The Game Plays On

Nirmal kumar of Anand Institute of Higher Technology, is the first student to have developed a ’sottai’ successfully. Few others are in the line too. However this photo is a prize ’scalp’ (pun intended :D) by me in the get together at the blue lagoon, ECR.

Here is the exclusive shot of his sottai

Ithuku than romba yosikakudathunu solvanga. Paavam, velaiku vera poga arambichuttan.. Ellam “Thala” vithi..

Tags: Anand, Baldy, Blue Lagoon, ECR, Nirmal, Sotta

Karthika, after a lot of googling, unearthed the TANCET 2009 M.E/M.Tech ranklist from some google groups site. Someone has taken the pain to collect the data and publish it!

So far, only 10000 ranks are there, upto a score of 29.292.

Karthika - 134th Rank
Hariharan - 522nd Rank
Thileepan - 1336th Rank
Vivek - 1740th Rank
Mustafa - 1755th Rank
Ramkumar - 2259th Rank
Poojith - 3916th Rank
Saravana Kumar - 4120th Rank
Manoj - 7659th Rank

Here is the link to the Text file

Tancet 2009 M.E/M.Tech Rank List of First 10,000 students

Tags: 2009, M.E, MTech, Ranklist, Students, Tancet

I still can’t believe what I saw! Karthika messaged me “We have got 2nd prize in Code for Freedom” and I was shocked beyond belief! The project which we took was very simple (concept wise and design wise), no hi-fi graphics and neat web layout, to satisfy average users. We even had the audacity to submit the project at the very last moment :P. Looks like God has turned his vision upon us and bestowed us with a memorable gift, an Apple iPod touch, worth Rs.25,000/-

Now we believe strongly that the participation in IBM’s “The Great Mind Challenge” has not gone in vain. Anand Institute of Higher Technology is a national name now, as AIHT is getting the Silver trophy for participation. Anyways, we lost it out to a better team from NIT, Jaipur. Best thing of all, Karthika and myself get free training in Open solaris. A certificate from Sun Microsystem to top it off ! Hoo boy! July 26th is a day that I can’t forget!

Tags: Code For Freedom, IBM, Quiz Software, Sun Microsystem

I had an enjoyable outing today. Having (made to) got up early morning, I made a trip to Hayagreevar Temple in Singaperumal Koil to visit my good ol’ buddy Lord Hayagreevar (Horse Faced Lord Vishnu). Entered the temple, and immediately went to Vasudeva (the calf, not the lord :P) and spent a few minutes for him. He was an adorable male calf. Then went inside for the “deeparadana” and recited “gnayana nandamayam…” in my mind few times. Felt fresh and comfortable in the temple ambience. Sat there for a long time, enjoying the cool breeze.

On my way back, dad took me to Mahindra world city - A massive industrial estate where many organizations have either a service base or a manufacturing base. BMW’s in the list too

Here are a few snaps I took with my mobile.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hariharanbcse/MahindraWorldCityTrip#

Tags: Lord Hayagreevar, Mahindra city, Temple, Trip

King of Pop and Numero Uno Michael Jackson expired today morning 2.26 AM in his house. He was found not to be breathing and was rushed to UCLA Medical center, where he was declared dead. Doctors confirmed that he suffered a cardiac arrest and his brother Jermaine Jackson informed the same.

Having been in controversies for the most part of his life, from plastic surgery to child molestation, Jackson had lived a tough life of 50 years. His fans (that includes me ) know him best for his “Billy Jean” and “Beat it”. His album “Thriller” rocked the world and sold nearly 230 million copies worldwide, during the period when Napster and Kazaa (Illegal Music and File sharing services) were prominent.

I’m a proud fan of MJ, had all his songs right from his first one “ABC” in my old HDD. Too bad, I lost it

God bless his soul, may he rest in peace!

Tags: King, Michael Jackson, Music, Pop

A few days ago, in NxG supplement of The Hindu, I saw “Amazon Kindle 2″, a portable ebook reader. I wished I had one like that. Well, I didn’t have to wait long for that because I found an alternate solution. I tried downloading and installing the mobile PDF viewer but it proved to be a pain in the neck as it constantly kept on asking “Allow reading and writing in this folder?” question. Besides, PDF files whose size is greater that 300 kb can’t be read using that software. So I tried searching for ebooks that a mobile (S40 series) can support. Karthika showed me that ebooks in jar format were available in mobile9.com, and then an idea struck me. Why not create ebooks in jar format for easy reading?

There began the search for a software that could convert either txt to jar or pdf to jar. I immediately found a tool created by Andrey Konstantinov, called “MjBookMaker”. Here is what I did.

1. Download the ebook “The Appeal - By John Grisham”, a small 1mb file
2. Just copy the text from a pdf file and paste it on a text file and save it as appeal.txt
3. Select the resolution of your mobile phone as this tool can support various resolutions shown in the fig
4. Source file is set to appeal.txt
5. For better viewing, I chose the font as Cambria and Font size as 14
6. Click Start and you’ll get 7 midlets (inside a midlets folder where the application resides) and you can copy them to your mobile phone

The midlet that is created has various options like Auto-scrolling, Find text, Line spacing, Character Spacing (when you open the Jar file in your mobile and select options). Quite a useful tool! Better yet, it is free!

Software Link: http://mjsoft.nm.ru/prog/mjBookMaker.zip
Author Page: http://mjsoft.nm.ru/booke.htm

MjBookMaker

Tags: ebook reader, Electronics, mobile, nokia s40, reader

It was coming and had to happen sometime in the series. Good thing it happened in Super 8 stage itself. India lost to england by 3 runs and the defending champions crashed out of the World T20 series. Had they lost the semis or the final, I think Dhoni (and not his effigy) would have been burnt alive

Excuses.. Excuses.. Excuses.. Tsk Tsk

Gary Kirsten was quick to point out that the fatigue factor played a major role. None could accept wholeheartedly that the loss of Sehwag was a cause. In any case, I think this is a lesson learnt in the hard way. Indians should know that they are totally incompetent in English soil and they don’t have enough experienced players to hit the short pitch deliveries. Frankly speaking, Sourav Ganguly (the man who hit 13 runs in 1 ball) could’ve been a better choice for Raina or Jadeja. Thalaivar could have played instead of Sehwag and Dravid could have played instead of Rohit sharma, the player who hits the Papa Teams like Ireland and Bangladesh very well.

Now that West Indies and South Africa have made it to semis, I will be happy if either of them win this cup. Neither Pakistan nor the Victor of today’s match (NZ vs SL) should win.

Tags: Cricket, England, India, West Indies, World T20

VIJAY AWARDS 2008

In all 6 awards for Dasavathaaram. Hard work of two great artists (The Living Legend and KSR) has paid off! With a monumental collection of 300+ crores worldwide, Aascar Ravichandran has already become the executive producer of a Jackie Chan starrer.

Source: Indiaglitz.com, The Hindu

Update: The awards function will be telecasted in Vijay TV on June 18th, 19th 7 PM

Tags: Dasavatharam, Kamal Haasan, Rasigan, Tamil Cinema, Vijay Awards

Accident at Sardar Patel Road

I was returning home when I saw an accident to my opposite side (opposite to Cancer Institute). I couldn’t click the army men as dad took off. But the fight was funny. The car owner and two army men were arguing, ignoring the traffic policemen completely. Even more funny thing was, those guys were arguing in Hindi, which the traffic police couldn’t understand. He was standing there simply, helpless. Though it was just a dent and none got hurt, driving has become reckless in the city.

Tags: Accident, Chennai, City

Match No.4 in Super 8 fixture

Over confident, Over rated, Controversial, Over hyped, Under performing are words that can relate to Team India as much as the word Defending Champion does. Every player is filled with ego and we can see a lazy Indian team losing to West Indies at Lords. Now, I don’t mean to discredit the West Indians, as they are pretty much strong with their depth in batting and fury filled bowling. Bravo has been a match winner and Simmons, the nephew of former West Indian all rounder Phil Simmons has been a revelation, both with the bat and the ball. Dhoni, captain c(f)ool has completely forgotten how to bat in a T20 format. Raina who looks promising, failed to rise to the occasion. Yuvraj has been the only saving grace so far and without his quickfire 67, we wouldn’t have managed a total of 153.

Coming to the fielding part of our side, I haven’t seen so many turtles and tortoises in field, save Raina and Rohit sharma. Ishant’s running in the boundary line is so pathetic that he actually gave up after running only 5 steps! I bet even Romesh Powar can run faster than that. Ojha keeps on trying to save a boundary, but can only manage to run along with the ball, like our famous Manoj Prabhakar.

In all, a poor performance by our team. It is high time that they started working hard by leaving their start status behind them or we will definitely see a new team crowned as champions this time.

Result

Team India 153-7 in 20
West Indies 156-3 in 18.4

Man of the match: Dwayne Bravo for his 66(36) and 4-38