Mozilla Campus Representative

It all started when I was helping a friend in her class demonstration on network intrusion (i.e. hacking). In discussing things , somehow we came to topic of firefox addons and voila, she didn't know what they were even though she had been using firefox for more than a year. Later that day, I asked few other non-geeky fellows if they know about firefox addons, they were clueless like anything. I realised that though people have started using better browsers like firefox,chrome , they are unaware of the difference or why they should switch from IE. They are unaware of the plethora of things one can tweak to make his browsing experience from OK to AWESOME...or can increase the ease in browsing things or organising stuff like bookmarks..

So, I decided to join the Mozilla Campus Rep program to spread the news about firefox and mozilla in my campus and make people aware of the fact that how much their surfing experince can be enhanced.

It's a new path to light, away from the shadows of ignorance which I have decided to tread, lets see how well it goes.

keeping fingers crossed, ;)

Pratik Anand
Mozilla Campus Rep
MIT Manipal

MagMIT

Last semester, I got an offer from Nitin, Editor of the College Editorial Board to design a website of it. They wanted the website to be the social interactive portal of the college. The previous website, despite being colourful was bulky and lacked much efficiency. Hence, I teamed up with Karik and we started making the site. After 3 times of design changes and code re-writings ,we finally got the node.
The current website is very light and has streamlined design. Whatsoever be the condition of college wifi, the site opens up on a mouse click. To our relief , the site is being well-appreciated everywhere. Though, this is not the end.We still have to make it power-packed.

Long way to go....
here is the link www.magmit.com

First bash-python script for ION access

It was all running well.When suddenly soon after midnight , it stops. Yes, all mitians know what I am talking about.Its the same strange restriction of ION to cutoff wifi access after 12:30, leaving us all in frustration. But there a privileged few whose IDs work at night. But they guard them as a great secret and rarely such id comes out in public. But when it does, it indeed attracts a whole bunch of users to use it. Ultimately ION detects the heavy data usage and blocks it down. Then again wait for new id to surface.

This was the situation with me too. It all started one night when my "painfully" acquired night id got blocked right at the moment when I needed it most. Anger and frustration started emerging. Suddenly, with a flash of light an idea struck to me : Why not make a script to find all the working night IDs. It will take ION ages to close them all down. So, this is how the work started.

A plan was made..the time was less..sessionals were about to start...something had to be done quick and perfect. So , me and harry teamed up together to do it. We started learning BASH scripting and started applying our existing knowledge of python. With much of sleepless nights and morning brainstorming sessions, within a week it got prepared. On the first night of its trial run, harry felt asleep :). So it was all upto me, I closed all apps, re-connected the connected , fired the terminal ,typed the script path and ENTER. Voila! it started working, almost flawlessly. I couldn't believe my eyes, it was our one serious effort of solving daily life problem using programming. It felt greattttttttt. And know what? the no. of ids it gave in trial run: 150+

Here is the screenshot of how the script looks. Though it is not of the original script (for security reasons.)

Girlfriend 5.0

Desperately seeking technical support!

I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend 5.0 and having some problems. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 for years as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it. I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you minimize Girlfriend with the sound off, but since I can't find the switch to turn it off, I just run them separately and it works OK.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with Golfware, often trying to abort my Golf program with some sort of timing incompatibility. I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with Girlfriend 2.0.

After months of conflicts, I consulted a friend who has experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and eventually it would require a Token Ring upgrade to run properly. He was right. As soon as I purged my cache, Girlfriend 2.0 uninstalled itself.

Shortly after that, I installed a Girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus. After a hard drive clean up and thorough virus scan I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time using a SCSI probe and virus protection. It worked OK for a while until I discovered Girlfriend 1.0 wasn't completely uninstalled!

I tried to run Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has an unadvertised feature that automatically senses the presence of Girlfriend 1.0 and communicates with it in some way, resulting in the immediate removal of both versions!

The version I have now works pretty well, but, like all versions, there are still some problems. The Girlfriend package is written in some obscure language that I can't understand, much less reprogram. And I've never liked how Girlfriend is totally 'object-oriented.'

A year ago, a friend upgraded his version to GirlfriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate-and-Stay resident version. He discovered GirlfriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiance9e 1.0. So he did. But soon after that, you have to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a 'huge resource hog.' It has taken up all his space, so he can't load anything else. One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife is because it came bundled with FreeSex 1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSex (particularly the new Plug and Play items he wanted to try). On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. And, although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0, which has an automatic popup feature he can't turn off.

I told him to install Mistress 1.0, but he said that he heard that if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife, that Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before uninstalling itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway, due to insufficient resources. If anybody out there is able to offer technical advice...


source:computerjokes.net

While pursuing my PHP tutorial , i came across this very unusual example in the book PHP-MySQL bible. It actually creates a form questionnaire for calculating if you are a GEEK or not and indeed, the questions are bone-crackling good...

See for urself

note:- i am just putting the questions not the code
HOW GEEKY YOU ARE?


0. Have you ever had a dream in which you were debugging?

1. Do you know the name of the company founded by Danny
Hillis?

2. Can you edit a file in both emacs and vi without recourse to
any documentation?

3. Is the computer you’re using at this moment hooked up to a
KVM switch?

4. Are you wearing a logowear T-shirt?

5. Have you ever written a chess program?

6. Have you ever set up an SMTP server?

7. Have you ever discussed the merits of a commercial LISP
implementation?

8. Have you ever used the phrase “I can do that in two lines of code” in public?

and the best one

9. Have you ever refused an otherwise welcome sexual advance
because you were debugging?