rohitj's domain

Author : Manu Bansal
Copied from his IM status message, with permission.

Who comes, who goes
Why, where, nobody knows.
But the corridors,
they itch my nose,
the gap I close.

The desks are full,
the stacks are high,
lo and behold,
its pizza time!

I eat a slice, I fill some more,
why free food, nobody knows
back at work, I wonder still,
but on my cup, Microsoft grows!!

Reminds me of last 2 semesters at IITK. But I guess PhD aspirants working in labs day n’ night might relate to this better.

That time of year has come again. IIT Kanpur is again busy preparing for Techkriti. I don’t think I will ever forget those days. Being a part of team makes it even more exciting. Specially those 4 days of drill. I wish I was there. Last year we added another branch to Techkriti. We called it FOSSKriti. I joined the team late, but I still enjoyed it to the full. Since it was the first event of this kind in Techkriti and IIT (not just IITK) in general, things were a little blurred. We didn’t get that much attention from Techkriti. But still most of the time, the rooms we had booked for talks or hackfests were full. The event was a success. We are again organizing FOSSKriti. I am more excited about this times FOSSKriti. This time amidst all initial doubts we have better layout of the events. And we again have awesome chain of talks and hackfests. This times theme is “Open Web”.

Mozilla Corporation is sponsoring this times FOSSKriti. We have speakers from Mozilla, Opera, Yahoo, KDE, Sahana and Drupal. They will be giving talks and hackfests, apart from other small scale sessions. The details for the events can be seen here : http://techkriti.org/#/fosskriti-events/

Here are the topics for the events :

• Workshop : Web development and Open Source technologies
• Talk : An Introduction to HTML5
• Talk : Yahoo! UI
• Hackfest : Drupal 7 Patch and Development Sprint
• Talk : Open the Web
• Talk : Humanitarian FOSS: Sahana Open Source Disaster Management tool
• Hackfest: Code for Sahana in Web2Py
• Talk : Webkit and Telepathy

Apart from these events, there will be few small sessions. Go to the FOSSKriti stalls to know more about these sessions. Oh, we will have a PGP Key signing party as well. Don’t forget to go there.

2008 :

• Graduated from IITK. I miss those days.
• Got into Purdue. For Phd. So, now I am student for another 4-5 years.
• No papers yet.
• Wasted summers in coding. Should have gone to some hill, and should have camped there for a month.
• Deleted Orkut account
• started using facebook.
• Bought Guitar and DSLR
• got 3.85/4.00 in first semester here. Not so happy about it.

2009:

• No web2.0 (mainly facebook), apart from little blogging.
• A little bit of photography
• Research
• Rare movies.
• Take Quals.

In continuation to my last post. I wrote the following on newsgroups inside IITK:

I think its important that’s why I writing it. I am anyways going to post it
on my blog as well.

Note : I haven’t read what all people have been saying on this thread.
(apart from 3-4 posts from some people I know)

I was discussing with it with some friends, and came to some good
conclusions…..

0) So, the first problem is that students here do not know what they want
from this place. They do not know what they want from life. They do not
have right information. Students when come here don’t know nothing about
nothing. So, we should have a questionnaire/review system. A system which
will ask students to answer some questions. People wouldn’t evaluate it,
but this questionnaire will make students think. Student will think want
they want from themselves. Students will think whats right and whats wrong.
We can have this questionnaire thing every semester. This will not only
make them think, they will tend to ask questions about possibilities they
have.
0.1) First supporting point to the fact that student don’t think of their
future and they don’t think logically is that lot of students are going to
financial jobs, without even knowing what finance is. I can surely say 90%
of people are going to finance without even thinking what their future is
gonna be, and without knowing what exactly they shall be doing (If you are
one of those who is going for a finance job, and think I am wrong, please
don’t reply. I don’t time to explain you why you are wrong.)

1) Student interaction : I find that people coming out for different
festivals are more or less same. You will find same guy working in Megabuck
and Techkriti. These big festival are big, but they are not attracting many
students (IITK students) as participants. We need something else so that
people will come out. We need a way so that people from different years
could come and talk at *same* stage, rather than with senior-junior ego.
1.1) I strongly propose that we should have a good place where people could
come and hang out. CC Canteen isn’t an enough place. We need a place where
I could sit for long time, where I could “hang out”. CC canteen isn’t a
place where you sit for long time. And anyways the kind of food we get here
isn’t good enough. CR sucks. I don’t remember even a single visit to CR
when I didn’t shout at the workers. This “good” place will serve in many
ways. A big problem with IITK life is that there is no happening place
around us. We need a happening place in or around IITK. These “happening”
places help you in lot of ways. All your tensions from acads/parents can be
removed. And you stand on a stage where there is no senior and there is no
junior. These places will trigger interaction. Someone suggested dance
place, but I don’t think thats possible. So, a normal food court sort of
place with probably good music would be a good idea. A place where students
will get good food, and also a good place to sit. A place where they will
come to have fun. Do you know of any place where you go to have fun apart
from your room where you sit in front of your computer. And also, remember
the kind of sucky and *unnutritious* food you get in mess. Seriously, why
do we need mess when it can not serve nutritious food. One main reason why
I am not doing a PhD from IITK is that I know my life will be sucky for
next 3-4 years. I will have to spend my time inside a small area with no
place where I could go to enjoy myself.
1.2) Why don’t we have a proper air conditioned SAC Rasoi. Make it a common place to hang out. Let it be a little bit extra expensive, but make it proper. Every now and then we have domino guys coming, why don’t we have a proper Rasoi in SAC instead. We have such a huge place about rasoi as well, we can utilize it to the best.

1.3) Mixed hall system in which 1st, 2nd and 3rd year students live together
is a good option. They get interact with each other. You may say that 1st
year can anyways interact with 2nd year, but its not good enough. 2nd year
students are *stupid*. They know nothing. I remember my first year when I
used to ask my seniors (2nd year mainly) what I should do to go for MS. I
remember their replies, it was all bullcrap. 3rd still knows something. I
wonder if all four year students could stay together. Can we

2) Happy Hours : CSE started a cool thing. We have a regular weekly meeting of faculty and students. Faculty and students interact informally about different issues. We talk about personal stuffs as well. We should have such happy hours thing in every department. This way faculty-student interaction will increase (which right now is very less). Not only that faculty knows a broader and better picture of the IIT world. They can talk better about what students can do. They have the right knowledge. Students can clarify their queries. Also students wouldn’t feel alien.

3) BTech Hons and BTech Minor : I got to know that IITB has this system now. You have a set of options. You can do BTech Hons, which is a bit harder than normal BTech, and you can do BTech which is 4-5 course less than normal BTech. You can decide to switch between them whenever you want. You can also do some courses in other department and get BTech Minor in that field. This way, you don’t have to spend time on wasteful difficult courses, and can spend some quality time on courses that you want to do. And if you find that you don’t want to be in technical field anymore, you can always opt for just BTech, and get a degree and then can join MBA/finance job whatever you want. This way the load can be decreased for those who are not able to /don’t want to take extra pressure.
3.1) Also, stop calling BTech as four year degree. Its a Btech/MTech, thats it. When you get your degree shouldn’t be important.

But for eff’s sake, do/suggest something “constructive”. Rather than just asking for decreasing academic pressure. Yes, stupid courses and stupid instructors are there, but why are we not able to ignore that? Parent?, to hell with them if they are not able to think constructive.

rohitj
PS: Last year, my views were different. I wouldn’t say they were wrong, but weren’t very broad enough I guess. So, if you find my views switched, my apologies.

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.

Yes, I am still able to write this post in some funny way. Some of you know how these incidences effect me. Still want to control my thoughts on the way things are going. As far as this issue is concerned, I have been shifting from one view to another. I still do not know whom to blame. But I think I have come up with some lemmas and theorems which will surely help.

Warning: If you are one of those who think I shouldn’t write about it outside IITK, you can go to hell. I gave you 3 years to come up with a solution or at least clear the situation. You didn’t do that. You hence loose the right to stop me from writing this post. Yes I know people (15 people a day?) will read it, and I guess they should.

Note: I am mainly talking about suicides which are not purely because of personal reasons.

The first thing to notice is that the students who do these things are stupid. Yes, lot of IITians are stupid (It may sound ironical, but its not). Like a friend of mine pointed out, an F or a bad grade doesn’t ruin your life. I get bad grades, and I am going to Purdue University, which is like one of the best universities for CS. I know people who will graduate in 1-2 more years and still have job offers. Who reads your transcript when they offer you job/admission? Sometimes they do, but most of the times they don’t. And do you know that an F doesn’t affect your CPI (GPA)? Its hilarious, isn’t it. People with lot of Fs have CPI similar to mine. Then whats the fuzz about? Oh one more thing, whatever you score here in IITK, people outside IIT will always call you IITian, and will always listen to you like an SRK fan watches SRK movies.

Secondly, lot of parents are stupid as well. I have some friends who are “frustrated” ( not real frustrated, but frustrated in IITK slang) with the way parents pressurize them for academics. Parents have small idea of how things go in IITs and will still comment on students performance. I remember my father once talking to me about job etc. He was like I got to know that a CS grad from IITK gets like 2 million a year or something. Though in general average salary is like 0.8-0.9 million Rs. Thank God my parents are awesome, who never show any expectations from me except from hard work. And thank God they let me do whatever I wanted to do. I never got to listen comment about my results.

Thirdly, the academic system of IITK. The guy who committed suicide (he was in first year) belonged to a batch of around 500 students. In their first semester itself, in one course, 96 out of 500 students got an F. 20% of the class was dumb according to the instructor. Thats what an F means, right. In IITK, in a normal course, getting an F is a tough job. How can 20% students get an F? Just think who was wrong. IITK is the *best* institute of India. It is one of the best institutes in the world for UG studies. Best students clear its entrance exam. In first semester, these students perform the best. My first semester SPI tops my chart as well. A similar thing happened with a guy from my batch, who committed suicide last to last semester. The professor sent a mail naming students who might will get an F. The list had almost 50% students who were doing the course. I wonder what happened in that particular course. I mean, the students are doing good in other courses, but in one particular course students perform so bad? Who is wrong? I was discussing it with a professor in Happy Hours, and he said that it happens only once a semester. But thats not the point. Why does it happen at all? And don’t you think it will affect student morally and mentally? And don’t you know that it does effect his future in some sense. An F given by mistake in final semester can waste a students 1 whole year. Every now and then there is a course which acts like this. Of course it creates pressure. People have expectations from themselves. I myself expect somethings from myself. Thankfully I do not expect to get good grades. But I do expect to learn from a course. Similar, one guy may expect to get into MIT. And if something tries to come in between even when it doesn’t deserve to come in between, and if the person gets to know that he can not do anything about it, it creates problems.

So, yes. The major cause of these suicides is the student. I know its very harsh to say it so clearly, and believe me its hard for me as well to say it this clear, but this is the fact. Its student who couldn’t think reasonably and couldn’t cope with the pressure. Like a friend said, “apne neeche dekho, duniya hai puri. agar upar dekh ke depression hota hai, aur phir bhi neeche nahin dekh pate, inspite of such a counselling service to help, to unka uthna hi bhala hai”. You know your parents have wrong expectations from you. You know the system is wrong not you. And you know that you are better than most of those who couldn’t even get into IIT. Then where is the problem. And yes, academics or parents trigger the process. But again, why do you give a damn to it.

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.

We had a Lab of 40 computers booked. We had to have 2 person per computer. We also had to kick out IITK students, and we asked them that they will have another kernel workshop. There were still non-IITK students who were kicked out because there was no place for standing the lab. We finally had 100 people inside the lab.

In evening we arranged same workshop for IITK students, in which we allowed non-IITK students as well. It again had awesome response. That even when it was clashing for i-Quiz.

Ankita Garg took the workshop. She was kind enough to take the workshop again for IITK students. People who came for the workshop varied from people who had heard about kernel for the time and people who had their “own” kernel.

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.

It was a great start for FOSSKriti. The first day itself when Techkriti team usually think that there wouldn’t be much participation, we got like 60-70 participation. Awesome. Cleartrip brought us some TShirts as well, which we gave to some participants. And we also had some Gnome badges and Gnome stickers.

The event started at 10PM. After 20-30min talk about beagle which Arun Raghavan gave, we shifted to lab, and people started hacking beagle. Well, there were people who didnt know much about beagle and linux. But still some people stayed there till 5AM. Yes,  10 guys stayed there till 5AM.

And more to it, we finally have 3 submissions from the workshop. One is a firefox extension to include beagle in the search engine list. Second is bibtex search. And third is searching in beagle for the select words in Pidgin chat box.

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:

0: RoR : Y4 batch, being highly affected by Prof. TVP’s, is highly interested in attending RoR workshop. Some people want to learn RoR, some people want to discuss RoR. And I assume that some people will come because they know Saurabh Nanda.

1: Linux Kernel : Those who eff around there linux distro, especially Gentoo users, and those who have slightest interest in systems, were found interested in this.

2: Lisp : I personally am going to attend this event as a participant, not as organizing team. . And I am sure I will bring 10 more people. Actually no, some people were found interested in this workshop, specially those who are doing compilers course, or those who have done compilers course.

3: Linux Chix :

(female.isIITian())&&(female.isGeek())&&(female.hasTalkedTorohitj()) = 0

So, I am not sure how many females will turn up, but I am sure people will be there. This is the second event I want to attend. I want to see what they are upto.

4: KDE4 : Those who do not know, recently there was a big shift in IITK linux community. People broke their long loyalty for Gnome, and shifted to KDE. Alas!! KDE4 is still not in official repos, but they are still on KDE. They think its worth waiting for KDE4. Of course, this talk will attract these people.

Left are beagle hackfest and Clutter talk. Beagle is a must-attend hackfest. (afterall it substitutes stupid google desktop ). And clutter? I have no idea about it.

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.

Basically, there is going to be talks on RoR, KDE4 and LinuxChix. There is going to be a beagle hackfest and kernel hackfest and workshop. And there are some BoFs. In short its going to be awesome. Those who are coming for Software Corner can easily attend these events, we have ensured that there is no major time clash between Software Corner events and FOSSKriti events.

And those who haven’t registered for the event, don’t worry. There is on the spot registration as well. ….

So, Navya @ IITK is finally doing something. In my four year stay here in IITK, its probably the first time when I am seeing navya doing something. Navya is basically a group of people who talk about open source. Most of them are pretty biased about open source. (I guess thats normal) They usually claim to help campus residents with some facilities, though people enjoying these facilities have been limited to 20-30.

So, anyways, this year navya is running a series of lectures to teach people about different Open source softwares. We are also going to have FOSS DAY in Techkriti 08. So, right now I am sitting in CS101, listening to this talk by sainath on “Making images great using GIMP”. Sainath is a great photographer as you might see in his livejournal. He uses GIMP to do some final touching in his photographs. He is talking about basics of GIMP. We have got 25-30 here. Most of them are probably new to photo editing softwares. So, basics are more facinating. I will share the slide very soon.

Updated : the slide is shared here.GIMP Workshop Slide