Thursday, June 30, 2005
I’ve realized, that as I grow older, I’m more willing to show my work to other people. I used to have three nicknames—three virtual identities on the net. One, for writing in not-so-polite circles, one on the IRC where I was very active for about a year, and another—my real one—that had, relatively fewer interactions. As time went by, the spheres of people that I knew in these three circles began to overlap. In fact, I was introduced to IRC by one of my writing friends, and we had a sort-of semi-clique over there for a while. But then as always, I diverged and managed to rope in new “friends”.
It’s only very recently that I’ve introduced my darker (Muhaha!) side to my friends. This site, and some of the stories it hosts are relatively inane examples. Have I become braver? Certainly. But just the fact that my mom can read some of the things I type in here leads to constant revisions. Guess I’ll never really grow less scared intimidated by my parents 
Hmm, or maybe I will.
Tags: chaff
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Sunday, June 26, 2005
I’ve been busy as a bee the last few days. There’s the work at my college campus for recruitment, and we’ve been working hard to bring in more and more companies. US Software, IBS, Iflex and lots more are coming to our college soon, and this is only the first wave. Things are looking very rosy indeed for students in our college ;-), although it’s taking a major part of my time.
I’ve also been working for my GRE. The Barrons Wordlist of around 3,000 words is subdivided into 50 separate sections. I’ve finished exactly 1. Considering that I’ve almost two months to complete it (I’ve decieded to take the test on August 31), that means an average of six to seven wordlists a week. Which again translates to: impossible. Not that studying words is easy. For me it is uber hard. I’ve a new theory: the more you’re a reader, the less you can actually sit down and gobble up words… I have a particular aversion towards it, and even now I’m reading three books together :-/. (Oh those are btw: ‘Coalescent’ by Stephen Baxter; he’s also the author of the excellent ‘Evolution’, Eddings’ ‘Treasured One’, and an excellent tale (which is free to read) called ‘Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town’.)
In addition to this, I’ve also been working on Koal. I’ve slowly been porting it to CherryPy; it’s a very slow task because I’m slowly becoming familiar with the toolkit and with Python, but I think it’ll turn out to be nice. Then there’s this other project I’m working on which it seems won’t ever see the light of day… I need at least two continous undisturbed days to complete ANY TASK I’ve been assigned to, and I’ll never get that. Have to learn some time management.
I’m boring you guys. Talk very much later when I’ve something interesting to say.
Tags: chaff
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Thursday, June 23, 2005
Just wanted to give a nod to Rustyshack, home to a dear friend and talented programmer Anoop. I think he redid it a while back, but only recently did I come by it. Good work 
Tags: chaff
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Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Got recruited into Infosys yesterday. They have a pretty relaxed test/interview session that I found unexpectedly easy. I must have been the least prepared one in the entire batch of people who wrote the test, so this is indeed a boon. Some thoughts:
Peer pressure: I’m not interested in campus recruitments, I’m not all for a job, but just the fact that all of my classmates have it inscribed with indelible ink in their minds that a job is the end-all-be-all, is an enormous push in that direction for me. I imagine it must be worse for people who got into the process because of the same pressure, but didn’t make it in the end. I know for a fact that it has shaken the resolve of a lot of people who weren’t interested in a job before. I have just one advice for them, please don’t go with the crowd. Do something you’re really interested in. And I’m of the firm opinion that it’s too early for work if you don’t need it. There’s still lots more to learn in life.
Helping out: Everybody wants a job, nobody helps out enough so that a campus recruitment becomes a reality. The number of people in our college who work for the recruitment process, the number of people who contact companies, who look into the interests of the college as a whole is just a handful. If you don’t want to join in, I respect that. Please do listen to people who know about stuff though, and do help them when asked. Another firm opinion? You can’t be happy if you think just about yourself.
Formal Clothes: They are hot. I mean, literally. The first time I wore a tie I nearly sweated my armpits out. Then I got into the airconditioned interview room, and I found it a bit more bearable. What’s wrong with working in informals? And why should the A/C be turned so damn high? I suspect (rightly, I think) that there’s a connection
Organization: If your college is in the middle of a recruitment, the most unhelpful thing you could do would be to organize a staff meeting in its midst. Do try to put the best foot out, that helps a LOT when it comes to visiting companies.
Record: 84 people were selected, out of 97 shortlisted and around 200 who showed up. This is a record single placement for our college. We’ve also matched the infamous CET when it comes to intra-college placement (they took 84 too from CET) and we’ve exceeded them when it comes to a single-campus placement for Infosys - we had three colleges appearing, and a total of over 130 selected. This really shows how far our Career Guidance & Placement Unit has come in recent years.
Oh, by the way, I’m done. Unless an extremely good company comes to campus, I’m concentrating on GRE.
Tags: chaff
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Friday, June 10, 2005
John Titor, Time Traveler?
Tags: chaff
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Thursday, June 9, 2005
@Amazon
Been ages since I reviewed something; the last book I looked at also turned out to be one of the best I’ve read, so if this post hadn’t come along, it would’ve been a fitting burial. Incidentally, that word could have been used to describe this site till just a month ago, with it’s frequency of updation being somewhere close to zilch, but like this review section getting a new lease of life, I smashed up some revamped kewl links so that even if I’m too lazy to type in huge entries, at least something gets on this site via ze magic of push-button publishing.
I’m deviating. We Few by John Ringo and David Weber is branded Military Scifi. Unlike the earlier books in the series: March Upcountry, March to the Sea and March to the Stars, We Few is not purely mil-fi, it’s more a combo of romance, space fiction, diplomatic theory and like all Ringo books, it force-feeds us a healthy dose of Kipling down our gullets. The story of the series is a pretty formulaic “coming of age” tale. Prince Roger, a sugar dandy and heir tertiary to the Imperial Throne is stranded on a deserted planet, and through a trial of hardships, gore, blood, loss and love becomes the uber king who restores the throne to its former glory. Since I delight in growing up tales, I liked this book the best, because Roger was in his element here. However, because of my immediate dislike of militiary fiction - I’ve read about 9 books of Ringo this past month and still I haven’t gotten over it - I didn’t like this as much.
But I’m not sure it’s mil-fi I hate, or Ringo’s writing, because just as the action seems to heat up, he breaks it up with military/diplomacy theory, and why this plan works or should work, and why something else shouldn’t or didn’t. Or why this situation turned out to be like this. Too much analysis is grating. I have to say though that Weber and Ringo write well together, they are very compatible authors. Perhaps this is too harsh, but I also find them decidedly mediocre. It’s okayish writing, but definitely not a cover-to-cover read.
There are definitely other niggles too: weak female characters, unfunny humor, dragging sub-plots, and some really convoluted name creation that takes some “Oh, this is that guy!” moments to get used to. And when you see “scholar”, “non-combatants” and “Imperial throne” in the same sentence and think nothing of it, you know it’s time to get up and take a long break before you come back to read.
Tags: reading • review
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Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Been a while, but Vivek has a new homepage. It’s a wiki, which is a very interesting idea and a pretty free-form way of having a presence on the web. It also looks good, so go take a look. He’s also been working on Words, which also looks to be quite excellent and useful.
Tags: chaff
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Wednesday, June 8, 2005
One of the good things about CSS design is that it’s free-form. You can have div elements all over the place to structure content, and with intelligent absolute/float positioning, get them to order themselves logically on screen. An oft-forgotten advantage though about CSS design is that styling with it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) affect the semantic layout of the page. Or: rendering with/without CSS shouldn’t affect the readability of the page.
Stress test this by working with a browser like Lynx/Links, but if you’ve got Opera, the user stylesheet feature can also be set to emulate a text browser. In the absence of tables, text browsers don’t have any sort of positioning at all: your content is rendered exactly as ordered in the source. Which makes source code order important.
Who’d want to go over your sidebar before getting to the content? Go through those myriad links just to get at the real beef? Make it easier by having a “skip navigation” link as done on many sites, or better, have the sidebar load after your real content. If you’re good enough with CSS, it shouldn’t matter an iota with your layout.
The current source code order that I prefer the most is:
- The header: Title, the
<h1> tag.
- Minimal navigation: the main pages of the site, and/or a spotlight link.
- The content.
- Sidebar navigation.
- The footer.
As an added guideline, avoid repeated links on your site which merely serve decorational purposes. It’s a pain to read through in text browser mode.
You’ll notice that Vysnu follows these directives admirably. Except for the guideline above. You’ll have to wait till I get over em date boxes. Interestingly enough, Sig9 doesn’t. We’ll get to that on the next redesign, promise
Tags: design • vysnu.com • web
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