The good things : You can get ur ticket done in just minimal extra charge (25 Rs/-) and stop bothering about going to a reservation counter and then standing in the long queue and sometimes getting to hear that the time is up (8 PM is the final time for ticket issue).

Here (i mean on the website) they give you two options, one is to get an online ticket which you can print and take for ur journey along with a photo proof for e.g Driving licence or passport etc. This is called e-ticket. The other option is i-ticket where the ticket is delivered to your address too. I only used the first one that too for the first time today, so no comments on the i-ticket. For e-ticket cancellation procedure is pretty straighforward and simple too.

The bad thing: The server was responding with bad errors for long time yesterday and today morning too. I dunno how much traffic has to be handled by these ppl that their server response can be so bad at times. Earlier the indianrail.gov.in site also used to be very slow at times. These days the experience is far better. Hopefully they will find ways to support the huge population of India on there servers.

Photos might give a better idea of what was there in the party. These Photos represent a very high sampled set of overall Fun.

Getting Started…
This one is from CVIT gali (street)

In the Bus

Thanks to the Faculty for the great Party

On the entrance

And on those the Punjabi beats, how can we control ourselves

The pupet show (quite interesting)

Visesh Showing something invisible to us

Boating

After the Shollay Show (resting on charpai(s))

DJ before Dinner

Dinner

Post Dinner Fun

(More photos are expected to be available tomorrow)

Hope Digikam + Flickr lovers enjoy the plugin. ( I am not sure if any other application user find it interesting too.)

Very soon the photoset support would be in too!

Last few days have seen lots of activity in our lab, almost all ppl working most of the times. On one particular day during logging out, I was kinda surprized to see that our lab was open for three consecutive days without break.
Last 3 days have been a different experience as I reached new personal records of sleeping less and lesser. Was not intentional as it never has been but was needed to finish of the work and the sleep was lost in tension probably. Now, its time to relax for 1-2 days , watch some movies, attend some treates and catch up with new friends who arrived in Hyderabad or are coming soon.

GroundHog day is also a good one. Comedy + Fantasy + Romance would be the nice description (as IMDB gave it).

Yesterday evening we(Nirnimesh, Ramneek, Sachin and I) went to this French movie “Le classe de neige”. Can’t comment much upon the movie but it wasn’t as good as the other french movies I have seen till now, and the only possible excuse for it could be that it was supposed to be an Art movie (btw I still understand what that means) But the good thing was that I and Nirnimesh were able to find lots of words/phrases we know in the conversation.

After that it was a dinner at Tabla, followed by the “Titanic” ice cream at Ohri’s. I must tell Titanic Ice Cream had much a different image in my mind and even others (Ramneek atleast) possibly due to the overhyped description by others It isn’t as big as some ppl described it, but yup overall the presentation was different and looked good.

Today morning it was wat I should call a Maggi/ Top Raman diet(Lunch). Possibly the highest number of rounds (4, each time 2 cakes) till date and evening it was again Dominos pizzas. Cudn’t have had a better weekend possibly

BTW AFAIK atleast 3 papers have been accepted from CVIT in the same conference.

Why?
Because Latex allows you to write the equations the way they should be and displays them the best. Besides the funda of Open Format (no strings) etc is upon you to decide

How?
I have seen two alternatives for making presentation in latex,

1. Prosper
2. Beamer

both of them are very similar and requires little effort for installation.
Installation: Prosper and Beamer are available on net for download. Just download the tar file.
Beamer
1) You will also need to download the packages pgf and xcolor which are available in the above beamer link too. On untarring (tar -xvzf file.tar.gz) you get directories say beamer, pgf and xcolor.
2) Move the directory to the path /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex. or try reading this link for more ways.
3) After this just need to run the command texhash and you are done.

Prosper
Installation is much more simple. You can just add the path to directory proper into the $TEXINPUTS variable. by say export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/path/to/prosperdir

Actuall PDF making
Beamer.
A sample presentation tex file is as simple as this one.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usetheme{Malmoe}
\title{ Example of a beamer presentation}
\author{ Vardhman Jain}
\institute{International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad}
\date{26 May, 2006}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Example of beamer}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile1.eps}
\pause
\includegraphics[height=1.4in]{somefile2.eps}
\end{center}
\end{frame}

The example illustrates the use of transition the pause command will hold the display until a key is pressed. So the points can be made to come one by one. Every frame block becomes one slide.

Prosper
Prosper, gives a much simple output. To make another pdf

\documentclass[pdf,default,slideColor,colorBG]{prosper}

\title{ Example of Beamer}
\author{ Vardhman Jain }

\DefaultTransition{Wipe}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

\begin{slide}{Examples}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{filename1.eps}
\end{center}
\end{slide}

Compilation:
Normally presentation classes need to be compiled to pdf before you can view it. xdvi can’t show the output properly. So you need to give commands
latex file
dvipdf file
you can actualy view the resulting file using xpdf or acroread.

Would like to thank Paresh for introduction to these presentation classes of latex.

Farewell: We have recieved farewell from our sub-juniors. Already mention about it but here are some snaps

make to the temple in a year, so Its important for me atleast. (These photos are of Jain temple at Aagapur, Hyderabad, India)

I came to know that many who searched Mahaveer Jayanti 2005 ended up going to flickr photos uploaded by me. I though ppl would like to have some more for this year, so here are them. Some Jain temples are really beautiful and you must check them out.

Since I myself don’t know much about Janism so I wudn’t say anything further, but there is this interesting thing in the temple, which the notes on the photo(flickr) should tell you how to use it.

On our trip, we also went to Karanchi Bakery, this was the first time I was there and I am sure its going to get regular visits from now on. Also visited this Agrawala sweet shop while coming back. The shop provide 100% pure veg stuff: cakes, pasteries etc. Some preview should be helpfull [No I am not paid for adverstising for them, but yes the option is open] [and Yes I do love sweets a lot]

The interesting news was that India's largest Insurance company, LIC(Life Insurance Corporation of India) sealed a deal with Red Hat to use its desktop and server software.

Besides this a small list of big enterprises using Linux already was provided in the post: IDBI Bank, Canara Bank, New India Assurance, LIC, BSNL, IRCTC, ABN Amro, Airtel and even the governments of Maharashtra and West Bengal. 
Another such list is maintained at http://shakthimaan.com/misc/database.html

I am sure Linux does have long way to go ahead in terms of Desktop adaption in the country. But the news like this will surely help dispell some FUD created by big enterprises against Linux. More important would be some ISV coming up with software on Linux. Budding Indian enterpreneurs can definitely try looking at this option now where they can directly compete with others who are also in the starting stage of understanding/exploring software development for Linux.