2010 Summer Internship

I just finished with my Summer Internship at a Software firm: Prosix Softron Pvt. Ltd. 

The last 6 weeks of work were very interesting. I worked in C# ASP.Net to design web forms for several projects undertaken by the company. I learned to use Ajax and SQL as a part of development of online software systems. I gained knowledge about the important aspects of network security and learned to use various Visual Studio tools for the purpose of login, file upload, file export, report generation and many other. I worked in Visual Studio Environment with SQL Management Server. It was a great learning experience both at the personal and the professional level.

Prosix Softron is an IT Services and Solutions provider established in 1988 in Lucknow, INDIA and now having it’s offices in Noida, Delhi and USA. Prosix has a wide ranging experience of application of Information Technology, involving software development, bulk data handling, sale & support of licensed software and hardware, facility management & application re-engineering. Solutions from Prosix have been widely appreciated in domains like Financial Institutions, Manufacturing, e-Governance, Railways and Defense.

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Emergency Management System - CS2103

CS2103- Software Engineering was a very interesting module i took in my Year 1 Semester 2 of NUS life! This module teaches the basics of the process of software development and involves a major group project to be completed in a team of four people. In my year of study the project given to us was implementation of an Emergency Management System (EMS).

My group comprised of me and my three friends all year ones. Initially we felt that the module might be difficult to manage as we may face tough competition from the rest of the cohort which comprised mainly of year twos and above. However, as the semester progressed this module turned out to be interesting and manageable.

We used C# in Visual Studio 2010 beta, PHP and SQL to code our project. What I realized after taking this module is that Software development is more than just coding. We spent countless nights figuring out the workflow of our system, defining key terminologies and logically refining our system.

Though our Iteration 1 was pretty bad and we ended up with a "fair" grade, the way we picked ourselves from then on, is something I really feel proud of. We came back with a finished logical design of our system and a cool Command User Interface in Iteration 2 which was appreciated by our invigilators. This filled us with confidence that the battle is not over yet and we could still get ahead in the race.

After a period of 13 weeks what we produces as a team was something really good ( in the sense it was more than what we had expected from ourselves at the start of the semester). I recieved with an A Grade for this module. Really satisfied with how things went regarding this module. I am really thankful to my team for their super support and understanding (*hint* only they know what I mean here ;))

Here are a few screen shots of our K4 Emergency Management System:

Main Login

Admin Panel

Dispatcher Panel

Do contact me if you wish to know more.

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Blogger Template- Working with CSS

I recently found time to expand my knowledge on web-designing by exploring in detail CSS-Cascading Style Sheets. For those of you who hear it for the first time, my friend wikipedia describes it: "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL."

I had the idea of its syntax and working but never did i actually put my skills to practise. So I decided to start with something simple but something that would be useful and not a waste of time. Thus, I decided to create a blogger template.

Designing a blogger template from scratch would have taken ages.. so i decided to start with a pre-designed template and modify it with my styles and classes to give it the look i wanted. What came up as a result was this template:

View Demo | Download

This template incorporates shades of black, white and blue.. includes a favicon like the one for this blog, a navigation bar and several other customizable features. To be honest i think the blog banner is a bit too simple and can be futher improved. Since I don't have enough time now.. maybe I will update it in future.

You can download this template and use it for your own blog. Just visit the demo blog above and find out the details. Feel free to give your suggestions!

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Word Game Solver

Word games like text twist, wordShuffle are great for time pass. They are not just intellectually challenging but also fun. All you need to do is figure out all possible words using the letters given within the specified time. It not only requires a strong vocabulary but also a good visual memory. To try out your skill at such a game play one below:

My first encounter with this game was when a friend of mine challenged me for a game on facebook. Since I am not into playing flash games (except maybe during computing lessons in lab) the game was not intriguing but something else was -- the fundamental logic with which the mind works to find the scrambled words. My programming instincts encouraged me to code this logic and what came up as a result was a word game solver.

This piece of software takes in the scrambled letters and gives you all the words that can be formed with them. So if you are too stressed playing such a game then you can have the computer find the words for you. You can download this solver here:

Download

Most people may regard this as cheating. However if you use it for friendly games and in good spirit, it may not be of major ethical concern. Have regards for those who have spent months of practice and loads of mental ability to set high scores.

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Ideas Worth Spreading

With the belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea, TED website is one of those websites which deserve a click every time you browse the internet. TED is devoted to giving millions of knowledge-seekers around the globe direct access to the world's greatest thinkers and teachers. Though TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, it can be best described as “a global community of thinkers from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world and hope to use the power of their ideas to change attitudes, lives, and - ultimately, perhaps - the world.”

I first landed on this website through an external link and what I found here was truly impressive. The website contains talks by the world's smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries and most-inspiring teachers on various themes like technology, entertainment, science, business, design, culture, arts, global issues and many more. The talks include inspiring speeches, demonstrations of upcoming technology, interesting research results, unconventional explanations, and much more. It is dedicated to the brightest minds of our time talking about things that they love and that changed their lives. The videos are freely available so that millions of people can gain a better understanding of the biggest issues faced by the world and inculcate a desire to help create a better future.

Here is the link to this website:

It does have ideas worth sharing.

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Is your hard disk running out of space?

“My hard drive is full of crap and my computer is running out of memory space.” This expression has become very common these days. With movies, MP3s, games, softwares, pictures, document and all sorts of password protected and hidden folders, people tend to overload their computers. “Overload their computers!” well why not.. when they have to pay less than 50 cents per GB of hard disk space.

I remember, my Computing tutor in Junior college once told us, that back in 1979 a 5MB drive (yes, five megabytes) cost over a $1000. Most of you can’t imagine how they even manged- maybe just like how the paleolithic man hunted with stone and wooden tools. Today, with rebates you can pick up 250GB internal IDE hard drives for $90 or so. Grab four, and you’ve got yourself a full terabyte for less than $500. Internal 500GB hard drives have recently appeared on the scene, and go for a premium so they’re still about $350-$375 for the internal versions. Presumably, those will be down in the $175-200 range by this time next year when, hopefully, we’ll be seeing companies releasing 750GB and 1 TB internal drives. What comes after the terabyte? There’s the petabyte (1024-TB). Then comes the Exabyte (1024- PB or exactly 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes). Next is the zettabyte followed by the yottabyte. At this rate of growth, beginning with the 1979 5MB drive we have arrived at one terabyte desktop drive in 30 years.

Considering this increase in capacity of 200,000 to 1 and a fall in price of 10 to 1, I reckon, roughly, that by 30 years hence we will be looking at an Exabyte drive selling less than a $100 giving us the capability of storing data equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video or if you are rich enough to buy five of those you shall be able to store all words ever spoken by human beings till date. And you think you have accumulated enough crap in your hard disk today! Then what will you have to say in years to come? Although I suspect, there will always be those who will still be using their 1TB thumb drive to store their “important” stuff.

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