The experience at Citrix was great mostly because of the kind of work and guidance i was given, we arrived in Bangalore on 3rd Jan, it was weird that no accommodation was provided to us for the initial weeks, but since manipal is one night journey away from bangalore, we came here after our exams and searched for a flat, we finally decided on a flat in Cambridge Layout (near Indiarnagar) since it was pretty close to our work place which was near brigade road !! I was working with the NetScaler Tools team on a internal stress testing tool called BlackWidow, the best thing about my work at citrix was that i had to work with FreeBSD kernel, which meant i had to use *NIX development tools (cscope/vim/kgdb which is what i am pretty comfortable with) and not some bloated IDE (for me Vim + cscope > any IDE) which i had to learn for my last internship at microsoft, this helped me get started pretty quickly which surprised my mentor, although i was not assigned the feature i wanted to implement still my work was pretty interesting.

I found Citrix to be a really awesome company to work at, it has a lot of interesting products, the people are friendly and helpful and the work culture is great, ohh and not to forget the facilities they provide to employees, but one thing that I noticed during my internship is that the work can become monotonous, so you really need to pitch in and get some interesting work or one might end up doing similar work again and again, but then i think thats the case with most of the places.

The main motive behind me coming to bangalore was meeting interesting people, not that people in Manipal were less interesting, i wanted to meet with some ‘similar’ minded people. I had hardly talked to other people from my college who interned with me, but they turned out be interesting, also interns from other colleges like PeeShit (read PESIT) were interesting. I didnt actually went out to meet people, but then i guess i can do that now as i am going to stay in bangalore. A few days back i met folks at Artoo on their Demo Day, they are doing some really interesting work.

My internship is over but I will be staying in Bangalore for my first full time job, i have a few on campus and off campus offers but more on that some time later, Thanks to my flat mates Mikhail Jacob, Sohil Himanish and Tushar Dadlani for making my stay in Bangalore awesome and Thanks to my mentor, manager, all fellow interns and everyone else at citrix for making my work awesome, you people rock !!

Hello From Hyderabad

It has been 4 weeks since i arrived in Hyderabad for my internship at Microsoft IDC and it has been a unique experience. There are 7 people from MIT,Manipal this time 6 in IDC and 1 in MS IT, but manipal being the crowded place it is none of the 7 people knew each other, well except for me which was kind of odd, imagine having to introduce people who have spent 3 years in the same college to each other !!. Akshay jhori (MS IT) arrived one week before us i.e. 23rd May (i guess) and rest of us arrived by 30th May. First day we were given a small orientation, which was just to get us familiar with how things work and what we were supposed to do, after the orientation we were taken to our respective Mentors who is the go to guy for all things related to what ever we were supposed to do, i was assigned to AdCenter team. I was given a cubicle and later my mentor explained what i was supposed to do for the next 8 weeks and was asked to get familiar with MS tools and process.

Hyderabad is kind of a strange city where if you ask an auto rickshaw driver to go to a place X he will simply say “i have no idea where that place is, but it will cost you Rs100″, so most of the time you need to look up on maps for directions and then tell the auto driver where you have to go, which is what we did after loosing our way few times, it all starts with Someone saying “Hey lets go out and see around” to which you say “Ok nice, lets find a good place to eat!!”, after walking a few kilometers and looking around and probably eating, when its time to return someone is bound to ask “Which way ?” and atleast one guy from your group will say “Its this way, TRUST ME!” by point to a particular direction in the INDIAN WAY, believe me that is the time when you should start asking for directions because every time the “TRUST ME” incident happened with us, we were going in completely wrong direction.

Coming back to the four weeks, for the first 2 weeks we were provided accommodation in white fields (Hyderabad, not Bangalore as most the people were thinking after i told them where i was staying), the place was good and around 5-6 Km from MS IDC at Gachibowli, you get shuttles from ~9am to ~10am and if you are taking an auto just say you want to go to Wipro, Gachibowli and not Microsoft, Gachibowli you will have to pay less this way, even tough Wipro Campus is just in front of Microsoft Campus, ohh and the sharing auto is a very cheap way to travel around in Hyderabad but it gets weird, i remember there were 8 people + 1 auto driver in a single auto one time.

Microsoft Surface

I got my hands on Microsoft Surface at the visitor center and it has increased my desire to create something like surface using what is already available by NUI Group, dunno if it will get somewhere. Also i have started to like C# as a language and i have personally found it to be more close to C++ then Java, which is not what a large number of people think, this has also made me realize that there is no computer language that i hate which is kind of strange because most of the people i know hate one or the other language and JAVA tops most of their list as the most hated (but used) language.

During my 2nd week AdCenter team had an outing to Leonia which was a great experience, i met some interesting people from AdCenter team during the trip and the best part was Paint Ball, a match in team of 22 Vs 22 it was pure fun, well except for the friendly fire part, where i got shot in the arm from a really close distance, anyways we lost the game because of what was clearly CHEATING done by other team but that is as always debatable.

After our 2 weeks were over we shifted out to a different place in White Fields itself, if someone is looking for accommodation there are plenty of places in HiTech city / Madhapur area to stay for short/long duration, we looked at a large number of places before settling for white fields because its close and we were familiar with this area now, plus the price difference was not much.

Microsoft India Development Center - Building 3

The first few weeks were pretty exciting but now after 4 weeks everything seems normal to us, all the free coffee/tea/ice tea/cold drinks/etc, all the games of pool/foosball/TableTennis, cab drop at night, the cubicle, all the excitement is gone and work has started.
anyways i am planing to roam around Hyderabad which i have done only a little, any special places that i should absolutely visit ? leave a comment….

My Apple Keyboard

Update :- update for recent kernels,

Removed because of objection form ION

old text avaliable here

We all have been listening ( reading ) a lot about the new iPhone 3G and how it is different, better and well cheaper from the first generation iPhone and a question came to my mind with Airtel and Vodafone planning to launch iPhone what will happen to Openmoko how many people know about it and well its available in India at a price of around RS. 20,000 by IDA system its really a great Phone to own actually Openmoko Freerunner is the second phone which will run Openmoko software and is similar to the first Neo 1973 its specification are

* Processor -- Samsung S3C2442 500MHz
* RAM -- 128MB
* Flash -- 256MB
* Display -- 2.8-inch diagonal 640 x 480 VGA Color TFT LCD
* Graphics -- SMedia 3362-based 3D graphics acceleration
* Accelerometers -- 2 x 3D accelerometers
* Audio -- "high-quality" audio codec
* USB -- 1 x version 1.1, switchable between client and host modes
* Cellular -- 2.5G tri-band GPRS/GSM (900MHz or 850MHz, depending on region)
* WiFi -- 802.11b/g WiFi
* Bluetooth -- version 2.0
* GPS -- AGPS (assisted global positioning system) receiver

Which is really great Freerunner does not have 3G but well in India at present there is no 3G and i dont think it will be there anytime this year as frequency allocation has not taken place add to that only planning is going on which will take a lot of time so remove all the 3G factor from iPhone 3G …….
Another thing Openmoko Freerunner is a complete Open Source Phone you can download the whole source code and change it according to your wish and well about the applications there will be plenty of applications available for it at no cost
So while many of people around me will go for iPhone 3G ( without 3G ) i am going to FREE MY PHONE!!!!!!

Here is the Server Code

#!/usr/bin/env python

while 1:
print "Waiting for connection"
tcpcli, addr = tcpsoc.accept()
print "connected from:", addr
while 1:
data = tcpcli.recv(1024)
if not data : break
print data
data1 = raw_input(">>")
if data1 == "q;t": break
tcpcli.send(data1)
tcpcli.close()
tcpsoc.close()


Here is the client code

#!/usr/bin/env python

while 1:
data = raw_input("msg>>")
if not data : break
tcpsoc.send(data)
data = tcpsoc.recv(1024)
if not data: break
print data
tcpsoc.close()

the code above might not be properly intended so you can download the code from http://fb.ankurs.com/tcp_server.py and http://fb.ankurs.com/tcp_client.py
enjoy!!!

Updates on my blog will be more regular now, i think i will be very busy this month but i wont let that come in between my blogging.

One thing about Racked Hosting — They Rock!!!!!!!!!!  the server is extremely fast, extremely efficient and at a great price
so if you are looking for hosting you know where to go……..

PAMP, an S60 Powered Apache Web Server with PHP and MySQL is available for the S60 3rd edition phones, imagine running a WEB Server on your phone, i saw a few days ago and as i had a supported phone Nokia E61i i was well happy. The supported phone are Nokia E90, Nokia N95 8GB these have 128MB RAM and Nokaia N95 and Nokia E61i with 64MB RAM, well i guess PAMP should run on any S60 3rd Edition device as long as it has 64 MB of ram. The Installation is Simple just download the pamp_with_htdocs_on_c.zip or pamp_with_htdocs_on_e.zip depending on where you want your servers root to be. Unzip the file and you will have

• pips_s60_1_2_SS.sis
• openc_ssl.sis
• PythonForS60_1_4_1_3rdEd.sis
• PythonScriptShell_1_4_1_3rdEd.sis
• pamp_with_htdocs_on_...sisx

transfer them to your cell and install them, after the install you will find pamp and connector in your phone menu, click pamp. then start pamp from [Options]->[Start]->[Pamp], when you see Apache and Mysql running, open your phone browser and goto 127.0.0.1, you will be greeted with a page that says IT WORKS….. congratulations now you have a web server running on your phone for more configuration options you can check the nokia wiki http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PAMP enjoy!!!!!!!!!

Second day began with partitioning and distribution of DVD’s after which the main install fest began and all the steps were shown and explained, there was some DVD corruption / Improper burning but everything else was just fine, a script was prepared for upgrading Compiz and enabling 3D effects for the HP 6515b laptops, the script handled most of the task which were to be done in command line though all people were explained what it did but since most of the people were First Time users it really made the task of configuring the system very easy, rest laptops faced no problems so they directly booted in Graphical mode already being out of time the Install Fest was Finished with some problems still remaining which were solved

more photos here

Above pic is form the OLPC deployment in India in Khaira, i found it when i was reading Venkatesh Hariharan’s blog he says
It was wonderful to see the enthusiasm with which the teacher, students and parents had embraced this project. Definitely one of the more fun things that I did in 2007 and something that I look forward to in 2008
well OLPC looks a promising project and well well Intel has left the project now due to some “philosophical differences” i know they joined it because AMD was there, whatever but i wont have much impact………….

yes KDE 4.0 is coming and i still think that i will stick with Gnome when most of my friends are saying they will go for KDE, now why is that i still dont know (maybe because it reminds me of Windows or because i am used to of interface of Gnome) whatever the reason be i plan to use it for some time and then return back to Gnome. Ok now things that i have been doing lately
tried learning PHP but left it on Day one, i know it not that hard to learn PHP and its really gr8 if you know it but still i left it for Python which i find really easy (well as of now) and hope to make something out of it, work for the automated script of Fedora 8 in complete and for Ubuntu 7.10 major portion in complete, i tried making a feed aggregator which will display all feed on a web page so as to make a blogroll but left it after i faced some problems with blogspots atom feeds and now i am using Planet for it, work on Ubuntu and Fedora repositories is almost complete with ubuntu giving strange problems sometime, i received invite from QIk but its not working for me will find a way to make it work sometime, i have also watched a large number of Episodes of different shows and well around 15 movies, well thats almost all of it now i still have around 11 days before i go back to Manipal, i hope 2008 will be a gr8 year for me and you
Happy New Year to all again, now i will go and watch a movie
Ankur Shrivastava

ok so lets come to the point how exactly did i solved these problems for installing ATI driver i have already explained it earlier here and here , so now moving to ndiswrapper
you need to download the source code (the .tar.gz file) from http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net well from any other computer if you have net access only by WiFi, after u have the tar.gz file copy it to any folder like your home folder ( /home/<username>/ ) now simply right click on it and select extract here, now you have a directory with all the files of source code but to compile the source you will need to install some more software from the DVD for this go to Add/Remove Software in the Applications menu, enter your root password when it will open it will give you error saying something like Repository could not be updated so go to repositories in that and let the tick be there only in front of Install Media remove that tick from every other option, here select Development then tick Development Tools (remove them after compiling if you wont use them), after that go to Search tab and select All packages, there search for ‘Kernel headers’ you will find a package with name of Kernel-headers – 2.6.23.1-42 select that, click apply it will ask you for the DVD insert it and packages will be installed, now you can happily compile your ndiswrapper source

For compiling open up a Terminal from Applications >> System Tools >> Terminal type ‘ su ‘ , enter your password now type
cd /home/<user name>/<name of ndiswrapper directory>/
now when in the ndiswraper directory type
make uninstall
to remove any previous non working installs of ndiswrapper, after that type
make
here you if you see a error then you probably dont have the correct/complete source or are missing a required package, if it proceeds without a error which it will then you just need to install ndiswrapper type
make install
your work is now over you just need to install the windows driver by the method which i have described here all done now let us proceed to the xserver problem

For this just login as root ( which i wont prefer but is best for this time ) and type ‘ startx ‘ at the prompt after logging in then go to /etc/ in the file browser there right click on ‘ inittab ‘ file and select open with “Text Editor” in the file there will be some thing written as
id:3:initdefault:
change that to
id:5:initdefault:
and save the file, reboot and you will be greeted by a nice Fedora Infinity Screen enjoy!!!!

People were really dancing on what ever music i was playing

there was some great celebration with huge fireworks