बात करने से बात बढती है
रोज़ बातें किया करो हमसे

दुश्मनी से मिलेगा क्या तुमको
दोस्त बनकर रहा करो हमसे

देख लेते हैं सात पर्दों में
यूं न पर्दा किया करो हम से

Lyrics By: Ibrahim Ashk
Voice: Jagjit Singh
Album: Aaeena
Listen It Here: http://mio.to/evCp

#jagjitsingh

Finally I bought the last thing on my wishlist: a DSLR camera. Nikon D3100.

This is one of the initial pictures taken by me while learning about the cam.

The technique is called forced perspective. The settings used are large aperture, slow shutter (to maintain exposure) and half strength flash (as the objects were close enough). I managed to remove other disturbances after trying out 15-20 various angles.

The interview opens up a completely different side of him, which is so unlike his stage presence. I used to admire him for his humour, but now I am fan of his magnificent personality too.

People in office always asked me that even though you work in the team normally, why don’t you have hangout friends in office. I can finally answer that with I-have-different-office-and-personal-life-personality argument. I am grateful to God that its that way for me too.

(±)-7-{4-[(Z)-2,3-Dihydroxy-2-butenyl]-1-piperazinyl}-6-fluoro-1-methyl-4-oxo-1H,4H-[1,3] thiazeto[3,2-a]quinoline-3-carboxylic acid cyclic carbonate; with its empirical formula being C₂₁H₂₀FN₃O₆S and molecular weight 461.5.

The chemical formula is absolutely amazing.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 27 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 63 posts. There were 15 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 7th with 139 views. The most popular post that day was half way through first phase of TCS ILP.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, sweethome3d.com, sweethome3d.eu, google.co.in, and superuser.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for gupshup, tcs ilp, tcs ilp ahmedabad, tcs ec1, and tcs ilp ec1.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

half way through first phase of TCS ILP November 2009
6 comments

changing drive permission in ubuntu through GUI May 2009
16 comments

First two days at TCS October 2009
14 comments

Delete Songs Through Songbird From Disk January 2010
5 comments

TCS ILP Countdown begins… October 2009
4 comments

We just finished our first street photography event. We went from fort till marine drive. There was no theme for the shoot as this was the first event. There were some very good pics taken, with a lot of fun in general. When the shoot ended at 6 pm on Marine Drive, there was a two hour fun session right there. People got to know each other, there were opinions and a lot of planning for the future activities too!

People in the group are of all kinds. Some has nice DSLR cams, some have point and shoot cams (like me), and some were with mobile cams or no cams at all (obviously with intention of buying one in near future). Some prominent names that I can recall are Sumit, Uma, Vikas, Akshata, Nimita and Sujoy. Most people are from Borivli TCS office.

There is a lot to learn in this group for amateur photographers, and I am glad that I learned a lot from the event.

See some pics here.

After a bit of struggle, we found the place called Agarwal Bhojanalay. The food was not only good, but also jain by default ! Here are some pics.

In the evening, we went to Elloits beach, which is second biggest beach in Chennai, after Marina beach. We enjoyed the beach thoroughly.

I wanted to clean up my collection by deleting the tracks that I never listened to. I had already given them 1 star rating. Now came the issue of deleting them from the disk. Here are some ways that I found on internet.

• Right click on each song, locate it on disk, and delete each song manually. This will work only if we want to delete a few tracks. If there is clean up of more than 10 tracks, this would be very tedious.
• Another very technical solution is given here. Jigar Mehta wrote a method for deleting the songs by directly interacting with the SQLite database that Songbiard maintained. However, there have been reports of script not working 100%. Sometimes, it messed with files. Also, for a non-techie, this is not at all feasible.
• Third method is somewhat simpler, which I figured out while doing other maintainance work of library. It involves two softwares: Songbird and EasyTag.

Steps are as follows:

1. Prepare list of song in Songbird:
   • In Songbird, assign rating of 1 star to all the songs which you want to delete.
   • Sort whole songbird library by rating. This will group all the 1 star songs.
   • Select all 1 star song, and set their “comment” field as “Delete These”.
2. Install EasyTag. Prepare EasyTag.
   • Disable auto-scan at startup of EasyTag.
   • Open your music folder in EasyTag.
   • Sort it with comments column. This can be done via file menu.
3. Rename files to be deleted
• All the files to be deleted will have comment “Delete These”. After sorting the comments column, all these files will be grouped together. Select the grouped files.
• From Scanner menu, select “Rename File(s) & Directory…”. Set the renaming mask as “%c – %t”. This will rename the file “Song.mp3″ to “Delete These – Song.mp3″.
• Apply changes. Save changes to disk.
4. From the Nautilus / Explorer, search your music folder for “Delete These”. This will list all the files which you want to delete.
5. Select them all, and delete !
6. Done !

UPDATE: (30-January-2010): Instead of doing renaming of the files (i.e. step 3 onwards), you can just select all the files with “Delete These” comment, and delete them from EasyTag itself. No need to rename, no need to do any complex operations. Just comment the file from songbird, and delete from EasyTag. This update makes this workaround even more simple.

Tags: songbird, delete_songs_from_disk

Also, more information on pongal can be found here on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Pongal.

Here’s the link: (Happy-Go-Lucky) http://koolthoughts.wordpress.com

We all welcome him in the world of blogging, and wish him a very best luck for all the posts that he will be writing.

As Jain food here is a problem, I and Kalpesh had to mix specific dishes so that we can eat them. First combination was of tomato-soup and cheese-naan. Another combination was jeera-rice and dal-makhani. In my office, lemon rice is served with sambar and some other things, which are not available in Jain version. So I ate lemon rice with coconut chutney. Even yellow banana wafers here are fried in coconut oil, and taste is yuk. But good news is that there is some area in Chennai called “Shahukar Peth”, which is populated by gujjus and marwadis. The best Jain food is available in that area. Next weekend, we will be going there.

The city of Chennai is almost literate, but mostly in Tamil. People here just can’t get enough of Tamil. They talk in Tamil with non-tamils. They don’t watch anything on TV which is not in Tamil. Cartoon network, Hungama and even Discovery channel is in Tamil. They are way too insecure about their non-acquaintance with Hindi.

We now understand how difficult it is to run a house on our own. We buy food everyday. So we now know how much we spend everyday. With all sorts of things getting cut from our salary, we somehow manage to save a couple of thousand rupees. True value of money is actually understood when you stay away from home!

Names of guys and girls are not very different here. On the first day, in roll call, one guy and one girl raised their hand on one common name. Names are also longer here. So roll call lasts for longer time. While taking down some class details, you cannot make two columns as each name will require whole line.

I and Kalpesh have become CR of our respective classes, so that we can interact with our HRs in a better way. This will enable us to communicate our food problems with them in a better way.

My eating preferences and schedule are totally disrupted in Chennai. I however expect that I will be able to figure out something soon, and things will be back to normal once again. One possible solution is already being used: Ready to cook packets. Just keep them in boiling water for 5 minutes and then serve hot. Options are Rasam rice, Jeera rice, Palak paneer, Chole, Pav Bhaji and many more…

Signing off at Kottivakkam, Chennai.

But there is other side of the coin too. People here are very orthodox. They are more insecure actually; as they know that they won’t be able to survive outside the state. Another big problem here is unavailability of Jain food. People just don’t know what Jain food means. We managed to find some ready-to-cook packets though, so we have some options. There are three seasons in Chennai: cold summer, summer, and hot summer. We feel that it’s hot here already, so god knows what will happen in April-may time. Worse is that my office starts at 14:15, and I have to travel in afternoon for at least an hour.

I am going to try learning Tamil. I am already familiar with the Tamil script; now slowly I’ll start remembering words and word-forms. Let’s see how difficult the language turns out to be.

BTW, we got 24×7 internet connection at our place!

Signing off at Kottivakkam, Chennai.

Typical People

According to the faculty, our batch was the most versatile one. We had blend of all types of people and talent. We were good in our performances too. And most importantly, we had many pranksters. Whole batch was basically fun loving. We knew how to use free time.

We had pranksters like Shawn and Ankit. We had simple people like Amrit and Shashank. We had bubbly girls like Ruchi and Sweta. We had singers like Pankeet and Amrit. We had wonderful CRs as Ami and Rachit. We had ever-happy people like Kalpesh. We had Pashto singer Ami. We had composer Hemprabha. We had “the best” faculty Anupam Pandey. We were initially blessed with a wonderful coordinator Bhavin Shah. We had super-friendly staff. Lately we understood that we had a theorist like me.

Typical Phrases and Gestures

Our group had this phrase “TCS is dynamic”, which referred to any change that we observed in the people’s behaviour.

Ankit, Akshay and Shashank had these amazing set of gestures. They would do things with their ties, mimic an almost falling man with two of their fingers, and act totally frustrated in a very convincing way. Except the tie thing, rest two were very difficult to copy.

I personally had some particular phrases that I used frequently while talking. Most famous was “darta to hai hi nahi dost”. This I used to say in a very peculiar manner. Another word was “dost” which I used to use with almost all the statements that I spoke. Later in the training, other people started picking up the word “dost”, and were actively using it too. Most unexpected of all of them was Dipali who started using “dost” very naturally at times.

Group Trips

We started with some smaller trips like koba and pathikashram. Some people thought Mumbai would be a better option. Baroda public went home every weekend. We finally visited Udaipur-Abu. This was most memorable trip of ILP. At last we had a goodbye party in Fun Republic Ahmadabad. Most amazing part of these trips was making new friends and having better understanding of the people that we already knew.

Things that I will be missing

We will be missing Gandhinagar. We will be missing all the talk we used to have. We will be missing various games that we played. We will be missing some people from the batch very much. I will be missing all the gujju staff. I will be missing MARS and B-MARS gang. I will be missing the peace that the place had. I will be missing all the squirrels running all over the studio apartments campus. I will be missing the walk that I used to go on alone on the long roads of infocity. I will be missing some of the nicest moments of my life that I spent there.

But now we will make our heart and mind strong; so that we can move on easily and not be sad about what we left there.

Thanks to the whole batch

People were kind enough to give me constructive feedback on the paper. They pointed out some things which I don’t think I could have ever figured out on my own. I have not only learned new values from this training, but also have a new direction for thinking. Thank you A19 for the wonderful time and memories.

One Final Theory

One final theory in chapter of ILP would be about the quote “darta to hai hi nahi dost”. I would like my friends taking this statement seriously. We should not be frightened of any situation, person or time. There is way out from everything. World is dynamic. We should just be confident and attack the time with full energy and full faith in ourselves. For any challenge, we should be able to say from our heart: “darta to hai hi nahi dost”.

EC1 was very easy and all the hype was totally unnecessary. most people scored well and average was around 6. some people though failed due to exam pressure. i expected to top the class but pankit surprised us all.

yesterday we all went to Ahmedabad. we first went to law garden, then to aashram road and then C G road. law garden is also popularly called love garden. on the aashram road, shawn wanted to visit prayer tower. i luckily found a farsaan shop near by and got all the snacks that i wanted. in prayer tower, i found Holy Bible’s gujarati copy, and i immediately bought it. in the national handloom, we had the best badam milk, dahi and other chat dishes. the only bad thing there was the slush, which was worse than the mumbaiya chammach gola. i also purchased ties and other things from V mart.

we also came up with some nicknames of our friends in the group. falguni is called gun (or gun-ji), madhura is trophy, ruchi is nautanki and shweta is tomato! we also convinced many people in our batch that kunal parekh has designed his own programming language KP19, which he completed in just 19 hours, and hence the number. the language has no object oriented approach possible, but now kunal is coming up with the new version of the language called KP21, in just two more hours! (and obviously this all is cooked up.)

i also came in contact with some new people whom i either didnt know already or i knew very little about them. some of them are kunal, pankit, chintan, madhura, ruchi, lavanya, ankit jain, kapil sahani and ami. except last four, rest all are from KJSCE-comps. lavanya is from KJSCE-IT. she knows almost all arts, including south indian classical music, classical dance, english literature, painting and karate. kapil sahani is a typical moody person who will do things as he wants to do them, no matter what. i too am somewhat of the same category. kapil is from DA-IICT gandhinagar which is just half a kilometer from here. He works for an NGO too (Aproch.org), and is very passionate about it. Ankit jain is one of the few firm jains here. ami is from MSU baroda, and we know her by the pashto song that she sung in the class. most people liked it (including our group). we then heard the actual recording of the song, along with pashto lyrics and english translation. but now she somehow feels that we all want to make fun of her over the pashto song and that we didnt actually like the song.

today we are planning to go for 2012. people said that its an okay movie, worth watching once.

shawn develped some taste for classical music and now hums some of the bandishes! but he still dislikes most portion of the recording.

signing off at TCS studio apartments, gandhinagar infocity.