Puh, another 2 weeks have passed. There happened a lot. But mostly I ate a lot out. And the registration process in India doesn’t seem to be finished so far.
I am not going to read through it again though there are more than 1700 words. Please excuse all mistakes.
Food and Beverages: Another 2 weeks with great food not only in Pune city but also on campus’s food court. For example:
- Broccoli chicken soup, calzone stuffed with olives, champignons, ham, salami, italian sausage and more sauvouring ingredients @ mungo’s, phoenix mall food court
- Paneer Burger @ McDonalds – spicy!! The menu with coke and fries for only 162 Rupees
- Chickenburger and Momos – Streetstall @ FC Road
- Chocolate Chip Muffin
- Lasagna and chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream @ Pizza Hut SGS Mall, MG Road. Amazing taste but very expensive!
- Dominos Farmhouse Pizza medium size
- Paneer and Veggi Sizzler opposite of SGS Mall MG Road
- Singapore Fried Rice @ Baba Food Mall
- ABC Farm Koregaon Park. Nice composition of different dishes!
Campus Hangout: This consisted mostly of chatting to mates on the food court, doing a digestion walk after dinner or having a drink at the campus very own coffee shop after dinner.
Since a few days, rules are more strict. Even male students are not allowed to enter hostel after 10:30 PM. Before it was also possible to enter after 10:30 PM. Everyone who comes late has to stay out.
Being Out to Pune: Yes mostly for shopping and this time I bought a very nice trouser from the brand U.S. Polo for roughly 25 €.
The Germans managed it to roam around Pune without being accompanied by Indians. Rickshaw drivers tried to trick us with manipulated meters and higher fares but we managed to get around that.
We discovered the Clover Center. Someone told us that this is THE mall where you can find very cheap unbranded stuff. Actually the smell in the mall was very odd and it also was hard to find what someone is looking for. I would not even call that a mall. See there are many little stores stuffed together in a large building. The stores are mostly not to walk in but usually just a counter where the cashier is providing you with the things you want to buy.
On last saturday night friends of Alex came to Pune as they were travelling through India. So a big night out was planned. Firstly we went to Pune to meet Prateek at 2 PM in his flat. We spent the afternoon eating and chatting and listening to the Linkin Park concert. We booked a cab for 8 hours starting from 9:30 PM. First the cab brought us to the ABC Farm for dinner. This is in the Koregoan area of Pune. Afterwards decision was made to go in the club at the Westin hotel. The entrance fee was 2000 Rupee but one gets a voucher of 2000 Rupee which he can convert into drinks during the night. The security did not grant me access to the club because I was wearing sandals. So I had a good excuse not to spend 2000 Rupees on coke. Our whole night cab driver brought me back to Prateeks flat. I chatted with the cab driver for another hour about India in front of the flat before I entered the flat and slept.
The paper: Anton and I set up a 6 page document and handed it to our NS professor. He stated the document as “good enough” and asked us to implement the basic algorithm without improvements in the first step. Anton did the main programming part. When he was stuck at some point we sat together and discussed/solved the issue. Finally the basic algorithm was working well and stated “well done” by the professor. We have got further instructions on that via email and will start implementing some improvements in the next days.
I have got Linux Fedora from the IT guys to have a Linux based operation system to try the programs. I got the OS finally running in a VMware Player.
Mobile Access: After being happy with my mobile I didn’t think about any problems. But soon problems appeared out of nowhere: the number of my friends and mine was temporarily suspended. First we tried to manage that by our own at the IDEA store but we didn’t reach anything. The statement was that they think that our signatures do not match to the passport signature. Another day later Mohit accompanied us to the store where we filled another set of forms – afterwards the phones were unlocked again. I also recharged a 2G voucher (3GB for 90 days for 270 Rupees) for internet acces on the mobile on that day. The person behind the desk promised that the phones won’t be blocked another time.
But only 2 days later my phone number was suspended again. This time Abhishek accompanied us to the IDEA store and made clear that we don’t want to have our numbers suspended again. Otherwise we just change the mobile provider.
These problems may not be caused by idea but by the Indian Government. The Government also limits the amount of daily sent SMS to 5 to avoid spreading rumor via SMS.
DS: Our professor introduced us something completely new. So new that I was hardly able to understand: The Stack. Just joking. The stack is very easy to understand but the application of a stack for expression validation was new to me. One can use the stack to convert an expression between the three formats infix, postfix and prefix.
Meanwhile I developed stack programs for the bracket-check of an expression, the string reverse and to convert a decimal number into binary representation. Furthermore I implemented the Quicksort and linear/binary search in another program.
The first assignment was stated last week and I answered all questions except the last in a word document before the deadline. The only problem was that it had to be submitted in hand written form.
Another issue is the journal book. A kind of hand written “what did you do in class”-book. This special kind of book is sold out for almost 2 weeks now which is why I didn’t write the book so far. I am not even allowed to hand it in in loose papers.
NS: The client server message program is finished. The RSA algorithm is coded. And the RSA is also integrated in the client server program. So the lab work is done.
The theory lecture was mostly about the ESP (Encapsulated Security Payload) which was not much. The content could have been much more but the professor was not in the college for a whole week.
The professor took one lecture on monday morning because the CC professor was late. After 25 minutes of NS the CC professor came in and tried to take over but the NS professor disagreed. Awesome!
CC: The professor explained a few more details about the contents. There is SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform …) and IaaS (Infrastructure) plus the benefits/disadvantages and examples of the first both.
In this subject I had to do my first assignment but I did not so far even though the deadline was the 20th of August. One good reason for not doing it is that the professor did not send us the assignment document. Rini told me that there is an assignment and kindly forwarded me the email.
ADBS: Here I was taught was througput, response-time, speedup and scaleup means when it comes to parallelism in databases. Now I also know a few partition techniques for horizontal/vertical partitioning (round-robin, hash-partitioning…) and what skew means in that context.
I also got a first insight into Object relative databases in the lab. Once in the lab the professor asked the students to get a board marker which is actually writing on the board. There were about 5 board markers in the room and only one of them was writing properly on the board at the end of the lecture.
Our teacher handed out the questions for the first assignment. Here I managed to answer the questions before the deadline.
One lecture was cancelled because the students explained the professor that the content was already done in a previous semester.
SP: I really have no clue about this subject. It is supposed to be good. But somehow I don’t know where to start. Everything seems to be simple about the assembler algorithms – but the correlations are not. Some assembler algorithms have one pass, others have two passes. And each pass uses several tables to store informations about the final program. Even reading a book in the library did not bring light into the darkness. I think it just takes another week or so until I get the full sense of this subject.
There were two Fridays in between. On each the lecture was preponed from 11 AM to 10 AM. This is why Anton and Me missed these lectures. But the professor was very kind and told us the content of the lecture in his office.
Police Story: Last time known as Police station category. This time I changed it to story because it is kind of an “endless story”. The campus administrator ordered us to his office: Alex and Anton has to go to the police station to finish the registration process. I thought there must be some misunderstanding and so I went with them to the police station the other day at 3 PM. Just before from 2 PM on we were chasing for documents throughout the whole campus. 4,5 hours waiting filled with just one disappointing sentence: Simon, they lost your documents; Do you have four passport sized photographs with you?. Actually I do not carry lots of photographs of myself always with me – I know how I look like. I almost lost my patience but gladly the police station has not been severely damaged. The international office guy will check whether my documents are at another police station. If not I need to start all over with the registration process.
Independence Day: Celebrated on 15.08 each and every year. There was a nice program with drums and flag hoisting on the up hill campus. The program also contained a freedom run from the up hill campus to the hill base campus where Alex finished 9th. More information on the day on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(India)
Book of household accounts: Withdrawal up to now was 27000 Rupee
Pictures: Not much pictures taken in two weeks. So enjoy the few which are following and please don’t forget to watch the movie which is about me slurping the rest out of a chocolate fondue!
