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.

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!

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.

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

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 :(

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 :(

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.

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.

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 :)