Side-Middle Berth!!!

Population is increasing. There's no space for more lines, we can't introduce new trains. So what do we do? Increase packing density :)

My first 0

I got my first ever 0 in AI mid sem exams. Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya had a wry smile on as he distributed the answerbooks, as if to say "Welcome to IIT". I managed a BB in the subject :-)

A do-anything firefox toolbar

We have a course called "Software Lab" at IITB. The agenda of this course is - one programming language every week, with a side effect - you fall in love with linux and everything that is free and open source. As a part of the course, we have to contribute something to the open source community. So, I, along with Sumair and Sree developed "Run-a-prog", a do-anything toolbar for firefox. Screenshot

Run-a-prog allows you to run ANY program on the text selected on a webpage. For example, if you have a text2speech program, you can add it to the toolbar and make it read out the text you selected on the page at the click of a button. You can write your own programs using any programming language of your choice and add it to the toolbar, and run it on selected text. All your program has to do is take a file name as a command line argument. Besides this, there are a few other useful features as well ;)



Run-a-prog has been tested on Fedora Core, Ubuntu and Windows XP and works fine with Firefox 2.0 and 3.0. To install Run-a-prog, download our cross platform installer and open it with firefox. Comments and suggestions are welcome :)

I have published the project on Mozdev.org, and can be accessed at http://runaprog.mozdev.org

Here is a presentation which gives an overview of the functionality and design. The source code and the documentation is available here.

26/11 and onwards

It was my last exam that day, and I was happy that it had gone well. After the exam, I went to the lab and started off on my mini-project for Service Oriented Computing. Dhaval and I had to do it, start to finish, in 36 hours, and we were coding frantically. At about 11PM, Vishal told us that there were blasts in a few hotels in Mumbai. We didn't give it much of a thought and just carried on with our work. At 2.30AM the same night, when I went back to the hostel, I saw the TV room was pretty crowded, and a whole lot of guys silently staring at the TV. I went in, saw the disturbing visuals for a while and went to bed, couldn't sleep for quite a while....

I woke up early the next day (because parents called early that morning to tell me to stay indoors) and grabbed a copy of the Times, the first page read - "WAR ON MUMBAI". The news didn't make a pleasant read. I went to the lab after breakfast and continued work on the mini-project, all the time hooked to the rediff homepage.

28th November was a busy day, I had my project demo. We did the final parts of the documentation, had a decent demo. I came back to the hostel TV room after that, and witnessed a very moving interview of Sabina Sehgal's husband on CNN-IBN, I simply couldn't stand the pain and went back to my room, lied down on my bed, frustrated, angry.

More thinking....and I thought of making a resolution to kill atleast one terrorist before I die...my heart said "yes", my mind kept on asking "Is it logical? Can you do it? What about your family?". I still don't know. The movie "A Wednesday" show's that even a "stupid common-man" can make a difference, but it's only a movie. My questions are still unanswered.