The Thought Chimney

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Ranklist Generator

WARNING: Technical stuff ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

Here is the post I promised about the rank list generator I built. It is a tiny program that extracts the CGPA and SGPA of every student, saves them in a file and then sorts them according to the SGPA and CGPA and saves them in two separate files. I used Python 2.7, with “requests” library for sending and receiving data and BeautifulSoup library to parse the web page received. The hardest part in this entire project was sending data. So, I’ll only deal with that. For everything else, which was very easy, here’s the code.

The main page (http://117.211.91.61/web/Default.aspx) has a text input field. On reading the page source, we find 9 input tags, of which 5 are hidden. The names of the important hidden input statements are ToolkitScriptManager1_HiddenField, __EVENTTARGET, __EVENTARGUMENT, __VIEWSTATE, txtRegno, btnimgShow and bt...

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Narrowing Down

I said in my last post that I am pretty much confused as to what I should do, and lazy enough to not do what I finally decide upon. However I am already in my sixth semester at college, and companies will start coming for offering us jobs right from the beginning of the seventh semester, and I do not know even a bit about my subject!!

So, this semester all I am going to do is study computer science and write programs (interesting ones, hopefully). And this will reflect in this blog too. Most of the articles will probably contain technical (read boring) stuff. But there will be a cautionary warning at every tech article’s beginning, so you need not worry!!

Warning: Technical Stuff Ahead

My results for the fifth semester are out and I am one of the last twenty students in the class (and this is not because I was working on some personal project that took all my time). Our results are...

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Hello World!

A few months ago, I had made the first commit (a version 1.0) to my [first project on GitHub](https:github.com/sourya/codoo). (GitHub is like an office for programmers)1. I had known programming for 7 years and this was the first useful thing I’d created2. Then I never got around to improving it. I just got bored and moved on to other stuff.

Probably that’s the reason I’ve never done anything noteworthy. I’ve never felt commitment towards anything. I’ve started a lot of projects, built a version 1 for some and then stopped. I want to do a lot of things (play guitar well, play good basketball, learn a lot about programming and electronics, build my own motorcycle, go to space, build my own drone… Ahem! OK, that’s it), have tried doing all of them, and then stopped doing them. I just can’t decide what to do.

To deal with myself(!), I set three goals today:

  1. Write this blog post (Done...

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