It’s no secret that professors come and go in an engineering college. In XIE, it’s rare to find profs in the Computers and IT departments who choose to stay for more than a year.

The EXTC department on the other hand has almost no changes which is pretty good not just for the obvious reasons, but because the profs cooperate a lot better and work for the betterment of the students. You can notice this from the staggering 6th semester results of EXTC where almost everyone has a 1st class or above and students with a single ATKT or more form a group of a number easily less than 10 (maybe even 5). Not just that, their experiments for practicals are recorded in printed journals and students studying for their CAT/GRE/GMAT/OTHR/LAME/XAMS are permitted to bunk college for a couple of weeks (this provision is obviously unofficial). Isn’t that effin’ awesome?

In contrast, the situation in computers and IT is an interesting spectacle and uhh…I digress.

Let me cut right to the chase. XIE is looking for a new principal.

I find this really absurd and full of WTFs as I heard that Dr. Kirloskar was very enthusiastic about teaching environmental science for the next couple of batches. Even I was interested in attending his lecture just to experience how a Ph.D in Environmental Engineering from IIT approaches the subject.

I have no further information about when he plans to quit but I can only hope that the new principal doesn’t screw around with me for my blog posts. I think I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime.

I entered the computer lab a couple of days back for the first time this semester. It felt great to be back in the lab, watching Gauri Ma’am and Nandesh sir trying their level best to ensure that nobody fucks around in the computer lab as well as Manuel Sir Uncle (that’s how his name is mentioned officially on a notice with phone numbers of the staff LOL) who watches calmly unlike Anand sir who is totally blatant that he finds every student annoying to say the least.

After dealing with the usual crap which Anand sir throws at me for wearing shorts to college, which is now a commonplace activity for me, I entered one of the labs and I booted the machine.

My reaction to what I saw in the next 10 seconds was a clearly audible WTF ????

Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition? WTF? Why? WTF could have possibly possessed those guys to have done this? WTF was wrong with Fedora? WTF are they upto? WTF happened to their reasons to choose Linux in the first place? Simply, WTF????

For the technology n00bs (i.e. those who have a life), Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a PAID SOFTWARE and is NOT FREE like Ubuntu or Fedora Linux which our computers ran earlier.

This reminded me of a day two years ago when Fr. John had given me a hard copy of his Linux Research Lab project idea, whose aim in a nutshell was to convert every computer in college from running Windows to Linux to save thousands of bucks in licensing fees. The document stressed heavily on the fact that Linux was completely free and was more secure than Windows and leveraged these points to convert our labs to Linux.

I’ve attached a portion of the document below. Click the picture to view an enlarged version.

And after all that crap about the advantages of free software, they’ve decided to use Red Hat Enterprise Edition which is 4000 rupees (minimum) per year for EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER THAT RUNS IT. What’s ironic is that this operating system is almost as expensive as the retail version of Windows XP Home edition which costs a little more than 4000 rupees. (CLICK HERE FOR THE OFFICIAL RED HAT ENTERPRISE EDITION PRICING OPTIONS)

I don’t know if they pirated the OS and downloaded it for free (notice the irony in the document) or if they actually paid 8 lakhs for the 200 computers (I’m assuming that the actual number of computers XIE has is close to 200. This isn’t the actual figure) this year but to be honest, I don’t really care.

Irrespective of what option they chose, it still contradicts the very arguments that got them permission to install Linux on every machine. Although I support the idea of learning to use an OS which isn’t Windows, this is blasphemy.

I wonder what made them choose this option in the first place? What was wrong with Fedora anyway?

My constant wtf’s are preventing me from writing anything without using profanities so I’ll just close this post with another WTF.

Let me know your thoughts on the issue. Comment away!

(and for God’s sake, I’m not offending any staff member in this post in any way whatsoever. I’m just livid over this situation. I HAVE NOT AND I DO NOT INTEND ON OFFENDING ANYONE, and if you have a problem, don’t visit this website anymore. Click this text for further details. )

An anonymous reader suggested that I answer a couple of questions that might be useful to the freshers and students from S.E. and T.E. Instead of just letting him/her ask the questions, I’m inviting you to throw in your set of queries about XIE.

So if you’ve got something on your mind that hasn’t been answered by the college authorities to your satisfaction, just fill in the form below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Just be aware that I’m not authorized to make any statement on behalf of the college so whatever I say is totally unofficial and is not to be used as evidence to strengthen your doubts when you deal with the college authorities. I’m just a student who will answer your questions from my point of view. Since I spend more time in the classroom and the college authorities in the office, remember that they are a more definitive source of information.

Now that we’re clear on that, just fill in a simple form that’ll take less than a minute to fill.

Fire away your questions!!!

If you can’t see the form, fill it up by CLICKING HERE.

Life is about to change….for the worse. ‘Chilling Out’ as we know it, will soon cease to exist. It’s the time of the year where you can’t even do anything else thanks to God’s gift of sporadic heavy rains in Mumbai and drought in every other farm in the country which only asks for a modicum of rain.

College reopens on the 20th of July. What’s weird is that most people don’t even know this. They still think the big day is on 3rd of August and yet I doubt I’ll ever see those guys even in the first week of August.

To us, the new final year students of XIE (hopefully), this day adds another headache as we need to present a PowerPoint presentation about our project on the 23rd and I haven’t even decided on a project yet.

I guess we can only vent our frustration out on the freshers who will turn up shortly after they complete the completely unnecessary and cumbersome procedure that is CAP (Centralized Admission Process, jeez…).

Luckily, this time a couple of things outside of XIE have changed and you can expect to see some of these things for real:

• The new Railway Budget has further cut down costs for a student railway season ticket. Although I’m not sure if this is applicable for both 1st and 2nd class coaches, I’m fairly certain that at least the 2nd class passes are covered under this scheme.
• Aah, the freakin’ Bandra-Worli Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link (I’m waiting congress…where’s my effing money) is finally going to almost entirely transfer all the traffic that originates from Lower Parel till Mahim along Senapati Bapat Road and should ease the flow of traffic outside XIE (which is a good thing as I had to pay 20 bucks once as taxi fare thanks to good ’ol traffic.)
• XIE has a new coat of paint which will enthral those with olfactory fetishes.
• The scum of XIE (previous B.E. batch) are gone *phew* (lol, kidding. it’s not like we’re gonna miss you but u know what I mean )
• Some of the other scums (profs) of XIE are gone. (Note to self: Never ever write something like this especially when they have you by the balls when it comes to internals)

I also hope that some of these things are implemented this semester:

• Upload class assignment and project files on the XIE website (like ex-lecturer Reef who used to do that). That saves me some fucking time and doesn’t require me to carry a pen drive to college every fucking day like a kiss-ass just to make sure I get all the presentations from the lecturers as soon as they use them, along with making false promises to every other bugger in class without a pen-drive about mailing them everything that I copied.
• UPDATE THE @&(^%$ WEBSITE! What’s the point of hosting it when there’s no relevant info on it? Universities today use twitter to broadcast college related news and we can’t even keep a website up-to-date. Ask the students, we’ll help. (okay okay okay…Rahul sir asked me a couple of times earlier about this, but I had my vivas and sem exams….Sorry man. I can *hopefully* help now   )
• Better organization of the college magazine. I can’t blame anyone for last year’s disaster because I saw what unrealistic deadlines and politics the magazine team had to put up with. The good thing is that Meera ma’am wants to start collecting articles right away so start scribbling some neat shit during boring lectures and pass it on to her.
• Be lenient to us about our Spandan budget. We’re undergrad engineering students for fucks sake, not hardcore management gurus. Cut us some slack. Engineering events always include unavoidable costs such as components and hardware so there’s nothing we can do about it (other than make Spandan a software only event which would be uber-lame)
• Let us play football/basketball/table-tennis during college hours. It’s not like you’re reducing bunking. People bunk anyway so at least you’ll keep a couple of us hovering around the college premises. Think about it.

I have a warm fuzzy feeling that this semester is going be really interesting, so let’s hope for the best as we enter the gates of hell letting our lives be vulnerable to Mumbai University’s charming fuck ups.

Cya in college!

EDIT: The college website now mentions that college reopens on 21st July. So don’t turn up on the 20th

For those who can’t imagine life without Counter-Strike, here’s some good news.

A couple of guys play CS 1.6 on Hamachi on weekends during the semester but now that we’ve got a couple more weeks left of our vacations, it’s become more of an everyday thing.

If you wanna join in, download Hamachi (Free) and join the following network:

Username : xie47
Password  : xie47

You’ll often find me pumping bullets out there, so be sure to drop in.

The server IP depends on who’s online so ask for the server IP in the network chat-room. If you have a microphone, connect it to your computer as many of use ‘team-speak‘ as we’re playing. The most popular maps that are used are de_dust2, de_dust, cs_untitled and de_inferno.

P.S: As this post will be crawled by search engines, it might attract spammers and other players. If you’re just a random dude looking to play some CS, you’re more than welcome to join in but even a single spam chat message will get you banned.

After 3 excruciating years in Engineering at XIE, we were finally awarded a 1.5 month vacation by Mumbai University.

I flipped out on hearing the news and started chalking out plans on how to spend 1.5 months in the best way possible. I knew it was too good to be true. There had to be a catch. But every passing day after June 11th kept inspiring me to give up my cynical nature.

A few days later, a SMS message was being circulated which looked like this:

Suvarna mam wants 2 address T.E.Comps.Mon,29-06-09 at 9.00 am.Pass on d word.

Just what I fucking needed. It was the fly in the ointment. As soon as I read that I said to myself  ”Pessimism FTW!” and I made a few calls to gain some more information about the message.

Apparently Suvarna Ma’am wanted to talk to us about the final year project. She told us how the system works in a nutshell and asked us to submit our project groups there itself. She also expected us to make a presentation about the overview of our short-listed projects  on the 21st or 23rd of July. Now wait a minute….We haven’t even got a confirmation from a company yet and she wants us to submit a fucking presentation? Every company we approach politely show us the finger and who can blame them during this slump?

Then we were told that college would be reopening on the 21st of July so that they would have more time to complete the syllabus. What the fuck happened to Mumbai University’s circular stating that all colleges should reopen on 3rd August? If you delve into all the technical intricacies of that statement, you’ll realize that the circular is just a guideline and what it really means is that colleges should reopen latest by 3rd August.

Then we are reminded that the next two semesters are going to be university exams and given the same lectures about how messed up our lives can get (as if it isn’t already) if we screw up those exams. And to add to that, almost everyone is giving the GRE/TOEFL/CAT/GMAT/etc. so that’s going to be an additional headache.

It’s amazing how one SMS can snowball into such a major pain in the ass.

So basically, the next (read: last) 2 weeks of our vacation are to be spent in exploiting every influence in this shit-hole of a system (which BTW prides itself on being meritocratic in nature) and work on a project under the guidance of a company.

The next semester has essentially commenced so brace yourself to deal with it.

In other news, apparently nobody cares about throwing a farewell party for the B.E. batch that passed out recently so they’re planning a little something for themselves which is being financed by the college. If it weren’t for the freakin’ general elections ruining the entire semester exam schedule, we’d (current T.E. batch) throw a helluva party. Sorry guys, but there ain’t much we can do about it.

Also in other news, speaking as a senior now in XIE, I can assure you that any extra-curricular or co-curricular activity that I’m involved in will be an attempt to set standards in awesomeness. I’ll also try and reduce all the crappy red-tape that’s required for any idea to be implemented.

Also Also in other news, since this will (hopefully) be my last year in XIE, I’ve decided to blog extensively about my college experiences and will share the greatest and the worst moments of our lives in XIE as the days progress.

Hasta la proxima.

As you may or may not have noticed, the domain name has been renewed till next year. Gaurav D’Costa (AKA GDiz) added some more time for the domain but I’m not sure if he was aware of the expiry date. My guess is that his domain reseller account must have had some provision to detect expiring domains and that might have caught his attention, (or maybe it was the blog after all )

Keep your browsers hooked on to the Transmission website as there are going to be massive changes in a few days.

ciao.

Not many people including the college administration know this, but the domain name of our college website xavierengg.com is going to expire on the 19th of February.

After that, although the website will remain online, nobody will be able to access it by typing the domain name. You’ll need to type the IP Address to get to it. Let’s see if anybody realizes this (heh heh)

Speaking of IP Addresses, we’re also thinking about getting a new domain name for the Transmission website. As of now we have none and you have to type in the IP Address to access the website or you can click here but soon you’ll either see a completely new domain name or something like xavierengg.com/transmission

It’s worth the wait to see how things turn out.

Although he’s taken a couple of lectures earlier, I attended Cyrus Sir’s first lecture today and found him pretty impressive. He teaches really well, even his practical sessions are pretty useful but I was pretty surprised to know that nobody in my class realized that he never looks at anyone while teaching, esp. when he’s writing something on the black-board.

A few friends have suggested that he only looks at one row which comprises only of guys and hence deduce an inference stating that he’s too shy to talk to girls. An interesting concept, isn’t it? I’ll hunt for more clues leading to the truth in the coming lectures.

Well, imagine sitting in a class where the prof doesn’t even look at you. I looked around and I saw people talking on their cell phones like there was nobody around. Some guys were involved in a pen-fight tournament and the rest were just enjoying a good uninterrupted conversation.

I couldn’t help but screw around a little bit, so I took out my camera and I caught a portion of his lecture to show you guys that he really doesn’t look at us while teaching. In his one hour lecture, he looked at the class only about 4-5 times.

The first video that I’ve posted below is about 5 and a half minutes long and you can hear him teaching “us” about various line drawing algorithms. You can also hear a few friends and me commenting on a few things (no offence people) as well as planning my ultimate test which I carry out at the 5th minute, so if you want to jump straight into the action, I suggest viewing from the 5th minute although you should really see the entire video and notice if he even looks back once.

As you must have seen, I went right behind him with a camera and he didn’t even notice. Obviously, I was pretty nervious as you can see from the unstable camera once I stand up and walk towards him.

I attempted it again a little later and went a lot closer to him this time but he didn’t notice.

I can only wonder what we can do in his forthcoming lectures, a coordinated mexican wave maybe?  I’ll give it a shot.

Psst…there’s a signature campaign floating around asking for faculty changes for three subjects: Advanced Databases, Operating Systems and Web Technology and Ms. Sowjanya, Ms. T Dange and Ms. J Justin might be in a little bit of trouble if the principal decides to take this letter seriously.

I’m not sure if this will succeed, but previous attempts have been fruitless from my experience in XIE.

The letter looks like this:

As I saw the letter being circulated, I could see students reading the letter and signing it with a lot of seriousness. I guess with that being said, it’s implied that the only guys who didn’t sign the letter were those who didn’t attend college today .

It will be interesting to see how this turns out in the end.

As always, I’ll keep posting so keep visiting and keep the comments coming!

As I’m writing this post from my toilet seat, I’m having this warm fuzzy feeling inside about last night’s event, Spandan.

Unlike all the other events that I cover, I couldn’t really take pictures of stuff happening behind the scenes thanks to my stand-by phone (Asus P320, don’t buy it…ever) but that’s never really stopped me from posting.

Before I write about stuff that happened at Spandan, I’ll take you through life during Spandan’s planning days.

When college reopened on Jan 21st, two committees were quickly formed and got to work that very day itself. These two groups were those managing Spandan and the Techfest respectively. To make things roll a little faster, the sponsorship committees of Spandan and Techfest were being tested on who gets more/better sponsors during this time of economic slowdown. Although it did result in everyone working their asses off, it also took a toll on their ethics. Everyone started creating hurdles in the other group so that they could have the upper hand. The guys managing Spandan ended up so frustrated that they started ’demanding’ companies to sponsor them instead of requesting them and man, you can imagine how ugly things were at that point.

Luckily, as days passed Spandan was getting closer and everyone mutually decided to tone down the rivalry. Since Pratibha Ma’am was busy with the TechFest, Meera Ma’am had a lot on her hands. She also had to look for comperes for the event and what better place to look at potential comperes than at extempore and debate competions, right? Since Parul, Robin and I were regulars at such events we all got roped in. Linson and Conell were added to this clique very soon. Conell backed out and chose to handle music which in retrospect I think was a pretty good decision. He probably had some kind of a fortune-teller who told him about the misfortunes that would lie ahead.

Initially, we were told that we’ll be comperes for the entire event and since most of our work wasn’t our problem (such as managing participants, chief guest details, lighting of the lamp stuff and other formalities) we were told to write a few fillers for the event. Meera Ma’am wanted the fillers to be better than the programme itself and we pretended that we didn’t hear that just to have a little less pressure on our backs.

We all tried the usual stuff that always gets the audience entertained such as asking people to do stuff on stage for which they usually get ragged off-stage. We tried roping in Sherwin and Harshad to act like their usual selves and we knew it would be a guaranteed hit but these guys wouldn’t do it for obvious reasons (would you do it? )

A filler always has a usual flow :

• Curtains close.
• 2 guys enter on stage.
• They crack some lame-ass joke or sing something that’s even more lame.
• They realize that they need to waste more time so they babble about how the crowd is feeling to get some audience participation.
• They leave the stage and the next programme begins.

I thought that instead of doing the usual stuff, it’d be a lot more cooler if we had concept fillers. Concept fillers are fillers which are connected by a single storyline which means that all the fillers are based on an underlying story. The idea was imbibed well by everyone and we got to work. We also knew that this was going to be difficult because the sequence of fillers in such a setup is crucial to maintain the storyline. Since the awesomeness of a filler also depended on the story, messing up the sequence would mean messing up the entire thing. Still, it was worth a shot.

We decided that there would be a ’bhoot’ who would roam around XIE during spandan. To find and defeat the bhoot, we introduced another character and their confrontations would be staged as fillers. The introduction of the person who defeats the bhoot was made into a Matrix parody where James Bond is chosen over Neo to find the bhoot.

Finding James Bond was a difficult task. We roamed around college searching for people but that didn’t work. Then something clicked and I wondered how it’d be if Harshad was James Bond? It’d be funny as hell and Harshad would love to do it as well so he was signed up as 007.

The Bhoot’s identity was to be revealed as Joker during the end and Linson promised to do it well if he was given a kickass facepaint and although none of us were sure if Linson could pull it off (although he had the perfect hair for the role), we agreed.

The rest of the fillers had a similar approach and we managed to get a few neat fillers for the final event.

But just 2 days before Spandan, we were told to find out who the chief guest was, find out her work experience and resume, write the vote of thanks, find oil for lighting the lamp, compile the list of winners and put everything on paper in the form of the script. What was worse is that all these things came one at a time, at an interval of a few hours.

We wanted the flow of events which Anupama was supposed to have, but she was dependant on some more guys who weren’t doing their work so I couldn’t blame her either. Unfortunately, I was the only one who wasn’t playing the blame game while the rest were just throwing shit at people under them in the hierarchy. It starts out with the Director raising a few questions to the Principal. The principal yells at Meera Ma’am, she yells at us and the chain stopped there so I really felt like taking out my anger someplace. Luckily the Tug O War competition was being held the same day and I was about to participate but I had to talk to Fr. Reggie at that very moment.

FINAL DAY – 9TH FEB

We were a little relaxed today ’cuz we got the final event list at 6.30pm yesterday and shweta had got the list of winners as well. None of our props were ready, our scripts were still messed up, speeches missing and tensions rising but for some reason nobody felt it. My group was selected for the treasure hunt and it hurt to see everyone having a nice time trying to crack the puzzles while I was working with the details of Spandan. I shaved my head for this day as I was playing Morpheus (lol) and I had loads of guys coming up to me asking if I had one of the clues from the treasure hunt ’cuz one of the clues read "find the bald mad scientist" lol.

Some guys were practicing for their band performance and I jammed with them for a while and they seemed pretty enthusiastic about their performance today.

We were working with the final details and rehearsals when one guy comes up to me and says: "Dude, it’s 5.30. You’re on stage anytime". Linson and I rushed to Robin’s place and changed there and ran back to college.

True to her word, the chieft guest arrived on time and Salil sir cancelled the band performance which pissed them off. They’ve been practicing for weeks and I completely justify their feelings when they were told they couldn’t perform. The mikes weren’t ready and we got off to an awkward start. There was barely anyone on the ground, it was hot as hell, the mike was covering my speech on the podium, so I messed up a few parts until I got the mike placed properly. I was also supposed to recite a Sanskrit prayer and my speech had something else on it. Fortunately, I knew the prayer by heart and was able to recite it correctly.

Things seemed to be going pretty fast and Robin forgot to announce that there was a ’bhoot’ in XIE. Still, we performed the Matrix filler and the crowd didn’t know that I had shaved my head for playing Morpheus and that Harshad was playing James Bond, and they had a blast. The slow-motion fight sequence went on flawlessly and I was glad that my idea was executed well by Robin and Harshad.

Most of our fillers were made up on the spot, cuz the programme was being sped up so that the chief guest could see as much as possible before she left (the reason why she came at 5.30 was because she wanted to leave early). Linson’s face was being painted by the one who earned first prize in face painting and after seeing his face, I could see why she won the first place in the first place. (pun intended, but too bad I don’t remember her name).

I had given Linson 2 Joker cards and someone equipped him with a pocket-knife and he used them perfectly. He spoke with the exact Heath Ledger accent, acted eccentric and the background theme song made it even more awesome. He scared the crap out of everyone, entertained them and gave enough time for those backstage to set up the stage for the next act. His confrontation with James Bond (Harshad) was even more awesome as Harshad had two bond girls with him and got the audience excited once again.

I don’t have any pictures of him, but many people do and I’ll upload them as soon as I get them. But honestly, Linson stole the show with his Joker performance.

The tech-fest Transmission was also being introduced today and they did pretty well with the falling scroll, transmission video and the fireworks. Truly spectacular and chic.

Sudhir played the Slumdog really well for the Slumdog Filler and he really became the Slumdog Millionaire when he was crowned as Mr. Xavier along with Shwetha Krishnan as Ms. Xavier in the persona competition. Both of them deserved it, although some wondered how Sudhir won the tie-breaker against Francis even though Francis bent on his knees to woo Shwetha. Too clichéd, I guess.

The show went on and was concluded by Linson and Robin at around 11.30pm.

Now for the stuff that never made it on stage.

1) THE SHERWIN RECONSIDERATION FILLER:

Sherwin was asked to prepare a speech and informally introduce the audience. As he would speak, the crowd would boo him (we had planted a few people in the crowd) and 4 guys would just run up on stage, pick him and get him off stage. The best part was that Sherwin had no idea that he would be picked up and thrown out from the stage.

Too bad that didn’t work out because the chief guest arrived on time.

1) THE ACTION-BEHIND-THE-CURTAINS FILLER:

This is how the filler was supposed to start. The curtains are closed. Suddenly everyone can hear loud screams "Ooh…Yeah….Come On….Harder…You can Do It….Yes…Aah….Give it to me….Oh Yeah!!" and after about 15 seconds, the curtains open. And no, you don’t see a couple of guys having sex on stage, but you see one of them trying some push-ups and the other guy encouraging him. This was supposed to be a shocker, and would have been offensive to a lot of people, but we decided to do it anyway but couldn’t because nobody needed much time to set up the stage and by the time we could do it, it was time for the persona competition.

I’m pretty sure I’ve skipped a lot of stuff in this post, but I can’t help it as I’ve got up from the toilet seat and I feel really sick. Yesterday’s food sure tasted fine, but my stomach begs to differ. Loose-motions, Food-poisoning, call it what you want, but it’s difficult to think and write at this point. Perhaps Robin can fill in the blanks for me with his post.

Overall, I think we did our job well, entertained the crowd and kept people asking for more. Sure, we had a few screw ups as well such as no background music during the prize distribution and persona but it wasn’t that bad without it as well.

Kudos to all the guys who put in their efforts for Spandan which include Parul (had fever but didn’t let that stop her), Robin (he also had Fever but he still pushed himself), Linson, Namrata (ever wondered where those slick lines from our speeches came from?), Conell, Sudhir, Harshad, Shwetha, Janice Ma’am (for helping us out with the formalities), Meera Ma’am (for tips n tricks), Chopre sir (for giving us time to prepare , only a few know what that means), Viren Sir and Jaychand Sir (stage would have been a mess without them) and last but not the least all the dance performers and singers who made me run after them everytime just to get them backstage

Hope you guys had a nice time at Spandan and enjoy the weekend!

IT has lectures starting from 8.30am tomorrow while Comps and EXTC have a little more time to snooze with lectures starting an hour later.

Now that Spandan and the un-named Tech Fest are on this sem’s TO-DO list, more than half of our semester is gonna be spent in preparations for these fests so be prepared for the chaos that will follow after these fests are over.

Meanwhile, my mobile application for bunking is complete and you can download it from here.

Some phones don’t seem to understand my Date-Checker algorithm for the statistics menu, so I’ve added an override option to bypass the algorithm in case it doesn’t work on your phone.

And oh yeah, now that the college has reopened it goes without saying that the Blog is back !

BunkM (previously Bunkulator) now has its dedicated page over here.

It’s got a lot of bugs fixed and has a few neat tricks under the hood plus a major feature which I’m sure all of you will love.

Now you can update to the latest version of BunkM straight from your phone.

So delete your copy of Bunkulator on your phone and install BunkM, as this one is going to stay.

Click here for more information + download links.

The latest version as of this post is 0.61 and there are plenty more updates and new features on their way so keep checking from your phone from now on

When I first heard it right before my math 5 paper, I knew it was totally obnoxious rubbish. I told the guy who told me Dhanashree ma’m had passed away to fuck off and stop spreading nonsense. Then came the math paper which was horrid and after leaving the exam hall, as I walked towards the groundfloor lobby, dissapointed with my performance, I saw something that would make this day even worse. On the notice board lay terrible news. Waves of disbelief passed over me and my jaws dropped as I read what was posted there. Dhanashree Ma’m had indeed passed away on december 14th, 2008. WHAT THE FUCK?? HOW??

Nothing else mattered right now. It didnt matter that the notice was littered with inappropriate mistakes. Here was an offical declaration that one of the most loved professors in XIE was no more. I struggled to recollect the smiling face of my BEE teacher whom I would never see again. Ms. Dhanashree was without doubt one of the most dedicated and hardworking teachers I ever had the good fortune to be taught by. I do not know much about her, but I do know that as a person, she was ever helpful, considerate, approachable and extremely kind hearted…be it lecture, viva or practicals. The fact that she passed away at such a young age while she was studying for her M.E. makes me wonder how fate could be so cruel.

The notice didnt say the cause of death, but rumour has it that she succumbed to malaria. This is even more mind boggling considering how many of us have gone through a bout of malaria atleast once without coming close to anything remotely ‘life threatening!!!’

Anyway, the details about her death are not clear to many of us but then thats trivial, is’nt it?
What I do know is that this professor will be missed by everyone. We’ll miss her bad.

May she rest in peace.

-Robin

One of our dearest staff members died a few weeks ago and this is how XIE displays it on the notice board. I have a few things to say about this notice:

1) The notice header is XIE, MAHIM . WTF happened to the official letterhead?

2) The Notice Title is SAD NEWS . WTF happened to showing aptness and respect in notice titles?

3) Grammatical Mistake. (The Institute deeply regret to inform…) Bravo, what a perfect time to skip proof-reading when even the lamest of notices go through a proof-read procedure.

3) Spelling Mistake. Absolutely Briliant, I have to admit.

4) (The News Came Now) Really? After I enquired a little bit I realized that many students knew this only a few days after her death. If students knew, the word would have passed on to the staff or office and they would have certainly known. That statement was included in the notice only to justify why the notice was over 2 weeks late.

5) (May the Departed Soul Rest in Peace.) The Departed Soul? The? really, like nobody effing even knew her as a lecturer. “Her Departed Soul” would have been more appropriate.

6) Date of the Notice. She passed away on 14th December and the notice comes out on the 29th.

7) Principal’s signature missing. Normally in this situation it is understandable if the principal doesn’t sign because in such situations, the notice is issued in haste but they had over 2 weeks to prepare a notice so a missing principal’s notice would only mean that the notice is invalid or fake.

What is more execrable is the fact that the principal refused to allow an intentionally invalid (i.e. without principal’s signature) ‘April Fools’ notice prepared by us (click here for information about the incident) for April 1st but couldn’t sign on such an important notice to deem it official.

Even though people have their technical qualifications, being human and humane is something they can’t study. That goes deeper than books and I sincerely thought they knew that.

I had no idea about her passing away till the 7th of January (not sure how I missed the notice, but being a little bit of a recluse I can imagine why I missed it during conversations with friends). She helped a lot of us with our BEE, saved our asses during practicals and vivas and was very approachable to all students, a rare quality found among lecturers.

I have no idea how she passed away, so if any of you gus have more details, please let me know.

- May Dhanashree Ma’am’s soul rest in Peace. -

As I mentioned in the previous posts, the Beta version of Bunkulator Mobile is out and you can test it before the next semester begins.

The latest version as of writing is Version 0.53 (Beta) and you can download it from here.

The screenshot for version 0.53 Beta are added at the end of the post in the following order:

1. Main Menu
2. About Page
3. Settings Page
4. Add/Edit Attendance Page
5. View Attendance Page
6. Date Range Selection for Statistics Page
7. Statistics Mode 1 (Practicals + Percentage)
8. Statistics Mode 2 (Practicals + Numbers)
9. Statistics Mode 3 (Lecture + Percentage)
10. Statistics Mode 4 (Lecture + Numbers)
11. Maintenance Page
12. Speed Test Result

Note that the user interface may change in the final version.

The final version is scheduled to be released somewhere around the end of January 2009.

Please post suggestions, feature-requests and bug-reports as comments to this post.

The Beta version of Bunkulator (Bunk Calculator) is out.

Click the link below to download the application.

Version 0.53 Beta (JAR file)

The next update will also include a Help section that will help you use the application.

But here are a few pointers to begin with:

• When you first start the application, open the Settings Menu and add your Name, Minimum Attendance Percentage (75), College Start Date (just choose a date about a month before today for testing purposes) and all your Subject Names.
• In the Add Attendance Menu, the Up key toggles the Lecture, Left Key toggles Practicals and Down toggles Extra Lecture. Press the OK (center key on the joypad) key to move to the next subject. Refer to the image on the attendance screen to help you out.
• In the statistics page, pressing OK toggles between the Percentage Mode to the Number Mode (Attended v/s Taken) while pressing LEFT or RIGHT toggles between Lecture stats and practical statistics.

Enjoy the application and feel free to comment on this post.

The Bunkulator Mobile Application which helps you maintain a dirty, yet safe attendance record is making good time as far as development is concerned.

I thought I’d share a little info by showing you guys the basic Design.

Once the Import/Export Data and the Statistics features have been written, I’ll release the application as version 1.0. The other features will be written after the first release version and will be released as updates (Funny how the Update Checker itself is released as an update huh? )

When your notice board has a notice which asks you to pay 9600 bucks within two days, you can’t help but wonder if recession has hit XIE as well.

But the real problem about this notice is the date it was issued (see underline). I read the notice board every time I’m at college and just yesterday I noticed this notice (pun intended) which claimed to have been posted on 2nd December 2008.

I have no idea why they had to fake a date to claim to have given the students ample time to pay the remainder of the fees. Even if the notice was put up 2 weeks late (which is more likely as the paper seemed a little faded), I don’t see why they couldn’t make the date change with a pen or a pencil on the notice.

Let’s analyze the text a little more to realize the amount of desperation of ’recession-hit’ XIE.

Firstly, how is it even possible to get a demand draft in so little time? Secondly, who are we supposed to pay to? There’s nothing mentioned about writing anything in the "Payable To" field. Even if we did take our chances with that field, even a little screw-up would mean a straight rejection by the bank which would lead to the office hunting down our asses for something which is really all their fault.

With an exam that’s only a few days away, I don’t think I’m gonna pay it before the 18th. It’s totally unfair to fake a date and expect the entire college to pay the tuition fees in 2 days. (actually just 1 day)

Unfortunately, to save myself from the relentless nagging I guess I’ll have to pay up before the 18th much against our ethics.