Screenshot of my openSUSE desktop

Blogger Widget

Phew!! I finally found a Blogger Widget for Dashboard...

In case this sounds all Greek to you, Dashboard is like the Windows Sidebar for Vista, except for the fact that, Dashboard is the counterpart for Mac OS X.

I have been searching for this widget since  long time on the Apple Widgets page. Thankfully, I finally found it in the widgets created by Google.

I'm in the middle of the tests so there's not much happening at the moment....

More Later,
Bye...

Net Rationing @ BITS Goa

Well..... it seems I'm motivated to write another post, when it gets too irritating to keep something locked up in my head.

Guess this is the place where I can let it all out.....

The third year of my college just started a few days back, and it's been quite a long time since my last post.....

We came to campus to find that there was no internet here for the first three days. Today is the first day of Internet in this semester.

There was a notice put up in our hostels today which stated the following...

In order to provide good internet speed to all students, the net timings would be as follows:

5 pm - 7 pm - C Wing Hostels
7 pm - 9 pm - A Wing Hostels
9 pm - 11pm - C Wing Hostels
11pm - 1 am - A Wing Hostels
1 am - 8 am - All Hostels

Now, the internet problem has been existent in BITS since a long time, but I honestly do not think that rationing out the net like this is the solution. The network admins should instead improve the infrastructure, and probably increase the number and efficiency of the proxy servers. Even now, they fail to configure all four proxies for each wing. Instead they give only two proxies, resulting in the same effect, so there really isn't much difference in the internet speed in the end.

One can probably start by reading thru the man file of squid, I guess that will be quite helpful. Other than that, when it comes to the download size restriction, I think that it should be increased from 5 mb to atleast 50 mb, taking into consideration that most driver download files (for example, the NVIDIA driver for linux) are more than 5 mb in size.

And as far as the timings go, I personally feel that they are very unsuitable for the A Wing side. Dinner usually starts at 8pm, so if we need to access the internet, we either need to skip dinnes, or stay awake late at night after 11 to access the internet, while the C Wing side gets internet after snacks, i.e. at 5 pm and after dinner, i.e. from 9pm to 11 pm.

Kudos to the network administrators.....

Thats it for now,

More later when I get another internet slot......

Quark '08 and Natasha

Its been a while.......

College ain't simple.. at least in Year 2 Sem 2......

Lotsa things to do.... reports... n assignments.... n projects..... hardly any time....

Waves '08 is here... and thankfully it gives me a bubble of time to breathe and live for myself instead of my CGPA (which keeps falling down no matter how hard you try to bring it up)

Its about time I wrote something to polish my non-existent English writing skills so here I go...

Many people have written various articles about Quark '08 so I'll make mine a little different and write about my contribution rather than Quark '08 in general

Quark is our college tech fest....

This year we wanted to make it legendary so the preparations had begun well in advance......

The organising committee this year had analysed the drawbacks and problems which had occurred at Quark last year and intended to make this year's Quark smooth and problem free....


Rewind to the beginning of Year 2 Sem 1

I had been for some while tried to learn PHP (its a language used to make dynamic web pages) following which I had made some simple web pages and a couple of small projects.....

Theres another friend into web development, I'll call him Han here (I just don't like to put down names in a public place). He's done a couple of good projects in PHP, Javascript, AJAX, CSS etc etc (Yeah I know its greek.... It's Greek to me too....)

Seeing our interest in the field, we were contacted by the CO of Quark '08 and asked to make an Content Management software (alike Joomla... if u dunno what Joomla is... plz Google it)

The CO being a really good programmer himself, gave us some tips on the database structure, and how the various modules should be designed.....

We were jobless anyway, so we started work right away.

Since I possessed lesser skills than Han, we decided that I build the smaller modules and some bigger ones, and he does the rest of them and the most important part of design and putting them all together.....

So we started planning our modules one by one and coding them......

The nature of PHP (no debugging tools available, and not too many ready made modules) made my task a handful (coding for the same things over and over again isn't exactly enjoyable) This led to a loss of enthusiasm at many times... But we came back, taking a break for a couple of weeks whenever we thought it was getting too boring to code....

All this lasted for almost one semester...... Then began the part of putting it all together....... Designing and testing.....

Since our modules were coded from scratch and there was no prebuilt code used..... we knew our code inside out and so there weren't any (noticeable) bugs.....

Once the designing was done, we named it Natasha (I really dunno why... It was Han's idea, but I like the name anyway..... Reminds me of my days in school - only a few will know what I'm talking about).......

After showing it to the Info Man in charge.... and implementing other modules as necessary, we had a fully functional event management system ready......

We then integrated the registration data from the Internet web site of Quark, to give us a complete database of everything related to Quark.

Natasha was used at the main gate to register and give accommodation to all students who were visiting our campus during Quark.

Later, we had a plasma screen in the B-Dome which showed how many students had come in from outside the campus, which events were scheduled for the day, the status of the events, (based on the status set by the event managers) a scrolling marquee showing News at Quark '08
and also the cricket score......

All's well but however, all this took a little more time than we had expected to, so we had no time for all the Event Managers to get familiar with it...... leading to the old pen n paper method...... anyway..... at least the CS/IS event managers used Natasha and were quite pleased with the functionality...

We received some good feedback (most of it being - It's too complicated to use - Papad Rule in play, so it was pretty obvious)

Well, atleast people now know that something like Natasha existed, and in all probability will be used next year too.... so they'll learn to use it well before...

However, I'm bored of web development (I'm more of a programmer than a designer) and I may not be fixing and coding Natasha next time, so I request anyone who is interested (seniors, juniors, anyone) to work on Natasha to contact me or Han... skills required will be any or all of PHP, Javascript, HTML, AJAX, CSS...

Even if you don't know any of the above, it all can be learnt in a matter of a few weeks of dedicated effort and willingness to learn......
I assure you working on Natasha will be a highly educational (and maybe entertaining) experience

Looking forward to the next Quark......

Cheers!!!

Water in a Tubelight

Captured on the train while coming back to campus. There's water in the tubelight, and its a wonder how the tubelight hasn't short-circuited yet. Here's 'Nisarg Saundarya' (Nature's Beauty) for you VAB, not outside the train but but right inside it........ :)

Cube Hunt

Puzzles have always fascinated me right since childhood. I have solved a variety of puzzles available at the local toy shops back home. On the second last day of college before a Diwali break, I was in a friend's room chatting with him when I saw a puzzle there which I had been unsuccessful at solving a long time.

The Rubik's Cube, one of the oldest puzzles available and also one of the most popular, was lying on his desk. Suddenly, my interest in it was rekindled, and I just had to buy a cube and learn how to solve it.

As soon as I got home, the first thing I did was get myself a cube from a local fair. The cube wasn't of a very high quality, but was decent enough to learn how to solve.

Jump to a month later.....

I had bought a cube but due to the busy exam schedule, I hadn't got an opportunity to actually analyse and solve it properly, though I had tried to play with it for a couple of minutes whenever I got the time.

Finally, after trying repeatedly to unsuccessfully solve the cube, I turned to Google™ for help. Finding a tutorial was simple enough. During the journey back home, I finally learned to solve the cube, but was still a little shaky.

During the vacations, I could finally perfect my technique but ended up spoiling the cube in the process......

Here's where the cube hunt began.....

I wanted a cube that was of a better quality that I already had. The first place I thought of was the toy store from where I used to buy all my puzzles a long time ago. However, unfortunately, the store had only one cube, but that was of a very low quality, compared to my cube.....

I tried going to a few more shops in the vicinity, but there I had trouble even getting the shopkeeper to understand what a Rubik's Cube is.

I had to visit my relatives in a neighbouring town. I tried visiting all the major shops there too, but to no avail....

Finally, there was one last shop left which I thought might be having a good cube for sale.....

I go there and find that all their cubes were sold out just two days ago. I asked the shopkeeper when new stock would arrive, and he told me that I would get a cube in a week....

Now the problem was that the vacation was almost over, and I had to return two days later, and hence my dream for a better cube remained a dream.

Hopefully, I will be luckier next vacation and will finally be able to procure a cube, and continue learning to solve it faster than the basic method I am now familiar with.

Until I get a new cube.........