The College Diaries

College started as usual in mid of July every one was excited and looking forward to meet their classmates and to experience the feeling of being seniors in the college (yeah that’s what everyone dreams of when they are in first year of Engineering). Met all my classmates who were gathered in the corridor greeting them and later enjoying taking swipe at few of them;)

In the pre lunch lectures there were rumors that the First Project Presentations were to be held on following Saturday and during the lunch break it was confirmed that the first presentation was indeed on coming Saturday. Tuesday and Saturday were supposed to be the project work days for us.

Me with 3 other project mates decided on giving the first presentation on ACCESS CONTROL WITH SMART CARDS (a Friend’s suggestion) wherein we would have to keep track of student attendance and privileges on lab systems and their attendance in lectures through smart card (we even had an idea of using existing college id card’s bar-code and were open to the idea of using same id cards instead of Smart cards).

We presented the project synopsis and guess what? Project got rejected, reason being that a similar RFID based project had been selected. With the first presentation over we had realized that if we could convince HOD our project was almost sure to be approved during the presentation. We went to HOD with few projects to ask for his views on them. But the HOD gave us a website. The website that was given to us was “EKlaavya “.

We went through the website found out that it gives a description about what the project is about what is needs to be done and who has done that project (there are no project source code present let me clear that 😛 ).

The projects that were present were either winner or runners up at some competition. While going thru the website found a project with name something like “VOICE ENABLED LINUX”, Now that sounds interesting let’s have a look at it, at the time none of four of us knew Linux, so thought of doing the same project for Windows name “VOICE ENABLED WINDOWS” .

The Project required us to first do speech recognition and based on that commands that were recognized operate the Windows by sending keyboard key codes to the operating system. After two presentations on the project it finally got approved (we were happy that we had finally got our project approved but we knew we had dug our own grave).

THE CALL FROM THE SAVIOUR

Like any other day we were about to attend our first post lunch lecture until HOD knocked the door and asked our group to meet him in his cabin. All four or us with no clue why we were being called in the cabin (I was thinking may be because we arrived half a day late on our last project day).
So we enter his cabin and he says

“I had got a call from this company and they have selected you all for their project , what would you like to do?”.

We came out of cabin had a talk and finally were happy that we had another option and were sure that it would be much easier that recognizing speech. We replied to HOD we would take the project and were asked to visit the company the next day. The external guide was a project Lead with 11 years experience.
So the project description was given as

“You will have to get all the HTTP packets that are passed through the network on a system get the URL from that packet and match the URL with the URLs present in database and you will have to use C for coding and Linux operating system”

(remember we had converted a Linux based project to a windows? ).Now that description alone was enough to make us dizzy.we had just started 7 semester had no idea of networks & packets and few questions like

“how do we get a packets in the application?”,

“can we even connect C with a database?”

started coming up in mind.

So rather than taking a risk with speech recognition and later having trouble during the final demonstration (it usually happens when your project is based on hardware) we accepted the project that was given to us.

The name of the project was “URL FILTERING AND BLACKLISTING”. It was already end of August and as per schedule we had to give Synopsis and SRS by September which was done within 2 weeks after accepting the project. The Design phase for the project was done, a midterm project report was made.

GETTING ON WITH THE BUSINESS PART

After completion of the Semester exams we decided to start early with the coding part.We studied the library function but we didn’t have a clue as to which function from the library will precede other. Found an example on an alternative official page for the library showing the structure of the program that was required. We managed to code but it didn’t give expected results.

Google came to our rescue and finally got the first packet into the application.Now we had to do a desktop application in java from where administrator could add and delete URLs from the MySQL database, we also required to understand how to connect a MySQL database to C program.

By the end of January 2011 three modules of (fetching packets, comparing URL with URLs from database and identifying if particular word is present in the URL if so entering the URL into the database) our project had been completed .With start of college the project took a backseat with only last module remaining.

With the submission of project nearing, the work on last module was on going .HOD who was not present for any of our reviews of project attended our review and asked to add some more features at a time when we were about to complete the project. The features were added within a week and the project as finally completed before end of March 2011.

Note: the article does not depict exact occurrences of event, and the dialogues used are written on what the writer could remember so it may not be true 😛