ThoughtfulChaos

Good old Slashdot had this article about The First Annual Underhanded C Contest.

A snippet from the contest site

we hereby announce an annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In many ways this is the exact opposite of the Obfuscated C Code Contest: in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.

Sounds interesting.

And in the time honoured tradition of Slashdot comments, the comments to this article itself has many possible and humourous candidates,

My favourite;
int main () { WinExec ("iexplore.exe"); }

Yawn. Its 10:00 PM and I am still in office. Am too tired now. Getting out.

Had a nice day today. Did some work. Reading docs and some designing and stuff. Also played around a lot with the site. Tweaked the look and feel a bit more. Also installed some more modules that will help make my life as a blogger easier.

The site has started getting hits. Search bots (Google and Yahoo mainly) have also started crawling the site. There was a configuration problem due to which new users could not sign up (Is that why there are no new users today?). Solved that and now users can sign up.

However I still could not get some things to work. I could not make captchas available in comment forms so I could not enable commenting for anonymous users. I also wanted to set up a Yahoo Groups! mailing list that I people interested in this site could subscribe to but I could not get my Drupal installation to send a mail to the group whenever content is posted. Will work on all of these in the coming days.

All in all a very satisfying day. Thanks to all of those who sent me feedback. I am working on all the issues that you have raised.

Good night.

Some of you will be wondering what the site logo stands for. It is a bit cryptic and geeky looking, isnt't it. Well... it is supposed to be :-)

The logo is what is more commonly know as the Hacker Emblem. It was/is a logo first proposed by Eric S. Raymond. You can read the Hacker Emblem FAQ to know more about this logo.

This pattern called the Glider Pattern is a pattern from a mathematical simulation called the Game of Life.

I subscribe and aspire to be a hacker as defined by ESR. It looks cool and geeky at the same time. So it proved to be the inevitable choice for my site logo.

Right now it does not blend in with the site colours. I will work on it in when I get the time. I am not too much of a graphics artist so don't expect it to happen in the near future :-)

Good old Google has announced yet another interesting contest. This one titled "Summer of Code" aims to introduce students to the world of open source software development.

Highlights:

• Only for students.
• Bounty of $4500 to each student who successfully completes a project by the end of the summer.
• PDF Flyer that gives the low down details about the contest.
• Lots of eminent mentoring organizations. These include Drupal, Fedora Core, Gnome Foundation, KDE, The Mono Project, NMap, OpenOffice, Perl Foundation, Ubuntu Linux and of course Google. The actual list is much longer and is available on the contest home page.
• There is a high volume mailing list for discussions related to the contest.

Hi there.

I am Varun,a 23 old guy currently residing in Pune, India. I have been thinking of setting up my own blog since a couple of months. I evaluated a number of CMSes (Drupal, Mambo, Wordpress, Nucleus, s9y, Textpattern etc.) and finally decided to use Drupal. Drupal's flexibility, extensibility and community tilted the scales in its favour.

This is the final beta. Everything here is temporary. In a month or so this blog will finally get a permanent place. I will be posting stuff once in a while but not too seriously. If you have any suggestions or comments feel free to email me at [varunvnair at gmail dot com] or [varunvnair at yahoo dot com] or [varunvnair at hotmail dot com]. You can also use the feedback form to send me feedback.

Thanks. Have a nice day