Back for more Labs action

June 25, 2009 By Anant in Fun, Mozilla, Music 1 Comment

It’s been 3 weeks since I started my (second) summer internship at Mozilla Labs, and needless to say it’s been a blast! I’m continuing my work on Weave, besides helping out with the gamut of experiments that are currently running at the Labs. Weave is going to see some major strides forward in the near future, as we now have our very own Product Manager (Welcome, Ragavan!) in addition to the awesome Mike Connor joining the team

Within the first week of my arrival here, Mozilla made the move to the new office, which is possibly the sweetest workplace I’ve ever seen in my life. Check out selected pictures here.

There’s been the usual slew of intern activities, including, but not limited to: Canoeing, Movie nights, Birthday celebrations, Music discovery, and even a few dungeon runs on WoW

Look for more posts on labsy stuff in the near future. Peace!

Miscellaneous

April 23, 2009 By Anant in Fun, Glendix, Places, SoC Leave a comment

I’ve been keeping quite busy the last few months, thanks to the extremely time-consuming but fun masters program I’m enrolled in. Sure, I’ve also ensured that I enjoy Europe while I’m at it, but that makes my blog posts much less frequent and further apart. Between “micro-blogging” and frequent facebook updates, there is much less time for blogging these days

It’s spring now and we can all stop complaining about the Dutch weather. The temperature stays around a pleasant 10 to 15 degrees. One of the more recent trips I made to take advantage of the season was to Keukenhof, the famous flower garden. Check out selected pictures here.

As I try to wrap up some of my pending assignments (did I mention they were fun?), I’m also preparing for travel in the next 2 weeks. First stop, Mountain View, for an “All Hands” session at Mozilla. Next, I head out to Italy, starting with Milan, and then heading on to Venice, Rome, the Vatican and Pisa. Looking forward to the trip!

In other news, the GSoC results were announced recently, and I’m continuing my mentoring role from last year with two students. Even though Glendix didn’t make it to the organisations list, we got several good proposals via Plan 9 and Gentoo, which was certainly very encouraging. This time, India has the second largest number of student selections (101!) – simply marvelous This will be my 4th Summer of Code, and I’m very happy to be involved with the program for this long.

Cheerio!

2009 already?

February 5, 2009 By Anant in Food, Fun, Life, Places 4 Comments

Ok, this post is way too late – but in my defense, I’ve probably never been this busy! I guess this is a good time to post, as today marks the 3rd anniversary of my blog. Wow, 3 years just flew by. As I go through some of my older posts, I can see how I’ve changed so much. I guess it’s useful to have a blog, some way or the other.

2008 was simply a phenomenal year for me: Glendix was born, I graduated from college, had an amazing summer at Mozilla, joined a masters programme at Amsterdam, and visited 9 countries. Phew

After winding up my only exam for the semester, a couple of friends and me headed out to explore Europe during the winter vacations. The experience was extremely overwhelming. Instead of writing anything, I will let some pictures do the talking. We visited 5 cities in total: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Salzburg and Paris. Christmas was spent ice-skating on a nice, snowy night in Munich; New Years eve at the Eiffel tower. I wish I could say there were great fireworks, but I would be lying

After returning to Amsterdam I was greeted with deadlines for programming assignments, so I spent most of the month writing a lot of code. Now, February has come, it’s a new semester, bringing a whole new wave of course load (taking 6 subjects at the same time!). I’m seriously considering cutting down on a whole lot of extra activity and focus just on the essentials: College, Mozilla and Glendix (in that order). Maybe it is time for me to retire from all the other FOSS projects, I just don’t have the luxury of time I had as an undergraduate student any more…

In other news, I am now pretty good at cooking a basic meal: rice and dal. I’ve also made Ghee from butter with acceptable results twice until now, and the latest attempt even resulted in some delicious ‘nei kasandu‘, a typical tamilian snack made from the remnants of the ghee-making. Oh, and I’ve also picked up a little Dutch; basic phrases like ‘Hello’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Pardon me’, ‘I don’t understand dutch very well’, and ‘See you later’.

I can’t even begin to imagine what 2009 has in store for me, so I’m not going to bother. Here’s to a great year 11 months ahead!

P.S. You may have noticed I’ve added links to archives of both technical and non-technical blog posts on the sidebar. This should help all my non-geek readers sift through to the posts where I don’t talk about programming or technology (for the most part, at least!)

My first meal!

December 17, 2008 By Anant in Food, Fun, Life, Photos 6 Comments

Today, after roaming the earth for 21 years depending on someone else to cook my food for me, I made a giant leap: I cooked my own meal. Right from buying groceries to cleaning up the dishes afterward

Here’s a picture of the modest beginning:

It looks a lot more delicious than it really was: just boiled vegetables with garlic bread – dressed with salt, pepper and a dollop of butter – rather bland for an Indian tongue. But, oh well, it’s a start

SSH-HTTP Multiplexer

December 16, 2008 By Anant in Fun, Hacks, Programming, Python 1 Comment

One of my friends wanted to run a HTTP server on his office machine, but the network it is connected to blocks all ports except 22 (SSH). Sure, he could run Apache on port 22 but that would mean he could no longer login remotely.

I wrote a quick hack in python: muxer.py, that will multiplex incoming connections between an SSH and HTTP server. It is slow, and makes all incoming SSH connections wait for 5 seconds before responding, but it works! The 5 second timeout is required because the SSH protocol specifies that the server should be the first one to send the client it’s version string, and only then will the client respond.

I should probably rewrite it in C at some point. Anyway, here’s your hack for today. Maybe someone will find use for it, or even better, come up with a better solution (this one is certainly the worst!)

Typealyzer

November 21, 2008 By Anant in Fun, Life 2 Comments

Just dicovered Typealyzer via Tejas. This post makes a nice successor to the previous one: Typealyzer analyzes a blog and tries to predict your Myers-Briggs type based on it. My result was ESTP (The Doer) as opposed to INTP (The Thinker) returned by other traditional personality tests (such as 41 Questions, covered in the previous post).

It’s interesting to note that while I’m an “introvert” in real-life, my blog posts are generally “extrovert” in nature. Though I wonder what an introvert blog looks like – most people maintain a blog because they want to express themselves, no? Also, I’m apparently more Sensing than iNtuitive in my writing, as opposed to real life. The other two characteristics: Thinking and Perception remain the same.

Binary Sunrise

Anant Narayanan

Category Archives: Fun