Rahul gives unsolicited advice

A Project i've been putting off for quite a while is to try and build a Radio Telescope. I've been reading up about Radio Telescopes for about 2 years but i could never get my ass moving to start building one. And well, i've finally started working on one. But firstly, let me tell you what Radio Astronomy is. The  Wiki  article is pretty detailed but basically, radio astronomy is observing the skies and studying the energy earth receives in the radio spectrum. I didnt say 'observing the night skies' because radio waves can be detected day or night, unlike in visible astronomy where the sun ruins the day time observations. Listing out the process of Radio Astronomy - Radio Sources - which emit energy in the radio spectrum. Receivers - which are able to pick up these signals. Data Analysis - for you to be able to infer something about the sources from this data.  Radio Sources - The emissions from Sun, Jupiter, The Galactic Disc and a couple of cl...

In an attempt to upgrade all the systems in out computer labs to Ubuntu 12.04, we ran into a couple of problems. Inorder to be able to connect to the central department server, the systems had to have NIS and NFS installed and configured on each of the systems. This way, students would be able to login onto anyone of the systems and still be able to access their files(no matter which system it is). So, after having installed Ubuntu 12.04, and having done the usual system upgrades after configuring the system proxy (yes, we have proxy in our college, kind of makes our life difficult when we're trying to upgrade on different versions of Linux), we move on to looking up Ubuntu Manuals and start looking for setup and configuration manuals of NIS and NFS. And well, the good thing about Ubuntu is that there are a looot of installation manuals, and the best ones we found are   Ubuntu help for installing NIS   and   Ubuntu help for installing NFS . Along with installation, ...

(this is how a lot of my blog posts will start atleast from now on. with a question!) (i think it will get you involved and make you think!)(i think!) So, how many of you travel by buses, local trains or share-autos regularly? or atleast, if you arent living in a metro and if you dont have the misery of having to travel by buses/local trains for an hour or more to reach home, i suppose you do travel by buses or trains-fairly regularly like once in a month or so-to other cities for varied purposes (personal or business) so, in these cases, have you ever talked to the another person? someone sitting next to you? someone of the same or opposite gender? someone who looks as bored as you are? im being serious! almost all of these transits will take longer than an hour, and 1 hour is a looot of time, believe me! personally, if i have an hour of time between home and college, i would read, listen to songs, chit chat with people around me. But lately, i have noticed that people, the ge...

Who is the most important person in a someone's life? his parents? his best friends? his Girlfriend / Boyfriend? or his soulmate? well after what i've seen, the one thing i realised is that the most important person in any person's life is The Critic. Yes, it is exactly what it means, the most important person in your life is the person who keeps telling you to improve and provides you with ways to improve, the one who keeps a watch on you and is mature enough to judge whether or not if what you're doing is right or if it's wrong! A person whose judgement you can trust and the gives you the wisest of choice! Not many people realise this. There is a critic in everyone's lives but not everyone is open to criticism. people are afraid! they dont want to be told that the're not doing well enough, they dont want to be told that they have scope to improve, they dont want to be told the right and wrong in their doings. and so, they shun away the critics...

What do you think is the most preached thing in the world? Excerpts from the Bible? the Qurey? the Bhagavadgita? Nope! There are a lot of people who arent religious and there are a lot of them who aren't adult enough to understand these religious texts. but still, they've all been told one thing for sure. they've all been preached that - " the best thing to do after you fall down is pick yourselves up, dust yourselves off and move on" am i lying? isnt this true? you must've been preached or must've preached this to someone or the other in your life, haven't you? (if you haven't, then dude you seriously need to do something crazy after reading this, something adventurous, something new) and well, this isn't true. atleast a part of it isnt. People think that the only thing they can do after they falldown is to just get  up, get over it. and well they move on with their lives without having gained anything from their mistake, without ...

After a recent discussion with a couple of friends of mine, who were in the middle of cribbing to each other about their professors, their skewed views etc etc, they finally ended up looking towards me who had been staring blankly at them all this while, as to why i wasn't cribbing. they then proceeded to complement(i think it is) that they had never heard me crib about anything before! (well i reduced it a lot in the past year or so) and they were wondering why. so, after a long discussion with them and later on myself, here is why i do not crib! and before i start, for the slang-impaired, to crib means to bitch, about college life, rooms, food, girls, friends, profs, academics and a variety of never before heard and strange things in life. im sorry but there i can't make it any more civilized. so, in my three years, i've heard people crib on a range of topics. and if and when you try stopping them or asking them the validity of the topic they are cribbing on, they lo...

I wonder how many of you reading this post are home sick, still. Well i've seen people who are home sick every week, who go home or to their cousin's place in Chennai every weekend, who do a lot of crazy things to not be home sick, like try eating at places with homely food etc etc. as for me, i've never felt home sick, expect for the 5mins on the 3 day of my hostel life in 11th. so, i didnt have problem adjusting to this college life, living all by yourself, staying alone in a single room and taking care of your daily chores, no one to fall back on if you screw up etc etc .. the list goes on as well all know. the difference being that a lot of people try changing their environment so much that they end up creating a home like atmosphere in their floor or in their room. well, at first thought you may think that this is a good thing but let me tell you, it is not. after having decorated and stuck posters(they're just posters of cars and superheros, no perverted t...

well, some more songs for the hungry mind. and yeah, following my need to categorize stuff and songs, today i post songs which i consider belong to Rock, Indie rock and Classic Rock.                                                               Stand By Me - John Lennon                                                     Foster The People - Pumped Up Kicks                                             Ac Dc - Rock n Roll ain't Noise Pollution                                       ...

Well, i know that m,ost of you are too cool to be bother with the difference of calling someone a nerd or a geek. you probably think that there is no difference between the two words, that it just means a guy/girl (highly unlikely), who's crazily brainy, who's known to excel at a lot of topics (usually academics) and as someone with whom your conversations will (almost always) be on a specific topic, on life, on tech, on living etc etc. well, let me tell you the difference. and let me tell you that we, geeks, take it very seriously if we are called nerds. so, nerd - a person who is hard working, one with a highly academic oriented mind set and very studious. im pretty sure what i have defined here is what you think geeks are. but here comes the difference, geeks do what they do because they love it, they enjoy doing it, and that is why they excel at it. they have passion for whatever it is they are doing. a geek maybe a nerd but a nerd is not a geek. there are geeks who a...

i wonder how many of you write at all in the first place, write when you are bored, write when you have a thought in your mind, write when you are not in the happiest of moods, write just for the saake of writing, cos believe me, it helps. and sometimes it's just fun reading up all the things you wrote from sometime back. some of you (or maybe most) may think this will be something like a diary and you writing in it may look, you know, girly.... so, what? it's you thinking that writing is girly, or mostly social convention that makes you think that only girls write diaries. first screw that, and try writing something, anything, or if you can, write nothing (you know, with those invisible pens which can only be read under purple or UV light :D) ... moving on, the other thing is that a lot of people (like myself) start a blog, try writing a couple of posts, not in specific about anything, but after a couple of posts, you'll start thinking that you have nothing to write but ...