Sen’s Blog

On 16th November, 2005 we started to Bangalore for a Poster presentation on our research project at the Intel India Student Research Contest. We took the Mysore Express from Madurai Jn in a two tier AC coach (since Intel gave us reimbursement for the forward and onward journey we spent less time to worry about our travelling cost ). Sri Ranjani and myself went for the presentation on the topic “Security in LAN through Autonomic Computing”. On 17th NOv,2005 we reached Bangalore and were given accomodation in Hotel Ashoka Residency. Since our college had the maximum number (13 teams) of teams in the presentation, we were given shared accomodation with our college mates. Shanker Vinay Arul(BE,Mechatronics), Naganathan(ME,Production), VijayKumar(ME,CommSystems) and myself were given a double bedroom room in the hotel. On the same day we went to the Intel India Office which was in the Outer ring road at Bangalore and there we attended many seminars. We had a chance to listen to a lecture by Frank Jones, President Intel India. In the afternoon after lunch we were given separate display boards in which we placed our posters for display. These posters illustrated the idea of our project and the entire design of what we are proposing. It was a big competiton with teams from almost all the IITs, NITs, BITS and almost all the well known universities. We stood at our stalls and the employees of Intel came to our stalls and interested people were enquiring about the projects description. Each team was assigned a Intel mentor. For our team the Intel Mentor is Mr.Kothandaraman Rengarajan who is a very dynamic person, and helped us in coming out with ideas of how to design our posters and improve our projects scope. He conducted telephone conferences before we made to this presentation at Bangalore.

On the second day also we had many sessions by prominent Intel personalities and in the afternoon again we were asked to display our posters. We had a chance to explain our project to Mr.Vadivel who is working at Intel who is an aluminus of our college (2000 passed out). I just recognised him, since I ve met him only once, that too when he came for a technical talk a year back to our college when he was associated with IBM. Felt proud to be a TCEian when I saw one of our aluminus in Intel. Some of the names which I shouldn forget to mention are Manav Subodh, Jagan J, Lisha who are the core people who worked for such an event to happen.

On 19th Nov,2005 we didn had any appointment with the Intel Contest. We had plans to party with our seniors Balamurugan(WIPRO) and Arun Ponniah(TRILOGY), but unfortunately they had a very tight schedule and our plans were in vain. But we had a chance to meet our senior K.N.Karthick(WIPRO) who was free on that day. He came with us and we went to various places in Bangalore and a nice snacks session at McDonalds in Forum. In the afternoon at around 4pm we went to his house and chatted with him and his family members. Then at 6pm we started to the railway station to catch our train which arrives at 9pm, since we feared Bangalore traffic(terrific) . Keyan’s mother prepared us nice Lemon rice and curd rice to have for our dinner. Then in the railway station we met Shankar Vinay and Naganathan and got in our berths in the train and had a nice sleep

That was a nice experience for us to be a part of such a great event at Intel. It gave us an exposure to new industrial trends and also built confidence in us to participate in such events in the near future.

Hmmm, I remember November 2nd, 2005. Sivaprakash, Selvamurugan, Muruga Prasad (these 3 guys are my friends) and myself were just having a bike ride in the Tanjore NH, near NIT (National Institute of Technology) Trichy at around 7:30 pm. I was sitting behind Siva in his bike (splendor), the other two guys were going in front of us (Muruga was driving) in a CRUX. When we were in front of NIT there were two buses in front of us trying to overtake each other. In order to be safe Siva made his way out of the road. Thats it, the road was full of small pebbles there… then the bike skidded and within a fraction of a second we were lying with the bike above us We fell to our right and I got scratches all over my left hand and leg (am still wondering how it happened). I got up from that road after a delay of about 5 seconds and I could feel the breeze of a fast moving bus in front of me (if I were a bit late, say a second to get up then the wheels of the bus would have used my head as speed breaker ). Hearing the sound of the crash, the 2 guys riding before us stopped the bike and came shouting, asking me to get up, since the bus was advancing. Then after I got up, they asked me whether I was acting in Matrix (movie), since I was moving in slow motion when the bus was advancing. Thank GOD am alive and typing now. Then we went to a tea shop nearby and washed the wound, a second year NIT guy went along with Muruga Prasad and took some Dettol for us from his hostel… Then the plan we had was wasted that night and we returned home. Still a scratch in my elbow is not cured and its slightly paining (hope it ll get cured soon). I was in complete rest all these days, ie., from the day when my study hols started and I ve planned to start my semester preparation from today onwards

On 25-08-2005 and 26-08-2005, I had an opportunity to stay at Karunya
Institute of Technology. It is really very pleasant and cool to be
there. Sri Ranjani and myself went to participate in various
competitons in Opzione’05. Opzione is the symposium organised by
Association of Computer Engineers (ACE as they call). We went to
participate in Paper and software presentation, fortunately we
cleared the prelims for quiz and we had an opportunity to take the
quiz also.

One interesting thing which urged us to put our efforts to go for
Karunya was their poster, which laid emphasis on Open Source
Technologies (“May the source be with U” this was their caption). On
25th we went to Coimbatore. Dheepan took us to Karunya and I was given
a room at Hepzibah block (no:30). It was very nice to be in that room,
very silent and pleasant. Two guys from Sona College of Engg. were at
the room next to me and gave me good company. We both went to the
auditorium and there we had a slight disappointment. Their theme was
open source, but nothing was in accordance with their theme. They had
a presentation about Free software on a Propritary OS

We didnt get any prize in the Paper presentation event. The following
day we had software presentation and quiz. On that evening I was a bit
upset over not getting a prize for our paper and also I feared that
there wont be any recognition for our software, since I coudnt figure
out any soul cared about free softwares. But before I could give up, I
met Johnny Jacob and Swen George, two cool guyz who were so passionate
about GNU/Linux and the free software philosophy. Hmmm… then I got
pretty interested in participating in the following day events. In the
evening Johnny, Swen and myself had a discussion on bringing awareness
on GNU/Linux to the students of Karunya. They had plans of starting a
GNU/Linux user groups in their college. They showed me the stuff they
had prepared for that and I gave my suggestions. It was a nice talk we
had and I enjoyed it. A third year guy Vamsi Krishna was also there
with us during the discussion.

Next day we got second place for our software and third place in
quiz. In the evening we had prize distribution and recieved the cash After a small delay guyz in Karunya have started their own Kits
Linux Club in their campus. Am very glad about it. I wish all success
for their new initiative and I hope this Club is gonna rock Coimbatore
GNU/Linux Users

It became one of the unforgettable moments in my life, my visit to
Sethu Institute of Technology [SIT]. The reason behind this is simple,
I was honoured as one of the delegates in SIT. I got a call from Joe
Steeve the previous day ie., on Sunday night asking me to join with
the team which comes to SIT the following day to give a talk on
GNU/Linux.

On Monday [08-08-2005], I went to hotel Supreme, Madurai to meet Joe
and the team. I could see four people there, discussing something
seriously about GNU/Linux in Madurai. I went inside and joined the
discussion. Sometime later we were taken in a car to SIT campus. I
couldn beleive that I was made a delegate in the talk that
followed. We were four people who were about to give the talk.

1) Mr. Hari Ram Athreya [Scientist, AUKBC]
2) Mr. Chandrasekar.T.V [Project Engineer, AUKBC]
3) Mr. Amalan Joe Steeve [Software Engineer, TGS]
4) Myself

They came as a part of NRCF, from Anna University KB Chandrasekar
[AUKBC] research center. These guyz are responsible for framing the
syllabus for the elective on FOSS to the sixth semester students of
Anna University. I represented as the Moderator of GNU/Linux User
Groups of Madurai [glug-madurai], and spoke about the activities which
are going on in this user group.

It was an experience for me to talk in front of the students and
staffs of around eleven engineering colleges [in and around
madurai]. I feel that this was a great opportunity for me. Hope this
may continue

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi

We went for a paper presentation at Velammal, conducted as a part of
the symposium of Department of Computer Science and Engineering. They
have named it as “Pegasus’05″ (what a nice name). The very attractive
thing in this name is not just this, the logo which they have designed
for it, they say it as a “Unicorn Horse” (the second logo which I
admired the most in my life). This college is situated some where near
Redhills road, near Ambattur in Chennai.

We were allowed to use their college bus. Sri Ranjani and myself went
for participating in the paper presentation. We also had plans in
participating in Spiders (a web designing contest) but due to my
laziness to sit and code and lack of time we couldn go for that. The
hospitality which they gave was nice. To add to this we had another
familiar person to us there, he none other than our Ex-HOD
Dr.N.Ramraj. He welcomed us and spoke with us recognising that we came
from his previous work place. He held the post of Vice Principal
there.

Hmmm, we were given the eighth slot to present our paper in “Papyrus”
(this was the name they gave to Paper Presentation). We had our
presentation in PDF. We were slightly different from others who
presented it. We were’nt worried to have less number of slides in our
presentation.

There were four judges. The HOD/CSE of MIT (Anna University),
Asst. Professor of CSE from Sri Venkateswara Engineering College, and
two other persons were from Tata Consultancy Services. There was not
any quetions from the judges and even from the audience as soon as we
finished our presentation, except for one which we managed to answer.

Then we were given the “First Prize”, which took us to the heights of
achieving something, since this was our attempt to present a paper. We
also didnt had much experience in presenting papers since we were
concentrating much on our projects After getting such a victory we
have decided to put more papers and we have started working on
Autonomic computing, OS, Networks and such related areas

Oh!!! I forgot the prize money was 2000 bugs…

Prometric ID : PR0325762

http://in.samsungmobile.com/en/phone/manual_software/manual_software.jsp?page=3

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7336

Its been a long time since I was preparing very seriously for getting an offer from a reputed company of my choice. I couldn forget June 7th, 2005 coz I got a job. It was on June 6th, 2005 we had Cognizant Technology Solutuions at our campus, on the same day we had a wonderful presentation by the Cognizant team and the toughest part came i.e, the Aptitude Test. There was negative marks and I managed to solve 25 questions out of the 40 questions. We got the short listed candidates on the same afternoon. Next day (June 7th,2005) I had my interview. It was a very easy, nice and pleasant interview. I remember I got into the room at 9:07 am and as soon as I got inside the interview there was a power failure and the room became dark. Then Mr.Renga a smart young chap who was my interviewer asked me to help him in opening the windows. I immediately went to one of the windows and started opening also he did the same, in the meanwhile the power came. Then he introduced himself as Renga and I did the same. Then I made myself ease in the chair in front of Renga (It is a custom in Cognizant to call all the associates by their first name). Then he asked me for the form which we filled with most of our personnel details and skills. The first question he shooted was to introduce my self introduction. After introducing he asked for my college mark statement. He had a glance and asked me why dont we start with Microprocessors. Without hesitation I said yes. He asked some basic questions from that. Then he switched to Datastructures and then to Object Oriented Programming. At last he ended the technical talk with Sofware Development practices. While I was explaining the various steps for developing a software I missed the important point i.e, review. Then he reminded me about that and he gave a small talk for a minute about review. He mentioned that review must be in between testing and delivery. I added that it must be between each and every phase of the software development cycle, he was very much pleased and appreciated me for coming with a valid point.

Then after 15 minutes of technical talk he moved to an informal talk. He asked who is my favorite poet, since I have mentioned in my resume that I have a passion towards tamil poetry. Immediately I replied, “Vairamuthu”. He asked whether I had read “Thaneer Desam” of Vairamuthu. How could I forget that wonderful work of him, the best poetic novel I’ve read thus far, so I said yes and we chatted for about five minutes on that. We both were talking about the great man Vairamuthu in which both of us were pretty interested (Like minded people, identify them easily ). At last he said with a smile the “You will be shortly hearing from Cognizant, to get placed”. On hearing these words I was very confident that I got an offer even before the results were read.

This was a pleasant experience of mine in my interview. All my efforts in my college helped me to achieve this. Immediately after the results were announced I rang my mother and said that I got placed in Cognizant, she started crying with joy, thats the greatest moment in my life, since I proved I didnt wasted the efforts which my parents took to make me successful in life. And I alwalys remember that this is not the end, this is just the starting for some big deal awaiting in my future endevours (Since I remember the words of Spencer Johnson in his book “Who Moved My Cheese”, its just my cheese has been moved). I would work hard and try to explore more in my field and give the best of mine where ever I work. Today am back into the Parallel Processing Lab after a short leave, with the regular hackers of the lab (my juniors). But this time its slightly different since there wont be any seniors . And the new HP Prolion server is waiting for me… cooooool .