pratul dot in /home/lut4rp

I’ve been using ZNC for the past two weeks now, and its awesome. In fact, I like it far more that a screen + irssi combination, and the recently-getting-popular Quassel core + client combination. So what’s so nice about ZNC? Its an IRC bouncer.

The advantage, you ask? I can use any client to connect to my ZNC `instance`. Yes! So I can use Colloquy (if I’m on my dad’s MacBook) or irssi if I’m on my own notebook. Lets go slightly technical now... ZNC runs as a daemon on a remote machine (say, your VPS?) on a port you specify (say 8888). It has these super easy settings where you specify what IRC network(s) you want to connect to. Then you press the Big Red Button. Now, the next time you want to connect to IRC, you don’t connect to the IRC network, you connect to your.server.address:8888. Push in your server password and vala! Your client will automatically join the servers and channels you had set up! Talk about smartness, eh?

And no, the phun doesn’t stop there. There are tons of modules available (and Mr. h4x0r can write his own in C++ or Perl or Tcl) which allow even smarter stuff. You can setup multiple users (each with their own modules and configuration) within the same ZNC instance. Users can have encrypted buffers and logs. No need to SSH to the server to change configurations every time (gasp!), you can control everything via a /query! Its everything you need, and more. Get it from http://znc.in.

From someone already acclaimed as quite awesome, came this nice (yaay) Lullabot t-shirt today! Hugs, hugs and more hugs to Addi! Thank you!

As per the road map to World Domination, the Universe has come together and handed me this totally brilliant opportunity to be a part of Google Summer of Code 2009. After much jubilation and happiness, I figured I have a responsibility to thank some very special people who helped me reach this point, and here they are in no apparent order :-)

- my mum and dad (and perhaps, sister) for raging an unending battle against my obsession for everything geek. And in process, pushing me to my limits :-)
- dear friend, co-drupal-evangelist, co-contributor, co-have-phun-everywhere Gurpartap, who has been a major source of inspiration in my contributions to Drupal.
- my mentor, Simon Roberts (lyricnz), for supporting Vote Up/Down even before I had thought of GSoC.
- countless IRC channel inhabitants from navya, linux-india and drupal for all the pointless talks (which do turn useful at times)

... and a hearty congrats and ^5 to the other 100 awesome participants this year from India. We rock!

What is the value of 500 Rupees in today's world? (approx. USD 10)
This video by Open Space India attempts to show the vast inequality in people's thinking and beliefs today. Watch it. (Thanks to Mohit for sharing this with me.)

I came back home from IIT Roorkee today morning after a really, really tiring Thomso 2008 (their cultural fest). I had an awesome time there,
hanging around the campus and interacting with a whole lot of IIT students (courtesy my best friend Nitish, who is doing his B.Tech. Electronics from there). Its weird because people there seem as dumb as us, when *ahem* they are not :-P

We took the bus to IIT on 23rd evening and it took us freaking 8 hours to reach Roorkee, as people wanted to stop for food/tea/nonsense after
every kilometer. But we did reach in time for the Battle Of Bands event (Hindi group rock) in which I had to participate, just to find out we were number 25 on the list :o Lots of bands there were simply awesome and had really good original compositions. We band members barely slept the first 48 hours, the result of which was that I slept most of the day on Friday. Apart from that, the campus was very beautiful, but it got *brrr* cold in the night. We stayed at Govind Bhawan (which is the largest boys hostel). I came to know that a particular boys hostel called the Jawahar Bhawan is the most demanded one, since it sits smack in front of one of the girls hostel ;-)

Overall, I'd say the event was ok. Not really good, but yeah, fine. There were problems with the management, some with the audio systems, some popular events clashed with each other leading to confusion. Of course, its understandable that the campus and fest were spread out over a large area, but there could have been better efforts. In fact, even the IIT students agreed that it wasn't up to the mark, Thomso '07 was better.

I had a fun time anyway (good break to leave my sucked college behind!) though I did miss a couple of people from college. Prestorika was simply awesome on the last day during the English rock event (Wargasm). They covered Metallica, Iron Maiden and Megadeath, and their own track 'Not My Way'. As always, its fun being a part of a large mix of people and forget we have to go back to our own lives as well... sheesh!

Photos here: http://flickr.com/photos/pratulkalia/tags/thomso08/