Another combo post :D

Its not fair. I write so less these days and most of the posts are just a sum total of the past days. Anyways, what can I do, lets continue the trend.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is a busy day. I have to prepare a BTP presentation, a Advanced Graphics course presentation along with normal classes (read it as one class at 11). The upcoming matches from 7th of this month is to be recorded match-by-match on the tv.iiit.ac.in server. Yes!! The same old server which people enjoyed. We are working on the audio-video sync of the recording system these days. Hopefully after the series, the server will be open for the public.

This week

Well, I’ve to finish a lot of things this week. There is a pile of backlog for the Cognitive science course and a pending GPU assignment. We’ve set up a YUM REPOSITORY SERVER for IIIT. But mirroring 12 repositories for 6 platforms is a wastage of disk space and bandwidth. As a result, we are working on a better mechanism to create the repository. Sagar and I are jointly working on the project to come up with something good. Lets see what do we make.

This month

Diwali is ’scheduled’ this month. And its been 3 long months since I went home. I came to college on 7th of July 2006 and today is 4th of October 2006. I’m thinking to go home from 16th to 22nd of this month. As a result I’ve to skip a few classes and also finish the BTP final report beforehand, which is to be submitted on 24th of this month. Hopefully Jawahar sir will allow me to go home. I have to restart the work on the 4th semester 4 credit Mobile Blogging software project. The placements have come very near, and I need to have a clean marksheet.

Qt 4

Wow! This new thing is such a marvel. Initially I used to hate it, because I didn’t understand how to use it. But now I am familiar with the Ui namespace, resource files and other fundas, it feels good. For starters, let me tell you a good news. In Qt 3, if we created a Ui from Qt designer, and edited the header and sources generated using the uic command, the ui files used to overwrite them next time we needed to change something in Ui. Now, they’ve separated Ui component from the functionality code. As a result, the programmer can completely rely for Ui on Qt4 designer and on his code for the rest of it. Another good thing is resources. Now we can define the resources like images, text files used by the application we develop. All of them will get embedded inside the executable itself. As a result, we need to ship only single files instead of zip archives.

My experiments - Embedder

I was thinking about making something like ’setup.exe’ of windows. Generally linux setups come as tar archives or like rpm files. Almost nothing (except jdk setups, etc) come like a single setup file which handles everything. I wrote a command line utility as the first steps to generate something similar for linux. The command is called ‘createArchive’. This command takes two arguments, name of a new executable and a resource file. The resource file contains a list of files, both executable and ordinary. The command reads all files given in the resource file and finally creates an executable by the name as specified. This new executable contains all the files embedded in itself. Upon execution, this executable creates a temporary directory in /tmp and extracts all the files. It then executes the executables in a specified order. It has options of ‘quiet’ and ‘destroy extracted files on exit’ too. You can try this too. Download the files from here. It works on Linux, but is pretty much platform independent, most of if is just CORE C++. Maybe you can try it on windows as well. Does “FILE * fp;” work on windows? Sorry, the code isn’t documented (at all).

Movies

Ok, not many in the list. Lage Raho Munnabhai has been the favorite since a few days. I don’t know if the director had any intention to spread the gandhigiri, but I can see it already spreading (at least in orkut profiles). What I think one should notice is that the ‘noble thought’ is being internalized and understood by someone who has been violent and aggressive all the time, a gunda. If such a person can understand the words of truth and non-violence, we, the ordinary people ought to.

Pyaar ke side effects… they are already there. Actually Tanu wanted me to see this one. And after people appreciated it, I got desperate to see it. Eh, well I can already notice some of the side effects in my life too, hehe. In all a fun movie, a must see for your PC and can be worthy for the cinema hall as well.

Blogging - bring me back

Oh its been so long since I last visited my blog or someone elses. I am like out of the blogging world. Not that I am busy or something, but I do other things more often. They include movies, orkutting, chatting, working on the YUM REPO, etc. And rest of the time I am outside my room doing some other activities. Lets see if I revert back with this opening post. Actually I was considering of creating a private blog as well, or making this one private or something similar. I think a lot of my thoughts don’t find place in this open blog. Maybe its too early to let my ideas open for the public to read and judge.

Conclusion

Ok fine, now that I wrote a post, I have to have a conclusion. There is nothing to conclude though. Welcome me back to the blogging world. Hopefully going home this diwali. And well keep your fingers crossed for the upcoming YUM REPOSITORY and TV.IIIT.AC.IN.

Ciao.

Backlog

So, its been over a month without a single blog. Great! Actually I didn’t feel like blogging these days. Some of it was due to some personal reasons, and most of the time in the later part of July, it was due to lack of motivation. Anyways, what I remembered is that it just takes a fresh start to make things roll again. Here is the fresh start.

Let me tell you things in the reverse order. Right now I’ve just returned from my class, Middleware Systems. It was a very hectic day today, hypothetically. I haven’t done much work today practically. NOW I have to do some wordlists for GRE. Phew, god help me.

This week

I have behaved quite complacently this week. Most of it is due to the fact that most people around me are attempting their GRE in August, while I am attempting it in September. Hence, the complacency. The Barrons GRE book, as they call it, contains 50 wordlists, each having about 75 words. That makes it 3700+, wow! I haven’t even done 200 of them. Hope I get a little more sincere on that front.

Last month

The month of July has been easy going. Not many classes, unneccessarily delaying the project work, not doing any GRE preparation has been the norm. All my classes are scheduled after lunch this semester, except one on Wednesdays. Hence, sleeping late and getting up late has become the ruitine. Well, and I explain it as taking rest after the tight schedule in the internship.

Post Noida

I already mentioned how nice was my trip to Noida. Thanks to Rakhi ma’am and Deepak sir for the kind remarks. After my return my Noida, most of the days back home were spent in roaming around with my friends. And then, an unplanned return to IIIT, which I realized was unneeded. I could have easily spent another week at home. Those few days living in the campus were painful, after knowing the biting reality.

Room shift
I shifted to a new room, OBH 110. Great room it is, the room of my pal, Arun. Apart from a screeching door and an almirah without any hanging rod, its quite cozy in here. Its in the front wing in OBH. Ravi Shankar often claims that girls come for breakfast at the exact time he is leaving for a shower, so that they can have a glance at him, half naked in a towel. I don’t know how true is that, hehe. Other things are great about this room. With Ashish in the adjacent room, and Devansh around the corner, its always fun time and guidance to this poor soul. And well, teasing and irritating Ravi is like a everyday timepass.

Courses

Not very many, just 4 courses this semester. And most of them are not much into the technical side.

A perspective to Industry and Society - As the name suggests, this one is a pure philosophy subject, just write what you want in the answer sheet kind of subject. Most classes are just fun.

Introduction to Cognitive Science - Ok, no need to think it like a real course with some matter to mug up and all. Its like a discussion forum. The only constraint is the topic is chosen by the course outline. Rest of it is just the way you make it. We are divided into groups of 15 each and have group discussions on topics like human vision in 3D, illusions and stuff. Most of it is fun.

Middleware systems - This one is a great one. Real tech thingi involved, all Java, Corba, .NET, J2EE and stuff. We learn some really useful tools and concepts and well we have a project to do too. Will also learn Java in the process. Nice one it is.

Advanced topics in Graphics - This one is like a learning and experimentation based one. Most of it is related to OpenGL and GPU programming. Today was the first class, so can’t write much about it. Its going to be a great experience I think.

Projects

Eh, this is the area I am lagging. Too many projects have aggromerated (hope the usage is correct). The BTP, Mobile Blogger (4th sem project), Visual Tracking (5th sem honors project), Computer Vision course project, isn’t four enough? Hope I get to some serious work.

Fedora Core 5

Since long I have been getting irritated with Random Hangups and Freezes with FC5. I just upgraded the kernel from 2.6.16 to 2.6.17 and the hangups disappeared. It seems there was some problem in the kernel and its ATI drivers or something. The issue has been resolved in the newer version.

KDE 3.5.3

Upgraded to this new KDE after I reached college. Its simply awesome. You would say it has copied stuff from XP, but the konqueror with its metabar and the capability to play video previews (actually play the video as a preview, pause, ffwd, rew, stop) is great. It supports ALL formats supported by MPLAYER, i.e. MPEG, AVI, ASF, RM, RA, RAM, anything, you just name it and it plays. And the KBFX menu (with the normal K-menu is great), actually the button looks cool, hehe. Rest of it pretty much similar to 3.5.

Conclusion

GRE is my priority. Others are my projects. The courses are easy going so need not bother much. And well, my readers, sorry to keep you waiting…. please come back.

Ciao.

KDE

The K Desktop Environment is THE BEST DE for Linux. This category is about describing the features, applications and its own versions.