I’ll just run you through things as they stand. I need to complete more or less all my journals and I need to study for ever subject if I hope to pass. Not to mention the few odd projects I still need to implement. Screw that. This isn’t a time to think of all the things you have to do. Its rather a time to reflect on things you’ve already done.

First of all, we (team SKAN) has made it to the India finals in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008. You can read about this on the AXIS Forum. I am also the proud owner of karunab.com. I’ve moved j@x over there. Have a look at the post about the new site!

So that’s basically it. There might be more but I’m really tired right now so I’m sorry. Have a good day and god speed.

Tags: Imagine Cup, random

Well, I don’t really like politics. I don’t really follow much of it either. But as many of you may know, I do like to debate things out. So I do use the knowledge that I have to do my best. There was a thread somewhere on the Messenger Plus! forums about whether US should come out of Iraq or not for which I wrote a post on notepad because my net wasn’t working. I just found it while clearing out my hdd of crap.

Why am I posting it here now? Its just something I had written which seemed interesting. Ages ago there was a whole thing in India about reservations. As usual I tried not to add fuel to the fire by saying anything on the topic but at last I did say something. I typed it out and to this day, I didn’t publish it. I still have it set to private. Only one person other than me has ever seen it. Well, its my view and I think it has the right to be put forth. After all, that’s the whole point of debating. Still, why am I posting this now? Well, I just thought this was something interesting. I don’t often get to write and when I do, when I really want to, I enjoy it So I thought I might as well post this. As for the other article, not sure when I’ll make the contents public. Though if any of you are lucky, I might let you read it (if you ask me)

The issue is dead more or less now (in respect to the fact that no one’s discussing it though nothing to my knowledge has changed). So you can read this just as an article. Nothing less. Nothing more. In fact, I’m not sure of what exactly I’ve said. That’s how old this is

The question was “Should there be a deadline to bring the troops back home?” And here’s my answer..

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: thoughts

I’ll try to keep this one short because I have an OOAD exam tomorrow and I haven’t really done anything.

Abhiyaan is Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering’s (Navi Mumbai) Technical cum Cultural Festival. I’ve not been attending for the past 2 years for different reasons but this year I had to, considering I was the event head of LAN gaming. We had over 165 entries for our event and that’s quite a lot considering not even the Technical Paper Presentation event, which is supposed to be the crown jewel of Abhiyaan drew that many entries despite what I believe was a Rs. 10,000 prize for each branch’s winner in that event (and there were 5 such branches I believe. Comps/IT, Electronics and Telecommunication, Instrumentation, Mechanical and Chemical). It was indeed hectic with 47 entries for NFS (an event I was in charge of).

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Tags: college, competitions, interview, SKAN

Ever heard this before? If you haven’t its probably good. Read on.
The whole thing started last Thursday, the 21st of February when I was late to a practical. I spent my time in the library doing my work and one of my class mates comes and tells me that Accenture is coming to Pillais this Saturday (23rd of February, 2008) and we (our college’s students) are invited!
The requirement was to have a mere 55%+ aggregate up until your 4th semester. The reporting time was 8AM. So we leave college 3 hours early telling our professors that most students want to prepare their resumes and all of them need to study for the tests.
If you don’t know this already, companies have an aptitude test, group discussion (GD), a HR (Human Resources) interview and a Technical Interview (hence forth referred to as Techni or TR).

I must warn you. This is going to be long post explaining the entire process. If in case you’re interested, do read on. This is written for freshers (students) who want to give Accenture interviews, know about their Aptitude test, GD, HR and Technical Interview rounds. I’m going to try to keep the 2 day ordeal as short as possible, yet informative.
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Tags: Accenture, interview

Says who? The person who says so seriously hasn’t been to India. Or maybe he just never had to deal with Exatt (read: evil ISP). These guys are the bane of my existence. If it weren’t for them, life would seriously be a lot easier. I have 7 points to this post.

1) The guys at Exatt can read minds
No other way to explain it. Got to submit an important project? Need to do some research for a subject? Need to write an assignment? Want to learn something? Got a customer/competition deadline to meet? Want to audio chat with a family member?
If any of these are true for you, you can guarantee Exatt will be down. 9/10 if you have something important to do, they seem to be down. You could say its bad luck if it happens a few times but when it happens for 4 straight years, you know something is fucked.

2) They can redefine what ping stats are supposed to be!
Here is my current ping stats to google.
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 592, Received = 139, Lost = 453 (76% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 300ms, Maximum = 320ms, Average = 303ms
In case you’re wondering how I’m here, its because I am typing this out in scite now. May be when Exatt deems I haven’t got anything important to do on the internet (refer #1) it will allow me to come online.

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Tags: exatt, internet, rant

I thought it was about time I made this site a bit better to access. We now have wordpress sitemaps being generated by a plugin and they are being submitted to the Google, Live Search and ASK search engines. The Web Management tools for the first two are pretty cool.
If there is anything else I should do for better search engine results/more traffic, do let me know. Pics of dt could help but we want to try non extreme measures

Tags: site

This is true in so many ways, I don’t know where to start. Work this sem at univ seems endless but things keep changing. A lot of things have changed of late around me but more importantly the day which decides a major part of my future is coming close. The date and time have been decided. At 1300 IST on the 8th of July 2008 I shall give GRE paper. Lets hope for the best. Should be a good birthday present for lopardo, eh?

So this sem is going to be crazy. We need to hand in 3 projects at univ, I need to finish up with j@x and Scribble Scrabble, I need to study for GRE and for this sem itself (since I hope to score good marks this sem) and there is this other project I’ve been contacted about at univ by some seniors. Its awesomely amazing and needs students from at least 4 engineering branches. I always wanted to take part in something like this and if time permits, I’d love to work on it. I’m meeting the guys today so lets see where it goes from there.

On a side note, I got a mail from Google yesterday that my site had badware on it. On investigating I found that I was on a older version of WordPress and that it had a SQL injection vulnerability. WordPress has been updated and the problem has been fixed. I’m on the WordPress notify list now so this shouldn’t happen again.

Oh, and I’ve changed the theme to BloxPress 2. The old theme had a nice christmassy feel to it but it had a few issues. I liked Indigo more but quite sadly it doesn’t work properly here for some weird reason Enjoy the AJAX.

Tags: GRE

I usually keep ranting about my ISP because [a] I deserve to [b] They suck ass [c] They have pathetic service [d] They have awful uptimes.
Well, all of the above still stand true but for the past 5 days, I have had almost an uncapped (or maybe a 2-5MBit) upload connection. Max speed so far? Try 462 KB/s. Yes KiloBytes, not KiloBits. I’m as shocked as you are! This isn’t a one time spike. My connection has almost died and come back a million times. It still randomly dies. Yet I get uncapped uploads.
What about the download speed? Well on a 64kbps line, I would expect 7.5~8 KB/s but for the past 8 months, I’ve had only about 5~5.5 KB/s and the tech support even tried to pass that off as normal (until I told them who I was and I knew how the connections worked..). The current status is that when this crazy upload speed bonanza started off, my download speed came back to 7.5~8 KB/s but now its down to 6~6.5 KB/s. May be the decrease is because its also uploading at 30+ KB/s simultaneously where as the 7.5~8 KB/s was clocked on a line which wasn’t uploading.

This did start off as a 8 KB/s down + 8 KB/s up thing which felt nice. Now it just seems crazy. Needless to say that my ratios which were already through the roof are improving (not that I needed it :P). I just wish that the same would happen to my download cap and that they don’t have a bandwidth cap for the month

Overall, I do hate Exatt. I know that I’m using a pretty powerful word but I’ve earned it over 3 and a half years of shitty service. Everything that can go wrong, has gone wrong with them. Changing plans without notification, adding bandwidth caps without notification, changing prices without notification, substandard service plans and even lower speeds (128k line costing 1K INR; 64k line working at 40k). And this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you need your internet the most like for an important email, project submission or research work you can be sure its not working and even if it is, it will have 40% packet loss. Waiting 10 minutes for a page to load is unacceptable. Having to wait 3 days for them to start your connection when a cable has broken near your house and you stay 40 feet from their office is equally unacceptable, if not more so. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. I just hope I can change ISPs soon. So in case any random Google user comes across this, you know you should not, under any circumstance, opt for Exatt. This whole upload thing was seriously one time.

Tags: exatt, internet

Sure.. I haven’t provided to the two odd people (from statistics, mean of average subscribers is 2 with a standard deviation of 0.5; oh wait.. too much math.. I guess Maths 5 can do that :P) who use the rss feed for my blog.. I don’t think they mind. Here’s an update.
Exams are over. Hopefully we won’t have a repeat of the Sem 3 Drama. A guardian angel or two at this time would help

You wasted 30 kb of your bandwidth in fetching this post because you need to be informed that me and motr_fresco have become the admins of the AXIS forum since the earlier admins are on a well needed break.

Well that’s basically it. That’s of course, good news for me and a bad one for my sister *cough*
Hope 2008 is better than 2007, not that the latter wasn’t quite an amazing year in itself. There are a few things lined up for the first quarter, if all goes to plan. You should be happy to know that

Tags: AXIS

No, I didn’t mess up the song. Its the season I’m usually happy about. Nice cool weather is fun (at least here it is. Sucks to be Mr. Nitro :P) I’m grumpy because I have to give a few exams now. I’ll be all caught up giving 5 exams from the 7th of December to the 9th of January. Yes, that’s a month and 2 days for 5 exams. FU MU You seriously fail at time tables.

Anyway, Christmas time is here and so is a special christmassy header Also my forum signatures have a distinct festive feel to them as well. Here are a few of the avatars and signatures I made/adopted from my existing collection.

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Avatars
Godsend:

JA Beta:

Wiggles:

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Signatures
Godsend:

JA Beta:

Wiggles:

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The Godsend signature is brutally screwed up It could have been so much better
What do you think?

PS: Christmas Godsend > Christmas Magical Trevor

Tags: christmas, photoshop, site