January 6, 2008
This is the Adyar Bus Depot. I took the shot some time ago while I was on my way to Marc’s place.
I’ll tell you: It’s the buses. There are beautiful new buses all waiting in the bays, just asking to be run around the city, but instead of the improved comfort, we have to put up with the old buses. It’s like the MTC is trying to get as much of their money’s worth out of the buses as possible. They’re probably losing it all on worse mileage anyway. I don’t understand why they can’t run the newer ones and make us a little happier.
Posted by roshan.george under Confusion, Madras, Musings, Rant | Comments (7)
January 5, 2008
Well, I’m rather happy because we were playing against the Engineering crowd, people who actually study all that C stuff for a living and who have a lot more invested in the whole thing. It went off rather well, though they didn’t give us any cash prizes there were a couple of certificates.
Quiz:
The quiz wasn’t all Maths, there was some Maths history and some general bits and a rather interesting round with a concealed picture that was revealed bit by bit. There was some strong stuff though, and personally I think that bit was given just a bit too little time. One of our team’s questions, for example. I went and made a mistake working it out. I had 50 / 25 written out in one particular part and computed that to be 25. My arithmetic always sucked. Anyway, they scored you partly on the method and partly on the answer so I got half the points anyway. In any case it wasn’t that important because we finished rather near double the closest team :) which was a good feeling. It was nice winning, they gave us a certificate each and a copy of some book that looks like its for people preparing for job interviews. Ah well. Oh yeah, they also gave us a rather big shield, but we had to sign that we were going to give it back after a month :)
C Debugging:
Remember what I told you about triple pointers? Well, today those people set us some tasks that were decidedly not debugging. They were some good questions, that I’ll admit, but my lack of knowledge of the usual library functions came back to bite me in the ass, so I had like more unfinished programs — must learn to focus effort. I have to admit that those unfinished ones weren’t going anywhere. So I figured out this brilliant method to swap variables using the ^ operator and was rather proud of myself. It turns out, however, that that is one of those old tricks that everyone uses. I was born too late, that’s my problem. Anyway, I managed to place second so its a bit of a consolation. They gave me another book, this time about being a leader. It’s cool, but I don’t go in for that kind of stuff.
I’m happy, thanks Anna University.
Posted by roshan.george under College, Math, Tech, Yay | Comments (4)
January 4, 2008
So we went to Anna University today for Mathrix ‘08 and it was actually pretty nice. I left early in the morning and caught a share auto to the CEG campus where they were going to hold the events. While we were travelling it started raining like mad, and when I got off I had to take refuge along with some other people in a traffic policeman’s shed. The only problem was I had to keep standing. Ah well, better dry and standing than wet and sitting.
So I managed to get inside Anna University and to the venue in time. Yay! First on the list was:
C Debugging:
A while ago, someone mentioned something about this event in Arun’s blog and I found it hard to believe that such crazy stuff would be asked. My mistake, I should’ve heeded the warning. It was crazy man, CRAZY! There was a little timer in the corner and it would keep ticking down the seconds till twenty five minutes had run out. On the screen there was this box with code that usually goes something like this:
Find the output:
#include
int main()
{
int i = 24;
int * Iptr = &i;
[gibberish looking stuff involving TRIPLE POINTERS! Which sane person uses freaking triple pointers?!!]
[some more stuff]
return 0;
}
Triple pointers?! What hater-of-all-things-human uses triple pointers? And then to make it worse they had questions about a pointer to a pointer to a character pointer returned by a function that accepts a pointer to a character pointer. Man, you know what? I don’t know the damn language, I’m going to say that, and I’m never going to be able to program stuff in anything other than python if its all like this. Jesus, imagine writing Hello World. No way, I’m not going near C unless I’m in a Hazmat suit. Needless to say we were near the bottom of the pack, if not last. On the way out this girl organising it asked if it was easy, I said it was ‘Interesting’ - which it was, it gave me insight into my programming skills. Then there was:
The Quiz:
I had to walk through the rain to get to the quiz, and I was drenched by the time I got there. No umbrella you see. Waste of time standing inside traffic booth. Anyway, the quiz itself was pretty nice, not too tough except for the last page that was full of computer science stuff and had some weird questions about definitions. Since there were no negatives we guessed :) It turned out well, I have to go for the finals tomorrow. That’ll be cool, I bet they’ll ask all sorts of engineering stuff and I won’t know anything. Ah well, worth a shot I guess and besides, it meant I didn’t have to go to class today :D
Incidentally, about that traffic policeman, a really sad thing happened. He was sitting there waiting for one of those police vehicles to come by, and when the fancy Hyundai Accent showed up he ran up to it in the rain and tried to talk to the cops inside, but they just said they weren’t going to do anything and sped off all nice and warm inside their car. All he wanted was a raincoat, he was grumbling about how they could’ve just given him the raincoat.
Posted by roshan.george under College, Madras, Math, Photos | Comments (4)
January 4, 2008
You know, the older versions of CPanel are weirdly quirky. One of those things that annoyed me was that all subdomains are also subdirectories. For example, if you create the subdomain george.arjie.com, then all files for that subdomain are stored in the folder accessible at arjie.com/george. This is very annoying if you have want web spiders to index your content because they’ll sometimes completely ignore the subdomain and index everything at the subdirectory. This was a rather painful issue for me because http://arjie.com/blog was rather well indexed but http://blog.arjie.com/, the actual address, was nearly completely untouched by Google — there was one result, the subdomain root.
In any case, I decided to make everything point to blog.arjie.com now and spent the better part of the last hour trying to get the right commands in my .htaccess file. The thing with .htaccess is that if you make a mistake you don’t get told what it is, you get a 500: Internal Server Error message, which is about as helpful as a monkey with a tyre iron but not. So I’ve got it all figured out finally so here’s the relevant bit of the .htaccess that I’ve placed in my arjie.com/blog subdirectory:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?arjie\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.arjie.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
and since I searched for a similar solution and didn’t find anything like it on the Internet. Here’s a version that I may be able to find by a Search Engine.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://subdomain.domain.com/$1 [R=301,NC,L]
Posted by roshan.george under Confusion, Internet, Tech | Comments (0)
January 2, 2008
Yeah, so college starts again from tomorrow. And unless I’m wrong we have tests starting from Friday. That’s pretty bad because, having attended only two hours out of the 150-odd so far, I have no clue what we’re going to have a test on. There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this paper well. I’ll just have to count on the good old 2 out of 3 rule and make the other two tests count. Life’s heating up again, just like in the 12th, it’s time to apply to a college for a post-grad course, and I’m not sure where I’d like to join. Best give everything a shot, I suppose.
The thing is I’ve suddenly gotten into the scheduling habit, so I’ve got a lot of things all carefully marked on my laptop calendar marking every thing I have to do. I’ve never been one for to-do lists and as a consequence, have never manage to get things done :) or at least I haven’t been organised for the past 3 years, but it’s time to put the shoulder to the wheel so this blog post is here to remind me later about what I’d hoped.
I just realised that this whole thing reads like a New Year Resolution. It’s not. I don’t make New Year Resolutions on the first of January, that’s slightly short of a real new year for me.
Posted by roshan.george under College, Confusion | Comments (10)
January 2, 2008
I saw Taare Zameen Par(तारे जमीन पर) today with the rest of my family. My mom’d booked the tickets and I didn’t want to go to be honest, but you know how it is — spend time with the family, that sort of thing. Man am I glad I went along because this has to be the best Hindi film I’ve seen. It was a film, not one of those entertainment shows that have all those silly song and dance routines involving people teleporting to fields of flowers and crap like that.
The Movie:
The acting was so natural, especially the little kid’s, it was almost like watching little bits of life. Now that I think of it, every single thing about how the actors played their roles was natural and real, and you wouldn’t have noticed it all then. The soundtrack was beautiful, it fitted in perfectly with the atmosphere and kept the tension going through the intense bits and stuff like that. I’ve been told the cinematography in Indian films is really good, but this was some neat stuff and combined with the music it was super. It all came together really well.
Aamir Khan:
I’ve got to give it to the guy. I hated Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and I thought Rang De Basanti was contrived, but the job he’s done this time is wonderful. He chose a nice film to do and didn’t try hogging the limelight or anything letting Darsheel Safary do his thing. It’s also very cool that he chose to make a film on dyslexia and children who are a bit different, talking about how things we take for granted are hard for them. Frankly, I find these films far more interesting than the standard Indian stuff.
Read more…
Posted by roshan.george under Art, India, Movies | Comments (11)
December 31, 2007
I like my news to be news. For opinions, there are hundreds of blogs - each with no less credibility than some random journalist. I couldn’t care less. Sometimes I just want news, tell me what happened, be dry, be real. Don’t editorialize. I don’t want to hear what you think, you are not important. Honestly. I can form my own opinion, my mind is capable of thought, and I don’t like being told what to think. Really, neutral reporting and interesting reporting aren’t mutually exclusive. If something is exciting, it will be.
Let’s see, I get three newspapers, so I got to see how different they are. Three headlines (and lets leave out any talk about lack of originality), The Hindu reported that Benazir Bhutto had been killed, The New Indian Express and Deccan Chronicle had their headlines telling me that a hope had died. Sloppy, that tells me nothing until I read the article. Matter of fact, the former has more impact. It’s a problem with Indian newspapers, TNIE can’t describe the BJP or the CPI(M) without making it an opinion piece, DC likes celebrities too much and The Hindu has real trouble relaying bad news about the so-called Left parties.
See, I have nothing against editorialising per se, but why mark an editorial as news? You have those center pages, marked Editorial, or those other pages marked Opinion. Put everything there. Call everything an editorial. Let’s have some honesty please. And while you’re about it, those Opinion pieces, try to write some good ones. The only interesting opinion pieces in a newspaper here are a few in The Hindu and the ones taken from the NYT or the Guardian or some other foreign newspaper. TNIE thinks inflammatory articles must be good, by default, so they print utter rubbish with little facts and lots of errors. And most of The Hindu articles have this air of I’m-the-venerable-old-colonel all over them — stuck-up.
Really, I’m beginning to think that those people who read only the comics, they’re the smart ones.
Posted by roshan.george under India, Madras, Rant | Comments (10)
December 29, 2007
A few days ago, when Bhutto was assassinated, I mentioned how there were countries worse off than us. The conversation veered to how Indians in general consider their culture rather great and illustrious. Adithya said,
Only the politicians and the press claim that we are upcoming super powers. Ordinary citizens like you and me know that it is not so.
Maybe, though I doubt it, but there’s more to it than just that. The majority of Indians I have met have an abnormal sense of pride in their country, and in its so-called ‘culture’. It’s almost unhealthy, the way people go around talking about how the Vedas contain so much information, or about how Indian culture is so much superior to other culture. I always suspected that this is not normal behaviour, and is endemic to India, and now the statistics seem to support that claim. The Pew Research Centre’s Pew Global Attitudes Project did a nice big survey over some 47 nations asking, among other questions, whether the respondents thought that their culture was superior to others. It’s hardly surprising that the people who you’d expect to be insecure score highest (click for all the results, the values are percentages, going left to right from completely agree to completely disagree)
Such self-importance is unbecoming of ‘one of the oldest civilisations in the world’. It’s not surprising that there is so much fundamentalism in this country, such belief in superiority reinforces any nationalist tendencies these people may have. Really now, the only reason one should wish to support one’s country is the desire to defend the way of life that one wishes to have; emotional attachment to an arbitrarily demarcated piece of land and the people there is a throwback to tribal ways. One would hope that civilised society has passed that stage, but then, are we civilised at all?
It’s no surprise that the poorest of countries are also the ones who chose to believe that their ‘culture’ is superior to other countries’, Tanzania, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Nationalistic spirit seems to be a substitute for real development, the soul of soulless circumstances
, to borrow a nice phrase. Unsurprisingly, these superior cultures are also the ones that seem to be in most danger of being overrun by unwashed philistines. The smart people at Pew wanted to know how many believed that their way of life needed to be protected, and guess what?
I’m not very surprised, though I am rather disappointed in those 2000 odd people who answered for us.
Update: Should’ve linked to the study straight. Here you go.
Posted by roshan.george under Math, Politics, Society | Comments (6)
December 27, 2007
And boy did they do a full job of the whole thing, two guys with ak47s shot her and then a suicide bomb was detonated near her car. They didn’t take any chances. I sent Marc a message asking for confirmation because I was at a wedding when I heard and it turns out it was true. Saw the rest of the story on the TV in the lobby, that Musharraf dude’s a live wire, you can’t just let him hold power. He’s dangerous, and not just to his own country. Pakistan’s one of those few countries worse off than us religion-wise, politics-wise…Heck! They’re just worse off than us. I feel sorry for the Pakistanis, but they’ve really let the religious fundies take over. Sucks to be them.
Here’s the BBC article on the assassination: Benazir Bhutto killed in attack.
A set of pictures they have: Life in Pictures
Posted by roshan.george under Disasters, India, Pakistan, Politics | Comments (7)
December 26, 2007
Marc’s got his collegemates to join him for a nightly match of Counterstrike:Condition Zero by linking them all on a VPN using Hamachi. I joined them for a couple of days, it was quite a lot of fun, but after a while things got repetitive and I don’t feel like playing CS anymore, maybe another game, maybe Team Fortress Classic or Q3F, now that can be fun with a lot of people and there are more than 10 players now and then on the server. Or maybe we could all play an MMORPG. I don’t know, there’s not much to do stuck here at home. Them docs don’t even let me drive.
Getting Hamachi to work through a router:
Simple enough. First setting the Hamachi side:
- Hit the gears icon to open the settings.
- On the first screen there, you’ll see a ‘Detailed Configuration‘ button.
- Hit that to get a screen which allows you to set which ports Hamachi uses.
- Ask it to use a particular UDP port, say 13000. Then just save the settings.
Now to set up the router:
- First go to the router’s setup page. Usually located at http://192.168.1.1/
- Find your port forwarding page.
- Set up a port-forwarding rule with the following settings:
- Start Port: 13000
- End Port: 13000
- IP: Set this to your IP, my computer is 192.168.1.5 so I set it to that
- Check Enable
- Now go disable your firewall. Don’t forget to enable it again once you’re done.
Now all you have to do is restart Hamachi and try connecting again.
After that, it’s best you follow Marc’s HowTo.
Stats:
We also have a couple of stats programs running. Here’s how the StatsMe plugin looks like in-game:
And post-game, the PsychoStats program compiles the statistics into a MySql database to view at http://ampli5.org/stats
Posted by roshan.george under Friends, Games, Internet | Comments (10)
