Amit’s Blog…

Four years – Forty Subjects! If that does not sound crazy enough, there’s more to it; the practical and oral exams. Every semester we take up five subjects, some of which we will never need! But if you want to get a degree you need to know about all the subjects. As long as you manage to score a 40rty in all of them, you are safe.

Clearing the theory paper is pretty easy, scoring is tough. As long as you know what’s in your syllabus and you are not very unlucky to get an arduous paper you are fine.

While it might be easy to get away with the theory papers is easy, it is not the case with the practicals and orals. It is not like in some colleges in Nepal where the marks that you get for your practicals depend on what the ‘external’ got to eat for the breakfast in your college!! Here, for practicals you really need to know your stuff AND be lucky. After doing all the assignments during the semester, you need to know all of them unless you are banking on some luck! You are supposed to pick up a chit which decides what you have to perform that very day. Even if you know your stuff, sometimes, you get unlucky and you just can’t get the damn code working! Luckily, this never happened to me during the four years. All my practicals have gone great, finishing most of them within an hour or a couple of hours max.

On the other hand orals have always been scary. You just cannot be prepared enough for an oral. The ‘externals’ here don’t come to check what you know they just want to show you what you don’t know. Although, most of the orals have been good for me, I did screw up one of them. Having a good reputation with the teachers does help and hence, as I had been a decent enough student in college, I was spared. Not all are that lucky, there are students who give the practical/oral over and over again.

Anyways, MY practicals and orals are done. I won’t be picking up any more chits or answering any more questions. The last practical and oral exam of mine went great!

Have to wait until June 5th to give my theory papers. It’s going to be real boring and long 3 weeks ahead.

I have my Network Information and Security practical exams on the 4th. I have been trying to implement most of these encryption algorithms on Java. The very nature of the algorithms and being incompetent with Java made it that much more difficult; overflowing, under flowing, data loss and what not!

I also tried to find a simple implementation of the RSA algorithm across the net but with no success. I finally figured a way out to implement it.

It may not be the most accurate implementation; but good enough if you want to learn how RSA works.

The code follows for those who are interested.

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