Walk Alone

The “toppers” went for a “heart-to-heart talk” with the HoD. The HoD is unrepentant. Its we who are to blame for the debacle. Another fact which became widely known was the presence of an information network gathering all the news that could be used to effectively shut up the students in a debate/discussion/argument.

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We (my team, that is) have finally got ourselves a project. For now, its “Visualization of Equal Area using Java applet”. And you guessed it right. I started Perl because of Blosxom, abandoned it. Started Python for my OOAD course, abandoned it. Started PHP because of the wiki business, abandoned it. Started MySQL becuase of MediaWiki, abandoned it. C/C++ is the only language I’m continuing with. And that too, well, in a way that is far from satisfactory. It took me three days (thank God for holidays) to convert two structs and their associated functions to their corresponding classes…

So now, its Java. And of course, C++ is de rigueur.

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I felt picked upon by the whole world. So calmly skipped college for two days. Or was going to. I remebered I had to fill up and submit the fourth year entrance form on the second day. A mad scramble for the demand drafts and a headlong rush to the college was how the two day break ended in. But well, the time I spent at home was relaxing. Cleaned up long overdue stuff and carried out other such mundane chores.

And now, its back to the daily treadmill.

The results for the notorious Electrical department’s TE batch are out. The gods have declared a ceasefire on me. I got only one KT. But the result reads like a casualty list straight out of the guerilla warfields of Iraq. THIRTY failed in orals. FORTYFIVE failed overall. SEVENTEEN asked to sit out the year. The honours guy gets his record scuttled by a freak KT, because the powers that be refused to jack up his marks to the safety level. The debate lover came second, one point behind the topper. Others in group scurried away with low marks (according to them). My dumbed down friend is angry over his second class result. Varun and Bhise, too have been sobered up. My knowledgeable friend, I guess, has come out on top.

The result has stirred an emotion in me which reminded me of a picture I saw in the 1991 Year Book of the World Book Encyclopedia. It was taken at a neo-Nazi rally. The skinheads were gesturing, not rudely, rather it was a martial salute. And its was clear - the slogans were not being shouted. The skinheads were not chanting or screaming either. They were roaring their defiance of the authorities. Their message was clear. “We dare you to stop us because we are the results of the mistakes that you made”.

Damn. The results are bullshit. And thats the most polite thing I can say.

The HOD (Head Of Department) of Electrical Engg. gave my CR (Class Representaive) [what am I doing - listing acronyms?] a dressing down over books that were missing from the departmental library. The poor guy has been asked to either recover the books or their cost from the defaulters.

As a matter of principle, I don’t condone filching books from a library. Or defaulting on due dates either. But then my CR did not deserve the dressing down either. I argue as follows.

1. There were no due dates. There should have been. And they should have been enforced.
2. A much talked about ID card system was used. It had a friends’s contact number along with your details. Supposedly to catch you through your friend, or increase the mea culpa emotion in the defaulter’s mind. So the department had the information to act upon if due dates had lapsed. However, refer to point 1 above.
3. The library register holds a record of the students to whom the books were issued. Also, a cupboard holds the ID cards of those students. Why were there no follow ups during the vacation, or during the exams? The students could have been asked to “Report to the concerned authority” after giving in his paper. Such notices always result in immediate action.
4. What about the CRs of the other classes? TE? SE?

I rest my case.

They are becoming more frequent. I hate them. What about you?

someone by the name of dvorak@yahoo.com wants to add you to your list don’t accept it. It’s a virus. Tell everyone on your list because if somebody on your list adds them you will get it too. Tell everyone on your list not to open anything from angell11, tewwtuler, and sassybitch. lt is a hard drive killer and a very horrible virus. Pleasepass this on to everyone on your list. We need to find out who is using these accounts. Sorry for the inconvenience. Right click on your group name of your buddy list and click Send Message To all.

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During 26/7 the following exchange took place between the guy who sent the above YIM spam and an autorickshaw driver.
friend : Saat bangla aayegaa kya?
rick driver : Tu chal aage, main aata hoon.

Tried out two CMS - Drupal and Mediawiki. I abandoned both for different reasons.

Before going going on, my config - Win XP SP2, Apache 2.0.54, PHP 4.4.0 and MySQL 4.1.13. Yes, almost on the bleeding edge, but then, I’m not running a production server. This trial of CMS also brought me my first experience of using MySQL and PHP (proper PHP, not just config details like in DokuWiki).

Drupal, reports from near and far say, is the CMS to use. I found its installation simple. After all, the only thing I had to do was create a database for it, which took some two minutes. The first hitch came when there appeared to be a client-server mismatch in MySQL. A quick search and a fix and I had Drupal running. Then came the killer blow. A CMS needs a mail server. It has to send a mail for almost every second event. If you think running a mail server is like running an HTTP or FTP server, do me a favor - download MailEnable or PostCast Server or any mail server of your choice and try sending some mails. Blocked ports, dynamic IPs, domains, hostnames, Mx records… you will soon forget your original job of running a CMS-driven website. I did. And so http://localhost/drupal was deleted.

Mediawiki was even easier to delete. Its setup script simply refused to connect to the MySQL server, no matter what I did. And at over 6 MB, its a huge upload to your remote server.

One result of all this is I’m pretty impressed by DokuWiki now. Its doing its stuff without any trouble. That was what had prompted me to try out the “segment leaders” in the first place. Now I’m content with DokuWiki.