6: Time for a change

It’s been a month now since the semester is over, but when you are sitting in California, and visiting amazing places on weekends, writing blog posts isn’t the highest priority :) But the 6th semester deserves 10 blog posts and atleast one is mandated.

6 not only had a personal highs, but in general wrought a lot of changes. I’ve begun taking a lot of pictures this semester. I always thought it was stupid of people to shoot images like crazy, but it turns out that photos are a very good way to trigger memories about past events. I also started scribbling down little notes about memorable days. Not only are they a great resource when writing posts a few months later, but you can capture your state of mind at that point which is impossible later. This is an outcome of the approach to the end of the college and seeing the emotional situation of the seniors during their final semester.

I’ve been torn between making this post a chronicle of events or focusing on deeper things, which I don’t write very well about. Apologies to the two friends whom I chided on not writing good enough entries. It is hard work :P.

Even semesters usually start with Synapse, and boy was this year’s Synapse blazing. The only reason this paragraph exists is so I could use the word blazing. But Synapse does not fit where this note is going, although it served as the beginning for many of the things that happened.

Life this semester was like American television shows, one larger story arc with lots of action in between :) That arc is of course trying for internships on two sides of the world. On the 22nd of March when Mozilla hired me past midnight – that was an EPIC moment! Living in Silicon Valley, working on Firefox and getting paid for it is a dream I never even considered, and it all became true in two hurried months of interviews with the nicest people, and visa procedures that make you an expert in filling up forms. I guess, now that I’m hired, I can reveal two interview gaffes I made. One of my interviews was during conf.kde.in when I was in Bangalore, with my Ahmedabad phone number. This meant I was on roaming. I conveniently forgot about the charges it entailed and was surprised when the call dropped half way through discussing hash tables. The second ‘disaster’ was on the final interview. Due to some time-zone blunder I was woken up by the interviewer and proceeded to give the interview in a most uncomfortable manner. That I still got the job seems like a bit of a shock now. (Note: Do not let the interviewer in on the fact that you’ve just woken up. Continue asking questions about the company until you are awake enough to deal with the technical parts.)

Most of my college life has been an attempt at improving some or the other part of my personality. Being more impulsive has been at the top of that list. I used to be too much of a planner with an inbuilt cron daemon and all that, and if you continue with that you can miss a lot of the fun parts of college life. With the switch I’ve lost a lot of sleep, but it was well worth it. The outcome – memorable all-nighters which had nothing to do with studying, going to a movie the day before the exam because it was a three day international film festival and spending a lot more time away from the computer. I now think this is also an attempt to break down every stereotype associated with me in college, and since the t-shirt incident last year, I’ve been performing brilliantly at it :)

As if determined to give me more reasons to be impulsive, India put on a massive World Cup win! I don’t really like cricket, but the crazy atmosphere in college, the constant cheering and the euphoria when the cup was won, was absolutely remarkable, and I think the Nikhil of yester-year would not have attended the matches.

The other change has been to experience as many things as possible, which means eating in new places, travelling around, attending just about everything I could. This has been at the cost of certain responsibilities, which might be seen as bad by others (ie. not holding enough OSID sessions) but I’ve finally decided that it is more important for me to be personally satisfied with what I am doing than to conform (again) to those stereotypes that the old Nikhil has built up.

I do not mean that I want to shirk my achievements. It feels good to know that you’ve set certain examples that others follow and to be a guide when jumping into the difficult world of FOSS development. This year, over 8 students were selected for Google Summer of Code from DA-IICT, and to know that me, Aditya and Dinesh had a part to play in it felt really good.

While I was having fun, the KDE India community ticked off its dream of having a conference here. conf.kde.in was a very special occasion because it was the first time the KDE community had a India conference. Pradeepto and Shantanu and others in Bangalore put in a ton of effort , and the eV provided full support, which led to a wonderful conference with well known KDE speakers and some great food :) The response was tremendous and some of the effects are already visible with the number of Summer of Code and other contributors who were conference attendees. My own contributions have been at an all time low and it seems it will be that way into the summer, but the motivation has not dwindled only due to the wonderful people.

Academically this semester was a personal disaster. I had really easy courses for the most part, but I did not like the amount of effort I put in. The parts which I thoroughly enjoyed, I did really well, but for the most part I was a pig-headed ass, and that has to change. I did get a 9.4/10 overall though :)

The software engineering course was Shakespeare all over again. I feared it, then I mocked it, then I rebelled against it, then I just mis-quoted it in desperation :), and in hindsight I respect it. It was a hard lesson in managing a team, getting work done and staying with one piece of software for four long months and polishing it. It proved to me that the hacker style of coding is not enough on its own to produce good software.

Finally, in my ‘thoughts document’ (see SEN ke side effects!) that I mentioned at the beginning, there are certain names of people that have affected or inspired me in college. While writing this I’ve been deliberating on whether now is a good time. It’s not, but two groups of students do deserve a special mention:

• The Press Club – We’ve had an excellent year with readership through the roof and high-quality articles. The batch of 2007 has been the principal force in rejuvenating the magazine and the main source of the more argumentative and well analyzed articles. At the same time you’ve been humble mentors and this is getting really fluffy so thanks a lot is all I’ve got to say.

• Special Ops – Ah, what to put here about the weirdest bunch of juniors and some batchmates, some of whom I got to know only this semester? Thanks for letting me enjoy the World Cup, listening patiently to my PJs, playing TT, and not treating me like a senior. Now just stop calling me bhaiya and we are cool. Also remember, you are all 10 pointers :)

There are other people, but I don’t want to embarass them and they don’t come under any group :P You know who you are.

If you’ve made it till here and know me, you may be surprised at how this post has played out, considering I’m the un-emotional, hug-less boy. Do NOT raise this slew of changes in a face-to-face discussion with me (especially you Mama and Baba :)), in some things I’m still closed source.

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Semester 5

Its been ages since I’ve got a post up, but I have my excuses. I have been working on a static site for myself, self-hosted and with my own domain name. I thought I would only resume blogging once that was done, but it is going to take some more time. Now with December a week old, it is time for my customary brain dump about the entire semester. In many ways these posts are highlights of the semester according to me. The short version: It was busy.

Last time, it was summer and I was in GSoC euphoria, and since then I’ve had a couple of posts about it and KDE, but I left out all the human bits.

The fifth semester is an important stepping stone in DA-IICT. It is the first time that you are free to chose half of the courses depending on your interests. It meant I could give up Communications, which had always hit me hard when it came to grades. So I had Introduction to Algorithms, Embedded Hardware Design (EHD), Database Management Systems (DBMS), Computer Networks (CNS), Introduction to VLSI and Approaches to Science Fiction (SF).

EHD was a course which was very interesting and very boring. The interesting part was programming Atmel micro-controllers in C. I. Loved. It. We even made a wicked cool one-way chat that used two Atmel boards. Typing messages to the serial port on one computer, would send it to the board, which would Huffman encode it, send it across the SPI bus, where another board would decode it and send it to the second computer. The SPI bus can be swapped with any system for longer range communication, it was only that our board didn’t support it. The boring part was the second half, when we were programming FPGAs using Verilog. FPGAs are the kind of technology that tries to think too much. It also makes programming the simple things on them extremely convoluted, with pin assignments on the massive board and using the god-awful slow Xilinx ISE environment. Write to Run time is a crucial parameter of programmer happiness. When you can finish a large ice-cream scoop in the time it takes to burn changes to a board, something is wrong.

Speaking of ice-cream cones, for the first time ever, I bought an entire pack worth of ice-cream (Baskin Robbins) and ate it all. It was delicious! It was great. It just got a bit boring towards the end. The 24th was incidentally the coldest day of November in Gandhinagar, and at 1pm in the afternoon, I was shivering, it was raining and it was the middle of final exams. It’s good I wasn’t thinking about the probability of getting sick.

VLSI was my most challenging subject. The professor was top-notch, and I loved the course. The look at how ALUs and memory is made using CMOS gates — that was truly full-stack knowledge. It was calculating the delay that seemed really tough for first two exams, but by the third exam I had it down well and managed to get a 7/10 overall.

DBMS was a fiasco. I disliked the course, I disliked the teaching assistants, I disliked the boring stuff we had to do in the labs. CNS labs on the other hand were very interesting, we did a lot of Wireshark inspection and set up BGP/OSPF routers. Very hands-on. The lectures were another matter. I attended 3 out of the 40 odd that happen in a semester.Algorithms was pretty normal, some very interesting things like O(n) median finding in an unsorted array and dynamic programming is a wonderful technique for solving problems, although not easy to get your head around.

Which brings me to the final course, Science Fiction. It was brilliant! We watched influential movies from the last fifty years, and I plan to review all of them in another post. It gave me a chance to review Stephen Baxter, analyze time travel and opened my eyes to this whole idea of SF being influenced by the society in which it was written. We had a very questioning professor, who introduced all these ideas. For all my life I’ve read novels pretty cursorily. The deeper themes and clues were lost as I spread through them. But that course brought all these things out. I’ve learnt to appreciate writing — the subtlety of language, the thorough research, the names — everything has to come together to create that perfect book.

With that course, and Entelechy bringing out 3 editions in one semester, I’ve written tonnes of articles in those 4 months, and it has spurred a certain love of writing. I need to work more on my description, and emotion more though.

Football always proceeds in fits and starts at DA-IICT, and this semester was more of fits. First I got a nasty ankle sprain, there went two weeks. Then my new pair of studs/cleats tore. Fortunately, the showroom didn’t have a replacement, so they gave me better ones! Neck-deep in work, I also had to forgo the tournament in IIT Kanpur.

As October approaches, Synapse preparations start. After last year’s series of disasters with a bad looking website and a server fire during the actual fest, we needed to strike back. So check out this year’s website. In fact, a full post about its making seems to be in order. This was done in one week, with two very late nights and taking advantage of the superb back-end code from last year. It has reinforced my belief that for something to be successful and worth doing, that initial idea has to be top-notch, a vision that provides very strong motivation. A mediocre idea will often lead to lack of perseverance in the team. Also I shamelessly request all readers who are college students to take part in Apps Dreamer

There was Hackfest of course, and I’m going to FOSS.in this year too. With an extremely busy four months, I’ve realised that its time to start saying no. I had a lot of mandatory tasks plus some others I took on voluntarily, but it proved a bit too much. So I’ve been really relaxing this month. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped programming or learning. It means that I don’t do too much and the moment I feel tired, I stop. Next semester will again have a few projects, and I’ll be attempting the GRE, so I need to recharge this month.

Overall, semester 5 was good. Not enough academic learning, but lots of non-academic learning, and very busy days. Something I don’t want to repeat again :) The weather all throughout was magnificent though. The rains decided that 4 months was too short a time, and continued almost till the beginning of November. That coupled with winter felt just great.

Posted via email from nikhil's posterous

This semester was... LEGEN-wait for it-DARY

It's been a week since the summer holidays, and that means another semester is behind me. Reflecting on the past two years of engineering, I would say that this semester has been the best 6 months of my life ever. I have changed (read: improved) in a hell of a lot of ways. I also dumped some of my inclination to always plan out the day and introduced some spontaniety. Just before the sem there was December, which meant FOSS.in and the rural internship. Both thrust me into the public all alone, resulting in an eye-opening experience. FOSS.in was a collection of geeks where for the first time I could talk to other people all day about technology and computers and meet lots of coders from around the country. From a wi-fi enabled, air-conditioned environment to a laid-back village in the middle of nowhere in 3 days. That was the beginning of my rural internship. Those 4 days in the village were quite boring, yet it also opened my eyes to what India was. It doesn't mean I am going to go and use ICT in a socially responsible manner -- It isn't as much fun as programming.

Next up was Synapse. For the first time any piece of my code was being interacted with by hundreds of people, as my backend powered the registration and site navigation for the fest. I knew my code was very good ( definitely better than some code I had to look at for some events with specific websites ), and it felt good when the amount of junk IDs were a very small percentage of the total number of registrations.

Then just a day before Synapse was to begin, we had a 'Bazinga!' moment. The server room air conditioner caught fire, rendering the entire DA-IICT network infrastructure down for about a week. No Synapse website, no updates to do in the dead of the night, which meant I had 3 days off to enjoy :-). This also meant I finally had time to give my laptop for repairs.

Enjoy I did. This Synapse was and will remain a very memorable one. We had a blast decorating the SAC for D-lounge. This involved hanging flags on the awnings by climbing a shaky ladder up to the first floor, then leaving both hands to unravel and hook up the flag. Next up was putting up a installation in the middle of the lotus pond. This required calling in a special-ops team as the pond was full of water. Which reminds me, someone has photos of the entire drama. That same rickety ladder was placed flat and one person sat on the end to keep it from toppling into the water. Then about five of us walked across to the first stage of the pond. Then the ladder was pulled across to the next level. Then me and tanmay passed over. After that the ladder was pulled back, and the artwork was passed over. Time for the final jump. The ladder was brought up all the way to the centre, and we literally pushed the canvas across it, hoping it wouldn't end up tearing or going in the water. Then we repeated the entire sequence to get back out. Fortunately, no one fell in, although two poor souls had to stand barefoot in the dirty water all this while.

(effort)

Finally at 3am the task was done, or so we thought.

Synapse Day 1 - 10:30pm I had just finished the last lecture of the day, and wanted to go to Ahmedabad and get my laptop back. But a gust of wind had caused the installation to collapse. Which meant going back in again, this time much more easily and confidently, and sticking it into the ground using bamboos and nails.

Of course this isn't a post about Synapse, so I am going to jump ahead to day 2, which was all about Indian Ocean.

There is a secret to getting the best view at the Pro Nites in Synapse. Get into security, and know a lot of people. The concert was just a treat, well worth all the effort put into Synapse. It was mindblowing and perhaps only the video can capture most of it. They played some never before played songs which are to be released in movies soon. Yet Ma Rewa and Kandisa stole the show as usual. But the most important part is at the end. Once the concert was done we formed a cordon to let the guys get to their room. Now we weren't allowed in, but in an act of spontaneity I took of my Synapse T-shirt (right there!) and threw it in to the coordinator so he could get it signed. And then I *ran*, to the nearest bathroom which was still some 100 metres away :o Well it definitely paid of. In my closet is now a T-shirt signed by Amit Kilam from Indian Ocean. Finally there was the D-Lounge treasure hunt and the late night pool-playing. Ah... those were the days.

Ok, enough about Synapse. The other thing I do in DA-IICT is play football. This year has been a record in terms of the number of tournaments we've played. In the 3rd semester we went to Patan and had our very own Concours. Then we won the IPTG Petro Cup. And in March we went to BITS Pilani, Goa. I've been in top form ( if I should say so myself ) and improved tremendously in ball control and dribbling this semester. Although we lost in the first round, I was happy to hold my ground and not make any mistakes.

And finally there was of course the Google Summer of Code result. I hadn't got in last year. But this time I had put in a *lot* of effort and would have been really disappointed if I didn't make it. But fortunately I did

Now I just got my results, and I got an 8 out of 10 SPI, my lowest yet :-( All thanks to CT and EL, although it was my fault... Well you can't have everything.

Non-trivium

When you don't post for a long time, it usually means you have nothing interesting to do. But for me it usually means that I have a lot of things to do. And the last month have been horrible in terms of free time.

We had a really great one day trip to Diu, but from then on, it was all underhill :)

You might want to check out the Synapse website which was crafted from scratch with a little help from these guys. This was done under constant pressure of the not so great marks I received in the first midsem exam and the looming second insem, so I applaud myself.

This was accompanied by Concours 09, the first time DA-IICT ever held an inter-college sports fest. We reached the finals and lost! (in football). But now the exams were just a week away.

This exam week was the worst of my short stint in DA. Never before have I skipped football for 5 days straight. And the woozy feeling in the head when I soaked up about 1024Kb worth of signals and systems and put more than half out on the paper. This followed by Algebraic Structures meant that I was with tics for the whole day. Whoo what a semester this is turning out to be...

Thankfully I've been home for almost a week now, enjoying great food after quite some time. But my football holiday is now up to 15 days! I have hacked on the Synapse registration, read 3 chapters of Programming Scala, watched the first part of A curious course on Concurrency and Coroutines, submitted a first code review of kwin-tiling, and procrastinated on some other things. Through all this I also read a few books, and watched the first 5 episodes of Heroes Season 4. That was a lot of stuff in retrospect. Meanwhile FOSS.in is starting to pick up steam and I'm looking forward to when the registration for simple attendance begins.

I'm also on the look-out for an internship.

In the next 48 hours, its back to DA, and time to get cracking on IEEEXtreme, at which I am going to fail miserably, since I don't get time to do pure algorithm practice.

And I thought I was on a holiday :(

PS: I wish some one would sponsor me to go to Camp KDE or atleast Akademy.

Great Weekend

So my second weekend in this place went pretty great. Now that I've found the right computer which easily boots from external devices I'm ready to slowly begin coding. On saturday five of us saw Ugly and Pagli — crappy movie — but I got my first pair of studs. Its been raining a lot for the last three days here. It starts at around 7 and goes on till late into the night, which means a lot of fun football (I've discovered that playing barefoot is better than playing with normal shoes), but being cooped up in the rooms afterwards.

I also made some headway into How To Design Programs which is a really great book, and read almost all of Joel On Software (the book) which is entertaining to say the least.

So right now I'm sitting here after attending a particularly boring calculus lecture. I haven't had a bath because there was no water, and I'm reading a boring story as part of the assignment for Communication Skills.

Right now I'm replanning Graffiti since I wiped it out a few weeks ago. I've also been messing around with Scheme, but can't think of what application to write to dig deeper into it.

A bit of improvement

I'm in the institute lab right now, booting from a pen drive (Slax). But tomorrow I'll get my external HDD and plug it in and try to be productive. These labs are only meant for 'academics' which means there are caps on downloads, so I can't even download firefox without it being interrupted. Also we haven't got our IDs yet, so this connection is thanks to a senior who was kind enough to let me use his account.

Also there is a firewall/proxy which means no IM sites or IM protocols are allowed. This does kind of suck, but it is better than nothing. And this is only till December ( or so I hope ). Cheers, I'll update this tomorrow.

PS. No CD drives on any computer, how do I install Arch? Probably go home and do it

Still no computer

So the second time I'm in a cyber cafe. In certain respects private universities aren't much better than public ones. We still haven't got ID cards, which means no net/linux access. Which means no coding too.

Other than that its been pretty good, playing football and table tennis. But a bit tiring too. Its been raining a lot today, which means there isn't much to do. We had the first couple of lectures today, but nothing new was taught.

This is boring, but the situation is likely to improve in a few days.

In DA-IICT

Well, I'm here, or I've been here for 5 days now. Since we haven't got ID cards yet, there is no computer access, so I'm writing this from a cyber cafe. The last few days have been a bit boring. With no studies, playing and reading seem to be the only things you can do in 24 HOURS!.

I haven't written any code in days, but I have managed to read Hutton's Haskell book, which is really good. This place's library is awesome for all the computer science/programming related books they have, now I just hope I'll have linux access in the labs. For atleast four more months personal computers are not allowed in the rooms. So it might be next year (read Jan 2009) before I actually have my own computer again. Till then I'll just hang on to the external harddisk.

Graffiti and more

It turns out parsing CSS according to specifications is no mean feat. So I am going to stall that for a moment, or implement a bare bones parser specifically written for Graffiti, and just plow along with Graffiti and doing what I can do, properly.

Maybe later ( read quite a few months ) I'll write a nice SAC compliant CSS parser and hook it into Graffiti.

Whatever I want to do, things aren't going to be moving fast. On Sunday I'm leaving for university ( DA-IICT ) and that involves a lot of pre-leaving things to do. And the week after that will go in getting settled there and taking a look at the computing facilities. I'll probably be taking a external HDD with all my files and I might just do a blind copy of this hard disk itself so I can boot Arch their if it is allowed.

DA-IICT decision

Today I'm leaving for Gandhinagar, to take a look around the DA-IICT campus and if seats are available, get in. Hoping I will, it has a great campus and faculty and, in a way, Gandhinagar is pretty close to home.