Home page - http://aanand.in

I got a domain registered at http://aanand.in, which will be my home page.
God damn rain is spoiling my mood and life has become a bit boring.

A trip to Chenji fort

On Saturday, I visited this place called Chenji located on the way from Thindivanam to Thiruvannamalai. This was once the capital of southern India ruled by Shivaji. It has been ruled by 22 Kings starting with the Cholas and was last ruled by Raja Desingh.

There are two forts, the King's fort and the Queen's fort. King's fort is a huge one with 1500 steps to climb up. I could visit only the King's fort since we couldn't get out of the Kings fort before 5:00 PM in the evening, after which no one is allowed to climb the fort.

Now they have planned to have a rope car from one fort to the other so that we can save time.

Entrance of the King's fort.

Gingee Fort Map

Fortified wall

A tank inside the fort

Diagonal view of the tank

One of the six Granaries

A tank barrel at top

On the way to the top

A watch tower at the topmost point of the fort

Ranganathar Temple

One of granaries that were destroyed

A cave inside the fort

The Kalyana mahal built by Shivaji that was used for inter-cast marriages between hindus and muslims

Stable

Inside the stable

The Anchanayar temple made of a single rock

A watch tower at one end of the 15 mile fort

Country side view

Venkataramana Temple. It was destroyed by the Nawab of Arcot when the place was under the control of Moghul emperor Aurangazeb.

The statues and idles of the temple were destroyed by the Nawab.

That was a memorable day with my friends at a worderful place to know about. It just took us one day for the trip. Try to visit this historical place if u get a chance.

Self Hypnosis - a way to mind control

I was reading about hypnosis few days back and this phrase caught my eyes, Self-Hypnosis.
Then I found out that self hypnosis is nothing but controlled day dreaming, which is my speciality.

Self hypnosis is not exactly day dreaming, but you make yourself totally committed or bound to a consciously controlled dream of whatever u like or whatever u want to do. Sometimes while doing some work(or even in bathroom), i start thinking of someone or something that puts me in a trance condition and i evade off to my own world, where i do whatever i think; for eg: be a super hero saving all the people and finally kissing my love(this often makes me work at half the speed). These dreams that i have dreamt so far are very detailed with even dialogs directed by me.
I don't know whether its good to practice or not. But i feel that it plays a very important part in self control. Human being is a social animal and he has every right to expose his emotions to the society. But not always, he may be bound to some social rules or feelings that prohibit those actions.
For eg; you would like to hammer your senior in college who ragged u, but you couldn't do it. The next thing you do is to start dreaming with vengeance where u get a good chance and situation to beat him up. This may look cowardly, but now we are in a good situation for that. You need to control yourself before u start doing stupid things.

I think I'm a good dreamer and self hypnosis can help me in controlling ME, Myself and I

A visit to college

Today, I visited the college were i studied accompanying my friend Kartik Kannan(http://katchucrap.blogspot.com). The college has not improved much, but for the stupid rules.


The parking area. dont even know how to park...


The entrance of Veltech Engineering college. We met some of our lecturers still continuing the good job.



Katchu speaking with Mr. Shamshudeen, the Placement officer and some juniors. The placement office looks good..



ppl eating at the college canteen.. hhm i remember the days when we used to eat hiding from the OC parties, the uninvited guests.






Kartik sitting at Bill Gates computer lab looking at some of the gorgeous babes(aka karikataigal) of our college.

I love her

Its my new HCL Beanstalk PC. Its good that i took LCD TFT monitor, its B.. E.. A.. utiful.
Intel Pentium 4 3.06 GHz with a GB of primary memory, is rocking me.
Application Performance
Fifa 2006 just took a sec to load and the performance is awesome.
It makes me feel eclipse is just another simple application and loads in not more than 2 seconds.
Media Center
Its the media center edition of Windows XP installed on the machine. The TFT monitor, the Altec Lansing speakers and the media center kit is making it a perfect entertainment system. A TV cum FM tuner card makes it much more powerful entertainment system.
The Altec Lansing speakers are too good with crystal clear sound quality.
Keyboard and mouse
Wireless multimedia keyboard and mouse are excellent.

Take a look at her

Lots of ebooks

May be they are illegal, but they are useful and so here they are :

1. http://lab.lpicn.org/pub/books/
2. http://books.netissat.bg/aragorn/
3. http://quintessence.gateit.net/E-books/
4. http://e-books.amagrammer.net/

U will find all sorts of books.

If u find more let me know.

Yet another get-together of classmates

I had a wonderful time with my schoolmates today evening at Pizza Hut. Here are some of the pics of the day.

Ladoo, the studious rank holder, who offered the treat for completing 24 years and has always stood first all the time in his life.

Venky R & D..ing on his kulfi.















Dhivya and Shami, seriously chatting with ladoo.














Richa and Lux










Next treat will be from me for my B'day.

A New PC for me! hee-haw

I have ordered for a new PC. It costs me around 60K, but its worth it. Have a look at the configuration.

Processor	Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 524 with 64-bit Technology Supporting HT Technology (1 MB Cache, 3.06GHz, 533 MHz FSB)
Operating System	Genuine Windows XP Media Center Edition
Chipset	ATI RC410L chipset mainboard with PCI-e x16
Memory	1 GB DDR2 RAM
Optical Drive	Dual Layer DVD Writer
Hard Disk Drive	160GB S.M.A.R.T SATA
Secondary Storage	25 in 1 Card Reader
Mouse	Wireless Optical Scroll Mouse
Keyboard	Wireless Multifunctional Keyboard.
Choice of Display	43.1 cm (17) TFT LCD Digital Color Monitor,
Speakers	2.1 Altec Lansing Speakers with Sub-Woofer (27 W RMS)
Fax / Modem	56.6 Kbps Fax Modem (Internal)
I/O Interface	USB ports, Audio In, Audio Out, Serial Port, Parallel Port, PS2
Audio	Integrated 6 Channel Audio, Headphone cum Mic
Graphics	Graphics Card with 128 MB Dedicated Memory with TV Out
TV Card	Media Center TV Tuner Card with FM & PVR
Remote	Media Center Remote Control

I'm not gonna sell my old one. Bcoz its my first PC and i'm sentimentally attached to it.

Being in bench is the time to learn.

People in IT industry sometimes may run out of projects and will eventually be in a virtual project called "The Bench". I have been in bench for the past few months.
At first i was a bit worried about my career, but then I just thought being in bench just means I cannot be billed for a client at present. That's only for a small period of time. We have to be hopeful that we will be assigned to a project in the coming days.
And that doesn't mean that you can just relax, have coffee , eat your lunch and go home. The time you are given here is the time to learn new things which you might not even think of while working in a project. It need not be technical, you can learn about new tools being used by the developers, you can try to followup the marketing strategies of companies, you can have a peep into a different domain of work.
Time, the fourth dimension is always precious in life.

Loads of OSS

Whether we use it or not, open source softwares and libraries have become an active part in the industry. You will find at least one open source software in any category you ask for.

Starting with
OS - Linux, Solaris follows it and many more that can be list
Office suites - Open Office, GNOME Office(Abiword,Gnumeric etc), KOffice and more
Browser and mail clients - Firefox, Mozilla suite, Thunderbird, K-Meleon....
Development Environments - Eclipse, Netbeans, Codeblocks, KDevelop, Anjuta, DevCpp...
Web Servers - Apache, Lighttpd...
Editors - Vim, Emacs, PSPad, Notepad++, Pnotepad, JEdit, RJTextEd, Scite, Jext,...
Databases - Firebird, MySQL, Sqlite, PostgreSQL...

C and C++ Libraries
GUI - GTK, FLTK, Fox toolkit, Ultimate++, WxWidgets, IUP....
General Purpose - Boost, PTypes, STLPort...

Java Libraries and softwares
GUI - SWT, Thinlet ...
Document converters and renderers - iText(PDF), POI(MS Office documents)...
Application Servers - Tomcat, Geronimo, JBoss, Jetty....
Web Frameworks - Struts, Tapestry, Cocoon, WebOnSwing, ...
ORMs - Hibernate, iBatis, SimpleORM, jPox, Mr. Persister...

The list goes on and i cant list whole list here and i dont remember everything too.
Today every programmer does use an open source library or software everyday and in few years to come, i think even the others would also go for Open source tools and software which are available for free with at least 90% of the functionalities in commercial products.

It has already begun from the governments of the developing nations to support OSS.
Day by day more and more Linux distros are coming out and they are much more user friendlier than they were. http://distrowatch.com
So what i would like to say is that the OSS era has begun and growing faster than ever. Let us support it.

Today's highlights

As usual city traffic was overflowing; i rushed over and reached my office at around 11:00.
I was struggling with the current assignment given by my lead for the past 4 days. So I was desperately determined to make sure that i finish it off at least by end of the day.
Something made me feel better today; it was the fortune section in orkut. It read "Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded". It felt good when i read it and I started my work.

I have been debugging the program for the past four days and i couldn't find the exact location of the problem. But today i felt comfortable with placing the breakpoints at proper locations and i found the problem and solved it. I feel that hearing or listening or reading something that makes you feel better will also make you think far better than you would expect. For example listening to your favorite music in the morning could be a moral booster.
I feel good listening to music while driving bike, bcoz the rhythm makes me drive in a rhythm. But don't try it, its dangerous to follow Maddy's(Madhavan) style.

Lycan kush hua

I love to think fictitiously

Don't mistake me for having named my blog such fictitiously. I just wanted to attract people like me(who like fiction). Blogs without visitors and blogs without comments are not blogs, its a mere personal diary.
Date : 27 Aug 2006

Started logging my life ...........................................