Monthly Archives: June 2008

Pan-Delhi Geeks’ & Quizzers’ Meet 2008

Date & time
Saturday, July 5, 2008

11:00 AM – 3:00 PM

Venue
PVR Plaza
Connaught Place
New Delhi, Delhi 110001

Before all the geeky folk of New Delhi schools (batch of 2008) set off to join their respective colleges (or prepare to drop a year), how about having a meeting of quizzers and computer club members of all schools across Delhi at some place! No competitions this time. 🙂 ‘Juniors’ (those who aren’t from Delhi Geeks Batch of 2008) and ‘alumni’ Delhi Geeks (who’re already studying in college are welcome too).
Right now, there’s a venue issue – we have none – so this is being kept an informal meet with no particular agenda. Basically going to be a ‘working lunch’ sort of meeting at some restaurant, at Connaught Place. PVR Plaza is simply going to be the meeting point, because CP is a big place and this is a good landmark everyone can get to. The actual restaurant (not at the end of the Universe) we end up going to would be dictated by the number of people turning up and the vacancies, but going by the current list I’d say that the Nirula’s, Outer Circle CP might be a place which will be able to accomodate an expected turnout of 20-25 people – other places, I don’t think they’ll be able to accomodate that many. Still, any suggestions are welcome. Oh, and since nobody is sponsoring this, everyone chips in to the bill.

IMPORTANT: There’s just ONE request Click the link http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/814201/ and IF you’re attending / planning to attend the event, please click on the “I’m Going” / “I’m Watching” buttons and add your name. We really need to know at the meeting point whether everyone has turned up, and possibly inform any stragglers on the event day where we’re leaving for from the meeting place.

POSTED ON BEHALF OF Ankur Banerjee and Prashanth Kanduri By me.

Trivia Quiz

I made this quiz long ago. Happy answering. Answers will be posted in 2 days time.The questions look vague but believe me they make sense.

Q. Who was the photographer for Larry Ellison’s wedding?
A. Steve Jobs. Larry Ellison is also on the board of Apple Inc.

Q. There is a particular problem with the popular arcade game ‘Pacman’ due to which the 256th level is known as the final level. What is the problem?
A. A kill screen appears on the right hand side of the screen making it virtually impossible to go further

Q. What is the engine for Far Cry 2 known as?
A. The Duniya Engine derived from the sanskrit word for “The World”

Q. In which popular game would you find the character ‘Nomad’?
A. The now extremely famous FPS, Crysis

Q. “True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken’s skull cavity.This was determined empirically in Australia , where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died.Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone.” Where would I find this text?
A. In the Turbo C++ library when you search for the function sound()

Q. Connect the Intel Penryn line of processors with Sunflowers
A. The new Penryn line of processors have replaced lead contents with Hafnium. Sunflowers absorb lead from the soil. Hence the connect. This was used by Intel to promote Penryn as eco-friendly.

Q. The original name of Intel was scrapped by its founders. What was the name and what was the reason?
A. The orignal name was supposed to be MooreNoyce which sounded like ‘More Noise’ which sounded inappropriate for an electronics company.

Q. Customer support technicians for Apple III often advised users to do what in the case of trouble shooting?
A. Drop it on a table so that the ICs which were displaced from their sockets could hopefully go back in


Q. The dancing in this music video has been used in the Blizzard Entertainment game World of Warcraft for the dance emote of the males of the Draenei race, as well as in the game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault – Spearhead as an easter egg.
I am pretty sure that you have heard this song somewhere. Which song and artist am I talking about?
A.
Tunak Tunak by Delhar Mehndi. It is quite a popular viral video. Check out youtube for some videos.

Q. What is the legend behind the naming of RedHat Linux?
A. Marc Ewing, the founder, was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the Beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone.


Q. Mick Jagger was approached by a company who wanted to use one of their songs for a product launch. Mick Jagger jokingly asked for an insane amount of $14 million. The company quite surprisingly agreed. Which company and song am I talking about?
A. Microsoft is the company and the song is ‘Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones.


Q. On June 1, 2006, the video hosting website YouTube was taken down temporarily for maintenance. A certain text appeared below the YouTube logo as a placeholder while the site was down. Some users believed the site had been hacked, leading the host to add the message
“No, we haven’t been hacked. Get a sense of humor.”
What text am I talking about?



Q. In 1989, Apple Computer was planning an online service called AppleLink Personal Edition. At the last minute, Apple withdrew from the deal, leaving the software developer with most of the software to create an online service, but no one to buy it. The developer decided to to roll out the service on its own. What is the name of this service now?
A. America Online/ AOL

Q. Something interesting happened to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Bulgaria where he was delivering a speech. What happened?
A. He got egged by a disgruntled tax payer.

Q. Daniel Lyons claim to fame?
A. Daniel Lyons posts under the name of Fake Steve Jobs on the popular blog fakesteve.blogspot.com

Ah, the good times

So i was just going through the exunclan website and went on to the alumni page, and i realised that, well, we’ve been exun alums for a while now(speaking for myself, sid, dhruv, mohit, RG, etc)

and that manas, khullar, and radhika are also alums. 
and then i scrolled down, and saw pictures of the guys that I met during my six years with exun. The likes of Manas Mittal, Mr. W, Shivinder and Gang, etc.
And then I found the picture of Mr. Rahul Merwah. I must really commend Mukesh sir, for finally getting hold of Mr. Merwah. Finally, at least we can see who our founder president was.
And then, when I reached the end of the page, I clicked on next and was directed to the members page.
And i saw pictures of you guys, the current batch and I was thinking.. ohhh. but werent these guys in 10th?. hehe. specially when I saw Kanika’s, Arshiya’s, etc pics. and i was thinking, “par yeh toh ninth mein the”.
Anyway, This post was quite random, but I just want to share how lucky you guys are to be exun members
Good Luck with the year ahead, win lots of trophies and finally try to do that national exun, which every batch tried to do.
Good night
Gursartaj

iPhone 3G

It was coming and everybody knew that. It was speculated that it would be announced during Steve Job’s keynote during WWDC 2008, and 0000 Hours (Indian time) it was.

  • There arent any visual changes with the iPhone save for the new glossy back (8GB or 16GB) and glossy white (16GB) color scheme.
  • Its a tad thicker at the center while it gets thinner at the edges.
  • Improved battery life
  • GPS
  • No mention has been made of MMS, video recording or built-in iChat.
  • On the chatting front, developers will be able to ping a centralized push server with their apps, to keep down battery usage and app overload on phones.
  • The Mobile me < Millennium edition. Hey thats copied!> service has been launched which will be a replacement for .mac
  • iPhone 2.0 Firmware with a plethora of applications (DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS)
  • Prices have gone insane. $199 For the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version. Totally sad. While this may help Apple to capture a significant part of the market share, that exclusivity of being an iPhone owner has just gone.
  • Just bought an iPhone? Listen up: “Customers who purchased a 2.5G iPhone on or after May 27 and want to swap it out for a new iPhone will be able to do so without incurring an additional handset charge for the new device. They will of course need to turn in their 2.5G iPhone.”

More information can be found here

House of Hackers

The house of hackers is actually a social networking platform but can be best described as a hacker community network.

The community is intended to support the hacker culture, mindset, way of life, ideologies, political views, etc. and the web site states in bold that they do not support criminal activity.

The Web site describes a “hacker” as someone, people express admiration for his/her work, skills, creative edge, cleverness, uniqueness, intelligence, etc. Supporting this is their tagline, “I want to talk to these people because they stay in power.”

What make this site unique as a hacker networking Web site are some useful features like Events, Plug-ins, and Network Extensions, and the Hacker Recruitment Network.

Through the events feature, if you run an event and would like to get a rough idea how many people will attend, then this will be helpful. When someone sets up an event on the site, event organizers can contact members directly and arrange any further details regarding entrance fees, etc.

Everyone can write applications, widgets, and extensions for the network. It is all free and based on Open Social. The Hacker Recruitment Network on HH, organizations/companies to be able to hire some of the world’s most talented information security experts, but not only hackers in general, says the Web site.(lets hope so)

The hacker community also proves to be useful in business research or advice or developing customized software for particular needs.They allow companies to sponsor the social network for a minimal fee.
To visit the site,click on the following link:
http://www.houseofhackers.org/

Download Day 2008

Mozilla is really planning to launch Firefox 3 in a big way! Download Day 2008 is a bid to break the Guiness World Record for the maximum number of software downloads in 24 hours. The release date for Firefox 3 has not been announced yet, but that hasn’t deterred more than 600,000(and growing) people from making their pledges to download Firefox 3 on Download Day(the day of the release). Visit http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord for details and to make your pledge.