Blog of Justin

Homecoming of another DELL

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:16:00 +0000

(Dell 1440 Laptop)

It was a sunny morning of Sept 25(10 days back) when the phone rang and the person at the other end wanted to confirm the address of the shipment. Once it was informed that he was from Blue dart and he wanted to deliver a sleek new DELL laptop, our joy knew no bound. In another hour's time we(me, mom and dad)saw ourselves, this beautiful and powerful baby(our sweet DELL laptop), right in front of us ......

I still vividly remember the day I got my DELL laptop(Inspiron 1420) last year. I still have it and love it for its sheer performance and stability. Now the one I am talking about here, is the one mom got for herself. We placed the order on Sept 21(which was a public holiday - Ramzan) but DELL functioned as usual. And here we have this great piece of hardware, ready to rock us.

The custom configured 1440(yeah, dell laptops can be custom configured to the core) has some really cool stuff inside.It featured a 45 nm architecture Penryn, dual core 2.0 Ghz T4200 Processor with 1 MB l2 cache, 800 MHz FSB, 4 GB ram, 320 GB Hard drive, DVD writer, on-board Intel graphics,and usual array of things like - wifi, blue tooth,1.3 MP built-in camera. The total cost including taxes and delivery came to 33,000( $ 691 approx) The package also features free trials of Office works, McCafee and the best part was it came with an installable Vista Basic.

All in all, it was a great deal. And I just love my DELL :)

My guitar story

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:37:00 +0000

A short story of boy and his guitar

Okay, now first of all this is a real story about me and music, so you would find very little technical(computer related) stuff in this, so may be, you want to skip this.

Okay now getting back to the story. It started with the guitar classes that I used to attend when I was some 9 years old. It was an acoustic guitar. Back then, I remember it as a very huge instrument, and that I always wanted to play what I wanted, but our teacher, used to have very rigid rules as to how once must proceed during the course of learning guitar. Although the classes stopped when I had to shift my school, the desire remained within.

Fast forward 10 years, now in college, thanks to my amazing friends, Melvin, Nithin, Nandu and many others, I started to get to know and see music and also try out various stuff. In the mean time, I had been trying out various stuff in Fruity loops(Its a great software, where you could have different instruments, and compose music with those instruments, right on your computer, with no additional add-ons)

The break through in music in my life happened, when our class decided to go big time with electric guitar and stuff for one of the events in the college. I was informed that Melvin would be on the lead, with electric guitar and the practice would be happening in the classroom where we had our 1st semester. As I slowly entered the room, I felt the entire room and world getting transformed around me..... He was trying out various effects on the pedal, like wah-wah, echo etc and he played a few licks. It was an amazing experience. After that I made sure that, whenever they practiced, I did not miss that out.

Some months later, when I decided to come to Bangalore to pursue my studies at NIIT, Melvin had come to my place and he had brought his accoustic guitar with him. After he showed me various stuff in it and we spend some time, he just kept the guitar at my home and said he would take the next time he comes to my home. And it did remain so the next couple of weeks at my home. Back then, I did not even know the right way of holding a guitar and this was the time when he just kept it at my home, and I did not know what to say. I tried out various stuff, I mean just playing around until I broke one of the strings :( ( Sorry buddy )

After I came to Bangalore, I kept contact with Melvin and asked about guitars and music. Finally when I saw the movie 'The rocker'(The songs in the movie by actor/ singer Teddy Geiger is just so cool) and 'Freaky Friday', especially the final scene in 'Freaky friday', I wanted to go for an electric guitar. In a span of 4-5 months, and a lot of discussion later I and Melvin decided to hit Brigade road, the home of many guitar and music shops in bangalore. Finally when the day arrived, I was excited beyond measure. And here I was at brigade road, and we hit the first shop.

(The story would continue in the next post)

Bitten by twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:13:00 +0000

It was recently that I decided to check out this cool microblogging site thanks to geekandpoke and my friend Swaroop . Twitter has this concept that, when you 'follow' someone, you get know by minute updates on the things that they do. When you 'tweet' it means that you just update what you are doing now. So if I was tweeting now, I would something like 'blogging about twitter'. To know more -> twitter help.

Twittering with python

Twitter is a cool micro blogging site, with many people updating their day to day activities on a minute by minute basis. So what if we could get as well as post updates in a neat way. The possibilities are endless. One possible scenario would be, If you have a firewall, your firewall could 'tweet' every time it is targeted by an attacker. So people around the world( who follow you) would get to know the attack process in real time !!!

Now lets try to programmatically read and then post a few tweets using python.

So lets get started,

The first site would ofcourse be the python section of twitter api library - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries#Python

In the next 4 steps, lets see how we could post a tweet in twitter

1. First download the wrapper python twitter.

2. Run > cmd. Go to the folder where you have downloaded python twitter( as mentioned in step 1 ) and Fire up python

3. Type
>>> import twitter

4. If you want to get latest tweets of someone, then the type the following

>>> client = twitter.Api()
>>> latest_posts = client.GetUserTimeline("yourusername")
>>> print [s.text for s in latest_posts]

5. If you want to post your own tweets, then type the following

>>> client = twitter.Api(username='yourusername', password='yourpassword')
>>> update = client.PostUpdate('The Twitter API is easy')

Other cool twitter api wrappers

Twyt - A twitter api interface for python
Python twiiter tools

Hang on buddies, more updates coming soon.

2009- A new beginning

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:43:00 +0000

credits of image : daylife

hi all,

This is the first post of 2009, nearly 6 months after the year began. And in the next few posts, I would like to update you guys on all the cool things that happened in the last many months(Yeah ofcourse it would be along with the regular posts on current happenings). I bet the blog is gonna have some really cool post on a variety of topics, Many things that i feel that you too may find useful from an information technology perspective.

Thanks for continually visiting my site. Thanks for your great support.

love you guys

Justin

News aggreagator in Python

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:40:00 +0000

Hi,
Following are some of the links I came across while trying to make a python based rss aggregator. Although the following resources(links) can guide to some really cool stuff, my plan is to have a python based rss aggregator customized to present information in some really cool ways like depending on my usage, tell me which news i like the most and present those and so on. If they are really nice info, I should be able to send it to my news group > uit_tvm, by just a click of a button. I will keep you guys updated on the status of the project.

As per current requirements, the project has 2 parts
1. Python parser - which fetches rss feeds from sites
2. Email the feeds to uit_tvm - either I need to run my own email server(which is really cool ) or I need to access GMail/Yahoomail using python API provided by yahoo.

So the following links to point to the above mentioned ideas.

Email APIs
Send email in python
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread136280.html

Accessing your Gmail inbox with Pythonhttp://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2004/06/18/1751
libgmail — Python binding

SendYmail
http://sendymail.sourceforge.net/

About BBauth required for yahoo mail APIhttp://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/web/LondonHackdayBbauthAndYahooMail

for Google's Gmail service
http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/

Running your own server
Apache emal serverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_James Comparison of mail servershttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mail_servers

Misc
PyDigg - A Python Toolkit for the Digg API
http://neothoughts.com/2007/04/30/pydigg-a-python-toolkit-for-the-digg-api/

Accessing Yahoo Mail withtout POP
http://bytes.com/forum/thread521242.html

Yahoo! Mail Web Service Code Samples
http://developer.yahoo.com/mail/code/

Official employee of ACS

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:04:00 +0000

(Official logo of ACS)

Tomorrow (Aug 11, 2008)is my joining date as an official employee of mulinational company ACS, and I am very much proud of it. The interview and selection process was really cool and I enjoyed every bit of it. Its a really good feeling to be part of $5bn company, and to know that whatever you learned could be put to use in the following days.

I just want to thank all my friends, teachers and especially my parents who stood by me, and helped me get this job. Thanks for your prayers and blessings. Love you guys

bye

Other news

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

My brother and my sister in law, would be reaching trivandrum, within a few hours. They will be spending some days at trivandrum.

Swaroop's dell laptop is half-way through shipment, and when it arrives, it would be the 3rd Dell laptop in our place where we are staying. Mine was the first!!

Came to know about hudson from Java posse podcast(Java posse is a really cool awesome java podcast). Its a continues integrations system. Hudson helps you to build/test software projects continuously and automatically. You can find more about Hudson here and to see hudson used in a live project visit the status of Continuous Integration Builds for NetBeans Projects site.

A small gift for my mom

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:19:00 +0000

(A small gift for my mom : A nice sweet blog)

Its been some days, since my mom wanted to write about one of her favorite pass times: Gardening.

She told this to me, and I just said Okay. Some days later, I found her meticulously(since she was new to blogging) going though the cool blogger help, page by page. This really did catch my attention and I asked her what she was up to. She told me she wanted to create a blog, to blog about gardening and was trying to learn about it.

I loved her enthusiasm, in learning new things, and sat with her. She created the blog and added a new post. Since she had selected one of the templates provided by blogger, it kind of looked dull, atleast not at all apt for a gardening blog, I thought, and I told her, of the same. She too liked the idea, and so I decided to chip in, to redesign her blog design.

So as mentioned in one of my previous posts(Changing blogger template) I started with freecsstemplates.org. Got a nice template, Nature's charm , hacked it a little bit to suit her needs and uploaded it to blogger.

But here comes the problem.

The navbar problem

(Due to navbar present at the top every blog, the menu contents has shifted downwards , around 5o pixels or so , which really spoils the aesthetics of the blog)

So I decided to remove the navbar. After a bit of research(Googling around), I found that removing navbar DOES NOT violate (citation needed) TOS with Google.

You can hide the navbar, by inserting this code in the style sheet part(css part) of your page

#navbar-iframe {height:0px; display:none;}

Even though you remove the navbar, the content seems to be around 50 pixel, shifted downwards.

So in the template, I added the following code inside the body { }

top: -50px;
position: relative;

This effectively shifts the contents upwards. Since the problem was solved, I decided to add the navbar back again - as a small token of thanks to Google.

So everything is cool, and my mother has a really cool, sleek blog which I am proud to announce to you.

The Flowering beauties - blog on gardening and plants

So guys do check out this cool new blog, and I wish my mother all the best for this new endeavor :)

Is this what captchas have become ?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:28:00 +0000

According to wikipedia,

A CAPTCHA (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer

which in plain English means that, whenever you want to register with some site or avail its service, the guys who run the site wants to make sure that its you, and that its not a bot(computer program created to automate / impersonate a human accessing that particular site)

Usually, this procedure involves, showing some images containing words in it, and asking the user to type those words. But as computer programs started to imitate these things too(using image recognition softwares) captchas started becoming more complex.See an example below,

(Captcha from a famous file hosting site)

The funny thing about this captcha ^^ is that, you are supposed to find the letters where a cat is supposedly sitting and type those in a text box. Also while looking at the picture, one wonders whether, it was a 2 or Z, 0 or O and so on. If you get it wrong once, the process repeats again.

While talking about this, I am reminded of a funny cartoon post from geekandpoke.

The make/break world of captchas

You can find a lot of technical aspects of captchas from the wikipedia page. Currently(while you are reading this) a lot of research is still in progress by people who want to break the captchas while another group finds newer and tougher(awkward?)ways to make it harder to break them.
At the end of day, its the end user who is at the receiving end.

A simple search for captcha in google is good read for an afternoon.

Accessibility problems for visually challenged

Captchas also cause serious accessibility problems. Even the audio these sites provide as an alternative is so hard to understand, let alone to make any sense of it(at least for me; but I would urge you to check out some sites for yourself to understand the situation better)

You can find an amazing blog by a visually challenged person at Blind Access Journal. I also came across a Great Accessibility Blog Roundup.

I guess, more research is needed in this area, and I believe all of us CAN contribute to make websites accessible, for all of us. Do post your suggestions and alternatives to captchas in the comment section.

Bye guys.

Brand new sleek openSuse 11.0 for you

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:12:00 +0000

(source:http://counter.opensuse.org)

Hi guys,
6 more days to go for June 19- The official release date of the much awaited OpenSuse 11.0, And the excitement has been growing like never before. The new release features all the latest packages as well as the much hyped and awaited KDE 4. Check out some cool screenshots and a review of OpenSuse 11.0 beta 2, here.

I recently found this at the Opensuse Forum, while trying to comprehend the meaning of the word GoldMaster edition as mentioned in the roadmap.

Re: Has opensuse 11 Goldmaster come out yet?
GM means it's finished, everything is done and it's ready to be sent out. It's related to game development and windows development. So I'll use those. In game development a GM release would be sent to pressing (to create disc's), packaged and sent to stores for the sell date. The same applies to a windows release, BUT they still do testing, and windows can ship with bugs, as long as they are not show stoppers. (not counting Vista )

Same concept applies here, but instead of going to get pressed (even though it will) they right now are preparing documents, getting the repos ready and contacting people so they can host the image. I imagine 10-15 people are getting the torrent file so they can have that ready, and the Opensuse website is getting configured to support 11, instead of 10.3. Bugs are still being worked, but since they aren't system stoppers these will most likely just be patches released close to the release date of 11. So all in all if you installed RC1 (or updated to RC1) and installed all the package updates you should be good to go, in fact my repo's switched over on my PC a couple days ago to use the 11.0 repos. Thats how it normally works. Remember it's going to take 2-3 days to sync all the servers and mirrors with the 11.0 release.
(source: OpenSuse forum)

After I reading, I felt very excited thinking about the great job done by 1000's of people around the world setting up servers, configuring websites and working round the clock to make sure that when we got to their site to get a distro(For FREE), its always a smooth ride, be it Slackware,Suse or Debian or any other great distro for that matter.

And guys, Also do check out the list of some great OpenSuse 11.0 Launch Party Locations.

Bye and do comment about your OpenSuse 11.0/KDE-4 experience after June 19th

Shopping for AMD Athlon XP 2000+

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:26:00 +0000

Today I recieved a call from my uncle, He informed me that his motherboard had some problems and he wanted to replace it. He wanted to buy a new motherboard, but didn't know which one to choose from. The only thing he knew was that, he had an AMD processor(purchased nearly 4-5 years ago) with a number called "2000". He had little/no information regarding the motherboard or the type of processor. Since I am Intel fanboy, I kind of always had trouble with the naming conventions regarding AMD processor line. So with this "2000" number in hand, my journey began to find a suitable motherboard for my uncle.

The first stop was obvious, the AMD site. They had a neat little search bar at the top. I typed in 2000, 2000+, amd 2000+ and various other combinations. But unfortunately most of them spewed out some old news related to Windows® 2000 Server !!!! Cool.

Googling for "amd 2000", I came to realize that(from the search results) the name of the actual product is AMD Athlon XP 2000+. Cool;

So ,The next stop was wikipedia. This search landed me up in the page -List of AMD Athlon XP microprocessors. From this page, it was clear that this processor had a frequency of 1667 MHz, 256 KiB L2 Cache ,266 MT/s FSB. I also came to know that the part number(I never knew such a number ever existed !) of this processor was AX2000DMT3C

I went back to the AMD site again and searched for AX2000DMT3C and this is what i got.

No results were found for your search.
Your query is too restrictive.
You might want to try ax2000dmt3c:

So i tried out ax2000dmt3c(the same query as before, but now in small leters) and this was the resulting page(see below)

No results were found for your search.
Try changing some of the words in your query.
Tips for better results:
Check your syntax.
Make sure to use the correct spelling.
Use the correct case (uppercase for capitalized names, lowercase for common words and phrases).
Use a comma to separate capitalized names or phrases.
For example: Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin

Cool, back to google again, googled for AX2000DMT3C and found this link from geeks.com. Nice, now just a quick glance through the page showed this :

Motherboard that supports an AMD XP 2000+ 1.67GHZ Socket A CPU .

A little more google revealed that I(i mean my uncle) needed a 462 Socket A motherboard and details of vendors providing this motherboard can be found here. And hence the journey ends here.

But coming back to amd, for a last try I headed on to Desktop Processor Solutions page and guess what among all the hundreds of amd processors listed, the 2000+ wasn't even listed !!! cool. Is anyone listening ?

Brand new Suse 11.0 beta 3 for all

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:38:00 +0000

(Screenshot of KDE 4 in action :
I hope to post some of my own desktop screenshots of KDE 4 soon, as soon I finish my Suse 11 download OR my friend Swaroop finishes the Fedora 9 with kde 4 download)

Hi guys,

The much awaited beta 3 release of Suse 11.0 was released today. You can read the release notes here. I immediately clicked download link in the download page to get my hands on the brand new kde 4. Check out some screenshots of kde 4 here.

If you want to try out Suse 11.0 with kde4 yourself, just head on to http://software.opensuse.org/developer and choose whether you want 32 bit / 64 bit(read the instructions ,just below the radio buttons, to understand which category you want to choose)

As a side note, i want to add some thing here; Nowadays people are crazy over the core 2 CPUs from Intel and X2 from AMD. So although these processors support 64 bit, I would suggest to go for 32 bit Suse distro, because, still a lot of softwares are written nativley for 32 bit(I am quite aware of the site www.64xsoft.com), the conversion to 64 bit memory address space, could result in a slight(very very small) time overhead.This is simple becuase, 64 bit processor show thier optimum power while running native 64 bit apps on a 64 bit platform( and i bet a lot of apps are going to be written(compiled) just for the 64 bit platform in the very near future)

This problem(?) doesn't come up, if you happen to use a 32bit apps on a 32 bit OS. So my humble suggestion is to go for a 32 bit distro, unless you want to google later on for "view flash videos in 64bit firefox+linux" !!

Hope to hear from you soon.

A web spider dream

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:37:00 +0000

(Spidering the web, literally !!)

Its been one of my dreams for a long time, to write my own spider. It came first to me while watching the movie matrix, where in one of the initial scenes,in which while the lead character is sleeping, his computer automatically runs search(about another character called "Morpheus") and gets the results for him.

Writing a automated search would only take a couple of minutes using any automation software like autoit but to efficiently gather data from the various search engines, organizing them, sorting it out and storing them requires talent of another kind. . .

So the journey begins, for the making of the web spider.

The google bot

By the way, guys, do you know that, google gets data of different sites using something like the web spider I mentioned earlier. The name of the spider that they use is google bot.

Robots.txt in action

Another interesting thing which i noted was almost all sites I visited after learning about spiders had robots.txt file which stated which parts of the site the web bot(spider) can visit(access). You too can see the file and the names of various spiders in the worlds, Just type the root name of the site and append it with robots.txt

Imagine you wanted to get the robots.txt of http://en.wikipedia.org
Then type http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
Then you get the details of all bots(spiders) allowed and disallowed by wikipedia guys. You can try this out for any site. Cool huh ?

So in basic terms, the web spider is basically a software that goes to the site and gets the data for you, rather than you manually visiting each site using a web browser.

In future posts, we shall begin the journey of actually coding a spider and using it.

(As a tribute to the movie "The Matrix", this post was intentionally colored green)

The strange close tab problem in firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:28:00 +0000

I had been experiencing this problem for the past few days, namely

Whenever i close firefox, with multiple tabs open, it doesnt show the usual "tabs are open, do you want to close" confirm dialog box. This really intrigued me and today I found the soultion.
Just open firefox, in the address bar type "about:config"(without quotes)

then in the filter text box, type
browser.tabs.warnonclose

click on the entry named "browser.tabs.warnOnClose
If it is set to false, double click it to make it true

After this, whenever i closed by firefox session with multiple tabs opened, firefox issues the confirm dialog

Cool

(note: For all those hackers out there, about:config, is a place to really check out all the cool featues hidden in firefox, but be sure to backup before proceeding
that is, if you are in windows, copy the file prefs.js located at - C\documents and setting\<user Name>\Application data/mozilla/firefox/profiles)

Font problems

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:24:00 +0000

Recently I faced a strange problem when viewing a website in our regional language. The website should have been displayed in the local Malayalam language, but see what happened(see the pic below)

(Malayala Manorama site being rendered using unknown characters)

I was taken aback, i was hoping to read some malayalam news( it was a malaylam news site) but instead, i could only find some junk characters on the screen. When I scrolled down, I found the link for downloading the font for the site. So in case if you face such a problem in the future, get the font for your language first then follow the steps furnished below. I believe you would find it useful

1. Get the fonts - Luckily for me, I got it from the site itself. If you dont find that way, you must google for it

2.Install the font - I am describing the steps for XP(If you happen to use linux and know how to do this in linux, please post it as comment to his post)Copy the font to the font directory.

That is, Control Panel > Fonts > and the paste the font file(a file with ttf extension) into that directory.You must be in "Classical View" to do this

3. Next open firefox. Go to View > character Encoding > More Encoding > User Defined Voila, the whole page suddenly transforms to this(see pic below), after you press the refresh button.

(The site after proper rendering of Malayalam fonts)

nrg to iso -Burn images in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 04:47:00 +0000

hi guys,

Recently I came across a neat solution to convert nrg files to iso in Linux which I though I would share it with you.

I guess, most of you would have faced the situation when you want to burn an image to disk and its in the ".nrg" format. Note that, the famous cd burning tool in linux(K3b) and many others wont be able to recognize this, but they could easily support "iso" type images. so you need to convert it before using them.
So lets fire up the shell first, then issue this command

dd bs=1k if=image.nrg of=image.iso skip=300

(You'll probably have to change directories to the location of the .nrg file)

Replace image.nrg with then name of your .nrg file (something.nrg), replace of with the name you want your outgoing file to be (something.iso)

It will take about a min or two, depending on the size of the image.Then its time to burn! Here our ".iso" image gets created in the same directory as the source ".nrg" file(you can change it by specifying the direcotry path, if you want to)

If everything went on smoothly, you will see a screen somthing similar to this

596572+1 records in
596572+1 records out
610889884 bytes (611 MB) copied, 47.6749 seconds, 12.8 MB/s
linux-master: #

Next, Open k3b(or type k3b in run) in Linux. In the tools menu, choose "Burn Cd image" and open the "iso" image and click the start the burn. You now have a brand new ISO image. C00l

As a side note you could also check out nrg2iso ,to convert nrg files to iso files, but i haven't checked it out myself.

Virus Attack!!

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 03:22:00 +0000

(The virus attack, reminds me of this ^)

Hi guys,

From what I percieve, my XP seems to down due to a pretty nasty virus. I guess, it might have got into my system from one of the usb thumb drives(flash drives )that i use. Anyway the funniest thing(if any) here is that, eventhough i used to open this drive open from linux systems, it was not affected.

As a matter of fact, the virus was not able to touch(change) even a small part of the linux system. And I am posting this post from my Suse system. The problem with XP now is that, as soon as I type the user name and password and try to login, i get immediately logged out.And even during all these crisis times, linux was there for me(all 6 distros, which i had installed in my box). Now i understand the meaning of 'stability'

Since, currently i am busy with my project(to be submitted my next week) at NIIT, i could not dwelve more into the issue. So I decided to reinstall the complete XP system. I have read that if the file -> userinit.exe(winnt/system32) get corrupted, this problem could occur. But I have tried to replace it and so on, but all in vain. So chances are, I would be reinstalling the complete XP system, from scratch, today.

As a matter of fact,there is much uncertainity over the actual cause of the attack, what was attacked and so on. Since I had installed 2 keyloggers, around the same time that I accessed the usb(flash) drive the chance for a nasty malware/spywaree cannot be ruled out. But one thing I can assure you dudes; During the last two times(in the past 1 year), when there were virus attacks, Linux just remained stable. Simply becuase, "exe" files wont run in linux(unless ofcourse, you force it to) and most of the time, i will be in the less previleged user mode, so even if virus some how got into the system, it cannot do much damage.

A cool parser in Python

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:03:00 +0000

In my last post, i told you guys, i had plans to move the compiler project from java to python. But here too, the chief problem(due to my lack of ignorance) was parsing. I was looking around, and I came across this awesome parser called BeautifulSoup .This is basically a html/xml parser, but i think, i can tweak it to work with the neo programming language.

I really liked the way, how various elements are accessed by using thier tags, as described in the documentation of BeautifulSoup. It really got me excited. Parsing and binary trees were once scary,obsturse terms for me, but not anymore.

I would love to go ahead with the project. If you would like to join in this project, you can get the complete documentation, along with the full source code for the project here.

Another exciting project

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:50:00 +0000

(Now its all starting to fit together - The compiler project I had in my mind for years)

Its a been a dream of mine, for a quite a long time, to write a compiler of my own. Rather than the sheer joy of creating, and getting invovled with such a cool project, my foremost aim was to get to know, more about how one language gets "magically" transformed to another, using a "special software" that we call the compiler. All these thoughts lay in my mind for quite some time.

And whenever i wanted to write a compiler, the first thought that came to my mind was that, I must learn assembly language and parsing and all those complicated stuff.

Now it so happened that, 2 weeks back, one of my friends Nandu had come to my home and we discussed about these things, that is compiler design, operating systems and so on(One of the best things i like about his visit) He asked me if it was possible to write a new programming language, but with an easier, yet powerful syntax, compared to Java. He also told me that the compiler could be written in Java, to compile this new programming language.

The idea really did strike me. After he left my place, I started to think about it, and this is the end result of that thought process. For identification puprose, the new programming language shall be called Neo(if any of you guys have copyrighted that name, please contact me and I will be glad to change the project name!)

(The compilation process)

As show in the figure ^^ ,the input to the compiler will be the Neo programming language source and the output will be source code in java(yeah, our plain old .java file)Now clearly, 2 challenges lay ahead of me.

Designing a new language - Neo.
Designing a compiler for this new language.

If you seem to feel any of the section highlighted below to be too technical pleae feel free to Google for the same and learn more about it. I bet you wont be sorry for that ;)

1)Designing a new language - Neo

A lot of questions arose in my mind. On the basic level I had to tackle :

What syntax must I follow ?(basic structure of the project)
Should it be loosely styped and strongly typed
What about functions?

Okay, so to keep up with the KISS methodology(KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid) I decided to make a prototype version first, then tackle more complicated issues.

I wanted something, like a mix of Python and Java.(Yeah i know Jython exists, but getting your hands dirty by creating your own compiler is something different)

So first thing i wanted was that in order to print a simple hello world, You must type print. Thats all. No more classes and pubilc static void main (syntax used in java) and all

2) Compiler

The compiler must be in Java, although I have plans to port it to python later on. But anyway currently I will stick on with java. The ouput of the program will be a java file that could be compiled using the normal javac compiler provided by Sun .

Let the coding begin

With a basic idea and some thoughts initiated by Nandu, i decided to start coding. I fired up jcreator and started to code. As the project progressed(in a span of couple of days) I got a lot of great feedback from Nandu and also by looking up in the web; thus the initial prototype version was completed, And i decided to release it, as an open source project.

You can get the complete documentation, along with the full source code for the project here. I want to polish it a bit further by adding more syntax, but still keeping it as simple as possible. If you like to contribute to this project, you can post your modified version as reply to the thread in the group where I posted the source code.

Your precious feedback is welcome, as to how this project should be continued. I have posted my vision here, and if you like to make use of this idea in someother place, do post it here

All the best guys

with regards
Justin

Searching for Torvalds !

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 05:30:00 +0000

(Linus Benedict Torvalds :best known for initiating the development of the Linux Kernel)

All along my life, I wanted to learn about linux and its creators(note the plural here!) and this journey has been going on for sometime. Below, i would love to share with you, some search adventures, that i had today.

First, i headed on to Google groups, which is best place to find archived Usenet content dating back from 1981.

I knew, I had to search for author:linus but the next term, I was not so sure of. Suddenly, it came to my mind about the talks Andrew S Tannenbaum(author of the famous "Modern operating system" book and the creator of minix) and Linus torvalds had in the group. comp.os.minix . AST(Andrew S Tannenbaum) supported minix and Linus torvalds supported Linux(ofcourse!)

And I feel, these are one of the best technical stuff i have come across in the web about operating systems. It was really cool to read them. You can find a sample here > What would you like to see most in minix?

Man its really awesome to go through the lines esp :

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready

Just think, how this serious hobby has turn into. It sends shiver down one's spine.

So the next term to search was obvious. It had to be minix. A quick search on Google groups for "author:linus minix" (without quotes) got me what i was looking for.

Is MINIX much better than LINUX? posted in the comp.os.minix user group.

By clicking on the view profile, I was even able to check out, the first post Torvalds made in Usenet using the famous "helsinki.fi" email id he used to post in this group. Curiously though, the first post read like this(It was posted on May 29 1991 - yeah its some 16 years old !!)

Hello everybody.
I've got this problem with a old PC my sister just "inherited" (not from
me). It works ok, but much of the hard-disk shows unrecoverable
read-errors. I've marked them bad in the FAT by using PCTools, running
surface analysis over the nigt, but I'd rather try to LL-format the
drive while it's still relatively empty.

You can go through all the posts Linus and the Linux devlopers had posted in comp.os.minix during the early days of Linux creation and how various developers discussed and got it into this great endeavor.

Its really thrilling to see the mindset of the early adopters of linux including Linus Torvalds from these threads in the comp.os.minix .

Notes:

Various Usenet profiles , which i believe belongs to the linus torvalds. The first one really belongs to him

torva...@klaava.helsinki.fi Profile

torva...@osdl.org Profile

Adding more search engines

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:17:00 +0000

(The mini search engine tool bar)

All of you might have noticed the cool mini tool bar located at top right of our Firefox browsers, saving us time and effort whenever we wanted to search something in Google. It saves us time and effort by not having us to type the address - www.google.com in the address bar, wait for the page to load and then type in the search query. Yeah, i know its not so difficult, but in case if you happen to search quite often, you will surely find the search tool bar, a real boon.

So coming back to the topic : Adding more search engines to the search tool bar. Its pretty easy actually. Our first stop would be the mozilla addons site 's section on Search engines. If you dont happen to find the search engine of your choice here; lets go to http://mycroft.mozdev.org This is just an awesome site, with about 12546 search engine plugins!! I really liked the 25 most frequently downloaded plugins and the section for google search plugins. I bet you will find the search engine, that you want to add to the search toolbar, here. In case if you do not, go the main page and you can search for it there.

Once you find your plugin, click on it, and firefox will ask if you want to add it to the list of search engines available in the search bar and say yes. And you have your favorite one added to the list.

Below I have included my search engine list.

(My search engine list)

Changing blogger template

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:52:00 +0000

(My blog, before the template change)

As promised in my last blog entry, this post would be about changing the blogger template. Note that in order to make full use of this post, you must either be using the old blogger or you are hosting your own blog site.
But guys, if you are using the new blogger, its okay. Here is how to revert to the old blogger.
Click on the 'Template' tab and then click the 'Edit Html' tab
Scroll down, do not scroll contents of the template, I am talking about the page. And you will see a link titled 'Revert to classic template'

Once you have done this, you are free to hack your template in which way your heart desires. But if you still want to use the new blogger and change the template, you can google for it.

So in the next 4 steps, I will show you how to get your blog and new sleek look.

1) Choose a cool template of your choice

This is the best part. Rather than being limited to a handful of templates that blogger offers, You are now free to choose your template that really suits your blog. So first lets google for it. When you google for 'free css templates' (without quotes) the first site you get is(or the first site I got was) www.freecsstemplates.org

(Screenshot of www.freecsstemplates.org)

This is a really cool website offering mind blowing templates, and that too free.If the 222 handpicked, eye candy templates do not suit you, you can surf through the other results that turn up in the Google result, most of them are really worth checking out.

Now to make things simpler, lets assume that you downloaded the template from www.freecsstemplates .org The folder will contain a css file an html file and many image files.

2) Hack the code

To start beginning to edit the css and html files that you got, I recommend you try to get a slight hang of using css and html. Googling for css or html could get you enough stuff to get your hands up and dirty.You could also head on to http://www.w3schools.com which has an excellent section on html and css.

Now someone may ask, why take "so-much" trouble(?) to learn and do things rather than be content with the same boring template blog that one has been using for ages. The simple answer is - its just the part of hacker mentailty and culture. Hacker mentality typically revolves around discovering new things, finding answers and learning new stuff and so on. Thats all.

Next edit the html and the corresponding css files to suit your needs. You can add your images and stuff like that. For example, I have added links to World Food Programme(a N.G.O) and Feedburner feeds and so on.

3)Add the necessary blogger variables

Now this part took a bit time for me to get used to. But I bet, this would go as easy as pie for you, since all the information is presenter right HERE.
Once you have a template that closely matches your blog's theme, then its time to decide, where you want the links to 'previous posts' , 'archives' and the body of post must appear. Then its only a matter of copy-pasting those variables to the html file. But it must be done in a proper order. So i have numbered them below.

(From now on, all code in this post will be in RED)

i) The blog post title and body

Inside the blogger tags add the following tags. Most of the tags are self explanatory
(if you have any doubt refer your original template [blogger >Template > edit html ]

<$BlogItemTitle$>

This displays the blog title, Next comes the date header

<blogdateheader>
</blogdateheader>
<$BlogDateHeaderDate$>

Note I have used tags to specify the formatting which suits my blog. It may be different in your case. Only thing you have to note here is that not to change the name of Blogger variables.
Then finally comes the actual body of the blog post


<$BlogItemBody$> and author and comments links

posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> @ <$BlogItemDateTime$>
|<$BlogItemCommentFormOnclick$>><$BlogItemCommentCount$>
comments |
<blogitemcommentsenabled> </blogitemcommentsenabled>

ii)Previous post link

Also add the links to previous posts

<bloggerpreviousitems>
<$BlogPreviousItemTitle$>

4) The great joining

This last section is the is the most simplest of all. Create a new file. Lets call it myNewTemplate.html.

Open using using your favorite text or html editor. Please do not open with Microsoft word or any such software, becuase these softwares themselves add unwanted code and bloat our neat, clean template.

For windows users I would suggest notepad, PSPad( its a freeware HTML editor, PHP editor, XHTML, JavaScript, ASP, Perl, C , HEX editor.) or cream (A awesome editor with syntax highlighting that supports most languages you can ever think of)

For linux users Kate, BlueFish or cream would suffice.

Now add the code from the css file to the style section of the head tag.

Next add the contents of the html file to the body of this newly created file.

<html>
<head>
<title>My new blog</title>

<style type="text/css">

<!--- add the code from css file here  -->

</style>

<body>
<!--  Add the code from html file here  -->

</body>
</html>

Once you have done this, save this file. Now head on to blogger >Template > edit html. Now remove everytihng from the text box and copy and paste the code of newly created file(myNewTemplate.htm) into the text box.

Click apply changes and voila you have your new template ready.

(My blog after the template change)

A Final word

If you encounter any problems, counter check the steps I told you and dont hestitate to google for more help. If you find any problems in grasping the css template while trying to edit it, its okay. Take your time and try to figure it out, with help from the web.

And finally, you can also comment this post and share with others your experience while hacking out your own template as I have shared mine.

One last note, in case you are hosting your own blog; Rather that using the blogger variables you will have to use the variable names of the language, used to host the blog. So if your blog uses PHP, substitute the PHP code instead of the blogger variables that I mentioned earlier.

Thank you

Justin

New Orange Flavor, Served

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:50:00 +0000

(The new theme of this blog -A juicy, fresh orange )

Hi friends,

Thanks for checking out this blog again. As you can see, the blog has undergone a complete revamp in its style and design. Hope all of you, my friends, like the new interface and design. I got the template from Free CSS templates site. If you would like to try out the same, thats the topic for my next post. So do watch out for my next post, as I bet you would find it a bit interesting( to hack out, your own design)

The name of the template is hot-spring, I hacked it a bit changed the style and applied it to my blog. And viola!! Here comes the new design. Hope you guys liked it.

As regular visitors this blog, you could see that the design was not a big bang!, it was indeed a gradual evolution of the design in the past 4-5 days. Today I finally added the archives section as well as the comments section, completing almost 90 % of the job(I guess, keeping fingers crossed)

I have had seen some problems when viewing the page in resolutions less than 1024 x 768. Also konqueror has some problems with the fonts in the side bar. So as the great beta-testers of this test, if you notice anything unusual in your browser please do mention it as comment to this post. You could also post anything that you liked/disliked about the new design(bricks and boutiques are both welcome !)

Thanks for being with me, during this cool change.

with regards
Justin

My first try on Google Sketch up

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:45:00 +0000

(A typical well as seen in India)

Wells are still common in many parts of India supplying clean and pure water to the masses. So why am I mentioning it here? Because this theme happened to be the first 3D scene I ever created in my life !

Behold, Google Sketch up. This is one of the coolest freeware(but not open source software) that I have come across in the last few months. You can download it for free from the Google sketch up site.
And for me the book "Google sketch up for Dummies" came in handy. Just within the 1 st hour of using this cool software, I was comfortable with moving around, zooming and creating various shapes and so on. By the way Google sketch up has a marvellous helper tool called "Instructor" (Window>Instructor)which provides really cool context sensitive help along the way.

The first shape that I created did not have any shape at all , a rather "modern art" style(no pun intended) Next was this "well"(depicted above) of course.

Its so special because, I always longed to create a game of my own using any programming language(preferably Java) but most of the time I was bogged down by the concept of creating 3D models of character - which seemed rather like an impossible dream to me.

Learning 3d studio max or Maya for that matter, just seemed impossible for me and I had almost given it up. But I think I can get my hands dirty again with some cool 3d Transformations!!!

A brush with "Wow" effects of the Linux world

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:28:00 +0000

(Slax with lg3D)

It was the first time, I took a screen shot of the power of graphics in Linux in action, and I thought I would share it with you guys. In the screen shot you can see the start menu, yeah the 3D "thing" at the left corner and the minimized windows get arranged in a 3D z-axis along the task bar. The appliaction that has been opened is the - picture viewer.

In the next screen shot,

you can the see the Firefox window being tilted over the right side in 3D space as in Windows Vista.
Remember all these shots where taken on my desktop PC with 256 MB RAM and a P IV 2.4 GHz processor PC. Now contrast this with the system specs and the hardware overload that would be required to run such extravagant graphics effects on some other O.S other than Linux.

If you want to try this out , check out https://lg3d.dev.java.net/
to read more about it, head on to https://lg3d.dev.java.net/lg3d-getting-started.html

and if you are curious to try out this on windows, check out
https://lg3d.dev.java.net/lg3d-on-windows.html

I had earlier tried out lg3d on windows myself and it was really cool. But it was a bit sluggish though, but in Linux this really did turn out to be really really fast. And i am loving it ™.

As a side note,I got the Live cd of lg3d(Slax flavour) with this month's Digit computer magazine.
bye guys

Fools paradise:A total revelation

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:37:00 +0000

(Moving target: The disillusioned donkey -source : Bobanum Moli)

When I finished reading the latest editon of PC world magazine(Indian edition), I was feeling like a total looser. After going through a whopping 167 glossy pages(Anniversary special) of latest stuff(?)I felt, I have not gained much. I had been, having this feeling for the past few months, and I decided to verify it.

So I would like you to join this investigation, to verify whether, this has some credibility or was it just another de-ja-vu

Firstly I started counting the ads in the magazine. Believe it or not, 26 % of this magazine is full of untargeted ads - which really makes one feel, you PAY your hard earned cash on some stupid ads? These are full pages ads and I have not included ads that cover up over half the page or even 3/4 rth of it.Counting these, would increase the toll to even unbelievable higher numbers

Note that,you may not get the complete picture of what I am saying if you have lot of cash, and have no idea on how to spend it or you do not have even the faintest idea of whats happening in the tech world. So lets proceed further.

Looking further, we can see that, there are over 38 pages of reviews of software and hardware, which may seem interesting at first. But looking closely, one can find that most of these hardware/softwares are not even close to the budget that the common computer guy can afford to.

Just check this out. To avoid randomness, I have included the review in a series (in the order, they appear in the magazine).
It doesn't matter what product they have reviewed(because I don't want to do that product's advertisement here, again !!) I have only included the page number as well as the price.

Page Price
115 Rs 17,500 (434.67 $)
139 Rs 8213 (204.00 $)
140 Rs 100,609 (2499 $)
141 Rs 26,128 (649 $)
143 Rs 40,219 (999 $)

the list goes on,
On an average, most of the products reviewed comes over 15,000 and buying a couple of products in this category is just unthinkable. They have also allocated 11 pages for Vista(still not widely adopted) and Mac(least minority users in India) and 18 pages of reviews for games on Xbox and PS3 - note that Xbox and Ps3 accounts to very negligibly small percentage of computer users in India

All in all a whopping 115 pages(68 %) of stuff, which you can't either use or afford to. Now someone may argue that you shouldn't be reading this magazine in the first place, if you cant shell out 30,000 - 40,000 a month and that too on proprietary software, I agree with you dude. But I just thought of sharing with you something, that I learnt, thats all.

Even with the 30 % stuff which you MAY find beneficial, some of them are targeted at enterprise users, some at home users and so on. So think again,what does all these really mean?

And unfortunately this is the same case with most computer magazines available in the market, But there are some exceptions like Linux Journal and Linux for you and Developer IQ magazines(Correct me, if I am wrong)

I have made of completing listing of ads, the product price as well as the page numbers that they appear. 68 % of stuff, which I have quoted earlier is also fully documented. So anyone who would like to verify could just mail me and I will be glad to send you the details. My email id is
j-u-s- t-i -n -c- s- 4 -@ - g- m- a-i- l - d- o- t - c- o- m (without spaces and hyphens)

So lets keep our eyes open on things that we buy and things that we really get.

And Keep clicking