New Homepage

Hey, we've got our new custom domain. Check out our new Home Page.
http://cmrise09.co.cc/

Feedback and comments will be appreciated.

Rebels : Revels : Rock : Roll

Okay, if you missed it, here are some snaps:




One question you might ask: "where was I when all these pics were taken? Huh!"
I sympathise. There there, it'll be alright, we'll have our own potty to take pics on! woowoo! get your cameras then people. And smile, most of all!

We couldn't get anything decent with the seniors, looks like all these silly people cared about
is themselves, selfish beasties with nose-rings! Bwah!

Wonderful people all the same, links to the album are in the embedded slideshow, download and ogle as you wish. But look as hard as you want, you won't find me in any of those pictures!

How exactly am I supposed to prove that I was there? Darn!

Don't be fooled by the tags, there was no booze. Just soft drinks of the CO2 pumped fattening kind.
What else did we have:
Doughnuts Yes
Cheescake Yes
Samosa Yes
Other stuff:
Lipsticky tissues (check in that big box behind the IS staffroom!)
Blurry snaps Puh-len-tee!
Snaps with people making odd facial expressions Let's just say, these are some of the passable ones!

Anything else I've left out? Leave your comments and let us know.

And most importantly, kudos to those wonderful people for making this happen: UD, Row, CheKaGoJo, Gaurav and my good friend PK from NIFT.

Wonderful people, all of them!

And yes, Dhanush and the rest of the band whose names someone else must supply. Good job guys, you really set the mood for the rest of the evening.

TESTED: JAIKU

Alright people, the testing is done, and we've finally CERTIFIED Jaiku as follows:

Not So Ideal Yet Perfectly Elegant For Those Miserly Miserly People Out There Class Networker

Trouble with Jaiku is, we don't have enough invites to go around। You see, Jaiku is still
invitation-only (we're so cool, we'll have people rushing to get their jaiku in the door!) , and each person who signs up has to wait for a bit to able to give out invites. They give them out 20 at a time and the trouble is, there's no telling when they'll stop sending out free updates to cellphones ("free" being the reason we use the service!)

Okay, what we're trying to do has been explained already.
But I'll repeat again, and tell you, we're trying to create make use of a platform that already exists to implement a broadcast system for all students in class to get information regardless of whether they're in class or not.

It works like this:

I want to put out a message to the entire class regarding the exam dates :





I've typed it out and now, I post:




People get this message on their mobile phones as a text message, on Jaiku, or on IM. All this within 5 seconds of posting.



They think they have some information about this, so what do they do:



The comment gets put up online, people get text messages with the comment. And thus, we have updates on the issue coming in as fast as people can use T9. You can also use Google Talk to send in your comments! Just use the @reply system.

Simple, right?

Just ask Chandru (his email mohan.rockstheworld (at) gmail (dot) com)

I'll put up a post with information on how to set your mobile phone up to receive messages on Jaiku. All will be revealed in time.

Thank you ChanMan. You've been a great help.

Chandru is on Jaiku.

The Unofficial CMRISE2009 page in Jaiku.

Communication: The Networked Classmate

Communication with a wide group of people becomes so difficult when you have a wide variety of ways to do it, and the intelligence and aptitude levels of the target audience varies considerably. :D

This is only expected as you can't have everybody understanding everything there is to understand. IF that was the case, then what we must ask the question: would the For Dummies(R) series have even existed? Probably not, but if everybody was expected to learn things as a dummy would, then it would probably be a better thing for the dummy books to exist.

Okay, this discussion concerns methods for communication across a wide variety of poeple with differing levels of comprehension and techno-comfort barriers. The more sophisticated ones would head on over to an IRC chatroom where all their classmates would be waiting at their keyboards, armed with up-to-date information to share with everybody else. The others would just slither over to class and wait for somebody (the class crier??) to raise their voice and disseminate information.

The objective here is to create a

redundant, efficient, low-cost, and speedy, wide-reaching

communication system to deliver and share information among the entire class.

The trouble with both approaches is that, they just don't work the way they're supposed to! Information delivered to people in class has the following features:

• Max audience reach, because most people are expected to be present in class at any given time of the day, however there are exceptions to this! (Think mass bunking)
• Whenever somebody makes a lot of noise to make his/her presence felt, people (unless they're making a lot of noise themselves) actually spend a few moments of their waking time listening to what they have to say (this is subject to variations depending on the ambient level of noise)
  
• Very few people actually dream of going up on stage to give seminars. "Not something I'd want to do everyday" sayeth the average Macha/Machi in class; so when somebody actually stands above everybody else, it is at least assumable that they have something to say

So, that's the take on the class. How do we make the communication personal?
Via the Internet? Why not? What happened to good ole' text messages? Let's use that for something more than just jokes! Let's use these to communicate and network! You see it's all about information. Let's examine some benefits these mediums offer:

• One-to-one communication, it's there, it doesn't go away (as long as you don't lose your phone, or end up breaking your machine)
  
• Intention and purpose can be made clear and concise depending on how one intends for the audience to interpret the message
• Efficient broadcasting medium: everybody gets the message and redundancy is ensured by broadcasting through multiple channels. (Chances of the Internet going down are far lesser than the chances of your mobile network going down)

If we can exploit a combination of these mediums, we'll probably end up with a far better level of communication among everybody in class.

Which is why, I'm proposing that we use Twitter (for SMS and Web), Google Groups (Web), and GMail (Web) for achieving what we want to do. We've already started using two of these services as you know, we just have to complete rolling out to twitter, and then in a few days and with very minimal expense, we'll be the first completely networked class in CMRIT. :D

I'll prepare an plan outline in the next couple of days, after the internals, and then we'll do what we have to do to get this off the ground.

Comments, questions, and ideas? Put it here, or start a thread in the group.

UPDATE: Just created a jaiku account, field tests will begin with a subset of class-student-body. Interested guinea pig cellphone users may volunteer cellphones (and that means talktime as well) and their time and patience to help us get this setup. We're trying it with a maximum of 5-10 people to see if we can actually make this work.

We'll also try it with twitter and see if that works as well. Just leave comments for this post, or reply to the "Getting Things Organized Thread" (requires you to be signed in to access) in the group to express your interest in poking around with T9 and URLs for about 20 minutes. I'll let you know when the time is right!