God is in control

I was reading through chapter 28 of the book Man the Dwelling Place of God by A.W.Tozer when I came across this wonderful reality from which we’re often blinded. There are times when we can’t find answers to questions such as Why me? How? Whence? What? But we’ve to understand that God is in control of our lives and all the things that appear so wonderful in this world will pass away over time but the things that we do for God lasts.

Here are some things that we should keep in mind always:

*Only God is great
*Only God is wise
*Apart from God nothing matters
*Only what we do for God will remain to us at last
*Human sin is real
*With God there is forgiveness
*Only what God protects is life

Below is an excerpt from a very meaningful song that God is in control of our lives:

He's still working on me to make me what I ought to be.

It took Him just a week to make the moon and stars,

The sun and the earth and Jupiter and Mars.

How loving and patient He must be, He's still working on me.

Rain drops, originally uploaded by nirmal_2186.

Just after the afternoon drizzle I shot this. Good that it rains. Madurai is too hot these days.

Flowers in my backyard

Flowers, originally uploaded by nirmal_2186.

This is my first shot of nature using my Digi Cam

No more a student

The final semester results are out. I’ve scored a GPA of 8.93. Never have I been so anxious about the results. It’s for two reasons I was so. Firstly, all through the final semester I’ve been involved in organizing Microsoft related activities at our college campus: 2-day .NET Workshop, Launch of Windows Vista, Campus Reach Programs and not to forget the 2-day session on Windows Vista by Ajay Thomas, Academic Developer Evangelist, Microsoft in TCE, MKU, KLN CE and SIT. Secondly, three out of the six papers were very theoretical.. With college life drawing to a close lemme compile what all I've done in each semester right from first semester till the eight semester:

I Semester: Came across a totally different teaching style at college compared to school. Disappointed with the score I got in the semester exam with the amount of effort I put in.

II Semester: Completed my first project along with Ramji, an Inventory Control for Web Design Lab, CSE Dept, TCE using VB6.0 and MS ACCESS. Then, a couple of projects in JScript and VB 6.0. During the semester holidays, started learning ASP.NET (Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix Mechanical Workshop by Mike Pope) hoping that it would have something for me in the years to come. Semester results were better this time :)

III Semester: Did a Quiz engine using ASP.NET and SQL Server 2000 along with Ramji. Then registered as a team of five on Police Crime Record Management System under the Microsoft Student Project Program 2004-2005 (renamed now as Microsoft Academic Project Program).

IV Semester: Was busy the entire semester even during the weekends seriously working for the project. Then the preliminary project review at Coimbatore Institute of Technology. Had interesting experiences (My teammates know what it is ;)). Got in-touch with Kevin D’Souza, Abhisek Kant of Microsoft. Our project got listed among the Top 300 projects in India and our project won the Best Project Award in South Zone from Microsoft

V Semester: Not much activity this semester except for the first .Net User Group meet at our campus where only 12 people turned up after a lot of canvassing. I and Padmashree made as Managers of the MaduraiDotNet UG.

VI Semester: Got an opportunity to see Bill Gates in person at Bangalore. Then the community launch of VS 2005, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006 at Madurai and Kaushik’s session. Got in-touch with Deepak Rajendran of Microsoft (Rarely can you come across with a guy with such a passion towards Microsoft technologies) who helped us in organizing the event here. Microsoft Community Roadshow headed by Reza and Team in TCE, KLNCE and SIT Placement Preparations ON.

VII Semester: Got dual offers. Visit to the Microsoft India Development Campus, Hyderabad last September as a part of the Microsoft Student Partner Program. Got a chance to interact with peers all across India. Won the Best New User group Award from Microsoft for the MaduraiDotNet User Group. Visit to KLN CE, LDC and SIT for conducting .NET Sessions.

VIII Semester: You can read it in this same post and here

I almost forgot!!! my good old mini bus, my mode of transport to college every morning for which we celebrated Bus day in the 8^th semester :)

Over the past 4 years my college has shaped me well and am thankful to God for helping me complete my course.

All these incidents mark the end of college life whose memories will be with me always.

Warning...Warming!!!

Yesterday a news report in CNN showed an alarming increase in Global Warming across the globe. CO₂ from vehicles is the major cause for Global warming. The top 3 nations that lead the pack are the US, China and India. But reports suggest that this will not be the trend in the coming years. China is fast competing with the US and will overtake it within the end of this decade. India too has reasons to worry as its emission rate has grown by 50% as it was in the early 90s. Scientists all around the world are working on techniques to prevent CO₂ from reaching the Earth’s atmosphere. Former US Vice President, Al Gore and Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airlines have announced a cash prize of $1 million to anyone who can come up with an ingenious solution to counteract this problem.

If you have any idea don’t just sit at home, go get the prize.

Mr. Weirdie

I read a review of the movie Spiderman 3 in The Hindu today. The thing that immediately came in my mind was the sticky hairs and its weird looking eyes. So I decided to snoop around my backyard for spiders. After a couple of strolls I found this weirdie on the wall. Thanks to my Olympus Digital Camera the photo came out pretty good.

Camera model: Olympus SP510UZ
Mode: Micro mode
Focusing: Automatic focus

A great way to celebrate the release of Spiderman 3 ;)

5 things the world doesn't know abt Me

I was tagged by this friend of mine. Here it goes:

1) I always wonder why one doesn’t fall while riding a bicycle. Keep aside the laws of Physics I know how it works. But it’s truly awesome to sit and think over that.

2) I always start studying only at clock times which are multiples of 15, like 3:00, 3:15,3:30,3:45 and so on.

3) Mango is one of the fruits I hate the most but I like drinking mango juice for reasons I don’t know myself

4) I eat cornflakes very often for breakfast. Except the plain flavor I don’t take any other flavors with milk.

5) The food I hate the most is Idli....

Procexp Tool => IE7 Vs Firefox 1.5

The procexp tool which comes as a part of the Windows CRK Toolkit is really cool. Its one amazing tool that allows developers to analyze the performance of an application by stepping up through the stack of DLL calls. So I tried to analyze which one of these either Firefox 1.5 of IE 7 consumed a larger memory overhead in terms of bytes occupied by its executable. If you’re a guy from the Open Source World, this info would be interesting

Move to drive name\CRK\Tools\CRK-Tools.zip directory and start the procexp tool. Then invoke separate instances of Firefox and IE7. These two EXEs appear below the Explorer.exe which is the parent process of both. Then select Properties from the context menu of these two processes, you’ll get a dialog box showing the following.

The analysis was made under the following conditions:

Processor: P IV 1.4 Ghz

Main Memory: 384MB

IE version: 7.0

Firefox version: 1.5

I opened 5 Tabs in both and the private memory occupied was as follows:

IE7: 40.7 MB

Firefox: 10.2 MB

Much to the delight of the Open Source Guys!!!

The point I am trying to make is procexp is a superb tool to analyze your applications :)

The Windows Academic CRK comes with Presentations on the following:

• Overview of Operating Systems
• Operating System Principles
• Concurrency
• Scheduling and Dispatch
• Memory Management
• Device Management
• Protection and Security
• File System
• Real-Time and Embedded Systems
• Fault-tolerance
• System Performance Evaluation and Troubleshooting
• Scripting
• Windows Networking
• Comparing the Linux and Windows Kernels
• Windows-Unix Interoperability

You can download the Windows Internals CRK here

It’s about 50MB in size.

Silverlight??? What it is all about

Microsoft Silverlight (code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a proprietary dual-platform XAML-based WPF technology for video, vector graphics, and animations. These plug-ins will allow compatible browsers to use Silverlight graphics capabilities. The browser plug-ins will be similar to Adobe Flash. Microsoft claims that content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as XAML

Silverlight is being designed to work in concert with XAML and will be scriptable with JavaScript. Version 1.1 will contain a version of the Common Language Runtime so it can execute VB.NET and C# code.

If you are an AJAX guy. This is one thing you wouldn't want to miss!!!