My Blog

An another nostalgic post.  "MicroIndians - The Complete Software Solutions" was the venture that we tried bravely and proudly during 2001. Let me  narrate the complete sequence of events: River Vaigai bisects my home town Paramakudi. I was associated with a training institute on the other side of the river Vaigai. The place is called Emaneswaram. There I got the intro of Mr.B (We used to call him Ji). Ji was (is) a textile designer. My home town is full of hand-looms. It was the bread and butter for my family too. Hand loom is a right mixture of science (engineering) and art.  Weaving sarees was the primary business there. In order to create designs in the Saree, we used to have  Jacquard machine and punched cards (the ancestors of present day computers). Converting the designs in to the form of punched card involves these steps: Graph generation of design Card Punch Marking.   The above steps are very tedious, laborious and time consuming. ...

Yet another invited talk at our department. This time around the speaker was Prof. Rajkumar Buyya  from University of Melbourne,  a well known name in the computer science community.  The topic was "Cloud Computing" . It all started on Friday evening. A nice little introduction with Prof. Then on saturday, the talk was on cluster computing - the funda of cloud / utility computing. Yes it is true that you can find loads of books / materials on internet regarding any topic. But listening from the real experts is a pleasure. The way Prof. Buyya handled the sessions was awesome. Not loaded with indigestible, over-the-head info but it was with lots of real life examples. Coated with the sense of humor, the technical concepts that he imparted in to the audience was really smooth like a song. Today's morning session was on cloud computing. With the background of no rains in Pondicherry during last week, it was a good downpour here as we were discussing about clouds i...

If i make a blog post saying "today we conducted an exam" then most of you would laugh and think whats the big deal of conducting an exam in an university department.  But the change that we did here is that the exam was "on-line". This time around, we have conducted Part -A of the end-semester examinations online. This consisted of 20 questions in each subject and today's exam was of 100 questions.  The "experiment with truth" was conducted with the I year M.Sc students. Let me narrate the background story as well. Many weeks ago we decided that the Part -A of the end semester would be an online exam, as a step towards utilization of technology, reduction in the usage of paper there by following the green energy principles.  Kudos to the thoughts of Prof. RS. Every time I talk with him, the glimpses of IIT-D would emanate which I have found as a source of inspiration.  The hardware / software stack responsiblity was given to me by him i.e. I have...

The systemic exposes that has happened recently both at national and global levels reveals the mind-set of people.  What is the Root Cause of these problems? You simply say "Greediness".. I guess it is not 100%, that alone. There is a fundamental attitude problem amongst the cross section of the society which believes that "Money can buy anything". They see in front of their eyes that what are all the different Laural that money can bring to them. It starts right at the schools / colleges. Gone are the days where attitude was measured with few un-flaw-able metrics and tools.  But the case with today is totally the reverse. You can easily influence people, more importantly people at respectable positions whose single decision can change the fate of a person, can be made addicted to this M word. The reflection of this issue doesn't restricts itself to the society but infiltrates into the families as well. The word of a person getting respected only bcoz  of the ...