Videocache

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 Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Life, Linux, Success

Busy with videocache

VideoCache project has come a long way since I started it in June last year as youtube_cache. I have released 18 version in last 8 months of time. Complete log of versions is available in the videocache code repository. Currently it supports audio and video (including HD) caching from 14 websites. It has been an exciting journey with videocache. Adding features/websites to videocache on user requests following a typical agile open source development model is more than just fun. The driving factor for the project has been my interest in web delivery optimization,  people writing blogs about videocache, forums discussing videocache, the increasing downloads of videocache and above all Python 🙂

Below are few stats for the videocache project and the website.

January 2009

VideoCache Downloads
Archive downloads – 507
Binary downloads – 318
Total downloads – 825
Downloads per day – 26

Cachevideos.com Stats (Excluding bots)
Unique Visitors – 5714
Total Visits – 10009
Page Views – 34458
Hits – 284585

December 2008

VideoCache Downloads
Archive downloads – 396
Binary downloads – 346
Total downloads – 742
Downloads per day – 23

Cachevideos.com Stats (Excluding bots)
Unique Visitors – 4413
Total Visits – 7924
Page Views – 25739
Hits – 199120

PS : Will blog more frequently this month 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Fun, Internet, Life, Placements, Success, Tips n Tricks, Wireless

Air Nirvana ( Got the job :P )

After countless written tests and two interviews I finally got the job offer from Airvana ( A mobile broadband company). This was the second written test which I cleared. The interview was very simple and straight forward. You can obviously outperform when somebody asks you something from your areas of interest. Main focus during interview was IntelligentMirror and VideoCache, you can guess the rest 😀

Before The Interview

**FUNNY PART**

Checklist before going for interview

  1. Company’s website’s page rank
    • Airvana.com (6 years) has a page rank (Google) of 5. Well thats good. Equals to my website Fedora.co.in (less than 1 year).
  2. Company’s website’s Alexa rank
  3. Domain Availability
    • Checked for Airvana keyword and airvana.in and airvana.co.in was available. Mouth watering. Isn’t it 😀 But somehow convinced myself not to spend another couple of dollars.

**STRANGE PART**

Both Saini(s) of my batch ( Me and Pankaj Saini) are placed together 😀 WTF!!!

Well, finally I am not a jobless anymore!!!

PS : Congratulations to Pankaj and Yogesh 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Computers, Fun, Hacking, Internet, Linux, Tips n Tricks

Back Links to VideoCache

This post’s aim is to boast a bit about my plugin videocache and generating some more backlinks for the website 😛 Recently videocache was discussed on a lot of Thai tech forums. They helped me a get a lot of traffic and exposure for the plugin.

Tutorials in English and Other languages

  1. Youtube Cache with Squid + Lighttpd on Ubuntu
  2. caching youtube squid 2.6.STABLE14 di easyhotspot (xubuntu 7.10)
  3. Caching Youtube dengan Squid di Debian
  4. Youtube Caching using Squid
  5. VideoCache: Plugin para Squid que cachea videos
  6. Squid, SquidGuard, YouTube Cache i AdZapper
  7. 【原创】终于搞定linux下的squid做youtube的cache
  8. Mambang News : Squid youtube caching

Other Backlinks from forums

  1. squid youtube cache
  2. ITP: videocache — cache audio and video files from websites
  3. Python on PFsense
  4. Setting cara menggabungkan 2 line speedy gimana ya..??
  5. only youtube taken from squid 2
  6. Squid zph and Mikrotik
  7. VC5 with webproxy – Caching youtube?
  8. Squid Wiki Pages

And a lot of other backlinks from other Thai forums but they need you to login to view forum posts, so not posting them.

PS : Everybody is in their true colors these days 🙂

PPS : Work is going on for a third squid plugin 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on BC, Blogroll, Fedora, Fun, Life, Linux

The ultimate feel of freedom

I feel really bad when I have a look at blogroll and there are no new posts. What has happened to the so called blogger batch? Well, after a bit of inspection, I discovered that *they* (including me) have placements. But should you really give up what you like just because right now there is something else which is driving you nuts? These days, I see a lot of people (who were cool till a month ago) under serious stress. People like KBC, Ganja who are talented in every possible way from watching the stuff of the other type ( 😛 ) to studies. But its a matter of one or two sentence(s) to completely break them down. May god help them in interview.

What happened to the senior bloggers? Well, it seems few of them are angry at terrorists and want to refrain from blogging and few others think that writing four lines after forty days is blogging. And few others think that they are not kids anymore. The grown up MS guyz now refuse to blog. And few others are now aliens. Don’t expect to hear from them. Thats all! So no bloggers and hence no posts.

And I feel bad when I say that there are countable people in junior batches who actually blog 🙁 There used to be a fight for being in the top 10 in IIIT Blogroll. But now even if I don’t post for a week, my posts will still be in top 10 🙁 Come on people!! What happened to you all???

You might be wondering about the title of the post. The actual post starts here 😛 I feel this (pre-placement time) is the most awesome time of my stay at IIIT-H. I don’t know why but I am experiencing a feel good factor 😉 No tension, no pressure and then these economic crisis boosting the dollar 😛 Taking everything lighter than I can afford. Suddenly everything looks hollow. The studies, exams, placements everything. But still this is THE busiest time of my stay here. Spending all my time on videocache, intelligentmirror, blogging. More than 25 downloads per day of videocache are pushing me to work on it 🙂 And in this crucial time, all I care about is how fast my Fedora boots 😛

Good luck everyone for the placements. And have fun 🙂