Last week, we didn’t have much to do at the hostel – so we decided to have a feast, where we would be the cooks. After a lot of excited discussion – we went for the simplest possible menu, chicken, rice/roti, and salad. After a head count (and recount), we found that there were 25 of us, and we decided to go for 12 Kg of chicken. So, on Friday afternoon, Abhijit, Gajendra, Gourav, Somnath and myself went to the Diamond Harbour market and bought around 14 Kg of chicken (undressed), 1 kg of yoghurt, 2 kg of tomatoes, 1.5 litres of mustard oil and half a litre of kerosene. The rest, we managed to salvage from our college canteen store. Meanwhile, Sourav, Arin, Kushal, Debangshu and the rest of the guys at the hostel setup a temporary kitchen at the balcony and collected the firewood.

After a lot of debate on the recipe, we kind of arrived at a consensus, and started to cook, with various kinds of goof ups happening (for example, we put the onion pieces in the oil first, and after a few minutes, decided that we should be putting in the ginger/garlic/onion paste instead… got a big spoon, fished out all the onion, and put in the paste in the oil, let it fry and then put in the half fried onion again) and all kinds of advice on cooking coming in from all quarters.

After almost 4 hours of cleaning, marinating and cooking, the food was ready (and believe me, it tasted really good). In the end, we had a really good feast – the only casualty being the HoD’s class on the next day, which none of us attended . Here are some pictures (I didn’t have my proper camera around, so I had to work with the camera of the A780):


# cat cpuinfo
Processor : Intel XScale-Bulverde rev 7 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 291.63
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
CPU implementor : 0x69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0x411
CPU revision : 7
Cache type : undefined 5
Cache clean : undefined 5
Cache lockdown : undefined 5
Cache unified : harvard
I size : 32768
I assoc : 32
I line length : 32
I sets : 32
D size : 32768
D assoc : 32
D line length : 32
D sets : 32

Hardware : Motorola Ezx Platform
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000


…I bought the Motorola A780 .

My old Motorola E398 phone is dead, and I’m thinking of buying a new GSM phone. The candidates right now are the Motorola A1200 (MotoMING) and the Motorola A780 (both Linux based). Probably I’ll end up buying the Motorola A780, since it has got support for EDGE (though I completely fail to understand why the Motorola A1200, which is newer than the A780 does not support EDGE). I’ll try to swap the 256 MB memory card which comes with the A780 for a higher capacity card (1 GB or 512 MB) – and as for the rest of the features of the A1200 which are not present in the A780 (FM Radio, 2 megapixel camera, business card scanner, support for the Bluetooth A2DP and AVRCP profiles, etc), I’m simply not interested. One more advantage of the A780 is that it has got a physical keypad, while the A1200 is entirely touchpad/stylus based. Knowing myself and my phone usage pattern, the keypad is going to be a major screensaver .

After doing some Googling, it also turns out that most of the directories in the A1200 is locked using SELinux, (yes – right, you have got SELinux on a phone) while the A780 is comparatively less restrictive (you can telnet into both the phones, and you also have a 3rd party terminal emulator program which runs natively on the A780). Someone also managed to get Debian GNU/Linux to run on the phone, and there is also an unofficial SDK which lets you develop native apps for the phone (the official Motorola recommendation is to go the J2ME way).

I’m looking for some feedback from people who have actually used the A780 – if you have any issues with the phone please do let me know.

Durga puja was spent mostly at Maddox Square (I’m too lazy to do pandal hopping) and meeting up with old school mates. Took a few pictures – will upload them when I get some time.

I need a haircut…



..and I’m getting addicted to the Mac