Posts Tagged quark

Three Festivals

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on March 8, 2010

Spree 2010 just got over. Truly pure sport. Massive participation (Noida? Chennai? Sri Nagar? We had them all), and some great matches. People even commented about the awesome grounds we have. All we need now are some flood lights on the cricket ground (built with help from BCCI) and the football field (built with help from the Salgaocar Sports Club). We had international players coming in for exhibit matches in various games/sports. And after a hectic day, something to relax.

And this was not the case with just Spree. We’ve had amazing fests this year: Waves (the cultural fest), Quark (the technical fest) and now, Spree (the sports fest).

Rewind to last year: The fests were okay okay. Nothing spectacular. One of them was particular bad. The 2007 batch has successfully pulled these fests to new heights. With a total worth of almost 1 Crore rupees, these fests have set a new benchmark for the entire BITS-Pilani university network.

I’ll be here to witness each of these fests for one last time in the next academic year. Let see what the 2008 batch does with what we’ve given them.

college, fests, Observations, quark, Spree, waves

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Quark 2010 in pictures

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on March 1, 2010

Finally I get some time to upload pictures. Here are nine pictures that describe the key events that took place at Quark 2010. If you want, you can read up about the Robotics events at Quark 2010 and a post Quark 2010 overview.

Open Showcase

King of the Ring Eliminations

King of the Ring Finals

3 Ball Pool

Airshow [real fighter jets]

Mission Salvation

TEDxBITSGoa

Fin

Were you here at Quark 2010? Let me hear how it went for you!

PS: Permission was taken from the copyright holders of these pictures.

PPS: Happy holi!

events, pictures, quark, tedxbitsgoa

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RobotiQ at Quark 2010

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on January 19, 2010

Quark 2010 is BITS Pilani’s Innovation Festival with competitions spanning technically inclined challenges, the humanities and the sciences as well. And robotics is an integral part for engineering perfection, right from the undergrad level.

Quark this year has 3 robotics events. Each one covering a different aspect of robotics, engineering, electronics and computer algorithms. And with almost a fortnight to go, it is the right time to start building your bots!

King of the Ring

Ever watched Robowars on television? Loved those weapons and all that agility? This event combines that with the world famous Sumo bot event. Create a manually controlled robot with weapons. Chainsaw? Flamethrowers (with deo maybe)? Hammers? You name it! But you cannot damage the other person’s wires. Just get it out of the arena somehow.

Mission Salvation

Here’s the thing: make a micromouse. That is, create an autonomous robot that can traverse a maze and reach its center in as little time as possible. Oh, and when you reach the center, you’ll save the only surviving humans… thus protecting the entire human race from extincion!

3 Ball Pool

Create a pool playing bot. Not in the literal sense. But, a bot that places colored blocks in the correct pocket using an overhead camera. And you get a lot of bonus points if you can “pot the balls” in the sequence we give you on the spot! Enjoy!

If you relish in technical challenges that combine a lot of different branches of engineering, go ahead and register right now. Oh, and I forgot to mention… prizes worth Rs. 60,000 to be won! You can get detailed event descriptions and rules over here: http://bits-quark.org/robotiq

Need help? Contact me or drop a comment over here… I’ll get back to you as soon as possible

If your college hasn’t received an invitation from us, please contact:

Hanu Prateek
Quark Coordinator
Department of Publicity and Public Relations
Mobile: +91 98238 14138
Email: hanuprateek@bits-quark.org

Update: I’ve uploaded pictures of Quark 2010.

challenge, quark, robotics, Technical

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My first GWT WebApp

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog, Work on January 8, 2010

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with the Google Web Toolkit v2.0.0. And I just completed my first GWT application today

An application for Contrive (an event for Quark ’10) had to be made. There were many options, Sliverlight, Flash, Java. I decided to go the JavaScript + HTML route. Quite a bizzare choice for an application so complex. But the GWT made life easy.

I’m sure I would have torn apart my hair if GWT hadn’t been developed. It needs to check if the connection to the server is established or not. Then it needs to continuously update according to the moves by other players. And it needs to make sure questions are answered in the given time limit. And all these things need to happen on as many browsers as possible.

I’ve got this application working on almost all major browsers without any glitch (except IE ). It also works on some older browsers with slight graceful degradations in the UI.

The event begins on 15th January… and I’m taking the application through intensive tests, trying to figure out exactly at what load the server fails. We need to get around 600 teams through the eliminations as quickly as possible. That is a HUGE amount of load. And we need to make sure that the thing actually works. But I’m guessing the software can easily handle hundreds of people simultaneously.

Oh, and go register for Contrive right now It’s a completely online event, and you just might win some money

contrive, Google, gwt, quark, webapp

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