ADBMS exams tomorrow

That's Advanced DataBase Management Systems. I have taken the pains to study from no less than four books, that's how fragmented the syllabus is. Sometimes I wish had taken one of those cheap local rip-offs ...

Anyway, the prep's good. I hope to do well.

Update: Didn't go as well as expected ...

12 hours unto the exams ...

Barely twelve hours remaining. Have finished most of what I had to, and as always, left something for the last day. As we in engineering get ready to face the exams, here is a dialogue from "The Return of The King" :

Thousands of orcs stream out of the (enemy) gates. Aragorn's soldiers look frightened. Many take a step back. Aragorn rides before them.

Aragorn: Hold your ground! Hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down. But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth. I bid you stand, Men of the West!

Question: Who would stand up to play the role of Aragorn among us?

A quest for the perfect Window Manager

Recently, I have been trying to choose a window manager (WM) that will suit my needs. The search has been long, and it's far from over. I hope u don't mind reading through my experience as I went on this quest.

When I first started looking, I was using WindowMaker as my WM. Initially, my "needs" were speed, speed, and speed. I have a 500 Mhz box, u see, and I resent even a two-second delay when I deal with my computer. So I went for a "pure X" WM - FVWM. This WM was *fast*, and the memory usage was the least of all WMs that I tested (about 500kb). However, configuring this WM was a royal pain in the u-know-what. The configuration possibilities were endless, and I seemed to be taking forever to come to grips with them. Why, even getting a keyboard shortcut to work properly took me about ten minutes! Also, fast though it was, it wasn't pretty. There are people online who say that it *can* be made to look pretty as well, I wasn't ready to put in the effort. Not for now, at least.

So the quest continued. I stumbled uppon FVWM95 (an FVWM fork that aims to be a Windows 95 clone). I left that alone. Then came Joe's Window Manager (JWM), which was very small indeed. Compilation : a mere 20 seconds, on MY machine. However, it was far too less configurable. I tried fiddling with the source, and even managed to overcome a deficiency (that of switching to the previous desktop - my first attempt at modifying source), however, there were far too many issues. Then there was IceWM. I can't recall why I left it ... ahh ... yes, the rendering was slow in some cases. Whenever I switched to a desktop with a Gnome app, redrawing was a bit slow. Not acceptable. Also, it had a far too many binaries (executables), one for managing windows, other to set ur backgrounds. Ditto with Blackbox, which needs bbkeys to get keyboard shortcuts working. I also tried Hackedbox, a hacked version of Blackbox, optimized for speed (or so they would have me believe). There was also TWM (comes with all Redhat installations, I think), but it has no support for virtual desktops. I moved on.

I had given up by now. In fact, I had decided to switch back to WindowMaker. Then a thought hit me - whenever I am *working*, I am in the console mode. I even have a console player (mpg123) that plays songs for me (with a randomized playlist, which is important for me :). All I use the GUI for is the internet, and maybe a few games. Not very demanding applications, are they? Then why was I looking for a lean-n-mean gui environment? I decided to revert back to the old console while working, and into the gui only at time of _leisure_. Now that speed is not one of my concerns, "looks" has taken over. While I am at it, I'm trying to get the best gui environment that is out there. I have decided to go back to KDE. Here's a screenshot of my latest desktop. It may not be the coolest one around, but I hope I am getting close!

BTW, notice the wallpaper ... does the lady bear any resemblance to Aniston?

Here's a close-up ...

LOGO interpreter for M$ fans

I had posted about LOGO yesterday. Just so that everyone on the bad side can share the goodness, here's a link for a LOGO interpreter that runs on Windoze. Haven't tested it, check for your self that it works.

Template to be changed soon ...

I am thinking of changing the template (look and feel) of this site, please post your opinions as comments to this post ...

Sibling expectations

Children can be so strange ...

There was this time when I used to try to force my sister to read the Harry Potter books. I myself hadn't read them, but I had heard a lot about them, so I thought it might do my sis a great deal of good (improve her English, for example) if she read them. However, she never listened, and after some days, I gave up.

I don't remember exactly when, but sometime before the vivas, I just happened to start reading the first book. My sister read the first thirteen pages or so, and since then, hasn't been able to stop reading the books! She's a big Harry Potter fan now, though I admit we are bit late to join the club.

These days, I am trying to get her to learn "LOGO", a very simplistic language with very elementary drawing commands (actually, all it does is draw lines, but you can control their direction, length etc.). She seems reluctant to learn it, however, I am hoping that she'll show more interest with time. After much coaxing, she wrote her first LOGO program today :


reset

fw 90

tl 135
fw 125

repeat 3 [
tl 90
fw 125
]

tl 90
pu
fw 125
pd
tl 135
fw 180
tr 135
pu
fw 130
pd
tr 135
fw 90


This draws a sort of a kite on the screen. Try running it in KTurtle (included in KDE, windoze users might be able to find a logo interpreter somewhere ...). Of course, the diamond doesn't come off well, because my sister couldn't determine the exact lengths needed. Afterwards, I tried to teach her the Pythagoras theorem(of course, I didn't mention Pythagoras ...). Unfortunately, LOGO doesn't seem to have a square root function ... Will have to write one for her now.

If she shows interest, that is. And I hope she does.

PS: If anyone of you has tiny tots around, you might want to introduce them to LOGO. KTurtle is included in the 'kdeedu' package of KDE. Despite the visible efforts, the documentation still falls short. Children whose native language isn't English might find it difficult to understand.

Esselworld trip

Our class (at least some of it) went to Esselworld the day before. With exams about two weeks away, we all wanted to have a bit of fun before getting down to some serious studies. Most of us have finished a major part of the syllabus, due to the vivas that just got over.

The trip was great. But it took us a lot of time to get through the rides. We were about 20 in all, and no one wanted to split up. So we all used to line up together, and while some enjoyed the ride, others waited in the queue behind. The only place where we all got together was the bumper car ride, which was real fun.

'Thunder' was terrific. Though most of us took the ride, we had to take a 10 minute break before we moved on. Some of us took it two times straight, but then regretted it. It took us quite some time to recover, my head was spinning like crazy. Only after did we rest and eat did I feel better.

Then there was this Karaoke tryout, where u were supposed to sing some song, and a computer (?) decided whether you were good enough. Some of us made fools of ourselves there, with our extremely flat voices. We actually noticed some people leaving the place because of us.

I also tried to dance. The music was really good, and the 'rain' added to the fun. Himanshu, who happens to be a terrific dancer, wasn't ready to stop dancing. We had to pull him out in the end. None of us really minded getting wet, even though we planned to do ice-skating next.

Ice skating was a blast. Although I fell down thrice, I was pretty good (really), though I have no prior experience of skating. I just tried to imitate the assistants, who, trying to be the perfect gentlemen, were only to eager to help the girls out. Whenever I or some of the other boys asked them for help, they demonstrated the art of skating by actually skating - away from us and towards the girls. There was this other girl from my class too who skated pretty well, and yes, an assistant helped her.

It was about 7:30 when we decided to leave. I and Shrikant Shrikant and I reckoned that boarding a train from Borivli wouldn't be that easy, so we decided to catch a bus. The next bus to Bhayendar was scheduled at about 8:40, so we had to wait fro more than an hour for it to arrive. I finally reached home at about 9:45.

XP vs. Linux

Here's a mail from Dhruv I received a few days back.

Hello fellow blasphemers.......
   I truly deserve to burn in hell for everything I've done today....
Let me explain....

o I've used Windows XP whole of today.

o I've [tried] to study Ooad because of constant taunting and
torturing by Sandesh. So, what o you have to say for yourself Sandesh?
X-(

o I've used many features of Yahoo! messenger, including 'invisible
mode', 'stealth setting' [don't worry, I'm not hiding from anyone here
;-) ]. Games, and Launchcast Radio, and I zimbly can't 'Get Over It'.
[yes, even that song!]. I must have heard at least 50 songs by now.
What a fruitful use of bandwidth :d.

o I am now at the stange of appreciating Windows XP!!!! God, please
help me! But fret not Linux patriots, I shall not desert you. 'I'll be
back', with a rebutal that is ;-) Let me add that Sandesh is sgain
responsible for this lin of thought,so any hate mail can be directed
straight to him :-)

An engineer's incentive

From Webster's New Dictionary :

incentive a. : arousing. -n. something that arouses to feeling or action.

It didn't quite start out as a normal day. I was somehow not in the very best of moods, today was one of those days where you feel right from the start that something will go wrong.

And I didn't make the proper choices either. I chose to wear a shirt that I had sworn a year ago to never wear again, thinking that it was time I got over those issues.

Today, we had our 'Web Technologies' vivas, for which I was decently prepared. I had not studied ASP, since I've never needed to use it, although I am pretty familiar with Java servlets and PHP. It started off well, I answered the first questions with relative ease, given that they were simple HTML/Javascript questions. Then the external asked whether we knew JSP. None of my partners knew, neither did I. Then she looked at me and casually asked - "Why?". And I answered - "I had no incentive."

Well, that seemed to tick her off. No no, it did tick her off. She talked about how she has to teach ASP, HTML, and JavaScript every year, does she ask for incentives? Do I get more money just because I teach ASP, she asked. I replied - "maim, money is not the only incentive one can get." Wrong move.

She countered by giving an example of a boy in her class, who, inspite of being well versed with JSP, did his project in ASP, because she had asked it to be done. According to me, that was compulsion. She forced him to do it. We were given the freedom to use any language for our project - of course, it still had to be an "e-commerce website." I chose PHP. Our ma'am had no problem with it, I am grateful to her for that.

Later on, she asked me questions that were very platform-specific, like where does IE store it's cookies, how do u set up an HTTP server (IIS) on a port other than 80, how do u disable cookies in IE etc. I told her that I have not used Windows for over a year now, and had no idea about how IIS goes about doing it's job, or where XP stores it's cookies. She found this unacceptable, she told me that I use Windows in college, I should know all this. Well, I do use Windows in college, but very rarely do I get the chance to surf the net. Even if I do, I am not the admin to be worrying about cookies.

Later, while putting my file in the heap alongside others, I heard the external tell our ma'am that people who need "incentives" to learn something, have no place in engineering. I am sorry ma'am, but I feel we two have very different views on engineering.

Letter to a friend

This is a true account of what happened tonight. I am the "first person" below.

No, it's not what u r thinking ;) !

But it was interesting, nevertheless. I watched Malcolm In The Middle till 
12:30, got down to study SP, couldn't understand much, so started reading 
Potter. Finished it off by 3:00. Then started playing Quake III, however, the 
CPU started beeping due to overheating (faulty fan, remember?). Got so 
irritated that I ripped the old CPU off and tried to put it in that old 
cartridge CPU that my friend had lent me. It fit in ... But the PC wouldn't 
start !!

Just below the slot, as I later saw, were some jumper configurations that told 
the motherboard which CPU to use. Kind of let me down, I thought the MoBo 
would figure it out by itself! Anyway, after searching a **LOT** among those 
tiny wires, I found the jumpers (1 and 11) and set them accordingly. Voila!! 
You are getting this mail courtesy the cartridge CPU.

One disappointment though. Read this cat /proc/cpuinfo -

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 7
model name      : Pentium III (Katmai)
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 501.277
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov pat 
pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips        : 989.18


Notice the clock speed? It's just 501 Mhz, instead of the promised 550. 
Anyway, I can play as much Quake as I want to now ... three cheers to that !


-- 
Sandy (http://sandesh247.blogspot.com)

"Roman Polanski makes his own blood.  He's smart -- that's why his movies 
work."
-- A brilliant director at "Frank's Place"

It is 4:15 a.m. right now. Time to study some SP, then off to sleep ...