Fireball

Stephen Wolfram

Vaibhav woke me up today. Its bad to have video conferences in the morning. Can’t help because of the time difference. After inital setup, Stephan Wolfram appeared on the big screen of barn. We got the connection of his desktop through Macromedia Breeze. I couldn’t listen to the first half of the lecture. He explained the techniques of computation and the ability to trace the behaviour of nature using computations. He showed us images of mollusc and the growth around its shell. His topic was about “A New Kind of Science”. The lecture went on well but that I couldn’t understand half of what he said.

We were able to record his video and the screen grab of his system also.

The rest of the day, I spent roaming around the campus watching various events. I saw specifically designed vehicles for the contest Fuel Bird. Fuel Bird infact was planned in a different way, but because of some snag, they changed the plan and used rockets instead. The event went on well.

Later on, I moved to the lecture hall complex. Venice Grand Prix, a robotics event was going on. Participation was really good. Bhaskar and other third years were conducting the events. The model by PSG students was really good.

Along with Karthik, I attended the Hacking prelims which turned out to be an ultimate flop. We weren’t shortlisted in that.

Sky Shows and Movies

The rest of evening was really interesting. The ground was really crowded. A coimbatore based company demonstrated a aero-modelling show, first time in NIT Trichy. The show was really impressive, especially for enthusiasts like me. They explained the technical specs when the model was in the air. It was there for around one hour. One of the model made a emergency landing and its wings got cracked.

The main ground was a place for all the years to eat,flirt and play. It was always crowded. The snacky-extension people made a good profit out of Pragyan. Hussain had a good play with the mic. He used it effectively to bring back the big-time flirts to the communication desk. I went to Barn to make some arrangements for the movie. As soon as it got dark, I left Bismay in the Barn and I went to ground again.

I joined Manju to watch the Pyrotechnic show. Pyrotechnic show was splendid. The beautiful sparkles decorated the sky with all colours. There were some amazing fireworks display. First a bright “Pragyan ‘06″ . Later on, the sivakasi people lit a series of fireworks, which was going on for half an hour. The public really enjoyed the show. Many had opinion that it was creating pollution, though I enjoyed it.

Stumble
After Pyrotechnic show, we assembled in the Barn. There was a talk show, where the public got bored. Prakash Belawadi, the Director of Stumble was there in the talk show. Along with him were his friends. They answered to the questions to the public. Belwadi’s friends were talking some sense, but he started talking arbit stuffs.
Finally, Bismay cut-shorted the talk show and they started the movie. We got a huge projector for the movie. The screening was really good. My eyes were drooping. I was sleeping in the first row. Karthik and Vignesh were near me, who found the movie to be interesting.

Chris Gill
Bismay woke me up today. The Video Conference talk by Chris Gill of SVASE was scheduled at 8:00AM. I reached Barn half an hour late. We tried recording the videos of the Video Conference using TV Tuner cards. Since I have never been into recording-editing stuffs, we couldn’t record the audio of the conference.

The lecture went on fine. He talked about entrepreneurship and a few questions were also posed to the audience.

I spent the rest of the morning session watching the robots in the Robovigyan contest. Students tried out their line followers. The systems that they employed were really impressive. A Sastra student won the first prize. We later moved on the ground where Unesco Club had organized a mini science exhibition for school students. Avishkar, functional modeling contest was simultaneously going on. After sometime the Aero-modelling company demonstrated one of the models which was simply amazing. He flew the model just above the stalls.

Prof. Yash Pal

The highlight lecture of the day was Prof. Yash Pal. Director came down to receive him from the car. Yash Pal looked a sort of really old scientist. Though aged above 80, he started walking over the stage.His lecture was a very casual and interesting one. He talked about the importance of questioning. Some of his thoughts:

• Children are the best resource for questions
• Believing astrology is safe, unless it does not pamper with your progress

His lecture was not prepared, but was well organized.He gave good explanations of some basic natural activities which impressed me. After Prof.Pal’s lecture, we had a movie by IGCAR, Kalpakkam and later on after dinner, we started setting up for testing the video conference with Dr. Wolfram tomorrow morning. We got a mail from his Secretary saying that they will be ready only tomorrow. We’re meeting Dr.Wolfram tomorrow morning 7:00AM.

Jacky Baltes

Morning Kaly woke me up at around 8:30 and the workshop was at 9:00AM. I hurried to the lecture hall complex, and found Parijat running here and there. Half the Debian systems were not working.Finally we got most of them working. Dr. Jacky and his two students demonstrated their latest robonoids(as they call it). There were three dancing robots among them. They asked us to do some C coding first and in the afternoon session, we were asked to interface with the readymade microcontroller kit using Serial ports.

Jacky Baltes’s robots were really interesting. There were crawling,walking,dancing,line-following robots designed using readymade microcontroller kits.

Finally we came to the Barn to see the inaugration.

Ankit Fadia

Ankit Fadia is crap. The `Guru` or security specialist infact started of with a good topic explaining the difference between a hacker and cracker. Pradeep recieved him and he came to the stage straight-away. Fadia is a good speaker rather than a Security specialist.

One of my college-mate Rajesh Kanna is an expert in collecting softwares, their cracks and pirated version of anything you can name. He’s perhaps better than Fadia. Fadia gave the people a list of websites from where they can download trojans. He also gave a list of softwares with which you can crack into any remote/local system.

He explained the funda of Proxy Jumping where he got ultimate insult. He tried out anonymizer.com, anonymizer.ru and couple of sites where our CSG’s big access denied faced the audience. He gave the hope to students saying that the college can’t ban all the proxy servers in the world. He never showed us a proper demo of cracking into a remote system. He typed the commands in notepad which would help us to send forged mail to any user from anonymous mail address.

He publicised his own books and a new “Ankit Fadia certified Ethical Hacker” Course (Which again is a crap). Probably he’ll give out a longer list of links from where you can download. And yes, he also added that if you don’t find it on internet, just mail him, he’ll send you the software by mail. Cool isn’t it!

Finally when the session was over, I asked him why he preferred Windows XP rather than secure Linux systems for his laptop. He said, “Windows XP is user friendly and I don’t have anything on my laptop to be attacked.”

An Ethical hacker cum Security Guru who prefers a user friendly OS rather than a secure and efficient operating systems - Ankit Fadia.

I found this quote in Ram’s site:

Schedule is supposed to be slipped, otherwise it would become a prediction!

-BVK (aka B. Vijay Kumar)

After launching Pragyan last year, NIT Trichy is again buzzing with activity for Pragyan 2006. Pragyan’06 as I expected is better than previous year. Activities are decentralized and organised.Most of the prelims are over. The core has been working throughout to make everything in place. External participation is good compared to last year. Around half of the participants are within the college. Stephen Wolfram, Yash Pal and Ankit Fadia are giving us lectures

I’m participating in two workshops. Movies are going to be screened by the newly formed Cinema Paradiso. Besides all these there will be regular screening of documentaries in the New Lecture Hall complex. The Public Relations & Hospitality team are doing a wonderful job. Expecting to get the most out of Pragyan this time.

Jacky Baltes is going to conduct a workshop for us in robotics tommorrow morning .I’m installing Debian for the workshop right now. Finally got the X server configured!