The Developer’s Desktop

I’ve released the last of my planned Chrome Extensions today (I had dubbed the project The Chrome Swan). It is called The Developer’s Desktop or Devdesk, for short. It is a productivity extension built for designers, developers, programmers and geeks.

The extension is finally available on the Google Chrome App Store. You can find it here: Developer’s Desktop.

What the extension essentially does is bring you the latest news and the best webcomics to your Chrome homepage. This way, every time you open a new tab, you will be treated to one of Randall Munroe’s best xkcd comics as well as the hottest updates from Hacker News. Also, there are links to other websites such as Mashable, The Verge, Slashdot and Tech Crunch.

In addition to keeping you up to date with the geek world and providing you sufficient dosages of geek puns and romance, the extension also has multiple utilities built into it. It features a to-do list that allows you to add, check off and delete tasks throughout the course of the day. The search bar lets you search the open sourced engine, DuckDuckGo. This way, you can search for something without falling prey to Google’s Tracking mechanism.
The QOTD feature brings you an inspiring quote every day to offer you a fresh perspective of life.

The app also brings you a list of your most visited sites upon request. This ensures that you do not miss out on the latest updates from your favorite sites. There is a Bookmarks link too which brings you a list of your most recent bookmarks.

Finally, Developer’s Desktop also acts as repository of links for some of the most useful websites and apps on the Internet. These links are categorized based on their utilities so you’ll know where to go for a particular problem or task.

This project, like the previous two, is open sourced. In addition to accepting pull requests involving code, I am also open to any kind of design revamp suggested to me.
You can find out more about this in the documentation here: Devdesk Documentation

Introducing Webchromic

 

Back in December 2014, I was doing an online course titled ‘Introduction to Computer Science’ offered by Harvard on the edX platform and taught by Professor David Malan. I remember that in one segment, where he was teaching elementary concepts of Linux, he showed us a comic that humorously illustrated what the command sudo did.

This entire incident may seem extremely trivial but it introduced me to xkcd and the world of webcomics. And since then, I’ve been hooked. It has become routine to start off my day by visiting my favorite sites to check if there are any new comics posted. And this got me thinking. Why couldn’t there be an extension that brought me all the comics I ever wanted to read to my homepage?

I tried searching for something similar on the Web Store first. I couldn’t find anything even remotely similar to what I had in mind. So, I went ahead and built one. The result was Webchromic.

Webchromic is a lightweight Google Chrome Extension that brings the best of the webcomic world to your Chrome homepage. Every time you open a new tab, the extension randomly loads the latest comic from its list of parsed sites. This list currently includes the likes of xkcd, Sarah’s Scribbles, SMBC, Pearls before Swine, Cyanide and Happiness among many others.

I published the extension today and made it public. It is available here: Webchromic- Google Chrome Store.

I understand that my taste of comics may differ widely from other people. As a result, I have open sourced the entire code on Github (You can find it here: Webchromic- Rounak Banik). I’ve also included explicit instructions in the documentation that would allow even the uninitiated to modify the extension and add their own favorite comics.

That said, if there is a comic that you’d like me to add to the official app, please feel free to ping me here or send me a mail to rounakbanik@gmail.com. Reports of any bug found and suggestions for new features are always welcome. I hope at least some of you here find utility installing and using this app.

Here are a few more screenshots of the app:

Absurdism and Existentialism

 

Recently, I have been reading books that tackle the subject of absurdism and existentialism. The first piece of work to introduce me to the subject was Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I subsequently followed this up with his essays titled The Myth of Sisyphus. It would be foolish and vain of me to proclaim that I completely understand this school of thought, I do not, but nevertheless from the little I could grasp from its essence, I don’t think it is a school of thought I’d identify myself with.

Absurdism is the state of apparent paradox that humans live in. We strive to seek inner meaning and reason out of our lives in a world which is unjustifiable. So, how is it that we tackle this conflict? Do we commit suicide as our lives ultimately amount to nothing? Or is there a way? According to Camus, there is. He suggests that inner peace can be achieved by accepting the absurd world as is. Acceptance will lead to happiness. It will erase every kind of expectation and meaning we try to derive from our lives.

As I’d stated in a previous post on Buddhism (Camus philosophy aligns very closely to that stated in The Dhammapada), I believe that hope is an incredibly important element which is crucial to human survival. This is in direct conflict to Camus’ school of thought. Yes, it might be true that there is no meaning to our lives. We are infinitesimally small, insignificant beings in an extremely vast Universe. But it is futile to delve deep into our damned condition. Maybe, we ought to deceive ourselves. We ought to lie to ourselves, convince ourselves of a meaning. For satisfactory human existence, there must be hope. And I think the Universe can forgive us for forsaking Her truths in favor of possessing hope.

Franz Kafka’s stories also contain elements of absurdism (In fact, in the appendix of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus analyzes absurdity in the works of Kafka. He concludes saying that although Kafka’s description of the absurd condition is near perfect, he fails as an absurd writer as he retains a glimmer of hope). The two works I’ve read of his, The Metamorphosis and The Trial are often cited as his best works. To be very honest, the books didn’t strike me as exceptional pieces of writing. Maybe what it tried to convey went over my head. In both his works, the protagonists are faced with bizarre, surreal predicaments. One gets turned into a giant insect, the other gets convicted for no reason at all. Both meet a grisly end. Through his works, I think he tries to draw a parallel between the blatant absurdity his characters face and the disguised one in which we live in. But like I said, I didn’t like the books very much. It’s highly unlikely I’ll return to him again.

My main criticism and problem with Camus’ philosophy is explored brilliantly by Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, probably the best Batman comic of all time. It was purely by chance that I picked up this graphic novel and found it to be aligning with the subject of the books I was dealing myself with. In the novel, Joker tries to drive Gordon insane to prove a point: that one bad day is enough to drive a person to madness. He fails and this is where the comic’s primary message comes out. Both Bruce Wayne and Joker had a bad day in their lives. Both lost their dear ones and for a time, their lives lost meaning. They had pushed cruelly into the world of absurdism. One chose to carve meaning out of it and become a symbol of hope; the other succumbed and became the champion of anarchy and psychopathy. That’s probably the only difference between The Dark Knight and the Clown Prince of Crime: A belief in good. A hope for a better world.

 

Of Science and Comic Books

 

Recently, I was reading through Randall Munroe’s works, namely xkcd volume 0 and What If… Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Both books strongly reminded me of the Horrible Science series by Nick Arnold, a series that formed more than half of my reading shelf in middle school.

Some of the absurd questions covered by Munroe in his book required a basic understanding of complex scientific principles. Yet when he explained them using his signature xkcd style stick figures, reading and understanding the material was a breeze. The same can be said for Nick Arnold. Some of the Horrible Science titles I’ve read introduced me to concepts that are usually taught in college level introductory courses. For example, I read about the Stanley Milgram experiments, a staple of every Social Psychology Introductory Course, in a book called Explosive Experiments when I was in sixth. And I still vividly remember understanding the concept of conformism (though Arnold didn’t specifically use the term).

Horrible Science inspired me so much that I wrote a title of my own. Back in seventh, I had converted my entire Science textbook into a Horrible Science style comic book. It was the beginning of my cartooning. And although I don’t draw too many cartoons these days, I’m sure the nostalgia induced by What If will induce me to draw a few strips.

I have always been a fan of conveying complex ideas through cartoons. How amazing would it be if all our textbooks were designed this way. I believe interest in the sciences would then increase exponentially. It is probably because of the element of humor and the application of intuition that makes them so appealing. Even in complex branches such as engineering, understanding can be more complete if we relied on scientific intuition rather than abstract mathematical models. It is the dominance of differential equations and Fourier transforms in my subjects that make me hate the branch so much. Maybe if it was more practical and less mathematically heavy, I would have learned to love it more.