8th Endsem@TMRS. Lab

It appears that the oZone layer has suddenly developed a big hole with temperature rising to 43 deg C in mid April. To add to the misery the hot endsems are here again. Survival in top floors in hostels is almost impossible. Libraries and CC are overflowing for the first time during exams. What about me??
Once again TMRS lab has provided me the shelter I needed with a nice kitchen and CC canteen in the backyard and a cosy bed.

And here I get back to my studies :)

It's April fool's day ....

Amidst loads of hassles and chaos due to uninformed visit of GM's top official, April fool's day fetched us many preys for entertainment, with Taru and Neha leading the row with Mr. and Ms. Popat award. The plan was incubated at the Hall 8 mess during lunch time while I was having food with Shubham. We had been thinking of some nice idea to play a prank on someone. When we were entering the mess I came across Ashwini Shukla. I had found my prey. Shubham suggested me to call Neha, and propose her. Since she didn't have my phone number so it should work out easily. I was little uncertain of the success of the plan... "proposing a girl ... although fake.. still first time in my life I was bound to stammer and fail." We even wrote a script for carrying out the entire series of events. Finally I gathered some courage and called her :

"Hello Neha... my name is Ashwini Shukla. I am a 4th year UG in the Mech Deptt and am planning to start my own firm and would like you to design the website for the same. I saw you a couple of times at CC canteen and got your no. from Rahul Verma. Could we meet at 6 in the CR."And fortunately she agreed in the first attempt.

Our evilness turned darker by the evening and we began making more wicked plans. We needed some girl who could fake Neha and call Ashwini to the CR. We approached Ruchira Ma'am and she agreed but 'Shubham didn't have the script ready by then'. Meanwhile Akanksha had arrived in the lab and gladly joined the gang. I confirmed Shukla's phone no. from Saket and called him from my mobile but he didn't pick the phone. While we were still planning what next... there was call on my phone from the same number. Akanksha picked up the phone. The plan was that she would say that she was a student from MNNIT who wanted to participate in Robocon and needed his guidance. She picked up the phone , "Hello , may I talk to Ashwini Shukla." On realizing that the voice on the other side was feminine she asked "Who is this?". "This is Neha. Is it Ashwini's phone number ?" I immediately realised that I had called up the last dialled number, that was Neha's and not Shukla's. What a popat were we making of ourselves; picking up Neha's call and a girl asking her for Shukla leaving no reason for her to trust us.

2-3 more attempts but Shukla didn't pick the phone. It was already 5 and we didn't have much time now. So we started thinking of some alternative target. But who could beat the mastermind Shubham who had already fooled 3 people in the meantime. He called up his Mom saying that he had finally found a girl and he wanted to introduce her to them at an upcoming family function at his uncle's. Surbhi was in the lab for a while and even she was not spared, "You know Vyas Sir has become the director of IIT Indore " :D He didn't stop at that. He wanted a double cross; when Ruchira Ma'am would call up Ashwini it should be someone else on the other side and she would herself be fooled.



We were browsing through our gtalk lists and came across Taru - the perfect choice. Akanksha made up a nice storyline , "Hello I am from Kanpur Institiute Of Technology. Our group is working on a solar heater project and Kadambi Sir wanted us to meet you. Could we meet at CR and could you share some of your notes and works". Poor Taru in his usual squeezing voice agreed to all her conditions (I could imagine him sitting on his chair and pressing the space bar for pausing the media player). It was 5.55 and we were planning to leave when Vyas Sir entered the lab saying, "Mr. Mangalgiri is in campus and would be here in 10 minutes." What the hell... we felt so cheated, while trying our best to somehow delay his visit but nothing seemed to work that day. Finally I somehow convinced Neha to come over to the CC canteen while Taru was still unreachable. While we were moving out to CC canteen Vyas Sir informed us that we would have to go and meet him in the VH itself so we were relaxed but it was little late as Neha might have already left. I again called her up and asked her to be at CR itself.

We moved towards the shop-C where Taru was sitting under the tree waiting for his lady. The sight was amazing. He had a big diary in his hand probably containing all his btp work to be sacrificed for a KIT girl. We went inside making him comfortable and at the same time pulling his leg. His usual stupid principles didn't take a break even here, "Yaar sabse buri baat ye hai ki log time dete hain aur late aate hain. Main 4 baar phone kar chuka huun but no kar de rahi hai." I was literally feeling sorry for him but could not stop recording all this conversation on my phone. "So, Taru whats her name," asked someone. "She didn't tell that and neither did I ask." And still this gentleman was waiting there well dressed up waiting to pour out all his knowledge. If only we had a little more time..... the story could have continued for some more time. I asked him to watch a video in the meantime which was nothing but the Akanksha's call video. He almost went dumb for a minute and then says, "Ab CR aa hi gaye hain to kuchh khila do." But we had to proceed to CC canteen to claim another treat. I called up Neha and this time some guy picks up the phone and spoke rather rudely as to who I was and why I was looking for her. I called on her cell back and assured that I am not fake and I was serious about the project to which she blindly agreed. While heading towards the lab a profile video was made on the Taru and the gang behind these activities. Shubham's description of his role in the story was worth noting, "Main sabse chaapu huun...saari achhi planning karta huun, tum log tel machate ho fir main usko wipe out karta huun".

Neha was waiting on a table behind the TMRS lab. Shubham jumped to ask her what was she doing there. "I was actually waiting for someone," with no clue to who the caller was and what was the name of the company she was making the website for. I tried to instigate some talks regarding Shukla but probably her enthusiasm about the first project of her life didn't let her stop.

Shubham :"So koi bhi ladka tumhe kahega ki kaam hai aa jao to chali jaogi".
Neha: "Mech mein main sab ladkon ko jaanti huun..ccc mein sabko dekha hai."
Shubham: "Rahul ko apna no. kyon diya?"
Akanksha :"Agar Vyas Sir peechhe se aa jayein to teeno ka jayega."

Praneeth who was supposed to be at the lab to hand me the bluetooth mobile for demo was already in the lab and was bugging me on the phone. So we decided to uncover the mystery fast. Once again, we showed her the call video and got our shares of abuses immediately.

Shubham: "Btw wo banda kaun tha jisne Deo ko jhaada tha ?"
Neha : "To wo tum the jisne phone kiya tha... you dog .. agar maine pehle tumhari awaaz phone pe suni hoti to galti na karti ... arey wo to cross connection tha."

We apologised to the victims and proceeded for mission lab's mission now, when Neha snatched away Shubham's phone. Shukla after seeing my missed call, called back on my phone. Shubham not having switched to the work mode yet, cooked up a nice censored story to him on the phone.

Now it was Praneeth's turn who was walking with us towards the VH. He overheard our conversation regarding Neha making the company's website and got curious, "Which company which website... you registered your company or what". Why should we let him slip when he wants to drown himself. We cooked up a nice story that Shubham's Dad has loads of contacts and he has got us a company registered dealing in embedded systems. A website has also been registered for the same. "You didn't even inform me. What is this ? ...bla bla..bla", the whining continued till we had reached our destination.

The movie was yet not over and some anti-climax was still in store for us. We reached the VH at 6.45 only to realise that his room was locked. After waiting for 15 minutes I called up Sir and the much awaited typhoon was there. I tried to calm him down. Then we went to pick Dr. Mangalgiri from the "Artist in Residence" show. We brought him to the lab at 9 pm where our presentations lasted till 11.30 pm. Next morning we got the 2nd part of the blow from Sir when the single wheel test rig was not working. "3 din se bol rakha hai...ready kyn nahi hua. hasi mazaak chal raha tha kya !!" Somehow RSS and Ruchira Ma'am managed the situation and showed him some working VI.

A day full of pranks and an evening of nightmares.. deadly combination !!

Steve Jobs at IITK !!

While I was busy working in my corner at TMRS lab at 11.30 pm yesterday, Shantanu enters the room and asks me for Nikhil Padhye's phone number.... why?
"He needs to welcome Mr.Steve who is coming tomorrow at 11 am".
"Who.. Steve Buckner ?? " said I.
"Nahi yaar ... I am forgetting his name...Steve...mmmm"
"Steve Jobs to nahi??", giggled we.
"Haan Steve Jobs".
"STEVE JOBS???? are you sure you are awake and its him?"
"Haan bhai Steve Jobs"
"Steve Jobs ...Apple wala?"
"Nahi nahi... IITK ka first mechanical deptt HOD"
Ahh... we took a deep sigh of relief while our heart beat count was already 5 count up.
Then he recalled its not Steve Jobs but Vijay Kumar Stokes who was coming to IITK and was visiting our lab.
Next morning we met the 70 year old young man who still had the spark of IITK alive in him. While Shantanu demonstrated him his classic nanosatellite ppt, we had some great conversations with him. First thing he stated was that he needed the most intelligent person in the lab to remind him at 1 o'clock to meet the director. No sooner had Shantanu started than he interrupted him, asking why is it called nanosatellite. He explained to him the standards for nomenclature and that the name has nothing to do witjh nanotechnology. This was followed by a small dicussion on the use of word nano and micro today. This time Amrit Sagar said like we have Tata NANO, we have a nanosatellite. "No, its not the same. Nano is the name of the car and not the category. You can name yourself Micro Srivastava but you can not categorise yourself as micro organism".
Very soon he was bored with the lengthy and irrelevant presentation and guided Shantanu on making the presentation precise as per the audience. He even went on to mark him fail on the poor quality of indentation and text justification. He said that one should first build the story that is to be narrated then add the relevant content into the presentation. If someone asks you the way to railway station, one should not go on telling him how to catch auto and where to get down and how to pay the driver. Too much of irrelevant details may make the audience miss the flow of talk.
In the middle he pointed out asking if the spelling of "Ahamadabad" was correct. "You are in IITK right, so at least use the spell check. I can easily make out there is something wrong from the two different sizes of Ahmedabad on the slide. While I was coming I saw three different speelings of students' gymkhana at the same place : Student Gymkhana, Student's Gymkhana and Students' Gymkhana." The next thing he pointed was the fancy style of bulleting and inappropriate eye catchy font which changed from 1 slide to other. He emphasized on quality control of things. He gave an example of marathon athlete; he is most tired at the end of the race but that is the time when he should cross the line with full enthusiasm. Quality should be maintained till the end before the result because it is then when it is going to be exposed to public. If everything was good but quality goes bad at the end due to tiredness all the efforts go in vain. So one should get refreshed just before the end for the show. He asked the team to do extensive testing of the components before launching the satellite.
Shubham feeling sleepy, popped up suddenly, "Sir its 1 o'clock."
"No its not, check your watch".
"Sir, I checked Shantanu's watch."
Amrit said it was 12:58 pm by his watch but it was 6 minutes fast. "How will you make satellite when can not keep your watches up to date". Amrit said, "Sir, but I know the right time now".
He remembered faces of people who met him last time. He remembered Nikhil but faintly. Nikhil promptly said, "The only difference is that I have grown older and you have grown younger". In the mean time Vyas Sir had arrived and we had a small photography session with him.

AVR fuse programmer for MAC

Flashing MCUs or programming fuses in MAC doesn't have much GUI support except for the java based Burn-o-mat. Someone has really taken pain this time to make an open source cocoa based app for burning the AVR (old .NET based version also available). The good part is that he has tried to make the GUI exactly similar to the AVR studio fuse programmer. The software can be downloaded from:
http://www.vonnieda.org/software/avrfuses

During the setup it will ask for the path to avrdude. If you are using AVRMacPack, avrdude is a hidden file with path similar to :
/usr/local/AVRMacPack-20080721/bin/avrdude

Note: Please confirm the location before specifying the path. e.g. you can do so by right clicking the AVRMacPack manual in application folder and clicking show original.

If you are using prolific based USB to serial converter don't forget to install the driver. Interestingly, an open source driver is available for the same which performs better than the one provided by prolific. Its available at :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osx-pl2303/

Below are some of the screen shots:

Writing to NTFS from Mac

One major problem which most of us face while switching between windows and any other operating system is the incompatibility of file systems. While I had read access to the NTFS drive from my Mac, I did not have write access. The problem became more prominent after I recently bought an external hard drive for porting data between my mac and my other windows computers.
One solution was to keep all my disks in FAT format which is the universal format for read/write for all OS. The only drawback being that it can not handle files greater than 4 GB. Someone suggested to me to use a software called MAC drive on my windows machine. This software allows windows machine to access HFS+ partitions seamlessly. It was a good alternative just that there are more windows machine than MACs so one needs to install them on every machine being used.
Today while browsing through heap of topics on Wikipedia, I came across an open source project called NTFS 3G which installs a user space driver on MAC for reading/writing to NTFS partitions. You can actually format a NTFS partition using this. Even the disk utility shows an integrated option of NTFS format after installing this.

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/



Not only MAC, it is available for other operating systems like Linux also. It actually rids one of lot of hassles. Do not forget to install MAC Fuse library package to make it functional.