This semester was... LEGEN-wait for it-DARY

It's been a week since the summer holidays, and that means another semester is behind me. Reflecting on the past two years of engineering, I would say that this semester has been the best 6 months of my life ever. I have changed (read: improved) in a hell of a lot of ways. I also dumped some of my inclination to always plan out the day and introduced some spontaniety. Just before the sem there was December, which meant FOSS.in and the rural internship. Both thrust me into the public all alone, resulting in an eye-opening experience. FOSS.in was a collection of geeks where for the first time I could talk to other people all day about technology and computers and meet lots of coders from around the country. From a wi-fi enabled, air-conditioned environment to a laid-back village in the middle of nowhere in 3 days. That was the beginning of my rural internship. Those 4 days in the village were quite boring, yet it also opened my eyes to what India was. It doesn't mean I am going to go and use ICT in a socially responsible manner -- It isn't as much fun as programming.

Next up was Synapse. For the first time any piece of my code was being interacted with by hundreds of people, as my backend powered the registration and site navigation for the fest. I knew my code was very good ( definitely better than some code I had to look at for some events with specific websites ), and it felt good when the amount of junk IDs were a very small percentage of the total number of registrations.

Then just a day before Synapse was to begin, we had a 'Bazinga!' moment. The server room air conditioner caught fire, rendering the entire DA-IICT network infrastructure down for about a week. No Synapse website, no updates to do in the dead of the night, which meant I had 3 days off to enjoy :-). This also meant I finally had time to give my laptop for repairs.

Enjoy I did. This Synapse was and will remain a very memorable one. We had a blast decorating the SAC for D-lounge. This involved hanging flags on the awnings by climbing a shaky ladder up to the first floor, then leaving both hands to unravel and hook up the flag. Next up was putting up a installation in the middle of the lotus pond. This required calling in a special-ops team as the pond was full of water. Which reminds me, someone has photos of the entire drama. That same rickety ladder was placed flat and one person sat on the end to keep it from toppling into the water. Then about five of us walked across to the first stage of the pond. Then the ladder was pulled across to the next level. Then me and tanmay passed over. After that the ladder was pulled back, and the artwork was passed over. Time for the final jump. The ladder was brought up all the way to the centre, and we literally pushed the canvas across it, hoping it wouldn't end up tearing or going in the water. Then we repeated the entire sequence to get back out. Fortunately, no one fell in, although two poor souls had to stand barefoot in the dirty water all this while.

(effort)

Finally at 3am the task was done, or so we thought.

Synapse Day 1 - 10:30pm I had just finished the last lecture of the day, and wanted to go to Ahmedabad and get my laptop back. But a gust of wind had caused the installation to collapse. Which meant going back in again, this time much more easily and confidently, and sticking it into the ground using bamboos and nails.

Of course this isn't a post about Synapse, so I am going to jump ahead to day 2, which was all about Indian Ocean.

There is a secret to getting the best view at the Pro Nites in Synapse. Get into security, and know a lot of people. The concert was just a treat, well worth all the effort put into Synapse. It was mindblowing and perhaps only the video can capture most of it. They played some never before played songs which are to be released in movies soon. Yet Ma Rewa and Kandisa stole the show as usual. But the most important part is at the end. Once the concert was done we formed a cordon to let the guys get to their room. Now we weren't allowed in, but in an act of spontaneity I took of my Synapse T-shirt (right there!) and threw it in to the coordinator so he could get it signed. And then I *ran*, to the nearest bathroom which was still some 100 metres away :o Well it definitely paid of. In my closet is now a T-shirt signed by Amit Kilam from Indian Ocean. Finally there was the D-Lounge treasure hunt and the late night pool-playing. Ah... those were the days.

Ok, enough about Synapse. The other thing I do in DA-IICT is play football. This year has been a record in terms of the number of tournaments we've played. In the 3rd semester we went to Patan and had our very own Concours. Then we won the IPTG Petro Cup. And in March we went to BITS Pilani, Goa. I've been in top form ( if I should say so myself ) and improved tremendously in ball control and dribbling this semester. Although we lost in the first round, I was happy to hold my ground and not make any mistakes.

And finally there was of course the Google Summer of Code result. I hadn't got in last year. But this time I had put in a *lot* of effort and would have been really disappointed if I didn't make it. But fortunately I did

Now I just got my results, and I got an 8 out of 10 SPI, my lowest yet :-( All thanks to CT and EL, although it was my fault... Well you can't have everything.

Worse is Better

Code Hale shows that sometimes performance needs to be sacrificed for security. Premature optimisation is the root of evil :p

Non-trivium

When you don't post for a long time, it usually means you have nothing interesting to do. But for me it usually means that I have a lot of things to do. And the last month have been horrible in terms of free time.

We had a really great one day trip to Diu, but from then on, it was all underhill :)

You might want to check out the Synapse website which was crafted from scratch with a little help from these guys. This was done under constant pressure of the not so great marks I received in the first midsem exam and the looming second insem, so I applaud myself.

This was accompanied by Concours 09, the first time DA-IICT ever held an inter-college sports fest. We reached the finals and lost! (in football). But now the exams were just a week away.

This exam week was the worst of my short stint in DA. Never before have I skipped football for 5 days straight. And the woozy feeling in the head when I soaked up about 1024Kb worth of signals and systems and put more than half out on the paper. This followed by Algebraic Structures meant that I was with tics for the whole day. Whoo what a semester this is turning out to be...

Thankfully I've been home for almost a week now, enjoying great food after quite some time. But my football holiday is now up to 15 days! I have hacked on the Synapse registration, read 3 chapters of Programming Scala, watched the first part of A curious course on Concurrency and Coroutines, submitted a first code review of kwin-tiling, and procrastinated on some other things. Through all this I also read a few books, and watched the first 5 episodes of Heroes Season 4. That was a lot of stuff in retrospect. Meanwhile FOSS.in is starting to pick up steam and I'm looking forward to when the registration for simple attendance begins.

I'm also on the look-out for an internship.

In the next 48 hours, its back to DA, and time to get cracking on IEEEXtreme, at which I am going to fail miserably, since I don't get time to do pure algorithm practice.

And I thought I was on a holiday :(

PS: I wish some one would sponsor me to go to Camp KDE or atleast Akademy.

Hello Planet

( One of my entries already got aggregated, but this is the traditional introduction )

Hello KDE people! My name is Nikhil Marathe. I'm a relatively new KDE developer ( ~3 months ), currently working on implementing tiling in kwin.

I started using KDE when I switched to ( what was ) Mandrake in 2001. I think it was KDE 3.2. Well I loved it, and have stuck with KDE ever since, following every release with great excitement. But I never considered myself able enough to hack the code. But it seems all those years of learning paid off, and motivation come in the form of Google's Summer of Code. Unfortunately tiling support didn't get a slot, but I decided to implement it anyway. And now it's coming along just fine. Thanks to Martin (mgraesslin), my mentor, for his guidance and Jonathan for his early interest in the code.

So a little bit about myself. I'm 18 years old. I'm an Indian. I'm currently in the 2nd year of the undergraduate course at DA-IICT. Though I'm currently in Gandhinagar, I'm a Mumbai boy through and through.

When I'm not hacking away I usually read or play football.

Thats it. I hope to keep contributing to KDE for many more years. I remember when I used to read the Planet wondering whether I would ever feature on it. Some dreams do come true!

Internship and back to college

Well, my holiday has been cut short...

I'm leaving next Saturday to spend the last month and a half of my vacations in college.

I've received an internship opportunity to work as a Playtester and Beta-tester MILLEE.

I really enjoyed the short vacation though, I learnt to drive, did a lot of swimming, and hacked some decent code.

The last year (academic) has been really really unique, perhaps the most satisfying and enjoyable one. But thats for another post

May updates

I'm home! Till almost the end of July I'll be @ home. Which means a better internet connection at the very least :p

So I've been swimming and learning to drive! Driving is fun, I've finished five days out of the 22 and I've managed not to hit anyone or anything.

In programming, I'm working on a game using Canvas for the CodeChef game contest. You can track its progress on github.

Also I've been doing some C socket programming, mainly doing segmented multithreaded HTTP downloads. Right now all the code is prototype, but someday it will be a decent download manager.

I'm also working on implementing tiling in KWin along with Martin Graesslin, my mentor. Right now there isn't much real progress apart from a KWin branch which maximizes every window you open.

And yesterday I got a copy of Real World Haskell. Yay!

Random Ramblings

Sorry for not blogging in a long time. This has been a very busy week, and so I'm just going to drop some snippets.

First RMS and Larry Ellison both commented against cloud computing.

Graffiti is uploaded and ready to use ( but not necessarily stable ).

I read Snow Crash and >loved it.

I'm confused between getting a Dell Studio 15 and HP Pavilion dv6767tx.

Meanwhile I'll be leaving for Pune tomorrow for SUMMIT '08 at MIT Pune. This is a sports fest, and I'm proud to be the only first year in the football team. This is the first time I'll be playing football as part of an official team with jerseys ( no. 2 ) and all, so it will be fun.

I'll be back on the 5th after which I will probably start with a new project. Right now I'm thinking of something like hyperlink visualizations, though I've no idea how to accomplish this.

Great Weekend

So my second weekend in this place went pretty great. Now that I've found the right computer which easily boots from external devices I'm ready to slowly begin coding. On saturday five of us saw Ugly and Pagli — crappy movie — but I got my first pair of studs. Its been raining a lot for the last three days here. It starts at around 7 and goes on till late into the night, which means a lot of fun football (I've discovered that playing barefoot is better than playing with normal shoes), but being cooped up in the rooms afterwards.

I also made some headway into How To Design Programs which is a really great book, and read almost all of Joel On Software (the book) which is entertaining to say the least.

So right now I'm sitting here after attending a particularly boring calculus lecture. I haven't had a bath because there was no water, and I'm reading a boring story as part of the assignment for Communication Skills.

Right now I'm replanning Graffiti since I wiped it out a few weeks ago. I've also been messing around with Scheme, but can't think of what application to write to dig deeper into it.

A bit of improvement

I'm in the institute lab right now, booting from a pen drive (Slax). But tomorrow I'll get my external HDD and plug it in and try to be productive. These labs are only meant for 'academics' which means there are caps on downloads, so I can't even download firefox without it being interrupted. Also we haven't got our IDs yet, so this connection is thanks to a senior who was kind enough to let me use his account.

Also there is a firewall/proxy which means no IM sites or IM protocols are allowed. This does kind of suck, but it is better than nothing. And this is only till December ( or so I hope ). Cheers, I'll update this tomorrow.

PS. No CD drives on any computer, how do I install Arch? Probably go home and do it

Still no computer

So the second time I'm in a cyber cafe. In certain respects private universities aren't much better than public ones. We still haven't got ID cards, which means no net/linux access. Which means no coding too.

Other than that its been pretty good, playing football and table tennis. But a bit tiring too. Its been raining a lot today, which means there isn't much to do. We had the first couple of lectures today, but nothing new was taught.

This is boring, but the situation is likely to improve in a few days.

In DA-IICT

Well, I'm here, or I've been here for 5 days now. Since we haven't got ID cards yet, there is no computer access, so I'm writing this from a cyber cafe. The last few days have been a bit boring. With no studies, playing and reading seem to be the only things you can do in 24 HOURS!.

I haven't written any code in days, but I have managed to read Hutton's Haskell book, which is really good. This place's library is awesome for all the computer science/programming related books they have, now I just hope I'll have linux access in the labs. For atleast four more months personal computers are not allowed in the rooms. So it might be next year (read Jan 2009) before I actually have my own computer again. Till then I'll just hang on to the external harddisk.

The cooldown

This year's hot hot summer is finally drawing to a close as the rains have finally arrived in Mumbai. This has led to a nice drop in temperatures which means I went the entire day yesterday without getting sweaty even once! I love the rains! The football, the volleyball, and now Euro 2008...

Changes while I was away

So I was totally disconnected from the outside world for 6 days. There have been a few changes on the Net. First Reddit has a new design with more colours, though for some reason it appears cramped to me. Orkut has a .co.in TLD for India. KDE caused a bit of a stir

Eating with my hands

As far as I know there are only three styles of eating: hands, chopsticks, knives and forks (spoons are universal).

And if you had to categorize what to eat with what, it would be

Hands: most indian food, fast food

Chopsticks: Oriental, South East, Asian, Japanese

knives and forks: most of the western world

So I find it pretty funny when people try to eat Indian breads which are flat and non porous with knives and forks. The forks don't pierce very well, the knives don't cut very well because the structure of the bread is different. It's all great to appear well educated in table manners, but I'll stick to my hands. Certain things are made to be eaten in a certain way.

Fragments

I have a bloody cold

I read packrat parsers in Haskell [PDF], and understood only about 25%.

I read 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' by Philip K. Dick and 'In search of Schrödinger's cat' by John Gribbin and understood both.

I also got a deadtree version of 'Programming Pearls' by Jon Bentley

I still have two exams to give.

I am still having some trouble with parsing Markdown in factor.

I am an egoist for starting all the sentences with I.

2 things pissing me off right now

Microsoft, for their persistence in monopolizing (?) document formats, and hounding countries which reject it [1]
And of course its associated allies in the NASSCOM, and the Indian media, who are Microsoft's pet dogs.

China, for all the shit going on in Tibet and for all the human rights violations going on behind closed doors. Boycott the Olympics! ( Hey china? will my blog be blocked now? )

Why Java sucks : Highly subjective

Java was the first language I learned properly. I cobbled together stuff in BASIC for a few weeks, but for Java I bought 2 books and programmed a lot of stuff. That was 4 years ago, I was young, not so experienced, and Java was God to me. It was cool, it had GUI libraries, and lots of people used it. And the WORA concept was quite cool to me then.

But since about a year, Java is slowly moving from Cool to Crappy in my dictionary.
Some how the whole thing seems to be a plot to let mediocre programmers take over the world, cobbling together 'stuff' in their spiffy IDEs. ( Yes there is some good software, Azureus is one that I have experience with )

To me the very fact that a language needs an IDE to get any big stuff done is a big turn off.

Tools

Every shitty small task needs a framework. Bloated pieces of shit with so many classes and fancy UML diagrams that it gets boring to even learn them.

And there are so many IDEs and so many addons that I'd probably waste a lot of time finding the perfect tool, before I started coding.

Code Noise

Java programmers seems to have this penchant for Really.Long.Names.In.DeeplyNestedPackages.

Design Patterns seem to be a half-hearted cure for the disease that is Java. I mean how many other languages do you know where people actively use the term Design Pattern. You have these big classes, with big names that basically convert one thing to another. Like AbstractFactoryDecoratorSingleton ??

Then there is the need to type a lot of stuff for something which should be simple. Where other languages have print, Java has System.out.println. I don't care about preserving your heirarchy! I want to print quickly. Where other languages have open("file") Java has

try {
 f = new FileReader("./words.txt");
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {}
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(f);

Even C/++ is not that bad. Even assembly is better considering its level

Java also has too many acronyms. JNI, EJB, JEE, AOP, ORM, JDBC, DAO. This again is due to Java's corporate nature. You should have realised by now that I'm quite against corporate programming :). I mean isn't Swing much cooler than SWT/AWT.

Less Code, more on How to Code

Apart from the Code Noise, Java programmers are forever arguing about the (de)merits of Agility, Aspects and Models.

Inflexible

In Java almost everything needs double or triple wrappers and lots of passing around. Supposedly for security, but most probably to prevent lousy programmers from messing something up. There are so many things you can't do. Considering the context that Java aims for, in web services and desktops and games rather than mission critical application, I'd thought that keeping things simple and flexible would be much better. I'm not saying dump the type system, but simplify the APIs, lose the structure, drop the formality. I think Python and Ruby have done this very well. The only bit of humour in Java seems to be 0xCAFEBABE.

Give me duck typing any day.

BEFORE YOU COMMENT, THIS IS SUBJECTIVE, MIND YOUR LANGUAGE. You can call me a egoistic ignorant moron, but not something which would make a profanity filter shudder.

I'm free, not, I'm FREE!

The board exams were over yesterday, and I was surprised that it wasn't really as euphoric as I thought it would be. Somehow studying, atleast for some time was pretty cool, writing the exams was fun, it was kind of like being pumped with adrenaline and keeping it in control. And now thats never gonna happen again. Its not like I'm having some huge attack of sentimentality, and of remembering all the cool times in school/college, its just that the relief is not as it should be.

So some guy said "It's more satisfying to want something, than it is when you get it", I can't remember who, so if you can, please comment.

In other news, I've got a couple of long posts lined up which I'll complete if I stop procrastinating ;)

.57142857 way through

Hey the name's KodeClutz, I had to be precise.

4 papers down, 3 to go, after which I'm one step closer to freedom, and quite a major step because all the exams after that are just one day affairs, 4 of them.

In going stupid, I'm thinking of writing a Markdown parser in Factor. The problem isn't Factor, I'm just not that well qualified. But I might just do it.

d-day

Board exams begin from tomorrow. I'll be having fun for 18 days. The situation is really starting to hit.