Deans Party :) Remembering 5th Sem

Somehow I made it to the Merit List for both the fifth and sixth semester, I didn't even think of being there. Anyways now I realize that those were probably the best semester spent in IIIT. In the fifth Sem I took lot of work in the sense of extra courses. I had 7 courses namesly. TOC, POPL, Computer Networks, Honour's Project, Cryptography and Network Security, and Middleware. That list is as heavy as the sem used to be. I feel good to remember about the happenings of that sem.

In TOC we, I mean most of my batchmates were literally f***ed up, I remember the first test when I was expecting around 10/15 and got 3.5, A serious blow to hopes of making a good SGPA in the semester. The next test and even the end sem was not that great. I remember how before the end sem we were worried not about getting good grade but just passing. I and dixit were pleasantly surprized to see that we had a total of around 40 or so out of 60. We knew we can pass well. But we f***ed up our end sem too. :) when the grades were 'first' release I got B-, but something like DBMS happened again, lots of shuffling, many ppl, IIRC girls took the lead in increasing their marks and grades. Finally I got a B. Very Happy.
POPL was a cool subject from the beginning, I always wondered about both my tutors, whether they were cool or whether they will screw up our grades. I happened to be the CR of that sem so I had to talk to them regularly on points of postponements etc. I remember now how we got so many assignments postponed and never did them, many copied and showed, other didn't copy and said we can copy and show , so give us as many marks as you would give after copying :). PP was our tutor, I did make the full use of the situation to get more friendlier with her.
Computer Networks What can I say, it was the first subject in which I topped in my class. Rememberable things were how there was such a mass copying in assignment on Network Design when all people were writing wrong answers with wrong assumptions and all and when we got marks I was given very bad marks 5.5/10, even though I was confident I was amongst the best in the class. That was the first time I ever had a complaint against my marks in anything. The day when grades were out, will always be one of my most memorable day.
Cryptography and Network security was a light subject and out batch managed to make it more lighter by giving senties and removing one of the major algorithm RES from the test. The course is really informative and must be taken.
Middleware, mostly the course sucked that time, we almost never followed the classes, a 3hr session with lots of slides mostly made by someone else rather than the presenter. Vandana was our TA she did take the pains to make the course easier for us taking some Tutorials that really helped much. But the bad thing was that she allowed ppl of my class to copy, Before the midsem I realized I was behind many ppl who always copied, but Endsems gave a good recovery. Me and Sachin got A along with some other students of my class, but they were changed to A-, when the grading changed from A/B/C to A/A-/B/B- etc. I can still remember that night when I, KG and Swati were standing in front of the notice board discussing about the semester and middleware grades etc. and I passed some bad remark to someone and Vishal Garg sir came out of his room :)
Honour's Project was one with TCS, It was continuation of our summer internship, with Nirnimesh being my pp I never felt burden of the project, I hoped he did the same too. TCS fellows use to come to IIIT for learning OpenGL etc, We had some longs meetings with PJN sir and Raj from TCS regarding the design etc of the software in a small classroom on second floor.
DIP would always be the last thing to remember, Dipti Singh was our tutor and she sucked badly, I realize that we were not very clear in concepts of DIP, but that was never cared for, she only use to ask questions for VIVA of assignments we did, and would cut our marks after deriving some conclusions from our answere irrespective of whether we did the assignment ourself or not. I did quite well in endsem, I was expecting around 35/40, after finishing the paper almost 1/2 an hr in advance, but when got our copies I got only 23 marks. I knew the grade was gone. Finally got a B-, mostly attributed to Dipti Singh, who unnecessarily cut marks for assignments which I did on my own. In this course me and Nirnimesh did a project on Morphological operators, I remember about going to his room for 2-3 nights doing some BC with Anand mostly and finishing the project quickly.

Blogging after long time...

After coming back from the great Simla trip, I kept postponing the blogging stuff. I remember having blogged my Novemeber vacations quite well, but there are reasons for delay in blogging.

My MS project seems to be crawling badly, Not much progress has been made, I am always worried about the grades I am gonna recieve in this project as well as when to start my thesis.

As such the greatest problem is not knowing which direction to work, Till now sir has been suggesting some experiments on the cellphone, they are mostly over. "NEWLC" forums have been a great help. Even though some questions remained unanswered some were answered nicely.
Now the biggest issue what to do ahead. I have already started implementation of some image manipulation etc on ANSI c++ on Linux system. Registration looks a difficult work in itself and doing it on phone is ofcourse more complex issue.

The Deadline for the Redhat project's SRS submission is gone, I will try to sit with Bedi and Dixit to do some work quickly and possibly submit the SRS. PR project work is restarted and hopefully we will finish that tomorrow. Project Management is another big issue to be settled down in near future.

This Semester is passing quite strangely, some days earlier I was thinking why I dropped the course of Computation Geometry, now it is VTK course that is to be worried about. Not sure whether to drop it or not.

Snacks with Apache Cofounder Brain

Though I got late to the talk by Brain, due to the CG class. Padmaja madam gave us a change to have personal interracion with him during the press meet.

I, Anu, Sunil and Vamsee went with him to ITC kakatiya for this press meet. We were supposed to help the press people make sense out of his techie language, but the press ppl didn't wanted so. So we sat on a nearby table during their meet. Had those dark coffee, in which we all put almost 3/4 sugar packets that were available there.

Then after the meeting with press was over we sat with him and interacted regarding what versions etc we use, what kind of coding he does etc. We were the last ppl he was meeting before the returning so he gave us all his visting card and also took our Email ids. After he went, we ordered some Pizzas and S, which really sucked, compared to the price they were charging, You can really get much better than them at normal local resturants.

Work as Networks TA finished...

Our work in networks TA ship is over. I hope the grades will be out soon too. Students are worried a lot about them. May God bring peace and happiness to them.

CVIT party!!!

It was a great saturday after long time. In the morning we(me and vidit) went to CMC to check networks end sem scripts. Some hiccups on regard to Bansi helping students. Later we started checking the objective part for Mtechs.

Had the lunch there itself, along with sir, who introduced us to some ppl there, the best part was that he said, "He was the only student from BTech to get an A in the subject," pretty inspiring sentence. After lunch we again sat for some time, finished the copies and then came back to IIIT.

Later in the evening, me Majji and Ranjith attended the ethics class (we had already signed a virtual pact to attend his class together and do lots of BC), but this time all of a sudden a new group including Nirnimesh, took the lead and sat on the first bench and did lots of BC, giving us a close competition. We take the challenge, let see next Friday.

Then there was this cool CVIT party, we went 7 in an auto to cyber pearls, Hitech city phase 2. The building is ok from outside, the first impressive thing was the filmi style glass entrance gate which opened automatically using those IR sensors.

In the party there was lots of BC, especially the introduction part and then the Dumb Cherades. I for the first time dared to enact the film, and lo it came out to be "the last Samurai", the movie that I closed after watching for 10 minutes. I gave all the indication about the movie, as far as I have seen it, but it took them lot of time to realize the movie. The overall party was nice.

In the night I watched the movie, "Along Came Polly," ok movie, 8/10.