This is my first post in a very long time. Exactly a month has passed since I joined Accel Animation Studios as a junior engineer in R&D. And this period has been the most exciting period of my life till now. I have been thinking of writing something for a while, but time has been short and when I did have time, I was too tired to write.

So I’ll just write everything I remember right now.

I came to Chennai on the 30th of May on a special day time train. I was fortunate enough to get a scientist working at the Kalpakkam Nuclear power plant in Chennai in my next seat. This was my first meeting with a nuclear scientist, and I had a great time talking to him. There was only one thing that was not right in the journey. Since it was a daytime train, I had booked a ticket only on the chair car, so there were no switches for the lights in the compartment. When the ticket collector finally arrived to check our tickets, I asked him to switch off the lights. He was a smart looking young man, wearing a blazer and a tie, still his response was that it was not his duty. I was really annoyed and if I had an internet connection right then, I would have made him not worth living. But it happens all the time. Nothing to worry about.

So once I reached Chennai, I boarded at Rathna Lodge opposite T-Nagar Bus Terminal for a few days, until I found this place at Nandanam. I wouldn’t recommend Rathna Lodge to anyone. The place was terribly dirty.

I went to the office on the 2nd of last month and met with Mr.Muralidharan, the CTO of the company. I was showed around and then I was told that there were two other people in the R&D department, and that they had gone to our Trivandrum studio regarding the feature film that we’re working on, and so I was packed off to Trivandrum right the next day. Things were much easier at Trivandrum because the company took care of transport and accommodation. An American called Peter Burlington, working for our company was also staying at the Guest House with us.

Our Studio is located at the Kinfra Video Park in Trivandrum, and the only other studio in the campus is Mohanlal’s Vismaya Max. Since we don’t have a canteen at our office, we go to the Vismaya Max canteen for breakfast and lunch. One day, as we were finishing breakfast, someone just came and asked what lal sir could get for breakfast. I understood that Mohanlal was at the studio, but I really didn’t expect Mohanlal, my most favourite actor, to walk into the canteen right infront of me. He came so close to me and then walked on to sit at a table near the window.

I was totally dumbstruck, I managed to smile at him and he smiled back and nodded. Only later did I realize that I could have got a photograph with him, or atleast given him a handshake. But no worries. Everyone says he comes often. I’m getting along with the job very well, and will get to go to Trivandrum again. I’ll get a photograph with him then.

After getting back to Chennai, I have been learning to create procedural shaders, and I’m getting kinda good at it. Thinking from an artistic perspective and analysing materials all need some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you get sort of addicted to it.

This has been my daily schedule for the past two weeks: Getup at 8 AM, reach office by 9;30 AM, lunch by 1 PM, office ends at 6:30 PM. After that, I play table tennis or carrom with colleagues at office, get dinner at 9 PM, reach home by 10 PM, and get to bed by 12 AM. Father bought a bike, a second hand Suzuki Fiero for me and sent me, and that takes care of my transportation problems. The only problem with bike riding in Chennai is that you have to wear a helmet always and that sucks. My head gets all soaked with sweat. And I’ve already paid 300 rupees in total as fine, for disobeying various traffic rules. You can’t take a free left in several places, and you can’t take a U turn in most places. And there’s a flyover under construction right in my way to office, but the roads should be really convenient once the flyover is ready.

I stayed up till 12:45 AM last night, because I got to the end of the novel `The Hungry Tide` by Amitav Ghosh - which I bought at Trivandrum and have been reading for the past 2 weeks - and I couldn’t stop until I finished it. I’ll write a review to the novel within the end of this week.

If you follow my blog regularly, you would have known that my father has brought a new computer running Ubuntu, and that I have completed my BE degree course and have brought my computer home from college.

At home, we have a broadband Internet connection that we share between the two computers. Here’s how I setup my father’s computer as a gateway for my computer.

Both computers had an inbuilt ethernet port and we bought an extra ethernet card for my father’s computer and use it as an internet gateway. Sharing internet on two windows computers is a very straight forward procedure. You just have to connect the broadband modem to one of the ethernet ports and use additional ethernet ports to connect other computers to the gateway.

In Linux however, this doesn’t work automatically. Port forwarding is disabled by default in Ubuntu. This has to be enabled if the computer should forward packets it recieves to other computers. Here’s how this is done.

On the computer you want to use a gateway

1. You need to connect the internet cable to eth1 and the client computer to eth0. Since the computer has two network cards, you have to figure out which one is connected to the internet and which one to the other computer. Here’s an easy way to do this
   1. Pull out the cable connecting the two computers
   2. Goto Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal and enter the following command

   $ sudo ifconfig

   3. You will be shown 2 or more sections with eth0 and eth1 being the first two. In the two sections, one of them will have a line similar to this:

   inet addr:192.168.1.2 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

   4. The section that has this line is the one connected to the internet. If this is in eth0, remove the internet cable and plug it in the other ethernet port and the cable from the client to eth0. If it is in eth1, you can connect the client cable back to its original port
2. Next you have to give a static ip address to eth0. In terminal, type

$ sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

3. And add the following lines to the file and save it

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.8.16.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 10.8.16.0
network 10.8.16.0

4. This will assign the static ip address 10.8.16.1 to eth0, but these changes take effect only after a reboot. To use these settings temporarily for the current session, use the command

$ sudo ifconfig eth0 10.8.16.1

5. Once your network card serving the client has a static ip address, the next thing to do would be to enable port forwarding:
   1. Goto terminal and open the local startup script as root. To do this, type

   $ sudo gedit /etc/rc.local


   2. Add the following lines before the exit 0 line in the file.

   sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
/sbin/iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables --table nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

   3. Before closing the script, make sure it is enabled. See the first line of the script. If it isn’t present already, just add a '-e' to the first line so that it would look like '#!/bin/sh -e'
6. That’s all you have to do on the server. Just do a restart for the settings to take effect. If that’s not possible, you have to execute all the commands you have added to the rc.local script one by one for all of them to take effect

On the client

1. Go to System -> Administration -> Network There should be a wired connection. Select it and click ‘properties’. Choose ‘Static IP Address’ in the Configuration list box.
2. Use 10.8.16.2 as the ip address and set the gateway address to 10.8.16.1
3. Network manager should give you a subnet mask automatically. You won’t have to change that.

This should be enough. This is what I did. If this doesn’t seem to work, just let me know and I’ll help you out.

P.S. You can use a Windows computer to connect to Internet through the linux gateway too. Nothing needs to be changed on the server. Just make 10.8.16.2 the IP address of the client in LAN Settings which can be found in Network Connections. Also, set 10.8.16.1 as the default network gateway address.

See how the mighty Arabs spam my stats page.

Who else has a monthly stats curve as beautiful as this? Show it to me, and I’ll add you to my blogroll!!

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Tags: MyActivities, Blogging, Funny

I’m not telling you that I understand exactly what Paulo Coelho says in The Alchemist, but, just like the Shepherd boy, I guess I have found my destiny too :D. Animation was one of my most favourite activities during school days, one of my biggest passions. (Yes, another one )

College changed everything. Though I did some animation during my first year, I started to get more into programming, as there were already a few people who were good at programming, and I was finding great company. By the end of third year, my animation dreams were totally out of my mind.

A few weeks back, it was announced that Accel Animation Studios would be visiting our college for campus recruitment. I was very surprised, to see a non-ITES company to visit us, but still very happy, and I signed up too.

The program was on the 10th of this month, and 108 students took the written test, which had two sections - a general aptitude section, and a C++ section. The questions were not exactly easy, but not tough either. But only three people managed to qualify for the interview. There were three interviewers in the panel, and one of them was an aluminus of our college, and another one was a teacher at our college.

And I was the only one to clear the interview, which lasted for only around 15 minutes! I am extremely happy I got it, but more people could have made it. The word is that they are comeing again for a second round of selection. I wish that they take more people next time.

I was not expecting such a sudden change, but I’ve already started enjoying it!

The placement and training officer of our college, Mr. Raja Singh, called me up to his office last week. I was not sure what it was about, the last time we had a discussion was at Empower.IT, more than a month back. And when I went to his office, there were quite a few familiar faces waiting already. It was the team that won second place in web designing at Empower.IT!

It was about this Web design contest from Microsoft, for college students, in which, you get to keep the free hosting and domain name, even if you don’t win (We have to send them a draft for Rs.1000 as registration fee, to cover the cost of hosting indirectly anyway)

I knew I was expected to participate, and I could protest neither on grounds of principles or on lack of time. God has made me that way, I’m really bad at saying ‘no’.

After reading all of Richard Stallman’s articles on how Microsoft is capturing the markets by giving subsidies to schools and college, I’m here participating in one of Microsoft’s contests, intended to get colleges to use Microsoft technologies. Can you believe it? Why didn’t my placement officer know FOSS enthusiasts don’t like to work on Microsoft technologies? Not that I’m anything like bad on Microsoft stuff. Infact, I’m much better at programming on Windows, than on Linux. Still, I’d like not to do this if I had a choice. But I’ve ventured too far, and if I try to get back now, it might just be enough for them to screw me up totally. And now that I’m in it, I’ll have to give it a good shot :P. The prizes are too tempting too.

It is called the GoAlive Challenge, where the task to design a website for our college, with Windows Live mail integration, and integrate other Live technologies like calendar and stuff too. Each college can have one team of 3 to 5 members.

Our college has its own domain, and fortunately, its hosted on a Windows server, so that’s one problem solved. So, the first thing we are supposed to do is create individual email ids for the students and staff (you know why), using Microsoft’s equivalent of Google Apps (Sorry, I don’t know what it is called yet :D).  The higher the number of email ids, the higher the points we score. Once that is done, we can get on with the development. We’ve got around 3 months to get it done.

I hope we get innovative enough to win something in this contest. And people, please don’t let anyone else know

This post is pretty late too. Here is what I managed to do using script.aculo.us for the proceedings CD of Intesy. It’s not much. It’s not even close to good. Download the zip here, extract and open index.html. And do tell me what you think.

The day was totally hectic. I spent most of my morning working on the Proceedings CD. I’ve used script.aculo.us to design the interface, and the effects look cool. Sort of. I’ll put it up here after a few days.

And most of the evening was spent on walking. Most of us had to. And the juniors did really great. Especially the second years. Things were up and rocking in no time. But I guess the final years could have done better. I, in particular, could have done much better. I wasted most of the afternoon on things others were already working on and so, we’re now lagging on hall arrangement.

The event starts at 9:30AM tomorrow, and I have to reach there by atleast 8:00AM for the computers and projectors to be ready. And I’m supposed to help setting up the computer lab to conduct Simtrix, which is the simulation event.

I hope it all goes well. Pray for us, people.

And surprisingly, I have planned to crash very early tonight. Have to get up early tomorrow.

Well, this post is a bit late actually. I haven’t been able to find time or the patience to write lately. Intesy is the Instrumentation Technical Symposium, organized by the Electronics and Instrumentation Engg. Department (i.e., my department) at college.

This year’s version was announced quite a while back and is on the 19th and 20th of this month. We’ve invited people from other colleges for presenting their papers and projects, and the winners earn hot cash.

We also have two more events for the participants. Once is a technical quiz, and the other one is a simulation contest called Simtrix. Well, I do think the name of the simulation event is stupid, but people like it when we disorient words to produce fancy names.

I designed a very quick website for the event using wordpress. It has been up at http://intesy.info for a while.

Now that the event is so close, life is really becoming hectic. We’ve just finished the reviews and intimated the selected people about their selection.

We’re working hard towards it, and I hope this year, its bigger and better than last year.

There are very few authentic tests that certify us to be cool people. I happened to come across this link and I scored 67/100. That’s a decent score and I’m happy with it. Try it. It is really accurate! Click here to take the test.