India Post

I had sent a PAN card application via speed post on 18th of September 2010 from IIT Madras to Pune. When I tried to track my application on the website for PAN card tracking, it said that my application has not yet reached them. So I went to the India Post site to track my speed post only to find that there was no information about delivery. It did show a detailed movement from the IIT Madras Post Office to the Pune Post office, but there it ended. So, I got worried and immediately mailed the Speed Post In-charge at Pune regarding the same. The mail was sent at 7:17 pm so I expected to get some reply by the next day and they if they dont reply by the evening, I decided to make a telephone call. But amazingly, at 7:45pm I got a reply confirming the delivery of my post! I was amazed at the quickness!!! They actually checked the mail, looked at the records and got back to me with the confirmation.

We always end up cribbing about the slowness or the insensitivity of Government offices. I felt that we should also commend them whenever we receive a good service.
Hats off to INDIA POST :-)

Installing vim colorscheme

Having googled n times about installing vim colorscheme, I have finally decided to blog about it so that it will be a reference (for me at atleast :-P ).

If you are a n00b vim user and hence do not know how to install vim colorscheme and you google, you get stuck. Most of the references ask you to download the colorscheme and put it in your ~/.vim/colors.

Yeah... its simple :)

But er... wait a second. I do not have a .vim floder. So what do I do ?

Create one!

Ok... I create .vim/colors and put the colorscheme there. But alas! the new colorscheme is still not listed.

Then it flashed that I cannot just create a .vim/colors folder and put my favourite colorscheme in it and expect vim to understand.

By default vim colorschemes are in


/usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/colors. So, just move the downloaded colorscheme to this folder.


$sudo mv .vim /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/colors


And your favourite colorscheme is installed.

To have the colorschemes in your .vim/colors just create symbolic link.

$sudo ln -s /home/ramya/.vim/colors/ /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/colors/


:-) Its simple!

My favourite colorscheme is ir_black.

For more on symbolic links :

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/understanding-unixlinux-symbolic-soft-and-hard-links.html

An account of my first Night-Show

There is always a first time! I saw my first night-show (Paa at Satyam in Dec hols). Totally unplanned idea got executed perfectly well and we had an awesome time :)

Eating in Tifanys for 10 days had driven me mad and I badly needed a change. It was only in the evening around 5pm did I make my mind up to go to ascendas for dinner. Experiencing the same state of mind, all my wing mates (Akila, Kad and Tata) immediately agreed to the idea. So we, four girls left the institute by around 8:30pm (Yeah it took us 3hrs to gather 4 ppl :D). My stomach had already started to rumble and hence we had cup-corn at Guru on the way to assuage our hunger for the time being. We managed to enter Ascendas with two ID cards and some Tam fundae at 9pm.

We had almost decided our menu on the way and ordered as quickly as possible. Pizza + Sub + Something + Softy. We hardly cared about the people around and gobbled the food as soon as possible. By the end of the dinner, Akila proposed the idea of a Night Show at Satyam. All of us were sketching plans for a week to watch Paa and they never turned into action. Within a couple of minutes we were out of Ascendas bargaining with auto-drivers to go to Satyam. It was around 10pm already and we were running short of time. Finally we managed to reach Satyam at around 10:05pm, and guess what! We had just 4 seats for Paa left; but we had to make a decision since it was split into 3+1. After a quick discussion we concluded that we shall take a chance and went ahead with the idea of watching Paa; hoping to get some adjustment in the theatre. And we did manage to push three guys in a row to our seats and finally four of us sat together with pop-corns and cold coffees; all set to see the movie.

The movie was awesome. Amitabh Bhachchan was brilliant in his role. Music was too good and after a long time did we get to enjoy unadulterated comedy. Apart from the story, the cinematography was also great. Abhishek Bhacchan looked too handsome ;) and watches of both Vidya Balan and Abhishek caught our eyes. We enjoyed the movie (also the advertisements during intervals :P ) a lot and laughed even during the most emotional scenes. (Seemed like the people in the theater were cursing us :P )

It was around 1am in the night (er... morning) when the movie was over. It took us around 20 minutes to get back to the institute and we walked back to the hostel by 2am.

GaNitha

gaNitha means Mathematics.

Today I attended a special lecture on "Number partitions as an extreme value problem" by Dr. Rajesh from IMSc, Chennai, as a part of my Physics Minor course. It was an extremely interesting lecture.

Some how this made me look back and see how my interest in Mathematics grew and realized how blessed I am when it comes to Mathematics teachers. Since school (class 5th) I have always had really good mathematics teachers. This blog post to is dedicated to all my mathematics teachers.

I still remember my first Algebra Class in 5th standard by my Math teacher (Ms. Vasudha ?? Cannot recall her name now :( ). The way she introduced the concept of algebra was enchanting. I was so thrilled how we could solve for unknowns! Somehow the x,y,z s in the equations looked fascinating. Later I had Ms. Jayashree, Sister Royaline, Mrs. Cinthia D'souza teaching me Mathematics in school. During +2 I had Vasudeva sir teaching in the college (Pre-University college).

At the pre-university level, I had the opportunity to learn mathematics under HLS Rao sir. The most amazing mathematics teacher I have encountered till now. A teacher who can teach mathematics without writing a single word on board! The motivation that he gave us during those days is something that I shall cherish through out my life. I will require a full post dedicated to him.

Here at IIT Madras, I have been lucky to have really good Mathematics teachers. Prof. A V Jayanthan, under whom I did my first two semester Math courses (Calculus I and II) and also my Linear Algebra course and Prof. Natarajan who taught me Probability and Random Processes.

Currently I am doing Basic Graph Theory under Prof. Choudum. Another amazing teacher. Its a pleasure to do the course under him.

The frien(I)DLY dinner

We had a very Special Dinner on 24th of October, 2009.

I entered the mess ignoring the board which read Special Dinner. Over-estimating the level of my hunger, I ended up taking a plate full of variety of items (which looked weird). There were finger chips which were really over-sized, gulab jamun which looked unhealthy, something that resembled manchurian, some special rice and curd rice.

The dinner was being served by the mess people (generally we help ourselves). The man in-charge of serving curd rice seemed too stingy. Even after requesting twice, he was reluctant to put more than two spoons of curd rice. Fortunately(?), he had to leave the place for a moment and I was quick enough to make use of his absence to fill my plate with a heap of curd rice.

I went to a table and sat with a bunch of juniors. They started to laugh looking at my plate. I ignored them and started to eat.

The gulab jamun tasted idly-ish! Moving to the manchurian, it tasted idly-ish too. The finger chips was no exception and the curd rice was not curd rice! It was crumble idly mixed with curds. Everything was IDLY!!

So, it was actually a "IDLY" dinner! It was too heavy and of course tasted too idly-ish.


The Menu :

1. Idly Finger chips
2. Idly Manchurian
3. Idly Rasa Vadai (read Rasa as "Rasam").
   
4. Idly Briyani ! (Biriyani :-P )
   
5. Idly Usilli (we never figured out what this was.)
6. Idly Curd Rice(?).
7. Idly Gulab Jamun (Wow!!)

This was to our frien(I)DLY dinner menu.



My final Dinner :



Banana saved the day!



P.S : Thanks to Tejaswi and her camera for the pictures!

Disjoint

The last day of my fourth semester!!
I just cannot believe this. It means that I am half way through my life in IIT!!

Well. I have had a so called the "rod" semester. 26 credits it was!!! With no slots free, all afternoons occupied and yeah, with lab making you do extra work.
As a matter of fact, this being my first blog of the year, further proves my point.

No. No. I was not that busy! I just did not feel like blogging about anything in this semester!! I mean, nothing phenomenal happened in the semester. It was just another even semester, with of course few credits more. So, what did I do in this semester?

ABCDEFGS.
I have not forgotten my alphabet! The letters out there in capitals were the slots I had. Do not worry. I am not going to bore you to death with the description of each course in this post. It needs a new post and of course a lot more time!

The semester started and within no time Saarang came and went; followed by the Quiz 1. Before we could even get out of the trauma of the first quiz, the quiz 2 barged in and then there were the presentations, lab exams, lab projects and end semester exams and that was it! Oh my God, The semester just got over.

I had my share of fun with colors at Saarang. I spent almost all my time at Indraprasta (the place where fine-arts competitions took place), splashing colors around. I did face painting, glass painting and also made puppets!

As a part of Astro Club, International Year of Astronomy, we had theory and observation sessions quite regularly in the first two months. We met every Friday evening for theory session and had sessions on Friday and Saturday nights. I enjoyed them a lot!!

Then there was Boltzmann, a bunch of Physics enthusiastic students guided by Prof. SG . We just meet mostly on a Saturday afternoon, and discuss interesting topics. For the first time, I started attending the sessions of Boltzmann regularly. Yet times the topics discussed seemed a little over-head projection but they made me learn so much!

I broke my previous semester records and ended up watching around 25 movies! Of course, we had cute little birthday parties, treats, hostel nights etc., giving us an opportunity to enjoy the sunny side of life.

And there it ends!

Moorakke Mukthaya

Third semester!
Its over!
I have been in IIT for a year and half.... er!? A year and a half ??? I cant believe this !

Being in THE ELEC department of IIT Madras which is know far and wide for its "RODness", I knew what to expect and what not to. Or I thought I knew it, till the semester started to gear up and THE ELEC department started to show its ramifications in RODness. Only then did I realise what the ELEC EFFECT actually is.

The three departmental courses that I did in this semester were
• 1 Digital systems
• 2 Network System
• 3 CAD laboratory.

Digital Systems: EC104
It was taken by Prof. Vekatesh and Prof. Ravishankar. The course teaches you the philosophy of life. There are only two states in this world, 0 and 1, everything else is an illusion.
The course seemed all fair and fine till i held quiz 1. A ' (complement) completely complemented my life in the course. At the end of the day, knowing that the grading is binary too, huh!.... er.... there are only two states.

Network systems: EC204
Prof. Vinita taught us how to be punctual. I never believed that I, Ramya K V, can ever be "in time" to a class. Me?? er... I cant believe this! I am the kind who wakes up ten minutes before a class and barely manage to get inside the classroom before the Professor.
All through the semester we bulbed and bulbed and bulbed. Prof.VV had to give up on us finally. Can you imagine, a class of >40 odd ppl, all yet to be Electrical Engineers from IIT Madras, having done a 4 credit course on Electro-Magnetic Circuits in the previous semester, did not know what "Natural Frequency" means till almost the end of this course?
Finally we did manage to transforme almost everything on the way. Being non-causal, non-linear and time variant, I too finally managed to Fourier transform Laplace!

CAD laboratory: EC205
The Programming Laboratory. Its fun, yeah! fun, you see. Really, I did enjoy programming. But beware of this course!! This One Credit course can potentially take away all your happiness in life.
I got scared! Yes, literally I got scared. I never thought that I shall love Programming so much in life that I will pack everything else and sit crazily in front of the machine and become a machine myself. This is not I want to do in life, I knew it, yet this bloody thing was not leaving me. Thank God finally I did manage to pull myself out of the "Paapakoopa" (The Cursed Place) **.

Despite the heavy load, Elec Rocks!!

The "other" courses during the semester were:
• 4 MA205
• 5 AM110
• 6 ID120
• 7 BT101
• 8 HS509

Probability And Random Processes: MA205
This is one of the courses I thoroughly enjoyed, especially at the end of the semester. Prof. Natarajan was quite good. Though, he was not so audible, mike helped out.
Having no fundae on permutation and combinations, I had to start with the basic concepts of counting. Moving on from counting to Probability to Random Variables to the Stochastic Processes was an amazing journey. Also we learnt how to read any kind of handwriting :P

Engineering Mechanics: AM110
The subject so dear to me became the most hateful course this semester. Certain Professor V took the course , huh!! My hard luck. I never thought I could ever not like er... actually hate a Professor to this extent in my life.
I am done with the course. That is it. Period.

Ecology and Environment: ID120
Thanks to the Supreme Court of India. We had to sit and bare with this course for two hours per week and give two exams. Well, we need to be concerned with the environment. Yes. I agree completely, but does that mean that I have to sit in a class of ~552, spread across three rooms, with Professors and Teaching Assistants patrolling around in the class room? Well, its over.

Life Sciences: BT101
Thanks to the Supreme Court of India again. We had to again sit for two hours per week and give two exams. The lessons that we were made to study were all interesting. But why don't they understand that we do not have 48 hours a day to sit and read Campbell. I can potentially give a Medical Entrance test now.
And yeah, its over too.

Accounting For Social Sciences: HS509
The one and only course that I enjoyed all through the semester. Prof. Umakant Dash was GOD!! If it was not for this course, I guess I would have been insane by now. The delicacy of accounting, its intricate nature were made all so easy by the professor.
The only formula that we needed to know was Assets= Liabilities+Owner's Equity !
The Balance sheet, the Income Statements and the Cash flow statements seem so cute and nice now! The business news pages in The Hindu has started to make sense :)

**P.S: I have nothing against Programmers! This is my personal point of view.