ShArk Food

What's next ?

2010-06-04T07:54:00.002+05:30

Yeah Rafa's gone. I feel kind of sad. I don't think it could be called a firing or a sacking. It's got to do with the money available(or rather not available) to buy players.

Liverpool are not the financially strongest club in the EPL. ManU, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man City can all easily outspend Liverpool. One can make an argument that even Spurs have a better purchasing power than Liverpool. I think it makes it that much more impressive that he has done what he has.

2005 - EPL(5th), Champions League (W), League Cup (Runner Up)
2006 - EPL(3rd), Champions League (16),FA Cup(Winners), UEFA Super Cup(Winners)
2007 - EPL(3rd), Champions League (F)
2008 - EPL(4th), Champions League (SF)
2009 - EPL(2nd), Champions League (QF)
2010 - EPL (7th), Champions League (Group), Europa League (SF)

People tend to criticize RB's transfer policies. I think he's brought in quite a few undeniably good players. I would put his transfers into 4 categories.

Good Transfers : Pepe Reina, Glen Johnson, Mascherano, Alonso, Kuyt, Torres, Skrtel, Agger, Ngog, Lucas

so-so Transfers : Babel, Aquilani, Riera,

Oh God what was I thinking : Robbie Keane, Dossena, Voronin, Pennant etc

Why did I let them go Transfers: Crouch, Bellamy, Alonso, Sissoko etc.

The total loss incurred on these players was about £15M. That's really not bad. (He made a profit on selling a lot of players like crouch, bellamy, alonso, gonzalez etc). Considering how other clubs have Purchased and had flops

ManU - Ferdinand(£33), Rooney(£26M), Anderson (£20M), Berbatov (£32M), Hargreaves (£20M), Carrick (£20M), Nani (£18M), Valencia (£16M), Ronaldo(£15) (That's a £200M).

Chelsea - Well Chelsea kind of went ahead and bought a whole new team. Shameless actually. I don't understand why anybody supports the club.

I think Liverpool's big problem was not Rafa, but those clowns in the board room. Dicks and Guillotine (Yeah that's what I call em jokers). In case you are wondering what the hell has happened and how did a stable club get into financial trouble.... Dicks and Guillotine took a £200M loan to buy Liverpool. They haven't been paying the loan off and interest accumulates on that loan @ 14% per annum. That interest clubbed with existing debt has helped reach a grand figure of yes .... hold your breath..... £350M. Under the previous owner David Moores Liverpool had a debt of £80M. I am sure that had David Moores taken a £270M loan to invest in players we would have been much better off. But not to worry. Other clubs are not that well off either. ManUre has debts worth £750M and Chelski has £500M worth of debt.

I am sad to see Rafa leave. Interestingly RB's stay at Liverpool coincides with my stay at IIIT. 2004-2010. Lets see what the world has in store for Rishabh and LFC.

Rebuilding for the next season

2010-05-28T18:10:00.003+05:30

Ok. That was a disaster. Can we look ahead please ? If I was Rafa

Out - Riera(5M), Babel (10M), Degen(3M), El-Zahr(2M),Aquilani(15M),Aurelio(free) Total : ~ 35M

In

1. Joe Cole(Chelsea) : He is out of contract at Chelsea. Would fit brilliantly into the Liverpool Starting line-up. Liverpool should pay him what he wants and get him (Replaces Babel)

2. Stephan Wornock (Aston Villa) : Former Liverpool player. Had a really good last season with Villa. Would love to see him back at Anfield. Approx ~ 10M (Replaces Aurelio)

3. Raul (Real Madrid) : Raul doesn't seem to fit in at Madrid. It's hard to make a case for playing Raul when you have Higuain, Benzema and obviously Ronaldo. I don't think Madrid would look for a fee if he wanted to leave. I can see him forming a good partnership with Torres. Raul's game was never based on pace and he's hit 20 goals in the last two seasons before the previous ones.(He scored in his last game but came off injured). Free (Replaces El-Zahr)

4. Martin Petrov (Man City) : Petrov is out of contract at City. I've always liked Petrov and thought his finishing and power were really good. Would be a straight swap for Riera.I think he would make a good squad player. Free (Replaces Riera).

5. Higuain(Real Madrid) : He is good. Higuain has been Madrid's top scorer for some time and his presence has saved them once too often. For some strange reason Madrid seem to want to get rid of him. Liverpool should pull out all the strings to sign him.Torres + Higuain = Lots of Goals. Approx ~ 30M.

I think that all this might end up costing Liverpool as much as 10M, but it's a better shaped squad with a better starting XI and a better bench strength.

So How does Liverpool line up ?

Reina(GK) - Johnson(RB), Carragher (CB), Agger (CB), Warnock (LB) - Mascherano(DM), Joe Cole (LW), Maxi Rodriguez(RW), Gerrard (AM) - Torres, Higuain.

Subs : Random-GK, Skrtel, Lucas, Benayoun, Petrov, Kuyt, Raul.

Squad Players : Another-Random-GK, Kyrgiakos, Insua, Ayala, Shelvey, Ngog, Pacheco, etc etc

Of Donating to IIIT

2010-05-19T16:02:00.009+05:30

I was recently reading Halley's blog post on Alumni Funds. He talks about what some other colleges have been doing with their alumni funds and their targets and so on. He goes on to talk about other things like his experiences with the Alumni fund among others. For those who need a bit of a history lesson Halley and I are perhaps the two most vocal critics of the IIIT administration on both the campus and the blogosphere . It's important that one understand what the Alumni fund is doing and why it's very important to contribute to it.

What does the Alumni Fund do ?

Evey year among the many kids who write AIEEE and get ranks good enough to make it to IIIT, there are a few who cannot afford to come here. Yes the fee at IIIT is very high. But this is a group of students who cannot afford to pay for any form of college. They have neither the savings nor any form of holdings to provide a bank guarantee for a loan. This is a situation unimaginable for most of us. But it happens. The Alumni fund is to help such students whom nobody else is willing to help. The money in the alumni funds is given out as a very low interest loan to pay for the tuition fees of such students. This money doesn't go anywhere else. Yes the money does indirectly go to IIIT but they would get that money anyways. If not form this student than another richer one who can afford it.

Why is this important ?

We all know how hard it is to get into IIIT. Some of us took extra time beyond our 12'th class to get year. And whatever one may say , IIIT has provided us with an education, an exposure and above all access to opportunities the rest of the country can only dream of. When a student who clears AIEEE and gets a rank good enough to go to IIIT, drops that idea because of something like money, it is a collective failure on the part of IIIT community to promote merit. In some sense out-pricing somebody from an education is tantamount to reservation; reservation for the rich. As a community IIIT has always put merit on the highest pedestal, and this would be a step in line with those ideas. The situation is best summed up by what Varun Boppana wrote in a mail on our mailing lists.
"It's not like, we are asking money for IIIT..its for some students studying there...for their fees..just to get to where we are..thats it!."

Why this should not be a big deal for IIIT Alumni

Over the last couple of years the average pay of a IIIT graduate has been about 7 LPA. If you gave just 1% of what you earned to the Alumni fund, it would be enough to support all the needy students. 2K3, 2K4, 2K5 and now 2K6 have about 150+ students who have graduated with pretty nice jobs. That's about 600 people. If we assume 25% people contribute that's 150 contributions. If each of these contributions are at least worth Rs.5000 then that would make up 7.5 lakhs, which is almost 75% of what is required to support students. The rest of the money would come from donations from caution money, loans recovered from students and off course contributions from other batches. As a community that has almost 2000 members we should be able to support about 20 students per batch. It's not a big deal. For starters, donate your caution money. Yes BLN might give you a weird mess bill to settle or the office might have something in store for you, but still donate your caution money to the Alumni fund. That will take care of your first year after college. After that it's up to you and your generosity

Don't mix this with other things

Whatever your experiences/opinions of the IIIT administration may be I think it's not relevant to Alumni Fund donations. I have heard classmates say "IIIT never gave a damn about me, so why should I ?". Well, donating to the Alumni fund is about helping fellow students. Donating to the Alumni Fund, does not imply you are okay-ing whatever is happening in college. Rather, it shows your concern for IIIT and that what happens here is still important to you. In some sense you continue to remain a stakeholder long after passing out. And it's the right thing to do, you know it :)

You can donate here

My $0.02 on IIIT's new admissions Policy

2010-05-12T10:37:00.005+05:30

I like certain things in this years admissions process. On the top of my "I Like" list is the admissions to the Dual Degree program for people who have cleared the Math/Informatics Olympiads at the national level. I don't know how many people will apply as most people in this category get admitted to some IIT anyways. For any student who attends a national camp at the Math/Physics/Informatics Olympiads we should
1. Allow them to join any course they want at IIIT
2. Give them a 100% tuition fee wavier
3. Have no limit on the number of such students we admit.
Whatever financial implications this may have will be more than made up for in other ways. This might mean that we would get to see more people like I.V. Aprameya Rao and Anshuman Singh and Nadeem ( Yes they are examples of people who have participated in national Olympiad camps) on campus. Even if we manage to admit say 5 such students every year, we would eventually have 20~30 of them on campus and that would make a great difference to the atmosphere at IIIT.

I am also pleased that with the different avenues of entry IIIT is considering to look at while admitting CNS dual degree students. The CNS course is slightly different from a regular B.Tech course and perhaps it calls for special admission procedures. The list of Olympiads/Scholarships listed there is quite long and I am hopeful that some of those people who join will be pretty enthusiastic about course. Personally I don't agree with the philosophy of shoving kids into a particular stream without letting them explore other areas of study. I don't agree with either the CNS or the CNL dual degree courses.

There is also this thing to admit foreign students. I haven't a clue about SAT scores and really don't know how that is going to work out. I just hope that we don't end up admitting some yahooo's who think that they own the campus.

Also CBSE and CCB deserve a kick. Their sheer stupidity has forced us into having our own counseling. This also pretty much completely screws up the idea of a national time table for all colleges (Which I thought was a nice idea !) Kapil Sibbal if you read this, fire whoever is running CCB!

I have spent some time looking the dynamics of admissions in US universities. And Indian Universities. The major difference I can see is a lack of diversity on campus in Indian universities. Almost everybody here doesn't have very many skills(of note) other than being good at Phy-Chem-Math. Yes the odd person can sing and paint and dance and some more people can play something but nothing significant. I think that makes for very poor exposure and a sense of elitism that only people really good in PCM have a right to study Engineering at the best places in India. I would love to see IIIT admit kids who are really good at say some arts or sports or something else. Of course we also have to make sure that they have a minimum academic standard as well (perhaps a mixture of 10th+12th Marks + AIEEE scores or whatever) so that they can successfully complete the course. I don't think that studying engineering should be the preserve of only the very insanely nerdy PCM kids. Any sincere kid who does well at school is good enough to go through the curriculum.

IIIT has already been very bold with the present initiatives and perhaps this idea comes ahead of it's time. However I suspect that this is something that the think tank at IIIT has had at the back of their mind. I think having a center like CEH is a step in that direction. The problem with that approach is that you are going to have to deal with kids who have a mindset where joining a place like CEH is simply "not an option". Lets admit some different people for a change !

PS : I don't understand why IIIT has asked people to register before the AIEEE results are declared. Before the results are out a lot of people would like to believe that they have a chance. I can imagine around 6~7 thousand people registering at the very least. IIIT might as well have had people register after the results were declared or at least charged them later. I am not aware of the logistics of doing something like this (I assume it would not be trivial), but if they have done this to make some money then it is indeed very naughty.

Prof. Sangal's reply to "The Al-Qaeda of Jeevan Vidya"

2010-01-14T20:16:00.003+05:30

After going through my last post Prof.Sangal replied to my post via e-mail. As per his request I am putting his reply on my blog. I am writing it as separate post because there is too much clutter on the previous post and I felt that his reply may be lost in the mess. The reply is posted as is.
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Dear Rishabh,

This is to provide clarifications to many points of misunderstanding.

Note that I am addressing only the substantive issues, I am not responding to many speculative statements and remarks.

(1)
When IIIT-H took the decision to introduce Human Values as an essential part of the curriculum, we placed 4 conditions which must be satisfied by the content in such courses. The content must be:

A. Logical - Should follow reasoning and should be open to discussion and questioning in the class.

B. Verifiable - One should be able to observe and verify through experiments by the self. (No mystic element!)

C. Universal - Applicable to all human beings without regard to their caste, creed, colour, religion, etc. (No sect of any kind!)

D. Human - Should be for the good of the human being.

Jeevan Vidya was chosen because it satisfied all the above. IIIT-H is open to using any other philosophy which satisfies the above.

(2)
It was also decided that Human Values course must be taught without preaching or dos and donts.

In JV shivir, there is no insistence on anyone to accept what is being said. In fact, on the first day itself, it is written in bold, asking people not to accept, but examine and evaluate. They should accept only if they find them ok after evaluation!

(You have said that JV asks people to do good, control their desires, etc. But JV never gives any dos and donts including these two! It only says "what can make a human being happy", and there too, it says that one should accept only after verifying on one's own right. Have you attended a complete JV shivir as yet? You can attend a full shivir, and indeed point out to the teacher, if any do's and dont's are being given.)

(3)
When you use the word "religion" for JV, it suggests that it is sectarian. It is normally understood that if you are a Hindu you cannot be a Muslim at the same time, and if you are a Sikh you cannot be a Christian, etc. Jeevan Vidya is not like that. Whatever be your religion, you can follow or relate to JV. Most people are able to connect JV with whatever religion they are practising. As a philosophy, it is even "open source". (See the attached article on Evaluating a Philosophy by Vineesh Gupta.)

Today, it is "fashionable" to say that I do not believe in any philosophy or thought, and that I am free. In such a prevailing situation, one might brand others who might have come to some conclusions as "religionists", and pass snide remarks at them. But one should examine whether that is an acceptable mode of conduct.

(4)
Education means not just training in a narrow discipline but developing an ability to think critically and independently. It implies an ability to separate "essence" from "form" when faced with any situation in life, not limited to problems in a narrow discipline alone. (It also means developing the strength to take decisions, particularly about one's own life, and acting on them.)

An academic institution strives for excellence in education and research. It functions in a cultural and social milieu, using accepted practises and procedures. In higher education today, accepted practise is to have a 4-year curriculum with semester-long courses with credits. We accept it and implement it at IIIT-H, even when 4-year duration or semester long courses might not fit everybody. Are we forcing every student to follow it? Probably we are, because of the currently accepted practises of society. But is "forcing" the right word to describe the situation.

In a curriculum, the courses are designed to cover the breadth and depth of educational goals. In the existing curricula, many courses are compulsary whether data structures, communication theory, or human values. We are even asked at times why are we forcing students to learn such and such a course in their discipline, when it is not needed for most jobs? We are also asked why do we have broad education with Human Values? But all this is the goal of education. Is "forcing" the right word in such a situation. (It goes without saying that Human Values should be conducted without preaching.)

Society today puts a lot of pressure on the individual, without taking into account their interest. Students succumb to this pressure, and take admission to areas they have no aptitude for, or come into higher education even when they do not wish to study! As a result, for many things they perceive being forced when these things are a part of education. (We would like to help by making it possible for the students to choose their area of interest, to the extent we have the facilities and disciplines. IIIT-H has examples of such help in the past. But doing something is difficult when the student has no interest in higher study and perceives the entire curriculum as "being forced".)

As the society and the individuals evolve, we hope that we will move towards a situation, where only the truly interested come for higher education, pursuing the areas they love, in a journey of joy.

- Rajeev Sangal
14 January 2010

The Al-Qaeda of Jeevan Vidya

2010-01-11T22:27:00.011+05:30

For a long long time I have thought about writing this post. I refrained from writing it because I was not sure about my competence to comment on a philosophy so many "educated" people have subscribed to. After attending a Shivir (over the course of 2 years!!) and taking a course that was for all practical purposes JV - 101 (Understanding Work and Life), I think I have some background to make certain observations about JV and it's tryst with IIIT.

The Philosophy itself : Having read a bit about JV, I can say that JV as a whole is pretty much oriented like any other religion is. Do good, be good, be in harmony with nature, surroundings, control your desires and so on. Since the philosophy has roots in a modern society, there seems to be a trend to rationalize every argument presented as part of the philosophy. The validity and thoroughness of these rationalizations is a debate better left to theologians rather than MSbR students :). There is also no component of JV that prescribes rituals or anything of that sort. In it's simplest form, the message of JV is pretty elegant and I couldn't not help appreciating it. If I was an alien visiting earth I could very well believe that JV was yet another among the various religions practiced on earth with a decent following.

Which is where my problem with JV's association with IIIT begins. Today, if the powers that be at IIIT were prescribing to interpretation of a Hindu or Islamic or Christian ideology the same way they seem to be enamored by JV, there would have been an uproar of epic proportions. Since JV doesn't quite have the status of a proper religion like say Hinduism or Islam, people just don't know how to give a name to whats going on. I don't think you can talk about Human values and spirituality without imprinting on the listener, a certain version of your own religious beliefs. Now, no matter what Prof.Sangal or anybody else says, I do consider all JV activities to be religious. Which is in itself not bad. But only provided you do not provide official patronage and pamper only JV. I don't see any Hindu Shivirs or Islamic Halaqas being arranged on campus. Do you ?

One of the reasons the Muslim League argued for a separate Islamic state was that, "Islam and it's tenets extend to every aspect of life, whether it is social discourse or even business. There is no activity that is not religious by nature. A separate Islamic state that understands this notion is required to safeguard the Islamic way of life". While I don't fully agree with this statement I can understand the sentiment. A close look at our lives would tell us that our religion shapes almost all aspects of our decision making in some way or the other. It would then come as no surprise that the philosophies of JV made their way into the decision making process at IIIT. A number of changes in the campus over the last 5 years, can be attributed to a JV or JV-ish justification from the decision makers. As time progresses, JV is firmly embedded in the psyche of a lot of influential people at IIIT. What is the result you ask ? Well in it's simplest form, I am forced to study a course on Literature from Vinish Gupta (as learned as he may be). I would rather take my chances with Prof.Sudhakar Marathe who is conspicuous by his absence. The fact that half the Humanities courses are offered by people strongly associated with JV or even officially associated with it, is troubling. I have already written about this.

But there is more. I see a more orthodox IIIT. I see JV inspired people complaining about girls in skimpy outfits in felicity. I see "Swayamsevak" committees popping up and I see faculty members making sure that they don't miss a single session of JV, all while MS student's can't get placed, IIIT is short of funds, ECE is a mess and we have a new main building reminiscent of a WW2 ruin. I see certain civil engineers have a greater say about the way IIIT is run, than the experienced pioneers of science that grace our campus. I see dance teachers being paid more than the people who help maintain the IT in IIIT. I see a lot of people not being valued for sharing different beliefs. I see a systematic removal of people with non-JV or anti-JV views from the seats of power in IIIT. It's almost like JV-ists are the new communists !

Where there is a religion there are fanatics. A few months ago I was reading Osama bin Laden's biography (by Adam Robinson). The book provides a detailed description of how Osama, fed up with his life, saw redemption in Islam and Jihaad and how he rallied thousands from different nations, from Kings to commoners and from the educated to the illiterate to form Al-Qaeda. The parallels I see with JV in IIIT and the people concerned are amazing. Both started out as small movements. Al-Qaeda had Afghanistan-1989 and JV had this. Boosted by their initial success and the charisma of their leaders the groups snowballed into fanatical movements, convinced about their interpretation of a religion, each wreaking their own version of a catastrophe on the world they interact with. Hell, we even have our own Osama bin Laden and Zwahiri, with a dollop of young impressionable lieutenants. Both believe in catching em' young (JV in the 1st year), and sending them to training camps far away in the mountains (Mussoorie). It is interesting to ponder over the question if it is JV that is to be blamed or the people who follow it here at IIIT ? That said, a more pertinent question remains : Is there a JV 9/11 round the corner ?

PS : The Al-Qaeda comparisons to JV are obviously satirical. But isn't the problem pretty much correctly described ?

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An Update

After reading this post, Prof.Sangal commented via email. His reply can be read here
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Interview Shinterview contd....

2010-01-09T00:54:00.002+05:30

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I did not get shortlisted by IBM IRL. I spent the whole day wondering why I did not manage to get shortlisted by a company where I have enough research work in 3 different areas that I could easily fit into 3 different groups at their lab. I thought it might be GPA, but they shortlisted people with lower GPA's. Was it the level/quality of publications ? Was it the nature of my work ...what the bloody hell was it ? Chunni (aka Anshul )spent an hour calming me down and told me that it might be something as simple as them not having a vacancy in any of the groups that I can fit into !

I also kind of figured out that things like A+ and A are truly meaningless methods of classifying research work when it comes to placements (Many would feel that it's a stupid way of classifying work for any purpose !). One man's A+ is another mans F-. I will take this opportunity to welcome myself to the club of people wondering why they haven't been shortlisted or selected.

I was also happy that Bharat Joshi got his first interview today. The guy is smarter than most 9 pointers you would meet and a bumper job would be fair reward for some smooth work he has done over the years. I am also sure that the IBM people would have liked some nice lessons on secure multiparty computation from Hans :)

more to follow...

Interview shinterview

2010-01-07T21:40:00.004+05:30

We have IBM IRL coming to campus 2moro. I did send my resume with 2 recos. It'll be interesting to see what they have to ask me. The only group that I could possibly fit into is their High Performance Computing group. Now, while I do have relevant research work(s) (in a conference titled IEEE-ACM High Performance Computing) I have no fracking idea about multi cores or parallel algorithms or anything remotely "high performance". If the state of my laptop is anything to go by, I barely manage to get any performance at all. They do not have a crypto group, so impressing them goes out the window. The only hope that remains is that they ask me something about distributed computing and preferably PRC :D

But whatever the outcome, I hope to meet a few people from IBM and see what they are up to. It is after all IBM. They have been great pioneers in electrical engineering and computing. I am sure that whoever they send would be somebody senior. I also hope they send a guy called Vijay Garg. He has a nice range of research work covering theoretical and applied distributed/parallel computing. It would be worth my while just meeting him.

The rubbish that is called a HSSM course.

2009-12-26T04:50:00.002+05:30

After looking at the HSSM's being offered being offered next semester I could broadly put them into 2 categories. The eight courses being offered are evenly divided between the two categories.

1. Courses offered by the brotherhood of JV
2. The rest.

Some of the important areas where we offer no courses are

1. Economics.
2. Finance
3. Literature
4. Public Administration
5. Law
6. Sociology (There are courses offered by Anuja Madan and Romesh Singh but it's more of an exception)
7. Management
8. History

There is much more and I could go on forever .... I hope you get the picture.

Why should students be forced to study such limited offerings, in some cases taught by inexperienced, self styled "Gurus" with no objective evaluation of the course content. Is there no objection from the side of the faculty ?

If a UG student must do 20 credits from within this set of courses, we should seriously reconsider having compulsory HSSMs. I couldn't find more rubbish even if I looked in a garbage dump.

Creating monsters.....

2009-12-08T22:28:00.007+05:30

I am part of the first dual degree batch. In the beginning there were 60+ of us. After 5.5 years and about a 100+ research papers later, most of us are still here. The question most of me and my batch mates are asking ourselves is "What next ?". Circumstances have conspired to make us unwanted by most and looked at skeptically by the remaining.
As the placement process unravels it's becoming clearer that our degrees, our work and our orientation is becoming an unbearable burden. Companies feel that we are either too "research minded" to work for them or likely to run away for a PhD. So most want nothing to do with us. Those who are ok with us, tend to have a selection process we are ill prepared for. If somebody were to ask me about crypto or cvit people about vision or Sarika about RoboCup we would blow them out of the water. Sadly nobody seems to want to ask us these things. It seems that data structures and puzzles are the flavor of the day. Most ug4's have spent the last 2 months, working very hard to prepare for the placement season. Most of us have spent the last 2 months making a final thrust to get that last paper accepted or to start giving shape to our thesis. Not an ideal scenario.
The faculty would like to believe that having exposed us to top class research, many of us would be motivated to pursue higher studies. 2 out of 60+ have gone for a PhD. Not numbers to go wild about. This begs the question : Has IIIT created a (confused)monster with it's dual degree programs ?
While I leave this question as a topic for open debate, I do have a few questions about the dual degree program.
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Section 1 : Jobs
Q1: Are there relevant jobs for 60 dual degree graduates in Computer science and Electronics ?
Q:2 Has the institute (faculty) spent enough time educating companies about the dual degree program ?
Q3: Has the institute made an effort to educate companies that the hiring process they follow for ug's is not optimal for MSbR
Q4: Has each faculty member asked himself how he can help get his students a job ?
Q5: Do the Institute and the faculty have a burden of responsibility to help get a student a job ?
Q6: Are all faculty members in agreement with or even aware of this ?
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Section 2: The Research

Q1: Has there been an effort to normalize/standardize the quality of MS thesis' ?
Q2: Has there been an effort to analyze the quality of research work done as part of this program?
Q3: Have we asked ourselves if we are publishing for the sake of publishing ?
Q4: Have all students been provided the means to present their research work at the relevant forums (i.e. sponsorship for conferences) ?
Q5: Do we provide enough faculty and by extension research areas for our students to work on?
Q6: Do we always have the resources to help a student complete his/her work ?

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Section 3: The program itself

Q1: Almost all the dual degree students will complete their degree in 6 years. In this aspect is the program satisfactory?
Q2: Why is the proportion of students from DD interested in pursuing a PhD so dismal ?
Q3: Has the institute thought about students stuck in the program even unable to do their B.Tech ?
Q4: Does an average High School student understand what he is getting into when choosing DD?
Q5: Has the institute taken initiatives to ensure that every DD student is at least paid a minimum stipend apart from a tuition wavier?
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Questions for the future:

Q1: Considering the issues computer science and electronics dual degree students have, was it prudent to introduce other courses like PostBSc, DD in computational natural sciences and DD in computational linguistics ?

Q2: Will we have a complete overhaul in the way we go about dealing with the DD students and their future aspirations, be it a job or a PhD or even an MBA ?

Q3: Is the institute going to clean up it's act when it comes to financial planning, to ensure students are paid a decent stipend and provided adequate funds for presenting their research work?

PS1: For fellow students - Don't write comments in a moment of frustration/anger. Think before you write.

PS2: For others - Don't write rhetorical junk. Appreciate reality, and yes....Think before you write too.

My webpage is up.....

2009-12-02T11:12:00.002+05:30

11 semesters late, but it's never too late is it :) Click here to visit my webpage. My thanks to Anuj Gupta and Prasant Gopal who allowed me to blatantly rip off the template. This is how a theoreticians web page should look like. In keeping with SIGACT's finest traditions(lame text only websites), mine is text only too.

The Kindness of others

2009-11-11T04:34:00.005+05:30

At times it is very easy to be ignorant of the all those selfless people who keep our society ticking. I think the biggest hidden heroes our society has, are people who work in life sciences and specifically those who are immunologists, virologists and microbiologists and the kind. I have a particularly dear friend who is a microbiologist. Her name is Deepti and everyday she makes her way to her medical college lab and transforms from a pretty young lady to the scientist in a bio-hazard suit(Yeah!! that's her a few days ago. I think she kind of looks like Storm Shadow). She works on testing live swine flu patients. Most of us would run away at the mere mention of swine flu. But she puts on her bio-hazard suit and gets into the lab to work with live samples of the swine flu virus for the whole day, everyday. There are obviously risks and there are instances when technicians have contracted diseases they were working on testing. People have contracted swine flu in this manner and have died. To put all that fear aside and work with the H1N1 virus, so that others may live, is truly courageous. I wonder what motivates her to take such a risk. Surely it is not worth the measly stipend she is offered. It's not personal either, as she helps in the treatment of people who she will never meet, and who will never even know her work. It takes a particular bend of mind - a truly humanitarian mind to drive oneself to be able to do something like this.

I write this because I feel that somebody should know her contribution. That society should look for heroes, beyond the surface of our social fabric and appreciate the contributions of Deepti and her colleagues who, from behind those masks deliver us from disease and death. It is time we started to acknowledge the Kindness of others.

Come on .... .give Rafa a break....

2009-11-01T03:42:00.003+05:30

Today's game against Fulham would have left many reds fans seething and cursing Rafa. I just think that Liverpool are really unlucky at this point of time. the squad has been decimated by injury. Normally Liverpool's first team would be:
What Liverpool's team ended looking up like today is below
When you are missing a 6 of your starting 11 in Aurelia, Skrtel/Agger, Johnson, Riera, Aquilani, and Gerrard and need to field half fit Torres and Benayoun, with 4 matches in 10 days, it's going to be bad. No normal team could recover from such a loss of players. I think all that is left for Liverpool is the Champions league. Hope to see the reds do well on matchday 4.

The cat !!

2009-10-12T10:39:00.004+05:30

This is a cat that roams around in the 1-12 and 20's wing. It is unofficially Ashwath's cat.

Revisiting the Desktop: Part 3 - 50K

2009-10-10T11:50:00.015+05:30

The last two posts I wrote here and here focused on achieving a balance between price and performance. This post focuses on building the best gaming rig in 50K. Now that is a LOT of money to pay for a desktop. For the AMD fanboys (mainly Kulbir Saini), we finally have a competitive AMD rig. Apart from the CPU, Motherboard and Memory all the other components are the same. First, lets have a look at the platforms.

Intel Platform
The newly launched Intel Core i5 750 CPU and the Intel DP 55WB motherboard bring the performance of the Core i7 series to mainstream prices. The processor sets you back by about a Rs.10,150 and the motherboard would cost about Rs, 6090. A minor issue with this setup is that you would need to use DDR3 memory and that is almost 70% more expensive than DDR2. A 2GB DDR stick costs Rs.1,800 as compared to a 2GB DDR3 stick that costs Rs.2,450. The cost of the platform i.e. the CPU + Mobo + RAM = Rs. 18,690. You can read the reviews of the Core i5 here. You can purchase the CPU here and the motherboard here

AMD Platform
We are on a bit of a sticky wicket here. I am going to recommend a Phenom II x4 940BE CPU. The CPU costs 10,350 and the Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H would set you back by another Rs. 4,775.Add to that another 1,800 for 2GB of DDR2 RAM. The platform costs Rs. 16,925. That's a saving of Rs. 1,765 over the Intel Platform.

Comparing the two Platforms
The 940BE is a slightly old and is outperformed by the Core i5 in almost all applications. Expect to have a performance difference of anywhere between 5~10% in most applications except for high def gaming where the GPU is the limiting factor. Add to that the improved performance of DDR3 memory with the Core i5 and the wonderful new Turbo mode that comes along with it. The question is "Is all this worth Rs.2,000 ? I personally feel the answer is NO and only an AMD fanboy would want to go for the 940BE. However if you feel that the 1.7K savings are important or you would like to spend them elsewhere, the 940BE based setup won't suck for sure !!

The other stuff is common to both builds. Let's take a look at the components selected.

1. GPU: PowerColor ATI Radeon 4890 - Rs.12,198
The Radeon 4890 is the best single GPU card that AMD has to offer in the 4xxx series. There are a whole slew of 4890's available in the market that range from 12K to 17K. This was the best bet. The benchmarks for the 4890 can be read here and here. Any higher GPU power would mean buying a Radeon 5850 for 19K for about 10% extra performance or a crossfire solution that would really bump up the price of the motherboard. Unfortunately there were no Nvidia cards that were competitive at INR prices. Sad for the green team. You can buy the card here.

2. Monitor: Samsung 2233 SW - Rs.8,871
The samsung 2233sw is one of the best monitors rupee for rupee. It has a 16:9 aspect ratio and has a diagonal of 21.5 inches. It is the cheapest full HD monitor, and performs better than any other monitor in the either the same price range or resolution range. The monitor has a clean look. Reviews of this monitor can be read here. Some people may be inclined to purchase a larger monitor. The Samsung P2350 or the BenQ G2412 are excellent 23.5 Inch options but would cost between Rs.2800 and Rs.3000 extra and was out of bounds of the 50K machine. The monitor can be purchased here.

3. Chassis: Cooler Master Elite 335 - Rs. 2,150
A Radeon 4890 and our choice of processors are likely to produce a lot of heat. The CM chassis is spacious, well ventilated and more importantly large enough to accommodate all components without creating any clutter. You do have the option of buying other cases like those from Zebronics or I-ball, but the CM chassis has excellent build quality and comes with a 3 year warranty. There are 2 front side USB ports, audio connectors and a e-sata port. The case can be purchased here.

4. SMPS: iBall Sprinter 600W - Rs.2,877
The Radeon 4890 needs 2 PCIe Power connectors and requires about 200W of power. A high end system running possibly overclocked processors and a few fans would push the system power consumption to about 400W. This would necessitate at least a 550W power supply. My experience tells me to never be a cheapskate when it comes to power supplies. The SMPS can be purchased here

5. HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM - Rs. 2,371
These days a 500 GB disk is par for the course. Despite what people say, all Hdd's are pretty much the same and come with standard warranties. This was the cheapest Hdd I could find and helped me shave off a few hundred rupees to invest in other places.

6. Optical Drive: Samsung DVDRW SATA - Rs. 1,100
Optical Drives are pretty much the same story as HDD's. Any of the major brands ought to do the job. We picked up the cheapest DVD writer from Samsung. It supports all DVD formats and doesn't raise the decibel level too high.

7. Keyboard + Mouse: Microsoft MMKB + Optical - Rs.700
The Microsoft Combo is pretty good to use with it's ergonomic design and pretty well built too, just in case you decide to take out your gaming frustrations on the controls. Logitech offers a similar combo for the same price. So you can take your pick.

8. Speakers: Creative SBS A500 5.1 Speakers - Rs. 2,800
Since the system is intended for gaming and multimedia and HD content, a 5.1 system is a must. The entry level creative system is a decent performer. Admittedly, better speakers could have been included, but we wanted to spend our money elsewhere.

Final Costs:

Intel System : Rs. 51,757
AMD System: Rs. 49,992

These Prices are from websites that sell stuff online(excluding shipping). Odds are that you will find this a bit more expensive in Hyderabad as dealers are pretty much dicks.

I really don't advocate spending any more money on a Desktop. If your needs are slightly different, i.e. you are a casual gamer and still have 50K to throw on a desktop, you could save 4K on the GPU by getting a Radeon 4870, another 1K on the SMPS by getting a zebronics 500W and use the extra 5K to upgrade to a 24" monitor and get some extra HDD space.

Things I bet you didn't know about IIIT'ans :)

2009-09-17T22:15:00.005+05:30

I am rather disappointed that people are not gossip mongering these days. I hope this post encourages other people to do some factual gossip mongering. The following facts are true (afaik) and fun :D

1. It's past the first mid sem and Kulbir Saini is still not officially registered as a masters student. He has also been eating Biryani for 5 days in a row now.

2. Jyothish Soman, A 2nd year masters student working under Kishore Kothapalli on parallel algorithms, has 2 publications. Both are with Abhijit Mitra and are on biology. An ECE student pursuing a MS in CS publishing papers in Bio.

3. IIIT has only 1 student sysadmin now. That is bitgeek. When Zenwalker last asked him to send person X to the compilers lab, bitgeek replied " I'll SCP him to you." Rest assured, our servers are safe.

4. Pranav Kumar Vasishta has not only submitted his Masters thesis but also grades for Gandhi and India. Needless to say both submissions were many semesters late.

5. A certain Mythalez has submitted his PhD thesis. Looks like very soon we will have to announce his arrival with a loud "Gentlemen Dr.Dodo in da house"

Happy Birthday IIIT

2009-09-03T15:30:00.003+05:30

After reading Maroo's post I too have decided to join the bandwagon of writing a b'day post for IIIT. In 2004, foundation day was celebrated properly. Sadly there isn't much hulla this year. I would usually write what we should do and look forward to and some more pranav-ish blah, but I'm deciding against it :) Somebody recently asked by somebody to give me the highlight of each year I spent at IIIT. I think it's a wonderful thing to do.

The best thing from my UG1 days would definitely be all the hell raisin that was done in GHEB. GHEB was a unique hostel. Imagine a completely isolated building with only ug1 guys :) The awesome part was the birthdays. Birthdays starting on one floor would eventually spread to all three floors and end with pepsi/mirinda and cake all over the place. It was the purest chaos I have experienced. Highlight: Birthdays in GHEB

For me second year was about football. I became part of the college team and our batch officially went football crazy. The year ended with an amazing come from behind win against UG2k3 where we came back from 2 goals down to win 3-2. Highlight : Inter-batch football finals

Third year did not start well at all, but we eventually started to get over it. The first half of the year spent frequenting Ohri's for midnight biriyani and also included a certain record 19 slices at the pizza hut iftar meal :O Then came felicity and lots of work. Highlight : Making an amazing new Felicity

My fourth year was not a usual one. I spent more than half of the year in Bangalore doing an intern. I loved the excitement that placements generated but only because i didn't have to sit for them :P . Every day we used to have a bunch of people coming back with big smiles on their faces knowing they now had jobs. I also got a job this year. I became a Sysadmin. It's a job that perhaps entails only abuse from other people but I found it to be an awesome challenge. Highlight : Seeing all my friends getting placed and kicking them in the aftermath :D

My fifth year was all hard work. I got my first publications. And the best thing for me this year has been the why I've been able to run every morning and play. I've managed to lost quite a bit of weight actually (I know it's a drop in the ocean....) Highlight : Writing papers with 3 people from 3 different areas and being the glue that keeps it all together.

This might be over-nostalgic, but it's a neat exercise. I tag SKP, ORB, mythalez, Sultan of Samarkand, @nks, Daka, Turbo, Raina, Bordeaux, Aniket, Maroo, Himank, Zenwalker and Bitgeek to all write similar posts. Some of you could really do with a post :P

Revisiting the Desktop: Part 2 - 40K

2009-08-09T15:41:00.003+05:30

The last post convered building a Gaming oriented desktop for 30K. This post bumps up that budget by another 10K. Lets see what that extra money brings to the table.

1. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 - Rs.8,800
2. Motherboard: Gigabyte Intel G31-ES3G - Rs.3,550
3. Video Card: Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 - Rs.8,800
4. Memory: 4 GB DDR2 - Rs.2,400
5. Hard Drive: 500 GB Sata - Rs.2,700
6. Case: Cooler Master Elite 355 - Rs.2,150
7. SMPS: Zebronics 500W Platinum - Rs.1,850
8. Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW SATA - Rs.1,100
9. Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech Black - Rs.700
10. Monitor : Samsung 2033 SW - Rs.7,500
11. Speakers : Creative SBS 5.1 - Rs.2,800

Grand Total : Rs.42,350

As you can see, I have crossed the 40K limit by 2.3K. The alternatives were to buy a cheaper CPU that would surely bottleneck the ATI 4870 or buy a cheaper GPU. The best GPU in terms of performance below the 4870 is another ATI card the 4850. The price difference is about 2K but the performance differnece is about 40%. No Processor bottleneck is going to reduce that much of a gap. If you do wish to remain below the 40K mark, you can use the E7400 used in the previous build along with a good CPU cooler. BUt as it stands the combo of a E8400 and ATI 4870 is great.

This is a system that has parts that can all be overclocked very nicely. This made it important to buy a Motherboard capable of handling overclocks. A good feature of the Gigabyte board is a redundant bios just in case you scramble the original one.

There is a major upgrade to the chassis and SMPS. The CM elite 355 is spacious and has ample circulation. The ATI 4870 needs two 6-pin power connectors and so it's best to play safe and hence the dedicated 500W SMPS. The rest of the system remains the same as our previous build. Some people would be upset to not have a full HD monitor at the 40K mark. Another 2.5 should upgrade you to the Samsung 2233SW.

So how does this system perform ? Well the GPU is pretty damn awesome. The 4870 can run every game at max settings @1600x900 at 60+ fps provided you ditch the anti aliasing. With this setup you have pretty much bettered every gaming console out there. This is also the last price point where you would have option of buying an additional netbook for mobility. Both of these machines put together would total about 60K. That is perhaps the maximum amount of money you should spend on computers while in college. Next up is part 3 where I push the budget to 50K. AMD fanboys might want to read that one.

Revisiting the Desktop: Part 1 - 30K

2009-08-09T00:59:00.010+05:30

Almost 3 months ago I wrote a post on how much better you could spend your money on a desktop rather than a laptop. Well, if you that was good, wait till you see whats happened to the markets in these 3 months. I will be writing multiple posts on buying desktops at various price points. 30K, 40K, 50K, 60K and finally 70K. These desktops are meant for two things: Gaming and watching movies, coz that's pretty much what we do in IIIT :) Today's post is about building a gaming rig for 30k. Here is what we put in.

1. Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.8GHz - Rs.5,675
2. Motherboard: Asus G31-PK5PL-CM - Rs.2,525
3. Graphics: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Rs.4,300
4. Memory: Kingston 2GB 800MHz DDR2 - Rs.1,850
5. Hard Drive: Western Digital 500GB - Rs.2,700
6. Case + SMPS: Zebronics 400W - Rs.1,500
7.Optical Drive: Sony DVD-RW - Rs.1,100
8.Keyboard+Mouse: Logitech USB KB+Optical Mouse - Rs.700
9.Monitor: Samsung 2033 SW - Rs.7,500
10.Speakers: Creative SBS 5.1 - Rs.2,800

Grand Total : Rs.30,600

In some ways building a PC like this is the hardest thing to do. Most components have to be entry level yet at the same time they shouldn't introduce bottlenecks anywhere into the setup. Lets have a look at some of the components chosen. The processor is a mid range dual core processor. At this price range there isn't much more any processor can get significantly get out of any of the other components. The motherboard is a very bare-bones platform. At this price range motherboards aren't expected to have great overclocking potential or anything. The Asus board has decent expansion options as well as good integrated 8 channel sound.

The choice of GPU is rather straightforward. The competition is blown away by the ATI 4670. The nearest competition from Nvidia costs a good 2K extra. An additional thing working in favor of the ATI 4670 is it's amazingly low power requirement. It doesn't need any external connectors! Just the PCIe interface power suffices. As the card doesn't need any connectors any decent power supply would do. Zebronics offers a decent combo of a cabinet and a 400W PSU.
Choosing a monitor was a tough tough call.There were lots of good deals from LG, Viewsonic and Acer, but in the end getting a 21.5" LCD with a max resolution of 1600x900 for 7.5K is a great deal. The Samsung 2033SW is a steal at such a price.
The rest of the components are very basic. A 500GB HDD from Seagate, 2Gigs of RAM from Kingston, a DVD writer from Sony, and a basic multimedia keyboard and optical mouse combo from Logitech. An entry level 5.1 speaker system from creative completes the list.

To give you in idea of how such a system performs, I benchmarked some games on my lab machine. This system runs a E7200@2.4 GHz, an Asus G31 board, a powercolor ATI 4670, 1 Gig of ram and a 160GB HDD. Surprisingly a 285W PSU seems to drive the system quite well. The monitor has a max resolution of 1440x900. Essentially it's very close to the machine we built with but with slightly lower specs on each component. This is system can handle any modern game at max settings @1440x900(Crysis included) at 45+ frames/second if you turn off Anti Aliasing, Volumetric effects and Specular occlusion. This things are hardly noticeable but can cut your FPS down to half!! Our 30K system is likely to perform 10~15% better due to a better CPU and loading times would be better due to some more RAM.

So there you have it. A 30K desktop that would perhaps smoke any laptop. If you had a budget of 50K, you could spend 30K on such a desktop and buy a netbook like Dell Inspiron Mini-10 for 18K for the sake of the Oh so hyped "Mobility". Coming up in a day or two is Part-2 where I increase the budget from 30K to 40K.

The Best Modern Strike Force

2009-08-08T02:24:00.008+05:30

After Real Madrid beat ManUre 3-1 at the Bernabeu, Sir Alex Ferguson said the the Madrid might have all the big galacticos, but Raul is the true jewel in the crown. That was a team that consisted of Zidane, Figo, Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos, Casillias and more. I think that was the last time the King of Spain was really considered a real threat. True he might have started scoring again (22 and 26 in the last two seasons) but he can no longer lead the line. The years have not been kind to him either. Amazingly the teams he has been used to playing for have found exquisite strikers and it's anybody's guess how long he is going to last.

I first remember reading about Raul before the 1998 world cup. A special edition of the statesman had describe Raul as a brilliant but playboy-ish player. Two Champions league finals later I was convinced of the brilliant part. In fact my admiration for Raul and his fellow Madrid strike partner, was the primary reason for my support for Spain at all major tournaments.

Raul's strike partner was Fernando Morientes. Most people new to football will perhaps always remember Morientes for his poor spell at Liverpool. But for years prior to his disastrous spell at Anfield, Morientes was a striker of undoubted quality, who at times outshone even the great Raul in terms of pure goal scoring statistics. Ironically his greatest influence was while he was on loan at Monaco and virtually single handedly dumped Madrid out of the champions league scoring in both the home and away ties. I still remember watching him score what looked like a consolation goal after Madrid went 3-0 up. It was perhaps the only time the Bernabeu crowd applauded somebody for scoring against Madrid. What has happened to his career afterward is a pity. But he along with Raul will remain one of the great European strikers.
When in their prime this was perhaps the most potent strike force I have ever seen. People may rave about Villa/Torres or Cole/Yorke or Ronaldo/Rivaldo or whatever. For the 5 years that they were the first choice strike pair for Madrid they scored 28,52,46,41 and 47 goals between them. In those 5 seasons Madrid won 3 La Liga titles, 3 Champions Leagues, 3 Spanish Super cups, A UEFA Super Cup and 2 World Club Championships. I don't think there has been a better strike force in the Modern Game. And it is perhaps more than a coincidence that Madrid were no longer the threat they were once considered after the demise of this partnership. True Ronaldo was eventually signed from Inter, but he never formed the kind of partnership with Raul that Morientes had.

Where is the Science in Computer Science??

2009-08-03T22:46:00.004+05:30

I ask this question because Raina writes in her blog about people telling her that science has lost a "devout follower" when she joined IIIT. I wonder why people call us computer scientists. Elecrtical engineers are never call Electrical Scientists or neither are mechanical engineers. So what then have we Computer Scientists done to deserve this honor.

Kannan Srinathan once told me that it is the study of "Theory" that primarily gives computing the status of a science. No other discipline apart from perhaps Mathematics carries notions like "impossibility proofs". No discipline can give you unique insights on what can and cannot be determined(or rather computed) the way the theory of computation does. Theoreticians have given the world amazing results that have even bamboozled the best of mathematicians. It is this power to tell people what they can and cannot do (read as compute) is what is responsible for the word science and computers being spoken in the same breath.

No post of mine is complete unless I wind somebody up. So in the context of what is said above, does it mean that people engaged in pursuing improvements in other areas of computing are not doing science but merely engineering ?

PS. I heard about a rather interesting quote from Churchill. "The best argument against democracy is spending 5 minutes with the average voter".

Breaking news : Rakhi Sawant is squatting on my TV Screen

2009-08-02T23:07:00.004+05:30

Right now I'm staring at a TV where the only thing occupying the news in a country ravaged by poverty, hunger, terrorism and a host of other problems, is Rakhi Sawant. You know other countries have reality TV too, but nobody is nuts like this. You would never see stuff like this on CNN or NBC or even Fox. This is one of those "WTF is the director of news" moments. I'm disgusted and I want my cable TV money back :((

Heart Break

2009-07-31T15:15:00.003+05:30

Of all the players Rafa has signed, Xabi Alonso is perhaps the classiest. There hasn't been a deep lying midfielder that good since perhaps ...... wait !! There hasn't been anybody like Alonso in the EPL! I think the closest person to Alonso in terms of impact is Seedorf at Milan. It'll be sad to see him go. I think Liverpool's chances will leave with Alonso. He was the difference between winning and losing so many times last season.

Despite good reviews I had a paper rejected. I did however have another one accepted but fuck the PC for halving my joy. A big Thank you to K.Kothapalli, Suhail, SKP and PJN for all the kewl work that went into the paper that got accepted. Who ever thought you could mix parallel computing, cryptography and GPU's!! The paper that got pawned was perhaps a victim of some rather shoddy writing on my part. Lesson: never write a paper that is double column, 9pt font and 12 pages long in one day even if you are Shakespeare.

This week I Shall be leaving my home of 17 years at Lab Quarters in Hyderabad. For the ignorant it's a DRDO colony and is an extremely beautiful one at that. We will be shifting to a place nearby. I will miss the lawns and Grounds and Badminton courts and the squash courts and all the pretty girls. No matter where life takes me, it'll always be *the* place I'll call home. I grew up there, met my best friend there, and did a lot of other firsts there too. Alvida.

Today also starts my last semester at IIIT. I think I'll spend this semester doing what I can, to help IIIT. This is a unique place in India, and after a few months when I am gone, I will dearly miss the slow, BC filled tension-less life that IIIT offers. Unlike many others I will not hate this place because of some differences with the people who run the place or their lame ass antics. I will remember IIIT for the friends it gave me and the things it taught me.

PS: Rafa Benitez you snobbish little panzie !! Look what happened when you didn't sign Arshavin, look what happened when you didn't sign Owen. Please Please Please sign Huntelaar. Dont make me sad.

It's that time of the year......

2009-06-17T11:36:00.004+05:30

When the hot shot magazines (who don't understand squat) start to rank colleges. In the last two years I've tried to analyze these "rankings" and make sense (or the lack of it) of them. This year seeing IIIT Hyderabad ranked 16th is rather disappointing and I feel that these rankings are doing prospective students a great disservice by advising them to join places like BHU or some of the NIT's or even VIT ahead of IIIT (Rofl. How can you take a ranking that has VIT as 10th seriously ??)

This post is for those prospective students, wondering why they should join IIIT.

Firstly, from a purely academic point of view, Only the 5 main IIT's i.e. Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras can compete with IIIT in CS. I don't think any faculty member from any institute mentioned in that India Today list would argue with that. IIIT has about 55 full time faculty members and about 20 more visiting + adjunct + Emeritus + blah blah blah faculty members. Each one of these people has a PhD and has significant research contributions even before coming to IIIT. Basically they are bloody damn good. Almost all non-CS/Electronics faculty (Humanities) are borrowed from the Hyderabad Central University (HCU), located just next door. They too are really really good.

Secondly, the quality and amount of research being done at IIIT is simply spectacular( Why would a undergrad bother ?? read on..). In the last academic year, papers from IIIT have been accepted to almost all top venues in CS. These are not some crappy local conferences that I am talking about. I refer to conferences and journals where the history of subjects is being made, the big league, where all the top notch people in the field publish. For those who understand I'm talking about A+ and A level conferences. But that's not the impressive part. Almost 90% of these papers have Undergraduate and Masters students as the prime contributors!! IIIT gives an extraordinary scope to Undergrads to publish at the highest level. I am confident that nobody in India comes anywhere close to IIIT in this regard. In my experience, if you have a quality publication(s), you can pretty much go wherever you want for a MS/PhD. IIIT students getting regular admits to all the top 10 US universities (except Berkley ... somehow nobody applies there) is proof of this being true.

Third, the future prospects after graduating from IIIT are pretty cool. For those interested in placements, IIIT averaged about 7.2 LpA for the 2008 batch (about 140 people. Includes B.Tech, M.Tech and MS) and 5.3 LpA for the 2009 Batch (about 160 people) All IT companies that visited the IIT's came here too. Not bad considering whats going on with the job market right now. As for MS/PhD admits abroad, IIIT has the faculty that a) Will help you do enough work to get noticed b) Give you a recommendation that will seal the deal. The reach of IIIT faculty members extends to cover all universities of any significance. Basically IIIT will give you all the tools to work and the faculty to push you to your "dream" admit.

Fourth, the Alumni network. You know your college alumni is doing well when you step into any google/microsoft/amazon/adobe/yahoo/cisco/(endless list) office and cant walk 5 steps without meeting an alumni. You know your alumni is doing well when half the people coming to conduct campus intervies on behalf of these companies are alumni themselves. You know your alumni is doing well when you know that there will be some IIIT student in the university where you are going to join a graduate program. Keep in mind that only 8 batches have graduated from IIIT thus far. Imagine what things would be 15..20...25 years from now.

And now what can you expect to find at IIIT by the way of facilities ? Well this isn't a glitzy glamorous college. IIIT as an institute, has a philosophy of simple living. And that's just how the campus culture is too. Facilities are a mixed bag. Basic facilities like hostels are very good and are much better compared to most of the IIT's. Don't expect any VIT/Manipal style AC hostels. Messes are decent. The canteen is rather average, but that has more to do with the subways and dominos and the likes that surround the college. Recreation facilities are rather limited. A Swimming pool, a gym, a basketball court, volleyball, TT and a Football ground is pretty much all you have. I personally find it rather lame.
Computing resources are again a mixed bag. Large portions of the hostels have WiFi as the only network. It's good for browsing but not really good for movies and LAN gaming. But once you are on a wired network, it's smooth sailing. IIIT is unique in that there is unrestricted internet/LAN access. The labs are pretty cool. They stock some of the nicest hardware around. In that respect IIIT is pretty good.

To summarize IIIT: If you want to study and learn, come to IIIT. There is no equal in India period. If you are more interested in other pursuits, especially extra curricular activities you might end up disappointed here. IIIT is yet to evolve beyond academics. I personally don't see a student having to make any significant concessions by being at IIIT. The only limiting factor for a student here is his/her motivation.

And as far as the rankings go, I don't consider IIIT to be an "Engineering college" per se. IIIT has a specific focus on Computer Science and IT and offers no other dimensions as of now. As far as computer science is concerned IIIT is a unique center of excellence. IIIT has 24 research centers that work on core computing and it's applications. If somebody were to rank CS courses in India, IIIT would be far ahead of the rest (including the IIT's) by a mile. But CS alone doesn't constitute an Engineering college. The diversity on offer at the IIT's is truly wonderful. Perhaps IIIT would catch up in a decade or two. Rankings take a lot of stuff into account. An institute that offers only CS and Electronics as courses can't and shouldn't compete for rankings with other places that offer courses ranging from electrical to mechanical to aerospace to marine engineering. That said, I am of the opinion that you should give up a seat at IIIT Hyderabad only for a seat in CS/ECE/Mech/Chem in the 5 Main IIT's. You are likely to regret any other choice you make. Not now, but perhaps while in your 4th year or after you graduate. That doesn't mean other options are bad or anything. It is always ultimately down to the individual. All I'm saying is that IIIT would give you a most competent platform to excel.

PS: Please don't write any hate comments.

80 Million Pounds

2009-06-11T17:51:00.003+05:30

The first Champions league final I watched was in 2000 when Real Madrid played Valencia. It was a classy performance by madrid. My then favorite player McManaman scored a goal and Redondo made what was the best move in a CL final till Zidane struck the sweetest of volley two years later. I watched madrid win again with their "Galacticos" in 2002. Both these teams had good attacking players but even better defenses. Madrid had Hierro and Helguera at center half and Roberto Carlos and Salgado as full backs. Makelele used to sit in front of them like a rock. Fast forward to 2009. Madrid have the worlds best central midfielder Kaka (zidane then) and winger Ronaldo (figo then). But at the back they have Cannavaro, Pepe and Metzelder all of whom can be described as bullshit. The only really quality players that madrid have at the back are Casillas and Sergio Ramos (for whom defending is an afterthought).

Looks like Senor Perez has learned nothing in his years out. The Galacticos were quite good for a few years. Then one fine night they sold both Hierro and Makelele. And that was the end of that. Madrid have still not recovered from that sale. In hindsight the sale of Makelele to Chelsea was one of the defining moments of World football in this decade, much like Fergie talking Keane into joining ManUre.

As for Ronaldo, he will be a big miss at ManUre. I think Ronaldo's greatest contribution to ManU was to be able to absolutely demolish mid table and lower teams. Don't get me wrong, Ronaldo is a fantastic player, but he was most effective in "taking out the trash". I can remember him winning at least 4 matches this term (Villa, Blackburn,Porto and some other game i don't remember), where ManU were drifting, with just one brilliant swing of his boot. ManU will miss him next season and that is just the start of their problems. ManU look to be losing Tevez as well. Hargreaves looks to be done and dusted and Giggs, Scholes and Neville are not 25 anymore. ManU have 4 world class players. Rooney, Ronaldo, Ferdinand and Vidic. Without Ronaldo that's a pretty lightweight midfield. A midfield of Fletchers and Carricks and Parks and 35 year old Giggs and Scholes is not going to threaten the likes of Gerrard-Masch-Alonso or Lampard-Essien-Ballack. Up front Berbatov seems to have his issues and wants to leave (Will he be allowed?) Fergie has his task cut out.

Onto Liverpool and Rafa Benitez is in a spot of bother. He has assembled the best Liverpool team since the days of King Kenny, and he cant spend a pound because to utterly incompetent Yanks have screwed up. What a pity. I think he might get to sign a player but not more than that. Actually Liverpool really only need one player and that is somebody to partner Torres. Rafa missed great chance to fill that void when he failed to sign Arshavin(apparently Liverpool's interest was what took Arsenal so long to finish a deal with Zenit). He has come to regret that 4 times in 90 mins already last season. If I were Rafa I'd be closely looking at a certain Ruud Van Nistelrooy's situation at Madrid. He might be a good bargain. So might Michael Owen or Trezeguet and even perhaps a look at Saviola. What's clear is that there will be no Torres like signings this year. It'll have to be bargain shopping. I'm also happy Liverpool didn't sign Gareth Barry. He's crap and nowhere near as good as the pass-master Alonso.

PS. A post after a long time. Feels good to write about football.

The Privilege of Teaching

2009-05-14T01:17:00.003+05:30

This year I had the privilege of being a TA for two UG courses. Data Structures and Algorithms. I am a rather unusual case. I have not had the best academic records through my UG curriculum, but have developed pretty well albeit quite late. I think the rigors of the dual degree program forced me to work very hard and improve myself. This TAship has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my stay at IIIT till date. How well I have done is for UG groups A1 and A2 to decide.

I must admit I was very nervous and rather skeptical of my abilities to teach what could be considered IIIT's premier course for UGs. A few words from K.Srinathan before the first lab I took gave me a lot of confidence. Piyush also told me not to worry and it would turn out to be just fine. To walk into a class with 60~70 people staring at you, waiting for you to give the class direction is a daunting task. The fear of screwing up or worse teaching something wrong was a very big concern for me in the first few classes. I used to prepare for 3~4 hours for a lab and perhaps even more for a tutorial (I later discontinued tutorials for my group but more on that some other time). I think this year has been particularly challenging for the TA's as there is a new curriculum, and a lot of new topics were taught in the DS course. On some occasions, some of the things we were teaching was stuff we had not studied. This made for an even tenser situation. However something Abhilash said, calmed me down at the time, quite a bit. He said that no matter who the TA is and how good or bad they do, the DS course is always kind of on auto pilot. At the time i was relieved as I was assured that UG1 can be sand boxed from any failures that I may be responsible for. In hindsight I find that to be sad because, I believe that TA's can have a fundamental contribution to the course and despite having some wonderful talents among the 3/4/5 years if we are not able to influence a DS course it is a tragedy.

In my opinion, that was not the case. During each lab session I found myself challenged by some or the other student who wanted to implement a particular DS or solve a problem in a completely new way. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by how good a lot of ug1 students are. The way they responded to the last assignment we posted was extraordinary. I was also very impressed by the the assignments Abhilash produced. The assignment set this year was in my opinion was one of the best sets produced during my stay. GG Abhilash.

Over the years, I have always believed that knowing a subject well enough is necessary and sufficient to be a good teacher. Based on my experiences this year, I can confirm that the sufficiency case is false. To be a good teacher requires a unique ability to communicate and get through to people. My experiences have helped me develop a new found admiration for those people who are blessed with the ability to teach well. It is indeed a rare gift.

I hope I do get to interact with UG1 again. It is hard work, but it's also an unmatched satisfaction. To work with some of the best and the brightest truly is a privilege.

Is the desktop dead ?

2009-04-25T03:02:00.009+05:30

In recent years I have seen almost everybody buy laptops. People have kind of lost track of what it is to have a desktop and the power it brings to the table(no pun intended). With people spending as much as 55~60K on laptops with crappy CPU's and GPU's and virtually no possibility for any meaningful expansion, I wonder if they are making the right choice. This post is a must read for those people planning to buy new machines over the summer.

So is the desktop dead ? NO NO NO not in your wildest dreams. In 60k you could buy a desktop that can easily outperform the best laptops money can buy for the next 5 years. So what do we put into this PC ? And what does it have to do ? Simple. You need to be able to watch movies, play games and be microsoft proof :O. Here is what I'm putting in.

1. Processor : Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700@ 2.6 GHz : Rs.9,000
2. CPU Cooler : OCZ Vanquisher + Arctic Silver(5gms) : Rs.1,500
3. Motherboard : MSI P6N-SLI-V2 : Rs.5,500
4. Graphics : Nvidia GTX 275(palit): Rs.1,7000
5. Memory : 2x2GB OCZ Gold : Rs.3,000
6. HDD : 2xSeagate 500GB Raid-0 : Rs.6,000
7. Cabinet : Zebronics Antibiotic : Rs.2,150
8. SMPS : CoolerMaster RP 600 : Rs.3,450
9. Optical drive : DVD writer : Rs.1,200
10. KB+Mouse:Cordless Logitech/M$ : Rs.1,500
11. Monitor : Samsung 2233sw - 22" 1080p : Rs.10,000

Grand Total : Rs.60,300 (All these prices are current prices in CTC, Secunderabad)

Some of the stuff put in looks really weird. Let me explain everything.

1. Processor and the 2. Cooler : This desktop is being built for both multimedia and gaming. While a higher clocked dual core will most likely be slightly better at gaming, a quad core would decimate it in any sort of multimedia apps. For those wondering what arctic silver is, it's a cooling compound - that shiny paste you find on the back of the CPU cooler. Arctic silver is damn effective. My laptop's CPU was getting really hot. I had idle temperatures of around 61'C. I purchased a 3 gram AS pack and opened my laptop up and put it on. Now the idle temperature is 36'C. Awesome!! So a OCZ cooler and Arctic Silver will easily allow you to overclock the processor to about 3.2 GHz. I think that's as far as you can go on air based cooling. @ 3.2GHz you can pretty much remove any significant CPU bottlenecks.

3. Motherboard : Why an SLI board and that too such an old one ? Well this board is the best bang for the buck. Intel boards with the same features are just as expensive. I went for this board as it has a better RAID controller and an extra PCIe slot . And I have something special planned for this slot. Stick in a low end card like a GeForce 8600 and use it for PhysX or CUDA :)

4. Graphics : The GTX 275 is about 6% slower then the GTX 285 and costs a good 7K less. Plus the power consumption is about 40% lower. The 275 beats all the cards in the same price range i.e. the GTX260 and the Radeon4890 by quite some distance. This pick was a no brainer.

5. Memory : You really don't need more then 4 Gigs of memory for anything. OCZ modules are a bit expensive but they have lifetime warranty and if you are interested, can be easy to overclock!

6. HDD : I used two HDD's instead of one, so that I could set them up in raid-0. The effective throughput is at least 60% higher. So if you get 70 MB/s transfer rates with one disk, a Raid-0 configuration would give you about 110 MB/s. It means significantly lower load times, and faster seeking in those high def videos that masked-menace downloads :). If you share a lot of data in DC++, your HDD's will experience lesser wear and tear as well.

7. Cabinet : With a GTX275 and CPU cooling you need to have a large and well ventilated cabinet. The zebronics antibiotic has 3 large fans, a temperature display and loads of front ports. Plus did I mention it's got custom lighting and it's transparent :O

8. SMPS : Most people never buy an SMPS seperately. But his desktop needs one. A GTX275, Overclocked quad core, SLI motherboard, and 2 HDDS need a lot of power. Coolermaster's SMPS' are awesome and 600W insures you against all future GPU/SLI upgrades

9. Optical drive : Buy whatever you want. It's all the same shit.

10. KB+mouse : You could buy a cheaper option but I like using cordless stuff.

11. Monitor : This was a no brainer. The Samsung 2233SW is a 22 inch full HD (1920x1080) monitor. DCR 15000:1 and response time of 5ms. And it looks really really nice. It's a steal at it's price.

I am missing a speaker set :( I could save Rs.600 by buying ordinary RAM Modules, Save about Rs.500 by buying a 1TB instead of 2x500 GB, save about Rs.700 by buying a cheaper KB/Mouse combo, and about Rs.1500 by using a cheap local SMPS. That's about Rs.3300, enough to get you a creative 5.1 system. In my opinion - Buy the speakers later. It's not worth making any of those sacrifices. Thats pretty much it. In 60K you get a machine that

# Plays all present days games @ Full settings @ 1920x1080 >60 FPS (except crysis@35fps)
# Watch Full HD movies on a 22inch screen
# Has expansion space to put in another GFX card/4GB RAM/4 more HDD's
# And puts the current best machine in CVIT to shame (This is the best part :P)

So do you you still want to spend 60,000 on a laptop that's going to be a useless old piece of plastic, incapable of running anything other then PAC-man in 2.5 years time ??

PS. Desktop Prices fall @ 1% every month. By the time you get back from your holidays, this same system would cost 57,500. You could get yourself speakers with the extra cash :)

Why the three political fronts can kiss my vote goodbye

2009-04-13T20:05:00.002+05:30

I read an interesting post by Sukesh about who he would vote for and why. I have thought about writing a post about the same for quite some time but somehow it didn't come along.

I will not vote for the Congress(UPA) because
I hate their minority appeasement crap. India is a country with a majority Hindu population. I think India should learn to live with it. There are minorities all over the world, but nowhere is there such a hue and cry as their is in India about them. We talk so much about minorities and caste and stuff like that, that even if a person wants to forget that he is a minority or from a lower caste ,every election year the likes of the Congress and the BSP go out of the way to remind people that they are downtrodden and neglected even if they aren't. The congress has announced loads of scholarships for minorities and backward castes. Why should a upper class person not be eligible for them? Poverty is the same for everybody: Hindu or Muslim, upper class or backward class. Clearly our present government seems to have forgotten that. Also the UPA government has perhaps done irreversible damage to the IIT/IIM system by opening the floodgates to all sorts of undeserving people. Plus the way the new IIT's have been setup and are functioning has to be a scandal. Pulling shit like this pisses me off to the core.

I will not vote for the BJP(NDA) because
Whenever and wherever the BJP comes to power we are suddenly faced with morons like the ones that vandalised a pub in Mangalore and attacked women. I have no idea what divine right, the BJP and it's more hardcore right wing elements feel they have, to be the custodians of Indian Culture. We have had such incidents all over India where couples in a park were attacked and every year we are bored to death by the antics of these so called "Standard bearers of Indian Culture" on valentines day. I wonder where Indian culture allows mobs to beat up women and young couples. I wish that these people were sent some more pink chaddis every year. Honestly these antics of the BJP's more orthodox parts scare the living hell out of me and is perhaps the only reason why most people do not vote for the BJP. Educated young India doesn't care about Ram-Raj. They want jobs and housing and health care and education. Not temples.

I will not vote for the left(the third Front) because
I am personally really scared of communists. Worldwide communists have this policy of "you are either with us or against us". Commies will argue otherwise but history will tell you that once the communists have got control of a country they never let go. They then set out to mercilessly kill any opposition. Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Kim Jong Il's North Korea and Castro's Cuba(the official line is Socialism) are all fine examples.In India 30 years of communist rule in West Bengal has reduced a state once the Jewel of India to underdeveloped, corrupt state where a company cannot setup shop without being hassled by the goonda like trade unions. The situation in Bengal is so bad that unless you are a proper CPI(M) cadre member you can virtually kiss any sort of government employment goodbye. The shit in that state runs much deeper and is a topic for a book. Their anti-West, anti-Globalisation stances are at times just for the sake of it. Their behaviour on the nuclear deal was also rather immature. The bottom line: I don't want to pay any taxes to a communist regime.

And while I am at it, I would like to drop a line for the Honorable member of Parliament from Hyderabad Mr. Asaduddin Owaisi from the Majlis-e-Ittihaddul Muslimeen(MIM) whose offices are a stones throw away from my house. During the Post nuclear deal trust vote Owaisi sahab said that he would vote for the UPA govt. as he would vote for the party that best helped the uplift of Muslims. Well Mr.Owaisi I thought that you would vote for the Govt. that would best help in the uplift of your constituency at the very least. Seeing as that you don't care about the Non-Muslims around even in your constituency, you can kiss my vote goodbye too.

Will I vote for the Lok Satta or the TDP or even an Independent ? Well the answer is an emphatic NO. I tried 4 times to get a Voter ID made. Alas all those attempts failed. I have no voter ID and have no mention in the Electoral rolls. Whats more interesting is that my parents names too have vanished from the electoral rolls. Looks like the Election commission of India has decided for me that my vote really doesn't matter. I wish I could find those bickering Election Commissioners and give them the walloping they deserve for leaving me and perhaps many more lakhs of legitimate voters our of the rolls.

Too much spare time!

2009-04-13T19:56:00.003+05:30

Inspiron 1705e, shot on location at Zenwalker's room by Gaganpreet. All laptops appearing here were older then one year and were out of warranty at the time of filming.

The one with the horrible mails

2009-04-07T20:26:00.004+05:30

I was reading this today and was left with a really big WTF look on my face. I then thought of putting up some awesome(er) mails to remind the alumni what they are missing out on :P

Mail 1

Sub:[Students] Reg:Kriya in yoga tomorrow morning

blah blah blah ...

But tomorrow, sir is going to teach new technique in yoga that is "kriya"
means cleaning of abdomen and stomach by drinking a bucket of water.

It will be, first driking of water as much as you can and doing some yog
and leaving the water out and again drinkng water like that the cycle will
be repeted till white water comes out of us. it will be nice experience.

blah blah blah ...

Mail 2

Sub: True Freedom

Too long to post here. Yet another one of those "Huh!! you talking to me ....WTF are you talking about, please don't put me through this, no stop ......noooooooooooo" reaction evoking mails

Mail 3

Sub: NOT IMPORTANT

Dear BTP PROJECT STUDENTS ( e.g. Arpit Jain )

Today, we have faculty meeting from 3 PM onwards.

Thus I will be in the LTRC conference room from

3 PM to atleast 4.30 PM.

YOU CAN LEAVE THE BTP REPORTS IN MY
MAIL BOX ON THE GROUND FLOOR

I am on LEAVE TOMORROW i.e. 5th March.

WIth Regards,
XXXXXXXXXX

I had to have one mail from XXXXXXXXX. He has been in scorching form this sem. And yes Arpit was indeed a fine example for many days after that mail :)

Mail 4

The background- 2 people were "exchanging ideas" on a SE assignment, and copied their drafts from a IM window. Unfortunately they also copied their chat by mistake and uploaded it. Their transgression was made public to the batch in a mail by the TA. Original post by BullzY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sub: A submission
From: The perennial Software Engg. TA

Mx. X: thr
Mr. X is busy.
Mr. X: ?
Mr. Y: haan
Mr. X: abe idhar aaja ek assnmnt mil gaya hai
Mr. Y: abey ek assnmnt hai mere paas dede wo
Mr. X: usko edit kar dete hain jaldi
Mr. Y: mix kar doonga manish: tym ni bacha
Mr. Y: abey mixing aasaan hai rather editing
Mr. X: thik

well, mr. X and Mr. Y tried to act smart. But forgot that last minute work
makes us more prone to errors + makes us answer questions that we never
asked.

Now, Mr. X and Mr. Y, you know who you are and we also know who you are.
So both are requested to meet me asap before we decide to give a F grade.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and when the TA sent the mail, the TA forgot to remove the attachment that X and Y had originally sent them, consequently revealing the identities of X and Y. Well... we do learn from our TA's don't we :O

PS.1 This post was inspired by sarika's last 2 posts with some awesome mails!! Way to go BullzY
PS2. Naming posts like friends episodes in completely legal.

The one with the arbit things

2009-03-30T04:17:00.003+05:30

I have not written a post since god knows how long. I could blame this on the standard guinea pig for all postponed tasks: research, but I will not. Yes I'm lazy.

I have been at home for the last 3 days and it gave me some time to catch up with the news. I think it's become fashionable for politicians to get arrested and have a shit load of cases filed against them. Also I find most political parties to be lame. I am also really pissed with the TDP spamming my phone inbox with loads of unsolicited SMS's. Grrrrr

I will now step into more pleasant territory :D Liv 4-0 Madrid, ManU(re) 1-4 Liverpool, Liverpool 5-0 Villa. w0000000000t!!! I must admit I have never seen Liverpool play this well. I must also admit that I have never seen Madrid or ManU(re) or Villa play that bad. I think Benitez is trying to build a team that will outdo everybody just on brute physical presence and pace. Not a bad ploy. I just hope Villa can get something out of their ManU(re) game so that the league really opens up.

While at home I have been downloading DVD rips of SouthPark. It is the most awesome series I have ever watched. Watching it in high quality all over again is great fun. (Yes ORB, you can take all 12 seasons in DVD quality, in exchange for your PS3 :P)

I also played my last competitive role in the IIIT football team. I have been part of 2 great football teams. Firstly our batch team and secondly the 2007 IIIT team. It has ben awesmoe to play with talented people like Raja, K.Rahul, S.Rahul, Shukla, Kochar,PP, Rakesh,Kabir, Abhilash etc.. I will miss playing with you fellows. It's also good that the present 2nd years like Adhyan,Yasir and Parikshit have been playing in the college team for some time now. I hope Satish can lead them to better things next year.

PS1. I wrote my first research paper this year !!!!
PS2. The new sysadmins are being kept really busy by the server room staff :O
PS3. I loved Button and Barrichello finishing on the Podium for BrawnGP. New life to F1
ps4. I hope Sachin scores some 2nd innings runs today

A draft

2008-11-07T01:12:00.004+05:30

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!

A Nvidia GeForce GPU reborn

2008-11-05T11:48:00.006+05:30

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 :(

Chandrayan

2008-10-22T17:58:00.004+05:30

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

The Truth about Pranav Kumar Vasishta

2008-10-13T23:09:00.006+05:30

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.

Rats

2008-10-11T19:34:00.002+05:30

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 .............

Arbit Post

2008-08-25T01:57:00.004+05:30

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

Where does nVidia go after the 4870x2?

2008-08-22T20:35:00.003+05:30

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.

Why IIIT will not have 50 PhD's anytime soon

2008-08-18T04:07:00.004+05:30

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.

Of reservations and Arjun Singh

2008-07-31T10:27:00.003+05:30

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.

Building a Gaming Rig in 60K

2008-07-24T10:56:00.003+05:30

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!!

What Dual Degree has meant for me

2008-07-09T23:39:00.003+05:30

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.

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 :(

What DD has meant for me personally

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.

Zidane Vs Ronaldinho Vs Ronaldo

2008-06-25T10:56:00.009+05:30

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

2008-06-24T13:31:00.005+05:30

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

2008-06-20T18:52:00.002+05:30

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

2008-06-13T11:00:00.005+05:30

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

2008-06-10T11:55:00.006+05:30

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!

2008-06-05T15:05:00.003+05:30

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

2008-06-01T16:33:00.003+05:30

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.

Have your say about the IIIT Network!

2008-05-30T15:43:00.005+05:30

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

2008-05-24T19:45:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-24T18:18:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-21T16:05:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-17T20:55:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-14T17:19:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-13T18:16:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-08T01:31:00.000+05:30

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

2008-05-05T02:30:00.000+05:30

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 :)

A tale of two rankings Part-1

2007-06-18T03:42:00.000+05:30

The Two rankings, one by India Today and another by DQ has brought out the hidden debaters in all of us. It's good to debate but introspection is also something we need to do after reading such rankings. India today ranked us the lower so lets see it's criterion and what it means for us.

Reputation: We rank 15 when comes to the reputation of the college. This is a weird and ambiguous parameter. So i'm not really bothered about this.

Curriculum: We rank 14 when it comes to curriculum. Honestly this is a bit harsh. However we do have some issues with the curriculum. HSSM's though necessary are not being conducted well. And some of the open electives are in my opinion totally abstract. Form this year forth PCO's will not be available either. Our curriculum was designed to be flexible to encourage maximum learning. But sadly course selection is driven by grades and not by learning or interests. So people end up skipping a lot of good courses in their B.Tech.

Faculty: We rank 14th in Faculty. Ok, now the India today guys must have been smoking crack when they thought of this one! For the sake of being critical the ECE faculty on the whole is not as good as the CSE faculty. As for CSE we still lack good faculty for certain core courses like OS and SE. But that apart i think we have some of the best faculty in the country.

Student care: We rank 13. Now this parameter is slightly ambiguous. I really dont understand what it means. Im guessing it roughly means campus life. Well to be honest campus life has been improving on certain fronts but seems to be going down on others. We seem to have more frequent events like carnivals and this years felicity had better student participation then previous editions. But I dont think inter batch relations are as good as they were when i joined the college.

Admission Procedure: We rank 14th which is really absolutely amazing! If I ever meet anybody form India Today i'll give him or for that matter anybody a 1000 bucks if he/she can justify this ranking. How can IIIT-A which takes people from the same exam and starts admission when we are about to close be ranked above us by 5 places! This is the joke of the century

Infrastructure: We rank 13th here. This is one place where I tend to agree with our ranking to some extent. Leave aside our WLAN and lets compare ourselves with other colleges. Just some time ago I read a post by somebody with pics of lizards/rats/insects etc. First and second year people live two in a room which i think is really too much by any stretch of imagination. The mess is too expensive and the food is generally not upto the mark. The canteen is ok but you cant eat there for any extended period of time. To be honest apart from the gym and the TT tables there isint a single piece of remotely decent sporting infrastructure in the campus. Considering this is a residential college that is really bad. And this has been the case for a decade now. As for computers, the institute can surely provide us with better and more computers. However by making laptops compulsory they have solved this problem and created another. The LAN both wired and wireless need a serious overhaul. This can go on and on..

Placement: We rank 15 th when it comes to placements. DQ rates us 5th. I was rather shocked when i read GAG Jaydev's mail which said somthing that despite placement not being a priority for the college we are still 5th. @Dr.Sanghal Dear sir, people aren't coming here attracted to research prospects. They come here because the placements have been decent up untill now. For a 12th class kid going to join a B.tech program research is a meaningless word. The sooner the administration comes to terms with this fact of life the better for all concerned!

The rankings were done in two parts. The data for all the above parameters was collected independently(75% weightage) and from the college as well(25% weightage) The data collected form the colleges directly was called factual data. If collages were to ranked based on what data they provided to India today IIIT would be ranked 24th among the top 25 collages listed. This means that Mr.Placement officer/Brand Manager royally screwed up. When I first saw that statistic I felt like venting my anger at him by torturing him like a prisoner of war only to later realise that it's useless to expect something from him.

Hostel Swyamsevak

2007-03-23T02:14:00.000+05:30

I have a few questions....

Who is "Hostel Swyamsevak" ? At first i thought ...hmmmmm the hostel wing of the RSS, I then remembered that we aren't supposed to be affiliated to any political body(For those who say RSS is not political oh phaleeeez)

I saw Piyush Jain putting up the "Save Electricity" posters. So is he the only "Hostel Swayamsevak" right now?? Whatever be the case it's a good initiative.

I don't think the OBH has a higher elec. bill because we dont swith off our lights/fans etc.Here's my logic.

1.OBH has more geysers then NBH/BHEB/GH put together
2.There more heaters(to make Maggi :D ) in the OBH as compared to the rest.
3. There are definately more coolers in the OBH
4.Majority of people staying in the NBH/GHEB are 1 year and PG students. They dont stay in their rooms most of the day unlike the 3rd/4th years of the OBH who laze around in their rooms all day long.
5. Most people in the OBH have desktops that stay on longer and consume more power as compared to the laptop users (1st Year/2nd Year/pg) of the NBH/GHEB

While I appreciate the initiative taken by the "Hostel Swayamsevaks" to encourage power savings I just hope that we dont have paranoid Swayamsevaks in the future who go from room to room trying to find out who's wasting power, and then report them to the authorities :D

PS1. Was murdered in the SE presentation by some M.Tech girl in Shishir's group. Grrrrrrrr
PS2.I heard some girl walked out after watching some of the "special Fx" in 300. Too bad for her :D
PS3. The canteen guy is an asshole.
PS4.It's hot on the 3rd floor need to buy a cooler

The end of The O.C.

2007-02-24T01:55:00.000+05:30

From what I can understand The O.C. has come to an end with episode 416. I'm sad coz the oc was the first drama series I ever watched and it's brilliance inspired me to watch more stuff. It had a really good cast, good story lines and perhaps the best music ever heard on television. Admittedly season 4 wasn't as good as previous seasons and cut-throat competition for ratings in the US have forced the show to shut down. I will miss hearing the familiar Tu ru ru ru - Tu ru ru ru ....Tu ru ru tu ru ru california here we come......right back where we started from........

PS: Day one of Felicity was really good. Congratulations to everybody involved for a lovely fun day. Looking forward to day two :)

unReal MAD-rid

2007-02-07T02:35:00.000+05:30

This is a football related post. For the uninformed Real Madrid has not won a single trophy for the last 3 and a half years. Sunday night I watched Madrid Vs Levante and after that osasuna Vs Barca. The difference in class between Madrid & Barca was just too evident. And no matter how many coaches Madrid hire and fire they always seem to be struggling. The reason is pretty simple. Look at two starting lineups of madrid. One is sundays game and the other is a champions league quarterfinal game with ManU at old trafford almost exactly 4 years ago.

The most interesting thing is that the lineup for last sundays game is madrid's first choice lineup. Comparing the teams on the left and the right the difference in class is sooooo obvious. The midfield of Zidane,Figo,McManaman and makelele won madrid 2 champions leagues,2 spanish leagues and a a uefa super cup. In this period madrid were so good that even they way barca play today with ronaldinho, messi, deco, giuly etc...they would have most probably been murdered.I know people will disagree with that statement but people who would have watched madrid's matches during that time would agree with me.

Madrid kept selling good players or players retired or they became too old and they never replaced them. No replacement was found for either Hierro(retired)or carlos or helguera or salgado who are all 33+. No replacement was found for makelele or zidane or figo or McManaman. Morientes and Eto were also sold. Madrid's last decent signing was Michael Owen who did really well to score 18 goals from about 30 apperances. Apparently that wasn't good enough and he was also sold!

But the biggest mistake was to sack Vicente Del Bosque. In 4 years incharge at real madrid he won 2 champions leagues and reached the semi-final twice,won 3 Spanish leagues,2 Spanish cups , 2 super cups and the world club cup. And he was fired because the then president thought that del Bosque wasn't good enough for the future!!

I feel kind of sad because I used to enjoy the brand of football Madrid used to play. No team plays like that anymore. All teams now depend on one or two individuals to provide creativity. With the old madrid you never knew who the threat was. Even defenders like carlos and Hierro were regular scorers. It think it was pretty much the "Total Football" of the modern era.

My Vista Experience

2007-02-03T01:25:00.000+05:30

I Installed Vista on my system.(Thank you FireFox for the assistance :D)

Pros: 1. Vista definately looks better
2. I Somehow have shared video memory (only with vista :D) Now I have 512 MB of video Memory
3.Booting is faster(unexpected surprise)
4.Ram Boost really works but you need a flash drive 4 times the size of your ram to make it work properly. With 1GB ram and a 4gb flash rive i got a performance equivalent to 2 Gb ram
5.Media player 11 is reasonable
6.System tools are much better organized and powerfull(read as linux like :P)

Cons: 1.Vista is a resource hog. Minimum requiremnts are too high
2.Degraded gaming performance. Now this might be down to the drivers but i have the latest nVidia drivers for vista. Generally there was a 10%-20% drop in FPS for most games I tried(q4,fear,nfs-c,bf2). You can expect this problem to go away as better drivers come out
3.OS occupies too much disc space. Xp took about 1.5 Gb. Vista takes 7.5 Gb !
4.Indexing is crap. It occupies a lot of space(2 gb), memory (about 20 mb) and is totally unintelligent.

My Verdict- Most of us don't have systems that can run vista properly. By properly i mean avoiding long delays to do simple stuff. If you want to run vista properly make sure you have
1. DVD Rom(for installation :D)
2. Atleast 1 GB ram
3.GeForce 6/7/8 or ati X1000 (integrated graphics suk big time)
4. Vista Drivers for your Hardware(although vista does support a lotta stuff better to have drivers supplied by your manufacturer)
5. And yes of course the crack :P

Please leave your vista experiences/questions as comments :)

Readboard wars!

2007-01-25T02:32:00.000+05:30

The following portion of the readboard(the relevent posts have been put together) has created quite a stir....enjoy

Saini @ 10:43:06 24:01 : Vivah Making of Movie and Music added in movies/vivah folder..

poiuytrewq1 @ 12:01:45 24:01 : @saini are u fucking retarded ??

sid1 @ 12:07:20 24:01 : @saini what the fuck man ?

Saini @ 12:18:44 24:01 : ..Fine that is my last addition then..

matrix1211 @ 12:28:07 24:01 : @saini if you are going to download such shit , then Thank GOD ur going to stop wasting bandwidth

KhanBhai @ 23:07:49 24:01 : @sid1 and matrix1211 ..... assholes...who ya think you r...if somestuff is being download

KhanBhai @ 23:08:28 24:01 : add2board thn is it a pain in your ass...if fuckers you r so much worried abt the bandwid

KhanBhai @ 23:09:13 24:01 : then ya don't you fuckers take up the responsibility and lets see for how long you ppl get

sid1 @ 23:34:37 24:01 : @khanbhai there's a limit to what nonsense you can download ..

sid1 @ 23:36:53 24:01 : what ppl are downloading now is more like shit piling up all over the place ..

Saini @ 23:47:15 24:01 : @sid1 who r you to define the limits..

Yippeeee_:) @ 23:54:54 24:01 : ppl plzz calm down :) ...... let ppl download wat they want to

Saini1 @ 00:02:16 25:01 : @yippieee thanks dude but it's his fault who started all this ..he must have controlled h

Saini1 @ 00:03:00 25:01 : Yaa fir shuru se ghar walon yehi language sikhayi hai usko..

15.26 @ 01:04:08 25:01 : if u download shit keep it to urself and shut the FUCK up

15.26 @ 01:04:54 25:01 : if you stop downloading garbage then someone else will start downloading

15.26 @ 01:05:12 25:01 : so pls STFU and stop and i will start downloading stuff

Here is iv's response(i think it was iv's response. correct me if i'm wrong):With all due respect to the downloaders ... such situations (read the board for more details) rarely used to come up a few years ago. While I may not speak for the majority, it'd be very nice if YOU chaps (people who download - Saini, maskedmeance, firefox etc) could atleast discuss amongst yourself before downloading anything and everything that you find. DF on 14.6 was initially started for this purpose (and for BC :D).

Question 1: Why would anybody for the love of humanity download "The making of vivah" and then post it on the readboard??
Question2:Cant we remove stuff from the readboard
Question3:How can we decide what to download and what not to??

PS1. I lost in a badminton tournament again :(
PS2. I have a really bad throat
Ps3. I have decided to attend a jivan vidya shivir sometime before i pass out. Lets find out what all the commotion is about :)

A post long due

2007-01-22T13:30:00.000+05:30

I last blogged on 17th oct 2006. Now that was a long time ago. I didn't post because i thought there was too much to pos about and if i started i would never end.

Finally liverpool kicked chelski's ass :) :) Manure lost to gooners and it kinda works out well for liverpool(Yes i belive they still have a chance!!)

Holidays were very hectic. Did a lot of travelling in almost freezing weather. Was playing qukae the rest of the times. I've put on weight but some people claim that i have thinned down :)

I have decided to play basketball and football everyday. Basketball is not nice. Some guy landed with his elbow on my head(ouch) and its really irritating to watch dhruvan and rathi bickering on the court. However it does give me a decent workout.

And now for the tragedy of the day.....I love ommlettes. The NBH was supposed to serve omlettes for breakfast today. I changed my registration two days ago went to bed on time yesterday and got up on time today, went to the NBH and FUCK no omlettes !!! reason..... there is a shortage of eggs!!!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!! a shortage of eggs !! thats the most absurd thing i have ever heard. All this waking up in time and no omlettes. :( Bastards :((

PS1. After watching Notting hill,Love actually and i think bridget jones diary rathi doesnt know who Hugh grant is :0
PS2.Somebody stole my goal keeping gloves! I have no idea what anybody would want with them ...
PS3.Had a cheese burst pizza It is heavenly :D
PS4.Rathi told me abt a place in hitech called Nihals. It is pretty good and cheap.

How I let in 6 goals in my best performance :(

2006-10-17T13:43:00.000+05:30

For the uninformed i'm referring to our football game at the inter university tournament in Madras. Yes we got beat 6-0 by the university of Madras. The scorline suggests that we got thrashed but i think it was the best performance I have seen our college team put in. We played for 90 minutes for the first time. And 4 of the goals came in the last 20 mins. Considering we play football primarily for recreation thats a pretty decent performance. I know some ignorant a$$holes may think differently and say that the team must really suck to get beat 6-0 but then they are a$$holes so they can go to hell. I'm sure we'll put up a much more credible performance in the ICFAI thing(I wont be there though :(( ).

ps1. Mess Food really really SUKS
ps2. Somebody really flamed zulu in the compilers feedback form. looks like some body from vizag
ps3. Wtf is wrong with liverpool! How can they be so incosistent :(
ps4.Unable to find linux drivers for my gfx card i have a go 7800. A treat to anybody who helps me get working drivers
ps5. Firefox told me that rapidshare has been blocked. The sysadmins are now officialy a$$holes

Is the Faculty accountable for anything??

2006-07-23T16:06:00.000+05:30

Back to blogging after a long time. Unfortunatley the events that have compelled me to write this blog were actually really avoidable.

Some of the faculty members in the institute are the finest academicians around. But when it comes to administration i find a lot of things hard to digest. IIIT has lots of vague rules(attendence, PT, Jeevan vidya....) Most of these rules were implemented without giving any importance to student opinion. But somehow the students accepted all this. But there are some things that i find hard to understand.....things that show a lack of transparency on the part of the faculty....

1. The first "instance" of this high handedness were the last elections held in the campus. The election reuslts were nullified without any valid explanation. Effectively the faculty disregarded our votes.

2.Allotment of computers is a touchy issue right now. Institute claims that there is a 2:1 student computer ratio. I can count and that ratio is wrong. We pay about 3~3.5 lakhs as fee for the b.Tech course. A resonable PC would cost u about 25K. That is not even 10% of our fees. And our labcom was informed by the server room people that even though there is a shortage of infrastructure there would be no new purchases. No wonder all surveys by magazines say the college has poor infrastructure.

3. The sysadmins...... I have absolutely no frigging idea about why,when and who came up with the brilliant idea of getting rid of student admins. The new guys suck and end up asking nirnimesh to do their trouble shoting. This is more then anything shameful for a place like IIIT which has a decent number of people capable of doing he job.

4.FSIS... I have been to a reasonable number of FSIS/SFIS sessions and i swear i have never seen a greater wastage of time. I dont remember a single FSIS where any Popular descision has been announced. it's more of a press confrence by the faculty to announce the new ideas they are going to implement. And to anybody who says "nobody turns up for FSIS".... nobody is interested to attend a session where descisions are announced and the discussions are merely a formality.

5.Ragging.....Some people from UG2 and UG3 were implicated by a DIS-committee. I think each and every word of the discussions that went on behind those closed doors should be made public. And i mean everything right from the students statements to the questions asked by the faculty. If the DIS-CO investigated everything in a Impartial and dignified manner i see no reason why things should not be made public....unless the faculty has something to hide.

The thing is i'm not saying the faculty is right/wrong. The point I am trying to make is that when descisions that affect the entire student community are taken things should be transparent so that we know why the descision is being taken. I'm sure by working in the open the faculty can form a much better relationship with the students.

PS 1. No wonder the govt tried to ban blogs. People like us use them to flame everybody .... :D
PS2. I hope I get a new room I'm still stuk on the 3rd floor :((
PS3.New mess OBH gf is reasonably good. hope it continues that way.

Summer Holidays....the first month in review

2006-05-05T23:40:00.000+05:30

1. Long time since i wrote my last post. It was during the exams and was more of a stress buster. That contained a lot of "I will do this , I will do that" kind of sentiment.

2. My project is getting my a$$ kicked. Kannan keeps handing me papers to read. It takes a week to get the background of the paper and why the damn paper was even written. I seriously question the wisdom of forcing incapable/uninterested people to do research :(

3.Arsenal Vs. Barcelona. Arsenal has a lot of money riding on this match. Victory here could be worth upto 30 million pounds to Arsenal (prize money for this year+participation in next years competition.) So guess they just cant afford to lose.Hope boro can land the UEFA cup.

4.I had mentioned in the previous post that i had managed to get a deal for a HP laptop. That deal got cancelled. I got something better :D
Dell inspiron 1705 Dual core processor 1.8 Ghz,1 GB RAM, 80 GB 7200 RPM SATA, Ge Force 7800GT with 256MB Video memory(dedicated mem no shitty turboCache), Sound blaster xi-fi,DVD writer,tv-tuner,17" tft widescreen with a refresh rate of 85 hz. This was all purchased for an indian equivalent of 57K.

I will get the laptop sometime in july. This is one gaming monster. It had a 3dMark 05 score of nearly 5000(5031 to be exact got 5879 with overclocking). To give you an idea of how good that is...A PC with the following config ....
AMD 2800+ (64 bit),512 MB ram,160 gb sata,radeon 9800 pro(not overclocked) has a score of 2100(This was rathi's PC when he had his 9800). It might seem like I am unnecessarily bragging. But i am excited to death to get such a laptop. I wonder how much the best pc's in CVIT would score?

5. I tried to sell my room PC to raise some cash. config is...
AMD 2800+(64 bit),512 mb ram,80 gb sata,17" monitor,16x DVD writer,tv-tuner,nvidia 5200 with 256 MB VRAM. plus the usual stuff.....Some person(i will not name him for his sake) wanted to buy this PC for 12K. Now, are people ignorant or are they just idiots? After seeing nobody was willing to offer even 20k i decided not to sell the pc. It will just be sent home. Getting such a PC for the price i was asking(25k) seems pretty reasonable. Dumb people.

6.Rooney broke his foot,Totti his ankle,Cafu his knee,Ronaldo doubtful,Owen unfit, Raul stupid, all the important people are screwed. World cup ki maa ki....

7.It's sooooooooooo humid this summer. This is baaaaaaaaaad. I have been in hyderbad for 15 years now and it has never been so humid in the summer.

8.Pramod Mahajan died. Sad. He was a good leader. I think the whole episode was stupid. He died, his brother will surely get life in prison or the death penalty. two lives wasted without reason.

9.My Heartfelt sympathies to the ECE people. They are getting some pretty bad grading. I know the faculty may read this part of the post someday but, Both the director and the guy who took the course(i think it's some ADC or DSP course) should get a kick on their a$$. The guy who took the course deserves a kick for doing such stupid grading and the director for not protecting the interests of his students by not fixing these dumb grades. Dean is a non-existant player(why should we pay for his salary if he is of no use?). Have no idea what is going on. Not giving A grades in a relative grading system is technically wrong. There must be a topper who must get an A grade. As apocalypse wrote in one of his posts the facluty doesn't follow any rules when it comes to grading. Very bad on the part of the faculty members.

Post Exam musings

2006-04-08T21:02:00.000+05:30

1.Exams finally over gfx lab left

2.Very Very hot on the 3rd floor esp during the afternoon

3.DVD writer not working :( driver is corrupted (wonder how that happend?)

4.Got algos paper today. have a grand total of about 60. Going to get a B- :((

5.Waiting for the next India-Eng match. can't remember india thrashing 3 teams in a row like this

6.Dad agreed to but me a laptop. Now i have to wait for some relative/friend to come to india and give it. But it's a cool laptop from Hp. Intel Dual core 1.8ghz,1gb ram, nvidia7400 256mb,80gb sata,16x dvd writer,17" tft with side lamps,tv tuner :D,creative audigy4. All this for $1300=60K=awesome deal

7.Having nightmares with the agrids lab server. The damn thing just wont work with linux. Open invitation to all those champions of linux to make it work :P

8.my cell phone is on it's death bed. (dont worry it's a moto c131 yuck....) Will get a new phone by next sem

9.looking forward to the summer. Have a cool project with kannan and kamal guiding me. Will have a lotta work but then it's not everday that u get to work on things u want to work on. Also got the world cup coming up. But somehow the world cup doesn't quite appeal to me. Prefer the champions league. coz the overall quality is better.

10.Finished with The OC. have watched till 320. waiting for more episodes. Also would like to thank Firefox(manan from ug2) for his dedication to dloading stuff. U rock firefox.

11.Finally the sem is over. It has been a horrible sem becoz of the workload. But i also made my blogging debut this sem and intend to put up a last post on 12th.

Counter Halley post

2006-04-04T21:17:00.000+05:30

About 2-3 months ago Halley wrote a pretty long and debate triggering post about the state d'affairs in IIIT. He raised more hell then good points in my opinion. I thought of writing a counter view to each issue raised. But Nirnimesh already did it. But recently Halley rewrote the whole thing(i found it only now !) so i decided to write a counter blog instead of counter comments.

1.Research: Do you expect miracles in research from UG students? The "research" work we do here is like a small taste of what research is like. It's like a "Intro to reserach" course or something. I have read people saying that honors and MSBR are useless. Well own their own they are but that's not what these things are meant for. They are supposed to put you on the track to research. And there is a limit to the amount of research and new ideas that can come up in a year so it's natural for the same things to be repeated in XoR or R&D though mind u things that are repeated are always improved models of the previous year.

2.Faculty suks: This sem i have had Prosenjit, Kannan, Kamal, PJN, and Sanghal teach us courses. I don't think any institute in India can do that. And sometimes we have Faculty members straying outside their areas of expertise to teach us courses(eg OS, ITWS) so they are bound to look dumb. But that doesn't mean they are hopeless.

3.HSSM suks:I have taken just one HSSM till date. (Industry n Society) last sem. I went to most of the classes had cool discussions with the prof(Dr.Janardhan from HCU) and enjoyed the course. i think taking a HSSM is like taking a course. You don't take dumb courses and similarly u don't take stupid HSSM's like fine arts.

4.Mess suks:If u employ private caterers this is going to happen. The institute should have it's own cooks who are like employees. This is the sytem followed by most colleges like IIT's

5.Canteen will commit suicide: This canteen is reasonable and it will survive coz the quality is ok. Honestly i think it's difficult to have a fancy canteen coz people aren't willing to spend money to eat in it.

6.Mag team suks: I have never seen the college magzine. I think the collection of blogs in IIIT does a good job of replacing the magzine. Blogs are the new age journalism tools. Blogs rock

7.Campus Life suks: Everything is in the hands of the students. We form the councils and even control the budget. But what do we do nothing? Faculty can't help us on this.

8.IIIT as a university: I agree with u. I also see IIIT as a corporate college. To be a university the institute has to sincerely encourage other acivities. This includes Cultural, Sports and social acivites. The present management sadly, doesn't see beyond academics

9.Misuse of resources: As far as computer resource allocation is concerned whoever is incharge of computer stuff deserves to get his a$$ fried. I dont have a lab PC. When i really pestered the labcom he said i have a room pc so i shouldn't demand a lab pc. Ballz. Institute is supposed to give us atleast a pc. Finally got a pc but it had no ram, no hdd and no drives. UG2 had a meeting with the director last sem to discuss the situaton with regard to pc allocation. He said he would do something but then again....this is IIIT nothing happened

10 Grading system suks: I agree. But isin't this a risk u are taking when u make ug students tutors? and by the way 70% tutors are honest. It's some guys who do some "hera pheri" but dishonesty is dishonesty.

11. Democracy suks: Well when we have elections we vote for people we know won't work once elected and then we complain how the parliament suks. The parliament is only as good as those that are a part of it. We all know how hard Pranav works for campus life issues. But i think this is the first time he is part of the parliament. This shows how irresponsibly the students vote.

I have nothing against Halley. Personally i admire u for standing out among the crowd and speaking ur mind. Hope u read this and leave some nice commets :D

The Attendence rule in IIIT :(

2006-03-23T15:03:00.000+05:30

Today i saw one of my batchmates pretty upset coz he didn't attend the AI class and now he's gonna lose a grade. I sympathise with him coz i'm one of the student's whose suffered a lot because of the attendence rule. I joined the institute about 15 days late(due to various reasons) and started off with about 6 absents in each subject.At the end of the semester i lost about 1 grade point and ended up with a sgpa of 6 whereas i had actually got about 7.1. I talked to the dean and the dean said that i came late and that i could "get out of his office." Numerous other people from my batch and also others have lost a lot of grades due to attendence.
If you look at the grades and their meanings here it's clear that grades are meant to reflect academic acheivement. Now if i get an "A" grade it means that i've performed excellently in the course. But in that very course if my attendence is 74% i get an "F" which means i "have not picked up any of the basic/required concepts taught in the course and have performed uniformly bad in all the assessments". How contradictory!. Aren't grades meaningless with such policies. I mean you could know everyting taught in the course get full marks in every test, every assignment and still be classified as "F" !
Secondly when a Faculty member gives you a grade he thinks you deserve that grade. Then to alter that grade for non-academic reasons is very disrespectful to both the faculty members opinion and also the hard work of the student.
And to anyone who says "grades don't matter it's about what you learn".....I'm sorry! that's how the system works. Wherever you go any faculty member will ask you your grades. Whenever you apply outside you are asked your grades. I wonder if any faculty member has had their grades deducted due to attendence during their B.Tech.
And i don't understand the need for such a rule. from what i gather senior batches like ug99 and ug2k really abused the no-attendence policy. There were people who didn't attend a single class the entire sem and still got A grades. I agreee that such a situation ruins the discipline of the college but implementing the current rules is way too extreme. Something like a 70 % attendence policy would be reasonable. Surely there must be other possible penalties for low attendence other then deducting grades.
And as for the rule it's a vague rule. And I know everybody says the dean is responsible and blah blah blah. But this is the institute policy. And such descicions aren't made by the dean alone. The director the dean and senior faculty members are all involved in this descision making. So in short all the faculty members without exception are responsible for this. I know some faculty members don't think this is the right way of doing things and but they too can't do anything.
I hope some of my fellow iiit'ians will read this and think of it as worthwhile to discuss this issue. This is a serious issue and deserves atleast a decent discussion. I feel if all students come together we can atleast force the faculty to have a rethink on this issue.

CUSAT to become an IIT

2006-03-06T23:25:00.000+05:30

But first wtf is CUSAT?? CUSAT=Cochin University of Science and Technology Anybody who at first sight guesses the meaning of CUSAT deserves a Medal. In fact anybody who even knows that there is something called CUSAT deserves atleast a prize. According to this article cochin university is going to be granted the status of an IIT. For once the Government of India should be serious about higher education. I mean i never even heard about "CUSAT" before i read this article. Now this is an online publication so i don't know how accurate it is but The Hindu is generelly pretty reliable so i guess the news is true. How can a place like CUSAT which never does any creditable work of any kind(never seen or heard of them in any technical/sports competition till date) leave alone research, become an IIT. I mean if this is how IIT's are made an this is there standard then i am sooooooo happy to be in IIIT. People will argue that the facilities will improve. But what about faculty? I'm sure the faculty of "CUSAT" are not upto IIT standard. So are they going to fire the entire "CUSAT" faculty overnight? this is a joke of the highest order. Man somebody needs to kick the governments ass.........

How the half-truth can make everybody look dumb

2006-03-03T00:44:00.000+05:30

Today i had one of the parliament members coming up to me and telling me that the director was pretty upset with the parliament and i was largely to blame for that because of some of my comments in a previous FSIS. Now for those of you who didn't attend the FSIS on 23rd or 24th feb (i.e. everybody in IIIT :D and i don't remember the exact date) here's what went down.

The director was cricizing the parliment members for not being active enough. Pranav defended the parliament members and somewhere down the line the issue of the elections came up. I then asked the director why the elections were cancelled in the first place. Dr.Sangal was rather surpised to know that the students weren't informed. The reason he gave us was that the then SLC charperson(Dr.Jayanthi) felt that the election was very regional in nature and some students were "coerced" into giving votes according to their wishes. I don't know how true this is. The point that i raised was that if the election results were cancelled that means that the faculty belives that some of the candidates were involved in some sort of wrong-doing. If that is the case then why were those people who, in the eyes of the faculty were involved in malpractices allowed to be in the parliament, given how strict the faculty is in dealing with "dishonesty". This is a glaring contradiction. On the other hand if the faculty is of the view that the candidates did nothing wrong then why were the elections cancelled in the first place. This is again a very contradicting situation. Either way their was a improper descision on the part of the facluty and the worst part of this was that all the students were kept in the dark about all this which is again very surprising on the part of the faculty. Even some of the candidates present there said that they also knew nothing about this situation.

After listening to all this Dr.Sangal said quote " Well we are very sorry about this situation and sorry that the students were not told about this " unquote.

Now anybody who has a different version of events can personally come and tell me his/her version. I'm pretty sure about what was said and i'm also sure that there is no other true version. This comes up because it seems some other people gave some parliament members a different version of events. That is pretty unfortunate given how crystal clear this part of the FSIS was.
And to the parliament members........I just don't see how i have incriminated you in any way. This was clearly something related to the vague descision making of the faculty. You or your credentials or your integrity or commitment were in no way questioned anywhere. If anything I was making a point that you people should have made for yourselves last year after the descision to cancel the elections was taken. I am really disappointed with the situation and hope for more positive and responsible reactions from people in ther future.

Champions League review....

2006-02-25T16:38:00.000+05:30

I had the chance to see the extended highlights of the champions league 2nd round first leg matches...Here's a brief review of the games...

1.Ajax 2-2 Inter
Ajax had the match won but threw it away....they were leading 2-0 at half time and it was some pretty slack defending that screwed up everything. I think Adriano and co will murder them at the san siro..
2.Chelsea 1-2 Barcelona
Man this was a really exciting match.Even though i think chelsea really suck and there are many around better then mourinho they were really hard done by when del-horno was sent off....but honestly...barca just raped them.....they hardly had a shot on target during the entire game...and as the home team they lacked any enterprise....even when they had 11 men...Also lionel messi was awesome ....man people talk about rooney and fabregas and all but this fellow is way ahead of them...as for chelsea they'll get raped all over again at the Camp Nou
3.Rangers 2-2 Villareal
Didn't watch this one properly...just saw the goals ......woeful defending from ranges... Villareal will do enough to go through
4.Wereder Bremen 3-2 Juventus
This was the game of the night.Bremen were a goal down with 5 minutes to go and they scored 2 goals in those five minutes to win 3-2. I saw the entire replay of the game and it looked like juve were playing casually....not something italian teams do...but they'll do enough in the second leg to go through
5.Bayern Munich 1-1 AC Milan
Hmmmmmm......apart from Michael Ballacks goal this game was boring......ands that all you can expect when germen team plays a italian team...But i think(some people are gonna be angry) milan have lost it this season. Not just in the champions league but in all competitions.....and the surprising thing is that they have all their major players fit. Maybe a time for a change of coach in milan....??
6.Benfica 1-0 Liverpool
Ok....this is the important one.....I think Liverpool didn't deserve to lose but they didn't deserve to win either. As for benfica.....Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooring.....I can't understand how they got to this stage......absolutely amzing....i mean they just kept kicking liverpool players....and btw no gerrard,no crouch and no cisse for liverpool....won't be a pleasent night for benfica at anfield
7.PSV Eindhoven 0-1 Lyon
for the uninformed Lyon are(belive it or not!!) the bookmakers third favourite to win the champions league just behind barca and juventus. Didn't watch this one in any detail....but i read that psv were pretty dull.
8.Real Madrid 0-1 Arsenal
Grrrrrrrr........madrid suks.....henry confirmed that with a awesome goal.....and if real madrid think they can go to highbury and win they are joking......k.o. for madrid..

looking forward to barca chelsea
So who will win it??? i think barcelona will win this tie but screw up somewhere else in the competition. They play attacking stuff only and you cant win the CL just attacking. As for Chelski...they may spend a lot of money....but they will never be able to win in europe. Chelski are like a group of mercenaries.......and they may be consistent in the long run but for europe you need to have passion. If you see the chelski line up against barca not a single player in the sixteen has come throught the youth system at chelsea. They were all purchased. All good teams(those that play natural football...) have a lot of players in the squad who are groomed at the club. Even real Madrid are facing the same problem hardly anyone from originally from madrid. But look at barca....in their starting 11 valdes,puyol,oleguer,messi,motta,iniesta and belletti are from the youth system in barca. It's the same for every team...the best players come through the youth system. at liverpool it's owen, gerrard and carragher, at real it was raul and hierro, in the man united team of the nineties the entire sqauad was a youth team,it's del piero at juve, it's maldini at milan,kahn in bayern munich and the list is endless....You can't completely buy success.

2 days in a hospital

2006-02-14T21:33:00.000+05:30

I have spent the last two and a half days in apollo DRDO with drips through my hands and a tube to my stomach through my nose with milk going through it. It is stupid to mention this on a public blog but i have no other place to vent my frustration about this.

I was diagnosed with acute gastro *****(donno whats after gastro ..) which translates into food poisoning. how did i get it?? god knows... :(

This post is to describe how life totally totally suks at a hospital. NO TV NO LAN NO MOVIES NO P.R. FOOD NO GOOD LOOKING NURSES (booo hooooo) and a s.o.b. doctor who wanted to keep me there till friday...(can u belive that....) I was lucky that one fo my friends dropped in and had his laptop and cellphone (LAPTOP + CELLPHONE = INTERNET :D ) And if that had not happened i surely would have gone into depression. Man life in a hospital suks... So i decided to get outta hospital...and come to the place where u have it all....(Of course the hospital staff,doctor and my parents think that i am still in the hospital :D )

And that's not all .....this food poisoning episode has really screwd me....below is a report of the damage done

1.Primary problem: Valentine's day ruined...fu*#%d raped :((
2. Grafix assignment screwed
3. TOC assignment screwed
4. missed Cricket match for ug2
5.Missed football match for UG2

Crap....shit......grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhh what rotten luck..all this had to happen at this time. Luckily i had attendence....otherwise attendence rules would have totally fried my a$$. Now im on the edge in 2 subjects......And as i write this post i realise what a heaven IIIT is.......LAN INTERNET MOVIES TV SHOWS FOOD(still waiting for canteen) sab kuch hai...... I never felt this happy at IIIT

The truth about Sports@IIIT

2006-02-11T02:23:00.000+05:30

Having read a rather interesting post i also decided to get my hands dirty and have a go at the way sports is run and looked at in IIIT. In this post i'll write about some things that may be rather embaressing for some people...but please note, i mean no insults to anybody. The faculty are fine people and i'm sure they try to do what they think is the best for us not that it always is :)

The first part is about general sp0rts and games in IIIT meant even for those who are not into sports on a regular basis.

On IIIT's web page they try to make it look as if they work hard to encourage sports. (they are supposed to do that it's their job :P ) They have made P.T. compulsory. Now i personally think that p.t. at six in the morning is dumb especially when you have to submit assignments at 12 in the night almost every other day(ug1 people have to do it.....remember DSA my friends :O ) Many people come here with the view that sports and games are useless. I belive most people coming here wouldn't have hade these many playing facilities ever before. But the way P.T. is imposed on them makes them revolt at the thought of sports. Instead of introducing sports as a recreation the institute has turned into a forcible boot camp. But the main motive behind P.T. as told by the dean is to make people get up early in the morning.....that was a poor excuse by any standards. When our batch got really fed up of P.T. the faculty agreed to shift the P.T. to the evenings. This was really good as a lot of people even from other batches turned out in large numbers to play. This was a great positive move from the faculty but god knows why that idea was discarded(plzz no wake up early argument......it is ridiculous) So the institute needs to have a better and more thoughtful policy to introduce many people to sports in a positive way.

The second part concerns sports played regularly

When it comes to sports at a slightly competitive level the institute tries to encourage students to participate in inter house/batch competitions. This is where the conflict starts. How do you fit in time to play regular events with the academic shedule? One thing i could never figure out is why classes go on even at 7:30. I think 5 is a good time to wrap up classes for the day. Finishing as late as 7-8 pm leaves the student no time to relax or to even to take part in activities. In this regard i feel the institute is very indisciplined and illogical with regard to the timings of classes and tutes. We even have tutes at 11 pm. This is wrong. The institute urges students to be professional but they should start with themselves. These randomized class timings make inter house/batch competitions hard to conduct(sunday is not the answer to all queries. How much can you play in one day? and is that what you are going to do every sunday....just play and play and play....) The institute has provisions for sport but has no mechanism for this to be feasible. This in my view is the hipocriscy of the mangement at it's very best and surely this reflects poorly on the institute.

Part three of this post deals with going out for competitions.

Before i deal with this issue let me tell you that i will not consider anything regarding the dean here. Understanding his ideas, his concepts and his visions is beyond the scope of this blog(or for that matter any blog :P ) but he is a nice guy and will get the limelight in future posts.
I have learnt that the faculty has strongly discouraged the physical directors to send students to participate in competitions outside the college. According to the unofficial directive sports is for recreation only and not meant to be played at a competitive level. The faculty will deny it but this is the truth. I was sad but not surprised to hear this. It is sad to see the institute stifling the talents of it's own students for what i belive is no good reason. They must realise that this is not a research institute or a software company. I have a theory as to why the faculty loo down upon sports. All the faculty members have been brilliant students in their academic lives. It is unlikely that anyone of them would have ever played any sport at any level. They think that they never needed to have any sport so why should we need it. Further they belong to a generation that look down upon sports as something that is meant for those who are not good at studies. Times have changed but their mindsets have not changed. And the sad thinng is that the faculty does not and in my view will never appreciate the beauty of sport. This is not just a problem in IIIT but in all "good" colleges like IIT's NIT's etc. I hope the faculty will realise that sport is not bad. I hope i see that change or atleast the winds of change in my time in IIIT

2006-01-25T01:04:00.000+05:30

Top Ten Food For Though topics in IIIT(in reverse order)

10.Management is of the view that we waste our parents hard earned money in the canteen. So having a canteen is not wise. What better way to address this concern by making us pay a fee of about a lakh per annum(ironic)

09.Projects undertaken in IIIT specially by people in my batch and more specificaly under ramu.....man those projects rock......when will i get one of those projects :0 ???

08.How, when and where do we display/publish the photographs of people pee-ing all over our campus. These are rare pieces of art the likes of which will not be seen for quite some time. All hail rao/su/ruchir/satvik/arpan/meta for this. Proud of you people :)

07.Who is this "Swamiji" ??.......Avik left.......he came.......felicity screwed(no glamour this time ?? ) canteen closed.......jeevan vidya started.....coincidence...???......hmmmmmmm.....never spoke to the guy though....so hard to say anything about him...

06.Sourav Ganguly(these two words are enough to describe the topic!!)

05.Should TV through LAN (read ESPN+STAR SPORTS+MTV+CHANNEL V + ONE PUBLIC Choice ......No Cartoons channels please) be availible???(don't ask me how....... :P)

04.Can UG2K4 make a clean sweep of all the inter batch sports this year??? I think so......What do you think???

03.wtf...who removed quake 3 from zombie zone.....and of all things put FIFA and UT....that was surprising coming from ug3 knowing their passion for FPS's

02.Who is gonna be the next sys admin of IIIT......???(me me me .........please me me me.....)

01.The main topic of discussion(trust me) in the coming days is gonna be the felicity t-shirt....some opinions are out and the shirt isin't receiving any rave reviews.......but saying that i haven't seen the shirt myself......so..........grrrrrr.......let's see......

ps 1.I will eventually get into trouble for this blog.... :(
ps 2.maintaining ShArK TV is driving me crazy....

The Truth about ShArK TV

2006-01-25T00:14:00.000+05:30

Considering the cool response to ShArK TV i thought I would dedicate my first meaningful blog entry to it.

1.HOW does it work??
I Have a software(Unreal Live sever) that captures video from my (illegal)TV connection and then distributes the feed to a server(Unreal Media Server) which then streams it to clients using the Unreal Media Streaming Player. A detailed tutorial on how to do this is available here and all the software is availible here

2.WHY Did i Do it??
Watching the match at neck wrenching angles suks. Combine that with people's stinking socks and a dirty carpet(ug2 people hardly get to sit on chairs!!) and u get a repulsive recipie for nausea. All that plus I had nothing to do :)

3.WHAT is the future??
Hmmm.......firstly the faculty shouldn't find out(dont worry some asshole will eventually tell the faculty).Secondly I'm working on improving the quality of the transmission and finally i'm trying to make some sort of an arrangement for people using linux. Wonder why a linux client is the last thing on my list?? No I'm not anti linux.......No i'm not busy.........No i'm not lazy.........then wtf is wrong?? I have absolutely no f***** idea how to do it :( seniors/linux bonds please help me.....

P.S.1 Please dont't IM me on to change the channel during the match

P.S.2 Please dont IM me to Change the channel when M TV is running. It is the only thing that seperates us and geekland

P.S.3 Don't demand slots for Tv. All people are equally entitled to watch it. Don't expect special favours. I'm not being all goody goody and righteous and crap like dat. It's common sense. If u wanna take connections all day long and deprive other people the very same thing may happen to you. So from 2 moro onwards you will be disconnected every 45 mins and can rejoin only after 30 mins or whenever a free slot is there whichever comes first. This is temporary till some proper setup comes up so chill out people

Remember this service is voluntary and experimental. So i request you to be patient. Any constructive suggestions are welcome

My First Post

2006-01-25T00:00:00.000+05:30

It's been almost 4 sems in IIIT and unlike most of my friends i didn't have a blog. Honestly i was of the opinion that blogs are useless...I mean I never even read anybodys blog till i was in my third sem :O which begs the question .....do I need a blog even now?? Well only time will tell.......

p.s. 1.I read Shibens blog on being "cool". Wonder what a categorization of our batch would look like...

p.s. 2.Lost my cap :[ sad.....very sad.... :(

p.s. 3. Going to write a lot of posts today