*I* deas

Yeah ! this sem which is just about winding up has been the best of all the sems.This is how a typical CS dept at NIT,Trichy goes .Every day 2 classes and 2 lab sessions a week and the rest … .But this time we have had atleast 40 classes per subject and networks crossed 50.I know classes are a pain but the best part of this sem was the projects.

The hallmark of any good college is in the projects end up doing .I remember cs guys at iit’s doing projects that are at the very heart of computers.Be it with operating system or networks,compilers .For most part we worked with the same algorithmic implementations and blah blah but this semester it was decided not to have any lab sessions for internals.It will only be a one project demo at the end and the topics were carefully chosen so that they were not implemented.

Wel compilers lab had to be the best where we spent time learning automata and compiler compiling tools ( lex and yacc) so much for these that we have been using lex for all kinds of parsing :-) .

The networks landed us in to implementing RFC’s ,for those who don’t know what an RFC is ,it stands for request for comments.Where you propose a standard/protocol and let people comment on them and if many agree it goes on to become standard.

They are great because since they are not implemented,you cannot steal them and hence you end up learning at the very heart of networking ( network layer and not application layer) .

I had RFC 4501 which talks about implementing a DNS URI .Its defining a resource retrieval protocol for dns information .Just like how http:// is a resource identifier and similary ftp:// and it also brings with it parameters type .

for eg :

dns://google.com?type=mx dns://google.com?type=A is a query and you should be able to get the mail exchange records and Address records of google.com .I know its not difficult accessing these informations but getting to write your own code for this is a huge learning curve definitely .

As usual i started off with python and first thing i had to do was parse the dns://string?type=s & class=in .

The default parser for URL parsing somehow doesnt work for dns:// although it works flawlessly for http,ftp and smtp .Even cheap hacks in to the library didnt work so you start with lex to parse your input string and then find the type and schema to do the rest .

Doing this was a lot of fun as it was pretty much for the first time that i got to work on the networking basics,really .

And with Hari it was even more fun.His was RFC 4952 .It was to implement internationalized mail . for eg,

say i could type <ramesh in tamil font>@server.com and it should be sent to ramesh@server.com .This is fun isnt it ? he got to work with mail system in unix and also sendmail .

I guess these are some of the advantages you get when you study in one of the top T schools in the country ( Atleast that was what people tell us every year) .

And not to forget the apple stall that happened in campus this sem :-)

It has really been a super duper sem this and hopefully we will have a better one next sem with only project to go .

And for the news ,i am sure you guys must have heard about Iyer’s ( Yeah the same 96lpa guy ) crack at ACM kanpur .It was a record ,no team except his have ever managed to solve entire problem set in an ACM match and also that it was never in this history that IITB ACM team was ever beaten on indian soil.Both these things happened and Iyer said ” Killall kills all”

The results can be seen here http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/regionals/ViewRegionalStandings.asp?ContestID=866

The code for dns uri implementation is ready but a little ugly really ,will put it up when i clean it up for final code submission and yeah ssk is planning to start a code repository :-) in lan

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