It feels great to be writing a post about a side project after a long while. The last post I made on the blog was about my trip to Dharamshala back in August. The last post I made about programming was probably about Birbal that too in the beginning of August.

The last 3 months have been weird. Really weird. August was about placements followed by a trip to Dharamshala. September was about a lot of things not related to programming or travel. A few friends and I started making videos and we called it pSentiSem productions. October was about The Great Nepalese expedition. November wasn’t really about anything mostly just wrote the crawler for the DC Search Stats that didn’t take a lot of time. I learned Android for a project in which we had to create an app that was basically a conversational medical diagnosis bot.

Videos

One of the most famous videos that we made in the last few months was about the Shikanji Challenge. Prabhjyot, Shubhankar and I visited all rehdis(food stalls) on campus and tried the Shikanji there. Bhagirath Rehdi won, surprisingly. Here is the video.

We also made a video that talked about our upcoming trip to Nepal. Kathmandu, Pokhara and the Annapurna region. We never ended up going to Kathmandu. In this video we experimented with making a stop motion video. Here it is.

We even made a video about our trek. I’ll talk about the trek later but here is the video. This video is just beautiful.

Edwin made a great video about our trip to South East Asia. This wasn’t under the banner of pSentiSem productions but it’s worth a watch.

There is also an upcoming video, that I shot during the Directors Tea Party(closest to a farewell a Bitsian gets). I went around asking people to say a few sentimental words. I’ll embed that here soon.

So what did I learn from the videos? Marketing. Creativity. Editing videos isn’t easy. To get a simple shot you have to record multiple shots. The audience often matters more than the content. Your best creation won’t necessarily get the most views.

The Great Nepalese Expedition

I and Shubhankar went to Nepal in the middle of October. We went post mid sems and came back on the second day of Oasis.

The trip started on the 8th of October. We took a UPSRTC bus to Lucknow. The bus was late by 2 hours. We visited my family in Lucknow and in the evening headed out to Tundays Kababi. It was dirt cheap and tasty.

From Lucknow we took a night bus to Sonauli(border city) via Gorakhpur. From Sonauli we crossed to the Nepali town of Bhairahawa. No checking at the borders. No one cared. The bus from Bhairahwa to Pokhara took 7 hours for a 210 Km journey.

We arrived in Pokhara on 10th of October in the evening. We learned about how Nepal has a 3 day holiday during Dusshehra. We couldn’t head go for the trek as the permit office was closed on the 11th. We went around Pokhara and visited the Lake Side and Sarangkot. Lake Side really felt like we were abroad somewhere. It was full of Cafes. The Fewa Tal was simply beautiful.

During our trip we explored a lot of top rated restaurants on WikiTravel and some new places that we thought looked worth visiting. We tried Neptalia, The Everest Steak House, Bamboostan Cafe, Almonds Cafe, Busy Bee Cafe, Asian Tea House, White Rabbits Coffee, Chicken N Falafel and Rice Bowl and a place by the Lake, the name of which I don’t remember. Asian Tea house was the best for food and the most economical. White Rabbit makes amazing Coffee and Shakes and deserves to be on the top of whatever list on WikiTravel. Busy Bee was very lively and lived up to it’s reputation. Rice Bowl was simply sad, do not go there. The Falafel stall was great too. People at Everest Steak House seemed to be enjoying but I guess it was too bland for two Indian dudes.

The next day we got our permits and headed out for Nayapul the starting point of the trek. Our initial route was bit ambitious and we were set back by one checkpoint on the second day as I wasn’t feeling so well.

The trek was long and tiring. We could do it in the 7 days as we had decided as on the 5th day we did around 44 Kilometers in around 12 hours. Our final route was Nayapul-Ghandruk on Day 1, Ghandruk-Chomrong on Day 2, Chomrong to Himalaya on Day 3, Himalaya to Machapuchre Base Camp (MBC) on Day 4, MBC to Annapurna Base Camp back to MBC and then down to Bamboo on Day 5, Bamboo-Jhinu on Day 6 and Jhinu-Siwai-Pokhara on Day 7. Something I didn’t expect was too see Western food available on every leg of the trek. From Risottos to Lasagne, everything was there.

Overall it was a good trip. We made friends with a lot of people during the trek mostly because I was walking too slowly at times and people talked to me out of sympathy. We met a Polish couple randomly a lot of times during the trip.

What did I learn from the trek and Nepal? The struggle is real. Struggle takes you to base camps, skill with struggle takes you to summits. Without struggle you get no where.

DC Search Stats

In November we had the idea of listening on DC++ for search queries. For those of who aren’t aware of how DC++ works, here is a primer. There are two types of users Active and Passive users. The Hub acts as an interface for Passive users to connect with Active Users. Whenever a user searches for something, all users get the query and there client returns whether a matching item is available. This part isn’t shown in most clients and is hidden.

We had decided to do static analysis of the data collected during the week in which the crawler ran. Nothing happened for a while. I decided to finally learn AngularJS and I made a sideproject that used angular to show what was being searched on DC++ live among other things.

I finally feel like making things again. Up next is a website that is basically an year book or a better, faster and more stable version of RouteRush.

I’m looking forward to 2017. It starts with around 6 months of research in the field of Cyber Physical Security at the iTrust labs in Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore. I plan to learn a lot of things about security and full stack application development next year. I want to be able to build beautiful scalable apps instead of the small hacks that I make currently. I also want to finally get started with Bug Bounties. Farewell till the next post.