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Thinking about developing an opensource P2P social network

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It has been a while since I made a blog post. I have been occupied by my academic work and I found using my past time on non-blogging related activities more rewarding. However, since it is summer break now, and I have mostly run out of things to do, I decided to get back to being creative and work on some project. Recently, I have been floating an idea about creating a social network that practically eliminates the requirement to have servers and databses. From a high-level, the idea is that users can host their profile on their phones and their connections can query data about the profile, send messages, form groups, and make wall post which can be viewed by anyone who is connected to the profile. I have seen a research paper summarising quite a few projects that has attempted to create something similar. However, I observed that these would at least have a server for authenticate a user; to tell confirm if the user is who he says he is. I believe this can be eliminated by allowing u
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Went into the University for the first time

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I went into the university for the first time today. It is less than a kilometer from the apartment. I had to go there to finalize certain documents regarding my accomodation. I arrived at the university during the lunch time and hence I had to wait for a couple of hours for the office staffs to return. During the time, I roamed around the campus. The place is aesthetically pleasing, however, it is pretty small, especially since where I did my bachelor's, IIT Patna, had a campus spread across over 500 acres. I also went to the nearby Lidl to get a few frozen pizzas. I had that for lunch, evening snack and dinner. I had thought about cooking something for dinner, but I felt a bit lazy to do the same. However, I did modify the last frozen pizza by adding some mushrooms, pizza sauce and pepper. I think this could be a good trick moving forward - buy a few frozen pizzas and chopped vegetables from Lidl and fuse them. I think this would make the pizzas a bit more healthier and the effor
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First impression of Lugano - Mindblowing

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I started off from Zurich at around 7.30 in the morning. There was a direct train to Lugano from Zurich HB. I vaguely remember my internet searches on the cost to travel from Zurich to Lugano via train to be about 30 CHF, but in reality, taking the ticket from the station, it costed me double of that. I don't know if the tickets have surge prices or something. Anyway, the journey was nice as I was able to see some beautiful places along the way and I think I had a chance to go through Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is the longest tunnel in the world. Getting down at Lugano station and looking out, I saw one of the most beatiful scene that I have ever seen. I am not sure if I could describe that properly in words, nor do I think the following photograph that I took justifies how it looked to me in person. I had to walk down a lot of stairs from here with the heavy bags that I had, only to realize that I made a wrong turn at some point. I was informed that instead of going back up, it w
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First stop - Zurich!

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I started my journey last night at around 11 PM IST from India and reached Zurich at around 2 PM CET today. The journey in itself was a bit hectic as I have been carrying four different bags that weight abotu 43 kilograms in total. However, I find Doha and Zurich airports to be nice. Furthermore, I like the concept of the 24 hour pass that one could use to travel anywhere withtin the city via any mode of public transportation - trains, busses, boats! Tonight, I am staying at Aswin's place tonight. Aswin was my Junior at IIT Patna and he is doing his master's at ETH now. I shall be going to Lugano tomorrow as I wouldn't be able to collect the keys to my apartment if I reach in the night. I have also contact Anupam, my batchmate from IIT Patna, who is working at Google Zurich office. We may go out a bit to explore the city.
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Preparing my journey to Switzerland

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My master's program in Computational Science at Università della Svizzera italiana is scheduled to start in the third week of September. I have already scheduled my flights and I shall be arriving in Zurich on the 15th. Since my last day at MathWorks is done, the only task that I have left to do is preparing for the journey: packing, getting the papers in order, purchasing the currency, etc. I have been informed that Switzerland is an expensive country to live in. Since I am planning on living mostly on what I have saved in the past couple of years, I have been looking into estimating the approximate living expenses that I would encounter. For starters, I have been trying to find the sweet spot between good nutrition, less expensive and easy to cook food. I was informed that there is a Lidl supermarket less than a kilometer from the university and it offers grocery products for a cheap price. I found Lidl Switzerland's website to have an understanding of the price for different
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Last day at MathWorks

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Yesterday was my last day at MathWorks. After working there for about three years and three months, I decided to leave the company to pursue my masters program that is scheduled to start in the third week of this month. Before leaving, I had a chance to catch up with people that I have interacted with in the past. Many wished me all the best for my future endeavour. Meera and Sreeranj put up a Kudoboard and invited people to write in it. As Meera suggested, I could work on making HexHoot to make it a good tool to visualize 3D agent based simulations, which she could use to showcase stuffs in the aerospace domain.
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Yet another impulsive domain purchase - HexHoot.com

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I was doodling on my sticky notes, and I came up with a few hexagons that looked like an owl. I found it quite amusing for myself and decided to go to a domain registrar and search for 'hexowl'. I found that the domain was already taken. I did a few more searches and I eventually found that 'hexhoot.com' was available. I showed my drawing to my sister and I explained it to her, and she told me to buy the domain. I don't know what I am going to do with this just yet, but let me hold it for a while to see what I could do with it. I have hosted it on Blogger itself. I find that the page works as in the screenshot while opening from a desktop, while a default blogger template gets loaded while opening it up from a phone. That is interesting. I think I need to get back at that. Originally, I created the logo using an image editor, exported into PNG. Just now, I re-created the same to create an SVG. I am sure that SVGs can be scaled to any dimension while having a very sm
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A look into Hire the Author

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Although I have never met Jeevan Thomas Koshy in person, I had befriended his elder brother, Kiran Mathew Koshy, during my college years. Kiran was in the final year of his bachelor's program while I joined for my first year and we lived on the same floor of the same hostel building. Recently, I came to know that Jeevan had started working on a project on his own named Hire the Author , and I had a chance to take a look into it, as well as, have a conversation with him. His idea is that there may be many people online who would want to be hired, and there are people who want to hire them based on the content that they produced. Initially, I thought the project was just another redundant tool that emails, online forums, and phones have already solved. However, he gave me one interesting example that made me love what he has done. The example that he gave me was a case where someone saw an answer on StackOverflow and wants more help from the author of the answer, but the author wants
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Regarding a Covid-19 related project that I worked on a few months ago

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A little over a year ago, I had written a blog post in this blog titled " COVID-19 Disease Spreading Simulation ". That was something that I worked on in a very short time frame. A few months after that, during a conversation with an old professor of mine, Dr. Jimson Mathew, we discussed modifying it further to create something really interesting. We started working on creating "A Framework for COVID-19 Cure or Vaccine Distribution Modeling, Analysis and Decision Making" in October 2020 and finished creating it and drafting a research paper about it in the first week of November 2020. We had submitted this to the Journal of Simulation, but the reviewers rejected the paper citing more information recently. Of course, we will be editing the paper and re-submitting it; however, I thought it would be better if I uploaded the project in the public domain so that anyone who would like to use it can do the same without having to wait. I have made this available on GitHub.
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Bought a new domain - chickfort.com

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A couple of days ago, I bought a domain named 'chickfort.com'. I have been wanting to own a '.com' domain for quite a while now, and I didn't want to buy one from a reseller. Every now and then, I used to go to one of the domain registrants and search for interesting names that would come into my mind. This has been going on for quite a while, and I finally found a domain name that is short enough and is a combination of two simple English words. The aforementioned is not the main reason why I chose to buy this domain. The words 'chick' and 'fort' coupled together could be loosely translated into the endonym of my hometown, Kozhikode. Additionally, I believe that the domain name could be potentially used for a wide-variety of purposes. The interesting thing is that, I have been receive calls from a few software and web development companies after I made this purchase. I wonder if the domain registrar is secretly sending the data to the marketing team
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