Something different

Some statistics of Google Summer of Code 2008 have been released. Sri Lanka is placed 9^th in the top ten countries by the number of applications and by the number of accepted students.

Seems like Sri Lanka is way into open source development and probably this trend will increase.

CARELESS MISTAKES!

Today I received a postal mail from the university. It was about an event – a career fair. This is one of the biggest events in the university and the organizers have done a great job running it. The letter I received had the list of sessions in this event (each session on a different day), and the dates. I was interested in participating for one or two sessions and wanted to look at the times of these events, to make sure that I was free.

Oops, they haven’t given the times of these sessions . Ok, I thought of contacting the organizers, (again ) it didn’t have a contact number either. Later I realized that they haven’t included the venues of these events as well (I’m almost certain that all events are not held at the same place, one of my friends is the chairmen of the organizing committee GUESS WHO??? ).

It’s very unfortunate to make such simple mistakes, because they sometimes cover all the good work you do. I observed a similar mistake on application form of a very well know international bank – HSBC (may be this mistake is present only in application forms in Sri Lanka). I saw this sometime back but thought of putting it up in this post .

Download the complete form here. After reading what happened to Seth, I don’t want to bother to write to the relevant parties.

It is very important to proof read not only to see if there are typos or spelling mistakes, but also to check if you’ve missed something. What I do is, whenever I’m sending out anything important (not in competitions ) I try my best to get someone with experience in the relevant area to check it. Proof reading yourself doesn’t help much because you tend to oversee the mistakes you’ve done.

Are you fed up with skipping the disk check at boot because it takes too long?

To cancel the disk check on Drive C:, just go to the command prompt and type

Chkntfs /x d:

To reset it

Chkntfs /c d:

• I had everything completed and there was a power failure just before I saved my work
• I have more exams than lectures (so I didn’t have time, for this)
• I completely forgot about you
• Someone has changed my code while I was away for lunch
• I just came from the hospital
• I thought 12/4/2008 was December 4th
• There was a power cut for a whole week
• 12/4/2008 is a public holiday
• I was run over by a truck
• I didn’t receive the e-mail you sent

This site wasn’t working properly last week due to some changes I made in the theme , and I didn’t notice it till a friend pointed me. Now, it’s back to the default theme.

I started using twitter last week (quite late ). It is much easier than blogging when you don’t have anything much to write or you are busy. Anyway, one of the main reasons I use it is to keep track of what I’ve been doing on the computer (more like a diary).

For those of you who don’t know, Google Code Jam Beta contest will be held this week and the practice session is already on.

Yuppy! our end semester exams finished yesterday with the last paper being relatively easy (all other papers were hard :P). Now, we will have around 40 days of vacation (time to enjoy).

The legend says that Ravana possessed some kind of flying machine which he used to travel around. Today, while I was browsing I dropped into these documents at Scribd, added by mohan. It is a series of 6 articles. I couldn’t go through each of them but I glanced at the pictures and it seems very interesting.

• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• IV

As they have done in previous years, Google has launched two new services today as well.

Gmail Custom Time

Lets you set the time of emails you are sending and also lets you whether it should appear as read or unread on the recipients mailbox.

gDay

Lets you search for content a day before they are entered to the web.

Lol… Have fun!!

Last week was a very stressful week, with university exams starting on March 31^st and GSoC application preparation.

I applied to The Apache Software Foundation for the two Axis2/C projects: XPath (my application) and Expat (my application). I had to spend more time than I expected researching on these areas but it was very interesting. I got to learn a lot about Axis2/C and in particular about XPath and XML parsing. I had to go through email archives of various developer groups, documentation and source codes.

Now, I’m waiting for comments from my mentors. Your comments and suggestions on them are also appreciated. :).

From the discussions in the Axis developer mailing list, it seems there are multiple applicants for both projects; so, it’ll be a tough competition .

About the exams, I think I screwed up the first paper (hope it was hard for all … just joking ). Therefore, I’ll have to concentrate more on the 5 papers left and I’ll probably be away from blogging for a week or two.

Or even less?

Watch this.

This is fun… lol

3. You use the AIESEC office key more than your house keys.

6. You see sunrise and sunset in school, maybe even miss them if the office is doesn’t have windows.

16. When morning jogs become a 10PM runs at night.

17. All you talk about to your friends is for AIESEC recruitment, even the hitchhikers that you pick up or pick you up.

25. when you go out with people, or at work or at home, or anywhere in the world you have to mention AIESEC in the conversation.

31. you sign off your e-mail with, AIESECly yours.

View the complete list at Life Via Andora