irc

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.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Graphics, Internet, Life, orkut

Google cum Orkut Rocks !!!

I was just killing time on IRC and was browsing some random sites. I opened my orkut account to check if somebody has written a scrap or not. The layout was as usual but there was written Happy Diwali before my email address at the top. I took my mouse to it and I just realized that it was a link to some javascript. I just clicked on it thinking that it would help me kill time easily as it would waste another 2-3 minutes browsing some more crap on orkut. But … after clicking on that link, I was presented with a brand new layout with a diwali theme. The theme was just awesome. I captured it before the feature goes away. Here is a snapshot, if you are late to check that out. Really, google does everything out of the box !!!

orkut-diwali2.jpg