Rain ke side effects

Rains are a time when many things begin to happen. Here in IIT Bombay, they start clearing the drains, cementing the roads and tarring the roofs (yeah, you read it right :-P ). Most of the campus goes a nice shade of light green, and the moist soil smells so good. And the best of all, little creatures start appearing. Here is my collection :)

Most of the pics which follow were taken in this corridor which connects the four wings of my hostel

:)

A slug

Interesting colour

What are these??

This one looks like a cross between a grass hopper and a moth

An earthworm. People say they are blind (I mean, they don't have any eyes :) ).

Suddenly popular :)

Thanks to Sree for starting the "Guess who?" contest.

Resizing images

Pictures accumulate. The treks, trips, parties and the infinite fun that we've had in the past one year of college has resulted in me filling up half my hard disk with photos. My dear friends have fancy cameras which produce 8 mega pixel images, each occupying almost 2.5MB of my precious hard disk space.

Since an 8 mega pix image is serious overkill, I decided to resize them all to 1600x1200 (2 mega pix, around 1MB). Now that I've turned all linuxy, I was looking for a 'Microsoft Office Picture Manager'-like application for linux when Sriram Kashyap suggested that it'd be way easier to write a shell script to do the job.

So friends, here it is :)

#!/bin/bash
pics=`ls $1 | grep JPG`
for pic in $pics
do
   echo "Converting $1$pic ..."
   convert -size 1600x1200 $1$pic -resize 1600x1200 $1$pic
done

Pass the folder containing your pics as an argument to the script, or just put the script in your folder and double-click :)

Renovated :)

I finally paid some attention to my long neglected home page. www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~pkamle

Train, food and home

It was 6.30 in the evening when I was at the new Canara bank ATM in IIT Bombay, looking at a receipt which said "Unable to dispense cash. Transaction failed". I had exactly Rs. 260 in my wallet, and a 24hr journey ahead.

After a short auto ride to Kanjurmarg, and 20 minutes of waiting in the queue, I got a ticket to Dadar. The local train ensured that I was at Dadar in the next 20 minutes. At the entrance of platform 8, my luggage was inspected, and the policeman on duty spent almost 3 minutes playing with my Nokia 6300. He seemed to be particularly interested in the albums. I still wonder what he was looking for!

On to platform 8, and I bought a packet of chips (10 bucks, and barely 10 pieces of chips) and boarded the train. There was 1 hour before the train departed, and I busied myself with the chips and Jeffrey Archer.

As the train was reaching Kalyan, I bought a veg palao for dinner (Rs 40!), and I felt thoroughly cheated. The fact that I now had only Rs. 183 left didn't help the cause.

After 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep (even the TTE didn't turn up), I woke up near Belgaum, the land of VTU. I had 2 idlis and 2 vadas for breakfast (Rs. 20), and it was a pleasant break from the usual pav-bhaji - vada-pav of Mumbai. Even the chutney had just the right amount of spice.

By lunch time, I was in Dharwad. I must say, the menu on trains has improved considerably. I had 2 ಜೋಳದ ರೊಟ್ಟಿs, curry, rice, dal and buttermilk for lunch (Rs. 35 only). I started feeling more and more south indian :)

After 200 pages of Jeffrey Archer, the train neared Tumkur. The cool air was refreshing. For the first time in months, my shirt was not sticking to my body - I was dry! What a feeling!

Dad was waiting for me at the railway station. I wonder why home always feels sweet.

The curious case of the burning finger

April fooled!

Last week, Prof. Om Damani announced our next assignment. We had to implement statistical machine translation, that too with exams just 15 days away. Given that he took almost around 4 classes (that's about 6 hours) to give the overview of the procedure, we simply had no clue how we would manage it.

Well, we got this email from him today.

Was it April 1st when I announced it  :)
Sorry to disappoint you, but no assignment 6.
- Om

I've never ever felt this good after being fooled!