Stream of Thoughts

Just gave Scrubs Season 3 DVD to Nitin to copy it for me into my pen drive, because its getting stuck in my DVD drive. Episode 1 was running good, it stuck somewhere in episode 2. I hope he is not having problems copying or else I will have to look in the LAN again, which will be tough considering the fact that my linuxdcpp client is crashing all the time, and I am having trouble installing the valknut client Debayan and Vignesh are using as its not there in the Mandriva repositories.

Scrubs Season two was good. I finished the entire thing in one night, except that in between I had to work on some bugs that my last work on ooldtp support for ldtpeditor had. Getting rid of the bugs were harder than implementing the feature. Its now fixed in GIT.

I have also applied for developer of LDTP to freedesktop.org. Hope it gets approved soon.

Speaking of getting approved Prateek Dayal wrote a great blogabout our Muziboo App not getting approved by Orkut.

Just one another Feature to implement in ldtpeditor after which I will move on to either Mono or the Red Hat Internship. Hope those will help me in getting a better job.

As for college placements, I don't think I will be studying for any companies considering the fact that most good companies are either getting canceled or postponed due to some reason or the other.

Tomorrow we will go to S.N. Sarkar our "Professor and Head, Training, Placement and Student Welfare" as he likes to be known to "talk" about the bad placement of CSE, IT and MCA Departments, but I don't think anything good will come out of it.

In any case, I will go back home tomorrow as its been a long and disppointing (in most ways) stay out here. There is a three day weekend with Independance Day tomorrow, so I will be back this Sunday.

I was terribly homesick, sad and depressed Yesternight, mainly because it was my friend's birthday back home, and I had no idea what I was doing here in college, as everyone of my colony friend circle was enjoying. Very childish and immature but that's that. My apologies to everybody with whom I was rude or ignored.

I really hope that the Linux InstallFest we are planning come out good, as most people are having apprehensions, not that its bad as it does help in bringing out the flaws and avoiding them, thus helping into a better InstallFest.

Episode 2 is not getting copied so I guess I will have to look somewhere for it.

My Desktop

ooldtp with scrubs

tanmaya gave me all four seasons of scrubs on four dvds, and because the season 1 dvd wasn't reading, i decided to download the lot from lan.

also it had turned out once again how futile studying was, so i got back to my ldtp work, latest being adding ooldtp support to ldtpeditor.

but then i had 24 episodes! (ofcourse there would be more but i thought i'd aim for completing the season 1 first). episode 1 was interesting, the whole concept and the humour, i saw episode 2 as well. thats all for now!

then i talked to nagappan, he had just once mentioned ooldtp and i had procrastinated saying that i had novell to prepare for... and no, i am not going into crying how futile studying for novell was again. so nagappan mentioned what was to be done and he also suggested some string formatting changes to be done, which i targeted to do that night itself.

but before that episode 3, 4, 5... scrubs was awesome.

at 5 am i sat with the formatting, it was done within minutes, but i didn't sleep that night... slept after having breakfast and attending two early morning classes.

next came episodes 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ...

nagappan pings that he had committed the string formatting changes to the CGIT. so i say to myself, thats enough... lets start with ooldtp now.I checked out the new code at GIT, the changes are not there, he must have made a mistake... so i mailed him, he replies he forgot to push the code back to origin (whatever that meant) so i had half a day until he did that.

episodes 11, 12.... 12 again... so sorry the last episode was episode 22... my mistake.... so now 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.... hey its melodramatic as well!

nagappan replied that its done now so on with the work. this time i started with the gui first and then moved on to the implementation. it was showing some errors and it was early morning.. so i went on to...

19, 20, 21 ...ZZZzzzz....

sat down again with it that evening... it was working but then nagappan said it wasn't sufficient...(window contexts needed to be created only once for each window and not again and again, which was fair enough as it spoiled the whole purpose of using ooldtp) so i did what was necessary.... fixed all errors... the patch was ready and i mailed it...

episode 22... oh i had seen this before.... 23, 24. wow, what a season finale for a comedy. can't wait to start season 2...

filed for another enhancement that will allow ldtpeditor to save user preferences in a local file so that they don't have to be selected again and again(frankly i was quite tired of checking "generate ooldtp script" in the preferences dialog again and again. looking forward to implementing that as well! soon...

p.s. the caps-lock key of my keyboard is not working, and i am too lazy to use the shift keys. (ok, i'm too lazy for the caps-lock too) ;)

Work of Fiction

I had screwed my Novell Written Test and was sitting sulking in my room when they called....

"Where are you? Your interview starts in 15 mins!"

That meant I had qualified my written... after all there were no negative marks for wrong answers, I had answered a lot on guesses, they must have paid off!

13 mins....

I hadn't taken a bath yet. But that had to wait. I almost emptied my deodorant on me, out came my ironed formals, my tie, my file and in five minutes I was locking my room door.

Oh no, I still hadn't got my updated C.V. printed. I went back in, at least I had in my Pen-drive. Some blessed soul took the responsibility of printing it from the Computer Centre. I had to run....

The C.V. arrived just in time when they called my name. I put them in on top of my old C.V. I entered the interview room adjusting my tie.

The tech guy asked a few formal questions and then jumped straight to hard-core stuff. I passed most of it. Then he asked me tell him move about my work at LDTP. I had never rehearsed it, but the words came out well rehearsed. The tech guy seemed impressed.

The H.R. Ma'am asked me to get comfortable, which I tried but failed miserably. She asked me about this and that and what I wanted to do at Novell and I explained. From her expression I could not understand what she thought of my answers.

I was pleased to see two more gifts, a leather CD bag and an OpenSuse 11 DVD. I hopped back to hall 4, waving and trying to ignore queries of how my interview went.

I came back and had a bath, felt releaved. In my heart I knew I had cracked Novell. But the tension was stomach squeezing. Three times I had to visit the loo. Finally they managed to take me to the mess to get some food.

After the missed call I swallowed what I had in my mouth, washed my hands, and ran to the Insti Building. There was a small circle in front of the notice board. Even if I saw people eyeing me I failed to perceive any meaning out of it.

There were three names, one of it looked like mine.




Shreyank Gup.....







Why is it that people fantasize about things that never happened....

Bullets !

I think its a long time since I blogged last, but the reasons were not lack of materials!

So i decided to jot down a few observations, thoughts and recollections which I hope you will consider a valid blog entry! (The heading does in no way refer to the shiny and streamlined metal objects that kill living beings when shot from a gun).

• The night I arrived to college was interesting considering the fact that the bus Me (yes, M capital) and Souvik Ray were coming back to college on broke its front-right tyre somewhere midway Kolkata and Durgapur. Even more interesting was the fact that both of us were carrying their luggage and computers(desktops) in that bus.

• In a span of 10 days I have spent over Rs 1000 and all of it was spent and not lost. All I can account for is that most of the money was spent on Food and yet I have lost a lot in Body Volume.

• Contact Lenses are sometimes comfortable but most of the times hurt the eye.

• I am drinking more water here than I was back at home.

• I did not qualify for round 2 of the Google Code Jam.

• I inducted two juniors, Roshan Kr Singh and Shailesh (surname unknown) into LDTP and feel happy about it. They seem to be making great progress!

• On my 2nd week back at college I have finally changed my sleeping patterns. I now go to sleep at about 4 am (instead of 6 a.m.) and wake up at 12:30 pm just in time to catch lunch. I have not however tasted breakfast at Hall 4.

• Single-seater rooms are boring.

• I am staying for the 4th year in a row beside the stairs, though that is not what I am complaining about.

• I went out to buy a bucket but ended up buying everything except a bucket (a soap-case, a pillow and a net-thingy to keep dirty clothes in) none of which I really needed. I still don't have a bucket.

• I did not understand anything of the movie Mullholland Drive.

• I was not studying for Novell when I was seemingly eligible for it, but from the time there is a doubt on my eligibility, I have started serious (well somewhat) preparations.

• Switched to windows only twice for an hour each to play Counter Strike. Rest of the time I have been running Mandriva on my system.

• A frog sits from 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on my doorstep at exactly the same spot every night. I am not worried about the frog but about the snake that may come looking for it.