- Will avoid going out of campus as the traffic is really frustrating and it can spoil all the fun.
- Will not overwork myself just for the sake of moral responsibilities.
- Will try to stay away from computers at least for one day in a week.
- Will avoid commitments which may be hazardous. Will think before I say yes.
- Will buy a digicam and start clicking nature to add some liveliness to life. Currently my life is all about few tabs in Gnome terminal and Firefox.
- Will try my level best to renovate IIIT LUG as its almost (?. completely) DEAD.
- Will try to do assignments as I have missed almost all the assignments till now in this sem.
- Will start thinking about aptitude tests for placement.
- Will try to implement caching for Google videos.
- Will try to work on the above resolutions.
Post and Comment of the century
I was trying to sleep and somebody woke me up. I tried controlling myself, but almost shouted at him. Was retrying to sleep since last one hour, but failed miserably as usual. Woke up. Started browsing the regular sites and happened to check comments on my life blog. And saw a back link. Visited and read this awesome post by Sanrag Sood. I never read such stuff in my life. I am sure the guy is crazy/mad/whatever. Its a must read thing. For me its a post of century kinda thing.
Also, I was browsing comments on IIIT Post the other day and read this awesome comment by a guy named “very”. This comment is also a must read kinda stuff for IIITians. For me its a comment of the century.
Condition for a getting a degree
So far the day has been really frustrating for me. I WONDER how people really manage to get a graduate/postgraduate degree when they don’t even know how to use a browser or how to look up ip address of a domain name or how to write an email ??? The institute should consider putting up a course in the final sem in which they’ll check the following
- The student knows how to use a browser.
- He/she knows how to bypass the proxy server for an IP range or domain names.
- He/she knows how to find out the IP address of a domain name.
- He/she knows what is https.
- He/she knows that if ssh is blocked it means if he/she tries to access the server via ssh access will be denied. And server can only display text and it will not cry/shout “Access denied”.
- He/she can find out the IP address of his/her own machine.
This post was written after all the frustration caused by the reason you know. Never mind 😐
Never ever screw your friend list
I have been using Kopete instant messenger since almost 2.5 years now. Never faced a problem with anything and it support all IM servers like yahoo, gtalk, irc etc. But one fine day (when, I don’t know. Probably a few months ago), I mistakenly put Hemant Verma‘s (a student at IIIT Allahabad) name in Vishnu Fafat‘s (a student at IIIT Hyderabad) contact address in my friend list as shown in the image below.
Since then I was talking to Hemant Verma as if I was talking to Vishnu Fafat. Hemant (or Vishnu 😛 ) used to put links in his status message like “Checkout http://profile.iiita.ac.in ” and related things to IIIT Allahabad. I was totally confused about his status messages.
One day (in the beginning of this semester), I asked this
I was shocked. Rawat sir will not allow proxies and attendance is compulsory at IIIT Hyderabad. I thought Vishnu Fafat has gone crazy and will end up screwing his course 😐
The other day, he asked me this
I said somani knows all this stuff as if I would have said to Vishnu Fafat because he’ll know somani. Hemant got a bit confused but he happened to know Ajay Somani because he also takes part in programming contests.
I remember another incident when he asked me for suggestions about the site http://profile.iiita.ac.in/ . I thought this guy Vishnu has gone mad. Why the heck he would ask for suggestions about a IIIT Allahabad site provided he is a IIIT Hyderabad student? But I didn’t care.
And the final incident happened today as shown
Vishnu said he developed that site from scratch. I was almost mad because of two reasons
- Why Vishnu will design a IIIT Allahabad website?
- Why IIIT Allahabad will ever give complete access to a IIIT Hyderabad student to their main website?
I was totally mad at this. But I couldn’t say anything to Vishnu (or Hemant). Accidentally I checked his name in the friend list and in the pop up kinda thing, I saw Hemant Verma (refer to the first picture in the post) and I was like WTF!!!!
While writing this post, I thought I’ll search my Gmail Chat History and I found that I was talking to Hemant Verma as Vishnu Fafat since 26th February, 2008. See below.
I am already not able to remember people’s name/face relationships and then incidents like this totally blow my mind 🙁
My blog is famous now
Its a stark truth that everyone in this blogosphere lives just for the hits, comments and money if applicable he/she receives. And if you are blogger and you are not able to fetch any of these, then I would say you are not doing your work properly. I have seen people doing all kinds of tricks from poking their friends to visit their blog to registering their blogs on random publishing sites to get some traffic. People die to get traffic and I am not an exception. As recently my linux blog has been receiving a lot of traffic which may be because of the following reasons
- From Google (people looking for howtos).
- From planet fedora as my blog is listed there.
- Because of the improvements in page rank.
- Because of my recent plugin development for squid, i.e. youtube_cache and intelligentmirror.
- Because people are dying to use linux 😛
- Because of the aging factor.
Anyway I thought I’ll publish some results.
I have been receiving 800 Pageviews daily on an average. Alexa says my blog’s rank in 3 lakh.
1. Google Analytics stats for the last week
Click for a clear view.
2. Alexa traffic stats for the last week , also available here in detail.
3. I recently activated the who is online plugin on Linux blog which shows how many users are currently online. Normally 5-15 users are online but I was surprised when it reached 38 users.
Click for a clear view.
4. This site says that my blog is worth US$4300.
PS : I think a blogger would know more SEO techniquest than a IE student 😛
Hunt for a digicam begins
Every time I come across something amazing like a poster or creature or scenic beauty, I feel a strong urge to capture the moment but I don’t have a god damn camera 🙁 Since the beginning of this summer vacations I wanted to buy a digicam but wasn’t motivated enough to grab one. But a few guyz and gals have finally motivated me enough to begin my hunt for the digital camera.
I have set the budget at 10K (strictly) and I want a nice digicam + 2GB memory card. My primary requirements are a nice optical zoom of at least 4x with a good digital zoom and Li-ion battery (no AA batteries please). FYI, I am not a pro photographer and if I tell precisely I have not crossed even the newbie level. I have hardly used any digicam ever(only mobiles till date), so I don’t really have any idea about optical zoom and focal lengths but those seems to be the standards when selecting a camera that fit your requirements. I need this camera basically for clicking anything (outdoor/indoor/wherever) and at any time (day/night).
Keeping the above requirements in mind, I spent the entire day on ebay and google. And I finally found that Sony Cybershot DSC W110 fits my needs. Also the price is really low for the features of the camera. Plus there are nice reviews about this model everywhere. I also found Olympus FE 290 good in terms of specifications but this review about the product scared me.
I have almost decided to buy the one from Sony unless I find some other model which offers more for the same or lesser price. If you have any suggestions regarding the camera I should go for, please leave as a comment. It will help me a lot 🙂
Getting Crazy
This happens when you intend to do something positive and its result turns out to be entirely negative 😀 I turned on squid proxy authentication on my machine just for the sake of better security. Switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. Firefox started checking for updates for extensions and now you can see what happened 🙁
Being ill sucks
This is not the first time I am ill but this time I am not able to get rid of the god damn fever, so just thought of expressing some rage against it 😛 All this started last Thursday (Sep 11, 2008).
Sep 11, 2008
I slept at 1AM because I had two exams next morning. I woke up at 7AM to prepare for the exams which was about to start at 9:30AM. When I woke up, I felt that everything was not really fine. But still I carried on, prepared for the exams, had my breakfast, rushed to main building to take the exam. Screwed the first exam big time because whatever I crammed ( 😛 ), I forgot 😉 I even forgot how to multiply two matrices 🙁 To learn, I took two 2×2 matrices in the exam and tried multiplying them and applied the formula |A|x|B| = |R| where R = AxB. I didn’t know whether that formula was valid or not. It was just another wild guess. But the damn thing worked and I learnt how to multiply two matrices. Sat in the exam hall for 1.5 hours for almost nothing. Returned to OBH.
Listen/watched some Punjabi pop videos for a break as if I returned from a war or something 😛 Had another exam at 12:00 noon. As I was walking from OBH to main building it was drizzling. I was not well and then this drizzling thing. Things got worse. Mild cold till now. TIS exam kinda surprised me. I wrote whatever I can think of in half an hour and rushed to Yuktahaar. Had lunch .. back to OBH and Punjabi pop videos at full sound as if India won a cricket match against Pakistan 😀 (BTW I don’t like cricket.) Did nothing useful for the rest of day. By that night I got mild fever. Mild fever + mild cold is awesome combo. You are not well enough to work but at the same time you are not unhealthy enough to rest. After Punjabi videos for the rest of the day and half the night, got back to browsing stuff. At about 2AM, went to Rishabh’s (the other student sysadmin) room to discuss some download policies. Was there up to 4AM. Got back and went to sleep.
Sep 12, 2008
Deepak rushed to my room at 10AM saying that we have some Systems and Network Security lab. I got ready asap and we were in lab in another 15 minutes. Did some blah blah in lab up till 11AM. At 11AM I asked TA for leave as I have to attend a presentation by few people from Cisco and IronPort. I wasn’t feeling really well but I decided to attend it. The presentation lasted longer than I assumed. It got over at 2PM. I rushed to OBH without any delays. Had lunch and went to my room to take some rest. But computer is a devil. Browsing stuff for the rest of the day.
At 6:30PM, Pankaj (another devil) pinged me and asked for McD. OMG. It has been months since I went to McD. Before going home, I used to go McD every week. And it the last week before going home, I went to McD thrice in the same week (twice alone :D). I couldn’t refuse. Finally me, Kapil Agarwal, Sambhav, Pankaj, Sachin aka KKG headed to city center. Pankaj and Sachin dropped off at Pizza hut and the rest of us went to McD. Had burgers, french fries etc.. It was nice visiting McD after a long time. We visited some shops in the mall after that especially the e-zone. E-Zone is the most fascinating shop in Hyderbad. After our quick visit to different shops, we had ice-creams at McD. It was raining (not drizzling this time) outside and I was emphasizing time and again to wait for the rain to stop because I was ill. But Kapil forced a bit and I have this ego problem. I didn’t wait for anything and rushed out in the rain towards the bus stop. We were waiting for a bus or an auto at the bus stand near city center for almost 10 minutes. We boarded a bus and headed to Mehndipattnam. From there we got into an Indica (thanks to all the employees on the wipro-infosys road 😀 ). Returned to IIIT. Got back to browsing and server analysis. By that time fever was not mild anymore. Went to sleep.
Sep 13, 2008
Woke up at 2PM. Just another day. Watched few movies, video songs. Nothing special to be mentioned here.
Sep 14, 2008
Woke up at 2PM. Rushed to Indira Nagar to see the doctor with Sambhav. I was surprised when doctor said I didn’t have fever. He gave some antibiotics. We went to reliance fresh, bought some eatables include three liters of apple juice. Got back to IIIT. I consumed one liter of that apple juice in just three hours to recover from weakness. But to my surprise that didn’t help at all. Situation got worse after dinner. Took few medicines and went to bed. After 12:20AM situation got even worse. I thought a lot about going to hospital. At 1:30AM, I decided to go to Apollo. Me and Mahaveer rushed to Apollo. Saw the doctor. He referred for some tests and gave some medicines as well. We headed back to IIIT at 3AM. There is a sensitive story related to our return but will write that in another post. We were back at IIIT at 4AM. Went to bed.
Sep 15, 2008
Woke up at 8:30AM. Had breakfast. Had milk in the breakfast for the first time (health conscious 😛 ). Rest of the day was just like another day. I am still not completely well. Let see whats next 🙂
PS : I am not going to proof read the post as I am ill. Ignore any mistakes you come across 🙂
Exams are here
The first mid sem exams has already started. I have only two mid sems this time. Looking at the blogroll one can easily guess IIITians have finally got something to do. The oldest post on front page is 3 days old. Preparing for exams is a good thing but final year students don’t have enough of them. So where are these guyz???
This time I am bit nervous about mid sems. Feeling like I never took a test and this will be the first time experience 🙁 BTW I have got a major break through in my quest for caching the internet. Will share it soon. It’ll improve the caching efficiency of my GSOC project IntelligentMirror by almost 300%. This caching thing is not permitting me to prepare for exams.
Hail open source!!!
PS : This was a total random post. Wrote is just like that 😐
Passed GSoC
I have passed my final evaluations for my Google Summer of Code’08 project IntelligentMirror. It was fun and excitement developing the squid plugin. The best thing was I didn’t have to move to a different place or go office for working. Work at home, do what you always wanted to do (open source stuff), talk with people with similar interests(fedora people), get nice payments and have your first project released in open source domain 🙂 That was GSoC.
Another post coming up with detailed GSoC experience 🙂
Have fun,
General Bordeaux 😀