Shutdownday :O

This is what www.shutdownday.org says

It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?
International Shutdown Day

I voted for “I Can” , though i have no clue what i am gonna do on that day.

Hmmm , maybe sleep , spend time chaating with friends. I just hope i dont go mad after few hours without computers :P . Cha without computers no movies, no coding , no songs , no games , no browsing :( :(

I am planning to shutdown few servers under my control . Let us see how it goes :) :)

The end of internet

Was checking out the settings of google reader and found this quite interesting .

The next bookmark is an innovative way to read your subscriptions. It allows you to use Google Reader through just one link – clicking on it takes you to the next unread item, marking it as read in the process. It is particularly useful for subscriptions which only include snippets or when you want to read an article in context.

But when i clicked the tab i got a page saying
I myself dont believe in end of internet and the page was not the end of the internet , since that page still had a link to some other page . The links said it all
http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

The contents of the page (for those who dont want to go to end of the internet )
The End of the Internet
Congratulations! This is the last page.
Thank you for visiting the End of the Internet. There are no more links.
You must now turn off your computer and go do something productive.
Go read a book, for pete’s sake.

Quiz is finally over :) :)

If at all if someone gives me the right to scrap three events from pragyan i will surely opt for junkyard wars, technical quiz and udaaan . These three are actually very good events when you are a participant. But when if you are the one who is responsible for the quiz software for these events, that too with all three events starting one after another , surely you will go mad.

Everything started when i made a foolish decision to attend a delta meeting . The meeting is to discuss about delta induction. I was trying to make a quiz manager at that time ( inspired from manu’s quiz manager ) and thought i will do one for delta induction, which can be used for pragyan also . ( never realized this was such a big blunder ) . Somehow managed to changed few things in manu’s code and finished the delta inductions.

The whole headache started few days before pragyan . All three event manager contacted us few days before their events. Actually i was kind of shocked by what they asked me . One wants a timer while the other says i dont need a timer :( :( . Err what is your fscking problem if there is a timer :(.

The worst part i did not code a single line in the pragyan quiz manager :( . It is coded by one of my junior and i saw the code just 3 hrs before the event. Of course i went mad , called up my junior every now and then asking to explain about what the code actually does.

Finally junkyard wars started 4 hrs late , udaan 5 hrs late and tq some 14 hrs late :P

Took a resolution that will never take up any more work in pragyan :( .

Allergic to Allergy test :(

Met a doctor for my sinus problem few days back. He said that a small surgery has to be done, but even before that he wanted to me to take an allergy test so that he can find what all things i am allergic too.

All he said was that they will do something to your hand . With my very little biology knowledge ( actually i managed to pass my 12th bio ), i assumed that they will test whether dust is allergic to me ( coz that’s the only allergic agent i could remember at that time ) . I assumed that they are gonna put some dust in my hand and somehow test whether i am allergic to that .

But the lady in the lab had different plans . She took 5 syringes . I was really sorry for the person who is gonna have those injected . I never liked injections , just because you know it is gonna pain and no way you can stop that :( .

That lady took a box which had around 50 small small bottles and asked me to show my hand. Now i realised that one of the injections among the 5 she had was for me . Ok i had no other option now . I cant run away from the lab saying i hate them . Anyway they looked small , so i was OK with them :)

34 bottles in the box she had were arranged properly as 8 , 8, 5, 5, 8 in each row . The rest of them were scattered . There was strange feeling that she is gonna inject them all to me , but thought she will mix everthing and give it in one single injection.

To my horror, she used the first syringe to inject medicines from the 8 bottles from the first row one by one . At the end of 8 injections ( within 45 seconds ) i thought it is going to be over and i can leave.

But no , she opened the next syringe and started with the next row. I was kind of shocked now and the slightest thought of all 5 syringes injected to me almost gave me an heart attack . But i thought no one will be cruel enough to do that and after the second row ( that makes 16 injections ) , she will let me go.

I almost fainted when she opened the third syringe. I stopped her and asked whether she is going to inject all these . She said “YES”.

Finally she was kind of enough to reduce the number of injections by 2 ( thank god i did not have dog in my house , so those test is not required it seems )

Within 3 minutes , 32 injections. That is really a record for me . Finally realised what an allergy test is ( my bio knowledge atleast improved ) . :(

Note :: It might be funny when you read this , but if you are gonna take an allergy test , certainly it wont be that much fun . So stop laughing and get back to work :-) .

MY FC5 Crashed

Well , seems this is the first time linux hates me. I have seen lots of problems with linux but most of them are generally a software not installing coz of failed dependencies or some file system error which a fsck will solve without any major issue . But this time it really screwed me .

The reason why it crashed is simple . “Improper Shutdown”. Was in a hurry when mom shouted the n th time to have breakfast that instead off the normal shutdown , switched off the power button . But never realized that will lead to the tragedy. Next time the comp never booted and even when i tried to boot in single mode , it just displayed two linesof error ( which i donn remember now , one of those lines had something about journal ) .

Tried hard to rescue my files but in vain .

Lost lots of work coz of this crash :( :( , like

1. Files related to the hacking contest i planned to conduct. Though i have the files uploaded in website , they are not the latest and anyway lost the mysql db )
2. Spider SMS ( not exactly. The prev night sent the code to prasanna , so almost got the files except for the todo and some other files )
3. ByteCode . A single web page which i managed to design for bytecode . Had to start again
4. Glug-t site . Set of web pages designed for the Gnu Linux User Group- Trichy :(
5. Spider site . A few extra features for the Spider site .
And ya all the downloads i did :( .
6. A patch written for ldtp as an extra option for ldtprecord

So learnt a few lessons from this crash

1. Always shutdown the comp.
2. It is better to have your /home and /var in a seperate partition
3. Backup the files every now and then in a seperate partition
4. Backup myqsl regularly

So one good thing about the crash is that now i have installed Ubuntu and recording can be done in that even if it is gnome 2.14. And i certainly like apt-get than yum . Hoping the get the repo’s soon :)

ACM Regionals @ Coimbatore

The ACM ICPC 2006 Regional Contest was held on December 16th & 17th , 2006 at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, coimbatore, and our team ( me , evo and vasu ) was one of the top 50 teams selected for the onsite contest .

The travel to coimbatore was really weird this time. This is the second time i am going to coimbatore (last time with Manas ) and never knew where amrita is :( . To make things worse , the train stopped at thirupur coz of some technical fault . Had to travel from thirupur to coimbatore by bus and then from there to amrita . As usual was late by a few hours and missed the tour of the contest :( ( actually it does not matter since it was Day1 ).

Then after meeting evo and vasu there ( OMG , they were discussing some problem already ) , we went for the “grand” campus tour . The cook book said “Campus Tour – Teams and coaches tour the plush greenery Amrita University Campus, campus facilities” . But it turned out to be one of the worst tour . The guys who came with us for the tour were so “dumb”. They used to show us a basketball court and say “This is our basketball court ” . As if we all thought it is a football court. Anyway another sad part is that the “greenery” we expected in amrita is nowhere to be found . Bad that this time the contest is during hols :( :(

After lunch had the first practice session . We were able to solve all three ( though presentation error rapped us and the guy who seems to answer our doubts is one of the dumbest i can ever find. We used to ask him , what is the presentation error . Our output seems to be fine and he used to reply “Yes, there is a presentation error.” ) . And anytime our Codelabs is far better than mooshak. Our Codelabs has a better interface than the mooshak , since codelabs is not a single web page and hence one can predict what will happen if the page is refreshed ( unlike in mooshak you have to remeber your last action )

After dinner , had the second practice session and this time we did not get one question :( . Anyway it was total fun being with vasu and evo around . Especailly vasu always had some funny stuff to tell us.

Day II
Break fast at 6.30 :-( and i got up at 6.40 ( One of the difficult thing for me to do :( ) . Contest started at around 8.00 PM and ended at 1.00 PM. We were able to solve three problems and ended up 23 rd . The final standings can be viewed here . Planned to start early but had to wait for the certificates .

The problem set can be found here

Came back to chennai the next day.