Netra’s Weblog

I still remember the stories told by my grand mother which typically begin with “In a distant land, lived a beautiful princess… loved by a handsome prince ” and end with “and they lived happily ever after “. Before i could even know the meaning of love, i was crazy about my dream boy ( following simran’s foot steps in DDLJ!!! ) and thoroughly believed that “my prince” would take me away one day

After some years, this fantasy world seemed to be too unrealistic.. I grew busy with my studies, caring for family etc.. My world revolved around them I have always believed in the quote — “If u desire for something with all ur mind n heart, the whole universe wil conspire in helping u achieve it”. I have always loved the feeling that I wil be in LOVE one day.

“He” walked into my life in the most unexpected manner possible. Calm, composed, warm, friendly, intelligent, cute.. everything that i ever wanted in “my” boy.. We have had a journey which has a stronger story line than most of the superhits in bollywood. Well, it definitely took some time for me to realize that “he” is THE ONE for me. But one point has always been significant ever since we have met each other and that is “happiness”. He came into my life as happiness, the journey of happiness continued each time we met and now “he” is my definition of happiness!! “He” is the greatest gift to me from GOD. Nothing seems more important than him.. not even my life. Thank u “my boy” for making me realize that love is ssssssoooooo beautiful. “He” changed my world by being my world.

All the moments we spend together.. chatting for long hrs, thinking about each other, planning our meets and those very special meets.. steal my heart, as though i am falling in love with “him” all over again!!! A smile on “his” face wipes out all my sadness and worries, and makes me feel glad that i am alive. My heart dances with joy when I realize how lucky I am to have “him”. I want to live for “him”, ensure that he is happy always, work towards realizing all his dreams. My life is the smallest gift i can ever give “him”. Puranas say that two persons become friends for life after walking seven steps together. I want to walk a million steps with “him”, hand-in-hand, so that “he” is mine for the entire spiritual journey.

His questions like “Why do u love me?” drive me to feel and think hard because every time i discover a reason to love “him”, it seems tooooo weak to express my love.. “My boy”, do i need any reason to love u? His sweetness, care, support make me crazy about “him”. I ponder over “his” naughty questions and romantic descriptions for hours together. Words fall short to express “his” importance to me. I hope and pray GOD that our “love story” will resemble a fairy tale and v ll be happy together forever.

My boy, since you love simplicity, here are the last few words ONLY for you .. “I LOVE YOU more than myself“.

-”Yours” forever Netra

P.S: No comments enquiring about “him” are encouraged

I received an internship offer from Yahoo! Research and Developement, India in last November. Since then, I have always cherished the idea of meeting people at Yahoo!, seeing their work culture and the ambiance at Y!.

Prasanna invited me to join them on Interns’ Day on 11-4-2008.. Luckily, I got permission from our HOD to attend the function. Rama, my classmate, and me first went to M.G. Road office. Pavan, our senior, who is working in Y! took us inside the office and GOSH!! Its a different world. Great place to work.

Then we went to the EGL office. I was told that I ll be doing my internship at that office.. The office carves a niche of its own Its simply superb. A huge mood chart welcomes u at the entrance. The most wonderful aspect is that each floor has a theme.. like historic monuments, music, sports etc. Whats makes Y! most special is its people. EVERYBODY is ssssssssooooo humble and sweet!! I was astonished at their simplicity. The work place also offers good food in LARGE quantities. I hope to put on weight during my internship Pavan explained that the work is tooooo good and stressful situations are rare. We interacted with Sushma, our HR, also.

I met Prasanna. He is a really nice person… very humble, down to earth and a genius ( He is the one who took my interview for the internship .. his approach to optimization is amazing). We attended the interns’ day function. It was very very funny :D. Great performances and it was a very good stress reliever. It was a pleasure to meet all the seniors from my college interning @ Y!.

Prasanna did a great help by dropping me home.. For the first time, I experienced Bangalore’s traffic at its worst. Well, it took us 3 flat hrs to drive home I must admire Prasanna’s patience for tolerating my unending questions for 3 hrs.. Prasanna, Rama and me discussed about lots and lots of topics ranging from movies to tech. Prasanna even gave a treat at Coffee Day.. GOD!! If the higher-ups of everyone is so sweet and caring.. life would be so comfortable..

Thank God. it was a PERFECT DAY.

Yesterday, I searched for open source tools for my 9 year old brother.. The results were amazing.

Tux Paint is a wonderful program for painting. In particular I liked the magic and stamp section. The happiness on my bro’s face after seeing this tool was priceless The features like sparkle, drip, shades, rainbow, grass, stamps etc are very good.

Pingus is a game involving penguins (well, u can term it as a strategic game ). The best part is its UI and the ease with with which u can create a level.. I designed a level for my bro and he enjoyed it very much. The game stimulates children to think about the necessary actions to be taken to reach the goal..

So.. If u have small kids at home, try exposing them to these tools and i bet they wil enjoy!!!

Signing off,

-Netra

One of the questions posed in 8th mile OSP prelims was :

Write a program to check if the compiler (C compiler ) allows nested comments.

Here is the solution I came up with

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{

int i=10,*j,k,l=20;

j=&l;

k= /* /* */i */*j;/* */ 1;

if(k==i)

printf(”does not allow nested comments\n”);

else if(k==l)

printf(”allows nested comments”);

return 0;

}

I hope it works.. Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Please tell me if u have a better solution.

    8th Mile is the techno-cultural fest conducted by our college, RVCE. The event occured after 5 long years and it was a huge success. The first day featured eastern music and eastern dance competitions.  The performances were great and we enjoyed every single moment. On second day, we had technical events. We won second place in “On the spot Programming”. Prabhanjan is my team mate and it was a joy to watch him code a solution in last 10 minutes!!! Hats off to u Prabhanjan..

We had performance by Raghu Dixit. It was rocking The most amazing thing about him is the spirit with which he performed. His performance was very lively and humous. He established a good rapport with the audience.

The next concert was by Praveen Godkhindi. It was majorly classical. I enjoyed it the most because I am a fan of Hindustani Classical Music. He played Bhupa, Bhinpalas and Pahadi..He also played many popular numbers from Kannada and Hindi movies. Classical music gives happiness to the soul. Its very refreshing. We realized the beauty of classical music. That concert has inspired me to continue my classical music riyaaz after engineering

8th Mile was the change we were seeking from the day-to-day routine…

Since the day I began to gain understanding of the word “kernel”, I was always curious to know more and more about it. I was trying since few days to write a very simple “hello world” module but couldnt. Today I came across this link http://tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/index.html … By following the instructions given in that tutorial, I was able to write my first kernel module, compile and load it successfully.

I am sssssssooooo happy about it

Well, ” A journey of thousand miles begins with a small step”…

I am trying to connect my Nokia 6020 handset through DKU-5 to my laptop for a project. I am unable to find drivers. The handset is not being recognized by the system. I use Ubuntu 7.04. I searched the web for info but couldnt find any. Can anyone let me know about the driver? Or some other data cable that can be used on linux wil also be helpful.

If I fail to explore a way to connect the mobile to my comp, i ll be forced to do the project on Windows Please help me…

I had never thought that I could stay awake all night anytime. Innofest 2008, a technical fest by IIIT, Bangalore had an overnight programming contest named CODE BUTTER on 22nd night. In a team of 3, we were supposed to solve one problem ( which was actually a mini-project) in 12 hours.

The competition was awesome. The most wonderful thing was the confidence I gained from the event. I forgot everything when I started coding at 9.30 pm at night. It was like addiction to programming. Its a good experience to work under stress.

Our team coded a utility to search files on Linux/Unix system. We used UNIX APIs for the functionality and Qt for the front end. We knew the details and usage of most APIs that we used. Qt assistant helped me a lot. We were given access to internet and that was very useful in certain special occasions (like converting a QString to char * for use by the APIs etc. ). IIIT, Bangalore is about to release our code under GPL.

We have created a mailing list for RVCE lug on Google Groups. Currently there are two projects going on in association with KK Mane sir from TIFR, Mumbai.

1. Free money project- Accounting package like Tally, basically an open source alternative to Tally.

2. Book reader project

As a part of activities on campus, I conducted a session on Shell Basics because we wanted the fundamentals to be strong and work culture to be efficient. The response was overwhelming.

Last Thursday, we had Hiran in our college. Hiran had participated in Google SoC last year. He gave a session on font development and it was very interesting. Many student from our college are now interested in designing Kannada fonts.

On Saturday….Kartik Mistry, Praveen, Shyam, Vikram and srijit had come to our college. Praveen and Shyam gave lecture on GSoC. Kartik spoke about debian. Vikram talked about localization. All the lectures were awesome. Please help the swatantra project in translation on http://translate.swatantra.org if you know Kannada.

Recently, my friend informed me that v can browse the internet using emacs. I tried doing it and it is an awesome feature.

I downloaded the packages w3m, w3m-el and w3m-img.

Started emacs, Alt+X typed w3m

This loads the w3m.

Pressed the open button in the 2nd row to enter the URL

Pressed Enter and there it is!!!

We can also use the images option to display images in the page.

Nice feature… right????

Thanks to RMS( Richard M. Stallman) for such a rich text editor

and..

Thanks to Prabhanjan ( www.prabhanjan.wordpress.com) for sharing this tip with me