/home/dayanandasaraswati

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Name: Sanath Kumar

Age: 630720000 seconds and still counting….

Address: 13.035413991316652°  North, 80.22137751258563° East

About Me: 1000 core, 64byte, CISC Processor, 100^100 TB RAM with One Input Device and One Output Device !!!!

My Computer: Intel Centrino Duo 1.83 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD running Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows Vista(Yuk I hate it)

What am I doing: BE Computer Science at College Of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai

My Passion: Mridangam

My Likes: Linux(I’m a Linux aficionado), Ubuntu, Computer Vision, FOOD

My Dislikes: Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows 7 BETA, and every other Microsoft Product expect Office 2007.

Contact Me: dayanandasaraswati [at] ceglug [dot] org

My Linux User Group: CEGLUG.ORG

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Hello,
My first and last concert this December season happened today between 1PM and 2PM at Vani Mahal. I accompanied Krithika Natarajan’s vocal recital along with C.V. Sukanya in the violin.

This concert was a memorable one in many respects. This is the first ever concert that I went late. I was almost 10mins late. All because of this terrible traffic jam at Duraiswamy Subway. I started at 12:15 from my house. Vani mahal is supposed to be just 10mins by drive from my house, but it took an hour to drive there. For almost 45mins the car barely moved 10 meters. Finally I reached the auditorium by 1:10 and the concert started by 1:15 PM. I don’t remember the songs that were sung. The first one was a varanm I think. The second one was on Vinayakar. The third song was Sujanajeevana. I enjoyed playing to this song very much. The third one was another Thyagaraja krithi and the fourth one was the main song. The song was set to Rupaka thalam and where she sang neraval and kalpana swaram was Rupaka thalam 1/2 edam. Her kalpana swaram was nice. It was already close to 2 o clock when I got my turn for thani-avarthanam. Since it was already late, I just played a couple of avarthanams of sarvalagu and finished with mora and korva. I had finished my thani-avarthanam but Krithika did not recognize it. She did not start her song. So, I had to play few more avarthanams of sarvalagu and repeat the mora korvai(sadly I didn’t remember anyother mora and korva. So I repeated the same one again). This time she picked up my end of thani-avarthanam and started the song.

I had a very bad feeling about the whole episode because of various reasons: 1. I went late to the concert 2. Thani-avarthanam problem 3. Lack of practice. I had very little of practice for this concert. So I played very plainly throughout the concert. No frills and no fancy. I played all the plain old lessons. This sort of switched me off. But after I was back home, my patti told this incident which apparently acted as an elixir on me - There was some old lady sitting in front of my patti during the concert. After the concert was over, that old lady told to my patti that the singer’s performance was average but the mridangam player’s performance was top class!!! I never played top class today. But some times playing plain vanilla can be very pleasing to hear.

I presented a paper/poster at the International Conference on High Performance Computing 2009(HiPC) at Cochin from December 15th to 19th. It was such a fantastic experience. The amount of information that you gather in a conference can never be paralleled by a semester of study. Most importantly you get information on the state-of-art work that is going on around the world. Big guns in the industry come there to the conference. You get to talk to people whom otherwise you have to wait for months to get appointment and talk. I spoke to a lot of foreign students and profs. It was a different experience interacting with a person of different origin. Foreign people never show any expression in their face. Even if you tell them that they’ve got Nobel Prize, their reaction would be “Hmmm..Ok..” :P. We Indians are accustomed to giving animated reactions but foreigners will never spend their energy in reacting to our talk :). This makes it very difficult to guess what the other person is thinking in his mind. This makes conversing with them very interesting as well as irritating :). I spoke to a group of Spanish students. Hell with their English accent. They have an accent that is very very difficult to understand. For example, we spell the word “utilization” as “you-te-lie-za-shan”. But they pronounce it as “vu-te-lie-za-shan” It takes a while to understand what they speak. Overall, it was fantastic.

You get to meet professors of U.S. universities in person. So, you can go market yourself and get a seat for yourself in their university in a matter of 10mins This is what two of my friends did. We also got a contacts of students working in the same area as ours. Contacts are very important as have a person to help you in place of any problems. My paper on “Reconfigurable Hardware to Accelerate Directory Search” was welcomed by a lot of people. One Mr. Shmuel Shottan, CTO of the company BlueArc was very impressed with our work because his company was manufacturing a similar product. He asked us to mail our papers to him and gave us his visiting card :):):) We spoke with him a lot during the conference.

Overall, the deluge of information that you get at a conference is fantastic. My recommendation would be to attended a conference even if you don’t present a paper. The conference atmosphere will stimulate you to put a paper. We even got plethora of new ideas from the conference. Probably some of them will mature into a paper :). I’ll share the photos of the conference very soon. But as of now, I leave you with a few of them.

All of us dressed to attended the first day of conference

Conference Banner

I listened to my second concert at Music Academy on 23rd December 2009 at 2:00PM. This was a fantastic concert by Chinmaya Sisters accompanied by Delhi Sairam in Mridangam. It was a top class concert. I had a feast at the canteen followed by a feast at the concert. Although I went half way the main song, I didn’t miss the thani-avarthanam. Sairam was fantastic in his playing. He was crisp as well as agile. The way he started his thisra nadai was notable. Just after the main song, Chinmaya sisters had a little chat and started with a Ragam-Thanam-Pallavi. It was a treat to listen to an RTP after almost three years. The thanam was very fast paced and I have to laud Chinmaya sisters for their splendid performance. They made the thanam very interesting and energetic.

The RTP was set in a peculiar thalam - It was misrachapu repeated 8 times => In adhi thalam, put misrachapu for every beat of the adhi thalam. So, you get 8 * 3.5 = 28. Although this was in essence plain misrachapu, it was easy to play in mridangam. But the peculiarity of the thalam made it difficult yet interesting to put the thalam in hand.

Overall, the concert was fantastic. After a long long time, I listened to a refreshing concert!!!

23-12-2009 Music Academy Concert

This December season I plan to attend a lot of concerts, at least one a day. I attended my first concert at Vani Mahal on Monday(Dec 21, 2009), 2:00 P.M. I don’t remember the singer’s name but what I remember is that her concert was too bad. She was a lady in her late 30s. A precise description of her way of singing would be to use the word “shouting”. It was as if she was yelling at the audience for having attended her concert The mridangam was not up to the mark. Mridangam was not able sync with the singer’s pace. Violin seemed a little good, probably because the other two on stage were pathetic.

Not everything was bad in the concert. The Kasi Alwa at the Vani Mahal canteen was fantastic. It was so nice that I went to Vani Mahal the next day just to taste it again I had one plain dosa and onion uthappam. Canteens now-a-days have become hell costly. I think Saravana Bhavan would be a lot cheaper than them. Onion uthappam was Rs. 35!!! The cheapest dish there was this alwa - Rs. 15 only.

21-12-2009_vani_mahal

I was reading a some theory on random numbers when I landed up in this paradox. This is Berry’s paradox as published in 1908 by Bertrand Russell. The actual statement of the problem is a little vague, so I’m rephrasing it for you here.

Before we go to the statement, lets have a small discussion on computer programs. Suppose there is a number 20. To print this number onto the computer screen, we write this small price of code print 20 . Suppose there is a sequence 1010101010, we print it on screen using the code print “10″ five times . If there is a sequence of 1s and 0s like 11010010101101, there is no big pattern in this sequence and therefore can be printed using a statement like print 11010010101101 . The point to be noted is that if you have a pattern of say 10 repeated million times, you can print it using a one line computer program like print 10 million times but for a random and arbitrary sequence, you have no other choice but the have the full number in the print statement as it is. Thus a code like print 11010010101101 , when translated to MACHINE LANGUAGE(binary), will have the actual number sequence along with some extra bits that tells the OpCode etc etc etc. Thus essentially, size of this code(in number of BITS) will exceed the actual size of the number itself. If the number is N bits long, then this code will be N+C bits long where C bits come because of translating the high level program to machine language.

Ok, thats all computer fundamentals. You all know it. Now, here is the paradox.

Write an program to find and print a RANDOM number whose binary representation has more number of bits than the binary representation of the program

The word RANDOM in the statement is given to emphasize on the fact that the binary representation of the number MUST not have any pattern or sequence. It must be purely RANDOM.

Explanation: This paradox asks you to write a computer program to find a RANDOM number and print it whose size(no. of bits) is greater than the number of bits used to represent that program. The catch to note is the words “Random” and “Print”. As we have seen in the second paragraph, a RANDOM sequence of 0 and 1 needs a program of size N+C to print it ie. To print such a random sequence we need more bits than the sequence itself. So, in order for a program to FIND and PRINT a sequence, it’ll surely take MORE bits than the actual number itself. Therefore, this program supposedly finds a number that is actually contained in the PRINT statement of the program BUT is larger than the actual program itself!!!!!!! If the number is written within the PRINT statement, then how can it be larger than the size of the program? Paradox.

If this explanation is not clear, pl do comment it. I’ll help to resolve the ambiguity.

As an offshoot of the discussion that was going in the CSE_H Google Groups, I am writing a small post on how spirituality can be understood by a computer science student. This topic sounds a little idiotic but lets see how I justify this statement.

How does the computer do what you want it to do?
It is through the Programs. The programs you write in high level are compiled into machine code which is nothing but a string of 0s and 1s.
In life, the programs are compared to religion. These have been created by truly enlightened people. Religion translates into ONLY two entities - Man or Woman.(Think about it - Whole purpose of religion is only for two people - a man and a woman)

True that all programs are sequence of 0 and 1, but what information is encoded in them?
The higher level program is written to perform some action. Even when compiler translates it to 0 and 1 the purpose still remains.
Likewise, religion, family, society etc have an unifying intent - To reach God. But sadly, when it translates to Man and Woman, this intent IS NOT maintained. Even if our religion’s intent is to love everybody, think about God always, be selfless etc, Men and Women who follow this religion never follow all its intent.

In life, the compiler that does this translation is the Mind of a person. Will you accept a compiler that alters the intent of the program after translation? Then why do you accept the Mind that alters the intent of the religion after translating it to the level of an individual? Think about it…(your religion asks you to be selfless, but after translation, your mind is always fixed on SELFISH activities. Why is this disparity?)

Change your Mind. Orient it towards your religion. Like a good compiler producing useful code, our mind will also produce a very optimal, efficient and successful life.

Here’s the background: This particular computer-geek/glutton was fired from his office because he was always emptying all the food stocks available in their food court. He had gone to such an extent that he doesnt even eats the “vada” kept to kill the rat. He had gone to such an extent that he even wanted to eat “Java Beans”, in particular, “Enterprise Java Beans”. Thank god he was a vegetarian or else he would also want to eat “Python”.

Having lost his job, he started searching for a new job. This guy was simply unable to resist his eating fascinations that every word he uttered had a pinch food-flavour in it :P. In desperation, he went to “Hotel Saravana Bhavan” in search of a job. Because of his food-flavoured talks, he immediately got a job.

Now what..the guy got a job, that too at SARAVANA BHAVAN..a job which he very much likes..so he must be enjoying his date with food..Right..?

You’re right. He’s enjoying his date with food but other workers at Saravana Bhavan are having hell of a time with this guy. Why? Whats the matter? …The problem is although this guy’s talks are food-flavoured, they are also IT-flavoured. This guy is using too many computer terms in his talk that NO BODY is able to understand it. Infact two bearers quit their job because of this guy’s IT-flavoured talk.

Hero to the rescue: Since I’m a frequent visitor to Saravana Bhavan(infact I have a PLATINUM frequent-eater pass. I get 30% discount on all eatables), the owner is a close friend of mine. Since I’m also a computer-geek/glutton, he called me to interpret this guy’s IT-flavoured talks. On a sunday morning I went to the hotel and met the manager. After much deliberation we decided to secretively hear his talks and interpret them. The manager slipped a mini wireless microphone into the guy’s pocket and we(I, manager and few other staffs) sat in a closed cabin and heard his talking. The following his talk with my interpretations given in the bracket.

—-START OF INTERPRETATION—-
A customer comes and sits in a table. This guy goes to serve this customer.
Guy: Sir, Can I know what you want?
Customer: Hmmm..What is available to drink?
Guy: We have C(coffee), C++(filter coffee), Java(java coffee), Ada Boost(Boost), HTML(Horlicks Tea Maltova and Lemon Tea)…….
Customer: !@#$%%^^&
[Unable to understand anything, the helpless customer is helped by another server. In the meantime, a phone call comes and this guy attends it]

Tring…Tring…Tring…
Guy: Ping(He’s trying to tell “Hello”. In computer parlance, you PING somebody to check if the other person is there)
Customer: Hello, is it Saravana Bhavan?
Guy: “Hello World!!!”
Customer: Sir, I want you to deliver me two special masala dosa.
Guy: 200 OK(This is HTTP’s response code when everything goes on well. He says “Ok”) Do you want anything else sir?
Customer: Hmmmm…GET me Pav Bajhi..
Guy: 404 Not Found( No Pav Bajhi is available).
Customer: What the ****?
Guy: What else do you want sir?(He doesnt understand the bad word because his brain’s transport layer drops “bad” packets).
Customer: Enough. Please send me the items I’ve ordered.
Guy: Do you want HTTP or HTTPS?
Customer: What…….?????
Guy: HTTP is cheaper sir. But HTTPS is more secure..
Customer: Unable to understand anything, he opts for HTTPS.

(Actually HTTP => Hotel SaravanaBhavan Thali Transfer Protocol. HTTPS is of course the secure version of HTTP. In HTTP, the delivery boy could eat a portion of your food. But in HTTPS, we use SSL(Secure SaravanaBhavan Layer) that prevents the delivery boy from eating the food.

Customer: When eating, if I want some more sambar or chutney, can you deliver it for us?
Guy: Yes sir. We provide AJAX(Asynchronous Juice to Appalam eXport) service wherein you can request us more food anytime and we’ll deliver it to you. First you download(eat) the Web Page(food) you’ve ordered. If you want to load(eat) any more content(food) in your DIV(stomach), you can send us your request using AJAX and we’ll immediately send the content(food) you’ve requested.
Customer: Kadavule…………………..
Guy: Sir, we accept both DNS addresses and IP addresses? What would you like to provide?(DNS address means Door Number Street address and IP address means I’m-on-Platform address. IP addresses are the addresses of people who dont have a house and stay as COPs[Care Of Platform]).
Customer: ****..[He tells his house address]
Guy: 200 OK.
Customer: When will you deliver it?
Guy: We generally take less than 3 RTT(Round Trip Time. Its time taken by a person to go to and fro three times between SaravanaBhavan and the desired address)
Customer: Thank you bye.
Guy: FIN + ACK(TCP’s way of closing a connection Free..He just says good bye)

(After this awefully cryptic conversation, this guy is called by one of the supervisors and directed to go to the kitchen for some doing work. Since the kitchen is a closed room, we didnt pick up the microphone’s signals and so for almost 2 hrs we didnt receive any inputs. Why does he take so long in the kitched?? Because he’s a glutton!!!)

(Atlast this guy comes out and meets a customer)
Customer: What do you have for lunch?
Guy: Do you want a kernel or an embedded kernel or some applications???
Customer: Dey ****** ** ***** ************ *** ******** *******(Verbiage of bad words!!!)
( I explain the manager: Kernel is full meals. Embedded kernel is mini meals and applications are other food items)
[The Customer, unable to control his hunger, he decides to order the food which the person in the next table is eating.]
Customer: Please get me that food[pointing to the plate in the next table].
Guy: The guy thought that the customer wants the other person’s food and says, “Sir, we do not support P2P services”
(P2P is Plate-To-Plate service. Using P2P if you like food somebody is eating, you can easily transfer his food from his plate to your plate without the help of any “SERVER”. If you want to get your food faster, you can transfer the different parts of the same food from different people. For example, if you want full meals, you can take rice from one person, appalam from one person, rasam from one person etc. This way you wont waste everyone’s resource :P)
Customer: Dear waiter, please get me one plate full meals. I’m too hungry.
[By the time the guy brings full meals, a friend of our customer arrives and sits next to him.]
Guy: Sir, here is your Kernel(full meals).
Customer: Thank you.
Customer’s Friend: Let me also order one full meals.
Customer to his friend: Hey dude, lets share this full meals. Come-on.
Guy: Sir, the Kernel(full meals) is protected by a MUTEX. Only one can eat it at a time.(MUTEX is used to allow only ONE process to access a SHARED resource at a time. So this guy says that only one person can eat full meals at a time. No two can do it.)
Customer: Poda naye.
Guy: [As he generally drops "Bad" packets, he drops this "Bad" packet also]

[This guy's rowdy-ism is continuing like this. If I tell everything then "Why Blood..? Same Blood..". I'm skipping over to the last incident of the day. Refer Glossary for more...:P]

[At last the day ends. All of them packing up things. This guy is asked to instruct his subordinate to cleaning the tables and close the shutter and go home.]

Guy: Hey you there.. There are a lot of memory leaks(spill over food) in the areas pointed by every “page table”(dining table) entry. So please “Garbage Collect”(clean) them.
Subordinate: Please dont scold me. I heard what your supervisor told. I’ll clean the tables. Please close your mouth.
Guy: \/\/\/\_____\/\/\/\/\/\_____/\/\/\/\/\_____(Singing some songs…)[The ascii art is the wave form of his song :P]
Subordinate: I’m done. I’m leaving.
Guy: FIN+ACK
[The guy then flushes all the memory blocks where dirty bit was set(ie. arrange all chairs properly), stops all daemons(stops all fans), kills all the running processes(kills all running rats), writes onto the system log(writes the day's account in the register) and closes the system(close the hotel)
[Apparently we all were sitting inside the hotel looking at all his activities. We were so much engrossed in his movements that we forgot that he locked us inside the hotel :P. We went to "sleep" state and came back to "running" state the next morning!!!!!]

Glossary:
[So let me give you a list of terms and their translations]
ASP - Agmark Sambar Podi
JSP - Java Sundal Packages
CSS - Coffee with Slight Sugar
API - Advanced Puliyodhara Interface
SVN - Sweet/Ven-pongal versioN.
MS - Mosamana Samayakaran
GNU - GNU is Not Uthappam
Unix - Uthappam n Idayappam miX
PHP - Hyperfood Pre-eater(it’ll eat some portion of your food, tell if its tasty and then only deliver u)
FOSS - Free and Open Source Sapadu(shortly you can call it “Annadhanam”) :P.
C#(C Sharp) - Coffee with Salt
VS(Visual Studio) - Vayaru Seri-ella
VB - Venapona Bonda

If you have some more terms to add to this glossary, feel free to comment it.

I’m back after a big period of gestation. Let me begin my new season with a post on what I learnt in this gestation period - How to do research?. This is one question which most people barely dare to ask. This is because of the common misconceptions like

• Research is for esoteric eccentrics only.
• Research will make you a nerd
• Research is only for people who have a gifted cognitive power.
• Research is only for people who want to keep studying till the end of their lives. Practical people ***Do Not*** do research.

This list goes on. These are just lame excuses for not doing research. It is indeed true that not everyone of us can become Mr. Einstein. But research is not about becoming Einstein. It is just about understanding a problem and providing it a solution. Dont we understand problems in our daily lives? We all do. For example, if you find that your pants are too tight, it means that you’re becoming a glutton and you gotta be a little stringent in your diet :D. You can frame millions of examples where you understand the problem and find the solutions to it. What does this mean..??? This means that We All Do Research Daily.

Good. Now that you’re convinced that you are a researcher, lets move on to the one and only step in becoming a professional researcher. The one and only mantra is

UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM

How is that understanding the problem completes research? Dont we need to frame the solution? Human brain is such a beautiful machine. Once you understand the problem fully, it’ll provide you with the solution without explicit efforts. Many people have their tricks of understanding the problem. I choose the following technique.

1. Decide the area of  research. This can be a very broad topic. For example lets choose “Algorithms”.
2. Now the topic is too vast. We must narrow our topic further. Since algorithms exist in every field of computer science, lets narrow down to “Operating Systems”
3. Now that our topic is “Algorithms in Operating Systems”, we now go to the abode of researchers - scholar.google.com. This is a site created by Google to provide specific search results to researchers. You will get only research works as your search results. Scholar is awesome because along with a research work, it also provides link to the site where the PDF document of that work is available.
4. Search in Google Scholar for survey papers on “Algorithms in Operating Systems”. Your search query could probably be “survey of algorithms used in operating systems”. Your search results could be varied because there are different parts of the operating systems where algorithms are used. For example, scheduling algorithms, memory allocation algorithms etc. Collect  a few of the survey papers and download them.
5. Our next step is to read through the survey paper. You’ll get a lot of idea regarding the kind of work that has been done till date. Make sure that the research paper is sufficiently new. After reading a couple of survey papers certain class of algorithms will interest you.
6. Now make your search specific to that area. Find out more survey papers in that area. Important areas to look in survey papers are the “Conclusions”, “Future Work” and “References”. The first two can give you an idea of what is going to happen in the future. They can even be a starting point for your research work. Before starting your research make sure that no body else has already done the same work. References can be critical sources of information. When reading the paper, you may not know a lot of terms. Go back to Google Scholar and download the reference papers and read them. Citeseer can help you easily track the references.
7. After the above step, you will be very close to having your own idea. Most of you would have got your idea in place. Dont narrow down on one single idea at the first place. Have a queue of ideas. Search for availability of existing implementations of those ideas. If someone has already implemented the idea, download his paper and read his future work and references. Do this for all your ideas and you’ll finally have a more refined, polished queue of ideas. Now among all these ideas, after delibration with your research guide(if any), fix up an idea and start working on it.
8. Working on the idea involves reading all related technologies to your idea. Collection of all necessary papers and reading them thoroughly. Finally concretize your idea and implement it.

As you can see from the above steps, only the last one is concerned with implementation, more precisely the solution for the problem. First seven steps bother only about “Understanding the problem”. This is the simple algorithm I’m following to do my final year project. All these are not my   own treatise. They have their origins from my friends’ advices.

I’m also following the same procedure to do my FYP. If you guys find a flaw in that procedure, please let me know. It’ll greatly help me too :P. Happy researching. Bye..:D

Hello friends,
This has been a very long pending post. I didnt find time to write a blog for the past two months. Today I’m stealing time from my busy schedule(:P) to write this short post. Formally, the internship at IITD got over. The internship was simply awesome. I think this internship has totally transformed me. From the way I think to the way I see the outside world, everything has undergone a catharsis. My personality has become more refined, my thinking abilities have undergone a water wash, I physically have become 1-inch thinner(Few ppl told me this. But few other say I’ve gone fat. I take the former and drop the later appreciating their effort to give such a straight-forward comment).
Now I completely understand why IIT is the most respected institution in the country. IIT Delhi is such a wonderful place to be. With such calm and serene atmosphere IITD seems almost like a heaven. Nothing is missing at IITD. Right from fantastic restaurants to titillate your palate to an awesome library to titillate your brain, IITD has got everything. More than the facilities, the hospitality which we received was unmatchable. I sincerely doubt if other IITs will provide you with such an experience. Every faculty is down to earth. You can just knock the door of any faculty and talk to them. The lab assistants are extremely kind. Except for their continuous chatter in Hindi, everything was awesome!! Labs are completely student managed. They are open round the clock and if you want you can spend literally weeks together in the lab. No body will kick you out saying that they want to close the door and so on. We had access to every facility there - right from the lab to the library.
What most impressed me was the TEA BREAK :D. Everyday they serve you tea with samosa or biscuit. Everyday at 11A.M and around 3 30 P.M. tea is served and any body can have any amount of tea and samosa. I’d keep waiting for those very moments and be the first person to have the tea because if you go late, probability of you getting a second samosa is less The food at IITD is awesome. They treat you with a variety of food everyday. I personally enjoyed the food very much although I craved for some homemade food.
You can see all my photos here at - Picasa Webalbums

My work at IITD was a project on Multiple View 3D Reconstruction of buildings. You give me a set of photographs of a building and I’ll give you a 3D model of the building. We have implemented upto single view reconstruction and are extending it to multiple views currently. You can have all information about the work we did at IITD through Srinath’s page on the internship. The source code for the project is available there and can be downloaded and used without any conditions. If the link is not active, please send me a mail, I’ll give you all the details.

Insight is a workshop organized by Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University Chennai to popularize Indian Science to school students. This workshop is an initiative started by Prof. Ranjani Parthasarathy, Prof. TV Geetha and  Ms. Bama from DCSE. Its an excellent initiative started in 1999 and successfully going on for a decade. Year after year, mam has been inspiring students and exposing us to various aspects of Indian Sciences. This includes Indian Mathematics, Astronomy, Logic and a lot more. Usually, students used to send mail to schools and request them to send their students to attend the workshop. This year it has been radical. DCSE collaborated with Science City and has organized this workshop on a grand scale. Science City has taken care of all the logistics and their efforts has fetched a huge participation from students. This year’s Insight had 130 participants in its first day of workshop - a massive outcome. Students had a fantastic day learning a lot of new stuffs. I am one of the speakers in the workshop. I had an excellent time too. Interacting with school students and watching their actions and behaviour reminded me of my school days when I attended such workshops. What was most nostalgic was the parents leaving their wards in the workshop and staying outside the auditorium for about half an hour and watching thier child listen to the workshop. This reminded of my parents who used to do exactly the same. What was a little new to us was 8th class students playing with their cell phones. This is one thing thats really new to me. I think as time progresses, schools will start proving Cell Phones to students with their ID cards :D.

More than just this three day workshop, there’s another exclusive workshop for students from rural background. Students from various districts in Tamil Nadu are coming all their way to Chennai to attend this workshop. This extravaganza will take place between May 27th to May 29th. Sadly I’ll not be able to be a part of this edition of the workshop because I’m going to IIT Delhi for my internship.

All the Insight material is available online in our website - http://cs.annauniv.edu/insight/index.htm. They are such invaluable information which you can never get anywhere. Such a cornucopia of information is very hard to get elsewhere. You have a glimpse of this Day 1 of the workshop in my picassa web albums - http://picasaweb.google.com/dayanandasaraswati/Insight09Day1