Festember X

The next edition of Festember is here in true cowboy style loaded with guns, hats and wagons. This years its being called Festember X instead of the usual Festember followed by the year. Refreshing change.

Sept 24-26th.

One of India’s best college cultural festivals. It has an impressive track record of being organized every year, right from the 1975. Many celebrities have performed at NIT Trichy for Festember and that includes Maestro Ilayaraja among others.

It is a must-participate event for lovers of music, dance, literature and arts. Look into the official site of Festember for further details about the events. There’s also an awesome publicity video this year.

Here are links to a few interesting posts about previous editions of Festember on my blog.

• Festember 09
• Kuraloviyam at Festember 08
• First Day of Festember 08
• Tune In, Drop Out
• Festember 07 and a few pics.

Python is a language which can be easily used by a beginner as well as a programming expert. It is fun to program and play with. Python is one of the languages which is simple yet powerful. It is clean, readable and has a minimalistic syntax. It uses indentation to delimit blocks which contributes to the readability factor. Its interactive mode makes it easy to test small snippets of code. You can also use the python interpreter as a calculator.

It is a wonderful language and if you are a programmer you should learn it. It helps you focus on the solution rather than on the syntax. I’m so into python these days that I’ve revived my SPOJ profiles after years. I rewrote pieces of my old SPOJ codes using python. I could compress those codes to a very few lines. With a fresh start I’m planning to solve more problems on SPOJ and other similar sites.

For those who don’t know python interpreter and the extended standard libraries are freely available at http://python.org. The site also contains documentation and links to impressive tutorials.

Resources

• Official Python Site
• Documentation – http://docs.python.org/release/2.2.3/index.html
• http://www.sthurlow.com/python/
• http://www.pythonlearn.com/
• Byte of Python – Book by Swaroop.
• Dive into Python

Learning Python is simple and I guess the official documentation available at the Python site should do. If you want more, the book Byte of Python can be comprehensive tutorial. You may want to read other links depending on your interest and requirements. Have fun coding with Python.

Whenever I used Firefox, it didn’t take more than 15-20 minutes for the CPU usage to peak, eventually hanging the browser, making me reload the page again. Believe me, with painfully slow internet connections its an awful experience. Gradually the browser began to consume more and more memory and became slower and slower. About a year ago I didn’t have much of a choice other than venting out my feelings, because Chrome was at its infant stages and I surely didn’t want to return to IE.

After a few months, Chrome came along as a light, super-fast and powerful browser with all its extensions and features. The choice was simple. Here are some reasons why I chose Chrome-

Startup time – Chrome is much much faster wrt to the startup time. While it takes about 7-8 seconds on Firefox, its just a fraction of the time on Chrome. Its blazing fast.

Each Tab is a different Process – Some sites contain a lot of JavaScript, CSS and AJAX. In Firefox, when such sites open, it freezes all the other tabs. For a user like me who has lots of tabs open simulatneously it could be really troublesome. Chrome resolves this making making each tab run as a separate process.  This ensures that one tab doesn’t hang the others. Chrome even has its own Task Manager which you can access by Shift+Esc. Also see some stats by typing about:memory on the Omnibox.

Clean and Simple with the Omnibox – The Address bar at the top often called as the Omnibox doubles up as a search box. This conserves much real estate and makes the browser look cooler and convenient.

No Status Bar – Until Chrome, I had been used to the status bar. But just by it not being present in Chrome I realized that it was just an useless addition which I never really needed. This too conserves much real estate.

Application shortcuts – Google Chrome enables me to create shortcuts for most of my frequently used web applications. This too helped me in conserving precious loading time.

I have been using Firefox for so long that I won’t hate it. My loyalties might have changed but I still have feelings and the desire to use Firefox. I would love to see some overhauls and expect the browser to bounce back. I’d be willing to shift to Firefox if they are able to attract me with powerful features.

PS : I’ve just started using Firefox 4 beta 3. I’m yet to reach my conclusion of the latest version. Hoping that it turns out to be good.

Any social network starts becoming interesting and useful only after it has gained a significant user base.  And twitter started gaining traction in 2008. A few of college buddies like @a4arvind and @sathyaphoenix joined twitter. Even in 2008 I just used the site for chatting with my friends about random stuff. It was like a substitute for IM clients. But I felt the features like tagging someone using @ very useful in linking to others’  profiles. I felt it could also be pretty useful for sending info to a group of friends. But the harder part was convincing friends to join twitter. I tried a bit but failed badly. Still I occasionally used twitter for updating my status during vacation and other holidays.

Around mid-2009, Twitter started becoming more interesting due to its explosive growth. It got a lot of media coverage and a lot of celebrities started using the service. And hence general public too started adopting it. A lot of my college buddies too started using it. Eventually I migrated from the old handle to the present one that is @alagappanr. Then I got the opportunity to interact with interesting people and follow them. I started using the service more often. Though I sticked to the web interface most of the time I also experimented with a few twitter clients.

Gradually twitter was being used for different purposes than what it was originally intended for. It began to be used a major real-time news source. As a influential PR/Marketing tool. As a tool to track events. As a major knowledge source. As a way to stay connected with friends 24×7. As a tool for fun. It was so overwhelming that Twitter changed its standard question from ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s Happening?’.

In the month of June in 2009 I attended Twitter Unconference in Chennai – Buzz140. It has some interesting presentations on what twitter could be used for etc etc. It was wonderfully hosted by Kiruba and Co. I got hooked to the service ever since. I have been tweeting regularly and have connected with quite a few people.

As far as the interface used is concerned I have been using the web interface predominantly. I find it simple and easy to use. Apart from that I use/used a number of services like Echofon, TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMSTweets, TwitterSMS etc. Twitter through SMS is one feature that I guess is the most useful.

As I was writing this post I found a site called MyTweet16 where you can get your first 16 tweets. It was nostalgic. My first tweet was about Orkut. Orkut is now dead for me.

Though I am still a small user with a small following, I guess I am more connected with the internet than ever before. I guess just existing on a service is not a big achievement. There is a long way to go for me to extract the maximum out of twitter.

[Find out When you joined twitter at www.whendidyoujointwitter.com] [Follow me at www.twitter.com/alagappanr]

And more importantly I finally get to say to people that I’m at work. It maybe just for showing off, or probably for just avoiding something. So all you people out there, I’m at work! (And I’m not blogging from office. ).

But going beyond the humor part of it, I consider ‘Ya We No’  to refer to the collective wisdom of people. It refers to the power of the internet. When each one of us contribute something, and encourage others to do so, then we get an ocean of knowledge. Wikipedia is the best example of collective wisdom of the internet junta. There are millions of people interacting every instant on the Internet. Be it twitter, facebook or any other social networking site. With the internet at our disposal, there is nothing that ‘we cannot know’.

There is a new phenomenon emerging. Its called crowdsourcing. It refers to the trend of mass collaboration enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies. It is so because, ‘Yeah! We Know’ it all.

I’m just reiterating the same with the title of my blog. You and I, together we know it all. Ya We No.

Update – I’ve changed my Blog Title again. Its no longer Ya We No. So you might actually find this post pointless.

The story revolves around an ancient dagger which gives the possessor the ability to travel in time whenever they press a joystick like button on the dagger.

The plot is ridiculously simple unlike the plot of the video game series. The story has nothing more than Prince Dastan joining Princess Tamina to rescue the Dagger and the Sands of Time from his treacherous uncle Nizam.

Gyllenhaal has the looks of a prince and portrays the character well. He surely should have been given more action sequences to prove his mettle. Alfred Molina as the opportunistic ostrich-race organizer is quite impressive. Ben Kingsley as the wicked uncle Nizam is pretty ordinary. Gemma Arterton looks charming and gorgeous.

Considering that this was a high-budget movie, I expected much more impressive action sequences. There is never a flow in all those action sequences and we are never given a chance to see the prince flexing his muscles in an impressive stunt sequence. Even the sword sequence was shown just for a short span of time. Its meant to be an adventure film, but if feels like all the action has been squeezed out of the movie.

My Opinion – Not Awful. It entertains. Could have been better.

If you are a beginner, it can be really frustrating and may seem next to impossible to solve the cube. However if you learn a few simple algorithms, it is very easy to solve. You too can learn to solve a Rubik’s cube by watching this wonderful two part video tutorial by Dan Brown.  Part 1. Part 2. These two videos should be sufficient. If you want more, there is also a tutorial on wH giving you all the details that you might need.

Its is now time for me to change the ‘About Me’ stuff in various social networks. From ‘a student of NIT-T’ to ‘an alumnus of NIT-T’. It does feel different.

It is now time to say goodbye. Goodbyes are not forever. Goodbyes are not the end. They simple mean that I’ll miss the place and all my friends here. We part only to meet again. Love you all.

Here is the link for you. If you are an Alumni of REC/NIT Trichy then register yourself at the following link to include yourself to the database. Even those students passing out of NITT in the year 2010 are requested to register themselves at the site. You can also register for the Global Alumni Meet to be held on August 7th. It is a full day event and the targeted participation is around 1500.

If you have any suggestions/questons you can mail them at alumni[at]nittrichyalumni[dot]org