Way to GSoC!

If there is one thing, which is a dream goal for any college student who loves to code, that would be GSoC (pronounced ‘jee-sock’). Well, what is this GSoC? Directly from the horse’s mouth,

“Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects.”

Long story short – Students willing to participate should first go through the list of selected organizations in GSoC -> Choose an organisation -> Choose a project -> Start discussing your proposal with the mentors and improve it -> Make a proposal and submit it through Google Melange. If you are selected, you make history (along with 5000 USDs in your bank account ).

I chose Umit as my organisation. Why? Take a look at their list of projects and you would understand the reason. Among all these projects, the relatively new “OpenMonitor” project was my favourite. I loved their idea. As it sounds, its a Monitor for the Open Internet. It keeps track of all the connections on the Internet and has the ability to trace back the reason of a network blockage or blackout. Simply put, it frames a nervous system of the Internet by implementing a peer-peer topology of nodes scattered around the globe. Thats totally awesome. I really wanted to be part of this wonderful project. When? It was last year (2011) May. I worked with Luis, who is a mentor at Umit. He was really really helpful. He guided me right from scratch and helped me out at every stage. I hacked around a bit on Umit Network Scanner, Packet Manipulator and OpenMonitor then. I even made a talk on Umit Network Scanner at Pycon India 2011.

Then came the news of GSoC 2012. And Umit made its way to the selected organisations list this time too! My joy knew no bounds to know that I had the chance to work on my favourite project as part of the legendary Google Summer of Code

I studied the code of Desktop Agent and Mobile Agent of OpenMonitor and I found that the Interpeer Routing was in a prototype-like stage and it really needed to be tweaked up for further enhancements to happen. Thus I started discussing the problem with Zubair, Luis and Adriano and finally settled with implementing a Kademlia based P2P implementation for the inter-peer communication among the desktop agents, mobile agents and the aggregator. We initially planned to make our own implementation from scratch in Python, but later planned to use C++ Kademlia libraries and writing wrappers in Python and Java.

And after all the discussions, I was able to fine tune my project proposal and submit my proposal.

The list of accepted proposals were out by GMT 1900 hours yesterday on the Google melange site and I was glad to see my name on the list. Now, I have a chance to work in one of the coolest projects in the open source world as part of the Google Summer of Code. I am really proud and happy to be at this place.

Special thanks to Dorai Thodla, Karthik Subramaniam, Madhumitha Vishwanathan, Yuvaraj Pandian and all the members of ChennaiGeeks and ILUGC communities in Chennai for exposing me to such excellent opportunities which until last year I hadn’t heard of.

Cheers!

Experience Cognizant – The Experience of a Lifetime

This post is about the wonderful experience I had with the Cognizant family in the first edition of “XPERIENCE COGNIZANT”. I wish each one of you experience the same!

So, how to make your way to be part of the 3-day festival? Open up your mind buddy, let me drop in some knowledge

Around the beginning of August 2011, I got the news about the first edition of “Experience Cognizant”. Initially I thought it was an usual mundane meeting wherein people at Cognizant say Cognizant is this and that and show some steeply raising graphs and charts of their profits. (Trust me, it was not so. The experience was OUT OF THE WORLD! )Students who were interested were asked to fill a terse nomination form which had questions like “Name” “Department” etc. and the second half of the page was left blank to fill in any specific achievements we would like to brag about After a couple of weeks, we got information through our placement cell that two students were selected as the Cognizant Brand Ambassadors from my college (SSN College of Engineering). Well! It was me and my college senior Nandhitha. Yayy! What next? The only thing we knew was that we should assemble at Cognizant Campus in MEPZ Chennai by 9.00 am on August 26, 2011 and we are gonna stay there for the next three days. Thats it. So I packed up stuff for the next three days and set off for XPC’11

The Cognizant Campus Ambassadors from the select 60 colleges from all over India were invited to participate in the 3-day conclave ‘Xperience Cognizant’. We were around 92 students in total. The purpose of this conclave was to create awareness among the student body about the work ethics of Cognizant and the future of technology as envisioned by Cognizant Technology Solutions. Lets call it a platform provided for the ambassadors to meet and interact with the senior level management at Cognizant and get to know how things work there. It was fantastic to meet the best minds from far corners of India pooled into a single place. We were excited to know what Cognizant had for us for the next three days. Here is a brief note on the 3-day festival.

Day 1:
Satish Jeyaraman who heads Talent Acquisition Team of Human Resource Department gave a presentation on Volatility in the technological world. He was a silent and humble person with versatile knowledge on the corporate world. He explained how Cognizant survived the legendary “Recession” disease. This was followed by a group activity where the ambassadors had to do role-play and collage art work on the topic related to placements. The creativity and acting skills of the students baffled me! There was another session at SIPCOT in Chennai by Ramachandran ,the Head of India for Campus Training Operations, about the training process that takes place at Cognizant. I must say that Cognizant is a mini-college. State-of-the-art technology with brilliant faculty. What else do you need for learning? Btw, it was the end of day. We went back to our rooms in the exquisite FORTUNE hotel standing elegant on the OMR road, Chennai. Owing to the continuous traveling that day, I slept like a baby as soon as I entered the room.

Day 2:
The ex-CEO of Cognizant Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan gave a short presentation and answered all the questions posed to him. I wanted to take a video of his talk. But sticking out my phone amidst such a refined set of audience would make me look dumb #PatheticMe . Then, Raj Bala, Chief Technology Officer of Cognizant took a session on upcoming trends in IT. He also explained about all the research initiatives that Cognizant was pioneering. I was really interested on Cognizant’s work on Cloud Computing and Mobile technologies. Until then I was thinking Cognizant was all about C#, .NET and Java. But I was completely wrong. Their scope is far far beyond what I had initially surmised. Then suddenly we had a quiz competition rolling in! They called it ‘AWE’ General Quiz. Each college forms a team. Nandhitha and I cracked the prelims and won Second Prize in the finals. Then there was a premilinary round on Technical quiz wherein we had questions on C and C++. Being a Computer Science student, I found it really simple and finished it off soon. This was followed with an evening of cultural activities where the employees of Cognizant performed. I even saw few of my college seniors there.

The Day-2 night is unforgettable. Each and every incident which happened then is still so vivid in my head. Now before you jump into conclusions, let me say that your guess is wrong (Bad bad mind, no doughnuts for you! ) That night, all the Tamil speaking people stayed up in a single room and we were chatting till 3 or 4 in the night (I don’t remember the time. But it was late). We had this “Truth or Dare” game and then some beautiful love stories getting revealed. It was nice meeting new people.

Day 3:
The day began with the Prize distribution ceremony. You have no idea how many prizes Nandhitha and I grabbed then! Let me list them.
1. General Quiz: 2nd Place – Won 12.1 MP Sony Cybershot Digicams
2. Technical Quiz: 2nd Place – Won iPods
SSN College emerged as the overall winners and we Campus Ambassadors won Acer Laptops and the title “Grand Brand Ambassadors”. And after that there was no talks, no quizzes or no Cognizantism. It was a special screening of the movie ‘Final Destination 5′ arranged at Mayajaal! It was awesome.

tl;dr : In a nutshell this program was mainly aimed at promoting the brand value of Cognizant so that more students will be interested in being a part of the Cognizant family. It was a wonderful learning-cum-fun experience meeting and sharing ideas with the best brains from across the country. Experience of a lifetime. (And I must say that Cognizant is one of the best workplaces I have seen. If you are a tech news follower, then you’d have noticed that Cognizant CEO D’Souza is one of the titans who’d define India in 2012)

Xperience Cognizant - 2011

And here is the interesting part! Cognizant is collecting nominations for the next version of “Xperience Cognizant”. Contact your college placement cell for more information. All the best guys! Don’t miss it..
Cheers!

Installing the Facebook Timeline feature : Step-by-Step

I just installed Facebook Timeline feature in my profile and got engrossed in it awesomeness. A brilliant feature introduced to the world through the recent F8 Developers Conference, FB Timeline gives a beautiful portrayal of what you are and what you have been. And the timeline is neat and concise with a good mix of statuses, videos and pics, (and most importantly) at an amazing speed! The Timeline feature is the perfect example of gigabytes of per-user information put into good use. Now lets see how to activate it on your profile.

<guarantee>The steps below would hardly take 2 minutes to complete</guarantee>

Step 1 : Open https://developers.facebook.com/apps. This opens the developer page for you account. If you haven’t developed anything yet, it will ask for the “legendary” Request for Permission where we blindly issue an “Allow” irrespective of whatever it asks us to allow

Step 2 : Now inside the developer’s page, you could find two obvious buttons to the top right namely “Edit App” and “Create New App”. Click on “Create New app” button.

Step 3 : A new message box appears where we are asked to enter an “App Display Name” and “App Namespace”. I entered it as “Narendran’s Chronicles” since my timeline is just gonna be my own history and the namespace as “narendranapps”. (Never Mind!)

Step 4 : You might have to enter your mobile number of credit card details to make yourself authentic to FB. I used my mobile number. After some 2-3 minutes, got a message saying “Facebook Mobile Confirmation Code: XXXX”. Enter this confirmation code into the textbox that appears on the screen and you are done with this authentication thing.

Step 5 : Now getting into the developer page once again, click on “Open Graph” on the Left bar. Under that choose “Get Started”.

Step 6 : You will get a page “Get Started with Open Graph” and it prompts “Start by defining one action and one object for you app”. I entered “read my timeline” at “profile”, since the timeline gets attached to my profile. Click the green “Get started” button.

Step 7 : The next page gives you options to edit the notifications which are displayed once someone reads your timeline. You can very well ignore this and click “Save Changes and Next”. Else if you are grammatically challenged like me you can have your own funny notifications.

Step 8 : Click “Save and Finish” in the next page.

Step 9 : Now you would be facing a page which gives you some alarmingly technical information and makes your mind-voice go WTF! But you could safely ignore this and open your FB profile as usual. You’l get a message which looks like this.

Message regarding Timeline feature

Step 10 : Click “Get it Now”. And yes, you’ve got it now!!

This is how your FB timeline looks!!

Cheers!

Rambling : my life in the past six years

I know that many people are like me – simple wandering about saying “yes” to whatever is asked. Spending most of the time dreaming what to do and suddenly a phone call reminds you that you need to go out to hangout with friends, submit your lab record or attend some meeting/function. In other words, not having a definite goal for yourselves and setting goals based on what you see around at that moment. What you are about to read is one such story – Ya, the story of myself. Read on and you might find a lot of similarities with your own life and that might bring up a smile on your face.

• In my 10th standard, I wanted to become an archaeologist – I read about the various civilizations and even visited monuments and temples to read history. I talk with Sanskrit professors about the origins of India.
• Then after seeing a big shot by the name Dr.Kathiravan in my hometown. He was a symbol of dedication, hardwork and passion. Then I wanted to become a doctor and serve the people.
• I was naturally good at drawing (thanks to mom). I attended some painting classes during my 11th standard under Mr.Sylvester Peter. He used to say me that I have natural talent and could become a very good artist one day. Coincidentally I was already winning prizes at state level competitions. So, (you know a school boy’s mindset rite?)  I wanted to become a professional artist.
• My father is a coach in my district cricket association. He taught me every nuance in fast bowling and made me a pretty good bowler. When I made it into the district team, I thought I should enter into the Indian cricket team one day.
• When I reached the later part of 11th standard, I loved every concept in Physics and made a prototype of a Reverse Osmosis plant with my classmates. I was inspired by Albert Einstein, the man synonymous with the word “Genius”. I wanted to revolutionize the world by inventing the Time machine
• During my 12th standard, I wanted to be a polymath and started winning every extra-curricular activity I found in my way. My dream of getting state rank perished with that. But I was very, very happy travelling long distances and meeting new people.
• The 12th annual holidays helped me get into better contact with my brother Vivek. My brother has been winning the best employee award every Q (Quarter of a financial year) ever since he entered into Robert Bosch. He is the youngest person to get an onsite job in the HQ of Bosch in Germany. Seeing him grow, I wanted to become a Mechanical Engineer.
• Then since I was engrossed in Computer Games during the 12th holidays, my parents said that I might be naturally inclined to computers and enrolled me for BE Computer Science under Anna University, Chennai. And yeah, I did learn it with passion (like I did for every other activity )
• I started learning Java in my first year under one of the Assistant Professors in my department. I made a calculator using Java Swing and said to myself that “Yeah! thats it man! I am the king of Java. I will learn all the packages within a month and create a really big project in it. Thus I can get into Sun Microsystems as a Java specialist”. (Naivety ruled me )
• Then came the voices on Cloud Computing. I started working on Xen, read lots of Amazon white papers and made some *trivial* papers on Cloud Computing. I was working all alone then.
• Then one celestial meeting occurred, I met my best friend Ahamed Nafeez in my own hostel. He too seemed to be in a similar wavelength as myself. When I talked with him, before I could realise we were best friends already. We decided to work in Networks. We did certifications togethers, won Network engineering competitions, paper presentations, and to cap it all, we did a workshop on Network security. During those days, my dream company was Cisco and Cisco only.
• Then when I saw Android flourishing, I started hacking into android development. I was jaw-dropped on seeing the cool projects in the Android Developer Conference. I worked with my roommate Ganesh to create some cool projects involving a variety of Android technologies. We wanted to make a startup on Android Apps.
• Then I got introduced to the Bhumi Social Foundation through Manoj. At this point, you should know that my entire family is known for social service. Even I got some accolades regarding that. So I was easily influenced and I got into that completely different world. Then I decided to  get into full time social service by becoming a member of Teach For India. I have already said about the phone interview I had. But with a second thought, full time social service did not look like a good idea. So I dropped it.
• Then I got my first Wifi enabled phone Nokia E63. I used Internet in my mobile very often. When I found that browsing was too slow in wireless networks, I started working on a solution and found a problem with TCP performance.  I made a research paper on it and it will published as a proceeding in Springer LNCS in few days. I wanted to bring a change in the way Wireless Networks worked.
• Then my interest in Python began to sprout out when GSoC 2011 approached. Though I couldn’t do GSoC this year due to my brother’s marriage, I got into another Summer of Code by Umit, which was also a part of GSoC. Then I started making a few hacks in Python and now am sitting at PyCon in Pune typing out this blog at an alarming speed Now I dream of becoming an expert python hacker.

To finish it off, I realize that what I am now is just the remnant of all the previous Narendrans I had been throughout my life. Sorta jack of all trades. Seeing the specialist Python Hackers around me makes me feel guilty of not having done anything significant. I have tried atleast a 100 different things in the past six years that went undocumented and unnoticed . Saying this, even my future is uncertain. Few years down the lane, I have no idea what I would be doing. I don’t even know if this is strange or this is a “Typical Adolescent Thinking”. I need to specialize in one field through which I can effectively serve the community. DOT.

When I was hopelessly lamenting this to my mom, she replied, “What is the highest position in your field? Something named Google rite? I don’t want you to get in there and break your head. You got placed already. Be happy for that. Oor suthify with your friends, get married in a couple of years, settle happily and speak Tamil at home. Thats enuf. And dont ever take this topic again when on phone or when at home!!”

In a nutshell : I say “Enna valka da idhu”, Mom says “Keep it simple silly!”

Life Lessons : What I learnt from my 20-year experience on Earth

Though I have loads of things to blog about, am settling down with the life lessons I have learnt through my varied experiences as a son, brother, friend, student, painter, gamer, social servant, hacker, team leader and an insane thinker. The final result I got after brainstorming myself is something that is better felt than being listened to. Here is the depiction of what I figured out from my little 20-year experience.

Lesson 1 :
You can become whatever you wish to become with sheer dedication and hardwork. Be it a doctor, computer engineer, scientist, painter, musician, Anna Hazare, or Osama Bin Laden, you name it! But what matters is what you love to do.. What you are made for.. What every cell of yours is inclined to do.. What is it that you can do 24x7x365 tirelessly with complete passion. That is your destiny. Don’t waste your life trying to become someone else. Life is counted on how much you have enjoyed by being yourself.  Don’t hide your true potential just because you feel that its not upto the mark. You are already awesome

The obvious question is “How do we find what we are made for?”. Answer – No one else other than you could find it. Ask yourself and get confused a million times, you will find the right answer one day.

Lesson 2 :
My life in Chennai taught me a hell lot about relationships. Ofcourse, am learning some hard lessons even now. But one fundamental concept I noticed is that – Many people in Chennai are NOT what they seem to be. They pretend to be that “someone else” for the sake of getting accepted by the society. And thats hilarious. When you are true to yourself and to the community around you, whatever you get would be a genuine fit for you. Even if you have very few friends, you could be 100% sure that they are true to you.

In short – Don’t waste your life trying to become something. Do what you love to do, and automagically you will become the one you are destined to be. A fantastic life is guaranteed if you start living YOUR life right now and enjoy every moment.

You might think that these are the words which you find on some lame books like “You can Win” or some Share-Auto’s cover. But trust me.. This is the Ultimate Truth.

Still I have lot more to say, but for now its better if I halt with this

Courtesy – The innumerable times I’ve spent time thinking about human life and to my role model who has been my inspiration since birth, my lovely lovely brother Vivek Thangarajan.

Cheers!

eBay Interview Process : How I got placed in eBay-PayPal

I’ve been wanting to share this for quite long. Am extremely happy to say that I got placed (along with @madhuvishy @TheAkj and Divya) in the reputed eBay-PayPal for a pretty decent compensation package. So here is the story how I made it.

eBay - Paypal

eBay-PayPal is the first company that came for recruitment in my college. So almost everyone of us was really excited about how the interview process is gonna be. We discussed a lot among ourselves about how the questions might be and had a good laugh over some really funny arguments. Pure #Naivety

Initially the eligibility criteria for attending the recruitment process was 90% in 10th, 12th and in college without standing arrears!! Manasatchilessly daunting, isn’t it? I see that you couldn’t help yourself from avoiding that jaw-dropping expression adorning your visage. That’s how we stared at our Placement Officer when he announced it. When he found that only one person was eligible from the whole college, he relaxed one of the constraints. From 90%, the cutoff dropped to 75% till 6th semester in college. Yet the 90% in 10th and 12th remained. I WAS IN!

The recruitment process started on August 1st (My  Birthday ) The first round was a written test. The “legen-dary” Multiple Choice Questions. We had 30 questions out of which (to our surprise) about 60% was based on Java and C++, while the rest of the questions spanned around verbal and quantitative abilities. To be more specific, here are a few niches you could focus on..

• OOPS concepts – Data abstraction, Excapsulation, Virtual Destructors etc.
• Database – SQL Queries and the basics
• Networks – Subnet addressing
• Probability – coupled with Permutation/Combinations
• Analogies

We were given the question paper, an OMR sheet and 45 minutes to crack the questions. To be frank, the questions were easy and I was wondering how the eBay recruitment team is gonna choose from the competitive scores. But after half an hour, a set of 22 students were shortlisted from the talented lot. And I was one among them That marked the end of the day.

The next day we had a series of Technical Interviews. The interviewers tested our knowledge on pattern matching, logical thinking, problem solving skills, Java, DBMS and Data Structures. And regarding Java, most of the questions were from java.util.Collections Framework. Poor me! Having no idea about this one topic, I was struggling with the Java questions. I m pretty good with the DBMS concepts, so that overshadowed my “Java Deficiency Syndrome”. And all thanks to my considerably strong resume. And I hold an 8.6 CGPA – neither too good nor too bad. So I had my resume as the trumpcard. Since I had two really good projects on DBMS and Java, one submitted to IBM and the other which fetched me a 30k bounty at the National Level Database Design Competition at IIT-K, I was confident. Another challenge I faced there during the interview was that I was more of a computer networks guy than a hardcore programmer, yet I had to project myself as a software developer there.

In my case, the third round of Technical Interview was skipped. And finally, by the end of the day, they read out five names including mine. I thought that it was done and I was in! But then dawned the ultimate twist. The HR interviewer Ms.Kalaivani said, “You guys are shortlisted for the final round, which will be held at eBay office tomorrow”. On hearing that the inner voices of all five of us resonated “OMG! Not AGAIN!!”. Of course, everything is for getting into a good company.

The next day, a gorgeous Innova drew up near my hostel gate at around 1 pm. I was comfortably escorted to eBay office where I met my four colleagues. The workplace was cool (pun -the A/C ). The employees there dint seem tensed at all. So I was really motivated to get such a tension-free yet high-paying job offer.

There we went through two more rounds of technical interview. This time it was us who did the talking. In my case, the interviewers were keenly interested in knowing about every line in my resume. Thus it was almost a cake walk for me then.  The final round was a HR interview with the mundane “Tell about yourself” and “What your strengths and weaknesses”. After everything was done, the same Innova car ensconced me back to my hostel. Thus ended the awesome experience!! And the very same night, we got the results from the eBay office. Thus after a written aptitude test, four rounds of Technical Interview and an HR Interview, I WAS SELECTED!!  So this is where I would find myself in a few months..

eBay-PayPal Office in Chennai

Thus happily everafter Cheers!

Internet and the Web : The evolution from Bits to Bitcoins

Web has become almost ubiquitous with our daily chores.  Take for example – When we sit before our PC/Laptop, how many of us start typing the letters “F” “A” “C” and choose “facebook.com” from the drop down and then wonder why we chose it? Such is the impact of the Web on our routine activities. Research says Internet has changed the way we remember facts. Rather than remembering the birthdate of our best friends, we just rely on Gmail reminders. Don’t we?

The amount of information generated in the World Wide Web each day is unimaginably high. What could be done in 60 seconds? Sounds trivial? Well, let me allow the picture to speak for itself.

The Web in 60 seconds

This mammoth network of networks wasn’t built in a day. The web has seen a phenomenal growth since its inception.

Web 1.0 – The Read web. People could just read the contents articulated by others. One-way communication.

Web 2.0 – The Read, Write Web. People could comment on what others said. Thus started the era of blogging. Two-way communication.

Web 3.0 – The Read, Write, Execute Web. People share their ideas. And the system processes and understands the information it has obtained from various authors and suggests the contents which a particular person would be interested in. That’s why he call it the Semantic Web. Suggestion Engines, Mashups, Micro-blogging etc. make the Web much more interactive.

Now we are experiencing the indocile rise of HTML5, which, I feel, is a paradigm shift in Web technologies. With a clever use of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS almost anything and everything could be emulated on the Web. And the OS makers are also ceaselessly working to avoid being an #epicfail. Say, with Windows 8, all the applications (called tailored apps) are supposed to run on HTML5, bringing in in a radically new concept for an operating system. And we are expecting a ChromeOS which could sound the death-knell to all the Native Apps and introduce the concept of “Browser is the OS”.

The Internet we are witnessing now is something larger than life. Something we are depending on so heavily that one day we might even forget our own names and check our Google+ profiles to get them.

The future of Internet, I believe, would be to make an unified ecosystem wherein it would be possible to get the same amount of data storage and processing power from any kind of device connected to the internet. 

Below is a wonderful infographic on how far the Internet has catapulted from humble beginnings to colossal heights.

Extent of "Internetization" : Courtesy - Cisco

Opinion : Doing your Engineering Undergraduation in a City

<Note> Absolutely No Statistics. Purely Experience </Note>

Well, its counseling time in Tamil Nadu and the students are already super perplexed on which college to choose. There are generally two ways students choose their college.

1. Best College — Whatever Department is available

2. Favourite Department — Whatever College is available.

I would flatly say them to choose their favourite department in any college in a CITY for various reasons. Though the word CITY seems general, I infer the following from my migration from Sivakasi to Chennai. To list a few of the merits..

Being in the city, you could get along with a good mixture of people from all corners of India. Mingling with them will often mandate the use of English. Thus you need not attend any spoken English classes for bettering your communication skills. Getting embarrassed a couple of times is the fastest way to develop your English knowledge. By the time placements are on, you are already an eloquent and attractive speaker.

In terms of technology, cities are (on an average) two years faster than other towns and villages in India. Well, its obvious. Since the city side students are exposed to such knowledge right from their birth, they are undeniably a step ahead of other students from villages. Thus getting in touch with them would help you learn and grow faster. And within a year you could find yourselves standing on par with them in every aspect of life. And remember, its not about competing with them, its about growing together. Many don’t understand this and fall into a conundrum.

City is the place where the things are happening for real. Like there is difference between reading about a Grand Startup Fest in a newspaper and being a part of that Grand Startup Fest itself. So being in the city offers you the chance to participate in many organisations which hitherto had been only in your monthly digests/newspapers.

The best coaching centres for GRE/CAT/GATE/You-name-it is present in the City. In Chennai, there are Time, Kaplan, Career Launcher, IMS etc. Numerous students get into top-notch universities through such coaching. And this is a major advantage.

About the culture. As with the variety in languages, you could enjoy a variety of cultures and mannerisms. It is a little hard to be yourselves when people around you sport enticing gears and cinematic lifestyles. But that is left to you.

Now getting down to the Computer Science stream, I would easily say that am enjoying a lot more features than any student in any other part of TamilNadu, just because I am in Chennai. The number of technology communities in Chennai is remarkably high that its tough to choose where you want to be. And each community is flourishing at a blistering pace. For the list of groups in Chennai you can refer to the list made by Kevin William David - http://blog.kevinwilliamdavid.me/2011/06/05/list-of-startup-tech-groups-in-chennai/

There are meetings from the Chennai’s Linux User Group where open source enthusiasts share knowledge by taking seminars on various topics. Then there is this Nerd Dinner wherein you could meet the nerds from all over Chennai and have dinner with them. Then there is the Python Group, Android Group, and loads of startup groups which guide you with your entrepreneurial skills. Thus you are never alone. You always have an excellent team working with you.

Though there are a few negative points, like the other side of the coin, I don’t think it would overshadow the merits of being in a college in city.

So thats it.. Just wanted to share this opinion.

Cheers

The two apps I love as an Android user

Its been almost a couple of weeks since I bought my Samsung Galaxy S2 and am completely in love with it. I believe that the current trend among the youngsters is like – Gadget companies are like religions. You follow one and keep your mouth shut about other companies. In that sense, I worship the Android OS ( with a true spirit of an open-source enthusiast ) Its been just a few days since I started using it and now my routine work has become much comfortable.

As they say “Character maketh a man”, I would say “Apps maketh a platform”. Even the phenomenal growth of Facebook could be attributed to the bountiful of apps that came flooding in every day. Now talking about apps, I started downloading numerous apps through Android market and it was during this time that I downloaded these two apps which have changed the way I use mobile phones.

<JustSaying> I know am late in this review. These two apps are already topping the charts in the market. But still I thought I could share my viewpoint on them  :)  </JustSaying>

1. DropBox : Dropbox is a free service that allows you to have all your photos, music, docs, and apparently every thing on your PC or mobile on to the cloud and make it accessible to all your devices wherever you are. Once you download (http://www.dropbox.com/) and install this app on to your phone and PC, you are not going to search for your pen drives anymore. After the installation, a folder named “Dropbox” is created on your system. In my system, the folder looks like this :

The Dropbox folder

The Photos folder in my Dropbox

Note : The tick mark indicates that the folder is completely synced with your Dropbox cloud storage.

And  this is the Dropbox folder on any Android phone :

Dropbox on Android

2. Evernote : If you are one of those persons who finds it insanely laborious to keep your notes synchronized among your phone, Windows and Linux desktops, you are not alone. Maybe you “were” not alone. Because I found this solution to be really good. This app named Evernote, is once again, like storing your notes in the cloud and accessing it from anywhere. Be it on your Windows desktop, Ubuntu Workspace or Android phone. You can make clippings of your webpage or even store a snapshot/pic as a note and sync it with your evernote account. Moreover, editing and syncing text is done so quickly that you don’t even realize that its connected to the web.

This is how Evernote looks on Android phone :

Evernote Screenshots - courtesy : TechCrunch

Evernote is not available for Ubuntu currently. So I use an open-source alternative called “NeverNote” (hilariously named) which could be downloaded at http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/. It offers almost the same functionalities as the original Evernote app.

Of course there are a lot of alternatives available to these two apps. But, according to me, these two are the best among them.

Good use of technology can save a lot of time, in terms of hours or even days. Lets celebrate technology!! Cheers

Increase Tata Photon Browsing speed through a simple DNS setting

Nowadays I find interest in solving the real-life problems which people face everyday through technology (However trivial it may look, its gonna help someone )

Are you one of those thousands of people who are not satisfied by the browsing speed they get with Tata Photon+ connection? Well here is the simplest tweak you could make and increase the browsing speed by a maximum of 300% and AM NOT JOKING!

If you are a geek, am sure you’d have figured it out already. But if you are a non-technically inclined person, this post is for you. The sloth-like speed of Tata Photon+ connection is due to the default DNS servers. So the tweak is setting your DNS to 8.8.4.4 and the alternate DNS to 8.8.8.8. These are Google’s Public DNS server addresses.

In Windows : 

This is for Windows 7. I believe everyone is current enough to have it on your PC

Open Control Panel –> Network and Internet –> Network and Sharing Center –> Change Adapter Settings

Right Click on your Tata Photon+ Connection –> Properties

Move to Networking Tab

Double Click Internet Protocol Version 4

In the second fieldset, change to “Use the Following DNS server addresses”.

Preferred DNS server  : 8.8.4.4 and Alternate DNS server : 8.8.8.8

Click OK and Reconnect.

In Ubuntu : 

Click the Network Connections icon on the right hand side tray of Ubuntu Desktop.

Choose “Edit connections”

Change to “Mobile Broadband” –> Choose the Tata Photon+ Connection and click “Edit”

Then it might ask for your password. Enter it.

Change the Method to “Automatic (PPP) addresses only”

Set DNS servers to 8.8.4.4, 8.8.8.8

Click Save and Reconnect.

Note :  If you don’t find any improvement after the change, then may be Google Public DNS is not the one for you. It works best if you are in Chennai. Now, the thing is that Tata Photon’s default DNS servers are not that fast. So we need a better alternative. You can find them by using Namebench software.

Please note that we improved only the DNS resolution part of the web page fetching process. This will not have any impact on your download speeds.