I was excited watching the master blaster scoring the double century and becoming the first person to do so in ODI cricket. I rushed to my system to share my joy with the nettisons. It was then I saw a post by Hiran in facebook saying:

Some one added 225* as sachins score in wikipedia!

I just went through the link, but it was not there. But to my astonishment, found something else interesting.

So, there is no chance for it to be correct; atleast for team India. I tried to undo that change and came upto this new word: Vandalism.

Lets look what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.

Don’t know whether this is wiki specific meaning; but was a new word to me.

After a few seconds, here comes another change.

This was just a beginning. Then came a creative edit by some Indian fan.

Sachin in tri-color. Its nice creative idea, but not suitable for a place like Wikipedia

What satisfaction does people get by seeing their name in a popular wiki page for just a few secs or may be minutes? Here is a sample of the revisions happening for the page at that time.

Okay, now it seems fine.

But then came these…

By that, I was tired and left the job of undoing the changes to someone else who will find hapiness in doing so. I might have missed many other similar changes due to my slow connection too(It tooks about more than a minute for me to reload the page). But, my question is why? A non profitable organization helping us to get all the information for free, who should people tamper with it?

The page normally had 3 to 4 edits per day, but at this particular 2 hour duration; from 4PM to 6PM IST, there were more than 300 changes made. Does anyone gets the benefit of these edits? The only thing I knew would have happened was the lose of time of people like me who love Wikipedia. I was eager to check the details of the edits and from where they came, but its exam time and I didn’t perform well in the one that was over today. So, going back to studies…

The page I was mentioning till now was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_One_Day_International_cricket_records If you are eager to know, just go and check out.

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This year FOSSMeet at NIT Calicut is scheduled on 5-7 February. For more details on the events, registration and schedules, check the website http://fossmeet.in/

FOSS Hut registrations has already started. Check it here.

Promote it as I did in my site. Promotion banners are available here. Spread it to your friends, colleagues and also through your blog and micro blogs.

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Just found out the time line for the next Long Term Support(LTS) version of Ubuntu. Thought it will be worth sharing.

I wasn’t blogging for a long time as I was busy with few works and MESTECH, the annual technical fest at MESCE. Due to the recent situations at college, the event was postponed indefinitely. Let those happenings be another post 🙂

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As a part of the annual technical fest of NIT Calicut – Tathva, FSUG Calicut and Geohackers are arranging an open mapping party to map the whole campus of NITC and to be made available in openstreetmap.org.

Check the wiki for more details and try to be there for the party.

We were in search for GPS enabled devices and it helped me to familairize openmoko, the mobile phone with an open source software stack. Thanks to Sreeraj and the Kriyate team for allowing me to hack it. Though the device was an older model(Neo1973), it is really interesting to hack. I’ll be blogging about the hacks I did in the moko soon.

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Its now more than 2 months, that we(me and my colleagues aka Flipperz) attended the class. More precisely, we last attended regular classes on 14th of August. On 15th evening, we left for our 5 day tour and when we were back, it was time for study leave. Theory exams were like a marathon, which took more than a month to finish, even though there were 6 subjects. After that came the DSA Lab practicals. Mine was over on 14th this month, but exams continues till 21st as we have two batches in CSE. So, as a result, almost 2 and a half months without classes, which is one of the largest gap, in my entire school/college days. Still, one more practical is left and there are chances for it to be being scheduled by the end of this month. So, the gap will increase again.

When there are regular classes, we all will be looking for ways to get a leave. Now, as far as I know, all are hoping for the classes to start soon; not because of the thrive to study, but it feels being irritated staying home, without the company of friends and the jokes and other stuffs that happens daily @ college. For me, I spent most of the time at Fastech Systems, doing this and that, playing network games, browsing net and so on.

What made me think about writing this post is the upcoming 5th semester, which we call by the pen name “S5”. Its just two months remaining to complete the portions and it makes me feel very HAPPY to think that 2 subjects have NOT yet started and there are more than 3 modules left in the rest. In this short time, we must attend two internals too…

Oh God, please have mercy on us. Please don’t make the teachers think of taking extra classes 🙁

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