The long awaited train journey!

Sitting at my window seat, I booted the laptop, set my wallpaper to black, launched vi on a transparent virtual console; wondering what this is all about?
This is about my train journey (after 7 long years) and this time it is from secunderabad - chennai, deviating from my default route secunderabad - howrah.

Probably the next thing on your mind is, why is this guy going to chennai at all?
Well, for various reasons including carte blanche at mit, enjoying my holiday, meeting some geeks who regularly hang out at #linux-india at freenode, surprise visit to a friend, who has been a great support during mukt.in ‘07, to devilisly eat dozens of idlis’ or dosas’ (I eat anything that moves).

It was fun in the train, points here:
1. People do not switch off the lights for the upper berth passengers, even on request.
2. The food still sucks.
3. Funniest of all, girls in the train use cleansers, soaps and what not to keep their face glowing; they did it thrice within 12 hours. If you’d want to argue with me saying that they are being hygienic, I’d say hygienic savvy people should brush their teeth when they wake up before they gulp packets and packets of bourbon biscuits.

Packing for any journey has been my weakness, I forget almost half of my important things and old habits die hard. I did forget them this time too; some magic that they were already packed up for me - thanks to my mom.

The train is expected to reach chennai central within 30 minutes. So, I should be packing up; shutting down. Will write later
I missed to post this yesterday!

Higher Caste != Better Programmer

I spent my last week in Guntur, as a .Net and C# tutor for one of the top engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh.
It was a blast time with my room-mates or co-tutors, but things got to my nerves whenever I entered that college.

The trainees were students of 4th year, and most of them lacked basics of computer engineering. Keeps me wondering whether the faculty failed to deliver or is it the students fault.
Some lacked common sense.
Some of them didn’t understand simplest of the errors being shown by visual studio IDE, while some do not know to close the xml tags that they began with.

To my horror, this college is famous for its caste discrimination.
We grouped the students into 3 per project basis and left the decision of team leader to them. Call it a cult; all the team leaders were of the caste that is believed to be higher in that region.
Well, this was not the end of it. They believe that they are superior to anyone, and one such hilarious case:
A super-intellect higher caste team leader was not able to figure out how to write the abstract of his project.
I explained him all modules of the project and asked him to pen them down. After 4 days, he asks me “Where on google can I find an abstract?”
There is a serious side to this. One of his team members was a non-higher caste guy and he was not allowed to write the abstract, even if he could have done it flat in a day.
The so-called higher caste members of the team do not discuss or share ideas with the other guys/girls of the team.

I’ve even heard that one of the members did bring this issue to the Head of Department, for which she was scolded. Guess what? The HoD belongs to higher caste.

Another important thing to note, these people ‘earned’ placements in giants like Infy, TCS, etc.,

People do not realise that castes’ are created by people, not GOD, not nature. The very sense of humanity is dying. Some people enjoy this power of being able to discriminate and probably there is no one to stop it!

Lets look at the technical trauma I’ve been through:
1. I was amid hundreds of windowsXP machines.
2. IRC, Orkut is blocked.
3. Anything with words chat, games,.. is blocked. This includes google search with words like Internet Relay Chat or XMPP chat server.
4. Debian/ubuntu repo downloads are blocked.
5. Poor students have never heard of ‘bug’ in software.
6. I was not allowed to use my cellphone or laptop in the college bus.
7. I was not successful in using the college projector. i810switch package had problems on my laptop.

Things that made me happy there:
1. The proxy server is redhat enterprise linux.
2. One student uses linux (out of the whole 4th year computer science and IT group)
3. A batch of 3 students have completed their project on COIN (Collaborative Open Innovation Network) using php and MySQL.
4. That I didn’t join formal education for my engineering in any such college.

Lucky me; my assignment there was only for a week, which is done and I am back to my base.