NIT Durgapur vs IIIT Hyderabad

I have completed my project here in IIIT this summer and will leave for Durgapur tomorrow. So I just thought why not write my views about the life in our IIIT and contrast it with that of our college. So here it is:

The first impression about a college that you get is when you enter the gate. The first impression about our college is not good at all because of our hopeless gate. Whereas in IIIT, as soon as you enter the campus, you’ll start feeling like you have come to a very good institution.  IIIT is much newer than our college so its buildings are much better than ours and as expected hostels are better than ours.

Now coming to more important things, the one sure thing missing in our college is RESEARCH which is omnipresent in IIIT. A lot of papers in a lot of conferences get selected from IIIT. Research is completely absent in our college. The research labs are state of the art here and there are no research facilities in our labs or even if there are, nobody makes any use of those. The faculty here stress a lot on research and they themselves get involved in a lot of research projects. The profs here, even though they are very well qualified, are very humble and interact a lot with students. I have seen a prof and a group of students sitting in the canteen at 12 AM and discussing a lot of things several times here in IIIT. But in our college, I doubt if any prof is friendly with students at all!

The student strength is very small in IIIT as compared to NIT D and they are either in ECE or CSE. Also, there is no state quota here in IIIT. Therefore our college has a wide variety of students and you’ll have friends from all across India. And if you are interested in working on something that involves students from multiple disciplines, then our college is better for that. The environment in the hostels of IIIT is completely different than that in our college. Cigarettes, for example is available in most of the stores inside our college campus, whereas a IIIT student would have to go out of the campus to buy a pack of cigarettes!

The placements in IIIT, as expected, are much better than that of our college. But NIT D is catching up slowly as we are putting a lot of effort to promote Linux on our campus and people are getting more serious. The LUG in our college has become very active from the past one year or so and IIIT has quite an active LUG too. A lot of people from IIIT go and study in foreign universities after their engineering, and from our college this trend has only started from a year or two and still, not many people go for higher studies.

The life of an average NIT D student, as I have seen is like this: The first year is a complete waste, thanks to the subjects, which are a repetition of +2 syllabus and ragging. This ensures that the student has completely lost his flow that used to exist till 12th std. The second year is when most of the people start enjoying their freedom from seniors and get involved in gaming, be it CS or AOE or FIFA, and it becomes difficult enough for him to get out of that. The third year is when he starts scratching his head to figure out what he has done in the past two years and gets into a bit of subjects and stuff, as the placements approach. At the end of the third year, most of the students are placed in some mass recruiting companies and a large chunk of the people are happy with that and take to boozing or some other stuff. And in the vacations, they start thinking of a project or a VT and just do it for name’s sake. A few more companies (dream) in the final year and the final year is gone!

But the life of a student in IIIT is quite different from this, as they complete all important subjects in the first four semesters and are ready for projects or research in any subject they find interesting. All the students have to get associated with some lab at the end of the second year itself and that’s when they start off. Then at the end of their third year, they have either completed a good project or have published papers in research topics. Many of them get internships in top companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft for their final year projects and most of the students get busy with their MS applications.

So there is a lot of difference between the life of a student in IIIT and NIT D. After saying all this, I have to mention that the situation in our college is also changing for good and people are getting serious day by day. The abolition of state quota this year has also changed the situation drastically, with very less or no ragging for many juniors. So NIT D is not far behind the “top colleges” of our country.

Garib Rath–kudos to Laloo

I wanted to go home really badly, not because I was away from a long time, but I was really getting bugged with the same routine of lab to room and back to lab in IIIT and the amount of work that I thought I was doing looked too much (thought it was not much). And thinking of the life at our college (NIT Durgapur) and the whole idea of me working in the vacations too, made me feel even more sick! I just needed a break. So I wanted to book my train ticket and started searching for trains. I then got to know about the Garib Rath, which plies between Hyderabad and Bangalore. So I decided to try it once and booked my tickets. To my surprise, the AC 3 tier ticket cost just Rs. 499, from Hyderabad to Bangalore!

The train is very new and well maintained, it’s worth more than 500 bucks surely. I enjoyed the journey and traveled in the same train twice more. Each coach has 78 berths. It’s just like a normal train, but there is a side middle berth also and that’s how they earn some extra money. But that is totally acceptable and even then it’s worth it to travel in that. I had a very good experience and hope that more such trains in many more routes will be started.

Cheers Laloo!

Having a tough time with Fedora Core 4

I’m here at the Robotics Research Laboratory in IIIT Hyderabad and the computer which I have been assigned to has fc4. It’s quite an old computer with an average configuration. And there’s nothing installed in it except the basic software that come during the installation! The first week of my project work, I was quite busy with the work that was given to me and did not even think about installing any media players or linuxdcpp or anything of that sort. Well, actually the comp did not even have flash player for me to see videos in youtube or any other site.

That was when I realized I had to install a few things if I had to survive in the lab! And as there is no computer in the room also, I had to rely on the computer that was alloted to me in the lab. Then I installed flash player. Well, it took me quite some time to figure out that the comp required x86_64 files itself, for installation.
Then I downloaded the required files from adobe’s site and did it all manually, as Yum was not configured and I was quite restless to configure it. Then I felt the need of watching movies, listening to songs, etc and started looking for dc++. That was when I really appreciated the install managers like Yast (is the best!!!) and Yum.

I then started to think that the installation is so easy in our college due to the repository on LAN itself. The download process was taking a lot of time and I thought I was wasting my time in doing all this stuff, rather than concentrating on my project. Then I recalled that the idea of our LUG’s repository, which Debayan had given, was taken from IIIT itself! That, I thought was the turning point.

But No! I went to their webpage which was really well documented and had many shell scripts which configured yum and other things automatically (This is an area of improvement for NIT DGP LUG). I did all those things which were mentioned in the webpage. I successfully changed the repository details, to point to the IIIT’s repository. And even after this, I got many errors when I gave commands to install vlc, mplayer, to update firefox, etc. These were the list of error I got….
Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates-released
Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository
Another process in transaction (well, this one was easy to rectify, just went to /var/run and deleted the file with filename yum.pid)
and a lot more!

All these days, i.e. for 3 weeks, I was alloted a room, which is more like a chamber for 2 people, the other one being an MS student, my guide for the project. Yesterday, I was asked to shift to the lab, the new robotics lab, as a PhD student wanted to take the place that I was using. So we just had to shift the CPU.

As soon as I brought the CPU to the new lab and booted, fedora refused to boot! The booting stopped after Enabling Swap Space…..[OK]. Then I started googling for the solution and found many, most of them included booting fedora from the cd. One of the solution was to remove the network cable and reboot! I tried that as it was the easiest. The result was the error was being shown this time! It looked something like write error !#@@crap#%*(^(*. That was when I got really pissed off. Then I thought that I will implement the other solution, and I thought I can network boot fedora. I again went to the repository and found that they do not have the network boot option that we do! (This is one place where our repository scores over theirs, thanks to Debayan’s efforts!). So I asked some people for fedora core 4 cd, as expected none of them had it and they said that they could burn it in a cd if I brought one. It was 11 in the night, so there was no chance of me getting a cd at that time!

Feeling dejected, I went back to the hostel. When I came back today morning, nobody was there in the lab and I thought that I will set up a repository in a computer in the lab itself which can be used for network boot! Then people started coming to the lab, and I kept asking each one for the cd again. One of the MS students here, Shivudu, then told me that cd is not required and he booted the PC again.

[Solution to the booting problem]
He just deleted the first command in the kernel options and entered Single.
Then when the boot was continuing, the terminal started, and we deleted all the unwanted stuff. Then after rebooting, it got stuck again! He told me to just unplug the mouse, and to my astonishment, fedora booted successfully!

Here I am again blogging in the same old comp and still figuring out how to install stuff in this comp!

[That's why in my opinion, Opensuse rocks!!!]

The dream final

Manchester United vs Chelsea
It was a final, one of the best that I have ever seen, of the Champions League between (my favourite team) Machester United and Chelsea. I had not watched a final in which Machester United was involved from a long long time.
I was in the Robotics Research Lab in IIIT Hyderabad along with my friend from college Vivek. I had completely forgotten that the final was on the 21st of May. It was around 11.45 and we rushed to the OBH (Old boys hostel) where we had been alloted a room. And luckily enough the match had not yet begun.
The match was being discussed as more of Sir Alex Ferguson vs Avram Grant than Man U vs Chelsea. The match was being played at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. The match kicked off with great excitement and it was a great experience to watch the match in the common room with most of the IIIT guys also watching with us. Clearly, we, Man U fans were more in number (as always). And to our satisfaction, the game from the beginning was controlled by Man U. Christiano Ronaldo, Paul Scholes, and Carrick were looking in great form! Though Wayne Rooney, Tevez were not up to the mark that day, Man U was still able to easily gain an upper hand in the first half.
Then came the goal in the 26th minute, it was a superb header by Christiano Ronaldo thanks to an even better cross by Brown and Scholes who worked one two with Brown on the right flank.
Till around the 40th minute, Man U looked to be commanding the game. But then, they seemed to be losing their concentration and Chelsea started to penetrate more and more inside Man U territory. Frank Lampard, Didien Drogba and even Michel Ballack were beginning to look dangerous.
So, we were heading to the half time, with one goal up and then came the equalizer by Chelsea’s Frank Lampard. It was a lucky goal for them as Lampard just guided the ball into the nets which was a deflected shot by Essien. It was a shock for Man U. An unexpected goal, right at the fag end of the first half! The players were all disappointed as we were.
After the half-time, the game was started off with Chelsea taking the upper hand, as Rooney, Tevez and a few others were looking out of form. Chelsea missed a lot of chances in the second half as did Man U in the first. Both teams were playing nasty football and a lot of time was being wasted each time the referee was blowing the whistle and giving innumerable yellow cards.
It was then time for Ryan Giggs, in the 87th minute to enter the field. He became the player with most number of appearances for United, surpassing Sir Bobby Charlton’s record! What a great moment it was for him as the match headed towards extra time.
Then came the extra time and no team was able to score in the 30 minutes of the extra time as well! As the match was progressing, a nasty incident took place in the field which was initiated by Tevez, I think. As more and more players gathered, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the referee to handle the players. Didien Drogba couldn’t control his temper and slapped Vidic, and luckily the referee saw that and straight away gave a red card to Drogba. And then the match headed towards penalty shoot outs.
The 5 players Man U chose were: Tevez, Carrick, Ronaldo, Hargreaves and Nani. Chelsea chose Ballack, Belletti, Lampard, Ashley Cole and Terry. The players of each team was scoring until Christiano Ronaldo, let down all his fans by not scoring and the score line was 2-2, when it could have been 3-2 in United’s favour. Even after that, all the players that took the penalty were scoring and it boiled down to the last kick which was to be taken by Chelsea’s John Terry! And luckily for Man U, Terry slipped and kicked the ball wide of the goal post! It was a huge relief to all the United players and fans, me too!
Then the match proceeded into the sudden death. Anderson scored for Man U, Kalou scored for Chelsea, Giggs did it again for Man U and then it was Anelka’s turn. His body language looked as if he did not want to take that kick and he was unhappy! He got ready and took the kick. And to the joy of Man U, Van Der Sar, got a hand to the ball and stopped the penalty! That was it, Man U were crowned the champions of the Champions League, the previous one being in 1999. We all burst out of our seats and celebrated, shouting slogans of Man U victory. It was such a big relief after a tense match!
Overall, the match was a very good one, close one and no doubt, an ugly match too because of the number of injuries, fouls and cards.