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.)