Truth, Computing and Fail

That is something which has been playing at the back of my mind for the past couple of days.

Google Code Jam Round 2 is on 26th Sept, 21:30 IST, right on the day PyCon India starts. In theory I can attend the 1st day of PyCon and compete in GCJ as well at night. But there are a few small things that have been bugging me like the possibility of being dead tired at the end of the day, lack of a decent internet connection etc.

Advancing to round 3 of GCJ would require me to be placed within the top 500 of the 3000 competitors. Effectively I have about 5-6 days in total to prepare for it, excluding the useless exams in between and a ~500 rank isn’t asking for too much. This is one of the reasons that I’m inclined to stay back instead of taking on a 10 hour long overnight bus journey coupled with running around the city for a whole day.

If you are reading this, put in a few words of wisdom (considering you have them at your disposal).

TechTatva is the technical fest held at my college and this year it starts from 8th September, that is a few days from now. No use of rambling on about its greatness and the value it brings to an otherwise morbid campus life.

Param is the category under TechTatva broadly relating to the computer science and IT oriented events. I’m in charge of handling it this time. Since last year, we have been trying to infuse some freshness into this category with the help of new events. Last year it was Mobivision which was about application development on two mobile platforms: Android and Symbian S60. The event was a huge hit in the college with 200+ people turning up for the workshops on PyS60 and Android development.

This time we have introduced an algorithm intensive event, Algosm which will be hosted and evaluated online by Codechef. This is the first time such an event will be a part of Param like Mobivision was last year. We hope this will help a lot of students in our college get acquainted with the overall concept of online programming contests.

Outstation participants are also welcome (obviously because it’s an online event . Do check out the Algosm page on the TechTatva website for more details.

I have never understood why Axl Rose got all the fame and fortune lavished on him while Tom Keifer was left to rot away in one forgotten corner of the memory of rock lovers. The sound of both the bands were a welcome departure from the generic hard rocking music of the 80s, if I’m to believe all those who lived through that era.

Now, the music of Guns N’ Roses is described as something to be like gritty, slick, dirty, street-smart and unpolished contrary to the kind that was being churned out by the pop metal bands of the day. So why forget Cinderella? Here is a band whose frontman was hugely influenced by the Blues records from Delta Records, who happened to sing tracks heavily inspired by both R&B and C&W genres with a hint of hard rock like Bad Seamstress Blues, One for Rock ‘n Roll, Dead Man’s Road and a lot of them!

Why oh why?

Read to gain an insight into Ramanathan Subramaniam’s sunshine-up-the-ass[1], everything’s-fine-but-not-us view of Manipal.

This freedom to live life on their own terms, to decide for themselves what they want and it makes them understand how difficult it is to take decision sometimes

Regular readers of this blog must be by now familiar with the knuckleheaded rules of the authorities that I have been putting up often.

There have been a lot of additions, of a whole new level of douchiness, to those rules and I was waiting for a few more (!) to aggregate and dissect them one by one. But this neo-Gandhian claptrap has forced me to cut short my period of silence. So let there be light.

“Freedom to live life on their own terms, to decide for themselves what they want”

Hell yeah! Click on the image and read #4. What does it say? “Police have been requested to detain students roaming around the campus after 12:00AM midnight”. Right. Detain. The cream of India’s criminal society have all converged upon Manipal and the fatass police force will save the day. Say hurray for them! There are so many things wrong with the whole point and I don’t even know where to start. For starters, as I have already said in my earlier posts, there is no fucking law in the country that would stop you from venturing out in the night unless some curfew has been imposed on the area due to riots. But trust the assholes here to turn around every law on its head with their money power and clout, running a clear cut case of parallel government with self-styled rules that are very much at heads-on with the laws of the land. The audaciousness of the University to order the detention of students found outside the campus is mind blowing. It has been said that power blinds people and this is a very good example of it. Is the police force a plaything of the University, or are they hired? Have the students entered into some kind of Devil’s deal with the University that allows the latter to intervene in their personal affairs (and maybe own their souls too)? Also, what the fuck is it with the midnight deadline? Right now, Manipal is at its worst kind of weather and add to that craptastically designed hostels that allow the least amount of airflow within them. If we were at our home town, it’d be very natural for us to take a stroll around and enjoy the night breeze. But here, it usually involves at least 10 different kind of profanities to get the guards to open the gates. So much for the freedom to live life on my own terms.

Now they decide what you should eat, where you should live and what not. What next? University branded underwear?

Also, the incident that the linked TMJ article reports only serves to highlight the ineffectiveness of the gazillion number of guards they have placed everywhere who don’t serve the purpose of representing a vibrant campus even closely. If there is one angle of the whole issue that goes unreported even by TMJ, the self-proclaimed champion of truth, it is the harassment of the timid, unassuming students by the security guards and of the girls by the ‘matrons’ in their hostels. I have myself seen at least five instances of students being harassed by the guards. There were this group of ten students who were just hanging out and chatting around 11 in the night. Suddenly a group of guards come out of nowhere and start shouting at them like they were driving away a pack of street dogs. Regarding the girls, if they come late to the hostels, they are forced to spend the whole night in a ‘common room’, which is just a TV room with wooden benches uncomfortable for even sitting properly. What kind of fuckery is this? No one signed up for this shit. I’m not even a little bit amused at this turn of events. It has been the latest trend among the ones lower down the administration order to needlessly harass the students, just for kicks. I can’t comprehend by what stretch of logic these uneducated, illiterate ( or at best semi-literate ) akkas are allowed to push around girls a thousand times more intelligent and qualified than them. If it were not for the non-existent recruitment standards of the hostels, they would have been sweeping floors and slaving it all around the town only for a few hundred rupees. But then fools tend to forget where they stand.

I hope you remember Pravin Madhukar Pawar, the SP, who uttered these memorable words:

Student nuisance in Manipal won’t be tolerated

Looks like he finally ran into the nuisance causers.

Coming back to the world of pink bubblegum virtues extolled by Mr Ramanathan, he goes on to condemn the students who did nothing but “stood there in dismay, in anger, in frustration, in fear, in amusement, or with carelessness and an attitude of ‘why should I care?’”. Nice, just that it makes a childish assumption that you can put the world in black and white, like those who felt bad and those who were nonchalant about the whole thing. I’ll let you into a secret. The world has “shades of gray”, like the new age character actors like to call it. There were also people in the crowd who sympathized with the devil on the bike. The reason for such a shocking behavior shouldn’t be too hard to understand. With each stupid and draconian rule imposed on day-to-day activities of the students, they have grown increasingly frustrated at the administration but unable to vent it. So when someone decides to take on the same administration heads on, people will silently cheer for him. Therein lies the most dangerous aspect of this reckless display of power by the authorities. It has only served to turn the students against them and with a hostility rarely seen out of battlefields. The situation is just the right kind for the dudes who would just want to cause havoc and anarchy, who are plain evil. They have no kind of ideological commitment, but they will utilize this situation to the fullest to further the damage. I am ready to bet my life on it that if such an incident had happened a couple of years ago, there wouldn’t be any bystanders but a group of students handing him over to the police. There are only 2 ways out of this:

(a) The authorities understand that the situation has gone out of control and behave in a rational manner while framing rules

(b) The current set of people in charge of things just need to step down

But seriously, I’m sure neither of these will happen. Not with eagles breathing down your neck. The fuglification of the campus with barricades, walls and all that shit will continue unabated in the name of security and spearheaded by a bunch of lunatic individuals who are here to implement their personal vendetta, likes and dislikes instead of giving a bit of breathing space to logic and rationale.

I rest my case.

[1] This phrase is an invention by Ted Dziuba and full credits to him

I couldn’t find a better title for the post than this. This is also being used as a hashtag on twitter.

Basically it boils down to a few plain and simple facts.

• Airtel had been clearly overselling their network infrastructure all the while. Now that people have been truly utilizing the full capability of their connections, it has driven a red fucking hot rod through Airtel’s arse and it’s hollow claims.
• One of the envelopes containing the Airtel monthly bill had Zaheer Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor and a few other cricketers staring at us like dorks. No wonder Airtel doesn’t find any money to finance its infrastructure expansion, if that’s the reason they are offering to justify their own version of FUP.
• TRAI has yet again shown it is being run by a bunch of old dinosaurs by not intervening in this matter with a firm statement that’d remind the ISPs what their primary focus is supposed to be.
• We need to get over the misconception that internet is being used either for social networking or for leeching torrents. There are a lot of people like me who stream legal, free audio from last.fm ( I have been listening to the Supernatural Radio quite often since the last one month, but that’s another story ), download alpha and beta releases of various softwares, stream videos from MIT OCW ( a single lecture video was 180+ MB ) and all that shit.

I’m willing to move away from Airtel if I get any such hint that my connection is being capped. I have done so in the past with the craptastic connection my college provides and Airtel just might be the next one.

This is the most strongly worded article I have ever come across on TMJ. Which is as manly as Prince gets.

The closest form of the so called PDAs being reported in that article I have seen in my 2+ years of stay here is hugging. Yes, nothing more than that. There is no French Lassiez Faire thing going on here, and even if it was, balls on your face if you think you have the moral high ground to complain about it.

The entire foundation around which the premise of a bunch of haggard fools going around policing people who are actually ‘adults’, in the legal sense of the word, is as strong as a crumbling cookie. I’m tempted to make a ridiculous looking attempt at putting across some equally damning yet very logical counter arguments that actually exist on paper as law of the Country and also accepted unequivocally across the civilized world as something called Human Rights, which…well, some people living in the medieval ages are still in the dark about.

1. The cultural sensibility marauding monster that PDA is, can also be termed as a peaceful assembly of two persons and the last time I had studied Social Sciences in school, every right to it existed in the Indian Constitution and in other countries too.

2. I touched upon this earlier too. They are adults and hence fully qualified to choose where they want to go and with whom. Do we really need a law to explicitly state this?

Since I’m not a lawyer, I can’t dig out citations of some Supreme Court or an International Court judgment but hey, you get the point, don’t you?

I don’t know from where did this current trend of some institution, which isn’t anyways legally empowered, to decide about how others go on about their lives caught on. For all the glossy promotional campaigns about this place being an ‘International University Town’, you’d get to see thirteen different kinds of barricades and walls at every step. Also throw into this grand concept about two dozens of illiterate security guards and a semi literate, jobless, unqualified for any kind of education ‘Hostel Caretaker’ who are clearly enjoying their day in the sun and making hay while it shines, and you get the perfect picture of a campus that I’ve no doubt other Universities abroad will be in a rat race to implement before anyone else does. India Shining indeed. What else can be a better example of a place to pursue your academic career other than this?

PS: From what I and some of my friends have got to know, our blogs and twitter accounts are being monitored by the people ‘higher up’. But then, I don’t belong to the clan mentioned in the post title. What I have learnt in all these years of my schooling and upbringing is to stand up to the truth, whatever it may be and I know I’m not wrong. I may not be a great orator like Winston Churchill but that’s what blogs are for.

My college decided to put out all internet access from midnight to 5 AM. The reasons haven’t been made official yet. Not even a single student was consulted about it. Damn wait, you may cut that out if you include the wimpy bastards in the so-called Student Council. It is a so-called one ‘coz the members aren’t elected by students but chosen by the director himself. Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Almost none knows not even a single member from the council. Now, about the unavailability of internet access during the peak hours for a college student to actually work on something outside the syllabus, obviously I’m not going to explain to some idiot who barely scraped through high school what I do and deal with. It is useless talking to the authorities. I can at best label them as prehistoric dinosaurs stuck in a time warp, who think ‘aengsters’ are getting morally corrupted by the internet and we are all jacking off whole night long watching Jenna Jameson. Yeah, I jerk off. So? Isn’t that my fucking personal choice and even more so when I’m paying for that shit of a connection. I gotta finish this fast, the clock’s ticking and the connection may be switched off any time.

Only way out now, to get hold of a private broadband connection but I sincerely hope the hostel authorities would put forward their best known instance of retarded behavior and create a hell lot of problems for me.

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts and get ready to be taken through a whirlwind tour through the kingdom of the self proclaimed ‘tech bloggers’ who profess to live, eat and breathe technology. Soon you would come to know they fart too.

Some generalized observations on the sweeping epidemic that is ‘tech blogging’ :

1. Someone starts a damn, fucking blog with a nice theme. Point to be noted. He could later throw around that fact and claim to be a CSS geek.

2. He starts writing vociferously about mobile phones, ‘gadgets’, ‘latest tech news’ (sic), ‘tips and tricks’ (did I forget to add Windows here?), ‘tweaks’ (o yeah, what’s next? tweaking nipples video on youtube?) etc etc

3. Uses the term ‘geek’ atleast once while describing himself.

That is all that is there to it. Uhm..you would say how do I term it as an epidemic? Let me begin with some specific cases in the Indian blogosphere scene. Cases that would make Tim Berners Lee cringe.

——–
Case I:
——–

Ashfame tech blog

What is it about: So this guy is a tech blogger. Heck, he knows he is damn popular. He even tom toms his blog stats in a separate post.

What does his blog offer: Let us allow him to describe it himself, “I blog about blogging, tips and tricks, tutorials, hacking, hardware and reviews. A niche is less than what I blog about.”

Fart factor (on a scale of 10): 9.5

Quick analysis: Looking at the first page, I see posts on Opera download, some obscure tool for creating animated gif, ‘tips’ on using IrfanView (aargh) and write protecting USB drives. No need to take the pain to delve dipper into the guano. Mr. Ashfame, you’d have got a 8 but for your zomg-look-i-am-a-hacker posts. Now Mr. Ashfame has ‘tips’ for becoming a hacker too! No wonder the old farts at AntiOnline are going to lose their jobs soon. In his md5sum post, he has a radically different view of the security of hash functions:

It is extremely unlikely for two non-identical files to have same md5sum as calculated by hashing algorithms (however the theory says something else).

Extremely unlikely, no way. The very nature of the 128-bit md5 hashing function opens it up to collisions as some researchers have already demonstrated and which I am not fully qualified to discuss. Mr. Ashfame, I have a task for you. I have a XOR encrypted C source file. Let me see you break it. This hint should be enough for you as I presume you have extensive knowledge of something even more secure than this i.e. one-way hashing functions.

——–
Case II
——–

Akshay Gandhi’s tips & tricks and blah blah…

What is it about: A blog that would give you tons of info on freeware and…again…*bangs head on a wall* tips & tricks!

What does his blog offer: Again, nothing better than allowing the person himself to demonstrate it to you.

An ALL INCLUSIVE BLOG – Find trivias, graphology, Vista tips, troubleshooting, mobile secrets, mobile code, reviews, freewares, tips, tricks,legal info, law firms, legal view, jokes, interesting facts, etc…

Fart factor (on a scale of 10): 9

Quick analysis: An all inclusive blog. What more could you ask for, eh? But wait, I thought people satisfied those needs by visiting santabanta.com . Some remarkable gems from the first page: Power Defragmenter 2.0.125, Rapid Typing tutor (they still have openings for typists?) and some shit about System Restore in Vista. Seriously dude, if you need ‘tips & tricks’ for working on Vista you better re-evaluate your current technical knowledge base.

———-
Case III
———-

John TP

Do I need to say more?

*SIGH* See, how things get redundant after a short trip to only two blogs? Redundancy, as we have come to know, is frowned upon in the computing world. We have extremely reliable and well edited sources of information for gadgets and cellphone news, new softwares, games and OS releases, major policy upheaval by decision makers in Government and all that on the Wired, Ars Technica, Endgadget, ZDNet blogs (no, I won’t be mentioning TechCrunch here) and a lot many which I don’t visit but have a loyal reader base. The point I’m trying to make here is that don’t fucking post just for the sake of it if you don’t have anything new to add to the already vast source of information available on the same topic. Why? It gets really frustrating for a newbie who would google for something like optimizing his PC and would end up at the countless sites like the ones mentioned above. Total wastage of his bandwidth and time. If an established site has already covered the same thing, DO NOT fucking post the same thing again. (Do I sound like Brad Pitt here?)

BONUS TIP: Stop using Windows and you’d never need to rummage through such shitholes for optimizing applications. There are enough GNU and other open source tools that come bundled with all *nix OSs which would take care of such nifty matters. Case in point: iptables or Zone Alarm?

Get a cue from the blogs of the numerous FOSS developers and also programming stalwarts like Jeff Atwood. Write something that really matters, has some real content. Else, just fucking get off the tube. You are doing no good to us. Just because you have been handed an internet connection, you can’t get away with swinging your fuckin badass boner like it was nobody else’s business (read: posting content with 8+ fart factor).

Signing off, as the lords of code would say:

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

After relaxing for 5 days and staying away from the internet as much as possible, I’m back to some serious work.

Wrote a client and server process in python where the client sends inorder arithmetic expressions(not parenthesized, as of yet) and the server evaluates them and returns the result to the client. Pretty lame but I think it was good for an hour’s effort . And Harsh, if you are thinking it is a threaded server, sorry its not

Server
Client

Coming to the other thing I’m working on, it is simulation of a network model with SSFNet and I won’t lie, at the moment I am not able make any head or tail of how to proceed with the work.

If you don’t wanna take the trouble of downloading the files and just want to check the code, read on:
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the LUG in my college was started last semester itself, in November but it is only now that we have swung into action and making our presence felt.

Soon after the college reopened we had a 2 day install fest and the meet over the last 2 days, at the time of writing this, was a follow up to help those who attended the install fest getting started on linux, like the basic directory structure, the different software alternatives, the power of the command line.

But still a lot needs to done to change the mindset of the students about linux in specific and the Open Source philosophy in general. I guess the first wouldn’t be so tough as they would be attending our meets and learning about the power of linux and how much it allows you to wield greater control over your system. Regarding the latter, those who attend the LUG meets have to change the way they view them, like a workshop or a ‘lecture’ by some guys where they would just be the silent audience. In a meet, you don’t listen to lectures, but ideas flow freely. Anyone is welcome to contribute anything (s)he assumes would be a better idea than the one being discussed. Its only by sharing that their knowledge would increase, not the opposite. There is nothing to be protective or guarded about what you know unless it is some world-altering hax0ring skills :p .

Here is the website of our LUG:
www.lugmanipal.org

We have a wiki too! wiki.lugmanipal.org/