Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Another Placements party
Vamsi Krishna's at Chutneys this time. Not saying much except that the Chutneys guys ran out of their Rasmalai once we started... And we rightly put it as, we came, they say, and we finished it all.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Successfully placed...
Ok its time to write about my job offer. I have been offered a job at David Sarnoff Research Center or in short Sarnoff, Bangalore. Which is surely one of the best jobs in my college's campus placements this year, not only because of the Company's Name and the work but also in terms of their pay package ;-)
Okay I understand ppl may not know what Sarnoff is. So I have almost got accustomed to tell ppl some facts about the company
The company in all took 4 ppl from the college others are Ranjith, Manikandan, and Natraj.
Okay I understand ppl may not know what Sarnoff is. So I have almost got accustomed to tell ppl some facts about the company
- Formerly known as RCA(Radio Corporation of America).
- Invented the Digital Telivision and HDTV
- Invented the LCD
- Plays important role in various standards, like MPEG2, MPEG4 etc.
- Major Role in development of CMOS technology
- Many more things which I wonder when I read the book given by them to us :)
The company in all took 4 ppl from the college others are Ranjith, Manikandan, and Natraj.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Matrix XP Funny film Must see
Wonderful parody movie made by fans, the last scene specially make you ROFL, Just watch it download from it here
http://www.matrix-xp.com/index2.php?page=downloads&lang=eng
Tag Posting (tagged by Rocky)
Lifted from Paresh's blog, with changes to suit my choices. Shetty tells me what it means so let me tag some more ppl.
Seven Things I want to do in my life
- Earn fame (being Great and therefor famous :))
- Earn sufficient money to be content
- Enjoy as many places in the world as possible
- Give back to society, places etc and make a difference!
- Have a great library (yes both technical and literature books)
- Learn more and more always (specially mathematics and programming better)
- Give the ppl their best time when they are around me
Seven Things I can do
- Yes all the above (except the seventh one may be)
Seven Things I am currently doing (trying to do)
- My Master's degree at IIIT
- Learning Guitar
- Learning French
- Learning Japenese (little bit)
- Blogging and advising the world:)
- browsing, chatting, and searching for old friends & new ones :)
- ...
Seven Things I say the most
- The idea is (Realized it in our last LUG meet ;))
- Its okay (changed to c'est ok! (in french))
- abey yaar
- ...
- ...
Seven Things I can’t do
- Appreciate someone untruly
- Watch insane voilence movies :)
- Stop appreciating beautiful things specially gadgets
- Being critical about hyped things and ppl
- Waste time discussing about some one's failure or despair
- ...
Seven Things that attract me to the opposite sex
- Geekyness (I would Love the You have got mail kind of girls :))
- Straight forwardness
- Dimples
- Sexy hair style (Can't define it more acurately)
- Smile
- Beautiful eyes
- Executive clothing (if that suits on her:))
Seven Celebrity Crushes (In no order :))
- Julia Roberts
- Elisha Cuthbert
- Preity Zinta
- Aishwarya
- Sonali Bendre
- Jeniffer Aniston
- Cameroon Diaz
- Abhishek Dixit
- Ajay Bedi
- Arvind Tiwary
- Sachin Rawat
- Arjun Pandit
- Nirnimesh & Ranjeeth (I hope u continue this tagging)
- Anubhav Agrawal and Vinod Gupta
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Motorola missing the Opportunity?
It has been almost 6 months since I bought Motorola A768i. Great phone it is, I must say. I also have strong respect for the company which delivered such a great phone, namely Motorola (and the ones that have strong components inside, namely MontoVista Linux and QT for Qtopia). They have really impressed me with the existing feature on the phone and some of the ways in which the device work very well(closing the flip pauses the video being played, but keep the audio file play on, isn't it cool ?) but there is something Motorola has been very bad at: promoting the PDA as a programmable device.
When I bought the Linux PDA, I did think that I would at sometime or other port some apps to the phone, and thought by the time I want to do it tools would come through, sadly they have not. Motorola hasn't published a single document about how the phone can be programmed. Okay there are ways to get Java Programs to run on the PDA but thats not sufficient/optimal.
The lack of good softwares for my PDA can only be blamed on Motorola, I donot see any possibility of adding any QT based app or porting any Linux game to my phone. Wouldn't the phone be more usable if we could just port some games like Soltaire or Same Gnome or Gnu Chess (Nir u there? ;)) or some app to upload our photos to some server like flickr.com directly?
Given the GUI is in Qtopia (QT for embedded) it surprizes me why it should be difficult to port some simple programs to the phone. I have earlier worked on a Symbian Series 60 phone (3660) for my camera phone based mosaicing project and have really appreciated the concept of programmability of a cellphone, which is what Nokia has done on its websites like http://forum.nokia.com by providing some documentation for getting started, or for knowing about the system architecture, or some sample code etc.
Now when Nokia eyes PDA on Linux, I really hope to have some good programming IDE for that. The concept is quite simple (at least to speak about :)).
1) You need to call GCC with the architecture specific options,
2) test/debug the code on a software simulator for that architecture and
3) have ways to just send the binary across the wire to the actual device.
Nokia has already done it providing some great Nokia SDK on Windows (Linux version is still not available), which plugs quite well with Borland C++ BuilderX for which I had to use a trial version.
I heard a GTK based engine called is already available for coding applications on Nokia's 770 Table. Anybody has any idea what can be done for developing Qtopia based apps for Motorola A768i phone ?
When I bought the Linux PDA, I did think that I would at sometime or other port some apps to the phone, and thought by the time I want to do it tools would come through, sadly they have not. Motorola hasn't published a single document about how the phone can be programmed. Okay there are ways to get Java Programs to run on the PDA but thats not sufficient/optimal.
The lack of good softwares for my PDA can only be blamed on Motorola, I donot see any possibility of adding any QT based app or porting any Linux game to my phone. Wouldn't the phone be more usable if we could just port some games like Soltaire or Same Gnome or Gnu Chess (Nir u there? ;)) or some app to upload our photos to some server like flickr.com directly?
Given the GUI is in Qtopia (QT for embedded) it surprizes me why it should be difficult to port some simple programs to the phone. I have earlier worked on a Symbian Series 60 phone (3660) for my camera phone based mosaicing project and have really appreciated the concept of programmability of a cellphone, which is what Nokia has done on its websites like http://forum.nokia.com by providing some documentation for getting started, or for knowing about the system architecture, or some sample code etc.
Now when Nokia eyes PDA on Linux, I really hope to have some good programming IDE for that. The concept is quite simple (at least to speak about :)).
1) You need to call GCC with the architecture specific options,
2) test/debug the code on a software simulator for that architecture and
3) have ways to just send the binary across the wire to the actual device.
Nokia has already done it providing some great Nokia SDK on Windows (Linux version is still not available), which plugs quite well with Borland C++ BuilderX for which I had to use a trial version.
I heard a GTK based engine called is already available for coding applications on Nokia's 770 Table. Anybody has any idea what can be done for developing Qtopia based apps for Motorola A768i phone ?
Still bad at reading mails?
I hate to spam the students mailing list, so here I express my frustation. I hope the blogroll is visited by enuf number of ppl to convey the mesg.
Well I wrote a mail to a group saying something like
Is it not very clear what is to be done? Or do the ppl expect me to reply each and every query mail for them? or probably I have to figure out how to write more clearly.
Finally here is the summary "If you'r interested in attending this course in current semester, please come and signup the paper on my desk in CVIT (ask someone where I sit, if I am not here)."
Well I wrote a mail to a group saying something like
> The Dean has asked me to collect the name of students (with theirAnd now I get replies like: "where can I meet you to sign the sheet", "Please tell me where and whom to pay the fees", "Please tell me where to come and sign", "please tell me blah blah".
signatures) who would be willing to take the course in the current
semester.
The course students will need to pay
(i) Advance amount of Rs 150/- per head
(ii) Per month fees upto 100/- per head.
The institute is paying some part of the fees too. The fees paid
by students will probably go in to the cost of material.
> if you are interested and ready to pay the required fees, please
signup on the paper which is available with me (address below in sign). I
will not be collecting any fees now.
--
Vardhman
(My Address)
Is it not very clear what is to be done? Or do the ppl expect me to reply each and every query mail for them? or probably I have to figure out how to write more clearly.
Finally here is the summary "If you'r interested in attending this course in current semester, please come and signup the paper on my desk in CVIT (ask someone where I sit, if I am not here)."
Friday, December 16, 2005
Une Visit à le Google Hyderabad office
I was told by someone that Google Hyderabad office shows their innovativeness from the reception itself. It indeed did. They don't have the normal office signup. They do it digitally, you are given a keyboard and a display LCD you type in your details, and signup on a sign-pad. A print comes out and then they paste it on your shirt as your id.
On the reception itself you have those Colored Balloons and Balls (those in symbol of Google labs). This doesn't stop here. There is more, they have a screen in which there is a globe rotating and some facts etc appearing at the bottom. Somethings like each light in the map mean a google search, and each language is indicated by a different colored light. Blue for French, Red for english etc. One other display shows you some keywords which I guess was the some recently hit search query (but it should be hard to list all isn't it?)
When you get in you can see something like other corporate office until you reach the place where there are lots of choclates, biscuits etc to pick up from. The cafeteria is too good in itself, the lunch we had was good too :), Now I understand when they stress so much on the food part of in their offers (Pre Placement talk).
The next interesting thing was the leisure room where you can see ppl playing guitar, a synthosizer, and some resting and relieving chair etc. At many places you wud see some interesting small note by the employees. What else, the ppl are real cool too.
On the reception itself you have those Colored Balloons and Balls (those in symbol of Google labs). This doesn't stop here. There is more, they have a screen in which there is a globe rotating and some facts etc appearing at the bottom. Somethings like each light in the map mean a google search, and each language is indicated by a different colored light. Blue for French, Red for english etc. One other display shows you some keywords which I guess was the some recently hit search query (but it should be hard to list all isn't it?)
When you get in you can see something like other corporate office until you reach the place where there are lots of choclates, biscuits etc to pick up from. The cafeteria is too good in itself, the lunch we had was good too :), Now I understand when they stress so much on the food part of in their offers (Pre Placement talk).
The next interesting thing was the leisure room where you can see ppl playing guitar, a synthosizer, and some resting and relieving chair etc. At many places you wud see some interesting small note by the employees. What else, the ppl are real cool too.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
News"Reading" in Linux using festival
Our discussion about how TTS on my mobile phone was a good app compared to the Festival thing in Linux, end up being fruitful. Paresh told me that Festival has matured a lot. My previous experience with Festival was of a being a bad program requiring to much of configuration by user. I was wrong.
Festival 1.4.2 version is the one I am talking about, which comes preinstalled in Fedora Core 3. To listen to some file you can simply use the command
festival --tts file.txt
Some computer generated voice will read the file for you. Not knowing how to use system commands through firefox I came up with better idea. Using KDE/Klipper technology.
What is Klipper: Basically klipper is a enhanced copy/paste buffer provided by KDE. You can program it do certain actions when certain kind of text is selected by mouse. For e.g when you select a email address you will be shown a small context menu kinda thing showing option to send email etc. So here is what I did. (Do explore Klipper for knowing more about it)
1) In klipper I added a new action.
2) The regular expression setting is quite trivial, I simply used \b[\w]+\b etc
3) Note that I have the autopopup disable and have setting up some manual invocation command for klipper actions, ( I have set up Alt+R)
4) Now in the command section I wrote this command
echo %s > ~/temp.txt ; festival -tts ~/temp.txt
Which does obvious stuff.
Festival 1.4.2 version is the one I am talking about, which comes preinstalled in Fedora Core 3. To listen to some file you can simply use the command
festival --tts file.txt
Some computer generated voice will read the file for you. Not knowing how to use system commands through firefox I came up with better idea. Using KDE/Klipper technology.
What is Klipper: Basically klipper is a enhanced copy/paste buffer provided by KDE. You can program it do certain actions when certain kind of text is selected by mouse. For e.g when you select a email address you will be shown a small context menu kinda thing showing option to send email etc. So here is what I did. (Do explore Klipper for knowing more about it)
1) In klipper I added a new action.
2) The regular expression setting is quite trivial, I simply used \b[\w]+\b etc
3) Note that I have the autopopup disable and have setting up some manual invocation command for klipper actions, ( I have set up Alt+R)
4) Now in the command section I wrote this command
echo %s > ~/temp.txt ; festival -tts ~/temp.txt
Which does obvious stuff.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
CSIDC 2006, its worth giving it a try
Would like to share some experience of our's from participation in CSIDC 2005 contest. So some juniors might take some interest in this highly paying contest.
Last year, we participated in team of 4, me, Jagmohan, Visesh and Nitin Gupta. The first step is to apply as a team, they get many teams from every region so they somehow randomely select the teams which progress to the next round, We were lucky. Next was the first round, we were quite busy with certain things so the report was sent without much interest and in much hurry, as we learnt that those who don't submit the report might disqualify their college for next year. The idea of the project was basically providing some new infrastructure to support remote education.(The topic for last year was breaking the digital divide or sthg similar).
We struggled a bit to make it to the top 90 teams. We moved on to the next round, the semifinals. Here they would select the 10 teams from the 90, who would participate in finals contest in Washington. But as usual the laziness stuck us and we didn't strive hard enough for the project, we did send a final report but while sending we only regretted not working more on it. (We thought 2-3 days more of work could have made things better).
So here is my word of advice, do go through their website, http://computer.org/csidc
see last years winning entries and analyze possibility of achieving the prize winning positions. Note that reports can always be made to show that work done was great, by putting great figures, graphs tables, once you read the report and you realize the work was quite simple to do. If we can win the Mantra 2006 contest for that auto pilot vehicle, this should be reachable too and don't give up easily, for winning a great prize needs a lot of hardwork.
It might be worthy to mention in CSIDC 2004 also our college team reached the semifinals. So guys lets have our college do better this year. All the best. You can bug us to know some details if you would like.
Last year, we participated in team of 4, me, Jagmohan, Visesh and Nitin Gupta. The first step is to apply as a team, they get many teams from every region so they somehow randomely select the teams which progress to the next round, We were lucky. Next was the first round, we were quite busy with certain things so the report was sent without much interest and in much hurry, as we learnt that those who don't submit the report might disqualify their college for next year. The idea of the project was basically providing some new infrastructure to support remote education.(The topic for last year was breaking the digital divide or sthg similar).
We struggled a bit to make it to the top 90 teams. We moved on to the next round, the semifinals. Here they would select the 10 teams from the 90, who would participate in finals contest in Washington. But as usual the laziness stuck us and we didn't strive hard enough for the project, we did send a final report but while sending we only regretted not working more on it. (We thought 2-3 days more of work could have made things better).
So here is my word of advice, do go through their website, http://computer.org/csidc
see last years winning entries and analyze possibility of achieving the prize winning positions. Note that reports can always be made to show that work done was great, by putting great figures, graphs tables, once you read the report and you realize the work was quite simple to do. If we can win the Mantra 2006 contest for that auto pilot vehicle, this should be reachable too and don't give up easily, for winning a great prize needs a lot of hardwork.
It might be worthy to mention in CSIDC 2004 also our college team reached the semifinals. So guys lets have our college do better this year. All the best. You can bug us to know some details if you would like.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Update regarding french Language course at IIIT
May not be the best place to post it, but this kind of premature annoucement couldn't be sent in a mail.
The course for French Language will not be a Humanities or Open Elective as far as offering it in this semester is concerned, It can be a non-academic credit, but the payment for that kind of course is not clear. The talk is on to have the college pay at least some part of the fees like it was for the German course last semester.
So in simple words the status of French course: The course with credits will probably be there is next sem. This semester it might come up as Non-Academic, but that is still being discussed and should be settled by this weekend, that is when I will send a formal mail, probably.
Please spread the word to other friends who were interested.
The course for French Language will not be a Humanities or Open Elective as far as offering it in this semester is concerned, It can be a non-academic credit, but the payment for that kind of course is not clear. The talk is on to have the college pay at least some part of the fees like it was for the German course last semester.
So in simple words the status of French course: The course with credits will probably be there is next sem. This semester it might come up as Non-Academic, but that is still being discussed and should be settled by this weekend, that is when I will send a formal mail, probably.
Please spread the word to other friends who were interested.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Decreasing their credibility themselves?
In need of posting some hot news, some sites like this one end up putting authors like Varun Dubey write some crapy articles without any reference or background about what they speak. Here is the start of the article
Also below your article it would be great to write what your experience on a topic has been. Like authors of other great magzines do. And allow for some comments from the readers if you think the article can stand them.
The Linux community was left stunned when Windows Server Sold outsold Linux in the server market. Gartner, Inc. recently reported that sales of Windows systems accounted for nearly 37 percent of all server revenue in the last quarter while Linux accounted for 31.7 percent. Windows has a 5+ percent lead over Linux, which should be the cause for celebration at Microsoft.Now what sense do you make about the author of the article and the site after seeing this actual figures from http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1754059524;fp;2;fpid;1
Sales of Windows systems accounted for 36.9 percent of all server revenue in the quarter, versus 31.7 percent for Unix and 11.5 percent for Linux,My first impression is that the author needs some basics taught: Linux is not Unix dude. When was Linux's server sales ever even close to Windows. Linux has only crossed the 10% mark in this quarter. It is Unix that has lost the first rank to Windows servers.
Also below your article it would be great to write what your experience on a topic has been. Like authors of other great magzines do. And allow for some comments from the readers if you think the article can stand them.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
The worst ever Spectator
The spectators of Calcutta have shown the worst ever behaviour by any spectator, far beyound what could have been expected. Oh! I forgot Its not the first time, they did back the same thing in same stadium in a world cup match against Srilanka. When they threw bottles etc on the ground.
The least step that should be taken is to close the stadium for any ODI match from now on. You can't win the heart of ppl who have so strong regional feeling that they have to go anti-Indian team for expulsion of their so called prince.
Those lossers don't imagine how many places the match have been held in the country and if it is possible to keep at least one local hero in the team for each such match. Should the Hyderabadi people cry against VVS Laxman not being in team? And this way will it be possible for any player from Bangalore to be out of team when a match has to be held in Bangalore? Should a person like so called prince be in the team only for playing for the local spectators?
I used to be a Gangully admirer until recently, I only felt that he was passing through his bad time, and had his weaknesses that he can work around, but recent developments have turned truly me Anti-Gangully and anti his supporters. Every person who played in the team had at some team leave the team for the arrival for better once, why is then this fuss about Gangully.
India is a big country and the team can only have 11 good players, those player should be the chossen by performance and not by the number of supporters they have or the region they represent. If such is the sentiment of ppl from Calcultta, The team should better not accept any young cricketer from that part of country for its ODI team in future.
The least step that should be taken is to close the stadium for any ODI match from now on. You can't win the heart of ppl who have so strong regional feeling that they have to go anti-Indian team for expulsion of their so called prince.
Those lossers don't imagine how many places the match have been held in the country and if it is possible to keep at least one local hero in the team for each such match. Should the Hyderabadi people cry against VVS Laxman not being in team? And this way will it be possible for any player from Bangalore to be out of team when a match has to be held in Bangalore? Should a person like so called prince be in the team only for playing for the local spectators?
I used to be a Gangully admirer until recently, I only felt that he was passing through his bad time, and had his weaknesses that he can work around, but recent developments have turned truly me Anti-Gangully and anti his supporters. Every person who played in the team had at some team leave the team for the arrival for better once, why is then this fuss about Gangully.
India is a big country and the team can only have 11 good players, those player should be the chossen by performance and not by the number of supporters they have or the region they represent. If such is the sentiment of ppl from Calcultta, The team should better not accept any young cricketer from that part of country for its ODI team in future.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Time to grow up to Web 2.0
I visit regularly to the sites http://www.cricinfo.com and also other like http://www.ndtv.com/cricketcard/odiframenew.asp or http://www.cricketnext.com, specially during matches that Indian cricket team is a part of.
These site however good they might be in terms of data they are providing suck bigtime in there presentation. In a cricket match when a ball is bowled every 1 minute or less, the slow refreshing of page irritates me. I don't understand how they could be so foolish as to not apply simple AJAX technologies to update only the variable part after each ball, where the variable part could be the figures(numbers), or even ads.
Instead they want to load the whole shit page with loads of images (browser and proxy server might apply some intelligence internally) almost same in there content. They page display goes off for a while and the user is simply supposed to wait till the page refreshes.
Another bad thing that happens with cricinfo is some times it goes back in history and shows up old score. Not sure whos fault it is browser, or the website or the proxy server but basically it sucks when you wait for the latest score seeing the page reloading slowly and see a score 10 balls earlier.
It good time the lesser known site put these technologies and come up with a better interface when the old once just hang around the old interface. Or rather some of us could write a better webpage aggregating all these scores from all the sites and displaying them properly ?
These site however good they might be in terms of data they are providing suck bigtime in there presentation. In a cricket match when a ball is bowled every 1 minute or less, the slow refreshing of page irritates me. I don't understand how they could be so foolish as to not apply simple AJAX technologies to update only the variable part after each ball, where the variable part could be the figures(numbers), or even ads.
Instead they want to load the whole shit page with loads of images (browser and proxy server might apply some intelligence internally) almost same in there content. They page display goes off for a while and the user is simply supposed to wait till the page refreshes.
Another bad thing that happens with cricinfo is some times it goes back in history and shows up old score. Not sure whos fault it is browser, or the website or the proxy server but basically it sucks when you wait for the latest score seeing the page reloading slowly and see a score 10 balls earlier.
It good time the lesser known site put these technologies and come up with a better interface when the old once just hang around the old interface. Or rather some of us could write a better webpage aggregating all these scores from all the sites and displaying them properly ?
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Everyone wants to be slashdotted :)
They say google gets slashdotted everyday, We should also have some flashy annoucements to make. M$ announce live *, ok basically ajax et al. and Yahoo announces awards to its engineers for not giving up to google maps and gmail.
Seems like net competition is catching up. Well thats good for us, customers. Google we are looking more slashdot stories but not like this one. So how many times they get slashdotted possibly this should tell.
Yahoo
Google
Microsoft.
As of now I am not satisfied with blogger, and wordpress looks a perfect option, will move sometime.
Seems like net competition is catching up. Well thats good for us, customers. Google we are looking more slashdot stories but not like this one. So how many times they get slashdotted possibly this should tell.
Yahoo
Microsoft.
As of now I am not satisfied with blogger, and wordpress looks a perfect option, will move sometime.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Ph.Ds don't grow on Trees
UGC asked('recommended') universities to increase the number of Ph.D scholar by 5 folds in next 5-10 years time. University principals and chancellor came back saying "Ph.Ds don't grow on Tree" giving reasons why this is difficult or impractical. Some points are worth discussion/pondering. (Times of India 4 Nov. 2005)
1) Students are not sure of Job after spending 5 prime years of their life doing Ph.D, govt should ensure jobs for Ph.D candidate (will argue below)
2) Funds are not sufficient (No argument its practically true)
3) Many Professors are not getting time to guide research students because of their heavy involvement in general Academics( worth thinking)
4) Most faculty are already guiding maximum number of Ph.D's they can guide(6) [ discussed below]
Point 1) wtf? Job seeking after doing Ph.D. Are we making people do Ph.D to do normal jobs? AFAICT a person who does a Ph.D should be worthy of choosing his company and pursue work on his area of interest ( some slight adjustments might be needed). Lectureship should be a great job(?) in itself. IIRC current demand of Ph.D in Education sector is around 20000 to 30000 (source Dr. U.R. Rao's talk at IIIT). That is good enough for targetting 500-2000 Ph.D per year.
Point 2) is Correct. Companies in India are not mostly worthy of Knowledge but of experience, I am quite sure if a B.Tech with 5 years of work exp is seen more value adding than a Ph.D by most companies, 'coz all they want to do it work which doesn't require any knowledge or brain application but just work which can be done by any person after training(for 2-3 months), sometimes I feel a 12th pass with 4year experience would be considered better than a B.Tech too.
Point 3,4) As said the solution is the increase in number of Ph.D lecturers in each college.
Infact a better way to increase number of Ph.D is the research exchange programme. The idea which is used by many countries from Syria to Ethiopia to get people to go abroad on government expence do Ph.D and come back and teach in the country for sometime.
People who have passion for research can find very good professors to work under abroad and in 5 years they will gain good enough knowledge to come back and share and enlighten 5-6 people per head(they might be obliged to do this themselve or by bond or contracts in lieu of government's expenditure on them). This process seems to have worked for China, Why can't it work for India. When there is sufficient number of people in India itself and research atmosphere is set, people can come up with good research work by working in the country itself probably.
Another point: IIRC IITs and many other government colleges seems to get lots of Fund from UGC( or government) for producing the MTechs. Noting that most of the M.Techs from IITs end up doing nothing but simple software jobs, which many graduates can do without doing a M.Tech, why not think of better way of spending this money? What I mean to say is if all M.Tech is doing no good to the intellectual strength/improvement of the country why not scrap the support for that program and support lesser a number of people doing Ph.Ds or Master of Science by Research (assuming MSbR does motivate many people to join Ph.Ds) ?
1) Students are not sure of Job after spending 5 prime years of their life doing Ph.D, govt should ensure jobs for Ph.D candidate (will argue below)
2) Funds are not sufficient (No argument its practically true)
3) Many Professors are not getting time to guide research students because of their heavy involvement in general Academics( worth thinking)
4) Most faculty are already guiding maximum number of Ph.D's they can guide(6) [ discussed below]
Point 1) wtf? Job seeking after doing Ph.D. Are we making people do Ph.D to do normal jobs? AFAICT a person who does a Ph.D should be worthy of choosing his company and pursue work on his area of interest ( some slight adjustments might be needed). Lectureship should be a great job(?) in itself. IIRC current demand of Ph.D in Education sector is around 20000 to 30000 (source Dr. U.R. Rao's talk at IIIT). That is good enough for targetting 500-2000 Ph.D per year.
Point 2) is Correct. Companies in India are not mostly worthy of Knowledge but of experience, I am quite sure if a B.Tech with 5 years of work exp is seen more value adding than a Ph.D by most companies, 'coz all they want to do it work which doesn't require any knowledge or brain application but just work which can be done by any person after training(for 2-3 months), sometimes I feel a 12th pass with 4year experience would be considered better than a B.Tech too.
Point 3,4) As said the solution is the increase in number of Ph.D lecturers in each college.
Infact a better way to increase number of Ph.D is the research exchange programme. The idea which is used by many countries from Syria to Ethiopia to get people to go abroad on government expence do Ph.D and come back and teach in the country for sometime.
People who have passion for research can find very good professors to work under abroad and in 5 years they will gain good enough knowledge to come back and share and enlighten 5-6 people per head(they might be obliged to do this themselve or by bond or contracts in lieu of government's expenditure on them). This process seems to have worked for China, Why can't it work for India. When there is sufficient number of people in India itself and research atmosphere is set, people can come up with good research work by working in the country itself probably.
Another point: IIRC IITs and many other government colleges seems to get lots of Fund from UGC( or government) for producing the MTechs. Noting that most of the M.Techs from IITs end up doing nothing but simple software jobs, which many graduates can do without doing a M.Tech, why not think of better way of spending this money? What I mean to say is if all M.Tech is doing no good to the intellectual strength/improvement of the country why not scrap the support for that program and support lesser a number of people doing Ph.Ds or Master of Science by Research (assuming MSbR does motivate many people to join Ph.Ds) ?
Monday, October 31, 2005
Some talk in past few days
Past few days there were lots of talks by very eminent and/or very knowledgeable/experienced people. I will post about them over some posts. Here are the two of them.
P. Anandan of MSR @IIIT: If you have done some work in Vision and specially in registration etc you probably know this person. He is the head of MSR India, and is undoubtedly one of the most successful researchers India ever produced(Ok enuf I understand).
The talk was about the kind of work MSR has been doing worldwide and specially about plans of MSR India. MSR India is looking for some young researchers to join them and work on some of the most uptodate technologies and evolving areas. The talk was simply superb, Anandan is probably the best speaker I ever witnessed. He was excited to see many students interested in Research jobs. One of his quote "You probably have to wait for 5 more years before you can buy your Benz but then you will be buying a better model"
Again if you have seen Siggraph videos or papers, you probably know the quality of work by MSR people, MSR probably produces the largest number of paper compared to any institutes. I hope MSR creates some interest in students in India for going for higher education.
Talk by Mark Herbert(?) Of Seirra Atlantik @ ISB: Just after the talk by a Researcher, I had the opportunity to attend a entirely different kind of talk, a talk by a successful Management guy. He was again a great speaker, his slides had lot of striking figures and facts which I was totally unaware of. I was just wondering if blogging was ok for such a talk, but some points could be shared harmlessly,
1) Every $1 of money spent by US on Outsourcing gets them a value of $1.46, of which Indian side gets 55cents and company makes a pure profit of something like 14/15 cents, after removing all the cost incurred in transfer of work etc.
2) The rates of work India have remained quite stable for past some time, this is mainly due to large number of freshers who are joining jobs regularly and who keeps the cost low due to their lack of experience. (Looks like a point to think upon)
3) A large number of Developing countries are gearing up for a competition to India/China in offshoring bussiness, this includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and some African countries.
4) India offers the second cheapest place to get the work done, just after vietnam, China is third.
5) Their no great loss of jobs in US do to outsourcing, atleast the people don't remain unemployed for long.
6) The loss of job happens not mainly because of offshoring but because of increase in Productivity
7) Based on point 6 India would be loosing a large number of call center jobs soon, when the software matures to handle lot of such work automatically.
... Many point I forgot. :(
P. Anandan of MSR @IIIT: If you have done some work in Vision and specially in registration etc you probably know this person. He is the head of MSR India, and is undoubtedly one of the most successful researchers India ever produced(Ok enuf I understand).
The talk was about the kind of work MSR has been doing worldwide and specially about plans of MSR India. MSR India is looking for some young researchers to join them and work on some of the most uptodate technologies and evolving areas. The talk was simply superb, Anandan is probably the best speaker I ever witnessed. He was excited to see many students interested in Research jobs. One of his quote "You probably have to wait for 5 more years before you can buy your Benz but then you will be buying a better model"
Again if you have seen Siggraph videos or papers, you probably know the quality of work by MSR people, MSR probably produces the largest number of paper compared to any institutes. I hope MSR creates some interest in students in India for going for higher education.
Talk by Mark Herbert(?) Of Seirra Atlantik @ ISB: Just after the talk by a Researcher, I had the opportunity to attend a entirely different kind of talk, a talk by a successful Management guy. He was again a great speaker, his slides had lot of striking figures and facts which I was totally unaware of. I was just wondering if blogging was ok for such a talk, but some points could be shared harmlessly,
1) Every $1 of money spent by US on Outsourcing gets them a value of $1.46, of which Indian side gets 55cents and company makes a pure profit of something like 14/15 cents, after removing all the cost incurred in transfer of work etc.
2) The rates of work India have remained quite stable for past some time, this is mainly due to large number of freshers who are joining jobs regularly and who keeps the cost low due to their lack of experience. (Looks like a point to think upon)
3) A large number of Developing countries are gearing up for a competition to India/China in offshoring bussiness, this includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and some African countries.
4) India offers the second cheapest place to get the work done, just after vietnam, China is third.
5) Their no great loss of jobs in US do to outsourcing, atleast the people don't remain unemployed for long.
6) The loss of job happens not mainly because of offshoring but because of increase in Productivity
7) Based on point 6 India would be loosing a large number of call center jobs soon, when the software matures to handle lot of such work automatically.
... Many point I forgot. :(
Monday, October 24, 2005
e2Fsck and Lost+Found in Linux
A friend of mine panicked to see his /home partition being corrupted badly as described by fsck program( he got lot of warnings/ questions while the fsck program was running asking "whether you want to fix this inode" etc.) Having faced similar situation earlier(5 semester of my B.Tech, when I was experimenting with LVM(large volume management)) I thought I might be impossible to get the data back easily.
When this friend finally gave up the thought of getting his data the new problem he faced was how to get his system to boot as their seemed some problem in /home which stuck the booting process.
Just before trying to format the partition containing /home, we gave a look at Lost+Found directory( after booting system in rescue mode) of the home partition. I was surprized to see that the directory had lot of content. While trying some simple grep include * etc we realized some of the things in the Lost+Found directory were actually directories.
The interesting things begin to happen then, We somehow discovered one directory with name like #109093 on cd-ing which we found lots of mp3 songs. That was it, As Anurag just told us, the data was probably all there. With more trying we got directories containing Movies, C/Java programs, Gnome, KDE setting files etc.
That just lead me to search for working of e2fsck program. Got the source from sourceforge, but wasn't able to get much in first look. So started Googling, for some basics of the program, unfortanely there were no good results. Luckily I got this link of origanal paper describing the EXT2 file system, ext2fs. This link is a great read. At the bottom of the page there is some data on Lost+Found, it say "during third pass of the fsck, the .. entry in each directory is checked, if some particular directory cannot be traced back to / then it is put in to Lost+Found".
In pass 4, e2fsck checks the reference counts for all inodes, by iterating over all the inodes and comparing the link counts (which were cached in pass 1) against internal counters computed during passes 2 and 3. Any undeleted files with a zero link count is also linked to the /lost+found directory during this pass.
It would be interesting to making some kind of recovery tool based on the values of inode tables etc which makes it simple for user to search for his lost files/directories from Lost+Found. Yes more study on fsck is needed and sought for....
When this friend finally gave up the thought of getting his data the new problem he faced was how to get his system to boot as their seemed some problem in /home which stuck the booting process.
Just before trying to format the partition containing /home, we gave a look at Lost+Found directory( after booting system in rescue mode) of the home partition. I was surprized to see that the directory had lot of content. While trying some simple grep include * etc we realized some of the things in the Lost+Found directory were actually directories.
The interesting things begin to happen then, We somehow discovered one directory with name like #109093 on cd-ing which we found lots of mp3 songs. That was it, As Anurag just told us, the data was probably all there. With more trying we got directories containing Movies, C/Java programs, Gnome, KDE setting files etc.
That just lead me to search for working of e2fsck program. Got the source from sourceforge, but wasn't able to get much in first look. So started Googling, for some basics of the program, unfortanely there were no good results. Luckily I got this link of origanal paper describing the EXT2 file system, ext2fs. This link is a great read. At the bottom of the page there is some data on Lost+Found, it say "during third pass of the fsck, the .. entry in each directory is checked, if some particular directory cannot be traced back to / then it is put in to Lost+Found".
In pass 4, e2fsck checks the reference counts for all inodes, by iterating over all the inodes and comparing the link counts (which were cached in pass 1) against internal counters computed during passes 2 and 3. Any undeleted files with a zero link count is also linked to the /lost+found directory during this pass.
It would be interesting to making some kind of recovery tool based on the values of inode tables etc which makes it simple for user to search for his lost files/directories from Lost+Found. Yes more study on fsck is needed and sought for....
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
project KDE looking for Indian Mirrors
Hi,
KDE project doesn't have any Indian mirror and their site says they are looking for one. It would be great if any one of you can offer some heavy bandwidth download mirror :)
Please let me know or directory contact KDE people.
KDE project doesn't have any Indian mirror and their site says they are looking for one. It would be great if any one of you can offer some heavy bandwidth download mirror :)
Please let me know or directory contact KDE people.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Eclipse IDE 3.1.1 first impressions
I loved the Eclipse IDE when I used it in my internship at CA (last summer). This IDE is probably one of the best IDEs for java, given you include the appropriate plugins for your task. Though most plugins are free, some may not be.
By as much as I knew Eclipse before my internship I was impressed, I have simply compiled some simple java code by then. During the internship I learnt using advanced options of external libraries, plugins etc. With a simple plugin setup(just copying some .zip file in a directory, IIRC) you can make it a J2EE studio, much better than other I have tried till that time. I used tomcat plugin too, which did some external invocation of tomcat server etc.
Now I happen to try this new version of IDE 3.1.1, In some 25-30 minutes I am impressed again. Here is a small description of setting eclipse to use ant build file and creat a project from it.
1) File -> New project
Choose Ant project. It will ask you the file locations and do the rest part almost automatically.
2) Setting Up Java etc.
Somehow eclipse detected existence of java sdk 1.5 from my system automatically. ( I wonder what intelligence must be used if not trying some hardcoded directory names etc). But I needed to compile my project in jdk 1.4.2 which was also installed on my system.
As shown in the figure, eclipse gives a simple option in Menubar->Window->Preferences->Java->Installed JRE, where you can add JRE if not automatically detected. And select the default JRE. The project is automatically build from this default JRE.
3) Setting up Ant.
Just go to Menubar->Window->Preferences->Java->Ant, to check if the classpath is ok, you can modify it to add some new files etc. ( I needed to add tools.jar from jdk1.4.2 instead of 1.5.2 so I removed the 1.5.2 tools.jar and added 1.4.2 tools.jar), all is pretty straightforward.
You might also use the option of external property file for ant.
4) Building
Eclipse has this wonderful feature of building incrementally autoMAGically, So at all times you can see if some error exists in you code without just needing to build again and again. (Yes you can turn the option off too).
For Building automatically Eclipse was using 'Java Builder' by default. It was annoying me with some Class path error, which indicated that ant was not properly used. I just checked Project->Properties->Builders, there I Clicked new builder which automatically opened option of Ant Builder, rest was all straighforward like setting this new builder as default etc.
5) On a Project->Build clean and rebuild I had my project build properly:)
Conclusion Eclipse IDE rocks. BTW I haven't tried JDev from Oracle which my friend Vishal tells me is another great IDE.
By as much as I knew Eclipse before my internship I was impressed, I have simply compiled some simple java code by then. During the internship I learnt using advanced options of external libraries, plugins etc. With a simple plugin setup(just copying some .zip file in a directory, IIRC) you can make it a J2EE studio, much better than other I have tried till that time. I used tomcat plugin too, which did some external invocation of tomcat server etc.
Now I happen to try this new version of IDE 3.1.1, In some 25-30 minutes I am impressed again. Here is a small description of setting eclipse to use ant build file and creat a project from it.
1) File -> New project
Choose Ant project. It will ask you the file locations and do the rest part almost automatically.
2) Setting Up Java etc.
Somehow eclipse detected existence of java sdk 1.5 from my system automatically. ( I wonder what intelligence must be used if not trying some hardcoded directory names etc). But I needed to compile my project in jdk 1.4.2 which was also installed on my system.
As shown in the figure, eclipse gives a simple option in Menubar->Window->Preferences->Java->Installed JRE, where you can add JRE if not automatically detected. And select the default JRE. The project is automatically build from this default JRE.
3) Setting up Ant.
Just go to Menubar->Window->Preferences->Java->Ant, to check if the classpath is ok, you can modify it to add some new files etc. ( I needed to add tools.jar from jdk1.4.2 instead of 1.5.2 so I removed the 1.5.2 tools.jar and added 1.4.2 tools.jar), all is pretty straightforward.
You might also use the option of external property file for ant.
4) Building
Eclipse has this wonderful feature of building incrementally autoMAGically, So at all times you can see if some error exists in you code without just needing to build again and again. (Yes you can turn the option off too).
For Building automatically Eclipse was using 'Java Builder' by default. It was annoying me with some Class path error, which indicated that ant was not properly used. I just checked Project->Properties->Builders, there I Clicked new builder which automatically opened option of Ant Builder, rest was all straighforward like setting this new builder as default etc.
5) On a Project->Build clean and rebuild I had my project build properly:)
Conclusion Eclipse IDE rocks. BTW I haven't tried JDev from Oracle which my friend Vishal tells me is another great IDE.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Google Does it Again...
Seeing Google's moves in past few days anyone would expect Google to be one of the company which has become Microsoft's nightmare. The good part is since M$ is a company everyone(I mean sensible one) love to hate, Google becomes the company which they love.
[Update: New reasons to hate M$ as demanded by M$ lovers : http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/05/10/01/1548246.shtml?tid=29 ]
Sometime ago we were just speculating about what kind of partnership with a Microsoft competitor should Google be looking forward too. Google and Apple combo came to my mind, Google and IBM is much expected combination, then Google and HP etc the list can go on. To our surprize Google has finally joined efforts with Sun to combat the evil. There collaboration's outcome can only be speculated still, since they haven't given any clearcut statements.
The most speculated is their effort to work on a Web based version of Open Office. For those who don't know there are already lots of applications to show the power of web AJAX word processor, AJAX spreadsheet, AJAX calendar, AJAX presentation-building software, AJAX e-mail client, AJAX note-taking software.
More in related events is Sun's President post on his blog , the world is about to change.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
The Indian Non-competitive-ness
A recent report rates India 50th in ranking of Competitive Nations. Some might argue that it ranks many other country like China(49) and France(47) bad too. But should that give us enough excuse for that poor rank?
Thinking of our competitiveness, let see where India(n) is(are) performing good. We are reportedly one of the best in getting outsourced work. Besides being a cheap and abundant source of people the credit goes mainly to our 'English' knowledge and capabilities rather than our actual software expertise.
What is not realized in the whole matter is that though the economy as a whole is growing with Foreign companies coming in and setting their offices in India, there is hardly any growth in the direction of India becoming a developed nation forget about being a super-power. Hardly any Indian company makes it to the fortune 500. Hardly any hardware company we hear of or whose product we use is Indian. Our Automobile companies aren't any globally competitive, once the foreign companies start competing aggressively within India the remaining Indian businesses will surely not be able handle the aggression.
Take China on other side, China is slowly becoming the manufacturing capital of the world. Name any hardware bussiness and Chinese companies are natively producing that, be it chips or printer or even Routers. Similar is the position of Japan, which is already the centre of Electronic Innovations.
Is there any chance of India achieving the developed nation status by even 2020 ( or we have to postpone the target year once again as usual)
Thinking of our competitiveness, let see where India(n) is(are) performing good. We are reportedly one of the best in getting outsourced work. Besides being a cheap and abundant source of people the credit goes mainly to our 'English' knowledge and capabilities rather than our actual software expertise.
What is not realized in the whole matter is that though the economy as a whole is growing with Foreign companies coming in and setting their offices in India, there is hardly any growth in the direction of India becoming a developed nation forget about being a super-power. Hardly any Indian company makes it to the fortune 500. Hardly any hardware company we hear of or whose product we use is Indian. Our Automobile companies aren't any globally competitive, once the foreign companies start competing aggressively within India the remaining Indian businesses will surely not be able handle the aggression.
Take China on other side, China is slowly becoming the manufacturing capital of the world. Name any hardware bussiness and Chinese companies are natively producing that, be it chips or printer or even Routers. Similar is the position of Japan, which is already the centre of Electronic Innovations.
Is there any chance of India achieving the developed nation status by even 2020 ( or we have to postpone the target year once again as usual)
Monday, September 26, 2005
Movie: Kung fu Hustle
A must watch movie for a comedy movie seekers. I like the composition of movie which include, good fast action, special effects, comedy. Some special effects are just awesome and look innovative, like the ppl moving like bikes, some other kung fu tricks etc.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Une Samedi bein passé
Le Samedi passé nos sommes allés à Jain temple et deux autre temples. Oh! My French is still so bad, I would rather continue in english, here are some photos of Ganesh Chaturthi Celebration captured during our trip to the city, and some photos of Jain temples too(It was the last day of the jain's festival of Paryushan, Thanks to Chaitanya and Abhay for letting me know)
The Jain temple at Aagapura
No caption!!!
Swetambar Jain Mandir (it came on the way, on Arpit's suggestions we went in)
The big truck(?) generally used for carrying Huge steel material was used for carrying the Idol of Ganesh, adjacent image.
Shyam Mandir(Somani took us here)
The Jain temple at Aagapura
No caption!!!
Swetambar Jain Mandir (it came on the way, on Arpit's suggestions we went in)
The big truck(?) generally used for carrying Huge steel material was used for carrying the Idol of Ganesh, adjacent image.
Shyam Mandir(Somani took us here)
Monday, September 19, 2005
What is Microsoft
In respond to some M$ fan's post on his blog.
What is M$, well they call it a Innovative company, which files for patents like double click, using email as an object(tell me what it means, that you can drag it around the Desktop like files and folders ?), Apple's ipod technology (hahaha), also Vfat file system(which was already invented and described in a paper, before M$ implemented it), Use of tab key in keyboard to navigate links, and lots of other crapy stuff.
[All news were read from slashdot over past some time, you can search in slashdot if you wish to clarify]
Lets peek at some of the technologies/products of M$:
1) MS DOS (bought from some one for 50000 $)
2) Office (Powerpoint was bought from someone, eXcel was bought from someone else(Wipro AFAIK))
3) Hotmail (bought from Sabir Bhatia)
4) Windows 95 (copied/pirated totally from Apple, Billy has to join Apple to see the code?)
5) Loghorn (Every thing copied from Mac OS X, Window/Menu transparency, 3D, Spotlight(filesearch) etc.)
6) Monad (or whatever their Bash look-alike is, the source if obvious)
7) .NET ( JAVA++, J2EE++ )
8) MSN search (again bought from someone, ideas copied from Google/Yahoo too)
9) Email (they gave 4 MB, until Google gave 1 GB, when they realized that space was cheap and more should be offered, They are probably in process of copying the actual gmail interface currently)
10) Personalized MSN (again probably Yahoo or Google copied)
11) Some MSN earth search stuff( Again Google Maps, Google Earth copied)
12) Finally IE 7.0 ( you know they are still in process of copying stuff from Firefox/Opera, if they were the first to concieve the idea of tabs, by names tabs should have been patented too, they will probably still claim a patent on tabbed browsing (their usual style).
13) Some Ad stuff( Google adsense)
14) Desktop Search (again Spotlight(Mac OSX) + Google Desktop's copy).
More research done by some ppl here [1], [2] [3]
And they fired one employee who captured photos of arrival of Macintoshes in to their company in his blog[4]. What should it indicate.
Do I need to put more examples? And then there is this CEO of there who was already a gone case, and now conditions are deteriorating with Microsoft employees shifting to Google.(one of the many funny mentions on the net)
If you could refer to my post on FSF AP, you find a mention of M$ giving free Windows and related software begging ppl to just use it in schools, when they are on there way to shift to GNU/Linux.
People should be little bit more realistic in their appreciation of a company and not just do it b'coz its very rich. For instance It did take AMD long time to come to competition with Intel but finally it is doing good in the market. Many ppl won't have expected any competition to Intel some time ago but now they buy AMD because of its proven quality, Same may happen in OS market or software market too.
I wouldn't like to spend any further time on such a post, just that it was required under the circumstances.
[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html.
[2] http://www.macobserver.com/news/00/may/000502/dvorak.shtml
[3] http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.shtml
[4] http://www.macnn.com/news/21786
What is M$, well they call it a Innovative company, which files for patents like double click, using email as an object(tell me what it means, that you can drag it around the Desktop like files and folders ?), Apple's ipod technology (hahaha), also Vfat file system(which was already invented and described in a paper, before M$ implemented it), Use of tab key in keyboard to navigate links, and lots of other crapy stuff.
[All news were read from slashdot over past some time, you can search in slashdot if you wish to clarify]
Lets peek at some of the technologies/products of M$:
1) MS DOS (bought from some one for 50000 $)
2) Office (Powerpoint was bought from someone, eXcel was bought from someone else(Wipro AFAIK))
3) Hotmail (bought from Sabir Bhatia)
4) Windows 95 (copied/pirated totally from Apple, Billy has to join Apple to see the code?)
5) Loghorn (Every thing copied from Mac OS X, Window/Menu transparency, 3D, Spotlight(filesearch) etc.)
6) Monad (or whatever their Bash look-alike is, the source if obvious)
7) .NET ( JAVA++, J2EE++ )
8) MSN search (again bought from someone, ideas copied from Google/Yahoo too)
9) Email (they gave 4 MB, until Google gave 1 GB, when they realized that space was cheap and more should be offered, They are probably in process of copying the actual gmail interface currently)
10) Personalized MSN (again probably Yahoo or Google copied)
11) Some MSN earth search stuff( Again Google Maps, Google Earth copied)
12) Finally IE 7.0 ( you know they are still in process of copying stuff from Firefox/Opera, if they were the first to concieve the idea of tabs, by names tabs should have been patented too, they will probably still claim a patent on tabbed browsing (their usual style).
13) Some Ad stuff( Google adsense)
14) Desktop Search (again Spotlight(Mac OSX) + Google Desktop's copy).
More research done by some ppl here [1], [2] [3]
And they fired one employee who captured photos of arrival of Macintoshes in to their company in his blog[4]. What should it indicate.
Do I need to put more examples? And then there is this CEO of there who was already a gone case, and now conditions are deteriorating with Microsoft employees shifting to Google.(one of the many funny mentions on the net)
If you could refer to my post on FSF AP, you find a mention of M$ giving free Windows and related software begging ppl to just use it in schools, when they are on there way to shift to GNU/Linux.
People should be little bit more realistic in their appreciation of a company and not just do it b'coz its very rich. For instance It did take AMD long time to come to competition with Intel but finally it is doing good in the market. Many ppl won't have expected any competition to Intel some time ago but now they buy AMD because of its proven quality, Same may happen in OS market or software market too.
I wouldn't like to spend any further time on such a post, just that it was required under the circumstances.
[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html.
[2] http://www.macobserver.com/news/00/may/000502/dvorak.shtml
[3] http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.shtml
[4] http://www.macnn.com/news/21786
The Magical klik install for Linux: You gonna love it.
Possibly the best app I have seen since quite long time. Kudos to the developers for such a great software. I don't really want to spend time ellaborating the details of the arch, metaphorically its out of scope of this post( actually, I didn't get it completely). As is said, just klik and install.
Here are my first usage impressions.
1) Download the client from a website.
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
2) Restart the browser for the plugin to get activated.
3) Just go to the list of available softwares
http://klik.atekon.de/
and click the link.
4) You will be shown some warning dialogs whether you trust etc stuff. Finally file copying will start and ...
5) The app will be launced :)
I have already klik installed sucessfully these apps opera, lbreakout2 (nice game), pacman, and currently installing skype :)
Here are my first usage impressions.
1) Download the client from a website.
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
2) Restart the browser for the plugin to get activated.
3) Just go to the list of available softwares
http://klik.atekon.de/
and click the link.
4) You will be shown some warning dialogs whether you trust etc stuff. Finally file copying will start and ...
5) The app will be launced :)
I have already klik installed sucessfully these apps opera, lbreakout2 (nice game), pacman, and currently installing skype :)
Sunday, September 18, 2005
FSF AP Workshop at Osmania University
Thanks to Kiran Babu, I was able to attend the FSF AP's workshop on FLOSS for students from Hyderabad and nearby districts at Osmania University today. The idea was simple, "just show the students the power of GNU/Linux and other OSS and they willtransfer(spread) their knowledge amoung their batchmates in their college."
The idea is much similar to IIIT's ExOR workshop.Me and Vakiba gave a small talk on "Introduction to GNU/Linux, installation, simple administration, and general usage",(material here).
Chaitanya then gave a talk on MySql(database), Umbrello(uml designer) and Doxygen(documentation generator), which I hope will be of great use to these studens for doing their projects.
Then Sunilmohan gave a talk on Programming in GNU/Linux platform, GCC and
GCJ followed by an introduction to Latex by OSK.
(I realized this while writing the post that IIITians are leading the FSF activities in AP).
During interaction with the students at the Lunch and/or tea break, I realized that some of them are really interested in exploring Linux, and some are even going to distribute the knowledge they gained here to other colleges and people. Many appreciated Vakiba's idea of giving handouts during the presentation.
Earlier during the inaugration FSF AP convener told about how much M$ is alarmed due to increasing activities of FSF and use of OSS. They(M$) just ended up installing free Windows and other applications to many schools in nearby places when the local mayors seeked help of FSF for porting their systems to GNU/Linux system. I am sure M$ effor will go in vain, they can't just keep doing this work everywhere. Once OSS has caught the eyes of a students, M$ products will mostly be dumped by them whether given for money or free.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Better ways of spending time at IIIT...
I thought I would pass-on(share) some of the experiences I(we) gained the hard way. Which I hope should be of some use to Juniors at IIIT.
Making more out of 2/3rd year in college: Most of us spent our leisure time and other time too playing some computer games or thinking about strategies etc. Lately I realized that their are better things one can do in 2/3rd year for time pass which will be many folds useful than those games.
First there are so many programming challenges and contest online that one if determined can easily find enuf resources on the net to practice hell lot of it. Some links of this catergories are http://www.topcoder.com, http://acm.uva.es/, IBM Linux Challenge, etc.
Second there are other things like topcoder component design/development competitions that one can take part in thereby both winning cash prizes and gaining the experience and fun of coding.
Third is jumping in to Open source software development, I did this when I started my MS, and believe me I always wished I should have started earlier. There is nothing too difficult that should behold us from starting contributing, the code is mostly simple, readable and gives you sufficient examples to build open and achieve your desired functionality easily. Moreover the great feeling comes when someone thanks you for the small contribution you have made.
This might only apply to IIITians: I realized this lately that our approach towards things is terribly wrong. There is some kind of lack of self-confidence and more over lack of motivation to work harder. Some how we never take any challenges (like IBM Linux Challenge, RedHat scholarship Challenge, CSIDC and may be M$ challenge too) seriously.
Some of us might think(at least many of my friends and I did) that these competitions are tuff and require great intelligence but its nothing so hard. To get a better idea make sure you enquire sufficiently about any challenge of your interest and see the previous years entry and you will realize, nothing is so difficult.
There must be many other ways of being more creative, like game development etc, Let me know if you want to add something.
I would also suggest ppl to avoid thinking of hidding information like these from their friends and thereby avoid local competition, Local competition and sharing will mostly help you increase ur strength and confidence.
Making more out of 2/3rd year in college: Most of us spent our leisure time and other time too playing some computer games or thinking about strategies etc. Lately I realized that their are better things one can do in 2/3rd year for time pass which will be many folds useful than those games.
First there are so many programming challenges and contest online that one if determined can easily find enuf resources on the net to practice hell lot of it. Some links of this catergories are http://www.topcoder.com, http://acm.uva.es/, IBM Linux Challenge, etc.
Second there are other things like topcoder component design/development competitions that one can take part in thereby both winning cash prizes and gaining the experience and fun of coding.
Third is jumping in to Open source software development, I did this when I started my MS, and believe me I always wished I should have started earlier. There is nothing too difficult that should behold us from starting contributing, the code is mostly simple, readable and gives you sufficient examples to build open and achieve your desired functionality easily. Moreover the great feeling comes when someone thanks you for the small contribution you have made.
This might only apply to IIITians: I realized this lately that our approach towards things is terribly wrong. There is some kind of lack of self-confidence and more over lack of motivation to work harder. Some how we never take any challenges (like IBM Linux Challenge, RedHat scholarship Challenge, CSIDC and may be M$ challenge too) seriously.
Some of us might think(at least many of my friends and I did) that these competitions are tuff and require great intelligence but its nothing so hard. To get a better idea make sure you enquire sufficiently about any challenge of your interest and see the previous years entry and you will realize, nothing is so difficult.
There must be many other ways of being more creative, like game development etc, Let me know if you want to add something.
I would also suggest ppl to avoid thinking of hidding information like these from their friends and thereby avoid local competition, Local competition and sharing will mostly help you increase ur strength and confidence.
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Some cool movies
I had long earlier narrowed down my choice of movies to Comedy and Romantic only. So most movies I watch are of these genre. Here are some I saw in last 1-2 months.
Scary Movie 1-3 : Comedy. Scary Movie 3 review at IMax was like a warning to not see this movie, but due to lack of anything else I couldn't avoid watching it and I didn't regret watching it. It was cool. In fact we (me and Jagga) went ahead and watched the other 2 also. Generally the movies will not be very interesting if you haven't seen the original movies for e.g Usual Suspect, Exorcist (the scene when the girl says f**k me left me ROFL) etc.
Taxi 2 (French Movie): Comedy. It keeps my rating of French movies high, the previous onces were 100 Girls and Amile. (Hope I understand more words in the movie over time.)
Scary Movie 1-3 : Comedy. Scary Movie 3 review at IMax was like a warning to not see this movie, but due to lack of anything else I couldn't avoid watching it and I didn't regret watching it. It was cool. In fact we (me and Jagga) went ahead and watched the other 2 also. Generally the movies will not be very interesting if you haven't seen the original movies for e.g Usual Suspect, Exorcist (the scene when the girl says f**k me left me ROFL) etc.
Taxi 2 (French Movie): Comedy. It keeps my rating of French movies high, the previous onces were 100 Girls and Amile. (Hope I understand more words in the movie over time.)
Monday, August 29, 2005
Sudoko
Sudoko fever has swept me in. But the problem now takes something like 5-8 minutes at max to solve from 3 hrs of thinking on the first puzzle. This is the timeline of Sudoko introduction to me.
18th Aug Didi Asks me if I solved Sudoko. I told I never tried. Suggests me about writing program for it.
20th Aug I try solving sudoko in the Hitvada paper for a long long duration.
24th Aug Read about sudoko from Paresh's weblog and found one website for solving it online.
28th Aug Completed my program (C++) for Sudoko.
I looked newspapers for input cases and solved them manually too. Its interesting.
One thing I must inform you about Sudoko puzzles in news papers is that they don't require recursion/backtracing. Just pure logic, which could programmatically be put using simple iterations over the blocks of 9 cells.
I will have to extend the program the handle the cases which require recursion. The interesting issue is to discover at what particular situation in the board you will have to try backtracing to get the answer.
18th Aug Didi Asks me if I solved Sudoko. I told I never tried. Suggests me about writing program for it.
20th Aug I try solving sudoko in the Hitvada paper for a long long duration.
24th Aug Read about sudoko from Paresh's weblog and found one website for solving it online.
28th Aug Completed my program (C++) for Sudoko.
I looked newspapers for input cases and solved them manually too. Its interesting.
One thing I must inform you about Sudoko puzzles in news papers is that they don't require recursion/backtracing. Just pure logic, which could programmatically be put using simple iterations over the blocks of 9 cells.
I will have to extend the program the handle the cases which require recursion. The interesting issue is to discover at what particular situation in the board you will have to try backtracing to get the answer.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Even BSNL can respond so well?
Ppl don't understand the importance of feedbacks/suggestions/complaints and simply feel that they are wasting their time by giving these valuable inputs to the vendor/service provider. Well I have different stand on it and I, though my own experience believe that any competitive person or company in the world will positively receive the feedbacks and improve upon to the best possible limits.
Therefore when I face problems with some service I would better send a feedback report to the service provider(SP) than simply curse them. How can you ever expect the SP to even know about the issues unless they are reported to them? Of course the next part is SP's duty to respond appropriate to the feedback.
Therefore I just thought calling BSNL customer care and telling them the problems of weak signal strength inside the campus. I did that on Monday 22nd and was told that some action will be taken by Friday. So I called up today (27th) again and explained them the problem again, on asking how they will get back to me they told "the problem will be forwarded to the technical team and they will respond to you on this number itself". To my surprise by the evening 8:30 they tried calling my number for verifying the problem and upon talking to them I was told some good news.
Firstly acknowledged the problems and told that they were expanding their network's capacity to 2 times the current one and this will be completed within 1 month, Moreover the Gachibowli signal problems is going to be resolved sooner by establishment of new equipments.
Hoping to have better BSNL service soon.
Therefore when I face problems with some service I would better send a feedback report to the service provider(SP) than simply curse them. How can you ever expect the SP to even know about the issues unless they are reported to them? Of course the next part is SP's duty to respond appropriate to the feedback.
Therefore I just thought calling BSNL customer care and telling them the problems of weak signal strength inside the campus. I did that on Monday 22nd and was told that some action will be taken by Friday. So I called up today (27th) again and explained them the problem again, on asking how they will get back to me they told "the problem will be forwarded to the technical team and they will respond to you on this number itself". To my surprise by the evening 8:30 they tried calling my number for verifying the problem and upon talking to them I was told some good news.
Firstly acknowledged the problems and told that they were expanding their network's capacity to 2 times the current one and this will be completed within 1 month, Moreover the Gachibowli signal problems is going to be resolved sooner by establishment of new equipments.
Hoping to have better BSNL service soon.
Friday, August 26, 2005
Absense at convocation
Many friends took out time for asking if all is well, when they found me missing at convocation. Good to know if you are really missed by some ppl at times :).
Well nothing is bad at my camp, It was just an urgent call for a Hyd-Chennai-Jbp-Hyd trip for me. It was because its first Rakhi after my sister's wedding in May this year, its a custom for brother to bring sister back to house for some time.
Since I Couldn't think of a big break, I made the trip as short as possibly I left Hyd on 17 eve (train at 8:10 PM), reached Chennai on 18th Morn(10 AM) left from there at 1:30 PM with Didi, reached home on 19the even(6:30PM) left from home at 20th morn(7:30AM) and was here on 21st (4:30 AM). Didi was left at home to come back later.
That was surely one of the most hectic trips ever. But reaching home was sufficiently refreshing to help me neglect the troubles incurred. The backward journey was cool too, met this very young kid, took some snaps and videos through the window and read the book "The tipping point", along with some lengthy discussions with a person which need to be blogged seperately.
Well nothing is bad at my camp, It was just an urgent call for a Hyd-Chennai-Jbp-Hyd trip for me. It was because its first Rakhi after my sister's wedding in May this year, its a custom for brother to bring sister back to house for some time.
Since I Couldn't think of a big break, I made the trip as short as possibly I left Hyd on 17 eve (train at 8:10 PM), reached Chennai on 18th Morn(10 AM) left from there at 1:30 PM with Didi, reached home on 19the even(6:30PM) left from home at 20th morn(7:30AM) and was here on 21st (4:30 AM). Didi was left at home to come back later.
That was surely one of the most hectic trips ever. But reaching home was sufficiently refreshing to help me neglect the troubles incurred. The backward journey was cool too, met this very young kid, took some snaps and videos through the window and read the book "The tipping point", along with some lengthy discussions with a person which need to be blogged seperately.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Topcoder Ups and Downs
Firsly I recommend you to join topcoder if you are not already a membe, if you are interested in just spending some small amount of time( 1 hr a week mostly) and keep urself challenged with programming questions.
The problems are not very algorithmic but the timing of coding plays the most significant role. Will try to write more about it later.
The interesting part is the topcoder fluctuations I faced in past one/two weeks.
The latest one was a boost in rank was around 180 points.(743->920). I scored 10 position in Division2 and just missed the best solution to 1000 points problem( my score was second). I cudn't avoid taken a screengrab. phoenixcoder is for Aiwa he made a yellow debut(1526 IIRC). Bravo dude!
Well there was a competition in which I did bad in solving 250 points prob got 147 and didn't solve anything else. So I was screwed and lost my position by around 100 points.( 980--> 884), then I got further screwd up in next contest which was simple but the net connection spoiled the game. I just opened the 250 points problem and net went down I coundn't submit it not for next 45 minutes. It sucked. I knew I was going to lose lots of points. finally I was informed that I lost position by around 150(884-> 743).
( since I was idle I took this screenshot).
The problems are not very algorithmic but the timing of coding plays the most significant role. Will try to write more about it later.
The interesting part is the topcoder fluctuations I faced in past one/two weeks.
The latest one was a boost in rank was around 180 points.(743->920). I scored 10 position in Division2 and just missed the best solution to 1000 points problem( my score was second). I cudn't avoid taken a screengrab. phoenixcoder is for Aiwa he made a yellow debut(1526 IIRC). Bravo dude!
Well there was a competition in which I did bad in solving 250 points prob got 147 and didn't solve anything else. So I was screwed and lost my position by around 100 points.( 980--> 884), then I got further screwd up in next contest which was simple but the net connection spoiled the game. I just opened the 250 points problem and net went down I coundn't submit it not for next 45 minutes. It sucked. I knew I was going to lose lots of points. finally I was informed that I lost position by around 150(884-> 743).
( since I was idle I took this screenshot).
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Is HP Dying? Whos' next
Sometime during my B.Tech I came to know about HP being one of the oldest computer companies thanks to the film Pirates of the Silicon Valley. If you see that movie you realize HP too did some mistakes like IBM in its history for e.g not even considering the concept of a personal computer when their employee steve Wozniak presented the prototype to them.
For so many years this company has been doing quite well, but perhaps with no focus, they seemed to have done a good thing by remaining the leader in Printing market as that now looks to be their main source of Income, They became a PC vendor of late, and as usual they wanted to earn some quick money so they rode on M$ windows for long time, becoming quite responsible for giving the Giant is current lead in the market. They did spend some money on making their own Unix (HPUX) but were not intelligent enough to promote it. Their research labs never looked very active as we never heard of any great project being successfully accomplished. Even then it should be interesting to note what has changed so drastically in past 1 month or so that HP is now giving its ads in paper everyday.
To me this everyday ads looks a very signing of finishing their current stock when it can sell. If you see the PC of HP Desktop machine it has come down suddenly from something like 40000 Rs to something like 23000 Rs. Whats' the reason? Anyone who keeps a watch on such ads can easily make out that they have changed their default OS from Windows to FreeDos. The statement HP recommendes Windows XP for bussiness/home is now gone. I have been told by my friend that the reason behind this is M$ showing finger to HP and making alliance with Dell.
As I often use to say whoever partners with M$ finally ends up being at loss. Had HP thought of their future sometime ago and acted they could have probably been in better position now, but thats not it, What happened to HP will probably happen to some other companies too, think of the scenerio when M$ starts selling a fully packaged Desktop system(they might make some ammendments in their name for that may be), like Apple does now. We have already seen them getting in to hardware like Mouse and Keyboard, next day they could simply accquire some Monitor company like Viewsonic or get in patnership and they are in position to ship complete Box(with Intel/AMD chip inside probably). Why will someone then buy a PC from any hardware vendor including Dell ? M$ can easily claim that Windows runs best on their hardware and they provide very good support etc.
You ask me why they haven't done something like this so far, well I can only Imagine that this delay was caused by the entry of Linux, They must have been looking for first eradicating the complete Linux market and then making such a move. They seem to have been trying a lot in this direction and till now they are not successful but you never know the future. Until the hardware vendors open their eyes to the great threat the possibility of such a move by M$ in hardware always remains.
But things are not all that bad, Apple have recently taken a great decision to enhance their entry to desktop market. With MACintel being available from Jan 2006, Desktop market is going to see some good competition for Windows again.
For so many years this company has been doing quite well, but perhaps with no focus, they seemed to have done a good thing by remaining the leader in Printing market as that now looks to be their main source of Income, They became a PC vendor of late, and as usual they wanted to earn some quick money so they rode on M$ windows for long time, becoming quite responsible for giving the Giant is current lead in the market. They did spend some money on making their own Unix (HPUX) but were not intelligent enough to promote it. Their research labs never looked very active as we never heard of any great project being successfully accomplished. Even then it should be interesting to note what has changed so drastically in past 1 month or so that HP is now giving its ads in paper everyday.
To me this everyday ads looks a very signing of finishing their current stock when it can sell. If you see the PC of HP Desktop machine it has come down suddenly from something like 40000 Rs to something like 23000 Rs. Whats' the reason? Anyone who keeps a watch on such ads can easily make out that they have changed their default OS from Windows to FreeDos. The statement HP recommendes Windows XP for bussiness/home is now gone. I have been told by my friend that the reason behind this is M$ showing finger to HP and making alliance with Dell.
As I often use to say whoever partners with M$ finally ends up being at loss. Had HP thought of their future sometime ago and acted they could have probably been in better position now, but thats not it, What happened to HP will probably happen to some other companies too, think of the scenerio when M$ starts selling a fully packaged Desktop system(they might make some ammendments in their name for that may be), like Apple does now. We have already seen them getting in to hardware like Mouse and Keyboard, next day they could simply accquire some Monitor company like Viewsonic or get in patnership and they are in position to ship complete Box(with Intel/AMD chip inside probably). Why will someone then buy a PC from any hardware vendor including Dell ? M$ can easily claim that Windows runs best on their hardware and they provide very good support etc.
You ask me why they haven't done something like this so far, well I can only Imagine that this delay was caused by the entry of Linux, They must have been looking for first eradicating the complete Linux market and then making such a move. They seem to have been trying a lot in this direction and till now they are not successful but you never know the future. Until the hardware vendors open their eyes to the great threat the possibility of such a move by M$ in hardware always remains.
But things are not all that bad, Apple have recently taken a great decision to enhance their entry to desktop market. With MACintel being available from Jan 2006, Desktop market is going to see some good competition for Windows again.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Finally: my first KDE commit
After lots of postponements my first commit to kde svn comes up. Here is the picture showing the proof of the same. My nick is jaiva (3 chars for surname and 2 for name :) )
Now some learnings about checkin
1) In case of KDE it was a command in the format
svn co svn+ssh://jaiva@svn.kde.org/
Not svn co https://... which I initially tried and came to know about this https_proxy variable today only.
You are asked the passphrase for you ssh key and you login.
2) After getting the code, you copy(I mean simple cp) your file/dir to the appropriate place in the checkout directory and give a command svn add
3) Next command is svn checkin. You might need to set up $SVN_EDITOR variable, I did export SVN_EDITOR=vim and on giving the checkin command, vim was lauched with a file where I could write my comments.
4) svn revert and svn del command were also needed when I messed up the thing first time.
What is not clear still is about .deps files creation and whether they should be checked in and also Makefile and Makefile.in should be checked in or not. I will get it clarified and update this post.
For memories... :) of my first successful(?) endeavour towards obtaining a bigger userbase for my code, and becoming a contributor.
Now some learnings about checkin
1) In case of KDE it was a command in the format
svn co svn+ssh://jaiva@svn.kde.org/
Not svn co https://... which I initially tried and came to know about this https_proxy variable today only.
You are asked the passphrase for you ssh key and you login.
2) After getting the code, you copy(I mean simple cp) your file/dir to the appropriate place in the checkout directory and give a command svn add
3) Next command is svn checkin
4) svn revert and svn del command were also needed when I messed up the thing first time.
What is not clear still is about .deps files creation and whether they should be checked in and also Makefile and Makefile.in should be checked in or not. I will get it clarified and update this post.
For memories... :) of my first successful(?) endeavour towards obtaining a bigger userbase for my code, and becoming a contributor.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Talk by B.V Jadgeesh
Had this wonderfully motivating talk by B.V Jadgeesh today. Some main points from his talk.
1) Don't be afraid of failures and don't give up on them they are the ones that gives you most experience. (similar to the book, Discover your destiny by Robin Sharma). The extra thing he said in answer to a question later was that even VCs in the Silicon Valley realize the fact that if you have failed once in your idea you are most probably gonna hit it high/better next time. The same VC who has lost money on investement on you previous firm will be ready to fund you again in most cases with more assurity than the first time. Amazing isn't it?
2) Differentiality, He emphasized the point that differentiality from the current technology or implementation or perfomance is a must to make ppl buy your product/service. Only cost effectiveness or selling your product for cheaper prices compared to others won't make it sell good. Examples of Apples' innovation in Ipod usability, Googles' in Searching faster and better.
3) Listen to customers. He cited the example Novel on how a arrongant crew of company leaders can lead to company's demise. Citing that he emphasized that regular improvement is a must and you can't sit and relax on your current potential and market share.
4) Emphasis on Self confidence. The fact that his initial company was started by just two Indians with a total money 50000$ and no US education and how that company soared to great hights in 1996-2000 period coming to a market cap of 27 Billion $.
5) How new companies can easily dominate the market share and take it away from the old players citing example of Chinese Router company and Cisco's compentence in Chinese market.
6) Look out for what is needed in the market and not just what you want to deliver, Strike a good Idea and funding will be easy process. Execution of the plan is the next important thing and that is followed by Marketing, all things are very important and their importance cannot be possibily ranked, important is to understand that you need all the three to succeed.
He shared how he felt when he was leaving his well setled job of 6 digit salary in Novel in 1993 end and took the pain of being underpaid for next 12 months, just because he new that was worth it. Also that Part-time ventures will mostly never succeed, you need to be ready to take risk if you want to be an entrepreneur and the motivation could be the higher rewards that might come through.
If I missed some point please point out.
1) Don't be afraid of failures and don't give up on them they are the ones that gives you most experience. (similar to the book, Discover your destiny by Robin Sharma). The extra thing he said in answer to a question later was that even VCs in the Silicon Valley realize the fact that if you have failed once in your idea you are most probably gonna hit it high/better next time. The same VC who has lost money on investement on you previous firm will be ready to fund you again in most cases with more assurity than the first time. Amazing isn't it?
2) Differentiality, He emphasized the point that differentiality from the current technology or implementation or perfomance is a must to make ppl buy your product/service. Only cost effectiveness or selling your product for cheaper prices compared to others won't make it sell good. Examples of Apples' innovation in Ipod usability, Googles' in Searching faster and better.
3) Listen to customers. He cited the example Novel on how a arrongant crew of company leaders can lead to company's demise. Citing that he emphasized that regular improvement is a must and you can't sit and relax on your current potential and market share.
4) Emphasis on Self confidence. The fact that his initial company was started by just two Indians with a total money 50000$ and no US education and how that company soared to great hights in 1996-2000 period coming to a market cap of 27 Billion $.
5) How new companies can easily dominate the market share and take it away from the old players citing example of Chinese Router company and Cisco's compentence in Chinese market.
6) Look out for what is needed in the market and not just what you want to deliver, Strike a good Idea and funding will be easy process. Execution of the plan is the next important thing and that is followed by Marketing, all things are very important and their importance cannot be possibily ranked, important is to understand that you need all the three to succeed.
He shared how he felt when he was leaving his well setled job of 6 digit salary in Novel in 1993 end and took the pain of being underpaid for next 12 months, just because he new that was worth it. Also that Part-time ventures will mostly never succeed, you need to be ready to take risk if you want to be an entrepreneur and the motivation could be the higher rewards that might come through.
If I missed some point please point out.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
DIP TAship
I have taken up DIP TAship for this sem. There won't be any tutorials as sir told me, I will basically be checking assignments, scrips and clarifying doubts.
Now since there are many surprize takers of this course, I should clarify somethings unofficially. I must say this course is not a very advanced course and very high level of mathematics background is not required in it. The content is mostly logical and easy to understand and also fun to implement.
Now as usual when I get a TA ship I want to make sure that my bad experiences for the course are not repeated for the students. This of course stands for only those who are genuinely interested in learning something from the course rather than just getting 4 cheap credits. But the course as it was done for us didn't give us much of excitement to explore anything.
The reasons for that might include our nonchalant behaviour but the main reason I feel was the bad teaching by the then Prof. DIP is somethings that could be made very interesting by showing some good effects created using various techniques and made vary boring by just showing some slides with loads of text describing the algorithm of those things, and almost everything follows logically if the concepts are clear, which was fortunately not the case with us. The surprizing part is that we never got the excitement to code any good technique, we only did the very little which would allow us to have working code in Matlab, mostly using heavy matlab functions and learning nothing about the implementation of them.
The problem arose because of unclarity of the assignments. We never knew what we were supposed to learn from the exercise the result of using some algo? or the basics of the algo? Since doing the first was like testing some small code in matlab, we ended up doing that most of the time. So it's a must for the student to get it clear what is the objective of the assignment, otherwise doing it may lend u nowhere.
If you hesitate asking the prof ask the TA, if you hesitate in that too, Then you are probably doing bad to youself.
If someone takes this course for getting in to Adobe as one of my friend guesses, I must warn that improper knowledge is more dangerous than innocence in the topic. So either do the course properly or skip it. Further I normally dislike cheating and malpractices. I don't like ppl getting more than what they deserve 'coz it spoils their habbit and the spirit of other hardworking ppl.
ooking forward for some great learning and teaching experience. Any comments(even anons) should be welcome.
Now since there are many surprize takers of this course, I should clarify somethings unofficially. I must say this course is not a very advanced course and very high level of mathematics background is not required in it. The content is mostly logical and easy to understand and also fun to implement.
Now as usual when I get a TA ship I want to make sure that my bad experiences for the course are not repeated for the students. This of course stands for only those who are genuinely interested in learning something from the course rather than just getting 4 cheap credits. But the course as it was done for us didn't give us much of excitement to explore anything.
The reasons for that might include our nonchalant behaviour but the main reason I feel was the bad teaching by the then Prof. DIP is somethings that could be made very interesting by showing some good effects created using various techniques and made vary boring by just showing some slides with loads of text describing the algorithm of those things, and almost everything follows logically if the concepts are clear, which was fortunately not the case with us. The surprizing part is that we never got the excitement to code any good technique, we only did the very little which would allow us to have working code in Matlab, mostly using heavy matlab functions and learning nothing about the implementation of them.
The problem arose because of unclarity of the assignments. We never knew what we were supposed to learn from the exercise the result of using some algo? or the basics of the algo? Since doing the first was like testing some small code in matlab, we ended up doing that most of the time. So it's a must for the student to get it clear what is the objective of the assignment, otherwise doing it may lend u nowhere.
If you hesitate asking the prof ask the TA, if you hesitate in that too, Then you are probably doing bad to youself.
If someone takes this course for getting in to Adobe as one of my friend guesses, I must warn that improper knowledge is more dangerous than innocence in the topic. So either do the course properly or skip it. Further I normally dislike cheating and malpractices. I don't like ppl getting more than what they deserve 'coz it spoils their habbit and the spirit of other hardworking ppl.
ooking forward for some great learning and teaching experience. Any comments(even anons) should be welcome.
The week that was
I can realize that time's pace already seems to get higher. Last week went without any progress, basically stuck with some implementation detail in a paper and debugging the code. Only to realize that the code was right but there was some problem in the understanding. That leaves the algo unimplemented for some time. Sir asked me implement the better and more reliable paper.
Had two parties at the weekend. One was Maliha's Birthday treat and her new house's inaugration(?) ceremony, had great time going to her house near Mehdipatnam trippling on Bapu's bike, (Me, Sachin and Bothra). There we waited for around 1/2 hr for the gifts to be brought in by Dixit and Rocky. Patke and AC joined us waiting too. Then we had some BC for around 2 hrs sitting on the roof of the house.
Next day Bothra took us to the Country Inn(?not sure?), Its a good hotel and the buffet was really nice. Photos should be hosted soon if only my flickr uploader gets updated with the new APIs.
Had two parties at the weekend. One was Maliha's Birthday treat and her new house's inaugration(?) ceremony, had great time going to her house near Mehdipatnam trippling on Bapu's bike, (Me, Sachin and Bothra). There we waited for around 1/2 hr for the gifts to be brought in by Dixit and Rocky. Patke and AC joined us waiting too. Then we had some BC for around 2 hrs sitting on the roof of the house.
Next day Bothra took us to the Country Inn(?not sure?), Its a good hotel and the buffet was really nice. Photos should be hosted soon if only my flickr uploader gets updated with the new APIs.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
KIO::http_post and KMD5, md5sum usage learnings
I needed MD5 sum for a given string for the api-signing(irrelevant) of flickr's new Authetication API. Simply guessed KMD5 and searched it and woooo!!! it was there.
Usage of KMD5 is quite well documented in their documentation page, what I used and what worked perfectly well for me :
#include
QString final("this is just an example.");
const char *test=final.ascii();
KMD5 context (test);
kdDebug()<< "Test Hex Digest output: " << context.hexDigest().data() << endl;
Since I was not getting proper response from the server on using the MD5 sum, I enquired and came to know that the command md5sum in Linux takes the terminating \n of the string in to account if not told otherwise. i.e
the output of echo "this is just an example." | md5sum
is the md5sum of this is just an example.\n
to get the correct answer the command should be echo -n "this is just an example." | md5sum
This might look very trivial now, but even when I copy pasted string in to a file and checked the md5sum the \n was creating the trouble. So be careful about the \n thing. Also if you can suggest how to get rid of this \n from a file in vim please let me know, I tried backspace etc but it didn't give correct checksum.
KMD5 works without any problem the QString converted using latin1, utf8 etc anything works well. The trailing \0 is not a problem as against what I initially guessed.
Now KIO::http_post. I basically don't have much idea about its implementation details , but only that it is used for posting html form. I wanted to send a form with a query string, so I suspected that I should use content type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded and encode the query string data in to the second argument somehow, I was wrong, that all is not needed, the first argument is a KUrl and it can handle any complex query string as a value so my final code looked like this. (I am still not sure what kind of data is to be send when I want to send the form data using second argument, I guess it should be the utf8 format.)
QString final_url=url+"/?"+queryStr;
QByteArray t;
KIO::TransferJob* job = KIO::http_post(final_url,t,false);
job->addMetaData("content-type", "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" );
connect(job, SIGNAL(data(KIO::Job*, const QByteArray&)),
SLOT(data(KIO::Job*, const QByteArray&)));
connect(job, SIGNAL(result(KIO::Job *)),
SLOT(slotResult(KIO::Job *)));
This page is just placed so that anyone who faces similar question finds a solution. In case the details are inaccurate please let me know I will apply them with acknowledgement.
Usage of KMD5 is quite well documented in their documentation page, what I used and what worked perfectly well for me :
#include
QString final("this is just an example.");
const char *test=final.ascii();
KMD5 context (test);
kdDebug()<< "Test Hex Digest output: " << context.hexDigest().data() << endl;
Since I was not getting proper response from the server on using the MD5 sum, I enquired and came to know that the command md5sum in Linux takes the terminating \n of the string in to account if not told otherwise. i.e
the output of echo "this is just an example." | md5sum
is the md5sum of this is just an example.\n
to get the correct answer the command should be echo -n "this is just an example." | md5sum
This might look very trivial now, but even when I copy pasted string in to a file and checked the md5sum the \n was creating the trouble. So be careful about the \n thing. Also if you can suggest how to get rid of this \n from a file in vim please let me know, I tried backspace etc but it didn't give correct checksum.
KMD5 works without any problem the QString converted using latin1, utf8 etc anything works well. The trailing \0 is not a problem as against what I initially guessed.
Now KIO::http_post. I basically don't have much idea about its implementation details , but only that it is used for posting html form. I wanted to send a form with a query string, so I suspected that I should use content type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded and encode the query string data in to the second argument somehow, I was wrong, that all is not needed, the first argument is a KUrl and it can handle any complex query string as a value so my final code looked like this. (I am still not sure what kind of data is to be send when I want to send the form data using second argument, I guess it should be the utf8 format.)
QString final_url=url+"/?"+queryStr;
QByteArray t;
KIO::TransferJob* job = KIO::http_post(final_url,t,false);
job->addMetaData("content-type", "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" );
connect(job, SIGNAL(data(KIO::Job*, const QByteArray&)),
SLOT(data(KIO::Job*, const QByteArray&)));
connect(job, SIGNAL(result(KIO::Job *)),
SLOT(slotResult(KIO::Job *)));
This page is just placed so that anyone who faces similar question finds a solution. In case the details are inaccurate please let me know I will apply them with acknowledgement.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
More on M$ front
I have heard that whatever you through in air, comes back around. Its probably from Noam Chomsky (My friend Ramneek reads his book and he told me). The same seems to be happening with Microsoft now.
Firstly there is this news of Google hiring another top M$ exec and M$ suing Google for that. Its a funny behaviour potrayed by M$, which itself has the tradition of hiring great minds from the competitors. Read this
Insightful comment on slashdot.
They do it not only to Industry but even to Academic institutes, wooing Professors to work for their research centers around the world leaving the universities.
Second, today this interview from M$ Linux Strategist has come up on slashdot which demonstrates how poor their knowledge of Linux and OSS is.
Finally this news and graph makes us Linux Lovers happier. Linux Trounces Windows Mobile in Smartphone Shipments
Firstly there is this news of Google hiring another top M$ exec and M$ suing Google for that. Its a funny behaviour potrayed by M$, which itself has the tradition of hiring great minds from the competitors. Read this
Insightful comment on slashdot.
They do it not only to Industry but even to Academic institutes, wooing Professors to work for their research centers around the world leaving the universities.
Second, today this interview from M$ Linux Strategist has come up on slashdot which demonstrates how poor their knowledge of Linux and OSS is.
Finally this news and graph makes us Linux Lovers happier. Linux Trounces Windows Mobile in Smartphone Shipments
Movies review
Was not able to post my reviews on some movies I saw recently, here is a short list of them.
Serendipity --> Nice movie. Don't put too much logic, its just about finding your true soulmate etc. stuff
Maine Pyar Kyon Kiya --> we went to this Sai Ranga theatre in Lingampally just for sake of an outing. Having already read the reviews of movie I knew it was gonna be a senseless comedy but its was okay. Since I left my brain at my hostel while leaving I enjoyed some of the funny incidents in the movie though they sucked most others.
Madgaskar ---> Its not a great animation movie. The basic storyline is not very impressive.
Black Friday --> This movie is awesome. As they say one of the great ones rarely produced by Indian cinema. Its about Bombay blasts in 1993, the best thing is that they don't go about teaching the secularlism throughout the movie, they simply show what was found out during the investigation. One ver y well put scene is where the ppl involved in the blasts found a bomb in their own car which was timed to explode soon.
Serendipity --> Nice movie. Don't put too much logic, its just about finding your true soulmate etc. stuff
Maine Pyar Kyon Kiya --> we went to this Sai Ranga theatre in Lingampally just for sake of an outing. Having already read the reviews of movie I knew it was gonna be a senseless comedy but its was okay. Since I left my brain at my hostel while leaving I enjoyed some of the funny incidents in the movie though they sucked most others.
Madgaskar ---> Its not a great animation movie. The basic storyline is not very impressive.
Black Friday --> This movie is awesome. As they say one of the great ones rarely produced by Indian cinema. Its about Bombay blasts in 1993, the best thing is that they don't go about teaching the secularlism throughout the movie, they simply show what was found out during the investigation. One ver y well put scene is where the ppl involved in the blasts found a bomb in their own car which was timed to explode soon.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Smallest Linux Computer::Picotux
Better go to the homepage to see the specs.
The dimentions are : (35mmÃx 19mmÃx 19mm) it runs ucLinux.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
BTech Requirements Completed...
ISAS shows my B Tech requirement completed. All the grades are out and my final CGPA is 8.52 and I am happy to have crossed the 8.5 mark.
In some sense I am already a graduate or specifically an Engineer but practically I will get the degree by next year only when I finish my integrated MSbR. So I am still an undergrad. :(
In some sense I am already a graduate or specifically an Engineer but practically I will get the degree by next year only when I finish my integrated MSbR. So I am still an undergrad. :(
Monday, July 11, 2005
Telnet access Motorola A768i phone from Kernel 2.6
I had almost given up connecting my phone by USB on Linux (I was told and I tested it not working on my FC2/3 machines)until yesterday when I landed up at this post by simon. Where he describs a patch in kernel 2.6.12-rc4 that enables usbnet to work properly in Linux without need of any extra usblan drivers at was required in kernel 2.4
I Got the kernel 2.6.12.2 from kernel.org and installed it. Just checked that everything relating to hotplug and usb was selected in kernel config. If you think compiling is a big problem it's not, you need just these commands and some time:
tar -cvjf kernel-2.6.12.2.tar.bz2
cd kernel-2.6.12.2
make menuconfig #(if you really wanna enable/disable default config of kernel).
make
make install
And your grub file will now contain your new kernel entry,
After booting in to new kernel, I just plugged in my phone, usb connection mesg was shown on the console. lsusb showed me the phone identified. This much was working even with 2.6.9 kernel, what mattered was that the usb0 interface was not getting created. Which happened without any problem in new kernel. I just checked "ifconfig usb0" and it showed the device. I don't know if the command echo "AT+MODE=99'>/dev/ttyAMC0 was needed on my phone as suggested in simon's post.
Then started the fun part. To assign an ip to usb0 I gave command ifconfig usb0 192.168.1.2
and then set usbnet option in setup of my phone to on. It accepted IP address 192.168.1.1.
I did telnet 192.168.1.1 and was able to login as root without any password. Did lot of exploration on the phone seeing all the directories. important files etc. Its real cool stuff to play around and see same Linux powering ur box running on such small hardware.
Some good stuff to play around.
1) As with all(mostly) devices this phone provides you only windows .exe to do things like syncing, updating etc. But if you really hate to boot to that OS you can do without it. The phone probably uses(read point 3 below too) samba for enabling write from windows, so from your linux box just smbmount your phone no password required, just press enter when prompted e.g
smbmount //192.168.1.1/home /mnt/tmp -o username=ezx ;# understood by reading samba config file ;-)
To get to your custom files and folder as shown by the filemanager app.
And
smbmount //192.168.1.1/system /mnt/tmp -o username=ezx
To get to the / you have to give this command. I must warn you to be carefull with writing files etc.
now you can simply play with /mnt/tmp/ as you like to and as the file/dir permissions allow you to do.
2) Run Nmap to see what the device is offering, its os fingerprint, its uptime etc.
nmap -o 192.168.1.1
3) I could see ftp in above command's output, as expected next command was ftp 192.168.1.1
by after getting "connected to 192.168.1.1", I was told device closed the connection. I didn't try much further. This could also be one possible way of file tranfer by syncing software.
4) Linux hackers love this /proc so I investigated it for a while, to see details of my device.
cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo
To realize it was running on Intel XScale. and kernel is 2.4. something
cat /proc/filesystems
To realize that it supports nfs and ext3
5) cd /dev/ ; ls
shows lots of devices I wonder what they are used for.
6) The phone seems to start as normal linux device and autologin to user ezx and startup is mostly what is given in this user's .bash_profile
here is
ls /bin
I Got the kernel 2.6.12.2 from kernel.org and installed it. Just checked that everything relating to hotplug and usb was selected in kernel config. If you think compiling is a big problem it's not, you need just these commands and some time:
tar -cvjf kernel-2.6.12.2.tar.bz2
cd kernel-2.6.12.2
make menuconfig #(if you really wanna enable/disable default config of kernel).
make
make install
And your grub file will now contain your new kernel entry,
After booting in to new kernel, I just plugged in my phone, usb connection mesg was shown on the console. lsusb showed me the phone identified. This much was working even with 2.6.9 kernel, what mattered was that the usb0 interface was not getting created. Which happened without any problem in new kernel. I just checked "ifconfig usb0" and it showed the device. I don't know if the command echo "AT+MODE=99'>/dev/ttyAMC0 was needed on my phone as suggested in simon's post.
Then started the fun part. To assign an ip to usb0 I gave command ifconfig usb0 192.168.1.2
and then set usbnet option in setup of my phone to on. It accepted IP address 192.168.1.1.
I did telnet 192.168.1.1 and was able to login as root without any password. Did lot of exploration on the phone seeing all the directories. important files etc. Its real cool stuff to play around and see same Linux powering ur box running on such small hardware.
Some good stuff to play around.
1) As with all(mostly) devices this phone provides you only windows .exe to do things like syncing, updating etc. But if you really hate to boot to that OS you can do without it. The phone probably uses(read point 3 below too) samba for enabling write from windows, so from your linux box just smbmount your phone no password required, just press enter when prompted e.g
smbmount //192.168.1.1/home /mnt/tmp -o username=ezx ;# understood by reading samba config file ;-)
To get to your custom files and folder as shown by the filemanager app.
And
smbmount //192.168.1.1/system /mnt/tmp -o username=ezx
To get to the / you have to give this command. I must warn you to be carefull with writing files etc.
now you can simply play with /mnt/tmp/ as you like to and as the file/dir permissions allow you to do.
2) Run Nmap to see what the device is offering, its os fingerprint, its uptime etc.
nmap -o 192.168.1.1
3) I could see ftp in above command's output, as expected next command was ftp 192.168.1.1
by after getting "connected to 192.168.1.1", I was told device closed the connection. I didn't try much further. This could also be one possible way of file tranfer by syncing software.
4) Linux hackers love this /proc so I investigated it for a while, to see details of my device.
cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo
To realize it was running on Intel XScale. and kernel is 2.4. something
cat /proc/filesystems
To realize that it supports nfs and ext3
5) cd /dev/ ; ls
shows lots of devices I wonder what they are used for.
6) The phone seems to start as normal linux device and autologin to user ezx and startup is mostly what is given in this user's .bash_profile
here is
ls /bin
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Multiexposure :: Cool imaging technique.
I didn't study details of that, but the images posted by ppl on flickr promises the MExposure is a great technique. Check out these example images.
Man seeing himself lying on the floor.
Do I need to describe it?
You can search other images on flickr with tag doubleexposure, by clicking here. Look for other similar tags too.
Man seeing himself lying on the floor.
Do I need to describe it?
You can search other images on flickr with tag doubleexposure, by clicking here. Look for other similar tags too.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Shitty Service(s) by Idea Cellular
I have been using idea for around 40 days now. As expected I should give some feedback/warning to them and their prospective customers. I should start from the beginning.
Getting the Sim card was a breeze just submitting a photocopy of passport and it was done. I got 7 days validity with 99/- card, and 19/- Rs talktime.
Rates were not given much heed as I wanted a temporary connection till my BSNL sim application was taken care off, but they need a mention as a kind of feedback 2.75/- PM for any outside AP call. 1.75/- for local non Idea phone/landlines. I soon realized I had to apply some scheme to make STD cheaper for me and I opted for Diet STD topup. Rs 2 PM on any outside AP call.
I was feeling great when I was just able to get a good scheme of 1200/- Rs recharge with (almost) full talktime and 6 months validity before I went for a vacation to attend a marriage in Banda (M.P)
I didn't get sufficient time to enquire their Roaming, charges so I stayed away from making much use of phone for outgoing calls in my Journey( It included Maharastra on the way with Airtel as the vendor) What seemed funny was that when I landed down at Nagpur to take a bus to Jabalpur, I saw two bill boards one of them from Airtel thanking customers for making them biggest Cell providers in Mah and another from IDEA again thanking customers for the same thing but with a bar graph ??.
So I reached my home in the night and called up customer care to know what were the charges etc. In MP I got Idea network, so I expected 12345 to be dialed for the customer care and dialed it. They had a huge sequence of menu operation and I had to press around 5/6 digits(options) before I could speak to a customer care executive(CC), which happened at around 5 minutes after the call. I just asked the CC as to what I have to dial to know my balance (it was 2121 in AP but that was not working there), the fellow told he will give me the number, when I asked him if there was no toll free, short number to do so, he informed me nothing was toll free on roaming, even the call I made to him is charged, It was already more than 6 minutes before I came to know this and Damn it costed me 28/- to call customer care. Coudn't they simply send me an SMS about there tarrifs and billing etc info when I go to some other network? They do send a lot of spam SMS(regarding some offers) at least.
Now when I came back from the vacations I realized I had spent around 130/- bucks in making/recieving some 5,6 1-5 minutes calls.
Soon I realized making local calls was getting tougher, so I thought of taking a "Topup" for local calling, I enquired the procedure, and based on that I sent a SMS to 4444 with mesg MOBILE, to my wonders no action was taken till next day, I again enquired CC told me that I can't opt that Topup as I already have Diet STD topup. Next day I again enquired if there was some other way to get my local calls cheaper I was told I can apply for Mobile topup, and I just have to pay separate 45/- rental for each of the topups, so I applied and this time I got the confirmation: you can now make local calls at 49p/m. I was glad, but that was not for long and I realized the mesg meant nothing when I called local phone next evening and was charged at 1.75/- Rs/M. Of course frustated I called CC again and this time the guy there didn't admit there systems fault and said I didn't send any SMS and made me send the SMS again. What the heck? Next day again, no action was taken so I called CC again and this fellow tells me he will make a request from his Comp and it will be activated by 12 AM.
Soon I got a call that they will be waiving my Diet STD for enabling this Mobile topup and now that I had made the request already the system will decide what to do. Meaning If I don't want to lose my Diet STD Topup and just stay out of this new one, they can't really do anything. It was for system to decide. It might subscribe me to Mobile or might leave things as such. Shit are computers given so much control by Foolish programmers?
Today I was finally informed that they have now enabled Mobile topup on this number and have cut 45/- Rental for both the topups? Shit! These ppl r really insane.
Getting the Sim card was a breeze just submitting a photocopy of passport and it was done. I got 7 days validity with 99/- card, and 19/- Rs talktime.
Rates were not given much heed as I wanted a temporary connection till my BSNL sim application was taken care off, but they need a mention as a kind of feedback 2.75/- PM for any outside AP call. 1.75/- for local non Idea phone/landlines. I soon realized I had to apply some scheme to make STD cheaper for me and I opted for Diet STD topup. Rs 2 PM on any outside AP call.
I was feeling great when I was just able to get a good scheme of 1200/- Rs recharge with (almost) full talktime and 6 months validity before I went for a vacation to attend a marriage in Banda (M.P)
I didn't get sufficient time to enquire their Roaming, charges so I stayed away from making much use of phone for outgoing calls in my Journey( It included Maharastra on the way with Airtel as the vendor) What seemed funny was that when I landed down at Nagpur to take a bus to Jabalpur, I saw two bill boards one of them from Airtel thanking customers for making them biggest Cell providers in Mah and another from IDEA again thanking customers for the same thing but with a bar graph ??.
So I reached my home in the night and called up customer care to know what were the charges etc. In MP I got Idea network, so I expected 12345 to be dialed for the customer care and dialed it. They had a huge sequence of menu operation and I had to press around 5/6 digits(options) before I could speak to a customer care executive(CC), which happened at around 5 minutes after the call. I just asked the CC as to what I have to dial to know my balance (it was 2121 in AP but that was not working there), the fellow told he will give me the number, when I asked him if there was no toll free, short number to do so, he informed me nothing was toll free on roaming, even the call I made to him is charged, It was already more than 6 minutes before I came to know this and Damn it costed me 28/- to call customer care. Coudn't they simply send me an SMS about there tarrifs and billing etc info when I go to some other network? They do send a lot of spam SMS(regarding some offers) at least.
Now when I came back from the vacations I realized I had spent around 130/- bucks in making/recieving some 5,6 1-5 minutes calls.
Soon I realized making local calls was getting tougher, so I thought of taking a "Topup" for local calling, I enquired the procedure, and based on that I sent a SMS to 4444 with mesg MOBILE, to my wonders no action was taken till next day, I again enquired CC told me that I can't opt that Topup as I already have Diet STD topup. Next day I again enquired if there was some other way to get my local calls cheaper I was told I can apply for Mobile topup, and I just have to pay separate 45/- rental for each of the topups, so I applied and this time I got the confirmation: you can now make local calls at 49p/m. I was glad, but that was not for long and I realized the mesg meant nothing when I called local phone next evening and was charged at 1.75/- Rs/M. Of course frustated I called CC again and this time the guy there didn't admit there systems fault and said I didn't send any SMS and made me send the SMS again. What the heck? Next day again, no action was taken so I called CC again and this fellow tells me he will make a request from his Comp and it will be activated by 12 AM.
Soon I got a call that they will be waiving my Diet STD for enabling this Mobile topup and now that I had made the request already the system will decide what to do. Meaning If I don't want to lose my Diet STD Topup and just stay out of this new one, they can't really do anything. It was for system to decide. It might subscribe me to Mobile or might leave things as such. Shit are computers given so much control by Foolish programmers?
Today I was finally informed that they have now enabled Mobile topup on this number and have cut 45/- Rental for both the topups? Shit! These ppl r really insane.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Check your mail signature...
I remember myself keeping large signature with lots of details about myself including my room number etc, Now I don't have any default signature. IIRC the realization came when I saw one of my mail in some HTML mail archive. It had details of my address etc.
Everyone becomes aware of how useless such signature of our are, over time, but by that time probably mails sent by you to public mailing list have made it to google's memory and a appropriate search query might give details about you which you wouldn't like to give to ppl.
I have seen one of my friend with a signature which give his email id in around 5 sites, his room number, his phone number, mobile number, etc etc. many other ppl do it to varying extent, ppl should realize how senseless these things are to the reciever of the email. Even if you don't care about your own privacy information, do care about spams, unsolicits calls on your cell, unsolicit messages on your phone(they are going to be a big problem as programmes searching for email addresses starts understanding mobile number too and map the number to the email address for the person).
Everyone becomes aware of how useless such signature of our are, over time, but by that time probably mails sent by you to public mailing list have made it to google's memory and a appropriate search query might give details about you which you wouldn't like to give to ppl.
I have seen one of my friend with a signature which give his email id in around 5 sites, his room number, his phone number, mobile number, etc etc. many other ppl do it to varying extent, ppl should realize how senseless these things are to the reciever of the email. Even if you don't care about your own privacy information, do care about spams, unsolicits calls on your cell, unsolicit messages on your phone(they are going to be a big problem as programmes searching for email addresses starts understanding mobile number too and map the number to the email address for the person).
Movie Sarkar: Awesome
Really nice movie, No BC, Yes those Indian tunes do come up at times, but they don't bore you much with all time pass customes etc and at the same time there are no songs.
Some great dialogs, "Kaam chunaab se karne chayiye dabab se nahi" (Rasheed),
"Tumey mallum nahin mein do din mein jail je bahar aa jayunga",(Chief Minister), Reply: Bahi to mein chahta huun (by Abhishek).
"Mein to Chala Tamil Nadu, Tsunami ke baad jo koi gaav bach gaya hoga usme settle ho juyynga, Tum bhi Dubai nikal lo, (wahan par sand mein chip jana), aur tum to gaye kaam se, tum to agar mar bhi gaya to Sarkar tumhe bapas Jinda karke marega, aur pandit tumhari bohut jaldi God se meeting hone wali hey" :) (Discussions between the Villians).
Some great dialogs, "Kaam chunaab se karne chayiye dabab se nahi" (Rasheed),
"Tumey mallum nahin mein do din mein jail je bahar aa jayunga",(Chief Minister), Reply: Bahi to mein chahta huun (by Abhishek).
"Mein to Chala Tamil Nadu, Tsunami ke baad jo koi gaav bach gaya hoga usme settle ho juyynga, Tum bhi Dubai nikal lo, (wahan par sand mein chip jana), aur tum to gaye kaam se, tum to agar mar bhi gaya to Sarkar tumhe bapas Jinda karke marega, aur pandit tumhari bohut jaldi God se meeting hone wali hey" :) (Discussions between the Villians).
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Patents...
I don't like software patents and pray that they are not legallized
in European Parliament tomorrow( you see most of the OSS projects have
contributions from Europeans).
While reading some research paper on my MS topic, I came across the line
"A large number of techniques for Chromakeying have been under patents...."
suggesting the problems ppl face in understanding and improving these
techniques.
If you need to search for some patent, you may find this site quite
useful.
http://www.patentstorm.us/
If you are European visiting this blog please take whatever action
possible reading http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/02/1451233&tid=155&tid=17
Friday, July 01, 2005
About Resolution : printing and viewing
Somu told me some good info about these things when we were discussing
about the use of a 5 MP camera that I recently got.
Resolution of a photograph is something like 2500x1900 (ignore exact
number please), when we see it on a monitor with resolution of 1024x768 we
have to scroll to see the whole picture. Now when we print it on a paper
we will not get that big a photo as our monitor is( forget about the
scrolling part). Why?
Basically monitors have a dpi (dots per inch) value of something like 72.
That means if there are 720 dots they will be put in 10 inches. Now in our
photo case they are something like 2500 dots which will mean around 30
inches of view, so with a monitor of view size 14 inch we need to scroll
for another 16 inch to see the photo completely.
Now coming to case of a printer, the printer has a resolution(?) of around
300 DPI which is roughly 4 times that of a the monitor, that should mean a
2500 pixels which should give around 8 inches of photo print.
So you will not get more than 8inch by 6 inch photograph by a 5 MP camera.
Now its clear why ppl look for better resolution.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Blogger now host photos too!!
This is cool feature I was waiting for long time. Check it our urself by clicking the button between spellchecking and eraser.
Going home again ;-)
Sometime in future I would recall Summer of 2005, those were the best days of my life. These summers have been going great till now.
Firstly my sister's marriage took place on 9th May 2005 and I went home for 2 weeks. That complete trip was just superb.
Then, I got another chance to go home. Yep I am going home again on 25 June, yep tomorrow. Well its just 5 days trip but I am hoping it would be a great trip.
Coming to other happenings I just met someone special today. Would write about it in details later. And also today we finished our BS project with satisfaction of Dr. Vishal. I should be writing a detail entry about the project later (we did do some good work there).
Also I have got in to some great company of developers on this Digikam project. I am not participating much but yet those guys are just great to talk and share ideas and learn from. I am getting more and more memorable events/happenings to jot down should write a complete year roundup blog sometime.
Firstly my sister's marriage took place on 9th May 2005 and I went home for 2 weeks. That complete trip was just superb.
Then, I got another chance to go home. Yep I am going home again on 25 June, yep tomorrow. Well its just 5 days trip but I am hoping it would be a great trip.
Coming to other happenings I just met someone special today. Would write about it in details later. And also today we finished our BS project with satisfaction of Dr. Vishal. I should be writing a detail entry about the project later (we did do some good work there).
Also I have got in to some great company of developers on this Digikam project. I am not participating much but yet those guys are just great to talk and share ideas and learn from. I am getting more and more memorable events/happenings to jot down should write a complete year roundup blog sometime.
Un rencontre apres 4 ans...
C'est mon premier blog en français. Aujourd'hui j'ai rencontré un amie à moi après 4 ans. C'était une petite réunion mais après un temps et une attente très longs. Elle a changé beaucoup et elle n'est pas la même fille enfantine que j'ai rencontré il y a 4 ans. Je n'ai pas aimé le changement beaucoup.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Four years ago!
This post comes totally unexpectedly. It just happened that a girl who is trying to get admission in to IIIT PG was sitting with her father next to us in the mess. (I have to blog this event as presence of my friends Aiwa and Dixit made it worth writing/remembering).
Well we were just talking amongst ourselves when the girls' Father, lets say Mr, X asked me, what course I am doing here? I told him M.S then he asked MS Vs. MTech and also that regular questions anyone who is new to this MS thing (It happened a lot when I met my relatives) has. At the end the girl asked about placements and Dixit replied "Don't worry for placements, take the field of your choice and take admission here".
When the both of them have left(Mr. X and his duaghter) we remembered the scene 4 years ago, when we came here for admissions. Things have changed so much that remembering old time is hard. But still some things were remembered, how most of us were not sure about joining IIIT, Aiwa recalled happily that had he not made this decission to join IIIT he would have been mining in Dhanbad( well thats a phrase to say ur rank in IIT JEE was around 2000). For me too it was a tough decission actually on the day of my admission here I came to know about my selection in Dhirubhai Ambani's DA-IICT. Then the confussions arose. All kinds of discussions went among the parents who were sitting with my father on those seats. Finally I was told that I was the last number to be taken in, I gladly accepted the admission.
It's hard to recall the situation completely, but that was a tough one. Well what happened b4 we came here: As expected I didn't get a call from IIT and Roorkee it was 1559 and against all expectations I didn't get a chance to take any field there and then came DCE 565, Papa and I went there and against our expectations the admissions closed at 240( the prev year they went till 917 for civil) foofed badly I took courage to ask papa about going to Kota again. (don't exactly remember how he reacted)) we came back home and I was not sure what to do. I was probably gonna wait till PET results and join PET if I got any good college. But then one day came IIIT Hyderabad's telegram. They just wrote we have some seats left ur waiting number is 161(i.e rank 661), I recalled that number of seats were just 500 and thought we were just going to have something similar to DCE trip. But Papa was hopeful, and we came here...
This college was just a newly born institute and they had not yet been recognized by the UGC to give a B. Tech or B.E degree. The discussions and debated continued untill one day we had a declaration that IIIT was declared a deemed university. Before that annoucement I had got to know that I was ranked 285 in MPPET. Though I didn't knew much about it but somehow computers as a stream was fixed in my mind. It feels great to realize that our decission four years ago came so fruitful.
Well we were just talking amongst ourselves when the girls' Father, lets say Mr, X asked me, what course I am doing here? I told him M.S then he asked MS Vs. MTech and also that regular questions anyone who is new to this MS thing (It happened a lot when I met my relatives) has. At the end the girl asked about placements and Dixit replied "Don't worry for placements, take the field of your choice and take admission here".
When the both of them have left(Mr. X and his duaghter) we remembered the scene 4 years ago, when we came here for admissions. Things have changed so much that remembering old time is hard. But still some things were remembered, how most of us were not sure about joining IIIT, Aiwa recalled happily that had he not made this decission to join IIIT he would have been mining in Dhanbad( well thats a phrase to say ur rank in IIT JEE was around 2000). For me too it was a tough decission actually on the day of my admission here I came to know about my selection in Dhirubhai Ambani's DA-IICT. Then the confussions arose. All kinds of discussions went among the parents who were sitting with my father on those seats. Finally I was told that I was the last number to be taken in, I gladly accepted the admission.
It's hard to recall the situation completely, but that was a tough one. Well what happened b4 we came here: As expected I didn't get a call from IIT and Roorkee it was 1559 and against all expectations I didn't get a chance to take any field there and then came DCE 565, Papa and I went there and against our expectations the admissions closed at 240( the prev year they went till 917 for civil) foofed badly I took courage to ask papa about going to Kota again. (don't exactly remember how he reacted)) we came back home and I was not sure what to do. I was probably gonna wait till PET results and join PET if I got any good college. But then one day came IIIT Hyderabad's telegram. They just wrote we have some seats left ur waiting number is 161(i.e rank 661), I recalled that number of seats were just 500 and thought we were just going to have something similar to DCE trip. But Papa was hopeful, and we came here...
This college was just a newly born institute and they had not yet been recognized by the UGC to give a B. Tech or B.E degree. The discussions and debated continued untill one day we had a declaration that IIIT was declared a deemed university. Before that annoucement I had got to know that I was ranked 285 in MPPET. Though I didn't knew much about it but somehow computers as a stream was fixed in my mind. It feels great to realize that our decission four years ago came so fruitful.
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