Broken

iTextSharp.dll

2009-07-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

iTextSharp has a patch for CE framework here . I have just applied the patch to 4.0.1 version to get the dll which can be downloaded here

A cracking tutorial on memory layout of programs

2009-01-27T13:43:00.001-08:00

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/anatomy-of-a-program-in-memory

Smartphone Programing

2009-01-05T20:47:00.000-08:00

Have been looking up recently for articles on programming smartphone devices. Stopped upon http://weblogs.asp.net/nleghari/articles/smartphone.aspx and looks like a great first point to anyone whose wants to start programming smartphones. A few of the links in the original article are out of date and below is a reproduction of the article with dead links replaced.

Best of Articles :: Microsoft Smartphone Programming

[This (sort of) book is a collection of different articles combined under related chapters]

Chapter 1: Introduction to the .NET Compact Framework

Fundamentals of Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Development for the Microsoft .NET Framework Developer

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446549.aspx>

What's New in Smartphone 2003

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms838097.aspx>

Develop for Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone Using the .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms839369.aspx>

An Introduction to Microsoft SmartPhone, and Programming SmartPhone using C#

<http://www.codeproject.com/netcf/SmartphoneIntroCSharp.asp>

Design Considerations for Microsoft Smartphone Applications

<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/01/07/smartphone.html>

Chapter 2: The Smartphone User Interface

Write Apps for the Smartphone without Dumbing Down Your UI

<http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/21291>

Creating a Multiple Form Application Framework for the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446546.aspx>

How to Create a Microsoft .NET Compact Framework-based Image Button

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446518.aspx>

Crafting Smartphone User Interfaces Using .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446513.aspx>

Develop for the SmartPhone Using Techniques You Already Know

<http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/17968>

Chapter 3: Smartphone Controls

Creating Controls by Hand in the .NET Compact Framework

<http://www.devx.com/getHelpOn/10MinuteSolution/17430>

.NET Compact Framework Sample: Hosting A Native Windows Control

<http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=794f5e1a-984b-474f-8139-a1a64c595151&displaylang=en>

Developing Custom Controls in C# with Smart Device Extensions

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms836776.aspx>

Chapter 4: Graphics

Creating a Microsoft .NET Compact Framework-based Animation Control

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446483.aspx>

Chapter 5: Files and Directories

Working with files on Smartphone devices with the .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446567.aspx >

Chapter 6: Mobile Web Services

Consuming Web Services with the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446547.aspx >

Chapter 7: Working with Unmanaged Code

Accessing Phone APIs from the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446547.aspx>

Advanced P/Invoke on the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446529.aspx>

An Introduction to P/Invoke and Marshaling on the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446529.aspx >

Creating a P/Invoke Library

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446550.aspx >

P/Invoking Serial APIs in the Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446551.aspx >

Using dumpbin.exe as an Aid for Declaring P/Invokes

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446532.aspx>

Chapter 8: Deploying Smartphone Application

Deployment Patterns for Microsoft .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446503.aspx>

Smartphone 2003 Application Deployment Demystified

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsmtphn2k3htmlsp_2003_app_deploy_demyst.asp?frame=true>

Chapter 9: Interoperability

Connecting Microsoft Mobile Devices to Java Infrastructures

<http://dotnet.sys-con.com/node/47342>

Architecting Disconnected Mobile Applications Using a Service Oriented Architecture

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446503.aspx>

Chapter 10: Game Programming with Smartphone

Games Programming with Cheese: Part One

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446511.aspx>

Games Programming with Cheese: Part Two

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446552.aspx>

Games Programming with Cheese: Part Three

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446553.aspx>

Games Programming with Cheese: Part Four

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446554.aspx >

Chapter 11: Advanced Topics

Security:

A Practical Guide to the Smartphone Application Security and Code Signing Model for Developers

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms839377.aspx>

Sending and Receiving SMS Messages:

Receiving SMS Messages Inside a Managed Application

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446561.aspx>

Sending SMSs from your Microsoft .NET Compact Framework-based Applications

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446545.aspx>

Debugging:

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Debugging

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446495.aspx>

Performance:

An Overview of the .Net Compact Framework Garbage Collector

<http://weblogs.asp.net/stevenpr/archive/2004/07/26/197254.aspx>

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Multi-threading Tips

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446540.aspx>

Microsoft .NET Compact Framework Background Processing Techniques

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446488.aspx >

Improving Microsoft .NET Compact Framework-based Application Form Load Performance

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446535.aspx>

Developing Well Performing .NET Compact Framework Applications

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446542.aspx>

.Net Compact Framework Advanced Memory Management

<http://weblogs.asp.net/mikezintel/archive/2004/12/08/278153.aspx>

Miscellaneous:

Creating Self-Updating Applications With the .NET Compact Framework

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446487.aspx>

Improving .NET Compact Framework HTTP Communications using HttpWebRequest and Custom ASP.NET Providers

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446517.aspx >

Connecting a Smartphone 2003 Application to a Remoting Infrastructure

<http://www.devx.com/dotnet/article/22460>

.NET Compact Framework Mobile Web Server Architecture

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446537.aspx>

Chapter 12: What's Next

What's New in the .NET Compact Framework 2.0

<http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/ws1c3xeh.aspx>

Other Resources (Links gathered from comments)

Pragmatic Smartphone Application Hints and Tricks:
http://homepages.inspire.net.nz/~gambit/Article/

Programming Smartphone 2002/2003/SE with Embedded Visual Basic (eVB):
http://www.omnisoft.com/articles/spevb/default.asp

Smartphone "Tip-o-the-Day"
http://spaces.msn.com/members/lesgainous/

Scribles from OSDI

2008-12-11T04:49:00.000-08:00

A few paper where I took notes - mostly first day papers.

dryadlinq:

how to write distributed data-parallel programs from ds.

pragramer writes program on a single machine and the program takes care of distributing code and running it

LINQ : Microsoft language INtegrate Query

LINQ is an interface - there are many excution engines - The prgram is sritten in Standard common interface.

Dryad: takes care of runnning the jobs on multiple machines - uses Files/TCP/FIFo for communication.

Very similar to map reduce.

The input documents could be located anywhere - SQL, disk, mem, ..

Generate a distributed execution plan - similar to optimization in programing languages. These optimizations may help reduce the network consumption, .. Runtime code generation is used to optimize on the fly.

map reduce program can be easily converted to dryad linq interface. 3 lines of code
call mapper
sort intermediate values
call reducer

Dryadlinq is to be realeased for academic commujnity.

The main goal is completely opposite of virtual machines idea - Combine multiple computers and give a view of a single logical machine.

q. Ramki:
1. What are the syntax and symantic of this language?
There is no parallel expressions. You write the code in relational algebra
2. What are limitations - ex: recursion is hard to capture.

q. Google: Performace and intuition: Structuring programs is important since the same program could run in a second and could run in a huge amount of time:
We are still learning about it.

Everest: Scale down peak loads through I/O off-loading
Dushyanth Narayanan, Austin Donnelly, Eno Thereska, Sameh Elnikety, and Antony Rowstron, Microsoft Research Cambridge, United Kingdom

problem: IO peak in servers: Peak - short unexpected and high
motivate: IO trace from exchange servers.

Insert everest client on disk that we are bothered about. Monitor disk usage on each disk and offshore load during spikes to free disks.
Offloads writes during peaks. When the peak comes down - reclaim all the writes back to this disk.

properties of peaks: Uncorrelated across disks. Have writes - few foreground reads

Challenges: Want any write anywhere. Read should always return the correct last write. State must be consistent - apps would crash otherwise.

Keep metadata to track offloads - cached in memory.

Reclaiming: everest client when sees the disk is free - asks the cluster who has offloaded data.

Evaluated using exchange server trace - particularly three peaks that were observed. Second set of evaluation was done using OLTP benchmark.

Offload works for small high peaks and not to improve 24x7 performance.

q. Is there a synchronization problem that requires data on server to become persistent?
Wait for data to get persistent.
q. Can you configure what to offload or what to not? Yes that can be done at different levels.
q. How much correlations happens in volumes? Havent done it yet.
q. if you have JFS, do you do anything special for that? No
q. Would be using more write caches help? They would have to be very big - It would be the same - but have to have high cache
q. Underlying system has hardware raid? Does it introduce more failures levels? There are no more special dependencies introduced.

Improving MapReduce Performance in Heterogeneous Environments
Matei Zaharia, Andy Konwinski, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, and Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley

q. Why have global parameters - rather than looking at local scenario?
q. What do you do when you have a small cluster? Launch all primary tasks - only relaunch in the last run.
q. How would different run times of each map/reduce job would effect LATE? You need to normalize with something that says this is a small task and is a large task.

Corey:
Many applications spend time in kernel. Bottlenecks in OS is due to DS shared in kernel. Continuous design change is required to increase concurrency. Applications dont need to share all the ds that existing interfaces share.

Main idea: Reduce contention.

Shares: control the kernel data used to resolve application references.
Cost of using FD table: expected to scale linearly with number of cores. Throughput drops from 1 core to two cores and stays constant after that.

Reason: Additional core takes 121 cycles instead of 3 cycles. lock serialyzes updates to the table.

Use shares - allows applications to control how cores share the kernel ds used to do lookups. Let the application decide the fd tables.

Benefits: Apps can control how cores share internal kernel ds.

They also implement address ranges for each app. They benchmarked performance using map reduce. Using address ranges, apps can avoid contention.

CuriOS:
Problem: Errors occuring in systems due to hardware / software faults. Ex/l bit flips, stuck at faults , bad usage of pointers.

Managing OS errors: Currently - let the errors happen and go on to fix them later.
The fundamental problem with restart recovery - state from previous instance is gone after a crash. Save per client state in the server address space and in case of a crash save this information.

Redline: First Class Support for Interactivity in Commodity Operating Systems

Network Imprescision: A new consistency metric from scalable monitoring:

How to monitor large networks
Goals for monitoring: Scalability, real time moitoring, acuracy despite failures.
Half of the reports can differ by atleast 30 % from the truth. How to safegaurd accuracy despite disruption. Instead of giving best effort results give reliable results.

Quantify the stability of the system.

Define lower and upper bounds on number of nodes which are good and number of nodes which are bad (double counted) resp.

Nall, Nreachable, Ndup matrixes exposes impact of disruptions.

Chopstix: lightweight, high resolution monitoring for trouble shooting production systems
Run with low overheads - collect rich information about system .. to generate system states later in time.

hard bugs - happens once - have no clue why it happens...

Good copstix gui that can be used to dwelve down into the problem.

Better than oprofile in terms of overhead.

q. scalability of the chopstix - how many metrics can we capture? We havent carried out the numbers but it is now under 1% of CPU utilization.

Automating Network Application Dependency Discovery: Experiences, Limitations, and New Solutions
Xu Chen, University of Michigan; Ming Zhang, Microsoft Research; Z. Morley Mao, University of Michigan; Paramvir Bahl, Microsoft Research

Managing enterprise netwroks is hard. Need to have dependency information which could help in troubleshooting networks.

eXpose and sherlocks do this work.

contributions: use delay distribution.

use passive sniffing and only parse tcp/ip headers - minimize false dependencies.

System orion proposed - time delay between dependent services reflects typical processing and network delay.

Ignore some transient services. Only consider services that occur close in time.

Target 5 dominant applications in MS datacenters.
Have low FP when compared to sherlocks/expose.

FP comes from normal trends - like opening a web page from an email would realte mail server with proxy if the user clicks the page immediately.

OSDI 2008

2008-11-08T23:56:00.001-08:00

People in bay area -- see you there

/art/osdi08_going.jpg" border="0" width="162" height="57" alt="I'm going to OSDI '08">

Compiling kernel > 2.6.13

2008-10-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

If you see anything like this --

modprobe: FATAL: could not load /lib/modules.dep " NO such file or directory
mount:unknown filesystem type 'devfs'
FATAL : could not load /lib/modules/2.6.14/modules.dep:No such file or
directory
umount: devfs: not mounted
/scripts/ext3-add-journal.sh:27:arith:syntax error : "0X"
modprobe:FATAL : could not load /lib/modules/2.6.14/modules.dep:No such
file or directory
mount: unknown filesystem type 'devfs'
/sbin/init:426:arith:syntax error : "0X"
kernel panic - not syncing:Attempted to kill init!

You are using mkinitrd for making initrd file. Use mkinitramfs

It works ! Make sure to * cramfs

Installing Hadoop on Ubuntu

2008-10-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

Have a cluster of 4 machines and am set to install hadoop on it.
Machines:
ds16: master
ds11: slave
ds04: slave
ds14: slave

Am loosely following sangmi's blog and the following
http://sangpall.blogspot.com/2008/09/installing-hadoop.html
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/GettingStartedWithHadoop
http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_(Multi-Node_Cluster)

Step 1: chk if you have ssh, rsync and java on all machines
For java
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

Step 2:
Download hadoop and in conf/hadoop-env.sh

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun

Step 3:
now you can just run your standalone operation as it is.
$ mkdir input
$ cp conf/*.xml input
$ bin/hadoop jar hadoop-*-examples.jar grep input output 'dfs[a-z.]+'
$ cat output/*

[One problem faced was - when I did ssh to my machines, I get output

id: cannot find name for group ID 521

So I added a group with id 521 that solved the problem
sudo addgroup -gid 521 test

Also disabled stricthostchecking in /etc.ssh/ssh_config -- causing problem since ~ is mounted on nfs]
Till now we have run hadoop on single node. Lets move to a cluster now.

Cluster Operations:
Step 4:
Configure conf/hadoop-site.xml on the namenode as follows



<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?>
<configuration>
<property>
  <name>fs.default.name</name>
  <value>hdfs://ds16:54310</value>
</property>
<property>
  <name>mapred.job.tracker</name>
  <value>hdfs://ds16:54311</value>
</property>
<property>
  <name>dfs.replication</name>
  <value>8</value>
</property>
<property>
  <name>dfs.name.dir</name>
  <value>/export/pathaka/hadoop/dfs</value>
</property>
<property>
  <name>mapred.child.java.opts</name>
  <value>-Xmx512m</value>
</property>
</configuration>
<property>
  <name>hadoop.tmp.dir</name>
  <value>/export/pathaka/hadoop/tmp/</value>
  <description>A base for other temporary directories.</description>
</property>

Edit conf/masters and conf/slaves on ds16 as shown



$ cat conf/masters
ds16

$ cat conf/slaves 
ds16
ds04
ds11
ds14

[Used http://www.palfrader.org/code2html/code2html.html for converting code to html .. its nice]

[Make sure there are no leading spaces in the file -- gives a weird XML exception
[Fatal Error] hadoop-site.xml:2:6: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.]

Step 5:

$mkdir /export/pathaka/hadoop/dfs
# This is the dfs file tree

$ mkdir /export/pathaka/hadoop/tmp

On master - ds16 run
$ bin/hadoop namenode -format
# This formats the dfs folder
#Do it only the first time and on master only

On ds16 - master, run
$ bin/start-dfs.sh
$ bin/start-mapred.sh
# master and jobtracker are the same machine

Stopping
$ bin/stop-mapred.sh
$ bin/stop-dfs.sh

PAM presentation at Cleveland OH

2008-05-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Presented a paper at cleveland OH last wee. Was fun driving up there and down here. Had a flat tire while return which was more like an adventure - trucks blazing at high speed past you and you are stranded on grass.

Slides would be posted soon.

http://pam2008.cs.wpi.edu/program.html

How travel grants make fun of poor grad students

2008-05-04T18:32:00.000-07:00

We thank you again for applying to the XXXXXXXX student travel
grant program. This year the selection committee is formed from the
Sponsors. Due to the large number of applications and a limited budget, we
were able to fund only a fraction of the applicants.

We are pleased to inform you that after careful consideration of your
application, you have been selected by the committee to receive a
financial award from the XXXXXXXX'08 student travel grant program. Your
award will be in the form of:

* a free registration for the main conference + $100 of travel expense
reimbursement.

Paper in LEET 2008

2008-04-08T15:01:00.000-07:00

Paper got in LEET 2008 -- Finally all the data collection was appreciated.

Check out the program here

See you at San Francisco ..

What to do

2007-12-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

when your machine in lab is pinging, but not responding to ssh, you are at home and temperature is -5 Deg outside?

Orkut Vulnerability

2007-12-19T11:55:00.000-08:00

Worm hits orkut

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140653-c,worms/article.html

The guy seems to be just a hacker (not a cracker) did not do anything malicious .. just replicated the scrap to all your frns in the friend list and added you to the community

Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=44001818

Amazing feat ! Javascript checking filter not proper at orkut's end

Intern Apping

2007-12-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

Found a very nice piece of collection of intern apping mails from a professor at IIT Bombay.
One example is really funny

Heighly honourable esteemable Sirji,
I, RRRR MMMM CCCC , son of Shri LLLL PPPP CCCC, am 3rd year student of information technology at BBBB BBBB AAAA University in LLLL. I saw your webpage on internet and I like it very much.

I like to go for higher studies in Berkly in us and I like to do research in same subject as you do. Some of the fields I am intrested are Bidirectional Expansion For Keyword Search on Graph Databases, Learning to rank networked entities, and general web search. You have good experience in such fields so respected honourable sirji I thought I could do 3 month project under your expert leadership in summer 2007. I like to go for higher studies in us and also like to take your reco if you think I deserve.

I hope you give me opertunity to serve you.

yours humbly
RRRR MMMM CCCC.

ps: My Tauji work in big position in Motrola in US and if you like I can send your resume to him.

Many such others at http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~soumen/media/images/pix-apkgkah/illiterate/

Sigcomm - Japan travel

2007-09-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

Was at Japan for sigcomm - 07. A shuttle to chicago, a 13 hr flight to tokyo, 1 hr train to tokyo central station, 2 hr 15 min bullet train (nizomi shinkansen) to kyoto and a taxi to hotel. Full pics soon.

Bros wedding

2007-07-25T23:21:00.001-07:00

Date was July 1, 2007 - Had fun in shoe robbery case - Pics are awesome - Full album soon

Alsa troubled me again - ubuntu

2007-07-25T23:12:00.000-07:00

hey there

Last week, mplayer and vlc started complaining about video port being blocked by another process (no clue which one).

ps -A gave a quick look at a process which got defunct (has to do with some lockup issues). Explicitly killing that process (kill -9 ) solved the video problem. The video port got free and videos were back online. But a new problem started out. Sound was gone. Alsa complained that another process is blocking the sound card. Strange !! Sound just worked a few minutes back and now its gone.

After a long time looking out for what was the problem, got on this page (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-lib/+bug/85157). Apparently the process which was killed contained the shared memory access to the sound device and it died with that. So, none of the other process got the sound card.

The solution was simple, though one among the best solutions I have seen

$ strace -o /tmp/out mplayer -ao alsa file.mp3

$ grep shmget /tmp/out

get one important line:
shmget(5678293, 384, IPC_CREAT|0660) = 48824355

$ ipcrm -M 5678293

Phew, sound was back !

Cake is meant to be eaten !

2007-05-28T23:34:00.001-07:00

(at a recent event)

Purdue - NYC - Niagara - Purdue Roadtrip - 2K Miles

2007-04-07T19:06:00.000-07:00

(Copied from http://musicontherocks.blogspot.com/2007/03/9th-march-aukat-ke-bahar-ki-gaadi-mil.html
First person narration from harinath
)

9th March
13:00> Aukat ke bahar ki gaadi mil gayi rent pe
19:00> Journey out of hell starts... Sabyasachi is driving... n Pathak is navigating
19:01> How to shut those damn wipers
19:15> Overhead lamp pissing everyone off
19:30> 4 log baith ke car ke manual ka magga maar rahe hai...
19:35> Finally those lamps are off..
21:00> Pit stop at Fort Wayne for dinner... everyone is in maxo enthu ki poori raat jaagna hai..
22:15> Ohio me entry - speed dropped to 65 mph...
23:00> Detour No. 1 -> we get off the planned route due to construction and journey ka pehla detour maara gaya... wasted 1 hr going thru arbit routes...
still everyone is optimistic abt our plan

March 10th
00:15> Called up brother to wish him on his birthday... Niagara jaate to treat mil jaati... but alas.. we are heading out to NY
00:45> Pit stop 2.... Pehle player retired hurt hoke pavillion waapas laut gaye hain... Change of drivers.. Now seating is
Front>Harinath (Asst Driver & Asst Navigator) , Pathak (Navigator)
Middle> Sabhyasachi (Driver) and Himanshu (aka Pro Photography)
Back> Mohit (majority) and Umang (his role is a suspense)
01:00> Now I am the one driving the car.. sabne isliye seat belt pehen li... pitch pe lateral movement kaafi ho raha hai... isliye kuch log dare hue hai... still going at speed limit
02:00> after getting acustomed to the wicket, main gaadi dauda raha hoon... piche Mohit chakke maar raha hai apne international theories ke saath... saare spectator dang reh gaye hai unke shandaar performance se (Note - contact Mohit for this theory which is capabale of a Nobel prize nomination)... saath mein pathak ne Radio Sargam shuru kar diya hai (besure aawaz me ekdum bekaar gaake driver ko uthaye rakhne ke liye perfect)...
03:15> Pit Stop 3.... Coffee break... finally saare spectator match se tang hoke so gaye hai... only Front grid is still working.. after refueling with coffee Reddy n Pathak ne full speed me re-entry maari track aur gaadi udana shuru... now we are going in full flow
03:30> Enter into Penn State. . you dont need to see the signboards to know this.. yahan ka chappa chappa ek hi aawaz kart ahi jab gaadi guzarti hai (ghad.. ghad.. ghad...)
04:30> Penn ke saare record dhada dhad rode ja rahe.. ek baad ek gaadi ko overtake karke hum 1st place ke taraf daud rahe hai... too fast too furious.. ek dum full enthu me gaadi chalayi jaa rahi hai.. is speed me 10:00 baje tak NY pahuncha possible ho sakta hai...
05:30> That was just the calm before ths storm... subah ho rahi hai aur ab is partenership ka ant nazdeek aa raha hai... milk in the coffee has started showing its effect... meanwhile.. ghad ghad... ghad ghad.. ghad ghad... jaari... still abhi tak ka Penn me Strike shaandaar 75 aur 80 ke bich me jhool rahi hai... agal bagal ki jo scenery nazar me aa rahi hai mast hai...
06:15> Reddy is near the end of his innings... shakal me saaf likha hua hai ki kitni waat lagi hui hai...
06:30> iski saath non-strikers end pe Reddy apni energy se run-out ho gaye hai... retired hurt player Sabyasachi back after treatment.... bilkul fresh lag rahe hai... piche as usual majority so rahi hai...

(day 3 and 4 to be up soon)

Ubuntu Firefox Flash Sound Problem

2007-04-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

My computer running ubuntu got rebooted after 177 days (due to a power cut early morning - The whole of purdue sank into it).

Long ago I did a fix to run sound on xmms and firefox - flash together. Basically one of them grabs the audio device and other waits until the first exists. So the solution that works for me is to replicate it.

$ ln -s /tmp/.esd-1000 /tmp/.esd
Or better, add it as a startup script in
System - Preferences - Sessions - Startup programs and add

So next time your computer get a reboot enjoy audio on both the devices simuntaneously.

Reference: http://www.macewan.org/2006/06/01/howto-firefox-flash-video-sound-on-ubuntu-linux-dapper/

Things to put on a virgin ubuntu

2007-02-25T17:49:00.000-08:00

http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com/2007/02/13-things-to-do-immediately-after.html

upgrade the sources.lst in /etc/apt/ to

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted
# deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security universe
# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security universe

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted universe multiverse

## MAJOR BUG FIX UPDATES produced after the final release
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-updates main restricted universe multiverse

## UBUNTU SECURITY UPDATES
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted universe multiverse

## BACKPORTS REPOSITORY (Unsupported. May contain illegal packages. Use at own risk.)
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-backports main restricted universe multiverse

## PLF REPOSITORY (Unsupported. May contain illegal packages. Use at own risk.)
deb http://packages.freecontrib.org/plf dapper free non-free
deb-src http://packages.freecontrib.org/plf dapper free non-free

## CANONICAL COMMERCIAL REPOSITORY (Hosted on Canonical servers, not Ubuntu
## servers. RealPlayer10, Opera and more to come.)
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu dapper-commercial main
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main

apt-get -y update
apt-get -y upgrade
apt-get -y install make gcc g++ tetex-bin mplayer gkrellm cvs emacs exuberant-ctags vlc libpcap-dev ispell xpdf gv xmms xfig vim tree traceroute sendmail manpages-posix manpages-posix-dev linux-source linux-headers-386 libncurses5-dev initrd-tools

Randomness

2007-01-25T21:58:00.000-08:00

This random blog is output of some of my random thoughts.

Randomness, exists in everyone. The degree of randomness says about physiche of a person. Imagine this, you ask a person where is the next bus stop and he replies "Italy won the world cup!". What would be your reaction?

Randomness exists in every person you meet. Some of them have it less and some more. Some of them hate it. Some of them like it. From wikipedia definition says, "The word random is used to express lack of purpose, cause, order, or predictability in non-scientific parlance."

Isnt this a random definition? This definition lacks purpose, cause, order and is not predictable. Isnt random randomly defined?

Isnt everything you do, everyday random? You wake up at a random time, eat a random breakfast, go to a random place, do some random work, spend time randomly in evening and sleep at a random time. May be play some random game too ! Can you predetermine your future? Can you tell where, with whom you would be five years down the line? Isnt the previous question random? Isnt your answer to it random?

Randomness is not same as crazyness ! Crazyness can be thought as "ordered" randomness, or controlled randomness.

To some people randomness seems strange, to some it seems funny. The most interesting thing is that people start relating somethings to your random answers. My current orkut profile names me as " Vigerin Vagrin Venegerin". This means absolutely nothing. All the three words are not english nor in any language I know. I named myself as this when I started writting this blog. By now a lot of people have infered many things as to why this name was kept. Not even one thinks it to be a random name. Some of funny ones are present in my scrapbook.

Quals Treatment

2007-01-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

Road to QE

( 5 Oct 2006) Registered for Quals
( 6 Oct 2006) Thats the second time we wash clothes in US
(10 Nov 2006) What is the syllabus this time?
(23 Nov 2006) We have run out of salt supplies on thanksgiving
(13 Dec 2006) Exams over ! lets start studying !
(13 Dec 2006) Got lots of work from advisor
(17 Dec 2006) Thats the third time we wash clothes in US
(21 Dec 2006) Last date to withdraw is gone
(23 Dec 2006) The work is over. Should start now atleast
(24 Dec 2006) 2 days complete movie watching
(25 Dec 2006) Celebrated christmas, we have run out of toilet paper in house
(27 Dec 2006) Got the information that Quals is on Jan 4th instead of Jan 7th. Lost 72 hours in an instant
(28 Dec 2006) Lets get the books out.
(30 Dec 2006) Reddy goes for trip, I stay back. Lets hit movies again
( 1 Jan 2007) Happy new year
( 2 Jan 2007) Padhai likhai se aajtak kuch hua hai kya ?
( 3 Jan 2007) Have to sleep early cause the exam is at 8 am in morning
( 4 Jan 2007) Gave quals, absolutely pissed, killed 3 pigs
( 5 Jan 2007) Post quals Trauma

From project Wifidump page

2007-01-19T13:41:00.000-08:00

(from project wifidump page) News ( 2 May, 2006) Version 1.0 up and working. ( 2 May, 2006) Who has screwed this news book?? ( 1 May, 2006) Had a nice sleep in exam. (30 Apr, 2006) We had a demo today. (29 Apr, 2006) kernel panic, seg fault, blood level indicates high level of caffiene. (28 Apr, 2006) Why is INFOCOM only for a week? (27 Apr, 2006) Hey, I crashed my kernel by hostap driver! Yahoo !!! (26 Apr, 2006) What is tcpdump??#$#!#% (22 Apr, 2006) DIP exam passed. (16 Apr, 2006) Where's the demo? (15 Apr, 2006) The laptop had crashed 4381 times. We had put OS on it +1 times than that. (10 Apr, 2006) Where is the group? (21 Mar, 2006) Back from mid sem break. ( 5 Mar, 2006) Mid Term presentation. Plan successful, no mid sem exams. ( 3 Mar, 2006) There was a talk across mess table about a project in cs725. (13 Feb, 2006) First project meeting. None turned up. (21 Jan, 2006) Team formed.

Life as a graduate student

2006-12-30T00:06:00.000-08:00

If you have a PhD and(?)/or are currently doing one, what comes to your mind when you read "life as a graduate student"?

Probably: frustration, "why", interesting, amazing, pity, a phase of life ...

Some of these thoughts were running into my mind when an old pal sends me an IM and asks me, how to apply to grad school. He has taken up a job after undergraduate and seems frustrated enough to leave it. It is one of the best job one can get in software in India. He told me why he hates his job and asked me this very question, of "how is life as a graduate student".

As one of my friend says "Ask any undergrad: 'how is life as an undergrad' (especially from iit k). Take his narration, negate every sentence and you get the answer." Is it that bad? Lets see

As an undergrad: You do not attend classes
As a grad: You attend all the classes

As an undergrad: You do not start any project until just before deadline.
As a grad: You start projects just after the projects are announced.

As an undergrad: You do not cook your food.
As a grad: You know the answer here !!

As an undergrad: If you have absolutely no idea about the course about an hour ago from its exam, there is always someone who could teach you out.
As a grad: If you land up in such a situation, you get one more chance to not repeat the situation, when the course is next offered.

As an undergrad: You booze, you shout, you fall somewhere in campus after a party, there would be someone to get you back in your room.
As a grad: You do that outside your home, be sure of cops accompanying you to your next home...

As an undergrad: You do not write anything in project report on your own. "Trust only copy-paste"
As a grad: If you 'trust only copy paste' be sure to get deported anytime, keep your bags packed.

As an undergrad: Cultural festival (antaragni) is what you live for in a year.
As a grad: What culture are we talking about?

With this gloomy picture in mind, I answered to my old pal. But as is said, 'Grad school is more fun than undergrad', I would be soon posting about pros of grad school compared to undergrad. I am working on it.. Yeah its hard .. I know..

First Hand at blogs

2006-06-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

Just completed Registration here.. and bagri is ready to go home. !!