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by Kulbir Saini on BC, Fun, Google, Hacking, Life, Linux

Best April Fools’ Day Ever

08:50AM April 1st, 2009

Alarm!!! Ring Ring!!! I had a class at 8:30AM. But thinking that I’ll sleep for few more hours, opted to miss the class.

10:26AM April 1st, 2009

I was in deep sleep (went to bed at 5AM) when my mobile started ringing. I hate it when somebody calls me when I am sleeping. To my surprise it was a call from a faculty member. I took the call and received a congratulatory message. When I asked about the reason, he replied, “You sold videocache for $20000.” I got a thousand volt shock. Immediately all those bollywood flicks (Khosla Ka Ghosla etc.) came to my mind in which X sold property of Y to Z without Y even knowing about it.  I totally lost my mind and couldn’t think of anything. He said a few lines after that and I just couldn’t hear him. I diverted the topic, said two-three sentences and hung up.

Woke up, had some water and switched on my monitor. Saw a message from Ankush Kalkote on Kopete saying, “Congrats yaar. ab to party deni hi padegi.”. In another tab Rishab Mukherjee saying congrats. I started believing it. I tried asking about the source of information but they wanted the god damn party desperately and didn’t really care what I was typing. I immediately openned cachevideos.com to check if somebody had hacked that. It was fine and there were no signs of any intrusions. In the meantime, Rishabh asked me to have a look at Rishi’s status message. It read, “Dollar Chacha (they call me so) has become a MILLIONAIRE. Sold videocache for $20000.” I kept browsing through the list and saw a lot of people changing their status message to the same. A few moments later I realized that its April 1 and everyone is trying to fool everyone else. Frustrated by the whole event, banged my head on the wall and went to sleep.

12:25PM April 1st, 2009

Mahaveer knocked my door asking for lunch. He didn’t know the truth. And fired all W questions (what, why, when, to whom) as soon as I openned the door. I switched on monitor and saw huge queue in Kopete. Everyone going crazy about videocache. People wondering about how can you sell a free software. WTF!!!! I immediately observed a huge potential in this venture. And put up my status as “@all it $21k and not $20k.” In the next five minutes almost 15-20 more people flooded me with queries about the sale.

Few sent congratulatory  mails and few even came up to my room to congratulate. Sudden change in opinion of few people (who didn’t know the truth) around. e.g. “Studies are a total waste of time”, “I should have developed some god damn thing”, “Four years well wasted :(“, “Getting into a job is foolishness” etc…

Taking advantage of the situation, somebody sent a SMTP mail to UG4 which read,

Hello,

As most of you know, Google has bought VideoCache built by me in 20K $. I am really enthralled on this feat. Since, I wish to share my happiness with all of you, I have decided to give you a fantabulous party tonight in the ground just behind the Motorola. Alok n me are busy making arrangements for that. If someone wishes to help us in making the party more than a memorable one, just mail @ mksharma@students.iiit.ac.in
If you wish to visit the VideoCache website, click http://cachevideos.com

As you must have figured it out by now, I didn’t plan any of this. It was planned by few people as a side-effect of attending Indic class. If anyone was hurt, he/she should go and kick Sachin Goyal, Kapil Bajaj, Rishi Gupta, Ankush Kalkote, Ajay Somani.

All in all it was big fun and best april fools’ day I ever had.

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Computers, Fun, Google, Internet, Life

My Googling Stats

Thanks Tifosi for tagging me for this.

Google Search Stats

Google Search Stats

Observations

  1. Top queries suggests that I care a lot about my name in Google search!
  2. Top queries also suggests that I tend to care a lot about the visibility of the work I do.
  3. Top sites stats are awesome! I visit my own sites more than orkut and any other website.
  4. November has to be my lucky month!!
  5. Sunday is a jackpot and Monday goes in hangover!
  6. It seems I am most productive after returning from Coffee Shop at around 11PM as the mid-night stats outperform every other hour! It suggests that I should visit Coffee Shop more often!

I tag ZenWalker!

PS1 : Cleaned my room after 7 months!!

PS2 : Song of the B.Tech. : “Rumors” by “Lindsay Lohan”.

PS3 : Felicity is not coming. We are going there!!!

PS4 : Posting after 20 days 🙁

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Google, Hacking, Hardware, Hosting, Life

Quick updates

    1. Super busy with my VPS adventures. Updated VPS to 512MB RAM and 20GB HDD. Its super fast now at a cost of $50/month 😀 Learnt a heck of technology in past week.
    2. 76 downloads of my software videocache in last two days 😀
    3. Thinking thinking thinking and so on.
    4. Future still uncertain.
    5. Had a real tough time making the resume. Wasted others’ time as well while building it.
    6. Fooling Google is on my hobbies list now 😛
    7. Exams have started yet another time.
    8. Feeling discontent with whatever I know.
    9. Watched Dasvidaniya, Oye Lucky Luck Oye and Sorry Bhai. Watched sorry bhai thrice in three days. Something driving me nuts for the second time in life [snip..].
    10. Rest laterz.
       
      by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Hacking, Success, Victory

      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 😀

       
      by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Google, GSOC, Hacking, LAN, Life, Linux

      Whats keeping me busy lately

      Previous week was a bit more busier than I actually expected. I wonder why I have to attend a lot of meetings. There were 3-4 of them last week.

      Constant complaints about wireless are killing and sometime frustrating. As rishabh pionted out “Become a sysAdmin at IIIT” as a never do thing. I don’t agree completely. But sometimes you get frustrated enough by the complaints and incompetence of your colleagues to say that. Keeping that apart, being a sysAdmin is real fun. You get to play with most critical servers at the place. You learn things that you will never learn in a course or project. (I wonder what we actually learn in a course 😛 One thing I can immediately point out is the attendence management.)

      Apart from above, I have been working on IntelligentMirror, my GSOC project and its sister project Youtube Caching using squid. I have achieved 100% youtube caching without altering the refresh patterns in squid. That means your squid will not malfunction and will cache youtube videos successfully and in a browsable fashion 🙂 Going to release version 0.2 very soon. Working on caching Google and metacafe videos as well.

      And last but not the least, sleep time has increased from 6-8 hrs to 12-16 hrs/day 😛

      PS1 : This is the funniest post, I have ever seen. A must see for MS by research people 😛

      PS2 : Also maruti has posted some nice crap 😛

       
      by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Google, Internet, Review, Tips n Tricks

      Mouse gestures in Gmail

      Did you checkout the gmail labs thingy on the settings page in gmail? They have introduced many features to enhance the email experience.  One of the features is mouse gestures which looks pretty cool and makes browsing in between mails very easy 🙂 To enable, go to setting page in Gmail and then to Labs tab in there and enable ‘Mouse Gestures’. Now go to any of the email folder. Open a message. Right click and hold. Now moving your mouse to left will take you to the next message in folder. Similarly, moving the mouse to right will take you to the previous message and moving the mouse upwards will take you back to the folder 😀 Thats just awesome. Hopefully this will save some of my time while browsing the all time flooded gsoc list 🙂

      Here is a pic of the gesture.

      Gmail Mouse Gestures

      Here is a video as well 🙂

      PS : I didn’t even realize that the previous post was my 50th post 😀

       
      by Kulbir Saini on Fedora, Fun, Google, GSOC, Internet, Life, Linux

      I am fedora’ed

      Ever since I joined IIIT, I was getting closer and closer to Fedora. For almost the first two and a half years, I was a user and explorer (not the internet one 😛 ). I learnt to use and hack many things as I kept climbing up. Few months ago, I stepped up one more stair and started participating in development channels (mainly #yum).

      Though I was not really developing anything, I was reading the source code and was constantly trying to break things. Whenever I happened break something successfully, I discussed it over the mailing list or irc and get it fixed. It was like a prerequisite to get started with the actual development.

      Then my project was accepted for GSOC and I knew that this will really be a huge breakthrough to get started with actual development for open source. I was damn excited as I saw the time coming when I will give back to the open source community.

      These days, I am feeling fedora in everything I do. Being a developer, you get surrounded by Fedora too much that you see Fedora everywhere. I use Fedora all the time. Whatever I code get pushed to Fedora Hosted. Whatever I write, again gets reflected at Planet Fedora. I am now addicted to reading blogs from Planet Fedora. They give you a nice place to host open source stuff, as in Fedora People 🙂 You get an email address [kulbirsaini AT fedoraproject DOT org] , which you can show off in your friend circle 😛 And thats all my routine these days.

      🙂

       
      by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Google, GSOC, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Yum

      Recent Happenings

      1. Entire wifi was down for almost two hours today. Emergency situation. I called whoever I could but just wasted time and money. Wifi admin would have felt totally surprised after getting 25-30 missed calls from my number 😛 Pinged back after an hour and things were back in tune. Thank god!!
      2. Celebrated Yum Bug Day today. We fixed and closed a lot of bugs. Was a very good experience.
      3. GSOC project is going fine.
      4. IntelligentMirror is now hosted on fedorahosted.org 🙂 Checkout the source code here.
      5. Hooked to Gossip Girls 🙂
      6. Playing cricket at 6AM after night out is now becoming a habit. Will post about it sometime 🙂
      7. Duration and frequency of BC sessions is on the rise. OBH really rocks 🙂
      8. Intake of caffeine is on the rise as well. Thanks to OBH coffee machine 🙂
      9. Chatting a lot these days. Don’t ask why ? 😛
      10. Blogged a lot this month 🙂

      🙂

       
      by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Google, GSOC, Life, Programming

      The first gift from Google

      People were wondering about my status messages on GTalk for a few days. It took around a week to ship things. Well, finally I have recieved the first gift from Google as a part of Google Summer of Code Program. Its a beautiful book named “Beautiful Code”. For more information about the book, click here and here. A brief description of the book

      How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.

      Though I don’t like books pretty much, I am looking forward to read it out of excitement and due to the fact that it has contributions from more than 30 world class programmers 😀

      Thank you Google 🙂

       
      by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life

      IRC is addictive, I am hooked

      I have been spending time on IRC since a few months ( 8-9 months) now. For those who don’t know what IRC is, check wiki. This is also a kinda social network but a bit different. This is more or less like yahoo chat rooms. Freenode is one of the most famous networks on IRC. Here I am talking about the techie part of it. Almost every open source project has a development and support channel on Freenode.

      I came across IRC in my first summer vacations. Back then, I used to hang out in #fedora (anything prefixed with a # denotes a channel … like a chat room) as a newbie to see what people talk about. And used to ask any questions that came my way. BTW, I use Xchat as an IRC client. I started answering to people’s questions as I gathered experience and expertise. The regular journey with IRC started in 6th sem. I came in contact with a lot of people via IRC. I came across Seth Vidal on #yum. And we discussed a lot about local yum mirror management. IntelligentMirror is an outcome of the discussions that went on for almost two months in #yum.

      My activity slowed down on IRC after I got busy with projects. After the GSOC result announcement, Ajay Kumar, a GSOC participant from India, created a channel (##gsoc-india) for selected Indians for GSOC’08. I am a regular in that channel now. There are a lot of people from all over the country, from different streams (CS, ECE, Civil etc..), from different institutes (IITs, DCE, DU, NITs, IIIT, PEC etc..) and from different places 🙂 I have got a lot of new friends. We have a lot of fun doing bc, sometimes discussing issues of national interest 😛 and sometimes projects if time allows 😛 Its really addictive and I tend to respond to every single message.

      BTW, it may interest you to know that India is #2 in accepted students for GSOC after US. And next time we’ll probably beat them.

      PS1 : Fedora 9 is out. Bandwidth sucking big time even in vacations 🙁 It’ll take almost 15 hours for Fedora 9 to be in. I am eager to check it out.

      PS2 : Getting a lot of ideas to post about.

      PS3 : We are hoping have a meetup for GSOC participants at Google Delhi and Bangalore Office. It would be REAL fun if it happens 🙂

      PS4 : This is probably the best blog post I have ever seen.