Yahoo Hack Day @ Bangalore

Hey folks,

Last weekend, I was at the Taj Residency. Now before you jump to any conclusions (as my PG room mate did :P ) , it was the Open Hack, Bangalore 2010, organized by Yahoo. It was series of tech-talks on Yahoo tools on YDN, followed by a 24 hour over-nite, hack development contest. For those who might be confused by the overloaded term "hack", it is in simple terms any application which is build on something, to add a feature or make it better and simpler to be used.

We saw a lot of new applications and ideas coming up, along with a sleepless virtual two day, 1 night stay at Taj Residency's Vijaynagar and Trinity Hall. Yours truly also tried a hand at developing a hack over PayPal API which gives you real time updates in your mail-box over changing Forex rates. Well anyone wants to keep a check over the foreign exchange rates and get a notification over the same in his mail-box can mail me and we can try and work something out.

Over all it was a great experience, with real good info on the Yahoo tools like YAP, YQL and YUI, and I hope to work on some of them soon. Would keep you'll updated though.

Ok, for those who are looking for the solution of the last week's puzzle, I am sure it would have been a good experience and although till now we dont have a concrete proof, what we do have is a strong and almost logically convincing solution from Kapil Garg. As Kapil puts in, if Alladin just moves diagonally opposite to the point where Roger is heading, Alladin would end up leaving the circle. People who love calculus may try writing some differential equations which may help them get a concrete proof. Its not hard to visualise that Alladin would follow a out-spreading spiral-kind path from the centre of the circle while Roger would keep revolving through the circumference in one direction. This reminds me of a similar problem from previous IIT-JEE papers with three people at the three ends of equilateral triangle, start moving towards each other continuously, where would they eventually meet.

For this post, I don't have a puzzle yet but I am sure you would be interested in Yahoo tools if you go on YDN. For a lead, I would ask you to visit YQL and see what all data you can access. It really seemed magical to me that YQL includes almost everything on the earth and web in the YQL and helps you extract info from it. Also, you can think of a hack that you would have made had you been here in Bangalore at the Open Hack. Do share your ideas with us, and who knows you may end up be on the stage with Yahoo Unique Hack prizes (they had almost 7 categories of prizes :) ).

Meanwhile, i would work on ideas/puzzles and would try keeping you a brain-knacker soon.

Cheers , (Yahoo??)

Vivek

nitkkr.vivek@gmail.com