Back on dialup …

Hmmmm … ( to be read as a very depressed sigh … )

After a month of cruising along in what our govt calls broadband … its that time of the month again when all the past days’ “bandwidth spendthrift attitude” comes back and hits you where it hurts …

I’ve got the BSNL 256 K home plan, which comes with a 1 GB download limit …
1 GB ???
Who in the right head comes up with these plans ?
Aren’t people not allowed to come in to work drunk ? What about doped ?

Seriously …
We have night time free … yeah …
Or call it early morning free … from 2 friggin’ AM to 8 AM …
These timings are making a moron out of me …

Last month, nothing major was happening, so I managed to cut down till about 970 Meg by the month end …
This time with seminars, all the papers to download and research, and by the end of the month, my XBOX got dinked …
More research and frantic searching ensued …
( But I got it up and running finally last night … yay !!! )

But with 940 MB gone and 4 days to take out on a 60 MB, I’m just holding on … for a rainy day …
If any of you’ll will need me, I’ll be on dial up for a couple of days …
( BSNL charges 1.2 bucks per MB of download !!! )
It’s kinda nostalgic you know … That 3 tone buzz that comes out of the modem when you try to connect … the 30 seconds !!! that you need to connect …
And the best things are the ultra variable connecting speeds ( mostly due to the awesome quality of phone lines that the same morons from BSNL put up )
As of now, I have successfully connected after 7 tries at 9.6 kbps !!!

Thats me signing off …

And yeah, if you are from BSNL and reading this, please grow a brain !

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Me … geeky ???

This test was actually amusing …
Hehehe …

Another one …

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The dirtiness factor …

When does your room become so dirty, that it actually turns into a feature of that place ?

When your mom gives up asking you to clean it and vows never to talk about it … ever …
When the maid starts charging extra, just to enter and clean your room ?
When ?

Anyways, I’ve got a normal room here …
Lets see … one cupboard, a study table ( which is never used nowadays ), one computer table ( which is as dusty as it can be ), one bed, two chairs ( I stole one chair from my dad’s room ) and quite a few boxes here and there containing stuff, I mostly will never open again …

You remember, the only time you “actually” clean your room is when your friends come over … for the first time ?
The first thing you’d probably hear is how “clean” your room looks …
Then you go something like … “Nah … I just did it today because you guys were coming over”

As more people stream into your room and compliment you on your “cleanliness”, “cleanliness” doesn’t remain a compliment any longer …
It seems more like a guilt, for a crime which you committed …
So, next time they come … they get to see what your room “actually” looks like …
And they feel better … and you become one of the tribe …

And then there is the “switcheroo”
We guys do it so often, that we have even come up a term for it …

Switcheroo /vb/ : The act of transferring clothes from one location to another, on the arrival of entities in your room, so as to make more space for people to fit in ..

Now, my room is not that bad … atleast comparing to stuff you see on US Television …
You can easily walk into the room … and you can probably sit somewhere too, once I have performed the Switcheroo …
But my mom kinda gave up on asking me to clean it sometime ago …

Rooms never stay clean ( or do they, and I am missing something here ? ), so the thought of cleaning it, is just in the back of my memory … somewhere …

But that great pile of clothes on the chair besides me, has started to give me the shivers …
Hence this blog, and maybe … just maybe … I’ll venture into that dimentia … the room cleaning one …

If that ever happens, I’ll update all you people …
Then we could probably have a party or something … :)

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The wet side of things …

Today, was a pretty depressing day :(
One of the days, when you just want to quit everything and stay at home … Not caring a damn …

Got up to a very dull morning … Like mornings are nowadays …
Haven’t seen the sun in like – weeks …

Dragged myself out of bed, and 45 minutes later, on my bike on the way to college …
Last place I wanted to be at …

Plus, today was THE monday, the day after the extended 3 day weekend …
Monday blues at their best !

On the way, it started drizzling …
You know, that kind of rain which neither stops nor pours …
Just the slight, very light rain …
You dont know whether to stop and take shelter or go on …

Finally reached college … pants soaking wet …
Those are the worst things you can get wet … pants .. and that too jeans …

Soo, spent the entire day in wet clothes … and only now, was able to get rid of them and put on some dry comfy clothes …
Ahhh … talk about being miserable …

Feeling my head hurt a lil’ … and think am coming down with a flu :(
And I bet you could swear that this must have been the most depressing post that you’ve read of late …

Hope things get better …
Blame it on the weatherman …

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BitTorrent Seminar Blues …

BitTorrents … doesn’t that word have a nice ring to it ?
It does, if you ask me …
Okay, it does only to Broadband users with some unlimited plan …

Anyways, I have used and abused that protocol for months now …
Ever since BSNL dataone started and they had the mind numbing plan to give away unlimited internet … hehehe … :)

So, when Seminar time came ( something all us BE in Engineering people have to go through ), I chose BitTorrent …
C’mon … I’ve used it for months … I know all the settings … Its not much work …
Right ?

Wrong !!!

I had to slog my ass off … but it’s okay, because the topic turned out to be interesting …
So, 13 papers, hundreds of websites, 3 interviews, 1 webcast and 3 days of gruelling typing later, I finished my 30 page report on the damn thing …

I am so confident … that I already printed out the report without showing a rough copy to my seminar guide …
How this works out, only time will tell …

But, I have this radiant glow by this sense of achievement …

Anyways, have sat to do the presentation now …
And after spending a day doing the graphics at 800 x 600 for the ppt ( b’coz our college comps are kinda screwy and mess up at higher res ), I figured out that powerpoint backgrounds unstretched are at 1024 x 768 …
No matter what the display resolution …

Aaaahhhhh !!!!

Update 04-Jan-2010: Please stop asking me for the presentation / report. I am not going to give it to you.
Please stop being a lazy ass and do your own work!

I am putting up the bibliography below so you can get started, but I am not sharing the ppt with you. Putting your email address here is just going to make it that much easy for spambots to harvest them and spam you even more! (Not that you care, I’m sure!)

The ones without links are papers. You will need to google for it and download the pdf.
(I don’t have the links for them at this time). Also some links might not work as  this was 5 years ago!

[1] Incentives Build Robustnes in BitTorrent – Bram Cohen
[2] Analysis of the P2P BitTorrent Protocol – Abram Hindle ( University of Victoria )
[3] The Bittorrent Protocol Paper – Bram Cohen ( http://www.bittorrent.com/protocol.html )
[4] Network Coding for Large Scale Content Distribution – Christos Gkantsidis and Pablo Rodriguez Rodriguez
[5] BitTorrent Metafile Specification – ApnaOpus ( http://apnaopus.var.cc/wiki/index.php/BitTorrent_Metafile_extension )
[6] Bram Cohen Interview on BitTorrent – Wired Magazine ( Jan 2005 )
[7] Gnutella and the Transient Web – Kelly Truelove ( www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/03/22/truelove.html )
[8] Free Riding on Gnutella – Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman
[9] Digital Rights Management – Wikipedia.org ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management )
[10] How BitTorrents Works – HowStuffWorks ( http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent.htm )
[11] How Gnutella Works – HowStuffWorks ( http://computer.howstuffworks.com/file-sharing.htm )
[12] How Webservers Work – HowStuffWorks ( www.howstuffworks.com/web-server.htm )
[13] Avalanche: File Swarming with Network Coding – Microsoft Research
[14] DRM Non-News: Microsoft’s Avalanche – DRM Watch

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Umm …

What can I say ?
I am not proud of it … but anywho …

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Sore, tired and broken …

Yesterday was a rough day …
I hadn’t touched a basketball in ages … actually no physical activity whatsoever in ages …

Ended up on the courts … and at the end of the day, the title says it all …

We have this tournament called ‘Dawn to Dusk‘ which happens every year on the 15th of August … and we guys … the old school team, come together and participate every year …

This is the 4th year we’ve played and the results every year, are mostly the same …

This is an open tournament … no age limit, nothing …
So people, from all age groups, from many different districts … from the School teams to the Sourthen Command and Bombay Sappers team ( both are Army Teams ) take part …

So, practically speaking, we don’t stand much of a chance …

As usual, we crashed out in the Quarters …
Actually, honestly, we could have won that game too …
But everyone was dead from the time the game started …
I for one, was in a condition to be carried off in a stretcher …
That was our 4th game in the day, and the previous game that we played was just 10 minutes ago …

What was surprising was that we got that far ( there were a total 72 teams taking part !!! ) even though we hadn’t practiced any …
Most of the guys ( 3 out of 5 ) were touching the basketball in ages … No practice whatsoever …

But where we lost out, was in the stamina department …
If we’d have enough energy, we could have taken that game too …
We lost by a measly 3 points …

But I guess … we all have to make compromises somewhere …
Hmmmmm … ( to be read as a long sigh … )

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My Firefox ate my bookmarks …

Okay … I use firefox …
Have been using since the day it has been released and in my opinion … it is the best browser to date … ( sorry MS )

The thing I really love about it is the tabbed interface … the ability to add enhancements ( otherwise called extensions. Plugins are different things ) …

One of the better features ( taken from Mozilla ) is the ability to search a document while typing … on the fly …
No need to hit CTRL + F … like you do it in IE …

But today, after I restarted my Comp, all my bookmarks had disappeared without a sign …
The bookmarks.html file which was about 73 Kb, when I last saw it, reduced to 1 K

I tried many things … searching for deleted files, even did a system restore … but to no avail …
On searching, realised that many people have gone through this dilemma …

Luckily, found a backup which I had taken in Jan 05 … so I am almost back to normal …
But this is a serious flaw and I am hoping they’re doing something about it …

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Saurabh’s day out with the camera …

Yesterday was results … very unexpectadly … but yes … we had to wait for 2 hours after college to get them …
The good news is that I cleared all my subjects …
I was dead sure of flunking an oral exam … but by some miracle, passed pretty comfortably in that viva too …
Marks wise, it was worse than last semester … and my total percentage slipped down by a percent …

Anyways, I am more than happy, that all the extra curricular stuff – The College CD, the Imagine Cup, et all … didn’t take a toll on my exams …

So today, the entire class took a day off … a mass bunk …
Our very first official mass bunk, where not a single student sat for class …
It was a long time due … its our final year now …
Yes … you must be thinking … class of geeks :)

Anyways, today the IEEE student branch of our college organised their cultural event … a tech fest kinda thing …
Though these guys come up with many new ideas … their implementation needs a lot to be desired … ( sorry people … nothing personal )

Anyways, they had this photography contest … where we had to shoot 3 snaps within our college campus, and the theme was either “Fusion” or “Bliss” …
Even though bought seem to be the worst topics … especially for our campus, I chose Bliss …

So, from 10 to 12:30 … I went trigger happy …
Armed with my digi cam and tripod stand … I scouted the college for snaps which would fit the theme …

With great difficulty, I managed to click a few … rushed to my friends place … burnt it on a CD and rushed to Foto Fast and got it printed …
All this done by 3:00 pm … which was the submission deadline …

Glad to say, that all the pictures came decently on print … though a touch brighter than I expected …

I was looking forward to this contest a lot … coz I wanted to put my photography skills to test …
Only time will tell how I match up with the rest …

Photography is an awesome job … but requires a lot of patience and understanding and foresight …
Knowing your camera inside out is a given …
As I learnt it the more tougher way …

Anyways, I am putting up the 3 snaps which I clicked today … for your viewing pleasure …

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38 cents !!!

Thats how much I made with Google adsense for the past … oh .. I dont know … how many months …

When I heard of google adsense … and all the success stories doing the rounds …
I thought .. this ju-st may be the thing for me …

But alas… after having some 1900 visitors all this while, only 13 clicked on the ad and 38 cents got added to my piggy bank …
And google will send you the check only after you get the $150 mark …

Lets see … that should take me about another gzillion years …
bah !
Not worth it … I think …

So, I am doing all you people a favour and removing it altogether …
Half the time, google does not know what ads to display, because the content of my blogs are so diverse …
Its tough pleasing everybody …

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