I got into SSN :-) (Part I – The Exam)

A Google search on SSN would be misleading. You would end up in ‘Social Security Number’. I am talking about SSN College of Engineering, one among few colleges in chennai that concentrates on education rather than following marketing strategies to lure parents. Now that I have completed my course, I can’t help but miss my college life so much. Despite all the bulbs(a word from student’s argot) I got, my life at SSN is so memorable that I want to blog it. Before that, I want to digress and mention a few of the marketing strategies that many engineering schools in chennai follow and it is also the answer to the question “what SSN is not?”.

• Say that boys aren’t allowed to talk to girls; go to the extent of saying virginity guaranteed with a degree!!! — you got a bunch of happy parents lined up in a big ‘Q’.
• Say that students are treated strictly and discipline(staying away from the opposite sex and not wearing jeans are on top of the list) will be injected into them.
• Advertise that you have a spy team at all recreation zones to apprehend people who enjoy!(once a gang of my college students were inquired if they were from an X college, say Jey-pee-yaar.
• Say that we do everything for the students and we can guarantee a job placement(we use the money from you to bribe HR).
• Although it is not a part of the strategy, never talk about quality of faculty(phd purchased at the doomed university itself) and infrastructure beyond buildings, cafeteria, canteen, hostel, et cetera.
• Beautiful girls (for guys; not a serious one.. but some schools are better than the other :-)).

These are what I have heard and there are a lot which I don’t know. This is how engineering is marketed! SSN doesn’t do any of these. Although it screws you a bit, you will definitely be allowed to study and enjoy your life. Back to the story of how I got into SSN.

I enjoyed my twelfth standard to the core! Although, I was forced to attend maths tuition classes, I had a lot of time to roam around in my new bike, explore the computer(bought for educational purposes :P) and hang out with friends. Classes were fun filled with MSK debating with teachers on what they teach. I usually join the debate.

Only after model exams, I got really serious and if it hadn’t been for David, Kavin, Vijay and Satish(ASK), I would not have scored what I did. After my parents, it was David who kept me motivated all the time and sent annoying messages during the night to keep me awake. One such message, which I got on the morning of chemistry exam(3:00 A.M), was about decoding a cipher which would say something similar to “I am jobless”. Kavin was the one who tested me on chemistry over phone on the exam day morning without which I would have never known that I had forgotten all the organic chemistry equations and that I needed to revise. Vijay helped me learn (taught) the last chapter of chemistry. Satish, the one on the flat over my head, was constantly helping me after my abysmally low marks in X. Of course, my physics and maths teachers encouraged me a lot despite my low marks at school!

After doing the exams reasonably well, I was ready to prepare for Tamil Nadu Professional Entrance Exam. I had joined IIPE, a premier institute(although self proclaimed, it was good to study there) for entrance coaching. I thoroughly enjoyed all the classes and every night there was a discussion on what happened at IIPE at Kavin’s place.

This post is dedicated to all those who helped me in my XII(the most hyped examination of TN, after JEE). The rest in next!

A Google search on SSN would be misleading. You would end up in ‘Social Security Number’. I am talking about SSN College of Engineering, one among few colleges in chennai that concentrates on education rather than following marketing strategies to lure parents. Now that I have completed my course, I can’t help but miss my college life so much. Despite all the bulbs(a word from student’s argot) I got, my life at SSN is so memorable that I want to blog it. Before that, I want to digress and mention a few of the marketing strategies that many engineering schools in chennai follow and it is also the answer to the question “what SSN is not?”.

-> Say that boys aren’t allowed to talk to girls; go to the extent of saying virginity guaranteed with a degree!!! — you got a bunch of happy parents lined up in a big ‘Q’.

-> Say that students are treated strictly and discipline(staying away from the opposite sex and not wearing jeans are on top of the list) will be injected into them.

-> Advertise that you have a spy team at all recreation zones to apprehend people who enjoy!(once a gang of my college students were inquired if they were from an X college, say Jey-pee-yaar.

-> Say that we do everything for the students and we can guarantee a job placement(we use the money from you to bribe HR).

-> Although it is not a part of the strategy, never talk about quality of faculty(phd purchased at the doomed university itself) and infrastructure beyond buildings, cafeteria, canteen, hostel, et cetera.

-> Beautiful girls (for guys; not a serious one.. but some schools are better than the other :-)).

-> Promise undeserving high internals.

These are what I have heard and there are a lot which I don’t know. This is how engineering is marketed! SSN doesn’t do any of these. Although it screws you a bit, you will definitely be allowed to study and enjoy your life. Back to the story of how I got into SSN.

I enjoyed my twelfth standard to the core! Although, I was forced to attend maths tuition classes, I had a lot of time to roam around in my new bike, explore the computer(bought for educational purposes :P) and hang out with friends. Classes were fun filled with MSK debating with teachers on what they teach. I usually join the debate.

Only after model exams, I got really serious and if it hadn’t been for David, Kavin, Vijay and Satish(ASK), I would not have scored what I did. After my parents, it was David who kept me motivated all the time and sent annoying messages during the night to keep me awake. One such message, which I got on the morning of chemistry exam(3:00 A.M), was about decoding a cipher which would say something similar to “I am jobless”. Kavin was the one who tested me on chemistry over phone on the exam day morning without which I would have never known that I had forgotten all the organic chemistry equations and that I needed to revise. Vijay helped me learn (taught) the last chapter of chemistry. Satish, the one on the flat over my head, was constantly helping me after my abysmally low marks in X. Of course, my physics and maths teachers encouraged me a lot despite my low marks at school!

After doing the exams reasonably well, I was ready to prepare for Tamil Nadu Professional Entrance Exam. I had joined IIPE, a premier institute(although self proclaimed, it was good to study there) for entrance coaching. I thoroughly enjoyed all the classes and every night there was a discussion on what happened at IIPE at Kavin’s place.

This post is dedicated to all those who helped me in my XII(the most hyped examination of TN, after JEE). The rest in next!

Advanced B’day Wishes..

I was just browsing my blog and saw this:
Feb 25, 2007 at 12:56 am this was typed.. but it wasn’t posted.. I don’t know the reason.. Just thought I would publish it :D

Glad to be back blogging, on my birthday.. :) . The first thing I am doing today is blogging :D

I guess I stopped cutting cakes on birthdays and celebrating it since when I was in sixth. After that all my birthdays had nothing special to remember. Anyway this one was different and will be fresh in my memory. My lab mate and friend Arvind also has his birthday in this month(24,Feb). I was on cloud nine after the surprise cake cutting (hitting) in our college canteen during lunch hour on Friday. The big chocolate cake read “Happy birthday to Arvind and Arun “. Since I didn’t know about it I hadn’t invited anyone. My friends had informed my classmates and some couldn’t turn up due to lab and some didn’t get the information :( . Missed some of my friends whom I wanted to have there with us. Anyway many of my friends turned up and it was great..I even forgot that I have finished not even one program in Visual C++ lab that was to follow. Thanks to all my friends who came there and made it memorable .. :) May be there is a reason why most people miss their college life and badly want to do it all again.

Thanks to my class guys for organizing it; thank you Jayashree & Jenifer for turning up. That day was great!!!

Happy New Year

I was musing over this topic – Why is this day important – may be because it will stay in your memory. I still remember the night when we cut a cake and watched the movie “Bala”. What a movie. I still believe it as the reason for all the problems I got that year. I got a smile when I wrote this.

New Years used to be different when I was in Todhunter Nagar. It’s a different place where you would find things that doesn’t happen elsewhere in Chennai. If you are wondering what Todhunter is, it’s the name of a British collector. It’s for government officials and these guys live in houses built for workers of the British Raj. In those houses you would find an open tank used to store water. My friend’s mom said it was originally meant for the horses. I lived in the newer apartments. There were around 144 houses in my street alone. You could imagine the number of friends I must have got to play with. It was a wonderful time.

Festivals were special. During the Tamil month of Margazhi (around the month of December), all girls (almost) would come out daily to draw the kolam. There were 24 flats in my building and 48 in the opposite. At least one family per bay(that’s a division of building in our jargon) would be out painting the kolam. Guys don’t involve themselves I kolvam. We had to just stroll and compare which one was the best. This continues through Margazhi, through Christmas, till Pongal. Those were half-yearly holidays, and that gave us the reason why not to remain stay put. New Year was special with more participants for drawing the kolam. I wanna get back those days.

New year eve will also be marked by building an Iyyappan temple, out of banana stem (pseudostem) in front of our Pillaiyar temple. That looks spectacular and it will always be crowded with a festive air. All of our friends would hang out after the midnight prayer. Hanging out meant just roaming around on our streets: D. It’s not usual to see most of your friends on road at midnight, is it?

After my life at Todhunter Nagar, New Years have been hanging out with my friends at some public place. But this year there wasn’t any hanging out though : (.

Anyways, Happy New Year readers : )(heard this is going to patented. Refer Kavin’s blog)
I also have a question -why do many people wish happy New Year in the oldest day of the year? :D

Getting Wicked…

This post is about cracking. Lolz, I was kidding. It’s about small tricks you can play with friend’s computer :)

My friends (kavin, David) and I have played many pranks over our friends when we were kids(school). One such was cracking their mail account passwords through forgot password attack. The most comical thing was we got the required information from the victim himself. We gave back their accounts after they requested us (Pleaded/threatened).

This is a small incident that happened in my XI std. Kavin and I sat up in front of the computer and opened up the forgot password page of yahoo. We typed in our friends id, started filling out the form. We knew all the details for he was my close friend. To our surprise, he had given all original info including his d.o.b. But here is the obstacle – the security question came up in front of us. “What is the name of your first school”. He was my school mate :D Anyways, to confirm if he had studied in that school from kindergarten, we called him up -

• ArunKumar C: Hi da. how are you?
• Victim: yup fine.
• ArunKumar C: Hey, I have got a seroius doubt. Are you studying in Alpha from kindergarten?
• Victim: yup, why are you asking?
• Arunkumar C: Thought you were from DAV and kavin said you were in Alpha from the beginning. Just wanted to check it up.
• Victim: lol ( ;))
• Arunkumar C: okay bye da.

Amazingly, he had set his school name to the real one and we had his password set comfortably :) We never looked into his inbox and after sending some teasing mails from this account to his other account, we mailed this password too ( ETHICS :) )

Moral of this incident: Never fill up all true details in your account and questions put to protect passwords should not ask for publicly known information :|

The latest prank I played on my friend is to change the windows account password. If you already don’t know how to do this, know how it can be done before your friend plays this prank on you.

To change the password of a windows account, just the username and net user command are more than sufficient. It’s likely that the victim is the administrator of the computer. This means that he isn’t a limited user. Usually all accounts in windows are admistrators except the guest user. A limited user executing a command to modify a user account will be prompted that he doesn’t have permissions.

The net user command is the provision given by microsoft to manage user accounts through command line. If I have a user account named “arunKumar”,

net user arunkumar fanofakc

would change the password of arunkumar to fanofakc.

This is how I changed my friend’s password. I opened up notepad, typed the command to change her password and saved it with .bat extension. I sent the file over to my friend and asked her to execute it. She clicked thinking it would do something interesting but finally got her password set to fanofAKC (ARun Kumar C).

You may not run any bat files sent by your friend. But beware, it might have been bundled along with a software and read me instructions. You wouldn’t run a file named “setup.bat” which would trigger the installer of the original software? What if this code was put after the code to trigger the original set up file. This just requires typing few lines using notepad and anyone can do this. The sofware would get installed and you would have no clue after your password had been changed. This isn’t a serious issue, but can be annoying.

I came to know about this when my friend Karthikeyan tried to play the prank on me. He sent me the bat file. I read the contents before I executed it. I googled up for the usage of net user command and didn’t use it. So to prevent all these kind of pranks and for more security – always have a single administrator account, one or more limited user accounts and before running a bat file, look into it.

SSNLUG

LUG stands for Linux Users’ Group. Many colleges have a lug, mostly called glug where ‘g’ stands for gnu. It’s a group of people who help themselves and others especially novice users to get started with Linux. It doesn’t end there! There are lot more about the the lug.

SSNLUG was initiated by one of my seniors Srikanth Lakshmanan. Two of my department Asst. Prof’s are very much interested in getting students involved into something productive. With their help, few workshops were conducted by SSNLUG. It all happened when I was in second year. I was really interested to attend more workshops. It will be mostly handled by tech persons from ILUGC/Chennai Lug or alumni. But it all ended that year. After my senior went out of college, there was no student who would take up his place in showing interest to create some activity. I thought some one from final year is going to do something. But nothing happened.

I am in final year now. I found a junior(Saravanan) who was enthusiastic about having a lug and this made me get serious about things. We spoke together to our HOD, Asst Profs Balasubramanyan and Venakata Vara Prasad. They were also happy about having a lug again and made sure everything went properly :). SSNLUG was reinstated. Initially we had a workshop on Basic Linux Installation and Administration for freshers. It was handled by my seniors Srikanth Lakshmanan and Prem. It was a hands on workshop and we had a huge response. It all went well :) And one more thing: I was announced as the official student Secretary of LUG :)

Well, you can have so much things done in a lug:

• You can always get support and help from Free Software guys to conduct workshops
• Get to know about latest of the technologies
• Getting yourself involved into some really interesting and valuable projects. Building a camera that would take videos and convert them to a open source format was one project which I came across. But I couldn’t do it cos it wasn’t my area
• Know about Free Software
• First Years will having a starting point for their career
• You can initiate projects and have a product developed. You can leave the the projects to your juniors to build on it.
• Ofcourse, it will help a lot in your placements.
• It’s all fun :)
• Get to meet really good hackers

There are many more things about lug that will benefit you. If your college doesn’t have a lug, you are missing something.