A Stationary Traveller’s travel log

Well its been a long time since i have sent in a blog post. I was finally done with the degree requirements and left Kanpur on 12th for Hyderabad. I have had nice time meeting my relatives and meeting one of my good old friends.

Well during the community bonding period, I was happily sedated and had to begin my work after May 23rd. Well I am sticking to the timelines and am almost done with the module which parses xforms and generates a .pdf copy of the form. 

But bzr checkouts were a big pain in the ass when you are on a slow connection ( initially i was on gprs connection and my modem hung up too frequently. ) 

And the good news is that I put on 4 kgs of weight in the last one month even though I am on a regular exercise routine.

I shall be going home to Bangalore on Monday and then update a few more things.

A few months ago when my 80 gb harddisk got corrupted, I got a new 250 gb internal hdd and thought man have I got a lot of disk space, but a few months later I am constantly facing shortage of disk space. Most of my disk space is consumed by music. Apart from the music, I have a few episodes of tv shows, guitar instructional videos and some movies.

These days I have been listening to a diverse set of artists right like Dave Matthews Band, Fleetwood Mac, Phish, Norah Jones, Foghat, The Doobie Brothers, Ted Nugent, Rory Gallagher, Arlen Roth, Eric Claption etc. I was just wondering who my all time favourites will be and the answer is Pink Floyd at the top, followed by Camel, Led Zepp, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Doors, The Allman brothers and so on.

I have been a huge fan of the glam metal from the 80s but these days I cant seem to enjoy it as much as I did a few years ago, I used to be a metal head around 3-4 years ago and I dont enjoy that too these days. Am I growing old for this ? :) Was listening to Van Halen yesterday, dint seem to like it much :)

I have been addicted to southern rock/ Blues rock/ Classic rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Outlaws, Black Crowes, Allman brothers, Derek Trucks, Foghat, Steppenwolf, Deep Purple, Rory Gallagher,Ten Years after, Tom Petty, John Mayall, Gary moore etc. I have been discovering the music of the classic blues legends, the three Kings, Paul Butterfield, Peter Green ( of Fleetwood Mac),  Robert Cray, Johnny Winter, Sonny Landreth, Joe Bonamassa etc. The contemporary hard rock bands Jaded sun and The answer are amazing too. For me Airbourne sounds like a cheap ACDC ripoff. 

For a change I have been trying out some indie music again, got the "The O.C" and "One Tree Hill" collections and been listening to them. Apart from those one song that I have liked very much is "Such great heights" by Postal Service.

I would like a few recommendations of good indie music.

I am getting two 1Tb HDDs or one 2 Tb harddisk which ever is cheaper within a few days.

Now that I shall be finally graduating from IIT K early next month, I
thought I should start applying for jobs. I sent in an application to
Amazon, Hyderabad for the post of "Fulfillment optimization analyst".
Apparently the recruitment involved 3 (elimination) rounds of
telephonic interviews. First round interviewers were from Hyderabad
and the interview was more or less smooth. They gave me an impression
that the actual job is problem formulation and solving it using some
numerical computational techniques. Then I enter the second round of
interview where i was interviewed by this tech lead from Amazon,
Seattle who heads that division. I was totally screwed as the
interview contained data indexing, data interpretation and data
analysis questions which apparently what the job actually was. I had
no f-in idea about any of these topics and thus I did not get through
the second round.

I get a standard email from the company saying that "Your aspirations
and expectations don't exactly match with the job profile we have
interviewed you for, thanks". Why cant they just put it out to me and
tell me "Dude your interview went horribly".

I also tried applying for PhD admissions at CSE, IIT K, where the
application was rejected as my academic background was not very good
(where they expected exceptional performance during the undergrad
level specially from those who aren't from CS undergrad background. I
am from Mechanical)

I finally have been offered an RA position which I can take up as soon
as my end semester exams end. This essentially means that I would be
spending the summers at Kanpur.

And if I get through GSoC this year, I sure do need connectivity to
get the work done. :D

It seems like I shall continue to stay in this city Kanpur, which I
have been despising for the past 5 years, for quite sometime.

Over the past few days, Shashank, Anuj and I have been working on our mobile computing course project which was to maintain session mobility while the vertical handoff between Bluetooth and WLAN. 

I was looking at the research that has been done by a grad student at ETH Zurich where he implemented a virtual interface on a computer which would bridge various physical interfaces and shift to one of them based on the availability and priority. I got the sources from the grad student's site and I recompiled my kernel with the necessary patches and then tried implementing the kernel modules but the sad thing is that there were many modifications to netdevice.h and sysfs-utils. (The comments in the  older versions of netdevice.h  say that code is messy and has to be refactored and has been done by 2.6.33 ). So rewriting the entire library and kernel modules wasn't really feasible for me. (Though I spent endless fruitless hours on rewriting it based on the new functions and libs. )

The most important part was, it was not feasible for a general implementation and moreover after a kernel recompile by the system package manager or something like that, this wouldnt work. :)

We were looking for a more user lever implementation and then Praneeth dives in to save us. So he directed us to this blog where that person describes how he set up a seamless connectivity between wireless to wired interface handoff. This pretty much was similar to what were supposed to do too. 

Praneeth gave us a vm on his student's server and set up the VPN and later we wrote a few trivial scripts to get the bluetooth running via my computer setting it up as a NAP and then set up the tunnel and the routes.

Well there was packet loss for sure, because the packets in transit will sure be lost in UDP but that couldn't be helped at the moment. 

We wrote a few handoff scripts giving the priority to WLAN as it obviously is better of the both. After a night of debugging then "indeterministic" bugs, we finally got it working an hour before the presentation :D. ( Those were 2-3 sleepless days and nights for all of us.)

Its all the magic of IPtables, Linux kernel  and openvpn. (And ofcourse the help from Praneeth)

And the presentation was smooth as hell with minimal questions from the prof's end who at the end added "very good, it would be have been awesome if you could have worked a bit more".

Towards the end of it all, I was in for a total surprise when he asked me if I was interested in joining him for a PhD :D . Well, anyday I would take such an offer but I am not sure if my academic background would really please the admissions department here at CSE dept. IIT K. At the moment I shall put in an application and shall have my fingers crossed.

---

BRL-CAD, the organization I have been eagerly waiting for to apply to did not apply to be a part of GSoC this year. Like sean mentioned on the brlcad wiki, that they wanted to give the other organizations a chance, CGAL (Computational Geometry Algorithms library) got through this year.

I, at FOSS.in 2009, was a part of the sahana workout sessions and thought I should apply for a GSoC for the same work. 

And thus I have applied to thse couple of organizations for GSoC 2010. 

Here are the proposals: 

SahanaPy -> OCR Module for the SahanaPy framework. -> http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/user/suryajith/ocr_sahanapy

CGAL -> A web service that solves geometric problems(motion planning). - >  http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/user/suryajith/cgal_motionplanning

It would be a great fun to work on any of the above mentioned ideas.

While this was going on, I have been struggling with my projects and other stuff. From what I have observed, last one week has been a pretty good week in terms of efforts and returns.

I have finally moved from KDE to awesome, a tiling/stacking window manager which also is extremely light. I started feeling that KDE was too heavy and flashy for me. I wanted a simple window manager and a login manager. When I was at Foss.in in December I have seen Jai use awesome and I caught the fever but then i was too high on KDE fanboi-ism. On one of the days in the last couple of weeks, when I was restless, I uninstalled all the KDE packages except kdelibs so that I still can run my favorite KDE apps Okular and Ktorrent. That reduced my root's space usage by a very considerable extent.

Awesome has just a single conf file rc.lua to handle the entire WM except another file theme.lua which handles the theming. Its one of the best WMs for multi screen setup.

I also wanted to try out XMonad but then its a tiling window manager and all the configuration and extensions are written in Haskell rather than the ones of awesome in lua. 

And also now my default editor is emacs. ( without X )

Its been a long time since i have put up a blog post. Three months into 2010 and this year hasnt been encouraging either. I stopped working on my research project as i was hitting dead ends with that, flunked GATE, job prospects are looking not so bright etc.

At this juncture in life I lay here totally confused about what really interests me and what is in store for me ? I absolutely do not know the answer nor can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Well i have been living in a hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel and I still continue to live the same way.

Post GATE results I started wondering if I am too ambitious and dumb for the same. From the times when I was a little kid till date, I have been living in a bubble in oblivion and I think this slowly turned me into a lazy slob. I havent been the kind who particularly had fixed targets and even if I did, a sway of wind digressed me from the path. I loved living in the present too much because I do not like reminiscing the past and have a confused yet huge expectations from the future which intimidate me.

I question myself again, what made me develop an interest in computer science in general, why do I keep saying my academic interest is in "Geometric modeling" ? Did I succumb to the society's hype of considering Computer Scientists as elite ? I dont know and I don't think so.

I truly do not know what makes me happy, life for me has been and is mechanical and monotonous. I, at the moment can not recall not even a single moment in life where I have been truly happy and content. There always has been something bothering me right down under and I do not know what it is. 

Well there are many things that interest me music, arts, computers but I turn out to be a royal jackass at all of these. Its time that I go on a path of self-discovery not by running into the wild but in my current living conditions.

Its that time of the year again when we get to organize FOSSKriti.
Even though everybody is busy with their academic schedule, we are
trying to work hard to get this event take form.

About FOSSKriti:
Started in 2008 as an event to promote free and opensource software as
a part of Techkriti, the technical festival of IIT Kanpur, instantly
became a success and attracted huge participation beyond initial
expectations. The event constitutes talks, workshops and hackfests
primarily aimed at the student community. FOSSkriti is a theme
oriented event - with the 2008 being the year of desktops with Shreyas
speaking about Clutter UI, Piyush Verma about KDE project, Arun
conducting a hackfest on Beagle, Ankita garg conducting a Kernel
hacking workshop, 2009 having the theme open web with a bespin demo
and the talk on html5 specs by Arun Ranganathan ( one of the
architechts of html5 specs) along with Seth Bindernagel (who works on
moz i8n), talk on Open web standards by Shwetank from Opera, a talk on
webit by Siraj, SahanaPy and Drupal hackfests .

Apart from that we had a lot of BoF sessions, some BZflag games :P etc.

This year we plan to have 2 tracks - one a beginner track consisting
of tutorials starting at a relatively basic level and a second
advanced track on "FOSS in the embedded world".

The bottom line here is we hope to make some difference by enabling
people to utilize FOSS tools in education.

The website shall be up in a couple days populated with the necessary
content and the CFP shall be sent out soon.
Keep checking the fosskriti webspace for updates and also fosskriti
could be followed on twitter @fosskriti .

Oh yeah! this winters have been one of the most amazing winters i ever had, travelled for around 6000 kms across India from Kanpur(UP) to Orcha(MP) to Bangalore(KA) to Trivandrum(KL) to Bangalore(KA) to Hyderabad(AP) and back to Kanpur(UP) all in 20 days going on a trek and visiting a palace at Orcha, visiting folks at home in Bangalore, attending foss.in ,scipy.in in TVM, meeting relatives and some good old friends of mine in Hyderabad.

But the saddest part of the trek was that the wildest things we could find in the natural reserve were the cows(and some bones here and there). Oh man, Kaushal and i had a lot of fun finding the trails back to the populated parts on the other side of the reserve while coming back.

Foss.in has been amazing with me randomly hacking on some SahanaPy code after being dragged into it by Praneeth, apart from that there was nothing better to do there either. And yeah there were some fun sessions with the other #hackers-india folks at various parts of the city and also a #linux-india meetup at Shelton Grand,MG road and this is where we finally meet Hobbes` and an old college senior/friend of ours Akshay Mathur.

A trip to Scipy.in was unexpected as we did not expect that the proposal of our talk would be shortlisted as it was pretty basic. But yeah that was an amazing trip considering the fact that we were put up in a 5 star resort in a Film studio in Trivandrum and the food was amazing. Praneeth and I did get to meet the architecht of NumPy, current maintainers of NumPy and SciPy, the folks working on NiPy and ofcourse the amazing FOSSEE team. This was the time that Praneeth ever visited a beach and his wish was finally fulfilled though we did not spend much time at the beach.

Back from Trivandrum i travelled back to Hyderabad via Bangalore where I bought some academic material from the IISc campus for my GATE preparation which havent been used properly so far. ;)

Back in Hyderabad I did have a lot of fun spending time with my parents, friends and my relatives. As usual my uncle and I drove through the city visiting various markets etc.

                       

Click here to download:

Winters_2009.zip (22695 KB)

Recently i had to hook up my codes with matlab (unfortunately i had to) to do some local search after a few GA iterations and the process of using shared libs was too much to do and being a lazy ass i just did something like this(with the help of Amit saha).

I created a pipe from my code to the matlab using popen and piped in all the commands from here.

 


FILE  *matlab = popen(MATLAB_COMMAND,"w");
sleep(10);
if (matlab ==  NULL)
{
        printf("\n Could not open a pipe to matlab, check  the definition of MATLAB_COMMAND \n");
        printf("\n Edit the  string to suit your system configuration and rerun the program\n");
         exit(1);
 }
  fprintf(matlab,"<your command> \n ");

This is the way you can use  gnuplot too like this on Amit's blog.

I know this is a very bad way of getting your work done but your work gets done trust me about it.