This is rather a late post. I am at Purdue now. Arrived here on 12th of August. A few glitches ( 0)The taxi driver charged me 300$ for a ride from JFK to LGA, 1) we didn’t get the apartment on the first day, thanks to Vikas and Himanshu to letting me stay in their house, 2) buying big things like mattress, table is a big deal. The walmart here doesn’t deliver things, and thats the only place here to buy things from. ) but otherwise it was fine. I *think* we are more or less settled now. I am sharing a 3 bed-room apartment with Ankit Jain, and Sourabh Dongoankar. Both are in ECE department, so we don’t discuss acads when we are together. 
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There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything: (more…)
In continuation to my last post. I wrote the following on newsgroups inside IITK:
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Yesterday, when I was doing the final preparation for my presentation for CS727 course project, someone was tying rope around the fan in his room, and sometime after that, a good observation was made. The way suicides are shown in Bollywood movies, its pretty much true. Fan can in fact take the burden of a dead body. Oh, by the way, IITK is best at that. It is bearing (why bearing? you will know as this post progresses) burden of God knows how many suicides. At least it is 5th time in my stay here in IITK. Only 2 of my batch mates “could” do this daring task. I “know” some more tried, at least thought about it. Its not only daring but geeky as well to come up with new ideas. See, all 5 had different ways of doing this deed. What actually is more problematic for me is that this guy had to do this just before end semester exam. I remember screwing my 625 end semester exam because of similar incidence. And I have got 648 exam tomorrow. 
…. oh yeah, my 727 presentation went well. It was my 20th project at IITK.
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Last week I went to Hyderabad to this “IIT Hire Meet” of Microsoft. It sort of sucked. They called all IIT students hired by Microsoft Indian Development Center. Yes, they had hired me as well. In December when placements started in IITK, Microsoft was the first CS company to hire students. I didn’t plan to sit for their first exam, but my friend woke me and asked me to take the test for the sake of practice. I did that. Though I was sure I wouldn’t get selected (considering that I had a bad fight (about Open Source community infringing some patents) with them just 1 months back when they came here for Microsoft Day, and the same HR lady came for placements as well.). Anyways Arun called me (otherwise I wasn’t very keen to know the result) and informed that I have cleared first round. The next round was just after 15 minutes and I didn’t have clothes and hadn’t had bath. That was a fun day. I was finally selected. I was 1 of the 4 selected from UG students. I then wanted to join Microsoft. I think it would have been cool to have an experience to see them working. And anyways since I am fan of some of their products it would have been cooler.
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So, again, we were expecting 50-60 people. Before FOSSKriti whiling planning for FOSSKriti, I was arguing with Arun saying that there wouldn’t be much participation for linux kernel workshop and we dont need 50 computers. To all my surprise, we had around 300 people interested in the workshop.
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Wow, I didn’t expect such an awesome response. I was thinking that only 10-20 people will come, but we had a huge participation. Rather I told Nanda, one of the guys from Cleartip.com our sponsor and IITK alumni, that we are expecting 30-40 people. Wow, we had like 60-70 people.
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For last few days, I have been talking to people (mainly IITK students) about different events we have in FOSSKriti. I found people pretty enthusiastic about different events. I am pointing out those events here:
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So this year in Techkriti, we are going to have FOSSKriti as well. FOSSKriti is basically a set of talks, lectures, workshop, hackfest and BoFs about different open source softwares. We have called people from Gnome, KDE, LinuxChix and cool people from Cleartrip (who is supporting this event) to give talks and workshops. Everything has been planned. Checkout the FOSSKriti site to get more information about it.
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All 7 IITs in India and IISc joined together to open their course materials so that people could use them. IITs and IISc are the best technical schools in India and are pretty much world renowned. They have started collecting course materials in the form of slides. The slides can be accessed from http://nptel.iitm.ac.in . Its still an on going process, and it will take time to have course materials for most of the courses. But its surely an awesome initiative. Now, they have also started uploading lecture videos. I don’t think they are actual classroom lectures, I think its all staged. But I think it will still be helpful.
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