Almost a graduate

4 years ago, I joined a college which had the highest mediocrity rating among the mediocre colleges in TN. To be honest, I didn’t have good academics in my high school, so I must say I was quite fortunate to get an undergrad ‘seat’ for a CS Engineering degree there. Luckily, on the very 2nd day of college, I had enough brains to come to a conclusion that my next 4 years would be spent in an Orwellian Dystopian Parallel Universe where students wore lab coats for CS Labs. (It still beats me, the purpose of a fucking labcoat in a Theoretical Computer Science Lab).

Engineering education in TN is as fucked up as it gets. The fact that Yours Truly will be attending his Convocation ceremony next month and getting a degree certificate is proof enough that its fucked up beyond all recognition.

And did I mention, there will be 50 more new colleges this year in TN alone! Fucking Pathetic…

Lastly,

Thanks to Krish Ashok for making a joke out of us poor zombies..

Why Python?

Ever had that feeling of insignificance? The feeling that your very existence is a microscopic peanut in the grand scheme of things. By grand, I mean the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. I am going through that right now. We are, according to our own theories an extremely smart species, yet for every answer we discover, 10 more questions creep up like one of those annoying LOLCATS shouting ‘OH HAI’. What the hell is the purpose of life? Why do we exist? What is our place in this infinite Cosmos (See the embedded video)? Its incredibly creepy even to think that our entire life is just a mega-complex probability equation, which most likely is too complex for our puny brains to comprehend.

Yeah, so basically what I am coming at is simple. Party now, Life is too short to be spent over unnecessary complications. Or in other words Frigging Use Python!!!!

(Strip from XKCD)

Zero Productivity

For the last few weeks, my productivity has dipped to an all time low. Progit is to be blamed. Suddenly I find myselves hitting refresh to see what’s ‘hot’ leading to more time reading blogs and articles, and less time actually getting some work done. So, from this point on I am activating a self-imposed ban on progit.

Lets see how long I last urge .

EDIT: Bleh…. Gave up, ban lasted 12 minutes

Prince of the Woodland Realm

Legolas Greenleaf

Legolas Greenleaf

“Legolas Greenleaf long under tree

In joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea!

If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,

Thy heart shall rest in the forest no more.“

My favorite character from Lord of the Rings. Not as good as the original, but I drew these after a very long time..

I also felt like creating a deviant profile for myself.

BhootKiddo..

As the summer holidays progress, I am finding myself become a nocturnal being. My sense of a “day” has changed a lot.

Wake up at 1200 or 1300 hours and fall asleep at around 2-3 AM, in a position as in the above photo (taken from my mobile which has a crappy camera). Back against the window, legs across my cot only to find myself waking up late in the afternoon sun with an excruciating pain in my back. Its great in a way, since both my parents leave for work early and I have the entire house to myself (na, I don’t run around naked).

After waking up, the usual stuff, watch TV for a while and back to GSoC stuff..

Move my butt around at 5 PM to the guitar classes, return back watch Seinfeld, eat, and back to code…

Trust me, fixing segfaults are really fun, but I think I need to go out and play for a while… :/..I find myself lacking a life these days

“What motivates you? Motivation”

I will be entering final year in a couple of months and this means…PLACEMENTS!!! yay! (..or the lack of it)

This means more “Mock Interviews Sessions” and “GDs” to “empower” engineering students to get placed in the only 3 software companies that exist in this physical Universe. Infosys, TCS and CTS (Apparently our college is too dumb for hybrid corporates like m$).

And this blog post sort of sums up my thoughts. Highly hilarious, rolled on the floor injuring my mutti.

Especially at this,

“Any actual work experience?
Buying groceries for my neighbour who has this pretty daughter called Gayathri.”

Oh, yeah! I can empathize.

First frigging milestone..

Why Milestone? Nope, I didn’t come up with fancy code or a “beautiful” one for that matter (Came up with a way to unload plugins). Milestone, because today was the first day I was squeezing up my half empty head to work around a teency weency problem. In short, I am happy I was actually thinking today about squishing a segmentation fault which was bringing the whole house down due to dbus and the kinky wifi plugin.

Now a word of warning. The wifi plugin is a circus freak of sorts. Being the lazy bum I am, I found it a drag to manually get into the trouble of coming up with xml introspection data for the “org.freesmartphone.Device.plugins.wifi” interface.

Instead I just came up with a grand plan of letting valac generate wifi.c and wifi.h, which I could modify later. Piece of cake? Sure…

After the wifi plugin is loaded it works pretty well. The keyword being “After”…By the way, check the progress report which I sent to the smartphone-standards list. That should give you an idea of how odeviced works and looks like. In fact, it works pretty satisfactorily discounting the segmentation faults  , which is easily reproducible in the following ways,

• Don’t load the wifi plugin on startup, set enable=0 in odeviced.conf. Instead load it manually after odeviced starts up and begins to idle.
• If the wifi plugin is already loaded, unload it and then try to load it again.

Part of this problem might be my arrogance of not to use GTypeModules for dynamically typing the plugins. I need to discuss with my mentor, mickeyl about this once he gets back to business after LinuxTag.

The barely bare bones powercontrol plugin loads and unloads without any problems, but it doesn’t do anything as remotely useful as the wifi plugin!! Just contains an init function that has a printf in it (bleh!, thank goodness it didn’t bail out).

Oh and the all important tarball is here. Highly effective than laughing gas!

…Another gdb session beckons

A debacle of an exam…

One of the Life’s greatest ironies. I actually enjoyed studying for the Artificial Intelligence exam, one of my favourite areas. In fact an hour of my favorite anime, Ghost in the Shell: SAC on monday was timed perfectly for the exam the next day.

But when I received the question paper, I sat there wide eyed just like the android who gets pwned by the Tachikomas when they attack her with the Liar Paradox. A big BLEH..

I managed to write (in my own words and crappy handwriting), a couple of big questions and 5 short ones. To add insult to the injury, yesterday’s paper was my personal record for the most number of pages filled in an exam; 42/44. My previous record was 34 .

On the brighter side, I may get to read Peter Norvig’s a second time for the back paper. Well, rationalization is the solution to all of world’s problems .

But somehow, I didn’t feel bad about it…..*shit*

Summer of code 2008

Atlast after sleepness nights, the results are out. I made it to this year’s Google Summer of Code. I will be working for the Openmoko project under the mentorship of Mickeyl. Fun times ahead. Will post the details later.

Now where the hell are my books. Got fricking semesters this tuesday .

Ceiling Fan, ban them in classrooms

Since ceiling fans are the main cause of the apparent noise in classrooms, ban them. Use air conditioners instead.