9 hr 45 minutes a day. 6 days a week. 33 days.

That's the duration of my summer internship. There goes my vacation, can see it fleeing away while I sit in the office.

Have a confidentiality agreement with them, don't want to talk about them anyway. My poor vacation...

Yet another 'Airport Blues' saga

This time around, hanging around Bangalore's Great Airport, I discovered some harsh truths of life. Life is like the Cafe Coffee Day Espresso that you get at the Bangalore Airport. You do not ever get what you wanted, its hideously expensive, it has no sugar, is black and really awful. Stirring it up makes no difference really, ultimately you end up with the same old stuff and its better to drink it up in one quick gulp than one prolonged struggle and bitter taste. And it always tasted better in the good ol' days.

I can say without doubt that THAT was simply the worst coffee I ever had in my life, and saying that would be a gross understatement. I was waiting to pick up my mom, and due to a series of (un)fortunate events ended up reaching the Airport really quickly, and an hour and half early. Bangalore Airport is seriously not the best place to hang out, and they take great pains to maintain and further that reputation. No chairs or waiting lounges at the Arrivals gate. Just one Cafe Coffee Day outlet with smirking faces serving you bad coffee. So I managed to find a seat in the Departures section, and then was sprayed all over with insecticide. The stupid bugger chose to make his grand entry right at the moment I sat down, and sprayed those fumigated kerosene-like smelling fumes all over me, and the people all around me too. Luckily its meant only for mosquitoes and small insects, not animals.

Oh, and I am alive, kicking and have finally returned back to this blog.
Auf Weidersehen!

PS: I speak German now.

PPS: I simply cannot understand how people manage to drink Black Coffee! My theory is that people find themselves awakened by sipping Black Coffee because each sip is so horrible and bitter that it shocks them awake. That's how I stayed awake for 1.5 hours at the airport, and just managed to finish half of my coffee (which was originally half a cup anyway). Gruesome really.

Basic “Google Suggest”-like script

Recently while working on the Google Project, I was messing around with AJAX and figuring out how JSON works etc, so I decided to implement the much talked-about “Google Suggest” thing myself just to test my JSON and AJAX techniques. Turns out it indeed is really simple in concept and implementation, except that the amount of “bells ‘n whistles” you can add is endless.

“Google Suggest” in 5 easy steps:
1. Capture the onkeydown events of the text-box where the person is typing
2. Send the text typed to a server-side script (in ASP, PHP, Perl or any language you prefer). This you could do by passing the server script URL with the typed text to inline frames or XMLHttpRequest suiting your taste and requirements.
3. The server side script will search the database table for entries whose text starts with the text presently in the front-end textbox.
4. This list can be converted to a JSON object, or an XML feed or plain inline-frame javascript etc and will be received back by the client
5. The client will display the received list in a floating DIV or container below the textbox and permit the user to select an entry from that list by either arrow keys or mouse clicks.

So in my script, I wrote this Google Suggest-like tool that would read names from a database and display them as we type.

This code is really elementary with loads of features missing, and lots of optimizations possible. I wrote this script in like 2 hours in the dead of night so wasn’t thinking about lots of goodies and optimizations.

Download the ZIP file: Auto-suggest names

Minimum Requirements: ASP 6.0+ support, Microsoft Access 2000, IE 5.5+, FF 1.5+.

I’ll list out some things that can be added to this code of mine:

1. Add mouse handlers to the drop-down menu to enable mouse clicks on suggestions
2. Improve the elementary keyboard support it gives to include responses to several other keys
3. Optimize the feedback process to the server by inserting a “delay” before sending the typed value to the server-side script. That is, instead of sending the text “immediately” on “every” key-press, wait after a keypress for a second or two and see if the person stops typing. If the person hasn’t entered anything for, say, two seconds then send the text over to the server for searching. This will reduce the load on the server as its obviously wiser to wait for the user to atleast tell the client what he/she has to say before jumping off to suggestions. This is done by Google too.

I’ll add some more suggestions as I think of some more.

All I wish is “A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down”…

Ahh.. what a wish, I really wish I could do that for a couple of days more, like I’ve been doing for the past 12 days of my vacation.

I just hit upon this site (nicecupofteaandasitdown.com). I really like their mission statement, really can relate spiritually to them:

Our Mission Statement:

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely.

What a beautiful concept! This is the reason why the Internet still remains sane today…

Take a look at the site: OPEN SESAME!

Shashank

PS: This might make you hungry.

I love keyboards… I hate people

God bless keyboards, especially at times when the mice decide to go on a hunger strike. I’m sick and tired of wireless mice, and am half inclined to walk right tomorrow and purchase an ordinary optical mouse. The problem is that its far and I’m too lazy to do that as such. :-/

Its been exactly just a week since I replaced the old mouse batteries with brand new ones, and bam! they’re already dead! My mouse has stopped working right in the middle of the night at 12:29 am, when there is no chance that I can go around the house and humbly beg someone to lend me a battery, nor run out of the house and purchase some. And I was just beginning to get cosy with my work.

Damn! Today’s been a miserable day, loads of work planned, and almost none achieved. Overslept as usual.. had planned to wake up at atleast 10am for a change, woke up at 12:30pm. So then I thought, “Such is life”, and started up my system and began designing the new website of my college’s IEEE chapter (I’m its Secretary BTW), and Bang! at 1pm the power fails. With no signs of it returning anytime soon, I grumbled at the interruption of my once-in-a-lifetime, finally-sat-down-to-do-it, just-when-I-was-getting-warmed-into-the-subject initiative of my website, and decided to sit down and paint something instead! Yeah, as in real paint and paintbrush etc, which is something I managed to do atleast for a while, before I dropped off to sleep right there holding the paintbrush.

When I woke up a few hours later, I discovered that the power had returned, and therefore sat down to work again (after removing those wierd paint daubs on my clothes from that paintbrush I took to sleep with), when that stupid UPS repair fellow came. Another 2 hours wasted on that. Clock struck 8pm, and I desperately sat down to do some work atleast, when my sis called up and asked me to help her fix her system via phone and Yahoo chat. Grrr.. it was 9.30 before both of us ran out of patience and went off our own respective ways. Next, dinner and the usual running around the house insanely, before I finally managed to sit peacefully at 11pm (while that UPS fellow, and my sister, and the rest of humanity slept cosily in their respective homes) and worked for an hour or so, before my MOUSE IN A SUPREME BURST OF IRRITATING GAS……. DIED! Bah!

I’m going off to sleep like the rest of the the irritating world.
Good night.

Looking back…

DynamiX Clan (Dec 2006)

There was one time when I was at school you know.. and I met two interesting guys called Roshan Shariff & Rahul Seth (in different ways.. Roshan because of an Intel project we did together, and Rahul ‘coz of one SchoolNet Website competition.. then me and Rahul jointly started and ran an online media portal called Big-Anda.com for a while). And before long we all met up and one thing led to the other and we setup up a Computer & IT Club/Klan called “DynamiX”! We were basically fed up with the lack of anything being done at school for identifying and encouraging talented students in the field of computers. The teachers had this attitude that our school wasn’t any good in computers, and that we didn’t have students here good at computers. We thought differently. My reasoning was that it physically wasn’t possible for them to know each and every student in the school and also know whether they’re any good at computers, or any particular field. So we decided to go deep among the students, of almost all classes and spot people with talent, and people with an aptitude for computers and a desire to grow and do things differently!

We had immense support from our Principal, Mrs. Meera Balachandran, and basically were permitted to do whatever it takes to get it running. We started off with Mr. Umakant Pandey as our chief mentor, who was the faculty in-charge of the Intel Lab, soon re-christened “The DynamiX Labs”. The rest was quite a rush, recruiting students, getting them to work, getting ourselves to work, competiting at the tech fests of many other schools (and winning several of them! ) and holding our own events & fests.

My point is that even though our fests never really played up to our expectations and planning, personally I have grown a lot as an organizer, manager as well as team-player, and the experience I gained due to DynamiX has been invaluable in my college life, ‘coz when we read about managing events, managing people, working in teams, division of labor.. for most of the folks here its just theory, whereas I can actually relate to it from my personal experiences and be better at organizing and working in teams.

Anyway, this post was just a bit of remiscence of my time at school and my “DynamiX Days”, and was sparked by the recently concluded (and very successful) “DynamiX 2007″, one that was almost entirely organized by the young talents (that the school believed didn’t exist before DynamiX started) with help from Rahul & Anshu. Kudos to the new DynamiX team!

Shashank

GOing in Boeing...

Just recounting some experiences of yesterday morning.. when I was fooling around inside the New Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport, and I ran into some unexpected expected trouble. :-)

Before anything, I must complain about the names that our airlines have been taking.. we started out with Indian Airlines and Air India. Now we have Spice, Deccan Airlines, Indian, Jet Airways, Kingfisher airways, Go Airlines, IndiGo Airlines, and whatnot.

Predictions for the next few airlines: Jet -> AirJet, TailJet, Jet-on-the-left-wing, Jet-on-the-right-wing, Cinnamnon Airlines, RedChilli, GreenChilli, Go -> GetLost, Exit Airlines, Jump-out-of-the-plane Airlines, and what not..

Anyway.. First of all, I "unconciously" skipped the luggage X-Ray, and full credit to our Indian Government that I did not get lynched by CIA-lookalike Men in Blacks. I was politely told by the check-in staff to get the X-ray done and then return. Great! It already felt wierd.. everybody was polite to the point of exhaustion... all these guys were really out to please everyone, can't figure out what everybody was so happy about. Anyway, X-ray done (needless to mention that it was inside a small cramped enclosure inside a HUGE HUGE hall [with those wierd Police DO-NOT-CROSS tapes enclosing the four sides] ), and I obviously found it hard to steer the trolley outside that HUGE 8x8 ft enclosure-inside-the-HUGE-HUGE-hall. So I was trying to exit when the X-ray guy caught my eye (or my hair which nowadays protects my eyes), and asked my to X-ray my bag (very politely of course). I said, "I have to Go to get my check-in done", and he politely shouted above the din, "You travelling by "Go Airlines"? This is not the X-ray for Go Airlines!".. and I tried to convince him that I wasn't travelling by "Go" airlines, I was merely GOing to the check-in counter. Only me pulling out my SpiceJet ticket convinced him of my honesty.. which left him wondering why I claimed to be travelling by Go Airlines earlier. Honestly...

Delhi being Delhi, I had to wait in a very LONG queues, find space in the lobby just to exist, and then catch the Bus to the plane a.l.a. DTC city buses.. stamping on others and trying to find space, yet again, just to exist.

Plane was uneventful, except that I accidentally kept pressing the "Assistance required" button each time I wanted to switch on the Light switch.. which led to the airhostesses finally giving up on me, tired of walking upto me and politely asking me for the nth time if I needed help, only to found out that I had a bad sense of button-direction. :-) I must mention though, the AirHostesses could do with a little less make-up.. they look so 'white' that they remind me of Ozzy Osbourne in his concerts.

Rest of the journey from Bangalore to Vellore (in train now) passed uneventfully too, except I kept getting woken up in the train that by adventurous cockroaches that crawled up my sleeve or worse, my pant. Lots of fun...

I know, the worst sort of thing to keep the blog active is to post the description of a journey, rather than some philosophical Point-of-View which will cause even serene white-haired wise old men to jump out of their skins uttering "Blasphemy!". Really cheap trick I know..

So here I pronounce my philosophical, anatomical and spiritual Point-of-View: Michael Jackson is a man.