Stress and us

[Cross-posted on the FOSSEE Blog]
Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you, if you walk into our lab sometime and mistake it for a game zone in your neighbourhood. You are indeed in “the” lab. If you came looking for Prof. Prabhu you’ll have to return. You’ll only find PR vowing to see the end of baali, for having a nice time pawning him. You won’t find me around – I’m cloaked and busy creating havoc. Unless, of course, you are the seer KD. Watch your step extremely carefully or you won’t know when and how fuchmed’s GM hit you. And don’t dare venture anywhere near madrazr, jumping all around with a shockwave, unless you are capable enjoying some real nasty shocks. Well, the team is busy in one of it’s two SB sessions per day. SB (short for Stress Buster) sessions are intense 15 minute rounds of bzflag – 3D first person tank battle game.

Hope you didn’t start thinking, I’m just goofing off here, doing nothing at all. If it’s not already clear, SB sessions are exactly what they are called – Stress Busters. Just to refresh ourselves and get back to work, with greater force. What then, am I doing for the rest of my time?

Mainly I’ve been developing course content that we have been working on, called Software Tools, Techniques and Practices. I have been working on a session for elementary LaTeX and basic Linux tools. I’ve also been attending classes of Digital Control and trying to Python-ize the Matlab/Scilab code that the course uses.

But, that’s not all. I’ve helped a guy restore a Joomla site on Day-1. I screwed up a brand new installation of a server with some real skill; then expect to be screwed but get some encouragement with the words, “It was a good learning experience for us.” Seen a Debian server upgrade from Etch to Lenny in under 10 minutes. Installed an instance of twiki and struggled to configure it. Helped a Humanities Scholar with LaTeX. Attended a workshop on Instruction Design. Restored Qmail on an old Fedora 3 server. Goofed around in gimp, for a CD cover and a T-shirt design. Chipped in with bits, for mutating Ubuntu into “LivePython”. Did a bit of css and javascript tweaking… The list goes on!

Now, don’t you think we deserve the SB’s?

Filed under: College, Libre, Programming, Ramblings , bzflag, fossee, iitb, stress

arbit blab

Well, just another post to make it clear that

• I’m still alive
• I haven’t forgotten that I have a blog
• I haven’t forgotten my blog’s password
• I haven’t lost the ability to write arbit crap.
• I’m not busy with anything interesting
• My Keyboard works fine

Arbit stuff going on around me off-late.

• We’ve had our official farewell; So we’ve officially bid goodbye to B.I.T.S – Goa. People tried their best to make the occasion appear “senti” but it seemed more like “psenti” for me.
• I wonder why our VC calls BITS as B.I.T.S; is it something similar to people choosing to call SAP as S.A.P?
• Most of the advice given was of a copy-book style. But I liked one of them, though it wasn’t expressed well enough for me – Learning from Books still remains an important way of learning, even if work teaches you a LOT.
• College now has its own Debian Repository hosted on a server running Hardy. Hats off to bad_sector for showing the enthu to get things done. The LUG here’s got a great bunch of people right now and its growing in leaps and bounds. I’m excited.
• A couple of my friends picked up Debian recently and apparently both of them are loving it thoroughly. Linux, as addictive as ever.
• It’s been a while since I’ve been on the winning side in carroms. Its so boring to be on the losing side for so long.
• Word is not a document exchange format^[1]; Use html, plain text, pdf or the open document format.(if you are not averse to openness) [I mention this now because I faced a lot of trouble recently trying to handle some .doc files which replaced the html pages that were being used on the PS site.]
• So often, little things get blown out of proportion, so quickly. Or its just that not everybody sees them as ‘little’ things.
• On slow connections, the download ‘handler’ of firefox does really poorly. It’s next to impossible to download anything over half an MB.
• This from the preface of SICP^[2],a text book for an introductory course on Computer Programming at MIT
  

  Our design of this introductory computer-science subject reflects two major concerns. First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. Second, we believe that the essential material to be addressed by a subject at this level is not the syntax of particular programming-language constructs, nor clever algorithms for computing particular functions efficiently, nor even the mathematical analysis of algorithms and the foundations of computing, but rather the techniques used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems.

  I would like to see a few courses developed on similar lines here.

• Gmail themes are good. I only tried the “Terminal” theme, though. I loved it!
• For the very first time, I upgraded a distro. I successfully moved to Intrepid from Hardy. (and that too with the campus net!) This was before the repositories had been set-up. Now, it should be a much simpler job to achieve the same
• Just got the news of more Violence in Mumbai; What the hell do these people want? I end this post here.

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Here’s an xkcd strip I liked.

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Links:
[1]Word is not a document exchange format — http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/no-word/attach.html

[2]Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Preface) — http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html#%_chap_Temp_4

Filed under: College, Ramblings , lafootgiri, life