Ergonoxis-C program contest in our college A Few observations

Ergonoxis is a three stage C-programming contest conducted by the electronics(Hmmm y not the cse dept?!) department of our college.the contest was conducted as three rounds,i got selected to the final round it was a night out programming on saturday last week.The test contained nine questions in which we answered two questions .,one was the multiplication of two 99 digit number and the other was a question onfinding the map based on certain constraints for a given set of locations.The contest organisers should be appreciated for creating a tempo among inter department students and for good organisation and many seniors sit with us the entire day giving us much needed refershments.

There are certain annoying things that happened that day.I was asked to work in Turbo C compiler which was a hell a lot difficult and uncomfortable.I have been doing all my coding using emacs and M x eshell has been the default way and use the emacs shell to compile and execute files after all emacs was the first tool i got introduced the first and me and my friend explained to audience on Fstival 05 those were happy days .Nowadays i am also using GDB to debug my programs so it was like hell coding with turbo C.

The other issue was lack of C99 standards in the contest.ther were questions involving *graphics.h*,this was mainly because people were not aware of something like that.Ther were questions in the first round based on the *implicit int rule* that is if a function does not return a variable on default the compiler thinks that it returns int i believe this is not even part of C89 standards.

I have one basic doubt in C ,heard that an array candeclared as follows:

void foo(int size)

{

int bar[size];

}

That is the size of the array can be declared as a variable at run time and compiler supporting C99 standards should support this if so can we get the size of an array from the user rather than declaring a array large enough to cater to the needs.Does GCC support this?.The C99 standard has accepted many of the functions that were already present in GNU C and BSD environments hence it gives all the more reason to work in GNU/Linux or to say *nix.

Guru.,Books hell a lot @Chennai

I am in chennai in my aunts  its a cool experience out here.It was made even more interesting by the book exhibition that i visited.The book exhibition a national level one is conducted at St.George Anglo Indian School opposite pachaippa college.The exhibition had some four fifty stalls having some cool english,urdu and tamil books.I bought a good number of books my uncle and aunt also bought some good number of books.The books i bought were :

1)The complete reference C–Hibert Schild

2)Atlas Shrugged-Ayn Rand

3)Einstein selected writings and Noam chomsky on power and economics

4)The ultimate Hitchhikers Guie to galaxy

5)A che Guevera Calendar (cute one)

The other books my uncle and aunt bought were 1)The 7 habits of a successfull person.,Who moved my cheese.,what are you doing with your life by J.K.,two other tamil books.

GURU.,A beautifull Film:

I went to one of the most epected movie of this year GURU written and directed by MniRathnam.I had only the chance to view the tamil dubbed version of the movie.The movie was a brave attempt to record the life of a buissness man.The salient features of the movie are acting of Abhisheik Bacchan,muic by A.R.Rehman,cinematography by Rajiv Menon,Art and the costumes.The tamil dubbed version was so wonderfully one that i never had a feeling of seeing a dubbed movie.Kudos to Surya ,Nasser for their excellent dubbing.The movie was of technical brilliance,special mention madhavan deserves a hats off for his Cameo,aishwarya Rai was beautifull as usual and had a strong role.People should support these brvae efforts and make it a huge success.A novel effort great work mani:)

FOSS seminar in my college-sweet words from a sweet person

My college is organising a conference in free open source software.I am passionate about Unix its the root from which computer evolved.It was natural that i went to the conference.The first session was handled by Joe(Da Rodnt) the man who found GLUGOT(Gnu/Linux user group in our college) he was giving a  lecture on the philosophy of GNU.The freedoms of GPL etc.He said one sweet statement that  has been in my mind.He said “I am a free software enthuiast,some call as lunatics some even call us communists”.The other seminar i throughly enjoyed was of ananth on debugging tools amazing lecture fully informative.

One thing itching my mind for some time is that the attitude of some of my friends towards any Unix.the believe Unix as an enemy probably.The thing is many of them are ignorant about history of Unix,history breads inspiration henceforth they lack inspiration.Whenever i say i supprt GNU/linux people comment oh you are against Microsoft being a computer science student you say i haven’t worked with any Unix(Gnu/Linux,Solaris,Bsd) you are going to loose a great deal.Its like someone doing a masters in physics saying i dont know Einstein.Many say will it help plaement ” i dont take birth get placed in Tcs” placements is an ancillory part and not the end in it.Its the knowledge you learn.The tools in FOSS world were developed by students like us.The basic reason for all these issues un inspiring staff community and prejudice that you are doing such and such things i am not going accept or use even if its a kick ass thing.The other thing is “will it fetch me internal mark? “will it increase my pay scale”.Fuck then y enginneering well if money is the end in allthere are jobs to do that.First of all  willing to learn is a life time journey.My grand father who is sixty seven years old translated a book  on palestine war which was released yesterday.He says to me “hey bring that Linux thing i will try that in my system!”.He bought a system six months back,has a gmail id and write s letters to the editor in it.

_Bye_Bye 2006.,__init__(self,year=2007);

The year 2006 has come to an end and year 2007 started.The year 2006 would be remembered for the brutal nature of American Imperialism how it transcended nation borders .,killing innocent people in Iraq,Somalia,Lebanon what not.The year ended with the hanging of Saddam Hussein.The protests against the empire has began,Imperialism will have a mighty fall.The new Latin American tilt towards the left lead by Fidel Castro,hugo Chavez,Evo Morales.Lucio De Silva will lead the anti imperialstic struggle spread the true spirit of internationalism.The Indian Government has become a junior partner of US right from votiong against Iran in IAEA to the Indai US nuclear agreement India has become a loyal partner of US.

Indian Political Situation:

India faces the twin challenge of growing economic disparities,farmer suicides,poor education and health access for the majority of Indians.

The recent incident in Kirlanji in maharashtra has clearly shown the economic situation of dalits how they face brutal suppression,massive oppression in every day life.After sixty years of independence dalits dont have regular access to water,public utilities like temple,toilets,separate tea glasses for dalits. Reservation alone is not enough for dalits .,liberalisation has meantno jobs for them in private sector,i stand by reservation in private sector,land reforms to be carried out massively redistribution of lands to dalits who are landless workers.Love marriages are the future especially inter caste marriages.

The Sacchaar committee report has clearly shown how bad is the situation of muslims in the nation.They are poorly represented in education,employment,virtual isolation from mainstream India.Coupled with India’s tilt towards US is going to make more of muslims desparate,breading terrorism.

The raise of the new IT upper class is causing ripples in our fragile society.I think they should be taxed more.Education,health,sanitation cant be left in private hands.

The govt at the centre need to show a lot of character to overcome these issues.Let us hope