Fraxer

Guess Fraxer is back after a pretty long break - not that I've been busy or anything, but something or the other always kept happening and I just couldn't finish any post fully.

Anyways, let bygone be bygones. So I'll restart with a dream I had not long ago. Some might think I'm seeing a lot of horror movies, some might say I'm bluffing. But here it goes...

The backdrop : No one at home - dad out to receive a relative, mom out for a walk and me cycling around pointlessly.

I come back - and find the lights off in all the houses except ours (eeks!). I assume everyone is sleeping (quite naive, eh!?)Then I see a snake crawling in the garden and the first thing that comes into my mind is,"I need to take a snap!" Little ahead, I find an oddish-like creature hopping around (Pokemon fans will know what I mean here). So I reach my house and am surprised to find the main door open. But the house seemed empty. Then something in my head tells me to turn back - and what do I see!?........a cobra with a raised hood in the garden just in front of the door. Nevertheless, I run inside and grab my camera..

I try to take a pic of the cobra, but when I raised the digicam and try to see the cobra through the lens - bingo! I find a girl clad in white standing behind the snake (am I seeing things!?) I lower the cam, rub my eyes to make sure I'm not hallucinating and try to take another look through the lens. Maybe I'm dreaming (of course I was dreaming, but I thought I was dreaming in the dream - does that make sense? I don't know) - coz a second girl clad in red joined the girl in white...

I somehow muster courage and click! But what do I see in the camera's LCD screen...the two girls standing in front of my house. Now this was insanely bizarre - the house was behind me, the girls were in front of me... just what the hell is happening!? I turn around to check - just in case the girls were indeed in front of my house and there was a mirror-of-sorts in front of me. Nothing... And when I look back at the snake via the lens, the girls are no more there. Out of curiosity, I take another snap. This time, it's a pic of me standing in front of my house, thus supporting to my 'ethereal mirror' hypothesis. I stretch my hand forward trying to locate the so-called mirror. No luck!

I try to view the previous snap on the digicam, just in case I've seen those two girls somewhere before. But all I find is a black backdrop, nothing more! Then "Aaarrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!" I hear a scream. Another sound - my alarm ringing - and I'm awake...

No speculations - I'll leave them for your imagination...


As a matter of fact, one of my friends says those two girls were the "White Angel" and the "Red Devil" of my life - were they!?

The transition from school to college - from notebooks to notebook, from home to hostel.....and from teachers to professors (if I can put it that way).

Speaking of professors,some of them sure are strange. They have studied too much but are afraid of forgetting it unless they use it in their daily life. And the students usually end up being on the receiving side of this gyanopdesh...

Time Management Funda!
When a professor can't enter a class on time as the professor in-charge of the previous class didn't finish his class on time, two possible cases arise. One, he finishes his class on time and leaves. Second, if the professor is too much of an idealist and insists on taking a class not less than 1 hour, the students proceed with their standard warcry "Siiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr...." Pat comes the reply, "I entered this class 10 min late at 12:10 pm, resulting in a phase shift. I need to take this class till 1:10 pm to the cycle..."

Uniplexing!?
There are times when the student is supposed to be jotting down notes during the lecture. But, the way we are, we keep murmuring to each other throughout. The professor realises this and starts erasing the board. Of course, very few would've actually completed it by then. Then comes another quote, "Multiplexing is not harmful in only those cases where efficiency is not a criteria. Those people who couldn't complete were the ones doing multiplexing!"

Transmitters or Receivers!?
If the professor finds everyone talking in his class (which isn't such a rare sight) and he wants to tell them to keep quiet, how does he say it!? "When someone speaks, he gives out energy and a person who is not talking at that moment must receive that energy. If all the students in the class keep talking, the teacher must receive the energy from all the sound waves generated by them. One person can't handle all this energy." Perhaps the professors should be equipped with storage batteries!

Caught Copying!?
If the answer scripts of two students who sit beside each other during exams is exactly the same, what happens!? The strict professors have only one thing to say - zero to both..."The waves generated in the two cases have same amplitude and frequency. However, a phase shift of 180 has been introduced which results in destructive interference. The resultant amplitude produced is zero."

Coupling!?
When an orthodox professor sees a guy and a gal together, he feels like saying, "Tumhara kuch nahi ho sakta!" or in other words, "It is true that opposites attract. But when two waves travelling in opposite directions interfere, a standing wave is produced with no net propagation of energy."

Proxy!?
If someone tries putting a proxy and ends up getting caught. "The receiver should respond only to a particular frequency. If it starts responding to everything, there'll be interference. Then on the same FM frequency, you'll listen to a amalgamation of different FMs."

LOL...

Keep quoting... And I'll keep scribbling...

India - the country with the largest rail network in the whole world! One would expect the train service to be at par, if not above, those elsewhere in the world. Alas! It ends up being nothing more than a hope - a hope which might never come to life the way things seem to be going..

Recently, the trains have been coming late, even by Indian standards. Just a couple of days back, I had to board the train no. 571 Salem-Bangalore passenger from Hosur to Banglore City. The train which was supposed to arrive at 1650 hours somehow manages to reach Hosur by 1750 hours - a delay of an hour in a four-hour journey, ie. a delay of 25%. Quite convenient, eh!?

Anyway, it's only a passenger train. So lets not bother about it now. Then I board train no. 2429 Bangalore Rajdhani Express at 2020 hours from Bangalore City. Now the Rajdhanis and Shatabdis are the best trains available in India, except trains which run primary for tourism like the Golden Chariot. (By default, I travel more by sleeper (and even general) compartments in express and superfast trains - but recently I've been getting aboard the Rajdhani quite often). But the moment I enter compartment B1, I was like "Is this really Rajdhani!?" The last non-Rajdhani air-conditioned compartment I had travelled by was that of Sheshadri Express from Vijaywada to Bangalore almost a year ago. And that compartment was in a much better shape than this one.

The restrooms were a complete mess. One of my co-passengers quipped, "The last time I travelled by Rajdhani, all the compartments were ancient. In this train, only this compartment seems old. Maybe they left this one behind." Forget the infrastructure, the service doesn't seem to be any better either. The next day, the newspapers are provided at 0800 hours, way past the schedule. The attendant comes and takes the order for breakfast (I wonder whether I should call it an order - we have only two options (omelette or upma-vada) at around the same time. Not a bad time at all. And then he vanishes and is nowhere to be seen till 0915 hours. Then also, he brings only the upma-vada. I had to get down at Kazipet Jn. and the train was scheduled to reach there at 0930 hours. So I hunt that guy down and ask the status of my omelette. He says it's not ready yet and tells me to take the only alternative available. Following the age-old saying "Something is better than nothing", I grab a packet of upma-vada, a couple of bread slices and a carton of juice (There was no time to eat in the train, so I decided I'll eat it on my way to college).

Then I just casually talk to him about the dire straits this train found itself in. He blames the whole thing on his manager saying that guy is inefficient - the start of a blame-game. It's not a matter of who is to blame, but how this situation can be improved. And if this continues, I'm surely gonna stop travelling by Rajdhani in the future. And I might not be the only one...

This is the FINAL LIST of programs to be submitted to K Ramesh Sir. (Disclaimer : I've no idea whether he asked it just as a record of the list of programs done by our batch or it is actually supposed to be used for the end lab. I've made no such claims whatsoever at any point of time).

1. Command Line Interpreter

2. Chat Server using FIFOs and parent-child processes

3. Chat Server using FIFOs and threads

4. Chat Server using message queues and parent-child processes

5. Chat Server using message queues and threads

6-33. Classic synchronization problems
* Producer-consumer
* Reader-writer with reader preference
* Reader-writer with writer preference
* Reader-writer with equal preference
* Sleeping barber
* Cigarette smokers
* Dining philosophers

using
* Semaphores
* Monitor as a different process
* Generic monitor
* Thread mutex

34. Sleeping barbers with multiple barbers using signals

35. Resource sharing between two different processes

36. I/O multiplexing using poll() and/or select()

37. Simulation of scheduling algorithms using different processes and calculation of waiting time and turnaround time
* FCFS (First come first serve)
* SJF (Shortest job first)
* SRTF (Shortest remaining time first)
* PS (Priority scheduling)
* RR (Round robin)

38. The above program (No. 33) using threads

39. Simulation of a deadlock monitor (should include safe sequence generator and resource request algorithm) using different processes

40. The above program (No. 35) using threads

41. Process log for n processes communicating using message queues

42. Simulation of page replacement algorithms
* LRU (Least recently used)
* MRU (Most recently used)
* Op (Optimization)
* LFU (Least frequently used)
* MFU (Most frequently used)

43. Simple file locking involving the shared read and the exclusive write locks

44. Simple user-defined thread library with functions for initialization, starting the threads, making a thread go to the end of the process queue (called yielding) and stopping a thread
* using clone()
* using context switch
* using setjmp and longjmp

45. Implementation of semaphores (user defined semaphores) and its applications

46. Clock device driver

47. Implementation of Pfiles

48. Adding a user-defined system call (echo2 as mentioned in class)

49. Alternate servers

50. Monitoring multiple servers and multiple clients using a handler process with the help of message queues

So recently, the linux craze has been catching many, including me. Even right now, I'm on Ubuntu 9.04. The main reason being the long booting time for windows – not to mention the time for the start-up services to load. Yet I feel, maybe since I'm used to working on windows for around 10 years, something is missing in linux – I guess I can even say some things “are “ missing.

Nautilus
The file explorer seems too primitive to me. We are so much used to the comfort of windows explorer. And I couldn't fins a proper replacement. XFE was sort of okay (it resembled windows explorer somewhat), but it didn't have NTFS support.

Video Codecs
If I try playing RMVB files with low bitrate on VLC, it keep stopping every now and then. So I use totem for that one. Makes me miss Media Player Classic, which played every video file perfectly.

Task Manager
Ubuntu doesn't have a task manager, though I suppose Mandriva does. And if an application stops functioning (many believe it never happens in linux, but trust me - linux ain't so fool proof either), there are times I just move it to another workspace, coz there's nothing left to do. Of course, if you have a “Force Quit” button on hand, it's useful.

Download Manager
Even after SK Downloader, Wget, Gwget, Tucan, etc etc, I feel the lack of a proper non java-based download manager, which supports multi-threaded downloads – something like IDM in short. If anyone knows of any such application, do lemme know.

Unclean Shutdown
Every time you don't shutdown the system properly, you'll have to go through the pain of disk-checking and sometimes, running the fsck command to correct the inode errors. I wish it would auto-correct all the time and stop asking my permission for correcting each and every error.


Yet, I'll stick to Ubuntu coz in spite of this this, it's way faster than windows. And it has it's own advantages. I've high hopes pinned on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala – maybe it can make me forget windows once and for all.

So with the new hostel in place and another one coming up in due course of time, the authorities really seemed to be concerned about its maintenance. And they did take up some steps – yet life isn't actually comfortable...

I wonder how many homes have Jaguar taps, lets alone hostels. Yet, we have 'em – Jaguar taps each costing a grand, maybe even more. But the bottom line still remains the same – who's bothered about the quality of the tap when you have no water coming through them. It seemed that watre was coming 24 by 7 for a few days. And ironically, water stopped coming the next morning after these “exquisite” fittings were installed. Yet another case of “so near, yet so far”.

And everyday, we have guys coming in with brooms, vacuum cleaners et all knocking on our doors, asking if we want our rooms to be cleaned. I still remember having a tough time trying to get the room cleaned in 7th block. So this definitely is an improvement. However, I really find no need for it – most of the students, since it's a single room, keep their room clean by themselves. But it'll help those who are really too lazy to even sweep their own room.

Even then, these authorities who are so concerned about the maintenance of the rooms in which we live, turn a blind eye towards the quality of food we are supposed to eat. I say “supposed to eat” coz many don't eat in the food court, including me.


So all-in-all, I feel they're trying to provide accomodation to mechanised robots of sorts, who need no water and food to survive – just a well-maintained to room. And unfortunately, we ended up in that place...

So here's my vijaydashmi gift to my classmates - for their unity in deciding to bunk the OS mid-lab. The third question in the list - process scheduler using signals and context switching. This is not for the studs of the class who can or plan to do it on their own. This is for the rest - those who can't do it or don't wanna do it. I won't say it's perfect - but it worked fine for me. If ya find any faults, please leave a comment. And if ya like this post, a thanks would do.


Download here

So now once again, our internet is being monitored (well, it has always been, but now, even more so). The situation is not as bad as the catastrophic day last week. Yet it’s appalling.

In order to look more professional, they have created an error page this time with two major error messages :
• Weighted phrase limit exceeded.
• Banned extension: .exe

Now I really don’t know what the first one means – I suppose they are banning sites which many people visit and which they feel do not fall into the category they call educational sites. The second one is obvious – so now we are prohibited from even downloading new softwares, updating our antivirus et al.

If it was some service they are offering free of cost. No would’ve really bothered. But they take thousands of bucks from us in the name of internet fees and now this. When colleges like IITs don’t bother regulating the internet connections given to their students, I wonder why NITW is trying so badly to establish its authority over its students. If some regulation was really needed, they can register the mac addresses of each computer so that they can monitor each student personally and take specific actions in case someone acts unethically. But no – instead they block the net given to all students just coz of one odd nutter in the college.

I hope someone can knock some sense into this orthodox sect of people. They need to understand that the more they try to stop someone from doing something, the more they’re instigating them to do that very thing. I think Harry Potter fans might remember Hermione’s words from the Order of the Phoenix when Umbridge banned Quibbler in Hogwarts, “If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!”

The human brain acts funnily – they better understand that before they start to overdo things, which they feel are long overdue (I like the combination of overdo and overdue – sounds nice nay)! What they’re trying to do is not wrong, but how they’re trying to do is. I guess they better do a viability check before implementing their plans of action – or else it would be a repeat of last week’s fiasco.

If it happens I guess might quote Bernard M. Baruch, “Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life have been the consequence of action without thought.”

Or even Mary Beard, “Study without action is futile. Action without study is fatal.”

So today, we were to have our Operating Systems (OS in short) Mid-lab exam. And our teacher for one, normally doesn’t cancel or postpone exams so easily. So we reached there at 10 in the morning and waited for him to come.

Meanwhile, we were reminded of the problem at hand – none of the computers had a mouse. And the Graphical User Interface (GUI) won’t load without a mouse. The lab attendant (should I call him so) told us to talk to our teacher. So we continue waiting for him.

Tick tock tick tock….an hour passes – he doesn’t come. Loads of speculations flying around, “Maybe the lab exam is only for 2 hrs – he’ll come now.” “Maybe he’ll keep it next week.” And the sorts… Another hour passes…still no sign of him. Now the probability of the exam happening was below 0%. So we breathe a sigh of relief. But then, he finally makes his entry in the lab.

And he says very little and to the point, “Only two questions. (1)What did you do in the last 4 days!? (2) What did you do in the lab today!? Come according to your roll number, answer these and go.” Well, for the second one, everyone had only one answer – nothing!!! Most of the people didn’t even bother to log in. That was expected – he kept us on tenterhooks for two hours and now this.

All it did was add a collection of zeros in his register. Nothing else. But then – was it a lucky break or a start to a catastrophe!?
• Anyways, very few will get output no matter when the exam is.
• On top of that, we screwed our lab credits for a week.
• And we don’t know when he’ll keep the exam.

Too much to speculate – maybe he’ll surprise us later.

But as Jane Austen says (she happens to be my favourite author), “Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”

Keep your fingers crossed buddies...