one of those days

I was supposed to write a game in Action Script, which I did successfully in 6 hours yesterday, and I was feeling pretty smug about it. Except for getting the game to work with a php script, I had done the whole thing. I submitted my code to my mentor yesterday night, only to find a completely new GUI based on my code to appear on his website, with everything working just fine. All my smugness disappeared as I looked at the spiced up GUI and tried to digest the fact that my code was read, understood and modified in under 3 hours. With my uncommented code, that is really something. Just one of those days when you realize that there is much to learn in life.

Addiction

It’s hard to wean off one’s addiction, I had heard. Almost everyone is confident that he/she can pull off from their addiction whenever they please. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about addiction:

Addiction is a state in which the body relies on a substance for normal functioning. When this substance is removed, it can cause withdrawal. It was first used in 1906, in reference to opium (there is an isolated instance from 1779, with ref. to tobacco). The first use of the adjective addict (with the meaning of “delivered, devoted”) was in 1529 and comes from Latin addictus, pp. of addicere (“deliver, yield, devote,” from ad-, “to” + dicere, “say, declare”).

Addiction was a term used to describe a devotion, attachment, dedication, inclination, etc. Nowadays, however, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual’s health, mental state or social life.

I believe that the definitions given over here are a bit too constricted. They are a product of a peephole effect in the writer’s vision. The term addiction in a broader sense, might not be necessarily associated with a substance as such. I believe that addiction of any kind is repetetion of any act to pacify some kind of insecurity that a person has. It might lead into a state where the body relies on that act for its normal functioning. Now this dependence of the body on the act might just be psychological in nature and not biological. This psychological dependence is more often than not the cause of addictions all around us; This is the part of the definition or the meaning of the term that most people miss out on.

On the lighter side, I am just glad that I realized that I was slowly getting addicted to web socialization; a thing that comprises overuse of social networking websites and also overindulgence in chatting via the internet. It feels good that I have been able to use these tools only when required, and not as a passive entertainment, as before. I have generated a lot of free time because of that; Which is spent on doing something constructive at least, like trying to get kde working on Windows*, planning the school reunion, watching complete Star Wars series back-to-back during the weekend…

*I have been stuck with Windows XP on my home box as my two awesome drives refuse to work, which sucks royally. To rub it in, the Ubuntu 8.04 disk sits right here in front of me.

Bordering Anti Social Freak

I have been called that name many many times. Its time I lived upto it. No more web socialization. It takes up too much time for my comfort, and as I have recently realized; it leads nowhere. I was not, and never will be cut out for socialization. I am what we can call, a social disaster. Instead of wasting time trying to do something I was not supposed to, I’d rather waste my time trying to do something I was supposed to. Lets see how that works out for me.

The strange feeling

The strange feeling as the title suggests is quite strange indeed. I am a big fan of it, and I experience it quite a lot. The familiar sensation of your eyes burning while they become blood red due to lack of sleep, and the momentary lapses of concentration are the fun parts of the strange feeling. As against common belief that this occurs only when a person does not sleep for long hours; the feeling creeps in even if you have had terribly low amount of sleep.

As an example, I was up till almost 6 am yesterday night working on my internship homework [Yes, I do pile up my work till the very end :P ]. I had to get up at 8 and push off for work after that. The feeling had crept in once I got up from bed. The following data is what I have collected from all my strange feeling experiences. The times that are given are approximately after 20-22 hours of lack of sleep, followed by a maximum of 2 hours of sleep.

0-2 hours: During this time, a bath or the simple act of washing your face can make u forget the feeling, although the burning eyes are hard to get rid of :). Interestingly, your calves start hurting a bit, I have never understood why.

2-4 hours: This time is the best, the feeling does not interfere in your normal work.

4-8 hours: The feeling starts returning, and a nice lunch can solve the issue; considering in my time table this is lunch time. The lunch gives you intense satisfaction, but then leads to a strong pull to sleep.

8-12 hours: This a generally lazy time. It is hard to do anything productive in this time, and there is a slight risk of going off to sleep.

12-14 hours: This is the toughest part. You will feel sleep overcoming you so strongly, that most novices can’t get past this point. Even veterans sleep for sometime at this point if they have nothing interesting to do :)

14-18 hours: Once you are past the 14 hour mark, its a easy ride for sometime, a good meal [not too heavy, too heavy meals are dangerous :P ] can help you concentrate here.

18-24 hours: This is the fun part. You start feeling you are in a dream sometimes. Your mind slips in and out of reality as it plays games with you while you work. The lapses in concentration widen, and it takes some time to get used to this. I would not suggest driving past this point, unless you are taking strong help from caffeine :)

24-30 hours: This is where you can work, but this is where I start thinking “why the hell am I awake for so long? Nothing is this important” My limit is reached somewhere around here, and I collapse, and give in to the strange feeling.

Right now I am at the 15 hour mark, and relaxing, writing my blog, listening to music, as I prepare myself for the ride ahead. As and when I reach new points, I shall release a new version of this post, with my new experiences.

PS: Anyone who has reached further, which I am sure most of you must have, kindly let me know of the dangerous points of time to stay alert :P

Quark ‘08

The one thing that has gotten me high for the past few months. The day I saw the notice saying that I was selected to be in the Organizing Committee to today, lots of changes have taken place in my outlook towards it. There are a lot of things that I have learned from it. I learned:
How work is supposed to flow.
How Organizations work.
How people have issues regarding work [most of the issues being "i dont want to" types].
How greedy people are for certificates.
How to get people to work for you.
How I was pathetic at all these things.
How busy can a person get.
How one can still find time for “social” activity.
How CGPA gets screwed up when you do that.
How people’s roles get decided naturally.
How important is it to wear shirts (and full pants too, both being at the same time).
How it gives an unnecessarily “important” feeling.
How much is music necessary in life.
How to design websites in AJAX.
How to design websites using DHTML.
How to give kick ass presentations.
How management has killed my projects.
How, once blogging is hit, is very hard to start again.
How high can you get.
Thats about it, I guess. Well, all I can say is that there are still 45 days to go for Quark ‘08. I hope I learn a few more things from it. There are also some things that I did not learn, still:
How to study without feeling so at all.
How to prioritize.(In general)
How to be a good student (something I was sent to college to do).
How to delegate and trust.
How to ask girls out, successfully.
How to balance everything.
These are the things I haven’t yet learned, with respect to the things I have. Otherwise, the page would run out of space if I list everything. But its cool, im still just 19 years old. So, lets just hope that I do learn some of this stuff in time. I hope Quark teaches me this.

Also, in a Marketing attempt:
Official website: www.bits-quark.org
[Kindly do check it out]

Long Time

Its been a long long time since I have written anything here, it almost seemed like the place was dusty… but then looking at the blog stats, I realized that I do get a decent 3 hits per day average, which is amazing considering the fact that the last post written on this blog is dated back in July. I am not sure what brought me here, back to write a post, some of the possible reasons are:

• A recent comment was made, so I got an e-mail saying so.
• Depression in life.
  Evident by the song I am listening to: (This is my all time depression song)
  Now playing: Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven
  via FoxyTunes
• Getting internet access and free time together after a lot of time. (Yes, sometimes there are major internet problems in my college)

I would give a bit more weight to the second reason, owing to the fact that the song is clear evidence (:D). On brighter side of things, nothing exceptional happening in my life since July up to today. The only thing I can be proud of is the linux users’ group that I started off in campus.
This is the mailing list of the group. I know that the fact that the mailing list is a Google Group is an insult to the concept of LUG, but then that was not a decision I took, or was informed of before it was taken.

This is the way I pass my time, except for excessive doses of World of Warcraft :D. So now that I have actually overcome the initial inertia of blogging, I hope that I will continue to blog this time around, without any huge gaps in posts. The only problem is that well, my college likes me so much that they think I should study, and so they do NOT allow me internet access at random times, which is a very good thing according to me :P.

Engineering

You know you are a budding engineer when:

1. You’re proud to be in engineering but completely hate it.
2. You have a knack for math and physics but when in class you feel like its all over your head.
3. You hate chemistry and are pathetic at it.
4. You are awful at spelling and grammar or anything english related.
5. After about a month of college a C in half your classes dont seem that bad anymore.
6. You recognize all 4 girls in engineering.
7. Instead of studying you spend your week before finals doing something stupid like writing this.(This was a pending post since comprees)
8. You laugh when other students complain about taking 30 credits in a year.
9. You believe that your best friend is the FX 991MS.
10. It’s 2am and your computer has:-
    • 15 firefox tabs open 4 of which or wikipedia looking up some term you should know, others include all your orkut, facebook accounts, some blogs and such junk
    • Text editor open with some stupidly long lab
    • at least 10 different adobe windows open with your lecture slides/ assignments
    • amaroK/winamp open with metal playing
    • Gaim/Trillian running with 4 chat windows, the four being the 4 girls in engineering.
    • Download manager running with the latest movie/episode of 24/heroes/scrubs/PB.
11. You wish that your college would start giving out Arts degrees as well. (Or is it just me?)
12. You analyze everything you see without thinking about it.
13. You have exams that are 3 hours to do 2 questions, and still run out of time.
14. You know the whole Greek alphabet.
15. You have fun talking about maths.
16. Your average sleeping time per day is 3-5 hrs.
17. You understand jokes like “I would like to be your integral so I can be the area under your curves” and find them hilarious.
18. You forget everything you learn as soon as you get home.
19. You do every assignment at the last possible moment.
20. You can fill up a 200 pages foolscap notebook in 5 days or less.
21. Your computer stays switched on for 4 days continuous, at an average.
22. You have finally learned that you’re not actually smart, high school kids were just dumb.
23. Though you will never admit it, you know we’re all losers.
24. You would rather do mutivariable calculus than have to write a paper or memorize anything.
25. You might not know shit about computer but can write a 5 page C++ code with ease.
26. No matter how confused you are you’ll convince yourself a textbook isnt worth buying.
27. Only reason you’re passing is because of those engineering friends that are way smarter than you, or whatever.
28. You depend on a curve to get a decent grade.
29. You are the only person that finds those stupid engineering shirts hilarious.
30. You hate engineering.

PS: This has been part plagiarized from a facebook group description that caught my eye.

Holidays

When I was in school, I always used to think that the school should be giving longer holidays, so that I can enjoy in the holiday time. Since I have started college, that feeling has vaporized, and I can’t put my finger on exactly why this has happened. As an example, my current holiday is so long, this is all that happened in it upto now:

• I saw my friends prepare for their first year engineering exams.
• I saw them give their exams.
• I saw them enjoy during their holidays.
• I saw them starting their college for second year engineering.

and I am still here on vacation. Although this might seem boastful or something, trust me, it has been more like mental torture to be ripped away from daily life for so long. Believe me, I still have one more month of holidays to go.

I have tried to invent ways to spend time. Some attempts at that have been:

• Going for an internship.
• Learning Java.
• Taking various personality tests, IQ tests, and such stuff (All through http://www.i-am-bored.com/ )

But somehow, I still have this empty feeling with me, since the time I have come home. I dunno what I do in college is so time taking, that I am still feeling jobless out here. Maybe it is that I do not do work with the same dedication level at home and at college. Or maybe I should attend college more, so that I learn to value holidays better…

Internship

Well, it turns out that somebody found my CV interesting enough to read and give me a call for a interview on the phone. The interview was held long ago, just before the first day of my comprees! It was decent, I mean that I really did not expect to clear the interview as I was told that there were a lot of applicants for the internships at Oneirix Labs , but then I got a mail on 5th may saying:

Hi Eeshan,

Congratulations! You are selected for an internship at Oneirix Labs. Please
intimate your acceptance of the offer and tell us when you will be able to
begin working for the internship project.

That was the happiest day I had in quite some time, as my exams were causing my slow and painful death… Well, then after I came home, I started on the internship on last Monday, and today I have completed one week of the internship.
The amount of knowledge I have gained(read as:knowledge not information*) in this one week of internship has been astounding.
I got introduced to:

• Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)
• Octave (Open Source equivalent of MATLAB)
• How Open Source Softwares are actually coded.(And their architecture)
• Working of Parsers(Lex+YACC)
• And well, editing all the above things, except Ubuntu

The most important thing that the internship did, is to tell me that no task is impossible to attack, its just a matter of patience and strong will to actually make in rodes into any problem out there. I would have laughed at anyone who told me a month ago that I was going to read, understand and edit a 4153 line C++ code in the next month…

*->There is a subtle difference, I shall write upon that in future posts.

Illness

Well, the reason I am sick, is really the sacrifices I make for other peoples’ objectives. I really do not mind helping people out by taking time out for them, but when the person I am helping is not really putting in as much efforts as I am for the cause, it gets a bit frustrating.
Seriously, when I work for someone else’s objectives, the only thing I expect from the person is that they put in as much efforts as me towards acheiving the desired goal (more efforts will also do!). If the person who is asking my help is not really concerned, why should I put in so much efforts for that person?

PS : whoever guesses the target gets a treat from me.