I myself was wondering when I would actually get to sit down to actually put up a proper post regarding my most recent significant development in my life so far, i.e. my admission to the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Oh yes, that place, with the yeah, 3 idiots, hmmhmm, yep.

Funny how after nearly two months (wait, what?), I finally feel like I have the time to do so. I have mapped out exactly what needs to be done for which subject and due. I had 4 classes today, and one pre-placement talk, followed by dinner, then helping out a friend who dropped by, with her presentation, then a remarkable 30 minute sleep before I had another quick meet for discussing Managing Organizations write up, followed by a lengthy meeting what we have in mind for Unmaad, IIMB’s mega cultural fest. Incidentally, I am a member of the Student’s Cultural Committee here (ask for my other business card )

It’s been quite a journey till today. From one of the most hectic first weeks ever – future bschoolers, look forward to it. To just gloss over the good parts, we were pretty much thrown into the deep end of the pool, and had to battle it out. Met some very good people there (incidentally, a recurring theme at IIMB: you always meet some fascinating folk here on campus. Your untold story is probably even more interesting than that guy who came from Uzbekistan, studied in Malaysia and was born in Germany ). (Yes, this is meant to provoke)

Anyway, we were divided and assigned loads of work, and various team building activities. One of the highlights was going to Breakthrough, a physical activities place that specializes in teaching lessons through group activities. More long stories short, I was the first person from the first year batch to present a powerpoint presentation in the auditorium to the entire batch of almost 400 people. Petrified. But well received.

One thing I really like about this place is the energy levels of people. I’d come to learn about the organic structure in Managing Organizations class (fellow IIMB’s rolling their eyes right about now), but the experience organizing and conducting the Aarambh 2010 – the freshers cultural show, in like 5 days, was quite phenomenal. The concept of POC – Point of Contact, helps give some responsibility of communicating and acting as a nodal point, but beyond that, everyone is quite highly talented and able to, well, simply put, ‘make things happen’.

Moving on, classes soon became part of our life. In the early days, it was mostly light hanging out, trying to get out of campus (managed a very few times only). Yes, to clarify, I don’t live in Bangalore. I live in IIMB. I see Bangalore a few times a month, no more.

In between, I put in my hand at some of the tech stuff I apparently am, well, known for. Created a few videos for Aarambh, and for an Ad making competition – where my new found Salsa skills also helped Good fun doing it.

Then things got a little crunchy with tests and exams. I’ll touch on this later in another post, because its worth lamenting posting on.

All in all, IIMB is quite a terrific place. Not a bad place to land up after spending the last few months of your life chasing a cat. (International viewers: CAT is the entrance exam to get into the IIMs. Most news regarding IIMs pretty much involves every possible permutation of terrible puns on felines).

As I was saying, quite some work cut out for me, including studying for final exams next week. Just like to thank Kaushik for reminding me that I in fact, do have a blog (and that it is giving off more malicious warnings on entry than a usb pen drive that was just inserted in our lab computers).

So where next is the obvious, cliche question. Simple answer. I don’t know. But there is definitely something that the interviewers at IIMB saw in me amongst thousands of others (or so we are told repetitively by our seniors) that is going to rock your world.

And as for posting on this blog, I’ll probably have lesser and lesser narrative descriptive tales of what happened yesterday (call me), what I had for breakfast (Twitter), or funny dialogues from class today (Facebook), but just general deep thoughts that I get when I do that brooding me. I figure this is also a reasonable forum to answer any big questions regarding IIMs, though I can only speak from observations and 2 months of life here.

A little warm up gyaan (subtitle: wisdom) here. People say that when you’ve reached a certain position in life (got in IIT (I haven’t), got in IIM (check), got into so-and-so company), “Your Life is Set”.

It’s not.

It only means people’s expectations of you have increased, and the game just got a little tougher. On an optimistic note, that ‘certain position’ guarantees a minimum worst case scenario of a status in life that is perhaps a hundred, thousand, or a million times better than, well, a vast majority of our society.

Just don’t let that get to you. Don’t let your life set. I acknowledge, easier writing this sort of thing on the other side of CAT, but wherever you are, know that there is more to live, and more to live for.

Its almost 4, and I have class in the morning. Ah, sleep cycles should make for an interesting next post, if I ever do get around to it.

jQuery - Javascript Library

Hey, I recently gave a presentation on jQuery, the javascript library.

For those of you new to jQuery, its an awesome Javascript (the in-browser scripting language), that allows you do play around with your webpages, and create some really fancy interactive elements and actions.

The basic points I discussed, in the order:

• Some basic applications of jQuery (Forms, Sliders, DOM traversing)
• Implementation details like jQuery function
• jQuery’s Function Chaining feature
• The $ function
• Links to various live examples.

View the presentation on the SlideShare.net embed, and download the pptx file, after the jump.

Google Public DNS

Google has just launched its Google Public DNS service, freely available for you to use. Another free Google service, yaay!

Wait, what is DNS?

DNS is something that ideally, you wouldn’t even know what it meant. Actually, it stands for Domain Name System, and is the system of computers and registries around the world that convert your delightfully easy to remember www.vishalkumar.in or www.orkut.com to get to your website.

What happens in the background is that your computer asks the DNS on which server www.vishalkumar.in is being hosted, and then downloads the data from that server. And you didn’t have to memorize the IP address (a delightful number like 74.125.45.100 (which incidentally, is Google’s homepage), and can surf the net that much easier.

The benefit will be apparent when you start browsing, as things will start moving faster, with the site and images and content loading faster (especially on sites where content is pulled from other sites). Overall, switching to Google Public DNS is a good idea, and unlike some ISP’s DNS servers, you don’t get pulled into an ad filled search page if your site is wrong, saving on bandwidth too.

Here’s a screenshot filled tutorial on how to set it up with your BSNL Router, or normal connection.

How to connect with your Router: (Scroll down to see how to set it up with Dialup)

1. Login into your router. This is done by typing 192.168.1.1 in your browser.

Login to your Router

2. Check out your Router screen. You should see something like this:

You should see this. Click on Advanced Setup.

3. Click on Advanced Setup. Again, you should see something like this:

Clicking on Advanced Setup

4. Click on DNS. You’ll see the following. Uncheck the Automatic Assigned DNS, and type in the values 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 in the given place.

Click on DNS and type in the servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

5. Click on Save. Thats it you’re done.

Some of you may be using a manual dialup, or broadband dial up. No worries, you can also put the DNS to use in the following way:

To use Google Public DNS on your normal dialup (or dial up BSNL too):

1. Go into your connections. Either its in Show All Connections in XP, or Network Connections, in your Network and Sharing center.

Click on Show all Connections

2. You should have something like this. I have my Broadband connection here. You should be disconnected to update any settings, so disconnect now, if you have to.

Select the Connection you wish to modify

3. Right click on it, and click on Properties.

Click on Properties

4. Check the tabs. Click on Networking.

Click on Networking

5. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and click on properties on the left side.

Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and click Properties

6. Select the Use the following DNS server addresses, and type in 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Type in the DNS Addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, and click OK

7. Click a bunch of OK’s, and reconnect.  You should be whizzing while surfing now.

In conclusion, Google Public DNS appears to be very useful for people around the world (DNS servers within the U.S. are fast enough). Google doesn’t serve any ads on failed sites, so you don’t end up wasting bandwidth.

You may also be wondering why Google is giving this service for free. Google has a lot to gain from the overall statistics. That said, Google won’t record anything personally identifying. (Your IP address will be in the buffer for 24-48 hours to address individual problems). But Google would get a lot of insight into how various websites around the world are being accessed.

Also, Google’s primary field is online applications, many of which depend on connections being as fast as possible. If Google improves on this aspect of web surfing, it will also improve the accessability of its own services too. The Google Public DNS shows improvement of anywhere from 30 to 50% (from ~250ms to ~110ms), compared to its competitors (one of which would be your default ISP’s).

Anyway, check it out, and let me know what you think.

Trac

While I was just digging around Dreamhost’s panel, I stumbled across a new One Click Install I had not seen before: Trac.

Trac is, according to their site,  an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Nifty. The last time I had tried my hand with Trac, I think I almost lost my hands. But now, Dreamhost has made it super easy to get Trac, and Subversion (a Concurrent Version System, made super easy with TortoiseSVN) along with it.

Now, as excited as I was to get this ‘new’ thing running on my account, I realized I knew precious little about how to set it up beyond the One Click of  the famed One Click Installation process. True, Trac was now installed in my account, but what next?

A long story short, I figured someone else might walk down the same path (and get lost like I did). So I basically screenshotted the path of least resistance to setting up Trac and Subversion on Dreamhost.

This procedure, assumes of course, that you have a Dreamhost account. If you don’t, then, well, you could enjoy this game I wrote in javascript, before you move on.

Step 1: Set up Subversion

After you’ve logged into Dreamhost’s Panel, go to Subversion under Goodies. And fill out the form. The steps are fairly logical. You’ll get a delightful email from the Subversion creation Robot.

Setting up Subversion

Step 2: Installing Trac

Make use of the One-Click Install feature in Dreamhost Panel, and go to second set of options to Advance Install. Select Trac, and type in an install directory. Make sure that this is empty. Select the SVN repository that you created above. Click install. You’ll (hopefully) get another delightful email.

Install Trac in One Click

Step 3:

After step 2, you should have a Trac and Subversion SVN up and running at their respective addresses. However, you still have to create an Admin user to get things rolling. (Unless having a fixed default installation is what you had in mind all along)

In Trac, the user authentication is tied into something called htaccess. This is something directly involved with Apache, the web server, and its settings can be access from the Goodies>Htaccess/WebDAV menu option.

Clicking on it will lead you to a list of the domains you have. Click on the one that you have installed Trac to. Then click on create a new directory.

Type in the same directory name as the Trac installation. And check the Password-protect this dir option. In the text area, type in some username – password combinations according the format given. You should have something like this:

Set up Htaccess in Dreamhost Panel

Step 4:Getting Shell Access

Now, if you are like me, and haven’t used Dreamhost anything beyond FTP and some of the nifty features of the Panel, then welcome to the Shell Access for your host server. Basically, you’ll need to login into the server and run the ‘trac-admin’ program on the server and tell it to give you the Administrator rights, so that you can do those tasks through the web interface itself.

So, get yourself shell access by going into Manage Users on the toolbox, and then selecting a Shell Account (so that you can still ftp with that account).

Grant Shell Access to User

Step 5: Login with PuTTY

Now you’ll actually need to log in into the server. For this you need a program that can SSH, like PuTTY. Get it here.

PuTTY Configuration

Upon pressing Open, you should be connected to the host, and you’ll get a username/password request. This are the same details for the account you just changed the type to Shell for.

Step 5: Giving Administrator Rights

Now, you’ll need to give yourself administrator rights. The way this is done is by calling on the ‘trac-admin’ program to give so-and-so user the ‘TRAC_ADMIN’ permission right. Once you have that, you needn’t return to this dark place, and can use the web interface for most of the work that you require. Right, go ahead, type something like the following then:

trac-admin www.vishalkumar.in/tracme permission add vishal TRAC_ADMIN

Replace the www.vishalkumar.in/tracme with the exact address you asked the One Click Installer to install Trac into. Replace vishal with your username.

Giving yourself Administrator Rights

Running  the permission list command will show the current list of permissions.

Step 6: You’re Done!

Well, if you’ve reached this far, then you’ve managed to successfully installed Trac and Subversion, and created an Administrator for it, on Dreamhost. If you browse to your Trac site, you’ll be requested for a username and password (the one you just created in htaccess). You should see something like

Trac Web Interface

Chat Noir in Javascript

I invite you to check out this Javascript game I created, called Chat Noir (Black Cat in french).

The objective of the game is really simple: Trap the cat before it gets to the edges.

I’ve used Javascript (with jQuery) and CSS to implement it. It’s based on a similar flash game by GameDesign.jp.

Play it here, and let me know what you think.

Here is my Inbox:

GMail Inbox

Here’s what I have in addition to the standard GMail Inbox:

• A Planet Theme (as you can see with the orange planet thing behind GMail)
• A extra side panel containing Multiple Inboxes, or different views of my mail
• Integrated Google Calender
• Integrated Google Docs

To get these and more activated in your GMail account, you will need the following:

• A GMail Account. If you don’t already have one, get it at Gmail.com

That about it.

Now, click on settings in the top right corner, and you’ll get something like:

GMail Settings

First of all, click on the tab that says Labs, and you’ll get the same screen as the one above. You’ll need to Enable the Labs features, after which its a good idea to refresh GMail.

You’ll see a lot of various options in this area, for enabling or disabling various Lab features.

Here, scroll down and find Multiple Inboxes. You can also enable Google Calender Gadget, Google Docs Gadget, and for those of you with slower internet speed, enable GMail Inbox Preview (first covered here).

GMail Inbox Preview

Once you’ve saved the changes, you need to click on the Multiple Inboxes tab link. Here, you can set the number of side inboxes you want, along with what kind of emails you want to show there. I highly recommend that you put ‘is:starred ‘ as one of the search strings. Basically this will have one of your Multiple Inboxes showing only the mails that you have starred. This way, you can put a star on an important email, and have it appear on the side of your main page.

Another feature I like about Gmail is purely cosmetic. I’m talking of course, about the Themes. I have the Planets theme installed, which looks really pretty, and also changes in image according to the time of the place you are in.

You can click on the themes tab and select a theme of your choice. Pepples is really good too.

GMail Themes

Anyway, these are just some of the basic GMail features that I have enabled on my GMail. I find that it looks way more interesting than before, and having links to my calender, docs, and starred mails right there in my main inbox saves a lot of time hunting down stuff. Check it out.

Have any other cool GMail trick? Comment it down.

In my system all exe files are being opened with notepad!!!

Thats more or less what I got in a conversation a few minutes ago. Now, this particular question isn’t particularly new, and it can be caused by an overzealous tinkerer or a malicious code (if you haven’t done anything, truthfully, and this happened to you, please check it out with an antivirus).

The problem, if you want to understand is that Windows is designed so that every file is expected to have an extension. That 3 letter ending tells the Windows OS with which program to open the file with. So if you have .txt file, you should open it with Notepad.exe.

Now what about a .exe file? Who opens that? The answer is simple: Itself! Hence you have to tell the OS (through the Registry Editor), to open the .exe file with itself. Hence “%1″ %* as the open with command, which indicates that the file needs to be opened with the same .exe (%1), and having the same arguments (%*) that it was assigned.

Anyway, in order to fix this, please follow the following instructions..

• Open up Regedit

Run Regedit

• Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

Go into HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

• Go into HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command

Go into HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command

• Now, there should be only one String entry. Double click on that, and type in “%1″ %*

Edit string and put "%1" %*

Anyways, hope that helped out. Comment if you need some more digging out

Shiny shiny Chrome, now also an Operating System

Google has created another stir in the technology community again with the announcement of the launch of their new Chrome Operating System.

Thats right. Operating System. Like Microsoft-makes-Windows-Operating-System Operating System.

The details are pretty sketchy, but here’s what we know so far…

• Its not out yet
• Its going to be an extension project of their already super fast Chrome Browser
• Its designed for to appear in netbooks (that is, small laptops without optical drives, meant for wireless surfing) near  (or far from) you
• It’ll run on your PC
• Google’s been working with a lot of hardware manufacturers like Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba (as of July 12th), to get their OS on devices.
• You’ll probably see them from the second half of 2010
• You’ll be able to use GMail, Google Docs, and a lot of other of Google’s tools via Chrome OS, brilliantly.

My Take:

That last point is significant here, and probably explains Google’s rationale behind working on an OS, after they already have Android (for smartphones, for now).

Now, we know that Google has developed a very rich user experience by making use of AJAX technologies backed by their own Cloud Computing servers all around the globe. Lets just simply say that they’re a big big Online only company. (Alright, I know, Google Earth, Google Desktop, and enterprise products are there, but Google still makes most of its money online, right?)

So it makes sense, that you would want to create the framework that allows the most direct interaction to all those web applications that you have created. And which hardware device is optimised for the web experience? Why, the netbook of course. In face, from their blog, they’re trying to design it so:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Get the ‘OS’, to run as lightly as possible, so all the real work will be online.

Some technicalities:

• It’ll probably be based on some Linux build
• It’ll be open source
• It’ll be free
• It’ll have Flashbuilt in (probably, since they’re working with Adobe too – see the list above)

In fact, I believe this blurs the defintion of the Operating System, as a simple interface between the Hardware and the User and software. This Google Chrome OS seems to be sort of a highly optimised web browser OS, a gateway to Google’s real delicacies: Online applications.

Delicious, isn’t it?

To find out (just a little bit) more, you can read their official introduction.

Comment below if you have any questions or anything interesting to add.

“Where are my car keys?” “I don’t know, google it, maybe under your bed?”

Then I saw this video.

Just took that concept to a very relevant perspective.

My take: If you know anything about Google and Bing, watch it and show it to your friends.

(If you’re new here: Google‘s a search engine from Google, Bing’s a search engine from Bing Microsoft.)

Search with Everything!

Don’t you just love those little programs that do that one small thing, oh so perfectly? (Remember the Norton User Access Control tool?). Well, this little program is also just as awesomeous.

So what does Everything do? Simply put, it is the fastest desktop file indexer and search engine I’ve seen till date.

Here’s what it does:

1. First it indexes all the files in your system
2. …and now its ready to search

There, its that simple. So whats so good about it? Well, for one thing, it indexes really really quickly. And it does it better than even Vista’s search functionality. I believe its magic lies in the NTFS indexing feature, which for some reason even Vista doesn’t use as well.

For example, I searched for the file ‘bebot’ in my system.
Vista returned no results.

Vista Search Fail!

While Everything got it in hairsplits of seconds:

Bebot in Everything!

Another really super feature is that it doesn’t take any time at all to refresh the locations (That NTFS index magic I think). Here, I moved the Bebot.mp3 file into a subfolder. And hey presto, the path was updated. Ma-ma-magic!

Moved Files Found Instantly in Everything!

Other cool features include:

• Searching by Case
• Search using Regular Expressions

Everything, with Regular Expressions

• Ability to launch a HTTP Web Server to search using Everything
• Ability to Start an ETP Server, or connect to another ETP Server, so you can search remote computers as if you were searching your own
• Oh, installation size? 334KB

My take: Damn useful. Get it now. Why wasn’t Vista search like this?

Download Everything File Searcher here!