Back to home

I got down to delhi today and its soo good to be at home...:)
meanwhile its raining heavily at warangal ... good that i came back hehe

Hmm I didnt knew that about me:)

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful. You show the world what culture really is.

Who's Your Inner European?

Character Recognition

IIT Powai has a techfest every year sometimes in Jan. This year its from 20-22 jan, there are a lot of events to participate in but most involed creating some sort of robots. My knowledge about bot making is limited to creating AIM chat bots:) so nothing in there for me. But we liked the event on handwriting recongnition its for hindi alphabet. The sytem we designed is a bit slow for now but i think it will improve. Any ways we sent the abstract yesterday lets see how it turns out to be.





Tags: IITB, Techfest, Character Recognition

Semantic Web Tags and More

One of the ways people can organise information better and help others search for it is by using tags. Meta data can help solve many problems related to semantics and appears to be a easy way to avoid more formal ontology matching which has its own problems. Things are heating up in the semantic web (SW) with lot of people coming up with new ideas to use the semantic web(SW). I recently had a few good discussions on the semantic web mailing list maintained by w3c. I found a rather nice use of the semantics in encoding for database compression and security. You can download the whitepaper at about semantic encoding in databases at the above link.

Ps: I deceied to tag my posts...:)


Tags: Semantic Web, Databases, Web 2.0

FastBlogit

During my discussions in the semantic web mail list i met Russel seth.
I hit across a new and better blogging service FastBlogIt I am posting on a group there about semantic search engine. You can try its fun... and a nice way to organise things.

This semantic web thing is good i got new friends and many associations...:D

Tim got a blog now

Tim Berner's Lee the creator of the world wide web has finally taken to the blogging world. He recently started to write his blog. Welcome to the blogsphere tim:)

Tim's Blog

Intel v/s AMD now in F1

Intel decied to sponsor BMW's Sauber... AMD already is the sponsor for Ferrari... this makes sure that the chip wars will now be fought in F1 as well...:)

Read more at today.reuters.co.uk/new...

Open Solaris Xmas

Dont knw if my girl is ready for open solaris but the this xmas tree sure looks cool....:)
Xmas Tree

PC World's Techlog - Is Google About to Buy Opera?

Hmm now it seems that opera is going to be the google's new browser. Its all speculative but if they acquire opera it will heat up the battle betweeen IE and FF and make it triangular...

Read more at blogs.pcworld.com/techl...

New Audio Blog

Odeo.com allows you to create a channel for podcasting or direct link to be used as a audio blog....
I created a new audio blog for me... here you go...

Carry On Coding - Comics

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live - Martin Golding

Read more at upsterzcomics.blogspot...

Google Extension for Firefox

Google has added a new firefox extension called the blogger web comments... it allows you to see whats happening about the current page ur surfing in the blogger community and you can add ur own post directly within the extension on ur own blog... its kinda kwel but now google knows all the pages i visit too :(

Semantic Web

I am working on the semantic web search and recently I sparked off a discussion in the semantic web mailing list. It was about how will the semantic web emerge? Most people think that a time will come when the web developers will start tagged their content and slowly the web will change from human readable to machine readable. But the question is why as a web developer I will like to tag my data? Unless I get some real good benefits from it I am not going to take the extra pain of tagged my documents. So what I believe is that the acceptance and increase in popularity of semantic web can happen only when there are applications based on semantic web which give better performance then traditional web.

Apache on Windows

I had never used the apache web server before. All my past sever side scripts ran on the IIS which is available with windows. So this time i deceided to go on with apache. The installation is swift and took no time at all. But the configuration of the server is the tricky part ( compared to IIS) , I had to add only one line in the httpd.conf file in the conf folder... it was the servername= localhost... all files that you want to put on the site go into the /htdocs folder the same as the www/root folder in IIS. Finally i had a few problems with running perll scripts on apache but he error.log file was helpful to figure out wat was wrong...

Fun Tests...

Sun Java Studio

I downloaded the Sun's Java Studio enterprise edition which was not free earlier from the sun download site. The Java Studio is intended to be a IDE for software development in java. It looks very rich in features from the looks:). The tomcat server latest edition is preincluded for programming with servlets and other web applications in java. Java Studio looks like its all set to rival microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 which was released earlier this month. Java Studio too comes with templates for software design and a large number of examples with full online support. This initiative should encourage use of java even more...

Solaris Back on Track

This is with reference to the earlier post on messing up os. We finally found a way to get that system back on track, we stoped solaris while booting by pressing stop-a and then gave the command boot -s in ok prompt. That makes solaris boot in single user mode via console. After logging in as a root user we executed /usr/bin/smartcard -D to disable login by smart card and got the normal password based login.:)

Installing Woes...

I think we are to blame microsoft and windows for making all tasks seem so easy. We have been trying to install the smart card drivers and the neccesary software on linux and its getting us into a lot of trouble. Type this configure that and so on.. the list is endless. Compare this with the simple installation package on windows which just expects us to press the next button:D.
I fail to understand why dont the ppl workin on linux too follow some standards and provide easy installations. Unless this is done the acceptance of linux as a desktop os for home user will remain a far fetched dream.
The use of rpm intiated by the red hat is a good step in this direction and should encourage developers to bundle thier software in that format. Even Mandrake adopted it and ships with all rpm packages :).
BTW mandrake is no more , they have changed the name of the release to mandriva. The lastes os mandriva 2006 can be downloaded from http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/downloads

My lens on Squidoo

I built my first lens on squidoo u can acess it at http://www.squidoo.com/asankhaya. Its all set to magnify this blog : )

Setting up Lan on Linux.

I had to set up the Lan on a Red Hat 9.0 system today. The process is fairly simple thought not as in the windows environment.

-Log in as root and open a terminal
-Type netconfig
-Select the propoer ip address and subnet mask
-press ok
-now you have set your system at that ip address
-type ipconfig to see ur present ip address
-you can use ping command to check if you are connected

Messed up the OS

Today i was just playing with the smart cards on the sun blade workstations. I allowed smart card based login and lol the normal prompt for login was gone and it asked for the card. When i inserted the card (sobs) it said login failed. I had succesfully locked my self out of the sustem:(. anyways there are no plans to correct it as we are going to load solaris 10 on it.

Sun Blade Workstation

Today was very eventful ... We installed two sun blade workstations from scratch for our project. The sun blade machines(sun blade 1500) come preloaed with solaris 9. we booted it and bang.. no one knew password for root we tried all combinations till the lab assistant came up with the list of password given by the vendor. Then it booted the solaris 9 has gnome and a common desktop preloaded.
Later we set out to install red hat linux on two machines wich was rather routine now.

Then we decied to load solaris 10 on the blade machines but we had only the x86 version. So we loaded it on other machine:). The solaris 10 os has a java destop environment which looks very kwel indeed. Didnt have too much time playing wid it may be tommrow...

Gmail Antivirus

Google added virus scanning capabilities to their mail service on 2nd dec. As people will know that gmail doesnt allow you to send an exe file as attachment. But even with the virus scan in place you cannot send an exe file (altough there are ways to do it but for common user it will not be easy). Moreover the virus scanning feature cannot be disabled which is useful in case you are sending the infected file to the antivirus support to get help.
People are already complaining about this. To add on google doesnt even tell which company's service they are using to scan the emails. The users would really apreciate that they know which antivirus software is scanning their mails

Partition Magic

I had a little problem with my partitions. One of them had too much free space and the other had a little and i couldnt simply move the data so i decieded to move the free space. The software i used was partition magic 8.5 its quite easy to use and simple. The resize partition option enabled me to change the sizes of the partition. So the space problem is sloved for the time been :)

Solaris 10

Today we had our very first experience with installing solaris 10. The operating system takes a lot of space(it asked for about 8gb for full installation) but the interface is similar to linux. We could install it on one partition but it didnt boot properly. We maganed to log on to a shell only once and could execute popular unix commands like ls, cd etc. I dont knw what is the problem maybe it isnt installed properly.
Lets see what happens next. :)

Firefox 1.5 released

So mozilla finally released the new 1.5 version of the browser firefox... most of the changes hav been cosmetic even thought the release was long expected. The browser is now in its 2nd year.. and has a market share of about 10% since it was launched in november last year. IE still leads the market but firefox ios catching up... no mozilla is going to design a new marketing campaign for the browser...

U can download firefox 1.5 from http://www.mozilla.com

All blogs I write

Here is a list of all the blogs in write..

Veni Vidi Vici
White Hackers
True Poems
NITW - News and Views

Here is the list of sites i maintain...

Google Games
BlogSphere
Ads for Web Publishers

Lab Exams

Yey...
today i finished 2 of the three lab exams...DBMS and OS...i got output in both of them

:)

Interview

Yesterday was tiring...i had the interview for intership at morgan stanley... i was all dressed up in formals since 9am in morning and my turn came in like 2pm pah.. nways it went on fine... the results will be on laters....

Murphy's Laws

Murphy's Original Law

If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.

Murphy's Law

If anything can go wrong -- it will.

Murphy's First Corollary

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

Murphy's Second Corollary

It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

Quantized Revision of Murphy's Law

Everything goes wrong all at once.

Murphy's Constant

Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.

The Murphy Philosophy

Smile... tomorrow will be worse.

Conclusions

1. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the first one to go wrong.
   Corollary - If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.
2. If several things that could have gone wrong have not gone wrong, it would have been ultimately beneficial for them to have gone wrong.
3. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
4. If anything can't go wrong, it will anyway.
5. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
6. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
7. Everything takes longer than you think.
8. You never find a lost article until you replace it.
9. If nobody uses it, there's a reason.
10. You get the most of what you need the least.
11. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
12. Mother nature is a bitch.

Corporate Lessons

I watched a slide show that was in circulation email lately, it was about some corporate lessons. It had three stories...

1)There was a crow on top of a tree it as sitting and doing nothing. A rabbit came by and asked the crow that, can he too just sit and do nothing the crow said yes. So the rabbit sat on the ground beneath the tree. A fox came pounced on the rabbit and ate it.

Moral of the story

To be sitting and doing nothing you need to be sitting very very high up...

2)A turkey met a bull and told him that it wanted to go on top of a tree but couldnt as it was weak. The bull suggested the turkey that it ate its droppings as they were packed with nutrients. The turkey ate the dropping and grew stronger. Finally it reached the top of the tree. Just then a farmer happened to pass by, he saw the turkey and shot it down.

Moral of the story

Bull Shit might get you to the top but it wont help you stay there...

3)A bird was flying south for the winter, suddenly it grew extremly cold the bird froze and fell on ground. A horse came and dropped shit on it. Soon the bird felt warmer and began to recover. It was so warm that the bird started to sing. A cat heard the bird sing it came to the dropings and dug the bird out and ate it.

Morals of the story

Not everyone who drops shit on you is your enemy...

Not everyone who take you out of it is your friend...


When you are in deep shit keep your mouth shut...

Top 10

Sridhar (when he came for the workshop) gave us a top ten... I would like to recollect them here

Top Ten by Sridhar

10) Prepare 5 year road map.

09) Work smart.

08) Dont change jobs frequently.

07) Select right mentor.

06) Work with your dream company/university while studying.

05) Skills diversification.

04) Leadership.

03) File patents.

02) Think global - learn mandarin.

01) Think different.

The future is Open

Recently i attended a workshop on is open source the future. The workshop was more on how solaris wil be the future then on how open source will be the future (as the guy who was presenting the workshop is form sun). But still workshop talked about a few recent sucessful open source projects. The problem with all open source projects is that most of them lack the funding and people pursue them in their free time. Which makes development in open source unreilable. With the sun's open solaris released under a CDDL license. Whci means that you can write our own code on open solaris and u need not contribute it back to the open community. The linux has a GPL license so that you have to open your code for all linux development. The sun's CDDL attempts to give the developers the rights to thier own code and help them market thier product. However what impact will this have on the open source community is yet to be seen.

Beyond Code

I recently hit on a blog blog.lifebeyondcode.com. It is apparently based on the book with the same name. I had a look at the book too when sridhar came to our college for a one day workshop on Open Source and the author seems to be sridhar'a friend. The title is a bit missleading, the book does talk about different skills for programmers. But with a title like that i thought the book should have an account to what happens to coders and what is their utlimate fate. You join a big software company for the 10lakhs they are paying you and from there on you go on coding and coding and coding... its always a kind of reassurance to your mind that you are working on the cutting edge and latest trends in the industry. But who decieds these trends.... its not you ....you are made to work on and on and on... and in the end you call quit (unless you are made to quit) you have a lots of money but dont knw what to do with it because you never thought about spending it. You go to a small village buy a cottage and end your life there if you are lucky or else you will be stuck up where you are till the very end.

I think this is life beyond code and coders which all of us should pay attention to.

The Great Indian Middle Class

I sent this article for The Hindu's Open page but today is sunday and they didnt publish it so i think its better if i put it on here...

The entire social economic structure of a country can be divided into different sections of people according to some arbitrary rules formed by the other people. As the website http://www.indiaonestop.com/middleclassesindia.htm notes a class which was non-existent when India became free; now has a size of more then 300 million people. The middle class is expected to grow at a rate for 5-10% annually. This represents a set of people who are educated, mostly salaried and are well off then the poor. For the economic development of the country it is necessary that the middle class grows and until it encompasses one and all. This clearly shows that how important a factor the middle class can be in the country’s economic growth. An educated population and unprecedented growth in the software and back-office service sectors have created a new young and wealthy middle class. Economic reforms and annual growth rates of around 7 per cent have led to unprecedented prosperity and higher incomes. The middle class is the consumer of most of the products in the market. Products which are not essential which are a matter of luxury, which could be thought of a middle class need are increasingly been consumed by them. If Indians are spending more than ever it's because they have cash in their pockets. But here I don’t want to show how much cash the Indians have, despite the indispensable nature of the middle class the media has not been good at portraying them.

Turn on the television and on all those family soaps where the entire family lives in a house bigger then Buckingham Palace they talk about middle class in a low way. The popular phrases that can be heard on most of Ekta Kapoor type serials are ‘Oh you have a middle class mentality’, ‘she is a middle class behenji type girl’ and so on. I have been observing these remarks on the middle class for a very long time now but that’s not what sparked me to write on here; recently one of my teacher (who apparently is teaching economics) repeatedly said about the middle class mentality to save money in bonds and other no risk schemes instead of investing in the share market. If a person talks about been modest and humble why does he have to be branded to have a middle class mentality and even if its does why is it looked down upon? What is so wrong if a girl wears salwar kameeze, doesn’t flirt with guys, doesn’t go to parties how does this make her a middle class behenji type girl and what’s so bad about to talk it in that tone on television. And if an average middle class Indian invests his hard earned money in banks instead of risking it in the market I don’t think he needs to be branded for that. Why is it that the attitude of people (as shown in TV) so hostile to the Indian middle class? It is the television that is feeding the people to look down upon the middle class (with the irony that even if you are not that rich) which is fueling a cultural and moral degradation of the masses.

If anyone remembers the very first shows on Indian TV – Nukkad, Uddan etc they used to portray the lives of common people. Where are all those shows now? Serials currently running on Indian TV depict 4 generations living together. Where I often have the difficulty judging who is the mother of whom because of almost no difference in age of the actresses and then they call it tradition, where they all fight with each other. It was never Indian tradition of India and it will be never the tradition of India. Margit van Wessel observes in his paper about consumption —‘How an Indian Middle Class Dissociates from Middle-Class Life’ (published in Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 16, No. 1, 93-116 (2004)) how people themselves try to detach themselves from the branding of an economic class. “People draw on collective ideological resources to describe and interpret their individual and social selves in order to individually dissociate from what they take to be an immoral society.” Hence is urge all the directors of the Indian TV serials to stop this middle class bashing and show what is real, because within reality lies the truth. And I ask you all to salute the great Indian middle class without which the country’s progress would not have been possible.

What should not be in times of india

I am not a very big fan of the paper the hindu but i think hindu is one of the better newspapers in the country. Every day i see the times of india newspaper which is filled up with indecent ads all over. What has advertising come to? The pictures of tennis stars flipping their short skirts are all over the times sports page... while such pics are never put on hindu. The times supplemet called the city times has a section on page 3 which shows pics of supposingly high class people in modern parties. But to me it all the is given on that page is a few cleavage and mid riffs. The city times also features several useless columns about sex and relationships... Its high time people decide what should not be in today's times of india

It's Diwali

Well its dewali today the festival of lights. There used to be a time when as a kid i would get excited at the prospect of lighting all crackers and have a lot of fun at dewali. There used to be preparations days before and gun fights with toy guns all over neighbourhood.

But today as i sit in my room in my college there no excitment, there is no fun , i havent done anything especial on my last 2 diwalis here in my college. Although a few students buy crackers but i dont feel a need to celebrate dewali without the family. I feel so old today. Its like i have lived an entire life. Nothing to look forward to and nothing to fall back on...

Mail Wars

Well we have a little group at yahoo called 'compilers_nitw' all most all the classmates are members of the groups. Now there was some interesting activity in it recently. People are usualy posting all the chain mails and forwards they get into the group. Mails which say if you dont sent it to like 15 ppl in 10mins something bad will happen. Some ppl actually like to receive these kind of mails most others dont.

Find a guy, who calls you beautiful instead of hot.

Who calls you back when you hang up on him.

Who will stay awake just to watch you sleep.

Wait for the guy who kisses your forehead.

Who wants to show you off to the world when you are in your sweats.

Who holds your hand in front of his friends.

Wait for the one who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares >>about you and how lucky he is to have you.

Wait for the one who turns to his friends and says, "...that's her."

If u open this U have to repost it, guy or girl, or you will have bad >>luck for the rest of your life!!!!!!!............

If I don't get this back I guess ur not my friend If u have a lot of >>love for some1...copy and send this to ur whole list...in 5 mins ur true love will call or message you.

You have just been DEATHWISHED.

Tonight at midnight your true love will realize they like you.

Something good will happen to you at approx 1:42pm tomorrow, it could be anywhere.

So get ready for the biggest shock of your life.

If you break this chain, you will be cursed with relationship problems for the most important time of your life.

Send this to 15 people in 15 minutes to carry on the chain...and spare yourself the emotional stress.

Mails like these can be very irritating it is not that we beleive in them but then why send it to evryone neways. Whatever be the reason this mail sparked off a little fight in the group with pple posting messages taking sides on this issue some asking them to post more and other asking to stop it. What these guys actually forgot that mail wars were actually adding to the annoying messeges sent to the group. This is a group not a forum that you have to reply to all the messages with your personal opinions.
In light of all the recent events i decided to have a look at the message logs and i found something really interesting...

compilers_nitw@yahoo.com
(dont plug me into spreadsheet its approx)
Total Msgs posted till date ---------------------- 368
Msgs Posted on this controversy----------------- 18
Chain Mails-------------------------------------- 122
Msgs where we had to look
at something stupid(from melons to coffeee)------ 114
Promotional Emails------------------------------- 42
Mail Wars (accusing and abusing)----------------- 44(include the above 18)
Others-------------------------------------------- 46

This makes it clear what has been going on in the group mind you its not a free for all group there are moderators who dont actually see wats goin on in the group. But i wont say they have the entire blame of the last 18 mails posted evryone said lets utilize the group but not even one person said in what way or how to utilize the group. so if we dont knw wat we wanna do its better watevr we get...

Two Movies

Its 430 in the morning and i have just finished watching two movies today....the first one was 'pulp fiction' it was all about killings ehuuua...but the second one was 'stealth'. Now stealth is about a new experiment in warefare by america they bulid a plane for combat completly automated but with artificial intelligence. The plane goes haywire and is bent ok killing ppl with missions that do not exsist. Later the plane realises its mistake it evolves and starts feeling emotions.
Now we may be very far in reality for making machines feel things but thats gonna happen some time or later. And when machines begin to think then they are no better then humans as they can be as good or as bad as us... Some ppl think the ability to think will give benifit to socitey by machines which can work talk and feel like us... and when they would do all this they well might love, have sex, reproduce and then why is the reason to create them we already have them in us.
creating mahinces that are more and more human like is an excercise in futility.

mahinces are most useful when they are under a man...there may be a time when machines will write (b)logs but till then its just us.....

Hey...

So its done today.... i decied to write a blog...but not wat to write in the blog...lol....

Today i have a minor test in class on Integrated Circuit Applications and as usual i havent studied at all. hope this one goes on well....