Monday, November 12, 2007

Things to Remember

One week to end sems, and I had loads on my mind. So I decided it was time to use the To-Do gadget on Google Sidebar once again. Here is the list I came up with :

  1. Meet Kandy
  2. MTH- Partial Differential Equations
  3. MTH- Assignments
  4. Start batti!
  5. CHM- remember to arrange inorganic notes to study.
  6. Thermodynamics, huh??
  7. You are so fucked...
hehe,
aRKade.

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Tesseract.

Be sure that you read Nirbheek's Blog entry before you get around to reading this.

Well, this is sort of a flashback, giving a slightly detailed look into how things happened around here. This will be a sort of "The Silmarillion" prelude to the "Lord of the Rings" Bheek's blog.

Monday: Teja and I postpone the making of questions for a later date because both of us have had lab reports to make and things are not looking very up-ish right now.

Tuesday: Teja mails me this:


from tejaswi venumadhav
to musically.ut@gmail.com,
date Nov 6, 2007 1:32 PM
subject panic
mailed-by gmail.com

hide details Nov 6 (5 days ago)

E-mail:
panic!!
TESSERACT poster.jpg
4895K View Download


And, well, the Tesseract poster had 7th Wednesday 10:00 pm as its starting date.

-dumbfounded-

And this is when the fun starts ...

We both had classes immediately after this quaker of a conversation that we had and that mellowed our minds a bit. Getting down to work, we convinced ourselves with, what I call an overwhelming power of supposition, that we had enough questions ready among us and we got around to trying to code for the final thing. If you have read Bheek's blog, you would realize that we finally settled for a XSL+XML solution, but at that point in time, we were almost ready to start with a plain body with the html tags in it.

We were seriously thinking of excuses for a badly presented site.

Well, to tell the truth, calling Bheek up for the formidable task of putting up ten web pages for the world to see in 24 hours was the last thing that occurred to us.

We tried exploring various options with different web programmers ... but to no avail. After all, this was the period just before the end sems. Who would be schmaltzy enough to help two wretched children, one bereft of ice-creams and one of something-that-cannot-be-recalled-at-the-moments-notice. It was bound to be a disaster. And it was 26 hours away.

The knight in the shining armor (that made a lot of noise and came packaged with a pink invisible unicorn) ...

We called Bheek, 20:00.

I: Bheek, awake?
Bheek: Sort of, why, what happened? (He had that tone of apathy that you would find in a ten year old who is feeling very sleepy, and soon will be wrongfully blamed of faking it)
I: Ok. Code Red. You remember Tesseract? The online treasure hunt?
Bheek: Ugh ..huh ... !??!!!? (The click of apprehension was so loud that even Teja noted it)
I:Well, ten webpages, need to be uploaded.
Bheek: Wha ..!??!! Oh .. ok, when?
I: Before 10 pm tomorrow.
[---x--- I and Teja in a eye to eye moment, the kind that in the movies they do a stroboscopic bullet time spin around. ---x---]
Bheek: Oh .. well ... ok ... WTH ..
[--x-- I and Teja shouted loudly in the CC enterance ... --x--]

And the rest, I say, is history.

Just in case you haven't seen the site, I'll tell you that the presentation of the site was better that any site that I have ever seen. If you ever want a perfectionist for any job, get Bheek. Teja and I were sure ALL along that Bheek will be able to do it. We have not seen him do it before, we just knew.

He almost single handedly did the making of the site, as I fooled around taking their pics, at odd moments in time, as I thought that the tension was about to spill over.
And then, I there was the debugging period, and well, as they say, real time debugging is not easy. And its fun to panic there. -grim face-

We also had the funny moments when the next.pl was out in the open, and we had moments of agony with the image maps. However, we kept the source code astoundingly clear.

If there was something to be gotten out of the variegated experience they are:

  1. The Students server needs to be made better.
  2. Nirbheek should be caught for all Code Red conditions.
  3. 60sec exposure pictures are awesome
  4. Well, coding in Perl is not always the best option.
  5. XSL is a honking g0Od idea and I should try it sometime.
  6. Teja's sense of humour is something that the world needs protection against.
  7. I like panicking, and mess up people very nicely. ;) Ask Praneeth and Bheek :P
Well, it was nice ... and I think I would look back upon these are _something_ good that I did in my 5th semester, EE. Thanks Teja for the thing, and thanks Bheek for the night.

~
musically_ut

Its all so very strange ... it looked almost like all Nirbheek's night. With Teja and me taking a sort of a backseat. We all were tired, but Bheek has the dubious distinction of being the most nocturnal of all of us ... Maybe that explains things somewhat.