The 5 best guitar solos I have ever heard

Guitars have always fascinated me, and why not? The instrument which is worthless in the hands of one, but can make someone else look like a God. Knowing that I would never have the patience to gather enough expertise to master such a stringed instrument, I am left with the next best thing.

P.S. Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez/One Direction/Taylor Swift fans, please stay away from the comment box.

GSoC Week 2 | Birthday Week

First things first. I got the FedEx package on Monday, which contained the card, a diary and a pen. It was great and definitely worth the wait! The first use of the money was to get an Amazon Kindle, something I wanted for a long time.

The week also included my birthday and I could afford to work less on that day owing to the fact that I had done a lot of work in the last fortnight.

Hacking | The Misconceptions of the Common Man

The other day, a junior of mine was narrating to a group how he hacked into a friend's Facebook profile. Great, I thought. Kids nowadays are turning out to be pretty smart. However, his emphasis was on what he did (about a lame ass chat with a lame ass girl) rather than how he did it. Turns out his friend had left his account open, and he just happened to be there. The meme here says it all.

Pundit Time | Predicting Chelsea's season

Here is a list of questions suggested by a fan post in WAGNS. I decided to log a formal reply and check how correct I am, come June 2014.

What will be Chelsea's final position in the BPL? (1- "6 or worse")
1st

What four teams will qualify for the UCL?
Chelsea, United, City, Arsenal

Will Arsenal win anything?
No

Will Chelsea beat Bayern in the SuperCup?
Yes

To Infinity and Beyond

Ever since I was a kid, I have always loved traveling. Generally, that meant air travel. However, I have had my fair share of road trips. Sometimes, you are fascinated by the destination, sometimes by the aura of the very road- and that is enough to get you started.

My idea of the perfect road trip has changed over time. As a kid, the twelve hour bus journey to my grandparents' place five hundred kilometers away gave me the thrills. As I grew up, my first trip to Manali made me believe there was no destination more perfect than the snow clad peaks of Himachal Pradesh. However, ever since my trip to the UAE last year, I believe your life would be incomplete if you do not experience the road trip I am about to describe.

Memorable Moments as a Chelsea fan

It's been a long time since I started supporting Chelsea and an even longer time when I became a football fan (thanks to the Brazilian Ronaldo with the triangular patch of hair) and there have been times that have been etched into my memory. Here are a few of those.

The Exposé‎

Disclaimer:

This is a short story for a contest, inspired by ongoing events related to PRISM. This does not represent my views and is purely a fictional piece.

Glenn took the corner-most seat at the diner. He glanced at his watch. 7.53 PM. Seven minutes before time. He smiled at the waitress and ordered coffee. He took some deep breaths and opened his notepad to make sure he was prepared for what was about to follow.

GSoC Week 1 | AJAXification continues

It's the first weekend of the GSoC coding period and I must say I have been really satisfied with my work yet. I believe I have completed more than forty hours in these six days, changing over a thousand lines of code in the process. The reason, you ask? It's of course my mentor, Alexey Novak (and the home cooked food that I am getting). His involvement has been great so far. Considering that he has a full time job- he manages to give me detailed code reviews after every single push. You can check our discussion here.

For the love of Python | Scraping IndiBlogger and other tasks

The title of this post is inspired by MIT professor Walter Lewin's book 'For the love of Physics | From the end of the rainbow to the edge of time'. I agree that my knowledge in Python is not even comparable to that of Walter Lewin's in Physics, but I couldn't think of a better title.

Let me start by tell you about the time I tried to learn Java. Someone told me Java is the easiest programming language to learn in this world. I had a background in C++ and one whole semester full of hardcore PHP and PostgreSQL. Naturally, I started by asking Google for tutorials. However, all the results seemed to shout loud at me why Python is better than Java. After nudging my seniors a bit, I finally got a project in Python/Django and that was it for Java.

GSoC official coding period starts | Work Progress

The official coding period in this year's Google Summer of Code has finally begun. Three weeks between declaration of results and start of the coding is a big time. That is why I had started coding almost ten days ago! This was to make sure I had a head start, which gives me a better chance of tackling unforeseen delays.

First, let's talk about the tasks that I have started looking into but come later in the GSoC. One such thing is adding an accessible flipswitch in place of Enable-Disable radio buttons. Here is a cool one that I found, which also keeps accessibility in mind. Note that it uses bootstrap, but that should not be a problem as I would be reusing only those classes that are necessary.