GSoC Week 9 | Polishing old branches

Continuing off where I left last week, the primary work this week involved three things. The redesign of the system preferences page has given me the highest number of issues because, well, it's too big and all the code has been manually written in a page!

The truth about the Russian Sleep Experiment | CreepyPasta

Long back, I had written a blog post on my views on the expressionless (which has quite a chunk of the total number of hits), an urban legend that I encountered on Facebook. It turns out that I have a similar situation. This time it's about the Russian Sleep Experiment.

It is a known fact that the average post on Quora is far more sensible that its Facebook counterpart. As I read through the Russian Sleep Experiment answer on Quora, it just didn't feel right. Had it been true, I would most certainly have heard it somewhere!

The Placement Catastrophe

The most challenging project I had taken up in IMG was that of the development of the placement and internship portal of the college. Although the basic development finished roughly a year ago, we have been doing tons of changes ever since. Since Sandeep was the in charge of the proceedings related to placement last year, I had literally been shielded from the queries. Unfortunately, this time, I had to take over and for the last two days, I have had a really bad time.

The 5 worst covers of all time

I never really understood the need for a cover in case of established bands. If you are successful on the basis of your own music, why try and imitate others? Naturally, they rarely come out good. Here's my list of the worst that I have heard.

GSoC Week 8 | Exploring new things

Officially, we are done with two thirds of the GSoC period now. Not bad, huh? Let me tell you what I did this week. We had three things to get over with before starting converting the CSS files to SASS.

The first was, of course, the dropdowns and improved navigation. I made minor changes to make sure every element in the fit well into the menu. I added a separator to make the dropdown look like a menu rather than a single unified area with some links in it.

Google Summer of Code 2013 Participation

Here is the GSoC 2013 participation by countries!

How I Met Your Mother

She was late. I checked my watch. Four minutes and thirty five seconds to be exact. She was supposed to meet me exactly at five thirty. I wondered how long I should wait. I wondered if I should call? Nah, that would make me look weak. If in case she didn't turn up, I decided I would just slip away and tell my friends I didn't feel good about a blind date, bailing out just before I met her.

The Arabian Adventure

I have mentioned time and again in this very blog about how I love traveling. I have visited numerous places in my relatively short life span and if you ask me what fascinated me the most- there is just one tiny little country which would rank higher than any other place!

Once the flight takes off from Delhi, you would know deep down that in just over three and a half hours, you would be in paradise. During my multiple trips there, never have I fallen asleep in those late night flights because the view through the aircraft is just breathtaking. As you go over the Arabian sea and enter into Omani airspace, the play of those tiny dots of lights just leave you mesmerized.

Evil Flipkart - A review of the Puma Elite Large Backpack

Getting the Google Summer of Code has its advantages, but it comes with certain pains too. I understand that since the GSoC is an international competition, but they provide us international prepaid cards, which makes them unusable in most Indian websites. One website where the cards do work, is Flipkart.

Flipkart is known for its exceptional service. Or so I heard. I had ordered a few things from Flipkart in the past and never had any issues with them (except a part of the order being cancelled due to unavailability of the item- with a proper refund of course). As soon as I came to know that the GSoC card would work in Flipkart, I knew I had to order something to satisfy my curiosity!

GSoC Week 7 | Polishing Previous Work

It's been another week in the Google Summer of Code and time seems to be running fast now. Last week, I passed my mid term evaluations and never realized it was much of a deal until I saw some happy posts on Facebook and a few blogs! Now that I think of it, I knew I would pass it, as I had done a lot- a tad bit more than what I had mentioned in my proposal!

Why 'The Oatmeal' was correct about customer service?

Customer Service has never been kind to me. Back in late 2012, I published a post on how I was pissed off by the Etisalat customer service. Fast forward eight months and the situation is exactly the same- just this time, it's our very own Reliance rather than the Arabian Etisalat.

Yet another Wlinkster post!

Ever since I came up with a post on Wlinkster just under three weeks ago, my blogging life hasn't been dull (One reason is that I have made my contact info public!) First, I was contacted by the founders who were on a mission to save our developing country, eradicating poverty and hunger in the process. Naturally, I came up with another post on how the conversation went. Next, I was contacted by 'the nice hacker' and I came up with a blog post telling his story. This time, I have been contacted by yet another person associated with Wlinkster- a white hat who found security vulnerabilities in Wlinkster and help them during the early days (although it's still early days for them).