Aspirations 2020

Hip!Hip!Hurray!! MEC WINS!!!

We sailed through to the State Level Finals in the Online Programming Contest conducted by the Infosys as a part of their Aspirations 2020 and finally emerged the Winners beating some of the best programmmers of Kerala (eg. students from CET, Rajagiri,etc..).
The Prize: A Trophy for the College, and a Sony PSP 3004 PB(PlayStation Portable) for each one of us.

Ya...It was a great experience...The finals was conducted at the Park Center and Bhavani Infosys Campuses, Technopark, Trivandrum...It was on March 19th.
Our team consisted of 3 members: Myself, Manu Thomas (leftmost in photo) and Suraj Shenoy (middle). Quite depressingly and ironically, only one team participated in the contest from whole MEC.


Pic: Park Center was where they conducted the events except programming....

Aspirations 2020 is being conducted for the first time in Kerala. Apart from the Programming Contest, there were other events like Paper Presentation, Distinguished Students, and Quiz. This event had been conducted through various stages, first there was the Teaser Round, then came the College round, then the Inter-College and finally the State Level Round. Unfortunately, there was no National Level Round this year. Infosys is planning to keep it from the next year.

Signing off for now...bye!!

GSoC 2009

Its by surprise that I decided to give a try at the Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC2009). I have now finally ended up sending a proposal to an organization. The funny part is that I am in the middle of my 6th semester university exams!!! One exam is over...5 more to go!!
The GSoC Student Proposal Submission deadline ends at 7:00 P.M GMT, April 3rd. I know as I am writing this post that its just one hour more for that deadline.
Anyway, I thought I'll spend some time blogging..... :-)

About GSoC: In the first week, I didn't spend time at all in searching for any projects....I had almost dropped the idea of participating on account of the squeezing university exam schedules. Around 2 days back, I just scanned through some organizations and their ideas...most of them were really hard for me coz I don't have enough experience with open source...
But I stumbled upon a project idea where the basic requirements were pretty ok for me. They were Linux, Bash/Perl/Ruby/Expect, Mysql. I thought I would give it a try...but it was actually yesterday that got some time to read through the ideas of the project.
Details of the project can be obtained from the link: http://wiki-oar.imag.fr/index.php/Test_Suite_Proposal.

The mentoring organization is OAR and the project I have decided to send proposal for is OAR Testsuites.

The main idea about this project is that the student has to create a framework and suites of tests to check proper functioning and installation of the OAR batch scheduler which is a resource management software that takes care of more than 5000 nodes in a cluster. Sounds really techie, right?
Did a little bit of research today morning and found out a few things that I could use it to send with my proposal. The Testsuites for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), referenced in the above link, really gave me an overall structure of the way certain tools like "EXPECT" could be used to create framework and "Plugin Technology" be used to develop test programs....The whole open source world is really interesting....

Anyway, I have taken the whole day from early morning for proposal and am happy that I have been able to atleast participate in an open online scholarship event like this.

Since not much research could be done on the day of submission, I don't have much confidence about getting shortlisted to do the project. If I am, I have gotta a hell lot to learn about great stuffs like High Performance Computing, Grid computing etc...Though this idea might sound great for any open source developer, I am really starting to get nervous!!:-(

Let me concentrate on my exams now...next is Digital Signal Processing(DSP)...
Hoping to have a nice weekend.....

Bye!!

P.S. My blog readers (stat counter) have gone above 1000, glad to know that!!

Brainfuck++

Finally our mini project (BrainF**k++ or BF++ Interpreter) is complete and we have presented the project quite successfully.

Our Idea: We were quite impressed by the simplicity the traditional BF language provided and the addiction it guaranteed...(To know more about BF - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck ) and at the right time we found a white paper submitted by "Jared Derinsk" about an extension of BF called the BF++ which takes BF outside the world of the Turing.

No doubt, Ruby was the best language suited for making our interpreter. Ruby being a very very high level scripting language reads like Poetry and is known for its flexibility and forgiving syntaxes.
To know more about Ruby and fall in love with it, visit : http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Our Project has now been released in sourceforge. All those who like to get a taste of the fun its gonna provide, delve into this beautiful language and contribute to making it fully bug free.

Download our project "Brainfuck++ Interpreter in Ruby" from:

http://brainfckpp.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!!

A Marvellous Flute Composition

Back to blogging again.....This time, I want to share with all carnatic music lovers about some masterpiece flute compositions by Kudamaloor Janardhanan.

Actually, I happened to come across his mellifluous compositions being played from CD while attending my friend's brother's marriage. But couldn't get to know more on that day...Next time, I had been to a jewellery shop with my mom, the same pleasant music invaded my eardrums.....soothing it was ...shudha sangeetham....
And when I enquired about it, I was shown this CD...Manorama Music's "Madhava Murali" by the maestro Kudamaloor Janardhanan....I rushed to a nearby "Music World", but to my dismay, there was no stock of this CD....the same news was waiting for me when I went to another music shop "Planet M".

Deeply saddened, I searched Google for any downloadable version of this music...Bad luck there also....
Next day, my mom gave a request for this CD at Planet M and two days later, we received a call....and I rushed off and bought the CD. Its price is Rs.125/-. Definitely a worthy purchase....Peace, enjoyment and entertainment fully guaranteed. When you are stressed, plug this music into your ears, and this is I would say the best relaxation you would get.



The six songs contained in this CD are:
1. Krishna Nee Begane (Yamuna Kalyani),
2. Alaipayuthe (Splendid one in Kanada....One of my favourites...)
3. Karuna Chaiva (Yadukula Kamboji)
4. Kripaya Palaya (Charukeshi)
5. Enna Thavam (Kapi)
6. Rara Venu (The artist has explored all the intricate nuances of this Swarajathi in Bilahari).

There are few more of his releases...one is Swathi Murali and another is Mohana Murali...Swathi Murali compositions are available in 4shared.

Hope all music lovers will get their hands on this priceless property....Njoy!! and please dont forget to leave ur comment....

Signing off,

P.S. Guys, Please let me know if there are more compositions like these...by different artists...

Bye.

Eventful Entry

Its bin around 5 months since I have seriously blogged....Quite often I had started some interesting topics and then saved it as draft promising to complete the post the next day but ultimately ending up eating my own words....I guess that is how life is for all ordinary people who keep deadline for the activities they do.

Ok...Now its my second month of this sem....sports is over and now it is Arts going on for three days in my college. The four houses this sem are Gladiators, Samurais, Titans and Pirates (me).


After a lot of head boggling, our mini prjct group(cyriac,me,abin,sandy) finally decided on the project "BrainFck++ Interpreter in Ruby language"....During the christmas hols we had to decide between lisp interpreter and the currently selected one...Our earlier selections like Boot Process Parallelizing etc..seemed to be very complicated and had to be rejected...anyway this selection seems to quite doable...the advantage is that the programming domain we have chosen is Ruby which is considered as the one of the emerging scripting languages in the industry.
Buying the name, Brainfck or BF is a very simple interesting esoteric turing complete programming language having just 8 symbols to do the various tasks...Our project aims at adding few more extra features like File Handling and Networking to BF and make a BF++. A little bit of Socket Programming has to be done...

Dunno when the placements are gonna start and all that...
A couple of all batch mock placement tests were carried out early this month...and still more to come...The recession is a worry...on top of that corruption like the Satyam Fraud Case etc...are leading to an IT plunge...
Hoping everything thing would become fine.......signing off ...

bye.

Updating my view

Three of our S5 exams have been postponed to December. Now that I have some time for blogging...here goes!!

I thought I 'll be eclectic with the contents of the upcoming posts coz there are loads of news comin' in everyday -Obama-The new US President, the Financial Crisis gripping the entire world, India beating Australia (2-0)in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, our beloved DADA and Kumble bidding goodbye to cricket ...and lots more!!!


Democrat Barack Obama is chosen as the 44th and the First Afro-American President of United States of America after he beat his counterpart Republican Mc.Cain.
Thus people of America proved that they were totally against the racial discrimination that had been prevailing in the country for more than a century - the verdict of the election bears testimony to that fact.
Obama with his good orator skills convinced the nation that he would be there to relieve America from clutches of financial meltdown, unemployment,health problems and the bad reputation it has gained under the Bush Administration.
But Obama is taking up the President's role at a time when America is struggling to stand upright and thus he has to show great resilience and leadership by converting his eloquent campaign rhetoric into efficient governance.
Will his win affect India's IT sector?? Will Obama be seriously taking up his "anti-Outsourcing" strategies??The Indian IT Companies are going through jittery moments and they are crossing their fingers and hoping that it would be difficult to stop something that is as deeply rooted as outsourcing coz it contributes 50% to US revenue.
Hope its just another election rhetoric, otherwise I can't imagine the plight of thousands of IT engineers going jobless after their BTech from the next year...that includes me too..



Sourav Ganguly, the most daring and successful captain Indian cricket team has ever had, has called it a day. His passion for cricket, his aggressiveness, leadership etc..have been beyond questions...A true hero of Bengal-Indian cricket...His comeback into the Indian team after a long gestation is the epitome of a spirited and motivated cricketer...junior cricketers must learn a lot about dedication from him....
I'll miss his elegant front foot sixers and waving of his T-Shirt from the gallery......Goodbye DADA!!

Filling in....

Its been a long time since I have posted something seriously, though a couple of draft posts are in the basket.....cant point the needle of excuse on "lack of time" anymore.....talk about laziness and its effects.....

For the last 4 days, I was occupied by the Thriller novel "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown...hell of a book, its got lots of information on Antimatter, CERN, Illuminati brotherhood,Ambigrams, Holy Conclave etc etc....,though some of it are fictional...It appears that I have just toured Rome and Vatican City in a few days....a must read...

Lot of events engaged me during this sem....They include my S5 Industrial visit to Goa and Mysore ;IIT Madras visit for taking part in Shaastra, their tech fest ; NIT,Calicut for Tathwa ;Arrival of my S4 results(84%)etc....I wanted to reserve a post for each of these events. I believe they are on the cards.

Days are leaping forward...5th sem university exams round the corner,starting on Nov 4th..the exam schedule is very tight this time....

Music classes,entering my 4th month, going on as usual though its slowing down considerably....

Most of the sundays busy with Cat coaching in TIME... but haven't opened a book of their's at home...

Hope to come back soon with my next post.....