Waves

Today was a great day, The Echo Club members (we), about 20 of them spent time with children of an orphanage named Karunai Illam. This home is located in Madambakkam, about 5 Km from Raja Kilpakkam, near Tambaram. Before i continue, let me give a hearty hug to Mrs. Amritha Rajagopalan, a very famous social worker who is one of the supporters for the home and the doctors, Dr. Jayachandran and Dr.Mrs.Parveen who took all the pain to come to the place and serve the children. Mr. Power Singam, who runs the home, had everything in place when we arrived.

It was certainly awesome fun being with the children, their max age being 12. When Mrs. Amritha arrived at the home, the children greeted her unanimously saying, “Good Morning! Aunty“. She became very happy at such a enthusiastic response. We arranged for a free medical camp. Things rolled well and we were on schedule. We reached the place by 8.30AM. The medical checkup started by 9.30AM. Dr. Jayachandran started by addressing the small gathering of students by telling them a story. Every single child listened with utmost patience and it was pin-drop silence when the doctor was talking (something that we college guys should learn). Every child was bubbling with enthusiam. It was a pleasure !!

Medical Examination
All the boys were examined by Dr. Jayachandran and girls by Dr. Mrs. Parveen. The checkup began by stripping the boys naked. One of us measured the height, another one weighed the kid and then was sent to the doctor. Some kids got so shy that they started doing brake dance ha ha! It was funny. All the children were physically very fit. Thanks to Mr.Power Singam who is running the home. The children are provided good food.

As the doc was examining the children, he was telling some medical terms that needed to be recorded.

1. CVS RS NAD (Cardio Vascular System, Respiratory System – No Abnormality Detected)
2. Genitals NAD
3. Liver Spleen Normal
4. Tonsils (+) – for those who had tonsils
5. Ears NAD or Ear wax or Ear fungus (if they needed to be cleaned)
6. Spine normal
7. Tooth normal or Tooth Cavity (+) and the no. of teeth that had cavity

Some children (about 3 or 4) had a small swelling on their neck, for which they needed to be tested for Primary Complex. Some other children who were hard of hearing due to ear wax or ear fungus needed to be taken to ENT specialists. Everyone was given Zentel (1 tab), Trifer syrup (iron tonic), MVTs (Multi Vitamin Tablets) and Vitamin A tablets.

We learnt how to recognise tonsils, abnormalities in the male genitalia, vitamin A deficiency, B-complex deficiency, abnormalities in spinal cord, liver and spleen abnormalities and problems in ear, tooth and nose. It was a very good experience by becoming doctors for 2 hours ;), an opportunity that can’t be missed for a lifetime :D.

One of the symptoms of Vitamin A deficiency was rashes on the elbow, just above the joint. For B-complex deficiency, there would be miniature wounds on the edges of lips, that look like rashes. Those who look very dull or their bottom eyelid is pale white or pale pink, they have iron deficiency. Of the 86 children that were examined, only about 1% of them had some deficiencies. Rest of them are 100% normal and very healthy. Every child was advised to take half tea spoon of Trifer syrup and dates (they have high iron content) for normal iron in the blood. They were advised to drink a lot of milk, a tea spoon of butter and vitamin A tablets daily so that there would be no vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A deficiency is 1 of the major problems faced in our country. Even though 99% of them were completely normal and since most of them are aged below 12, they were advised for daily intake of dates and butter so that they would grow into super healthy humans 😀 😀

We played with them
As the camp was going on, a small crowd began forming around the tables where the doctors were seated. They were the children for whom the checkup was over and they wanted to understand what was going on. So, 5 of us engaged them by taking them over to a nearby ground, forming teams of 6 each and played cricket for the next hour.

Those kids taught us the long forgotten street game of Goli :). Ismail and Abdul did a really cool job of calling groups of children in turn to clear their doubts of what was going on in the camp. Many of them came to ask us vidu-kadhais. We even took small group photos. This excited them very much and they crowded around the digital camera to see their faces :). Prashant was patiently explaining how the cam worked, and they did listen to him. Good job dude!

Encounter with a Snake
We had two digital cameras whose silly batteries kept running out. So myself and Arun decided to go to Tambaram to buy duracel batteries. I was riding Abdul’s pulsar (150 cc). On the way back, the roads were free and i was going at a speed of 70 kmph. About 100 m ahead of me, a TVS 50 biker was wiggling with his bike. I was wondering what he was doing in the middle of the road and within a second, i was just 10 m behind him.

A huge snake was lying along the width of the road with its raised hood. I was terrified at such a sight. I was going at 70kmph. Stopping the bike suddenly spelled danger of skidding as the road was a bit sandy. I also had the fear of the snake striking me. Closing my eyes and raising my legs, i let “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee !!” and ran over the snake !! Without even pausing to see what happened to the snake, i turned the bend at 70 kmph, something that i had never done before. A few minutes later, i was back at Karunai Illam.

Hopefully, the snake shouldn’t have died.

Lunch at the Illam
The medical camp was over by now. We thanked the doctors, gave them a small gift and they left with their heart and soul very contented. They rang a bell to signal lunch. All the children stood in queue with their plates to get the lunch. They stood in height order with no pushing or pulling and shouting. They behaved very decently. After getting their food, they settled with a glass of water at their table. What surprised me was, even the smallest kid hadn’t spilled a bit of food on the floor. They were very clean.

We also had our lunch along with them. After the lunch, we looked thro’ the prescriptions that the doctors had given us, split the tablets for each of them and gave them to Mr.Singam so that he can give them to the kids.

We took a big family photo with the kids and left Karunai Illam by 3pm. It was a very nice heart-warming experience today.

Team
Here is the list of people who made it to Karunai Illam. Aarthi Sarma, Abdul, Anusha, Arun, Balaji B, Dilli Boy (actually she is a girl 😉 ), Ismail, Mangai, Nachal, Prasanth, Rajeev, Saranya Ranganathan, Senthil, Sriram Nishwanth, Uma and myself. If you had seen clearly, half of the team were girls. A wake up call to all the hyper-conservative dads !!

On the whole, it is NOT a great job done by great people, it is a small deed done by ordinary people to make this world a better place to live in.

Photos
I have posted the photos here. Have a look at them.

Thanks! for dropping by 🙂

Hi!! people, a small announcement

YES Chennai (Youth Ever Service, Chennai) has now become Echo Club, Chennai and henceforth, will be known as “Echo Club”.

All the very best to Echo Club in all their future endeavours. 😀

–

Hi!!, just downloaded mustang beta. Have to try it. You can also download it here. There are a lot of cool features introduced with this. Read more about it here.

It says there are improvements in UI too; and during the Sun Tech Days, they told that support was being added for Vista UI too. Let us see how the UI displays in Vista. Will post more about the UI later in the day. By the way, i have uploaded some vista pictures from my very own installation of Windows Vista :D. See them.

Bye!

Hi! all, im just back from the Andhra trip. All the days were fun and personally i made some good friends during this trip. And all those guys have the same mind set as im. I had to leave on 25th morning by Brindavan to Bangalore where we had to meet the Bangalore champs to go that evening to Hyderabad. It was a rejoiceful meet. This time, we had a new person in our team named Nirmal, who had nicknames such as AbNirmal, Psychic etc…

That nice after a very very late dinner at a good place, we left to hyderabad.

[26th Feb 2006]
Reached hyderabad at about 12 pm and had breakfast. We met 3 hyderabad champs who had lunch with us at 4.30 pm ;), after which we left for Microsoft IDC (India Development Center) at HiTech City. The whole city of hyderabad is superb. The roads are excellent. Most of the roads are of 8 lanes or 6 lanes. Imagine the traffic going at an awesome speed of 80kmph. You can never imagine that in chennai and in bangalore if you are able to cross 20kmph, you are God!

We were glad to meet the hyderabad ADE (Academic Developer Evangelist) Prathiba and her champs 😉 at the IDC. After a brief meeting about the bandwagon, we chennaites were on a tour of the IDC. There are 2 huge buildings and a sprawling green lawn that will hold your eyes for hours together. Its beautiful :D. The lawn also extends to a cricket ground, basket ball ground and many other outdoor games. The office building we visited is where actual development of Microsoft softwares takes place. Every floor has a pantry, where you get all types of cool and hot drinks (for free !!). There are also libraries (obviously) and places where you can play snooker, table tennis (my favourite), carrom, chess etc. Infact, more than place for work, its a place for enjoyment; in short its a small amusement park :D. Since it was a sunday, the place was deserted and we were able to move around freely 🙂

This day concluded with the outing at “Eat Street”, one of the most popular hangouts at hyderabad. Eat Street is located on the shore of the lake Hussain Sagar. In the middle of the lake is a huge statue of Buddha. The hyderabad guys told us that this was the largest statue in Asia.

[27th Feb 2006]
We reached IDC early today. The Andhra roadtrip began today and it was flagged off by Mr. Srini Koppulu, the big boss of the IDC :). Aarthi was also there with us to flag off the event. The first college we went to was Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU). The sessions were with the MCA people. They were not too good. In many respects, TN students are way better than Andhra.

The second session was also at the JNTU for the CSE dept. This session was good as the crowd was good. As a matter of fact, the first session was good because, we were able to them lots of things they didn’t know about. I’m sure the interested guys will go back and check the websites we gave them. This was the main purpose of the Community Bandwagon and the roadtrip. Spread the word of community and technology.

We went for a movie at iMax theatres today :D. The movie was Taxi No. 9211 starring Nana Patekar and John Abraham. The movie was good and lasted for 2 hours. We had dinner at iMax itself.

[28th Feb 2006]
We visited two more colleges. Since the colleges are far apart, we spent a lot of time travelling. In the evening, we went to Birla Mandir. The temple is a architectural marvel and we took lots of photos there. Will upload some to flickr soon..

We went to Fortune hotel for dinner. It was supposed to be THE star hotel in hyderabad. The dinner was ok.

[1st Mar 2006]
I met a geeky genius named Dhaval Bhanushali. He is a very good programmer in C and Core Java. He has extended HigLayout to make it a bug free one. He participated in code4bill and went for the interview. Due to some silly mistakes, he lost it. Nevertheless, he shared his valuable experience with me and gave me lots of websites and tips. He is also a level 7 hacker 😉

A down-to-earth person, there is no hint of pride in him. A Great Soul. Along with him, i met another gem of a person named Mahendar. Both of these guys taught a lot of things i never knew (both tech & non-tech). It was an eye-opening experience today 😀

During the whole travel time today, i was reading Linda Goodman’s Star Signs book. And within few minutes, i was telling each of them what their name and dob meant to them. Since I’m interested in java, they crowned a title called MCJA (Microsoft Certified Java Astrologer)….ha ha ha! Every minute of the tour was exciting.

[2nd March 2006]
We went to some more colleges. The response at every college we went was excellent. During the dinner today, an exciting thing called Operation Salt happened. The core persons of this being myself, Chitresh and Gautam. After we were seated at the hotel with Prathiba (it was her treat), we were served water. We took the salt container that was meant for soups and emptied half of it into Chaitu’s glass. A minute later, all the salt got dissolved in it.

We called Chaitu for Cheers! and the minute he drank the water, his face changed colours. It was so funny that we were laughing for the next 15 minutes. Instead of pouring out the water, the glasses were slowly exchanged with that of Prathiba. Now, all the 15 of us “cheers”ed and Prathiba drank the salt water..ha ha ha! This time, the salt jar was empty ! Imagine her surprise when she drank the water that was as salty as sea water !

We left for Vijayawada tonight to visit colleges there.

[3rd March 2006]
At Vijayawada also, the response was excellent. Today is one day i won’t forget in my life. After the exciting day, during the dinner; mine was almost over. I was over a cup of ice-cream when someone shouted, “Hey, anna university results have come”. I almost spilled the ice-cream and dashed off to make phone calls. After some frantic tries, i got a reply saying that the results will be out tonight. The night passed sleeplessly, when at 3AM i heard that familiar “keenk- keenk” sound of the mobile. I was sweating despite the A/C in the bus. The mobile almost slipped out of my hand.

Shivering due to both fear and A/C, i opened the “1 Unread Message”. This is what it said, “Machan, yay! we cleared da! u got 83%, let us have a blast in Chennai when u r back..yoo! hoo!”. Yipee! i saved my job. Thank God! I fell asleep immediately.

We were going to bangalore to attend the Academic Days event at PESIT college.

[4th March 2006]
Like the Coimbatore one, we reached PESIT directly. The only change being, this time we brushed our teeth. The 16 hrs of travel wore us out completely. The sessions by Yashavant Kanetkar on VC++ programming was tooooooooo good. The event ended with Kevin’s session on “Intro to .net” with Reza and Sharath doing some cool demos.

Myself and deepak left for chennai tonight. The whole tour came to a nice end. I’m looking forward to more of this 😀

Bye!

Hi! people, i have been hearing that a web browser in VB.NET takes 6 lines of code. How much lines of code do you think it would be in java??

Well, it takes just 3 lines of code. If you come back to me saying that it takes lot of pain to create the necessary GUI then “WTF, download netbeans”. With matisse, netbeans provides a solid foundation for designing GUIs, so that developers like me can forget GridBagLayout and rest in peace. Ok enough of that 😉

1. Open netbeans ide.
2. Create a new project. File->New Project. Select “General” and on the right pane, choose “Java Application”.
3. Click next. Give the project name as “TwoMinBrowser” and “Finish”.

Your project is ready. Go to java.net and download JDIC (JDesktop Integration Components). It doesn’t come as a part of Java SE 5.0 or J2SE 4.0. Good news is that, it is a part of Mustang (Java SE 6). Unpack the JDIC zip file and you will find a “jdic.jar”.

Click on the Projects tab in the IDE (Window->Projects), expand TwoMinBrowser. Now expand “Libraries” section, right click on it and select “Add JAR/Folder”. Navigate to the “jdic.jar” and add it. The projects tab should be like the image on the left.

Expand “Source Packages”, right click on “twominbrowser” and select “New->JFrame Form”. Give it a name and click “Finish”. From the Palette, drag n drop a JPanel. Resize it to fit the full form. Now add a JTextField (txtUrl), a JButton and JTabbedPane (browPane). The final form should be like the screenshot on the right. Click on the image to see a bigger one.

Double click on the JButton (“Go”) or right click on it and select Events->Action->actionPerformed. Write the following code. Press Alt+Shift+F to resolve unresolved classes. Press F5. Should you get any errors, delete the Main.java from the “Source Packages” node and press F5 again. It should now compile and execute.

try
{
WebBrowser wb=new WebBrowser();
wb.setURL(new URL(txtUrl.getText()));
browPane.add(wb);
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,ex.getMessage());
}

Type in a proper url at the textbox and click on “Go”. Our TwoMinBrowser will work. This is the result of display of yahoo page in our browser. The same code will work in linux also.

Change the url and click on “Go” again, you should see a new tab. Thats it, ur tabbed browser is up and running in just 3 lines of code. If you are a netbeans user already, building this will take you only 2 minutes.

As i’m writing this, Netbeans 5.5 preview release is installing. It requires JDK 1.5.0_06. In case you don’t have, download it here. Read about the UML features of Netbeans 5.5 here and here.

Bye!

Update: Geertjan has a cool post on porting this simple application to netbeans platform.

hi!! guys, yesterday i developed a simple “Hello World!” webservice with java. With Netbeans 5.0 IDE its a breeze to create web services. It comes bundled with Apache Tomcat 5.5.9 and Sun Java Application Server 8.2.

You can find the quickstart tutorial here to develop web services. Just follow that tute and you will be fine. I will tell you how to consume the same using .net. I used Visual Studio 2005 to consume this service. I assume that you have the url for the wsdl of the webservice which should be similar to, http://localhost:8080/WebApplication1/NewWebService?WSDL.

1. Open Visual studio. “File->New->Website”. If using VS2003 then, “File->New->Project->ASP.NET Web Application”.
2. A web application should have been created by now and you have the “design view” of “default.aspx” or any other aspx page of your choice.
3. Press Ctrl+Alt+L or View->Solution Explorer. Right click on your project name and select “Add Web Reference”. In the windows that pops up, give the WSDL url and an “Instance Name”. My instance name was “JavaAdd”.
4. Add a button and a label to the asp.net page. Double click the button and paste the following code.

VB.NET
Dim js As New JavaAdd.NewWebService()
Dim myadd As New JavaAdd.add()
Dim myaddRes As New JavaAdd.addResponse()
myadd.int_1 = 10
myadd.int_2 = 10
myaddRes = js.add(myadd)
Label1.Text = myaddRes.result

C#
JavaAdd.NewWebService js = new JavaAdd.NewWebService();
JavaAdd.add myadd = new JavaAdd.add();
JavaAdd.addResponse myaddRes=new JavaAdd.addResponse(); myadd.int_1=10;
myadd.int_2=10;
myaddRes=js.add(myadd); Label1.Text=Convert.ToString(myaddRes.result);

Instead of “sayHi” method in the quickstart tute, i created a method called “add” which accepts 2 integer parameters and returns an integer after adding them up.

5. Press F5 now. You should get something similar to these.

Thats it for this post…bye!

After the grand event on 13th, 13 Microsoft Student Champs from Chennai and Bangalore, left for Coimbatore from where we had to proceed to Erode and Madurai after visiting some colleges there. As it was already late by the time we left Chennai, we stopped for a mid-night dinner at a nameless roadside dhaba. This is where all the fun started 😉

When the bus stopped, we were all shocked to have dinner at a place like this. Jk pushed all of us, came to the front like a gaint and asked, “Where is the damn menu card?”..We all roared into laughter when he asked that. Tell you, this was the worst place where i had eaten till now. The oothappam they gave started stinking the minute he served it. Donno how i managed to eat it :(. And Vivek gave us a surprise by ordering chicken noodles ha ha ha…and it was like “veratti (dried cow dung, used as fuel) cut in pieces and soaked in kurma”…

We reached Coimbatore next day by 10.30 AM. As it was already late, we had to skip our hotel and proceeded to PSG directly. Imagine all 13 of us, without even brushing and dull from the night’s sleep entering a college ! Thankfully, we were given rooms for refreshment, which gave us enough time to brush and get ready for the 1 hr session at this college. We had prepared a separate set of quiz questions. The first question was an easy one; the CEO of Microsoft. Lots of hands came up immediately and a guy confidently told “Bill Gates”. When i said the answer was wrong, all the hands came down in a milli-second. Another guy told it was “Allen Paul”…(some of the champs were already giggling). None of the colleges gave this sort of an answer. Well, PSG shocked us beyond the bizzare dreams. The answer is Steve Ballmer.

After this college, we went to GCT. The crowd was pretty ok there…no fumbling with the CEO of Microsoft. They also answered the $1 question. We reached the hotel by 7PM and had our lunch! On a side note, our breakfast was at 1PM 🙂 Dinner consisted of juices and salads !

[15th Feb 2006]
This day was an awesome one! All of us went to Black Thunder water theme park, to chill out the travel pressure. It is very cheap. For Rs.260 per head, all rides are free and is allowed for unlimited number of times. Ofcourse, they don’t give free lunch ;). We had a good time pushing everyone in the water after they got on to their floats he he…Reza triggered a mini-tsunami as soon as he landed on the water from the slide…Rajagopal had a tough time getting on his float and as soon as he got on the float, everyone pounced on him and pushed him once again ha ha ha…Even i got pushed twice or thrice…

Of all, the wave pool was the best. It simulated the sea environment by creating waves thro’ the water. The whole pool had a depth of only 7 feet, starting from 3. It was awesome enjoyment when you have to jump up as the wave hits, otherwise a huge amount of water will fall on you.

The best part of this day was during the lunch when the hotel waiter was ragged for not getting us extra pappads. You should have seen the waiter’s face go red when Deepak asked him whether they were still frying the pappads. He was embarassed by Krishnaa when he asked “whether water was the only unlimited thing here”…

This nice day came to an end after the excellent dinner at Recidency.

[16 Feb 2006]
We went to Kongu Engg. College today. The crowd was good here, they answered the quiz questions. Krishnaa finished off, by doing a demo of Office 12. Reza also did a demo of VS2005. On the way to Kongu, we had a really tough argument of netbeans vs. VS2005 IDEs. Though i wont say which side won ;), the argument was good enough ‘cos we were able to able to convince the college staff’s that we are more of student technologists 🙂

The evening passed off by a visit to Tirupur, the t-shirt town of India. We purchased some nice ones and rates were 5 times less than what you have in Chennai.

[17 Feb 2006]
We went to Thiagarajar College today at Madurai. After visiting KLN college and Sethu Institute of technology, we visited the Meenakshi Amman temple. On the way to the temple, the Sethu guys sang some Madurai folk songs for us. They were a really cool bunch.

This day was also the birthday of Siva. We were treated at Taj on Microsoft’s expense 😉 and he got splashed with chocolate cake all over him. The exciting trip came to an end with this.

It was an awesome experience in planning something this big and making it happen too. The main reason for some colleges not answering simple questions was that, their exposure towards the technology and industry as a whole is very limited/nil (null, for the geeks out there). At the end of this tour, we feel confident that we have sowed interest for technology in them.

This is just the beginning
Towards the end of the month, we are moving to Andhra. In the near future, we are touring Karnataka and Maharashtra too 😀

And i wont hesitate to tell again that the new year 2006 is exciting 🙂

ha ha! Tell you what, this “hi” thing during every chat got very boring for RSA (Ram, Supratik, myself) that we devised something else. Infact Ram came up with this idea and got the majority of votes 😉

The idea was that we start our conversation with “bye” and continue working backwards thro’ the chat session. It is exciting to watch people’s reaction when we say bye at the beginning of a chat conference, and we 3 burst out laughing. Here is a chat excerpt…

A: Bye humans…
R: Good night aliens 😉
S: bye, ha ha ha
…….
…….
After some time, Supz gets tired and says..
S: ok ppl, im “hi”ing now
A: ok..hi
R: good morning 😀

Ok, im feeling sleepy now…bye! (this is the real bye, he he)…

Hi!! friends, the last 2 weeks has been too good. Let me start with the first one. The first week was filled with 2 things.

1. Sun Tech Days 😉
2. The Community Bandwagon

Sun Tech Days
This is a technical conference that Sun Microsystems (inventor of the Java programming language) holds annually at different countries. Last year, it was in Bangalore and this year it was in Chennai, at the Chennai Trade Center. The crowd turned out to be more than 4000 and they had a bonus 3rd day. It had 2 tracks called the “Netbeans day” and “Solaris day”. This big event ends with the JavaOne conference that is held at San Fransisco, USA.

As usual, the 2 day event was superb with experts showing off the new features of Java language, developing web services using netbeans IDE, sun java studio creator, sun java enterprise studio, AJAX and a lot of other cool stuff. The sessions i liked the most was the ones on mobile devices, web services security, AJAX, Matisse (the new GUI creator for netbeans) and developing web applications using the sun java studio creator.

All the tools mentioned are 100% free. Netbeans 5.0 can be downloaded from here. By becoming a member of SDN, you can download Sun Java Studio Creator 2 and Sun Java Enterprise Studio for free. Even the membership for SDN is free.

A Java jacket is given to 1 person among the audience. 6 people have to volunteer from the audience and they have to showcase their unique talent. Based on the response of the audience, he is given the java jacket. This year it was won by Sivanand working for HCL.

The Community Bandwagon
Myself and many Microsoft Student Champs from Chennai and Bangalore worked on an idea called “The Community Bandwagon”. The main purpose of this was to promote technical usergroups and create awareness about the latest technologies, particularly .NET. As part of the plan, we had to visit colleges in and around Chennai and talk to students about technology. We covered about 4 colleges per day and went to more than 12 colleges in Chennai. The Bangalore guys joined us on 7th Feb.

After enjoying a superb dinner with the Bangalore people, we set off to colleges from 8th morning. We took a bus with us to different colleges and told some students of each college to paint a portion of the bus. The painted bus will then move to other colleges. This was absolute fun and every moment was recorded. At the end of the tour, the bus was completely painted and it looked colourful with the creativity of the students.

In every college, we spent about an hour and half by giving out pamphlets on Microsoft Academic Project Program, Imagine Cup. From the 20 of us, some of them were selected to talk at each college on introduction to the user group and its activities etc. We conducted sudoku contests, JAM and a quiz session at the end. Those who got the answers right were given t-shirts, visual studio 2005 express editions, visual studio 2005 trial editions and original windows xp professional. We received very well at every college we went and the event was a huge success.

The Community Bandwagon at Chennai lasted for 4 days covering more than 12 colleges and it culminated with the “Date with .NET” event organised solely by/for the students. The event was held at Kamaraj Memorial hall, Chennai on 13th Feb 2006. Eminent speakers at the event included the Anna University Vice Chancellor Dr. Viswanathan, Former CSE HOD at IIT-M Dr. MuthuKrishnan, Microsoft Academic Lead Mr.Chander Sundaram and Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist Mr.Ashwani Sharma. More than 1800 students all over the city participated and in one word, the event was “excellent”.

After an excellent week of ceaseless excitement, the Bandwagon team moved on to a tour of South India comprising of Coimbatore, Erode and Madurai. More about it in the next blog 😉

Hieee all,

I’m really excited today ‘cos a lot of exciting things have happened in the past week and the good news is, ITS GOING TO CONTINUE FOR THE NEXT WEEK TOO. Before i blog on the exciting last week, an important thing has cropped up. Yuvi has geeky tagged me and here goes the rules and my specification of dream computer.

Rules:
1. The Tagged victim has to come up with the specifications of their dream personal computer.
2. The Specifications have to be feasible : They atleast have to be in the lab. So, you can’t ask for the Google Supercomputer :D.
3. The Victim needs to tag atleast two more people. If you are tagged again, you have to start the process again if the dream computer specification has changed.
4. The tagger needs to leave a comment (that he has been tagged) on the victim’s blog 😉

My dream spec.. follows:
11. An unlimited broadband internet connection
10. Microsoft mouse.
9. A nice speaker set from Creative.
8. 21″ LCD monitor with integrated high quality web camera ;-).
7. Pentium 4 processor extreme edition with HT.
6. TV tuner card.
5. nVidia GeForce card.
4. DVD Writer.
3. 2 GB DDR2 RAM.
2. 250 GB HDD.
1. Necessary, original Microsoft software 😉

Apart from this, a digital camera, iPod and 40 GB USB harddisk won’t cause any problem :D. Hmm…thinking along the same lines, it would be better to have a Toshiba laptop with the following specification, 80 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM, DVD writer, integrated memory card reader, bluetooth, IR (so that i can program it as my TV remote control 😉 ), WiFi and other extra bells and whistles such as webcam, USB mouse etc. 😀

Ok…as part of the rules, im geeky tagging Ramesh, Sathya, Moyeen, Krishna, Siva, Sabarish and every single person reading this post. 😉

Bye !