Road Trip To Shivanasamudra

The only road trips that me and my wifey had been having for more than a month were to the malls for grocery shopping. And it was high time to break the status quo. So, we decided to pack up the bags and head over to Shivanasamudra. It was a pretty easy choice as I had recently seen pics of the falls and there was no way I was going to hold back on going over.

We were planning to start off early around 6:00 but people had suggested that it was OK to go a bit late and 8:00 was a good time to start off. All said and done, we started from our place at 9:30 Albeit, it was Saturday, it took some time to get out of Bangalore and get on to the Mysore road. We reached Kaamat at 11:30 and had a decent breakfast. Decent, because I had heard several rave comments about Kaamat but the food served wasn't warm and I hate eating food which seems to come out of cold storage.

We hopped back into car at 12:00. I however missed the turn required to get onto SH33 due to which I had to travel some extra distance. SH33 didn't please me much as there were few rough patches en route. Guys at Team BHP had recommended to go to Barachukki first and it turned out to be a pretty great recommendation. Its an amazing place and the falls were perfect to just go in and relax. It is recommended to carry extra set of clothing if you truly want to enjoy the falls. One however needs to be bit careful over here as when you are crossing over the stones to reach the falls, there is a great chance of slipping. I had a narrow escape as I myself did slip once, but someone quickly held my hand.

We spent a cool 2 and half hours at this place, after which we started off for Gaganchukki. It was pretty quiet over here and there weren't many people around. We stayed there and enjoyed the falls for half an hour. There is also a hotel over here and one can get a quick bite and enjoy the swings over here.

We started from Gaganchukki at 17:00 and I decided to give my wifey some confidence of driving on highway and let her drive the entire SH33 stretch. We were planing to have dinner at McDonalds but we missed the turn and decided to eat at Kaamat itself. After a round of Poori Bhaaji and Vaada's we hopped back at 8. We didn't want to spend time in traffic near Corporation circle so we decided to take NICE road. As always it is just sheer thrill driving on NICE road as I just love hitting top speeds whenever I am on this road.

We reached back home at 21:30 and it was end of an amazing journey. You can check up the pics on my Facebook page


Route while going: --> Bangalore -> Mysore Road --> Maddur -> Malavalli -> Shivanasamudra

Route while coming back: --> Shivanasamudra -> Maddur --> Malavalli --> NICE Road --> Bangalore

Route Map: Click here

Did You Know?

My Brother, sent me this video link.

I call it the "Words Most Amazing Facts In 5 Minutes"

Intel SMM Exploit Code Released

Johanna Rutkowska and her team at Invisiblethings have done it again. Their team which has earlier found several issues with Intel chips have found another major exploit in Intels SMM [ System Management Mode ] which is Ring -2. Yes minus 2, a level which is at a much more privilige level at which OS runs.


In what may be embarrassing for Intel would be that the expoit unveiled by the team also mentions that Intel filed for patents which apparently fixed up these exploits but have somehow not been integrated into the processor. It also describes just how easy it is for someone with root access on Linux can modify mtrr [ Memory Type Range Register ] using /proc file system and get into SMM mode.

Arstechnica is also covering the story "Intel CPU-level exploit could be tempest in a teapot"

Chatter Bots and Humans: What is the difference?

Have you ever tried Alice, the chatter bot in your EMACS editor? If yes, then how easy was it for you to find out the difference between the both? I bet it won’t have taken more than 30 seconds that human race is still better than the robo one. However, what happens when you just open up a academic institute's website at around 00:30 and it pops up a window with the following message:



Agent : Good Morning
Agent : Welcome to LivServ HelpDesk
Agent : How may i help you

I am curious now, have these people really put in a chatter bot? And I start off..


Guest : Are you awake?
Agent: Yes
Agent : May I know your requirement please ?
Guest : Are you awake? # I reckon the above are standard chatter bot response. Lemme ask again.
Agent: Yes
Guest : How come are you awake? # Hmmm,… Interesting.
Agent: We Provide 24/7 support # Now, this one seems like something else.
Guest: Is this some computerized agent or manual?
Agent : This is manual. #Whoops!
Guest : Oh I am sorry then for bothering you, I will look for info myself
Agent : You are welcome.



Guess which website would probably feel the need to invest thousands of rupees in providing live customer care?

http://www.iiitb.ac.in

I have absolutely no clue, none whatsoever though as to why an educational institute would need to invest money into providing 24/7 customer support services. I am ready to believe that providing education is a service, but IMO, this live support seems to be stretching it a bit too far.

Now as regards to answering as to how to differentiate between a chatterbot and a human? Simply ask :)

Sun's Blackbox

I have always admired Sun, for all the unique ideas that it seems to come up with. And of late, I have been tracking Project Blackbox.

The concept basically invoves having Data Center on wheels. The size of the box is the same as that of standard shipyard container, so it can even be shipped all the way across, well, on a ship, what else?

Now Sun is going one step further, it is dumping these Blackboxes into old rejected coal mines, wherein they would be just dumped in and would save power as, it would require little external cooling as it would be using ground water(?). This would bring in a cost saving of about $9 million/year. All in all, sounds good, though I always have second thoughts whenever any company comes out with $x million of savings for whatever product they are pushing in, without mentioning the fact that their product itself would cost some $y million more.




Though surprisingly, Blackbox's first customer Stanford, colored it all white, evidently to save more energy, as well, if you remember physics, black, what else. radiates more heat.

Long pending updates.

Geeeeeeeeeeeeee........

That has been one break from blogging. I really don't know, just exactly why I actually stopped blogging, not that I know, why I started doing it at the first place itself :).


A lot has happened over the time I blogged last over here. And it has been such a long duration that I actually have to open my own blog to see what exactly I wrote earlier. Here is a summary of some of the stuff. Some really cool stuff, some not so cool stuff and something that just completely goes *bad*.


1) For one I got a chance to work on some really cool stuff during my internship at IBM. I worked with Manish, Bhavesh and some of the coolest and the most hardworking people out there. That was fun, but then Booooooooom!! IBM has this hiring freeze and I am out of the scene. So long Deep Blue.

2) Hello Red. I have always liked blue and red. If somebody would give me a sheet of paper and colors I would just use blue and red. That said, I got an offer to work at Oracle. People are really cool over here. I am currently at Oracle’s HQ in US and people here are fun to work with.

3) I went over to meet my folks, and spent one whole month with them. Yippie!

4) Out of hostel and now living my buddies, Kundan , Taran, Vikas and Vivek.

5) Started earning! Yippie!

6) Got a girl! She is sweeeeeeet! Love her. Wait, shouldn’t this be the first one?

A lot has happened. I just hope this tiny miny little update is O.K for all the blogoscope friends and friends who haven’t been able to talk to in a loooooooooooong time and were just wondering if I was dead or alive.

Job At IIIT-B

Phew!! Finally a blog post! Seems that I was running out of ideas or for that matter had gone brain dead itself.

So here is something that came up while I was chatting with one of my friends.

int get_A_Job_At_IIIT () throw(TooUnluckyException )
{ 


    switch(current_Status ) { 

        enjoy_Maadi: 
        case ALREADY_PLACED: 

            get_Drunk(); 
            get_Flat(); 
            shift_House(); 
            enjoy_Maddi(); 
            break; 
  
  
      case COMPANY_FIRED: 
      case RESEARCH_STUDENT: 
  
          pray_God(); 
          if ( apply_Off_Campus() == true ) 
                goto enjoy_Maadi; 
          else { 
                if ( butter_Professors() == true ) 
                    goto enjoy_Maadi; 

                if ( sit_For_Placements() == true ) 
                    goto enjoy_Maadi; 
                else { 

                    try { 
                        push_Push_Button(); 
                   } 
  
                    catch ( TooUnluckyException& toulex ) { 
                            // Solution not yet known. Ask caller to handle 
                            throw; 
solution. 
                    } 
               } 
         } 
        break; 
        
   } 
  
return 0;    
  
} 

Please post your comments and bugs if any.

Testing In The Toilet

If you thought toilets were the places where you could just escape after a long horrifying testing or debugging session. Think again, Google posts several test cases and test scenarios on the bathroom walls. So, even if you are in the bathroom or the toilet just to ease off a bit, you still might end up looking at the walls for the clues.

http://googletesting.blogspot.com

And

http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2007/01/introducing-testing-on-toilet.html


Geee, I feel like flushing this one off :)

A Post That Should Not Have Been

I had no intention of posting this. I had thought about writing about it but chose not to as it would involve me taking names of one individual and I did not want him to suffer more than what he already is, and at no point did I wish to get personal with any of such things. I did not want to post it but then again this guy seems to be spreading all the (mis)information about me telling that I was culprit in the whole thing. And I think it is time to clean up my closet a bit.

I was working on a project for one of my course here. We were a group of three people who had got together to do the project. Each one had a module assigned to one individually, among ourselves. One of my friends had decided to take some of the core implementation to himself to which I somehow agreed. However, we had agreed about the interfaces, as he was supposed to call my set of routines I had already told him well in advance about them to him, and he had said it was “Okies” with him. About ten days before the demo when I decided to get it integrated, I realized that there was nothing according to the interfaces that I had specified. To top of it all this guy started cussing me and the other partner for the poor quality and buggy code that we had written even though we had tested it extensively, not to mention he had even gone to the extent of asking the other guy to just take the code from somewhere. And he was generous enough to actually provide the other code. And somehow he knew it would work without issues.
One night before the presentation as I was busy fixing up all the issues that were left over in the integration I had to log into his machine to synchronize the code and I saw folder which was named as one of our senior’s code. One night before the demo, I was just curious how the seniors had done the code, not to mention the fact that even tough my friend kept on saying that he had “referred” this guy’s code, I wanted to know just about how much the codes were “referred”. And here what I found once I got the codes.

Snippet 1 by senior:

int int_no_of_col=0, int_index=0, int_position=0,int_col_size=0,int_flag=0,int_k=0,int_len =0,int_temp_len = 0;

char* chrp_col_name = NULL;


char* chrp_default = NULL;

char chr_col_type ;

char** chrpp_record = NULL;

char* chrp_temp_complete_rec = NULL;

int* intp_element_len = NULL;

int int_def_len;

string str_table_file;

string str_index_file;

string str_table_meta_file;

HeapFile hf_meta_file;

HeapFile hf_data_file;

MetaInfo mi_meta_info;

HeapFile hf_index_meta_file;

char* chrp_final_rec = NULL;

short* chrp_offset = NULL;

int int_sum = 0;

int int_ret_size = 0;

int attr_list[30];

char* chrp_index_name = NULL;

char* save_rec = NULL;

int returnVal;

IndexInfo* temp_index_info = NULL;

int int_page_no;

int int_slot_no;

TreeIndex* _treeIndex = NULL;

rid_list_t* start=NULL,*rid_list=NULL;

//The following decalration is done by Hari. 27 Dec 2005//To remove compile time error: "crosses initialization"string str_absolute_index_pk;

string str_index_pk;


Snippet two by my friend:


int _intNumOfColumns=0, _intIndex=0, _intPosition=0,_intColumnSize=0,int_flag=0,int_k=0,int_len =0,int_temp_len = 0;

char* _chrptrColumnName = NULL;

char* chrp_default = NULL;

char _chrColumnType ;

char** _chrptrptrMetaRecords = NULL;

char* chrp_temp_complete_rec = NULL;

int* _intptrMetaRecordsLength = NULL;

int int_def_len;

string _strTableFileName;

string _strIndexFileName;

string _strMetaFileName;

HeapFile _metaHeapFile;

HeapFile _tableHeapFile;

MetaInfo _metaInfo;

HeapFile _heapIndexFile;

char* _chrptrFinalRecord = NULL;

short* chrp_offset = NULL;

int _intTotalLength = 0;

int _intReturnLiteralSize = 0;

int attr_list[30];

char* chrp_index_name = NULL;

char* save_rec = NULL;

IndexInfo* temp_index_info = NULL;

int _intPageNo;

int _intSlotNo;

//rid_list_t* start=NULL,*rid_list=NULL;

string str_absolute_index_pk;




Can you actually find the difference? For once I feel like sending it to one of those entertainment columns which say “Find 10 differences between the given pictures” .

This kind of similarity extended to the whole 4500 lines of code that he had always been boasting off writing single handedly. And we figured out that the reason he was asking my friend to use somebody’s code was plain and simple, he won’t have to bother about integration. What should have been me and my friends response after this? What could we have done? I for one decided to get out of the lab where we were all sitting and integrating and told him that it was against my conscious to work on the code. Next day, both me and my friend decided to tell the truth to the professor and true even we both got screwed because for quite some time we both were integrating our code with this guys and we decided not to show the integration to the Professor, and we ended up just showing what we had already shown a week before the actual demo. But then again, somehow we both knew what was the right thing to do that day, that moment. I just hope my friend knows the same.