Change Log of the past 6 months

It was after 4.5 months that i returned back home from college. It was a hard time as one has to manage his studies taking care of his routine, food, clothes, and what all is required to leave a healthy life @ any college. The first semester is an important part of the 4 year BE. After the completion of the first sem, i currently have a healthy GPA of 9.38 on a ten point scale.

December is vacation time for most of the college students. I had pre-planned my vacations in all respects. Most of the part dealt with gaming and other computing activities that i could not indulge into while i was at college. To start with, i completed Farcry, probably rated as one of the best FPS of all time. Graphics rendering was not good on my notebook, but i should appreciate what the integrated intel chipset could do with 1759MB of shared memory. Today, many people have completed even Farcry 2 , but that can hardly run on my machine. The second game i started with was Machinarium, a super puzzle game. The biggest thing about this game is that it relies entirely on the flash engine. And Amanita Designs have put their heart and soul into creating this amazing piece of adventure.

Regarding computing, i had several things in mind. I wanted to learn Visual C# completely. The confusing part was with the pre-knowledge of C++, Visual C++ was a good second option. It carried great weightage as the new code i had thought of implementing in Firefox was based on Visual C++. I was unfamiliar with Mercurial (and the huge list of hg commands) which were a sort of prerequisite to begin coding for mozilla. During this year, i had succeeded in creating some windows form applications of general use in Visual C#. I finally went with C# and currently in the process of learning. The second thing regarding computing was getting back my data from my old desktop to my notebook. I had two options, direct LAN or WAN. I tried both ways, first LAN, i got a nearly constant speed of 10MBPS. Switching to WAN via my Siemens 802.11 a/b/g Router gave me a maximum of 54Mbps, much slower than what a single LAN wire would easily provide. At the end of nearly 4 hrs, i ended up transferring 150GB of data :)





Christmas time one of the most awesome period of the year (Even though i hate cold weather :P). This year, i got for myself a 1600 CPI iball laser mouse and some comic books, including Superman Adventures, Batman, Justice League and Spiderman. My old 800 CPI mouse had a defective scroll wheel. Things at home had changed somewhat. I had shifted to a new temporary home far away from my old place, something that i hardly liked. So meeting old friends was an integral part of this vacation. These holidays are coming to an end in a week's time from now and i'm already waiting for the next semester to be over as soon as possible.

Technorati Tags: change log, christmas, computing, vacation

Adjusting to Mandriva Linux

I did a clean install of Mandriva Linux (i586) powerpack 2008 yesterday on a separate 25GB partition (ext3 formatted), thereby dual booting with Windows Vista Home Premium.

One of the early problems i faced was regarding writing data on NTFS formatted drives (i had 3 of them!). Thankfully Linux programmers have written out a library known as ntfs-3g to enable write support on the Linux kernel. Fetch the ntfs-3g through "Mandriva Linux Control Center", unmount the NTFS drive through disk drake, switch to "Expert mode", change the type of the drive to "NTFS-3G", uncheck ro (read-only) from options, and re-mount the drive for the changes to take place.





The same thing can be done through "Configuration Editor".


Second thing was getting my windows applications to run so that i dont feel like i'm in a no-man's land :)

The default "Software Management" tool was useful in itself but it is not a complete solution. I fetched software info's as well as their main updates from Online Repositories through Konsole. A useful website for this job is :- http://easyurpmi.zarb.org






The links to the repositories (which are infact Konsole commands) are provided by selecting the appropriate linux, its version as well as its architecture.

To integrate those repositories into the "Software Management", the Konsole commands have to be executed as root.





Next, i updated my system via "Mandriva Control Center". I had around a 1100 updates (now that figure seems a little big for my 256Kbps connection :) ). After the updation process is complete, switch back to "Software management". Applications are now updated and new ones are added.



After doing this much, i felt somewhere near to being @ my home.


The one thing that surprised me in linux was its Konsole being case sensitive, as it is seen here while i was trying to install Nvidia Drivers for my 6200TC:-




Technorati Tags: mandriva, linux, repository, ntfs

My First Windows Application!

It's a Web Searcher!

U need to have .NET framework 3.5 installed along with windows installer 3.1 in order to run the application.....

Here's the LINK for the software.

Technorati Tags: Web Searcher, mediafire

International Students Software Competition ( ISSC 2007) At Bangkok, Thailand

I with my 2 friends( team of three) represented our nation at Bangkok in International Students Software Competition, which consisted of programming ( problem solving). We stood first at the All India Level after qualifying the state level. We programmed on Java, rest teams like Sri lanka used C++, Thailand folks themselves used Java, Taiwan team worked on C++ as well, etc. There were 2 rounds on two separate days, trials and finals, we stood fourth overall. Its a great pride to represent your motherland, that was the most amazing thing that we experienced. Rest details can also be found at this site in the achievements of last 6 years list. Some Pics of Bangkok of our trips taken by my taiwan friend, Danny, can be seen here