I am shifting my blog to http://cherianv.wordpress.com
Two reasons : main one is that blogspot has been blocked by most Indian ISPs. The other reason is that the default template looks better in wordpress. I guess I can make my own template for blogspot but as of now I'm too lazy to do it :D

It's been a long time since I posted. The weekend after my last post, I was supposed to go parasailing but it somehow got cancelled for that weekend and so instead, we went rock climbing followed by trekking. The trekking was nice... it was up a 4000ft high mountain and I was pretty tired by the time I reached the top, but the view from the top was indeed nice.

The weekend after that, I went to Kerala, back to my hometown for a day. The following weekend I went parasailing. I had a minor accident while parasailing : the tow rope somehow came undone from the jeep, and the wind was a bit strong so it literally blew me away and I had a rough landing after descending 450 feet vertically. I twisted my ankle and hurt my neck, but was back to normal in a week.

This last weekend I went shopping and bought a lot of clothes/a pair of shoes. The coming weekend is my last one in Bangalore. I plan to go river rafting followed by trekking and hope to return in one piece.

Work is going on okay. The 802.17 simulator that I was coding is more or less over. Now I have to design a few network configurations and simulate them and see if there is any wierd behaviour. This last part was supposed to result in me writing a paper but now I don't think there is enough time left for that.

That's it for now.

It’s been a while since I last posted here, the reason being that I had a lot of work to do : deadlines were thee almost daily. I was basically modifying and adding code to a Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) network simulator.

The RPR standard was standardized in 2004 but the equipment is being deployed nowdays (there is a present project on making a 40Gbps backbone using an RPR network). The only thing is that since it is a new standard, there aren’t many people who, given the requirements, can tell what equipment/capacity would be required. Hence the need for a simulator.

The simulator I was working on was initially developed by Simula Labs. It had about 5000 or so lines of code, to which I added another 3000 lines in the past month, which made it more configurable and easy to use and make sense of results.

I had my mid-internship presentation on the 14th of this month. It went well. My primary mentor works here itself in Bell Labs Bangalore. The other person with whom I was working is at Bell Labs, Murray Hill (in New Jersey), so he demonstrated the simulator to the Lucent Business unit there yesterday (who will eventually be using it to show demonstrations to customers).

So far the work has been an interesting experience. Juggling with 8000 lines of code is very much different from juggling with a few hundred lines of code, since if there is a bug somewhere, it takes a long time to find and fix it and often if it takes a long time to find the bug, you feel like chucking all the 8000 lines of code into the bin. Just for the record : before this I had never written more than 1000 lines for code in a single project.

For me this problem was compounded by the fact that I hadn’t done a networks course, leave alone the fact that I didn’t know the RPR standard that well. But in the end, it went fine and my mentors are happy. So now I can safely drink as much tea and chocolate as I want from the office pantry without worrying.

Anyway, so after a week of deadlines et al, this weekend should be enjoyable. The company is organizing a parasailing trip tomorrow morning. I’ll probably spend the rest of the weekend going around Bangalore and watching movies. Next weekend, I’ll be going to Kerala.

I usually spend the evenings in the malls, looking for things to buy. Unfortunately I don’t have enough cash to buy most of the things I “want”, though I have enough to buy whay I “need”. I was chatting with my Mom the other day and she asked me if I had enough money. I said no. Then she asked me why I didn’t ask my dad for money if I was short of it. I told her I didn’t since I wanted to be independent. I didn’t expect her to take this ‘independence thing’ well, since in the past my parents generally have been a bit protective of me, to the extent that I sometimes felt they thought I wasn’t capable of taking care of myself. But I guess things have changed. Mom actually seemed to be happy that I wanted to be independent (this time, financially).

On the whole I guess coming here for the internship, instead of doing a project at IITK was a good idea (though not necessarily better). There are various day to day problems that I face here, starting from with financial problems to problems with the auto-rikshaw guy to some problems associated with office environments. I guess it’s good because next time I face them, I will be more prepared.

Anyway. that’s it for now. I’m off to drink some iced tea.

It's been a week since I posted. This week I didn't work as much as I did the week before. The main reason is the laptop :)

Now daily my schedule on weekdays goes like this : wake up at 7, reach work by 8-8:30 am (it officially starts at 9). Then I spend an hr or so checking mail (yes, checking mail takes an hr since I have to sit and read/reply to about 20 mails). Till 12:30 I do some reading of a few papers my mentor gave me/coding of the simulator.

12:30 is when lunch starts, so I go along with the other interns to have lunch. Coincidentally, one of the interns is ex-IITK (Pushpraj Shukla of the Y1 batch, who is doing his MS/PhD at U of Texas, Austin).

We interns, generally talk over lunch about our project, colleges etc. With all due respect to the Hall 2 mess, the food they serve tastes really good, so I usually skip breakfast and have a heavy lunch (heavy means, for example 10 chapatis, paneer jalfreizi and 6 gulab jamuns today).

After lunch, I come back and chat with friends online for an hr or so. Then again it's back to work. Official working hours are till 5:30 pm. Initially in the first week, I would run away at 5:30 but now I leave usually at 6-6:30. I go to Forum (the mall I mentioned earlier), have dinner there, go home, watch a movie on the laptop and then go to sleep.

The food I have here is awesome : the lunch is Indian food and tastes really good, and dinner I try some other cuisines (I'm starting to get tired of the American burgers and pizzas so now I'm trying Chinese Dragon Chopsoueys, Mexican Quesadillas and Lasagnas and Subway subs and so on). After I got into IITK, my mom had predicted that I wuld spend all the money I earned on food and gadgets and till date, she has been right : )

I finally bought the laptop. It belong to the HP nx6125 series, only difference being that I thought 512 MB RAM would be on the lower side, so I made it 1.5 GB. The laptop has got a fingerprint reader, so I've configured so that I can login to XP by swiping my index finger, instead of typing in a 11 letter password.

Work is going on okay. I met my first deadline three days ahead of schedule. Now if only this would happen with the IITK assignment deadlines!
The mall, (Forum) that I had talked about earlier, that was 100m from my workplace... its quite big and one of the employees told me that half if not the whole of Bangalore hangs around there on weekends. Its seriously is a nice place to go if you are hungry : There is Pizza Hut, Pizza Corner, Mc Donalds, KFC, Coffe Day, Subway and also several other fast food places that server everything from red hot Mexican to Italian to Chinese to British to Indian!
Then there are plenty of these international brands like Bose, Nike, Pepe Jeans and so on.

The only problem is that I dont have enough cash to spend now : My monthly expense account goes like this : 3K for accomodation. 3K for food (Rs 100 for a meal at Pizza Hut/McD/KFC/ the rest of the lot multiplied by 30 days). Then 40x 30 = 1.2K for transport.another 1K misc. so totally about 8K a month. Bangalore is quite expensive. At Kanpur I struggle to spend 2K a month (this includes the mess bill which is 1K).

Anyway, its time to get back to work now.

One thing that makes the work environment at Bell Labs very different from that at IITK is that there is hardly any perceivable notion of juniority/seniority. At IITK, for just about each and every thing that I've been involved in, there has been some kind of hierarchy :

For Techkriti/Antaragni and the other festivals, there is the system of Coordinators-Asst Coordinators-Secretaries-Volunteers. For clubs again, there is a similar hierarchy. In general, a 4th (final) year is considered "superior" to a 3rd year, leave alone 2nd and 1st yrs...it is not explicit, but it is reflected in the attitudes of people.

Here, excluding salaries, everyone seems to be level : I'm interning here for 3 months and I get a cubicle of the same size, with the same facilities as full time employees, including a computer, Internet, email account, proxy quota, printing quota, comp, phone, refreshments, lunch and so on.

moreover, my mentor (who did his Btech from IITM and then a PhD from UWashington) has no problems coming to my cubicle (which is a bit far from his cubicle) to see what I have done.... I just phone him, tell him that "I've done this this this and am wondering how this should be done", he says "okay, ill just come over there" and comes here.

At IITK its standard for a senior to call a junior to his room, when he wants an update on the progress of some work. As far as I know, no senior at IITK has ever gone to a junior's hostel for this purpose, in fact, they generally avoid going to hostels where the juniors stay (except during the initial week of the odd semesters to do 'you know what' to the freshers, also some of them come to see the hostel preparation festivals).

Okay, so the first week of my intern is over. I'm pretty happy with this place and my project. The project is basically to take an RPR network simulator, add a GUI and later, modify the algorithms and see the results.

The deadline for the first part is June 15th, when one of my mentors in the US will use the package in a presentation. The internal deadline is 29th May, so I don't have much time.

RPR stands for Resilient Packet Ring. It is an alternative to Ethernet and SONET for optical networks. It is a state of the art technology, which was standardized just recently, in 2004. That's why I'm happy with this internship : since it will help me whether I go in for a job in future, or for research since I get to do both during the intern.

More interns have arrived. Now there are 8 totally : one 2nd yr from IITM, 3rd yrs, one from IITM, one from IITB, two from IITD, one PhD each from the university of Nebraska and from DAIICT. We have lunch together, so its interesting to discuss various topics that come up.

Work is offcially from 9 am to 5:30 pm but it's quite flexible. We get free lunch and snacks here. Also there is this Mall called Forum, 200 metres from here where there is a Pizza Hut, KFC and a McDonalds, so this is a pretty nice location.

I commmute from room to work by autorikshaw. It generally costs about Rs 20. I've pretty much decided on buying a laptop...the configuration is decent and it is a bit expensive, but not so expensive. I plan to buy this model.

That's it for now...I'm off to probably KFC for lunch :)