#nsit @ Freenode

You can find me on IRC at #nsit channel usually with the nickname “deepank” (yea yea I could not think of a better creative name!). Now, why this sudden urge to start a new channel at IRC for the college. Well first of all, its not my idea, it was Mohit’s idea originally and I brushed it aside that time.

This is how my thought process went : who wants to come to chat on IRC when there are many better chat clients available like Google Talk. But then I thought: hey there is one feature that Google Talk does not have. And the feature is: Chatrooms or channels. At IRC, a channel might contain hundreds of members who can all chat simultaneously on a single window. If you have never been on a noisy IRC Channel before, you might think that it will be hodge-podge, believe me it is not! Humans have a beautiful ability to self-organize when left on their own devices.

But this was not the only motive behind starting up with the IRC Channel. IRC has the unique marketing appeal of being geeky. It has been made hard to use with the lack of good IM Clients. Nearly all of them require you to learn to use commands, and using commands in today’s user-interface crazy world is a sure shot way of advertising that you are geeky :)

So, I believe that the new IRC Channel will attract all the programmers and geeks of the college. It will not have 100s of members, rather a very small following of 4-5 people at best. In the past two days, its membership has not gone past 5. But, I believe that the membership will rise slowly and steadily to over 10-20 people in 2-3 years.

The channel is here to stay… and I would love to hear back in comments.

Exams and me

My end semester exams are going on. So, what am I doing here, blogging? Shouldn’t I be studying? Well I am not, because I believe I will do it later!

If you are thinking that I am a procrastinator, don’t bother telling me. I have known it always, and I get this huge realization of being the worst procrastinator during exams. Some facts to support the claim: [I have to defend this self-derogatory claim because some people won’t believe me!!!]

1. Till 10 PM at night during every exam, I manage to complete 25% of the course at max!

2. Till 12 PM the exam morning (exams are being held in the afternoon shift from 2 to 5), I complete my 90% course!!!! [Please don’t assume that I stay up all night for mugging up! I can do coding all night, but mugging up, no]

But surprisingly enough, my exams have gone well till now, heck, I took 3 extra sheets for 3 of my theory exams and took 2 extra sheets in the fourth. Previously, I used to be a guy who could never fill up even one extra sheet. How did I do it:

1. The revision during 12 to 2 with friends helped me a lot. And I realized that all those guys who give advise to students sitting for Board exams have got it ALL WRONG. In fact, you should:

a) DO LAST MINUTE REVISIONS

b) NEVER MEDIDATE/CALM YOURSELF BEFORE EXAMS. INSTEAD YOU SHOULD STUDY ENERGETICALLY AND DISCUSS A LOT TILL 5 MINUTES BEFORE EXAMS

c) DO EVERYTHING ON THE LAST DAY, THAT WAY YOU WILL REMEMBER ENOUGH TO WRITE FOR 3 HOURS

[I am not Joking]

2. I have tried to write faster. [I am not a slow writer per se but my writing speed declined as my typing speed increased.]

And now, if you have managed to read this far, congratulations. Comments welcome as always!

Sleep

I have been sleeping a lot for the past 2 days. Infact, I slept for more than 12 hours yesterday and 4 hours in the day itself today. How has the change come in me, I don’t know, but it has definitely made me conscious about the one body function we care very less about i.e. Sleep.

I read some things about sleep and thought, hey, this would be a cool topic to blog about. Sleep it seems is quite essential to body, but its exact functions are still a point of research. It can be divided into two stages based on eye movement – REM(Rapid Eye Movement) and NREM( Non-Rapid Eye Movement). REM Stage is also known as the dream stage while NREM is the so-called sound sleep without dreams. Both stages are essential to humans.

There is a term known as “sleep debt” which basically means that if you ward off sleeping for some time i.e. lets say you sleep for only 3 hours for one day, the next day it is mandatory for you to sleep for 13 hours to make up for the lost sleep previously. I find it true in my daily life, though I have found that the graph decreases as the amount of sleep missed increases. My personal graph for the two components is like this:

 

Sleep is thought to be very essential for restoring functions and growth of the body. Studies have shown less healing and growth in sleep-deprived rats. Apart from this, scientists have also shown that working memory which is responsible for reasoning, cognitive functioning, and remembering things (important for exams) is directly affected with sleep deprivation. In this case, the test subjects were human beings. Apart from this, it has been shown that people who are unable to sleep properly are weary most of the time and lack the ability to concentrate on the task at hand.

The sleep requirements for various age-groups are different. Adults need only 7-8 hours of sleep, adolescents nearly 9-10, elderly 8-10, pre-school children 12 hours and babies upto 18 hours of sleep! Guess, I should re-evaluate the category I fall in.

If you are having problems having sleep, then I think you might be doing one of the following:

1. Eating late at night
2. Watching TV/Computer till late(like me who is writing this post at around 1 AM)
3. Doing no exercise during the whole day.
4. Having tension/exam blues(Basically procrastinating your work till the last night to the submission).

Apart from all the scientific stuff, I think I have my own theory too about sleeping. I think we learn all the things we did during our dreams. In my experience, dreams during exams are mainly concerned of formulae, theories and nightmares involving giving the wrong exam. While, dreams after watching a movie, reading a gripping novel consist of you enacting a part of the story. For instance, after a 12 hour dose of Harry Potter novel(don’t remember the novel number), I had this brilliant dream of flying on a broomstick, and that was the most wonderful dream ever! Dreams after playing a sport are usually the best, once I had played Table Tennis for 2 hours before dropping off for sleep, and all I dreamt of was the TT Ball bouncing up and down. But after a hard physical day, I do not dream at all. Guess, my body feels the need for physical restoration higher than mental reinforcing of experiences. So, the graph for this will be like:

Would love to hear your experiences on sleep… Comments awaited.

Why I Love Cartoons

Cartoons are a very simple way to portray human emotions in a loud and a fun manner. I mean, look at any cartoon, their smile is always bigger, when they cry buckets of water flow out, their voice often betrays their fear and emotions and they are so damn funny. A human can never act it like a cartoon, cartoons live in wonderous worlds, do impossible stunts while never getting hurt, don't need any laws of physics and no special effects too. They are only limited only by the imagination of their creator.

Its not just me! Every-body loves them, that why Disney is raking millions these days with Wall-E and Finding Nemo like cartoon films. India too is getting its share of animation with the films like Hanuman and the latest one - a love story by cartoons. Japanese have always known the secret of cartoons, its the rest of the world which has been slow to catch up on the fact that a drawing is often better than real actors.

If you disagree with the above statement, it is not you who is disagreeing but it is your ego that was hurt by the above statement. We feel that since we humans are the best, it is we whom we would like to see. But tell me, aren't you bored by seeing humans all around you day in and day out. We have already eliminated most of the other animals from this planet, and the rest are all locked up in zoos. So, when I go out for a movie, or switch on a TV, heck, I don't wanna see someone like me all over again (Note this doesn't mean I won't admire beauty, sadly not found in cartoons, on TV and movies :P).

Also, cartoon movies have been changing to reflect the change in times. So, times have changed from the Spinach eating Popeye was popular during the times of food shortage in World War II to robots in love with each other and saving the humans from self-destruction in Wall-E. The themes have progressively changed from focussing mainly on cat and mouse stories of Tom and Jerry to now include robots and inanimate objects to fairies, mythological gods and ofcourse humans.

So, I can only feel bouyant about the future as I will get to watch many more cartoon flicks despite my child-hood days over a long time back :). What do you feel about them?

Placements – What does a Company Expect From You?

There have been many debates on "how to hire the best candidate for your company" over the past few decades. Also, there has been a proliferation of guides and books telling you how to ace an interview. But in my limited experience as a job hunter and some of my friends' experiences, the one thing I can tell for sure is: "there are no tried and tested methods". When I told a close friend that I am going to blog about interviewing, he asked, who will you write about-me or yourself? I replied cheekily – myself, but then I realized how small my experience set is. So, with this in mind, I set out to asking other people – Why Should a company hire you?

Companies have their own methodologies, like Johanna Rothman or my entrepreneur friend who advocates a week long project instead of an interview to check the viability of a candidate as a potential employer.

The responses I got from the job seekers were varied, but I will try to document them under categories and add comments from various people as we move along:

1. Enthusiasm: The one quality which sets you apart. You might not be the smartest, but you are enthusiastic and eager to learn. You cannot fake this easily. Either you have it or you don't. It gets reflected, in the way you solve technical problems, the questions you ask during the interview when an interviewer asks you a puzzle, and the final question that you ask from your interviewer at the end of the interview.
   

   My friends describe it to me as – right day, luck and attitude. But one of them used an interesting word for this – "Innovation" and then launched into the problem he solved during Atrenta exam which was really a brilliant solution.

   I will give you an example, one friend of mine got through in Cisco, after getting rejected by 6 companies, 4 of them in the final stage. And when I asked him how did you get selected today, he replied – "I did everything right today by God's Grace". But, the thing which he attributes to God, was actually his enthusiasm. This is his dream company, he has worked on Computer Networks for the past 2 years.

2. Hard Work: Apparently, this is one of the most obvious qualities to the students. One of the guys who got through in DE Shaw summarized it as – "techinical proficiency, for a tech job ie coding, algo thinking capability".
   

   You demonstrate your hard-work by your academic performance, projects and performance in written tests. These things are always taken into account and we always lament when we miss out on any of these.

3. Ethics: This I found to be one of the most overlooked quality by students. But this is something, an employer values the most. He might be looking for Humility or he might be looking at Honesty. What do you think an HR Round is for? These guys know all the right answers, they distinguish people on the basis of their honesty and not the supposedly "Right" answers as advertised in guides.
   

   So for instance, I was asked a programming Problem at Microsoft, for which I knew the answer before-hand. I told the guy: I know this. He was impressed enough to hire me. Don't try to fake, you will get caught and you won't even know why you were rejected?

4. Communication and Inter-personal Skills : This is mostly the reason why some people get rejected again and again, in spite of being brilliant technically. You are of no use to me, if you can't communicate that brilliant idea in your head to me effectively.
   

   But many employers feel that if a candidate is good in first three, they will be able to teach her the fourth effectively.

These are the four points I have discovered, during the short span of past 1 month. I would welcome criticism as well as assent from both employees and employers.

SOME TIPS FOR FEDORA USERS

1. Cool Desktop Effects: You can enable desktop effects by going through System->Preferences->Desktop Effects and there enabling desktop effects. Effects include Alt+tab utility, 3d flipping of workspaces, animated minimizing and maximizing and other cool things. The best thing being it doesn't slow down the computer.

2. Easy Explorer: If you are frustrated by the explorer of the Fedora which keeps on opening new folders in new tabs then go to Edit->Preferences and in that go to Behavior Tab. In that tick the option-”Always open in Browser Windows”. Click ok.

3. Install Software: To update or install any software in Fedora, one can use yum. Yum is a software which can automatically resolve dependencies, unlike RPMs, which sometimes, fail to install due to failed dependencies.

To install a software using yum, the syntax is

yum -y install application-name

To do full system update

yum update

You must be root to run the yum command.

3. Important Step: Fedora Packages are often found in stores called as repositories. There are 3 repositories enabled by default- core extras and update. However, these do not contain multimedia and other 3^rd party softwares which are often quite necessary. These are contained in the two repositories named-livna and FreshRPMS. To add these two repositories try the following commands as root user.

rpm -ihv http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/6/i386/RPMS.freshrpms/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/livna-release-6-1.noarch.rpm

4. Why no Sound: If your sound card has not been detected, check the status of your sound card at the following link : http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ . You can also try and update ALSA by running the command:
yum update kernel alsa-lib alsa-utils
ALSA is the "sound system" used by Fedora Core. It has drivers, libraries and utilities. The drivers are included with the kernel package.

5. Fedora BUG: Fedora Core 6 has a bug by which it installs i586 kernel for i686 architectures also. If you have a P4 PC and your kernel is i586, then you can better your system by running the script available here.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC6Common?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=kernel-fix.sh

6. Playing MP3: To get mp3 plugins and other softwares, just visit the following link: http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc6-tips.php

Following command will help: yum -y install xmms xmms-mp3

Use of Hindi on Computers

We do everything in Hindi and yet we tend to switch to English as we go on to computers. Why?
Are there no tools available for hindi on the web or is it just our ignorance. As it turns out : it is just our ignorance...

Some of the tools available on the net are :

1. Hindi language interface pack for windows XP Professional : http://www.microsoft.com/india/windowsxp/skins.aspx
2. A set of tools and softwares for Hindi are available from the government of India for free of cost with no postage cost too .... More details at this blog :
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/06/free-software-tools-and-fonts-cd.html
3. You can change your interface of google and gmail in Hindi too
4. There is a new portal by microsoft in Hindi ... Visit it at : http://content.msn.co.in/hindi
5. A Hindi editor : http://www.balendu.com/madhyam/

Thats it for now ... Hope many people do switch to or try to spread this news around ......

Ubuntu Operating System-Part 1

I had initially planned to have a journal of my technical forays along with my views on varied subjects so that people can know me well when they read my blog. But after 2 months with just 6 posts in the blog and with none of them as technical ones I think my blog has not went the way it should have went.So starting today I will be putting up a series of articles related to Ubuntu operating system.Recently, I put my hands on the ubuntu operating system. And I must say that I was blown off by the first impression it created.

Ubuntu (literally meaning mankind) is a linux distro which can be delievered straight to your home without any postal costs too. They just redefined free software. One can order for the free Cds by clicking on the url https://shipit.ubuntu.com/.
They just ask you to make up a new account where you give your address and email id so that they can contact you and then you can order free Cds from this url. Amazing isnt it.

When you open up the CD, you see an endorsement from Nelson Mandela. The first impression of ubuntu is great. What we get is a live CD which automatically runs the operating system without installation to the hard drive. So you can get the preview of the operating system, if you don't like it you can just dump it.

Over with the first impression, you would like to install it on the Hard drive. Now this is where there is still a room for improvement. The installation of ubuntu, especially along with a Windows edition is not exactly fun. You have to know a lot of things before you can start off with the installation. I will outline the various things in this article.

First of all, one must know about the linux filesystem. A linux partition is neither a FAT32 or an NTFS partition. It is based on other formats (currently ext3 is being used). The drives in linux are not alphabetically ordered like in windows sucs as C drive, D drive etc. Rather there is a root (/) from which other things are derived. However, there is an analogy which will explain more.
Consider
/ as your C: drive in windows
/home/username as analogous to C:/Documents and Settings/Username/
The Linux system has more folders too for other purposes.

Secondly, one must know about the need of a swap partition in Linux. Now ideally the swap partition must be equal to double the memory taken up by RAM. So for instance if one has a memory of 256KB then swap must be 512 MB. One has to make the swap partition at the time of installtion.


Now during the installation there will come a dialog box, in which you will have to select "maually partition" in order to preserve the previous instalations an your data too. Now as you must have already emptied one of your drives, select that drive and click on delete partition. Ideally the root partition must be of 5-6 GB as more than that will not be required. Create a root partition with ext3 formatting and a swap partition of size double the amount of RAM.

Afterwards the installation can proceed smoothly. One can also encounter a problem with the detection of hardware drivers but mostly all the drivers are recognised by Ubuntu. If a particular driver is not available it is always good to check on the net and posting in ubuntuforums.org and see if people over there can help you out.