Shirish's Journal

Jan

Sometimes my mind is like a live-wire, electrifying my head and compelling me to do the things I love and blank out everything else. So when I came to know of a senior giving us a seminar on how the recruitment process in VJTI is going to take place, that thought of going for it never really got too much attention. Over a period of 22 years, you’d think I would know to distinguish between right and wrong, what’s good for me and what’s not. Well, some may think I’m not taking things seriously, some others may feel I’m rebelling against any significant change in my life, and some others may believe I refuse to grow up. But in the end, what really matters is what I think, isn’t it? After all, being an adult, I’m supposed to own up for the decisions I make.

’twas a choice between going to college on a Saturday morning and sleeping till late afternoon. I chose the latter, not purely because I was lazy, but because I needed the rest to work for long hours and implement some of the things I had thought of. Besides, the part of my brain that’s responsible for deciding what’s important from what’s not, gave the event of listening to a senior speak about the placement process a measly score. Apparently, my mind would like to stay unemployed.

I guess my greatest fear is that I won’t get to express myself in the way I want to once the job-life begins. I’d be forced to do things someone else’s way, out of my comfort zone, doing the things I may not necessarily love. This is the only time I get to do what I love. To put my stuff out there.

In contrast to what people generally have to say about living your college-life (or pre-job life), I disagree with most “experts”. They usually say something along the lines of “Trust me, you need to do this. You won’t understand the importance of doing this until later”. It usually seems like they’re trying to educate us on their regrets, or boat about all the things they did right. One respectable person recently pointed out that participating in extra-curricular activities, competitions, college festivals was critical. To that, my brain said, “This website counts as extra-curricular. The visitors who stumble down here are the judges. This is a gold-mine I’m working with here. I’ve built this from scratch. And it leaves my mark on the world. Google my name and have a look. What could be more critical that making it to Google?”. I agree that my brain constantly tries to find ways to avoid criticism, but I firmly believe that I am my own critic. Criticism is essential for growth. I don’t expect you to believe that I am my harshest critic and you may feel like I’m resisting growth. If you feel that way, that’s when you’ll find me telling you to mind your own business. I live in a shell thanks to my introverted nature, and it’s cosy in here. You are not welcome. At the end of it all, it’s me and my brain that decide what’s good for me. Outside opinions are welcome, but they may not stick.

What works for you may not necessarily work for me. That’s the basis for everything. Live life your way. Own up for mistakes; that’s what life is for — making and learning from mistakes. Have no regrets. I don’t believe people should try to learn from other’s mistakes, at least from ones that aren’t obvious. You just might miss out on some golden moments.

Interruption — I just watched a bit of “Beautiful People” on CNBC TV18, with Anuradha Sengupta interviewing Ram Gopal Verma. God, she was annoying! She didn’t let him finish his statements. I bet he was annoyed out of his mind. Maybe the folks at CNBC TV18 put her there to do just that; to get as many questions through as possible. Every time “Ramu” was about to say something interesting, she’d interrupt him and ask another question. Boy, would I hate to deal with such a personality in real life, even as a friend. It’s like she’s barely listening and drawing conclusions prematurely even before you finish expressing yourself. She kept saying, “You mean to say…” and blabbered on about what she had gathered from what he said. That is just rude!

Anyway…

I’m thinking of creating a “Changelog” to document the cutting-edge changes here. I intended to mention the names of the Wordpress plugins I’ve edited so that it could help people, but recently I’ve experienced my fourth interaction with a hacker (this time, from Ukraine). Reported that sucker to StopBadware.org and McAfee’s TrustedSource.org. That experience also introduced me to a real-world SQL-Injection exploit, that I had only heard of previously. The exploit looked to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the code of some plugins, namely — wp-cal, fgallery, wp-adserve, wassup, st_newsletter, wordspew, and others. Not something you would learn by attending lectures in college, boy. to_date=-1+group+by+id+union+select+1,2,3,0×6875616B,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12– :P

Some of the changes that took place IN ONE DAY are as follows —

Embedding YouTube videos in Wordpress the jQuery.Flash way
Adding YouTube videos in Wordpress was kind of a pain since the code generated by YouTube for embedding videos is NOT XHTML-standards-compliant. Validating this page would produce errors. Annoying. Then, I modified a brilliant plugin (that will not be named) to insert a SPAN element with the YouTube video ID, and a small JS code to make jQuery replace the SPAN with jQuery.Flash magic. This method was used long ago on the main website.
Clickable Flash Headings
Gone are the days of system fonts. Behold the new way of display non-default fonts in the web browser without requiring the user to have the font installed. The power of two of the most exciting web technologies combined. jQuery and Flash. Again, a very old feature on my website. The change I made was that the Flash animations are now clickable. I mean, it’s the heading of a post, so it ought to be clickable! I now pass the post URL as a Flash Variable to the movie, which applies the link (getURL) to a rectangle shape for the onRelease event. I was mighty impressed with myself.
RSS, better than ever before
RSS feeds for Facebook are now rendered beautifully. An added feature was the replacement of “You” in FB feeds with my name. Well, not necessarily my name. I modified the Wordpress Feeds plugins to replace “You” with the owner of the blog, presumably having user ID 1 in the Wordpress Database “wp_users” table. The getuserdata(1) function helped out. A bug that later caused trouble was identified and rectified. I was using str_replace() whereas I needed to use the str_ireplace() function, which is case insensitive. More problems followed, but were rectified. Admin options for the widget’s new “Replace You” feature added.

View Code
Finally fixed the time issue. Who would’ve known that I would actually have to go through documentation to find a solution to this. I was previously using the date() function, which took into account the Daylight Savings time. date_default_timezone_set(‘Asia/Kolkata’) wasn’t working for some mad reason. Tried editing php.ini and setting the date.timezone too. Anyhoo, I needed to use gmdate() Greenwich Time, and that’s what I’m doing now
A Facebook Share icon
Numerous other changes in CSS code