Planet LUG Manipal

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Weekend Project II

Ankur Shrivastava — 2010-08-30T16:51:02+00:00

In march i posted about a weekend project which involved controlling a small toy car using my cell phone, this is a similar one again implemented in few hours, here we are trying to play the awesome game of pong using the tilt sensor on Samsung Wave. The pong application running on Laptop is written in Qt (C++) and the application on the Phone is written using the Bada SDK.
The working is simple, the pong application running on Laptop requires phones to make a TCP connection to it. Phones just create a TCP connection to the application on PC and sends tilt sensor data to it, movement of paddles is done by the PC application based on the value it receives from the phones. It still requires better calibration and we will work on it after the exams are over (Education prevents you from doing cool things!!), there are a lot of ideas buzzing in our empty heads (according to our teachers!!) , the original idea was by Abhimanyu which we implemented.

if you cannot see the above video here and here are short demo of how it works.

PS – code and proper working for the previous and this weekend project will be posted soon!

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Hour Bangalore

Manish — 2010-07-31T19:39:13+00:00

I have noticed that Ubuntu community based activities in India are lot less than expected and Fedora leads the game here. To give a boost to Ubuntu, Nigel proposed to hold an Ubuntu Hour for Ubuntu users/power-users to meet. Apart from ubuntu-in mailing lists, rest everywhere the activities are pretty much nil.

Nigel sent a mail to ubuntu-in telling that he was organizing a small meetup. Initially I was also not very much hopeful of a huge turnout, but to my surprise 6+1 people turned up.

Nigel blogged about it on his weblog on the turn of events. Initially he was sitting alone with a laptop with Ubuntu sticker for confused people. Initially four of them were sitting inside the Cafe Coffee Day on Richmond Road, Bangalore when I turned up. Since I had never seen any of them, I was not sure whether I should ask them or not. Nigel suspected that I was “Manish” as he recognized me by my pic. After talking for an hour we left.

Just before leaving, I found Ritesh waiting for us. I had sent a mail to him telling that there is a meeting of Ubuntu users and as a Debian Developer does he want to attend? Well, he got lost and came only after we left.

After everyone left, me and Ritesh went inside again to have a coffee. In the next one and a half hours, we talked about Ubuntu and Debian communities, their policies, their cooperation, the plus and minus points of both the systems. We also talked on apt-offline, a tool which Ritesh himself developed for offline package management. He is also a maintainer of laptop-mode-tools in Debian. He gave me a lot of insight into kernel development, APT and a plethora of other technologies.

The day was fun filled and we Ubuntu people expect to meet every fourth Saturday of every month. Meanwhile I might meet Ritesh again this Saturday to finish the work on apt-offline, so that the changes me and Abhishek made on our forked repos can be merged back upstream.

Above Pic: Arjuna, Nigel, Ganesh, Harish, Manish, and Venkatesh

Above Pic: Manish, Ritesh, Harish, Ganesh, and Venkatesh

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Developer Week

Manish — 2010-07-13T19:25:32+00:00

After Ubuntu user days ended on July 11, Ubuntu Developer week started the next very day. I was more interested in following the latter since it was my wish to know the basics of Ubuntu Development esp Packaging

You can have a look at the Ubuntu Developer Week Wiki page

My main interests are

Getting started with Development 1 and 2 – Daniel Holbach (dholbach)
Desktop Team overview – Sebastian Bacher (seb128)
Authoring Upstart jobs – Steve Langasek (slangasek)
Packaging like a Ninja – Rohan Garg (shadeslayer)
Operation Cleansweep, reviewing patches – Nigel Babu (nigelb)
Forwarding bugs and patches upstream – Pedro Villavicencio (pedro_)
Daily Builds and You – Jorge Castro (jcastro)
Making your application shine with application indicators – Ted Gould (tedg)
Kernel Triage – Jeremy Foshee (JFo)
Improving Ubuntu In An Evening – K. Vishnoo Charan Reddy (vish)
Django and you – Micheal Hall (mhall119)
Adapt an upstream – Jorge Castro (jcastro)

Progress

On 12th , I attended 1 and 2, but missed 3 as it was in late night. I do have the IRC logs.
Today on 13th, I even missed 4 as I was too exhausted. Again logs are there to rescue.
Tomorrow on 14th, 5,6,7,8,9 would be there which I would try to attend at all cost.

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): 4 weeks at Microsoft (Internship)

Ankur Shrivastava — 2010-07-10T00:10:43+00:00

Hello From Hyderabad

It has been 4 weeks since i arrived in Hyderabad for my internship at Microsoft IDC and it has been a unique experience. There are 7 people from MIT,Manipal this time 6 in IDC and 1 in MS IT, but manipal being the crowded place it is none of the 7 people knew each other, well except for me which was kind of odd, imagine having to introduce people who have spent 3 years in the same college to each other !!. Akshay jhori (MS IT) arrived one week before us i.e. 23rd May (i guess) and rest of us arrived by 30th May. First day we were given a small orientation, which was just to get us familiar with how things work and what we were supposed to do, after the orientation we were taken to our respective Mentors who is the go to guy for all things related to what ever we were supposed to do, i was assigned to AdCenter team. I was given a cubicle and later my mentor explained what i was supposed to do for the next 8 weeks and was asked to get familiar with MS tools and process.

Hyderabad is kind of a strange city where if you ask an auto rickshaw driver to go to a place X he will simply say “i have no idea where that place is, but it will cost you Rs100″, so most of the time you need to look up on maps for directions and then tell the auto driver where you have to go, which is what we did after loosing our way few times, it all starts with Someone saying “Hey lets go out and see around” to which you say “Ok nice, lets find a good place to eat!!”, after walking a few kilometers and looking around and probably eating, when its time to return someone is bound to ask “Which way ?” and atleast one guy from your group will say “Its this way, TRUST ME!” by point to a particular direction in the INDIAN WAY, believe me that is the time when you should start asking for directions because every time the “TRUST ME” incident happened with us, we were going in completely wrong direction.

Coming back to the four weeks, for the first 2 weeks we were provided accommodation in white fields (Hyderabad, not Bangalore as most the people were thinking after i told them where i was staying), the place was good and around 5-6 Km from MS IDC at Gachibowli, you get shuttles from ~9am to ~10am and if you are taking an auto just say you want to go to Wipro, Gachibowli and not Microsoft, Gachibowli you will have to pay less this way, even tough Wipro Campus is just in front of Microsoft Campus, ohh and the sharing auto is a very cheap way to travel around in Hyderabad but it gets weird, i remember there were 8 people + 1 auto driver in a single auto one time.

Microsoft Surface

I got my hands on Microsoft Surface at the visitor center and it has increased my desire to create something like surface using what is already available by NUI Group, dunno if it will get somewhere. Also i have started to like C# as a language and i have personally found it to be more close to C++ then Java, which is not what a large number of people think, this has also made me realize that there is no computer language that i hate which is kind of strange because most of the people i know hate one or the other language and JAVA tops most of their list as the most hated (but used) language.

During my 2nd week AdCenter team had an outing to Leonia which was a great experience, i met some interesting people from AdCenter team during the trip and the best part was Paint Ball, a match in team of 22 Vs 22 it was pure fun, well except for the friendly fire part, where i got shot in the arm from a really close distance, anyways we lost the game because of what was clearly CHEATING done by other team but that is as always debatable.

After our 2 weeks were over we shifted out to a different place in White Fields itself, if someone is looking for accommodation there are plenty of places in HiTech city / Madhapur area to stay for short/long duration, we looked at a large number of places before settling for white fields because its close and we were familiar with this area now, plus the price difference was not much.

Microsoft India Development Center - Building 3

The first few weeks were pretty exciting but now after 4 weeks everything seems normal to us, all the free coffee/tea/ice tea/cold drinks/etc, all the games of pool/foosball/TableTennis, cab drop at night, the cubicle, all the excitement is gone and work has started.
anyways i am planing to roam around Hyderabad which i have done only a little, any special places that i should absolutely visit ? leave a comment….

Manish's Tech Blog: Maverick Development Updates #2

Manish — 2010-06-23T14:15:32+00:00

1. btrfs support
With current daily builds of maverick, installation with btrfs filesystem is supported, though ext4 is the default filesystem. btrfs was pulled in mainline kernel on 9th January 2010.

2. Suspend/Resume bug

Lee Jones working in the kernel team, has written a long exhaustive mail on his experience reguarding to suspend/resume in Thinkpad X61 when SD card is in the card reader. If this bug is solved, it can help a lot of us. Just read the whole paragraph and you would come to know how nasty the situation actually is.

3. Maverick Alpha 2 approaching

Maverick Alpha 2 would be released on July 1st (Thursday). Archives would be frozen on June 29th,. The next Alpha would be Alpha 3 on August 5th.

4. Freezes in effect and in future

DebianImportFreeze on June 24th and Colin Watson has sent a mail to ubuntu-devel asking people responsible for packages to get the packages imported ASAP

Freezes which are still far off are FetaureFreeze on August 12th, UserInterfaceFreeze and BetaFreeze on August 26th. Beta freeze is for Beta Release planned on September 2nd.

5. Bug Days

Bug Day on 3rd June target – Compiz
Bug Day on 10th June target – GNOME Games
Bug Day on 17th June target – USB Creator
Bug Day on 24th June target – fontconfig

6. Ubuntu Developer Week has been announced

Ubuntu Developer Week starts on 12th July(Monday) and ends on 17th July(Friday) between 1600UTC and 2100UTC

7. Kubuntu Tutorial days

Kubuntu doesn’t get as much love at Ubuntu gets, still it’s the second choice for many people after Ubuntu(GNOME) who want to stick to the environment.

Kubuntu Tutorial day is just one way on 7th July and only some 6-7 hours.

8. Update from Operation Cleensweep

Daniel Holbach informs that progress is at 14%

9. Software Center Update

From the logs of Desktop Team Meeting dated 15th June, it looks like, we can buy applications from the Software Center in near future. Remember, long back it was rumored to be called Ubuntu Software Store? Later the actual name came out to be Software Center

Under “Buy Something”:

# Payments API is in good shape; we had an API overview from Ricardo Kirkner including a walkthrough of the process
# We identified a problem in that there is the potential for unverified payment amounts submitted to the billing service by the client

* Will require some LP to payment service integration for verification of price paid before authorizing access
* This integration has been targeted for Alpha 3 (after the June 30th LP upload window, tho we can use edge while developing)

# Currently prototyping a payments widget to learn/test/use the payments API
# Launchpad login functionality and basic integration features have been release with Software Center 2.1.2

* As these features are still in-development the next release of software center (later this week?) will hide this feature unless s-c is launched using a command line switch

# LP team on track to deliver needed core functionality at June 30th upload window

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): TRYING for feedwordpress

Shubhendra Singh — 2010-06-15T14:39:40+00:00

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Maverick development updates

Manish — 2010-06-08T18:41:45+00:00

For last 2 hours, I dug through all the mails from ubuntu mailing lists, esp the announcements related to development, recalled many changes which I heard in last week or two and penned them down.

Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat Alpha 1 released with Linux Kernel 2.6.34-5 #
Ubuntu sparc and IA64 ports are candidates for decommissioning unless someone comes up to take the responsibility of maintaining it. #
Maverick won’t run on processors below i686 #
DebianImportFreeze on June 24th, Alpha 2 will come on July 1st #
On Alpha 1 alternate, creation of encrypted /home is broken #
Shotwell replaces F-Spot as Image organizer #
Daniel Holbach invites everyone for Operation Cleansweep. It aims to bring down bugs with patches down to 0(zero) by the time of Maverick release. #
Ubuntu User Days has been postponed till July 10th, 2010 #
Jono Bacon has invited interested people to come forward and take over Acire and PyJunior development #
Maverick rebased to Kernel 2.6.35-rc1 # # # (Status: Maverick (ogasawara) section)
Maverick will be getting 1.8 X Server due to which all drivers need to be rebuilt. It might break X when upgrading. Later in the cycle X will be upgraded to 1.9 #
Chromium is default for Ubuntu Netbook Remix #
Martin Pitt has a page for burn-down chart and work progress for Maverick Alpha 2 #
Lots of Software Center UI enhancements on the way #

Edit on June 9, 12:02

Two more entries:

Next Ubuntu Hug Day targets Gnome Games to be held on June 10th. 68 New bugs, 28 Incomplete and 14 Confirmed. #
Aptitude has been removed. Though it is still available in repos. #

Manish's Tech Blog: Are you a pundit?

Manish — 2010-06-04T16:01:36+00:00

Before going ahead, read Jeff Atwood’s post on pundits

Here is your checklist

1. are you expert in talking crap? (esp shitloads of them)

2. have an opinion on everything under the sun?

3. regularly use buzz-words like “ecosystem”, “model” etc?

4. regularly use phrases like “You won’t understand”, “You don’t matter in the ecosystem”, “You are not the target audience”?

5. get outraged if someone doesn’t agree to you?

6. force your opinion on everyone?

7. when opposed, do you express your opinion like an essay, such that the person in front has to say tl;dr

8. your opinion essay lacks proof?

9. scorn at “Talk is cheap, show me the code”?

10. can cook up points for defense instantaneously?

11. you are an unofficial PR spokesman for your favourite company?

By writing this, I fear I am starting to gain some traits of a pundit. If it is true, I apologize. You can call me a sinner.

Manish's Tech Blog: Introducing WADL#

Manish — 2010-05-12T17:59:50+00:00

Of late I have been working on a small project which deals with C# code generation. I named it WADL# by the way most of the C#/.NET projects are names. If Apple products can start with i , GNOME with g, KDE with K and Windows with Win , then I think WADL# is an apt name.

For all the people who have been working on .NET and web-services must be diving deep into SOAP based web-services. Right? How many of you know that SOAP based web services are not the only type of web-service which exist on this planet? How many of you have heard about RESTful web services? I know the fight between SOAP and REST is just like Emacs v/s Vim and GNOME v/s KDE and SQL v/s NoSQL. If someone worked on SOAP based web service, they must be familiar with WSDL. They added a “Web reference” and voila – Your IDE generated the client proxy for you.

For people in the RESTful world, don’t have something called WSDL. Sun came up with something called WADL. It is again a XML based representation of operations offered by the web-service. WADL doesn’t get so much of love since RESTful people are opposed to anything such as WADL. Whatever may be the case, WADL is still pending with W3C and not yet finalized. This makes the situation more complex for people from WSDL background who have been in a habit of getting their client proxy code. Hardly anyone looks at the actual XML. Why does it make the life tough? This is because I along with many people could not find any such code generators for WADL. After days of hunting I finally gave up.

I actually needed the WADL -> C# code generator as I wanted to write a client side proxy for Launchpad. After figuring out that LP provides a WADL, I started researching how to use it, but only in vain since no such code generators exist. This inspired me to write one of my own. I got the WADL schema, read the reference, sent some mails to launchpad-dev mailing list asking for clarification and finally came up with v0.1 of WADL#, download the assembly file.

I am still learning WADL and not everything is clear. There are many conflicts which might take time to grasp, but the current assembly works flawlessly for Launchpad WADL. Let me know if it fails for some WADL file which you provided. Take the pains to mail me the WADL file too. My email is mail at manishsinha dot net

Documentation:

This is no magic or rocket science. All you need to do it to call the Convert method of WadlConverter which implements IConverter interface. This means you need to use LpNet.WadlSharp.Common.WadlConverter class and call it’s Convert method. The signature of the method is

void Convert(string inputFileName, string outputFileName, string rootNamespace)

The explanation of the method:

The first argument is the filename of the WADL file.
Second argument is the filename of the .cs file. If the file does not exist, it would be created. If it does exist, it would be truncated and then overwritten.
The third parameter is the name of the namespace which you would like the generated code to have.

Languages Supported:

WADL# uses CodeDom which is provided both in .NET and also Mono. WADL# can theoretically gen rate code for all languages which CodeDom can.

In reality, there is a small problem in the file Customizer.cs at line 215 where there is a hard coding for C#. Next release of WADL# will remove that.

Code:

WADL# uses Launchpad for development using the Bzr source control system. Get the code from trunk, make changes, push it and add it to merge queue. I love contribution and patches.

License:

WADL# is an open-source project released under MIT/X11/Expat License. This means you can use it freely any way you like it provided you do not remove the Copyright notice. Know more about MIT License.

–

Just now I got a mail from Softpedia informing me that they have added WADL# to their repository of Linux Softwares.

Please don’t start with Mono and patents talk. Please point your browser to Slashdot, Hacker News, OSNews and Reddit for such discussions. You’ll get better responses in such places.

Please let me know if there is any mistakes on this post which includes typos, grammatical and factual ones. I would correct it at the earliest.

Update: I just got a backlink from a blog at weblogs.java.net on a post titled Bumper Crop of WADL Tools

Swaroop Hegde (BE-2k4): Filttr – A New Hope

2010-05-04T05:49:49+00:00

Note: This post is cloned from blog.filttr.com
It has been a year since Filttr’s last beta but that doesn’t mean we haven’t done anything since then. There has also been heavy performance improvements. However, our company has been looking forward to move from Filttr over to other things. It was an experiment by Aditya & me which transformed into a full time project as we got popular – not to forget the first big coverage by TechCrunch followed by CNN & New York Times. However, we hit some roadblocks and then the negative attitude of Twitter towards the developers led us to lose interest in trying to monetize the service. The final nail in the coffin was flurry of decisions by Twitter last month. We will not get into the details as everyone here at RH loves Twitter & the way they’ve managed the service so far.

Coming to my point, our company has decided to move on to other projects & I, have decided to take over Filttr’s development & server expenses. We have never charged our users and I do not plan to do so either and yes, ads suck! There are no major bugs (tracker.filttr.com) but I will try to add more features (filttr.uservoice.com) during my free time. I’m already in the process of developing FilttrFon – a mobile app for iPhone & Android.

I would be grateful if people can even donate something as little as $5; it will help me pay for some part of the expenses and most importantly, encourage me to continue developing Filttr!

–
Swaroop

P.S. You didn’t think I would actually forget mentioning Star Wars day, would ya? Hint: Check title.

LUG Manipal: Distributed Computing and MapReduce

varun — 2010-04-09T16:18:13+00:00

Today I conducted a session on Distributed Computing. It mainly focussed on MapReduce and its open source implementation-Hadoop.

The session first covered a brief idea of why we need to have distributed computing since everything is driven by need.Then It covered how a distributed file system works.It focussed on the Google File System.A demonstartion of how Hadoop works on a single node enviornment where a example very similar to the wordcount example was show. It was an election simulation where the input was the votes cast and the Hadoop Job aggregated the results.After this some finer details about Hadoop was covered which was the last topic in the session.

Some resources that are very helpful:

http://code.google.com/edu/parallel/index.html#hadoop

Slides for the session:

http://www.slideshare.net/varunthacker/distributed-computing-3635200

http://www.jakobhoman.com/search/label/Hadoop

How to setup an Hadoop enviorment:

http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_%28Single-Node_Cluster%29

http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_%28Multi-Node_Cluster%29

LUG Manipal: Session on Distributed Computing and MapReduce

Kartik Mandaville — 2010-04-06T12:20:06+00:00

We are organizing a Session on Distributed Computing and MapReduce.

Ever wondered how Google,Yahoo! index the web ..

Technologies Include :
MapReduce
GFS(Google File System)
Apache Hadoop

An IDC estimate put the size of the “digital universe” at 1.8 zettabytes by 2011.
A distributed system consists of multiple computers that communicate through a network.
Distributed computing refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems on the distributed system.
MapReduce is a framework which implements the idea of a distributed computing.
GFS is the distributed file system on which distributed programs store and process data.
Hadoop is an open source framework written in Java which implements the MapReduce technology.

The following are the details :

Date: 9th April, 2010

Venue: NLH 104

Time: 5 pm

LUG Manipal: GSOC Session

Kartik Mandaville — 2010-04-06T10:37:12+00:00

LUG Manipal presents a 3 hr session on Google Summer of Code.

Get to know how to work on projects from Google, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Linux Foundation, Facebook and many more
Find out how to apply to these organizations and getting to work with them
Learn how to earn $5000

Venue : NLH 104

Date: 24th March 2010

TIme: 5pm to 8 pm

The slides for the session are available here :

GSoC 2010
Slides

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5)

Shubhendra Singh — 2010-04-05T21:49:43+00:00

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Simple Finite State Machines in C

Ankur Shrivastava — 2010-04-04T21:59:15+00:00

I was having discussion about State Machines with one of my friend, regarding pro’s and con’s of implementing programs as Sate Machines, it was then that i realised there is no simple way to implement programs as Finite State Machines, so here is a very basic implementation of FSM in C

file: fsm.h contains the function definition for our FSM

file: fsm.c contains the function implementation for our FSM

file: main.c contains an example on how this FSM can be used

PS – If you are reading this post on a blog aggregator like planet you can view full post here

LUG Manipal: LaTeX Session

Kartik Mandaville — 2010-04-01T15:08:13+00:00

We are organizing a 3 hr session on LaTeX. LaTeX is a document markup language used widely by academicians, scientist, scholars etc

Date : 1st April 2010

Venue : NLH 102

Time: 5pm

Download the slides here

Installation:

Linux Users:

Install texlive package by sudo apt-get install texlive

Use any text editor for writing .tex files. Optionally, install Kile,a IDE for LaTeX ( sudo apt-get install Kile )

Windows Users:

Download “basic-miktex.2.7.2960″ and install the latex compiler by executing the file.
Install TEXnicCentre an IDE for Latex compiler by executing “TXCSetup_1Beta7_01″ . Optionally, you can use any text editor.
First time when you run TEXnicCentre it will ask for path where the tex.exe and
other files are present. Please select the path “C:\Program Files\MiKTeX
2.7\miktex\bin” (After verifying for the file in that folder).

Useful Links:

Wiki

http://www.latex-project.org/

http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

Some Ebooks :

The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2 by by Tobias Oetiker

A Beamer Tutorial in Beamer by Charles T. Batts

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): Time to blog!

Shubhendra Singh — 2010-03-21T00:16:46+00:00

Hello World! Seems to be the time when I feel like blogging, mid of the semester when so many things are going on. The hunt for something is always there, at the moment its summer internship/something constructive to do in summers. Sometimes I feel that because of the hunger to hunt I have forgotten about very basic concept of "Try to keep it simple and stupid". Expectations are always building up mostly not from others but from me itself. Today saw a video in which Virendra Sehwag talks about Sachin Tendulkar's greatest achievement "200 runs in an ODI match". He said that when Sachin was close to the achievement last time, when he scored 175 runs against Australia, but couldn't achieve it he humbly said "If its in my fate I will achieve it". Sachin always inspires me, his humble nature mixed with hard work does the job. I tell myself in the end "don't worry just work and work, if its in your fate you will achieve it".

Kunal Kerkar (BE-2k7): Auto album name fill in amarok

Kunal — 2010-03-12T01:02:08+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()

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Weekend Project

Ankur Shrivastava — 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

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Using Apple Keyboard in Linux (Fedora)

Ankur Shrivastava — 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,

Manish's Tech Blog: The Ubuntu Rebranding

Manish — 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.

Manish's Tech Blog: Mozilla Developer Day Bangalore, 27th February 2010

Manish — 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

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): strange thing in python

Ankur Shrivastava — 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?

Kunal Kerkar (BE-2k7): Valentines Day Dilemma

Kunal — 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/

Kunal Kerkar (BE-2k7): Alrighty then

Kunal — 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!

Manish's Tech Blog: Directi Hackfest 31st January, 2010

Manish — 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.

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Begining Python workshop

Ankur Shrivastava — 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

LUG Manipal: PYTHON WORKSHOP

Kartik Mandaville — 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

LUG Manipal: C++ Workshop

djays — 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.

Manish's Tech Blog: 2009. A Recap(Technical)

Manish — 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.

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): The 50th one!

Shubhendra Singh — 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.

Dhananjay (BE-2k7): Simple espeak Program (speak_lib)

djays — 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

Soumen Banerjee (BE-2k7): BSNL 3G Modem (HUAWEI E156G) in Linux

Soumen — 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.

Manish's Tech Blog: Education given by Indian Engineering Lecturers

Manish — 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.

Dhananjay (BE-2k7): MEDIAFIRE DIRECT LINK GENERATOR

djays — 2009-12-15T14:28:14+00:00

UPDATE: Added Proxy Support

This is a python based Mediafire link resolution script . It resolves the input link to give the direct link to the file.

By using this script you are automatically agreeing to MediaFire ’s Terms and Conditions.

If you wish to have the source code , contact me.

DOWNLOAD

For help use “mediafire.pyc –help”

Posted in Bash, Linux, python, Windows

Ayush Pranshu (BE-2k5): Schindlers List and related thoughts

gurudev — 2009-11-29T07:22:05+00:00

I watched Schindler’s List recently. To many this may come as a surprise considering that it is a film that has been generally acknowledged to be one of the best. This is the precise reason why I hadn’t seen it earlier. Such critical acclaim and multiple recommendations raise my expectations too high. To be honest, this level of expectation is unfair. The film was great, it now ranks as one of my favourites after Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and alongside Lakshya, DCH and Pyaasa. But that is digressing from the point. The film showed what human nature is all about, how compassionate and caring it can be and how selfless can man become. The events shown in the film are historically true. Such a camp, factory and man did exist. The town is also still there in Czech Republic though it is listed in Wikipedia as Svitavy even though the film shows it as Brinnlitz.

But this blog entry is not about the film, it is about something more important, more manifest; this one is about human nature. The film shows the main protagonist as one who is kind at heart, but as I was watching the film, this question was coming up in my mind repeatedly, are human beings really so compassionate as to risk their lives, career, reputation and more for the sake of others? I mean, it is difficult for me to believe that humans can be so selfless. I am not a skeptic, I like to believe in human beings, in the inherent good qualities of human nature, I believe in believing in others till my faith is proven misplaced. I was not always this skeptical but recent events have made me into one.

What are those recent events that have changed my view? Good question, but the answer to which isn’t forthcoming. I am just expressing my thoughts. One may argue that not all human beings are such. Well, when the time comes we will know the true nature of every person and not always is the reconstructed picture rosy. One thing is for certain, I will never be the same person again, I have undergone a profound change, may not be for the best but I am hoping that I never have to go through such a harrowing experience again.

Swaroop Hegde (BE-2k4): iPhone

2009-11-28T09:07:53+00:00

I am now a proud owner of an iPhone. All thanks to Mike, who kind enough to send gift his 3G – I gave up hopes of an iPhone 3GS launch in India. The phone arrived a month ago but I had to wait for 30 days for the sim card tray to arrive from Hong Kong. The screen replacement never arrived and it looks like I’ll have to order again

I couldn’t hop around like an excited kid on finding every coll feature of the phone since I already owned an iPod Touch and have been working on iPhone apps. I was forced to “unlock” the potential which did help bringing out much of the hidden potential. Some day, when I am competent in Objective-c, I might try a hand at a few hacks myself.

Once the screen replacement arrives, I’ll be posting pics. I don’t need to review this gadget, do I?

Manish's Tech Blog: The Art of Power-Point Presentation

Manish — 2009-11-18T19:37:52+00:00

How many times did you have “butterflies in your stomach” just because you were told to be present in the auditorium/seminar hall where your attendance was compulsory for something more precisely called “Power Point Presentation”. You especially need to take care that it is referred to as PPT and not just a presentation, the former probably stands for “Powerpoint”.

PPTs are probably one of the most hated things in this world, due to one simple reason-They are usually boring. The person giving the presentation considers it a liability and the audience feel attendance a compulsion. The audience resist from asking questions as it will prolong the event to unbearable lengths. The presenter just wants to get rid of his responsibilities either because he is not interested or he knows no one cares to listen.

Essayists

Nothing is more torturous for me than attending a presentation, where the dude has copied the whole content on the slide and is reading it aloud for the audience! Like we are illiterates.

Body Language

Would you like to attend a presentation where the person uses his hands, eyes, face for communication or in a presentation where the person speaks like a robot? We have enough text-to-speech converters. Humans need not take the pains for the same.

Animations on the slides

Probably many people might disagree with me on this topic, but I hate those presentations where the slides have tons of effects like fade-in, swirl, zoom-in etc. To add more insult those effects have sounds effects like brake,gunfire,coughing, sneezing and what not.

One-Phrase Focus

This solution is probably for all the essayists. I have seen many people who can capture the attention of the audience by focussing on one-phrase at a time. If a person is speaking on say “Memory Management”, then keep this word/phrase on the slide and nothing else. The slide is just to keep the audience alert on which topic the talk is going on. If there are many sub-topics, probably all of them can be shown on the screen, but only one of them should have focus and rest should be grayed out.

PPT

Presentation is not a “Power Point presentation”. You don’t need Power Point for putting forward your views. I don’t know who coined this horrible term called “PPT” which most probably stands for “PowerPoint”. I use OO.org, so it means I am unfit for giving a PPT?

Steve Jobs

If everything else fails, turn towards one of the biggest visionary and orator of this time for more suggestions. Have a look at the keynotes delivered by Jobs. Learn from them. Do you find his whole speech written on the background?

In fact presentation should not use PowerPoint. Ideally, every so called PPT should be like a Steve Jobs keynote.

Conclusion

I am also not an expert in delivering speeches or presentations. Since I have to attend some of the other presentation every forthnight, I do notice some of the other mistakes committed by others, make a note of it. Next time when I prepare for any speeches, I keep those points in mind. The above points are taken from that list. This list is from an audience perspective.

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Mobi Vision 2.0 Slides

Ankur Shrivastava — 2009-11-15T12:34:33+00:00

First and Second Phase for MobiVision 2.0 is long over, and we can call it a workshop well done, the slides are here

Mobi Vision 2.0

View more documents from Ankur Shrivastava.

Manish's Tech Blog: Computer Science Project for Indian Engineering Colleges

Manish — 2009-11-12T19:35:15+00:00

How many times you put your best effort in making a project only to be ridiculed during the presentation with words like “This is shit”.”WTF is this” by the teachers. OK OK! I am exaggerating, but it is a truth that students who put their best don’t get their reward. Most of such students put their sincere effort just because they like their work and not just for marks. To add insult to injury, those who copy-paste the projects get great reviews.

The situation is no different in Computer Science branch too. We loose hundreds of such talents students just because they became de-moralized after poor feedback for their project by the faculty. They should realize that hard-work in college hardly pays off. They should put their coding efforts in competitions like “Google Code Jam”, “CodeChef” or some open-source projects.

Now the million dollar question is “How to handle the college projects”? Let me explain with an example.

Project: Create a source Control Management or Revision Control System for efficient code management for single person project.

Technology: Python with SQLite for client.

Additional Information: There need not be a central repo to push the changes, local commits are enough. The name of the binary should be srcs or “Simple Revision Control System“

Creating the Project:

In real world development, people would ask you to make tons of documents like SRS, Technical Specification etc before moving on to coding. These things simply don’t exist in colleges. All you need to do for your project to be ready is shown below.

You need to run the following commands on any Debian based distro (probably Ubuntu)

$ sudo apt-get install bzr

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/bzr /usr/bin/srcs

….. and it’s done. Now let’s start using it

Creating the repository

$ cd ~ && mkdir code && cd code

$ srcs init

Creating files

$ touch file1.c

$ touch README

Adding and committing

$ srcs add file1.c README

$ srcs commit file1.c README -m "First Commit"

So your project part is complete. Now come let’s handle the typical vivas

Conversation 1:

Teacher: Why have you used Python?

You: Python is _______________(put all sorts of Python advocacy here)__________________

Teacher: What. Explain it clearly!

You: So that you can’t make the head or tail of the codebase.

Conversation 2:

Teacher: Explain your project briefly!

You: My project is to create a system to manage the code. Keep revisions, find the differences between two commits

Teacher: How to keep differences?

You: I save the code at regular intervals, or say commit it to the repo, so that I can access any file any time if I make a mistake

Teacher: Why the **** do you need to make such a big software to keep copies. Can’t you just use “Save As(s)” every time you need revision of a file?

You: *Facepalm*

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): USA and my first Semester as master's student

Shubhendra Singh — 2009-11-06T11:13:08+00:00

So finally got enough time to think and write down what I think. So after awesome experience in France, spending a month at home is always best time. In the middle went to Manipal which was like one more trip to heaven, the weather in Manipal just sets up the mood. Now next trip was to USA, an unknown land to me but as they say its always exciting to explore new places. Well the exploring part was more intellectual till now rather than exploring different parts of USA. Have finally figured out what does research means to different people, atleast to me it means that I should be able to make something work in the end of my research and people can use it. People here are really friendly and a big misconception that American's have limited knowledge about world outside USA isn't completely true. At least some of those I met were really smart people, thinking about what they will do in like next 5-10 years. American's have tendency of wasting things also like the one promptly seen was wasting electricity (all there stores have all lights open even at night when shops are closed, they even don't switch there LCD panels) and at the other end they want to move to solar powered systems and how to conserve energy, recycle everything (which is good approach). This trip is really helping me to understand how to handle pressure in tough situations esp. when deadlines are around you and nothing is working. Will be back to India again in winter and really hope to get good amount of rest before gearing up again for next semester.

LUG Manipal: Install Fest and Web Development Workshop

Kartik Mandaville — 2009-11-06T10:24:19+00:00

Well , here is a small write up of both the events LUGM conducted in October 2009 .

Install Fest :

LUG Manipal organisesd a Linux ( Ubuntu 9.04 to be precise ) Install Fest from 6th to 8th October . Well , this time , it was the job of the second years to do it . Most of us were noobs . We should congratulate Saurabh for the excellent organisation of the entire fest which went without any major hiccups . Also ,at the last day , there was a small talk on the upcoming Web Development Workshop .

Web Development Workshop :

A workshop on how to make web pages covering HTML , MySQL and PHP conducted by LUGM .We ( LUGM ) focused on web development rather than web designing .We were planning this workshop from around 6 months but due to many problems it could not materialise . Kartik had prepared the slides way back in July .So , it was finally decided on the last day ( i.e 9th ) to conduct the workshop from 12th October 2009 . With only three days , we had plenty of work to do .The next day , we got the room booked ( NLH 405 ) . We got the top floor as there were many other events going on . The posters were up the next day at all important places in MIT .SMS’s were sent with a request to “Forward to all ” . LUGM website , the wiki page and the Facebook Fan page was updated . Also , a facebook event was created to futher publicise . Manu, made class announcements in all the first year classes . He did the job single handedly ( Dunno why he likes the job so much ) . Meanwhile , slides were being given the final touches by Pratik and Saurabh . Kartik and Saurabh made a comprehensive plan of the entire workshop detailing each and every thing . Our seniors suggested some changes and then we were all set to roll .

So , finally the D-Day arrived . Most of us bunked classes to be in time for the workshop . The crowd was ok , almost the entire class room was filled . One more thing which is worth a mention is that we received a number of calls asking for registration and if there is any fees for it .

For the record, LUGM does not charge people for attending a workshop neither is there any registration . ( Check out the guiding principle of LUGM )

Coming back to the topic ,the first day went pretty well .HTML and beginning of MySQL was dealt with . As expected , the turnout on the second day was less than the previous day. The second day consisted of MySQL and beginning with PHP . At the end of the day , we gave a small assignment which involved the use of forms and POST . Many had made the effort of completing the assignment . The third day basically consisted of integrating PHP with MySQL , Sessions and Cookies .On the last day , we were expecting a low turnout , but the turnout was far less than we expected . We had kept this day only for application , so we demonstrated a login page complete with Remember Me feature from scratch .Although the turnout was less but the response was amazing .We had divided the entire application into modules and then gave some time for the students to complete . We were glad that many were easily able to complete the modules in time .

For more ,

The post about the workshop on the LUG Website

Slides of the workshop

Refer to the Guiding Principles of LUGM

Facebook Fan Page

Manish's Tech Blog: My Stackoverflow archives #1

Manish — 2009-10-28T18:12:07+00:00

Usually when I am wandering around on stackoverflow, there are times when I find some of the questions being interesting and bookmark them. Since this list grows day by day, it came to my mind to publish them for the betterment of the general public. These are the questions which I found good and don’t claim to be the “Best of StackOverflow”. You would notice the variation in the type of questions.

If you have your list, please let me know. The comment section is open for this noble cause. BTW here is the part 1 of the list.

LUG Manipal: Slides Web Development Workshop [Oct 2009 ]

Kartik Mandaville — 2009-10-18T17:52:57+00:00

The slides of the workshop :

Slides

LUG Manipal: Web Development Workshop[Oct, 2009]

Kartik Mandaville — 2009-10-09T21:57:25+00:00

Ever wondered how to build your own web page ??? No need to wait any longer !!

LUG Manipal is organizing yet another workshop — “A Web Development Workshop” covering HTML , MySQL and PHP.
This will be a 4 days workshop Starting on 12th of October 2009 at 5:30pm at NLH 405 , MIT.
Our main focus will be to promote Open Source Technology for Web Development and Design.

The content material for this workshop will be basic HTML for getting a start to web programming. The basics of this tagged language can be learnt at W3Schools. We will then advance to the basics of server side and client side scripting and the differences between them.

PHP is the choice of language for Server side Web Design. There is usually a lot of spectaculars between ASP and PHP. Some of the most famous places where its used is Wikipedia, Wordpress (most famous blogging software), most of the Content Management System. Even Google and Yahoo make use of PHP for their pages. It is a very simple language which borrows it’s syntax from Perl, another classical language. It is time to make PHP your friend.

Now turning to MySQL, this is the most widely deployed database software which has more than 5,000 downloads per day as the statistics revealed by MySQL AB. Being the world’s most famous Open Source Database, its bound to be quite attractive. Being a very lightweight database software, its easy to install even on desktops.

The scripting will be done on Apache Web Server, its the world unchallenged king when it come to server deployments, covering some 70%of the webservers. Lightweight, extensibility , great features make it the no 1 choice of web developers all over the world.

A brief Schedule :
Day 1 : Introduction to Web , installation , distribution and basic HTML , MySQL
Day 2 : PHP overview , variables , functions and HTML forms , get and post methods
Day 3 :MySQL through PHP , sessions and cookies
Day 4 : Full Fledged Login Script demonstration from scratch

Please bring your laptops

It is advised that you go through the following links to have a better understanding .
MYSQL
PHP

Further References :

Get the Official PHP Manual from its website.
Get the Official MySQL Manual from its website.
Past Workshop’s PHP and MySQL Portion Syllabus

Planet LUG Manipal

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Weekend Project II

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Hour Bangalore

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Developer Week

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): 4 weeks at Microsoft (Internship)

Manish's Tech Blog: Maverick Development Updates #2

# Payments API is in good shape; we had an API overview from Ricardo Kirkner including a walkthrough of the process # We identified a problem in that there is the potential for unverified payment amounts submitted to the billing service by the client

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): TRYING for feedwordpress

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Maverick development updates

Manish's Tech Blog: Are you a pundit?

Manish's Tech Blog: Introducing WADL#

Documentation:

The explanation of the method:

Languages Supported:

Code:

License:

Swaroop Hegde (BE-2k4): Filttr – A New Hope

LUG Manipal: Distributed Computing and MapReduce

LUG Manipal: Session on Distributed Computing and MapReduce

LUG Manipal: GSOC Session

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5)

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Simple Finite State Machines in C

LUG Manipal: LaTeX Session

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): Time to blog!

Kunal Kerkar (BE-2k7): Auto album name fill in amarok

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Weekend Project

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Using Apple Keyboard in Linux (Fedora)

Manish's Tech Blog: The Ubuntu Rebranding

The change in branding

Improvements

The Roadblocks

Solution

Manish's Tech Blog: Mozilla Developer Day Bangalore, 27th February 2010

Introduction

Web Standards

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

Web.Next

Speaker: Seth Bindernagel

Mozilla Labs

Speaker: Ragavan Srinivasan

Broken Sites

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

Hack Session

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): strange thing in python

Kunal Kerkar (BE-2k7): Valentines Day Dilemma

Kunal Kerkar (BE-2k7): Alrighty then

Manish's Tech Blog: Directi Hackfest 31st January, 2010

Rewind

Agenda

Talks

Code

Conclusion

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Begining Python workshop

LUG Manipal: PYTHON WORKSHOP

LUG Manipal: C++ Workshop

Manish's Tech Blog: 2009. A Recap(Technical)

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): The 50th one!

Dhananjay (BE-2k7): Simple espeak Program (speak_lib)

DEPENDENCIES:

USAGE:

SOURCE CODE

Soumen Banerjee (BE-2k7): BSNL 3G Modem (HUAWEI E156G) in Linux

Manish's Tech Blog: Education given by Indian Engineering Lecturers

Case 1:

Case 2:

Case 3:

Case 4:

Dhananjay (BE-2k7): MEDIAFIRE DIRECT LINK GENERATOR

Ayush Pranshu (BE-2k5): Schindlers List and related thoughts

Swaroop Hegde (BE-2k4): iPhone

Manish's Tech Blog: The Art of Power-Point Presentation

Essayists

Body Language

Animations on the slides

One-Phrase Focus

PPT

Steve Jobs

Conclusion

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Mobi Vision 2.0 Slides

# Payments API is in good shape; we had an API overview from Ricardo Kirkner including a walkthrough of the process
# We identified a problem in that there is the potential for unverified payment amounts submitted to the billing service by the client