Stockastica Day 1 Results & more

Stockastica Day 1 was pretty exciting, with a close competition all day long. Though the markets didnt show any spectacular rise, and most stocks ended up losing, participants made upto 5000USD through Intra Day trading.

The winner for Day One is Indranil, who had an impressive net worth of $104549.63. For sometime, Vinit Vishal and Ashu Khemka were also good contenders, though they slipped at the end.

We had to revise our rules of the game and today onwards we will be disallowing mutilple accounts by users. We really did not have issues with 2 or more accounts per user in case a person wants to start afresh, but that led to misuse and spamming.There were at a time around 10 accounts of a certain user and a few more of others which was irksome. We did not have a policy for not letting people have multiple accounts, but did not expect one to sign up with 10 Handles, which appeared as spam on leaderboards, which is when we had to intervene and delete multiple accounts. However we gave participants a benefit by allowing them to retain their most profitable accounts.

Day 2 of Stockastica is ON , and we currently have over 200 unique participants, and the competition is close. Hope you enjoy day 2 of Stockastica!

Have fun!

Best Days Of My Life..

Six months ago, as I look in retrospection, we all just wanted one thing – big company,big salary!!!
Today when most of us have got it, we are stil not happy, not satisfied. Today we want only want one thing, for some even at the cost of their achieved/accomplished wishes, LIFE BACK IN MANIPAL!!! Watched numerous times on TV before the carefree, independent, full of masti college life. Never thought it could be that great. But saw it becoming true, Manipal was just way beyond it. Never thought I could get up at 8o clock for 8am class and stil get entry. Never thought could make nightouts everyday and still manage to go to class(slept there though [;)] ) Manipal was a dream come true.

Miss those interaction sessions (don’t dare call that ragging, Please! Feel sorry for juniors who never came to know about what they call or know as ragging) with seniors.
Other than studies, got the opportunity to participate in sports and activites too. Those cricket practice sessions in first year and Students’ Council at end of my Manipal life, what more could I have
asked for. Still don’t remember what made me apply for the President’s post. But today, don’t regret even a bit. Enjoyed like hell, revels, techtatva, golden jubilee dinner, diwali celebrations, Half day after
india won twenty20 world cup [Editor's Note: Yeah, He did it ! ], being blamed for bikes being banned, getting attendance letter even being a council member ( who said council gets free atendance? ) All sweet memories.

And yeah. How can I forget my beloved friends, friends forever. Those trips on bikes, nightouts dipped in beer and vodka( I was just watchin them :p ), sleepin till 2 on Sunday. Those days will never come back. It was a home away from home. I feel so MANIPAL SICK!

”Aisa yaadon ka mausam chala, Bhoolta hi nahin Dil mera….Purani
Jeans, Ali haider”

To al the juniors. Enjoy manipal like hell..u wont get smthin like dat
ever again in ur life. Believe me!!

- Kunal Gupta

(The author was the President of Students’ Council 2006-2007, and a proud MITian. He wrote his only article for this blog only after he left the college, in one of his nostalgic moments. He is currently pursuing his internship in Germany. )

We’re gonna miss You, Hutch

I’ve been on Hutch for some five years now, and have been in love with it. The Hutch buyout by Vodaphone was personally painful, since we’re never gonna see the cute Hutch pug again, and those lovely green-grass-blue-skies advertisements showing the Hutch pug following the kid. Hutch was best when it was Orange. I mean that *categorically*. The orange Hutch logo in white was inspiring in some way. The change to pink was OK. But the complete extinction of Hutch is gonna be real painful to those who have loved Hutch, the puppy. and those advertisements. Even the pug looks scared :

We’re gonna miss you, Hutch !

Ramblings Of Confused Mind..

Its two years since I came to Manipal, and the journey has been worth it. I have always written diaries since I was young, and I feel quite nostalgic, when I read ‘em sometime.Here is one of the entries that I wrote two years back :

The month long suspense came to an end today. The Engineering Mechanics Prof finally got it right. Ever since our first semester classes had begun, one of our teachers always referred to certain girl as the *raunchy* girl. Now it came to a surprise to most of us all as the girl referred to above was a simple oily-haired kameez-salwar-types who never did anything *extra-curricular* to win the title. At least none that we knew of. And every time he addressed her as the raunchy girl, she was almost red-faced. Not that we stared at her then.

And finally the mystery unfolded today. The girl hailed from Ranchi, and all the time the Prof had been calling her as the Ranchi girl, which, courtesy his pronunciation, sounded like raunchy.

(P.S. He was also infamous for calling a certain chick as My-Kel)

~Quote Of The Day~

~”Someday you’re gonna meet someone who’ll convince you for the rest of your life that Life is a Bitch. Don’t meet her“~

The Baiju Fever

It hit MIT harder than bird flue hit Hongkong or Katrina hit New Orleans. The Baiju fever! All I can say is OMG !

Once in a score of evenings, he holds classes in MIT, wherein you could see all the *happening* and wanna-be-happening couples of MIT taking serious CAT classes in the backbenches.(P.S. CAT classes are not the same as MBA classes. Its *class* apart. Ask anyone attending those classe, and they”ll swear by it! ) Its a perfect expense-free date for most MIT couples and their only chance to showcase all the good that their fuckin relationship can contribute towards their life, academics, career, blah blah blah. Some chicks even call up their parents to tell ‘em how (re)productive their relationship has been with their respective guys, since they can study together and prepare for CAT(and would probably, crack it next year).

The guy is a magician. He would write some random basic mathematical calculation like 87646375 x 28756345 , grin at the audience, turn back to the board, hide the figures with both his hands, do some abra-ka-dabra, and Lo!! The solution would be right there on the board! And the awestruck chicks sitting in the last benches would squeeze their spouses’ hands, out of wonder, amazement, and UGH, excitement, looking at their spouses with *that* Honey-you’ll-have-to-teach-me-this-after-the-class look. I personally kinda admire him because he manages to do it without a magic wand !

I had attended one of his orientation classes around a month back. He started impressively saying -’ If any of you feel anytime during this orientation, that I am wasting his/her time, you can walk out of this session. No questions will be asked.’ And I am glad an infamous Sardar did the honours, by walking out of the class nonchalantly while the entire class burst into laughter. He claimed he had a 100 %ile in DI and QuanT sections of CAT 2004 and CAT 2005, and will be doing so in the coming CAT 2007 and if you coughed up 15000 bucks, you could be getting as much in CAT 2007.

Soon every guy with a disastrous GPA and a willing chick, enrolled for the perfect evening classes.Its a fortnight since the classes commenced, and things have been going perfect as of now. And everyone is having the promised *satifaction* claimed by the P C Sorcar of CAT.

P.S: I ‘ve a disastrous GPA too, but I don’t have a *willing* chick.

~Quote Of The Day~

~”Ninety Percent of my money, I spent on women and wine. The rest ten percent, I wasted“~

ID

The guy is absolutely smashing. I recall he had organized the code breakers event for Techtatva’06. And Boy! It was class apart from all other events that we had. As far as I can recall, it used classical ciphers to encrypt description about geographical places.The description was in simple English and once you broke the code to extract the description, you were in! You were supposed to locate five places in the world map in this manner, and when you joined the five places on the map by straight lines, it formed a pentagon.The center of the the pentagon was the solution.

The first level was easy, but definitely not substandard. If you shifted each alphabet of the code by 13 places to the right, you could see the code unfold itself. And the key was simple. The code had the word *rot*, which anyone knowing the ‘c’ of ciphers, could guess it was a simple Caesar Cipher. I can not recall the exact code, or I would have shown it to you here.

I have known ID for quite sometime. And I knew that the first level was only a warm up, more of a bait to get people going. I remember remaining awake all night long trying to break through the second level, searching for all sorts of code breaking techniques, but couldn’t make any foray. Ever since, I have been his fan, not just for his brains, but also for his managerial skills and a high fun quotient. Whats more, he has promised to write in here, so you could be reading him soon. He is also the part of the official Techtatva Committee

Its always best to hear it from the horse’s mouth

~Quote Of The Day~

~”If computers get too powerful, we can organise them into a committee – that’ll do them in.“~

Adobe Flex Builder Workshop

After dilly-dallying for two days and keeping me waiting for almost an hour, the senior i was supposed to be taking orders from, met me at KC today.[edited].She came with the expected sorry-you-had-to-wait look, and listened patiently to all that I had to say with a diplomatic I-totally-agree-with-you rejoinder that did wonders to my confidence. After receiving marching orders from her, I finally called up the *no-frills-guy* from Adobe, making him an offer he couldn’t refuse

And finally, at the end of the day,before I goto sleep, am feeling euphoric about the whole flex thing. The 2-day workshop will be held in the first week of October, preferably on the weekends. We have arrangements for having 25-30 students for the workshop and so chances are, registrations might close even before most people come to know about it. I had personally been using Flex 2 on Linux platform for sometime, (before a certain timani tunduwani from the US replied to one of my emails telling me the immense beauty of Flex in Windows albeit he had personally blogged on how to install Flex 2 on Ubuntu and also won accolades from the Adobe Team) and I had loved it. I have now moved to good old Windows (the damn thing erased my entire Linux partition, of which I had already been warned by the second year Einstein who built the Techtatva Website ) . It was also important to me because I had so much wanted to built a website using flash after I saw this.

Flex is easy, and Flex is fun.You can download the 30-day Flex Builder 2 trial here

For starters, the Getting started with Flex documentation(though I like to call it eBook ) can be downloaded by clicking here.

The already hip ones can view and download the Flex Builder 2 Developer’s guide from here

Happy FLEXing muscles (“,)

~Quote Of The Day~

~”A Windows User spends 1/3 of his life sleeping, 1/3 working, 1/3 waiting.“~

Manipal Institute Of Technology’s

Annual Tech Fest commences on 10th October, and there is so much buzz in the campus. The standards are raised even higher this time around by inviting over 500 colleges and institutes from all over the country and having super cool gadgets as prizes. So its gonna be a thrilling time for all the techies of our collage , busy and bustling with the organization work.

I have specially been looking forward to Param . I still recall the Internet Mania event under it that kept me hooked on to my dv2000 pavilion notebook for hours. There was also this event called Google Champ, which required the participant to enter the smallest word in Google Search bar so as to open a required URL in the first place.You could not enter any word that was a part of the full form of the URL name. I still remember one of the toughest of them all was http://msn.com/,because you weren’t supposed to be using “Microsoft” or any related word to search for it. After much effort,the damn thing opened up on entering “us messenger”.

Its an year now, and I just noticed ,on entering “us messenger” in Google,it opens up messenger.yahoo.com Now, from a business perspective , the change speaks for itself.It shows how Microsoft has been losing markets to its rivals.Now, getting into the issue, even Yahoo has lost markets (and advertising revenues) to Google.No wonder Yahoo and the big daddy of software, MS joined hands,and so the honeymoon between Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.

Oh and by the way a certain alumni of our collage has agreed to conduct a workshop in the college,which all the more makes me happy.Whats more, he isn’t among the handle-with-care faculties .He is a super cool complete no-frills guy.I am glad I found him while blogging on my latest technical blog wherein I have decided , and committed at 43things.com(I ‘ll surely write about the amazing 43things.com some other time.Hate it or like it,you can’t ignore it!) to be regular technical blogger ever since I have moved from Windows to the debian based Ubuntu .And it has been a roller coaster ride,but I kinda love roller-coaster rides ;p

Techtatva’07 is a month away am I am keeping my fingers crossed.Keep watching this space for news and more (“,)

~Quote Of The Day~

~”If at first you don’t succeed, call it version 1.0“~