Blogs

The list of selected applicants for GSoC 2008 is out! And I’m on that list (big grin here). Honestly, I lack the ability to express my nearly orgasmic joy. It only happens to be my birthday today as well, so this is like the best birthday present eva. Um, a hi-5 anyone? For those of you who aren’t familiar with what GSoC is all about, it’s an awesome program conducted by Google to promote open source development. A lot of open source projects register mentors with Google, after which students start applying for these mentoring organisations. This year, the mentoring organisation list was pretty diverse. Students can either implement some of the ideas proposed by the organization, or propose some ideas of their own (like I did). The mentors go through applications, deciding what’s best for their project, and checking to see if the applicant is capable of pulling it off. If selected, the student spends his summer directly interacting with the project. Google steps in only as a mediating body, and of course to pay the cash. ‘Course they’re responsible for putting this all together. Kudos to them. ...

A warning to potential readers (if they exist), this following article is slightly technical. As a move to make it remotely bareable, I have decided to blindly splatter it with over-dramatization, poor jokes and innuendo. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, whether or not you have a technical background. It might help to replace my characters with whoever you’d think I’d be uncomfortable with. Do comment on your selection. ‘Tis the eve of Valentine’s. I can imagine thousands of couples all over the world planning a romantic day/night. It also happens to be the eve of my most feared quiz, my arch nemisis, Dr. ThermoD (yes, he has a thick curly black mouschtache and speaks french). However, in the true spirit of love, I decided to blindly force my way through all reason and spend some quality time with my sweetheart through the wee hours of the night. Having no luck in the quarter of an actual person, I turn to the only area where I can hold my own fort, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). My partner for the evening, the vivacious Madame DBus (who apparently is a petite brunette with a (3 arbitrary figures separated with hyphens) figure. She’s probably French as well), is quite popular with the closeted community of developers. In fact, she’s responsible for getting all of us to talk to each other and live in harmony (to those remotely interested, this is a vague reference to the fact that DBus is a inter-process messaging bus/protocol, whatever that means…). ...

I promise I have a better article in the works, but since I’m trying to keep regular with posts I’ve got to push out something… Another weekend, another concert. Arguably this is college life; going to second rate concerts to try and glean off some musical taste, establish contacts, and then form an army to take over the world (with music and harmony). But this concert was particularly bad. So bad that we walked out half way through. ...

The event: a rock concert by 6 previously unheard of bands. The time: 6:00 p.m. on Feb. 16th (Saturday). The venue: a small closed auditorium. That in itself should describe the quality of the event; not very good. It is just not fundamentally possible to hold a rock concert (that too with metal bands) in a confined room. You need open space for all that energy, or just to get away from people who don’t realize how bad they smell. Nonetheless, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. 2 of the bands were pretty good (Armour of God and some other vague name), one band tried to play around with their musical style, but chose the wrong venue for Hawaiian rock. The remaining three were your stereotypical death metal bands. ...