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!

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 :)

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

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!

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.

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.

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.