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So, I pulled all-nighter because I needed to understand 3 research papers and was supposed to compare them and then meet my BTech Project Guide. And to my surprise I couldn’t even complete a single paper. Of course, after all I am daring enough to work under Dr. Ganguly. Of course, I am still hoping that this ‘dare’ will give fruits . It’s interesting to work on something which you know you can not do. Isn’t it?

So, after this night, I had class at 02:30 UTC. To enter Academic Area there are mainly 4 gates. I usually take a gate which is usually not taken by other students. Each gate has a Security Guard. Of course we never notice security guard, and I assumed that security guards never give any attention to students. But today when I was rushing for the class, this security guard at the gate said, “Sir, aapki chaal mast hai”. Which means “Sir, your walking style is good/interesting.” I was shocked. First I didn’t even notice that he was there. Second that he must be observing me for quite sometime. Third that he said something like this. I said “kya?” (“what?”) and he replied “aap chalte hue achche lagte hain.” ( “you look good when you are walking”). wierd!!! I am sure he wan’t hitting on me, but still, its weird.
Then it comes out that there was no class today. And I need to complete an assignment by tonight. And I need to complete some formalities by 06:30 UTC for placements. So, I have no time to sleep in day time as well. On thursday, I have got  2 exams, need to do preparation for that as well. And then BTP work.

By the way, my BTech Project is about “Compressed Sensing”. I will be starting a new blog to talk about it. Stay tuned.

Dr. Dheeraj Sanghi, who is a professor at Computer Science and Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur, and who is currently SUGC in IIT Kanpur did a special observation and posted it on iitk.misc newsgroup. The observation is like this :

Year of passing means the year in which the student finished his/her high-school. Since IIT is very prestigious school and other schools are way worse than IIT, everyone wants to get into IIT. Thats why, some students who couldn’t get into IIT spend 1 year after high school and prepare for IIT Entrance Exam.

This observation is important for 2 reasons (at least):

1. The statistics says that out of 535 student 351 students wasted their at least 1 year for IIT JEE preparation. Note that most of the 2005 passouts spent 1 year just on JEE preparation. Most of the times they do not join any other school. And even if they do when they come to IIT and join as freshers they in fact trash that 1 year. For 2004 passouts and others I wouldn’t say its all true. They may have joined some other school. But still they wasted years in that school. Isn’t it horrible? Students are wasting time in JEE prepartion, the time they could have used in some creative work. Of course it’s not IITs fault. Rather now IIT has made the rule that you can join IIT in the year say ‘y’ only if you completed your high school in a year > y-2 . India need to create more ‘good schools’. But please don’t do that by sacrificing IIT’s name. Stupid Arjun Singh can do this thing. Improve NITs. They have got potential.
2. Second thing is the trend of CPI. What is the reason that CPI is decrease with gap between passout year and IIT joining year? I am not sure about the reason. Here are some reasons I could think of :

• Fresh students can study more because they are the once who studied for high school and for JEE both. So, of course IIT load wasn’t too much for them. On the other hand since dropouts (students who spent a year or more for JEE preparation) had lot of time during JEE preparation, they couldn’t face the IIT academic pressure.
• Freshers are still studying for exams and marks. On the other hand dropouts had time and they now understand that exams are stupid things and working for marks is stupidity. (I believe that exams doesn’t prove anything. And if it doesn’t prove anything, fuck it, don’t care about it)

Can you suggest something seeing this stat?

I started writing some quotes that I use sometimes as my status messages. my_status_messages . Then I got a hint that even using quotes can infringe copyright laws. Here are some links :

• US Copyright Office : It says :

There are circumstances under the fair use doctrine where a quote or a sample may be used without permission. However, in cases of doubt, the Copyright Office recommends that permission be obtained.

• University of Cambridge : It says :

Although a quote may appear to be a small part of the entire work, if the particular quote has assumed great importance, this may be a ‘substantial part’.

Really, “FAIR USE” is bullshit. I have to think twice before using quotes. wtf! I have removed some quotes from my wiki page. Hope the existing ones are not infringing any copyright.

Listed are the burgers that I use :

1. Twitter : Quite good for keeping status messages.
2. Jamendo : A good collection of songs
3. Dokuwiki : cool for my wiki
4. wordpress : perfect substitute for blogspot.
5. eyeOS : havn’t used it properly yet.
6. gallery2 : good enough for gallery.
7. wikipedia : The GOD.
8. youtube : sometimes when I just can not control myself, I listen to metallica.
9. revver : My first video is on revver.
10. facebook : yet other way of wasting time.
11. orkut : bullshit
12. skype : I needed something to talk to my parents. Ekiga doesn’t support proxy
13. Google : Second GOD
14. godaddy : They should give me some discount as I bought 6 domains from them.
15. linux : life line.

mm, I want my Gentoo back. This is a funny article which says who uses what linux distro.

http://www.askreamaor.com/linux-and-unix/what-your-linux-distro-says-about-you/

So, what does your linux distro say about you?

http://www.pclaunches.com/software/olympic_committee_chooses_xp_over_vista.php

What Google services have you used?

I have used the followings :

Search Engine : Its awesome. Does some one has any doubt about it?

Reader : Well, I recently started using Google reader. I have not used other readers, but I had once made an rssfeed reader. Well, if someone will give me an option, I will use my rssfeed reader. My rssreader was made on .net framework (mercy, please). I have not tested it on Mono. Surprising my thunderbird on Fedora doesn’t give me option for “news and rss” account. And anyways, thunderbird sucks for networks with proxy. My rssfeed reader has proper proxy support. But the point is that I want my data on net, so that I could access it from anywhere. But at the same time, its a bit inconvenient as well.

Calendar : Currently, I am using Google Calendar. I mainly use it to keep track of the money transactions and birthdays. I don’t use it that frequently. It’s not worth seeing online calendar. I want desktop application and online application both. I don’t think google calendar can be a solution. Whats going in Evolution? Really, Office Outlook is far too good for this purpose.

Documents : I don’t prefer it. It’s very slow.

Photos : Picasa is good. I do not have doubt about it. But Gallery2 and digikam combo is better. Both are free. Its working fine on my site. rohitj.net/photo . I will write a separate review on it.

Blogspot : Well, I have shifted from blogger to WordPress. I did not have any problem with blogger. Blogger was equally good except the fact that there was this blue colored strip at the top of the page which didn’t go well with my green theme.

Groups : I have used 2 google-groups now. The good thing in google groups is that you can make a group which will be all email based. So, you don’t need to go to a site to see posts and to write anything. Thats cool. No advertisements, nothings. I don’t think phpBB has this email feature.

Orkut : Those who don’t know about it, orkut is like facebook. Let’s try to compare facebook and orkut. In facebook, one good thing is the privacy it gives you. Others can not see your profile unless they are your friends or you have tried to communicate with them. You can add so many photos. In orkut you can just add 12 photos. Though you can give your picasaweb address. Tagging on photo is cool in facebook. Orkut doesn’t have this application system, which is good. Facebook is so full of these silly applications. Facebook has Indox, which is good. Groups in orkut are cool. Orkut groups make you use them. Some groups are really active. Overall, I think facebook is better.

gmail : I have used yahoo and hotmail as well. I think gmail is better. Well, the user interface is no doubt sucky. There is no option for user made folders. Labeling thing isn’t cool. Hotmail is better for this purpose, but its too heavy. But Google spam filter is awesome. I get like 10 spams everyday. It filters it properly. In my Indox, I rarely see any spam. And unlike hotmail, it doesn’t delete spams without asking me. Yahoo anyways sucks, so lets not talk about it. I think 1GB is more than enough for a normal person. So, lets not compare space. But there is no IMAP server, thats very bad. POP3 doesn’t work as well. If they will make POP3 work properly, I will start using gmail as my main mail box. Right now, its my school mailbox.

iGoogle : ah, thats not cool. I never found any use of iGoogle.

I do not know about this pictures licensing, don’t kill me for that.

If you know me well, you know that I think psychiatrists are dumb. But anyways, I am doing this course in this semester named “ORGANIZATIONAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY”. In one class of this course, the professor told us that with anxiety performance increases. It reaches a peek and then with further increase in anxiety performance decreases. I think that makes sense to some extent. (if you attended his class, you will agree on this point.) Anyways. So, I told a friend of mine that when there is no exam I am 100% normal (otherwise I may not). And this is a part of her reply “100% normal? I don’t believe it for a second. What are exams like at your school?” So, this gave me the idea of locating IITians in that graph. According to me the graph pretty much looks like this :

In the graph, No 1 means IITians after entering IIT. No 2 means IITians when they were preparing for IIT Joint Entrance Exam (IIT-JEE). Note that students in 1 and 2 are same. No 2 is not talking about students preparing/giving JEE. Its for students who were preparing for JEE and finally cleared JEE.

Red Line means the anxiety on a normal day. Blue lines numbered 1 are making a range in which an IITian’s anxiety falls during exam time or when there is a big assignment deadline. Blue lines marked as 2 are making a range in which an “to-be-iitian”‘s anxiety falls during exam times. Note No 2s had mainly one major exam i.e. JEE and a some internal high-school exams.

Note, red lines are not forming any range that doesn’t mean that everyone’s anxiety is same. It means that anxiety of different students are closer.

Another point : This model is supposed to be for 80% of the IITians. Exceptions are always there, and just to make analysis simpler and less controversial, I am taken 20% students as exceptions. By the way, these 20% students are those who are exceptionally good at getting grades. ( getting good grades !=> good in acads). And it also contains students who are very poor in acads. ( very poor in acads => very bad grades). This also contains people who are intelligent but are really cool, so they do not give extra efforts for exams ( Do I belong to this category? )

Disclaimer : The author is not drunk when he is writing this post. This is just my perception (supported by 2 of my wing-mates). I mean the model is my perception, not the point that I am not drunk. You have full right to disbelieve this model or the fact that I am not drunk. If you are one of those exceptional 20% students, don’t dare to reply. You guys suck big time. … ah, wait, I am ( atleast want to be) in the cool and intelligent guys category. . So, if you are in that cool + intelligent category, you can reply.

Wow, I am good at writing nonsense.

So what does the model say : it says that IITs and its deadlines/exams have changed us. We work when we have deadlines. Just to give ya a glimpse, there is this guy in my school who studied in some univ in Singapore for 1 semester. The prof gave them an assignment on some date (say D) which was supposed to be submitted before or in the class on “D +1 month”. This guy, he submitted the assignment on the “d+1 month” day. He entered the class late because he was working on the assignment till the class started. And after the class he got to know that everyone had submitted the assignment before “D+15 days”. Thats a general thing here. We work on last days, and at that time we work like dogs. We wouldn’t sleep for days and will be working all the time.

Anyways, so it seems that our performance on a normal day is very poor as compared to the time when we were not in IIT. Secondly, note that our average performance during exam times remained same. Also note that JEE used to make more anxiety in us, which actually decreased our performance a lot of time. (hint : see the range for No 2, it cross the best anxiety level)

Also, since no of deadlines increases drastically when we come to IIT (this high anxiety is on 10 days a month normally), overall performance of an IITian is better when he reaches IIT.

But it also leads to 2 points :

1. Is JEE right way of examining students? (For your information 180,000 students from all over the India sit for JEE and only 4000 are selected.)
2. Is IIT system good? Isn’t this varying anxiety bad for students. So much ups and downs. Rather, lots of students become fatigue because of that. (Don’t forget the suicide cases)

If you laughed after reading this post (either because the post is funny, or because I am a stupid/typical geek), BIG THANKS. The post is supposed to be funny and nonsense. But it seems this topic always makes me serious. I will elaborate the last 2 points some day. I shouldn’t do that today, I am already very serious.

I was tweaking some settings of my blog. And I faced a problem which was a bit horrible for a moment. Login as admin and then go to the “options” tab. There you will find 2 options, one is “WordPress address (URL)” and other is “Blog Address (URL)”. I couldn’t understand the purpose of 2 addresses. So, I started thinking weird things, as in what would WordPress URL mean. I thought it meant the actual WordPress URL (i.e. wordpress.org, it may change in future ). I didn’t think anything else as I didn’t find any point calling my blog as wordpress blog, yes it is wordpress powered, but I am not freak about wordpress. And anyways there was this another option called Blog Address. So, I changed the WordPress address to www.wordpress.org. And what is this? It started redirecting everything to wordpress.org. Oh my gosh. What to do? I wasn’t able to login. There was no other way to revert back the settings. I first started searching some config file where these settings were stored. Couldn’t find anything. Then it struck me that all settings should be on database. So, being a database nerd, I tried understanding wordpress database. I didn’t want to screw anything, as now I have a lot of things on my blog and making it again will be horrible ( I have done it once). And cautiously, I changed one record in the table “wp_options”. The record had option_id “1″.
Its so cool to have all settings in a proper file or database.

WordPress guys, please take this into consideration. Add some mechanism for reverting settings. And make options labels more explanatory. I think for reverting, some script that we could run through browser should be enough. Another option can be that when configuration is changed, send a mail to admin. And in that mail send a link that should revert those particular settings. So, you have to keep a log of what settings are being changed and when were they changed. Of course dependencies of settings will have to be considered. But for the time being, at least option for reverting back the last change in settings should be easy and is must.