I created a short movie out of the still pics of our stay at Mussoorie and Rishikesh. A pinch of creativity and a couple of hours of work went into the creation/direction of this movie. Hope you like it!
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.
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 ;)
My college wanted us to do a project as part of a “Bridge Course” this semester. In a way, I liked the concept as it was at least trying to convince some people to do something besides curriculum. Personally, it’s always good when you are working towards some objective like completing a project you have to submit. An example is last summer, when I had to create a project for the summer and I ended up doing a lot of fun stuff.
So, I thought, why not build a solution for a problem I have been facing for quite some time now. Those of you who know me personally or follow me on twitter, know that I am particularly unhappy about my college’s attendance criteria. It’s always been a headache for me trying to keep track of when I went to college and when I didn’t. I tried using Google Calendar but I thought it was pretty cumbersome to use for this particular purpose.
So, I thought, why not create a simple, easy-to-use and nice-looking webapp for exactly this purpose. That’s when ProxyCal was born. Even at the beginning, I had the idea in my mind of a calendar which used colors like green, red and yellow to denote the status for the day i.e. whether you went to college, took a leave or college was off. One more thing I wanted to do was to avoid anyone from creating a new account for using ProxyCal. So, I decided that I was going to store all the data regarding the attendance in a separate calendar ‘ProxyCal’ in the user’s Google Calendars.
Uptil now, the only way I had to keep track of Twitkut was the Google Gadget Directory, which still shows that it has <100 users. At the time I developed the app, Google Analytics was broken.
I have an Orkut filter setup on my Gmail, so that all the emails notifying me of scraps skip the Inbox. Today, however, I decided to check my Orkut emails. And guess what, the first mail I saw was from the Orkut guys giving me the weekly statistics of my Opensocial application!
Here it is:
Here are the statistics for your OpenSocial app twitter.xml on orkut for the week of 2008/12/30:
App submitted to orkut on 2008/11/04
Number of unique users who installed the app this week: 77
Total number of unique users who currently have the app installed: 532
Number of times profile pages of users who have installed this app were viewed: 16395
Number of times this app was viewed in canvas view: 446
Wow, and until now I thought that less than 100 users were using my application!
I think the Orkut team only recently started mailing developers weekly stats. I think it’s a great idea and hopefully they will continue to do so.
