Posts Tagged ‘Friends’

Posted on December 22, 2008 - by Sarath

A tech savvy trip to Kasargod

It has been a long time I travelled along with a number of friends. Yesterday I had been to Kasargod for attending Widad’s Marriage party. Widad was my senior at MEC and passed out last april. She is a nice friend of mine and an amazing techie during the college. Of course she is an FOSS savvy girl. Her husband Jemshad is a Yahoo and well known geek. We friends were making fun out of him thinking what would be his chat status during marriage. We guessed it would be ‘brb’ . But widad commented mostly it is ‘afk’. It was fun.

Six friends of mine from MEC boarded in Mavel express on Saturday night 11.30 pm. Srijith, Cyriac, Cijo, Rathin, Sadhashiv and Neelakandan were the guyz. Neelakandan and Sadhashiv had only general compartment tickets and they didn’t get the reservation. But altogether they had 5 reservation tickets. So they requested TTR to make some adjustment, but he didn’t allow them. Finally Neelakandan was out of reservation list and he became inside general compartment. I boarded into the train from Mahe. A few hours later Neelakandan came to the reservation compartment. Everyone expected him to burst out against Sadahashiv for leaving him alone at general compartment. But unluckly it didn’t happen. He spoke like a Brand Ambassador of general compartment that it was a fine inside general compartment. When the train approached Kangangad, we realised that Cheif Minister of Kerala, V.S Achuthananthan was there in our train. We went to Govt guest house straight way from kasargod station. But the policemen at the guest house questioned us like a culprit since Chief Minister was going to have the accomodation there. Widad arranged us some other hotel and went there. Rathin had brought his laptop. He was worried about his mini project about Wireless networks. Srijith and I decided to hack on the Network Manager, though we failed to find some intersting bytes. BTW, Cijo was hacking with bash for a while.

We guys spent few hours at the marriage party. Met a good number of xmecians. We were having great fun altogether. It was a geek company and I enjoyed the with everyone. Srijith, Cyriac, Rathin, Cijo and I are from computer science and we belong to MACS(MEC’s Association of Computer Students), being the organisers of FOSSMEET @ MEC we were in search of ‘freedom images’. After the marriage party, we had an hour journey to Bakel forte, which is a famous tourist destination. I didn’t my camera being lazy and since we have our Photographer (Cyraic) with us.

Bakel

We took a couple of photographs which portraits the natural beauty of the coast. When we were in the beach, I suggested to photograph FOSSMEET written on the sand. Cyraic’s face lit up saying our hunt for the ‘freedom’ photograph is over. We wrote and photograped FOSS @ MEC on the sand. it looked very great and its going to be put on FOSSMEET website header.

Scribing FOSSMEET

We set back to railway station from Bakel fort around 5 pm. We reached the station few seconds before the train leave. Of course, that was a narrow escape. Neel, Sadhashiv and I took in the general compartment and Wowed ! There was lots of free seats. We talked a lot about MEC and Free and Open Source Software during the journey. Sadhashiv and Neel was maintaining the funny elements all over the journey.

From life.blog

FOSSMEET banner

From life.blog

I enjoyed the entire day well.

Note: Photography courtesy to Cyriac Chittuthara

Posted on November 2, 2008 - by Sarath

The Bugfix day

Last sunday I had been to Navin’s house in agreement of certain deals. I go for outing very rarely and went to Hotel Abad Plaza for giving Navin and Navas a treat for completing gsoc2008. It took a couple of hours to arrive the ordered food and finally resulted in missing my train to home. They suggested me to stay at Navin’s house in Elamkkara and fix certain bugs. I had a couple of things to be done as a part of ending semester. I have my electronics lab record in pending and came up with a deal that I would try to fix those problems related to computers and Nawaz agreed to fill my graphs of electronics lab record.

Soon after we reached home, Navin and I de assembled his desktop box. His machine has been rebooting frequently due to overheating. I just re plugged the CPU and it started working fine. Voila.

Next we installed Kubuntu 8.10 for a try. KDE 4.1.2 looks really much better than earlier with 100s of bugfixes. I started loving dolphin, the filemanager for KDE 4. It has a cool feature, When pressed F4 a terminal slides up from the bottom. Also pwd for the terminal changes automatically when we navigate through different locations. Its cool !

Navin has been complaining for a long time that his nvidia graphics card hates his ethernet card. Whenever he install nvidia-glx proprietary driver, his Ethernet goes down. It was a real headache for him. So he used to install the nvidia driver with a third party tool called Envy. He tried envy-ng, the latest version with Kubuntu 8.10 and it failed returning some error. I confidently told him to install nvidia-glx. He installed it and soon after a reboot he was pulled into darkness.

I just found that loading nvidia module before the ethernet module makes it some conflict. I just blacklisted the nvidia module.

I manually loaded it via init script making sure after ethernet is loaded.

The problem got solved

I dont know exactly how ethernet module and nvidia module is loaded in present day distros. In earlier days I used find a module list. I assume that nowadays it is performed via UDEVD.

Here comes the second problem. Navin uses his Asianet Dataline for internet connection. Basically it is cable modem based one. Hence the connection is permanent to a MAC ID for Ethernet card. Nawas wanted to do an OpenSuse upgrade from his lappy with Navin’s internet connection.

I went for MAC ID spoofing and its done.

Find out the mac id for the ethernet card.
Found it to be 00:1C:23:FB:37:23

Now on the other machine.

Everything went fine. I had a 3 hour sleep and went to home via Ernakulam – Cannanore Express in the morning.
It feels like a bugfix day.

Posted on October 24, 2008 - by Sarath

Tux of Wars turns to Keyboard war

Accidents are always unexpected. I had never ever thought even in dream that a computer will become my killer. Today I witnessed to see two computers turned to be my villain. Although it is really stupid to blame a computer, its fun. . The reality is unluck trapped me.

Today I had been to NITC’s technical fest Tathva 2008 for participating in Tux of War contest. The prelims went very fine and found myself on the of the prelims result. I went to Software Lab along with other MECians. Navin and I sat in front of a DELL machine. I found some problem with the keyboard that sometimes ‘Return’ was not working. I reported the same. The organisers told us to use the adjacent machine. we tried next one. It had problem with Shift and Return. So we decided to move to the previous one. We received the questions for round 2. I felt very confident to do 3 out of 5 questions. We started working with those idiot keyboard. It was very frustrating to work with it. Keys are not pressed as easier. Damn.. the keyboard gifted us with syntax errors. The machine started behaving wild, when I press some keys letters are not printed instead some applications and windows were opening. Seemed like some keypress jam. I called the organisers more than twice and they came and slapped the keyboard. It stopped misbehaving. When we were about to complete 2 problems, suddenly machine crashed. It stopped working. I called organisers again, they tried rebooting but it failed. I moved to the second machine, the one which had Shift and Return working very bad. I slapped hard the keys to print on screen. 3rd round arrived. We felt good that 3 problems can be done confidently. We started working.. 2 of them almost completed. The time was up. The Tathva guys transferred the old 2 scripts from the last machine. I was in a hurry and was trying to arrange the scripts I have wrote in problem no wise. Accidently I overwrite 2 bash scripts. !!

Finally, in a loser’s words I would say that the DELL keyboards I worked with sucks ! ( Loser in the sense that I couldn’t do what I knew). I don’t want to blame any organisers of NITC or Tathva team. They had done good job. It was my mistake, that I couldn’t perform well and was really trapped by unluck.

A real winner is the one who always can respond well with respect to the situation.

The other part of Tathva
Tux of War event for Tathva was organised very good. The questions were of good standard. It consisted of 3 rounds,
1. Preliminary
2. & 3. scripting round.

NITC software Lab looked great with various distros liked OpenSuse, Debian, Fedora installed on boxes.

It was really great to feel that We the team MEC, contributed a very good number of participants to the event. (around 50). 20 participants were from my class.

The Tux of War event was filled with 9 out of 17 MEC teams won in prelims. The results will be out only by tomorrow. We had a great time to enjoy at the event.

Solutions are here