New Wine in Old Bottle(BEANBAG)!

A BooKlovers paradise and a techies toy! 

A fresh new application with a pretty good UI and almost all sort of funtions which a user needs or wants……. like checking the reviews, Blogging it, downloading its Wiki page, getting suggestions(book of same taste), related links and what not!

Amazon, Yahoo, Technorati are few of the webservice providers for the app.

Probably the second app. in the world to give an exaustive coverage of gutenberg books  and an option to download them.

Made in QT4.2(which is still in its technical preview), i have serious doubt as to if there is any app. at all made in this version, amd Sqlite.

UI as i said is cool and Ankur is still not happy so there is still a lot more to come!!

Details ’bout the BeabBag is here and snaps are here!

Ankur ”THE MAN” has made a wonderful job…….as i saw it in making from close quarters. Too bad he is already in his way home(Mumbai) however im sure he is goin to make it smooth wherever he goes, a rare talent with creativity….!

Tintin in Congo……in bookstores in English!!

Last day at crosswords I came across another “till now unpublished” Tintin called “Tintin in Congo”…….I am a Tintin fan since I can even remember…..i got the hang of it through my sisters and there was always an air of studying something good new and worthwhile in my house in kolkata, it could be anything from Ravindranath Tagore to asterix to stories of our dear ol’ Belgian reporter.

   My cousin had a huge and exclusive collection of Tintin (probably all), famous five and other comic books I have seen thus far. May be because my uncle was in customs and used to get to buy things which we couldn’t imagine at that time, most of my tryst with Tintin was in their house.

I got my first Tintin at the age of 4-5 I guess, “Tintin in America” though the oldest one in my house was way before I was born (“Destination moon”), later I heard that it was bought for Rs.14, the publisher was Methuen, cause later the publisher was changed to Magnet (in English)……as the days passed by, Tintin was out of reach for the students like us with meager money we used to get for Tiffin or bus fare.

There was some respite when Tintin came in Bengali by Ananda publisher around 12-13 yrs ago; I bought my first Tintin in Bengali (“Tintin in Tibet” alias “Tibbote Tintin”) for Rs.29 taking some loan from my friends at my school bookfair……..I am not much of a collector as my father but I have an assortment of about 15 Tintins(both Bengali and English). Few years ago “Tintin in
Russia” came after a long time, it’s in black and white and the sketches where not totally as what we know, it was probably one of the oldest written one and contained much more pages than the regular count of 64.

I read “Tintin in congo”, It was mentioned that its published in English for the first time, Sitting in Crosswords itself; thanks to there policy of letting people like us sit there and touch and even read few pages of a book we can’t even imagine buying, no wonder people who gets caught in Calcutta bookfair stealing books are celebrated as martyrs (Disclaimer: I sincerely don’t support there cause and donot align to the belief of any such people)……

Anyways it’s mentioned that the book completes the 24 books set of Tintin; a lot of respite and morose for Tintin lovers at the same time!

PAC exams……Been there…..Done that…

When I went for registration just three days before the exams I made up my mind to atleast get something out from them…..the timings (sectional), kind of sections it would have and what to study…..The reply was “you don’t need to study anything specially for this test” what he meant was almost like that army slogan”do you have it in you” which is; if you have it you can do it otherwise not.

The exam was a typical american aptitude test :

First section: Diagramming- which is like finite state machines where you have to fill in the states. this would be about 30 mins 32 questions.Then there is one IT reasoning which is actually nothing but aptitude. This is for 20 mins and about 30 qs. After this, was the most funniest and the shocking part…….we had to solve 20 maths probs. in 5 mins, the probs were simple (345343 *5.66%) but 5 mins will scoot by before you even take a breath….next one was hilarious 3 mins and 20 “right or wrong” questions, it was simple if u are good you can attend almost 15.This all consists of the first booklet and you cannot touch it anymore( your fate is sealed in 1 hr as this booklet is the most scoring one).

Second had a mix of general ques. on OS, S/w eng., SAD, flowchart reading and some more apti. This would add up to another about 60 ques. Keep in mind this section has a no cutoff in terms of time and you can attend any ques. or any sec. of your choice.

Latter part of this booklet had psychometric test and other crap which has no importance as far as the marks are concerned. So you can fill in what ever you want…….

This Exam when I took was attended by around 40 people(max) from
Bangalore and we took the exams in there office( I was sitting on one Mr. Ravi’s Cubicle admiring his collection of Dilton cartoon calendar).The results comes out with in 10-15 days and your profile in PAC also gets updated with you score(You would also get the results by email).

My tips would be to study a bit of OS specially the threading parts, S/w eng. and digital electronics and also practice some simple equations with time constraints…….I guess if you can do that 100 is definite…….as most of the companies ask for people with 100 and more scores.

Rs.1800 can be a key to some companies or it might join the club of “wasted in a pub or a joint or to a GF who was never yours”.