Worries of a labcom

Yesterday was a really really bad day for me. Had a row with one of my batchmates .... The culprit was neither him nor I, it was the whole ug2 batch.
I don't understand why r ppl stealing RAMs, graphic cards,etc. from the labs? There are two types of stealing currently going on :-

1. Stealing from one PC of lab and putting into another PC of lab: This is the most common type of stealing and is creating a hell for we labcoms(UG2). Every hour RAM goes missing from some PC and the owner then asks us ... This is exactly what happened today. Someone stole the RAM from the PC beside me. When the owner came , he asked me. So,what do I do ? .... Its not possible for me to open the cabinet of every system and see who has put an extra RAM into his.( it can be done without opening the cabinet also, but only if u can login into it, which requires password). I can check all the PCs once a day ... but not every time(almost 4 times a day) a owner ask for his missing RAM.
So, I made a temporary arrangement for the owner(whose RAM was missing), i.e took out RAM from one of the PCs that was not being used at that time. But just 15 mins later, the owner of this PC also came. Now he started accusing me and we had a row over it. What can labcoms do yaar ? We can't sit in the lab 24hrs guarding the PCs. We are just co-ordinators.

2. Stealing RAMs from lab PCs and putting into room PCs: This is less frequent but more serious. Two batches have already been fined 8K and 16K for thefts. I don't want that two happen to us also. If one can pay 1 lakh(approx) to be in iiit and can purchase a 35K PC, then what attraction does he/she finds in a 1.5K RAM. Also almost all ppl in room have 512 MB RAM. The full 512MB is rarely utilized even if u play very high demanding games. Then why the need for more ?

Solutions:-
Don't think that labcoms are just sitting idle. We(I,GN Aditya and Mohit Jain) already had 3 meetings with Prof. Vikram Pudi regarding thefts. We suggested putting locks in every cabinet. That was the best solution we could think of.(If anyone has better soln, plz let me know). Then after discussions with faculty, Prof. Pudi decided to implement doors with swipe cards in all labs. But what can swipe cards do if the ug2 students themselves are stealing ?(Prof. Pudi first thought that students from other labs or outsiders are stealing and the cost of locks for all PCs in iiit labs is equivalent to swipe card system). So we met him again and suggested plastic locks(like what we have in teaching labs PCs) which are cheaper. Now on Monday we have a meeting with all the faculty. Hope we get locks soon. In the meantime Prof. Pudi has assured us that he will provide some temporary seal to us.
Lets hope for the best.....

PS :- 1. We are also talking with faculty about keeping the lab open during night. Lets see what comes out.
2. Feel free to give any suggestions regarding betterment of our labs.

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Technorati: personal, life, iiit, labcom

UG1 vs UG2 Surprise!!!!!

Yesterday we had a football match : ug1 main team VS ug2 Surprise - the people who seldom play football. But we still beat them..... yes we did beat.... and it was a very very very ... exciting match.
Our match was sheduled at 5pm and i don't know what enemity God Indra has with IIIT .... yes, it rained again ... not just drizzles but a full fledged rain. But see the excitement of UG2 surprise .... we still wanted to play and reached the ground 10 mins before. But alas !!, the excitement was not with the ug1 ppl. So what to do ?? ... We were fully drenched with water and there was no point in going back. we started playing amongst us .... and then ... we saw a ray of hope ... a ug1 was coming. We caught him and sent him to call the ug1 football team. And then after waiting for ages .... ug1 ppl started coming 1 by 1 ... after around one and half hours, the match finally started .
Every one played with full enthusiasam and first,we scored a goal (luckily it was me :) ). But then, they fought back and soon it was 1-1. Then we scored again ... Dhruvan took a nice header off a corner kick (i took the corner kick :)) and we were 2-1. Then till the end we were at the top, but ..... just 30 seconds before the match was supposed to end ... they scored.....so 2-2 now.
So what next ? .. played 5 mins more but with no result. Then came the penalty ... and with the Xtra quick reflexes of our goalkeeper Mohit Jain, WE WON, hurrah!!!!!!!!!!!.

But that was not all, before we could realise, we were out in the rain , fully drenched for more than 2 hours. So , I got fever and had to take paracetamol to bring down my temperature.

Oh! I forgot to mention others. Our team captain was Abheet Bharti, who made sure that every aspiring UG2 got a chance to play, sometimes in place of himself. Our other goalkeeper, Sankalp Mulye aka sikka has a few nice saves to his credit. Then, Gaurav Ruhela, whose breath taking last penalty made us win the game. Sandeep Saini and Ankur Singla(singla scored in penalty as well) did a nice job as defender. Saini made quite a few nice clearances. Anuj, Sumit,Abhay all did a gr8 job in defence and midfield. Dhruvan(not to forget his nice header), Rahul Chauhan and S Rahul were wonderful strikers.

This was the one of the best matches we ever played...... .

Technorati: personal, life, iiit, football

Projects and my Wishlist

So finally we all(ug2,iiit hyd) have been alotted ITWS-3 projects. Some got their first preference, some 2nd and some none. Some are curious whereas some are frightened.
The main purpose of my writing this blog was to write about my friend Abheet Bharti and his poor luck with the ITWS-3 project. He got none of the five preferences that he chose. Ask Why? Because he has the first roll number(200401001) in our batch. Prof. Vikram Pudi, in his mail, used his roll number as an example to explain us the format in which we have to submit our preferences through mail. So everyone replied to that mail. But the example was written in almost every one's mail( because they all also included the original message by pudi in their reply). So when our gr8(no offence intended) professor used 'grep' to extract the preferences out of the mails, abheet's preferences where extracted as the one in the example and not his original one. And alas!! he didn't want any of these projects.
Then he went to the proff. and compalined. Pudi said "I can't do anything now. You have to choose one of the remaining projects." So Abheet finally got the 'Robosoccer Project'.
But alas! his nightmares didn't end here. When the remaining allotment list was announced, Abheet got some other project!!!!! .......... Bad Luck.
.....Payed the price of being the first :)

Ok. now see again the topic of this blog .... It says something else also apart from projects. MY WISHLIST. These are the things( actually programs, softwares.etc) that i intend to make. Not under any proff. but myself. My wishlist is quite long and i m only describing here about the first object in my wishlist :-
The IIIT Search Engine
Well, i know many readymade softwares must be already there for LANs such as ours or maybe google itself is more than enough ... but I am making it out of my curiosity and blablabla(i m not getting correct word to describe. After all i got only B- in English :) ).
So today i did a bit of research on it. In fact i was doing this for last few days. But today i got a kind of breakthrough. I made out how to parse html scripts to extract out relevant information on it. It could be very easily done by httplib module of python. Python is great. It has something for everything. Now my next task is find out how to store all the data and index them.

Ok now I will stop. Rest of wishlist will be unleashed in coming blogs.

PS:- All wishes do not come true. :)

Technorati: project, work, technical, iiit