The Magnet Blog

nirav May 20th, 2007

We had another Hackfest in Magnet this weekend. The last Hackfest was a roaring success. We had only five participants this time, but it was fun as well. For me, it was a “Samosa to Samosa” hack fest. We started at Saturday 7pm, and I really got on after 3 samosas in my tummy around 8.30! And after a Sunday morning dose of samosas, I started pacing down!

Collectively we did a number of things. Let me put some bullet points:

• Openfire integration with MSN, Yahoo!, Google and AOL messengers. So now we can easily talk to our clients using the same internal Jabber based messenger system.
• Streamlined user level backup system - spanning multiple servers and multiple configurations
• Lot of research on Microsoft Share Point Portal Server
• 3D UI with standard Flex components on Outsmart Labs. Amazing work! I wonder how they are doing it!
• We read a lot of blogs and learnt many new things!
• A lot of QuickSilver hacking
• Batch audio conversion using Switch as I wrote earlier
• Lot of research on mobile and mobile web - the trends, technologies etc
• SQL Injection and general hacking around
• SVN
• MySQL Clustering
• And we watched “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro” - had a great time laughing! Spent more than an hour getting the VCD to show up on the projector though!
• The dinner and in-between discussions were insightful - we talked on topics ranging from security, grid computing, mobile as a computer, IPTV, Windows hacking, Benefits of eating healthy food, GTD philosophy, planning with a calendar, RSS subscriptions with Thunderbird and MP3 streaming

Good fun as usual! I am always looking forward to Hackfests in Magnet! Missed Kartik, Ameya and Naveen though!

• time , roaring , participants , success , yesterday , Updates , hackfest , magnet , Technology
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nirav December 23rd, 2006

Kartik, Naveen and Ameya have organized Magnet’s first HackFest this weekend. Eight of us are here, ready to hack, and stuff our stomachs with pizzas and pesticides (err.. Coke). We already have some stuff going on. Participants so far are: Kartik, Naveen, Ameya, Vishal, Vinay, Mohan, Arun & Me.
Kartik kicked off the HackFest and told everyone about the schedule. We logged in at 5.15pm and will be logging out tomorrow 5.00pm. Till then, we are in the office, no one stepping out (except the organizers We brainstormed ideas of what we can hack on! Shortlisted a few, and after the pizza party, things will start rolling.

Till now, people have just got their feet wet. Researching a little bit here and there. Most of the research by the way, has gone in getting Quake working on all the machines here. Couldn’t join the arena from Linux / Mac yet. The Frag Match is over, and the winners are announced - Kartik and Vinay. I didn’t know Kartik was so good at Quake (or that the rest of us are so bad

I started on finding more about the popularity contest plugin to WordPress, to fix the spam comment problem I had - it was taking even the spam comment counts in calculating popularity. Surprisingly, it just worked today, without my changing anything. Not sure what changed. I reviewed the code, ran it, and it worked! Looks like my aura is really getting stronger!

Have made a list of things I want to work on. Let’s see where we reach!
I have put up some photos in the gallery under HackFest01, will be posting more as I process them! Will also post updates here.

• kartik , vinay , ameya , weekend , hackfest , naveen , popularity , Updates , quake , Technology
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