Planet Manipal

4th Sem

2010-03-12T05:42:41+00:00

Almost two months went by since my last post… I presume many of you must be wondering what happened to Kartik ?? Don’t worry guys. I am back with a bang !!!!

January – A new Year, a new Semester. It started with great news from my employer at Dulcet Solutions in the form a nice letter. I completed my first industrial exposure successfully. I boarded the Rajdhani( bunked the first day) to reach on 4th. Train journey as usual was great fun. I had confused feelings in the train, was both happy and sad. Happy because I was going back to the place I loved most and sad for the reason of getting away from my family. Manipal was the same, no noticeable changes were there. I had three half days . The tiring 7pm classes were no longer there. Within a week of arriving in Manipal, I was back to work. Editorial Board work was going on full swing. We overhauled the entire design of MAGMIT and implemented a forum for MITians with great plans but alas, many of those plans are yet to be implemented. The first two weeks were pretty hectic owing to the enormous workload of the website. Needless to say, I enjoyed the work and learned a lot. This sem I came with a firm mind to shape up my body. In that direction, I joined a gym. Yes guys, you read it right.Even I had never expected that I would join a gym. Many of friends were pretty much shocked to hear, many laughed, teased but none could stop me from what I wanted to do. The first few days were tiring and then I enjoyed it. For the record, I still go thrice a week, if not more. I had my german exam this month, was pretty scared. This is the second time I have been this afraid of a exam( the first was Engineering Graphics). I studied pretty hard in the last week of Jan and understood German properly. I regret not giving more attention earlier. There are plenty of nice websites available on the net which are a awesome help. Needless to say, I passed with a ‘B’ grade which was far more than I expected.

February: IAESTE offers were about to be released and I was ready armed with letters, certificates etc. I had been dreaming of this since my first year. The first two weeks went pretty fast( IAESTE and Sessionals). I scored pretty badly in the sessionals, it was one of my lowest. Maybe partly because of IAESTE and partly because of ‘not in a mood‘. Feb 14th, as usual was a dull affair for me. I had candlelight dinner with around 10 seniors(all males). I was pretty much free in the evenings, started playing Badminton and TT and developed a bad habit of sleeping in the evenings. I was not in a mood to do something new as I needed some kind of a push which I was not getting. This is also one of the many reasons for the delay in a post. In the end of month, I went to Bombay, Shirdi, Aurangabad with my family. This was one of the best trips I had. Maybe, I would write a complete post on my trip. Ah!! I forgot to mention that I got nominated for KOREA for a internship at ETRI. Though, it is yet to be confirmed by the employer, I had already started my celebrations as this was what I always wanted. I would like to mention the enormous wishes I could got from all my near and dear ones. For almost a week, I had developed a habit of saying ‘Thanks’ to anyone whom I met.

March: March brought Revels and for the first time, I did not take part nor organised any event. I was busy with sending my nomination to Korea. Too much work preparing your CV, LOR and cover letter.Once again, sessionals have arrived.

Overall, this semester has been going pretty well though I had planned a lot more. I have further strengthened my friendships, made enemies( not my mistake ). Hope the rest of the semester goes well and my internship at Korea gets confirmed.

Auto album name fill in amarok

2010-03-11T21:00:18+00:00

Here's a small piece of code i wrote ages ago, never really published it anywhere. Get it from here https://code.google.com/p/albumtagger/

Run the script externally with amarok running in the background. Download all the modules required, especially the ID3 module which can be found on sf. This script uses last.fm api. Keep it rocking with Amarok.

# albumtagger_amarok by kunal kerkar (aka tsudot)
#
# simple script which fetches album tag and inserts in the ID3 metadata

__module_name__ = "albumtagger_amarok"
__module_version__ = "0.1"

import urllib
import time
import commands
from ID3 import *
from xml.dom import minidom

basic_url = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?"
method = "track.getinfo"
api_key = "1895a6ef7a8783052dc011f6ed747964"

def isPlaying():
return commands.getoutput('dcop amarok player isPlaying')

def countDown(seconds):
sleep(seconds)

def getTrackDetails():
global artist
global track
artist = commands.getoutput('dcop amarok player artist')
track = commands.getoutput('dcop amarok player title')

def getAlbum():
global artist
global track
global method
global api_key
global basic_url

url = 'http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=track.getinfo&api_key=1895a6ef7a8783052dc011f6ed747964&artist='+artist+'&track='+track
feed = urllib.urlopen(url)
xml = minidom.parse(feed)
lfm = xml.childNodes[0]
track = lfm.childNodes[1]
album = track.childNodes[19]
album_title = album.childNodes[3]
album_title_data = album_title.firstChild.data
putid3tag(album_title_data)

def putid3tag(album_title):
if(album_title== 0):
return 0
else:
path = commands.getoutput('dcop amarok player path')
print "Album: "+album_title+ " has been appended to the track"
id3info = ID3(path)
id3info.album = album_title

def findTime():
totalTime = commands.getoutput('dcop amarok player trackTotalTime')
currentTime = commands.getoutput('dcop amarok player trackCurrentTime')
leftTime = int(totalTime) - int(currentTime)
print "Time left for the next check: "+leftTime
return leftTime

if __name__ == "__main__":

while True:
if(isPlaying()):
getTrackDetails()
getAlbum()
countDown(findTime())

else:

print "No tracks playing"
countDown()

Weekend Project

2010-03-11T18:45:31+00:00

In Dec 2009 at foss.in at the maemo stall i saw a guy control a small toy car through accelerometer on his N900, i thought of replicating that but it just remained in my mind, so last Saturday i finally decided to implement it and went straight to a toy store and bought a toy RF car, one hour of hacking and i was able to control the small car through by phone (Nokia E61i) here is the video of it working.

the concept is simple, i send commands through my phone over wifi to my laptop which controls the car remote, controlling a toy car remote is very easy with a Parallel port and few transistors but laptops don’t have parallel ports, so i used a micro-controller in between to sort that out, so now micro controller controls the car remote by acting on signals received over UART from laptop.
the working is Phone —(WiFi)—>Laptop —(USB/UART)—> Micro controller —(Relays)—> Car Remote —(RF)—> Toy Car
will post details with code sometime later

Using Apple Keyboard in Linux (Fedora)

2010-03-11T18:39:01+00:00

My Apple Keyboard

Few Days Ago i received my Apple Keyboard and i am enjoying typing on it, but having to hold down the Fn key then tap one of the F-keys to get F-keys working was irritating.
a simple solution to get it working just add this to your /etc/rc.local file



echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode

and F-keys will start to work properly, enjoy

Update :- update for recent kernels,

Love beans

2010-03-10T07:44:56+00:00

*sniff

That scent…where was it coming from?
I could recognise it anywhere…that sweet, bitter aroma that hit every nerve on my body and made me tingle.
He was near…very near. What could I do? I looked around me to see if there was anywhere I could hide. Maybe I should just turn around quickly and walk away…
No.
I should continue walking calmly and just pretend that I hadn’t noticed. Yes…I should do that. I can do that. I had done it before…just moved on.

---- ---- ---- ----
It had been three long years since our last rendezvous. The affair…yes, I call it an affair…had kept me bound for five years. Those five years in which I had spent every waking minute trapped in his rapture. I was young, naïve, and eagerly ready for new discoveries. I thought I was in control, but oh how I overestimated myself. The moment my lips were touched on that cold winter night, I knew there was no looking back. The taste consumed me…my tongue was on fire…the ecstasy seeped down deep into my body and into my veins until I felt something like never before. What was this feeling? This sudden rush…my head felt light…and I felt alive.

After that night there was no looking back. I would crave for more…at all times of the day…In the corner of the classroom…or even sneaking out of my room in the middle of the night. I was suddenly happier, more energetic. People noticed a different side of me...told me I looked radiant, and everyone was happy for me. I was glad, but craved for more.

As time passed, our relationship got rocky. I became too dependant and couldn’t function normally on my own anymore. It had come to a point where the sparks were barely flaring…there was no more exhilaration…no more erotic intensity…just mundane routine; a routine that had consumed me and taken control over every one of my decisions and actions. Mornings were spent in an air of strenuous silence, no eye contact, no intimacy; just a chronic sketch. I didn’t know what had happened…what had changed? He seemed indifferent to everything…perhaps it was me…
I needed out. I needed to end it. And I did.

---- ---- ---- ----
I look up as I hear the clinking of a spoon. That familiar clinking as the sugar dissolves and blends into the flavour of his dark and alluring presence. I close my eyes and take a deep breath…I breathe in and savour that warm, creamy, zealous fragrance. It’s been such a long time…a tiny peck wouldn’t hurt… after all, I am much stronger than I used to be.
I spit out the two-hour old gum from my mouth and drink some water…if I was going to do it, I as going to do it right. I march up to the counter, look directly into the handsome barista’s eyes and say, “One caramel espresso macchiato please”.

It was time for chai to step aside for a bit, so that I could rekindle my first flame: Coffee.

To be happy or be sad?? Its coming to an end!!

2010-03-09T02:11:46+00:00

Day before, 7th of March, 2010, was a very lazy day. I slept through the entire day and when I could not force myself to sleep anymore; I finally decided to rise from my slumber. There used to be a time when the thought of going online used to make you happy; but I tried even that and got bored after thirty minutes. Its then that I met a friend online and we decided to go out somewhere for supper. As we were getting out of the lift, we met another of our friend who decided to give us company.

So three of us debated for sometime, deciding where to go. Finally we could pick a place from the very limited options we had. Oh, but am not writing this blog to tell you how boring my day was, or to complain about the very few eating options that we have here. My purpose to write this blog is something totally different.

We sat down, placed our order and started talking. Initially it was mostly random stuff, how someone hooked up with someone, how the college fest was, or the new hot girl that someone had spotted (lol), but I don't remember how it came up but it hit us suddenly that in another eight to ten months our college life will be over! Trust me when I say this, there was literally a moment's silence as if we were mourning!

Lot of things started to come back to me. People say that college life is one of the best part of your life and to think that it was going to get over was something big. I still remember the day my class twelfth board results had come. I was still deciding that time which college to join. The whole idea about finally going to college was very exciting and I was looking forward to enter a life which everyone has spoken very highly of. I am pretty sure that towards the end of our high school all of us have thought about college life and it has always brought nice good images to us. We have always looked forward to it. Though we have been really sad about the fact that we were leaving school; but still all of us have looked forward to see what college holds in store for us.

I still very clearly remember the first day of my college life. I had just left my parents in Udupi and along with another friend of mine was taking a rickshaw back to Manipal when we got a call from another friend warning us that seniors were looking out for freshers and ragging them (which turned out to be a false warning). The call did scare us and I remember getting out of the rick and just running away! Those initial days when we kept asking each other names cause we were still trying to remember them, or getting lost in place as small as Manipal, still discovering something new everyday, those times when we shouted out of frustration cause we had not been given our laptop yet, still trying to find our drinking buddies! It all seems like yesterday!

Its really hard to believe that time flew by so fast. There we were, all new faces, wondering how the place is going to be, how people are going to be, will be manage surviving here; and now we have almost reached the end of our course and I can't even believe that in another year we won't be here. We saw people going from very happy state to sad state; we became a family; shared our happiness and sadness; saw our friends really excited about a girl/guy to those bad break-ups; someone scoring A+ to people getting F; we saw buildings coming up; we saw the entire face of the campus changing and am sure all of us at one point or other cursed this place for being really boring or monotonous or sad. Now, today I want to ask everyone, each and everyone of you if you disagree with me when I say that these have been one of the best three years of our lives! Did anyone of you realize how time just passed by? We cursed the administration for making it so hectic for us; one sessional after the other, then those assignments and lab exams, now all we can think of is, we din't even realize and it all just went by!

While there is a part of me which is really excited to enter the 'real' world out there, the world that exists on the other side of those college gates, and to experience first hand various things; there is a very big part of me which asks me if I really want this to be over? The various changes, so many of them that we will have to adapt ourselves to, do we really want all that? Changes which are going to be really hard! People who really matter to you, who you really care for, they will go, trying to make a place for themselves. I am in dilemma, should I be happy that finally I will be graduating (hopefully) and will be earning; getting my chance to conquer the world, to make a place for myself out there or should I be sad cause none of this is ever going to come back. Life is never going to be so simple and relaxed! It will always be a race from here if it wasn't already!

Time flies by and those of us who adapt to the changes around us manage to survive and the rest of us just perish. I just hope that while adapting to these changes I don't change, I don't lose my identity and I don't lose the people who matter so much to me. I am lost, I am confused, I don't know what to do, I don't know where to go. All I can do is hope that everyone, each and everyone of you, make a place for yourself out there and we are still together and I still have you and am sure with you by my side, rest of my life will also be like my college life.

Good luck to all of you!!! Cheers!!!

Smoke And Mirrors

2010-03-08T21:00:18+00:00

As a Tithonus, waking joyfully in lustTo see the golden sunI choose, humbly, to greet youMy love.The air shimmers as you moveMaking space, Paying homageTo your passingBowing and scraping on its heels.What joys are concealed within that smile?It curves easily upon your faceLike a rose in full bloom's springResting.What infinite grace is in your swayThe swish and flick of the ends of your

The Ubuntu Rebranding

2010-03-05T18:40:15+00:00

When I look back at my college days, the only two distros on which I can count on for simplicity was Fedora and Ubuntu. I used the latter just because it suited me and for exercising my right of freedom. Let me jot down the biggest problems I faced whenever I wanted to propagate Ubuntu in my college days under the LUG Manipal banner:

People disliked the dark brown theme
It didn’t look professional
The graphics card didn’t work (The ATI ones)
Atheros wireless driver has it’s own share of problems
It wasn’t windows
…..list continues

The change in branding

This is what I actually wanted from Ubuntu. Just making things doesn’t work. Normal people don’t want advanced things like GIMP or a desktop mail client. All they need is basic things should just work and an eye-candy. Everything should look cool and pleasant.

This font looks better and more professional than the earlier one. The one before this looked someone like Comic Sans.

Improvements

The re-branding brings in much needed boot-screen change. A simple boot-screen is a lot better than a constantly animating one. Remember, the blink tags and marquees for HTML. They do nothing more than distraction.
I liked the light theme more than the dark. The reason being that it looks better to my eyes and not because it remotely looks like Mac OSX.
Read Mark’s view on this whole saga. Orange will represent Community and Aubergine would represent Canonical. Every branding should be looked with three parameters: Community <=> Commercial, Consumer <=> Enterprise and End-User <=> Engineer. Aubergine with white dots means it is more Commercial and Enterprise based branding.
The newer website is a lot better than the previous one. Hope they are not moving away from Drupal.

The Roadblocks

Ubuntu has many roadblocks in becoming a major Operating System. Many of them are from within the Open Source community itself. Probably Ubuntu is growing quite fast, but when compared to overall OS market, it is stagnant.

Wireless driver problems need to be fixed. Many people just give up because they cannot make Wireless to work on it.
The graphics support is still quite weak. People with ATI cards report more problems with NVidia ones. This is one of the places where everyone has been bitten one or the other time. Since I have Intel 945GM graphics chipset on my laptop, those bad days have not struck on me yet.
Another roadblock is that Ubuntu has to face a lot of hate from within the OSS community itself. People bash it because it brings in non-technical people into the Linux worlds who don’t want to compile their drivers or don’t want to use the command line. Some of them go even one step ahead and claim that Linux isn’t meant for people who can’t understand computers. My situation would be the same if I was asked to open the BMW engine(Linux kernel) and fix something deep inside by pulling some random wires(typing commands)
Linux in particular was designed to run on ever goddamn architecture on this world. Even though it is a good thing, the effort is split up.

Solution

OEM tie-ups: To me, this is the only left to fix the current mess. If you buy a system, the people supplying the hardware will make sure that everything works fine with the OS they provide. In this case, graphics and wireless drivers can be pre-installed. Depending on patent jurisdictions, even codecs can be pre-installed.
Focus on Looks and Usability: Many of the GNOME apps have such horrible looks that I feel it was hacked overnight by devs in half-sleepy state. Some apps like gnome-system-monitor eat up 50% CPU and report the CPU usage to be 50%+.

Finally I am thinking of shifting to Lucid once it comes out.

ROONEY – The Rise to Stardom

2010-03-03T16:17:54+00:00

Wayne Rooney

He is United’s main man. He is England’s new hope. He is 1 of the most feared players at the moment. He is none other than Wayne Mark ROONEY. After C.Ronaldo left United for a world record transfer all the goalscoring burden fell on Rooney with most of the pundits predicting United to have an indifferent season. But Rooney had other ideas.

Rooney exploded into the premier league scene at the age of 16 becoming the youngest scorer in the premier league (at that time). A wonder goal against Arsenal had all pundits quacking about the next big thing in England. Rooney’s brilliance didn’t go unnoticed as after 2 years a host of clubs were behind his signature. He finally ended speculation by putting pen to paper for Manchester United. His work rate & overall contribution was never in doubt but as a striker he scored fewer goals. C.Ronaldo grabbed all the headlines when he was at United & Rooney had to share the limelight. All has changed this season , United fans chant 1 name all the time – ROONEY ROONEY ROONEY!!!.

28 goals already this season, Wazza is heading the goal scoring charts in the premier league with the last 6 goals coming from his head. With CR gone & a stage all to himself Rooney has finally begun to show what the fuss was all about. With a possible 17-18 games for United (if they reach the UCL final) & a goal per game Rooney can reach upto 45 goals for the season.After 8 years or so in the top flight Wazza has arrived. England have their new golden boy.With his form at the moment he is a nightmare for any defender. If Rooney can maintain his hot form n weave his magic in South Africa, England have a major chance of getting their hands on some major silverware since 1966.

Aamer Aslam

NLE

2010-03-03T16:11:18+00:00

He watched above him, as the building tilted slowly to a seventy degree angle. Each inch of movement was accompanied by an ear-splitting, constant, high-pitched shriek of metal twisting against will. The tall, gaunt structure of steel and concrete and glass towered above him; he hunched on the ground below, holding his hands to his ears.The ground was not safe beneath him either. It cracked open

Walk Like An Egyptian

2010-03-03T16:09:07+00:00

There are two ways he saw of doing things. He always did the other.A tall, man in long trousers and a slack shirt around his shoulders. His sleeves were halfrolled up, half rolling down. Long since forgotten the need to tidy, or the consciousness. He walked alone. It could be a street, stuffed with vendors and fumes and commuters in black overcoats. It could be a garden-path, trees with branches

The day I “fell” for Genesis Burson-Marsteller!

2010-03-02T04:57:41+00:00

The Xavier Institute of Communications was busy with its everyday activities as usual; classes, assignments, tests, a packed timetable and the usual peripheral activities. We were all lost in our own respective little worlds when reality dawned upon us- The Public Relations & Corporate Communication batch placement phase was soon to start.

The course coordinator was at his diplomatic best trying to rope in the top PR agencies to recruit and take in all 53 of his ‘lovely and bright’ students- they were, after all, “the future of the PR industry”. Administration and staff was at its peak of efficiency; all e-mails on time, no phone calls missed and timely company allotments. Faculty members were trying to be as supportive as they could, guiding and advising. The campus suddenly went abuzz like never before with contemplation, speculation, apprehension. Everyone had just one thing on their minds- I need to get that job!!!

As each one of us tried deciding on what we want to do, which company we would like to join, which domains we wished to work in, which clients excited us, almost to the extent of mapping our entire careers as though all the agencies had a red carpet rolled out for us! Our class being our class, me included, had a zillion questions doing cart wheels in the brain. They fluttered over our heads like mosquitoes do in the dark, round and round in circles, with no purpose whatsoever! We had a few classics as well... “Oh God, what do I do, I just can’t decide yaaaa... should I sit for Perfect or no? Are you sure Hanmer is coming only for internships, are they coming at all???” As one ended his/her dilemma about this near life and death situation, the other one started as if the sky was going to collapse any moment, “Listen... I heard CMCG wants only 3 people. It’s true or what, oh my God, how will I ever make it man??? ”, “No I don’t think I’m sitting for BL, it has only IT clients and apparently they’re not paying very well, you know!” blah blah blah...

The week finally arrived. Everyone’s hitherto neatly folded formals with the naphthalene balls were all out in full grandeur, or the newly bought clothes were in full display. A smile on the face, laden with a line of nervousness, yet laced with a streak of confidence, armed with files, folders, certificates and resumes, we were ready; ready to take the challenge, ready to overcome and ready to conquer.

My phone chain messages were on in full swing... “The ENTIRE class has to be there for the presentation tomorrow. Rajeev Sir’s strict orders. Attendance will be taken.” Websites were researched in the computer labs and discussions went on in the canteen over chai. People religiously asked me every day, “So, you’re sitting for any of the companies today?” And my answer would be the same throughout, “Errr... no.” I was elated as my friends and classmates got their jobs one by one. ‘All the best’ & ‘Congratulations’ were the favourites of the season. I was sooooooooo happy for everyone, and at the same time I was freaked out. As companies came and went, day in and day out, I waited, waited and then waited a little more. What was I doing, what was I thinking, I let go of 6 companies! Damn it, why did Genesis Burson-Marsteller have to come right towards the end?

But I managed to hang in there, show some courage and not have a nervous breakdown. D day was here. After my CR work that day, it finally struck me, “Ok, this is it!” We patiently sat through the presentation, we asked our questions and everything was done with. I realized I had to say something important to Rajeev Sir. I got up to do so and............................. flat! Before I knew it, I had blacked out and fallen. I could see stars, was too weak to get up on my own and my heels added to the drama. And then, I fell again, and again. After my entertaining act, people finally realized that they needed to attend to me! The rigmarole was driving me mad, not to add making me dizzier. Soon everyone crowded around me, helped me up on my feet, made me swallow chocolate and sour punk, stripped me off my jacket, massaged my back, and brushed my hair. And I thought to myself, wow, after waiting all this while, I make an utter fool of myself right in front of the people whose hands my career is in! However, I politely composed myself and with a subtle smile I said, “I’m perfectly fine ma’am. I shall see you in the interview room.” Tamasha khatam.

The rest of the evening was spent in mixed emotions-relief, happiness, anxiety and what not. Finally, the results were out, and I was in! What an adrenalin rush. All of a sudden, nothing else mattered. The wait, the fall, the tension-it all seemed so small and trivial. I had made it and I was ecstatic. Congratulatory hugs, calls and messages followed. I was happy, but what next? I didn’t want to go home at 6 in the evening, that too when I had just earned myself a career launching job.

I guess God had his own celebrations planned for me. I can almost envision the omnipresent up there in the heavens looking down at me with an evil grin and saying, “Who said the adventure was over darling, let the night unfold...”
So what happened? I got lost. Surprised? Don’t be.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Magic in Graphs

2010-02-28T09:36:07+00:00

I found a digital copy of Williard C. Brinton’s 1939 book “Graphic Presentation” via twitter and as I read through the book, it amazed me how little our data visualization techniques have evolved since Brinton wrote the book 70+ years ago. What was even more fascinating was this quote from the preface to the book by Henry D. Hubbard who worked for the U.S, National Bureau of Standards …

“There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation —the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.”

– Henry D. Hubbard

These words so aptly describe the power of visualizing data.

Here are some interesting snapshots from the book, which I highly recommend checking out …

Mozilla Developer Day Bangalore, 27th February 2010

2010-02-28T08:04:03+00:00

Mozilla along with Mahiti organised a Mozilla Developer Day at NIMS, Bangalore at JRD Tata Auditorium. For people who want to know about the event via tweets please check the hashtag #mozdevday on Twitter

Introduction

As per the schedule, the event was supposed to kick-start at 9:30AM in the morning. After getting up in the morning and beating all the traffic as travelling 33KMs, I finally reached NIAS Campus at 11AM. After getting the badges, feedback-form and other delegate stuff, I went inside the auditorium to see what’s cooking inside.

Web Standards

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

When I entered Arun was speaking on Web Standards. I think I missed the drum-beat part of his presentation as I was late. Abhishek Mishra and Rohan Prabhu had reached at 10AM itself and were a part of the audience from the very beginning.

Arun gave us a presentation on

Geolocation based services for pictures.
Font-face support in Firefox and other HTML5 based controls.
API for drag-and-drop
2D support in Firefox. He showed us a Mario kind of game made using Canvas.
3D support in Firefox using WebGL
Accelerometer support for Firefox. He showed a game which we can play by tilting our devices (Mobile/Laptop)
Video support in Firefox using HTML5

Arun even showed us how powerful video tag is on Firefox. We can embed a text inside a video, or even a video inside a video. Don’t believe? Have a look at the page where Arun pointed us to visit

Web.Next

Speaker: Seth Bindernagel

Seth is the localisation Director at Mozilla. He was speaking on what we can expect next from Firefox. His presentation covered mainly:

Out of Process Plugins
Improved cold startup time
Personas
Extension Manager
Weave

Seth discussed a bit on how Flash crashed are a big headache for the web. The next Firefox will have these plugins running as separate processes, so that the crash effects can be isolated.

For people who actually want to see how Flash crashes on the browser and how easy it is to make Flash go bonkers, just visit this site http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/

Seth also gave a lot of time on Weave and how useful it can be for a person to sync his preferences on the cloud. For privacy fanatics, he explicitly stated that all the data is encrypted at client side and then sent on the Mozilla servers. People can even run their own Weave servers.

Mozilla Labs

Speaker: Ragavan Srinivasan

Ragavan came on the stage to present Mozilla Labs and what all they develop apart from the browser. The products which come out of the lab are Weave, Bespin and Jetpack.

Broken Sites

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

If you visit MS Ramiah Institute of Technology’s Student Information System or FYJC’s site using a non-IE browser, then you can experience the over-smartness of the super intellectual web-masters behind the site. FYJC takes the situation to extreme levels.

Arun explained how we are supposed to report these broken sites using Firefox itself or using Mozilla Bugzilla. When using bugzilla, the explanation needed to be very exhaustive. He even asked us to tag such reports with “India” so that Arun can personally hunt down such sites.

Hack Session

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

Arun recorded a video using a camera. Then he transferred it to his MacBook which was in MP4 format. He created a small page using HTML5 video element and opened it in Firefox,Safari and Chrome. The video which was recorded showed up properly in Chrome and Safari and not in Firefox. This was posed as a question. Many hands went up, with the first answer being the correct one. Yes. Firefox wants the web to be free and doesn’t want to license proprietary codecs for the web.

The million dollar question remains – How to convert H.264 videos to open format. Arun introduced us to a Firefox Addon named Firefogg. This converts the video to ogg which can be now played using Firefox and Chrome. Safari doesn’t want to support ogg.

I know I made no reference to Mahiti’s speech and Praneesh’s too. The post would be just too long.

Finally I would like to thank Mahiti and CIS-India for organising the event, providing free WiFi and arranging Lunch, tea and T-shirts and badges.

Seth Bindernagel

Home Automation through Cellphone Keying (H.A.C.K)

2010-02-24T16:58:20+00:00

I always wanted to control my lights and other appliances in my room remotely while I’m somewhere else. Many a times I forget to switch off the fan or AC in my room and then I have to go back and switch it off. I always wondered how cool it would be if I could control my appliances through something like my cellphone (which I never forget to take). Well now I can see that dream right in front of me. Yes, its yet another hobby project by Kaushani and me. Its the ‘Home Automation through Cellphone Keying(H.A.C.K)’ .

Fig.1 H.A.C.K’s Main Circuit

For those who are not aware of, for every key press on a standard telephone keypad an audible ‘beep’ is generated. It actually is a signal which is a combination of two distinct frequencies i.e. every key is uniquely defined by the combination of two distinct frequencies. Many (multiple) frequencies are used in which combination of any two defines a key on your keypad hence the name ‘Dual Tone Multiple Frequencies (DTMF)’‘

Fig.2 DTMF Frequency Combinations

H.A.C.K uses a Full DTMF receiver CM8870 from CMD which gives the binary output of the key being pressed. For more details refer the datasheet.

Fig 3 DTMF Receiver Circuit

The DTMF receiver circuit is interfaced with an ATmega16 MCU which is used to drive the external appliances ON or OFF. For demonstration purpose I’ve used 3 leds to be my external appliances. I’ve also used my old NOKIA 2300 in the automatic answer mode and the earphone is used to give input to the DTMF receiver circuit.

Working:

Call the control phone from any other phone from anywhere in the world.
The control phone being in the automatic answering mode picks up your call.
Press the correct password to have access.
If the password is correct a buzzer will ring which you can hear through your phone otherwise you can’t control the appliances.
Press Keys on your phone to control your appliances.
I’ve used the keys 1 to 7 to control the LEDS but the other keys 8,*,0,# can also be included.
I’ve not used any password in the demonstration.

Feel free to post your queries and feedback in the comment section below.

GALLERY

Caravan

2010-02-24T13:59:16+00:00

Four boys ran away into the desert, tired of life. Tired of an endless vaudeville. They decided to seek life and God, in loneliness and vacuum. They held forth an induced vision, that the Truth was out there.The Truth was waiting to be found, and it was their holy duty to reach it. They carried their organs and their guitars, songs to keep them through the nights under starry skies, flickering

How numerals 0 – 9 got their shape? Here’s the Answer!

2010-02-23T10:54:04+00:00

The numbers we write are made up of algorithms, (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) called arabic algorithms, to distinguish them from the roman algorithms (I; II; III; IV; etc.). The arabs popularise these algorithms, but their origin goes back to the phenecian merchants that used them to count and do their commercial contability. Have you ever [...]

Moonlight SpaceDrive

2010-02-22T21:39:32+00:00

Let's swim to the moon.Let's climb thru the tide.Ah ha.Let's go deep into space, into spaces never seen before. Let's break all these ties and chains. Be free, past the final frontier.In space, in a year millions ahead of us, in a year past several million more, a time-stamp (or a frame) resolved itself. Raised its hand over the formation and came forth to light. In space, in another time, lived

Wep v9.03: Audio Splitter for laptops

2010-02-18T19:36:00+00:00

Its yet another tech weekend for me and Kaushani. This time we have come up with a hobby circuit called the “Audio splitter” specially meant for laptops as we’ve taken the power supply from USB. Its implemented using TDA2822M Dual OPAMP IC with internal feedback which gives a gain of 89 (39db).

It has separate volume knobs for each headphone(o/p) as you can see in the photo below,works on a 10mA current.Its based on a prototype designed by Vasuki Prasad,an ex MIT,Manipal student.

Main features:

1. Power supply from USB (5 Volts)

2. 39db gain and low noise (A bit of hiss sound when fully amplified)

3.Separate volume knobs to control volume of your choice on each o/p.

4.Low cost (complete prototype @Rs 190)

N.B:

(i) Wep stands for Weekend Project

(ii) Version format :Year.Month

wep v9.04 : ‘Duplex Intercom’

2010-02-18T19:35:28+00:00

Its another technical weekend for Kaushani and me. After burning our grey cells in debugging the decade counter 7-segment display circuits of the first years in ‘Innovent’ ( organised by IEENC Manipal,MIT) we decided to come up with a new weekend project (Wep) and this time its a ‘DUPLEX INTERCOM‘ . With a 6-12 Volts power supply its a very simple DIY hobby circuit using TDA7052 Audio power amplifier (manufactured by Philips) which gave us a gain of about 40db.

The very interesting part of this circuit is it uses very simple technique to minimise the ‘Larsen Effect’ which i’ll explain in a bit. First of all, there has to be (yes, you guessed it right!) two sets . I’ll call it SetA and SetB to make things clearer. Now whatever I speak in the mic in SetA should not get amplified in the speaker of the same set and similarly the speaker’s output(voice from SetB) shouldn’t be fed into the mic again.This audio feedback is what we call as the Larsen Effect and it becomes a very vital role to minimise this whenever you deal with audio frequencies .You must have felt the Audio feedback many times -a high-pitched squealing noise during musical performances; that’s why we use monitors to avoid such effect. Now in this circuit the audio input signal is first amplified by a BC547 transistor and an intermediate output(before feeding into the power amplifier) is taken from collector as well as emitter of the transistor.As we know the output is in-phase and out-of-phase to the i/p signal in emitter and collector respectively, therefore by using a 22k Timpot we can minimise the input from the mic.The cable (o/p) from SetB is fed at the collector of the transistor at SetA which we can hear in the speaker.

Can you see the switch (red colour) up there ? Well if you close this ,there won’t be any signal transmission but signal reception is independent of the switch.As we can’t get any log potentiometer in UDUPI, we managed with a simple 22k pot and it worked fine (of course not amplified as the way it should).We worked using 9 Volts and the Duplex Intercom is running absolutely great!

For any queries and suggestions about the circuit, comments are always welcomed or mail us at

dydflyer[at]gmail[dot]com

kaushanihp18[at]gmail[dot]com

Cross ‘n’ Not using Tkinter

2010-02-18T19:28:37+00:00

Me and Kaushani were reading the tutorials on Tkinter (its a GUI module in python for those who don’t know) and we thought of writing a simple Cross’n'Not game using that.We are just so called ‘Bathroom Coders’(plz don’t take the literal meaning) and so our code might seem a little inappreciable to the regular coders.Therefore, we firmly welcome recommendations,comments and suggestions wherever needed.

Here’s the code for Cross ‘n’ Not V0.1 or you can even download from the link given at he bottom of the post.

P.S. Few exceptions will be raised when you terminate the application.Kindly bear with it as we are currently working on it and will come up with a better version very soon .Suggestions are always welcomed.

DOWNLOAD

Twimer – schedule your tweets

2010-02-18T19:27:50+00:00

This is a script that lets you to either ’send your tweets at a sheduled time when you are not with your phone or computer ‘ or ’send a direct message as a reminder at your set time’. These features are already there in the web like twitter-timer and in futuretweets . However the script combines both in it. As per the present it has only these features but I’m trying to aggregate some more cool features in it. Kindly bear with these features till then. The present version has a maximun time of waiting of 24 hours ( made intentionally).You can add for particular dates and months as per your wish.

To run the script you’ll need python-twitter API. You can download it from here. Follow the installation steps.

You need to enter your username and password in some parts of the script.

api=twitter.Api(username='<username>',password='<password>') # enter ur usesname & password within qoutes

status = api.PostUpdate(tweet,'<username>')     # enter your username

directMesg= api.PostDirectMessage('<username>',dmesg) # enter your username

DOWNLOAD TWIMER

Note: when you are prompted with “Enter time(hh:mm): “ it will take input in 24 hours format with hours and minute separated by ‘:’

eg. 20:15 for 8:15 pm

A beautiful poem

2010-02-18T19:19:31+00:00

I read this yesterday and i find it really expressive

A Valentine is nothing like
A chocolate or a rose.
For in a week these shall be gone,
But Valentines remain.

If love were always sweet to tongue
Or fragrant to the nose,
Each day would be like Valentine’s,
And we would go insane.

A Valentine just hangs around
Waiting to be kissed
Long after special days have passed
And every days are here.

So one is wise to choose one well
And chocolates to resist.
For in the midst of mania
It’s nice to have one near.

courtesy:www.poemsforfree.com

Zehen on a winning drive!

2010-02-18T19:18:54+00:00

Eastern Battle of Bands is a part of “Revels” , a cultural fest of our college. It was held on 4th of March this time i.e on the first day. We were told that there won’t be any such event this time as there were no other bands and later told us (Zehen-thats our band) to give a half an hour performance.Just before the registration in the morning we got to know that a Band from NIT-K was coming and we got so excited as we were told that the competetion was on again.

Later in the evening while we were back stage another band from MIT turned up and we thought yeah…its gonna be fun now! The first band performed was from NIT-K.Inspite of taking so much time in sound check they managed to do pretty good.There were couple of moments when there music went so messy but i truly agree its because of our Marshall MG series amps (worst and cheapest of its kind).

Then it was our turn and we performed three songs.First one was ‘Khidki’ by Raghu Dixit ( Its a new band coming up with a project known as the Raghu Dixit project).Second was ‘Bande’ by Indian Ocean.I think the crowd enjoyed it and the last but not the least was ‘Nayan tarse and Emotional Attyachar ‘ from DevD.

Zehen during the Revels ‘09 Eastern Battle of Bands.

And then the third band performed which i missed as i went to

have dinner.Later i was being told that we have actually WON

and there were two winners. We had to share with the band

from NIT-K.It was a awesome experience and with Rs 8-9K we

have now got enough budget to purcase our new Bass Guitar.

Evergreen retouched!

2010-02-18T19:18:04+00:00

Evergreen retouched!

Originally uploaded by wordiac

Ever Green rocked MIT with Deep Purple’s Perfect Stranger in Revels ‘09. While the crowd was ponderously waiting for the problem with the equipments to be laundered,they came like a fire and swept the air around to a cyclone of thrills. Heretic was supposed to come but they didn’t turn up due to some circumstances. However, Ever Green expunged all the depression and kept the crowd alive. According to organizers, Opeth will be a wonderland for the next Revels.If it goes fine it will be awesome.So to all the music fans listen to Evergreen’s latest hit “Altar of Dreams” .

Zehen:Live in Revels’09

2010-02-18T19:17:10+00:00

Zehen’s performance in Revels’09…

MIT Placements 2008

2010-02-17T17:30:36+00:00

Before I was about to join my college, there was a deep confusion going on due to the fact that MIT’s placements were too poor 4-5 years back. While joining people used to say me “Why u going there, placements don’t exceed 20% any year”. At that time I didn’t have any other option, so joined the college.

Now looking back at the history I feel, that it was so apt that I didn’t listen to people, hundreds of people will give you advises, many of them advantageous and many not, its upto you which you wan to listen and which disapprove. The placements at our college is soaring new heights, many many major companies are scheduled to arrive when college reopens including Deloitte, Yahoo, Cisco, EMC2, Microsoft, Honeywell etc etc.

So far TCS, Infosys, Accenture and Wipro have made their visit to college. TCS took a whooping 322 students on2nd of May and rest three came on 2-3rd of June. Students in my college are a bunch of lucky lots, companies and companies, if such trend continues who knows there will be hardly students left for companies which arrive later. Will students get more than 3 jobs this time keeping in mind that more companies are coming this time.

Before summing up the placement situation, I would like to tell the readers that placements is a trivial thing provided you have one job in hand. College is not just placements or marks or grades. I have seen people saying that “I wont go to that college because it has only 95% placement”. Isn’t this statement too much? Try to come in the 95%, this statement implies lack of confidence. Participate in extra-curricular activities, sports and all non-academic events too. GPA’s and CGPA’s are trivial things, they loose importance after you pass out of college.

Fashion Faux Pas/ For Pa

2010-02-16T12:56:27+00:00

When we were little, Juls and I used to fight over who gets to ‘swing’ in dad’s lungi.

Yup, you read that right.

Let me start again.

When daddy wears a lungi, and then sits on his sofa (yup he has his own sofa spot), it forms a little seat of cloth where little kids can park their ickle bottoms and ‘swing’. I became heavier quicker than the little one did, so she got most of the lungi swinging time. And Jon? Well we girls bullied him too much for him to get a chance of anything in the house at all.

Before I continue with my story I should explain what a lungi is to all those non-desi people out there…I have to a lot of international readers ok.

The lungi, can also be known as a sarong, dhoti, mundu etc. is a garment worn around the waist. In some places like Burma, Malaysia and Singapore it is worn by both men and women. But in India and Sri Lanka it is mostly sported by men, and is common in some parts of Punjab, West Bengal and Bihar. The mundu which is popular in the South of India is white in colour and has a gold border and is usually worn for formal events and ceremonies. But the lungi I am talking about is the typical, casual (cool) South Indian one, available in every single colour and print, usually in a checked or striped pattern.

Okay so yeah, I’m not here to give you a history lesson, you get the point.

A couple of months ago we were sitting and talking and realised that our parent’s generation were the last of the lungi race. In our family at least… which constitutes of the whole of Mangalore, so that’s saying a lot. Not a single one of my fifteen male first-cousins can even imagine wearing a lungi, unless it is for a dance/play thing which they get roped into during a family wedding. They’re more than comfortable in their boxers.

I can’t imagine dad and all the uncles going to bed without changing into a lungi first. Heck, they kick off the darn trousers and belts as soon as the sun sets, just so they can be comfortable enough to relax the rest of the evening drinking and smoking in lungis. It’s such a homely sight

But yeah, I’m not holding it against these boys. It’s not like I’m going to wake up every morning and oil my hair and put fresh jasmines in it. It’s just sad that our children won’t know what a lungi swing is. Actually I don’t think kids nowadays know what a normal swing is, unless it comes in a digital format on one of those computer/ps3 games or whatever those things are.

I think I’ll end with some ‘interesting’ lungi stuff I found on the internet:

-www.lungi.co.uk

(yup there’s a site)

The Song Of The Lungi

When in white, you are my formal wear.

When in design, you are a festival!

What good are those trousers?!

If I wrap you around my head,

you become a turban.

You are a blanket if I am cold.

And a sail when the wind is good.

After I play in the sea,

you become my towel.

A flag when I wave

A trap to catch the mango!

Ready for Cricket when I fold you in half,

Ready for hanging when I twist you as a rope

ready as bed when I'm struck at fairs

You become a shawl when I need modesty

and a carrying bag during a loot.

The trousers are no good!

(Inspired by the "Trousers are no Good!" folksong, which in turn is inspired by the classic "Neenarigadeyo Ele Manava" (the humans are no good).

http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/attire/lungi.htm)

Interesting Facts about Lungis

> Male students of Trivandrum engineering college never have pajama parties; they only have lungi parties

> Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu is the Paris of lungi fashion

> Seventy percent of the India's lungi trade takes place at Coimbatore and Erode railway stations when trains are halted there

> Foldability of the lungi is very handy for fighting villains on the street, as Mohanlal and

Mammooty and other actors have demonstrated on the silver screen

> In addition to providing comfort, the lungi also acts as a ventilation factor in summer.

(www.tradeindia.com/about_products/796/Lungis.html)

And last but not least, the world’s best lungi dancer-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrCXnrsa0TQ

------------------------

The lungi is going to die soon, but I hope it makes a kickass comeback someday.

HP Battery Check for Windows 7

2010-02-12T20:42:34+00:00

Those who own this machine (HP 6515b) and are having troubles with their battery lives know for sure that they need to replace their battery.

But there is an HP tool to check the same.

Download URL (HP Site <http>)

Download URL (HP Site <ftp>)

As far as i have experienced, the tool runs perfectly on Windows XP and Windows Vista. But i had been having problems running this on Windows 7. The problem is now fixed with a somewhat better ‘Troubleshoot Compatibility’ option of Windows 7 Release Candidate.

If you have Windows 7, you can make the HP Battery Check run as demonstrated…

Download the File
Extract the contents to “C:\HP BatteryCheck”
Right-Click on ‘setup.exe’ and select ‘Troubleshoot compatibility’
You will see something getting processed like…

“Detecting problems…” –> “Detecting Issues…” –> “Resolving Issues…”

Next it will show the two options…
”Try Recommended Settings” & “Troubleshoot program”

you can try whichever you want…

I used “Try recommended Settings” and it showed me this page…

If you choose to go the other way round ( or it does not give the correct result), you can click on the other button and proceed as shown below:
Click NEXT

On the next screen, click – “i don’t see my problem listed”
You will then reach this screen-

Click on “START THE PROGRAM…”
The program will then ask for administrator privileges. Provide the privileges to continue.
The Setup will run and will install the software successfully.
Click on Finish when the setup completes.
Search your Start Menu for the “HP BATTERY CHECK”, right-click and click on properties…
In the COMPATIBILITY tab, set the program to run in WIN XP compatibility mode and also check the “Run as Admin…”
Click on OK
Now Run the program…

I was having problems with my battery lately and the check told me to replace my battery… … better luck to you…

Posted in HP 6515b, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP x64 Tagged: Battery, Compatibility, download, Driver, hp, HP 6515b, Issues, MAHE, manipal, Problems, Troubleshoot, User Account Control, Vista, Windows, Windows 7, XP

What do Teachers Make?

2010-02-12T18:34:30+00:00

The dinner guests were sitting around the table discussing life. One man, a CEO (proud of being a professional), decided to explain the problem with education. He argued, ‘What’s a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?‘ He reminded the other dinner guests what they say about teachers: ‘Those who can, [...]

The road ahead, with a nostalgic twist

2010-02-12T10:30:57+00:00

Hello my dearest readers,

Hope you all are doing great...
Yes, I’m back. And that too with a completely new look for my blog! :-)
(By the way, I’d really like opinions on how this template looks. So, write in people.)

The word ‘new’ brings me to the new chapter in my life, the roller-coaster ride that I’m to commence very soon. I’m almost done with the course at XIC and it’s time to start working now. Wow, it seemed like only yesterday that I was this small little girl in school with all her unrealistic dreams bunched up in one corner of her head. Suddenly, I feel all mature. Not that I wasn’t earlier. But daddy’s little girl is finally going to earn her first work paycheque in less than a month. And it’s a journey that I’m ready to take, no matter how many ever ups and downs it brings along with it. A fortnight of placements and I shall have my dream job. *fingers crossed* Pray for me.

It’s been close to a year in Mumbai now, and I have no regrets (Except probably the Shiv Sena and MNS), a beautiful family to be with, a great house to live in, an amazing college to be in and the most awesome friends ever! Naana, naani, Priyamasi, Faridmasa, Azaan, Amaan, Sonali Walia, Swati Drolia, Priyam Duttroy and Anshul Raj; (Mummy, Daddy and Venky for being with me inspite of not being here) you are my world in Mumbai and I cannot thank you enough for being there with me throughout.

The entire XIC, my PR batch mates, Rajeev sir, Niharika ma’am, faculty, friends, and acquaintances have been a constant support, motivating me to work harder and to make a success story of my life here. They’ve provoked me to think deeper, be emotionally stronger, work smarter, personified fun and happiness, spread smiles, created special memories and helped prepare me for the upcoming expedition.

Looking back, there have been various instances related to the people around me, my college, and the city of Bombay which make me rather nostalgic.

The midnight escapades that we (the trio) suddenly decide to have, that too at the most expensive places if I may add where I end up running the highest bill amongst the lot for reasons still unknown to me :-O, the madness in the middle of the Mumbai streets, the never-ending nights and the early sunrise mornings, they’re all divine. It’s at these times that I feel like the all of Bombay/Mumbai belongs only to me.

I have my own little connection with the Western Railways. And with pride I say that it has never disappointed me till date. It religiously comes to my service everyday, always gives me space to travel comfortably, and it gives me the time to think. It sometimes feels so peaceful to be in the train by the window as the wind softly caresses you and you find yourself lost in a world of your own.

College classes, the canteen, the foyer, the comp lab, the student’s lounge, the basketball court, Bling, ITC Grand Central, Marine Drive, the Army Auditorium, Bandra Bandstand, Kala Ghoda, from jalebi to Gelato, I’m going to miss it all!

Be it the long conversations, breaking our head over assignments, moving our leg to the beat, chilling and hanging out, acting absolutely insane, making crazy plans, getting worried over our work and placements or mulling over the future- Sonali (thanks for being so full of life and making me laugh at absolutely anything with your stupid jokes, trying to solve all my problems just to see me happy, encouraging me to think out of the box, making the most outlandish plans and more importantly, making them happen! Ensuring that I’m in the ‘pink’ of health. You are most definitely the livewire of my life and there's no "question" about it! ;-)), Swati (thanks for being so sensible and mature, a calming factor, a great guide and advice-giver, having excellent culinary skills :-), you truly are an inspiration, in every which way!) , Priyam (thanks for bringing a smile onto my face always, bringing in crazy memories, being ever ready to do the most weird things, for being a film buff, for understanding exactly what I’m feeling and how I’m trying to convey it in words, for having faith, belief and confidence in me even at times when I myself don't, and constantly reminding me that being Karishma is a pretty cool thing after all!), Mr. Anshul Raj (thanks for being so good at your work especially the creative aspects, for being a part of all the randomness, for being my ‘mother India’, for letting me bully you, for taking my mood swings, for having your girl fan following, for tolerating my unrealistic demands and wishes, for being a patient listener, for being a complete idiot and the dorkiest boy in my life, for being my supposed/rumoured/alleged love affair in XIC), you’ll rock! And needless to say I love you all very much.

As I look into the prospective months and years, I do see my life facing changes and more importantly myself growing and progressing as a person. I do see myself working hard at something I really want. I do see the people I love close to me, I do see an alteration in my ideologies, thoughts, activities and lifestyle, I do see the comfort, I do see the compromise, and most of all I do see the challenges, I do see, the road ahead...

Erlang Web Server Benchmarks

2010-02-12T04:58:04+00:00

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing a server side web application framework for Erlang. Essentially, I looked at various available erlang frameworks like WebMachine, Nitrogen, BeepBeep, Yaws, ErlyWeb etc. and pulled out and assembled my own little framework with features I needed. I’ve also been writing an Erlang library for encoding/decoding AMF which will help me add some interesting Flash/Flex specific features to this framework.

Among other things this framework provides web server library specific request/response format abstraction similar to SimpleBridge, A Django templates implementation using ErlyDTL, an MVC implementation inspired from ErlyWeb and a lot more. Even with all this functionality I’m quite happy with the performance we’re able to achieve, so I thought I’d share some benchmarks with everyone.

Since the framework completely abstracts out the web server library used, I was able to try out various web options, but I think we’ll stick with Misultin for our production enviornment since it seems to perform significantly better than other implementations. Here are the results of running AutoBench on our framework powered by Misultin.

The server was running on an m1.large amazon instance running ubuntu and the tests was run from an m1.small amazon instance.

$ autobench --single_host --host1 xyz.com --quiet --low_rate 20 --high_rate 200 --rate_step 20 --num_call 100 -num_conn 5000 --timeout 5 --file results.tsv

Here are some more tests using a different tool Apache Bench
$ ab -k -n 500000 -c 1000 http://xyz.com/

Document Path: /
Document Length: 27 bytes

Concurrency Level: 1000
Time taken for tests: 39.937 seconds
Complete requests: 500000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 500000
Total transferred: 57510350 bytes
HTML transferred: 13502430 bytes
Requests per second: 12519.82 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 79.873 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.080 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1406.29 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 2 71.8 0 3005
Processing: 1 78 25.9 77 732
Waiting: 1 78 25.9 77 732
Total: 1 80 79.3 77 3427

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 77
66% 87
75% 94
80% 98
90% 110
95% 119
98% 132
99% 144
100% 3427 (longest request)

Running the ab test without the keep alive (-k) option, causes the request rate to fall drastically to around the 3600 r/sec level but looking at the Tornado performance tests here, 3600 seems reasonably good. I haven’t tried adding nginx similar to that Tornado setup, not sure if that would help.

strange thing in python

2010-02-10T12:52:17+00:00

i recently noticed this anyone has a proper explanation for this

for literals i get this
>>> def a(): ... b = [] ... c = {} ... >>> import dis >>> dis.dis(a) 2 0 BUILD_LIST 0 3 STORE_FAST 0 (b)
3 6 BUILD_MAP 0 9 STORE_FAST 1 (c) 12 LOAD_CONST 0 (None) 15 RETURN_VALUE

but for constructors i get this
>>> def a(): ... b = list() ... c = dict() ... >>> dis.dis(a) 2 0 LOAD_GLOBAL 0 (list) 3 CALL_FUNCTION 0 6 STORE_FAST 0 (b)
3 9 LOAD_GLOBAL 1 (dict) 12 CALL_FUNCTION 0 15 STORE_FAST 1 (c) 18 LOAD_CONST 0 (None) 21 RETURN_VALUE
i mean why the difference, i was thinking {} and dict() do the same thing, shouldn’t they?

Google Chrome Full Standalone Offline Installer

2010-02-09T17:00:43+00:00

Google Chrome has been in the arena for quite some time now and many of us are liking it. It is a good alternative to our sweet li’l ‘Internet Explorer’… If you want to download Google’s web browser ”Chrome“, you’ll need to download a small 474 KB installer from its official website and then it’ll download the required files of [...]

Create Multiple User Profiles in Google Chrome

2010-02-09T17:00:35+00:00

If you have used Google Chrome ,you would have loved it… (click here, to view some good features of Google chrome) As is it still in development phase, there are new additions every now and then. There are many features which exist but have to be found manually and activated. Sometimes, you would have felt the need [...]

Valentines Day Dilemma

2010-02-08T12:25:25+00:00

My understanding of gifts are PS3, Asus Ferrari Notebooks, A Fire-steel knife or a BUG gadget fctory. So when some gifts me a spongy heart with a press me sign on it which gives out some monophonic voices when pressed, it makes me go 'Wow I could have never thought of that!!'

Over the last 1 year I have been getting all sorts of gifts, a bamboo plant, a pen stand which has a red headed guy kissing a pink headed female ceramic figurine, a star named after me, scotch tape and balloons too! While i have stuck to the text-book and given things like chocolate, roses, teddy bear and more roses(seriously they are a cheap getaway!). So the other day when I was thinking of buying a gift, I was as blank as a Turbo C NONAME page in a graphics lab. Coming back from classes today I asked a few friends of mine to suggest a few gifts. Well, turns out my friends stay away from girls like a Baba Ramdev from Beauty Parlors, let alone buying them gifts.

Anyway while Im trying to decide between a box of chocolates or a stick with a furry dog on it, valentines is still 6 days away!

Ps. Anyone remotely planning to buy me something, heres a clue http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/abf5/

Alrighty then

2010-02-04T03:20:06+00:00

Well, the writers block, we all go through it! Anyway moving on.

What makes this post so special that i wake up from my angelic sleep and wonder what Katy Perry would be doing, is the fact that today is 4th february, the day Yasser Arafat took over as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yeah like you care!

Directi Hackfest – 31st January, 2010

2010-02-01T19:09:02+00:00

Ever since I learnt how to use git, there has been an urge from within to share my code, look at others and collaborate and develop something useful which everyone else can use. For me, usability is as important as functionality. Both are as equal as the other in general cases.

Rewind

Long back I once asked Abhishek Mishra (ideamonk) if we could meet up and organise a small hackfest. The aim was to let know each other’s project, meet new people, learn new things etc etc. One in these *etc* was to complete our unfinished projects due to lack of time, motivation or even know-how of some of the aspect of a technology. Long back Abhishek and Yuvraj Pandian T (YuviPanda) have collaborated on a project named PyMos which was to generate Mosaic for any image. It was written in Python and works like a charm. Give it a try.

Since me and ideamonk live in Bangalore, having a hacking session being physically present would be better than working online. Abhishek liked the idea and tweeted whether anyone is willing to give us space for this event which has wifi. He instantly got a reply from The Chef of CodeChef and there we had a space in the Directi office. Thanks to all the kewl cool people at Directi with “Hacker Mentality” for supporting us.

Agenda

Abhishek invited his friends for this session and two of them turned up – Ishaan Chattopadhyaya and Rohan Prabhu. Naresh from Directi was waiting for us. When we came in, there wasn’t any plan on what needs to be done, as we expected to work out on a common interest field. Ishaan had to speak on Location Based Search and me on CodeIgniter (PHP Framework). Abhishek had some projects like sahanapy and creating a GUI over apt-offline.

Talks

Till this time I had a feeling that we won’t be working much today since I didn’t knew anyone apart from Abhishek. To learn more, we first had small talks so that we can know each other and their interest of fields. Ishaan talked on Location based search which includes geographical searches like Google Maps. It wasn’t a very exhaustive one, but a pretty nice explanation of what all complexity lies beneath the hood.

At this time, we were total 4 people – me, Abhishek. Rohan, Ishaan and Naresh(Directi)

Then I went to speak on CodeIgniter which is a Framework of PHP. As opposed to what I said earlier, it actually doesn’t look like a framework, since it does not have many of functionality which make a F/W. This is what I explained – why it has only the things which we want, awesome documentation and a dead simple setup. It is just a set of classes which relive you from messing with lower level functionality. Since it is very simple, there is hardly any overhead with speed. You get only the basic boring things and complicated and interesting things are left to you.

Code

Abhishek showed us apt-offline which is an utility for getting updates, upgrades and packages on a Debian based box which does not have internet connection. The system on which these updates,upgrades and package download is done can also be windows. Typical situation is you have a very slow or no internet at home, but blazing fast net at workplace. You would be tempted to use office net to download the packages and update your local index, install updates and install packages.

This utility was created by Ritesh Raj Sarraf long back and was just a command line based application. Abhishek had tried it and it works flawlessly. All which was missing was a GUI over it. It first looked like an easy task. Use Qt Designer and drag-drop every control and here we go. This way of development had a big flaw. The GUI developed is no better than the CLI since the clueless non-techies wont understand words like “apt-offline set”, “apt-offline get” etc etc. Even it took me a minute or two to actually get what all these mean.

Rohan can be called a Qt geek. The guy knows each and every class and it’s properties and event etc etc. This made us even more interested since he is always at disposal to help us and teach us more. By this it was pretty late and we were wondering if could do something worthy at that time. Then we decided to work only on UI as of now, make small changes in the core class to accommodate the GUI which is otherwise hard-coded. We had to dive in the code to get better knowledge of how apt-offline works as there is hardly any documentation apart from one written by Ritesh himself.

Conclusion

I don’t have much idea of Qt and this was a good learning curve. I agree that this hackfest didn’t pay off well as we expected. Most of the time we spent in discussing data structures, algorithms, Qt, git etc etc. which was again as usual – AWESOME.

My personal expectations from such sessions is to create some useful software and not just YAXX (Yet Another XX). Functionality, Usability, Accessibility and Documentation – all matters equally. I would also like to slowly slowly move on more tougher and promising things like kernel and filesystem level coding.

Winding up, this is just a start and I have great expectations from these sessions. I would like to again thank the Directi guys and the other people who were supposed to come but were not able to turn up due to their personal commitments.

Begining Python workshop

2010-01-30T21:17:50+00:00

LUG Manipal python workshop poster

LUG Manipal is organising a workshop on python, Workshop is aimed at people interested in beginning programming with python.No programming experience required.

Details are ->
Time: 5:30 pm
Place: NLH 103
Date: 29th JAN to 3rd FEB

PS :- Slides for the workshop are available Begining Python Slides

PYTHON WORKSHOP

2010-01-29T17:04:34+00:00

LUG Manipal is conducting a workshop on python from 29th January. Python is a remarkably powerful and easy to learn, dynamic programming language. No prior experience is needed. We would be starting from the basics.
No Registrations required. Free of Cost.
Bring your laptops along

"...Like a Diamond in the Sky"

2010-01-28T08:02:23+00:00

I remember looking up at the sky when I was a kid and had no idea what the thousands of dots in the sky were. They looked like tiny pin pricks which showed bits of some holy daylight from beyond the otherwise dark night sky. And that was probably the beginning of a four-year old’s fascination for the night sky; the thousands of bright pinpricks –the twinkling little stars. For all of you out there, who feel or have felt even the tiniest of inklings of awe and wonder for the vast dark night sky at some point of time; I’m sure you have your own story to tell.

Throughout man’s existence on the planet, since the time of the early Neanderthal man, he has tried to explain what the sky, the pinpricks meant; what they implied. We had our share of men –astronomers and physicists who strived to solve the mysterious unexplained, right above them in the sky.

“Where does it come from? This quest, this need to solve life's mysteries, of the simplest of questions can never be answered. Perhaps we'd be better not looking at all, not delving, and not yearning. But that's not human nature, not the human heart. That is not why we are here.”

We will keep looking. We will keep searching for answers. We will always be awed by the mahakaash. We will keep looking at the constellations, the stars, the planets, the nebulae, the thousands of pinpricks and wonder. And be amazed now, tomorrow, for many many years to come.

***

Men came and went. Theories came and went. Models of the Universe explaining why the night sky is the way it is, were given. Few of them accepted. Even they went. The only thing that stayed the way it was, was the sky and man’s fascination for the unexplained.

For the thousands of bright pinpricks in the sky...

-Pramit

An Introduction to Rich Internet Applications

2010-01-23T20:48:19+00:00

I had the opportunity to present a 4.5 hr lecture on Building Rich Internet Applications at ACM’s Compute 2010 today. We started out by defining what an RIA is and exploring the various RIA platforms available, we then further explored the Flash Platform in more detail, wrote some experimental code to understand the internals of Flash Player, looked at Flex 4 and its various new features and also spent some time understanding the Flex Component Lifecycle

Here’s the slide deck from beginning of the lecture which tries to define what an RIA is and explores the architecture a typical RIA platform …

C++ Workshop

2010-01-17T05:58:59+00:00

LUG Manipal is conducting a C++ workshop to introduce Industry level C++ (ANSI) for both experienced and inexperienced programmers.

OPEN FOR ALL
NO REGISTRATION
NO CERTIFICATES WILL BE GIVEN
BRING LAPTOPS
G++ COMPILER WILL BE USED.

Views on God and Religion

2010-01-16T08:25:18+00:00

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to hurt any religious feelings. It is written from a neutral perspective.

God loves you. He loves the world. Even if you do a thousand sins, he won’t demolish the earth. Any speculation of doomsday and apocalypse due to his anger is pure bullshit. No one wants to destroy what they built. If any disaster happens on this planet, it is because such a disaster can happen. Murphy rules them all.
God loves you. You don’t need to fear him. Remember the religious books? — God forgives. Now stop fearing God and live your life peacefully.
You think that you committed some grave sin and God will forgive you. Now since you know God will forgive you, so you go on committing more sins. See what you have done? Created a chicken-egg problem. You idiot!
If you goto God only when in times of need, you better need to introspect yourself. You love God just because you need something from him. Is this what religion is meant for?
When God sent you on this planet, he expected some minimum output from you. This output actually includes living you life, crying like a baby to make others say “choo chweet”, becoming a good human being, making love, raising your children, doing humanitarian services and all those good things taught in Moral Science books. No where did he say to give up the normal life and worship him day and night. Get up and serve the society. God would be more pleased.
Going to place of worship won’t make God as happy as much as you think. He would be more happy if you spread peace and humanity all around. Hey! Leave God for a while. Doing these would even make you happy.
Who on this planet can ever think that offering sacrifice to Gods makes them happy? I mean sacrifices like Animal Sacrifice or even Human Sacrifice. Urgghh! You are committing a ghastly crime right front of his eyes. You really need to rot in hell. He never likes to see his creations butchered by narrow-minded people like you.

Trip To St. Mary’s Island

2010-01-14T06:56:10+00:00

First of all, a short and simple intro :

St Mary’s Island is a small group of islands lying 58 km north of Mangalore and little to the north of the port of Malpe town. St. Mary’s Island are known for their famous basalt rocks which have crystallized into columns and split into hexagonal mosaic.

Now,about my trip :

One of friends(Pratik) had asked me if I would be kind enough( ) to accompany him to St. Mary’s on Sunday,10th Jan. Well, I did not have any urgent work and moreover it was my first weekend at Manipal in the new year, so I readily agreed. Next Day, I bunked gym( Yes, I started gyming) and we started at 10 after having a nice breakfast. There were 14 people and I knew only 3 well. I had asked my friend (Abhinav) to accompany us just half an hour before because I knew had I asked earlier he would have said a clear “NO”.

We took a Bus from the MIT Bus Stop to Udupi and then took another to Malpe. Then, a ferry to the Island. Detailed travel instructions below.

During the ferry ride, there was water all around us and I remembered the famous “Water Water everywhere but not a drop to drink” from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor. On reaching the island, we quickly changed and took some nice pictures (We had a wonderful photographer among us ).After a round pf pictures, where each one of us displayed their best poses, we went to the other end of the island. There were big rocks all around and I later came to know that these are Basalt Rocks and St Mary’s is the only place in India where these kind of rocks are available. The water too was quite ok but not very clean (thanks to the careless tourists). We went to a place which was surrounded by rocks and there was water in the middle. We started swimming and I got a chance to try out my skills ( ). We played catch – catch and some other idiotic but fun-filled games. At around 3, we boarded the ferry again to take us back to Malpe as the last ferry was supposed to be at 4 and we were not in a mood to spend the night there. If given a chance,I really plan to spend a weekend at an island. On reaching Udupi, I had lunch after getting turned down at two restaurants. One more bus ride and HOME SWEET HOME ( Well, I call my hostel my home )

Travel Instructions from Manipal

1. Take a bus to Udupi bus stop.

2. Ask for a bus to Malpe Harbour, tell him clearly that you intend to go to St Mary’s Island.

3. At the Malpe bus stop, walk for around 200 meters to Malpe Harbour .

4. Buy a 1 rupee entry ticket for the harbour.

5. Go right till you see a gate and a shipyard.

6. You would find a ticket counter there, buy a to and fro ticket costing Rs 80 for the ferry ride to the Island

7. Wait for the ferry, it can take upto 1 hour. As soon as the ferry comes, don’t rush, make a queue and board it nicely. Pushing others is dangerous as people may fall off into water.

8. Find a seat, the ride takes around 30 minutes. There are two floors in the ferry, go upstairs if you can spare another 30 bucks.

9.All the passengers are transferred to a smaller boat which then takes them to the island.

10.This boat ride takes 5 min. Get down safely and voila, you reached the island.

Tips :

1. Be prepared to get yourself drenched. Take another set of clothes if you are too shy to take of clothes while in water. More importantly, take a towel.

2. Take adequate amount of food along ( Chips and cold drinks). Alternatively , if you are a rich lad, you can buy them at the island at triple the price.

3.Take along a nice camera.

4.Most important, take your friends along.

Final Word : On reaching the island, I was not actually happy as I expected a lot more but at the end it turned out to be one hell of a trip. I recommend all my friends to at least visit once.

Annular Solar Eclipse-January 15th 2010

2010-01-09T21:47:25+00:00

On Friday, 2010 January 15, an annular eclipse of the Sun is visible from within a 300-km-wide track that traverses half of Earth. The path of the Moon's antumbral shadow begins in Africa and passes through Chad, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and Somalia. After leaving Africa, the path crosses the Indian Ocean where the maximum duration of annularity reaches 11 min 08 s. The central path then continues into Asia through Bangladesh, India, Burma (Myanmar), and China. A partial eclipse is seen within the much broader path of the Moon's penumbral shadow, which includes eastern Europe, most of Africa, Asia, and Indonesia.

* courtesy NASA

to view the official page,

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEmono/ASE2010/ASE2010.html

Bottled Up!!

2010-01-08T21:26:22+00:00

"Tears are words the heart can't express"
I have been caught crying many a times and most of these times I have heard people say, "be a man, don't cry"; what I still don't understand is what's ones sex got to do with ones feelings? Men are expected not to cry and keep their emotions and feelings bottled up inside; and we tend to try our level best to do that. However when words are not enough; when it becomes to much for us to keep it to us anymore; it all comes out in form of tears.

We have been told since time immemorial that we will portray our selves as weak if we cry and that its not manly enough to cry; but what I don't understand is that how can the entire male specie be expected to turn emotionless. Well wait, before you start hurling abuses at me let me amend my previous sentence a little; the male specie is expected to keep his emotions bottled up inside only when it will portray him as a weak person (read make him cry), otherwise he is expected to show full emotions,feelings and understanding.

I am sure most of us have come across circumstances when we feel the urge, the need to cry. Its supposed to be one of the best ways to let out your emotions. Its scientifically proven that after you cry, you feel more relaxed. Metaphorically speaking you feel a big load off your chest.

You can close your eyes to the things you don't want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you don't want to feel. Emotions are such a big part of ones life that its almost impossible to be emotionless. A person without emotions is as good as a dead person. Emotions like any other thing have two sides to it. A happy one and a sad one. How can someone be expected to show the happy side whereas keep the sad one just bottled inside?

Is it fair to ask a person to laugh along with you, to make you laugh and to show it when he is happy but at the same time if he becomes sad he must not as much as tell someone that he is sad? Is it possible to ask a person to show love but at the same time not show hatred? Is it possible to ask a person to care but not feel bad? Is it possible to ask a person to be cheerful but never be miserable, to be happy but never sad? I think this is as impossible as tossing a coin and hoping that you always get heads.

I feel if a man cries, he doesn't become less manly. Only a man who is totally comfortable with himself and is courageous enough can cry in front of others. There is nothing wrong in letting go of your emotions in what ever way possible. So all I want to say is that next time you see a guy crying don't say, "Be a man!" or "Guys don't cry! or "You are such a sissy!"; just try to understand that there can be a very deep reason for him to cry; that maybe you should talk to him instead of making fun of him; that maybe all he needs right now is a hug or an ear to hear him, cause you never know the little actions you do can make or break a man. Remember no one other than yourself is going to love you for what you are; people love you for how you make them feel.

My first encounter with working lifestyle

2010-01-08T10:55:14+00:00

Till now I was living in a very well guarded world. My boarding school in Ajmer was like a fort; I was not allowed to go out neither could someone just come in, so my interaction with the outside world was very limited. Then came my high school in Delhi. It was a place with relaxed rules. I could go in and come out, we had day scholars, we had people from different backgrounds; so my interaction with the outer world increased. Finally came my college. College as we all know, places almost no restriction on you. It is assumed that you are now mature enough to decide what you want, to distinguish right from wrong. Here I chose my set of friends. My life was again going very smoothly. My parents kept meeting my demands for money and I never faced any difficulty as such.

It was towards the end of my fifth semester that the thought, "Life is not a bed of roses", rang a bell. I started to wonder that for me till now life has been more or less 'bed of roses', with only minor hiccups here and there. It is then that I decided I need to experience first hand how life outside the protected walls of my college is going to be. How it is going to be after I am forced out of my comfort zone.

So armed with 126 credits (thats what you get for clearing every subject in your course even if you don't understand a word of it) I went looking for a place which would be kind enough to offer me training. In time of recession, when people are finding it hard to retain their jobs, finding a place willing to offer training was surely a tough task. Here also I was again saved the hard work as a place was found through 'contacts'.

So we(me along with two of my friends) reached Mumbai, all set to experience the working culture, thinking about how I will manage when I have no support! The experience started right from the time we got down at Andheri Railway station. Looking for a place to stay was not only very confusing but a big hole in pocket too. Finally we found a place and decided to stay over there for a night.

The next day we were supposed to go to the head office of the company. The ride in the local Mumbai train is a experience in itself. When I saw the building which housed the office, I was awestruck! It was so huge and beautiful. Excitement took over me. The person I was supposed to meet was very helpful (contradictory to my belief that no one treats college students seeking training nicely)!

My training was to start from the next day. I was supposed to go to Vashi which is very far from where I was staying. Again the local Mumbai train came to our rescue. I admire the person who gave the concept of local train. It would have been so difficult without it!

I was expected to reach office by 10:00 AM and by the time I reached it was already 11:30 AM. On my first day at office I was late by an hour and a half! So you see things didn't exactly started as planned. To be honest I was little scared cause I didn't know what to expect. After waiting for sometime our department head came to us. He was a very helpful person. During the entire course of training he never made us feel as if we were trainees and took really good care of us. We were treated very nicely.

Everyone in office seemed to be busy with their own work. A few of them I guess where even surprised to see three undergraduate students walking in the office. All my fears vanished soon. The next few days were decent enough. Other than the fact that we had to travel more than three hours everyday, everything else went fine.

The entire experience taught me few things. They are :

Once you go out of college, life is not easy. I saw people working there. They probably reached home late and slept cause they have to wake up again next day cause they can't afford to be late.
Discipline is a must. You should be disciplined in whatever you do
If you are good to people, they will be good to you

So friends I would like to say one thing, don't get scared. Go out and have fun. Its not an easy world out there but its not that scary also. Remember who you are and don't get lost in the crowd.

Cheers!!

2009. A Recap(Technical)

2010-01-07T19:40:29+00:00

2009 has been a great year for me in the sense that I learnt many new technologies and used a few other. Below is the list of keywords/products/terms which have affected me in the last year. Take this list as a collection of technologies which I adopted, hated or loved.

1. GitHub

Status: Adopted and love it

Probably one of the best thing for me this year when it comes to software engineering is the evolution of GitHub as a de-facto standard for hosting code. Earlier there was no such service by which people used to swear by. Projects were scattered all over Google Code, Launchpad, FedoraHosted, SourceForge and what not. GitHub changed the way people looked at source code hosting. It also gets the credit for making git insanely famous such that people who had settled with svn started their shift to git. It was only due to GitHub that I tried out git other I would have been stuck up with Google Code with svn.

2. Nokia 5800

Status: Bought

I bought a Nokia 5800 in September 2009 and it has now become my major source of internet on the move. I know many die-hard Apple fans bought curse me for not buying an iPhone. Anyway, thanks for the pain to think about it.

3. Posterous

Status: Love

Posterous is probably one of the most awesome service I have ever seen. Just mail the snaps, audio files and whatever you have and the awesome Posterous would take care of it. It is integrated well with many twitter clients too(Gravity) which allow us to snap and send the pics. The best platform for informal blogging.

4. Dropbox

Status: Adopted

I started using Dropbox on the daily basis quite late. Even though I had an account long back, I didn’t feel to use it on day to day basis. After exploring the awesomeness of this service, efforts were made from my side to get used to it. Now I keep all my code in Dropbox folder. This code is basically those which I have checked-out(svn)/cloned(git) and made local changes and havn’t commmitted(svn) or pushed(git). Sometimes of other some recent snaps also find their way.

5. Lotus Notes/ClearCase

Status: Use at work. Hate a lot

I am still not able to understand which idiot made these two junk software? Lotus Notes isn’t meant for humans and ClearCase creates more problem that it actually solves. Files take ages to checkin and half of the options are not clear. Even Lotus Notes is no less. WTF is replication? Shocked? In Lotus Notes lingo "Replicate" means "Fetch Now". Even people with sound technical knowledge easily get confused with this junk.

6. Seagate 500GB External Hard Disk

Status: Purchased.

I recently(3 months) bought a Seagate 500GB external Hard Disk. It has solved many of their storage problems. Including a HDD in this list would look lame, still it deserves it’s place due to the problem it solved and the immense help it provided.

7. Google Reader

Status: Got addicted

Someone says that due to Twitter effect, feed reading is declining. For me feeds are still an important source of knowledge since I shell out dedicated time for reading feeds. The subscriptions contains only those sources which give complete or sometimes exhaustive coverage of the topics they are covering. Sources whose feed vomits only the URL are purged. I need atleast half of the article to be in feed as a minimum qualification. Only Ars is the single source left with a partial feed.

8. Python

Status: Now I swear by it

Even though I like Python, the first half of the year was spent in hacking, coding, eating and sleeping python. The language got on me and at one time I found it as the only language which exists on this planet. After a period I recovered and started looking the world from a wider angle and became language agnostic (for language which pass the minimum threshold)

9. C#, .NET and Silverlight

Status: Love and Hate

My employer needs me to work on .NET based tehnologies. Since I usually don’t have much problems with .NET unlike others and I view C# as really a good language which has evolved as a good alternative language of choice. Silverlight is the thing I really don’t like personally even though I have been working on it. I hate technologies which are as a plugin for browser technologies like Flash, Java Applets, Silverlight, Shockwave etc.

10. IE6

Status: Hate

God! This thing refuses to die. My hate for IE6 has grown so much that these days I find any browser fit for my need. Earlier it was just the pain of developers as ignorant users never had seen a better browser. After using IE6 at my office for official work, I am ready to fund for the funeral of this villian. Anyway I use Firefox/Chrome for my personal work at work.

Symlinks in a libfs virtual file system: The Pains

2010-01-06T18:44:22+00:00

The only documentation you have got for libfs is the code itself, which says a lot about the hoops I had to jump through to at least get this thing working

I still don’t claim that I know all the innards of libfs regarding this functionality. It took me around 3 days, poking around the code and quite a few kernel freezes and oops to figure this thing out. Also to be noticed is the fact is that this is for a non disk-based file system like /proc. I guess things will be different when it’s done on file systems like ext3.

WARNING:

This is quite a long drawn post as I haven’t presented the solution in a straight forward manner. I have rather chosen to ramble on about my personal experience. For a no-nonsense, tldr-free answer, visit this

To begin with, I was absolutely clueless. All this time I had been using `ln -s` or symlink() without worrying about what really goes on under the hood. Imagine my frustration when ln -s didn’t work on the file system. I had completely neglected this part and thought that it’d be somehow taken care of automagically.

Going through a few online resources, I managed to deduce that the symlink operation takes place on inode level (whatever you make of that). Looking through the fields of struct inode , I found struct i_op for inode operations. Referring to both the book Understanding Linux Kernel and the source code for the fields in i_op, I found out a few function pointers that had something to do with links, namely symlink(), readlink(), follow_link().

Initially, I thought of implementing getattr() so that it’d return a S_IFLNK for the symlink but the idea of having to handle attribute generation for the rest of the dentry objects was too much for my puny brain and this plan was discarded.

Reading through man 2 symlink, I came across this and instantly everything was clear:

Symbolic links are interpreted at run time as if the contents of the link had been substituted into the path being followed to find a file or directory.

First, I changed the file creation function a bit for the symlink so that the proper st_mode is set and put the target location string in the i_private field of the inode structure.

Then I created a inode_operations structure and put in the following function definitions:

static void *sample_follow_link (struct dentry *dentry, struct nameidata *nd)
{
    nd->depth = 0;
    nd_set_link(nd, (char *)dentry->d_inode->i_private);
    return NULL;
}

static struct inode_operations sample_inode_ops = {
    .readlink = generic_readlink,
    .follow_link = sample_follow_link,
};

....
//in the function for the dentry and inode creation
inode->i_op = sample_inode_ops

But it was the second step that actually took up the most of my time. I read the man page of readlink and naively put in my own readlink implementation.

int sample_readlink(struct dentry *dentry, char __user *buffer, int buflen)
{
    unsigned long ret = copy_to_user(buffer, dentry->d_inode->i_private, buflen);
    if (ret == 0)
        return buflen;
    else
        return -EFAULT;
}

Kernel freezes happened and wailing of wolves were heard in the distance. Putting in just generic_readlink didn’t solve the problem either with kernel oops happening every time ls was run. Looking into the function definition of generic_readlink in the kernel source, I found it’s mentioned in the corresponding comment block that follow_link needs to be implemented for it to work. Looking into the code for ext2 gave me some idea about dealing with struct nameidata. Problem solved

Internship at Dulcet Solutions

2010-01-06T18:25:30+00:00

In my IIIrd Sem , I was consistently trying to get a internship for my Winter Vacations so as to get some industrial exposure etc … blah blah . The process of finding one was a lot easier than expected .

In late September , I had got a internship ( 6 months project well beyond my 1 month holiday) at Data Mining Tools but had decided against pursuing it as the asking working hours were too much ( I had to enjoy my holidays too )

Then , I came across Dulcet solutions through a IEEE Delhi Branch mail . It was a startup and was in the field of Web Development . Bingo , the one I had been exactly searching for . I called up the number given and then sent my CV by mail .I received the reply within a couple of hours . And Yes , I was selected and in fact he was impressed by my CV .After that , I finalised a couple of details about the internship .I was told to learn MediaWiki , Ushahidi and sum other packages for better understanding .

As soon as I arrived in Delhi , I started working . Rather than a internship where you learn nothing , mine was more like a project which we did on line and hence there was no need to go the office ( ).The project was about Democracy i.e to empower people their democratic rights . Our work was to create a software ( rather a crowd sourcing website ) which brought life into the project .We were a group of 8 people ( 3 from VIT , 4 from NSIT and me ) . All were in the their final years except me .All of us collaborated over the net ( mostly chatting ) .Our employer had made a google site which was used as a platform for our discussions ( maybe Google Wave could do the same ).

Perhaps , you could say it was a software ” of the people, by the people, for the people ” in Abraham Lincoln’s words.

We were using Drupal , a very popular CMS ( Content Management System ) .

My Experience

I learned about the ER Diagram and Schema , which I was supposed to learn in my IVth Sem . More importantly , I coded two Drupal modules from scratch .I worked deep into the night as I have seen I can concentrate a lot better at night . I had used “Learning Drupal 6 – Module Development ” by Matt Bucher . It is a excellent book as it has covered almost the API’s that Drupal provides .During the coding , I learned many conventions eg the function names , when to use a underscore ( all functions which are for internal use by a module start with a ‘_’) etc . It was also my first experience at using API’s ( Database , Form ,hook ) .

Very Soon , both my modules will be released under GNU GPL ( its Open Source ).. I am currently documenting it . I will post the link once the modules are released .

Lastly , this has been a great learning experience for me .And Yes, it was great fun too . I would recommend all my friends to try doing a internship as it gives you huge amount of exposure .

Download the Module here :

Email Node Module

Users Tax Module

References and Links :

The Quote ” Of the people , by the people , for the people ‘

Drupal

Content Management System

Crowd Sourcing

PS: As usual , comments are most welcome

Snippets

2010-01-04T01:37:55+00:00

Hey there all you lovely people,

Owing to the government’s order regarding the Swine Flu situation, my ‘ever-so-generous’ college (I still love you XIC) finally had some pity on us and decided to give us 5 days off… Therefore, I decided to finish my assignments and write… Not that I have any burning issue to talk about, but yes, my random thoughts floating here and there as always… So here goes…

I saw Kaminey today. Needless to say, as an after effect I’m still drooling over Shahid, yes the BOTH of them! ;) I liked the movie; it’s full on Dhannnn taaa nannnnnnnn!

Pardon me for coming back to the two words that have been all over the papers lately and of which you must be sick and tired of by now, Swine Flu. But its magnanimity has seriously left me dumb-founded, probably because it’s closely associated with one of my favorite cities, Pune. Travelling by the Mumbai local trains and walking on the streets, seeing everyone equipped with their masks, handkerchiefs, shawls, stoles or any piece of cloth for that matter and laden with an intense sense of fear which is very evident in their eyes. It scares me.

I miss Manipal. I really do.

Nose rings. Wear it ONLY if it suits you dahlings’! Now, now, you don’t want to look like a walking-talking fashion disaster, do you? :P

Public Relations & Corporate Communication. Phew!

I want to be dedicated to dedication, sincere to sincerity and committed to commitment.

The ways of Mother Nature are simply beautiful. Subtle and strong, all at the same time. There are some forces in life you don’t dare to mess with.

I’ve always wondered why the city of Mumbai is what it is. And you know what, each passing day in this place makes me marvel at this thought even more…

I thank all my class/batch mates throughout school, junior college, graduation and post-graduation. You have acted as a catalyst in making me work harder, think smarter and try to give everything I do nothing less than a 100%.

I will lose weight and I will get fitter. Don’t ask me when. I WILL.

A long-distance relationship is not that bad a concept after all. :) It’s like that approach-avoidance conflict we learnt in our Psychology lectures. Where the same thing, comes with its positives and negatives both.

Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai is taking me closer to realizing my dreams. From MIC to XIC, after being ‘inspired by life’, I am finally in a place ‘where potential becomes achievement’! ;)

Till next time, lots of love xoxo

The 50th one!

2009-12-30T21:58:36+00:00

Saw that this will be my 50th post. 2 years of blogging has been really a nice experience. In this post I mainly see back my last one year "2009". The year where I traveled a lot (Land of dreams, city of lights, beautiful beaches) saw lots of people suffer (everyone in family was going through some problems), saw lots of close one's leave (some left forever and some didn't left me a chance to stay with them further), made lots of new friends (friends made in France, friends made in US).

Next year 2010 will be a whole new experience, I hope it is for best. Happy new year to all of you and I hope it goes well for all of us.

IIIrd Sem

2009-12-30T12:26:04+00:00

Well , Here I am once again after a long long time .

Finally the most awaited IIIrd Sem came to an end ..It was the semester which brought many changes into my life . First and foremost , I became a senior .. So the first question that comes into your mind obviously is Did I rag ??? Na , that’s not me .

What prevented me from ragging ? Was it the fear of getting fined ( Rs 25000 /- ) or Was Ragging not my type ? That’s left to you guys to answer .

So, my IIIrd Sem, the first time in life all I had to study was Computers , Computers and Computers . Time and again , I was thanking my brother who helped me avoid getting into NIT Allahabad . I had got into there through the AIEEE Round 1 Form 2 Counselling , where you only get the Institute’s name and not the branch . Well , this is one thing I totally disagree with the Indian Education System . How are you supposed to join a institue when you don’t know what branch you would end up with ? According to me , branches should not be decided according to the rank but instead there should be a test to assess your ability in that particular field or let the student decide after a year or so .

Coming back to the topic , We had five subjects and three labs , thats one subject less than others, a advantage for the CSE guys . One subject less means one sessional less , one end semester less and more importantly, you would be home earlier than others .

Our course was ok ok , I found COD ( Computer Organisation and Design ) pretty boring . My teachers were ok , not that bad as expected .Our OOPS teacher was the best . Many of our classmates would disagree on this fact but I liked his teaching style .

Most of my theory classes were boring as mostly it was a repetition of what I had learnt in 12th . The best part was the labs . They usually finished within one and a half hours .This is one more advantage CSE had .Also , we had two half days because of the crappy time table . CSE usually had 3 to 4 half days .

In the first month , I made a website for Formula Manipal (http://www.formulamanipal.com ) using WordPress . It was not much of work , but I had to edit almost all files to suit the needs .It brought me instant recognition . For more info , refer my previous post .

August went by and September Came . We had our tech fest Techtatva 09 in September and I was one of the organisers .This has been previously mentioned in my post .

Two sessionals were over and Diwali arrived . As usual , Diwali in Manipal was not much fun . October too went away

In November , I participated in NITK’s Engineer , Tech Fest . I got through the prelims but as usual did not win anything . I played laser tag for the first time and won too. I guess I am better at non- technical events .Then our end sems came, everyone started studying and I started to get bored .

One more thing , I made a couple of very good friends this semester .Thats the end of my IIIrd Sem. It was the best semester till date .

Looking forward to another semester full of surprises .

Simple espeak Program (speak_lib)

2009-12-27T09:53:55+00:00

One of my friends was making a project requiring espeak. He was using speak_lib.h and wanted help on using it , so here is a simple c/c++ program i wrote:

DEPENDENCIES:

portaudio-devel
espeak-devel

USAGE:

(Assuming speak_lib.h in your current dir)

(Replace g++ by gcc and .cpp with .c for compiling as c )

g++ -g -I. Speak.cpp -lportaudio -lespeak -o Speak
./Speak

SOURCE CODE

Download

Posted in Fedora 11

BSNL 3G Modem (HUAWEI E156G) in Linux

2009-12-26T13:05:04+00:00

Heres how to get your Bsnl 3g connection working in linux. Im going to outline a process which uses mandriva since it provides a GUI way of working through configuring an internet connection. You will however find all the relevant information you need to configure something like wvdial (a heuristic auto-dialer) to use this connection in case you want this to work on some other distribution.

First things first, ill describe the connection properties.

1) this is technically a dial up connection. there is a phone number your modem dials using the bsnl network, this is then followed by a authentication process, which results in an internet connection.

2) The phone number for BSNL east is *99# for other zones try plugging the thing into a windows computer and read the connection properties to find the telephone number.

3) The authentication protocol in use is CHAP, to know more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge-handshake_authentication_protocol

4) this renders a username and password inessential.

So here goes,

Right click on the network icon in the taskbar, and click configure network. When this is done, youll be promted for the root password. Enter it.

From the several types of connections you can choose select Analog Telephone modem.

This will present you with a choice of modems, select Manual Choice, then select port /dev/ttyUSB0. In case this is not present, youre using too old a version of mandriva. The drivers for this ind of modem have been around since kernel version 2.6.20.xx so upgrade to a newer version of mandriva, 2010 is a beauty.

Now, it will present you with a choice of Telephone Number, Username, Password, and the Authentication protocol to be used. In telephone number, write *99# (or the number you read from the windows connection in case you are not in BSNL east)

Leave the username and password fields empty and select CHAP as the authentication protocol. Youre done!

press next and youre presented with DNS, etc settings, leave all of them at the default (automatic) and press finish. You might want to select allow users to manage this connection on the way.

Your network should now be connected. Enjoy!

EDIT- I had initially tried this with mandriva 2008.1 and since ppp etc is preinstalled there, there was no problem, on 2010 however youll have some trouble since ppp etc isnt installed.

just download these and install them serially

kppp-provider-4.3.2-1mdv2010.0.i586.rpm

ppp-2.4.4-10mdv2010.0.i586.rpm

kppp-4.3.2-1mdv2010.0.i586.rpm

just do a google search for these and download them. Follow that by double clicking them, which should install them. Now you can follow the instructions starting from “Configure Network” and it’ll work.

Err..... hmmm..

2009-12-23T23:58:47+00:00

Blogging after a long time can get nostalgic.
I hate nostalgia, hate it. Too emotional. Rather be drunk out of my skulls and pass out than think about the past.
And yes, my friends, all of them, are on an I-miss-Manipal-overkill for a long, long, long time now on Facebook. One of the other disadvantages of social networking, you have to let people know you miss them. Yes, we all love Manipal, all of us do miss that place and each other. So let’s move on, shall we?

Sometimes, you close your eyes, take a few steps, and then open your eyes. You suddenly find that you have reached the point of no return. The only way is the road ahead. The only way is to run forward, you might not even be able to slowdown. Has the journey been good so far? You don’t know. Is the present position good? Dunno. Are you comfortable? No. For sure, no, this post wouldn’t be here otherwise.
But then what really matters is to do what you want to do. To have the balls to turn around, show the world the finger, and walk back. There are other routes, better ones. And there is always the same route back to the present position if need be, it IS there, I will make sure it is there.

Hypocrisy is a funny thing. It bothers those people the most who don’t want to be hypocrites. There are two kinds of hypocrites, and all of us fall in either of the category. Number one, people who like being hypocrites and think that’s the way ahead. The other, people who are forced to be hypocrites because there is no way ahead without being a hypocrite. I just wish I remain among the latter.
Ethical hypocrisy can be even funny. Ethics are designed to hide incapability. Ethics is what people talk about when they are incompetent in a competition driven environment. Ethics hold back innovation, creativity and enterprise.

Arrogance has to be earned. No, not the first time I say that. Have seen that HOUSE episode a million times. Undeserved arrogance makes the guy look like an idiot. Almost always, even when he is not being arrogant.

Performance is relative. But what will happen when there is no performance in the first place?

I need a break. Short, refreshing one.

Got it, back to work tomorrow morning.

Education given by Indian Engineering Lecturers

2009-12-21T12:04:59+00:00

Case 1:

Lecturer: Write a program to implement a simple stack.

Student: Here is the program

Lecturer: No, not like that .You need to ask the user which element needs to be pop-ped.

Case 2:

Lecturer: What is your project on?

Student: I have implemented a software tool like revision control system which can keep revisions of all files during the software development cycle.

Lecturer: Why have you taken so much pains to implement it, can’t you use “Save As”?

Case 3:

Lecturer: Total Internal Reflection happens when light travels from rarer to denser medium.

Case 4:

Lecturer: Examples of web browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape.

Students (shouting): Ma’am Mozilla too.

Lecturer: No! Only Internet Explorer and Netscape.

All incidents are true. Don’t ask me for proofs – I don’t carry a video camera with me for collecting proofs. If you think the incident can’t be true, consider it to be cooked up.
Not all professors/lecturers are like these. I have met lecturers/readers/professors with sound technical knowledge.

Tonight, We Feast On Human Flesh

2009-12-19T22:58:38+00:00

For infidelity, Tiger Woods receives censure and the upturned noses of the entire world. ATP's Player of The Decade is criticized by television reporters and journalists from around the world, his every single following day tracked and pored over. Will he do something again? Will he talk to someone about it? What will he say? How dare he??Random talk-shows on random networks discuss perversity,

dauna paula,goa

2009-12-16T09:12:46+00:00

Well, before starting I’d like to apologize my readers about the part—1.Agreed it was very long, but can’t help it, after all its college & some of the experiences are just inarticulate. It’s fun writing about those things. Hope that my readers are satisfied with the reason. Although this one is long too. :-‘)
I had come home after 5 months. Naturally I was treated very well (as if I were some awaited guest) & pampered by my mother.Mom used to prepare the choicest of delicacies for me. The food was just finger licking good (I know it’s the punch line of some food chain) but after the terrible mess experience that is the least I can say.
Apart from all that, a bigger surprise awaited me. My father told us that we were going to the Kolkata & the Andamans.I was ecstatic. It had been ages since we had gone for a nice holiday. I was very excited & a lot of fun was going to be there for sure. It was a cold December morning,We landed at Kolkata.Our relatives were there to receive us. We visited many places in Kolkata. I liked south city mall very much. There was not much in Kolkata for me, it was the “amazing Andamans” that I was waiting for. We spent 3 days in Kolkata & after that we left for Andamans…. After having lunch in the hotel, we went for a sightseeing of Port Blair. The city was small & surrounded by water. The best place in Andaman’s was Havelock Island. The seashore over there was unique. The water was turquoise & crystal clear. I went for snorkelling. Truth be told, it was an experience of lifetime.

We returned to Delhi. A few days were there for college to start. I had bought a lot of stuff in the holidays, mainly tees. Finally the 2nd semester started. There was something new to notice in the class. All the girls were looking prettier(counting only those who were pretty before).It was a good time pass,suddenly,a number of makeovers(in the traditional guy language ,sab “maal” ban ke aayin thhi).The records needed to be updated(sexiest & beautiful girls only, nerds were still the same…(refer to part—1 for more)).It was our physics cycle, I was finding it more interesting than chemistry cycle, although it had difficult subjects. Don’t have much to write about the subjects,oh yes,I didn’t make notebooks for any subject except EG.But I still managed to pass all the papers…thanks to xerox notes of my friends & a BIG thanks to the “akka”(meaning lady in kannada) in the Shiva xerox shop(I still have to pay them 17 bucks).How can I forget about ma’am Sujata.She was the reason that our maths lectures suddenly became interesting. Our classroom seemed like a battle sky, with all the paper planes landing near ma’am Sujata.The best part was when ma’am used to squeal (her voice used to freak out the ear drums) & scold us, she used to say” who throwed the rocket”(believe me after the scolding a few more planes took off to fly the friendly sky of section L).I was once caught. My friend, Vaibhav, aimed at ma’am, but, it crashed on my head (on the first bench).I decided I would do the rest for vaibhav,I threw it towards the board & it landed in her feet. She had seen me. She threatened to cancel all my attendance for the sem,but then bluffer in me never goes down, I just kept on insisting that it was not me.Ma’am didn’t agree, but, my section co-ordinator(NNK sir) was my saviour for the day.

We had EG (Engineering Graphics),it was the most difficult subject for that semester. I was miserable in graphics. All I did in graphics classes was just copy the positions of all arcs & points from Kartik & Akansha(thanks to both of you).only god knew how I was to pass the subject, no ,perhaps one more person Mr. Potty knew (don’t laugh at the name,i know it’s shitty,but,he is only a little lesser than god as far as EG is concerned, I passed because of him only, thank you sir).This was EG.
Time to tell you about the Goan curry…We (myself, my friends Appan & Sanidhya) visited Goa on Republic day holiday.Since it was Goa, we did a lot of bakchodi (i know that you know what it means) apart from the usual.It was another memorable trip that I won’t forget for the rest of my life. I hadn’t informed home, travelled ticketless on train in the general compartment, drove in Goa on a rented maruti, slept on the railway platform, etc(might sound creepy to you, but I had fun).we visited our friends in BITS Goa. It was a nice get together. We had the time of our life on the beaches, looking forward to visiting Goa again.

I had to visit home in the middle of the semester ,there was no particular reason just that we had few half days,many other people were going,and then flight tickets came cheap. It wouldn’t have been possible without the daredevilry of a true friend,Saim.It was Saim bhai who gave proxies for me,had it not been him,I would have got ordi(i.e. repeat the subject during holidays).I don’t know how do I thank you Saim bhai.
My birthday was luckily during the holidays, I was saved from those brutal birthday bumps (man they kick the hell out of you),but that didn’t mean that my birthday treat was also saved. I have a very large friend circle, so I had to give 3 birthday treats in all(man this time they kicked the hell out of my wallet).I enjoyed all the parties, I also apologise to my friends whom I couldn’t invite,I am sorry guys.

It was the last few days that I was to spend in 5th & 6th block, what I now consider the best hostels in MIT. One thing i disliked about these blocks was that there were too many thefts. I had a jeans, few pairs of socks & few jockeys stolen (ya.. they stole those used ones too).But overall, these hostels were very good,I hated them in the beginning,but had adapted really well later on.
This time…
This sem was over very quickly…unlike the first sem when we almost died waiting for it end. Results came..I had done well considering the amount i studied…I had crossed 8.
Some more things can be written, but I have to watch Two and a half Men…