I’ve deleted my Wakoopa account (sorry Wakoopa!), since I didn’t see it help me in any way besides maybe me taking a look at it every now and then to look at an abstract graph of how I spent my last week on the computer.

I am not going to all together delete my Facebook or Orkut accounts since they let me stay in touch with friends with whom I’m not in touch with in real (non-internet) life and share stuff ( photos, links, etc. ) with friends with whom I am in touch with in real life. I would instead be limiting my use of both these social networks to a trickle. At least that’s the plan.

It wasn’t until I heard Conan O’Brien joke around about the “attention deficit disorder” on The Tonight Show that I realised that I was actually suffering from a minor form of it. One of the culprits is Twitter, where one follows so many people that it actually pushes you to skip through information. I will gradually start to unfollow people who create a lot of noise and tend to feed my habit of ignoring information. I’m also going to avoid running a Twitter client in the background ( in my case, Tweetie ). On a more positive note, Twitter, for me, is useful to keep up to date with the latest news in areas of my choice ( Design and Technology ) and have conversations with interesting people on the Web. And yes, ofcourse, it lets me rant about me.

Google Reader and Friendfeed are useful and almost my main sources of news and information (along with Twitter) and since I use them in proportion, they don’t really hinder me. I like Last.fm as it allows me to listen to its radio and I’m not addicted to it so it doesn’t eat up my productivity.

So, what led me to the brink? Over the past few weeks, I had been overtly commenting on Facebook and checking my Gmail. It made me realise how much time and energy I was wasting doing nothing.
Then, I asked myself the following questions about each social app I use frequently:

• Does it generate content that is meaningful and useful to me?
• Does it connect me with people who are interesting and like-minded to me?
• Is it a time-sucker?
• Does it make me less productive?

Social Web does have a lot of Pros in favor of it, that is if you keep your usage in check.

• It allows you to have conversations with interesting and like-minded people on the Web, no matter where they may be physically located, eventually expanding your intellectual horizons.
• It lets you stay up-to-date with what is happening in the world.
• It allows you to collaborate with other people on creative projects.
• It lets you create your own individual presence on the web.
• It allows you to share content with your friends and family.

If kept under a check, the social web will continue to be useful to everyone instead of making everyone unproductive.

So, if I don’t reply to your Orkut scrap or Facebook comment, and if it is really important, @reply me on Twitter or email me.

The music used in the movie (in the same order):

Eye of the tiger by Scorpions
Bebot by Black Eyed Peas
The Hill by Markéta Irglová
Enter Sandman by Metallica

Mussoorie-Rishikesh ’09 Trip from Ankit Ahuja on Vimeo.

This previous weekend from 18th to 20th September was probably the most fun and adventure I have had for quite a while. While I was on leave from college on Thursday, my college friends were planning a trip to Mussoorie via Haridwar and Rishikesh for the weekend. After much vacillation from everyone, 5 of us finally decided that we were going to the trip! Part of the fun was that the final decision was made just hours before the actual trip began. So, none of us had any time to really think about the beautiful weekend that awaited us.

We began our journey early morning on Friday. The plan had changed a bit, we were now going to Mussoorie and possibly Haridwar and Rishikesh on the way back. It was also ironic that the route to Mussoorie went scarily close to our college. We had a chance to kiss it goodbye and see what it felt like. Trust me, it felt very good to actually see everything you’ve learned to hate pass you by.

When we were about to enter Uttarakhand, the state to which Mussoorie belongs, we suddenly got pings from everywhere that our University Result had been announced. At first, we were resolute and decided that we will check our result after we came back. But then, one of us was too eager and he checked his result. And guess what, he got a very good result and then we were all scampering for our mobile phones to know our results via SMS. A couple of us had to wait a wee bit longer ( Jatin and Vishal ). But we all now had a reason to celebrate. All of us had got a decent result!

Thanks to someone really awesome, we got a chance to stay at the ITM Hostel in Mussoorie. It is located right at the top in a very scenic place. The most wonderful thing about the place was the silence. All we could hear was the wind and our voices. It was the peacefulness any city inhabitant could only dream of. Our trip had now officially touched its first milestone that was to reach Mussoorie. We visited Mall road, had dinner at Udupi (a south indian restaurant) and I increased my winning streak in Air hockey by +1. We then had hot tea at the hostel and I slept the most peaceful sleep I had had for a while, without all the traffic noises and dog barks.

The next morning was beautiful. Abhishek and I decided to go out for an early morning self-professed hike. After walking along the road for a bit, we took a kuccha path into the valley. It was the pleasant feeling of adventure that I’ve always loved. It felt like it had been picked right out of a Ruskin Bond story.

That day we decided we were going to go to the Kempty Falls. We went there and took a dip into the chilly water. It was refreshing and fun. We then made our way to Company Park. It was beautiful and I got a chance to practice my photography skills. After that, we made a short tour to Gun Hill. Unfortunately, it was foggy and so we didn’t get to see much. We did, however, get a chance to practice our shooting skills. Tired after a third of the day, only Vishal and I had the will to walk the entire length of the Camel Back Road. And boy, was it worth it. It was the most scenic and peaceful walk I have ever undertaken. Luckily, the clouds drifted away for a bit and we had a chance to glimpse the amazing landscape of Mussoorie. While on our way back to our cab via Mall road, we also saw a Sikh procession. It ran the entire length of Mall road and we saw the talented students of schools in Mussoorie march and play music. We gave a visit to the almighty and headed back to the hostel. Our stay at Mussoorie was nearing an end.

The next day we all woke up early and got ready to go to Rishikesh. The journey was a sleepy downhill ride across Dehradun to Rishikesh. We then took a bath in the Ganges. It was wonderful! We had breakfast at Chotiwala and headed back. After another round of dwindling decision making and heading in the opposite direction, we decided that 4 of us were keen to go rafting. All of us are glad now that we made the right decision. It was the dash of adventure that our getaway had always needed.

Our awesome instructors guided us through the whole rafting experience. We rafted in still water as well as rapids and whirlpools. We even took a dip in the middle of the river! At the end, we were all pretty tired after covering a distance of 12 kms, but the tiredness felt good.

It was then the way back home. Our only stops were some fried maggi at Roorkee and dinner at Chital.

Now, it is back to the daily drag that is normal life. I wish my home was in Mussoorie. I wish my academic institution was in Mussoorie. I wish I get to stay at a place as scenic and beautiful as Mussoorie on a permanent basis. I wish I could’ve lived the adventure longer. But, for now, I’ll hang on to the memories and make it through the monotony of life until the next adventure!

You can take a look at the photos of our trip over at Facebook or Flickr.

Yes, I’m in (yay!) and I will be participating in Google Summer of Code this year with Joomla! For those of you who don’t know what Joomla! is, it is a Content Management System ( CMS ) used widely to create and manage websites. I will be working on an Enhanced front-end editor for Joomla! Ashwin will be mentoring me for the summer.

I am thankful to Sameer for inspiring me to take part in GSoC. I also thank Elin, Sam, Toni and all the other mentors and community of Joomla! for helping me better my application into something practical and at the same time useful. It has been a great experience interacting with the Joomla! community for the past 1 – 2 months and that is something that has really inspired me to work on the project.

Things have been moving very quickly since I got to know that I got selected on 21st April at 12:30 am. But, the journey has just begun. I will be coding this coming summer to complete my project and to validate my selection. At present, I have been getting myself familier with the Joomla! framework, finalizing the implementation details of my project as well as sorting out a few issues in my mind. I plan to give my best effort to the project so that it becomes a useful feature for all Joomla! users.

I see this as a terrific opportunity to work in collaboration with talented people from all over the world. I see now why people love open source so much. It feels great to be a part of the Joomla! as well as the opensource community and to contribute to a project that is used by so many users.

My heartiest congratulations to everyone who got selected for Summer of Code. You can have a look at the list of students who got selected for Joomla! here: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/joomla

This post’s title makes my obsession with use of hash-tags in twitter updates pretty clear

I already tweeted about this but I thought this was exciting enough to deserve a mention on my blog. Also, now that I have a decent no. of followers on Twitter, I am hopeful that more people would be reading this blogpost. So, hello tweeps!

Only recently, I came across TheStatBot. I really liked the idea of twitter wordles, like mine above. It gives you a quick refresh on what the person talks about on twitter. If you look for more than a minute on my Twitter wordle above, you can sum up that I usually talk about cool apps, twitter(ofcourse), India, API’s, design, college etc. If you look deeper into the cloud, you will know that I have talked about twitkut, Internet, Mac, last.fm, coffee, firefox, etc.

It wasn’t exactly a very smooth process to come up with it, though. At first, I tried using my twitter RSS feed on wordle.net . That didn’t work, as it then only considered my recent 20 or so tweets. What I wanted was that it should span across all my tweets. Then, I came across a python script created by Yuvi Panda that simply takes all your tweets ( max. 3200 are allowed by the twitter API ) and puts them into a txt file. You can simply then copy all the text and use it on wordle.net.

I am pretty certain there is room for a webapp for this. If only wordle had an API. I believe TheStatBot is working on extending wordles to services like FriendFeed, etc.

Update:

You can checkout the script using svn:

svn checkout http://goodfather.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/GoodFather/MonaN

I have always believed in astrology since I was in school. Maybe, it was because I was sometimes in a bad mood and it gave me a sense of consolation to know that my horoscope said that I will have low energy levels today.

But the truth of the matter is, I have always been able to connect with my horoscope in one way or the other. It may be because they are so generalized that you can relate to them from several perspectives. But, whether they actually have any meaning or not, they generally do give a sense of optimism and happiness. Thats why I like reading them.

Why am I suddenly talking about astrology? I jumped on to this website, Astrodienst, and was really impressed with its horoscope prediction. Since, I have actually read quite a few of my predictions. They have really neat Personal Daily Horoscope section.

Here’s an excerpt from my prediction for tommorow and I quote here :

Matters of love and affection are uppermost in your mind today. You are conscious of your loved ones and your feelings for them. If other testimonies agree, you might fall in love with someone new. In any case, you are more concerned with love and your relationships than with your own ego. One manifestation of this influence is a pleasant daydreamy mood in which you are not disposed to work, other than creative activity.

Now, you see why I like reading them . Now the daydreamyness and love matters might be because my exams just got postponed a couple of days and I am possibly not going to study tommorow.

Now the dictionary meaning for the word “Geek” is :

A knowledgeable and obsessive computer enthusiast

Well, I was made to think by my college-mates that I was somewhat of a geek. But all my geek-ego came crashing down late one night when I was up chatting through the IRC.

First of all, even though I like to think I type at a decent speed, I had a hard time catching up with these guys. And I managed to land up randomly on this channel while going through a list of 4000+ IRC channels. Here are some funny excerpts from the chat:

1. On female geeks


hitboxx always witnesses girls >:)
lol
lol
LOL
lol
ok ok...never heard of
would be the right thing to say
probably
if you mean the same
Rules of the internet : #20934 : no lol' ing twice at the same thing!
Go to #python and say lol
they'll kick ya
pick up line : "help me setup linix on my computer plz"
lol yea!


2. On Windows


I just found this channel in a list
on Mirc
off 4000 other channels?
OMG
leave my IP alone
HE USES WINDOWS
HE IS AN OUTCAST
don't kick me out for that
TOTALLY
Devil's cape for the Win
BURN
CRASH
THROW HIM IN SOME VOLCANO
AND BURN

Really, so much love for Windows?

These were the couple of parts I felt the general person might be able to understand. I refrain from posting the more unusual.

So well, this is one reason, I have started liking IRC. Especially the channel #wordpress is cool where I am able to get my queries answered and one can find lots of like-minded people who are capable of helping you out.

IRC can be very useful to hang out with people working on the same open source project and answer/get your queries answered. And so, IRC is much more than just idle chatter.

The following couple are examples of IRC clients that can be used on Windows:

1. mIRC:

I find it easy to use. Though I was warned by the geeks that it is a ” hotzone for malware, trojans, etc. to enter one’s pc” since it uses p2p. Presently, I use this one but I will definitely crossover in little time.

2. x-chat 2:

This was the one that was suggested to me by them as the replacement for mIRC. I will definitely try it in a couple of days since I have already installed it. Its just a matter of letting go of mIRC.

It’s about the applications that give us a quaint little feeling that somehow using Windows is after all justified These applications range from web apps to utilities and tools for windows. They don’t occupy much of the memory and prove to be very useful many times.

Its important that you choose which applications are more useful to you for 2 reasons :

1. You don’t want to be clogging up your task bar with a no. of icons which not only eat up space but also take up memory ( unless you have a widescreen 19″ monitor and 2 gig memory like me . And even then I have to be careful. )

2. As if the startup in windows wasn’t already slow enough, they can make it even more painful for you, that is, if you don’t keep them under a check.

Here is my list of my favorite 10 apps that I can’t live without :

1. Instant EyeDropper

This is especially useful if you are a designer of some sort, whether a web designer or graphic designer. I used to find it exceptionally painful to copy hexadecimal color codes from any website on the internet to use in my own design. And this really helps out. I use Adobe Kuler. And there are more websites out there which help you make your own color schemes. All you have to do is click on its icon in the taskbar and then just drag your mouse pointer to any element whose color code you want to copy to the clipboard. As simple as that.

2. WordWeb

One of the most useful applications which I think everyone should have. Whenever you come across a difficult word, all you have to do is select it and press ‘Ctrl+Alt+W’. You can also assign your own shortcut. Its window crops up and instantly gives you the meaning along with a list of synonyms and also the word’s pronunciation. I personally have never even required to consult the ‘Web References’, since its quite sufficient on its own.

3. Wakoopa

So are you crazy about sharing everything and anything you do ? This is a great web app that tells you what applications you have been using and for how long. This has a social aspect to it, as you can find people who are using the same applications as you are.

4. RescueTime

This does the same job as Wakoopa but has entirely different utility. It provides you with an insight into how you have been spending your time on your computer. It has nice graphs and you can see data for the day, week, month or year.

5. Zscreen

I recently discovered this opensource application. Great for bloggers as you can easily assign a shortcut key to take the screenshot of the current application, entire desktop or a specific part of the screen. It automatically saves the screenshot in your chosen directory in any format you please ( png, jpeg,etc. ). It also gels well with image editing applications like Paint.NET or Adobe Photoshop.

If you are interested in some other cool opensource applications, go here.

6. NetMeter

Though one might argue that it doesn’t have that much of utility, but still I think it provides a nice little nifty look into your broadband upload and download. It also provides a nice total of all your download and upload. So sometimes it provides this overwhelming feeling that you have already downloaded 10 gigs of data this month

7. FlashGet

Best download utility ever. It easily downloads torrents as well as any other file. You can pause and resume and it definitely provides the best speeds. Better than utorrent and others for me.

8. Last.fm

Another social app which scrobbles the music that you hear whether in any of your media players or its own client. It comes with plugins for practically all popular media players including Windows Media Player, foobar2000, Winamp, etc. In its client, you just enter an artist or song you love, and it plays you similar music seamlessly.

9. AutoHotKey

Great for those who love scripting. I personally haven’t played with it a lot but I feel it has scope to do a lot in a jiffy. You can assign any combination of keys or clicks to do practically anything you want. Go here to find some cool ways to work with it.

10. AVG

Everybody keeps screaming about antiviruses so I feel its better to have one. Though I hardly update it or anything . But still the free edition of AVG is nice, it doesn’t consume much of your memory and works quietly in the background.

Well, that about sums it up. If you want to share your fav. taskbar apps, feel free to share them in the comments. It would be great to know what other little nifty apps are out there ( And I am sure that there are many many more ).

After all, they do make us feel more optimistic about Windows.

I occasionally do experience this sort of a feeling. It might be when I wake up in the morning and have faint memories of last night’s dream or in one of my subconscious mind states ( sometimes during my long journey back home from college). Recently, after a particularly intriguing 2mins of dreaming in my bus journey back home, I realised it is actually a pretty accurate insight into what you subconsciously actually want.

The Dream

Now, of course, I am not going to tell you what the dream was all about , but when I connect all the dots ( i.e. all the different events from my life linking up together to form a very intriguing dream ), I realize that someway or the other I actually do want those things to happen.

Somehow, the brain manages to pick out all the things you like ( and you thought about them recently ) and then manage to connect them together in a very story-like sequence of events. Now, at this point of time, I actually don’t remember the exact dream ( I perhaps should have jotted it down, it was that interesting ), but I remember finding it very interesting and could easily relate to every single detail.

Example

I will take a small example to make things clearer. Suppose there is a girl you like and then you also love roller coasters and ice cream. And you only recently thought about all the three in the same day at different points of time. You then could have a dream where you go out and you are sitting on a roller coaster with that girl eating an ice cream . Now the brain ( at least my brain did ) manages to pick up a lot more things and produce a much much more interesting sequence of events.

Cause

Now, I don’t know whether it is because :

1. I am extremely creative, even subconsciously.
2. I am just too desperate to have that particular thing.
3. My nerves are so tired due to the daily stressful routine that they have started malfunctioning.

or 4. Its my brain’s way of telling me and reinforcing what is actually my true giver of happiness.

The 4th reason definitely sounds a lot more promising and optimistic .

I mentioned the 3rd reason because I recently read a small article about removing all the pressure that builds up inside us. It talked about Tai Chi and its ability to relieve stress and improve health. It also said

“The neurological overload caused by lack of rest slows down your ability to think creatively or make accurate observations. Your capacity to send correct signals to your subconscious mind gets diminished. Your subconscious mind is like a slave. It will obey any order you give it.”

Here is the complete article if you would like to read it.

I have been going to college continuously for the last couple of weeks ( i.e. the entire 5 days ) and when you consider the distance I have to travel ( 1.5 hours long single trip ), it probably could be a cause. But, it definitely didn’t slow down my ability to think creatively .

It is, perhaps, the latter part of the article text, that talks about the subconscious mind obeying your orders, that holds greater significance. We probably are the author of the entire sequence of events ourselves.

You are welcome to share your views on the topic.

“Haal Pooch Kar Mera, Intezar to Karte, Mera Haal Sun-ne Ka,

Haal Pooch Kar Yun To, Aap Chhedh Sakte The,
Jaise Ghar Tattayon Ka, Phir Bhi Ain Mumkin Hai,
Aap Se Na Keh Paata, Naagawar Sach Batein,
Aur Ram Dohraata, Muskaraa Ke Yeh Kehta,
‘Aap Ki Inaayat Hai’

Phir Bhi Sochtaa Hun Mein, Haal Pooch Kar Mera,
Intezar To Karte, Mera Haal Sun-ne Ka
”

Now in case you are wondering what inspired me to write up this nazm, it was a communication skills workshop conducted by Mr.Ashok Lal of MDI, Gurgaon,India in my college recently. I instinctively liked it and found it very inspiring especially in today’s modern times. This nazm has actually prompted my interest in Urdu poetry and the like.

The meaning behind this nazm is pretty obvious ( i.e. if you understand a bit of Urdu )but still I will state its meaning.

Having asked me how I feel, maybe you could have waited for my answer. It is true that you might have submitted yourself to a tale of my miseries but still its highly probable that I would have repeated the polite ritual of saying “I am fine, Thank You” with a forced smile.The true essence of the nazm lies in the fact that we all are very circumspect while communicating with others, tactfully modifying all our responses so as to make the other person feel cared about as well as keeping ourselves at a distance from their problems.

What I infer from this nazm is that, no matter what, we should try to be true to ourselves, more than to others, and make sure we don’t say something just for the sake of saying it.

Having said that, no matter how hard we try, we are sometimes put into situations where we can do nothing but compromise.

Thats where, I feel, lies the true beauty of this contemporary nazm.