Waves

Aha!! finally, we have got a fine working demo of our project. Thanks to Moyeen and Sathya, who were working very well and very co-operative. We have uploaded it to an asp.net server and after testing it, we will provide the url which you can use to try out our project.

Working on the project was very exciting because it was not a paid project and it was team work. We developed every module from the scratch and encountered lots of problems, which were cleared ASAP, giving us more experience in the technology. As Kiruba says, “I like teamwork and i like winning too“. Thanks for the sentence Kiruba, it works here also 😀

And hey, those of you who don’t know what the project is, its an Email Client for Mobile Devices. We have the 3rd review for the project on 28th of this month and we should be doing fine for it.

Bye!!

Hey friends!! last sunday and monday (yesterday n day before yesterday) was so good as usual. 2006 proved to be a great year for me yet again. I became a member of the barcamp organisers group and was called in for a meeting with Kiruba and his barcamp friends. It was too good to be a part of the planning for a big informal tech event. All of them were damn cool and everything (atleast most of it) was discussed openly. Its there on the wiki too. If you are interested to join us, subscribe yourself to the organize_barcamp google group and be a part.

We are also looking for sponsors for the event. If you know anyone, kindly email me at “aswin [dot] barcamp [at] gmail [dot] com“, or if you like to take up some other activity, don’t hesitate to drop a mail.

Yesterday was really cool as 6 of us (Bala, Chitresh, Krishnaa, Prathul, Siva and myself) went to St.Josephs Engg. College in Chennai for giving introductory sessions on .net. Bala started with showing the demo of codeless tabbed notepad and then proceeded to discuss about language independency of .net. Krishnaa showed off the new features of Office 2007. Though its still in beta and a bit buggy, its a phenomenal improvement. You have to see to believe all sorts of things that are possible in Office 2007. See a video here.

After the awesome lunch, we continued with Siva doing ASP.NET. He developed a full fledged codeless website, in which different types of users can login and based on the permissions per user, certain pages will be shown and others are inaccessible. My session was on Web Services and how one can develop a web service using C# and consume it in java using Netbeans. More details about it on my tech blog.

St.Josephs college has a nice auditorium and everything required was made available for us. Things went perfectly on schedule and we wrapped with the usual quiz (Prathul and Chitresh were the quiz masters 😉 ), giving Visual Studio Express cds. Thanks to Saurabh, Aswin R (3rd year IT) of St.Josephs and their team who organised this small event.

Today was a great day, The Echo Club members (we), about 20 of them spent time with children of an orphanage named Karunai Illam. This home is located in Madambakkam, about 5 Km from Raja Kilpakkam, near Tambaram. Before i continue, let me give a hearty hug to Mrs. Amritha Rajagopalan, a very famous social worker who is one of the supporters for the home and the doctors, Dr. Jayachandran and Dr.Mrs.Parveen who took all the pain to come to the place and serve the children. Mr. Power Singam, who runs the home, had everything in place when we arrived.

It was certainly awesome fun being with the children, their max age being 12. When Mrs. Amritha arrived at the home, the children greeted her unanimously saying, “Good Morning! Aunty“. She became very happy at such a enthusiastic response. We arranged for a free medical camp. Things rolled well and we were on schedule. We reached the place by 8.30AM. The medical checkup started by 9.30AM. Dr. Jayachandran started by addressing the small gathering of students by telling them a story. Every single child listened with utmost patience and it was pin-drop silence when the doctor was talking (something that we college guys should learn). Every child was bubbling with enthusiam. It was a pleasure !!

Medical Examination
All the boys were examined by Dr. Jayachandran and girls by Dr. Mrs. Parveen. The checkup began by stripping the boys naked. One of us measured the height, another one weighed the kid and then was sent to the doctor. Some kids got so shy that they started doing brake dance ha ha! It was funny. All the children were physically very fit. Thanks to Mr.Power Singam who is running the home. The children are provided good food.

As the doc was examining the children, he was telling some medical terms that needed to be recorded.

1. CVS RS NAD (Cardio Vascular System, Respiratory System – No Abnormality Detected)
2. Genitals NAD
3. Liver Spleen Normal
4. Tonsils (+) – for those who had tonsils
5. Ears NAD or Ear wax or Ear fungus (if they needed to be cleaned)
6. Spine normal
7. Tooth normal or Tooth Cavity (+) and the no. of teeth that had cavity

Some children (about 3 or 4) had a small swelling on their neck, for which they needed to be tested for Primary Complex. Some other children who were hard of hearing due to ear wax or ear fungus needed to be taken to ENT specialists. Everyone was given Zentel (1 tab), Trifer syrup (iron tonic), MVTs (Multi Vitamin Tablets) and Vitamin A tablets.

We learnt how to recognise tonsils, abnormalities in the male genitalia, vitamin A deficiency, B-complex deficiency, abnormalities in spinal cord, liver and spleen abnormalities and problems in ear, tooth and nose. It was a very good experience by becoming doctors for 2 hours ;), an opportunity that can’t be missed for a lifetime :D.

One of the symptoms of Vitamin A deficiency was rashes on the elbow, just above the joint. For B-complex deficiency, there would be miniature wounds on the edges of lips, that look like rashes. Those who look very dull or their bottom eyelid is pale white or pale pink, they have iron deficiency. Of the 86 children that were examined, only about 1% of them had some deficiencies. Rest of them are 100% normal and very healthy. Every child was advised to take half tea spoon of Trifer syrup and dates (they have high iron content) for normal iron in the blood. They were advised to drink a lot of milk, a tea spoon of butter and vitamin A tablets daily so that there would be no vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency is 1 of the major problems faced in our country. Even though 99% of them were completely normal and since most of them are aged below 12, they were advised for daily intake of dates and butter so that they would grow into super healthy humans 😀 😀

We played with them
As the camp was going on, a small crowd began forming around the tables where the doctors were seated. They were the children for whom the checkup was over and they wanted to understand what was going on. So, 5 of us engaged them by taking them over to a nearby ground, forming teams of 6 each and played cricket for the next hour.

Those kids taught us the long forgotten street game of Goli :). Ismail and Abdul did a really cool job of calling groups of children in turn to clear their doubts of what was going on in the camp. Many of them came to ask us vidu-kadhais. We even took small group photos. This excited them very much and they crowded around the digital camera to see their faces :). Prashant was patiently explaining how the cam worked, and they did listen to him. Good job dude!

Encounter with a Snake
We had two digital cameras whose silly batteries kept running out. So myself and Arun decided to go to Tambaram to buy duracel batteries. I was riding Abdul’s pulsar (150 cc). On the way back, the roads were free and i was going at a speed of 70 kmph. About 100 m ahead of me, a TVS 50 biker was wiggling with his bike. I was wondering what he was doing in the middle of the road and within a second, i was just 10 m behind him.

A huge snake was lying along the width of the road with its raised hood. I was terrified at such a sight. I was going at 70kmph. Stopping the bike suddenly spelled danger of skidding as the road was a bit sandy. I also had the fear of the snake striking me. Closing my eyes and raising my legs, i let “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee !!” and ran over the snake !! Without even pausing to see what happened to the snake, i turned the bend at 70 kmph, something that i had never done before. A few minutes later, i was back at Karunai Illam.

Hopefully, the snake shouldn’t have died.

Lunch at the Illam
The medical camp was over by now. We thanked the doctors, gave them a small gift and they left with their heart and soul very contented. They rang a bell to signal lunch. All the children stood in queue with their plates to get the lunch. They stood in height order with no pushing or pulling and shouting. They behaved very decently. After getting their food, they settled with a glass of water at their table. What surprised me was, even the smallest kid hadn’t spilled a bit of food on the floor. They were very clean.

We also had our lunch along with them. After the lunch, we looked thro’ the prescriptions that the doctors had given us, split the tablets for each of them and gave them to Mr.Singam so that he can give them to the kids.

We took a big family photo with the kids and left Karunai Illam by 3pm. It was a very nice heart-warming experience today.

Team
Here is the list of people who made it to Karunai Illam. Aarthi Sarma, Abdul, Anusha, Arun, Balaji B, Dilli Boy (actually she is a girl 😉 ), Ismail, Mangai, Nachal, Prasanth, Rajeev, Saranya Ranganathan, Senthil, Sriram Nishwanth, Uma and myself. If you had seen clearly, half of the team were girls. A wake up call to all the hyper-conservative dads !!

On the whole, it is NOT a great job done by great people, it is a small deed done by ordinary people to make this world a better place to live in.

Photos
I have posted the photos here. Have a look at them.

Thanks! for dropping by 🙂

Hi!! people, a small announcement

YES Chennai (Youth Ever Service, Chennai) has now become Echo Club, Chennai and henceforth, will be known as “Echo Club”.

All the very best to Echo Club in all their future endeavours. 😀

–

ha ha! Tell you what, this “hi” thing during every chat got very boring for RSA (Ram, Supratik, myself) that we devised something else. Infact Ram came up with this idea and got the majority of votes 😉

The idea was that we start our conversation with “bye” and continue working backwards thro’ the chat session. It is exciting to watch people’s reaction when we say bye at the beginning of a chat conference, and we 3 burst out laughing. Here is a chat excerpt…

A: Bye humans…
R: Good night aliens 😉
S: bye, ha ha ha
…….
…….
After some time, Supz gets tired and says..
S: ok ppl, im “hi”ing now
A: ok..hi
R: good morning 😀

Ok, im feeling sleepy now…bye! (this is the real bye, he he)…

Hieee all,

I’m really excited today ‘cos a lot of exciting things have happened in the past week and the good news is, ITS GOING TO CONTINUE FOR THE NEXT WEEK TOO. Before i blog on the exciting last week, an important thing has cropped up. Yuvi has geeky tagged me and here goes the rules and my specification of dream computer.

Rules:
1. The Tagged victim has to come up with the specifications of their dream personal computer.
2. The Specifications have to be feasible : They atleast have to be in the lab. So, you can’t ask for the Google Supercomputer :D.
3. The Victim needs to tag atleast two more people. If you are tagged again, you have to start the process again if the dream computer specification has changed.
4. The tagger needs to leave a comment (that he has been tagged) on the victim’s blog 😉

My dream spec.. follows:
11. An unlimited broadband internet connection
10. Microsoft mouse.
9. A nice speaker set from Creative.
8. 21″ LCD monitor with integrated high quality web camera ;-).
7. Pentium 4 processor extreme edition with HT.
6. TV tuner card.
5. nVidia GeForce card.
4. DVD Writer.
3. 2 GB DDR2 RAM.
2. 250 GB HDD.
1. Necessary, original Microsoft software 😉

Apart from this, a digital camera, iPod and 40 GB USB harddisk won’t cause any problem :D. Hmm…thinking along the same lines, it would be better to have a Toshiba laptop with the following specification, 80 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM, DVD writer, integrated memory card reader, bluetooth, IR (so that i can program it as my TV remote control 😉 ), WiFi and other extra bells and whistles such as webcam, USB mouse etc. 😀

Ok…as part of the rules, im geeky tagging Ramesh, Sathya, Moyeen, Krishna, Siva, Sabarish and every single person reading this post. 😉

Bye !

My mom is a great cook. 😀 😀 She cooks so well that, once the aroma begins wafting through the house, you can’t help getting hungry. Today was such-a-day. The dishes are pretty simple…Lets go and have a look at what we have…

1. Vatha kuzambu – a typical tasty yummy south Indian dish, made in every home
2. Vendakka poriyal – to be precise, its fried “ladys finger”
3. Fried appalams – Pappads
4. Rasam – hopefully you should be knowing this
5. Vegetable salad – cucumber, carrot, onion, capsicum etc. etc.
6. Thick ice-cold curd (as usual)

As these got ready by 12pm, i just couldn’t wait for lunch…i grabbed a plate from the shelf and was making such a din with it that my mom had to serve me those…slurp!! Half way thro’ lunch, i felt, “hey!! why the heck we have to eat the same way everyday….sambar rice, rasam, curd”…its actually quite boring…so lets make a change by preparing a combo today ;-).

All the items were piping hot…i took a small vessel, put some kuzambu in that (cos if this didn’t work, i don’t want to spoil other’s lunch he he) and then broke about 2 appalams to get 8 pieces and made appalak-kuzambu he he…nice combination…Next, i put some rice and mixed ice-cold curd to form a thick mass (consistency of chapathi dough..) along with the vegetable salad to form a colourful curd rice…wow!! u shud have tasted this..it was heavenly..

Added to this, the appalak-kuzambu in small amounts blew the top…it was great…wow!! slurp! Curd and vendakka-fry is always a hit combination…u know what to do next…add lots of vendakka fry…The combo can’t get yummier than this. I tasted this a bit and devoured it myself. So here goes my thathuvam “A simple lunch can be a great lunch…but a great lunch can never be a simple lunch”. Want to taste some???

This simple lunch, combined with a 2 hour siesta is the best combo you can get. There is nothing else to beat this satisfaction 😉

Btw, i have started cooking too…Next time anyone is going to ask that question, im gonna punish you with my thakkali (tomato) chutney he he…

So…u have wondered why the hell you need a “Start” button…Well, even if you hadn’t wondered like that, this is worth knowing…

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/07/22/54559.aspx

Yippppppppppppeeeeeeee!!! yahhhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooo!!! im dancing here. reason?? Its obvious…i upgraded my computer yesterday….and its flying now. Here is the upgraded configuration.

1. Added another 512 MB RAM to make it 768 MB. But my motherboard won’t allow that :(. So, it had to be 640 MB. Nevertheless, the speed increase has been quite significant. Able to run both VS2005 and Netbeans 5.0 simultaneously.
2. Upgraded my existing 40 GB HDD to 120 GB….Its cool now…lot more space…enough to have a full family sleeping 😛
3. A brand new APC UPS after the UPS burst. Haven’t tested this yet. But atleast now, the computer isn’t getting switched off after power cut (Phew!!).
4. An experimental purchase of the new iBall optical mouse. Its good too.

Above all, im having original windows server 2003 😉 because my college is having MSDNAA. But its human nature that, how much ever we have, we crave for more. Most of the time, the grass on the other side looks greener. So, heres my wishlist.
1. DVD Writer
2. A 1GB USB flash drive.

Oh…ya, i haven’t stopped dancing yet. The system is quite fast, and that too with broadband internet connection, i left the computer switched on through the night to download netbeans 5.0. First time, its running for a full 24 hrs. 😀 😀 The new year has been great till now. I’m enjoying every bit of it. Hope you are doing the same !!!

Instead of burning them, you can exchange them at some retail showrooms to get new items…ofcourse, you have to pay some extra money. Here the gain is personal, atleast you are not damaging the environment. The second thing you could do is, sell those goods to scrap dealers. The little money you get by this can be used to buy new dress that can be given to deserving people. Ultimately, by doing such small things, we not only get a lot of satisfaction but also making someone else happy.

Wish you a very happy pongal. Let our mistakes or faults we made/make perish and let the phoenix of goodwill rise from the ashes…

Update: Check this post too.