Finally I am writing another post, exactly a month after my previous post!

Well, I had been pretty busy with finishing my internship project and on weekends I was hardly in my room; so didn’t find much time to post something here.
But now that I am here for only a couple of more days; I wanted to recollect my sweet memories of this excitingly wonderful summer before I leave. (Of course I am done with my project, so I have all the time in the world now.)

2 months and 10 days! Time passed by so very quickly.. At the end of my intern I just wished I had some more time in Braunschweig. I can’t specifically think of what I would do, if I had some more days.. But I would just love to be there. I always felt like I couldn’t get enough of that place. And the people, they are so very helpful! I’d never seen so friendly and helpful people.

A couple of weeks ago, I came to know about Jekyll and Octopress and to the new hackish way to blog. Blogging just got more interesting for me as it’s like hacking away my own custom-tailored blogging engine. Well, I’ve written a full post about it in case you want to read how much I loved the new blogging platform.

I am relatively new to Ruby and thus it’s gems. So I was playing around with it to hack my Jekyll powered blog. Something that I found missing, and that nobody had designed yet was the feature to use smileys. Obviously you can always insert smiley faces manually, but of course that won’t leave you smiling at the end of a long, otherwise interesting and enjoyable post.
Now that I have my blog powered by Markdown, why not do something similar for smileys as well? So, basically I wanted something like phpBB has on the forums, something that magically converts your text emoticons to image smileys. And so, I sat down to write my own Jekyll plugin: smilify which converts the text smileys as soon as you rake generate your blog
I tried to make smilify as flexible as I could, give it a go and let me know

About a week ago, I came across a GitHub:Gist on a really interesting polyglot written by grever. It was titled, “PHP and Perl and Python/Ruby polyglot”. Except PHP, the other 3 languages had almost similar commenting and syntax style, and the polyglot well exploited them
And then I tried adding C and C++ to it as well, and succeeded with some effort You can check my fork.
And then grever followed my style of addition and just slightly changed my version of the polyglot to make room for Objective-C as well, in his fork.

This hyperglot (in 7 languages) looks quite readable till now.
There is a hyperglot in 16 different languages, including Brainfuck!! And the code, as you can imagine; looks horrifying. You can find it @ GitHub:mauke/poly.poly

Already a fan of GitHub, I was ecstatic to know that the repo giant now also allows users to host content at GitHub:Pages. No more need for a hosting solution, no more search for a domain name, no more losing data because of unsaved backups, best of all .. no more crappy WYSIWYG editors, bye-bye HTML, Markdown rocks!

I just love my domain name http://saswatpadhi.github.com. They even allow you to use custom domain names for your page, but I am good with this

The whole blog is a repository, so it’s hosted on GitHub, like any other project. Every change that I want to see on my blog is a commit to repository, so GitHub always has a backup of the previous state of my blog. So, I am always free to branch, try (and break ) things; and then finalise them after tweaking to my heart’s content!