Past two weeks have been just too good to ignore. It all started with the gift that I got from cini. Then Archana gave me a cute rubber smiley key chain. To top it all, today Nandu gave me Kubunu CD(the KDE version of Ubuntu Linux) which he had ordered for me – Just for me. I was wonder struck when he phoned me yesterday and told me that he had ordered this great linux flavour for me and it would be bring it today ; it was really thoughtful of him. Now you need to take note that , I badly wanted to try my hands on ubuntu especially after my encounter with it after I got the cds from my cousin during my visit to my native place.

Other tech encounters

As you know , i am a regular poster in uit_tvm group. But you are only allowed to post around 40 posts per hour. If you post more than that, google freezes your id and you wont be able to post using that. You then have to send an email to support guys at google stating them to activate your account again. Initially I used to post less than 40 posts, and this did not seem to be such a threat. But later when I got access to more channels and hence more news feeds, post started increasing.

So I then waited for 1 hour before i posted the rest of the post. So if i had 85 posts(its not very unusual, as a quick visit to uit_tvm group would prove) I would be spending 3 hours in front of the pc. So I thought i would write a script, to time the posting.

To do that first i downloaded the lightning extension( a calander app) for Thunderbird(my mail client) but it did not work out as I planned. Then I started looking for other extensions and finally I got my hands on what I was looking on. The app is called sendTools(Just google for sendTools Thunderbird , if you need it)Using this utility one could schedule the mails for sending on any particular day or time.Cool huh?

I also noticed that , if I changed my time in my PC and compose a mail and send it to google group then google would interpret that I was sending that mail tomorrow(eventhough I am sending this mail today)Another pretty cool hack huh ?

Using a script that I wrote , i made my scrapbook entry in orkut cross 1000(its 1300 now !!)I also wrote a script for automating some “necessary “ tasks while scrapping; details of which I will reveal later.

Today I also read about how to read a directory and the files in it using Python. It looked seemingly easy, so I would like to work more on it.

Linux learning is progressing at a commendable rate, but since I am not reading that extensively , its not as fast as I expect to proceed , but things would speed up in the coming days I suppose.

News in college

Much anticipated results for the exams of Semester 4 finally arrived. I passed in all subjects with distinction. That was indeed surprising because it was much more than I hoped for. Ranjini topped the ranklist with 89% marks – a very unlikely percentage compared to previous many year's results in our college. Most of my friends got really good marks. And although many of my friends lost ranks for just a couple of marks, I consider all of them being within the top 3 ranks. I have some really awesome hardworking friends indeed.

Today everyone celebrated Diwali(festival of lights) in our college. There was singing and dancing, all afternoon in our class. Even guys and gals from other classes turned up for the “Event” !!

Another surprising thing happened, Karim today gave a present to Ranjini for scroing 1^st in the class, it really came as a surprise for everyone including Ranjini who initially refused to accept it. But after that things went on smoothly.

We are having holidays for the next 4 days. So I have some great plans ahead.

Yesterday Karim told me that his Python learning is going at full swing and he really enjoys every minute of learing it. And today Nandu told me that he would be looking into scripting(using auto it) more seriously which is indeed very nice considering the power scripting gives you.

And this is the best part of it, even without my friends knowing what I am up to, we all seem to be bonded by some invisible chord to work towards the same goal. Cool huh ?