My pensieve

it is about a week now since i started feeling like this. havent been doing any thing lately. just trying to get involved in whatever i find little interesting but unfortunately havent found anything much also. i watch movies but am never interested in it. i had thought IOTA would give me some chance to work on something seriously but unfortunately it is being postponed. I think this will continue till i reach back home on 28th. will have lots of things to do there. especially since i have my cousin bro’s marriage to attend. let us see how it turns out.

26th March — TCS(package–Rs. 3.15 Lakhs pa)
TCS was the first company to come for recruitment for our year in the college and also the first company that i tried for. So my journey of campus placement started from it. Written was cool and easy, a piece of cake in fact. Most of the questions were easy and verbal section which i have always been weak had already answers marked in the question paper. So i got selected for interview. It was my first interview since my interview of NTSE which was way back in 2003. So i was little nervous, what made me more nervous was the wait of around 6-7 hours. So when i my name was called at last for the interview, I just wanted to go and give the interview and finish it off and i no longer thought of the result. The interview room was a big hall with around 5 tables kept little away from each other. So at a time, 5 students were being interviewed by 5 different panels. I was interviewed by a panel which consisted of 2 members. Both of them looked friendly. But I was so nervous, that when I was asked to tell about myself, I simply babbled something which overall had very little sense. I first told about my branch and some personal details. Then i told them about my schooling which obviously wasnt at all needed. I told them something about studying in Varanasi and Hubli. Then I started telling them that I am interested in Opensource projects and that I am an active member of NITDGPLUG. While telling them this, I was so nervous that i forgot the name “NITDGPLUG” and had to think for few seconds before telling them the name. This must have given them an idea how active member I was of NITDGPLUG. Then I told them about my intrests in Sudoku and puzzle solving. When I said so, one of the interviewer said that he will ask me a puzzle. He asked me about the why -1=1 when you find its square and then square root them again. I just told him that since we were finding the square-root of a number we were bringing the possiblity of both positive and negative numbers into the answer and only one of them is right, which in this case is 1. Then he asked me if i knew C and C++ programming languages. I told him yes and so he asked me the definitions of some technical features of C++. I told him in my own words, some of them right and those which i didnt knew properly, i told him how much I knew and then said that i didnt know anything more. Then he asked me to write a program to sort an array using bubble-sort. I wrote some code, but didnt check it with any values. Then he asked me if I was sure and then he asked me to check it once using an example and also explain it to him. When I tried to explain it to him using an example, i found that i hadnt written that program correctly and i tried to correct it. He gave me some more time to correct it and asked me to explain it again. After that, He told me to always check a program with an example before saying it is right. The he asked me what subjects i have learnt in my college. I told him mot of the subjects i had learnt till then. He asked me if I knew DBMS properly, I said no. The he asked what else I knew. I told about OS and unix. I told them that i have been using Opensuse10.3 regularly. They asked me many questions from Unix and its commands. I asnwered most of them as i had used most of them myself. Well that was the end of interview. I had very less hope of getting into TCS after the interview because i knew that i had screwed it big time. The only hope I had was that i am from Comp Sci and they might give some preference to me. And that is what happened. TCS took 200 students from our college and I was one of them.
30th July—Tejas Networks(package-Rs.5.5 Lakhs pa)
Well Reddy had asked me to prepare seriously for this company as he had said that not many prefer it and there is a very good chance of getting into it if i knew networks properly. I had taken his suggestion seriously and had studied networks lectures in holidays. However, I wasnt eligible to sit in it when it visited our college as it had kept a cut-off of 7.5 CGPA. So it rejected me.
4th August—NOVELL(package-Rs.6 Lakhs pa)
Before Novell came to our college, there was a lot of confusion in our department. It seems that Novell had asked for a list of 40 students available and ofcourse these 40 students were selected on the basis of their CGPA. And i stand at 52nd-53rd position in our dept according to CGPA. and since some of them werent intrested and some of them had got placed in Tejas, I had somehow reached the 44th position and still had to convince 4 students above me in the list, to not to appear for the company so that i cold get a place in the list. However i wasnt interested in any such business. But still i thought of atending the PPT of Novell and in the PPT, no conditions were told and hence i was able to write the written exam. Actually, according to me, this was the only company in which i had a very very bleak chance of getting selected as i had tried to do an internship in Novell during summer, though i hadnt done anything useful. However written according to me was easy and there was also an essay to write about linux in it. So i wrote about how i have been using linux for past 8 months and reason why i was relutant to shift to linux because of addiction to AOE and blah blah….. End result was that i couldnt clear its written. So again I got rejected.

SAMSUNG– wasnt interested as i didnt like the work we had to do there.
CSC–wasnt interested as its package was very less.
AMAZON–wasnt allowed to sit. because of low CGPA.
MICROSOFT–since the written was subjective, couldnt clear it.
ONMOBILE–had lots of hopes to get into it as the its written consisted of only puzzles. luckily cleared the first round, but i did it only because i had copied the answers from Shilpa. however my puzzle solving ability was tested and i came to know the reality in the second round. I didnt clear it and i was sure of it after the test itself.

When I downloaded the movie from dc++, as I had heard very good comments from non-gulty friends. That was the main reason why i thought of watching it. I had great expectations from the movie but unfortunately, it was not upto my expectations.
The story is about 8 students,4 boys and 4 girls who have just joined an engineering college. They become friends because of the ragging process that they face and in very little time they become very close friends. Till now, it was fine. But then the ragging gets intensified and surprisingly, one of them slaps a senior. That was the first incident which took the film away from reality. And the reason was because even the senior was behind the girl and he was using seniority funda and forcing her to come with him for a movie. And amazingly, to settle this matter between juniors and seniors, someone i dont know whom, comes in between and arranges a meeting and in that meeting they decide to settle this matter in a way simple manner, a cricket match. Well i suppose everyone had just watched Lagaan and when Britishers can agree to decide matters by the result of a cricket match, then why shouldnt the college students follow the same. After all, for every system in India, we follow the British style. Well my disappointment doesnt end here.
During the cricket match, in which the seniors have State level players(as in all movies), there is a fat boy in the senior team and to lure him, what the juniors do is throw a boiled egg on the ground in which they mix some drugs (I dont know which one, but i surely would buy loads of those drugs!!). And the fat boy picks it up from the ground during the match and eats it(what happened to hygiene!). The effect of the drug is that instead of fielding the ball, he kicks it outside the boundary line(Sorry, i forgot to say, The fat boy is fielding at boundary!!Imagine Inzamam ul haq fielding at boundary, India would have won so many matches). And after all this, junior team wins the match and guess what it is the end of their ragging period. You see, we werent so lucky. Even our year guys had won the college cricket tournament in first year but till then our ragging period was already over :(.
After all this bullshit which made me loose all the interest I had on the movie, the story goes on like any other movie involving friends. there is some difference among friends and then they fight amongt eachother. In between there is also fight in between all the couples and blah blah blah.
The only good thing that i found was the way they show how all these friends in their final year, concentrate on their futures and the way they show how all of them are sad for leaving the college. Well i might have liked it because even now i am in my final year of engineering. However i always try to find some good point in any thing, and this is what i found in this movie.
Also please remember that i have not discussed about the boy is in love with a senior right from the first day of the college and how one of them proposes a college teacher who reacts by showing him a box which contains all the love letters she recieved from her students(hehehehehe) and also the way the placements are held in their college.

In short, I would say even though the frist 15 mins and the last half an hour was good enough and the theme was wonderful and different, the writer sadly fucked the story in middle.

I would give it a rating of 5/10. But again the theme was good but it was badly put into a story.

well i started reading about Gtk when i started fixing usability bugs in evolution and the main thing i found about Gtk was that it has many many functions.

• The bandage was wound around the wound.
• The farm was used to produce.
• The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
• We must polish the polish furniture.
• He could lead if he would get the lead out.
• The soldier decided to dessert his dessert in the desert.
• Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
• A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
• When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
• I did not object to the object.
• The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
• They were too close the door to close it.
• The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
• I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

today atlast i have fixed the bug in Evolution . I had tried fixing this bug in my holidays for around 15 days. But due to some or other reason evolution used to crash with whatever code i had written. At the beginning, I was trying to destroy the categories-dailog and restart it. But later, after jjonny’s advice, I tried to reorder the list instead of restarting the dailog. But still I was not able to write any correct code. However, today I dont know how I did it.

I slept at around 2 am(strange considering that i had spent night-outs for last 8 days). I was feeling so sleepy that i thought it was best to sleep. But I woke up at 4:45 am. Since I had nothing to do for entertainment(due to some missing dependencies, I have not been able to install any video player in Opensuse 11), I thought I should try to fix the bug. So I again started to write fresh code to fix the bug, as I had re-installed Opensuse and due to my foolishness, I had lost all my previous codes. After about half an hour, I had completed writing about 15 lines of code which was very similar to codes that i had tried earlier. And when i re-builded Evolution, strangely the bug was fixed.

Ofcourse, now i have to see whether my patch will be accepted. If it is accepted, then it will be my first bug that i have fixed successfully. let us see.
UPDATE: The patch was accepted. Yippee, my first contribution to free software. :).

I just completed watching all 3 parts of Godfather. No doubt they are counted in the list of best movies ever made. Wonderful story and so well directed and acted. Over all a very good movie. I was just thinking about the way it ended. Michael lost his daughter whom he had always thought of protecting. I am going to describe about some roles in the movie and how i understood them.

I think about the 3 gangsters, Vito Corleone, Santino Corleone and Micheal Coleone. Vito Corleone was a very good person by heart and i liked the way he ruled. His decision to go against supporting Drug dealing was right but as we know it had very bad consequences on him and his family. This again raises an importent moral question. Can a person try to be good while working along with bad persons? This is a very importent question and i am sure you would agree with me if i say that a definite yes or no for this question cannot be given. Santino, on the other hand,was a person who loved his family very much, but he was a person who had power but not the patience to think before useing it which ultimately made him loose his life.

Now the main character, Micheal Corleone, a gangster who never wanted to be a gangster, but had to become a gangster to protect his family. He liked his father very much but didnt like his father’s work. But still he got involved when his father needed him. So now let me share with you the moral question that i have always been thinking about. What do you do when someone whom you like very much but is superior to you (in some or other way) is doing wrong? You have only 2 option, either support him in whatever wrong deed he is doing or leave him and try to lead your own life leaving all concerns about the person. Micheal’s daughter choose the first option and was killed whereas his son choose the second option and became a good musician. Both loved their father very much but choose different way to show their love. So which is right? What would his son do if Micheal was shot instead of his daughter and was badly injured?

We find similar examples in both Ramayan and Mahabharta. In Ramayan, we see how Bharath cuts off all his relationship with his mother for being so unjust to his brother Ram. Where as in Mahabharta, due to the support Dhritarastra gives to his son, Duryodhana, he loses not only all his sons but also his dynasty is washed off completely. So history and also as in Godfather suggests that, it is always good for you to leave a person who is very much involved in his bad deeds.

wget is a nice tool for downloading resources from the internet. The basic usage is wget url:

wget http://linuxreviews.org/

Therefore, wget (manual page) + less (manual page) is all you need to surf the internet. The power of wget is that you may download sites recursive, meaning you also get all pages (and images and other data) linked on the front page:

wget -r http://linuxreviews.org/

But many sites do not want you to download their entire site. To prevent this, they check how browsers identify. Many sites refuses you to connect or sends a blank page if they detect you are not using a web-browser. You might get a message like:

Sorry, but the download manager you are using to view this site is not supported. We do not support use of such download managers as flashget, go!zilla, or getright

Wget has a very handy -U option for sites like this. Use -U My-browser to tell the site you are using some commonly accepted browser:

  wget  -r -p -U Mozilla http://www.stupidsite.com/restricedplace.html

The most important command line options are --limit-rate= and --wait=. You should add –wait=20 to pause 20 seconds between retrievals, this makes sure you are not manually added to a blacklist. –limit-rate defaults to bytes, add K to set KB/s. Example:

wget --wait=20 --limit-rate=20K -r -p -U Mozilla http://www.stupidsite.com/restricedplace.html

A web-site owner will probably get upset if you attempt to download his entire site using a simple wget http://foo.bar command. However, the web-site owner will not even notice you if you limit the download transfer rate and pause between fetching files.

Use –no-parent

--no-parent is a very handy option that guarantees wget will not download anything from the folders beneath the folder you want to acquire. Use this to make sure wget does not fetch more than it needs to if just just want to download the files in a folder.

Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Øyvind Sæther. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

courtsey::http://linuxreviews.org/quicktips/wget/

got it from www.iqleague.com what a joke :):):)

I came to know about this when i had gone along with my cousin-brother, Charan, for collection of money from his clients to whom he supplies banana as a wholesale dealer. After collecting money from some of his clients, he parked the bike near a hardware store. I went along with him inside the store which was packed with all sorts of electrical appliances. After looking around for a while, I saw that 2 men were sitting in a corner and another person was standing beside them. After listening to them for a while, i came to know that they were bidding on something and one of the person sitting was the auctioneer. He was increasing the amount as either the other person sitting or the person standing would make some indication. The bid amount had reached around Rs. 7500. The bidding process was going on very quietly and only the auctioneer was mentioning the amount very slowly. This made me very suspicious as to what they were bidding for. However Charan called me and said that we had to go to one more of his clients. I asked him what the 2 persons were bidding for. He told me that they were bidding for Rs. 1 lakh. He explained to me that the system is called FUND SYSTEM. A group of people, exactly 40, who are basically businessmen and who know each other very well, together make the fund system. Each one of them agrees to deposit Rs. 2500 every week which totals up into Rs. 1 lakh. So now anyone of them can borrow that money and use it for his business. He has to return it compulsorily after a stipulated time. All this happens on the basis of trust on each other. However if there are more than one person who wants that money for that week,which always happens(any businessman would want more money in his pocket), a bidding process takes place where both of them can bid for it in front of some other member of group who volenteers to become the auctioneer and the maximum bidder wins. For example, if a person bids at Rs.7500, it means that he is going to get only Rs. 92500, and still payback Rs. 1 lakh after the stipulated time. Charan told me that he also was a member of that fund sytem and he had actually gone to that store to pay his weekly dues, Rs. 2500. I asked him if he also takes out money from the Fund. He told me that he normally takes the money only when the bid price is very low. He added that the maximum bid varies from Rs. 800 – Rs. 8000. And then we reached one of his client’s shop and so he stopped the bike and he went to the store to collect money.
I still have lots of doubts about the Fund system like:

1. What happens to Bid price?
2. What is the stipulated time?
3. When does he get back the money he has invested?

I will ask him when i next go to village and clear all the doubts. This surely looks like a very system where local businessmen can help each other but as i had mentioned earlier a lot depends on trust on each other.