Weekly Newsletter 20/8/2017

[sahil shah]

Hey guys!

This week we had a session on open-source, which marked the start of our campaign to encourage and increase GSoC participation from IITB. We had quite a few past GSoC-ers who shared their experience and explained the basic road map to participate in GSoC by next year. The speakers were Kalpesh Krishna, Sumith Kulal, Arunabh Ghosh, Arpan Banerjee and Nihal Singh and you can find the slides here.

Also, the results of the Scratch Day held for Freshmen are (finally) out. This year's Scratch Day was a huge success and we had an extremely large number of finished submissions. After much deliberation, here is a list of the top five teams (in no particular order) along with links to their games:
Mohd Safwan & Aryan Lall
Pruthak Joshi & E Aakash
Yogender Singh & Arvind Manimurugan
Harsh Dolhare - Abhishek Tanpure
Sunni Kumar - Sachin Avhad

In other interesting and paranoia-inspiring news, there is a project called Sansifter which checks your processor for hidden instructions! All chip-manufacturers have some hidden processor-instructions that they do not reveal! You can read all about that here. These undocumented instructions may even contain methods to do stuff like this. HCF (or Halt and Catch Fire) will make your processor halt whatever it is doing, and catch fire or totally stop functions unless you restart it.

If you want to know which new programming language should you invest your time in or if you are curious about which programming language will stand the test of time and which will become obsolete in the near future, this article would be a fun read. (Spoiler Alert: He thinks FORTRAN will outlive all others!)

No good WnCC newsletter would be complete without a couple of tech memes!

Before we sign off, all those who have signed up for WnCC t-shirts, can collect them from:

Kumar Ashutosh H7/51 8291339274
Yashvardhan Didwania H7/51 7021482388
Tushar Dhawal H7/52 8087068314

Also, if you have not paid yet, bring the money along with you.

Cheers,

WnCC IITB.