Filed under: The Good Stuff

The IT Cottage Industry

My mom is a brilliant chef! The best there is! She has had about 30 years of cooking experience and she has been at since she was twelve. Similarly, my colleague's father is a master automobile engineer and has been working with vehicles for a great deal of time now. Many of my uncles are profound at their religion and mantras. This is a generation that we look at with great pity, since they did not have the power of information and computing at their disposal. Well, atleast that is what i hear when people talk about them. And it is hilarious to say the least. This is a generation which might not have had Wikipedia or Google at their disposal, but were equally and perhaps more knowledgeable and experienced in certain things in their days than what we are today. They did not have information at their disposal, but rather they hunted it out, and held it close and together even after all these years. That is information you cannot ignore, that is knowledge that we must not let go of. So as i sat about doing nothing fantastic at office, i realised the amount of value, monetary, this information had. You are talking about expertise gained over 30 years, in very specific areas ranging from South Indian cuisine, Motor bikes and Sanskrit mantras. Most of these things from our culture as human beings.

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My favorite Class in College

I am a Computer Engineer. And i love my subjects. Having said that, i never really enjoyed any class in college when it was to do with computers to be very honest. I like doing practical work. Thats my nature. You can not change it. So that probably restricted me from doing a lot of work in class as such. And practicals would be taken care of in the hostel rooms rather than the practical laboratories. Again, fact of life, i hate working on someone else's time frame, a time frame mind you. Give me a deadline, and the work will be delivered. Do not give me schedules. And for the better part of my engineering it work rather well. But, i am not going to talk about the classes i did not attend or the ones which i did not enjoy. I am here to talk about the one set of classes i did enjoy.

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The Marriage Code

While attending a typical south Indian wedding today, i got engrossed in the ceremony and its proceedings. Every hour there was a puja to be done and it was kind of maddening to be very honest. So, while this madness was going along it normal course, i started taking some interest in the prayers being offered to the Gods and started to ask people as to what they meant, (they were being chanted in Sanskrit), i noticed that every now and then the priest would ask for the bride's or the groom's name. Very so often he was also asking for the names of the parents. At places the priest was asking the couple to do a thing or two by giving them explicit instructions for the same.That is when a brain wave came to me, which might probably leave most of the priests unemployed when it comes to performing such ceremonies and prayers.

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12 Months of Persistence

aitoss.net/commons This is what 12 months of pure persistence has resulted in. What started as a simple suggestion by Tosif Ahmed AIT computers 2008, (currently in Edinburgh University, UK) has come to that link above. He suggested this to me and asked me to set up the team. I called in Karan, Akshay, Nikant and Prince all seemingly capable people in web development, eager to learn and build something new. After a month of work, i think that was the time period, Paritosh joined in. He was brilliant at generating the right content for the site world right from the word go. Prince and Nikant were just good at learning something new at a very rapid pace. Karan and Akshay employed their skills at Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Late nights figuring out the structure of the site, living on caffeine, generating content, brainstorming on the organization of the site. It was fun. Here is a picture of us, which we took for the college magazine, Srijna 2010. I think this was around April. [caption id="attachment_251" align="aligncenter" width="363" caption="The Website Team, April 2010 (LtoR): Vijay, Nikant, Paritosh, Prince, Karan, Akshay"]
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[/caption] After I passed out new people joined the team, the Web team as we call it. Pallavi, Nitika, Avinash & Sandeep. It seems a lot has happened over the last 8 months or so. The team finally made a bold presentation to the HOD's meet in the college and they were well received. We have come this far and hopefully the 24th of this month should be a day of success. May God be with us and may this site see the first ray of the rising Sun on the 24th!

Google Static Maps

I will cut to the chase. The following are two static images showing the location of my college on Google maps. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="AIT on Google Maps"]
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[/caption] [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="AIT on Google Maps with custom marker"]
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[/caption] The following are the two URLs which i constructed in about 5 mins to come up with these images: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=18.60598,73.87507&zoom=14&size=600x600&sensor=false&format=gif&markers=color:blue|label:A|18.60598,73.87507 http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=18.60598,73.87507&zoom=14&size=600x600&sensor=false&format=gif&markers=icon:http://tinyurl.com/62863uh|18.60670,73.87900 Its simpler then saying Google. Or so i think. :D

Chrome WebStore

I opened my browser (read Google Chrome) yesterday and i saw something new in it. Apps !!! I was like, "Hello!! What are you?" And within two clicks of the mouse i end up in the CHROME WEBSTORE!!! It is awesome the way Google does it! Google has now housed all of its Chrome  Extensions, Skins and Apps (yes that is correct, Apps) under one roof and it is simply awesome to say the least. Most of these products or add-ons are free, but you can charge for your apps as well. It takes a nominal fee of $5 to submit your app into the Store itself. A price which is next to nothing in my opinion, given that it is a one time payment.

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