Dr. APJ Kalam to teach in IIIT Hyderabad

'Missile' man to teach at IIIT-H

Hyderabad, July 28: After relinquishing the high office, Former President A P J Abdul Kalam will now devote part of his time teaching students of the premier International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) here.

''Dr Kalam has agreed to be part of the distinguished faculty of the IIIT-H,'' its Chairman Raj Reddy announced at the sixth convocation amid huge applause by students.

Beginning August, Dr Kalam would visit the IIIT-H and fulfil his passion for being in the midst of young people and lecturing them, IIIT-H Director Rajeev Sangal said.

Promising an unstinted support to the IIIT-H, Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, who was the chief guest, expressed happiness over Dr Kalam agreeing to be part of the distinguished faculty.

The E-sagu initiated in collaboration with the IIIT-H in 6,000 farms would be expanded to cover the entire state soon, the Chief Minister said adding three more IIITs would be started in the state from next academic year.

Delivering the convocation address, Satyam Computer Services Limited Founder and Chairman B Ramalinga Raju, stressing on team work, wanted young graduates to adopt best practices available.

As many as 250 B Tech and M Tech students were awarded degrees during the ceremony.

--- UNI

Instrumentals galore !

Though I knew about this site "http://www.apunkabollywood.com" but I had no idea that they have this huge collection of good instrumentals and karaoke music about which I learnt just yesterday. We have our Annual Day celebrations in KritiKal on 5th of August for which I was searching for some original instrumentals and was glad to see the collection here.

I want to download all the instrumentals from here but I was just wondering if there was a better way than clicking on each and every link on every page to download them. Coz that would take me days together I guess :)

ne suggestions ?

New albums added ..

Do visit the new albums

• Lovely Lonavla (June 2007)
  
• Mystical Clouds (June 2007)
  
• Timber Trail Trip (July 2007)
  

Most of these pictures have been taken from Nokia 3250 cellphone with a 2MP camera. And the effects were added using Picasa and Gimp. The panoramas have been made by ArcSoft Panorama maker which has given me the best quality panoramas till now. I am still to understand the features of my digital camera so haven't used it to its full potential.

Fried Ice Cream ??

I was amazed to see this shop at Pinjor Gardens (near Panchkula) where you get Ice cream pakodas and equally disappointed when the shopkeeper told me that the material had got over so there wont be any ice cream pakodas available for the day. Though I did ask him how does he make them. He takes a small cube of ice cream, marinates it in corn flour and deep fries it. I am yet not convinced that the ice cream wont melt but then he has his shop doing great business there, so must be true :)

5 states in 24 hours

Nothing great but just to make a statement, I did travel to 5 states in the past 24 hours. Started from my office in Noida (U.P.) on Saturday evening and reached New Delhi (Delhi) railway station. I was going to Panchkula (Haryana) to my sister's place so I boarded the train to Chandigarh(Punjab). On Sunday we went to Timber trail, Kalka (Himachal Pradesh) which was an awesome trip. A perfect Sunday spent with the family (parents, jiji and jiju). Anyway, details about the weekend trip later. For now, the five states are Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh :D

Talk about travelling ehh ?

Broadband at room

Finally, took airtel broadband connection at my room in Noida. The details are as follows:

Rs. 725 Plan
Unlimited surfing
Unlimited download
Zero rental for modem and landline
No installation charges
One time modem charge of Rs. 500
Flat rate of Re. 1 per call
Pulse is 1 call/3 min for any local landline, 1 call/minute elsewhere.

My first client meeting

It feels good to be back to blogging ways :) Its been a month since I posted something. A lot to be written which includes

-> Lonavla trip
-> Lonavla pics
-> Ubuntu review
-> Broadband at room

But first, something about my first demo to the client without my senior. Today I had a demo/meeting with one of our clients and believe me I was tensed like anything. Had met these people earlier once along with my senior but today I was the one to handle everything. And a decent demo was important. Setting up the camera and software hardly took half an hour and instantly we could run our application live. I cant give the details of the demo and our application due to privacy reasons but the demo went well and I am very happy with the way things went today. Saurabh was also with me so it was not completely being alone which was somewhat soothing. But this is just the starting. The clients have suggested many changes and not to forget the improvement in accuracy which is of prime importance. Anyway, the demo went well and it has made me more confident to handle such meetings/POC (proof of concept) demonstrations.

On the contrary, yesterday was one day I would like to erase from my life. Nothing went right except that one of my friends cleared the CA exams and is officially a CA now. Save this fact, rest of the proceedings were something like this:

1. Had one day to prepare for the demo.
2. Had to pay 500 bucks as late payment fine on my credit card.
3. My cellphone fell from a decent height :) I know it might be a very trivial thing for many but to me its very painful to see my cellphone fall on the floor, that too tiled floor which tends to incur more damage.
4. The demo application ran well on the development pc but as soon as I tried to run the application on the laptop, it crashed. Wasted 2 hours trying to figure out the problem but in vain. Finally compiled the code in "debug" mode and then ran the application on the laptop and it worked. But those two hours were real torture. And I am still a little irritated at not being able to figure out the problem till now.
5. Finally was able to catch a bus for Ghaziabad at 9 pm only to land up in more trouble. The bus engine stopped working after only going a kilometer. The driver did fix the problem partially so that now the bus ran at 20-30 km/hr. And then it dropped me at Vijaynagar which is midway between Noida and Ghaziabad. Changed two tempos to finally reach Ghaziabad at 10:20 pm. Phew !!
6. And when I reached home, there was no electricity :) A perfect rotten ending to a perfect rotten day :D

But I find it all funny today though yesterday I was so mad that I could have easily hit anyone trying to mess with me.