The Chemistry Lab Casualty

Hydrogen Sulfide smells like rotten eggs. Sulfur Dioxide has a smell of burning Sulfur. Ammonia has a pungent smell. Well, at least that's what the books say. For as long as I can remember, I have had a really hard time describing smells like these. How was I supposed to detect Sulfur Dioxide by smelling it if I had no idea how burning sulfur smelt like?

Mathematics and Kids | Talent and Hard Work

India may be a developing country but there is one important thing about us Indians- we are smart. Not just in modern times, India has been contributing to the field of mathematics since time immemorial. The number zero ring a bell?

GSoC Week 6 | Half the journey completed

It's completion of week 6 and that's officially half way through the Google Summer of Code 2013. Now that I look back, I have been going at a pretty comfortable speed and just ahead of the deliverables mentioned in my application. Having said that, I guess it's time to reflect back on the changes I did in my last week.

The Wlinkster hacking | How it was hacked

After coming up with a post on the negative publicity of Wlinkster, I have generated a few haters (who happen to be the same as the founders and people associated with Wlinkster). At the same time, what I have also been blessed with are a few sincere readers. I have been contacted by the founder Sagar Rana, many times, the last message being the following (pardon his grammar) in many of my public posts (and they are getting marked as spam automatically by Facebook).

DELETE YOUR BLOG POST ABOUT "WLINKSTER" THIS IS THE LAST WARNING FOR YOU OR I WILL DO THE SAME AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE GONNA VIEW THAT INCLUDING YOUR PIC AND YOU FACEBOOK. I HAVE TOLD YOU MORE THAN 10 TIMES IF YOU WILL NOT DELETE THAT POST THEN BE READY FOR THE WORST THING OF YOUR LIFE THANKS. DON'T GET PERSONALLY WITH ME CEO / FOUNDER AT WLINKSTER SAGAR RANA

However, that is not the reason why I am writing this. I am writing this because I was contacted by the person who hacked Wlinkster. Naturally, he used a fake email and a good proxy before sending me the mail, and I don't think there is a way to get back to him. Let me just tell you what he has to say.

New Hostel Woes

Last year, when we were allotted Radhakrishnan Bhawan, everyone was happy. Why? Just one reason- the internet! Unfortunately, this year, we had to move inevitably. Only the fact that the internet wouldn't be there was bothering me. I thought everything else would be fine.

GSoC Weeks 4-5 | More UI Changes

As the days roll by, I have started writing more and more code for making changes to the front end. Week 4 started with changes to my previous work to bring in perfection.

First, the browse courses page. I had already implemented real time search in the page. However, the search options were taking up too much space. Alex suggested that it should be something like this-

Search: |==============| o Advanced

2013-2014 Fantasy Premier League | A collection of private leagues

Another new season. Another season of player swaps and deals. The registrations have started and in case you haven't done it yet, go to the Fantasy Premier League site NOW!

In case you want a step-by-step guide on how to register, here is a nice article explaining the process with screenshots.

An Update on my Wlinkster post

Five days ago, I came up with a blog post criticizing Wlinkster's methods of spamming Zuck's posts and generating more hatred towards their cause rather than appreciation. The post took two or three days to get high up in the Google Search (after all, I write pretty sincerely), and if you search 'Wlinkster', that post comes in the third position. Not bad, huh?

The Perfect Road Trip | Through the Lens

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So, here's my story of the perfect road trip through the camera. It was day 3 of our field trip back in the second year.

What the Zuck, Wlinkster? | The Wlinkster.com Craze

Back when Facebook started the idea of subscribers two years ago, the one profile which quite a lot of people subscribed to was that of Mark Zuckerberg. And why not? He is the founder of Facebook, and posts less than once a week on an average. His public posts were never spam, and usually contained interesting information. However, one thing has changed in recent times.

The Prologue

I came with this piece of fiction for some elaborate thing I was planning. Unfortunately, it fell apart eventually and I have decided to 'open source' the prologue, as I don't really know what I want to do with it. Basically, it's up to you, the readers, to decide how you want this to go ahead. If this post gets any good responses, I could follow up with it.

GSoC Week 3 | UI changes

After a comfortable two weeks of mostly AJAXification, it was time I did something which truly resembled the title of the project. I started the week with some code changes from the browse courses branch and a mind to do some changes which would affect the UI directly. Going back to our original discussions during the community bonding period, we had decided that there were four areas of ATutor that urgently needed changes- the browse courses page, the help page, instructor's manage page and the main navigation system. I had done some basic changes to the browse courses page, so I decided to start on the navigation and help page.

Programming - The Django Way!

When I started web development, PHP seemed the easiest language (and the obvious choice) to get little things done. I would first submit simple data through a form and store it in a database. Eventually, with that knowledge and a bit of AJAX, I came up with a full application, which worked well, but only I knew deep down how bad my procedural programming was. That was two years ago.

Soon thereafter, I shifted to Django for my needs and life has been great ever since. And I wonder it took me two years to write a blog post on the same.

My July Reading List

The best thing about getting a Kindle is that you don't really need to carry big sized books to read them, but have this light weight paper-like thing with immense power. Here the books that I plan to read in the coming month (in no specific order).