Guilt

No man escapes that feeling and I am no specimen.

It all started when I took the two pens in my hand - a black and a blue. My dad had bought these 2 expensive pens (Rs 40 each) for my semester exams the previous day. It was 6 in the morning, the 15th of April. At 2:00 in the Noon was Artificial Intelligence final semester. I had most parts of all the 5 units to cover in less than 8 hours time. 1 hour for breakfast, bath etc, 30 mins for lunch and another hour for the travel and hall ticket formalities. This makes it, Five and a Half hours.

No time to think. I should be hands on. I was brushing through my PPTs and Text Books. And suddenly I hit upon these 2 pens. I wanted to try it out. I opened the pen and a note book. The fact goes that, given a new pen 97% of the people write their name. I'm that 3% candidate. Time was running out already. I dint care to think about my morale - it might have been low. Before I could pen down my first letters, I saw Dad passing by. He told me - "All the best Sorna, Do Well!".

Emotions flow. I wrote "Good pens, but for the worst person!". I felt I was not worth the 80 rupees he spent for me. I've got all the amenities one could ask for. Food and clothes at my wish, money at my disposal, Parents to care, Bro to be inspired at, a separate room to study, a phone to talk, a MAC to work on and what not! All they expect from me is to be 9.someone. But all I manage to do, is study at a Unit an hour.

Is that all? I could've retaliated in a better fashion, I felt. 8.7 was not the grade they would be proud of. I envied all my fellow 9 pointers. I had 5 days to spare, but only the 11th hour provided all the necessary intentions.

I've always wanted to be the guy who finishes his work early and does a 2nd revision at the last minute. I've tried taking the book 2 days in advance. I've tried reading it. But Sorry Dad, all I could do was try.

Dad, 9.someone from now seems impossible to me. But I'll make sure, I make your 80 rupees count one day! Until then I lay stuck, in Guilt.

MS IDC - Part 3

A lazy morning. I woke up around 6:30 and got dressed up around 7. We went to have our breakfast around 8:30 as we were supposed to leave by 9. But when we went to the buffet area, there was no one there. We ate breakfast all alone.

We got into the van around 10 after everyone was ready. The van took us into the town. We drove past Google's office and many big buildings. The van dropped us near a 5 story building. We entered the building and went to the 3rd floor. As I entered I heard the DJ beats and saw a dark room. It was like a party area with bowling and snookers. We played for sometime.

We were a little hungry around 12. We finished our 9 ball game and started eating from the buffet. Our vans to the airport was scheduled at 2. We had our flight at 7 in the evening, but we wanted to goto the airport early to see the World Cup finals! We reached the airport at 3. We checked in and got our Boarding pass. We then sat in front of a huge television there and started seeing the match.

As we were watching the match, Sundhar Ram bought a novel - Chetan Bhagat's Two States. I was a little bored. I started reading the novel. Time passed. The novel was really interesting. I finished reading the novel in 2 days. This was the 1st novel I read completely. It was around 6:35. The Sri Lankan innings came to an end. We then boarded into our Jet Airways flight around 6:52. We were the last to enter our flight. As soon as we boarded the flight started and we landed in Chennai around 8:30.

We all took a train to our respective places. Came home, changed and started watching the India, Sri Lanka finals. And of course, India won.

The awesome supplement of happiness provided by the Indians at the end of Day 2 was unforgettable. It was the most exciting trip I've had for a while. With high expectations, I wait for the 20th of June to meet the big-brains in the Country :)

MS IDC - Part 2

I opened my eyes to see complete darkness. The AC was on 19 C, I was wrapped up in my blanket and the other 2 were fast asleep. I searched for my mobile phone. My clock ticked past 5:40. I woke up. I got ready around 6:20. As I came out of the bathroom, I saw the other 2 people slowly waking up. I asked them to get ready soon. We were supposed to go for breakfast around 7:30 and be there at the office at 8:30 for the event.

As they were getting ready, I called up my house and friends to inform I was doing great. Around 7:30 we went for breakfast. We were the first. :D We had bread and dosa there. After filling up my stomach with some food, we went to the gate. A tempo-traveller was waiting to pick us up to the office. We boarded into the tempo traveller and started talking to all new friends. 10 mins after the start, we saw a huge building with most part of it being brown. And the remaining was glass filled which from the reflection looked green. As we moved closer to the building, we could see letters written in silver color. This was the most familiar logo which I've seen in any Desktop Computer I've seen all throughout my life. It read "Microsoft", my destination after 2 months. I observed the building as my watch ticked past 8:33. We drove past the building to Gate 03. The company was easily more than half a kilometer long. The office is the size of a mountain!

I stepped down from my van to see the most awesome views of one of the finest companies of the van. I couldn't stop myself from taking a camera to click the best views of the company. As I started a guard came to me and told me "No camera Sir". Yes. Disappointment. But I tuned my eyes to capture every moment I spent there.

After checking with our IDs they sent us in. We walked around 300m and we saw a huge entrance. It was an 8 floor huge building with the lobby the size of 6 floors. I could spot DJ lights at the top. I put my camera in the security area and I entered the lecture hall which was located on the ground floor. They distributed our Offer Letters there.

And as planned, by 9:30 the lecture sessions started. Some of the Top Officials from Microsoft India Development Center came there to address us. We were initially entertained by a madam and then asked to sit according to our birth signs so that we can get to know new people. After she was done, she invited Amit Chaterjee, the Managing Director, Microsoft R&D India Development Center.

AmitC looked bold. He walked straight. He went upfront, took the mike and started -

"Welcome to the best place to work in India......, or maybe the entire planet"

He sounded firm and confident. His prowess in English and his satisfaction with his current job reflected in his speech. His voice was loud and clear. He instilled the spirit of MS in every participant there. No doubt, he was the best of all the speakers of that day!

After he was done, we had different speakers like the Ms. Jayashree Venkatraman, Principal IT/OPS PM, Engineering Excellence Team India, Mr. Srinivas Prasad, The HR Director, Mr. Rajiv Kumar, GM, MS Business Division, Mr. Raja Seera, Search Technology Center, Mr. Srinivasan Chandrasekar, Director of Program Management, Windows and Windows Live Group, Mr. Balasubramaniam Sriram, GM, App Fabric, ICB, MSIDC. Everyone were at their best. I personally liked one Mr. Balasubramaniam Sriram, GM App Fabric, ICB, MSIDC. He spoke about the Cloud Operating System - Windows Azure. But not only that. He also gave personal advice on pursuing a career based on our interest. That, according to me was the most impressive part of the presentation.

After the presentation was done, we walked to the Microsoft's Amphitheater. Here we played treasure hunt. Awesome game. We were divided into teams and we solved puzzles to win the came. We finished second B-)

The day came to an end. An office bus picked us up at 9 and dropped us at Serenity Inn. A lot of new friends, and a lot of exciting stuff happened. All this in one single day! What more can we expect. But wait. There is more fun to it! Tomorrow is the "Entertainment Day". We pulled ourselves into the blankets waiting for more fun the next day..

Continued here..

MS IDC - Part 1

Get two sets of dress. One formals and one formal-kinda casuals (:P). Get the new pair of socks. And the kerchief. Dont forget the towel. Man where is the flight ticket? - I am getting stuff packed for the "Microsoft's New Hires Day 2011", a 2 day event on 1st and 2nd of April. I've a flight to catch at 7 in the evening of 31st March and I reached home from college at 1:30 PM. I received shocked looks from mom and dad as they tell me, "You have a flight at 7 and you haven't packed your stuff yet!". I went on to pack my stuff before touching my food, lest my mom would keep echoing this until my food reached its end.

After putting in all my clothes, I closed my new suitcase which my Dad bought for this trip. It was compact and could hold stuff enough for 2 days. I then started to eat my lunch. Pepper Chicken and white rice - Not my favorite but I can handle it for a Thursday afternoon lunch. After putting in as much as I could, I went and sat in front of my MAC. My MAC has been my best buddy whenever I needed a company. I'll sadly be missing her for 2 days. But never mind. I'm gonna see her for the rest of my life. So not much feelings.

I had a PoPL assignment to complete. We had to create the Language Specifications for a new programming language which we thought would be worthwhile. We spec-ed an Object Oriented wrapper for HTML. I gave it a start and my teammate Sudharsanan K, completed it. Never mind, the other two teammates dint bother much.

I started doing it, specified the topics which need to be done. Then completed almost a Chapter. After this, my clock ticked 3:30. I had to shave and start. My Dad started telling me to get ready. I thought it was time I leave my Teammates to take over. I put in a new blade and started shaving. I kept my usual french beard. Dint bother to trim it as well. Not the best of shaves I could do, but is sure the quickest I could get to. At times you don't bother much about your look when you have lots to do.

I then started changing. Took my favorite blue jean and a brown t-shirt. My jean dint fit. I've become fat - literally fat - off late :( I've been trying to reduce but once you've got used to food, its tough to say no. My Dad noticed the same and criticized me for growing so much. After appreciating his time to express the truth, we began to do a small prayer. We usually do this before starting on any outing.

After the prayer, we took my bag to the ground floor. My Dad, Mom and Bro came to drop me. My Dad has arranged for a Fast Track Call Taxi before. We went to the Airport. There my Mom and Dad got acquainted to my Colleagues - Sundhar Ram, Saravana Vel and Manjusha, and their parents too. We spoke for a while. We then went into the airport around 5. We took the boarding pass and came to the visitors area where our parents were waiting.

Saravana Vel's brother formed a good company to all of us :) He was talkative and so were we. It was time we boarded. Took the boarding pass and went to the Gate as we saw the Kingfisher officials welcome us. We took a bus to the closest propeller plane. It was smaller than the KPN bus. But we managed to enjoy the One hour 25 mins trip.

My clock 8:28:33 PM and I was entering Hyderabad. This is my city where I am going to experience my forst work-life. I was all excited. The escalator brings me down the airport as I see many people standing with pluck cards. My eyes search for the "New Hires Day" pluck card.

"Bing!!", I found him! ;)

"We are for the MS New Hires Day" I told him. He said "Welcome" and something something in Hindi. I dint understand a bit. But luckily we had a girl from our College who can speak Hindi. She spoke to him and we travelled to the Innova cab which was arranged for us. We loaded our luggage and started to Microsoft's guest house where our stay was arranged. The driver took us to the place "Serenity Inn" in no time. It was 29km from the airport and we reached there in like 20 mins. Man that was fast. The road was completely empty and it was a highway. Absolutely zero traffic!

We reached there. We filled in our names. They gave us a T-shirt to be worn for the next day. We checked into our rooms. We changed and came down to eat. After a nice buffet dinner we played snookers. This was the first time I'm playing snookers in my life :D

Time passed, and we slept around 11.

Continued here..

Being idle is no fun without peace of mind!

Long time! Yes. Lazy have I become. No idea why. The only good thing I do nowadays is Eat and Sleep. I take good care that my belly doesn't go down. I have often been asking myself, where has all the enthusiasm gone? Who has stolen it from me?

I sat down to think of all the reasons I could hit upon. "A good placement with a descent pay can deny you from working any further" - the learned told me. Maybe I've taken it to my head! Even before I could start thinking about it, my head said "No, you are not that!". Maybe I dint wanna be like that or maybe I am not really that. Whatever, I refused to think further. I believe thinking too much about some success might take it to your head. If that was not the reason then what really is?

I thought hard. Two months ago, I had no time to sit, relax and think. I was all surrounded by people. I was all hands-on Kurukshetra - The International Techno Management Festival. I was the Web K!ore Head. I dint stop with Web. I handled the Food and Accommodation Team also during the days of the event. This event kept me all busy for more than 6 months. And before this, I was involved in AU CEG's ACM Student Chapter. We conducted an event called "Prodigy" for the School Children. This kept me busy. And before that were the placements. All time preparation for the next giant company I was going to encounter, kept me occupied. Anytime before that, I took all my projects seriously. I was also involved in the CEG's Linux User Group.

All throughout my college life, something has kept me occupied. Either it was Projects or Technical Symposiums or a day-out with friends. As far as I can remember, whenever I find two to three days free, I hook up myself to some responsibility. But is that all college life is about? These are the last few days of my college life. I still have responsibilities left. I need to pass over my knowledge to my juniors. My Final Year Project (FYP) was on-board. I've always expected my FYP to be the best project of my college life. But the fact is, even my Second Semester project turned out to be more fruitful than my FYP.

Is that lack of interest? Something drove me to work all these three and a half years on satisfying projects, but all of a sudden the interest is nowhere found. What is changing? I have got work to do, but the interest to complete the responsibility has slowly leaked out somewhere. Why has such a thing happened?

No Clues.

Sleep. Eat. Gmail. Facebook. All these, take its share on my everyday life. Where are those Fun, Projects, Outing etc? I don't have a peaceful relaxation time also. My mind keeps telling me, you have work to be done, but my body refrains to do any useful work. I remember a buzz from my friend saying "Having something to do and doing nothing is entirely different from having nothing to do and doing nothing . Being idle is no fun without having peace of mind !" (Courtesy: Kannan KV) This perfectly explains what situation I am in currently.

Guess its time for me to wake up and do my work. I'm used to doing work. I'm used to taking in responsibilities. Why am I trying to stay idle after all! Time should answer.

Well, the bad time has its toll on everyone. And I guess I've just heard it say "Hello!"

Compiling my 1st OpenCV program in my MAC

MAC has always been sweet enough to make life easier. It holds the same when it comes to OpenCV. Probably I choose all the easier options when doing it :P I tried compiling a sample program. I took the program from the tutorial here.

Simple steps. I created a folder and a C file in it. Copied this content into it. To compile use the following commands.

First you need to set some environment variables:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr

Step 2 is to compile using the following command:




g++ -bind_at_load `pkg-config --cflags opencv` test.c -o test `pkg-config --libs opencv`

And then run it using the following command:




./test

It worked like a flash. :)

Some useful links

1. http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Installing_OpenCV_on_Mac_OS_X
2. http://www.cs.iit.edu/~agam/cs512/lect-notes/opencv-intro/opencv-intro.html

OpenCV is back into my life! :)

Started doing my final year project just sometime back. Its high time and I start doing it. I moved to using MAC a year back. Now I need to install all the required software in MAC. The first thing I would need is to install OpenCV in MAC.

I did a simple googling and found this link. This is the OpenCV wiki which tells us how to install OpenCV in MAC. It shows us different ways to do that. I did it using the MacPorts way. The MacPorts as I read was an awesome piece of software which allows us to install OpenSource applications in Macintosh platform. So initially I grabbed myself an installation package of MacPorts from here. I kept things simple. I downloaded the dmg file and installed it :) Went like a flash. NOTE: I had to restart for the application to start working. But I guess this is not needed generally!

Step to would be to install OpenCV. This was as simple as -typing a command and sit back and see it all happen-! Goto your terminal and type

sudo port install opencv

As this was happening, there was an error in the middle. There was a problem installing one of the dependencies. - db46. This happens when installing the dependency ffmpeg via macports. The error is as follows:

Error: db46 requires the Java for Mac OS X development headers.

I have Java installed already. All you need to do is to link it up! To do this, just put in the following command:

sudo ln -s /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Headers /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Headers

And hurray it worked! Now I start the installation by typing "sudo port install opencv" again. And it finishes the process in a while. OpenCV is some 20mb in size. So if you have slow internet connection it might take some time.

Here are some interesting links:

1. http://opencv.darwinports.com/
2. http://blog.jay2k1.com/2010/11/12/db46-java-error-while-trying-to-install-ffmpeg-via-macports/
3. http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/Mac_OS_X_OpenCV_Port

Long time no see! :)

I've been waiting for a pretty long time to update my blog. Have not really been into it off late. What made me come back to my blog after a long time? There is a reason. And the reason is Chrome's all new Web Store. You know, I came to know about the web store only a few minutes back and I am already impressed. It has a lot of interesting apps going around. I downloaded the NOTES app and to try it out, I just started typing an entry for my blog. Woah! Awesome it is :)

Get your hands on some of these apps : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/

Div inside a Div - problem

This is a CSS related article. You have a div inside another div and the outer div does not expand as the inner div expands. If that is your problem, then you are in the right place. I have the same problem and I found a solution too.

The problem is because of the fact that the inner divs have float content, but the outer div is not floated. Here is a work around. Initially your code should look something like this:


<div id="outerdiv">
<div id="innerdiv" style="float:left">
...
</div>
</div>


This should have been your code initially. Now all you got to do is, go in to your css and add the following code:


.clearfix:after {
content: ".";
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}

.clearfix { display: inline-table; }



Now in your HTML you will have to add a small div at the end of outer div like this:


<div id="outerdiv">
<div id="innerdiv" style="float:left">
...
<div class="clearfix">
</div>
</div>
</div>

And that is it. You are all done :) Many sites helped me in identifying the solution. But one site which clearly explains this concept is : http://www.positioniseverything.net/easyclearing.html

Google Balls - My first HTML5 tweak

I've always looked at HTML5 as a weird mysterious thing - one reason was the various experiments available in Chrome-experiments and others. I just got a little closer to HTML5 when I saw Google Balls for the 1st time. I've already done a similar kinda work before, but it was a huge failure. One of my friend shared a link to an open source version of Google Balls in Buzz. I just took a look at it and downloaded the code.

With a little tweak I did this: http://kumar.byethost6.com/thek/

Well, not much did I learn, but my first steps on html5. Thanks to RAWKES for sharing that code. :)