Phoenix

Another year has gone by. 2009 sped away; like the gusty winds of North Carolina! As with every year, here's a new year quote: May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions! -- Joey Adams That is one more reason NOT to make a new year resolution! The year started with my second semester at NC State, then an internship at Qualcomm in San Diego and then a feverish third semester. Of course with four courses in the last semester, it was bound to be meteoric! After a laborious one-and-half years, here I am with a Master's degree in Computer Engineering. It is so satisfying to see the hard work reflected on the degree :) It really feels strange though, when I think that I no longer have projects, assignments, exams! The very next day after my exams ended I followed the routine to check the course webpage for any new projects/assignments. It was then that I realized that my MS is over and I've graduated! It's a strange feeling... no project deadlines, ...

Yes, "long time no see". I've been way too busy with my final semester of Master's. Projects, exams, assignments and sometimes classes... I'm stuck in this infinite loop! I wish like running away. Sigh! I have no choice but to endure these. After all, there's this consolation that I'll be earning my Master's degree in a month from now. So, with those elements in the infinite loop, what's the one thing that's "loop invariant"? Music , of course! I've been hooked to The Fray's How to save a life since quite sometime now. Not a new song (released sometime around September 2006, first version), but the lyrics are touching. The lead singer, Isaac Slade, (though has some vocabulary problems :D... weird pronunciation I must say!), says he was influenced by his experience while working as a mentor at a camp for troubled teens . You can listen to this song here . But the song that gets to be the cherry on the cake is " Iktara ...

To start with, let me clarify that this post is not meant to be a job search guide! It is intended to only give some pointers in choosing the right courses. If you are in the field of computing, you would know that these days the mantra is Multi-core CPUs rather than Blazingly fast single-core CPUs. Gone are the days of clock-cranking where you would see a jump in the CPU clock speed every fortnight or so. In a way, the computing industry has reached a theoretical barrier of cranking the clock speed. The focus is now on inclusion of multiple cores on the same die. No wonder you see the "dual-core, tri-core, quad-core and soon octa-core CPU" ads. Unless there is a breakthrough in the field of microelectronics and cooling solutions, this "stuffing-of-more-cores-on-the-same-die" will continue. From a normal computer user's perspective, it may seem like "Wow! Two cores, double performance!". Nope...Thats not entirely true, in fact not even half true! The...

Summer full of enjoyment and a trip back to India. What more could one want??? Studies and Classes??? Its the same ol' routine again - class, home, cooking, projects, assignments! Well, hopefully this will be my last semester at Graduate School. Will "try" to enjoy my time! The palatial home at San Diego, the work at Qualcomm, the beautiful San Diego, my home in Bangalore, Mum's delicious dishes - I waved a bye bye to all that for the time being and am back to being a student at the hot-and-humid Raleigh. I'm eagerly waiting for winters. I hate summer in Raleigh. My trip to India was really good. Its always nice to see your near and dear ones :) Most of the time I was home, helping my family pack as they are moving to a different place. Met friends, family. Had a nice time. About the travel, I'd like to caution people traveling on Lufthansa. The journey wasn't particularly a pleasant one. Especially my last leg of journey Frankfurt to Bangalore. It was an...

Its election time in India and polls are held state-wise. Being in the US I neither had the opportunity to vote nor to nullify my vote (well, if not for me I'm sure noticing my absence at the polling booth some smart@ss must've cast a vote in my name!). I remember the last time I got my finger 'inked'. I'd voted when in Bangalore just a month before I left for Raleigh. This time I'm eager to see what the results would be since its a 'bigger' poll. Did you cast your vote? If yes, then what was the scene like at the polling booth? If not, then what was the reason for the abstinence? Did you not wanna vote or were you unable to? If you didn't wanna vote, did you know that you could nullify your vote? You can leave your comments to this post :) On a lighter note, here is something which I couldn't resist posting. Haf a look at the Bachchan family in the pic... I fell off my chair when I first saw it! :P Source: The Hindu

Since the past couple of days I've been wondering about the '0 comments' phenomenon on my blog. It didn't strike to me till date that the recent posts were starving for comments. I guess many of you must've noticed that the ability to leave comments on my blog was completely non-functional since sometime. I dug into the template code and could find absolutely nothing. After much head-breaking, it hit on me that I'd enabled the option to embed comments in the posts which was causing the 'kirik' (Bangaloreans will understand this :P) Finally its back to normal. You can now leave your comments on my blog. A handy pop-up window will help you abuse me now :)

I'm sure everyone of you must've noticed the 'new, improved' TwitterBook, err... I mean Facebook. I personally do not like Twitter and keep away from it. Facebook is a nice platform (for the public as well as the web developers, I'm sure the latter will in no way disagree with me!). But the new Facebook is bad, really bad. A complete Twitter rip off and also tries to act smart by integrating Twitter. Why, oh Why did you haf to do this, Facebook? The main interface is a complete mess now, worser than my trash can. The Wall is hidden behind another 'wall', all the 'cool and innovative' Facebook features are now lost in the oblivion and all I can see on the homepage is now garbage! What do you all think? Do you like the new Facebook?

I had just pulled down Mac4Lin files from the SVN repo and was to reupload them yesterday. This time I decided to upload each folder separately, one by one. The first folder (directory for UNIX people) was properly uploaded. When I did and 'svn add ' the folder got successfully added. Next when I did an 'svn commit -m "message"', I got this dreaded error: svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: MKCOL of ' ': 405 Method Not Allowed ( ) I kept scratching my head for a long time as to why this kept happening. I was finally able to fix it. After an 'svn commit', all I had to do was an 'svn checkout '. The local copy would then be sync'd with the remote copy, brining it up to the same revision. I could then proceed to adding new folders/files and then svn commit'ting'. It turns out that the folder previously added/uploaded needs to haf proper revision before the new folder can be added. Otherwise, svn will treat it as trying to...

Holi, also known as the Festival of colors is celebrated by Indians on the full moon day of the Phalguna month (usually falls in the month of March in Georgian calender). People put colors on each other to celebrate holi. While there are about 2 theories behind the origin of the festival, it is best known as the 'Spring Festival' to all. Interested in knowing more about Holi? Head here . We, at NC State are celebrating Holi on 15th March, 2009. Here's wishing everybody a Happy and Safe Holi :)

I have been getting a lot of mails and posts on various forums asking me about the procedure to use 'subversion' to pull Mac4Lin v1.0RC2 files from the repo. Here is a post describing the same. Your OS may or may not have 'subversion' package installed. To check if its installed, open a Terminal window and type: 'svn'. If you get a positive reply (something like: 'Type 'svn help' for usage) then skip to Step 2. If not, goto Step 1. Step 1 : Install subversion on your OS. The procedure for some commonly used OS' are given below: 1) Ubuntu: In a terminal window type: 'sudo apt-get install subversion' 2) Fedora: 'yum install subversion' 3) openSUSE: Use yast2/yast to install the package: 'subversion' 4) Arch Linux: 'pacman -Sy subversion' 5) Mac OS X: Download this DMG and install SVN (Courtesy: Coding Monkeys) 6) OS Independent: Download the 'subversion' source files from here . For any other OS, please refe...

Oscars 2009, a big event as always. Well I guess everybody had predicted that Slumdog Millionaire would win awards, but not as many as it won! There was no doubt that Heath "The Joker" Ledger would win an award. In fact, I liked his acting in the movie "The Dark Knight" so much that IMHO he should've been nominated for Best Actor instead of Best Supporting Actor. He was simply amazing in the movie. The award for "Make up" should've surely gone for The Dark Knight. I feel Heath Ledger's make up was the best of all times. Kate Winslet was good in the movie The Reader and I guess she deserved. I don't see any reason why Penelope Cruz was awarded the Best Supporting Actress! As for "our" Slumdog Millionaire, I suppose it was nominated for 10 categories out of which it won 8! Thats an amazing feat that too by a "semi-Indian" movie. I've seen the movie and feel the movie was good but not an exceptional one. A.R.Rahman sure...

Its been movie time for me surrounded by exams. Saw Billu Barber last week. An average movie I must say. But Irrfan Khan has acted well. Lara Dutta was hopeless! This week (actually just back sometime ago) I saw Delhi-6. Now I'm assuming (in fact, sure) that everyone reading this would haf seen Rang de Basanti. After such a movie the expectations from Rakeysh Mehra would surely be high. Delhi-6 falls in a different category. While its not a nation-awakening movie or such its like any other videsh-se-returned-love-your-country kind of movie. The plot is good. But I think the picturization could've been better. The movie has so many "cut-to"s that one may lose track of whats happening ( a la Ghajni, eh? :D ). Oh one interesting snippet: The movie is called Delhi-6 because it is picturized in Chandi Chowk, Delhi whose postal code is 110 006; hence the name Delhi - 6. I guess its become a fad these days in Bollywood movies to include a couple of Hindi abuses and Delhi-6 ...

Goodbye 2008, Welcome 2009! A year has gone by. Things moved fast for me in 2008. Some good events, some heartening... Graduate Studies, gOS, Mac4Lin, Linux Magazine and some more exciting things in the pipeline :) Semester has ended and I'm getting my much needed break. "Chilling" out in Connecticut. Mind you, its really chilling. Snowing since quite sometime here. Will be getting back to Raleigh tomorrow. A week more of vacations and the usual life starts again. We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day. -- Edith Lovejoy Pierce Here's wishing everybody a Happy and Exciting New Year ahead! :) EDIT: I'm back home. The New York/Connecticut trip was great. The photos are in "Now Playing" widget at the top right of my blog.

Being away from home you mostly don't feel like celebrating (unless of corz, you were "caged" at home! :P ), but then birthdays are something which get you in the mood; especially after getting your face painted with the cream! About 10 of my friends were part of my birthday celebrations this year. Very thoughtfully they'd got a chocolate cake with my name "engraved" on it! The cake was looking just yummy. Poor cake.. if only it'd know its fate ;) After cutting the cake my face was "decorated" with the delicious cream, smeared all over! We all had a ball on my birthday. The photos, as usual, are on my Picasa Album. Being away from home I couldn't visit the orphanage this time on my birthday, unlike last year. But my wonderful mum went to the orphanage and spent time with the kids. Some simple things in life sure give us a lot of satisfaction :)

With my mid-terms over, it was time for some outing. We hadn't been anywhere since our classes started. Class - Home - Lab and the cycle continued! Two cents of Hope (TCH) team decided to plan an outing to Asheville. Its like a "small" hill station, something like Ooty in India. About 30 of us in three 11 seater cars drove to Asheville on 18th October 2008. The Fall season is just beginning to show its colors. The leaves on the trees change from green to yellow then to red/pink color and finally fall off. This change is called 'Fall Colors'. This phenomenon has just begun and trees are half green, half yellow in Raleigh as of now. To see Fall colors in full glory Asheville was the perfect place and we hit the road. The temperature was close to 0C there. The trip was wonderful... a trip to remember. The photos can be seen in the right frame - Now Playing. PS: I know I need to update the MS in US and the Mac4Lin posts. I'll do it soon.

What is the value of a cent? Well.. actually nothing in the US, but certainly something in India. Just like drops fill up a bucket, cents collectively mean a lot. In their own words: The Power of Cents - "Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land." Two Cents of Hope (TCH) is all about creating a responsible and self-sustaining society. A society like this can be created by imparting education to the aspiring children and youth. TCH focuses on providing educational opportunities to deserving children and youth who crave to learn but cannot because of financial constraints and other such factors. The organization supports such deserving students against the harsh realities of life and makes an effort to help make their dreams come true. Committed volunteers across the globe work closely in order to ensure that resources reach deserving students and monitor the progress of the student ensuring fairness and proper utilization of fu...

With Elections around in Karnataka there has been much campaigning by all political parties. Bangalore voted on 10th May (Saturday). The turn out was comparatively poor. And yes, I did not contribute to the "poor turnout". I got my index finger inked! Frankly, I don't want any party to form a government at the state level; we are much better off without any goverment! But I voted for a candidate who had done good to the locality and who's been doing good since quite some time. The noise due to campaigning was getting unbearable and I also piled up a huge number of pamphlets. A good source of income, I must say! Oh.. Raddiwala... if you didn't get it ;)

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day. - Edith Lovejoy Pierce Wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous new year!

Here I am again! With a revived blog - a new name, a new place and new contents. Welcome to my blog. Those of you who used to read my blog will surely feel at home :)