I remember reading last year that of the 250 seats offered in the december course of the Indian Military Academy (IMA) only 84 people joined. For a country of more then a billion that is just amazing. As much as this may say about the youth of our country it says as much about the Indian Army as well.
Entry to the armed forces is after 12th class or after graduation. I feel that the class and caliber of people the armed forces are looking for, do not want to quit studying after 12th or in case of graduates, want jobs that have something to do with what they did in college. Somehow the armed forces haven't quite made arrangements to accommodate such people.
I have had decent exposure to the armed forces way of life. I have a lot of friends who are serving in the armed forces. It is in all honesty a reasonable life. Yes, it is at times hard, but is nowhere as near as "hostile" as it is perceived to be. For what it's worth I feel it is a much more comfortable and meaningful life then the crappy "BPO/KPO dream" that thousands of young Indians seem to want to pursue.
So back to the original piece I had read, The cheif of army staff had suggested that a draft might be a good option going forward. While this works in countries like the US and some EU countries I really don't think this would work in India. Our largely agrarian/service oriented society is a far cry from the gun slinging cultures of the west. Plus I don't think this is something politicians in our country will ever embrace.
The armed forces need to be thinking in other directions to attract people. One of the areas where I am personally disappointed with the armed forces is their capability to absorb and more importantly, utilize the skills of highly educated people. In the west, working for the armed forces and/or law enforcement is a very attractive proposition for the best graduates. For example the US armed forces, intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement make it a point to try and absorb the best talent graduating from top notch US universities. Today the Indian armed forces do not have a place for high skill graduates. It is time that the armed forces realized that there is much more to forming an effective military then conscripting able young men and packing them off to 18,000 feet. Yes we need people to do that as well, but there are high skill graduates in India who might wish serve in the armed forces, whose skills the armed forces could very well do with, who don't see a place for themselves in present armed forces setup.
And as for those people who join the armed forces after their 12th class, it's really not much of an education. In other countries joining the armed forces is a route to college. In India sadly, the options of education for a young officer are rather poor. The so called engineering that people study through the technical entry scheme of the army is at the college of military engineering which is really not much better then any B-grade college. I feel that people in the armed forces who wish to study must be allowed to do so at top places like the IIT's or AIIMS. For those who cry about merit: These people have committed to serve the country. Letting them study in good colleges is the least we can do for them. At any rate 50% of people in these places aren't exactly meritorious.
It's time the armed forces offered something concrete to those who join them. Simply calling India's youth unpatriotic and driven by the greed for money is just not on. It is a lame excuse to sidestep the problems the structure of the armed forces faces. The armed forces must wake up to the reality that they face direct competition from India Inc. They must face this competition with the same flair that has made them a respected force in the world. A draft will not do!
Friday, November 07, 2008
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
A Nvidia GeForce GPU reborn
Well I'm talking about my laptop. I have a huge Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. The bling bling inside it being a spanking GeForce Go 7800 GPU. For the last few weeks I wasn't able to get any sort of performance out of the laptop. Initially I thought there was something wrong with the OS. Following a reinstall the laptop started to suck even more :( Not to mention it was running really hot. Looked up on forums and found out that this has someting to do with dust. I never really bothered about the laptop running hot as my GPU is always OC'ed.
A lot of credit is due to Bharat Sankhlecha of UG4. This guy's knowledge of laptop internals is amazing. After he opened up my laptop and removed a shit load of dirt(it was like a huge fur ball sadly no pics ) my laptop started working properly. Apparently all the crap inside wasn't allowing proper cooling.
My GPU i.e. the Geforce Go 7800 is made from chips rejected from the manufacturing process of Go 7800GTX chips. The GTX has 32 pipelines and is one of the most powerful mobile GPU's out there(Only a 8800 M was ahead of it) . Those chips that don't have all pipelines functioning properly are then "locked" i.e. the number of active pipelines is reduced to 16 by bios locking. So despite pipelines being present on the chip they aren't used. Unlocking is rather dangerous. It involves opening up the laptop, taking out the card and flashing it's bios. Emboldened by opening up my laptop once I opened it up again took out my card and flashed it with the bios of a 7800 GTX.(A heart stopping moment coz a wrong step and your card is fubar) Below is the effective transformation.
Pipeline : 16 to 31 (There was just one bad pipeline!! Yippeeeeee)
Clock core : 250 Mhz to 365 Mhz
Memory clock: 1.3 Ghz to 1.58 Ghz
Fan always at full right from startup
Idle temp 68 to 79
A driver reinstall followed. What better way to see how your card performing then crysis :)
I set the settings to low(the 7800 has got just 256 MB of memory so there is no way I can turn on the pretty stuff!) and the res to 1920x1200! Well I must say crysis looks gorgeous even at low specs at this resolution.
The results: I got a very respectable 27 FPS !!!(min 17- when staring out into the open,max 38- when in rooms or smaller environs, avg 27.6) Wow that is some going for a laptop GPU. Add to that the fact that I am definitely bottlenecked by my processor (I have a 1.7 Ghz core duo OC to 1.9Ghz) and RAM 1 Gb@667, this is quite some going. The load temp has skyrocketed to around 88~90 C. I need a new cooling solution otherwise my card will burn out. There were a few artifacts courtesy the 1 pipeline that is bad. But it was rather limited. This is a mighty performance for a laptop purchased in April 2006.
For those gasping in horror (read Playboi :P) I told you I'd do this someday :P
PS1: DO NOT try this at home. Flashing GPU bios's is not something you want to do!!
PS2: Wow! people who made crysis rock. It is just the most beautiful thing I have seen run on a computer.
PS3: Congratulations and the thanks of a billion people to Anil Kumble
PS4: Not doing any active research for the last 2 weeks :(
A lot of credit is due to Bharat Sankhlecha of UG4. This guy's knowledge of laptop internals is amazing. After he opened up my laptop and removed a shit load of dirt(it was like a huge fur ball sadly no pics ) my laptop started working properly. Apparently all the crap inside wasn't allowing proper cooling.
My GPU i.e. the Geforce Go 7800 is made from chips rejected from the manufacturing process of Go 7800GTX chips. The GTX has 32 pipelines and is one of the most powerful mobile GPU's out there(Only a 8800 M was ahead of it) . Those chips that don't have all pipelines functioning properly are then "locked" i.e. the number of active pipelines is reduced to 16 by bios locking. So despite pipelines being present on the chip they aren't used. Unlocking is rather dangerous. It involves opening up the laptop, taking out the card and flashing it's bios. Emboldened by opening up my laptop once I opened it up again took out my card and flashed it with the bios of a 7800 GTX.(A heart stopping moment coz a wrong step and your card is fubar) Below is the effective transformation.
Pipeline : 16 to 31 (There was just one bad pipeline!! Yippeeeeee)
Clock core : 250 Mhz to 365 Mhz
Memory clock: 1.3 Ghz to 1.58 Ghz
Fan always at full right from startup
Idle temp 68 to 79
A driver reinstall followed. What better way to see how your card performing then crysis :)
I set the settings to low(the 7800 has got just 256 MB of memory so there is no way I can turn on the pretty stuff!) and the res to 1920x1200! Well I must say crysis looks gorgeous even at low specs at this resolution.
The results: I got a very respectable 27 FPS !!!(min 17- when staring out into the open,max 38- when in rooms or smaller environs, avg 27.6) Wow that is some going for a laptop GPU. Add to that the fact that I am definitely bottlenecked by my processor (I have a 1.7 Ghz core duo OC to 1.9Ghz) and RAM 1 Gb@667, this is quite some going. The load temp has skyrocketed to around 88~90 C. I need a new cooling solution otherwise my card will burn out. There were a few artifacts courtesy the 1 pipeline that is bad. But it was rather limited. This is a mighty performance for a laptop purchased in April 2006.
For those gasping in horror (read Playboi :P) I told you I'd do this someday :P
PS1: DO NOT try this at home. Flashing GPU bios's is not something you want to do!!
PS2: Wow! people who made crysis rock. It is just the most beautiful thing I have seen run on a computer.
PS3: Congratulations and the thanks of a billion people to Anil Kumble
PS4: Not doing any active research for the last 2 weeks :(
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Chandrayan
Today is a proud day for India. For a country that was incapable of manufacturing pencils 60 years ago, sending probes to the moon as a great acheivement. I salute the people at ISRO.
Jai Hind
Monday, October 13, 2008
The Truth about Pranav Kumar Vasishta
We all know pranav as the elderly IIIT thinker that he is. This post will expose the evil behind the mask of innocence that he puts on.
The victim was mythalez (a.k.a Ramachandra :O )
The year was 2006. Rama had just checked his mail on Dilip(also from ug2k2) room PC. After he checked his mail, he exited the room without logging off. Enter Pranav. Seeing rama's console open, the devil inside Pranav took over. Encouraged by Dilip, pranav changed the title of the putty window (putty window bar->right click->change settings->window->behaviour->window title) to vasishta@students. This was followed by a change to the prompt(the .bashrc file) to make it look like [vasishta@students ~]:
So we have Ramachandra's putty session looking like pranav's session.
Thus the trap was set for Rama. In some time Rama entered the room and saw a putty session titled vasishta@students . Ramachandra eyes lit up like 1000W bulbs. Encouraged by Dilip and sensing a once in a lifetime opportunity, Rama quickely composed a tullu mail to his batch from that putty session. Rama then went to pranav and with a big smile on his face asked pranav to check his mail. Pranav opened his mail box and lo and behold there was a mail:
Ramachandra Sub: I am the greatest tullu of IIIT.
And that is the story of how Ramachandra was *pawnd* by Pranav Kumar Vasishta. I have seen lots of tullu mail in IIIT. But this has to be the mother of all tullu mails.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Rats
Yes Rats.... They chewed up the link between the NBH-GH and the rest of IIIT.
PS1. At times working in the server room is a real education as to the flexibility of the protocols of TCP/IP and the amount of abuse cisco hardware can take.
PS2. I am happy ganguly and dravid managed to get some runs.
PS3. After a long time(6~7 years) I played four continuous days of badminton. It felt good.
PS4. I saw kulbir saini's cam. The auto click(when you smile) thing either doesn't work or I don't have a happy enough smile :(
ps5. Played far cry all over again. Not in the mood for "research" these days.
ps6. My gfx card(7800gtx) is totally and utterly useless. I need a new machine. Donations please :)
ps7. I think most of your batchmates leaving makes for a very lonely and boring existance. I think the life in the OBH is kinda dull these days. No longer see people out in the corridors BC'ing.
PS8. Somebody download some good series .............
Monday, August 25, 2008
Arbit Post
I have had to work a lot in the past few days(MS/r) I learned quite a few new things. First that there are more then 15 ways of doing binary multiplication. Second there are at-least 10 ways of doing binary exponentiation!! Boy people do have a lot of time on hand :) And the worst thing to happen was that a conference date was advanced by a full 20 days :( Now I have to work even harder !
The Olympics are over and it's fair to say that none of us expected 3 medals for India. It's an outstanding achievement.On he whole just when we thought that it couldn't get any better then Phelps, along came Usain Bolt. WOW is the only word I have to describe him. He ran the 100m as if it was a morning jog.
This was the first time I really followed the Olympics. I was getting used to life at IIIT when the last Olympics happened and was too ignorant in 2000. I think our generation has seen something of a miracle in the performances of Phelps and Bolt. Odds are we won't see anything as spectacular anytime soon. I'm glad I was around to watch Beijing 2008.
PS: I watched only the last 10 mins of Liverpool vs Boro :) Awesome awesome awesome
The Olympics are over and it's fair to say that none of us expected 3 medals for India. It's an outstanding achievement.On he whole just when we thought that it couldn't get any better then Phelps, along came Usain Bolt. WOW is the only word I have to describe him. He ran the 100m as if it was a morning jog.
This was the first time I really followed the Olympics. I was getting used to life at IIIT when the last Olympics happened and was too ignorant in 2000. I think our generation has seen something of a miracle in the performances of Phelps and Bolt. Odds are we won't see anything as spectacular anytime soon. I'm glad I was around to watch Beijing 2008.
PS: I watched only the last 10 mins of Liverpool vs Boro :) Awesome awesome awesome
Friday, August 22, 2008
Where does nVidia go after the 4870x2?
AMD/ATI recently launched the 4870X2. It's basically two 4870's on one physical card. Benchmarks show that it totally outperforms nVidia's flagship GTX280. Which begs the question: what was nVidia thinking when it launched the GTX280? When launched it was almost always outperformed by the 9800GX2. It only beat the 9800GX2 with AA turned on at high res. Not to mention the initial price of $650. This untimely launch by nVidia has seen it lose the crown to ATI after almost two years. The last I think time ATI was on top was with the x1950XT.
In all this mess, does there lie any salvation for nVidia?? Yes there does. CUDA works amazingly fast with the new GT200 core. CUDA based Applications are springing up pretty fast and they work really well. Also 3 way SLI with GTX280 is still the fastest solution commercially available for gaming.
Where does nVidia go from here? Well I don't see nVidia being able to put anything more on the GTX280. What would be a good idea though would be a 9800gx2 2GB Edition. The main problem with the 9800GX2 is with using AA. This is more of a memory problem then anything else. Doing AA @ 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 with 512 MB of memory is not really feasible. ATI realized this as well and put in extra memory on the 4870x2. I think a 2GB 9800GX2 would really put nVidia back in competition with the 4870X2. At present the 1GB 9800GX2 retails as low as $265. Adding a extra GB of memory will push this upto not more then $350 and still keep it to within 5% of the $570 4870X2.
In all this mess, does there lie any salvation for nVidia?? Yes there does. CUDA works amazingly fast with the new GT200 core. CUDA based Applications are springing up pretty fast and they work really well. Also 3 way SLI with GTX280 is still the fastest solution commercially available for gaming.
Where does nVidia go from here? Well I don't see nVidia being able to put anything more on the GTX280. What would be a good idea though would be a 9800gx2 2GB Edition. The main problem with the 9800GX2 is with using AA. This is more of a memory problem then anything else. Doing AA @ 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 with 512 MB of memory is not really feasible. ATI realized this as well and put in extra memory on the 4870x2. I think a 2GB 9800GX2 would really put nVidia back in competition with the 4870X2. At present the 1GB 9800GX2 retails as low as $265. Adding a extra GB of memory will push this upto not more then $350 and still keep it to within 5% of the $570 4870X2.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Why IIIT will not have 50 PhD's anytime soon
There is just one reason why many people don't want to pursue a PhD at IIIT or any other Indian university - Money.
American Universities pay PhD students anywhere between $1500 and $2500 per month. You get paid something like Rs.9000 in India. There is just no comparison. For those wondering why money is that important: A PhD would start at-least at the age of 23 and would take almost 5 years. By the age of 28-29 you would come up against at-least one of these issues if not more.
1. Repayment of Loans
2. Family Obligations
3. Marriage
If you have any of these things to deal with you can't afford to earn the paltry 9K per month that a PhD gives you. You could however, possibly do all of the above while doing a PhD abroad. Just think of it like this. As a PhD student abroad, it would cost you a quarter of your monthly pay to buy a laptop. In India it would take you 5 months pay to buy a laptop. In India, we have the universities, we have the faculty and we have the level of work. What we don't have is a realistic stipend structure. Somehow academics in India think that there is some novelty in Poverty. There is *no* novelty in poverty.
IIIT is a place where things can happen. It just needs some will. Still paying TA's and RA's peanuts and not paying MS students like myself and many others anything, doesn't help. If any faculty member is reading : Fix this !
PS: The "Novelty in Poverty" phrase was originally put forward to me by Jimmy.
American Universities pay PhD students anywhere between $1500 and $2500 per month. You get paid something like Rs.9000 in India. There is just no comparison. For those wondering why money is that important: A PhD would start at-least at the age of 23 and would take almost 5 years. By the age of 28-29 you would come up against at-least one of these issues if not more.
1. Repayment of Loans
2. Family Obligations
3. Marriage
If you have any of these things to deal with you can't afford to earn the paltry 9K per month that a PhD gives you. You could however, possibly do all of the above while doing a PhD abroad. Just think of it like this. As a PhD student abroad, it would cost you a quarter of your monthly pay to buy a laptop. In India it would take you 5 months pay to buy a laptop. In India, we have the universities, we have the faculty and we have the level of work. What we don't have is a realistic stipend structure. Somehow academics in India think that there is some novelty in Poverty. There is *no* novelty in poverty.
IIIT is a place where things can happen. It just needs some will. Still paying TA's and RA's peanuts and not paying MS students like myself and many others anything, doesn't help. If any faculty member is reading : Fix this !
PS: The "Novelty in Poverty" phrase was originally put forward to me by Jimmy.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Of reservations and Arjun Singh
Of all of the reservations proposed and implemented by the honorable HRD minister Arjun Singh, the one I fail to understand at any level is that of faculty in IIT's. I feel kinda sorry for the existing faculty and students at IIT's who I guess are rather pissed with this. Reserving seats for students is one thing but reserving faculty positions is dangerous. By admitting inferior students you really don't compromise any academic opportunities available to students. Yes, things like academic atmosphere and placements do suffer but these are in the "can be handled/absorbed" category. I feel anybody in their right mind cannot sign off on something like this.
By installing inferior faculty you are screwing everybody for very obvious reasons. And I really don't see any benefits of this to anybody. To be a faculty at an IIT you need at least a PhD. Now I think I can safely assume that somebody with a PhD in any engineering or science discipline really doesn't need help in getting a job. The beneficiaries of reservation should be people who are needy or disadvantaged. If you are telling me that somebody with a PhD falls into this category then I think we have much more serious issues with society and our education system, then can be fixed with reservations.
But what is most worrying, is the Ministry for HRD. This decision doesn't help improve any academic standards, does not help any disadvantaged section of society or give the government any political mileage(I would bet less then 0.1% of India understands anything about faculty positions at IIT's or even remotely cares). It worries me that there is no thought behind decision making in India's premier education controlling authority. If there is I would welcome the ministry to share it. Right now Arjun Singh reminds me of a certain Muhammad bin Tuhglaq I had studied about in class 7. This Tughlaq dude did a lot of crazy and whimsical stuff much like Arjun Singh is doing today.
A lot of institutions have had run ins with the government. The Indian Armed forces summarily rejected reservations proposed. Even the IIM boards have resisted reservations and have even tried to get court injunctions if I am not mistaken. Here is where I feel the governing body of the IIT's has let everybody down. They have been silent bystanders to the systematic destruction of the IIT's. They have not spoken up and this is where they are doing more damage to the IIT system then Arjun Singh himself. I hope somebody on the governing body of the IIT's reads this and finds the strength to take on the HRD minister.
By installing inferior faculty you are screwing everybody for very obvious reasons. And I really don't see any benefits of this to anybody. To be a faculty at an IIT you need at least a PhD. Now I think I can safely assume that somebody with a PhD in any engineering or science discipline really doesn't need help in getting a job. The beneficiaries of reservation should be people who are needy or disadvantaged. If you are telling me that somebody with a PhD falls into this category then I think we have much more serious issues with society and our education system, then can be fixed with reservations.
But what is most worrying, is the Ministry for HRD. This decision doesn't help improve any academic standards, does not help any disadvantaged section of society or give the government any political mileage(I would bet less then 0.1% of India understands anything about faculty positions at IIT's or even remotely cares). It worries me that there is no thought behind decision making in India's premier education controlling authority. If there is I would welcome the ministry to share it. Right now Arjun Singh reminds me of a certain Muhammad bin Tuhglaq I had studied about in class 7. This Tughlaq dude did a lot of crazy and whimsical stuff much like Arjun Singh is doing today.
A lot of institutions have had run ins with the government. The Indian Armed forces summarily rejected reservations proposed. Even the IIM boards have resisted reservations and have even tried to get court injunctions if I am not mistaken. Here is where I feel the governing body of the IIT's has let everybody down. They have been silent bystanders to the systematic destruction of the IIT's. They have not spoken up and this is where they are doing more damage to the IIT system then Arjun Singh himself. I hope somebody on the governing body of the IIT's reads this and finds the strength to take on the HRD minister.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Building a Gaming Rig in 60K
I can't play crysis better then medium@1200x800 on my laptop This state of affairs is not limited to crysis and the situation is simply unacceptable. I have decided to purchase a new system. This time I won't go for a laptop. I plan to build a monster desktop. I have 60K in savings and that will be my budget for the new machine. I want to build this desktop without having to sell my laptop. My laptop, having served me very well for almost 2 and a half years now, will retreat onto my dads desk where he will use it for his word-processing needs.
Processor: The 3 contenders
1. Core 2 quad 6600
2. Core 2 quad 9300
3. Core 2 quad 9450
For those wondering where AMD is, there is a simple answer: AMD is totally absent in this segment. Their best processor is in the phenom range and doesn't even come close to the intel ones listed here. After some head-breaking I have decided to go for the 9450. It's damn expensive. But overclocked it comes into the performance range of an stock core 2 extreme processor. Not bad. I don't want my processor to be a bottleneck.
Pehla Jhatka : Intel Core 2 Quad q9450 @ Rs.15,500
Motherboard
1. Intel DP35DP
This was rather straightforward. I want to buy a single card solution. SLI is a pain. You have to buy a higher power supply that will cost a little fortune on it's own. Plus not all games leverage SLI.
Doosra Jhatka : Intel DP35DP @ 5,750
Grafix Card: When I sat down to research the situation on gfx cards I was shocked by how abnormally high these cards are in India. Check this out.
XfX 9800gx2 Price in India 33K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 14K
Xfx gtx280 Price in India 45K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 18.5K
Generally other components like processors and motherboards have a variation of 15~20% from their American prices. But this is fucking insane. The gtx280 and 9800gx2 cost almost 2.5 times their original price. Whats more they come with lifetime warranties in the US as compared to the 3 year warranties here. I will wait for somebody to get me a card from the US. I'm not going to waste money buying them here. As for the card I am going to buy a gtx280. 9800gx2 has outperformed it some games, but not all games are optimized for multiple GPU's and there is also the advantage of higher texture memory and phyXis.
Teesra Jhatka: XfX gtx280 xxx edition @ 19K
Other stuff:
RAM : 2x2GB @ 4K
HDD : 2x250 WD @ 4.6 K
Stuff I already Have:
Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, Wireless card, TV tuner, DVD writer.
Lets see where I am in terms of money
15,500 + 5,750 + 19,000 + 4,000 + 4,600 = 48,850
Which leaves me with roughly 12K to buy a cabinet, SMPS and a monitor. I am terribly overshooting!!!
Assuming a basic cabinet costs 2K and a basic 600W power supply would cost 3K, I am now left with 7 K for a monitor.
I am looking cutting costs possibly on the processor. I don't want to fiddle with the rest of the stuff. The next post when I figure out what to cut out!!
Processor: The 3 contenders
1. Core 2 quad 6600
2. Core 2 quad 9300
3. Core 2 quad 9450
For those wondering where AMD is, there is a simple answer: AMD is totally absent in this segment. Their best processor is in the phenom range and doesn't even come close to the intel ones listed here. After some head-breaking I have decided to go for the 9450. It's damn expensive. But overclocked it comes into the performance range of an stock core 2 extreme processor. Not bad. I don't want my processor to be a bottleneck.
Pehla Jhatka : Intel Core 2 Quad q9450 @ Rs.15,500
Motherboard
1. Intel DP35DP
This was rather straightforward. I want to buy a single card solution. SLI is a pain. You have to buy a higher power supply that will cost a little fortune on it's own. Plus not all games leverage SLI.
Doosra Jhatka : Intel DP35DP @ 5,750
Grafix Card: When I sat down to research the situation on gfx cards I was shocked by how abnormally high these cards are in India. Check this out.
XfX 9800gx2 Price in India 33K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 14K
Xfx gtx280 Price in India 45K. Online price in America converted to rupees: 18.5K
Generally other components like processors and motherboards have a variation of 15~20% from their American prices. But this is fucking insane. The gtx280 and 9800gx2 cost almost 2.5 times their original price. Whats more they come with lifetime warranties in the US as compared to the 3 year warranties here. I will wait for somebody to get me a card from the US. I'm not going to waste money buying them here. As for the card I am going to buy a gtx280. 9800gx2 has outperformed it some games, but not all games are optimized for multiple GPU's and there is also the advantage of higher texture memory and phyXis.
Teesra Jhatka: XfX gtx280 xxx edition @ 19K
Other stuff:
RAM : 2x2GB @ 4K
HDD : 2x250 WD @ 4.6 K
Stuff I already Have:
Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, Wireless card, TV tuner, DVD writer.
Lets see where I am in terms of money
15,500 + 5,750 + 19,000 + 4,000 + 4,600 = 48,850
Which leaves me with roughly 12K to buy a cabinet, SMPS and a monitor. I am terribly overshooting!!!
Assuming a basic cabinet costs 2K and a basic 600W power supply would cost 3K, I am now left with 7 K for a monitor.
I am looking cutting costs possibly on the processor. I don't want to fiddle with the rest of the stuff. The next post when I figure out what to cut out!!
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
What Dual Degree has meant for me
When I first read about the dual degree course at IIIT-H i thought they were referring to a B.tech + M.Tech combo just like you have in the IIT's. What I didn't know was that It was B.Tech + MS/R. The following was a sequence of events that led to the dual degree students slowly, but surely drifting away from the rest of the people.
I have been a rather ordinary student if CGPA is a good measure. But what CSD did make me do was help put all the mediocrity of my first two years behind me. Here was a new challenge of picking up a stream of CS and excelling in it. I was in my second year amazed by the technology behind video. So I promptly went to Jawahar and expressed my interest in working with video and more specifically with video compression/encryption. The Big 'J' told me to register for DIP and PR. I had no interest in these courses and I made that clear to Jawahar. For those who do not know Jawahar, he has a "It's either my way or the highway" attitude. I left CVIT as fast as I had rushed in. I then thought of approaching stuff from the encryption side of things. In IIIT(unfortunately) crypto == Venkaiah, but(fortunately) as fate would have it, Prashant Jaikumar suggested with a rather grim tone that I should work with K.Srinathan as opposed to Venkaiah. 2 years of work with K.Srinathan have enabled me to excel at crypto and information security, in my own small way. The stuff that I picked up from K.Srinathan helped open a lot of doors for me, including an 6 month internship at RSA labs, the home of cryptography. I would most certainly not have had the urge to study like the way I did, had I not been in dual degree. In a way, if I ever make anything out of myself in the technical sphere in my life, I would say that the pressure of being in CSD was the single most important thing that turned my academic life around in college.
But having said all that, Dual degree should be an M.Tech with an option to go for Ms/R if you want to. The most important thing is that Ms/R has to be driven by self motivation and passion. You can't do Ms/R by default. You can still go through the motions and complete your courses to receive an M.Tech. Dr.Sangal argues that students who have joined the Dual degree program must complete their MS as they have given that commitment while joining the DD course. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence and common sense would agree that it is ludicrous to expect a 12th student to properly understand the concept of MS/R and be committed to it. It is only after 3 semesters that the reality of MS/R starts to sink in. This is not a good arrangement. And how this could escape the scrutiny of the experienced faculty we have, baffles me!
The coming year will be a great challenge for IIIT on many fronts. There will be about 150 Ms/R students all people put together (DD + PG) This is going to stretch resources to the limit. I wonder how defences will be carried out and students will be payed. I sincerely hope for the best.
- Special lunches for dual degree students in our 4th semester. These lunches acted as a medium for formal exposure to the various research centers. I remember some CSE/ECE students also joining us (illegally of course :D ) for these lunches. I remember Sumeet Joon telling me that we were lambs being fed before a slaughter. I now agree
- Then came 5th semester. All DD students were to pursue honors. Even people like me whose CGPA's were barely holding onto 7 mark were plunged into the abyss of research. Honors means extra projects(real projects and not messengers/firewalls) and extra IT electives.
- No BTP. I don't know if this was good or bad, but seeing the kind of arbit grading that was done, I'm sure a BTP would have been a saga of frustration.
- And now finally when everybody has left, here we are spending days in research centers with most people sifting through papers and trying to XoR two papers to get a new one. Further screwed are those people in centers like CSTAR . My guide has made it abundantly clear that the lab has no funds. Boohooo :(
I have been a rather ordinary student if CGPA is a good measure. But what CSD did make me do was help put all the mediocrity of my first two years behind me. Here was a new challenge of picking up a stream of CS and excelling in it. I was in my second year amazed by the technology behind video. So I promptly went to Jawahar and expressed my interest in working with video and more specifically with video compression/encryption. The Big 'J' told me to register for DIP and PR. I had no interest in these courses and I made that clear to Jawahar. For those who do not know Jawahar, he has a "It's either my way or the highway" attitude. I left CVIT as fast as I had rushed in. I then thought of approaching stuff from the encryption side of things. In IIIT(unfortunately) crypto == Venkaiah, but(fortunately) as fate would have it, Prashant Jaikumar suggested with a rather grim tone that I should work with K.Srinathan as opposed to Venkaiah. 2 years of work with K.Srinathan have enabled me to excel at crypto and information security, in my own small way. The stuff that I picked up from K.Srinathan helped open a lot of doors for me, including an 6 month internship at RSA labs, the home of cryptography. I would most certainly not have had the urge to study like the way I did, had I not been in dual degree. In a way, if I ever make anything out of myself in the technical sphere in my life, I would say that the pressure of being in CSD was the single most important thing that turned my academic life around in college.
But having said all that, Dual degree should be an M.Tech with an option to go for Ms/R if you want to. The most important thing is that Ms/R has to be driven by self motivation and passion. You can't do Ms/R by default. You can still go through the motions and complete your courses to receive an M.Tech. Dr.Sangal argues that students who have joined the Dual degree program must complete their MS as they have given that commitment while joining the DD course. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence and common sense would agree that it is ludicrous to expect a 12th student to properly understand the concept of MS/R and be committed to it. It is only after 3 semesters that the reality of MS/R starts to sink in. This is not a good arrangement. And how this could escape the scrutiny of the experienced faculty we have, baffles me!
The coming year will be a great challenge for IIIT on many fronts. There will be about 150 Ms/R students all people put together (DD + PG) This is going to stretch resources to the limit. I wonder how defences will be carried out and students will be payed. I sincerely hope for the best.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Zidane Vs Ronaldinho Vs Ronaldo
Three truly great players, lots of fun, lots of eye- popping tricks and some uber-cool moves. Zidane is retired, ronaldinho is in a super slump and ronaldo is setting the world on fire right now. Who do you think has been the most prolific player at their peak?
My personal favourite is Zidane. He just made people look stupid with his skill. Ronaldinho and Ronaldo have a lot of pace but Zidane was about elegance, daft touches and some awesome 360 degree spins! Ronaldinho's flip flop is something out of this world and Ronaldo's eye for goal is
outstanding but nothing quite matches the creativity of Zidane!
My personal favourite is Zidane. He just made people look stupid with his skill. Ronaldinho and Ronaldo have a lot of pace but Zidane was about elegance, daft touches and some awesome 360 degree spins! Ronaldinho's flip flop is something out of this world and Ronaldo's eye for goal is
outstanding but nothing quite matches the creativity of Zidane!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Outlook rankings 2008
This refers to the outlook survey of colleges. For those wondering,Yes! it was done with a random number generator. I was surprised to find IIIT-H in the government colleges list as it is not a government college. But particularly interesting was the score IIIT Hyderabad had in a category called "Pedagogic system". From what I could see the average score in this category was something around 130. IIIT -H managed a score of 13( Thirteen). The lowest score apart from IIIT-H in this category belonged to a certain Jabalpur engineering college(???) with a score of 80. Surely something has gone terribly wrong here on the part of outlook!
But my heart goes out to my IIIT brothers at Allahabad. I wonder what sins the college has committed for Outlook to suggest people go to NIT-Jaipur, Andhra Univ, Harcourt Butler and Coimbatore Insti of Tech before having a look at IIIT Allahabad. Surely, Outlook deserves a thunderous kick on it's rear end for this. I remember last year when IIIT-H was ranked just behind Harcourt butler I was laughing my ass off. I'm not sure people at IIIT-A would be that generous to outlook though!
There were some other weird scores. Outlook says IIIT-H has the second highest placements with 7.2 lpa and 100% placement. However we are ranked 7th in it's placement performance parameter. Self contradiction! Intellectual capital is another interesting thing. Among all the institutes raked ahead of IIIT-H only PEC and DCE supposedly have inferior Intellectual capital. If you tell me that places like NIT-S, ISM, NIT-Allahabad,NIT-Jaipur and Andhra Univ have better faculty and students then IIIT-H (here by students i mean the AIEEE ranks only:P) or for that matter IIIT-A, you can kiss my ass.
But the icing on the cake has to be the ranking parameters. Apparently 30% of the weightage goes to the opinion of aspirants! i.e. people from class 11 and 12. That has got to be the joke of the millennium. I couldn't stop laughing for a good 10 mins after I read this.
Vinod Mehta if you some day read this......Do you know how people in college campuses across India are laughing at you and your magazine? You make an ass out of yourselves every year. How how how do you manage to pull it off year after year?
And for the geniuses at Synovate, the company that did the rankings for outlook. I would safely assume that this would be that last survey you ever did. God knows whatever prompted you to come with out such BS. When you rank college A ahead of college B it means that in your opinion a student should join college A ahead of college B. Surely your rankings are not correct if admission trends are anything to go by. And whatever prompted you to go and get 11th/12th class students involved in judging colleges! Do you know how stupid that is?
Yet another ranking, yet more stupidity.
PS: Here is a link to last years ranking from outlook. Randomness re-visited :)
But my heart goes out to my IIIT brothers at Allahabad. I wonder what sins the college has committed for Outlook to suggest people go to NIT-Jaipur, Andhra Univ, Harcourt Butler and Coimbatore Insti of Tech before having a look at IIIT Allahabad. Surely, Outlook deserves a thunderous kick on it's rear end for this. I remember last year when IIIT-H was ranked just behind Harcourt butler I was laughing my ass off. I'm not sure people at IIIT-A would be that generous to outlook though!
There were some other weird scores. Outlook says IIIT-H has the second highest placements with 7.2 lpa and 100% placement. However we are ranked 7th in it's placement performance parameter. Self contradiction! Intellectual capital is another interesting thing. Among all the institutes raked ahead of IIIT-H only PEC and DCE supposedly have inferior Intellectual capital. If you tell me that places like NIT-S, ISM, NIT-Allahabad,NIT-Jaipur and Andhra Univ have better faculty and students then IIIT-H (here by students i mean the AIEEE ranks only:P) or for that matter IIIT-A, you can kiss my ass.
But the icing on the cake has to be the ranking parameters. Apparently 30% of the weightage goes to the opinion of aspirants! i.e. people from class 11 and 12. That has got to be the joke of the millennium. I couldn't stop laughing for a good 10 mins after I read this.
Vinod Mehta if you some day read this......Do you know how people in college campuses across India are laughing at you and your magazine? You make an ass out of yourselves every year. How how how do you manage to pull it off year after year?
And for the geniuses at Synovate, the company that did the rankings for outlook. I would safely assume that this would be that last survey you ever did. God knows whatever prompted you to come with out such BS. When you rank college A ahead of college B it means that in your opinion a student should join college A ahead of college B. Surely your rankings are not correct if admission trends are anything to go by. And whatever prompted you to go and get 11th/12th class students involved in judging colleges! Do you know how stupid that is?
Yet another ranking, yet more stupidity.
PS: Here is a link to last years ranking from outlook. Randomness re-visited :)
Friday, June 20, 2008
10 things to never do
10. Trust the competence of your testing team.
9. Scratch somebody's car
8. Write "modular" code in C++
7. Play cricket inside your house
6. Become a sysAdmin at IIIT
5. Watch sarkar followed by sarkar raj at 5 a.m.
4. Eat ice-cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same day!
3. Assume your boss will be nice and considerate and grant you leave
2. Assume your dad will bail you out financially
1. Tell your girl friend how well your mom cooks
9. Scratch somebody's car
8. Write "modular" code in C++
7. Play cricket inside your house
6. Become a sysAdmin at IIIT
5. Watch sarkar followed by sarkar raj at 5 a.m.
4. Eat ice-cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same day!
3. Assume your boss will be nice and considerate and grant you leave
2. Assume your dad will bail you out financially
1. Tell your girl friend how well your mom cooks
Friday, June 13, 2008
The blasphemies of CVIT
Ladies and gentlemen this post talks about the spate of blasphemies that have occurred in CVIT over the last 2 years. CVIT is in the possession of beasts like 8800 gtx, 7950 gx2 and the quadro 5600. Every quarter we have a post by SKP that contain vivid pics of these beasts and SKP's ugly hand. The post invariably also contains a comment from obelix asking the CVIT bitches to stop showing off, something that they don't listen to.
These beautiful and expensive cards, meant to churn out millions of triangles per second to render the beautiful environs of crysis and assasins creed have been reduced to processing garbage(CUDA) code. This is akin to using a thoroughbred horse for drawing a cart filled with laundry.
And while my mind begins to grapple with the mind numbing blasphemies committed by CVIT, the two people who returned a semblance of dignity to the magnificent cards by gaming, are about to leave soon. Yes I'm referring to ORB and SKP.
Let us all unite to stop the blasphemies of CVIT. This is a call to all those working in CVIT. Screw vision, screw CUDA, screw your MS (let it take 3 years instead of 2)......But return those magnificent cards to their originally intended position of glory. Game away into the night.
PS: This is the most arbit post to appear in this blog or even in blogroll. This is the result of me finishing my work early and waiting for other people to complete theirs!
These beautiful and expensive cards, meant to churn out millions of triangles per second to render the beautiful environs of crysis and assasins creed have been reduced to processing garbage(CUDA) code. This is akin to using a thoroughbred horse for drawing a cart filled with laundry.
And while my mind begins to grapple with the mind numbing blasphemies committed by CVIT, the two people who returned a semblance of dignity to the magnificent cards by gaming, are about to leave soon. Yes I'm referring to ORB and SKP.
Let us all unite to stop the blasphemies of CVIT. This is a call to all those working in CVIT. Screw vision, screw CUDA, screw your MS (let it take 3 years instead of 2)......But return those magnificent cards to their originally intended position of glory. Game away into the night.
PS: This is the most arbit post to appear in this blog or even in blogroll. This is the result of me finishing my work early and waiting for other people to complete theirs!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
A visit to VIT
In a older post I had said that VIT's position in India Today's ranking was undeserved. Well yesterday I had the chance to go to VIT. My cousin sister had counselling in VIT and my Mama had asked me to come along. What I saw at VIT is divided into 3 parts. The good, the bad and the ugly.
The good
1. The buildings at VIT look absolutely gorgeous from the outside. The library in particular was really well done. I wish we had a library like that (I'm talking just about the building here) in IIIT.
2. A building called the technology tower was also very impressive with it's hanging gardens theme.
3. Canteen Rocks!
4. Sports facilities were pretty good. A tad over-indulgent to be honest.
5. Nice lawns. the walkways have small shades built all over them to escape from the sun which I hear is pretty strong usually.
The Bad
1. During the counselling they totally mis-represented the placements. When I asked for an average for the CS department the answer was it's somewhere between 3 and 5 lpa. When I asked for a number, I was, after a lot of persuasion, given a number of 3.3 Lpa by somebody in the PAT dept.
2. I wanted to go and check out the the CS department. I was stopped by one of the many rude security guards present in the campus. When I insisted he took me to some faculty member who was apparently a prof. He asked me stuff like "why do you want to see the dept.?", "What is the point in speaking to he faculty?" etc... I then walked into the office of the Public relations officer who, scared of me creating a scene told the guard to take me to the CS department. Why would you stop people from checking out departments?
3. There are apparently 500 students in a single batch of computer science. I enquired about this branch coz this is the one my cousin is joining. 500 people! Source P.R.Officer
The ugly
1.In the batch of 500 students 266 seats were offered through counselling and the rest i.e.234 were offered under the management quota. This is shocking. So much so that I confirmed this thrice. Once with the PRO, once with the admissions office and once more with some CS faculty!! Apparently the numbers for ECE and some extent EEE are also rather identical!! For those people who had commented on my blog about VIT offering only 10% seats through donations....People go check you figures. These are shocking proportions to take through management quotas!!
2. After I manged to get into the CS dept. I spoke to some faculty members. I cannot express in words how poor they were. VIT has about 180 faculty members in the CS dept. Of these 3~4 have PhD's the rest of the people have a B.tech/MCA background. I spoke to about 15 faculty members and hardly anyone was capable of carrying out a conversation on any academic lines. I was left speechless at how unbelievable bad there are. I have absolutely no idea of how these people are going to educate students in the art of CS! Here is a part of a conversation I had with 3 faculty members. All 3 were senior lecturers. I will not use names :P
f1: What are doing(as in where are u studying?)
me: sir I'm at IIIT-h. I'm a dual degree student. I'm doing my ms/r part right now.
f1: what is ms/r
me: This means you will get your MS for research work and not coursework. You will have to produce some research work that will form your thesis and after that you need to defend it.(some more explanation about msbr followed)
f2: So you don't do any courses in your final year?
me: yeah pretty much. The focus is on research.
f2: Tch Tch what kind of a PG course is this? You should look at the M.tech course at VIT. We teach our students advanced concepts like software engg and java programming!
f3: so You need to just present a few papers and you get your MS?
me:(utterly shaken state) Yes thats it ...just a few papers(sigh!)
some time later we came to the topic of placements.
f2: we had very good placements this year. M$ , google and yahoo came here.
me: How many people did google hire?
f2: Google didn't hire anybody.
f3: actually google's selection process was wrong. They allowed only computer science people to sit for their written tests and in that written test they asked things that were out of syllabus.
At this point I started to giggle!
f3: Why man ...what is so funny?
me: Nothing sir...I was just thinking how silly these IT companies can be! Asking things out of syllabus is really atrocious :D
There is a lotta more masala where this came from but I shall not write it in respect of those Studying at VIT (which includes my cousin :P)
But on a more serious note what I saw at VIT was the unholy nexus of money and education in it's full fury. While I'm not against institutes charging very high fees, I'm against institutes selling them. Also I have now developed great respect for those who study at VIT and manage to do well with their careers. It's a credit to them to be able to emerge from this mess and do well. I hope my cousin can do the same.
And for India today and all those who campaigned for VIT on one of my previous posts. It is very irresponsible of you to attempt to position VIT as a top class institute ahead of NIT-T,NIT-w and IIIT-h. For those who study there and know the place I'm even more shocked that they would consider lobbying for VIT. With the faculty you have and the method of admissions....all your infrastructure counts for absolutely nothing. I never ever imagined that the faculty would be so so atrociously bad. Good luck to whoever studies there.
PS: This post contains only my opinions and shouldn't be your guide to choosing/rejecting VIT. Go there and check out the place to form a educated opinion.
The good
1. The buildings at VIT look absolutely gorgeous from the outside. The library in particular was really well done. I wish we had a library like that (I'm talking just about the building here) in IIIT.
2. A building called the technology tower was also very impressive with it's hanging gardens theme.
3. Canteen Rocks!
4. Sports facilities were pretty good. A tad over-indulgent to be honest.
5. Nice lawns. the walkways have small shades built all over them to escape from the sun which I hear is pretty strong usually.
The Bad
1. During the counselling they totally mis-represented the placements. When I asked for an average for the CS department the answer was it's somewhere between 3 and 5 lpa. When I asked for a number, I was, after a lot of persuasion, given a number of 3.3 Lpa by somebody in the PAT dept.
2. I wanted to go and check out the the CS department. I was stopped by one of the many rude security guards present in the campus. When I insisted he took me to some faculty member who was apparently a prof. He asked me stuff like "why do you want to see the dept.?", "What is the point in speaking to he faculty?" etc... I then walked into the office of the Public relations officer who, scared of me creating a scene told the guard to take me to the CS department. Why would you stop people from checking out departments?
3. There are apparently 500 students in a single batch of computer science. I enquired about this branch coz this is the one my cousin is joining. 500 people! Source P.R.Officer
The ugly
1.In the batch of 500 students 266 seats were offered through counselling and the rest i.e.234 were offered under the management quota. This is shocking. So much so that I confirmed this thrice. Once with the PRO, once with the admissions office and once more with some CS faculty!! Apparently the numbers for ECE and some extent EEE are also rather identical!! For those people who had commented on my blog about VIT offering only 10% seats through donations....People go check you figures. These are shocking proportions to take through management quotas!!
2. After I manged to get into the CS dept. I spoke to some faculty members. I cannot express in words how poor they were. VIT has about 180 faculty members in the CS dept. Of these 3~4 have PhD's the rest of the people have a B.tech/MCA background. I spoke to about 15 faculty members and hardly anyone was capable of carrying out a conversation on any academic lines. I was left speechless at how unbelievable bad there are. I have absolutely no idea of how these people are going to educate students in the art of CS! Here is a part of a conversation I had with 3 faculty members. All 3 were senior lecturers. I will not use names :P
f1: What are doing(as in where are u studying?)
me: sir I'm at IIIT-h. I'm a dual degree student. I'm doing my ms/r part right now.
f1: what is ms/r
me: This means you will get your MS for research work and not coursework. You will have to produce some research work that will form your thesis and after that you need to defend it.(some more explanation about msbr followed)
f2: So you don't do any courses in your final year?
me: yeah pretty much. The focus is on research.
f2: Tch Tch what kind of a PG course is this? You should look at the M.tech course at VIT. We teach our students advanced concepts like software engg and java programming!
f3: so You need to just present a few papers and you get your MS?
me:(utterly shaken state) Yes thats it ...just a few papers(sigh!)
some time later we came to the topic of placements.
f2: we had very good placements this year. M$ , google and yahoo came here.
me: How many people did google hire?
f2: Google didn't hire anybody.
f3: actually google's selection process was wrong. They allowed only computer science people to sit for their written tests and in that written test they asked things that were out of syllabus.
At this point I started to giggle!
f3: Why man ...what is so funny?
me: Nothing sir...I was just thinking how silly these IT companies can be! Asking things out of syllabus is really atrocious :D
There is a lotta more masala where this came from but I shall not write it in respect of those Studying at VIT (which includes my cousin :P)
But on a more serious note what I saw at VIT was the unholy nexus of money and education in it's full fury. While I'm not against institutes charging very high fees, I'm against institutes selling them. Also I have now developed great respect for those who study at VIT and manage to do well with their careers. It's a credit to them to be able to emerge from this mess and do well. I hope my cousin can do the same.
And for India today and all those who campaigned for VIT on one of my previous posts. It is very irresponsible of you to attempt to position VIT as a top class institute ahead of NIT-T,NIT-w and IIIT-h. For those who study there and know the place I'm even more shocked that they would consider lobbying for VIT. With the faculty you have and the method of admissions....all your infrastructure counts for absolutely nothing. I never ever imagined that the faculty would be so so atrociously bad. Good luck to whoever studies there.
PS: This post contains only my opinions and shouldn't be your guide to choosing/rejecting VIT. Go there and check out the place to form a educated opinion.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
My Two cents on Petrol Price hikes!
First of all I don't own a vehicle. It's by foot to office and back. At Hyderabad, I have a cycle at home and nothing at college. I'm not one of those save the planet people! It's just that I like walking/cycling around.
As far as price rise goes ...Serves you right, all you karizma/bullet/pulsar200 owning show-offs :P I found out that the cost of production of pterol is somewhere around Rs.25 per litre!(courtesy CNN-IBN) The rest of it is taxes! Duty+tax+local sales tax etc... Considering 50% of the cost of petrol is tax, a price rise sounds kinda irritating coz in the extra Rs.5 we pay, again some portion goes to taxes. There are also some totally "blah" fundas some economist was giving on TV yesterday which made this sound an even more stupid thing to do. Also I hate the concept of Income tax! The government should scrap Income tax and have some form of unified sales tax. The finance guy at RSA told me that only 1~2% people in India pay Income Tax. With unified sales tax people won't be able to dodge taxes.
As far as price rise goes ...Serves you right, all you karizma/bullet/pulsar200 owning show-offs :P I found out that the cost of production of pterol is somewhere around Rs.25 per litre!(courtesy CNN-IBN) The rest of it is taxes! Duty+tax+local sales tax etc... Considering 50% of the cost of petrol is tax, a price rise sounds kinda irritating coz in the extra Rs.5 we pay, again some portion goes to taxes. There are also some totally "blah" fundas some economist was giving on TV yesterday which made this sound an even more stupid thing to do. Also I hate the concept of Income tax! The government should scrap Income tax and have some form of unified sales tax. The finance guy at RSA told me that only 1~2% people in India pay Income Tax. With unified sales tax people won't be able to dodge taxes.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
The industry and openSource
It's been 4 months today since I came to Bangalore. I decided to write about open source tools that we use in our office to show people how much corporates rely upon open source for their businesses.
1. Development: RSA uses Eclipse for java and gcc for C++. Eclipse is open source and is a very good IDE and we all know about gcc. along with these are numerous open source plugins.
2. Management: We use a mix of openLDAP and active directory to manage people
3. Everybody uses firefox
4. RHEL is popular :)
5. Many products have their own wiki's
6. squid
7. tomcat for web-services
8. apache for hosting
I think thatsa lot of things used! Who-ever said open source doesn't work at the enterprise level ?
That said, that the open-source stuff listed above is some of the finest ever built. These softwares come with ultra-cool documentation and optional paid support. I think enterprises look for support and reliability. They don't then care if it's open source or commercial. Thats a major reason they go for a lotta M$ stuff even though it's not much better then open-source. Plus it's only now that open source products are starting to become compatible with each other, an area where M$ is way ahead.
1. Development: RSA uses Eclipse for java and gcc for C++. Eclipse is open source and is a very good IDE and we all know about gcc. along with these are numerous open source plugins.
2. Management: We use a mix of openLDAP and active directory to manage people
3. Everybody uses firefox
4. RHEL is popular :)
5. Many products have their own wiki's
6. squid
7. tomcat for web-services
8. apache for hosting
I think thatsa lot of things used! Who-ever said open source doesn't work at the enterprise level ?
That said, that the open-source stuff listed above is some of the finest ever built. These softwares come with ultra-cool documentation and optional paid support. I think enterprises look for support and reliability. They don't then care if it's open source or commercial. Thats a major reason they go for a lotta M$ stuff even though it's not much better then open-source. Plus it's only now that open source products are starting to become compatible with each other, an area where M$ is way ahead.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Have your say about the IIIT Network!
After getting into the finer points of administration in IIIT,The faculty, kulbir saini and I have come up with a list of things we would try and do by the end of the year. Here are a few things. If you have any suggestions please leave them as comments.
1. Wired LAN to replace Wireless LAN as primary LAN. They new LAN will be Gbps!
2. New LDAP server to replace SAS that runs on 200. Each student will have a single IIIT Id.
3. Stop forwarding of e-mail for current students. We will give you 5gb space insted to store e-mail
4. Un-block all internet resources in IIIT. Webcams, VoIP, torrents rapidshare etc..
5. Each student will have to enter his IIIT Id in the proxy for authentication.
6. Each student will have a 3 Gb limit of internet usage per month! Do whatever you want with it! (This is where I expect a lot of comments)
7.Each batch will have a 100 GB multimedia download account per month.
8. We will buy a blade server. This will run mirage, teaching lab servers , ldap etc..
9. Setup VPN system in IIIT . This would be to a secure and efficient way to access IIIT from outside.
10. Restart the sysAdmin blog and be transparent about all configurations we make(available on the intranet only)
Plz don't comment like anony-mouse cowards. Leave your name, link/e-mail ID! All constructive suggestions/queries are welcome!
I would be especially happy if IIIT alumni would share their experiences from working in the industry and from what they see there.
1. Wired LAN to replace Wireless LAN as primary LAN. They new LAN will be Gbps!
2. New LDAP server to replace SAS that runs on 200. Each student will have a single IIIT Id.
3. Stop forwarding of e-mail for current students. We will give you 5gb space insted to store e-mail
4. Un-block all internet resources in IIIT. Webcams, VoIP, torrents rapidshare etc..
5. Each student will have to enter his IIIT Id in the proxy for authentication.
6. Each student will have a 3 Gb limit of internet usage per month! Do whatever you want with it! (This is where I expect a lot of comments)
7.Each batch will have a 100 GB multimedia download account per month.
8. We will buy a blade server. This will run mirage, teaching lab servers , ldap etc..
9. Setup VPN system in IIIT . This would be to a secure and efficient way to access IIIT from outside.
10. Restart the sysAdmin blog and be transparent about all configurations we make(available on the intranet only)
Plz don't comment like anony-mouse cowards. Leave your name, link/e-mail ID! All constructive suggestions/queries are welcome!
I would be especially happy if IIIT alumni would share their experiences from working in the industry and from what they see there.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
India Today Rankings 2008 Part 2: IIIT-H perspective
You can read part one here
Coming to IIIT-H. For people from IIIT reading this: I think we have the best Computer science programme in India by a large distance.We can match any IIT in terms of faculty man for man. We have all seen Computer Science graduates from IIT's and we are the same if not slightly better! The placements this year are almost 7 lpa(average) which is good going considering we have almost 150 people including PG :( to place. We have almost doubled the A and A+ conference publications this year which is a great trend. We have new research centers coming up as well to add to the almost 20 present. And the thing about IIIT which makes me very proud: Not a single seat is reserved for anybody not even for physically handicapped!
You may ask why IIIT features so low? Well that's a complex question to answer. I was pretty pissed last year when i saw IIIT ranked at 16. The thing is that IIIT-H is not a normal engineering college. The aim is excellence in IT. We are doing that very well. But these rankings are oriented towards reflecting competence in broad array of engineering disciplines. This is perhaps a reason why we do better in Dataquest rankings as they are geared towards the IT industry. I think this is as far as we can push with CS and ECE. Plus these rankings do not consider research work, Curriculum and also the admission process. These are major strengths of IIIT.
Today the only negative thing I can say about IIIT-H is the fee. It is perhaps the most expensive B.Tech in India. But money does not go into anybody's pockets. All money earned is re-invested into the college. So that's fair enough. But on the bright side if you want to study at IIIT-H you will get a loan and with the jobs on offer after graduating from IIIT those loans will seem pretty small.
In conclusion I would say what I had said in my previous post, if any student studying in any of the institutes ranked above us(except for the IIT's) was given a chance to study at IIIT he/she would in all honesty, never turn it down. That is the bottom line!
Coming to IIIT-H. For people from IIIT reading this: I think we have the best Computer science programme in India by a large distance.We can match any IIT in terms of faculty man for man. We have all seen Computer Science graduates from IIT's and we are the same if not slightly better! The placements this year are almost 7 lpa(average) which is good going considering we have almost 150 people including PG :( to place. We have almost doubled the A and A+ conference publications this year which is a great trend. We have new research centers coming up as well to add to the almost 20 present. And the thing about IIIT which makes me very proud: Not a single seat is reserved for anybody not even for physically handicapped!
You may ask why IIIT features so low? Well that's a complex question to answer. I was pretty pissed last year when i saw IIIT ranked at 16. The thing is that IIIT-H is not a normal engineering college. The aim is excellence in IT. We are doing that very well. But these rankings are oriented towards reflecting competence in broad array of engineering disciplines. This is perhaps a reason why we do better in Dataquest rankings as they are geared towards the IT industry. I think this is as far as we can push with CS and ECE. Plus these rankings do not consider research work, Curriculum and also the admission process. These are major strengths of IIIT.
Today the only negative thing I can say about IIIT-H is the fee. It is perhaps the most expensive B.Tech in India. But money does not go into anybody's pockets. All money earned is re-invested into the college. So that's fair enough. But on the bright side if you want to study at IIIT-H you will get a loan and with the jobs on offer after graduating from IIIT those loans will seem pretty small.
In conclusion I would say what I had said in my previous post, if any student studying in any of the institutes ranked above us(except for the IIT's) was given a chance to study at IIIT he/she would in all honesty, never turn it down. That is the bottom line!
India Today Rankings 2008 Part 1: The overview
India today published it's rankings for engineering among many other streams today. The rankings were more or less as expected but there were a few glaring anomalies.
1. Vellore Institute of Tech.
2. IIIT - A
Before you start reading any further I have one thing to say: These rankings in no way really reflect where your college is. These rankings do not consider a lot of important things. If you feel that you would rather study in college A then your present college then rank college A above yours. Be honest while doing that and you can evolve your own rankings :)
Now to the amazing facts!! VIT at no. 10 !! Well I can safely say one thing - If any VIT student was offered the chance to study in IIIT-H(ranked 13th and also my college!), I don't see him turning it down . The way I see it there are 3 major problems with VIT. Firstly the admission process is murky. Donations and back door entries galore. Secondly I don't see great faculty at VIT.(I know of CS and speak only about CS) and thirdly I don't see any great research work coming out of the place at the International level. Agreed they have great infrastructure but that's not the only thing that counts.
Secondly...Whatever happened to IIIT-A !! I know that it's ranking last year was inflated but surely IIIT-A is not as bad as JNTU hyd! This is where I'm surprised at the rankings. I have absolutely no idea how IIIT-A got to 23!! Having said that I have no idea about what is actually happening in IIIT-A! But still 23 is very weird considering some very poor colleges are in between.
Here are some major flaws I see in this ranking
1. Factors not considered : Research, curriculum, admission procedure. The reason given is that this is out of the hands of most of the institutes. Well even if it is, these things do matter!! How can you not consider these?
2. The facts provided by colleges are really hard to verify. India today has something called a factual rank in the process. This is basically a ranking of colleges on the facts they provide to certain standard queries. These are slightly absurd. For example just on the basis of facts VIT is ranked number 4 and IIT-M is 21! Some facts like placement etc are for the previous year and not for this year. The placement facts used here are for the batch that graduated in 2007 and not this years batch!
3. India today does not publish the facts and figures supplied by colleges or by any other people. I think any college should not hesitate to allow these facts to be published. This is where the whole rankings lack transparency.
4. I think India today should stop just asking people who are HoD's and deans and principals in obscure colleges. It should go and ask people who attend counselling for competitive exams. It should go and ask Graduates where they would want to join a masters programme. It should go and ask the industry and I mean the top players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo,Cisco, Intel etc who actually hire top quality talent, about their perception of colleges.
5.India today should also take a look at what the alumni of a college is doing and where it is placed. This is very difficult but this will give a really clear picture of how a college has developed over a longer period of time.
1. Vellore Institute of Tech.
2. IIIT - A
Before you start reading any further I have one thing to say: These rankings in no way really reflect where your college is. These rankings do not consider a lot of important things. If you feel that you would rather study in college A then your present college then rank college A above yours. Be honest while doing that and you can evolve your own rankings :)
Now to the amazing facts!! VIT at no. 10 !! Well I can safely say one thing - If any VIT student was offered the chance to study in IIIT-H(ranked 13th and also my college!), I don't see him turning it down . The way I see it there are 3 major problems with VIT. Firstly the admission process is murky. Donations and back door entries galore. Secondly I don't see great faculty at VIT.(I know of CS and speak only about CS) and thirdly I don't see any great research work coming out of the place at the International level. Agreed they have great infrastructure but that's not the only thing that counts.
Secondly...Whatever happened to IIIT-A !! I know that it's ranking last year was inflated but surely IIIT-A is not as bad as JNTU hyd! This is where I'm surprised at the rankings. I have absolutely no idea how IIIT-A got to 23!! Having said that I have no idea about what is actually happening in IIIT-A! But still 23 is very weird considering some very poor colleges are in between.
Here are some major flaws I see in this ranking
1. Factors not considered : Research, curriculum, admission procedure. The reason given is that this is out of the hands of most of the institutes. Well even if it is, these things do matter!! How can you not consider these?
2. The facts provided by colleges are really hard to verify. India today has something called a factual rank in the process. This is basically a ranking of colleges on the facts they provide to certain standard queries. These are slightly absurd. For example just on the basis of facts VIT is ranked number 4 and IIT-M is 21! Some facts like placement etc are for the previous year and not for this year. The placement facts used here are for the batch that graduated in 2007 and not this years batch!
3. India today does not publish the facts and figures supplied by colleges or by any other people. I think any college should not hesitate to allow these facts to be published. This is where the whole rankings lack transparency.
4. I think India today should stop just asking people who are HoD's and deans and principals in obscure colleges. It should go and ask people who attend counselling for competitive exams. It should go and ask Graduates where they would want to join a masters programme. It should go and ask the industry and I mean the top players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo,Cisco, Intel etc who actually hire top quality talent, about their perception of colleges.
5.India today should also take a look at what the alumni of a college is doing and where it is placed. This is very difficult but this will give a really clear picture of how a college has developed over a longer period of time.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Top Coder
For all those wondering why a 5th year student would blog about top coder.......My office uses Java as the primary language. I had to learn Java and what better way then spending a few days on TopCoder. Here are some of the highlights of my top coder fling
I took my sweet time to solve problems and i always got scores of 190/250 , 350/500 etc. My solutions were correct but i still got average scores. I thought this had to do with my running times.....then i coded very optimised stuff. Surprisingly my scores went down even further.
Troubled, irritated and almost pissed I asked Harry(ankur jaiswal) what the problem might be. he told me I was taking too long to code the problems. WTF! TopCoder bitches didn't say anythin abt time! Next time i coded pretty quickly and the result 250/250, 499.45/500 and 1094.05/1100. Muhahhahhahahah.
I know it's stupid that I have started using TopCoder so late in life. But better late then never.
And I have also developed a liking for java. The language is pretty neat, clean and quick. Most of the people I saw on topcoder were using either cpp/java. I think we have a case for java to be taught in some ITWS course.
PS: The annual India today college rankings should be out soon. I hope IIIT has improved it's rank. If it hasn't, expect a post filled with rants about how India today and it's ranking procedure suck :P
I took my sweet time to solve problems and i always got scores of 190/250 , 350/500 etc. My solutions were correct but i still got average scores. I thought this had to do with my running times.....then i coded very optimised stuff. Surprisingly my scores went down even further.
Troubled, irritated and almost pissed I asked Harry(ankur jaiswal) what the problem might be. he told me I was taking too long to code the problems. WTF! TopCoder bitches didn't say anythin abt time! Next time i coded pretty quickly and the result 250/250, 499.45/500 and 1094.05/1100. Muhahhahhahahah.
I know it's stupid that I have started using TopCoder so late in life. But better late then never.
And I have also developed a liking for java. The language is pretty neat, clean and quick. Most of the people I saw on topcoder were using either cpp/java. I think we have a case for java to be taught in some ITWS course.
PS: The annual India today college rankings should be out soon. I hope IIIT has improved it's rank. If it hasn't, expect a post filled with rants about how India today and it's ranking procedure suck :P
Saturday, May 17, 2008
UG2K4 and football
I just looked at avi's status. It read "missin futball". I think we as a batch are crazy about football. Football was in my view one of the first good things to happen to our batch. At the peak of our playing time 70% of the college starting line-up came from our batch. It formed a part of the daily routine of a lot of people and was one of the high points of life in IIIT for some of my batch-mates. We won *EVERY*competitive match in 4 years except for 1 draw this year. I think I can safely say that no batch/house will ever match this. This is a list of the people who played for the batch. Sorry if I miss out on anybody. This is a random order. People with a * played for the college as well. I guess we are the "invinvcibles"
1.Avinash Shukla*(F) -Captain
2.Kochar*(F)
3.Rishabh*(GK)
4.Arjun*(RW)
5.Pavan Pandey*(LW)
6.Ankul Batra*(D)
7.Pratyush Bhatt(M)
8.S.Rahul*(everywhere!)
9.Turbo(M)
10.Supreet(D)
11.Joy(D)
12.Rathi(somewhere)
13.Singla(D)
14.Mohit Jain(D,GK)
It has been a pleasure playing with you people over the years. I hope we can play one more time some day and kick some more ass :)
PS: I too miss futball :(
1.Avinash Shukla*(F) -Captain
2.Kochar*(F)
3.Rishabh*(GK)
4.Arjun*(RW)
5.Pavan Pandey*(LW)
6.Ankul Batra*(D)
7.Pratyush Bhatt(M)
8.S.Rahul*(everywhere!)
9.Turbo(M)
10.Supreet(D)
11.Joy(D)
12.Rathi(somewhere)
13.Singla(D)
14.Mohit Jain(D,GK)
It has been a pleasure playing with you people over the years. I hope we can play one more time some day and kick some more ass :)
PS: I too miss futball :(
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
My introduction to IDE's and why I hate Google
One of the reasons I never liked programming had to do with "vim". I never liked the interface. It seemed too geeky and dull to me. But during my intern I have come to work with two new IDE's. Visual Studio and Eclipse. I liked Eclipse the most. I have kinda started to enjoy programming with Java on the eclipse IDE. It's fast and reasonably error free. Plus the IDE does a lot of conceptual checking for you along the way. Pretty neat stuff.
I can now imagine a barrage of pro-Vim comments. Vim is good in it's own way. It's pretty fast in dealing with long files and has a lotta functionality but it can never beat an IDE.
Miscellanious things
1. I hate the subway guys here in Bangalore. Apparently there is no cheese or mayonnaise in the sub-of-the-day in Bangalore. WTF!! plus they are pretty rude. I miss the Jubilee hills subway :(
2. I am planning on getting a CCNA certification. The exam is easy but it's expensive. I plan to dupe the college into paying for me :D
3. From my 2nd year to my 4th year, Google always used to have vaccancies for a job profile titled "Information Security Engineer". Just when I am in a position to apply for jobs, Google removed the position from India. I hate you Google :(
I can now imagine a barrage of pro-Vim comments. Vim is good in it's own way. It's pretty fast in dealing with long files and has a lotta functionality but it can never beat an IDE.
Miscellanious things
1. I hate the subway guys here in Bangalore. Apparently there is no cheese or mayonnaise in the sub-of-the-day in Bangalore. WTF!! plus they are pretty rude. I miss the Jubilee hills subway :(
2. I am planning on getting a CCNA certification. The exam is easy but it's expensive. I plan to dupe the college into paying for me :D
3. From my 2nd year to my 4th year, Google always used to have vaccancies for a job profile titled "Information Security Engineer". Just when I am in a position to apply for jobs, Google removed the position from India. I hate you Google :(
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Back to Bangalore
After a pretty uncomfortable journey on a APSRTC bus I'm back to bangalore. I can see why people want to have offices in this screwed up city. Even though there are no good roads, lots of traffic and and a pretty high cost of living it's a hill staion compared to Hyderabad. After a week of Hyd's blazing heat this feels nice.
Here is pic of my workspace it's a pretty neat place with lots of space and some major computing power.
In totally urelated news
1. I don't who Vijay Mallya will fire next.
2. I do know that deccan chargers totally suck
3. Man-ure won the EPL fair and square but they still suck and so do chelski.
4. I tried to sell my laptop, but there were no bids. One matka did send me a mail where he offered to pay me Rs.7000 for a laptop with a HD screen that runs crysis on medium at 1280x800 at 40 fps. And we wonder why we make fun of matkas :)
For those wondering why I would want to sell such a laptop...well it's a 17inch, 4KG monster. Not interested in carrying it around anymore.
Here is pic of my workspace it's a pretty neat place with lots of space and some major computing power.
In totally urelated news
1. I don't who Vijay Mallya will fire next.
2. I do know that deccan chargers totally suck
3. Man-ure won the EPL fair and square but they still suck and so do chelski.
4. I tried to sell my laptop, but there were no bids. One matka did send me a mail where he offered to pay me Rs.7000 for a laptop with a HD screen that runs crysis on medium at 1280x800 at 40 fps. And we wonder why we make fun of matkas :)
For those wondering why I would want to sell such a laptop...well it's a 17inch, 4KG monster. Not interested in carrying it around anymore.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
The return of the student SysAdmins
Finally the server room has been returned to students. From next year Kulbir Saini and yours truly will try our best to revive the IIIT Network. This transition has taken the students, and a few of us in particular a lot of hard work. It's sad that it took so long for this to happen because a lot of talented people in UG2K3 and UG2K4 missed out on being SysAdmins. I hope such a thing never happens again.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Amitabh Bachchan's blog
Yes I wrote a post! After almost a year in hibernation I wrote a post! And what drove me to write about it?? Amitabh Bachchan. I was going through his blog. It's more like a press release web-site rather then a blog. But when you are Amitabh Bachchan you can do pretty much whatever you want :)
For the un-informed I am in bangalore interning at RSA Data Security! (That's why you don't see me in campus...mystery solved!) It's a nice place to work. Will write about it in some future post.
Found out today that, pretty sadly two of the brightest students of our batch are passing over the chance to study at Stanford and Colombia respectively because of a lack of funding. That suks big time. For all those alumni out in the industry earning big bucks: Considering all the college has given would you like this to happen? and are you sure you can't do anything about it?
Congratulations to the following people
Shashank J - IIM Ahmedabad
Joy Bhakat - IIM Calcutta
Samba(sreekanth p) - IIM Calcutta
Abhay Kesharwani - IIM Calcutta
Arjun A.V. - IIM Calcutta
Ranjai banerjee - IIM Lucknow
donno about anybody else sorry if I left you out :)
For the un-informed I am in bangalore interning at RSA Data Security! (That's why you don't see me in campus...mystery solved!) It's a nice place to work. Will write about it in some future post.
Found out today that, pretty sadly two of the brightest students of our batch are passing over the chance to study at Stanford and Colombia respectively because of a lack of funding. That suks big time. For all those alumni out in the industry earning big bucks: Considering all the college has given would you like this to happen? and are you sure you can't do anything about it?
Congratulations to the following people
Shashank J - IIM Ahmedabad
Joy Bhakat - IIM Calcutta
Samba(sreekanth p) - IIM Calcutta
Abhay Kesharwani - IIM Calcutta
Arjun A.V. - IIM Calcutta
Ranjai banerjee - IIM Lucknow
donno about anybody else sorry if I left you out :)
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