Snail Mail Widget

My very first widget!

This is based on Prateek's idea. Its such a chore to go to the hostel website everyday to check if any postal letters have come (heck, I haven't check mine even once till now). So, we have developed a widget that takes the days letters list and brings it right on your dashboard.

This is my first attempt at creating widgets and the product is in alpha. There are still a few bugs remaining (none which would crash the widget fortunately).

Features:

1. Provides a calendar (on the back) to check letters list of any day.
2. Ensures that the names are in proper case most of the time even if they are entered in wrong case (which seems to be the case most of the time).

Bugs:

1. Size is still a little big.
2. 31 of all months is displayed as 30th of that month. Will debug the javascript date functions soon but no energy right now
3. Changing the month without choosing a date ruins the date display in the front. This can be changed by going back and choosing another date
4. Sometime prev button does not fetch the data. Use the calendar in that case

Thanks to Prateek for the idea and for bearing with me for a whole session.

Get it right here: snail.wdgt.zip

Open Source Project

Successfully hosted my first open source project at code.google.com. It is a program that reads windows shortcut files and lauches files linked by them.

Check it out at: http://code.google.com/p/winshortcut/

I am planning to do the same with IPMessenger after trying to contact the author again.

Personal Achievements.

Now is the time for placements. Since the resumes are constrained to only 2 pages, a lot of people are finding it difficult to write their real personal achievements.

We are more than glad to help our fellow DA-IICT students by providing a free space for their achievements right here:

Chaitu:

• Stick cricket master (unbeatable; run rate > 30)
• High jump
• Continuously spoke for a whole day
• Exploited Andhra Mess to the fullest
• Caused price rise in Andhra Mess
• Ruined futures of many cricketers (success rate > 95%), tennis players(100%), actors (100%), actresses (100%), movies (100% - Pirates 3, 300, Sainikudu etc.)
• Death of one author (Sidney Sheldon)
• Ruined holidays of at least one person (Venky)
• Ruined computers of at least 4 (Vihary, Sidhu, Sharief, Siva Karhik)
• Ruined phones of at least one person (Adarsh)
• Ruined pop quizzes of at least 15 persons

KRC:

• Good health regime: Eating only once a day.
• Sleeping for 13-14 hours every day.
• Spider Solitaire and hearts champion. Plays them throughout the night
• Got praised by Anish Mathuria for thinking too much.
• Specs more DotA games than the players themselves.

Lingam:

• Reading for 20 hrs a day.
• Reading for 20 hrs a day.
• Reading for 20 hrs a day.

Vihari:

• Got all common diseases
• Second place in running race (from last)
• Saw the naked back of Praneeth.
• Crying
• Sulking
• Went to catch a bird instead of the ball while playing cricket.

Venky:

• Super fast bowler.
• Successfully tuned his body to sports (computer sports).
• Just missed a exam and then its re-exam.
• Tearing exam papers

Sai Deep:

• Surfing net for a complete day
• Could disturb a whole wing (E-wing, by arguing loudly during exams)

Vijay:

• OMG from V. Sunitha.

Kunal:

• Critique of user comments in IMDB.

Siva Kathik:

• Record sleep of 18 hours a day.
• Excellent coding conventions.

Praneeth:

• Implemented a complete user login system in PHP by using just one function - strlen
• Undertaking a major initiative to write a research paper.
• Exposed a lot in the 3 years in DA-IICT.
• Roughest hands in DA-IICT (or maybe the whole world).

Chandrashekar Movva:

• Absorbs and emits more radiation than anybody else in DA-IICT.
• Provides excellent company for his roommate.
• Bought a knife worth Rs. 10 to kill a leopard (in rural internship). Now it is successfully being used to cut mangoes.
• Could fool a lot of people into thinking he is a road side vendor (also in rural internship).

Ganachari:

• Reading for 24 hrs a day.
• Watching all released Telugu movies (only cam prints).
• Watched Ghazni for more than 10 times.
• Successfully maintaining the same timetable he had in his intermediate.

This list is no way complete. Please tell us of yours and your friends' personal achievements and we'll be more than glad to include them here :)

New features

Before people start wondering why I'm delaying updates to IPMessenger, let me tell you what it takes to add one feature.

The feature in question is the addition of logging. One might want to archive important messages and retrieve them later. In the first glance this seems simple enough. Most of support files like these are stored in the Application Support/IPMessenger directory. All that needs to be done is to create one file per every user to interact with, store every message that pops up with its time stamp.

Now come the problems: How will the archives be retrieved? Will the IPMessenger provide an interface for it (like Adium)? Or just let the users look at the plain text files? If we are to provide an interface, this little feature will require the user-interface design, a good file format for the archived files, a way to delete the archives, export them as text files etc.

All in all, a significant update but which, in my opinion, is not worth the feature. Very few people use the archives (for something like IPMessenger) and that too for a very few things (like if they delete the last message accidentally).

Lets suppose we do not want to take all that trouble and let the users look at the plain text files. This also has the advantage that since the files are text files, spotlight can index them. However one can't expect all the users to know where the application support files are. What if you don't want archives of every conversation? What if you don't want archives at all?

How will the archives be deleted? They just can't keep growing indefinitely. One menu item to remove all archives? What if one specific user's archives are important and the rest are not? Or if only one user's archive has to be deleted? This includes significant number of preferences for something which will be used very rarely (if at all).

My solution so far has been to put just two menu items - last sent message and last received message. If you accidently close the last received message, or you want to send the sent message again (or to someone else), these two actions come in handy. I think this is what most people use.

If you have any suggestions about the archiving, please let me know. I do plan to incorporate the archiving feature if people find it important.

IPMessenger alpha

This version contains the following features/fixes:

1. Now all users across different subnets are visible.

2. Duplicate local names are removed. You see yourself only once now

Important: Please do not edit the user list. I will have to work on it.

IPMessenger.zip

Shakespeer with improved search

Now browse files will actually take you to the file you were searching for in the user's file list

ShakesPeer 3.zip

Shakespeer with search integrated

Now shakespeer has google search integrated in it.

Also removed recursion in a few places which gave a little increase in speed.

ShakesPeer 2.zip

IPMessenger beta

Did major work on it. Will release the first beta version in a while.

Shakespeer

Did some work on Shakespeer - the popular DC client for mac. I think these are specific to DA-IICT hubs and hence haven't thought about making these official.

This version has the following fixes/features:

1. The hub flooding is removed. This was the most important thing that was holding the whole app back. Now just enjoy chatting and trivia.

2. Better search.

Will put some screenshots later

ShakesPeer 1.zip