The clock showed 8; the office was unusually quiet. I guess most people had left already. I finished up my work for the day and packed up. Raincoat - check; Backpack - check; Helmet - check. Time to set out for home. The elevator buttons glowed and the buzzer rang softly. "Going down?”

It was drizzling a little when I reached the exit. I looked up to see a few droplets falling lazily downwards, pushed around by the uneven winds around the base of the flyover. It looked like the beginning of one of those typical Bangalore monsoon rains. The drizzle would get a bit heavier and stay that way for a few hours at least. A steady, miserable, depressing shower that never really started and wouldn’t really end. It was time to leave.

It was a dank and musty evening. I kick-started the bike, shifted into first and left the parking lot, only to be greeted by the diesel fumes and cursing auto-drivers. I turned a corner and hit Residency Road. Past the first couple of potholes and speed bumps, the rain increased a bit. I drove on past the shiny new office buildings with their elaborate facades, past the shops with their bright neon signs, past the pedestrians rushing in to the awnings in anticipation of the rain, a part of their world and at the same time totally oblivious of it.

I’d seen it all before.

Aashirvadam circle. The drizzle had become stronger. My helmet visor was beginning to fog up and I couldn’t see too far. Taillights flared red against a greyish haze of tar and the entire world was a blur, diffracted through a million tiny drops of water on an acrylic sheet. The signal turned red and I slid to a stop.

Up ahead, a road off to the left led to shelter from the rain. The light turned green. “Why not find out how it feels?”

Past the worried faces outside the Bowring hospital, past the modest elegance of the Skoda showroom, I rode on. Traffic is getting lighter now. I can’t see too far ahead of me anymore. I’m forced to slow down, forced to look at the road right in front of me. I cut across a couple of lanes and pull up at the next junction.

A reddish car stops next to me. Dust on its roof had streaked down across the windows, leaving long brownish trails that were being washed away in the rain now. (The rain, it cleanses Bangalore). There’s another car on the other side of me. The drivers of both cars have this dead, wooden stare that’s quite common now. They aren’t here. They don’t see the rain. They don’t see the people around them. Their entire life now revolves around that one light now changing its colour. The rain can’t cleanse everything yet. It’s obvious they don’t like me looking at them. Loud honking precedes the signal switching. I move on.

The rain’s getting heavier now; it’s become a steady downpour. Either the fog in my visor has cleared up, or I’ve gotten used to the blur, but I can see the road ahead quite clearly. I open up the throttle a bit till the needle moves up to about seventy. I look down to see steam rising from the engine block. Raindrops are splashing on the black tar, zipping past my feet.

Rain changes the order of things. The world below us is vibrant now, full of life and movement. Drops fall and splatter into thousands of little fountains refracting headlights and catching colours. Puddles form and streams flow where roads and people used to be. And meanwhile the human world has come to a standstill, waiting under trees.

I move on. I’m in an older part of Bangalore now, remnant of a time where space was more important than buildings and people were more important than the all-pervasive hurry of today’s world. Raj Bhavan on the left and the planetarium up ahead. The lights go red, it’s time to stop again.

A tiny electric vehicle pulls up next to me. I look at the lady driving the car and she looks at me. She breaks out in a smile and that’s when I realize I’m smiling too. I’ve been smiling since the rain got worse and the downpour began and I took a chance to see how it felt and I felt the rain and I kept on going, through the wind through the cold, through the rain through the blur, past the people and past the shops down that same road which felt different now. Maybe it’s only different because I wanted it to be different, but different nonetheless. I’m not going to be logical, just truthful.

There aren’t any cops around; I take off my helmet. I’m still smiling. The old man sitting next to her in the car doesn’t like this. The rain feels good on my face. The drops are large now, they land with audible splats and fall into my eyes, forcing me to close them. The light changes, I ride on.

Past the golf course, past the luxury hotels, onward to the next inevitable signal. Suddenly, the rain slows down. People move out onto the roads again, blocking my path up ahead. Just when things were getting clearer, too.

I turn left to avoid the traffic up ahead. All roads lead home, and I want the empty ones. I’m in a richer part of the city now. A newly rich part where people have bought themselves culture from the latest fashion magazines. I ride past the haughty and dead eyes looking out through the back seats of luxury cars. I ride on past the 5-star gardens, there’s nothing new to see here.

The rain has reduced and people are getting restless on the roads. A car pops up on to the wrong side of the road, trying to overtake someone. I am pushed onto the left shoulder. I am angry now, angry at what happened and how it could have happened and the lack of control and discipline. Another car up ahead comes up onto the wrong side of the road to overtake. I’m not moving off my line this time. I hold my course until the car swerves back inside. I won. I should’ve been happy.

To be continued...

If you're having a good day, the whole universe conspires to make it bad.

If you're having a bad day, the whole universe conspires to make it worse.

Either way, you lose. Don't even bother. Just give up.

Devadutta (website, blog) and me have started up a little website called Boiled Beans. Boiled Beans focuses on tech quizzing.We post a question a day and post the answers by the end of the day.

The questions usually focus on science and technology related topics (but also occasionally explore the other mainstays of the geek gestalt such as Star Wars. You can post answers, and if you're right you get points.

If you get lots of points you win a special prize (we'll tell you as soon as we decide what it is).

New host, same everything else.

More content hopefully ;-) 

So, here's the saga of how I did something almost disastrous totally by accident...

Prelude

I had too many partitions and all my free space was strewn all over the place. I had the bright idea of merging a few partitions and making life easier for myself. I seemed to be on the brink of finding out what happens when you assign drive letters past Z by on Windows...

Chapter 1: Storm clouds gathering

So I decided that the simplest, least dangerous way of doing it would be to boot from Knoppix and then mount the disks and move the data around manually. Then use QTParted to delete and merge a few partitions and move data back. This was, obviously, the extremely long way of doing it but I would be in total control. So I booted from knoppix, and, suddenly, it wouldn't work. I have no clue why. (In fact, I was just bragging yesterday that I had knoppix working on a P2 333MHz with 64MB RAM... Pride did not goeth before the fall...) It didn't boot, when it did boot, it didn't auto detect and mount the partitions, and when it did that, it refused to open them.

So I thought, "Oh well, guess it just isn't Knoppix day today" and went ahead to try Partition Magic. In retrospect, I guess this wasn't a very good idea. (The version I had was the PowerQuest PM 7. Since then apparently PQ has been bought out by Symantec or something)

Chapter 2: The eye of the storm

Anyway, it had a nice neat interface, it would let me pick two partitions and merge them, and it would move the data automatically! Excellent! Just what I needed! I was still a bit cautious though, and wondering how it could possibly do that to mounted partitions. So i tried to merge two partitions that didn't have much useful data on them that were adjacent to each other. PM said it had to restart and my confidence grew again, since it was attempting to ensure that it didnt mess around with mounted partitions. PLUS, it had a DriveMapper majick which would automatically correct all the references to the old drive. Brilliant!

Chapter 3: Lady luck strikes

I went ahead and rebooted, and, well, it failed. Just failed (at 19%) with some error that said something along the lines of being unable to read Block 4000.

I guess it may have been a power fluctuation, but it looks like the drive stopped responding for some reason. I doubt this was PMs fault, but it happened. So I knew it was panic time and rebooted, hoping that things would work out.

They did, but not the way I expected. All the other drives were intact but the drive I was merging had disappeared. I guessed that PM had deleted the partition, so I booted with some linux rescue disk I had lying around, and checked, but GNU parted found all the partitions!

These were enough warning signs for me so I decided it was time to abandon this PC till things could get sorted out. I had one last look at the drives through PM and realized that it had changed the partition type to PqRP and not changed it back. Desktop shutdown, laptops Ahoy!

Chapter 4: Damage control

Google is my best friend. I found this guy who had the same problem and had a clue about how to fix it almost immediately: Partition Magic crashes during partition move, resulting in PqRT

Here's the relevant part:

* Procedures:
======================================
PQ KB article:
Solution: Fixing a PQRP with PTEDIT
To fix a PQRP with PTEDIT:

1. Run PTEDIT.

2. Locate the PQRP (partition type 3C).
If the PQRP occurred on a logical partition, click "GoToEPBR" to locate the correct partition.

3. Click in the "Type" field associated with the 3C partition.

4. Click "Set Type."
A list of available partition types is displayed.

5. Select the appropriate partition type (e.g., FAT32 if the partition type was FAT32 before the PQRP, etc.).

6. Save the changes and exit.

If the system does not boot properly at this point, run a directory listing (DIR) on the drive and make sure there are no "DYN_ROOT" entries. A "DYN_ROOT" indicates that the original root directory has been relocated but can, in most cases, be restored. If the directory listing appears as random ASCII code or unrecognizable characters, the partition is likely corrupt and cannot be recovered.

Note: If the root directory appears as a DYN_ROOT, do not SYS the drive. Modifications made to the drive while in this state can reduce the probability of recovery. Contact PowerQuest Technical Support for further assistance.

The page, in fact, recommends I do NOT do this but I had a hunch that, since it failed real early, the actual data had nbot been affected. A bit of a gamble but I couldn't resist it.

So I tried to get PTEdit but it wasnt available from Powerquest.com. Google stepped in again and led me to download PTEdit from Symantec. But a problem came up, PTEdit was designed to run in DOS mode, and WinXP wouldn't let it run. I had to get a bootable floppy and copy it onto that, boot from it, and run it.

Chapter 5: Crisis/Opportunity and all that chinese gunk

Well, wonder of wonders, my floppy drive wouldn't work. I hadn't used it in about 2 years. So I didn't even bother trying to fix that and went to try to get a DOS bootable CD and copy PTEdit onto it. Didn't have to do much though, I soon found and used this wonderful piece of help called Bart's way to create bootable CD-Roms (for Windows/Dos). I extracted PTEdit, added it to that bootable CD and wrote it onto an RW. I booted from that and had PTEdit up and running.

It took me a while to find that deleted partition,and then I realized it was in an extended partition within another extended partition. PTEdits interfaceallowed me to figure this out quite easily though. All hail PTEdit!

Chapter 6: Land in sight

I changed the PqRP partition type to FAT32 (which it was earlier) and saved my changes. Rebooted into Windows, fingers crossed (literally), and then, to my great happiness and rejoicing, I had my old drive back!

Chapter 7: Epilogue

I'm back where I started, but the problem is solved though. My data all seems accessible and I have learnt something about this Bart guy who's quite helpful... I've wasted a lot of time with fixing it, so I hope this helps you if you need the help. Of course, no guarantees. If all your data disappears its your own fault.

Still need to merge those partitions, still need to free up some space, still need to figure out why that drive stopped responding... I see more Geek melodrama in the future.

So yeah, it's the new year. And I'm doing nothing.

I came here with the intention of writing a bitter, sarcastic and scathing entry on the rest of the world who seem to be enjoying themself thoroughly while I'm sitting here and sulking, but the thoughts just won't come up. My usually cynical and always vindictive mind has nothing to say on this matter. I figure it's just given up, like the rest of me.

I've spent the last 4 new year's eves preparing for some crappy exam or the other. This was because the VTU has a, fairly obvious, sadistic streak running through it, and always had an exam scheduled on the 1st or the 2nd. I'd promised myself every year for the past 4 years that I'd spend this new year doing something extremely amazing, but it looks like I'm gonna be spending it, as always, reading crap on the internets, since I don't want to do what I'm supposed to do, and this is the closest thing to a social life I have.

Things need to change. 

A few pictures from a recent (Approx Feb 2006) motorbike journey to Savandurga. Savandurga is a small mountain about 60kms from Bangalore city. There's a small climb up a mountain that's quite interesting for the average tourist, and fairly tiring for your average pasty-skinned programmer, but a piece of cake for anyone in moderately good shape.

This is more for my own tracking purposes than for anyone to read and understand:

• Centralized the DB access parameters
• Integrated TinyMCE into the backend.
• Re-did the weird tag layout to look right on IE, with help from people at CSS Creator
• Sorted out the design to look less freaky

Hi!

This current incarnation of the site is the first major update its seen in a long time. The changes aren't all cosmetic. The site is actually running on a few hacked up PHP scripts now (including an aicle" is attached a set of "tags" that do Many Things.

• No proper login system
• Code has no structure. Can definitely be organized more modularly
• Code is just not commented. Period.
• No simple way of extending it to do anything besides organize itself
• Sticky articles need to be implemented
• HTML and CSS do not validate properly
• The CSS messes up on IE. So the site only looks good on FF
• The developer does not take the site seriously

Without further ado, the farewell from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering to the 2002-2006 batch of students.

Most of the photos suck. If you want better ones, buy me a better camera.

One of the things I've ended up doing is designing websites. Here's a look at some of them...

MSRIT IEEE

The famed MSRIT has a student branch of the lesser-known IEEE ;-). I design their website, and have currently gone through two designs, in as many years, for a very simple, low-bandwidth, largely static website. Version 2 won an award for being the Best Student Branch Websiteby the IEEE Bangalore section for the year 2005.
Version 1 - Local mirror.

Version 2 (current) - Local mirror,Offsite official.

int04h

My college computer science department had a technical fest in 2004, and part of my work for that was on the fest website. My requirements for the site were that it should give a user all the information he needs, look moderately while not too gaudy and work for low, low, low bandwidth users. So me and three others from the college (Devadutta, Arpit and Luveen) worked out this site. The original was taken down by our administration, but there's one copy mirrored here.

This site is barren, I know. I don't have enough content yet to make up my mind about a proper design, so it's best to just not give it any design at all, and just let it accumulate enough content for a while to actually be worth designing. Of course, I can probably get a simple two or three column CSS layout and stick everything in it, but they look so dull and uninspiring, and they've been overused so much, i though it would be best to wait and come up with a proper layout that is better suited to this site's needs. Anyway, if you have come here, you've probably dropped in by accident, so there's nothing much for you to see here, yet. Hopefully, after a while, it won't be this pointless and it'll actually serve some useful content. I'll be adding more stuff slowly, and less sections of the site will be empty, so hold on.

And I'd like to thank UNSSFree for giving me the webspace and some excellent support in getting it up and running over the past few days