Manish’s Scribble Board

Its late 3 in the night morning and yeah its Sunday. Just to inform the whole world that an epic named Engineering is about to finish. This is going to be the last engineering of my life. I had thought of persuing higher studies as MS, but fear that it may too turn out as BE.

Today Yesterday, Sat, 25th October was that auspicious day which marked the closing ceremony of the sessionals in our engineering career. We have five papers this semester. The last paper was Visual C++ which is named as Design of Windows Application. What a bullshit? Its an utter waste of engineer’s patience. I was struggling with MFC and anything closely related to VC++. This paper recieved a lot of bad reviews from all seniors earlier. Just have to give a semester paper for this. My piece of advise to my juniors and friends is that - “Dont be a fool to pick up Visual C++ as a new technology to learn. Its pure bullshit and very very old“.

Oh yeah, by the way I came across two pics on Mrinal’s Camera. Posting them here. First one is the one taken on my birthday eve in Rock’s(Ankur Bansal) room. Its a pic to cherish. The second one is quite controversial. Just guess what is being done in the pic…..

A Snap To Remember

What the Fuck is this going on?

Thanks God! I am not that popular on the internet and neither is my blog. This blog contains nothing but just my life happenings and some random thoughts.

Coming to the point, I am a heavy blog reader and have many blogs subscribed on my Feed Reader or Google Reader. I always add and remove subscriptions after finding them useful and spammy respectively. Slowly slowly there are more of respected tech blogs rather than those crazy tech bloggers who have nothing rather than reproducing articles from trusted sources like Ars, Wired etc.

Anomit had kicked badly the arses of those so called religious bloggers in this post on this blog. A citation is well required.

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts and get ready to be taken through a whirlwind tour through the kingdom of the self proclaimed ‘tech bloggers’ who profess to live, eat and breathe technology. Soon you would come to know they fart too.

Some generalized observations on the sweeping epidemic that is ‘tech blogging’ :

1. Someone starts a damn, fucking blog with a nice theme. Point to be noted. He could later throw around that fact and claim to be a CSS geek.

2. He starts writing vociferously about mobile phones, ‘gadgets’, ‘latest tech news’ (sic), ‘tips and tricks’ (did I forget to add Windows here?), ‘tweaks’ (o yeah, what’s next? tweaking nipples video on youtube?) etc etc

3. Uses the term ‘geek’ atleast once while describing himself.

Another thing is that blogging about blogging is really lame. It is taken up by those people who don’t have any work and want to be famous without effort. I have seen many many people who only blog on “Blogging and making money from blog” and yeah, they make lots of money and regularly showcase their Adsense cheques in the blog. While browsing on the net, I had seen Anirudh’s post on Blogging about Blogging.

Lets take a practical example of Blogging about Blogging. If you were so much into earning money from blogs, you should have saw Rishi Raj’s tech blog. Hey! Its a tech blog, then how come “Blogging about Blogging and Making money?” Well! That’s a thing warped in mystery. This famous blogger has retired citing  reasons like studies and academics. He sold his blog to someone and started a personal blog where he hasnt posted since ages. This proves that when adrenalin runs through your spines its more of intoxication and then your career dies a painful death.

His blog is down and isnt being shown up on google search. I have tried to get a page from the Internet Archive and here is the whole cache.

That was enough for today, wait and watch for the rest.

Take it easy, am not crying! Its a pun intended intentionally for most of the people. You would like to ask what it actually means? Well read on…..

Software Engineering was the paper this semester in which every Tom,Dick and Harry scored more than he expected. Leave besides what this paper really meant, the teachers were also rich with marks and flooded the students. Naturally, everyone has high expectations in it and many even hoped of getting an A+ once in engineering.

Now my scene: I left the first sessional (no regretting) and then second. My internals were the lowest in the whole batch or at least among lowest. Means I dot know what software Engineering it and am very weak in it. Maybe I am,according to the Indian Education System. Whatever happened later doesn’t count. People got A+, majority A and I surprisingly got a B ( more than expectations).

Well the above two paragraphs was just to build the story’s climax,well its not a story anyway. Now working here at Microsoft on real time projects, I felt half of the things are not required at the earlier stage and more complicated things can be learnt gradually with experience. Have we been give any idea of Version Control Systems ? The answer is a big NO! I cant imagine developing a good software without a version control system.

Coming to some simple things. We had been told to document our codes, even the format of documenting was taught and any other way of documenting was prohibited (unless you wanted to lose marks). What happens here or anywhere, document the way you deem fit keeping in mind some standards. All companies have their own method of documenting codes. In a typical file, 2/3 rd of the content are comments.

My suggestion to budding coders and programmers is not to blindly follow the books as suggested by our Education System but think use the net to find out standards. We havnt been even taught how to file bugs. We had been taught testing, now what to do if we find a bug? ( Swallow it? ) There is something called a bug tracker or Issue Tracker.

Concluding the whole article, I would like to say that you alone can make a big software provided you follow the standard methods like documenting, naming, intendation and some more software development concepts. In any way dont follow the Books blindly.

Ahem! I forgot one thing, most of the Engineers in my batch are preparing for MBA! Who wants to be a coder? Hard to figure out.

I dont know how much people would be able to understand this comic strip, but hope those with knowledge of linux may find it quite easy. Just stumbled across it while surfing, I want to say only one Line, XKCD Rocks!

If you still cant guess what it meant, have a look at this link, then compare it with the above strip.

Have Fun

Our friend and beloved CR, Ankur Bansal is one of the laziest person on this earth. When he has no work he gets busy with his GF’s. Imagine of the scene what would happened when one of his GF’s messaged him to get online, only when he found that Vikash’s computer had crashed
This happened a long time back. At that time Rock didnt have his laptop and solely relied on Vikash’s desktop for satisfying the unsatisfied lot (Note: pun intended) . Now what can he do? At that time there came an excellent idea in his mind. He just took out an Ubuntu CD which Vikash had ordered long back and booted from it in *Live Mode*. Net works flawlessly out of Box in Ubuntu, which proved out to be a boon.
This story was leaked out by Rwik and he did give an expert comment, which can be well used for publicity of Ubuntu reguarding its ease of use and simplicity. Here I designed the poster highlighting it.

Note: This story is approved by Rock for public display.

Have you ever seen killing an ant with a gun? Or fretting hours for getting things done which could be achieved in a few hours? Yeah! We did it. It took us more than 6 hours to do something which can be done in just an hour. This is how we did it

We had to submit a project on Software Engineering paper. As a perfect engineer we recalled it near midnight. Finally the plan was made to assemble in Swap’s flat and do the needful. The work on project started at 12:30 at night. As usual we felt hungry, so swap ordered pizza, prepared lime juices, shakes etc for the well being of their friends I and Rwik put up a lot of effort to get things done. Swap was busy cooking and serving food for these two hardworking people. And Yeah! Anup was deadly busy in watching TV, youp***.com and sleeping! Finally we gave our final touch to project at 6AM. Deadly tired we pleaded swap to take out the printout. Anup got up and asked was it done? We would be a fool, if we didnt make it even overnight.

The main hurdles were avaiabilty of easy net connection at 512Kbps, swap owns 3 computers and Rwik brought his laptop. Total of 4 comps for 4 people. Now imagine what would have happened to our project? Am happy that even after so many hurdles we achieved our aim.

We had lots of fun. Locked Anup outside balcony, Rwik made a video of mine having pizza like an animal (I was too hungry). Swap is camera shy, still Rwik has all the talents to get snaps of people without their notice. Keep it up Rwik, get going!