gave just introduction about the algorithms like why one should study algorithm and the need for various algorithms. His speech was very interesting and it created a liking towards the algorithm. He taught us about the various paradigms of algorithm like pruning. Tommorow we have two sessions, first from 9.00am to 12.00am and the second session from 2.00pm to 5.00pm. Hope it goes well .

PVM tutorial link

2005-09-20T18:53:00.000+05:30

This link contains tutorials about PVM starting from the Installation, configuration and setting up of PVM cluster and about the various methods used for programming in PVM along with their syntax.The html version of the tutorial is available at

www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.html

and the postscript version of the book is available at

www.netlib.org/pvm3/book/pvm-book.ps

Coder's Congregation

2005-09-18T15:35:00.000+05:30

Coder's Congregation the online programming contest conducted as a part of our department symposium today was a great success. we had a good response to Coder's Congregation. The total number of participants reached 29 greatest in the past two years after online programming contest has been launched. We also had contestants from companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Trilogy. The event started sharply at 11am in the morning. Once the contest started the contestants were very fast and we got the first upload in just 10minutes. It was awesome to watch the status page getting changed so fast with uploads reaching us every few minutes. Sen was in online in trichy and we had Sriram here for online clarification of doubts about the programs. In the middle we encountered a problem with the status page but it was solved soon and the contest continued peacefully. We felt more elated on seeing the feedbacks. Most of them had appreciated about the way the event proceeded without interruption and about the questions. Some had given some valuable suggestions. Overall the event went well and we are happy about it.

First Seminar in College

2005-09-18T06:34:00.000+05:30

I took my first seminar in college two weeks back in Java . I had relatively large topic to cover and it was fully on "The collectionframework" in Java. It lasted for around 2 hours. In the first hour i covered theCollection Interfaces and the Collection Classes and in the next hour which was on the next day i covered Maps. This seminar needs special mention as it is my first seminar after joining the college. After the seminar in Java, on Sep 16th i took a seminar in compiler design. It lasted for around twenty minutes. I didnot prepare fully so i wasnot able to teach in the way i wanted. Though these seminars make us study even before the internals, seminars like these help us in overcoming stage fear and improve ourpresentation skill.

FStival 05

2005-09-17T01:05:00.000+05:30

FStival 05, the software freedom day was celebrated in our college on September 10th. It was a organised by GLUGOT and GlugMadurai. It was a good experience for us. The chief guest was Dr.M.Murali from AUKBC chennai. He gave a small and interesting talk about the philosophies and the ideologies of Free Software and OpenSource. It was good to meet our seniors Mr.Amalon Joe Steeve and Mr.Balamurugan. Joe has changed his hair style and Bams (balamurugan) had doubled in size after going to Bangalore. I gave the welcome address and in doing i so i gave PHD to joe by welcoming him as Dr.Amalon Joe Steeve. Praveen handled the MOC, Sen talked about the Glugot activities and Musi (muthusivam) gave the vote of thanks. We had a good support from our second years. They handled most of the stalls and we third years took GTK Glade and LAMP. Karthick Balaji from REC and Venkat of IT took GIMP and Shell Script. Altogether the Stalls was good. I felt more convinced when i finished my stall that is GTK Glade. But what still irks me is the crowd that turned up on that day. The total number of students from our college was very less. I still wonder why dont they turnout in large members. The meetings are also arranged for them but still they dont respond to it. That needs to be discussed.

After the software freedom day celebrations it was time for partying. First stop was at annan kadai in college with Bams sponsoring the little treat. Each one had a double Omlette and a slice while Joe was at ATM preparing f0r the next treat in Hotel Park in Palanganatham. As Bams was going to Dharmapuri he didnot come to next treat. So we went to park by 6:30 pm discussing a lot about the future plans with Joe doing most of the talking. And then in Park we had a nice treat which lasted till 9pm after which we departed. Hostel guys went to Thotti jaya but subramani, musi and myself returned home.

Internals Over

2005-09-08T19:11:00.000+05:30

Today i am free after finishing my second internals .Relieved from three days of mental pressure .Regarding my preformance in this internals it is not good . I thought of putting up of fine performance but that means i should be studying which i did not do. I have not done my compiler Design and DAA paper well . I am expecting very low marks in both these papers .Hope to do well in next internals atleast .

And today we are having a night lab for our department symposium but unfortunately i will not able to stay for it . My mom and dad have gone to Nagerkovil for my Brother's marriage and i should be taking care of my pet (Tommy) who would probably be sitting alone in house and waiting for my arrival .No problems we would be having atleast one more night lab and i can stay for that . On friday we have the software freedom day celebrations in our college and that would keep us busy tommorow .To end life is going normally without serious problems hope it continues the same way .

Cyber Website Launched

2005-08-13T07:25:00.000+05:30

Preperations for our department National level Symposium is going on in a rapid pace. My part was to do the dynamic part of the Website i.e creating pages for Online Registration and Feedback Form .Everything was working fine during testing in local environment. But while launching the condition was not the same as we had expected. we encountered problems with establishing connection with the database . We searched the Docs ,Googled but everything seemed okay .We were not able to find and correct the problem on that evening .As a result we launched the site with static pages .Today we were able to identify the problem and we were able to correct it with just 30 minutes of work .Still there are some minor changes to be made in the code .We expect to finish everything tommorow .

I encounter problems when it touch something related to Apache,PHP and MYSQL but everytime i learn something new .Most of the time it is because of some unnoticed configuration details that needs to be enabled or disabled. Now everything looks fine .The next task is some thing related to file uploading for softwares and papers .

GNUGET Released

2005-08-05T01:28:00.000+05:30

GNUGET ,a frontend for the Wget utility available in GNU/Linux was released by me on last month. I did it for the Linux Programming contest conducted in our college last year .When i submitted it for the contest it was good enough to be even considered as a software . I spent some days redeveloping the software during my semester holidays .Now it looks better than its older version .First i released it in geocities and then i registered a domain in dot Tk . GNUGET can be downloaded from the site www.gnuget.tk .I just preparing for my next project GMessenger ,an instant messenger that is can be used in GNU/Linux environment .It is planned to be developed as a team work by Subramani,Praveen and myself .Hope we finish it soon .

DB2 Certified

2005-08-05T01:24:00.000+05:30

I am returning to blog after a very long interval .I got my IBM 700 certification on 24th of July ,and it was achieved without much effort . I just spent some two to three hours for the preparation along with my friends Subramani and Sriram .There were some 6 PDF's that were given as study materials . We didnot even look into it deeply .The questions were centered around basics of SQL and basic DB2 concepts and were easy.Funny to get a international certification with just two to three hours of study and without knowing much in depth about the concepts .Thanks to Ramji and Nirmal for their timely helps .Anyway i am happy about it and now i am just passing away my time listening to 'Anbae Aaruyire' songs .

Scheduler for AAOSK

2005-03-08T13:13:00.000+05:30

Writing scheduler for an OS is more difficult than i thought . I had no clue about the scheduler at first . Thanks to joe he came up with a great idea of using function pointers to establish this .
After getting the idea coding was little easier and the schedular code grew day by day .It is growing steadily and is sure to be finished early .

Harry Potter

2005-02-22T13:36:00.000+05:30

I read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of azkaban . Though i have read it late i didnot miss the thrill and suspense as i didnot know the story . The story was splendid filled with suspense and thrill till the last . And finally what a twist it was at the end . I had my test on the next day
but i was thrilled by the storyline and never took my book till i finished the story . I dont have the other books but i am determined to read the other books also .