Doctoral Commitee Meets on 31st August

Doctoral Committee (DC) meeting is scheduled on 31st of August. It is an annual review of my reserch. I need to write a report and give copies to six DC members and departmental office. So mostly I will not be convening any meeting from today as I need to concentrate on analysis of the results, report and presentation preparation. Eventhough I will take care of EMLs scheduled during this period. I will try to attend some meetings if necessary.

But naturally, I will complete my responsibility over this weekend in the Tsunami Challenge BPlan Competition.

Green Peace Exhibition on 2nd and 3rd Sept

Most of us know about Green Peace. If some body does not he or she can do a search on net. They will be in the campus on 2nd and 3rd Sept for an exhibition about there history of their evolution as an international organisation. We will provide them mostly HSB113/114 and CLT.

First EML Videographed

We had the first EML of the season. It went exceedingly well. I am completely impressed by politeness and simplicity of Prof Krishnan Balasubramanian. All the arrangements were made well. I must congratulate Harshit and all members of EML team for their excellent job.

This lecture was unique in one aspect. EML team started videographying the lecture series by its own camera which is just twenty six hours old as of now. These lectures will be put in library and also on a streaming server for future use.

Servers for Message Board and websites of Shaastra/Saarang

I again gave the desired specifications for the computers to DoS. One computer will be used for the Institute Students Message Board and the other will be used to host the websites of Shaastra and Saarang. The approval for these computers is already taken. Also the software for the message board is already purchased.

First extramural lecture of the year

Today evening we will have the first extramural lecture of this year. We have invited Prof K Balasubramanian of University of California Davis, Livermore for the talk. He will talk on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Arts and Science.

Action Taken and Action to be Taken for Improved Internet Access

I received email from Prof TAG just sometime back. The mail goes like this.
============================
Prasad,

Earlier, 3 proxies were being used for the Academic Zone and only one for the Hostel Zone. Sreekumar (with help from Dinil of DONlab) discovered that part of the problem was that the Hostel Proxy was overloaded and hence delaying/losing requests. This caused access to even local websites and smail to be slow. He then reconfigured the proxies so that the Hostel zone shares 2-3 proxies. This would have caused the improvement that you experienced.

In the next day or two, Sreekumar will configure the proxies to change the Internet bandwidth allocation as follows:

Academic zone:
7 a.m. - midnight: 3x2 Mb/s
midnight - 7 a.m: 1x2 Mb/s + 2x2Mb/s shared
Hostel zone:
7 a.m. - midnight: 1x2 Mb/s
midnight - 7 a.m: 1x2 Mb/s + 2x2Mb/s shared

This should further improve the download speed for external websites during the late night hours. One of the Shastra coords from EE Department had met me last week regarding their website access. If he is still having a problem after these changes, ask him to meet me again.

Regards
TAG

Internet access in the hostel zone improves today

Today morning I experienced improvement in internet access in hostel zone. I have asked for the information from Prof TAG about the action taken for the same.

Some days back I had informed DoP about the clogging in the hostel zone. This report was well received by him. He asked Prof TAG to look into the matter. After studying the situatition for a day Prof TAG made some observations and shared with me. It seems that some action must have been taken. It's good thing for all of us.

Tsnunami Challenge BPlan Competition - First Leg

Second day of the competition concludes. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were completely busy with the competition. This was some thing that I consider myself fortunate for being involved in my capacity both as the students representative and as an individual. Total 128 teams from varius collages in Tamil Nadu had registered. This itself talks about the kind of response the competition recieved. From our institute 21 teams had registered but after screening only six were allowed to participate. I think there was no alternative for us other than this.

There are so many things to write about the experiences during the time organising this event. I will certainly do that if time permits.

The finals for this competition are scheduled on the next weekend. Only 8 teams will make to the finals. Results of screening will be announced at 6 pm tomorrow.

Many thanks to the volunteer who were exemplary in their contribution.