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Moved to a New Blog!

Hey guys,

I’ve moved to a new blog and I’ve abandoned this blog. (This blog will continue to exist so that people can read the old archives.)

AIHT Update

Vinod, Maama and I were in the Internet Lab (in college) yesterday when we found the address www.aiht.org saved in the address bar. We accessed the site and found a simple blue and white layout that contained some basic information about the college. Then, when we accessed the same site from the library a few hours later we found a new layout in place with quite a lot of content in place. Of course most of the facilities were exaggerated.

We were quite surprised that someone was taking the initiative to develop the college’s site. I did a DNS lookup and found the domain registered to a Sekar Swaminathan in California, USA with the email address sekar[AT]sekar[DOT]net. Further investigation (going to sekar.net) took me to a HTML page with the words ‘Sekar’ (in Tamil) and ‘Incomplete’ on it. It had been registered in February last year and was valid for 10 years! That must have cost a lot! Earlier, I had noticed that the registration for the domain name www.aiht.ac.in which was registered to the college itself expires on June 28, 2006.

Also, while browsing the new site, I found a copy of the report the college had sent to the AICTE in PDF format. We downloaded it and checked out the contents. It had all kinds of real statistics about the college without exaggeration (cause it was a report to the AICTE and could not have fake information). It listed the Internet connection speed of the college’s net connection as 128 kbps while the website claims it is 512 kbps. All sorts of tall claims are made in the website about the facilites and staff. Also included were statistics about lecturers like their educational qualification and experience. There were even some poorly taken photos of quite a number of our staff. You can find the file here.

I’ll find out more and keep you updated.

Yet Another Mesothelioma Post

We all know why I’m talking about mesothelioma and mesothelioma lawyers again. (If you don’t know, you don’t need to know.)

I’m Really Busy

I’m really really busy setting up a Wordpress blog that requires quite a bit of server side work. Also trying to set up a nice home page for www.marc.igb.net so that’s occupying quite a bit of my time. So not much time to update this blog.

My semester is coming to an end too, so records to get done and tests to study for. Really annoying.

Will keep you updated on status of things. Meanwhile, play my hangman game.

And here are some sentences to get the word Hariharan google indexed on my blog so that I boost my soaring ego. So here goes: Hariharan studies at AIHT in Chennai. He is associated with Marc Zephyrin. This is a shameless attempt to get google indexed.

Thank you, thank you very much.

Mathematics and Programming

I’ve repeated whined that the Math they teach us is completely useless to us from a practical perspective. I believe my statement still holds true: “The only use for a semester’s math subject is to understand math in the next semester.”

And btw, it is math, not maths. So let’s learn to say it correctly.

Here is a good article on how they teach mathematics incorrectly and how you can develop a interest in useful mathematics. A must read for engineers. It’s a long article, but if you don’t want to end up in some call center on the night shift, you better read it.

Link

Don’t Touch My Computer!

Every time I leave the computer on to download something my mother or sister logs my account off to use the computer.

I got really pissed off with this and used the scrolling marquee screensaver to display red scrolling text on a black background that said:

Flightplan and Crash - Movies I Watched Recently

Ragha gave me a DVD with Flightplan and Crash and it was really good quality. The DVD menus actually worked.

Anyway, Flightplan was a decent action thriller but not all that great.

Crash was a sad story about racial discrimination (in the USA, where else?) and it had its moments but it wasn’t really a proper story. Rather, it was bits and pieces of the lives of some people which occasionally overlapped. I honestly think it didn’t deserve the Oscars it got cause the movie was quite forgettable.

I hope Ragha finds more such good quality DVDs for me.

The Results Are Coming - Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

As I type this, there are about eight collegemates online (and probably lots more not signed onto a messenger service) eargerly awaiting the semester results. Most of them are trying the Anna University main site (which has absolutely no information on it, as usual) and a few others better informed ones are checking other private (more reliable) websites like SquareBrothers (nothing yet) and ChennaiOnline (not accessible right now).
If you know any other alternate sites please tell me in the comments section.

Chetan messaged me that someone had contacted Anna University by phone and had been told the results would be out by 10.30 PM. It’s 11 now.

The results are going to be a disaster, especially for me. I didn’t do all that great in the semester exams, particular in Math and that Digital subject whose full name I’ve forgotten.

Edit: Ok so I flunked the Math paper. Wasn’t much of a surprise. However, everyone seems to have passed the third semester, taking my class pass percentage way way up. Vijayalayan, for some strange reason, has flunked the two subjects nobody else flunked in - System Software and OOPs. How do you manage to do things like this, Alayan?

KGB Archiver - Ultra Compression Software

We were thinking that UHARC was a ‘mattamaana’ piece of software cause it took so long for files to decompress (sometimes even half an hour).

But it turns out that there is a even better/worse program called KGB Archiver. Here is a site comparing the compression ratios and here is a place to download it from. Unfortunately it requires way too much processing power to be effective (atleast a 1.5 GHz processor).

This page points to a Rapidshare file where they’ve compressed [Microsoft Office 2006] from 450 MB to 1.4 MB! No, I’m not joking. Now before you decide to try it out they also mentioned this:

The extraction time depends entirely on your hardware and setting of priority for extraction . Average time extracting the files on a P4 3.2 GHz system with 1 gig of ram is about 2.47 hrs (Priority = Above normal)

I’d rather download the uncompressed version. My point is, see how much you can compress files! And it also has 256 bit encryption!

(Now you can distribute Windows 98 on floppies, Ragha.)

George Bush, Go Back

Arundhati Roy has written a scathing article asking Bush to go back to where he came from in today’s The Hindu. Link

I totally agree with her. Why do we invite a war criminal to visit our country? Go back, Bush and never come here again. You are not welcome here and you never will be. You are a bigger accused than Nirmal Raja.