apokalypz

A Book Grant

2007-12-01T17:30:00.000+05:30

Even with gazillions of e-text surrounding your existence, a new book, still generates an excitement that's hardly comparable. And when you get a book grant of Rs. 2500... that's quite a reason to be happy. Don't smirk at the amount, it comes from my company, who unfortunately seems to believe young employees shouldn't be spoiled with handsome figures when money is involved.

The book grant came as a first prize for the Project Readiness Program, which is just another name for training in Wipro Technologies. It consists of three phases - the fundamental readiness programme - a quick recap of C and Data Structures, followed by a month long training on SQL, PL/SQL, Core Java, J2EE. Next you have to make a small project with whatever you have learnt. Anyway, the tests were pretty easy and my total score came to 89.9%.

Next we were trained on Object Oriented Analysis and Design, XML, and from tomorrow, there would be a week long training on EJB. So its been over three months of training, and its nothing close to what you would expect when you are being trained for the industry! It's similar to college days, where many a things are left out which helps you get a deeper understanding of the technology. For example in Formal Language and Automata Theory classes we had in college nobody bothered to talk about XML/DTD when EBNF was discussed ... likewise, here it seems to be just the other side of the same coin.

And I had no idea that configuring Tomcat Oracle 9i, setting proper enviornment variables could generate such humor! Oracle 9i installs XDB, an HTTP listener on port 8080, which is the default port on which Tomcat listens - and things dont work out of the box. The system guys at the external training centers kept formatting the hard drives to troubleshoot these problems - but unlike college there was nobody around to share the fun! Anyway, the admin became good friend after a few similar incidents.

I'm postponing the shoping spree till I have finished the books I have in currently reading queue - Anne Frank - The Diary of a young girl, Only the Paranoid Survives by Andrew Grove, Lateral Thinking by Ed de Bono. In the meantime all suggestions are welcome.

Surviving Bangalore I

2007-10-14T02:11:00.000+05:30

Its been almost one and a half month that I have joined Wipro Technologies in Bangalore ... and its been both exciting and disappointing! I came to Bangalore thinking its a dream city with young and dynamic techies everywhere and updated, automated, mechanised way of living. But sadly its not even 25% of what I expected!

Whenever you want something to an extent that you are afraid of losing it - be sure Murphy's law is grinning! Many, joining with me were lucky enough to get Unix System programming(system programming in unix with c++ using tools like gdb, cvs... just the package I wanted) and thanks to the supreme order of randomness in Wipro, I got Java. Only satisfaction is that it seems probably I would be playing with web services a lot.

I'm staying as paying guest in J.P. Nagar 5th Phase. A room-mate of mine, also a fellow wiproite - bought an HP Pavillion dv2000 and took an Airtel broadband. Moreover the "lucky person" got into Unix (thanks to the randomness once again). And like any good FOSS enthusiast, I did not waste time to introduce him to the joys of Ubuntu. But some people are capable of limiting their excitement to "hmmm... good!"

I'm really missing ilug-cal ... Indrada's never ending plans of world domination with FOSS, Sayam's anecdotes on dangerous weekend projects with gnome, SM's neatly formatted words of wisdom, or Debarshi's quick and spot on responses! Even though I was seldom a passive speaker, I was always an active listener - and it was great to see the masters at work - and kudos to all their initiatives in taking free software to everybody!

Somehow I had the idea every other person in Bangalore would be excited about FOSS - but things to be almost same as that back at Kolkata - still limited to a selected few. Expecting GNU/Linux in a cybercafe seems like asking a bit too much! Till now I haven't met a single person in Wipro who is enthusiatic about free software. I'm waiting for FOSS.IN like anything, though chances of attending it seems bleak enough. Wipro has even disapproved the leave for elder my sister's marriage!

Without a system of my own, and breathing insufficient bandwidth ... my dreams of becoming a FOSS contributor seems drifting away into uncertainty now. But the optimistic person inside me says I'm yet to knock the right door, and I'm more hugry and foolish than ever!

As for the good things, the weather here is just right ... and contrary to the popular view that Idly-dosa-sambara are your only choices when it comes to food - you'll find tonnes of choices here! But teetotalists beware ... it seems here there's almost one bar per person ;-)

To be Bangalored ...

2007-08-14T07:05:00.000+05:30

One week from now, I would be aboard S2 307 on my way to Bangalore to join Wipro Technologies. And its nothing more than a mashup of feelings that I'm having currently. Firstly, I'm worried about the work I would be getting at Wipro. I have been a part of the Opus Magnum project, that Wipro had undertaken in a bid to make freshers a bit more industry-savvy ... and oh yeah, it was supposed Open Source Software development. Being utterly desperate to be a part of FOSS, there was no second thought before appearing for the selection programming competition (which proved to be cakewalk). A total of 430 students got selected from their innumerable 2007 fresh recruits from all over India.

Me and my partner were extremely hopeful thinking this would be the end of the barriers that have kept us away from joining any FOSS project - SCM tools, how to become familiar with an existing (and overwhelming) code base, patch submitting etiquettes etc. Our project was to write a presence adapter as a part of an IP Multimedia Subsytem, the other parts of which were being built by other students. Each team was assigned a mentor for their project, who would communicate through mail and telephone.

Everything seemed pretty exciting - but slowly the balloon started losing air. Hardly anybody was interested with queries like if the everything should be under GPL, which JDK should we be using ... communication gaps led me wonder how work proceeds in the FOSS projects, and as for technicalities of the project, Google was my friend! But even it has its limits ... its robots can't breach the corporate firewall and give you the names of the variables that your stub would communicate with! Moreover, after you have toiled hard(read googled hard) with your lean and thin desktop to get JBOSS, Eclipse and Axis to work in unison resolving yum dependencies in fedora core 6, extensively documented the process - only to find people for whom you were doing this has "\" in their URI syntax (clearly they were not on GNU/Linux) - you feel, well, not that much excited. And SCM, patch etc, hmmm... I was yet another failure to become a FOSS developer! But I'm still super hopeful with Wipro - its their maiden venture, bloopers may happen!

With roughly fifteen days left to submit the final year project, my partner and I had to give up, to maintain our grades. We submitted a ray tracer written in C++, which my partner had started building as a weekend project.

Secondly, I became friends with the Kolkata lug members just a few months back ... and I've been learning a lot of new things from a lot of new people. Surely, the scene would be similar once I can reach out to Bangalore lug people ... and started visiting #FOSS.IN at freenode ... but I hardly know anybody there!

It feels a bit bad to leave the place you have been calling 127.0.0.1 for 23 years, but on the whole, I'm too exited that I would be able to meet new ubergeeks in Bangalore. Moreover I would be sharing the apartment with a Google employee, and a super-coder ... oooh!

In other news, we have been having fun with kickstart installation with packages from Fedora 7, in the Protos boxes(funny thing is, these are supplied exclusively by Wipro in India). We used system-config-netboot, system-config-kickstart ... but with cobbler was a delight. Things became rather interesting yesterday when I tried to build a .deb package from the src.rpm of cobbler-0.6.0 for my Ubuntu box - my /var/log/dpkg.log became almost 1.5 gb ... and strangely, it found a friend in /var/log/syslog as my new usb dongle (Frontech JIL-0741) filled it up to a similar size preventing even a graphical login :P. And my bid to be mobile-phone-virgin till iPhone was shattered as mom bought me a Motorola L6i, to check on what I'm doing in Bangalore!

Nije Shikhi Day 1

2007-08-01T22:39:00.000+05:30

Last Sunday, Indrada asked me if I would want to volunteer for the Nije Shikhi project. Nije Shikhi, is a novel idea that West Bengal University of Technology (WBUT) and L2C2 Technologies have taken up in order create a difference in the way technology is perceived by young minds.
Within few hours me and Susmit, a classmate of mine, were inside Dr. Ashok Ranjan Thakur's (Vice Chancellor, WBUT) room at WBUT, listening to his plans to spread the joy of hacking through FOSS and low cost, eco-friendly computing. The idea is to do something like linutop or koolu (yes, the ltsp brainchild of Maddog Hall) that would be used by students (mostly from underprivildged/rural backgrounds) to self learn, with minimal/no adult supervision. The first school to join the Nije Shikhi project Bijra School. Another aspect of the project is to throw open all its resources to the current students of WBUT and get them involved for managing the technical aspect of the project. Students from second and third year can volunteer in a 21-days long fast-track internship programme in FOSS, which includes working weekends. As Indrada writes in this blogpost, "Our goal is to create small, dynamic teams well-exposed to and capable of carrying on activities in a given area of specialization during their post-internship period." At the end of the project you get a certificate from WBUT.

Here you are free as in freedom... you are encouraged to open up tiniest of screws of the devices - no questions asked! You are also given the luxury of a 2Mbps leased line and the entire library, for your reference. Having said that, the intern is not for the faint-hearted where you doze off without actually doing anything... you would be working under the watchful eyes of Indranil Dasgupta, CTA L2C2 Technologies and a FOSS champion - the learning opportunity is what you limit yourself to!

Yesterday was our first day on the job. The team consists of Susmit, Ananya (another classmate) and me. The goal that we are trying to achieve is customizing Fedora 7, building images and implementing disaster recovery policies for the Nije Shikhi boxes that packs in an AMD Geode LX800 (500 MHz), comes with a 40 GB hard disk, and four usb drives. Currently, we are setting up a pxe install server to serve a custom packaged Fedora 7 derivative to the Nije Shikhi boxes.

If you are interested in taking up this 21 days fast-track FOSS workshop, feel free to send an email to indradg AT l2c2 DOT co DOT in.

ilug-cal logo

2007-07-28T20:45:00.000+05:30

Our local lug is having a logo design contest. The number of applications have been low, and I wanted to participate in the contest ever since it was announced in the mailing-list. But procrastination got justified by the requirement of 150 dpi CYMK color mode in TIFF format. Gimp 2.2.13, that comes with Feisty Fawn does not provide that support. I tried to get the plugin for the purpose ... but could not get it to work. Without wasting time, (the competition closes end of this month), I decided to settle with ordinary jpgs. Here we are the end products...

This is a very simple design.

After it was done, it seemed very girlish, no idea why!

Clean and simple.

Voting begins 1st August. Fingers crossed!

SEO - selection, election, optimization

2007-07-10T22:56:00.000+05:30

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." (Code Complete, Page 594)

Computer Scientists have deep insights into the alleys of life, as is evident from this quote by one of the masters of the Art. A predicament, that we regularly face, is to select or elect out the optimized choice. Most of us want to squeeze out the best of what life has to offer. This desire has led few to become great, maestros, masters of their art. But the flip side of the coin has a detrimental view... the unfortunate majority manage to often loose focus and spiral down the the track to mediocrity and eventually give up. Why?

"Choice, the problem is choice"

With more choices comes the burden of making the right selection. That they tend to defy all reasons for their singular existence, making the right choice from an overwhelming number of them, is enough to reduce your efficiency. And try to optimize even more, you'll find yourself at the fine edge between rational thinking and endless speculations with the dagger of if-s and but-s hanging overhead.

If you are convinced and think for a while, you'll be amazed at how often we do this in our regular life. Ordering a menu at a restaurant, looking for a tutor to enroll with, may be even shopping for the right toothbrush. Lets say, everything goes well and after an intense, nerve raking session, you select the one toothbrush that satisfies every single aspect that all those ads have convinced you is integral to save the last remnants of the 16 pairs in your mouth. You brush day in and night out, grinning with sheer pride as you remember the wicked bargain. But after a few weeks the bristles turn away from each other in utter disgust and its more of a toothbush than a toothbrush.

So what's the way out, I ask you. For me its summarised by Don Knuth in the opening quote. While decisions like selecting an university to apply to, choosing a career path does require careful planning and research, it would generally suffice to optimize on three factors - time, money, and something really relevant to the problem. There is no choice that is up there, floating above the other mere mortal choice-s, demanding a tuft of hair from your receding hairline as ransom. The choice you make after a little rational thinking and gut feeling, stick to work on it to make it the right one for you, the dots will join up after you look back. This is what I'm telling myself - drop in your precious suggestions.

Configuring your home router

2007-04-07T07:29:00.000+05:30

I have delayed configuring my Sterlite SmartAX MT841 CPE as router for quite sometime and been running it as adsl modem. Here is a quick guide on how to get it working in your GNU/Linux Os. I'm using Fedora Core 5 after a painful separation from Ubuntu 6.06. (can't wait for Feisty Fawn)

1. Fire up Firefox, and type in 192.168.1.1, this being the default ip address of your CPE.
2. A username, password authentication popup opens. Enter username admin, and password admin.
3. Click on Basic - > Connections in the left panel. You'll be shown a list of WAN connections.
4. Because this is your first configuration, you have to delete the existing entry PVC0. To do this, cilck on the edit icon in the under the Note column and PVC0 row, scroll down the page and click delete.
5. Next you create a new entry. Click New and enter VPI/VCI value as 0/35. Next enter your dataone username and password. Click Apply and save the configuration on the left panel by clicking Save all.

Well, thats all to it. Your CPE will reboot now, and if everything works our fine, you have your Basic -> Connections page looking like this.

BSNL also supplies other CPEs like Huawei MT880/882, MT 800, WA1003A and Dare Global DB108. You'll get setup guide with screenshots for the above models from here. [pdf]

Now your desktop computer or laptop boots up connects to your CPE and uses it as a gateway.
It uses an IP issued by the dhcp server running on your CPE and you can get your work done with it properly. Meaning if you have a few computers you can connect them through them to the CPE through the four 10/100 Base-T RJ-45 ports, one USB 1.1 interface or one PCMCIA slot for WLAN 802.11g NIC.

Everybody gets their own IP and is happy.
Now as I have been using pppoe interface to connect to the net, my yum stopped working after this configuration. An utterly frustrating output greeted me every time I tried to use yum.

[root@localhost ~]# yum update
Setting up Update Process
Setting up repositories
Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates-released

The problem was my desktop, which gets the IP 192.168.1.2 from the dhcp server of my CPE, and uses it for domain name resolution, did not have a gateway address as indicated by ifconfig.

[root@localhost ~]# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0F:EA:94:F0:40
inet addr:192.168.1.2 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20f:eaff:fe94:f040/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4977 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5227 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3506993 (3.3 MiB) TX bytes:1238125 (1.1 MiB)
Interrupt:17

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:22929 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:22929 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:7700037 (7.3 MiB) TX bytes:7700037 (7.3 MiB)

So type neat as root in the commandline. The Network Configuration GUI will open up.

With eth0 entry being selected, click edit. A new window for the Ethernet Deveice opens up. Select Statically set IP address and use the following values
Address : 192.168.1.2
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Default gateway address: 192.168.1.1ie, your desktop now has the statically set ip address 192.168.1.2 and your gateway is your CPE - 192.168.1.1. Next thing to do is to change the password for your CPE.

Back to blog

2007-04-03T00:37:00.000+05:30

Its been ages, since I blogged...
I have been very active ever since the last semester finsihed. The entire January month was spent preparing for GATE 2007. I didn't rest a day, and jumped into organizing the first techfest of our college Dakshh. Designing the website, planning the events, ... it calls for a different post. And it has been a huge huge hit!
Amongst all these I got a peek into web services with Java and Axis.
My mentor hardly says a word, other than Thanks ...

Laughing Back!

2006-12-26T17:00:00.000+05:30

I am over with those days when Microsoft bashing was a signature of GNU/Linux love. I do realize that its Technology at the end of the day that matters to me the most! But couldn't helping posting this one!

Automata

2006-12-25T16:42:00.000+05:30

I was looking for problem solving techniques while I came across this video. Life is getting too exciting!

In an unrelated note ... I was watching an episode of Still Standing in Star World yesterday. I have never seen the show previously ... its a comedy about a fat man and his good looking wife. This fat guy gave his mom an electric keyboard as a Christmas present, ... and the mom was pertified as she saw it and uttered the words "I dont have get into the Internet to use it? Do I?"

Hmmm...I wonder what the future would be like for a technophobe!

SketchUp Video

2006-12-21T08:52:00.000+05:30

The video above was prepared as an introduction to a presentation. I did it in Google Sketch Up ... a wonderful tool for generating 3D stuff. Bad part is, its only a demo version, that too only Windows, and as a result I could not finish it propoerly. The idea was something like

"Battlefield of tomorrow. The Deathroids - the ultimate killing machines are charging ahead across a desert. Little do they know scattered in the desert bed lay enemy mines fitted with smart sensors that wirelessly form up a mesh network to co-ordinate the explosion and annihilate the enitre troop."

I have been working on Wireless Sensor Network for quite sometime now. Few weeks back I had participated in a paper presentation competition ... though I did not speak about the Routing Algorithm that I developed, it was meant to be an introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks. But when we reached the competition ... we came to know the time limit had been reduced to 15 minutes from 30 minutes. We had to chop down all a number of our slides, and ...

As for the Algorithm ... lets see what my mentor says about it!

Always identifyng myself ...

2006-11-29T21:39:00.000+05:30

Bill Watterson knew people.

Mining my Search habbits

2006-11-29T11:14:00.000+05:30

one

Most of you must have tried Google Trends, but do you think the personal trend analysis tells the truth?
Login to Google, goto personlaized search and on the left handside column click Trends. You'll find amazing results of your search pattern, i.e the searches you did while you were logged in.
Here are my search analysis ... Though this is just a fraction of my search activities, as these are results when I was logged in.
The first two are cool, but the third one is absolutely worthless ... other than "Java gpl", I never made all those queries.

ssh rocks!!

2006-10-27T23:50:00.000+05:30

I would be talking about ssh-s in this post. One is pretty famous, good old
Secure Shell, and the other is the the worst BOFH in making,
friend and fellow GNU/Linux enthusiast Susmit Shannigrahi.
Fisrt about the last... I have never tried my hands at crimping. On our last attempt, Susmit got evrything required from his second home, Chandni Chowk (the hub center of hardwares in Kolkata), but we lacked the crimping tool. So we had borrowed one from a local shop for a fe bucks. But as I came back, I found the crimps were not done properly the jacks would not go in!
So today, months after that, I took my stuff to Susmit's place and he was kind enough to crimp it again for me. Its working fine now. So our BOFH fails to live up to his name!

Next, the ssh we all are so fond of. I'm making this blogpost through ssh ... uhu, it aint those links or lynx, those commandline browsers ... its Mozilla Debian Package 1.7.12-1.1ubuntu2 running on my Fedora Core 1 box [192.168.11].
No need to setup squid, all I did was to start the sshd ( sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start in my ubuntu box 192.168.1.10 which is connected to the net). Then from by Fedora box, I issue the command
ssh -X -C username@192.168.1.10 mozilla . And believe me, it doesnt feel like its actually from some different machine ... damn fast! This trick was submitted by Yara Pavan Kumar in the Linuxforu April 2006 Issue.
But I have to make this independant ... and would use my Huawei modem as router. But right now, my ubuntu box is being put to some excellent use (orkuting - I hate Orkut Buyukkokten! His creaion, is wasting everyones time, an more importantly, I cant get my Ubuntu box!).
Thanks SSH'S

Phisy...

2006-10-16T16:18:00.000+05:30

I've been enjoying codesearch a lot. Its also good in a way that you dont have to be innovative to get the kind of code you are looking for ... no shit, just code. And surely the labels are helpful!
But I noticed something very funny few momnets back ...have a look
I made a typo .. typing in gogle in place of google. and look at the result

I tried www.gogle.com only to find being redirected to google.co.in, meaning Google has bought that domain.
Here are the nslookups



neo@tathagata:~$ nslookup gogle.com
Server:         218.248.255.145
Address:        218.248.255.145#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   gogle.com
Address: 66.249.93.104
Name:   gogle.com
Address: 64.233.161.104
Name:   gogle.com
Address: 66.102.7.104

neo@tathagata:~$ google.com
bash: google.com: command not found
neo@tathagata:~$ nslookup google.com
Server:         218.248.255.145
Address:        218.248.255.145#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   google.com
Address: 64.233.167.99
Name:   google.com
Address: 64.233.187.99
Name:   google.com
Address: 72.14.207.99

http://gogle.com is still accesible. Now if you go to gogle.com/translate ... you'll land up in gogle.com/translate_t. Hmm...whats wrong?

Bush Speech (Edited)

2006-10-07T11:36:00.000+05:30


You cant stop laughing ....

how nice!

2006-10-03T11:25:00.000+05:30

Getting CYGWIN ready for Nesc

2006-10-02T07:32:00.000+05:30

Yesterday was spent only fixing cygwin, to make it ready for use. The default terminal that it provided, was without taste. Since I hardly write programs in Windows, I dont have any good text editor here. Moreover, nesc syntax highlighting isn't a feature that some text editor would boast about. So, with my spyware crippled Windows I got to make the environment a bit more friendly.

First fix cygwin.
I googled two really helpful pages that enabled me to get a pretty cygwin. Now ethically I should link them to boost up their pagerank, but sorry folks - I lost the links.
Instead I'll put down the steps

1. Create a file under the folder /home/username named .Xdefaults. It should have a period in front, so that it doesn't show up in normal ls.
2. Put the following code in the file .Xdefaults


! ~/.Xdefaults - X default resource settings
Rxvt*geometry: 100x40
Rxvt*background: #000040
Rxvt*foreground: #ffffbf
Rxvt*borderColor: Blue
!Rxvt*scrollColor: Blue
!Rxvt*troughColor: Gray
!Rxvt*scrollBar: True
Rxvt*scrollBar_right: True
Rxvt*font: Lucida Console-15
Rxvt*SaveLines: 2000
Rxvt*loginShell: True
! VIM-like colors
Rxvt*color0:    #000000
Rxvt*color1:    #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color2:    #00A800
Rxvt*color3:    #FFFF00
Rxvt*color4:    #0000A8
Rxvt*color5:    #A800A8
Rxvt*color6:    #00A8A8
Rxvt*color7:    #D8D8D8
Rxvt*color8:    #000000
Rxvt*color9:    #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color10:   #00A800
Rxvt*color11:   #FFFF00
Rxvt*color12:   #0000A8
Rxvt*color13:   #A800A8
Rxvt*color14:   #00A8A8
Rxvt*color15:   #D8D8D8
! eof

3. Now edit the batch file under cygwin directory in the Windows folder as


@echo off
C:
chdir C:\tinyos\cygwin\bin
set EDITOR=vi
set VISUAL=vi
set CYGWIN=codepage:oem tty binmode title
rxvt -e bash --login -i

note: My cygwin is located under C:\tinyos, so the argument of chdir would change accordingly.

Next to get the nesc syntax highlighting for vi.
1. Create a directory .vim in your .home/username folder. mkdir .vim
2. Inside .vim make another directory syntax. mkdir syntax.
3. Put the code below in a file named nc.vim. I have just copied the C++ .vim file and added the necessary stuff.


" Vim syntax file
" Language: Nesc 
" Maintainer: yer on yer own pal!
" Last Change: 2006 Oct 1

" For version 5.x: Clear all syntax items
" For version 6.x: Quit when a syntax file was already loaded
if version < 600
  syntax clear
elseif exists("b:current_syntax")
  finish
endif

" Read the C syntax to start with
if version < 600
  so :p:h/c.vim
else
  runtime! syntax/c.vim
  unlet b:current_syntax
endif

" C++ extentions
syn keyword cppStatement new delete this friend using
syn keyword cppAccess  public protected private
syn keyword cppType  inline virtual explicit export bool wchar_t
syn keyword cppExceptions throw try catch
syn keyword cppOperator  operator typeid
syn keyword cppOperator  and bitor or xor compl bitand and_eq or_eq xor_eq not not_eq
syn match cppCast  "\<\(const\|static\|dynamic\|reinterpret\)_cast\s*<"me=e-1
syn match cppCast  "\<\(const\|static\|dynamic\|reinterpret\)_cast\s*$"
syn keyword cppStorageClass mutable
syn keyword cppStructure class typename template namespace
syn keyword cppNumber  NPOS

"Nesc extensions
syn keyword ncFunction  command event task interface
syn keyword ncCall  call post fire as
syn keyword ncPreProc  includes
syn keyword ncInterface  module implementation configuration
syn keyword ncWiring   provides uses components
syn keyword ncConstant  SUCCESS FAIL 
syn keyword ncBoolean  TRUE FALSE

" The minimum and maximum operators in GNU C++
syn match cppMinMax "[<>]?"

" Default highlighting
if version >= 508 || !exists("did_cpp_syntax_inits")
  if version < 508
    let did_cpp_syntax_inits = 1
    command -nargs=+ HiLink hi link 
  else
    command -nargs=+ HiLink hi def link 
  endif
  HiLink cppAccess  cppStatement
  HiLink cppCast  cppStatement
  HiLink cppExceptions  Exception
  HiLink cppOperator  Operator
  HiLink cppStatement  Statement
  HiLink cppType  Type
  HiLink cppStorageClass StorageClass
  HiLink cppStructure  Structure
  HiLink cppNumber  Number
  HiLink ncBoolean  Boolean
  HiLink ncFunction  Type
  HiLink ncCall   Statement
  HiLink ncPreProc  Structure
  HiLink ncInterface  cppStructure
  HiLink ncWiring  cppStatement
  HiLink ncConstant  Constant
  delcommand HiLink
endif

let b:current_syntax = "nc"

augroup filetypedetect
  au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.td, *.ti,*nc setfiletype nc
augroup END

" vim: ts=8

4. Copy the sample vimrc files.


 cp /usr/share/vim/vim62/gvimrc_sample.vim /etc/.gvimrc
 cp /usr/share/vim/vim62/vimrc_sample.vim /home/Tatha/.vimrc   #change to home/username

5. In the .vimrc file add the line
set background=dark
So that the comments can be seen properly.
6. Now the code


augroup filetypedetect
  au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.td, *.ti,*nc setfiletype nc
augroup END

was supposed to turn on the syntax highlighting when a .nc file opens, but its not working. Most probably, it needs a source to the nc.vim in the .vimrc file, but I'm not sure.
So, what I have to do is, open a nesc file in vi as


vi MultiHop.nc

Then press Esc followed by Shift + ':' and write


:runtime! syntax/nc.vim

Press enter.

It stays in the buffer, so everytime you open a new .nc file, you can just press Esc followed by Shift + ':' and press up arrow followed by enter.

Well these steps were written from memory and the present state of my cygwin (which is very nice, BTW). If you spot something I missed, or something terribly wrong ... just be good to point it out!

Weird Google Earth Images

2006-09-29T07:24:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, a post in /. pointed to a bug in the Google earth images. Apperantly, this is not the only one, there are quite a few, but not as literal as this one though! The Google Earth Blog has an explanation for odd buildings as seen here.

Feeling desolate

2006-09-28T09:27:00.000+05:30

Its been long since my last post ...
Blogging took a back seat due to many a things in life; much have changed, much hasn't. Of all things in life, change doesn't change!
Today is Durgapujo. Its the biggest festival for us, the Bengalis. It is supposed to be an auspicious occasion ... but all I can see around me is business. For me pujo means business - a time to make money! Saddest point being I like the majority would be paying the bill.
Who would be receiving it? Well, who wont? Starting from the potuays who make the idol, to the pandelwalas, the Puja committees, the restaurants, car-for-hire, taxiwallas .. the list is long.
If you leave out the bill paying experience ... I think its all this is really great! Thanks to some fossilied superstition, for a few days, somebody would be able to live in a better way!

If long for a digital camera with which I can shoot pics of the puja that nobody would care to look at, forgotten amidst the grandure of theme pujo ...

As for work ... my decesion to install TinyOs in Windows has been a real bad one ... my SP2 deprived illegal copy seems to be infected W32/Nyxem-d and now I have to work with out the net turned off! Should I install TinyOs in Ubuntu?

I submitted the form for GATE and TIFR. But studies have been reduced to the point of extinction.

I aint feling good at all!

My CSE with Ubuntu CDs

2006-04-23T05:56:00.000+05:30

This is my class .. with Ubuntu CDs. Navin has ordered a pack of 50 ...
It was also significant in a way that we were able to hold back our Head of the Department through peaceful negotiations with the management.

Google Calender .... the next big leap

2006-04-14T04:19:00.000+05:30

I cannot hold it anymore ... Google has gone crazy ... how can Sayan and me take over the world if they go on releasing softwares like these ...
A software like this is bound to amke you extreemely dependant on it ... it packs in so much possibility ..that I have already had the bad dream of us conspiring against Google to regain control over the world, accidentally writing something in a public calender ...and then being punished by DOS by Google ....

remind me if I forget
And yeah pretty soon theres gonna be O'Reilys Calender Hacks ....
please upload it in rapidshare and gimme the link

If I lived in a world like this ....

2006-04-11T09:01:00.000+05:30

Tomorrow i have two exams ...computer graphics and networking ...
and as usual ...I am studying everything else other than those two...

I'm reading a book called Absolute Begginer's guide to build a robot ...
[ok ok,.. I like these for dummies, idiot's guide, absoulte begginers guide ...ok I find them much more human than reading papers from arxiv.org or citeseer.ist.psu.edu ... you can laugh endlessly at me.]

Getting back to where I was ... heres a nice little window to the future, that we would love to be in ...

The year is 2008. You're in your home office working feverishly on your latest book and you're in dire need of a major snack break. "Dexter, can you come here?" you shout. From the living room, you hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner powering down and the increasingly loud whine of servo motors as your Sony Roboman 3000 lumbers in. "Can you get me a diet soda, the guacamole from the fridge, and that bag of corn chips from the kitchen counter?" you ask. "Hey, not a prob, Chief," your bot responds, in disturbingly casual English. You sigh. "I thought I told you not to call me 'Chief'," you scold, as Dexter heads for the kitchen. You make a mental note to complain to the service company about the slacker attitude of today's "brain." Dexter brings back your snacks, along with the day's hard mail. "Well, that's the end of my shift, Chief. Call me history," he announces, after he sees that you're happily munching away. Without waiting for a reply, he walks over to the recharging station and snaps himself in. The activity lights on his chest and head slowly wink out as your R3000 goes into "stand-by" mode.
Across the country, in a nondescript California office building that once housed an endless parade of dot-com start-ups, your "brain" peels off his virtual reality (VR) headset and steps out of his motion capture suit. "What a load that guy is," he snorts, fluffing up his multicolored dreadlocks. "A writer? Ha! And I thought my gig offered poor job security." He hops onto his gyro-stabilized scooter and buzzes down a hallway lined with cubicles of other people in VR suits hired to inhabit the world's robots, to serve as the higher intelligence that, so far, still eludes the world's machines.

ns-2.29

2006-04-08T14:50:00.000+05:30

Finally ns2.29 is running ...
Too bad its Windows version is crappy ... I wonder what my friend will do ... he aint that commandline savy like me..
sometimes its good to be old fashioned

This is for test

2006-04-08T14:23:00.000+05:30

This is for test.

My First Video Post

2006-02-03T20:08:00.000+05:30

nuts as usual.....

Allow to stream in before clicking ...

Launching http://www.scoopal.com

2006-01-01T13:30:00.000+05:30

Many of you blog, many of you are in many social networks like orkut,hi5 etc.My friend Sayan and me strongly believe at a given point of time the advancement of a civilization is measured by the simplification and efficiency in its communication methodologies that binds the soceity together. We have long been intrigued by human relationship and the various aspects of it ..analyzing from various standpoints, from our peronal experiences - we have spent hours and hours of disscussion in order to understand what an individual wants from the soceity and more importantly what the soceity wants from an individual.
Viewing a socity as a densely connected graph was an obvious solution...
with nodes as individual and edges as the connecting link between them. The edge weights can be taken to denote how strong or weak the relationship may be...and weights being a function of the average time dependency on the set of communication tools used. We saw different sites and tried to undersatnd the drawbacks and plus points of each.
Seeing many of our ideas being implemented jerked us into developing our dream ----

http://www.scoopal.com -scoop your pals

which is a down to earth implementation of the big words I wrote above.
the site is still in beta stage. And following Google we plan to keep it in that way for a prolonged period till bugfixes become history.
forget what i said above...
The main thing here is to speak your mind ...blog blog and blog.
See what your pals are writing,
comment on them ... mark them thumbs up thumbs down
form your network by adding like-minded guys and gals as pals ..see whats your scoop,
share pictures ... free emails and many more to come
We cordially invite you to join and see things around ...say what features you like what you hate and what more you want

ebooks on |-|4CKi+|\|6

2005-11-20T21:02:00.000+05:30

its been quite a while since i blogged ...obviouly i was bogged down with so many things that i could not blog.

exams are once again knocking at my doors ...and as usual i'm behind schedule by large margins!
but lets talk business:-
i gathered quite a few good ebooks on the topics we are all interested in - HACKING

nost of them are bogus ..really intended not to teach you anything
but some have gold mines burried into them
one such is

web hacing exposed

i have just started reading the book and is pretty kwel, starts up with a no-nonsense straight
to business approach. the language is also pretty nice.check out the website ..its good too!

another from the exposed series

Hacking linux exposed

i do have the hard copy of this book...and anybody who lknows me will say, "pura ratta mar liya na?",but ya know the truth i havent read it completely even once.

when you are talking about HACKING..how can you refrain from talking about

kevin mitnick

i have started reading both Art of Deception and Art of Intrusion ... it really gets your pulse racing!i'll review the books once i finish them

i havent given any links as from wher i got the books ...
do i need to, coz u've got google, you can dig up anthing from the net with it...i believe it!
but wait ...i promise you a script that will even quench your thirst for ebooks
forever.

some more chaaps

i've trying to install oracle 8.1.6 in my redhat 9 , but due to some compatibility problem with glibc its failing ..can anybody suggest something?

i'm enjoying the forum posts in chip-india. recently my answer was selected over prachandas(the wizard's) answer,which is a great sign..

ket this exam be over ...i'll enjoy learning new tricks and tips and sharing them with you

one more question to anybody seeing this blog...
why is orkut doing such a philanthropy? its got huge huge huge data of sooo many people in the world but, ...not even one text ad?
this is surprising! what do you think?

Talking of ads... i enrolled my self for adsense... i've no doubt that i'll be rejected, but its a stepping stone for my web programming future.
from next post i'll start implememting tricks to increase my page ranks! till then its chow-chow

back to you...

2005-10-28T22:21:00.000+05:30

well, i'm back..
i'm back to blog.. i vowed not to write anything until my broadband connection arrives -- i didn't. my broadband connection has finally arrived and now i'm surfing the net pretty casually without the ass-on-fire attitude that typically overpowered the joy of surfing the net.

I'm yet to find ways to tune the service and havent tried it on GNU/Linux yet..
but i'll do it pretty soon..

Personal life
well much has happened ... i saw so many people around me doing what not
and ultimately given up all expectations of any noble thing from any human relationship..life has yet again taught me to understand that the teachings that
we get from the so called civilization that we are living in is wrong.
Is being civilized may be viwed as suppressing the animal instincts in yourself,
denying your senses, denying the very essence of who you actually are... a beast?

a decesion...
i think i'll make this blog a store house of the frustration i'll collect through out my journey in life
as for all other technical stuff ... they'll be freshly done in a new blog

back..

2005-09-13T13:58:00.000+05:30

well, nothing much happening in life right now;just let this exam shit finish over and i have loads of things to take care.
1) i'll do a bit of MFC programming to get a feel of the Windows operating system - yes yes it SUCKS big timr.
2) learn up assembly
3) write some stuff in voice XML - I wish I can make my webpage voice enabled!

Anybody having any idea about the ashkenazik jews and history of the Jews (hope I got the spelling right) can you please drop in a comment where to find more info on them;

I am back ...

2005-08-31T00:53:00.000+05:30

i've been very busy writing a paper on voice browser and markup languages for that...
so i've been away from my blog and I would be so for a few more days. I'll end this post with a voice that all my programmer friends would like to hear.
One of the greatest programmer of all times -Bjarne Stroustrup.

real good people...

2005-08-11T22:51:00.000+05:30

now when people like these(sayan & sauparna) are in your life, frustration can get frustrated if it tries

#ping -l tatha.com
....
....
.... (ping statements)
ctrl + c

zillion packets sent, 100% data lost.

my iptables are secured by :

soup said...
Forget the game once it has been played. That's what Steve Waugh had said.( I know u don't love sports, but still.....pay heed to it)

6:16 PM

Sayan Chakraborti said...
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain

9:31 PM

thanks guys for your comments;

confused....

2005-08-11T11:01:00.000+05:30

life all of a sudden is becoming so ..... confusing

on one hand i find everything falling into place...

i have my mind cleared of every possible diversion

i am getting neat search results ...at 6006|_3(koi shak?)

i'm getting cool documents and materials to explore new technoogies

and there ends cool things

i got a 7.93

bad, bad , bad ,bad...

look at my marks

LIFE SUCKS!!!!

2005-08-05T01:49:00.000+05:30

[redhat@Heritagehost Tatha]#

well, where to begin from, ...

we were told that today we would have a seminar... ok we all know what happens at the seminar!
But today morning when i took the bus, i came to know redhat was coming to college....????

"holy shit!", was my first reaction as i simply could not believe my ears, i've heard that there

were some plans of our college tying up with redhat, but that wasn't something very concreete ..
and today morning i hear redhat's coming to college!
i didnot believe as people around me are always playing jokes on me when it comes to GNU/Linux and the information came from a person...ahm

our first class was an OS class :-)
after the class we went to the audi which was jam-packed ... just like it happens whenever people at our college hear anything little about career opportunities...
we got a seat and after some initial delays and a talk by manish sir it kicked off.
mr. iyer talked about the development of Linux since it was posted on the net and how everything reached where it is today...
next it was the question answer session...

by this time i was flustered with emotion and questions...
and people kept sitting without uttering a word..

then a guy stood up and talked shit... I couldnot controll my emotions

i knew i had to get up, so many things were at stake...

I was in the first floor and was planning to shout my questions allowed..
as i began saying "sir i am a huge fan of GNU/Linux...", Manish sir came running and gave me the microphone from the groundfloor,
I was shivering with excitement and didn't know what to say,

I told him how much I've enjoyed FC4, and drifted away asking a stupid question (..I had the

words of Tanenbaum and Torvalds in my head, the famous quotes about the monolithic kernel and I've heard its problamatic for embeded systems, .. so it was a mixture of the two, with a
personal Zeal to defend GNU/Linux).
He simply started ..well nobody defends Linux,and i interrupted saying that i need to coz i love Linux more than anything else in the world. (.. it was a slip of tongue - i missed the GNU/ !!!). The entire audi went 'oooooooohhhh'!

i was so..........!!

he answered that he has been doing seminars for quite sometimes and nowadays he's finding more and more people who think the same way.He added that all defensive jobs are done by.... you guessed it right Mr. Stallman.
ultimately it boiled down to...
Rs 5000 for a six months training by redhat people
and
Rs 8500, for RHCE exam.
The remaining part of the day you know how people tried to pull my legs apart...
But main thing is I cannot decide what to do. Anybody whos reading this ....please advise.

My friends blog:
i have a very good friend who has been all over the coolest places in the world.She's Kumud Bihani and check out her blog where she has written all sbout Ice Land and other paces, she has also uploaded the pictures.

2005-07-31T16:18:00.000+05:30

n00b sp3kz out....Google,to cry for..

I got to know one thing about God, ...its Google...

I'll list some of God's grace, if you have witnessed these or been benefited many a times, comment how you enjoyed it;
and for you
1337 H4xor ... f33l f|233 2 7a6 |\/|3 n00b
I'll cut to the point,

With great power (read 6006|3) comes....

a well known software company fancies a tagline "where do you want to go today?" ... well lets follow them
open their browser
and goto 60D thora hatke way,

http://ww.google.com..(mind the 2 ws)

ext: pdf confidential "for internal use only" + site:mil

(ab)USE

Forget me not...

Good times, good persons,... seems like all good things loses the bet of time.
But God is great,if you have lost her ask Him to return her and He will, unlike in the world outside the net. To get back many of really important things that has been removed from the net chant the mantra,


cache: www.thishasbeenremoved.com

INDEX.Everything.

type in "index OF" and force it with objects of interest ... for example

"index OF + mp3 + Madonna".
Once again I'll refrain from the malacious ones.

Spam the world to death

this ones the easiest but ... SPAMMING IS INJURIOUS TO HEALTH

"adding new user" more inurl:addnewuser -"there are NO domains"

60D looks at all the urls for occurences of addnewuser. After that create your id,spam every one to death.

Real Deal

ok... u have labelled me n00b reading the easy ones above ... something a bit elegant.
Type in
"A syntax error has occurred" filetype:ihtml

"access denied for user" "using password"

"incorrect syntax near"

"Host vulnerability summary report" - must checkout

you have already been flooded by info thats enough to bring the bazar down (obviously you have used your 1337 sk1llz). But why am I mentioning all these old crap is its so simple to get into good places even if you dont have the slightest idea about how the net works. for example I had
reached the intranet of IIMB where I just needed one valid user id(not even password) to change the account password; even if you brute force - tell me how long would it take?In another try I downloaded a specification for weaponaries of Uncle Sams soldiers, may be its not that classified but you can abuse the huge info in it.

and you 1337 l4|\/|3|2, put your teeth inside and help me by giving some more good stings.

Heres something GOOD (or BAD...)

Many a company giving online support to their hardwares have opened up a new world.In case you dont know ( stop laughing 1337) after you install the hardware and if you're online, the company can remotely monitor its product .. meaning your machine, so that it can provide you with better support. But 60D is all pervasive .... even without a password you can gain controll over these products. what these vulnerable products are?.... printer and ....webcams. i guess the last word has ignited sparkz in your perverted brain, and to tell the truth even in mine.Anyone having an "American Pie" experience, please mail me in details.

Word of caution...

Good days are gone. Many sites have plugged in their vulnerabilities after they learnt them the hardway.so before doing an "index OF" of your favourite porn items ..or say passwords remember if you can be bad so can others ....people have planted enough viruses and spywares to get your computer down to lowest level of hell.Gone are the good days when people did that famous credit card trick to buy some goodies or get accsess to those really interseting but restricted sites.

To end this post in a dancing mood ...

"Every month Google updates its indexes.These updates are known as 'Google Dances'. The indexes are quite large and the calculations take account of a shifting palette of algorithms,and take several days to complete.During this peroid , the search results are not stabilized and may vary fom minute to minute.That's Google's 'dance'(towards the end of every month, usually between the 20th and the first days of the following month, the 25th is a good bet). When the dance starts the 'linkers'(the numbers of site pointing to specific site) are different on the three googles:www,www2,and www3(these two point to the San Jose datacenter which is supposed to be 'frishest'). Since Summer 2003, Google dances much less wildly. The indexes are now updated every week, mostly around Monday."

Well thats not all I have to say about Google, I'm still digging in ... and anybody bothering to read my blog, I'll keep you well informed....
whether you like it or not. And just incase you wanna read more about Google's archi checkout rup's blog

look who were here

2005-07-27T23:44:00.000+05:30

have you seen the comment section of my previous post
sayan and sayamindu, both were here....

if you have spent reasonable time with me, and youre Linux literate you definitely know how i respect these guys. both of them visted my blog and commented on linux, what else can you ask for at the end of a day like this .....
today i was flustered by my friends complaining against Linux and my inabilities were used to substantiate Linux's weakpoints....(grrrr....(pure animal instincts))...
what happended was a somebody(..or a nobody ) was a witness to my failure to succesfully run a program written in emacs ! I've been using Linux for 10-11 months now, and being the sole supporter of it, they picked me up as an easy target!

even if it means reading millions of pages (that's the best part)and experimenting to death ... I'll show them why i love this os so much.

Anyway,its not about showing anything to idi(b)ots,I just dunno anything, bottomline is

I LOVE LINUX

thank you sayamindu, your comment in my blog means a lot to me. Same to you Sayan, you have always been around.

2005-07-27T00:33:00.000+05:30

its a new world...

look at my os.....


           its FREE==>
          its SLICK========>
its got KILLER APPS===================>
and its DEADLY FAST=======================================================>

is it a bird? is it a plane?or maybe superman?
......no...

Its FEDORA CORE 4.......

the superos

My Experience

boy am i excited....to unravel the new & hot stuff

to be quite honest, i was apprehensive, coz i really hate the feeling that my computer is running slow, its humiliating ..isn't it? but thanks to sayan, who gave me the courage to proceed with the insatllation.

so i inserted the dvd, and booted in from cd...
with my heart pounding, i reached for the return key and pressed it...

anaconda (the installer) started, and asked if i would like to check the disk... i skipped.
next after configuring my processor, monitor keyboard mouse etc it detected my previous Fedora Core 1 installation and asked if i would upgrade or do a fresh installation...

i knew this was the last step for me to turn back... it was like standing on the edges of snowclad mountain with your skateboards on, a dive and you make your mark on fresh powder of the unchartered teritory, or stay back in a reasonably explored land.

i called upon torvalds and stallman...(just kiddin, i dont trouble gods for little things), and dived in....

as the installation began,.. it showed it would take 90 minutes. I wondered if I had done the right thing and kept my fingures crossed.

my nail-biting excitement was stalled as one of my family members(dont remeber who) asked me to get her something from the market. I returned home and found the installation running smooth. I picked up a qt tute in the latest lfy, and moved a bit away from my pc trying ward away the any negetive thoughts, but I was still thinking if i had done the right thing .

after a while, with only two minutes left, I came closer to my pc, monitoring the packages being installed.

suddenly the screen flashed saying a package wasn't found and it couldn't proceed!
though its a familiar sit during installatioin but with only a few seconds away from victory even a minor glitch like this (reminding really bad experiences), gave me cold feet.
I clicked retry and ....it worked! this happened once more, but ulimately it ended fabulously.

sadly enough i had lost track of time. But then I sat with my watch as I rebooted my pc, though start up wasnt much appreciable,( but my Linux loads faster than yours!) once youre at the desktop, u'll know what's speed
and why billu and baldy(walmer) would be kissin ass after a few summers...(hey nothin personal dude... just that youre doomed mr. gates).

.....a brief tour....

well lets start with whats new & hot....

                                    my experience above

Kernel: 2.6.11 optimised to squeeze out your P4
Xen virtualisation softare: allows multiple os run on same computer. This stuff is huge, try to read about it on the net and u'll understand what i'm tryin to say
Latest Version of GCC: coders rejoice,your favourite complier's version 4 is here
GNOME 2.10: GNOME has never really impressed me, but a few helpful changes in the main menu is defnitely appreciable
KDE 3.4: lets talk style baby; longhorn....try to learn the GUI technology
OpenOffice.org 2.0: those of you yell at it, believe me it has actually become faster.it uses Oasis OpenDocument XML standard by default,its vendor neutral,transpaerant to users and koffice supports it.

Development Enviornment

lots of goodies like Eclipse IDE,PHP 5.04,Perl 5.8.6,mod_perl 2.0

FC4 works on machines with Power processors, such as PowerPC G4 in Apple Computer's Mac mini.
it supports 32-bit and 64-bit chips, such as Intel's Xeon and AMD's Athlon 64.
it can run even on a 400Mhz Pentium II, obviously you cant expect too much in such a machine,
but throw in 1.5 gb you'll see speed.

Though I havent have the chance of using it that much, i still feel its much much better than previous fedora releases. But having used Debian (knoppix) i'm feeling a bit low ...
theres still no mp3 support if software can be free why cant music?
"apt-get" the package management utility is way ahead... redhat guys must do something about it.

giant skeleton

2005-07-11T23:54:00.000+05:30

i received a mail,saying that in a western part of indian desert a huge skeleton has been found, by National geographic in collaboration with indian army.the exact words are::"Recent exploration activity in the northern region of India uncovered skeletal remains of a human of phenomenal size. This region of the Indian desert is called the Empty Quarter. The discovery was made by National Geographic Team (India Division) with support from the Indian Army since the area comes under the jurisdiction of the Army. The exploration team also found tablets with inscriptions that stated that our Gods of Indian mythological yore, "Brahma" had created people of phenomenal size the like of which He has not created since. They were very tall, big, and very powerful, such that they could put their arms around a tree trunk and uproot it. They were created to bring order among us since we were always fighting with each other. One of the sons of Bhima of the Pandava brothers is also thought of to have been carrying these genes.
Later these people, who were given all the power, turned against all our Gods, and transgressed beyond all boundaries set. As a result they were destroyed by God Shiva. The Geo Exploration team believes these to be the remains of those people. Govt. of India has secured the whole area and no one is allowed to enter except the Nat Geo personnel. A very small article on this was published in Times Of India- Mumbai edition on 22-Apr-2004.
See the attachment below and note the size of the two men standing in the picture in comparison to the size of the skeleton."
if you are feeling pretty excited check this

http://www.rationalistinternational.net/article/20041001_en.html
and finally ... its another net hoax, so goto
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/giant-skeleton.html http://www.faithfreedom.org/oped/sina40428.htm

i became a member

2005-07-02T00:01:00.000+05:30

sayan is really upto something, the nql (natarul query language... hey hey ..you know the inspiration), can have real gruesome applications.i registered my self at sourceforge.net. pretty funny.. their registering process is (talking in yoda style again!).my account name is - tatha (...thats what i am)user can send me mail at tatha@users.sourceforge.net (... who will?)i downloaded the web api from google, they are allowing only 1000 queries perday.my license key is ....ha ha bolbo na!

unix programming

2005-06-27T06:43:00.000+05:30

finally i'm back on track. for the past few weeks what i've been writing, made my blog look like a prem kahani(....that too fully faltu and fully frastu... i wrote coz i never knew people would visit my blog.) to some (............) guys, surely they will find this entertaining.
its amazing how good people really can be. check out this url http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node1.html#SECTION00100000000000000000
if you havent been there already (coz its pretty famous), you are missing something. its got real goodies arranged in such a nice way. if the link doesnt work search by this stringUNIX System calls and subroutines using C and check for a.d.marshellmay be u'll get this.
check out another cool site
http://www.coding-zone.co.uk
i really like the look and feel of the site... its got that "kick ass ..... politely" attitude !
well these goodies are enough to make my summer holidays .....ROCKING.
my blogs gonna be better ...i promise. and oh yeah, no way am i writing anything more on my prem kahani ...... u know she's too personal to share even her thoughts with someone.

2005-06-26T00:50:00.000+05:30

google is really sorry they couldnt hire me for writing code... i'm feeling bad for those guys their letters' tone is really upsetting ... oh how they longed to include me in their list of coders, perhaps they were even thinking of changing their name to tathagole to honour me ... but alas they couldnot. never mind googie, better luck next summer..... till then just keep trying you'll be able to reach me one day!
yeterday i wrote:
i have recovered completely.(dont mind the gibbrish above ... i have recovered)
yesterday me and soup enjoyed a lot... we went to the college to talk about the techfest..and it was also the farewell of the fourth years, which was not a fitting one for such a good batch. as the group photos were being taken, it made me think only two years after we will also be in the same place.. how fast the last two years passed by makes me even more thoughtful, it seems like yeaterday that i took admission in Heritage, how fresh my memories are ...first day i went for admission with both my parents ... thankfully thats the last day they went to college with me.i'll be missing my college - much much more than my school.
next we went to bcl.. and my dear friend who was trying out "how it is like being tatha" or "give tatha a taste of his own medicine", suddenly became nostalgic and planned to pick up all the books of richard dockins ... eventually he picked up two and i issued a book on the third card.
i have seven books on linux stacked up on my desk now....as for the soft copies minimum 34 mb lined up. sauparna has the openion that i should stop surfing and collecting the books and read at least one completely... he's damn right, i havent read a single one inside out.
since i first got an ebook i've been mad after those and now i have a cute little bookshelf enough to keep my hunger down for two years at least.shushobhan de deserves a huge "thank you" for this.

from the sick bed...

2005-06-20T23:38:00.000+05:30

its really frustrating...
being sick... i am feeling like the sun .. as if i'm radiating heat all around, my eyes are are hurting... my reflexes seem to be getting slower.
one of the benefits of being a vegi (well eggi ... to be more precise) is that i have a lower rate of falling ill. but .......har kutte ka din ata hai (well, dont find this obscene... i couldnt find a better line)
the saddest part being i cant work... may be i wont be able to go to college tomorrow...
things are just wiring up... silence can be so loud, i am feeling sorry and missing something ....
dreams and expectations must be there ... but one needs to be strong to face it if they are not fulfilled.
life is the biggest teacher.

2005-06-07T22:48:00.000+05:30

hmm

automata- farewell (hopefully!)

2005-06-07T22:37:00.000+05:30

this is what i wrote yesterday:-tomorow is the last day i'll be reading automata,.. well for the btech course at least.this is a farewell(hopefully temporary) to one of the greatest subjects i have ever read.i really dont have toime othewise i would have made it really special.GOOD BYE---------i dont know how youre gonna pay me back tomorrow, but together we had a real nice time,..well the pleasure is all mine. thanks to daniel i. a. cohen sir, for writing one of the best pieces of literature i have ever read(Introduction to Computer Theory).And how can i forget chandrashekhar and mishra... too student friendly.
and after the exam:---------------------the paper was quite a joke...a real bad one though. May be the guy who maybe knows the nothing of the subject(highly probable) or he knows a bit too much (negetive probability). i would relly like to send this paper to all the lecturers whose notes i had downloaded and ask them, how would have their students faired in such a paper.
i wonder how other college students have done!
and if i meet the paper setter someday he'll have the time of his life!

2005-06-05T00:15:00.000+05:30

kinda old days

2005-06-04T23:58:00.000+05:30

from tomorrow will start the week of exam.... and my preparation is ..well bad as usual.it was terribly hot these days with the mercury trying to break out of the glass tube, but today evening a refreshing shower cooled everything down.it was really welcomed. sayan was so overwhelmed that he called up to celebrate it.talking with sayan, is always entertaining, sometimes(well most of the time) you just get awestruck thinking how can somebody know so much! this was something that intriguied most of us when we were in school.we studied together in the same section - mechanics section which was supposed to be the home of all the rational and smart kids, most of whom longed for the tag of "genius" by solving numerical problems or ansewring some stupid old question which a guy called Newton had already taken care of hundreds of years back; there was an easier way - ask a teacher a question really without any meaning, even if it did, make sure nobody really understands you!and if the tacher failed to answer your question - till the next time any such question comes up - you remain the "genius".guys like me had a better option like calvin (see the clip)
well many had there share at this tag for short periods of time, but to one guy it kind of got stuck, and i lovingly named him newtonstine - its a different story that other "genius" (genuine asses) did not give in easily and worked harder to reclaim the title but fact is even today the tag resides with him.well a big load got cleared up today, as i talked with sayan and understood that may be shamasis isnt pissed off with me, if he were sayan would have understood that.i dunno if i did anything bad to smita, i admit of an infatuation towards her, but soon(two months) i realized our differences. i never made any commitment -so just kinda hung up - what was the story on the other side i'll never want to know.before her i admit of having a serious crush on a girl called yamini. it was all hindi movie inspired on a platonic canvas - i had it all in my mind feeling real great about the whole "love" thing.these two things helped me get a matured view of the life, helped me to get a better look at complex thing like human relations; to understand that everthing is done with a purpose, it helped me realize how alone people are in a crowded room and finally it also paved the way for understanding the difference between love and infatuation.

star wars - even got me

2005-06-02T00:21:00.000+05:30

star wars in the air.
freaked out by hectic study schedule, i was surfing the net and came across a really cool site.
its links are given below, it matches your persoality with a science fiction character;
and just think of this - i match with yoda - the jedi from star wars. its fevers getting every one!

http://www.tk421.net/character/
check it out and find out who u r

catching up with old pals after practical exam

2005-05-27T06:51:00.000+05:30

my practical exams are over.
operations research and communication was rocking... but i goofed in computer organisation lab.
one thing ive been noticing - or have realized that i ve suffered in my exams 90% due to lack of confidence, and followed by dropdown of concentration level to zero. result- i end up with disaster.
while anybodys concentration level breaks and he feels down - what should he do? i think the best tutorial is offered by the boys in the field. thinking of steve wagh - and what soup told me about his attitude towrds "last game" ... i am not feeling bad about my messup in co lab, coz i aint thinkin bout it.

yesterday evening was fun .. catching up with school friends , real old pals.

anyway we went to 8b, it took us about 1 hr to decide where we should eat, sayan found it feasible after 9 pm to go to golpark and have some predinner stuff at grub club. everybody stronjgly opposed to it - so went to "banzara" had a look at the price menu - and smartly walked out. then it was back to good old "bawarchi". we met rishi on the way, who chatofied dibbendu to max - and dibbendu gave his old "balad-balad" smile, without a protest - same old dibbendu. dibbendu has not changed a bit- hes the same guy i knew before he went to iit. doesnt your enviornment matter? i think it does,
but one thing i need to checkout, how do you measure if a person has changed or not?
ive observed few people reflecting change in their, so i should have understood if dibbendu had changed.
then we had some coldrinks and ice cream at hiduthan sweets followed by shorbhaja and mishti doi at srikrishna.

i spent only 10 bucks

burdened with exam

2005-05-23T21:33:00.000+05:30

its 9-45pm tomorrow my fourth semester starts with operation research lab
i relly dont have any idea hows everything gonna be
by crossnnuts program is lying in the same state as before
today as i was writing program to find solution to transportation problem by lcm, i found i had to really toil - and ultimately its still bugged!!

so lets make a confession after the exams i'm gonna go real code crazy, and will develop away to think clearly and steadily while coding. the main problem i have is i see too many possiblities of solving a problem, but optimizing to the best one becomes real problem, - i land up in deep shit as i constantly hopp from one idea to next.

nothing about her- lifes' a mystry, an illusion that breaks painfully if start expecting things from it.but still... somewhere there linger a stubborn desire that says ...
oh oh i'm loosing it
tomorrows exam. best of luck dude! its I who matters to me...said tatha

one month to go

2005-05-18T23:51:00.000+05:30

i just came to know today that within one month my exams are going to be over.
that is good in one hand .... but the darker side is that, the result may be apocalyptic, ie for me at least.
i failed to meet the deadline for submitting the program, it now seems to be lost in the jungle of pointers; it would need some serious debugging after the exam;

now a serious question - how frak do u get in your blog? when i started blogging i decided to make it pretty open - so what i have written in my blog is quite without the thinking what othersmight think about it! but now i am having doubts - numerous what if s seem looming over the question of writing your heart out .... and specially when it concerns some body real special,
untill i decide lets not write anything!
anyway its exam time, lets do some kick-ass studies now.

its odd

2005-05-15T01:58:00.000+05:30

i havent finished the program, communication matrix - 'll get it photocopied tomorrow, lets try the problems

why does all good time end like a suuush...?
i met her on thursday, we talked we walked and i .....
had to leave in a hurry, coz prantikda was waiting for me,
i really dont kow what to make out of her words....but one thing is veery sure i am missing her a bit too much,... but i dont mind.
i went to chironjoy's house today to take the communication matrix - and as i was returning i saw mr. m, on the other side of the road , may be he noticed me too.... and as usual we turned away .... do i give a shit at that? hahaha noway!

quotes

2005-05-12T15:38:00.000+05:30

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg." --Bjarne Stroustrup

Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. (Bill Gates)

Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers. (Leonard Brandwein)

"Programs will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving abilty...... there need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are mechanical may be turnrd over to the machine itself."
Alan Turing 1945

Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. (Joseph Weizenbaum 1976)

Being a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking. (Eric Raymond)

Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers. (Robert Hummel)

Let's face the obvious: yesterday we were nerds, today we're the cognitive elite. Let's conquer. (Chester G Edwards)

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over-taxed. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

random thoughts

2005-05-09T22:53:00.000+05:30

with every new day comes new promises, new hopes for the betterment of life in planet earth:- and as we move forward we tend to forget the path we trudged to reach to this point as a race; so its good that we dont stop and move forward but at times we should also look back to see the path that the previous step left behind.
the celebration of 50 years of victory over germany in today was a reminder of the bloody days of the previous century, a saga of heroism for every soldier who fought for his/her country and leader - speaking of leader reminds Stalin; had this guy not been there todays celebration would seem quite like an illogical dream; but at the same time he was the one who unleashed ruthless brutality that shook the entire world.
kindness is a virtue - today as i was standing in the midst of santoshpur bridge waiting for a friend the scorching sun seemed like biting off my flesh- an age old couple seem to have mercy on me and willingly shared their umbrella to offer me a cool shade. i was assured ... humanity still finds relevance in todays context.
how to be more human? its simple ... live and let live. be humble, and just open your mind to new ideas, arguments ... then you'll find the world has become such a great place to live.

ekushe pa

2005-05-07T14:15:00.000+05:30

Good lord, I have grown even older – I’m 21(=7*3, two primes);

And what do you get to do in your birthday – study for semester !! perhaps the last thing anybody would want to do in his birthday!

Anyway how does it matter – what have I been able to do in these 21 years, waste some oxygen and other important resources of this planet, been a pain in the ass to a lot of people, and produced shit!

That is just what every other guy around is doing, so I shouldn’t feel the urge to CELEBRATE my birthday!

But, when you give a second thought - u only get one shot at life, so make it large & enjoy it!

Hopefully if I can manage to write some good code today that will cheer me up! I mailed LinuxQuestion .org with my problem of X, hopefully somebody will answer!

What a pity - I wont be able to see the face of MY OS (LINUX ROX, HANDS DOWN IDIOTS!!!!)

on this day!!

Let the forces of the universe bless me with CODING POWERS !!!

Some good links

http://www.wrox.com,

http://www.wrox.co.uk,

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/9784/tut.html

www.dinkumware.com

http://www.infohelp.co.nz/lnxprogm.html

its exam time

2005-05-06T00:21:00.000+05:30

once again its exam time; i hate it - u really cant do what u actually want to and u have follow what some asshole who made a sucking syllabus; this is what i hate - being contrlled- re u need to be free yaar, theres so many things to do in life;
never mind soup and me have a real nice idea to get our programming practices going; and we are also having great "to do" list.... and the best part is he has moved to santoshpur, working together wont be a problem!!haha - what fun!! i'm really happy!!

now lets write some thing about someone real real special; some time i think all these love stuffz a shit, but when she's nearby my openions seem to get a solid set back. i have known her for two years now and havent felt so strongly about any body before... hmmm and i seem to remeber everything about her so afresh!

need to get realistic coz its exam time

important links

2005-05-02T15:50:00.000+05:30

collected from ilug-site
http://www.fredericknoronha.net
http://www.linuxlearningcentre.com
http://www.peacocksys.com,http://www.ee.mu.oz.au/linux/programming,
http://www.linux-india.org,http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/,http://members.tripod.com/~potm,
http://www.indlinux.org,http://www.fredericknoronha.net ,http://www.bytesforall.org

looking for training

2005-05-02T15:21:00.000+05:30

i am very much worried - its almost end semester and i havent been able to decide on a summer project. i am still searching for a good place where i can put the vacation to some good use. looks like i really need start to explore whatever contacts i can manage!!! cant even work properly at home coz of the ucking exam shit!!

what r u?

2005-04-29T14:02:00.000+05:30

a question that has been there from the beginning of our exsistence is who are we and what exactly are we here to do.
remember the quote ,"i think therefore i am ";
consider this statement to be true and assume that u can create a person just by thinking!
so u go to a deep sleep and you get a completre control over your dream so that you go on to create an entire world of your own:
you have the power to dream as REAL as possible - means you dream nothing ILLOGICAL;

thee words written in caps would reveal important significance once you read this;

in your dream everything is just like the world you have witnessed before going to sleep;so it has your friends relatives and evry other person you know and also you dont know. you have complete control over them such that when you wake up you back to REALITY and your control is lost!

answer these now?
1> if you can create somebody and control him, how about somebody dreaming you and controlling you?
ie, you are a fictious peron in somebodys dream
ie, the REAL you see now is manufactured!
ie, the LOGICAL you argue now is manufactured

if u love your life keep fingures crossed he never wakes up!!

2005-04-27T14:33:00.000+05:30

cool links - linux
http://linux.ITtoolbox.com/r/hdr.asp?r=43559
http://www.collaborium.org/onsite/romania/TUTORIAL/LinuxSurv1/start-win.html
http://www.collaborium.org/onsite/romania/TUTORIAL/LinuxSurv2/start-win.html
http://www.collaborium.org/onsite/romania/TUTORIAL/LinuxSurv3/start-win.html
http://linux.ittoolbox.com/microsite/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/

notes:: collected from a site, BUT I KNOW SMARTER WAYS
booting linux without password
in lilo
Boot in single user modeHold Ctrl-X while rebooting and when you get : prompttype boot single.
In Grub You need to type a space and single in the last of thesecond line when the grub bootloader is displayedIt will take you to the single user mode

WELCOME TO THE BLOG OF TATHAGATA

2005-04-27T13:55:00.000+05:30

hi!! welcome to my blog!!!
keep in touch with this blog and u'll find some pretty amazing things !!!