Here, we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want. And throw it away if we don’t like it. And Americans throw away 50% of their food. A colossal wastage. Understand that people in many parts of the world don’t get to eat, they die starving. Watch this video, it will say more than I or anyone can ever write.
And this is the follow-up to the above video
Well, its been a long time I cried like this. But then again, me shedding tears ain’t gonna help one damn bit…
This is my personal blog (Please notice the emphasis on the word ‘personal’). Moreover, the Indian Constitution gives me freedom of speech and expression. These two facts imply that I am free to write whatever I want on this blog. Anything and everything that is mention in this blog is either my personal opinion or a verifiable fact or both. For example, when I say “ZFS is a 128 bit file system”; its a fact. If I say, “Ubuntu is better than Mandriva”; its my personal opinion. And I have every right to form a personal opinion and also to write it on my blog.
If any of the statements made in this blog, hurts the sentiment of any person and/or organization, I am extremely sorry for that. However, I will NOT take it off the blog. Those are my statements and I stand by them. If at any time in future, any of my opinions are proved wrong, categorically and with proper evidence, facts and arguments, I shall publicly admit the same on this blog. In fact, if I don’t, you are free to remind me of the same. I am open to facts and evidences and am ever ready to change my views in the light of verifiable evidence. But unless evidence to the contrary is provided or I stumble upon it, I shall not change my opinion.
However, this is a free world and you are entitled to express your opinion as much as I do. Therefore, if you think that any of what I have written is wrong as per your established views, you can leave those opinions as comments and I will publish them provided they are reasoned arguments and in a civil language, and I shall also answer to them. You can also try convincing me to change my point of view.
Lastly, I am not an expert on any topic other than squandering my parent’s money and wasting time. Therefore, my views expressed on this blog on any subject barring the aforementioned should be read with discretion. I can not and will not guarantee that whatever I say here is correct. However, I always strive to provide a correct and well judged viewpoint to the best of my mental faculties. But, like any human, I could be wrong. And as mentioned earlier, you are free to argue with me on that.
If you don’t like what I write, you can do either of the following
What you cannot do
Also understand that, it is not in my nature to slander any person or organization. I respect people and their abilities and consider that everyone is brilliant in their own ways. But as a human being, it is in my nature to form opinions. We do that all the time. However, I have no agenda against anyone. If I write against anyone, it is probably because I feel strongly about it and I want my readers to be aware of it. Again, I repeat, my opinions could be wrong. But I try my best to be right.
So bottom line: THIS IS MY BLOG AND I SHALL WRITE WHAT I WANT AND WHAT I THINK IS RIGHT.
Well this is my 7th sem, and by this May I will be an computer engineer, expected to contribute to the Indian IT industry and make billing/ERP/SAP/CRM software for some of the biggest(and boring) IT companies. Of course, if the Training and Placement section has its way, none of us will be working for anyone whatsoever. This and the fact that I love my coding, and therefore do not want to do stupid IT software, is making me think about a good career choice. See I love my coding, and I think its an art. But what you do in IT firms in not art, its road painting. Therefore I detest. So here are a few career options before me and I have arranged them in the order of appeal and ease of attainability
Hopefully, I will be able to take a decision over the next few months. Any suggestions and sarcasms on the same are welcome.
For those who do not know, Renesa is the monthly magazine of Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology (NIT Surat). Its a complete student magazine, partially funded by NIT Surat and the rest comes from sponsors. Do read it and let us know what you think.
Posted in APJ Abdul Kalam, Renesa
Wow. What an experience!
Attended BarCamp Mumbai 6 today at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR). This was my very first BarCamp and so I was unsure what to expect. I reached the venue at 6 in the morning as I had reached Mumbai early and had nowhere else to go. I had prepared half of my presentation on the bus to Mumbai and wanted to finish the rest provided I get a place to charge my laptop. On finding the gates of SPJIMR closed, I headed off to the Andheri Railway station hoping to find a plug point. Once again I was failed by Mumbai. By now hungry and tired I reached a KFC outlet which had opened at around 7:30, which again could not provide me with a plug point but I did find the next best thing, breakfast and that too, chicken. So I had some breakfast. But I still wanted coffee and a helpful guy at KFC told me that one Barista outlet nearby would be open. So I headed off to Barista for my morning cuppa. However, to my dismay, the outlet was to open only at 9 and I decided to sit outside. By now, having had a nice breakfast, mother nature was giving its call and I had no place where I could go and answer it in solitude. I was however relieved that the Barista outlet opened at half past 8 and I hopped in, dropped my bags (one containing my laptop and the other containing lots of Netbeans and OpenSolaris Cds) and answered mother nature’s call just in the nick of time. Once done and much relieved, I had the best start of my day with two cups of double espresso and proceeded to finish the rest of my presentation. Then I headed to the venue at 10 AM.
I got my session registered and selected a time suitable to me. Then I lay down Cds of Netbeans and OpenSolaris 2009.06 on the floor of one of the auditorium and on a desk at the other so that interested people may collect them. I also kept a bunch of OSUM Laptop stickers for whoever was interested. Soon a horde of people started picking them up and there were some queries coming my way. In all I had kept a hundred Cds in all and by the end of the BarCamp all were taken and many had stuck the OSUM stickers on their laptops. Someone had also brought Ubuntu 5.10 Cds to distribute.
Next was the introduction ceremony where everyone introduced themselves in 30 seconds followed by another chance given to attendees who wanted to take sessions to give a very brief intro about what they are gonna talk about. Then the people who wanted to talk were asked to choose a timing for their talk and mark that time on a board placed outside with a post-it not, in many ways like a physical wiki. The sessions were divided across two halls. The first session I attended was by Manan Kakkar who spoke about the tech blogging scene in India. Some of his tips and ideas were good but I found his tone admonishing and patronizing at times and his idea about tech blogging seemed a bit myopic because of his presumption that all tech blogs only report tech news. This was followed by one on solving Rubik Cube and What History can teach us about prospering in the tech age respectively.
The session that I like most (beside mine of course) was the one of Scaling web apps by Vaibhav Arya of Skenzo as bits of it related to HPC which is my area of interest. Lunch followed and I chatted with Amitabh Jain who was to present a talk on Django Framework to be parallel to mine. He is a techie-turned MBA from IIM-A-turned entrepreneur and techie again. Talking to him again made me think if should reconsider my decision to go for MBA, or should I do a Masters in Comps. Soon after lunch I attended a session on Zopte, a web based dynamic website creation and hosting tool. I wanted to go deeper into it but mine was the next session and hence I was busy re-reading my presentation.
I had realized during the introduction session that the crowd was only party techy and that too relating to web technologies. And my talk on Parallel Application Profiling using Scalasca was strictly cutting edge High Performance Computing. Actually I had wrongly assumed that one must speak of ones original work at a BarCamp and my Scalasca work was the only original worthwhile work I could claim of. Had I known the target audience I would have probably talked on JavaFX or Zembly or FBML. Nevertheless I decided to do my best to talk about HPC, Parallel Apps programming, Profiling and Scalasca in my span of 20 min, hoping to create a world record of sorts. As expected, my session had a little more than a dozen people, most had left after reading the title. Still I decided to give it my best and skipped slides which I knew would be too technical. I had prepared those slides while on the bus and at Barista the next morning, so they weren’t exactly my best creation. I finished up my session fast and was asked quite a few questions and all were on the basics of Parallel Programming and MPI which I tried to answer to the best of my abilities.
I attended one more session and then left as I was tired and wanted to go back to Surat and sleep. Overall it was a great experience. I met school kids, entrepreneurs, professional blogger, coders, a really varied crowd and you could learn something from everyone.Overall an enriching experience. Looking forward for more.
So guys I will call it a day now. Am dead tired, need sleep and my back aches from having sat for nearly 32 hours. Good night.
More photostreams
As most you reading this blog might know, I was the Chairperson of the ACM Student Chapter of our college last year. As I am in my final year now, I have resigned and handed over the reigns of the chapter to an enthusiastic group of third year students. I will advising them in the capacity of a Student Mentor and so will Punit Mehta, the ex Vice Chairperson.
Until now the focus of ACM has been in conducting events and imparting knowledge to the students. This year, the junior decided to curtail on such events and instead go on a project drive where a group of students from First (Freshers) and Second (Sophomore) years will be alloted a project and they have to complete it by the end of this year. The will be guided by their seniors in Third (Junior) years.
Being senior students, I and Punit are guiding these students in their projects. Our job is to look after all the projects and ensure that issues are sorted and deadlines met. The projects are from varied areas like web designing, J2ME, Java apps, Robotics, Image Processing and Linux. I wont go into the details here. Between me and Punit, we have experience in all the areas and yes, the projects were itself decided based on the experience of the people guiding them. A Project Allotment drive was conducted by the current ACM Core Team and projects were assigned.
And today was the first meeting since then.It was held at the canteen.I and Punit talked to the students on what technologies they were required to learn and how to go ahead with it. We gave each team a small task to accomplish by the end of their diwali vacations. Also we would be interacting with them on the ACM SVNIT Mailing list. We have high hopes with these projects.Lets see how things turn up.
Posted in ACM
I am attending BarCamp Mumbai 6 at SP Jain Institute of Management on the 11th of October. For the uninitated a BarCamp is a developer unconference. A BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.
Starts at 9 AM and ends at 6 PM. I have registered for a session on SCALASCA and the Division algebra that I am working on for SCALASCA.
So be there. 
I have been part of various committees and organizations in this college. I was deeply involved with the ACM Chapter as a volunteer, then a Secretary and finally as the Chairperson. One other organization that I have been involved over the last one year is Renesa, the college monthly mouthpiece. I have been the editor of the tech page for over a year after Sunayana quit Renesa (Yes, like in almost everything I followed my Tech mom’s (Sunayana) footsteps here too).
The last year we really did not work much. We could not bring out the promised number of issues and never made it on time. I would not blame any particular person or persons for this. It was a collective failure. A failure to understand what Renesa meant to the college, a lack of dedication and enthusiasm. We used to have meetings where some gave ideas but which never got implemented or were implemented poorly. I myself wrote boring articles for the tech page and mostly they were hastily written. Another reason why the editors were not interested in writing good articles was probably the fact that nobody ever read those. People were mostly interested in the college gossip page called “Rumor Mill”. The rest of the pages were used for various innovative purposes like tissue paper in the canteen, making kites etc. So that dampened the enthusiasm of the writers. Of course this is not just a fault with the readers, if the content fails to generate interest a large part of fault of course goes to the content writers and planners. In all Renesa had become just another thing that the college does. Just another slightly colorful piece of paper.
Now come to this academic year. A new team was formed with Nijeesh Padmanabhan , Ashwin (a)S(s), Srividya, Thomas, Swati and Shruti at the helm. Nijeesh is the editorial consultant and chief designer. Ashwin S and Srividya are the chief editors. Thomas along with Swati and Shruti are the impact consultant (btw, do magazines have such designations? 
) . And what was the difference this time? Well these guys had a vision. They really wanted to “Change our world” with Renesa. They wanted it to be platform for people to think, to learn and also have fun. Most importantly, they expected people to read it and love it. Renesa, to these guys, is not a thing that they have to do, it is a responsibility they love to execute. And this is the vision they propagated to the team, specially Nijeesh, Ashwin and Thomas. And motivated they were. Earlier where we had to pester editors to write articles, this time we had an avalanche of articles and most of them very good ones. It was hard to decide which one to print and which one to reject. Our first issue had 33,000 words in 16 pages. To include that many articles, we reduced the font size. Readability suffered because of that and I have assured by Nijeesh that this wont happen again and I take his word for it because he wants his balls intact.
The design too was awesome. Never before did Renesa have so many colours and my respect for Nijeesh’s designing skills has risen considerably. We printed Renesa in glossy paper and people loved it. Our editors debated endlessly on what to write, how to write on the Renesa mailing list. In fact, my mailbox received at least 15 Renesa mails a day. Last year there used to be 15 mails per month. We put up a new Renesa site. As of now, the site does not contain much content but we expect usage to pick up. The site is my job so I am thinking of ideas to promote the site. Our alumni read the issue and loved it. We got lot many mails of appreciation from them. Some even circulated the issue among their colleagues and relived their college life through Renesa. Students sent SMSs of appreciation with one even saying that he loved the issue so much that he was afraid to read it, lest it get damaged or wrinkled.
The editors are putting in everything they got. No one calls it work. We call it fun. Some of us are now accused of not having a life beyond Renesa because Renesa constantly crops up in our discussions. Some of the new things that have been included this year are “Jack and Jill” where we publicize about a guy and a gal of our college who have had significant achievements so that others can emulate them, “Reviews” where we have reviewed not just movies and books but also gadgets, restaurants etc, Guest articles by famous people (Shashi Tharoor wrote for the first issue), “Faculty Speak” where we ask a faculty to write, “Walk when you talk” where we interview a member of the college administration and College Band Review where we review the music bands (all Rock bands as of now) of the college. Also the Hindi editors are doing a fine job. And with this month’s issue you can expect some really good stuff from them.
All this was good. Now the bad part. Where we went wrong? Well for one the font size was too small. Some people even asked for a free magnifying glass with the issue. There were too many spelling and grammatical errors in the issue. I am sure we can all do with a bit more proof reading.
As for my tech page, I am trying to move it from being a Computers only page to a more general tech page. I want to cover all branches of science and engineering. So suggestions and ideas are welcome.
Do visit our site www.svnit.edu.in/renesa and download an ecopy at http://www.svnit.edu.in/renesa/files/renesa.pdf
And finally, I would like to praise the marketing and distribution team for distributing some 1800 copies in 8 hours, delivered room to room across 11 hostels. And thats an awesome feat considering that there are only 4 people in Marketing. They rock.
As for my role in Renesa, I do the tech page and a bit of humor articles apart from making useless funny comments on the mailing list, abusing people and using expletives that would put many rappers (and Christian Bale) to shame. In all, I have taken it upon me that we never have a dull moment on the mailing list. Kudos to me for that.
Finally,
@Thomas: The above praise to you was probably the first and the last time I did that. Please do not expect such magnanimity again.
@Ashwin: I still love my abuses and nothing will stop me from using them.
@Renesa Team: You guys rock and so do I.
Found it on the Internet. Its nice.
After my first…
I built this suit of armor
So strong, so invulnerable.
I came across you.
Slowly my guard was let down.
So, so vulnerable to pain and despair.
A love so perfect, so beautiful
Was the double edged sword.
One side so sweet
So dull of worry
So full of love.
The other so sharp of worry
So deadly with confusion
So overcome of aberrancy.
They meet at the apex.
The sword was the only thing,
The only thing to pierce through the armor.
Through the mind, the soul, the heart…
The sword tears a hole
The sharpest of sides is numb to pain,
The dull side brings a pain.
A pain so excruciating
the pain unreal the suffering so great.
This side pierces the mind, the soul, the heart..
The wound lasting and irreparable.
A pain never to leave.
A pain that allows you to live but in turn
It kills the mind, the soul, the heart
A pain that may lie dormant
Only to arise and hurt more than it ever did.
But through all doubt and suffering
The love was worth the pain.
The love so perfect so beautiful.
Was worth the pain
Was worth the death of me
Was worth losing everything I ever had.
Even if it was you that I lost.
We all know who Ankit Fadia is. He is self proclaimed child prodigy in ‘hacking’ , a self proclaimed ‘world famous’ expert is computer security and digital intelligence consultant (digital intelligence? Does he mean AI. I never heard this term getting used anywhere in print other than by Mr. Fadia though I agree its a perfectly meaningful amalgamation of the two official sounding words ‘digital’ and ‘intelligence’) .
However I beg to differ. I think he is a fake and douchebag and I would like you to read on to find exactly why I think so. Please understand that the findings are either my own of collected from various websites. Wherever I have gathered info from any site, I shall mention the link so that you can find out. The information provided here is true to the best of my knowledge (and googling skills). And I request you to point out if I am wrong. The views expressed are my own and issues in public interest. I shall be constantly updating the information on this post as and when I gather more information on Mr. Fadia. Hence the v 0.0.1 at the end of the title.
So lets begin with his profile on http://www.hackingmobilephones.com/courses/about.php . I will highlight the interesting parts in blockquotes and add my view and/or proof below.
1.His profile on http://www.hackingmobilephones.com/courses/about.php
a.Milestones in Ankit Fadia’s Life
AGE 14 Published his first book titled The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking which became an instant bestseller worldwide, sold 500 000 copies and was translated into 11 languages.
My opinion: Have you read that book? Here are the reasons why the book sucks
b.AGE 16 After the Sept. 11 th attacks, cracked an encrypted email sent by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network for a classified intelligence agency.
c. AGE 21 Widely recognized as an Ethical Hacker, Computer Security Expert and Cyber Terrorism guru. Written 13 bestselling books, delivered more than 1000 seminars in 25 countries, received 45 awards, provide certification courses on Computer Security, is writing a script for a movie, runs his own consulting company and is a senior at Stanford University.
2. Again, as per http://www.hackingmobilephones.com/courses/about.php his clientèle includes Google, Citibank, Shell, Volvo, Thai Airways, UOB Bank, PT Cisco Systems, Bank of Thailand, Bangkok Public Bank, Amari Hotels, BlueScope Steel, Jumeirah International, Wipro, Singapore Health Promotion Board, Infosys, Satyam, Schering Ltd.
My opinion: This list seems too good to be true. It exceeds clientèle of various well know security consulting firms. Again, none of the above mentioned organizations have corroborated Fadia’s claims.
3. Widely celebrated in international media publications, Fadia is also regularly invited by BBC Radio World News, London to share the latest updates on virus outbreaks, loopholes and cyber crime trends.
My finding: I searched the BBC site to find one reference to him being on the said show. Guess what I found? Nothing. Nadda. Zilch.
4. For his outstanding contributions in the field of computer security globally, Fadia has been honored with numerous awards namely: Indo-American Society Young Achiever Award 2005, IT Leader Award 2005, Person of The Year 2002, Limca Book of Records, Hall of Fame Award, Outstanding Young Achiever’s Award, Silicon India Person of the Week, Embassy State Award, Best Speaker Award (4 occasions), Student of the Year 2002-03 and many more.
My findings on his awards:
5. Fadia is also a consultant to many universities in India, Singapore, China and USA on the design and structure of their computer security courses.
My question: Will Mr Fadia be so kind as to provide references and/or links to universities for which he designs courses? You will find this thing occurring over and over. Fadia never provides links or references to many of his achievements. Isn’t that strange? I have gone through profiles of various researchers and they all provide links and references wherever possible.
6.According to Wendy McAuliffe at ZDNet UK, Fadia’s Hacking Truths website was judged “second best hacking site” by the FBI, though no ranked list of “hacking sites” has been published by the FBI.
7.In April 2000, Rediff.com published an interview with Ankit Fadia. Anti-India Crew (AIC), a Pakistani hacker group noted for defacing Indian Government websites, rubbished the claims that Fadia had made in the interview. Fadia had claimed that his alert to a U.S. spy agency had prevented an attack by Pakistani hackers. However, he never divulged the name of the agency, citing security reasons. AIC and another Pakistani hacker group WFD defaced an Indian Government site, epfindia.gov.in, and “dedicated” it to Fadia in mock deference to his capabilities to hack or prevent hacking. AIC also said that it would be defacing the website of the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), www.cbec.gov.in, within two days and challenged Fadia to prevent the attack by patching the vulnerable website. AIC maintained that Fadia should stop calling himself a hacker, if it succeeded in hacking the CBEC website. AIC kept its promise and defaced the CBEC website after two days. At another defaced website (bhelhyd.co.in), AIC termed the claims of Indian media about Ankit Fadia as “Bullshit”.
So why is he famous? There are various reasons.Firstly, masses are computer illiterate. They see computer security as some sort of dark magic wheres it is a systematic process, a science. Hence these people can be easily fooled by the FUD campaign that are done by the likes of Ankit Fadia. They instill fear and show some nice tricks that fool everyone into a false sense of vulnerability. While I would not be so naive as to suggest that Internet is very secure but many such ‘independent’ security experts make tall claims and demonstrate their attacks in a very controlled environment on a weakened security set up that just asks for a break in.
The other aspects that contribute to such fakes getting attention is obviously shoddy journalism. They print whatever might catch readers’ attention and a child prodigy in computers does that like nothing else in a ‘idol crazy’ nation of ours.
As to why Reliance does a Ankit Fadia Ethical Hacking Course. The answer is simple. It sells. And it seems the certificate given by Reliance are not valid either. Read this http://lists.sarovar.org/pipermail/plus-discuss/2006-April/000288.html
And Ankit Fadia is neither the first nor the last of these fakes. Go to http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan.html for a larger list.
You may also read this email sent to FSF mailing list http://tutorial.web4all.in/archives/fsf-tn/2006-April/000293.html
And finally, what is ‘ethical hacking’? Hacking as I know it (and what people like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds and others would tell you) is about exploring and knowing in-depth about computers. Its also about making a computer do things that it wasn’t programmed to do and it comes from in-depth knowledge about the system. Hacking is NOT cracking someone’s email password by installing a trojan (or some other lame way) or defacing websites and causing loss of any kind. Hacking is a passion to learn and explore. The ones who break into system to cause harm are called crackers. Hackers like Richard Stallman don’t steal credit card details. Crackers do. So basically there is nothing unethical about hacking. Ethical hacking is a term coined by some sales people to sell basic network security and network administration course, books and solutions to gullible customers. Once you term it ethical hacking, it attracts novice users wanting to crack their girl friend’s email password, wannabe network administrators and some people seriously interested in computer security. While many of these courses are good, the usage of the word ‘ethical hacking’ is deplorable.
