Life Of Navin - Mere Dil ki Baat...

Semester 7 : The Good Parts

2011-12-31T01:21:00.000+05:30

Aah... that feeling at the end of the semester. That warm fuzzy feeling when all the memories of the 5 months that have just passed by flood the mind. Semester 7 is particularly a remembrable semester for me, for reasons both good and bad. The whole semester was like a rollercoaster ride, always something happening...

There's no point in hanging on to the sour memories though, because the good memories always outlive the bad ones. So here's some of the best memories of my semester:

Semester 7: The Good Parts

Technix 5.0

Wow, so much pure awesomeness happened in Semester 7. Starting off with the big one: Technix 5.0 . Almost 8 months of work culminating into 3 days of lectures, events and workshops. Technix is the annual technical festival organised by the Computer Science department of Goa Engineering College, and this year, it was our turn to take Technix a few steps further from where it was left last time around, and I was glad to say we didn't disappoint. Technix was the biggest technical festival held in college in recent years in terms of participation, collaboration, and sheer hype. And it was my honour to stand at the helm of affairs as General Secretary of CURSOR (the Computer Students' Organisation) in the organisation of this event. The whole experience as part of CURSOR both as SE Executive (in my second year) and General Secretary (in my third year) taught me a lot of life lessons and were some of the best times spent in college. I'd highly recommend everyone to try a taste of college politics. Do read this as well :)

Tandav: Tandav is the intra-college cultural/sports festival of college. After a dismal performance last year, the COMP department was in full prep mode to bring back the Tandav trophy home where it belongs. The Sports segment of Tandav had an amazing bunch of events, and it was awesome to see such spirit and competitiveness among branches. My favorite sports event was the volleyball finals between MECH and COMP (which was an event very personal to COMP, since we lost last year, after a lot of not-really-sportmanlike language/behaviour by MECH players (and final year students) last year). This year, we were out with a vengeance, and since we were the seniors, we weren't going to be pushed around by anyone. The match was the match of a lifetime, staring off with the first 2 sets getting split between MECH and COMP. The final set was a complete romp by the COMP team, and by complete romp, I mean the only way it could be described was as a thrashing! It was brilliant to see the exact opposite of last year's event take place. The MECH supporters had been silenced after a yearlong wait. Oh, sweet revenge! :) Many slogans that originated on that day, such as 'Di Teka', and 'Umeshachi Pepsi...' still ring in my head.

Boycott Scenes

But sports was just half the Tandav story. Next up was the Battle Royale: the cultural trophy... Over the years, the cultural trophy was of Tandav, an event meant to bring the college together through talent, had led to massive branchism in college. Initially, this branchism showed up only during Tandav, but as time went on, branchism which started off at Tandav would veer it's head through the entire year, leading to the college getting split into 6 seperate colleges (6 branches). Since winning became more important than participating, cheating slowly began to rise, to the level that even faculty judges were "fixed" beforehand. This time around, the same thing happened, and the IT branch was heavily favoured. Irrespective of performance of their participants, that branch seemed to be winning every event with ease. Many stories of fixing rose through trusted backchannels, and it reached a stage where certain branches started asking for a boycott of Tandav altogether, in a "Either play fair, or don't play at all" message. COMP was one of the branches as part of this, and while we did not support a boycott of Tandav, we were strongly for fairness in Tandav. At the end of a set of discussions with the organising students' council and faculty involved in the very conception, the conclusion reached was that Tandav has to go on as scheduled irrespective of judging issues. This was unacceptable to 3 branches, COMP, CIVIL and a large segment of IT, who said they'd much rather lose Tandav fairly than win unfairly (Respect to IT students). So, a boycott resulted. And it seemed like our last Tandav was going to end on that sour note.

During 'Summer of 69'! :)

But then something amazing happened. When discussions with the Students' Council was ongoing, I had suggested that we continue Tandav as it is, but remove the concept of scoring, winners and losers from it, since any 'Winner' at this point is useless because events were fixed. Since people had all prepared, some for weeks, I personally felt it was wrong to boycott the event and put to waste all their preparation. Somehow, as the day went on, this idea garnered more and more support, and a few hours later "Amchee Tandav" aka "Tandav 101" was born. One large room, A little convincing of the security guard, Speakers from the hostel, invites via SMS /Phone calls /word of mouth, and in under an hour we had 3 branches that had "boycotted" Tandav come together to have Tandav the way it was supposed to be. People who had slogged weeks off in preparation got a chance to perform in front of their true fans. COMP students said CIVIL slogans, CIVIL students said IT slogans, and we all screamt 'Dara Singh' (Our notorious college slogan). It was a super proud moment for me to see students united as Engicos rather than branches, and it was even more awesome to know that I was one of the people who made it happen! Multiple dance performances, band performances, and song performances later, I was sure this was the greatest ending to Tandav I could expect. Only thing missing was the Fashion Show, which we could not have due to lack of space for a ramp (We honestly hadn't expected soooo many people to show up).

Performing Socha Hai! :)

15 mins of wondering what to do, and BOOM. Someone came up with the idea of a basketball court fashion show. One hour later, the whole crowd had shifted to the basketball court. Carlights, a set of large speakers which had automagically appeared there, some superb freestyle dancers (I still don't know where some of them came from! :P) and Tandav was taken to another level. The most common comment I heard was "Dude, this is like Step Up", and I sooo totally agree! I never knew we had such awesome freestyle dancers in college! It was awesome! And the ending of Tandav 101: The fashion show ofcourse. Call me partial if u want, but that was the hottest fashion show I've seen in my years in college! All in all, Tandav 101 was one of the best days of my life. :)

Hard Rock Cafe! :)

Along the semester, I had a superawesome trip to Pune with Douglas (@mistcrafter), Sahil (@FlamesAlchemist), Damodar (@genzen21) for Pycon 2011. It was 4 days of getting lost in Pune, reaching awesome places, having awesome experiences, and just going completely crazy! Pune is one awesome city, and I really hope I get to visit there more often. My fondest memories of the trip (besides PyCon itself) are the night we decided to watch "Spirited Away", a movie which Sahil claimed was the best animated movie ever made, but at the end of which we all felt we've been on drugs for the last few hours, and the trip to Hard Rock Cafe (where we were lucky enough to listen to Dream On by Aerosmith played inhouse \m/). The whole trip was a geek outing and it was great to be together with fellow geeks :)

Besides this was the trip to Bangalore to relax post-Technix, countless picnics, numerous trips across the state and beyond with friends, Crazy amount of silliness we've been upto, strengthening bonds with people who're nothing short of family to me, as well as with other friends, a never ending list of personal projects, website designs and code, a tonne of internal politics (which I'll really miss post college), all the memories created in Hostel, including the hostel parties and a tonne of other stuff!

People close to me know that the semester hasn't really been easy on me... but let's leave all the sour memories for some other time (or another blog post). Because right now, with these memories, I can confidently say, I've lived life to the fullest this semester... and that's all that I can ask for! :)

My Examtime Online Presence [Infographic]

2011-12-10T02:21:00.001+05:30

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks. - Anonymous

10 things I Learnt As General Secretary

2011-09-12T01:11:00.001+05:30

My first impression of a General Secretary

My earliest memories of college are of this guy named Shakir Usman, the General Secretary of the college students' body talking at the Freshers' Day function (2nd week of my college life), and from that moment, I've wanted to be involved in college politics. I'd be lying if I said he didn't play a part in me wanting to become part of "the system" somewhere down the line.

Over the last year, I was the General Secretary of the Computer Students' Organisation (CURSOR), the students' body of the Computer Engineering Dept. of my college. Last Thursday, I handed over charge to a new set of bright juniors, and I have complete confidence (knowing many of them personally) that they'll take CURSOR to new heights! :)

This is NOT a blogpost praising what we've done or to put someone else down. I'm sort of against tooting my own horn. This is a blogpost that (I hope) every Students' Council member, irrespective of college/branch can relate to. And I hope juniors get a fair idea of what expect as part of the Students' Body, when the time comes for them to take charge. These are 10 things I learnt through my year as General Secretary at CURSOR

There's Nothing (And No One) To Fear
One major reason that I've heard people give for not indulging in college politics is the associated "fear factor" with it. Teachers will hate me because I'm in the Students' Council (I have no idea where this rumour started from), People from class will hate me (Some maybe, at first, but if you're effective, it won't last for long), My girlfriend will hate me (Really? How insecure are you?). For us, there was this certain teacher whom everyone feared, for god knows what reason. She's hyper, a little mad, crazily eccentric, but then again aren't we all? :P You have to realise, everyone's human! It's just about getting that person's soft spot! Be a newborn child.... Have no fear, no preconceptions about people, or about "the system" as a whole.
Dream Big
The reason why most students' councils end up being dull issues are because of people too afraid to dream big. Don't always be serious. Don't be practical. Dream BIG. What's the worst that can happen? A plan that doesn't take off? A plan that falls plop on it's faces? I know this'll sound really cheesy, but starting off is winning half the battle!
Think First, Talk Later
When you're in a Students' Council, especially in a executive post, your opinion is many times considered the opinion of your class, or (in worse cases) of your branch. While this is good in some cases, there are times where your personal opinions are misinterpreted as opinion of the masses. And sometimes, these opinions come back to bite you on your bum. Having personally experienced this, I learnt my lesson...
Get Your Hands Dirty
This is something that I'm sure people have heard about in the past. Students' Council is basically politics, a dirty game, with many underhanded tactics and people without any morals. I won't lie. This is partially true. As part of your work, you'll have to work with many types of people, come up with everything ranging from barters to straight out blackmail to get things done, consider various options ranging from ethical to unethical. I personally tried my best not to work unethically, and the worst I went to was a gray area! Just know that whatever you decide, have the guts to follow through!
Nothing Is Easy
People who've never been in any student body think it's really easy to be in a council. I even heard stuff like "It's a license to bunk" or "Dude, it's just timepass". This may be true if your plan is to just cruise along the year. However, if you want to get any sort of change or make an impact, you have to realise that nothing is easy! The college hierarchy is NOT made to aid change, and while some things will be logically tasking, others will be time hogs, while others will be emotionally tasking (Read No. 7)
Credit is NEVER yours.... Unless something goes wrong!
This applies to the whole council, and more so to the General Secretary. When something goes right, irrespective of the actual contributors, the achievement is of the class (and branch), but if something goes wrong, it's directly blamed on the Council (and the General Secretary specifically). I personally believe in the "Never Blame Anyone Else" philosophy, something that I learnt from one of my personal heroes, and have always tried to step up and take the blame for the team's mistakes (whenever possible). Nobody's perfect!
The Team ALWAYS Comes First
My Team! :)
Like I mentioned before, people outside the council simply cannot understand how or why a student body works, and as such the remaining members of the council become nothing less than your family. These will be the few people who'll understand exactly what you're going through, and how to help.Keeping secrets is part of your job profile, but thankfully, you can share most of those secrets with these people. I was glad to have superawesome people like Rohan Hodarkar (as Treasurer), Anamay Tengse (as Technical Secretary) and Pranali Naik (as TE Executive), who were always there to share the load! It's only because of the way that we gelled together that we managed to do so much through the year, and pull off GEC's biggest technical festival in recent years: Technix 5.0
Help comes from the least expected places
Yes, it happens! I've had help coming in from teachers who've traditionally hated me, people with whom I've never really gotten along with, people who you didn't think could help (eg. security, sweepers, electricians), random people (literally, people who heard we're in a sticky situation and came forward to help), etc. In fact, in many cases, your "contacts" which are lower in the "presumed" hierarchy tend to get stuff done faster than the bureaucratic upper hierarchy. Trust me, never ever close a door.... keep everything half open! Because you never know which door will be pushed open in your time of need!
Shit Happens...
One of the most important things you have to learn: Shit happens... Quite a bit in fact. Our dear Mr. Murphy plays his part in full and stuff starts going haywire. But it's all about keeping stuff within your control. Never write plans in stone! Plans often change at the last moment for a variety of reasons, but you cannot, I repeat, cannot put your hands up in the air and give up, or get all hyper about it. Expect things to go wrong. Terribly wrong. Heck, I even considered the probability of a hurricane happening on the day of an event! :P Still sometimes stuff won't go the way it's planned. Don't take things to heart.... Unless you accept your failures, you're not fit to even think about your successes!
but EPIC EPIC AWESOMENESS Happens more often!
At the end of the day though, you end up having an EPIC time as part of a Students' Body. You'll make friends for life (isn't that the whole point of college?), you'll learn to take responsibility for your actions, you'll learn the value of money (I'm sure Rohan will grin if he reads this! :P), you'll live life on the edge (and off it at times), you'll mess around in everything ranging from politics to administration to plain out marofying. You'll see the best in people, you'll see the worst in people. Some people will trust you with their confidence, others with their bullshit. Everything you say or do seems more professional because it's coming from a person in a post of power. Respect will have to be earned, but once it's earned, it stays! Crazy incidents will happen, both behind and in front of the scenes. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl insults, you'll beg, you'll scream, and most importantly, you'll live!

How very true...

Long story short, being General Secretary of CURSOR was one of the best experiences of my life. It was an absolute honour to lead Team CURSOR through the year, and stay at the helm of affair. All those closed door meetings with teachers, all those maddeningly frustrating arguments, all those crazy experiences will remain with me till the moment I die (and probably even beyond). It was truly a superb experience to work with some of the brightest minds in Goa, and do so much! :)

An(n)atomy Of College Priorities!

2011-08-25T02:48:00.004+05:30

Humko azadi aadhi raat ko mili thi aur savera aaj tak nahi hua.. -Shabana Azmi (on Twitter)

LEX and YACC on Windows

2011-08-24T23:55:00.014+05:30

We've just started compiler design as part of the Language Translators subject at college and a practical aspect of it involves using LEX and YACC for Grammar Lexical Analysis and Parser Generation. Since LEX and YACC are both originally developed for the *nix OSes (read: Linux), there was a sudden rush of classmates downloading linux distros (Fedora being the default choice as it's used on lab systems). In many cases, people actually downloaded entire distro DVDs just for LEX/YACC!

NOTE: When people say they use LEX and YACC, almost always, what they mean is FLEX (Which is an alternative to Lex) and BISON (which is part of the GNU project) /BYACC respectively.

Sticking with the "When in doubt, try another hole" philosophy, I just googled around a little and came up with a much easier solution.

Here's how to set up FLEX and BISON on Windows systems

1) Download the Windows version of FLEX
2) Download the Windows version of BISON
3) Download a C/C++ Compiler (If you say TurboC, I'll reach out through the monitor and thump your head)... I recommend DevCPP or Code::Blocks
4) Install all 3. It's recommended to install in folders WITHOUT spaces in their names. I use 'C:\GNUWin32' for FLEX and BISON and 'C:\CodeBlocks' for Code::Blocks
5) Now add the BIN folders of both folders into your PATH variable. Incase you don't know how to go about this, see how to do it on Windows XP ,Windows Vista and Windows 7. You will have to add ';C:\GNUWin32\bin;C:\CodeBlocks\bin' to the end of your PATH
6) Open up a CMD prompt and type in the following



C:\flex --version

flex version 2.5.4



C:\>bison --version

bison (GNU Bison) 2.4.1

Written by Robert Corbett and Richard Stallman.



Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO

warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.



C:\>gcc --version

gcc (GCC) 3.4.2 (mingw-special)

Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO

warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

If you do not get the output as above, restart your system and try again.

That's it! You now have a Bison and Flex set up! Now for some coding! :)

Create a Lex file, let's say "exp.l" and open it up in your favorite text editor (read: Notepad++)



%{

#include 

#include "y.tab.h"

%}



%%

[0-9]*[02468]"\n"       { return EVEN;  }

[0-9]*[13579]"\n"       { return ODD;   }

%%

int main(void)

{

yyparse();

return 0;

}



int yywrap(void)

{

return 0;

}



int yyerror(void)

{

printf("Error\n");

exit(1);

}

Similarly create a YACC file as well, say "exp.y" and edit it as follows



%token EVEN ODD



%%



input:

EVEN     { printf("EVEN NUMBER\n"); return 0;   }

|ODD      { printf("ODD NUMBER\n");  return 0;   }

;

Now in the CMD prompt, navigate to the folder where the exp.l and exp.y files are and run the following commands:



C:\LT\example>flex exp.l



C:\LT\example>bison -dy exp.y



C:\LT\example>gcc lex.yy.c y.tab.c

At each step, assuming all is well, you won't get any output. Note that the final step compiles the C files generated by FLEX and BISON. And generates a executable named a.exe (To use a different name, change last command to "gcc lex.yy.c y.tab.c -o nameofexecutable.exe" )



C:\LT\example>a.exe

666

EVEN NUMBER

C:\LT\example>a.exe

667

ODD NUMBER

Now just run the program (through the command prompt itself). For and even number input, it prints out "EVEN NUMBER" and exits and "ODD NUMBER" is printed for odd numbers. A simple example, but I guess it gets the point through!

Enjoy! :)

PS The GnuWin project is a superawesome project which "provides ports of tools with a GNU or similar open source license, to Windows". The number of packages that they've ported to Windows is amazing. Do check it out.

PPS Yes, I'm a FOSS/Linux enthusiast, but that doesn't mean I have to praise Linux all day long! Projects like GNUWin, which take code to the masses, are nothing short of brilliant! Linux distributions have so many advantages over Windows for any real developer, but I honestly believe every developer has the right to "choose" his/her development OS and environment, be it PC, Linux or Mac. Do try out Linux distros as well (infact, I'd highly recommend you try a few before deciding which suits you best! Most distros are free!), but don't get dragged down by an environment! An OS is simply a tool to enable you, the developer, to work your magic! :)

Update: Here's a Zip file of FLEX, BISON and the Source Code used in this post.

The Week That Was....

2011-04-23T17:06:00.006+05:30

... Just incase you wanted to know!

Using Hobo With Rails 3 and MySQL!

2011-03-26T22:25:00.013+05:30

For my college project this semester, We (me, Damodar "Damu" Dukle and Poonam "Patlinbai" Patil) chose to use Ruby on Rails, a framework that has been used to create tonnes of stunning webapps. As a developer, Ruby on Rails (or RoR) has been of great interest since the "Convention over Configuration" philosophy RoR emphasizes upon leads to a quick, non-repetitive coding. For the backend, we decided to stick with MySQL, a SQL that all 3 of us are experienced and comfortable with.

Now for our project, we'll be designing a webapp called Press Play, a sort of Napster meets Last.FM meets SoundCloud mega-mashup... more on that some other time (probably once we finish it).

Now, one of the first things we needed to get done was user authentication. And I recalled Kaustubh (@geekblues) telling me about Hobo, a framework that builds upon RoR, and simplifies tasks such as user authentication, permissions and object lifecycles. And after using Hobo, I must say, I am very impressed! :)

The following is a simple tutorial to get up and running with Hobo on Rails 3.x.

1. Setup Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Follow this tutorial if you need to.

2. Next step is ofcourse to install the Hobo gem. Now there's a small issue here. If you use the stadard gem install hobo command, it installs Hobo 1.0.3, which is incompatible with Rails 3.x. Hence we use the command gem install hobo --pre , which installs a prebuild of Hobo 1.3.0, which is compatible with Rails 3.x.


C:\Press_Play>gem install hobo --pre
Fetching: hobo-1.3.0.pre29.gem (100%)
Successfully installed hobo-1.3.0.pre29
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for hobo-1.3.0.pre29...
Installing RDoc documentation for hobo-1.3.0.pre29...

3. Start MySQL . Let's use XAMPP here as well (as discussed here). Install the mysql and mysql2 gems using


C:\Press_Play>gem install mysql
Fetching: mysql-2.8.1-x86-mingw32.gem (100%)
Successfully installed mysql-2.8.1-x86-mingw32
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for mysql-2.8.1-x86-mingw32...
Installing RDoc documentation for mysql-2.8.1-x86-mingw32...

C:\Press_Play>gem install mysql2
Fetching: mysql2-0.2.6-x86-mingw32.gem (100%)
Successfully installed mysql2-0.2.6-x86-mingw32
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for mysql2-0.2.6-x86-mingw32...
Installing RDoc documentation for mysql2-0.2.6-x86-mingw32...

Navigate to the XAMPP install folder ->mysql ->bin (Generally C:\XAMPP\mysql\bin) and then copy the libmysql.dll file. Paste it in the Ruby install folder-> bin (Generally Ruby192/bin). Overwrite if you need to.

4. Run XAMPP and Start the MySQL service from the Control panel

5. Now it's time to put Hobo into action. Assuming your project name is Press Play (stop copying our project! :P ) and you too want to use MySQL, do the following


C:\Press_Play>hobo new Press-Play -d mysql
Hobo Command Line Interface 1.3.0.pre29
Generating Rails infrastructure...
create
create  README
create  Rakefile
create  config.ru
create  .gitignore
create  Gemfile
create  app
create  app/controllers/application_controller.rb
create  app/helpers/application_helper.rb
create  app/mailers
create  app/models
create  app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
create  config
create  config/routes.rb
create  config/application.rb
create  config/environment.rb
create  config/environments
create  config/environments/development.rb
create  config/environments/production.rb
create  config/environments/test.rb
create  config/initializers
create  config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb
create  config/initializers/inflections.rb
create  config/initializers/mime_types.rb
create  config/initializers/secret_token.rb
create  config/initializers/session_store.rb
create  config/locales
create  config/locales/en.yml
create  config/boot.rb
create  config/database.yml
create  db
create  db/seeds.rb
create  doc
create  doc/README_FOR_APP
create  lib
create  lib/tasks
create  lib/tasks/.gitkeep
create  log
create  log/server.log
create  log/production.log
create  log/development.log
create  log/test.log
create  public
create  public/404.html
create  public/422.html
create  public/500.html
create  public/favicon.ico
create  public/index.html
create  public/robots.txt
create  public/images
create  public/images/rails.png
create  public/stylesheets
create  public/stylesheets/.gitkeep
create  public/javascripts
create  public/javascripts/application.js
create  public/javascripts/controls.js
create  public/javascripts/dragdrop.js
create  public/javascripts/effects.js
create  public/javascripts/prototype.js
create  public/javascripts/rails.js
create  script
create  script/rails
create  test
create  test/fixtures
create  test/functional
create  test/integration
create  test/performance/browsing_test.rb
create  test/test_helper.rb
create  test/unit
create  tmp
create  tmp/sessions
create  tmp/sockets
create  tmp/cache
create  tmp/pids
create  vendor/plugins
create  vendor/plugins/.gitkeep
apply  C:/Users/navin/AppData/Local/Temp/hobo_app_template
gemfile    hobo (>= 1.3.0.pre29)

Now is where Hobo shows it's strength... the Hobo Setup Wizard offers to run. Let's have a look at it shall we?


Hobo Setup Wizard
Do you want to start the Setup Wizard now?
(Choose 'n' if you need to manually customize any file before running the Wizard
.
You can run it later with `hobo g setup_wizard` from the application root dir.)
[y|n] y
=> "y"

Startup
Installing Hobo assets...
create  app/views/taglibs/application.dryml
create  public/stylesheets/application.css
create  public/javascripts/dryml-support.js
create  config/initializers/dryml_taglibs.rb
create  app/models/guest.rb

First thing is Customizing the test framework. Let's leave that for later! So say n


Test Framework
Do you want to customize the test_framework? [y|n] n
=> "n"

Next up is a name for the user resource. If you;re writing a movie webapp, you may want to use the term "moviebuff" instead of "user".. For now, I'll stick with "user"


User Resource
Choose a name for the user resource: [<enter>=user|<custom_name>]
=> "user"

You know how those fancy sites send an activation email when you create a new account? or those sites which are invite only (Did someone say Google? :P )? Well, using Hobo, you can have both those features with complete ease!


Do you want to send an activation email to activate the user? [y|n] n
=> "n"

Invite Only Option
Do you want to add the features for an invite only website? [y|n] n
=> "n"

Since I'm comfortable with erb, I want to be able to use the erb templating system as well alongside the default dryml system. This can be done in the next step


Templates Option
Will your application use only hobo/dryml web page templates?
(Choose 'n' only if you also plan to use plain rails/erb web page templates) [y|
n] n
=> "n"

Hobo Rapid
Installing Hobo Rapid and default theme...
create  public/javascripts/hobo-rapid.js
create  public/javascripts/lowpro.js
create  public/javascripts/IE7.js
create  public/javascripts/ie7-recalc.js
create  public/javascripts/blank.gif
create  public/stylesheets/reset.css
create  public/stylesheets/hobo-rapid.css
create  public/hobothemes/clean
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/101-3B5F87-ACD3E6.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/30-3E547A-242E42.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/30-DBE1E5-FCFEF5.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/300-ACD3E6-fff.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/50-ACD3E6-fff.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/fieldbg.gif
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/pencil.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/small_close.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean/images/spinner.gif
create  public/hobothemes/clean/stylesheets/clean.css
create  public/hobothemes/clean/stylesheets/rapid-ui.css
create  app/views/taglibs/themes/clean
create  app/views/taglibs/themes/clean/clean.dryml
create  public/hobothemes/clean-sidemenu
create  public/hobothemes/clean-sidemenu/images/100-ACD3E6-DBE1E5-H.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean-sidemenu/images/100-DBE1E5-FCFEF5-H.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean-sidemenu/images/300-3B5F87-ACD3E6-H.png
create  public/hobothemes/clean-sidemenu/images/spinner.gif
create  public/hobothemes/clean-sidemenu/stylesheets/clean-sidemenu.css
create  app/views/taglibs/themes/clean-sidemenu
create  app/views/taglibs/themes/clean-sidemenu/clean-sidemenu.dryml

Front Controller
Choose a name for the front controller: [<enter>=front|<custom_name>]
=> "front"
Installing front controller...
create  app/controllers/front_controller.rb
create  app/helpers/front_helper.rb
invoke  test_unit
create    test/unit/helpers/front_helper_test.rb
invoke  test_unit
create    test/functional/front_controller_test.rb
create  app/views/front/index.dryml
remove  public/index.html
route  match 'search' => 'front#search', :as => 'site_search'
route  root :to => 'front#index'
Installing 'user' resources...
create  app/models/user.rb
invoke  test_unit
create    test/unit/user_test.rb
create    test/fixtures/users.yml
insert  app/models/user.rb
create  app/mailers/user_mailer.rb
create  app/views/user_mailer/forgot_password.erb
invoke  test_unit
create    test/functional/user_mailer_test.rb
create  app/controllers/users_controller.rb
invoke  test_unit

OK, it's all done. Let's take the site live shall we? Let's migrate our database schema to MySQL. As it;s been throughout, it's a completely hassle-free process. Just choose your database migration option as 'm'.


DB Migration
Initial Migration: [s]kip, [g]enerate migration file only, generate and [m]igrate: [s|g|m] m
=> "m"
Migrating...
rake  db:setup
(in C:/Press_Play/Press-Play)
C:/Press_Play/Press-Pla/db/schema.rb doesn't exist yet. Run "rake db:migrate" to create it then try again. If you do not intend to use a database, you should instead
alter C:/Press_Play/Press-Play/config/application.rb to limit the frameworks that will be loaded

---------- Up Migration ----------
create_table :users do |t|
t.string   :crypted_password, :limit => 40
t.string   :salt, :limit => 40
t.string   :remember_token
t.datetime :remember_token_expires_at
t.string   :name
t.string   :email_address
t.boolean  :administrator, :default => false
t.datetime :created_at
t.datetime :updated_at
t.string   :state, :default => "active"
t.datetime :key_timestamp
end
add_index :users, [:state]
----------------------------------

---------- Down Migration --------
drop_table :users
----------------------------------
create  db/migrate/20110326174912_initial_migration.rb
rake  db:migrate
(in C:/Press_Play/Press-Play)
==  InitialMigration: migrating ===============================================
-- create_table(:users)
-> 0.2700s
-- add_index(:users, [:state])
-> 0.2450s
==  InitialMigration: migrated (0.5180s) ======================================

Next up, the internationalization (I18n) option


I18n
The Hobo supported locales are de en es it pt-PT ru (please, contribute to more
translations)
Type the locales (space separated) you want to add to your application or <enter> for 'en':
=> "en"
create  config/locales/hobo.en.yml
create  config/locales/app.en.yml
remove  config/locales/en.yml

Hobo even asks you if you want it to set up a git repository for your new project and git init it!


Git Repository
Do you want to initialize a git repository now? [y|n] n
=> "n"

Process completed!
You can start your application with `rails server`
(run with --help for options). Then point your browser to
http://localhost:3000/

Follow the guidelines to start developing your application.
You can find the following resources handy:

* The Getting Started Guide: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
* Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book: http://www.railstutorial.org/

That's it! Really! Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself. Navigate to the folder Press-Play


C:\Press_Play>cd Press-Play

C:\Press_Play\Press-Play> rails server

C:\Press_Play\Press-Play>rails server
=> Booting WEBrick
=> Rails 3.0.5 application starting in development on http://0.0.0.0:3000
=> Call with -d to detach
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server

Fire up your browser and key in http://localhost:3000 . And if everything has gone well, you should see:

Yeah, a site with user authentication, individual profiles and hashed passwords all ready for you, and you haven't written a single piece of code yet! The first account created is given administrator priviledges, and priveledges of all other accounts are decided by this account.

Now it's all about customizing it as per your preferences... Check out some of the sites that were born exactly as your project right now: http://hobocentral.net/gallery/ ... Amazing eh?

I'd strongly suggest that you download Rapid Rails With Hobo, a free ebook of Hobo tutorials. Examples in the book make use of an older version of Hobo, so commands may not work out of the box, but it's still an excellent read! Also check out the Hobo cookbook for ideas on what can be achieved using Hobo.

Have fun with Hobo! :)

PS. The original plan was not to post on LoN this entire semester (a hiatus of sorts), but I just couldn't keep myself away! :)

2010 - The Best Year Of My Life (So Far!)

2010-12-23T20:59:00.019+05:30

OK, this is my officially my last post for 2010, a year that I shall cherish as the best year of my life (so far)! Tonnes of awesome stuff happened in the 12 months that passed by, both on screen and off of it!

As always, end-sem/end-year is a time of nostalgia for me, and looking back at the year that's gone by, here's a list of some crazy stuff that happened this year in the Life Of Navin!

The People: Sooo many awesome people I've met this year.... I mentioned some of them in this earlier blog post, but they all certainly deserve a second mention! The world is so extremely large, yet so small, at the same time. Both on and off-campus, I met the good, the bad, and the plain weird, and really connected with people on so many different levels. Reconnected with old friends, got back in touch with old crushes, made new enemies... what more could I ask for?

February 2010: One word: AWESOMENESS (Why? More Why? More More Why?)

My Semester Bucket List: Ended up managing to complete 14 of the 20 things listed! Could've probably done a few more, but I'm happy with what I've got! :)

The Politics: In a single year, I feel like I've taken the leap into politics, perhaps one of the reasons being the fact that I was elected General Secretary of the Computer Science students body CURSOR. I had a weird confrontation with some friends (well, I only knew one of them), who're members of the Students Wing of a certain famous political party, over the post of University Rep of college. I still don't know exactly who our University Rep is (I've heard it's some guy from Civil who is there as a puppet representative), but I seriously hope he/she is fit for the post, because it is a post of major responsibility, and the solutions to quite a few problems in our college can be addressed only by him/her.

Random Bullshit I'm Proud Of: Tonnes of stuff to list here:

Scoring a mark (yes, singular) in an internal test
Walking around campus at 5 in the morning
Staring at a PC monitor blankly for 3 hours with an awesome friend by my side
Discussing "proper" Rock music with a girl
Speaking to someone on the phone for over 2 hours straight
Managing the whims and fancies (some of them legitimate) of an entire class to pull of an awesome inauguration ceremony for CURSOR
Downloading the entire discography of multiple bands, just because I like 1-2 songs by them
Being woken up by a kick on my butt.... and a hard one at that!
Being woken up by her phone call
Waking her up with an early morning phone call
Quitting Facebook
Travelling all alone to Pune for a conference
Being a part of Technix 4.0, PhotoFlare, Twestival Goa, Tandav etc.
Getting CLUSTR off the ground (More on this next year!)
Getting my Drivers License
Getting thrown out of the college library
Being called a Casanova (yeah, me! :P)
The crazy Kachori eating session me and some friends had on campus
Sleeping in one of my department labs for an hour or so just before Technix
Managing to remain smoke-free and drink-free (It's a challenge in college, really is!)
The Random behind-the-scenes help provided by friends and teachers, which unfortunately very few people know about and appreciate
Some other stuff that remains with me for the time being! ;)

All the stuff that happened in 2010 has affected me, for good or for bad, and has helped me become the person I am today. 2010 has delivered all that could be expected from it. 2011, you have have your work cut out for you! Hope you manage to deliver! :)

P.S. I leave on a family tour on the 24th, and return on the 2nd! So here's wishing everyone a Super Awesome Christmas and a Mindblastingly Kickass New Year! :)

Venn I Suck, I Suck!

2010-12-12T02:50:00.002+05:30

Always be yourself... unless you suck -Joss Whedon

Kiddin' Around!

2010-12-01T23:57:00.017+05:30

Honestly, this post is complete nonsense!
--------------

U me katti no no,
Me no katti u
This all makes no sense to me,
Does this make sense to u?
Me was sleepy bye bye,
So me no msgs see
N when me wake up fresh fresh,
Saw 12 msgs fr me!
Now me to Tanika say say,
Me lyk u very much
Now random fact me say say,
Vodafone was once called Hutch
Now me be saying shit shit,
Infact shit from a bull
Or bullshit as me call it,
Me has gone mad full
If me keep say say bullshit,
Me'll be banned, that's a fact
So me just say say Good Night
to Limbu from my Max

--------------
Poem Backstory:
I'm pretty sure none of the above made sense, so a backstory is definitely necessary!

Basically, I have this extremely crazy, super-awesome, junior friend named Tanika...
Always smiling, eternally blissful, and completely mad (she's easily one of the whackiest friends I have!). She's my 'Baby Pishe', and whenever we talk, it actually is like two kids talking to each other!

Our semester exams are going on (yes, I'm updating my blog during my sem exams! :) ), and we both have exams on alternate days, but I have papers on days she doesn't (and vice versa).

Right after my first paper, once I got back home, I did what us half-baked engineers do best during exams, sleep! And when I woke up, there were over a dozen messages from Tanika, reminding me to wish her Best of Luck for her exams the next day!

Why would someone remind me that? Well, simply because I have memory of a goldfish... I actually had a friend who called me up at 11:55 one night, just to remind me that it was her birthday the next day (in 5 mins) and I'd promised that I'd call her up at midnight! :)

Anyway, the last message from Tanika was:

me no lyk u.. u no nyc.. u no wish me afta yaad karofying olso..
me u angyy.. me no tok u.. me u, katti fu!! :( :( :(

If you grew up in India and still don't know what 'Katti Fu' is, you may as well go hang yourself!

Anyway, my reply to her message is what you read above!

I know, even with this huge backstory, it's still nonsense, but I totally felt like a kid while typing that out! And that's exactly the kind of craziness I needed to get me back to studying my prehistoric portion!

Ah, One more thing. Me and Tanika are connected by our weird phones.... I have a Micromax, and she has a Lemon (Limbu!) cellphone ... hence the last line! :)

Related: God(dess) Mode

Planning My Luck!

2010-11-26T00:48:00.004+05:30

The Commonwealth games weren't planned with as much precision as the planning us guys do to "arrange" a chance meeting with that special someone !

Teh Internetz Iz Awesome! :)

2010-11-19T15:16:00.016+05:30

There are many reasons why I love the internet, and the following story is simply one of those reasons!

It all started out this morning when I saw the new Airtel 3G Voice Calling advertisement for the first time, and instantly fell in love with it. And being the twitter addict that I am, the first thing I did was tweet it!

Here is the advert:

Over the next 20 minutes or so, I watched the advert on loop, and besides the awesome concept and brilliant execution, what really touched me was the background music. I messaged a few symphony addicted friends of mine, asking if they recognized the music, but each person gave me the same reply- NO! A small ray of hope came from my mom who said she remembered hearing this track somewhere, but couldn't remember exactly where.

Baah! I had to find out more about this song, by hook or by crook. The first thing I did was use to brilliant service Youtube2MP3 to get the track from the advert. Next up, I googled around a little and found this post that linked to a wide range of music recognition sites. I instantly started trying them out... but alas:

A check back on twitter revealed that people were suggesting methods to find the song. The most interesting tweet was by @dpreacher (Diabolic Preacher \m/).

Now I was totally stuck, with no leads on the song at all... and desperately hoping that one of my leads (including a post at WatZatSong ) would provide a lead. About 15 minutes later, I had a new reply on twitter :

Boo Yeah! There it was.... the exact same song used in the advert. Incase you are wondering, Ludovico Einaudi is a bigshot Italian composer/pianist and I Giorni (translation: The Days) is a track from his 2001 album of the same name. From then on, all I had to do was find a download for the song and download it (I almost never buy music online... sue me!:| )

Here is the song:

A comment seen on Youtube is very apt for this song:"I'm sure this song is in god's playlist."

Thanks to the internet, a few really helpful tools, and some awesome people (ofcourse, special mention of @dpreacher), I found the brilliant song that I may never have found otherwise!

Thanks to everyone involved in the process, from friends to fellow tweeps, to the amazing guys over at Shazam, besides the other tools which (didn't work for me but) seem awesome, and ofcourse the ever so powerful Google for strengthening my faith in the Internet as a community! :)

Remember, Remember The Fifth of November!

2010-11-05T22:16:00.003+05:30

This 5th of November, let us vow to fight our oppressors, the scum who call themselves our leaders, the sewage in our system, the megalomaniacal sinners who live under the impression that they can control our minds.....

... or on the other hand, we could just watch V for Vendetta again, in all it's 1080p glory!

{Insert Fake Punch Sound Here}

2010-11-05T00:46:00.002+05:30

Guess who A and B are! :)

Hint: A fight between A and B will be infinitely more epic than this!

RoR On Windows With XAMPP!

2010-10-09T19:59:00.017+05:30

Ruby is an Object-Oriented language that was born in the mid-90's, but gained popularity in the early 2000's. As the creator of the language Matz puts it: "Ruby is about making coding natural, not simple". And once you get used to it, Ruby really begins to feel natural!

One reason for Ruby's popularity is undoubtedly Ruby on Rails aka RoR, an open source Web Development framework for Ruby. The power of RoR lies in it's simplicity and speed of development! Many popular websites like Twitter, Hulu, Scribd, and Github make use of RoR (see this).

One must note that Ruby != RoR. They're totally different!

Hopefully, this short intro has gotten you interested in Ruby and RoR. So let's see how to setup Ruby and RoR on Windows systems! Why Windows? Because the install procedure for Windows is a bit of a pain in the a** compared to the install procedure in Linux. For this article, I'll be using a system running Windows 7.

Anyway, here's what you need:

The latest version of Ruby Installer (Get it from here)
The latest version of XAMPP (Get it from here)

Ruby Installer is a compact package containing the entire Ruby setup and all it's dependencies. Another thing included in Ruby Installer is Ruby Gems, which is a package manager. (At it's simplest, Ruby Gems is like the Add/Remove programs feature in Windows.... except that it deals only with Ruby components/modules (which are called gems) ).

So let's get started shall we?

Double Click on the Ruby Installer executable and install Ruby into C:\Ruby
Double Click on the XAMPP executable and install XAMPP in C:\xampp
Go to My Computer-> System Properties->Advanced System Settings
Choose the Advanced tab and then click on Environment Variables
Check if C:\Ruby\bin is present in the Path row. If not present, select the Path row, click edit, and add C:\Ruby\bin; at the start.
Open a Command Prompt and do the following:
C:\>ruby -v ruby 1.8. C:\>gem -v 1.3.7
If you get this output (or something similar depending on the version of Ruby and RubyGem installed), you have Ruby and RubyGems installed successfully! So How about we get on the rails now, and install RoR?
C:\>gem install rails --include-dependencies INFO: `gem install -y` is now default and will be removed INFO: use --ignore-dependencies to install only the gems you list Successfully installed rails-3.0.0 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for rails-3.0.0...
Let us check if Rails is installed or not:
C:\>gem list *** LOCAL GEMS *** abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (3.0.0) actionpack (3.0.0) activemodel (3.0.0) activerecord (3.0.0) activeresource (3.0.0) activesupport (3.0.0) arel (1.0.1) builder (2.1.2) bundler (1.0.2) erubis (2.6.6) i18n (0.4.1) mail (2.2.7) mime-types (1.16) polyglot (0.3.1) rack (1.2.1) rack-mount (0.6.13) rack-test (0.5.6) rails (3.0.0) railties (3.0.0) rake (0.8.7) thor (0.14.3) treetop (1.4.8) tzinfo (0.3.23)
Yeah! So we're all set with RoR! Now let's get XAMPP configured shall we? Go to C:\xampp\htdocs and create a new folder where your RoR project will reside. Let's name this folder Ruby.
Now go to C:\xampp\apache\conf and open the file named httpd.conf with a text editor (I use Notepad++) and add the following right at the end of the file:
Listen 3000 LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so ################################# # RUBY SETUP ################################# <virtualHost *:3000> ServerName rails DocumentRoot "c:/xampp/htdocs/ruby/public" <Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs/ruby/public/" Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all Allow from all Order allow,deny AddHandler cgi-script .cgi AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi </Directory> </VirtualHost>

Note the DocumentRoot and Directory line.... they must have the correct path of the folder that you created.
Now we shall see the power of RoR. Go to the Command Prompt and type in:
C:\Ruby\bin>rails new C:/xampp/htdocs/ruby -d mysql exist create README create Rakefile create config.ru create .gitignore create Gemfile create app create app/controllers/application_controller.rb create app/helpers/application_helper.rb create app/views/layouts/application.html.erb create app/mailers create app/models create config create config/routes.rb create config/application.rb create config/environment.rb create config/environments create config/environments/development.rb create config/environments/production.rb create config/environments/test.rb create config/initializers create config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb create config/initializers/inflections.rb create config/initializers/mime_types.rb create config/initializers/secret_token.rb create config/initializers/session_store.rb create config/locales create config/locales/en.yml create config/boot.rb create config/database.yml create db create db/seeds.rb create doc create doc/README_FOR_APP create lib create lib/tasks create lib/tasks/.gitkeep create log create log/server.log create log/production.log create log/development.log create log/test.log create public create public/404.html create public/422.html create public/500.html create public/favicon.ico create public/index.html create public/robots.txt create public/images create public/images/rails.png create public/stylesheets create public/stylesheets/.gitkeep create public/javascripts create public/javascripts/application.js create public/javascripts/controls.js create public/javascripts/dragdrop.js create public/javascripts/effects.js create public/javascripts/prototype.js create public/javascripts/rails.js create script create script/rails create test create test/performance/browsing_test.rb create test/test_helper.rb create test/fixtures create test/functional create test/integration create test/unit create tmp create tmp/sessions create tmp/sockets create tmp/cache create tmp/pids create vendor/plugins create vendor/plugins/.gitkeep
If you now go to C:\xampp\htdocs\ruby, you should see something like this:

These are all the files created automagically by RoR! Nice, ain't it?
Start XAMPP and start the MySQL and Apache services:
Open a browser (Read: Firefox! :) ) and type in http://localhost:3000 ... and you should see this page:
That's it... you're now officially on the Rails! So now it's time to start developing you web apps with RoR!

Notes:

Gems are, in my opinion, the most powerful feature of Ruby. Gems are like modules that can easily be used in any project. I'd urge you to head over to this site, which holds over 16500 Ruby gems. Installing any gem is the same procedure as Step 7. Just type in gem install [gemname] to download and install the gem. You will probably need gems like mysql (gem install mysql), sinatra (gem install sinatra) etc. for web app development.
Yes, I know this is NOT the only way to install RoR. But I use XAMPP for almost everything so have included it here as well! This procedure should ideally work with WampServer as well, as long as the paths are corrected.
By default, RoR assumes that your MySQL root password is absent. However if you have assigned a root password, you must change the database.yml file present in C:\xampp\htdocs\Ruby\config.yml . Also, RoR recommends the creation of 3 databases: One each for testing, development and production. By convention they are named as [projectname]_test,[projectname]_production and [projectname]_production. You will have to create these databases externally through MySQL or using rake db:migrate. If you prefer to use alternative names, simply modify the config.yml file with names of your choice!
RoR on Windows really is a bit of a pain, and may not even work the first time! Honestly, I believe any serious developer must be comfortable working in Linux, which is more suited to the need! RoR on Linux is a breeze and works great (if not better)!

So far, I'm having an awesome time on Rails and am looking forward to working more in RoR! Hope you too enjoy the trip on rails! :)

Site Design Memoirs: GEC Tandav!!

2010-10-04T00:14:00.016+05:30

On the 1st and 2nd of October, we held our annual intra-college event Tandav, and being a Comp. Science student, I agreed to design the Tandav site, currently online at http://gectandav.in.

The site, as with most of my recent web-dev projects, made use of Joomla, the super-awesome Open Source CMS. Less than a year ago, I had a hard time choosing between Joomla and Drupal, another open source CMS, but now I've totally become a Joomla fanboy! :)

Within minutes (literally), the basic framework for the site was set! Most of the site was meant to be static, and hence didn't really take much time to set up! Tandav is supposed to be a dark, fiery event, and as such the black-red colour scheme was a really simple decision.

After rounding up some pictures from DeviantArt and Vi.sualize.us, and a little lameass photo-editing, the site header was ready. Some even more lameass photo-editing later, a set of 16 'Tandav Wallpapers' were ready! Credit for these also goes to Nikks, who created some of the less lameass walls! :)

An important part of the Tandav site each year is the 'Heartbeats' section, which while actually intended to be a place for people to declare their love for one another, always ends up as the online battleground for the six branches participating in Tandav to showcase their aggression (read: swear at each other). For the site, I used a modified version of the Phoca Guestbook component, modifying the Guestbook into a To-From-Message script. Hats off to the makers of the component for packing in so many features including a built-in CAPTCHA system (that too with different types of CAPTCHAs), which made my job really easy.

I got a few friends to test the site before I took it online, and thankfully everything worked perfectly!

Moderation of the 'Heartbeats', which, as expected, turned rapidly into 'Hatebeats', was a breeze, and despite loads of them being overtly vulgar/crude (yeah, even by my low standards!), moderation didn't take more than 10-15 minutes each night!

The site received loads of praise, both online and offline, and thankfully never went down! :)

Easter Eggs:
Being a hobby project, I took the liberty of adding some fun easter eggs and customisations into the Tandav site:

1) 404 Page (Click Here To See)
I don't really think anyone noticed this (thankfully), but the Tandav site had a custom 404 page!

Super Mario Bros. was a huge part of my childhood, and (according to my mom) the reason for interest in electrical gadgets that I have, and this was a small way of me showing the same! Also, more recently, Nikks talking constantly talking about playing Mario retro-style had implanted the Super Mario idea in my head! :)

2) The ~~Sambhavi~~ ~~Shambavi~~ Shambhavi conundrum
Last year, on the Tandav site, a bunch of jerks took the liberty of using the anonymity (?) provided by the site to repeatedly insult Shambhavi, who happens to be a good friend of mine, with extremely vulgar (yes, again, by my low standards) comments. And so she'd asked me to set up a 'Shambhavi' filter, which would filter out her name. And I did just that! On the Tandav site, anytime someone used the string 'shambhavi', '***' showed up instead of her name! :)

It was pretty funny once people realised such a filter had been set up, and then tried to circumvent it using alternative strings like 'sambhaavee'! :P

Thankfully though, the filter didn't have much use, as she was spared the online insults this time around!

3) The Konami Code
Like I've said before, have been thinking a lot about retro-gaming recently, and something that had always inspired me was The Konami Code, and after seeing a whole bunch of sites at KonamiCodeSites , I was convinced I needed to do something similar on the Tandav site. An hour or so of tweaking later, it was all ready to go!

Now if you go to the Tandav site and go up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a, and wait for ~5 seconds, you should be seeing the entire source code of the page. Super cool, and uber-geeky= iLike! :)

There are some really awesome sites listed on KonamiCodeSites. Do check them out!

Overall, I had a lot of fun designing and maintaining the site, and strongly recommend my juniors to take it up as a mini-project next time around! Trust me, you'll learn more about Web tech in a few short weeks than you will in an entire semester of Web Tech classes! :)

Hostel Diaries- 7 Days Later!

2010-09-03T23:47:00.026+05:30

7 days ago, I took a huge jump into something I'd personally been looking forward to for a looooong time! Assuming you've read the title of this post, I'm guessing you've figured out that the miraculous event was indeed that I got into Hostel! I've always personally felt that college life is incomplete without hostel life, and was actually looking forward to get my own room in the hostels of Goa Engineering College as soon as possible... so much so that this is even on my semester bucket list!! Anyway, here's a short recap of the week that was!

I got into hostel on the 28th, and straightaway headed to my new home for the next few months: Room 27, Hostel 4! The day went off great but was mainly spent setting stuff up in my room. Meh.

The hostel rooms are really comfortable. Even though they're on a 3-in-a-room basis, we have enough space to arrange the provided 3 study tables, chairs, and beds, and still have loads of free space! I've heard a lot about bad hostels/hostel rooms, but am glad that my hostel has no such horror stories to speak of!

One of my roommates, Rohan Hodarkar (a ubercool friend, a classmate, and treasurer in my council) arrived the next day. The third bed in the room is yet to be alloted to someone, and is meanwhile being used as a elevated dance floor! :)

The actual madness started on Sunday. I know people across the world love this day, but if you're in my college, Sunday is near-hell for you! Partly because many people head home for the weekend (most hostelites are Goans)! But more importantly because all the eateries on campus are closed! And that's like 7-8 oncampus eateries.... all CLOSED! Aaaaaah! I had to make do with black tea (made by a hostelite who'd carried tea powder but no milk :P ) in the morning. But then, almost like a Godsend, Umesh appeared. OK, so who is Umesh? Umesh is a supercool guy who owns a oncampus gaddo! He generally supplies overpriced, stale food cooked in unsanitary conditions, but on Sundays, he's no less than God! What he lacks in cleanliness, he makes up in character! Umesh is really an awesome guy.... loved and respected by every hostelite, so much so, that most of us now call him Umesh bhai! :)

So, long story short, Sundays on campus is basically an exercise in scavenging for food! (Trust me, 100 samosas were bought from that one gaddo in less than 15 mins time!)

Other days are pretty awesome! I love having my friends around me at all times, from 4 in the morning to 3:59 in the night! Our college campus is HUGE (over 200 acres) and my dream of actually seeing my campus is finally coming true! Not having a night check in time at the hostel is simply awesome! I've already made trips to the College back gate and an edge of the a huge field known on campus as Infinity grounds (because it seemingly stretched to infinity! :) ). I've roamed around campus at one in the morning, and watched a friend frantically try to get rid of ants in his room using a burning newspaper (really)! I've celebrated a two friends B'days with EPIC birthday bumps, and another friends b'day with a midnight surprise party! :)

My daily ritual of late night calls to certain individuals does continue, albeit with loads of distractions, including a orchestra (?) of friends who start singing Kuch Naa Kaho every time I pick up the phone! :)

I'm pretty sure you've heard that Absolute Zero cannot be achieved. That's a lie... it can, and has been achieved. Where? No, not in our labs, but in the bathrooms of my hostel. The water is so cold that it can actually freeze the balls off a brass monkey (an interesting story behind that quote incase you're interested)! So the hunt for hot water is always on! Somehow, over the week, I've kind of adjusted to the cold water, so that's no longer a big deal!

The lack of a television hasn't really affected me as badly as I thought it would! There's enough watching material here to last me a few lifetimes! And that's just the non-porno stuff! :) Infact, I feel, not being a TV addict has helped me utilize my time better! Being a total musicaholic, I love the fact that I can now blast music at full volume all the time! It's no longer odd to hear music from my room at 4 in the morning, something that was totally looked down upon at home! :)

I now totally understand what Dad meant all those times he asked me "Does money grow on trees?". The answer is dead simple. NO. And I realised it the hard way being stranded cashless till a friend bailed me out of the situation! All this in the last 7 days!

I've adjusted almost instantaneously to hostel life, and hope that the coming days continue to be just as eventful as the first week!

Till then you know where you can reach me: Room 27, Hostel 4! :)

----------------------------------
P.S. The lovely pic at the start of this article is by my supertalented friend Achintya Kambli! When he's not trying to burn entire ant nests, he produces beauties like this! :)

God(dess) Mode!

2010-08-28T13:59:00.005+05:30

When the goddess is angry, the mortals shall face her wrath!
When the goddess is sad, the world drowns in despair!
When the goddess is happy, flowers bloom, birds chirp, and the whole world smiles with her!
When the goddess is confused, kids start crying, fish start flying, and craziness rules the day!
When the goddess cries, the rivers rise, the desert undries, and the mortals feel the pain!
When the goddess loves, the problems all end, and those who were enemies, so quick, become friends!
When the goddess is busy,the chai grows cold, the calls on hold, and time goes out for a stroll!
When the goddess is sleepy, her eyelids start drooping, her body starts stooping, and the world doesn't matter any more!
The moods of the goddess are so many, but us un-godly understand but a few,
and the world keeps turning, churning every moment,
hoping for the goddess to be reborn, fresh, anew!

--------------------------
Poem Backstory:
There's this friend of mine, and one of the many nicknames I have for her is 'Goddess'. On a rainy morning a few days ago, she messaged me saying she was feeling angry at something... and I replied back 'When the goddess is angry, the mortals shall face her wrath!'. Somehow, starting with that message, a funny to and fro of SMSes started, rhymes started emerging, and line after line of the poem you just read was born!

Yeah, I know it's pretty much rubbish, but then I personally think it's really sweet, and it's one of the few times I've actually penned a poem for someone so it's all the more special for me! The girl too has repeatedly maintained that she loves the poem, and is honoured that I actually wrote a poem for her! :D

Random Note: I've been in a weird poetic mood over the last week or two! :)

EPIC!

2010-07-20T03:45:00.002+05:30

I propose a new word to measure EPIC-ness : NOLAN!
As for the Epic Browser bit, do read this!

The Not-So-Epic Browser!!

2010-07-18T02:50:00.028+05:30

On the night (rather, late late night) of 16th July, I started a twit-review of the latest darling of the Indian online media, Epic Browser, which is being touted as India's first web browser. What started off as random comments, ended up as a 31 tweet review (LinkBunch). So just editing those tweets a little and ordering them, here's my review of Epic Browser.

Epic Browser, is built upon the Firefox 3.6.6 base, and claims to be available for all 3 major platforms (Win-Linux-Mac), but on the site only the Windows version of the browser is listed. Later, I found out that the makers, Hidden Reflex, have released only the Win version, and plan to release the other versions later on.

A ~10.5 MB Download and a quick install later, I was greeted by the Epic Browser UI:

Note the checkbox over the Username box? Simply by checking it, you can type in Hindi (or one of the other inbuilt languages like Russian and Nepali! :P ).

The UI is almost the same as that of Firefox, with a few additions here and there. One of the most noticable additions to Epic Browser over Firefox 3.6.6 is the sidebar, which comes pre-built with stuff ranging from a timer to a word processor to shortcuts to FB, Orkut, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. On the first-run, every feature you click opens up a pop up window explaining the feature. While this is a great feature for newbies, it is a little clunky. Unfortunately, the sidebar is static (i.e you can't remove or add stuff to it) and hence irrespective of whether you use FB (read) or Games or Jobs, those buttons will always exist in the sidebar.

One interesting feature is 'Collections' which enables users to create a collection of websites to launch with a single click. Another interesting feature in the sidebar was 'Backup', and I was pretty surprised to see that it basically consisted of logging into Gmail, and uploading it to your inbox. (Kind of like GMail Drive). The highly touted 'Inbuilt Antivirus' is simply a free system scan + an advert for ESET! The 'Video' feature opens up a sidebar Youtube search app. The Youtube videos play within the sidebar app itself, and generates a download link for the video as well. While this is a convenient feature, the fact that the videos play within the sidebar itself is off-putting. And of course, it begs the question of the legality of such an option to be asked.

One thing I absolutely hated about the sidebar was that clicking on a feature didn't open a new tab, but rather a sidebar app. So basically you end up having |sidebar|app|main browser|, which is a huge Pain-in-the-assassin.

The default theme, "Peacock With Feathers", while nationalist is pretty ugh. Thankfully, just like FF, you can change the themes as well (Firefox calls it Personas). Personas was brilliantly implemented, but here the theme changer leaves the user wanting. You can also use Firefox Personas themselves as themes for Epic Browser. One design error is that the text on the bookmarks tab remains black irrespective of the theme, so if you use a dark theme you end up with a bookmarks menu that looks like this:

Epic Browser, as mentioned before, is based on Mozilla Firefox (which as you may know, I am a huge fan of!), and thankfully it doesn't hide the fact. The Help menu features a "About Mozilla" link, and some browser options actually link to official Mozilla pages.

Epic Browser is made for people who use the mouse a lot, since there is a serious lack of keyboard shortcuts to access the features.

On the technical side, Epic Browser is a resource hog, taking up nearly 1.4-1.5 times the memory of Firefox 4.0 beta. Also, the Epic website lacks any information whatsoever! Licensing information, Source codes (or atleast saying it's free but not open source), release information, proper documentation, etc. are lacking! Infact the Epic site looks like a scam site for one of those "registry errors" downloads.

At best, Epic Browser is a India-specific Customised FF release. At worst, it's a clunky browser with unnecessary overhyped features! As for being India's first browser, it depends on perspective! If you think BOSS Linux was India's first Linux distro, then Yes, Epic Browser is India's first browser! I personally don't think Epic deserves that title, considering it isn't a indigenous browser, but rather a child born out of a group orgy between multiple members, most notably Firefox!

I don't understand why the makers launched the browser only for a single platform, instead of waiting for say 15th August or 26th January and launching the browser for all platforms together. This would also give them time to work on their documentation, site, and to polish the browser, things which are desperately needed. Also the fact that Firefox has already moved to v. 4.0 (the first beta is already out!), plays against Epic Browser which is based on v. 3.6.6. Unless there are some radical changes made to the browser, this shall be my first and last experience with Epic Browser!

------------------------
Just a bit of promotion here: I've absolutely fallen in love with LinkBunch over the last few days. So here's a hat tip to the maker of LinkBunch, Aalaap Ghag (@aalaap).

Sabse Bada Rupaiyaa!

2010-07-16T05:43:00.017+05:30

Another day, another interesting development, this time in the form of the Govt. of India announcing the results of the yearlong nationwide hunt for a symbol to represent the Indian Rupee! And the winner, the oh-so-softspoken D. Udaya Kumar, a product of Anna University and IIT-B, who has cemented his place in quizzes for years to come! (If you're into quizzing, this smiling face is something you'll start seeing a lot of!)

Despite Ambika Soni nearly falling asleep during the Press Conference, the news of the new rupee symbol hit the internetz within seconds, and people started thinking hard to come up with views, reviews and personal interpretations of the symbol, completely ignoring Mr. Kumar's hi-fi explanation of arithmetic equivalence!

One of the earliest reactions to the symbol was that it looked kinda Communist! And no, not the Che Guevara type communist (read: Awesome!), but more of a Brinda Karat type lamess Communist! Don't believe me? Check it out :

@Krishashok came out with a very interesting "Colonial Hangover" explanation of the new symbol:

Unless you're blind, you've probably noticed how the new symbol looks kind of like a illegitimite kid born out of the union of a R and F, albeit a little less elegant than the more famous RF symbol:

Mah online bro Jyotishko (a.k.a @OldMonkMGM) came up with arguably the best symbol for the rupee. He calls it the "Rupeace"! And I swear to God, the minute I saw this, Dylan baba's The Times They Are a-Changin' started playing in my head! :)

On some blog, I saw some of the other contenders in the competition, and there are some pretty interesting ideas!{sarcasm begins} But if I had to give an award for best design, it'd undoubtedly go to this one:
No, really! I mean, can you imagine how much time we'd spend improving our drawing skills if this was adopted? Heck, we may well produce another Tyeb Mehta or M.F. Hussain. And it's truly nationalist too! While Mr. Udaya Kumar said the lines in his design were inspired by the Indian flag, this design takes the whole friggin' chakra into account! I have a gut feeling that this prospective symbol was designed by an Engineer! Only we can come up with such amazingly awesome designs! {sarcasm ends}

Last of all, here's something that popped into my mind the very instant I saw the design:
And don't act all saintly now! Admit it, it does fit doesn't it? John Cena FTW! :)

In the end, the new symbol is just that, a symbol! No, it won't cure poverty, nor will it reduce inflation, but is simply an image building exercise for the FinMin. The wait now begins for computer companies to start making keyboards with the Rupee symbol. Let's let the FOSS activists have a laugh shall we?:

What's done is done! Now, let's pray (for the impossible) and hope that our government finally begins to focus on the important issues that need to be looked at. Until that happens, the only thing we have is an identity! :)
------------------------------

All images except those attributed to someone else have been made/edited by me! So feel free to plagiarise them without linking back! :P
For a more serious review of the new rupee symbol, check out HoboGobo's Posterous.

It's Always Darkest Before Twilight!

2010-07-08T20:44:00.006+05:30

The things we do for love! Trust me, this IS a true story....... well, kinda!
Thank you Reddit, for the awesome alt text! :)

Vuvuzela Filter Demystified!

2010-06-18T02:57:00.011+05:30

Read update at end of post, and then continue!
-----------------------------------------------
There’s been tonnes of noise (ironically) about the South African wind instruments known as the Vuvuzelas. So much so, that it’s prompted sites like AntiVuvuzelaFilter to spring up overnight with solutions to the problem. What these guys do is charge to charge you 2.99 Euros for a ~50 minute soundclip, which, when played alongside your TV, apparently cancels out the sound of the Vuvuzelas.

It didn’t really take much time for me to get interested in the problem, especially considering that Sound has always been one of my fields of interest (I regard Amar Bose as one of my top icons, somewhere between Chuck Norris and Gandalf). And the first solution that popped to my mind, which is exactly the same as that used by the AntiVuvuzelaFilter guys, was Noise Cancellation.

Well, I’m sure most, if not all of us have heard of Noise-cancellation headphones… I once had the opportunity to use a Bose QC3 on a bus, and boy, it does its job really well! How does noise cancellation work? Let’s break it down shall we?

Sound, that you hear from your TV, if looked at closely enough, looks like a piece of string that’s been tied to an end and is being pulled up and down by a hand at the other side. The absence of sound simply implies the string is stationary.

The blue line represents sound

So when we want to get rid of the sound of the vuvuzelas, all we need to do is take the shaking string and make it stop. Now there are two ways to do this:
1. Make the hand stop (which isn’t possible in this case)
2. Tell the hand to both move up and down at the same time i.e when the TV signal tells the hand to move up, we tell it to move down and vice versa.

Now this seems simple, but the problem is that if we tell the hand to move up by say 10 points, while the TV also tells it to move up by 10 points ("points" here are a randomly assumed scale of measurement), we just get a 20 point signal. In simpler words, 10up+10up=10+10=20up. Also, if we tell the signal to move up by 5 points, while the TV signal tells it to move down by 10 points, the wave does indeed move down, albeit with a -5 point level i.e. 5up+10down= 5-10= -5down.

That made sense, I hope. If it didn’t let’s break it down even more! :)

Now products like the Bose QC3, use intricate circuitry to analyze the noise (determine whether the signal is telling the hand to move up or down) and then generate a invert of this i.e tell the hand to do the exact opposite!

The thing about Vuvuzelas is that noise is more or less stable (kinda like a looooooong drone), so we don’t really need realtime analysis. So here’s how you go about it!

1: Get hold of a sample of the Vuvuzela noise in the stadium. Tonnes of sites offer these. I actually ripped the sound off this SWF clip using SWFRIP (a nifty open source software).

2: Generate the invert of the signal i.e when the signal is telling hand to pull up, your signal tells it to move down. I used Audacity, an awesome open source audio editing software. Simply open the sample, copy paste it till its around 45 minutes in length, and then invert it (On the top menu Effects-> Invert in Audacity).

3: Play it on a music player alongside your television, at a volume close to that of the Vuvuzela noise, and such that the sound from your clip and television reach your ear at roughly the same time eg. place the music player on top of your TV

NOTE: It may take a few adjustments here and there, such as decreasing/increasing the bass (since some TVs provide an artificial bass effect). And sometimes, your track may be playing in sync with the noise (i.e 1st pic shown above), thereby creating a louder noise. In this case, simply pausing and playing may help. It may take a few tries to get it right. But overall that’s about it! Also, your volume level must be more or less equal to the soundlevel of the Vuvuzela noise.

Using this method and a bit of optimisation, the noise of the Vuvuzelas can be eliminated for 90-95% the time of the match, which in my opinion is a big thing, especially considering that your entire investment has been less than 15 minutes! For a more customised solution, you could try asking these guys or if you have the time, do what this German engineer did, and actually create a realtime filter. Tonnes of sites, including LifeHacker and CrunchGear have simply translated this guys method on tutorials given on their sites! Some dude even did the same thing on a Fedora machine! And trust me, that method is the ultimate fix. But this is, as us Indians call it, a Jugaad fix.

I personally don’t mind the sound of the vuvuzelas, and infact feel that it adds to the atmosphere of the match! But one suggestion for all you vuvuzela haters out there: Just think what it’d be like, if U had one of these at the stadium instead! :

PS: There’s tones of cool stuff you can do with Audacity using the same invert method, like taking out the vocals of a song. As with most audio editing tools, there's generally no stepwise method to do stuff, and quite a bit of tweaking will have to be done. So go ahead play around with Audacity!

Update: As the Worldcup gets closer to the big finale, the Vuvuzela sound has gone more from being stable background noise to unpredictable bursts of Prrrrrrrrr. :) As such, the method outlined above WILL NOT WORK! It works only for a stable Vuvuzela background noise. In the current scenario, only real-time filters, as mentioned in the latter part of the post, will work!

Semester 4 - The People Semester!!

2010-06-16T22:14:00.012+05:30

“Arey tum Computer Engineer log sirf apne PC ke saame baithe rehte ho, aur kuch nahi karte.”

This quote by a friend in the arts field, may have been said jokingly back in November 2009, but was something that really got me thinking. And a simple introspection revealed that the friend was indeed right. I've never really had a strict friends circle, and am generally a member of different groups, sometimes even of rival factions (which BTW can be amazingly fun!)! But in my life, the term “socialize”, despite being a second year college student, was limited to just college friends, a bunch of North Indian friends, and a few colleagues, besides the tonnes of "friends" on soc-net sites.

But the last category didn’t really count, cause other than the yearly B’day wishes, I didn’t really know these people! And even the b’days were remembered only because these “networking” sites had a b’day reminder feature! Yeah, maybe that guy had been in that competition with me.. or maybe that gal was my classmate back in the third grade, or in tuition class. I mean I really was feeling like one big dumbass, having so many "friends" and yet not feeling like it! Heck, I didn’t even know the names of a quarter of the people in my own class, despite having spent 4 whole months with them! And when your mom herself starts calling you anti-social, you know that’s something is definitely not right.

Now this simply wouldn’t do…and as twitter-junkies would put it, this was a big #fail in the Life of Navin. So I’d more or less vowed to change my ways over the next semester.. And boy, I did! I call Semester 4 the people semester, because people formed the most crucial component of these 4 months.

Events like NullCon, brought me so much closer to people who thought like I did, worked in my style, f***ed around just like me. Heck, I had a discussion on The Hacker Manifesto with a bunch of guys, something I simply can’t imagine happening in my own college! Meeting people like Raoul Chiesa and Cassio Goldschmidt, and learning stuff from them was simply brilliant!

Then ofcourse came the Pune trip for GNUnify, which brought with it another bunch of awesome people to meet, right from the team from Mozilla and Fedora, to the engineer-hater Aschin (I’m praying I’ve spelt that right!). And then there was an awesome meetup with a dozen guys at the bench we’d vowed to sleep at if we didn’t get hotel rooms! :)

Another biggie was TwestivalGoa, which introduced me to tonnes of new people, right from the BITSians Varsha, Neha, Snehal, and later Asmita and Shwetamsu, to kickass dudes like Jude Mascarenhas and Nikhil Velpanur! The conceptual stage too was awesome, with meetups with people like digital media warrior Frederick Noronha, awesome photographer Anoop Negi and Mr. Heritage Jazz Armando Gonzalves! Heck, till date, the extreme awesomeness that TwestivalGoa was, hasn’t left me, and I hope it never does!

By now I’d more or less reached the peak of socializing. But was that the end? Not by a loooooong shot! Because lined up right after Twestival was PhotoFlare, which introduced me to the who’s who of Goan photography, right from Prasad Pankar to Akhil Khandeparkar, the funny shutterhappy duo of Akshaya Shivkumar and Sharafat Khan, besides loads of other awesome people from college itself, whom I’d not had the opportunity of interacting with before!

(click on image for larger size)

And the cherry on the cake couldn’t be an event better than The SEQC SoQ, a quizzing jamboree for kids, during which I not only got a chance to pick the brains of the smartest kids in town, but also got a new lease on life, looking at life through their perspective. And ofcourse, as organizers, we got to get to know people like Arjun Halarnkar, of ICG, who’s one of the nicest and most helpful guys you’ll ever meet! Another great aspect was meeting up with friends like old friends Adish Talwadkar, Anant Lawande and Amit Shet, and having loads of crazy times over a cuppa coffee!

I could start off with a few special mentions, but I have a gut feeling that the few will stretch this post from “Does this guy have nothing better to do” long to “WTF? The Mahabharata was shorter” long so I think I’d better leave the special mentions out!

I really do feel sorry for the guys who live in the bubble of Soc-Netting, and think what they’re doing is even minutely “networking”. While you were wishing your “friends” Happy B’day, I was out actually meeting, greeting and getting to know them! During the 4 months that’ll go down in the “Chronicles of Navnya” as Semester Quatro, I met and worked with more people than I had (arguably) in my whole life, and I’m really grateful to the awesome people who helped me though the journey that I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed! And hence, as the guys as Cisco would put it, this semester is dedicated to The Human Network, and YOU are a part of it! Yes, you, the poder who spent half an hour on a cold morning telling me about your life, and you, the crazy guy who did a double backflip just to show me you could, and you, the chick on the bus to Pune, who had the awesomest stories to share on the loooooong trip! Thanks to all you guys and gals for truly making my Semester four, the people semester!

P.S. I now know the full names of every person in my class, and have had atleast a few conversations with each one of them! :)

Related Posts:
Stuff I did this semester (Sem 1)
This Semester... (Sem 2)
S4TD -Sorry For The Delay!! (Sem 3)
Stuff I Did This Semester - The Bucket List (Sem 5)

Klingon Is Evil!

2010-06-16T01:58:00.006+05:30

Some languages are best left to the TV Series/Movies! :)

Oh, and incase you're wondering: tlhIngan 'oH mIghtaHghach = Klingon Is Evil!

ChecXKCD!

2010-06-06T02:46:00.006+05:30

No mosquitoes were harmed in the making of this comic strip!
Nana orders you to watch this video:

The B'day Pessimist!!

2010-06-03T19:19:00.004+05:30

61 SMSes, 45 Emails (12 of them Auto-generated!), 7 E-cards, 4 non-E-cards, 24 calls (including 2 very special ones!), Tonnes of scraps, tweets and gifts are testament to the fact that I'm now 19!

Thanks for all the love! :)

The Book Is A Lie!

2010-06-01T22:38:00.007+05:30

The "Network" sometimes scares me!

Law-abiding citizens value privacy. Terrorists require invisibility. The two are not the same, and they should not be confused. -Richard Perle

Incase you haven't heard already, I quit FB !

The Final Chapter of The (Face)Book!

2010-05-31T10:38:00.030+05:30

Okay, it's official...... I've quit Facebook! The whole concept of QuitFacebookDay got me thinking about FB, not just the point of Privacy issues but also as a complete social networking site. And here's what I concluded: Facebook Sucks!

People who know me well have heard me talk for hours at a stretch on how I hate FB, and prefer other social networking sites (Infact, I'm arguably the last surviving member of my species who still uses Orkut!). But just to get the points through: Here's a list of reasons why I'm leaving FB:

I'm leaving FB Because Of:

Privacy Issues: Yes, it does concern me that Suckerberg thinks he can make all the data I trust his site with public. And no, I don't buy into the "If you don't want it broadcasted, don't put it online" philosophy. That is kinda like saying "Your car may catch fire. Walk to the store instead". No, I won't walk.... I'll build a better car instead! And that's what the web is all about. We're moving towards a world where everything is going to take place online (and already is to a large extent). And data safety is of prime importance, especially since it now can be given a monetary value.
The Business End: Something I realised a few days ago. Who do you think the consumer of Facebook is? You? Me? That Sudanese kid you just accepted as your friend? No mate, sorry if this shocks you, but we're just cogs in the system.... just a resource! Facebook's real consumers are the advertisers, who pay FB to showcase their ads. And while selling my and your info to them may seem fine to some ("after all, it's just targetted advertising", or so they say), to me it's a breach of trust! Oh, and did I mention that Zucky thinks we're all Dumb F***s?
Ethicality: I read a great book called The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich a few months ago. The book tracks the story of the creation of Facebook, which is more scandalous than most hindi TV soaps! Suckerberg broke every rule in the book in his aim to create TheFacebook , right from stealing code, lying, breaching trust, to even stealing data. As a ambitious webtech guy myself, I frankly don't think it's ethically right for me to remain on a site built on a foundation of lies!
This:

formattingformattingfBTW this goes on for 3 more screen lengths!

The Fotugraphers: I have tonnes of friends who're awesome photographers, and use sites like FB and Flickr to showcase their art. However, there has slowly emerged this new group of morons on FB, who seem to think that every pic they click is a gem. I hate seeing my timeline flooded with 22 pics of a cat's tail followed by 15 pics of a guy sitting on a chair (mind you, NOT even posing!). And that really gets on my nerves! I've been on Flickr for over a year, and have seen what photography can be! Infact some of my friends on FB, like Prasad Pankar, Sharafat Khan, and Suyash Kamat have some mindbogglingly brilliant pics in their albums! It's sad to see some people degrade the art of photography to such a low level! Thank you, but I don't want to see that unfocussed pic of a toothbrush in my timeline! Grr! Oh, yeah, and special mention needs to be made of the morons who upload a pic, and then send out "Comment on my pics" messages to everyone on FB!
The Photo-Taggers: Another category of FB users are the Photo-taggers. These are basically 4Chan trolls who seem to have moved onto Facebook. Every pic of theirs is tagged with a 100 names. Over the last month or so, I've been "tagged" as a tree, a road, a shoe, a bird, a cricket ball, and a monkey (can't really say anything about the last one! :) ). And it pisses me off having to untag myself each time this happens! Why not just disable tagging you ask? Well, because, along with these pics I've been tagged on some truly awesome pics as well. Pics from my school days, my farewell, even pics from my Kindergarten days!!
The Over-mature Kids: Kids in my age were just that, Kids! Yeah, I know I'm sounding old now, but frankly I can already see the generation gap! Kids on FB have gotten a whole lot more, how do I say this, Phil-hollow-sophical. They aim to show they're philosophical, but are actually as hollow as my skull! I hate stupid kids who invite me to "groups" discussing sensitive issues without even understanding the issue and making jackasses out of themselves there. Sorry mate, this ain't the Miss Universe Pageant. You want world peace? Get off your ass and do something other than creating a "Peace for Everyone" group on FB!
The FraandSheepers: These are the asses who've brought down many Soc Net sites down with their moronic activities, and they've now come onto FB! Just before closing down my account, I was ignoring all these requests (Twitterers probably know that I've been having a Fraandsheep count since May 1), and took this screenshot after ignoring 7 requests:I've (arguably) not added anyone myself since the first few days of FB! Just been accepting requests depending on whether I know the person or not! :)
Mafia Wars /Farmville/Zynga: enuf said!
Social "NotWorking": Well, this whole premise that FB is built on is the concept of Social Networking. And with a friend's suggestion in mind, I decided to investigate this. I took a short trip down memory lane right upto my first FB update and here's what dawned upon me: I have barely networked at all. Most of my FB usage has been Playing stupid games/ answering lameass quizzes/ linking FB with Flickr/Random rants. Come to think of it, I've networked more on IRC than on FB (which is kinda shocking, considering my stats show ~300 friends on FB). The people with whom I've spoken most on FB are the people who I meet everyday, and the people I want to meet on FB, are almost never online! So frankly the whole concept of SocNetting takes a beating there!
The Family Conundrum: It's official, my whole family is now on FB. And I'm talking about my extended family here. Right from my parents to my uncles and aunties to my cousins, everyone is on FB. And that brings in a new problem. I generally rant about issues that I'm thinking about and tend to use quite a bit of foul language. Now I definitely don't want my 70 yr old uncle to read my "update" telling my OOPD teacher to Sod off. And I definitely don't want my 7 year old cousin to see the results of the "Which Angelina Jolie tit are you" quiz I'd taken a few hours ago (left, incase you're wondering! :P ). It's not that I don't like these people... it's just that it isn't right for them to know everything I do online! And changing privacy settings isn't really worth it because who knows when Suckerberg decides to change rules again?

So am I considering shifting to some other soc net site? Well, not really.... Answering quizzes/playing flash games is something I've almost completely stopped. For photos (real photography, I mean), I have Flickr, and for ranting, there's always Twitter. There's a whole bunch of topic specific sites I'm a part of, and as of now, no soc net site brings it all in a single package for me.

So to all the morons who don't get the idea of social networking, right from Suckerberg and his minions to most of my "friends", here is a humble gesture of my love:

And to the 2% of my friends who I actually networked with on FB:

And am I going gaga over other soc net sites (read: Diaspora)? Naah, not yet atleast. Because there's one thing I don't understand: Why the hell are people posting alternative solutions to Facebook, when the only solution is to quit living your life in a computer and stop being so self absorbed. Sorry, I hate to break this to you, but you are not THAT important. If you belong to a social networking site and you can't seem to stay away from it, then you're addicted and you have a problem. You're in denial and guess what? It's time for therapy to get you back on your feet again and turn you back into a whole, complete person.

I'll leave you with this amazing comic by The Oatmeal: How To Suck At Facebook (trust me, I had dozens of each type!)

So long FB, thou shalt not be missed!

Exam Time!!

2010-05-25T00:03:00.005+05:30

Best of luck to everyone answering their semester exams! :)

Global Warming!!

2010-05-23T17:58:00.007+05:30

In other news, 55% of Hummer owners said that Global Warming is a scam!

LoNely!!

2010-05-23T00:57:00.007+05:30

Incase you're wondering, a Harshad number is a number that is divisible by the sum of its own digits! Awesome eh?

Open Letter To General Fonseka

2010-05-22T06:15:00.017+05:30

Dear Gen. Fonseka,

I'm an Indian writing to you on behalf of a certain section of society that has gotten tired of our government's lack of interest in well... governing. I've heard that you're currently out of a job in Sri Lanka after the whole LTTE hoo hah and the presidential election mumbo jumbo, and have an offer for you. Why don't you get up here to India to tackle a similar situation that's been brewing up in the forests of Jharkhand and a few other neighbouring states?

Well, the basic problem is this... some faggoty pussies have been waging war against the entire nation, while other faggoty pussies in our capital are all being diplomatically dickheaded, and refusing to get rid of the aforementioned faggoty pussies. And the reason being argued is the some of the latter mentioned faggoty pussies believe that the initially mentioned faggoty pussies are innocent tribals who've taken up arms because they have no other alternative.

All of this rings a bell right? Well, yeah, I can see you nodding your head there. Kinda reminds you of the situation in your own ~~Ravana land~~ Sri Lanka doesn't it? I agree that the tribals have problems, but these guys ain't downtrodden tribals! They're just asses who have a great time blowing up police cars with landmines, and taking on dudes from the CRPF in some weird TNA Impact style handicap matches simply because their neighbourhood multiplex isn't screening Kites! And frankly, do they really think that we'll believe them when they say they don't have money for food, but yet manage to brandish equipment that is superior to the army? Well, in case this is a bit too confusing, I've attached a picture with this mail as well, please do check it out.

Oh, and of course there are more similarities. Remember the a*****e you guys had shot through the head? Well, guess what? A new a*****e is in town, and his name is Kishen .... known as Kishenji by the effing news channels who still haven't figured out that the "ji" is just a sign of respect that his moronic followers give him! Wikipedia says his real name is Mallojula Koteswara Rao, but I'd just like to call him Weird-name-fetish guy. Well, this dude is more or less as effed up as that Prabhakaran guy. You see, this guy is the face of the naxalites, but well, his face hasn't ever been shown on TV. Dude has stage fright, I think (much better than anti-Semitism don't U agree?) and always faces away from the camera... but not to worry. Using our latest CID technology, ACP Pradyuman and his team of super-talented agents have managed to flip his photo to reveal his face. Here it is:

Yeah, I know, he's suffered a small flesh wound (we'd all heard of that), but here's what he looks like otherwise (again thanks to ACP Pradyuman's Flesh Addinator 5000 gizmo):

As a added bonus, we've already provided you a head start: We've given the mission a ubercool name! Now that we've taken care of that difficult bit, you can take care of the easy bit of taking out the bad guys!

Okay, I'm convinced that you've made up your mind to come visit the land of the dude who burned down your land many many years ago. So let's talk specifics. Yeah, I know you're kind of in a tight spot with the whole arrest+court martial+Where's a calender when I need one controversies going on, but don't worry, we've already assigned our top lawyers to your case. We'll expedite you from the country, just as soon as we finish erm... working out the kinks (read: Hang Kasab) . Or else we can always hope that Martin Scorsese and/or Woody Allen may come to the rescue. After all you haven't even raped a 13 yr old. All you did was cure a 26 year old gangrene, that certain sections of society wanted to drag along.

Oh, and talking of gangrenes, did I mention Arundhati Roy, whoops, slip of pen, I meant have you heard of naxalite sympathizers? Well, they've been really active on Twitter and FB, churning out pages in support of the downtrodden naxalites. I'm just guessing, but maybe Mr. Kishen has threathened to kill them if they don't, because I frankly see no other logical explanation to educated individuals supporting brazen terrorists. Oh wait a minute, The "e" word is the reason.... I get it now! If you ever have 3 hours to kill (and I literally mean "kill", since that's what you'll want to do after 2 hours or so), then read this article by the grammatically gifted Ms. Roy, where she makes the most extreme use of "may" s and "maybe" s.

We've read all your military tactics, but have somehow been unable to implement them perhaps since the IPL and the world T20 has kept us kinda busy. Anyway, we're all back on track thanks to the true patriot of the nation, Ravindra Jadeja, who showed us which matters are of higher priority. Infact, we were sending over some Ammonium Nitrate to you for your approval, but it seems it got stolen along the way!

I'd have offered you the president post, as an incentive to victory, but I've really grown fond of my own president. She may be a hundred and fifty years old, but she definitely knows how to be awesome! Don't believe me? Check out the attached pic!

And guess what? She's been on a jet as well ....and NOT died of cardiac arrest during the flight! What more could I ask for?

I'm hoping that you accept my offer and get rid of this problem before we again need to disturb some viking dudes from Norway to mediate talks between us and them!

Talk to you soon

Cheers
Navin

P.S. If this helps, Rajapakse Sucks! :)

----------

The above post is a work of fiction. Any names other than that of the awesome Mr. Fonseka, Why-isnt-he-dead-yet Kishen, Maybe-coz-this-guy-isnt Kasab, The goddess of small things Ms. Roy, the Viking dudes from Norway, Hollywood's answer to Dev Anand Woody Allen, kickass filmmaker Martin Scorsese, The probably fictional Ravana, conniving bugger Rajapakse and the awesomest guy alive ACP Pradhyuman are purely coincidental.
All facts mentioned are true, or atleast the truest to my Googling abilities!
Getting serious, this is a very lame attempt at satirical writing by the author and no sentiments are intentionally harmed ....except if you liked it, in which case it is a well thought out philosophical treatise on the naxalite problems plaguing the Indian state! :)

Stuff I Did This Semester - The Bucket List

2010-05-19T20:17:00.026+05:30

I watched this movie a few months ago called The Bucket List, starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson which showed two terminally ill guys going on a wild ride, trying to complete a wishlist of to-do's, before they die. The movie was brilliant, to say the least, and I really connected to it at an emotional level.

The current stage I'm going through in life, there seem to be infinite things to do, and just a little over 2 years (in my case) to do them all! And so, I present the 4th part of my "Stuff I Did This Semester" posts, this time as a bucket list! This is stuff I want to do over the next semester i.e my fifth semester.

Some of this stuff is crazy, some of it is impossible, but most definitely, all of it is awesome!! And I don't really want to have a regular bucket list, so here's how I do it:

I have my Sem 5 bucket list down here, though in an encrypted form (yeah, encryption is indeed one of my fields of interest), and as I complete each task, I'll decrypt that line. Silly, I know, but it's my blog so what I say goes! :P

So here it is:

Get Into Hostel...... Finally (Yeah! :) )
Kcr sn y pybgm qwqrck rm qrpcyk ksqga 24v6 (kw amkn lccbq qmkc pcqr) gl fmqrcj
Start actually drawing the comics that I keep thinking of in my head! (The first)
Ycr Krpygefr Xpmk Lfc Empml (KXLE) zyai ml rpyai!
Become GS of the Computer Sciences Student Body, CURSOR (Won Unopposed!)
Setup a site for CURSOR (Site ready, but will go live next sem)
Organise atleast 1 workshop for the students of CURSOR (1: HTML/CSS Web Dev 2: Intro to RoR)
Go on atleast 2 wildlife treks. (1: To Tambdi Surla Waterfalls 2: Mollem to Collem)
Post atleast 1 post on LoN every month (Done with ease! :) )
Read atleast one complete technical book and two complete non-technical ones (Check Readernaut)
Tsgjb yrjcyqr mlc pmzmr.. qmkcrfgle A'tc zccl nsrrgle yqgbc dmp dyp rmm jmle
Deliver a legen...wait for it...dary speech (A motivational speech delivered to juniors, which apparently got them high on adrenaline! :))
Opgrc y SA zyqcb afcqq npmepyk
Convince atleast 5 Windows people to try a Linux distro (On last count: 9)
Argue with a teacher... and get him/her to admit he/she is wrong (An argument with my DBMS teacher on 27/08/2010 regarding my project,at the end of which she finally let me have it my way! :))
Get a girl...or atleast ask one out! :) (Really awesome story... wait for the blogpost! )
Dcypl yrjcyqr rfc zyqgaq md mlc glqrpskclr (Lfgq gq ufcpc A pcyjjw lccb fcjn)
Go without bathing for 3 consecutive days(Won't say when, but yeah, it happened!)
Watch atleast one complete TV series (Took the easy way out: Watched all 3 Seasons of The IT Crowd ...can't wait for Season 4 to start airing!)
Umknjcrc yjj rfc yzmtc ryqiq zw rfc clb md rfc qckcqrcp!!

Phew! That's quite a long bucket list, and covers diverse fields of interest. But as Chef from South Park rightly put it: There's a time and place for everything. It's called College!

I'm hoping that I'll be able to complete most, if not all the tasks on this bucket list by November 2010!

Wish me luck, and keep checking back for the tasks I've completed!

P.S. Incase you're wondering about the encryption, it's a pretty simple piece of code that I've myself written (in C++) out of boredom... here's a screenshot of the program at work on the blogpost!

You can try decrypting the text yourself if you like, it's not really all that difficult! :)

Oh yeah, and the "Stuff I Did This Semester" post for this semester (4th) will be out soon!

Related Posts:
Stuff I did this semester (Sem 1)
This Semester... (Sem 2)
S4TD -Sorry For The Delay!! (Sem 3)

I'm Too SEQC For My SoQs!

2010-05-18T16:16:00.018+05:30

A Report on Sunday Evening Quiz Club (SEQC) Summer of Quiz (SoQ) , a quiz camp for school kids that I partly organised (agcfsktIpo) :

Over-excited kids, even more excited QMs and truckloads of brain picking is what you'd have witnessed if you lurked within spitting distance of the International Centre Goa, Dona Paula anytime on the 10th and 11th of May, for this was the epicenter of the event that we’d humbly named the Summer Of Quiz (SoQ) 2010. After months of torturing kids with mind-numbing questions at the monthlies, SEQC has had a stretch of children specific events, and SoQ, a quiz camp for kids in the 10-16 age group, was another way of us thanking the youngsters for maintaining a straight face through the gruelingly difficult monthlies (and introducing newbies to the world of Quizzing).

Despite being an event that was organized in a very short timespan, a bit of targeted publicity helped quite a bit, and about 30 young quizzers signed up for the quiz camp. And these 30 young guys and gals along with the quizzards from SEQC embarked upon the two day SoQ journey.

Day one had consecutive general quizzes by Amit Shet and Anant Lawande . These two quizzes were, to say the least, marvelous! The aim of these quizzes was to get the participants in the groove of quizzing, and boy, did they get into the groove of things. They say a building is only as strong as it’s foundation, and these 2 quizzes set up a Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) foundation for day zwei.

Day two had topic specific quizzes on Sports, Entertainment and Cartoons & Comics by Amit Shet, Adish Talwadker and yours truly, besides a treasure hunt and an innovative game called Around the World in 80 minutes, both organized by Annie Sen Gupta. The treasure hunt was by far, the wildest event of the day, with kids running around the ICG premises like geese on an icy lake. Infact, they had so much energy that it did actually seem that they were high on sugar coated …well, sugar! The quizzes were great, and most questions the QMs posed were answered, albeit sometimes with a clue or two thrown in. Around the World in 80 minutes, a NatGeo Genius style around the world trip, was a great addition, and was well received by the participants. We witnessed history in the making, as a team actually managed to complete the around the world trip, at the last breath of the tournament, with a little help! :)

A bit of late night photoshopping and a some early morning bhaaga-daudi later, we had our cheekily named “Certificate of Quizzitude” ready for the quizzers who’re gonna rule the quizzing world in days to come! Curtains were brought down on the event after the certificates were handed out, and promises to meet again at the next SEQC kids event were made.

Quizzitude is a state of mind! :)

The entire event was a resounding success, to say the very least! Many participating quizzers suggested we make this an annual event…. others suggested we make it bi-annual! So we may very well be looking at a Summer of Quiz Winter Edition as well! :)

Over the 2 days of the event: I slept for 4 hours, nearly got mauled by a bunch of 12 year olds, had a bad headache, had my laptop hacked into (unknowingly) by a 14 year old, was requested by a kid to play a certain song with highly explicit lyrics, was mocked by teenage girls, realized that managing kids ain’t as easy as it seems, realized that kids nowadays are weird (as Adish puts it, They actually like quizzing!), signed 36 certificates along with a bunch of other SEQC-ites, phew……. And now they want a sequel??

BRING IT ON ,I SAY!! :)

-----------------
Originally published on the SEQC blog as "SoQ it to me!"

Feb 2010- The Best Month Of My Life!! [Part Tre]

2010-03-29T19:21:00.019+05:30

And finally, I'm at the final post of my three part series dedicated to the awesomest month ever, Feb 2010.

After the great outings throughout the month (read part 1) and the kickass events (that I'm part of) beginning to take shape (read part 2), you'd be forgiven for thinking that it simply couldn't get any better. But there's a thin line between being a "Great" month and a "Awesome" month.... Two major gadgets that I bought during the course of the month transformed Feb 2010 from "Great" to "Legen ....wait for it ...dary"!! And here they are:

1) A Dell Studio 15 Lappy
I'd been planning to buy a lappy for quite some time, and plans finally finalised in Feb 2010. I'm now the proud owner of a Dell Studio 15! I have just one word to describe it's looks - KICKASS! Watching movies on the HD LED TrueLife™ display has been a complete joy, and stuff like the slot load DVD really makes it look very slick! Battery life is pretty great, and heating issues are virtually non-existent. Here are the rest of my specs:

Core i3 Proccy
320 Gig HDD
3 Gig DDR3 RAM @ 1333 Mhz
512MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570
Built-in 2.0MP webcam
Dell Wireless Bluetooth Internal (2.1) mini-card
2 USB 2.0 compliant ports
1 USB/eSATA combination port
HDMI and VGA Connectors
IEEE 1394 port (Firewire)
8-in-1 Media Card Reader
Preloaded with Windows 7 HP (Personally repartitioned to include a Linux partition)
Loads of other Preloaded Software
A Targus carry case

The lappy weighs around 2.5-2.7 KGs, though it feels much lighter. The final price came up to ~47-48 K. The preloaded face recognition software (FastAccess) is initially pretty crappy (understandably), though it gets a pretty acceptable face detection rate as time goes on. Highly recommend that you go for the Studio incase you're currently planning to buy a laptop.

Unboxing of the Lappy [IMG] [~1MB]

1) A Cellphone
And this is the big one ..... I finally got myself a cellphone!! After over half a decade of being president of I-Don't-Have-A-Cellphone club, and having insults hurled at me by everyone ranging from my 10 year old cousins to my 70 year old uncles for not having a cellphone, I've finally joined the leagues of the network enabled brick wielding generation. And it didn't take me too long to decide on my cellphone of choice: the Micromax Q5

Pretty odd choice? I'd generally agree.... but my trip to Bengaluru set one thing straight. Indian phone makers were entering the scene, in a BIG way. I actually saw more Lavas, Micromaxs, Karbonns and Lemons in Bengaluru than Nokias, and SonyEricssons. Also, speaking to my uncle, who currently works in the R&D at the cellphone division of Videocon convinced me to change my choice from Videsi to WeRDesi!! :)

Anyway, here are the specs of the Q5:

Dual SIMs, GSM-Dual-Band (900/1800 MHz)
262K Color QVGA Screen (320*240 Pixels, 5.6 cms)
Trackball Navigation with Full QWERTY keypad
A Yamaha sound chipset
2.0 MP Camera
Bluetooth (A2DP), Speed Dial, Conference Calling etc.

The USP of the phone is the inclusion of keys that directly connects to Facebook. Infact, the phone is generally called the "FB phone". There's a pretty crazy ad for the phone on the Micromax site. The FB key simply launches a nifty java app that connects to FB and has basic features like updating your status, checking statuses etc. There's a similar key on the phone that launches messengers like Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, MSN messenger etc.

Internal memory is pretty low (15 MB) though the microSD slot enables you to add upto 8 gigs of external memory. The phone weight is less than a 100 grams.

Overall the phone, being the (sort of) blackberry clone that it is , performs pretty well. The Java UI is pretty quick and the camera and music player too are more than satisfactory. And at a selling price of ~7 K, it's a definite steal!!

Unboxing the Cellphone [IMG] [~ 1 MB]

Well, that's it I guess.... Feb 2010= Travel +Events +Gadgets +Loads of other random awesomeness!! If I could sum up the entire month in a single expression, it'd probably be something like this:

I can only pray that a month like this will show up again sometime soon! :)

Feb 2010- The Best Month Of My Life!! [Part Deux]

2010-03-14T15:40:00.013+05:30

Check out Part 1 of this post!!

Over the last few months, I've been steadily migrating from the participation side of events towards the organisational aspects. I've been fascinated by how, in event planning and execution, small things can make huge differences (did someone say Butterfly Effect?), and how, as organisers, you get to meet tonnes of awesome people. What you see as the event, involves tonnes of behind the scenes negotiations, compromises, favours, a small amount of infighting, and a gazillion tonnes of pure awesomeness.

Nobody works slower 3 weeks before an event than India and nobody works faster once the 3 week mark is crossed. -Famous Quote by (insert name here)

And February 2010 marked the start of full fledged preparations of two events that I'm partly organising: Twestival Goa and Photoflare.

Photoflare: Our college has a kickass photography club led by a bunch of really awesome people. And there are loads of ideas that keep flowing around. The idea for a photography festival started off as a spark, and soon transformed into a wildfire with many people from and outside the club showing interest in the idea. And a short time later PhotoFlare was born. Now, PhotoFlare is an international photography festival that will be wholly organised by our club, and will consist of a competition, workshops and lecture sessions. The photography competition is already picking up pace with photographers from all over submitting their entries. PhotoFlare is close to my heart for another reason.... the website. Why? Go through the source code of the site and see if you can figure it out!! :)

Twestival Goa: So I guess everyone knows that I'm a twiddict. So much so, that people actually check my Twitter profile to see if I'm home or not (since I generally only tweet through my PCs). Anyway, a Twestival is an event that's organised completely by volunteers on Twitter. For more on the event, I'd suggest you watch this video. Goa, along with cities across the globe, will witness it's first Twestival on the 25th of March. By "we" I mean me, @varsha181, @neha1989, @naikaustubh and @dpreacher who form the core-ish team of Twestival Goa. All proceeds from the event go to Concern Worldwide, a global humanitarian organisation. We've already had DJ's Ryan and Joel and the awesome retro band Bac2Basix as confirmed acts for the event, and we're hoping to get some more. Incase, you're in Goa on the day, do try to make it. Here's more details.

Yup, so that was February for me.... so you're already nodding your head in agreement that Feb was the best month of my life eh? Well, believe it or not, this is still not the end! Part 3 of the post coming up soon!

Feb 2010- The Best Month Of My Life!!

2010-03-14T14:35:00.019+05:30

It's been quite some time since I've updated the blog, but believe me, I've wanted to do so at a much earlier date! But I've been amazingly busy over the last month and a half or so.

Loads of craziness in the works, and I can proudly claim that February 2010 was the best month of my life (so far)!!

Why?? Read on and I'm confident you'll agree...

Feb started off on a great note with TEDxBITSGoa on the first Friday (5th Feb). Despite the initial hiccups with the projection and sound system, the event went off well. Kudos to the guys from BITS for managing to bring together so many amazing individuals under one roof. It was super-inspiring to listen to guys like Himanshu Parikh, Arvind Gupta, Nikhil Velpanur, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett Orlando speak about their lives. A special mention again of Mr. Himanshu Parikh, whose work in slum development really brought tears to my eyes. He's a person I really really hope I get to work with over the next decade or so of my life. He encompasses (for me atleast) exactly what being an "engineer" is all about.

Still high on TEDxBITSGoa, I headed off to NullCon the very next day (6th Feb), a Indian hacker conference, where I was to be a speaker. And believe me, Nullcon was the awesomest event ever!! The whole thing was informal as can be (the way I like it), with gyaan sharing going on on all fronts. What I liked best was that there was no audience as such. It was more like a bunch of network security professionals and enthusiasts meeting at a 5-star to discuss their topic of interest. Kinda like a large BoF session. Met some amazing people like Raoul Chiesa (a legendary hacker who currently works for the UN in a cybercrime branch UNICRI), Cassio Goldschmidt, Prince Boonlia, Veysel Oozer amongst others. The whole event kinda reminded me of the X-Files, since many conspiracy theories (and methods) were discussed. I say this also because quite a few talks followed the 0-disclosure policy (i.e. no photos/videos/external discussions). NullCon was two days of complete awesomeness, and it concluded with my talk (which was just before the ending keynote) on the 7th. My talk was, much to my awe, well received by the crowd. Here's an online copy of my NullCon presentation, though I doubt it'll make much sense without the speaker's voice. :)

So it's around the 10th of the month, and I've already had two huge events. But this isn't the end of my Feb, not even close!! :)

On the 18th, I left for Pune, for GNUnify, A FOSS conference/workshop organised by SICSR. Another great opportunity to meet loads of cool people such as a certain "engineer hater" Ajachi, Gautam Rege, Manjusha Joshi ma'am and the entire FOSSEE team from IIT Bombay. GNUnify had so much going on over 2 days, that despite my best efforts, I managed to barely attend 30% of the events. Yet, over these 48 hours, I attended some fabulous sessions/BoF's on coding in CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Drupal and Python. The talks by the guys from Mozilla (the main sponsors for GNUnify 2010) were extremely captivating. They spoke on topics ranging from l18n to HTML5, and showcased some of the newer products by Mozilla such as Bespin and Weave. Overall, GNUnify was a great experience, except for the fact that the crowd was too mixed, with complete newbies right next to professionals!! I didn't like the fact that I had to explain the ls command to a guy next to me during one of the workshops!! But this qualm apart, GNUnify was a great event. Plus, after pronouncing it wrongly for over 2 months, I finally learnt the right pronounciation of GNUnify (it's "ganu-nify", incase you're wondering).

The very next week (24rd Feb), I was in the IT hub of the country, Bengaluru, though this time for a family event, a cousin's marriage, that too a marriage of the only type that should be legal.... a love marriage!! Bengaluru, being the city I was born in, holds a special place in my heart, and it was great to be in Bengaluru after nearly a year! The whole wedding was more of a neo-hindu marriage with pujas being followed by jam sessions!! :) Overall I had a great 4 days out in the intellectual capital of India.

Phew!! That was enough travelling for one month eh?
Well, this was just one part of the awesomeness that February 2010 was.
Second part coming up soon!! :)

NullCon is here ....Well, almost!!

2010-01-08T20:14:00.000+05:30

If you're short on time, just read the last paragraph of this post!!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I think everyone, and I literally mean everyone, who knows me, knows that network security is one of my main regions of interest in the field of computers. From the script-kiddie email phishing, to much more advanced exploits and network pen-testing, I've grown quite a bit in the field, since I first forayed into the field roughly eight years ago. The main source of information has been, of course, the World Wide Web, with its infinite amount of information, that satisfied my craving for knowledge. However, one thing I always despised was the large net-sec community in countries such as the US, Romania and even Iran, while the only well known Indian hacker was the script-kiddie Ankit F(r)a(u)dia (read more).

However in mid-2009, I heard of Null, a group of security enthusiasts who aimed to bring together all the net-sec enthusiasts in India, and share infomation (which is the most important foundation stones of Hacking). And it seemed to work. Null continued to grow, and as of now, has 3 chapters, in Bengaluru, Pune and Bhopal. But this wasn't of much help to me, since the closest among these three, Pune, was the short distance of 500 Kms away from me!! Grr!! However, I had the chance to see some of the members of Null in action, when they conducted a short workshop in my college. I was really impressed with the hands on approach these guys took.(They did a ARP poisoning on my college network right in front of our eyes!! That was awesome!!)

And then they dropped the bombshell on us all. They announced that they'd be organising a community driven security conference, Nullcon, right here in Goa. (I'd read this on their site the previous day, but was still excited when they announced it!!).

A few days later, the Nullcon site was up, and in big bold letters were the alphabets C-F-P. I instantly started writing a paper, and sent them the abstract of it, making sure I completed the whole process before my god forsaken sem exams began (read this). And one fine day, I logged into my mail ID, and lo and behold, there was a mail from NULL informing me that I'd been chosen as one of the speakers for NullCon!! W00t W00t W00t W00t!! Pretty soon, the site was updated with the list of speakers, and I was super-excited to see my name mentioned on the same page as gurus like Veysel Ozer and Prince Komal Boonlia!!

So long story short, NullCon is going to be held on 6th and 7th Feb 2010, at The Retreat By Zuri, in Salcete, Goa, and I'm going to be one of the speakers at the conference. You can check out the schedule of the event, and if you're interested in the talks, then please do register as a delegate for the conference. It's a huge learning experience, and a chance to meet the who's who in the Indian Net-sec community.

Hope to see you there....... Beware, Be There!!

LoN Top 7 Movies of 2009 - Part 2

2009-12-31T01:46:00.008+05:30

See: Part one of this post ( No.7 to No.4 in the list)

Let's get straight to it shall we...... the Top 3 movies of 2009

3) Star Trek
I've never really been a fan of Star Trek. So much so that when my friend suggested we see the new Star Trek movie, I thought George Lucas had come out with a new Star Wars film! That's how ignorant I was! But I really am glad I watched this movie!

The Star Trek movie was a great introduction to the Star Trek universe, and infact a prequel to the popular TV series. The movie introduces the various characters of the Star Trek world, Kirk, Spock and Uhura to name a few, and how they met for the first time.

The CGI of the movie are astounding, and it's an absolute delight to watch on the big screen. However, this wasn't one of those iPhone type movies. And by that I mean "All style, no substance" kinda movies. The acting was nice, the dialogues were witty, and the storyline was simply awesome!

All in all, the movie instantly made me a fan of the Star Trek world, and inspired me to watch the TV series, so I guess, that's a job well done for the makers of the movie!!

2) Up
After watching Madagascar in 2005, I never really thought any other movie could ever compare to it, in terms of a story, or emotional strong points. And it did prove true for every animated movie I watched since then, including the sequel to Madagascar. But Up, the story of 78-year-old balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, definitely goes right up there amongst my favourite animated movie of all time!

A crazy story, told with such a humane storyline, is what makes Up such a brilliant movie. Through the whole movie, you're either rolling on the floor laughing at the antics of Fredrickson, Russell and Dug, or at the edge of your seats with excitement.

The beginning love story, is by far the most brilliant animated love story ever, so much so, that despite having watched the movie over half a dozen times, I still cry in the scene when Ellie passes away. And I have no qualms about admitting that!! That's how brilliantly the scene is shown!!

The animation by Pixar, is as awesome as can be, but the emotions portrayed are what steal the cake from them.

Everyone - regardless of age -will enjoy this movie, since there's a little something for everyone. And while this may not be a start to finish laugh riot as Madagascar was, it'll definitely leave you with a great feeling at the end!!

1) 3 Idiots
And the number one spot, in LoN's Best of 09 list goes to Aamir Khan's latest venture, 3 Idiots. And I don't think too many people will be surprised by this choice. This comedy with a message, released on the last friday of 2009, manages to pwn every movie I've seen so far with pure filmmaking genius.

I must admit, I had a slight reservation whether Raju Hirani, the man who successfully wooed the masses with the Munnabhai series, would be able to tackle a young and peppy theme in the presence of ever-critical, scrutinizing eyes that cry for realism, but only under the fundamental stipulation of it being coated with entertainment, is not an easy task. Nor is it an easy task for a director to make a strong, personal philosophical statement in today's cynical times. Hirani expresses his beliefs clearly and effectively without committing the cardinal sin of getting preachy.

And how can we forget the acting. Yeah, I did wonder if Aamir would look odd as a college kid. But believe me, once the movie starts playing, you simply never even think about this. Aamir, Sharman and Madhavan keep you completely engrossed in their conversations, and before you know it, you're dragged into their world. The musical score is brilliant, with some awesome lyrics by Swanand Kirkire, who is known for his quirky lyrics, and manages to create many lovely memories through song and dance in this movie.

Sure, some people out there say that 3 idiots is simply Munnabhai MBBS with slight changes like MBBS<-> Engineering, Munna<->Ranchoddas, Dr. Asthana<->Viru S, and so on and so forth, but believe me, as an engineering student myself, I can truly tell you that 3 idiots is a much more unique movie than Munnabhai MBBS. Infact through the whole movie, I saw a character who did stuff exactly as I would, whose thought process was parallel to mine (I won't name that character here. People who know me well know exactly whom I'm talking about.) . And that made me love the movie even more, since it was a glimpse into my own life!!

Who steals the show in the end? Everyone steals the show! 3 Idiots isn't an ordinary film. It's not a standard use-and-throw or watch-and-forget type of entertainer. It's a life-changing experience. One won't look at life the same way after watching 3 Idiots.

When I first saw the trailer for 3 Idiots, I was disappointed that it looked nothing like 5 Point Someone, the Chetan Bhagat novel which the movie is loosely inspired by. But now that I've seen the movie, I am extremely glad that it isn't based on the book!! Yeah, 3 idiots is whacky, quirky, maybe even a little predictable, but at the end of the day, it's a movie capable of change. Change in the system we know as our education system. We can now only pray that a ripple effect of the movie is felt, in the same way that Lagey Raho Munnabhai managed to create a nation wide revival of Gandhian philosophy!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, that's all I guess. Hope you guys watch the movies listed in the posts.

Do you agree with my picks?? Do let me know!!

Wish you a Happy New Year!! Have a great new year's party hangover!! :)

LoN Top 7 Movies of 2009 - Part 1

2009-12-29T00:27:00.018+05:30

The year 2009 has been a year filled with loads of entertainment for me. I've been fortunate enough to have been able to make time to watch some of the greatest movies, ranging from the classiness of The Godfather series, to the comic stylings of the The Monty Python Series, to the sheer epicness of The LOTR series, to name a few.

At the same time, a more than gracious increase in my income, mainly consisting of odd projects, quiz earnings and pocket money, enabled me to visit the friendly neighbourhood multiplex on multiple occasions, to watch some of the latest movies play out on the big screen.

And as the year comes to a close, a look back at the movies through the year reveals quite a few gems. So I present the best movies of 2009, movies which simply must be watched at all costs, by any self respecting individual!!

Note: The list was originally a Top 5 list, but was extended as there were too many choices to make!!

Honourable mentions (in alphabetical order):
Avatar, I Sell The Dead, Paranormal Activity, Public Enemies, The Hangover, The Invention Of Lying, The President Is Coming, The Tournament, The Ugly Truth, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Zombieland, 99

7) Watchmen
I'd blogged about Watchmen earlier (link), and the fanaticism following it simply compelled me to read the graphic novel and then watch the movie. The movie is a brilliant visual experience. It was amazing to see Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach and the rest of the gang performing to perfection on the big screen.

The director Zack Snyder has managed to remain true to the book right upto the last scene, with many scenes literally looking like 3D versions of the graphic novel. Of course, the jury is still out on whether the movie ending was better or the original graphic novel ending was better, but I think I'll just leave it at that. I've become a huge fan of Snyder's work, after watching this movie, and his 2006 blockbuster, 300. Kudos to him for having managed to perfectly bring to life this novel, which uptil recently was "too dark, too complex and too 'smart'" to be made into a movie.

Hats off to Jackie Earle Haley, who managed to brilliantly portray the complex role of Rorschach in the movie.

If possible try to watch the Director's Cut of the movie, which is a more complete experience than the feature film. And I beg you, please read the novel before watching the movie!!

6) Inglorious Basterds
"Once upon a time, in Nazi occupied France....", started the trailer, and right from this point on, I simply had to watch Inglorious Basterds! Being a huge fan of World War related movies, I had sky high hopes from this movie. And boy, did it live up to all of them! Quentin Tarantino's masterpiece, showcasing a group of Nazi-hunting jewish secret allied-forces regiment, instantly made me a huge fan of QT!

A beautiful storyline, wonderful editting, and some brilliant acting, including what is arguably the best performance this year by Christoph Waltz (Col. Landa), was an absolute delight to watch.

This movie has all the elements of a timeless classic, and is a definite must watch for everyone with a strong enough heart. (In typical QT fasion, this movie is filled with loads of gory scenes)

And of course, what better way to celebrate the holiday spirit, then watch a bunch of elite jewish allied forces attempt to murder the Fuhrer in this pulp fiction masterpiece!!

5) Dev.D
Anurag Kashyap's modern day take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's classic Bengali novel Devdas, is a movie that leaves you with a mixed feeling once you leave the theatre. Infact, I and my friends had collectively concluded that this movie, which generated an enormous amount of hype when it was released, was just another overhyped bollywood flick. However, this movie is more like a bottle of wine... the more time you spend thinking about it, the more brilliant it gets!!

The movie, set in the modern day background, rather than a murky, depressing early 1900s background, involves some excellent modern day substitutes for the characters from the novel. So, Devdas not only drinks, but is a chain smoker, and does drugs as well, while Chandramukhi, is a modern day prostitute, who even offers her services over the phone!! :)

The musical score of the movie is revolutionary, to say the last, with Amit Trivedi managing to bring out a song to portray every emotion in the movie! And of course, Emosanal Atyachaar (and its remix) will hold a special place as one on Bollywoods mindnumbingly crazy, whackiest, yet brilliant track, for many years to come!

The amazing cinematography (many techniques which have been copied in newer films), will simply leave you in awe! This movie is a brilliant portrayal of one segment of the youth of India, and if you're in the 18-30 age group, you'll simply love it!

4) District 9
When I first heard about District 9, the only thought that came to mind was "Just another 'Alien vs. Human' movie", but once I'd watched this movie, I had to take back my words!! D9, to put it simply, marks the coming-of-age, of a genre that has long been plagued with flimsy movies.

Director cum writer Neill Blomkamp's masterpiece, which actully is a feature length remake of his 2005 short film, Alive In Joburg, deals with aliens in a mature, and completely human manner. The whole movie is shot in a documentary style, and deals more with the interaction between aliens and humans, rather than a full fledged war between the two.

The movie is the director's version of District Six, a real life district in Cape town, South Africa, where the movie is based, where nearly 60,000 blacks were forcefully removed (during the height of the apartheid era). The movie thus is a social message as well, putting light upon events that occured in South Africa in the 60's that were shameful, to say the least.

Sharlto Copley, as Wikus, is simply brilliant, and is definitely one of the best perfomances of 2009. He manages to portray the role with such ease, that you actually begin to think that the movie is a series of true events.

The doors for a sequel are wide open, and I really hope the sequel will be just as good as the original, if not better, though I doubt it can get any better than this gem of a movie!

So these were No. 7 to No.4 in the list. If you want to find out the Top 3 movies of the year, Click Here!!

Things You Didn't Know About LoN!!

2009-12-15T22:27:00.018+05:30

Over the year and a half that LifeOfNavin(LoN) has been in existence, I've been overwhelmed by the response it's gotten!! What started out as a means to rid boredom soon evolved into a full-on blog, often appreciated, while also sharing its share of rumour-driven attention. LoN has evolved from being a tech blog, to a random awesomeness blog to a proper personal blog. The final phase arguably started with the first in the ongoing "Stuff I Did This Semester" series of posts.

Anyway, one of the favourite sections on the site seems to be the "Contact Me" page, with quite a few people writing in, with both bouquets and brickbats. And I've made it a point to reply to almost every one of them, excluding the "Fraandsheep requests". There are some questions about LoN that have been asked by multiple people. So here are the answers to some of those questions!!

Logo Ka Rahasya!!
The logo next to the title is the subject of many mails that I get... Stuff ranging from "What does that signify" to "Hey, that's a very creative logo" to even "WTF is that?" is pretty common. Anyway, I'll spill the beans.

The logo is something that's very personal to me.... I won't say much, I'll just let the picture below do the talking:

So yeah, It's my name..... Original?? Lame?? Whacked??

Actually, this logo was first drawn in a book during a boring college lecture back in July '09, and I thought it was kinda cool so added it on the blog!! A nice, simple personal touch to a nice, simple personal blog!!

Why did you start blogging?
This is something that I've told very very few people!! No, I didn't start LoN to write about my life, but to write abut someone else's life!! And that person is a guy whom I consider the greatest physicist who ever lived, Nikola Tesla. I'd just finished watching the movie The Prestige, in which Tesla is portrayed as a crazy but brilliant inventor, which is as close to reality as you can get, and his personality had a profound influence on me!

I studied Tesla religiously. Not just his physics, but also his philosophies, his life, his everything!! And I realised how some of the greatest inventions, though invented by Tesla, are to this date credited to people like Edison. This made me so upset internally, that I simply wanted the world know the truth about Tesla. And to vent out my rage, I wrote a long Word document (made up of bits and pieces copied from various sites). Now I simply had to get the word out to the public.... and blogging was a platform to do just that!! Thus LifeOfNavin was born!! The Tesla post was the first one on LoN..... all other posts, including the intro, were written later and then pre-dated!!

Here's the link to the first post of LoN:
Nikola Tesla-- The Man, The Machine (Part 1 of the 4 part series)

Why The name LifeOfNavin? Why not something cooler like Life of P[a]i?
Firstly, like I said before, the blog was simply meant to vent out my feelings about Tesla. I needed a name for the blog before I could post anything on it... so I simply went with the first name that sprung to mind!!

As for the LifeOfP[a]i suggestion, this may seem amazing, but I hadn't heard of the Yann Martel novel when I started the blog!! If I did, then probably you'd be reading LoP right now!! :P

You had a poll to choose the new LoN layout (link), but you didn't shift to the template with the highest votes... Why?
I know this seems unfair to the voters considering that I'd specifically said that I'd shift to the template with higher votes, and Acid Rain(23 votes) got more than twice the votes that Studiopress (10 votes) got! But the truth is that I did change the template to Acid Rain for a short while of 10-15 mins, and not only was it too dark, but it also wreaked havoc on the formatting of the previous posts!! So I had no other option than to go for the second best option!!

Do you write about everything in your blog?
Well, that depends on your definition of "Everything"!! I almost always write on more general topics, that everyone can relate to, rather than esoteric topics that will find barely any readers. But once in a while such esoteric topics do come up. I write equally from my heart and my brain, and try my best not to be opinionated (except in movie reviews). My writing on this blog has progressively moved through topics ranging from tech to space to network security to geekiness to personal posts to rants to complete random coolness!! And I personally feel that's how it's supposed to be...... After all, Randomness= Life Of Navin.

When is the domain coming?
I've mentioned loads of times that I'll be getting a proper domain for the blog. Well, to tell you the truth, things haven't been working out so good in that direction. Certain domain names that I simply love have already been taken, while others are too costly!! Many people have suggested some really cool domain names, but let's just say, I'm waiting for that special domain. Till then, it's Blogspot zindabad!! :)
Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that something clicks really soon!!

Well, that's all for now! Keep the comments coming in!! Cheers!!

Events I Miss Coz of My Sem Exams!!

2009-12-04T23:46:00.013+05:30

Okay, I'll say it outright..... I hate these exams!!

Well, not really the exams as such, just the timing of the exams!!

My semester exams seem to have arrived at the worst possible time, and boy, am I upset!!

NOTE: Sem exams stretch all the way from Nov end to mid Dec.

I'm missing loads of events because of a less-than-helpful sem timetable..... these are the important-ish ones among them:

FOSS.IN (Dec 1-5)
Had big plans to attend FOSS.IN, India's foremost Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) event, which draws crowds from all spheres of computer sciences, right from the end of September. I was all set to go for it, but then the semester timetable was released and I found out that it's right in the middle of my Semester exams!! :( :(

Now a few friends from Mumbai and Goan dude Kaustubh Naik, are my eyes and ears at FOSS and are keeping me updated about the event.

ClubHack (Dec 5-7)
ClubHack is an initiative to bring security awareness in common people who use computers and internet in their daily life. It's a member driven open community to make cyber security a common sense. Being the Net-sec monkey that I am, I was planning on packing my bags and heading up to Pune for this event, but.......

Megawhats (Dec 13)
A team based quizzing event organised by a bunch of India's finest quizzers at Karnataka Quiz Association, Megawhats is a national level quiz conducted in 9 cities across India. It's a big event on the quizzing calender, and one that is anticipated by quizzers across the country...... well, except for one quizzer, named Navin Pai!! :(

SEQC Dec Quiz (Dec 6)
The Sunday Evening Quiz Club quiz, held on the first sunday of each month are quizzes with some serious standards yet laid out in the traditional Susegaad Goenkaar manner. I really like these, since not only do I get in touch with some of the best quizzers in the state, but also manage to brush up on my quizzing skills (if I may call it that). This month, I'll be missing this quiz as well!!

As a consolation though, I'll be the quizmaster at the January SEQC quiz (W00t W00t!!).

IFFI (Nov 23- Dec 3)
I think pretty much everyone here knows what a huge movie maniac I am. Well, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), despite all its flaws, is still a International level film festival, which screened some pretty amazing movies, and I wanted to be a part of it.... And I don't think you'll be surprised to know that it took place entirely during my semester exams!!

Two Trekking Sessions (Dec 6 and Dec 13)
Canopy Goa organises trekking sessions every once in a while, and they've scheduled two tours (a birding trip and a butterfly watching trip) for the month of December.... and guess what? Both of them lie during the semester exams!! Waaaahh!! :( :(

A Goa #Tweetup (Nov 25)

A tweetup is a gathering of a group of people who've met on Twitter, and there was a Goa Tweetup scheduled for the evening of the 25th of Nov. I had missed an earlier tweetup since I got news of it very late, but I seriously wanted to be able to make it for this one!! Too bad, my timetable played spoilsport!!

So overall, I'm completely pissed off at the University Board for ruining one entire month of action for me!! :(

Hope, other events planned out over the next couple of months, including two national conferences, one national level conference that's to be held here in Goa and one or two college technical fests, work out in my favour!!

Update: And just when I thought that the worst was done, it turns out NOTHING works out for me. Practical exam dates came out today, and one of the exams falls on the 18th, a day when the Goa Open, a state level quizzing tournament is to be held!! So one more event added to the list!! Grr!!

MiniNOOOOOOOOva!!

2009-11-27T16:49:00.006+05:30

On the evening of 26th Nov 09, after getting back home from first sem paper of the third sem, my twitter timeline showed an unusual tweet by @OldMonkMGM, a bong dude, and it was kinda fishy!!

Hmm...This dude has a weird sense of humour I thought, and casually proceeded to the site mentioned in the tweet for my daily dose of torrenting. And BOOOOOOM!! My world came crashing down upon me like a stack of cards squished by a mammoth!! Mininova was NOT Mininova anymore!! And gleaming away in all its HTML yellowish ribbony glory was this notice:

And I knew it at once..... Mininova had just died! The monk was right after all! You may want to read the original Mininova blog post before proceeding.

Now you're probably wondering why I'm so sad over the death of a site, that too of a P2P site, which we all know are sprouting like mushrooms all over the place!!

Well, here's the story (Forgive me if I get a little senti here!):

My tweets after I read about the demise of Mininova!

I've been living an active online life for over 8 years now!! It all started with a modest dialup internet connection, which when connecting to the interwebz sounded like a cat getting run over by a truck, and using which, downloading anything over 8-10 MB was considered simply impossible (or pathetically slow)!!

And then came the age of broadband... and I instantly realised what was at stake!! Every single file I had deemed unobtainable would soon be, well....... obtainable!! And with gleaming eyes and a hunger for information, I waited for the friendly neigbourhood BSNL-walla to call up and offer a broadband scheme. But that was not to be!!

Being in the middle-of-nowhere village that I am, acquiring a broadband connection was almost as difficult to get as getting John Abraham to show some facial expressions!! And after over a year of gadha-mazoori (mostly by my dad and a neighbourhood colleague of his), I secured a broadband connection in October 2008!!

Every broadband enabled friend I had had told me about torrenting, and I remembered my experiments with torrenting using a dialup modem (A movie that showed 1 year 2 weeks left for download to complete for nearly 24 hrs!!), and so I downloaded the eternally trustworthy uTorrent and began looking for torrent sites..... and the first, and by far the best one I found, had a name that instantly was etched upon my heart, MiniNova.

The site, which was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, instantly opened up a new world to me.... a world where sharing is caring, where seeding is next to godliness, where names like aXXo, nHaNc3, FxG and FxM are considered to be gods!! Where Robin Hood seemed to be everone's favourite story!! Living a life behind the mask of mysterious usernames, torrenters stole from the rich, and supplied to the poor, all without any compensation other than a "A/V 10/10" rating which implied the "rip" was perfect!! Despite initial doubts on the ethicality of P2P, I torrented, and boy, I torrented like hell was on fire!

formattingArtist's impression of aXXo!!

Movies that were not/yet to be released in India, Music by obscure yet amazing bands, E-books on everything ranging from Amateur photography to Zucchini modeling, Comics, Graphic novels, Games, High-res images of Jupiter, declassified FBI files, everything you could think of was right there on mininova!! And it was not just me.... a whole generation of people took to torrenting through mininova... so many infact, that Mininova ranked 9 on Google’s list of most queried terms in 2006. It recently even crossed the 10 billion torrent downloads mark!!

I loved Mininova so much that even after discovering sites like Torrentz.com, which showed torrent statistics from various torrent sites, I'd still religiously log on to Mininova almost everyday!! Mininova was the only torrent site on which I actually registered as a user, just so that I could be part of the community! Infact when ThePirateBay, another popular torrent site, let go of its tracker (again for legal reasons), I didn't care, since I knew I still had Mininova. When aXXo stopped putting up files, I didn't care, since I knew Mininova would show me equally good quality files. And now it's all gone!!

I'll miss you Mininova, your bright home page, your lovely tabbed interface, your autocomplete enabled search box, the brilliant comments you gathered!!

Actual comments for an episode of The Office

But most of all, I'll remember you as a source of endless hours of entertainment, and as a rebel against the system/rage against the machine kinda initiative that you were!!

You have nearly always answered my pleas for information and entertainment, and nearly all of my ~350 Gig torrented material directly or indirectly branches from you!

I hope you have a great time in website heaven... you're definitely in my Website Hall of Fame!! With the death of Mininova, comes the death of its active community(and my username: madmax108). Farewell homies!! God bless the 5 guys who came up with the concept of Mininova, and God bless every commenter on the site who'se valuable info has helped my pick out some of the best stuff I'll ever lay my hands upon!!

Apparently, Mininova became popular after its predecessor, named Suprnova, closed down (you guessed it right..... for legal reasons). Now that gets me thinking, will we see a Micronova soon?

P.S. I'm seriously thinking of staging my own Pirated Film Festival in memory of Mininova (and after reading the first comment in this post)... let's see how that plan works out!!

Related:
10 Alternatives to Mininova (via TorrentFreak )
Linux+Watchmen=Vacation Masti

10 movies I simply MUST watch after the sems!!

2009-11-25T16:30:00.006+05:30

It's that time of the year again!! After 4 odd months of ~~attending~~ bunking classes in college, the semester exams appear out of the blue and every student runs helter skelter trying to get his hands on as many notes as he can!! (even though in 90% of cases, he doesn't read even 50% of the collected notes!)

For me however, exams always mark a time of acute lack of concentration, and it seems as if every small thing distracts me (see this). Being the movie fanatic that I am, the last week or so has been like hell for me, since loads of people have been recommending awesome movies to me, and I've been restraining myself from watching (or torrenting) any of them!!

So here is a list of 10 movies (actually a few more!!) I'm dying to watch once the sems are done:

10) The Punisher and Punisher:War Zone
The movie The Punisher and its sequel, are said to be the best in the leave-your-brains-at-home whacked out action Boys only testosterone-overdosed movie genre!! Enuf said!!Definitely on my list!!

9) The Maiden Heist
I'm a huge fan of Morgan Freeman's acting, be it in comedy or serious roles (kinda like the Amitabh Bachchan of Hollywood), and this movie is on my list simply because of his presence in it!!

8) Goodbye Bafana
The true story of how Nelson Mandela, a man I regard as one of the greatest icons of all time, changed the life of his prison guard!!

7) Absurdistan
One of the few comedy movies on my list, Absurdistan is a story about women in a village who go on a strike of the worst possible kind- A Sex Strike, to ensure their demands are met.

6) Looking for Eric and The Football Factory
Two movies based in soccer, though in a thoda sa hatke manner. the first movie deals with Eric Cantona (aka God!!) giving a fan some life coaching while the second deals with Soccer
Hooliganism..... What more can I ask for?

5) Schindler's List, Munich and Saving Private Ryan
Three movies by Steven Speilberg, two of which I've watched when I was much younger (when they didn't make much sense to me back then), rated very highly by friends and critics alike.

4) The Flying Scotsman
This one was recommended to me by one of my bestest-est friends Avantika. The movie showcases the true story of Graeme Obree, the Champion cyclist who built his bicycle from old bits of washing machines who won his championship only to have his title stripped from him and his mental health problems which he has suffered since.[sorry about the IMDB synopsis]

3) Catch Me If You Can
I remember watching part of this movie, which is based on the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr., the most famous conman in the world, but I want to watch the whole movie now!!

2) Enemy at the Gates and The Mongol
Both these movies, which are fictional, but based on true stories, one on the extreme sniper Vassili Zaitsev and the other on another great leader, Genghis Khan!!

1) The True Story of Che Guevara, Che (Part one and Part two),Motorcycle Diaries
Three movies on the life of the man, the leader, the revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara, who, despite what anyone may say, is, in my humble opinion, the greatest leader who ever lived!!I really want to know more about the man who single handedly brought down governments!!

I don't care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting. - Che Guevara

0) Harishchandrachi Factory
Yeah, I know this is number 11, but what can I say.... I'm a movie fanatic!! This movie, India's official nomination to the Oscars this year, is about the the efforts that Dadasaheb Phalke had to take during the making of India's first feature length film Raja Harishchandra, and has been recommended to me by loads of my marathi speaking friends, and I simply can't wait to watch this movie (with subtitles of course, since "mala marathi maaet naai").

Ok..... that's all. In all, I've named 19 films in my 10 films list!! :) :)

And I'm sure there will be many ore that'll get added to the list by the time the sem exams are done!!

Think you know a movie I may like? Recommend it to me in the comments!! cheers!!

S4TD -Sorry For The Delay!!

2009-11-18T22:12:00.014+05:30

Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes. --Che Guevara

I know I haven't been able to update LoN as frequently as I'd have liked to (or as you'd have liked as your mails and comments have mentioned), especially over the last 3-4 months and this has led to quite a few rumours popping up about LoN (and me). So let's clarify em: Firstly, I'm NOT dead, or sick, or sick in the other sense.... okay, now that we're on a roll, let's move on shall we?

Here's What I Have NOT done over the last few months:

1) Gone back to my home pl anet
2) Decided to quit blogging.
3) Become a CS Pro and started practising for the World Cyber Games (WCG)
4) Relocated to the Himalayas, and broken all ties with the outer world in my aim to become a philosophical master of mankind!!
5) Become a perfectionist to the extent that I don't feel any of my posts are worth posting (Did someone just say Aamir Khan?).
6) Started studying for college!! (Most important!!)

But yeah, I have been amazingly busy (with a capital B) over the last few months. This semester (3rd out of 8) has introduced me to a whole new world that I'd never imagined, even in my wildest dreams. And hell yeah, I've been enjoying every moment of it!!

Instructions I live by!! :)

And while I'll leave more details of what I've been up to through the course of my 3rd semester for my End-sem "Stuff I Did This Semester!!" post, here's just a sneak peak of what I've been up to:

1) Gotten involved in college affairs as the second year representative of CURSOR, the Comp Sciences student body of my college that I'd briefly mentioned here.
2) Attended a workshop on the Python Programming Language organised by FOSSEE
3) Attended a workshop on Network Security organised by NULL
4) Co-founded a youth magazine, Straight From The Moron (SFTM) and was chosen as editor. Here is the latest issue (Issue 4)
5) Written papers and prepared abstracts for 2 national level conferences, the more notable amongst the two being NullCon 09.
6) Designed half a dozen websites, including two for start-up companies!! Plus one crazy whackjob site for my class which'll go live once the exams are done!!
7) Twitter-ed, Facebook-ed,Orkut-ed,LinkedIn-ed ,Networked.
8) Played CS like crazy, but still at a level which makes the G-force guinea pigs look like supermen!!
9) Participated in a street play.....to very mixed responses:

REVIEWS:

The show was great, and the showstealer was Navin Pai, one of the finest acting talents I've seen in a long time --Critic 1

Navin is the kind of actor you go to when a block of wood is unavailable! --Critic 2

10) Joined the College robotics club and the College photography club (and won the inaugral photography competition)!!
11) Participated in a inter branch intra college event, Tandav, and worked on everything, right from organisation to participation to jubilation!! (we came second in the cultural segment and won the sports segment!!)
~~12) Bunked loads of lectures so that I could do points 1 to 11~~

My semester exams start at the end of November, and go on till the 20th of December....so again, there'll be a break from posting at LoN!! :(

But kya karein, I've got a lot to study, especially because of point 12 mentioned above!!

So cya guys in the final weeks of the year!!
cheers!!

Related Posts:
Stuff I did this semester (Sem 1)
This Semester... (Sem 2)

Striking In On Counter-Strike!!

2009-09-11T16:25:00.048+05:30

Well, I know its been over a month since my last post on LoN, but there's a reason to that.... infact there are quite a few!! Firstly, I've been preoccupied with loads of other stuff right from college ~~crap~~ studies to pursuing other hobbies like photography, robotics and web designing. Being a computer engineering student, I've been coding like crazy, shifting from platform to platform, and jumping from langauge to language faster than you can say C++. Secondly, I've been facing some serious writer's block. Thirdly, certain complications with respect to my last post have made me question whether posting personal views on a blog are actually apt or not. Fourthly, and coming to the topic (finally), I've been constantly distracted by this certain mod of Halflife, that the world knows as Counter Strike!!

Counter strike is NOT a game... It's a religion!! It has its own rules, its own etiquette, its own X factor. And in case all this sounds like crap to you, just think for yourself: What can be better be getting along with a bunch of friends from around the country and frying some opposition ass!!

Well, for the morons among us who don't know what CS is, here's the Wiki definition:

Counter-Strike (commonly abbreviated to CS) is a tactical first-person shooter video game which originated from a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe.

Well, I guess that's all you need... now get back to not having a life!!

There are basically 2 ways to play counterstrike:

Against Bots
Against Humans

Now lets just say that playing against bots is only for n00bs!! The real "mazaa" in CS comes only against human opponents!!

I've been playing this game only for around half a year, and I'm definitely addicted to it!! Counter Strike, like most online activities, is played with a nickname. In my case the nick is not really hard to guess...... its M@dmAx , an alias I've used for over 8 years!!

Now of course' you're probably wondering why this "game" is so special over the millions of similar First Person Shooters out there!! Read on to have your question answered:

CS is a celebration!!: How many of you can truly say that you have celebrated someone's B'day in a truly different fashion?? We can!! CS gives you a million reasons to celebrate life {mainly because you spend a lot of time on the dead side of the table}!!

bloggerformatting at work!!Kunal a.k.a. Neo_HaNgmAN's B'day!!

CS is artistic: If you've ever played CS, you'll know what a spray is..... its basically a design that you paint up on a wall/on the ground. Its function is very very limited yet it is by far the most customised thing in CS. A clan is generally recognised more by its spray than its name!!

bloggerformatting at work!!Example of a "spray" around the bomb

And its a territorial battle after all and what better way of showing the opposition who's boss than by spraying a design over their dead bodies!! Believe me, nothing pisses them off more than that!! CS gives you an opportunity to test you're creative side and create sprays that stand out from the rest!!

Here are a few custom sprays that I've used over the last month and a half!!

CS is Universal!!: One more great thing that CS has done is that it has introduced me to a whole new group of people from across the globe!! Knowing that the guy who just fragged you is from Kolkata, or Delhi and even from out of India is no longer a surprise!! Infact, its sometimes even funny. There was this one time I was playing well into the night and after a looooooong session, I decided to get to bed (at around 3:00 AM!!). I said G'nite to my fellow players and three of them instantaneously asked me where I'm from!! When I told them I'm from India, they revealed that they were from Auckland, New Zealand, and infact it was time for them to head out to college!! Such is the brilliance of CS, that breaks all borders between countries!!

CS is an opportunity to make friends...... its a learning experience.... a celebration..... a toast to teamwork...... and if you ask me, its a fan-friggin-tastic game as well!!

So if reading this post has gotten you excited about the ~~game~~ religion that we call CS, pick up your mouse and start practising your headshots!!

I leave you with this piece of music made completely out of sounds from the game!! Enjoy!!

P.S. I'm seriously hoping my next post comes soon!! :) :)

Afflicted By A Disease!!

2009-08-09T01:50:00.020+05:30

Over the last few days, I have been afflicted with a strange illness. No no, its not the Swine flu!! But its just as serious!! Let's just call it the "why-am-I-still-single-please-get-me-a-girlfriend-quick" syndrome.You may think I'm joking, but believe me, I'm not!! This is serious stuff people!!

It all started off around a month ago, when a certain grade "A" muggu moron, asked out one of the nicest girls I know. Obviously my first reaction was "Hehe, this bum actually thinks he can go out with her...this is bound to be funny!!".

But I was wrong!! Not only did she say yes, but as the days went by, this guy actually managed to keep her happy, and many people actually accepted these two as a pair!! Now that got me completely bugged!!

Why?? Because in an Indian college, muggus are generally at the bottom of almost every pyramid you can think of, right from the people who can play soccer list, to the people to invite to that late night CS session list, to the most date-able lists!! But the very fact that this freak-of-nature managed to get hooked, while yours truly remained single just blew me out of my mind!!

The "accepted" Social Pyramid in college

I want to change my status in Social Networking sites to "committed"!! But here's the catch..... I first need to get committed to a girl. I call my current state a sickness, because I'm pretty sure this is just a temporary phase, and this miserable feeling of being single will go away soon..... Oh yeah, I'm sure!! But right now, all I want is someone whom I would be able to call my girlfriend (for real)!!

Now, studying at a college with an almost negligible female population (by female, I mean 'my type' of female), what sources do I have to get committed?? Well, not many really!! :(

I don't have the balls to just walk upto any girl and say ‘Hi! Have we met before??’ And practically speaking, it is simply impossible to talk to any girl out there on the street. We always hear of stories like - "You heard of X? He just found his love at the mall! And now they are dating ..." Believe me, these fantastic stories only take place in people's fantasies!!This leaves the option of a long distance relationship with one of of my schoolmates..... but somehow, the idea of not actually being close to 'her' nudges me away from this idea.

I don't want to go online onto some Orkut-like site and ask girls with nice display pics (which generally are not theirs) to "Make Fraandsheep" with me, because frankly, I'm not that cheap and will never fall down to that level!! {why on earth are you smiling??}

And most of the "offline" girls I know are all either taken (some even by these goddamned muggus), while others are blissfully single and ignorant of my condition!!

Most conversations I have with girls look more like interviews, with me portraying the role of the interviewer shooting out questions like: "How're you??" "What are you doing now??" "Met so-and-so recently??" and ofcourse the most popular showstopper "So what else??".......most conversations end within minutes of me popping this question!!

This is usually how things progress at my end. However, there have been exceptions!! And I'm seriously hoping that one of these "exceptions" works out in my favour!! Over the last week, four very interesting girls have given me their contact details....hopefully something clicks!!I have made blunders in the past, which have been totally successful in keeping me blissfully single till date!! Lets just hope that this time will be different!!

With that I leave you.......but before I go, here's the chorus of my current favourite track, Hey Juliet by LMNT

(Hey Juliet)
I think you're fine
You really blow my mind
Maybe someday,
you and me can run away
I just want you to know
I wanna be your Romeo
Hey Juliet

Sniff Sniff... No wonder I like this track!!

P.S. I'm pretty sure that atleast one of those girls-who-gave-me-their-contact-details will read this blog, read about my affliction (and the fact that I referred to them as "exceptions"), label me a despo, and then block my number... There, another blunder :( :(

5 Things I Learnt From "The Gods Must Be Crazy"!!

2009-07-08T17:23:00.023+05:30

You've probably heard of this movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy (TGMBC). It is a South African movie which tells the story of a bushman named Xixo (pronounced KeeKo), who encounters technology for the first time in his life, in the form of a coke bottle, and all the (mis) adventures that follow. It is widely claimed to be South Africa's finest movie, and considering its the only South African film I've seen, I completely accept!! :)

There were so many things that I realized after watching this movie. And, as the title of this post suggests, 5 of them are listed below.

1) Fast motion comedy is cheesy.... but fun to watch!!
I'd always had this impression that fast motion comedy is too slapstick to actually be fun. But this movie changed all that!! Yeah, its cheesy, its slapstick, its wacky, but its a whole load of fun!! Not wanting to spoil the fun of the movie by posting the fast motion segments of the movie, I'll simply post the fast motion version of Hakuna Matata!!

2) South Africa is simply awesome!!
Believe me, this movie sigle handedly moved South Africa up by atleast a dozen places in my "Places To Visited Before I Die" list. Sample this: The picture shown below is the location where the climax of the movie is shot..... And right below it is the actual shot from the film. Amazing eh?

3) Globalization is an arsehole!!
I'm pretty sure that you're wondering how I can even say such a thing considering that the very reason that I'm able to write this post from my nook in Goa, India, and you're able to read it sitting in ________ (fill place name here) is due to the amazing phenomenon that we call globalization.

But this movie opens you up to the other side of globalization. It shows how something as insignificant as a coke bottle can wreck havoc in the lives of an indegenious culture. And how a universal language (English) and a common culture have become such an integral part of life, that we cannot accept anything that doesn't conform to our culture!!

4) Coke is evil!!
You might have read that the pesticide content in Cola drinks is higher than the drug content in Amy Winehouse, and have probably heard of bugs being discovered in packaged coke bottles, and even read stories of Coke being banned in certain countries, but TGMBC introduced me to another reason why its probably right to say that Coca Cola is evil. Of course, in the movie the bottle has been used simply as an example, but considering that I prefer Pepsi anyway, you can say that Coca Cola is a huge No-No!! :)

5) Kalahari Bushmen rule!!
I'd heard so much about indigenous cultures, right from the Eskimos at the north pole, to the pygmies in Africa, to the Dayaks in Indonesia but one culture that I have always been intrigued about but never really knew much about were the Bushmen of the Kalahari. This movie focuses a lot on this culture and its cultural values (such as their family system, their way of life etc.). Another thing the movie showcases is the amazing eyesight these bushmen have. All in all, I learnt a lot about this culture that I'd been fascinated about simply by watching this movie. Now I've read up a lot more on these amazing people who're endowed with some amazing skills, both physically and mentally. Would I want to be reborn as a Bushman?? Hell Yeah!!

(Things you have to do to format in blogger!!)I agree with this guy!!

All in all, TGMBC is an amazing movie, and a must watch, not only for fans of the "World Cinema" genre, but also for anyone who is fascinated about learning about cultures other than your own.I'd strongly suggest you watch this movie to understand how much bigger the world actually is (yeah, BIGGER, not smaller as the internet suggests!!).

Simple Problems, Exhorbitant Solutions!!

2009-06-27T19:55:00.020+05:30

Note: If you have a sibling then you'll understand exactly what this post is about. If you're amongst the unfortunate few whose parents decided that one brat running around the house was more than enough, then I'm sorry to say but you'll probably miss out the point of this post!!But read on anyway...

Rule No 1 Of Siblingry: Arguments are part and parcel of a siblings life. And logic has absolutely no place in these arguments!!

Now believe me when I say that me and my kid sister respect this rule like its the 10th commandment!! Infact I'd rephrase the rule to read something like "Thou Shalt Argue Illogically With Thy Sibling Atleast Once Everyday" for more of a dramatic effect!! Infact I think this rule is more universal than any of the other 9 commandments!! Don't believe me?? Read on my friend, and be dazzled by the idiocy portyared by yours truly!!

This is NOT fiction. This conversation actually occured on today evening.

Me and my sister* were having a huge argument over how I'd murder someone and not get caught. (This may sound a very gloomy topic to be discussing but it was very relevent at that time because we'd just finished watching the movie Zodiac which is based on a true story of a serial killer). I kept coming up with many many ideas and she contradicted me everytime.

Most of my plans included my hands leaving fingerprints all over the victim or the surroundings and my sister kept pointing it out that a single finger print would be enough to screw my case!! So I thought for a while, and then came up with "The Ultimate Plan" [insert cool techno music here] :

"I'll kick him off a cliff" I said, but then she argued that even toe prints are distinctive like finger prints (She's right apparently). So I thought for a while and then came up with my solution..... "I'll kick him off a cliff and then...... I'll chop off my legs, and use a pair of prosthetic limbs instead for the rest of my life". I then looked at her waiting for her to say something stupid to contradict my "Plan par excellence". She thought for barely 5 seconds, smiled, and then said "Why don't you just wear a pair of socks when you're kicking him off?"

D'oh.... So simple!! Why didn't I think of that?? My plan had a monetary cost of a few lakh rupees, and me losing my legs forever, while her idea cost me barely Rs.50-100 (plus I maintain all my limbs intact!!). You have no idea how moronic I felt when I realized the simplicity that this 12 year old had used to solve a problem that my "to-be-engineer" brains couldn't figure out!!

I seriously need to get back to my basics!! Grrr...

*This is a pic I took just now of the two of us!!

Linux +Watchmen = Vacation Masti!!

2009-06-15T00:49:00.017+05:30

Random thought no. 765891 of the day:

College vacations have just started a week ago, and already I've gotten so much stuff done, that I seriously feel that going to college anymore will just be a waste of my time!!

Random thoughts apart, this post is about two amazing things I did over this past week.

Messing around with Linux and
Reading my first graphic novel!!

Okay, so let me clarify:

Messing around with Linux :
Always having atleast 2 computers at home means I can always be messing around on one of them and generally messing around means experimenting with OSes. I've had a computer running various distros of Linux on a rotational basis for nearly a year now. However, thanks to my other priorities, I never really got my hands into Linux that much. Now, finally that I've got the time, I've started moving towards linux as much as possible!!

I started off by getting rid of Backtrack 3, which I'd installed to run some network tests on a friends remote network, (but which was since that day lying there almost unused), and then installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Codename: Jaunty Jackalope). After a smooth install,I was greeted by the linux boot screen. Post logging in, I noticed that all my hardware was recognized and functioning properly [Now that's what you call "working-out-of-the-box"]. Anyway, this perfect picture of Ubuntu 9.04 lasted only until I rebooted!! Once that was done, it seemed I couldn't get my audio driver to function past the login screen!! So I went to the Ubuntu forums and noticed that quite a few people had similar problem and the Gnome ALSA mixer seemed to solve the probem for them. I tried the same, and a few minutes later, music flooded my room once again!!

Now being the true computer junkie that I am, I decided to work with terminal commands as much as possible!! Crazy idea but awesomely fun!! But now lets shift the focus of this post to point 2.

Watchmen:
The people who guard our societies in the nights, whistling every now and then to scare away the badmaash gundas who're out there with the sole aim of looting you while you snooze.....But NO, I'm not talking about those guys!! I'm talking about the new movie with the same title that is said to among the best in recent times. Even IMDB users have rated this movie 8.0 on 10. Wow, I had to watch this movie!!

However, I read that the movie was infact an adaptation of a 12 part graphic novel by Alan Moore. And apparently, the novel was a super duper hit back in the late 80's. Being the ardent tweeter that I am (follow me), I asked some of my fellow tweople what they thought of the movie, and the book. Some of the tweets were amazingly informative. I soon realised that this book actually has a cult following!! One day, by mistake, I called this novel a "comic", and around 15 people tweeted back telling me to change that the word "comic" to "graphic novel"!! Then I read this(Read the second half of the article). I also read on wiki, that not too long ago, the novel was considered by Hollywoods top directors, to be too dark and complex to be made into a movie!! Then finally someone said "People who watch Watchmen movie without reading the comic should be burned alive!". Ooh.. so I decided to read the comic first.

I downloaded all the 12 issues and then found that the downloaded files were in some strange .CBZ format. A little research later, I found that .CBZ is a format specific for graphic novels. This started my hunt for software that could display .CBZ formats.

And this is where the 2 points collided. The first software I found that seemed to do the job, was a software meant specifically for Linux, and guess what its name was?? It was Comix!! Take that Watchmen fans!!

Anyway, installing Comix in Ubuntu was as simple as using the terminal command:

sudo apt-get install comix

Reading the novel was a joy, firstly because it was my first proper read in a loooooong time, secondly because it was my first graphic novel, and thirdly because it is an awesome awesome book!! Comix is a piece of brilliant software and runs very smoothly on Linux .

By the end of it all, I have become a huge fan of both Ubuntu 9.04 and Watchmen. I'm really planning to get more into more graphic novels especially ones that have been adapted into movies or TV series such as Black Hole, V for Vendetta and 300 (The latter 2 being among my most favourite films of all time!!). I watched Watchmen (the movie) a few days after reading the novel, but I'll save my comments on that for my next post, hopefully by the end of next week. I've absolutely fallen in love with Ubuntu 9.04 and plan to make it my permanent Linux distro.

Now, I'm pretty sure, that if you've read this far, that you're interested, either in Watchmen or in Ubuntu 9.04..... so its time for some links!!

You can buy Watchmen (the graphic novel) either from Amazon (for $12.73) or from Flipkart (for Rs.812)

OR

U can do what I did, and download the all twelve parts as a single torrent download from here. The torrent, at the time of writing this post has ~150 seeds which is more than enough for a fast download.

You can watch a trailer of Watchmen the movie on YouTube.

As for the Linux part of this post:
You can download Ubuntu 9.04, you can download the disc image either directly or using the BitTorrent protocol from the official Ubuntu download page . The page even offers downloads of the earlier version of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 8.04 Codenamed Hardy Heron).

Comix, the comic book reader is open source, just like Ubuntu, and can be downloaded here.

That's all for now I guess.... more to come soon

P.S. A day after writing this post, I uninstalled Ubuntu 9.04 from my system and installed Fedora 11, which is another awesome Linux distro (codenamed Leonidas. Yeah, after the hero of the graphic novel 300!!). So much for my love of Ubuntu 9.04!! cheers!!

This Semester...

2009-05-21T19:03:00.010+05:30

This semester:

I was busy.And lucky.
I floated.I sunk
I dived and I gulped.
I prayed.Perhaps more than I've ever prayed before.
I grew as an individual.
I branched out.I learnt new stuff.
I danced.I felt good in a weird unexplainable way.
I spoke to an old friend and felt full once again.
I found many new buddies.
I walked on stage.I walked in glory.
I won.More than mere competitions.
I clapped and shouted.
I jeered.I cheered.
I stood with my people through difficult times.
I sat in a field just staring at the stars.
I realised.I was proud.
I disintegrated with laughter.
I was in peace.Internally.
I was a peaceful warrior.
I made a presentation.
I worked.I impressed.
I was unsuccessful.I was happy.
I was funny.I was loved.
I was disgusted in people.I told them so.
I was secretive.I was self-absorbed.
I fed a friend with my hands.
I programmed.I coded.I debugged.
I acted.I made a movie.
I made an omlette.I threw it out.
I tried again.And unexpectedly succeeded.
I met people.I was really impressed by 2 of them.
I saw beautiful girls I don't remember faces of anymore.
And then I met .::Her::. again.
I lost in cuteness to a 2 year old. I was bewildered.
The kid lost in cuteness to .::Her::..I was NOT shocked.
I changed things.I let things be.
I slept in a room filled with music.
I had my cake and ate it too.
I stayed up all night.Eleven non-consecutive days.
I went to the beach with my grandmom.
I walked in the corridor a whole night in anxiety.
I saw someone's tears washing away a whole mountain in me.
I saw eyes glazed with admiration.With surprise.
I flirted.I cracked PJ's.I watched movies.I had fun.
I was confused about the future.
I was happy with how it looked.
I ran. I jumped in water puddles.
I was jolly.I was full.

This semester.
I was so much. I understood life. I lived life.

Related Posts:
Stuff I Did This Semester!!

LoN Is Getting A Facelift!!

2009-05-02T14:56:00.006+05:30

I donno why, but over the last few days I've been thinking of changing the template of LoN ... And considering that I've been brushing up on my HTML/CSS skills, I think this is the right time to upgrade the template (and mod it of course!!). I've come up with the following options..... and now I need your help to decide which will be the brand new look of LoN.... So here are the options I've cut it down to:

Obviously, these are just the default templates.... and after selecting them, I'll be modding them to the max!!

Please do vote, and help LoN with its new look!!

I Love Avial!!

2009-05-01T18:55:00.008+05:30

If you're from South India, then you probably know what Avial is..... Its a semi-dry curry made by mixing literally every single vegetable you can lay your hands upon..... sort of a medley of a hundred different tastes. Yet by the end of it all, you end up with a curry that is so complete, so clear, and so very yummy (You can check out the recipe of a traditional avial here).

But wait a minute, why is Navin talking bout some weird sounding south Indian food?? Guess what, this post ain't about food at all..... Its about the brilliant band from down south!! Unbelievable?? Read on my friend!!

With the amount of free time I've had over the last few days (Believe me, even a jobless call centre employee wouldn't have as much free time as me!!), I've been tuned into all sorts of extra curricular stuff like music, photography, novels, films,web designing, Orkutting and the rest!!

On the musical front, I've been experimenting with various obscure bands whose whose music is offbeat to say the least. But I've been hooked on to this new genre of neo-Indian rock/metal music. You're wondering how I said Indian and metal in the same sentence?? I thought it was impossible too, until I heard this brilliant band whose name is, you guessed it right, Avial!!

Note: These guys sing in malayalam, but all I can say is music crosses all boundries. Even though I don't understand their lyrics, I really really like their music.

Avial is a five member band based in Thrissur,Kerela. The bands line up is as follows

Tony John- Turntables
Rex Vijayan- Guitars
Anand Banjamin- Vocals
Naresh Kamath - Bass
Mithun Puthanveethil -Drums

These guys have sound amazing ..... and I certainly understand why they call themselves Avial: Their music is a blend of metal, classical music, rock, and flavours of many other "traditional" genres of music, just like the dish.

I've heard quite a few of their songs and all I can say is that they impress me more with every song I hear. Here are a few of their songs along with my personal ratings. Click on the songnames to download the songs.

Nada Nada (5 Stars)
Aranda (5 Stars)
Chekele (5 Stars)
Aadu Pambe (5 Stars)
Karukara (4 Stars)

They even have a Video of Nada Nada on YouTube.

For more on Avial, you can check out their official site.

You can also buy their album for the amazingly low price of Rs. 157 (Rs.180 with shipping) at MusicYogi. I've already ordered mine!! :) :)

If you like Avial, you can also check out the following bands, which are redefining the term "Indian Rock":

Slingshot
Indus Creed
Parikrama
The Circus (From Lauchpad 3 Fame)
Moksha
Pin Drop Violence
Workshop (Yeah, the band from Launchpad 3 .... Amazingly funny band!! Especially like the track "Bunty Aur Mallika Sherawath")

Enjoy all this yummy yummy music!!
cheers!!

PS: None of the download links or the video links are hosted by this blog..... I've simply copy-pasted these links off the web.

Engineer's Love Song!!

2009-04-28T09:04:00.006+05:30

Feeling a little poetic, and a little nerdy, and missing that certain somebody in my life...

Found This On The Net....... Added a few stanzas of my own before posting :) ....You may find this a bit slow compared to the general pace of this blog.....par kya kare, dil ka maamla hai...... and after all the blog title does read: "Life Of Navin-Mere Dil Ki Baat..."!!

Engineer's Serenade
I was alone and all was dark, Beneath me and above
My life was full of volts and amps, But not the spark of love

But now that you are here with me, My heart is overjoyed
You turn the square of my heart, Into a sinusoid

You load things from my memory, onto my system's bus
My life was once assembly code, and now it's C++

The days I do not see you, my tears all turn to drops
This guy who was a MBit, starts doing TeraFLOPS

Its great how well you dress up, I really like your hair
I hope you use a welding torch, coz my brain needs some repair

My hard disk has corrupted, my keyboard's lost its keys
but holding you by my side, I'll run with complete ease

Its cool how hot i think you are, I think you're so sexy
Why don't you get in my registers, lets runtime this exe

I love the way you solder things, My circuits you can fix
The voltage across your diode is, much more than just point six

My voltage rails have malfunctioned, I think there's been a surge
there's been a point of inflection in my cardioidic curves

Adrenaline starts pumping, my heart starts beating fast
Its not pythogorean, its more confusing than Laplace

Baby, you've changed my life, and made my maths discrete
And now I'll end my poem here, Control, Alt, and Delete

-----------------------------------------

And while we're on the topic of geeks and love, here's a list of the Top 5 Geekiest Proposals That Worked!! Especially liked Proposal 2.0!!

And how about expressing yourself with a tee....... Geek ishtyle!!

And here's another attempt by a geek trying to please his lady love!!

Enjoy
cheers!!

Happy B'day Bloggy!!

2009-04-15T13:55:00.007+05:30

Happy B'day Dear LoN .... Yes, Its officially been one year since my first post (which by the way is unofficially the lamest blogpost ever)

Sorry that I wasn't able to attend the birthday party, but as Suhanna rightly said, I was definitely waiting for this day for a looooooooong loooooooong time.

And it seems, by the number of wishes you've gotten, that people actually like you.....and for me, there is no greater compliment than that (coz after all, you are my baby!!).

So I totally hope that Mike Ronson's wishes come true and you live to be a 100 years old!!

I'll just end this post saying it all over agin, this time in style:

Update:
Thanks Mike, Suhanna, Rohan, Sharon, Mr/Ms. Anonymous, Rajneesh, Shreya,Avantika, Sarvesh, Robin, Samar, Govind, Twinkle, Diya, Deepti, Kris "e8rnlRokr", Nivedita, Anushree and the long list of others who wished LoN happy birthday through Twitter, the comments section of ths post, emails, and phone calls!!

I'm just hoping you guys remember my b'day as well!! :) :)

Update 2:
Oh yeah, in case you didn't notice, I'm back after my loooooooong break .....So LoN, will be back up to speed from now on

Keep reading!! (And commenting!!)

LoN Entering A "Temporary" Self-Exile!!

2009-03-11T17:08:00.011+05:30

So over the past few months, starting from my first post on LoN, this blog has become an integral part of my life, my way of telling the world that I'm not a "Nobody", or just a "Somebody" but the moronically unique, technically challenged, humorously untalented NAVIN PAI. To a large extent, I have been successful in doing so. I've recieved emails and comments from people from around the world, made friends within the international blogging circle, developed professional contacts ranging from web gurus to security researchers to even a hair stylist (seriously!!) and even been the recepient of a few brickbats (Life's not always a bed of roses!!). Also, LoN has gotten a pagerank from Google (in less than a year of its existence), and the first result in a Google search for "Navin Pai" shows up my Blogger profile. (I simply love going to Google.com, typing in "Navin Pai", and clicking on "I'm feeling lucky"!!). The other results on the first page include my blog and my twitter page!! So I guess when you wonder who Navin Pai is, even Google says "It's this internet freak from Goa"!! "MISSION SUCCESSFUL" to say the least!!

But over the past few days, I've been struggling to find the time to update this blog, mainly due to my pre-occupation with other **activities** (I'd already said in this older post (at the end) that Sem 2 would be barely eventful).

My dear friend (snicker snicker) Albert gave me the following advice:

As such, after going through my list of options, I've decided to put myself and LoN on a temporary timeout until May 2009...... I stress on the word temporary, because I'm sure that I'll be back up and running once May is here. Now that's less than 2 months so I'm guessing that I won't miss too much. But I promise, that I'll be back (not with a bang, but with a BOOOOOOOOM!!), and so will LoN, and this sign sums it all up:

Hope that you guys (and gals of course) will understand......

So for the last time until May,
Cheers!!

Wordle.... Now That's A Concept!!

2009-03-09T18:16:00.006+05:30

Stumbled upon this site today, and found it very unique..... The site is Wordle

Here's how the siteowners define the site:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Now I wouldn't really say that definition is wrong, but somehow, it doesn't bring out the beauty of this simple sounding java applet. But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Here is what the site made from My Blogger Profile:

So I guess you understand what this site does..... It simply takes the words off a given webpage (or a sample of text), and arranges them is a 'word-collage', but as can be seen above even this simple concept can lead to some strikingly brilliant results!! Plus if you don't like the results you can change the font, the colours, the layout, or the text itself...... The possibilities are virtually endless!!

The best part of this site is that the images created are completely free for use in any manner you may think of, from T-shirts with wordles on them, to even monetary purposes (like a book cover with a wordle on it!!). And the images produced do not advertise the site (No watermarks/logos/any such thing). I Personally am thinking of getting a tee with the above picture on it....... What a perfect way to define myself!! Could a site get any better??

I personally believe that this site should be among the 10 most innovative sites of 2009.

You can check out some brilliant Wordles at the Wordle gallery. And when you are inspired enough, you can begin creating your own wordles at http://www.wordle.net/create

Waiting to see your wordles!!
cheers!!

'Gulaal' Trailer -- It Can't Get Any Better Than This!!

2009-03-05T00:29:00.009+05:30

I'd gone to the local multiplex to watch Dev D with a bunch of friends today. (I'd have named them all but they're all guys so I don't really think you're interested in knowing them :) )

The movie was pretty good (Though NOT deserving the rave reviews its gotten!! Except for the cinematography ..... It gets a 6/5 in that sector!!). I'll review it if I get the tid (That's time in Norwegian).

But what really struck me was the trailer of Anurag Kashyap's next venture.......... Gulaal, which was shown before Dev D began. Note that Dev D too is directed by Mr. Kashyap.

THE TRAILER ROCKED!!

When the trailer started I thought it was the trailer of some cheap C grade movie (hehehe, incase you clicked on the link), but by the end of its 2 and a half minutes runtime, I was left completely speechless!!

Hard hitting dialogues (including a new twist on the "Mere Paas Ma Hain" cliche), eerie scenes, A brilliant tag line (Love.... Power..... Revolution.), and a well executed background score in the trailer make this movie seem like a mindbogglingly brilliant, politically supercharged, youth awakening movie (Comparable to the likes of Sarkar (desi) or V For Vendetta (V-desi)). Even the movie poster (shown at the start of this post), seems to point at a movie which is unlike any one seen in recent times.

Check Out The Trailer Of Gulaal Below

This movie is one that I'm waiting for with great expectations..... Hope it doesn't turn out to be a dud!! Did someone just say "NO SMOKING"??

EDIT: Watched the movie on March 19th ...... My Worst nightmare came true......It sucks royally!!!! I'd just give it 2 stars out of 5 !!

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