Childhood mischiefs

Childhood is the only no regret stage of human life span. The childhood mischiefs are the most cherished memories too. Steeling the neighbor’s pencil, eating the slate pencils, skipping the lines in the homework passages and sometimes the home-works :P, gang fights with classmates,forging the dad’s signature(Sorry dad, I am not that bold to confess it to you even today) in the answer sheets for scoring low 😛 and a lot more.I cannot imagine how mischievous I had been! Those silly mistakes often teach us valuable lessons to carry through our lives.I thought of sharing with my readers my unforgettable childhood mischiefs.

My nayna(dad) was strict gentle man and we people obey and respect him so much. On an evening. when I was around the age of seven, I came home after my tuition. My amma was telling one of our guests that my nayna was not home then.My Eldest brother’s voice and physic resembles nayna a lot. I thought my brother was sleeping on the cot and I punched his tummy till he suffer, asking him to get up since it was too early to sleep (I was too close and friendly to him then!). Later I realized that it was my nayna out of his usual stiff laughter! Geezzzz…. I thought I was finished!But he did not react over this later. I came to know that amma was telling the guest that he was not home just because nayna was taking some rest due to head-ache!

This time, the biggest sin ever! Santhosh, my younger brother and I used to fight for anything and everything. Santhosh(my younger brother) was in UKG and I was in Second standard at JAM School, Pannaikadu. He was brighter and better than me and always took an edge over me in his curriculum till his third standard. One day, we both had a usual long fight and I was waiting for a revenge over him. I came to know that he got his rank card that day and decided to seize it. That was the first time, we bought our washing machine. It was packed and even then, I managed to play with the buzzer buttons! I hide rank card behind the washing machine! I forgot the same as few weeks left without any question. One day, Santhosh’s class teacher called me and asked to look for his rank card immediately. We both left the school and we were searching for the rank card seriously. suddenly, the very sin came flashed my mind and so i looked for it behind the washing machine. The rank card was there and we brought it back to the school. Sorry Santhosh!

This incident happened when I was fourteen years of age. Again a rank card story! I started growing brighter and better as I grow. But accidentally , I did not meet the passing score in chemistry in one of the monthly tests, that resulted in poor grade then! After so many days of postponement, I managed to get it signed from my nayna, when he is rushing for some work out-stationed, telling him that I am ranked 3rd in the class (They followed grade system, S represent fail and the S on my grade sheet looked like 3!). Amma is too strict and scary, when it comes to education.That lie did not stop there! Whenever my monthly tests are over and the grade sheets come, I usually delayed a lot to get my rank card signed!and all other times, I managed to score D grade, that stood for distinction 😦 Poor kid’s sin did not even let her small achievements acknowledged by her parents that year! The end of the year was a great relief then!

There are so many confessions yet to make and lot of learnings made!

Build your own cloud with Eucalyptus

I want to have a reminder for myself and share for the use of others, those things i dug about building a private cloud using Eucalyptus. Through this post I have planned to cover the idea of Cloud Computing, Significance of building a private cloud, and finally about building the Eucalyptus cloud.

“Providing IT as a service through internet in Pay-as-you-go basis” is the crispiest defenition for Cloud Computing. Software-As-A-Service (SAAS), Storage-As-A-Service, Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IAAS), Platform-As-A-Service(PAAS) are the popular cloud offerings. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Cloud Computing Model (EC2) model has occupied a huge market of IAAS to form the Hybrid cloud. Eucalyptus is a similar kind of Open Source Model that helps you to build your own Private cloud within your infrstructure.The major advantages of the private cloud are cost-effectiveness, high efficiency and security.

http://www.box.com/embed/v3pu8tnc048lbap.swf

Eucalyptus stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking your Programs to Useful Systems. The model is almost synonymous to the Amazon cloud and provide compatibility with the latter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Eucalyptus installation process is very simple.The Architecture of Eucalyptus constitutes of three layers, viz Cloud Controlers, Cluster Controlers, Node Controlers along with the Client side API translater. You can simply install Eucalyptus contollers to the machines in one click to form the three layers to emulate the private cloud. Find more about Eucalyptus and its similarities and differences with Amazon Cloud in the presentation embedded.

Another person, I am indebted to!

There are so many good hearts, who shaped me in the past and molding me every day into a better person( really! 😉 ). I used to express my thanks and gratefulness to those people in every possible occasion, I am gifted with. But still, i have left out one of those beautiful beings, who has changed my view on the society. I am very thankful to those talkative nights spent together. Her stories about the life in city and the way she explained real modernity helped me a lot in overcoming my inherent obstructions!
So many debates, so many discussions, so many agrees and so many disagrees involved in our talks!

She encouraged me a lot in finding my pace in GVG. It is her and only her, who gave me enough room to breath in the two years of misfortune! I was inspired by her clear flow of thoughts and the view of modernity. She always had a habit of appreciating people for their good that gave me the much needed inspiration to prove my real self!

My salutes to the kid from the garden city, who had been very flexible and adoptive! The pencil accident is something i am feeling sorry for, even today! Roopini, thanks for being on my side!

My wait for the periodicals’

Few people find it comfortable with full length stories and books, and few others, like me, feed on editorials, magazines and short stories. I am going to blog about my wait for the next editions of periodicals that drove me crazy.

It started when i was in kindergarten (if i remember right!) , my mother used to read for me from Siruvarmalar, a weekly supplementary with dhinamalar for kids. The range of stories varies from ancient history. India before independence, moral stories, facts and current affairs and so on. The curiosity has grown along with me through my schooling. The beautiful part about the weekly is the sections those hosted the pictures of unseen flora and fauna, antique crafts, precious gems and a lot more. I used to nag my mom for bedtime stories and challenge at dinners for the same, ever since an infant of five 🙂 Thanks to my mom for standing the mischievous me! Interestingly, I have never missed a fight with my dad for reading the newspapers  on Sundays 🙂
As I grow with age, i felt the warmth in the computer related articles came out every Monday as computermalar! Honestly, yesterday’s computermalar is more like today’s digit to me! It made me more practical than ever! I used to read in completely in a day or two and wait for the Monday to come 🙂 Thanks to the weekly for being my trigger!

How can I not remember the competitive me, who fight hard with Steena for the morning newspaper and the educationplus from Hindu! Opportunities column is also my favorite then!
Now, after coming to hexaware, the war is with the librarian for the digit. The sad part is i cannot barrow the current editions of the magazines and so i need to wait for a month! (by then, i will finish almost all the pages by reading from the library :p )

Computers, my soulmates!

I remember the summer 5 years back, a computer illiterate kid of 17, came out of her environment boundary to learn Microsoft office 2003, internet and programming with C. That was my very first time, i started to understand the potential of a machine that can create beautiful drawings,do those tough math problems and few more fascinating things. The fire and love for computers started there.In fact, i laugh at myself whenever i recollect my debate with one of my uncles, aggressively against the computers. Wondering how much i have changed drastically!

I find no big difficulty in understanding the concepts after entering my college. Digital computer fundamentals and Programming with computers are the two subjects in first year, i loved and i was being loved (by the subjects and also the lectures 🙂 )! That was the period of transition of my affinity from science and English to Computers. Though i did not own my own computers then, i usually dream at the hardware parts and fascinated.

The love and passion for computers multiplied and followed me when i owned my first laptop, LG X-Note with windows vista. Though there is a huge talk about the vista’s failure and bug banks, the beautiful User interface impressed me. I am someone who love to experiment things, especially gadgets. The curiosity grows exponentially after owning my lappy. Thanks to Dhinamalar’s computermalar, a Tamil weekly supplementary that came out every Monday. I am a crazy follower of the magazine that taught me a lot about troubleshooting software problems and updated so many things about the software releases. My parents are equally interested in collecting the weekly for me. My college’s wi-fi’s bandwidth is maximum utilized by me. I tried enough number of softwares with my soulmate, I read a lot about computers and even experimented with enough number of operating systems starting from vista, windows xp, ubuntu, suse, fedora, BOSS, debian, knoppix and few more on my direct hard-disk. Can you imagine, how crazy i had been! I made my lappy sick enough to make it unrecoverable! I remember a crazy conversation with one of my best friends, as follows:
“Shaba: what will you do when you have your kid crying next to you while you are working with your system!
Sharmi: i will take care of my kid once i am done with my computer! (Crazy punk)
Shaba:Then do one thing, don’t marry at all. I don’t want your kid and Hubby to suffer under the hands of merciless computer.” LOL :p
I cried and missed my computer as if i have lost my first love! That is also the first and last time, i shouted at my dad (periyapa), for not fixing my machine! Thanks to cloud storage with Google docs and adobe acrobat that have most of my syllabus materials collected for exams. Thanks to Suba for lending me her computer till i owned my new lenovo ideapad!

It was during January, i saw and worked with Apple and mac during my internship in IIT-Madras with my steena. Thanks to classle for the offer! I bought my new lap again in the end of February 2011, a day before my interview with Hexaware, that turned lucky for me 😉 now no more direct OS installations instead tasting the flavors in my oracle virtual box!
My first smartphone is also from LG! The experiment continues 🙂

How to inspire others?

Inspiration is the one word that can bring big changes to your inner personality and sometimes your external looks. I am very sure that all of us have our own list of people who inspired us according to our own interests. We tend to know and learn from people who got some attraction point and we used to call them our Inspirations.That attraction points will be our focus and the scope in this blog post.Let me brief about the ingredients of the recipe, “Inspirations”.

There are so many things,(good things,in deed) we need or develop within ourself before we try to inspire others. The unquestionable integrity, Clear flow of ideas, impersonal and selfless attitude, self-inspiration are the few things we need to adhere by default. It is always important to look for good things in people you meet in your life. To be very open, get inspired and inherit the good things we come across everyday. Being a better human is the most important ingredient, of course.

Be Inspired and Inspire

Learning makes a complete man. The more you learn, the more you are respected.Do not try to restrict your learning to the boundaries, instead expand your inherent borders. According to me,a good learner can reflect the society, the skills, the right judgements and a lot more better. After all, I am not talking just about being a book-worm 🙂 Learn from everything and everyone everywhere.

As I always say, Sharing is as important as learning that can double the joy. You can learn so many things, improve your selfless nature and correct your mistakes, when you share things with people around you.

Experience the joy of sharing

Communication and Presentation follows sharing! The most important thing, we can notice at our inspirational people, is their delivery of inherent skills. Add innovation and uniqueness to your final product. Whenever there is something or someone as good as you, innovation and uniqueness can bring the difference and make the impact.

Delivery makes the difference

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After all, Impression is different from inspiration. Acting as if you posses the features could give you the desired impression and living the features could make you an inspiration, which cannot be demanded  🙂

The Most invincible applications, I cannot live without!

The past few years have shown us a big leap in the technology world. It was few years ago, people spoke a lot about cloud computing, Virtualization, Text mining, surface computing and a lot more. Though R&D and Business communities are highly synchronized with these technology trends, the B-word changes from Cloud Computing to Smartphone which houses a lot of attractive and highly essential features. To be exact, Smartphones are the union of good things in all the above listed trends of past years like Cloud, Virtualization,  Virtual reality, Text mining and so on. The researches are reaching a new height, looking to bring in the processing power of super computers to the hand-held smart phone. Thanks to Google for its highly open Android that brought down the prices of the smartphones and made accesible to people from various economic layers and thanks to Apple for its highly innovative piece, Iphone for making the Big trend in reality.

I see smartphones as all-rounders that can entertain me with AVs, Guide me to places, teach me things, communicate with the society, keep me very close to my loved ones, plan my tours, record my memories, game around and even, it can talk back to me (Siri). I wanted to share my favourite applications without which i cannot live (Of course, facebook and twitter are default favourites 😛 )

I give Evernote the first rank, because it follows me, wherever i go. Wonderful piece of innovation that can keep track of all my stuffs starting from my minutes of meeting, to-dos, pictures, schedules, reminders, library notes and lot more. Salutes to evernote for its Platform-independent Memory-As-A-Service that synchronizes my account wherever I log. I feel, it can be much better if it has an implicit alarm and Forms housed.

The other application which is very close to my heart is Photobucket. An easy way to maintain and share all your pictures online. In my understanding and experience, I have never seen a photo-management tool as flexible, as simple and as effective as Photobucket. It’s instant syncronization to your smart phone camera clicks and Social sharing are highly notable.

I always wanted to recommend Stumbleupon for those who are into blog-reading as a hobby. Stumble upon could suggest you the articles based on your personal interests which varies from technology to kitchen. This will never let you miss any of the recent update in your area of interests.

Skitch, another piece by Evernote corporation that enable you to edit pictures and share them to the social networks. This become my favourite because, I do a lot of story boarding and self-analysis.

Offline dictionaries, is something I really love, just because it has shown me cool so many times 😉 I often get into trouble, while reading high-end language. Unless I do not have this little repository, I will be puzzled at most of the times. Thanks to you!

There is a default application that came along with my LG P-500, called AG Indian Newspapers. I always love to know the country’s happening and the trends. This application stand by me and list me most of the Indian newspapers to choose from. It also has the World’s best newspapers in its Choice list.

Though the above applications are smart phone numbers, I have few web applications in my list those are equally special to me.

Prezi.com ! If you are tired about the conventional Powerpoint presentations, prezi can give you the interest and keep the momentum going, while preparing the slides and also while making the presentation. It has the online presentation editor that allows shared editing. I can assure you, Prezi can help you make the presentations innovative and can add a lot of humour!

Dropbox, allows you to share and synchronize large files into your desktop’s folder. Whatever update is made in the folder it will synchronize to your cloud, whenever you get connected to the internet. So, No need to bother much about the low-speed internet and download failed error, Good news to me!

Google docs, made its way right in the start of the talks about the cloud computing and inspired the market to go for Cloud in the very early stage of the technology. Google is still adding a lot of features to it apart from the basic docs,presentations, excel. The recent Forms and Drawing are also attractive.

Acrobat.Com, adobe’s cloud initiative with really rich user interface and really rich features can never fail to impress its users. The feature rich web application has all the good features of Google docs and added rich sharing experience that ensures collaboration at work. Adobe connect is a part of it, a Web conferencing tool.

Thanks to technology for being so close to me and inspiring me!