Movie: Kung fu Hustle

A must watch movie for a comedy movie seekers. I like the composition of movie which include, good fast action, special effects, comedy. Some special effects are just awesome and look innovative, like the ppl moving like bikes, some other kung fu tricks etc.

Une Samedi bein passé

Le Samedi passé nos sommes allés à Jain temple et deux autre temples. Oh! My French is still so bad, I would rather continue in english, here are some photos of Ganesh Chaturthi Celebration captured during our trip to the city, and some photos of Jain temples too(It was the last day of the jain's festival of Paryushan, Thanks to Chaitanya and Abhay for letting me know)

The Jain temple at Aagapura


No caption!!!

Swetambar Jain Mandir (it came on the way, on Arpit's suggestions we went in)

The big truck(?) generally used for carrying Huge steel material was used for carrying the Idol of Ganesh, adjacent image.

Shyam Mandir(Somani took us here)

Bigger photos at the url http://www.flickr.com/photos/vardhman

What is Microsoft

In respond to some M$ fan's post on his blog.
What is M$, well they call it a Innovative company, which files for patents like double click, using email as an object(tell me what it means, that you can drag it around the Desktop like files and folders ?), Apple's ipod technology (hahaha), also Vfat file system(which was already invented and described in a paper, before M$ implemented it), Use of tab key in keyboard to navigate links, and lots of other crapy stuff.
[All news were read from slashdot over past some time, you can search in slashdot if you wish to clarify]

Lets peek at some of the technologies/products of M$:
1) MS DOS (bought from some one for 50000 $)
2) Office (Powerpoint was bought from someone, eXcel was bought from someone else(Wipro AFAIK))
3) Hotmail (bought from Sabir Bhatia)
4) Windows 95 (copied/pirated totally from Apple, Billy has to join Apple to see the code?)
5) Loghorn (Every thing copied from Mac OS X, Window/Menu transparency, 3D, Spotlight(filesearch) etc.)
6) Monad (or whatever their Bash look-alike is, the source if obvious)
7) .NET ( JAVA++, J2EE++ )
8) MSN search (again bought from someone, ideas copied from Google/Yahoo too)
9) Email (they gave 4 MB, until Google gave 1 GB, when they realized that space was cheap and more should be offered, They are probably in process of copying the actual gmail interface currently)
10) Personalized MSN (again probably Yahoo or Google copied)
11) Some MSN earth search stuff( Again Google Maps, Google Earth copied)
12) Finally IE 7.0 ( you know they are still in process of copying stuff from Firefox/Opera, if they were the first to concieve the idea of tabs, by names tabs should have been patented too, they will probably still claim a patent on tabbed browsing (their usual style).
13) Some Ad stuff( Google adsense)
14) Desktop Search (again Spotlight(Mac OSX) + Google Desktop's copy).
More research done by some ppl here [1], [2] [3]

And they fired one employee who captured photos of arrival of Macintoshes in to their company in his blog[4]. What should it indicate.
Do I need to put more examples? And then there is this CEO of there who was already a gone case, and now conditions are deteriorating with Microsoft employees shifting to Google.(one of the many funny mentions on the net)
If you could refer to my post on FSF AP, you find a mention of M$ giving free Windows and related software begging ppl to just use it in schools, when they are on there way to shift to GNU/Linux.

People should be little bit more realistic in their appreciation of a company and not just do it b'coz its very rich. For instance It did take AMD long time to come to competition with Intel but finally it is doing good in the market. Many ppl won't have expected any competition to Intel some time ago but now they buy AMD because of its proven quality, Same may happen in OS market or software market too.

I wouldn't like to spend any further time on such a post, just that it was required under the circumstances.

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html.
[2] http://www.macobserver.com/news/00/may/000502/dvorak.shtml
[3] http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.shtml
[4] http://www.macnn.com/news/21786

The Magical klik install for Linux: You gonna love it.

Possibly the best app I have seen since quite long time. Kudos to the developers for such a great software. I don't really want to spend time ellaborating the details of the arch, metaphorically its out of scope of this post( actually, I didn't get it completely). As is said, just klik and install.
Here are my first usage impressions.
1) Download the client from a website.
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
2) Restart the browser for the plugin to get activated.
3) Just go to the list of available softwares
http://klik.atekon.de/
and click the link.
4) You will be shown some warning dialogs whether you trust etc stuff. Finally file copying will start and ...
5) The app will be launced :)

I have already klik installed sucessfully these apps opera, lbreakout2 (nice game), pacman, and currently installing skype :)

FSF AP Workshop at Osmania University

Thanks to Kiran Babu, I was able to attend the FSF AP's workshop on FLOSS for students from Hyderabad and nearby districts at Osmania University today. The idea was simple, "just show the students the power of GNU/Linux and other OSS and they willtransfer(spread) their knowledge amoung their batchmates in their college."

The idea is much similar to IIIT's ExOR workshop.

Me and Vakiba gave a small talk on "Introduction to GNU/Linux, installation, simple administration, and general usage",(material here).
Chaitanya then gave a talk on MySql(database), Umbrello(uml designer) and Doxygen(documentation generator), which I hope will be of great use to these studens for doing their projects.
Then Sunilmohan gave a talk on Programming in GNU/Linux platform, GCC and
GCJ followed by an introduction to Latex by OSK.

(I realized this while writing the post that IIITians are leading the FSF activities in AP).

During interaction with the students at the Lunch and/or tea break, I realized that some of them are really interested in exploring Linux, and some are even going to distribute the knowledge they gained here to other colleges and people. Many appreciated Vakiba's idea of giving handouts during the presentation.

Earlier during the inaugration FSF AP convener told about how much M$ is alarmed due to increasing activities of FSF and use of OSS. They(M$) just ended up installing free Windows and other applications to many schools in nearby places when the local mayors seeked help of FSF for porting their systems to GNU/Linux system. I am sure M$ effor will go in vain, they can't just keep doing this work everywhere. Once OSS has caught the eyes of a students, M$ products will mostly be dumped by them whether given for money or free.

Better ways of spending time at IIIT...

I thought I would pass-on(share) some of the experiences I(we) gained the hard way. Which I hope should be of some use to Juniors at IIIT.


Making more out of 2/3rd year in college: Most of us spent our leisure time and other time too playing some computer games or thinking about strategies etc. Lately I realized that their are better things one can do in 2/3rd year for time pass which will be many folds useful than those games.
First there are so many programming challenges and contest online that one if determined can easily find enuf resources on the net to practice hell lot of it. Some links of this catergories are http://www.topcoder.com, http://acm.uva.es/, IBM Linux Challenge, etc.

Second there are other things like topcoder component design/development competitions that one can take part in thereby both winning cash prizes and gaining the experience and fun of coding.

Third is jumping in to Open source software development, I did this when I started my MS, and believe me I always wished I should have started earlier. There is nothing too difficult that should behold us from starting contributing, the code is mostly simple, readable and gives you sufficient examples to build open and achieve your desired functionality easily. Moreover the great feeling comes when someone thanks you for the small contribution you have made.

This might only apply to IIITians: I realized this lately that our approach towards things is terribly wrong. There is some kind of lack of self-confidence and more over lack of motivation to work harder. Some how we never take any challenges (like IBM Linux Challenge, RedHat scholarship Challenge, CSIDC and may be M$ challenge too) seriously.
Some of us might think(at least many of my friends and I did) that these competitions are tuff and require great intelligence but its nothing so hard. To get a better idea make sure you enquire sufficiently about any challenge of your interest and see the previous years entry and you will realize, nothing is so difficult.

There must be many other ways of being more creative, like game development etc, Let me know if you want to add something.
I would also suggest ppl to avoid thinking of hidding information like these from their friends and thereby avoid local competition, Local competition and sharing will mostly help you increase ur strength and confidence.

Some cool movies

I had long earlier narrowed down my choice of movies to Comedy and Romantic only. So most movies I watch are of these genre. Here are some I saw in last 1-2 months.

Scary Movie 1-3 : Comedy. Scary Movie 3 review at IMax was like a warning to not see this movie, but due to lack of anything else I couldn't avoid watching it and I didn't regret watching it. It was cool. In fact we (me and Jagga) went ahead and watched the other 2 also. Generally the movies will not be very interesting if you haven't seen the original movies for e.g Usual Suspect, Exorcist (the scene when the girl says f**k me left me ROFL) etc.

Taxi 2 (French Movie): Comedy. It keeps my rating of French movies high, the previous onces were 100 Girls and Amile. (Hope I understand more words in the movie over time.)