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OASIS is here!

The place to be this week. OASIS 2008! 20th to 24th October.

What's my motto?

"A circle is a series of connected lines each making a fixed specified angle with the previous line."

Have you ever wanted to do 26 different things at once? I have. Sadly inferring - its impossible to do it. You just CAN'T do 26 different things at once.

I do imagine sometimes how things will emerge out in 15 to 20 years from now! (Ok I know there are too many people who do that, so what is the big deal huh?) In the scenario that humans still do seem to be around and looking for a reason to live, it wouldn't be wrong to imagine that there will be an inherent requirement to do many things at once.

(People may argue on the contrary by asserting that futuristic developments will ease the life of human beings by giving away trivial tasks to monotone-loving technological gizmos. Simple counter-argument: rewind 10 years in the past. Our life has become more comfortable than that but has also become even more busy. "Oh! I have to read my RSS feeds. And darn! My phone has already reached its capacity of receiving tweets!")

"Multi-tasking" will be a "zillion-riyal" industry in the future. And humans will achieve that through a series of brain surgeries which their rich parents will convince them to have in their childhood. It will become imperetive for my grandson to answer a call on his PM while riding a horse or some "space-vehicle". Doing such a thing would obviously not be illegal.

Ok, diverting from "future-talk" - coming back to what I really wanted to discuss. A circle is a series of connected lines each making a fixed specified angle with the previous line. So are ideas - a series of connected thoughts... There is only one thing to infer and its pretty clear.

If I want my ideas to go ahead, I need to orient my thoughts as parallely as possible - or I will end up in a circle...

Time to ask The Question again:

How did I change the world today?

Practice School at DCPL, Kolkata

A much much needed post!

Practice School has indeed managed to keep me busy for the past month. I am interning this summer at a Engineering Consultancy firm called Development Consultants Private Limited (DCPL) at its headquarters in Kolkata.

Excerpts from my Mid-Sem Report -

DCPL is an India based transnational Consulting Engineering Group offering the entire package of Project Engineering services starting from concept to construction supervision and commissioning for various core sectors and high-technology projects in India and abroad. An ISO-9001 accredited Indian Company, DCPL has diversified to 14 different areas of engineering starting with the flagship Power Engineering and including Cement, Paper, Chemical, Petro-chemical, Steel and Metals, Space, Defense, Mining and Mineral Processing, Software, Architectural, Infrastructure Development, Environment and Management Consultancy.

The IT services arm of the DC group, Data-Core Systems, Inc. is an international professional IT & Business service provider to Fortune 1000 companies and government organizations. Data-Core develops custom solutions that address and resolve requirements that are unique to each client. It focuses mainly on medium and small businesses.

IT Service offerings of Data-Core fall into the following categories:

• Application Services – Development, Support, Maintenance
• Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence
• Quality Assurance & Software Testing – SQA Solutions (Testing) Practice
• Development & Marketing Of Application Software Products

Data-Core is a Microsoft Certified Advantage Partner, a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and has significant expertise in the design, development and deployment of mission-critical applications for major corporations in the United States. It provides Microsoft .NET based technology solutions for businesses through total project life cycle services.

 

It's been over a month working at the Data-Core office housed in a newly constructed centrally air-conditioned building in Salt Lake (10 mins away from home!). We (meaning 4 of the 10 interns at DCPL who are working for Data-Core) have been handed over a fresh project to work on. The job is to design a Student Information Management System and one can get enough information about it on Wikipedia so I wont explain.

More technically we are developing a web application based on the Prototyping development model using the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Platform. The application has already required us to work on the following development tools: Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft C# Object Oriented Programming, ASP.NET, XML (XSLT and XPath), XHTML with CSS, JavaScript and PL/SQL for Database Procedures. The project is nearing completion.

From a BITSian perspective (something that we kept in mind while designing every particular aspect of the software) we have basically managed to combine all internal BITS management software like Instruction Division (which manages the courses, subjects and sections in the University), ARCD (which manages all the academic and registration details of a student - and yes that includes making clash-free scheduling of Time Tables for students as well as faculty), SWD (which manages Student Dues, Activities, Search etc.), IntraBITS et al. into a single application managed centrally by one single database and a common and user friendly GUI that can be accessed by Administrators, Accountants, Faculty & Students.

Cheers to an experience worth having!

The new revolution!

Overheard (at a future date) in a street corner not very far away...

OBC IITian 1: Arre dost!! We finally got our degrees! Saat saal lag gaye but we made it man! Now we will enter a good company and earn fat bucks!

OBC IITian 2: Don't be so happy man... Statistics have shown that very few reserved IITians get good jobs. I think we have to keep struggling...

OBC IITian 1: Not to worry dude! If we don't get a good placement we will apply for lectureship in IIT! Remember, the Government has reserved seats for the faculty as well! We will surely get in. As long as there is God above, he will always take care of us.

PS: Call for cartoonists is still on. (Refer here)

Future Perfect Tense?

Those were the days!