Mohit Taneja

Do we really need google search..?

2011-06-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

I have been recently thinking about the number of times I have to use google search. Well it has been decreasing for sure. The reason being that there are other places where I can search for things and that too in a localized way.

If I have to search for books I search on flipkart, if I have to search for movie shows, I search bookmyshow, If I have to search for food outlets, I use zomato, isohunt for torrents, wikipedia for knowledge based articles.

It seems that google search has lost relevance to a certain extent today. I guess it is because it generally redirects one to places where u can search for things instead of searching things for you.

Any thoughts..? Anyone else also feels like their google searches have reduced..?

Pygame + Desktop ------> Javascript + Canvas + Browser

2011-06-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

The topic is just about the change of platform for my personal projects, till date I have worked on games focused on desktop environment and have used Pygame + Python for them.

But, recently I have been trying with Javascript + HTML5 canvas. I have been just trying out things as of now, not yet an expert at anything or so. But yeah there are a lot of things which are supposed to be done differently, and many things are similar too.

The rendering context for both of them is same. You have to expect the screen in both the cases as a piece of paper, once you draw anything on it, you cannot delete it or change it. In every new frame you can either use the same paper or clear some parts of it and then use it, or use a new paper altogether.

The event handling mechanism is different, in python one used to handle every event like a keypress in a loop and depending on the type of the event (check that in a switch) one used to take appropriate action. In Javascript, one needs to attach a callback with different events and when they will occur, the callback function will be called.

The good thing with python was that it was cross platform so one was not required to take care of platform specific details. But that isn't the case with Javascript, the way firefox handles events it might be, and in some cases is, different from safari or chrome. For example the simple code for finding the position of a mouse when it is clicked is different in firefox and safari. So, for such things one needs to use JQuery another library, which makes traversing DOM objects easy, and standardizes Javascript code across browsers. The good thing about JQuery is that it is pretty lightweight, something like a single javascript file of less than 1000 lines.

Most of the animation in pygame was supposed to be done by manipulating images, infact most of the game view part was done using images/surfaces, in Javascript one tends to use native drawing functions. Now, this might be just a paradox in my mind, or it might just be the cult as canvas is yet a work in progress, or it is just a difference in the themes of games I used to work on pygame as compared to those of canvas, in my mind. But, still this seems to be there in general. It could also be because of speed issues of handling images in browser versus that in pygame.

All in all, I am still learning about new things many of my findings here might not be true, but still i will try and update them as and when I find out more.

Gaming + Work + Movie + Less Sleep = Crazy Dreams

2011-04-08T06:01:00.001-07:00

I return back to my cubicle and open a ninja fighter app on my mobile and just when I open it I am sucked in by my mobile and put in a virtual arena, where I have to fight against 4 japanese black belt fighters, I see that my clothes have also been changed from jeans + shirt to a karate dress with a black belt. And as I approach those fighters with full confidence I am punched right on my nose. And I get up from my dream.

This is what happens when you have been playing a lot of games on your phone, watched a late night show of sucker punch, and have been overworked with issues related to thread synchronization, and have been missing on your sleep since quite some time.

Code Reusability in Game Designing (FoodForce2 to Aspiring Citizens)

2011-03-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

It isnt going to be about how you can copy code from somewhere. This post is more about how you can use a publicly available code and modify it according to your requirements. This might not even require pretty good technical skills.

All you might have to do is change some text files or so. Or maybe some changes in the code too.

In my second year in college, I developed a game engine as a part of open source social service for OLPC, while definitely getting some great experiences. The major challenges while making that were about developing the rendering engine, the little bit of physics behind it, the UI engine and the storyboard engine. Then after that we built a lot of things over that engine, basically that would be designing the layout of the elements on the screen, designing different storyboards, a sound engine, and finally we had a full fledged awesome game in our hands FooodForce2. And definitely we had a pretty good impact through this game, around 2,50,000 downloads, deployment in a few schools, and hopefully, some smart kids becoming even better at decision making. Also, yeah , we won prizes at many intercollege competitions, which got us some money too, so I cant really say that we did social service :P.

But, the important part is not what you can gain immediately out of it, it is more about how your past contributions are used currently, I just checked out a modified version of FoodForce2 being released as Aspiring Citizens by a startup from our college itself. They did pretty cool stuff with it, they added new stories in the game using the existing engine, made the storyboard chats customizable. This used with the original game engine was good enough to provide totally new learning lessons through the game (Just kidding, I haven't been able to checkout the game as of now, as the download button doest seems to be working on their site, but still I hope so, for the time being there is a video).

Now the beauty of the process is that the engine was written in such a way that it can make this process seamlessly easy. The engine was written in such a way that it reads a data file which is written in such a way that the engine reads it in terms of conditions and actions, whenever you start a story, the storyboard is given a few actions to complete, actions like showing initial chats and showing messages, after which it waits for events for these actions to be completed. And when the player is required to complete a task a condition is passed on to this engine and similar events are raised on the completion of these conditions (those interested in the code, can go here. So adding new storyboards is made a piece of cake with this type of framework, all one has to do is make a UI for selecting a storyboard, writing new storyboard files and you are done. The only tricky part being knowing the code, well for that there was Vijit, at their disposal.

Well instead of bragging about this particular feature of the game, I should feel sorry about the non-reconfigurability of the rest of the features of the game engine.

Anyways, lessons to be learnt make your code as configurable as possible, you might earn some "ThankYou" mails from coders who reuse your code (sadly, I didn't received any :P)

P.S: If you feel like downloading the game to know more about what the heck am I speaking, you can give it a spin sometime.
Also, feel free to share the post if you found it helpful :)

Cache Coherence Gyaan

2010-08-28T04:31:00.000-07:00

Total Geek talk, noobs feel free to close the tab.

Finally, I realized that it is good to share technical knowledge , because the more you share the more you know.

Basics: Cache is a mid level memory between the CPU and the RAM, the simple funda behind cache is that it is a bit expensive and much more faster than your RAM (in terms of access time) , so during processing some of the data from RAM is brought into the cache, the data which is assumed to be accessed much more often. So that the system becomes more efficient.

Now, all is good till the time there is only one core, but if there are multiple cores which are sharing the same memory space, it creates a bit of a mess. One needs to know who is changing the memory contents, because each core would be having its own cache. Say, there is a variable which is used by both the cores, and both of them have cached it. Now, if core1 updates its value in its cache, or even if it updates its value in the memory. Core2 needs to know that the value of this variable has been changed and it should update its value before using it. Well this is called as the "Cache Coherency" problem. The problem statement is simple, "Figure out if something has been messed up, and if yes , what??"

Before we delve into the details, we need to have some more basics. There are two ways to maintain a cache (even if there is a single cache), through which we decide that what data should be loaded into the cache and when, because the size of cache w.r.t RAM is quite less. (Just as a spec my laptop has 4 GB RAM and 3MB of cache). This is maintained as either write through cache or a write back cache. In a write through cache, the contents of the cache are written back to the memory as soon as they are updated in the cache. In a write back cache, the contents of the cache are kept in the cache even when they are changed, but when they need to be swapped out of the cache to load some other memory contents, only then they are written back into the memory.

Now, there are two ways to handle this situation :

The Software way
The Hardware way

In the software way, to implement cache coherency, it is the responsibility of the compiler , and sometimes the programmer (if he/she is programming in assembly language) to take care of cache coherency. A simple and a bit inefficient way of doing so is flush the cache or mark it as invalid, as soon as you write a shared/global variable. Well this a very inefficient way and there are many more efficient ways to do this. And these ways generally depend on the hardware too.

Now the problem with having cache coherency through Software means is, firstly, it is inefficient one might end up updating the whole cache even when only a few memory locations are changed. Secondly, and most importantly, the code which depends on software cache coherency cannot be easily ported from one machine to another, as the other machine might be having a different hardware configuration.

In the hardware way, there is special space reserved in the cache for cache coherence. The cache is in general divided into cache lines, say if a cache line consists of 100 bytes of data then whenever data would be swapped out of cache into the memory or data is swapped into the cache it is transacted into multiples of this number. One can imagine a cache as a 2D memory consisting of some number of lines. And for each cache line there is a directory entry in the special space reserved for cache coherence, this space is generally called as "cache directory". For each cache line there are 3 bits reserved in the directory which tell about the state of the data in that cache line.

The issues with hardware coherency is, first, it generates a lot of inter cache traffic, whenever a cache write occurs, that cache needs to send info about this to all the other caches so that they can update themselves. Secondly, the amount of cache memory which is usable for storing data decreases.

So which one is better ?

Well it depends on the situation, if the program has too little shared variables, then the hardware method is preferable, as the amount of inter cache traffic is manageable. Whereas if the amount of shared variables are too many and they are updated by different threads quite often, then the software method is preferred, as in this case network traffic will be too much, and it is fine to flush the whole cache at once instead of doing it one by one, by hardware method.

Now, how about a system in which we can dynamically change from software coherency to hardware coherency. This is a paper which talks about such a system, and also inspired me to write this blog.

Sherlock Holmes on a prowl

2010-08-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

Place : CCD, Indiranagar, Bangalore
Date : 15th August
Time : 5 P.M.

So finally, I am here sitting with my dear friend Deepank, celebrating Independence Day, checking out girls and figuring out how people use CCD for match making. So we have three couples here in front of us.

#1 This couple is here or an arrange marriage intro meeting, the gal was waiting for the guy with her parents, and as soon as the guy came the parents went away, in 5 mins . So here is a brief detail of the guy and the gal that we inferred from their looks and habits and actions, commonly called as body language.

The guy is a very straight forward types, not very hawabaaz, and maybe a banker. He is wearing a very modest watch , which signifies that "duh!! watch is used just for checking the time" , with his car keys still in his hands, a bit hidden though, and talking thoughtfully aka expressionlessly with his spectacles kept on the table in a "I am a writer" sort of a way.

The girl is a probably a hawabaaz, for sure, two phones (obv one reliance for a bf) , a green dress, probably designer, with a purple bag.

Btw, they are talking boring shit like, "What movies do you like ?", "My favorite food is Rajma Chawal", "Aapke paas kaunse gadgets hain..??". damn..!!

#2 This couple is a typical posh guy, posh girl type of a couple, guy with a nike Tee ,nike shoes, and nike everything. Girl is also in a sporty attire, but she doesn't seems to be endorsing a particular brand.

They are sitting so disinterested in each other the guy is busy eating the ice cream in his coffee. The girl too is busy doing that and checking out other guys, deepank being sadly (sad for me , good for him) one of them. Finally they started talking briefly, now as they are bit far we cant really listen but it was nothing interesting, according to our guess, as nobody laughed and they again started licking ice creams.

#3 This couple is the best one till now, because I found this girl the most interesting ;) Anyways the guy is a typical boring engineer, I guess, who is blabbering about things, and as the girl is facing her back towards me currently so I cant really say, whether she is taking interest in his talks or not, but I seriously doubt that. The guy seem to be like a wanna be hep guy, wearing sneakers with a normal jeans and a tond (tummy), and a kabhi khushi kabhi gam type spectacles of kareena kapoor.

And well, what else we are sitting here checking out more and more girls and more and more couples but since Deepank's mac's battery is gonna die soon , so I will sign off.

mohit@ti:~$ping http://www.ti.com/ww/in/

2010-07-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

I hear some sort of little bit of an alarm after a long time in the morning, I am still asleep, opened my eye slightly to check the time in my mobile, it was 6:50. I said to myself, it is too early Mohit , go back to sleep. Suddenly I hear someone's noise, my roomie, which made me opened my eyes a little more, just to figure out that I am in bangalore and in TI's guest house, and I have my first day today, and I am supposed to be there at gate no.5 by 7:15.

The next thought which comes is very simple, "omfg, hurry up". I shifted myself to "Turbo Mode", and was out of our flat by 7:15 \m/ .

We all reached TI office by 8 A.M. sharp, followed by a warm welcome by the HR and the Operations team. The first impression had random thoughts wandering through my mind: neat and clean building, pretty good reception, a lot of trophies and awards (almost innumerable) kept in the reception area.

This was followed by a informal session with Vikrant, a guy in Sales/HR deptt. who had a lot of fun with us, went on the verge of (though he didn't) harassing some people....;) (kidding) though there were a few brave souls around who were able to have fun with him too.

This was followed by another sort of informal session with the HR manager, which was followed by a break and then we were provided our awesome bags and even more awesome shirts, thanks to Sneha the HR (She claimed to have designed/selected those). This was followed by another round of informative sessions, in which most of the people were struggling to keep their eyes open :P. The reason for that was probably quite good food in the cafeteria just before these sessions.

Well overall I noticed a few points about the organization,
"Going out of the way is a convention",
"Hell geeky work, and that too over a wiiiiiiideeeeee spectrum",
"Things are optimized at every place, not just the speed/operations of the IC's, the way the whole office is organized, one can see visibly that the operations have been optimized (highly), there was no wastage, at any place, be it cafeteria, pantry, paper (the number of documents which we were given were just enough, no blah blah things, only the useful things)",
"Personal respect for anyone/everyone in the organization",
"Fun environment, helpful people, infact most of the people we met the first day were very eager to help us, in almost any possible way :)"

I hope I will explore more and come to know more about the place soon.

mohit@bangalore:~$ping bangalore.org

2010-07-05T10:28:00.001-07:00

Ok, those who didn't understood the topic, this is about how was the first hand experience in bangalore, in just 2 days.

(Some of the facts presented here might not be correct, and might be just some incidences)

The good points first:

-> Awesome weather, its like it is a big relief as compared to Delhi.
-> Neat and Tidy, atleast the parts I have seen.
-> Guest house is sort of OK, all the basics are somehow fulfilled...:P
-> The company @ guest house is also good.

The other points ;)

-> Food: as usual a similar thing like that in hyderabad, but i guess either i would have to get used to it (which seems difficult) or figure out good places for food.
-> Traffic: It is worse than Delhi even.

Thats it for now, have to get up early tomorrow (I hope I do).

OS and Sex...?? wtf??

2010-07-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

Here are some cool quotes which we came to our mind while studying Operating systems with a friend of mine. Read them, I hope you enjoy...:P

1.) "OS is like sex, the less you know , the more you enjoy!!"

2.) "OS is like sex, virus can kill the feel of both of them"

3.) "OS is like sex , sensual outside, sweaty inside"

4.) "OS is like sex, make one mistake and nurture it for the rest of your life". Here mistake is the one while designing it, and not using it.

5.) "OS is like sex: It's better when it's free."

These quotes were invented (:P) when I was helping a friend of mine in ECE (Mohit Kumar), to motivate him to study OS for his last sem.

The happiness of being Normal

2010-06-25T13:20:00.000-07:00

Well after quite some time things around me are "Normal", infact a more appropriate word would be "Stable". Things seem to be filling in the blank spaces, definitely there are tough aims, and hardworking nights and even everyday's nitty bitty works, but still all of them mostly are in control.

Well from the experience of leading a stable life from past few weeks, I realized that the key is just to control the outcome of things from one's mind.

My First Snakey Game

2010-04-18T03:44:00.000-07:00

First of all. Yay!! its working...!! and perfectly fine... \m/

Finally after a lot of time I am feeling like a doer and less like a speaker or manager. I just coded away a snakey game probably in something around 3-4 hours, in python + pygame. And it is awesome, not the game, as in even that is awesome, but yeah the feeling of accomplishing a project, even though a micro one is great.

Well I always wanted to make games sometimes just for fun. And yeah for sure I am having fun now. Also if anyone wants to play it, you can download it from http://bit.ly/bvgFF8 . Though you would be requiring to install python and pygame on your system to run it..!!

Whats the theory behind it??

2010-04-08T07:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, this one is totally philosophical, those not interested can leave at any time.

Well it has been quite some time and I have been thinking about a lot of things. The most time consuming being "What next??" or say "What do I want ultimately from my life?". The biggest problem being the hunger for more, there is always a feeling of trying to get more out of my life, trying to get more out of my time. Okay this is not just about more money or more marks!! or more friends??,but maybe more achievements or maybe more knowledge. Sometimes, it is about making more sense out of my life. But, all that i think would make more sense out of my life, before doing them, end up hardly making any difference once I am done with them.

Now, for quite some time, I used to believe that materialistic things are things like Money, objects, and similar things. But now I think hey even achievements are also like materialistic only, you achieve achievements to gain something, maybe success, or popularity or maybe even money, but yeah doesn't it sounds like materialistic after all.

There was this guy who was mentoring me sometime back,(no it isnt deepank, this time) he used to say that his theory of life is like a circle, you get one aim then you complete it and get another aim and then you complete it and it goes on and on and on, and eventually you end up dying one day. And yeah then he added external factors like failure of an aim, gaining knowledge in every loop and so on. Well I liked his idea at that time, but now its like , c'mon life cudn't be that dumb. I guess life should be something like building a house, you collect all the raw materials for making it , then you learn all the skills for making it, then comes all actual building of the house, and after some time you feel like okay I have worked enough on it, its time to live inside it and enjoy the ambiance, though you still maintain it and upgrade it occasionally. And then yeah one fine day, you feel like okay now I am feeling bored lets die.

Well this one sounds more meaningful and more interesting, but still keeping this in mind in real life is quite difficult. The big issue is that I want to make multiple houses, bloody I want to be great at many things. As in I guess its high time I should make myself realize that I can't be great at many things or even great at anything, as in there are good enough chances for that too, and that might be the case even (You who is reading this post right now maybe knowing better). And I guess there are many more things, this is just one, as in there should be something much more meaningful towards life, I don't know what, probably I am too young for that, but yeah there should be.

Okay, this might make me sound like a nomad roaming in a desert looking for something (yeah I feel so sometimes), the worst part being he doesn't knows what is he looking for, but pretty sure about the thing that once he finds it he would be able to know that this is what he was looking for. God!! This post sounds crazy.

Well at the end I would say, any comments/help is welcomed.

Developers Day Out

2010-03-06T06:31:00.000-08:00

Well picture speak much more than words!!

Well if you guys are thinking like "Okay, these images probably deserve an explanation". Then here it goes. But yeah if you aren't thinking so, you are free to close this tab in your browser...

So, these pics were taken in IGIT during their fest. Well officially we went for the Project Expo competition, but it was uninteresting and probably a bit uneventful too, so forget it. Btw, we were able to gain third position in it after showing the same presentation + the same project to the same teacher as we did last year.

Followed by that was an exciting event, which was like a sponti event. It was named PhotoFuniya, the event was about taking photos in their campus based on a few tasks. Honestly speaking, the tasks were totally impossible without taking any help from the girls over there in the campus. Probably the IGIT girls wanted the outsiders to interact with them through this event, as in yeah something like that. At first Grivan and I were a bit nervous about things like shall we ask for help shall we talk to them or just complete the ones which we can do on our own and leave the rest to the luck, and we had 1 hour only to complete 21 tasks. Infact the event had some cool organizers too, although I am yet to know whether they were nice or not.

Finally we thought what the heck, lets do it. We did all that we could do, we took the help of any girl available, also utilized all the resources available and we were able to complete 16 tasks.

Btw there are some anomalies (not photoshop stuff) in the above pics lets see if you are able to catch them.

Whats "right" and whats "wrong" ?

2010-02-17T05:47:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, the answer to the above question used to be straightforward. The rules were defined by my parents and brother and the answer used to be based on those rules + a little bit of intuition. The same was the thing with who is "good" and who is "bad". Most of the times the answers used to be loud and clear. Also, every person used to be either "good" or "bad", there were no middle categories. And yeah, I generally used to keep myself into my limits of a good person according to those rules.

Then came the teen-age. When I was entering my teen-age, there was a hell lot of discussion going on about how to handle teenagers, be it newspaper, television etc etc etc. In most of them, I was referred to be a part of a specie called "Today's Generation", and there were some particular tags associated with this specie; "resilient" , "arrogant" ,"pre-mature" and a whole sort of things, which I probably wasn't even able to decipher at that time. That was a time when doing a "wrong" thing also felt fine. Breaking the rules was the "in" thing for our specie. After all, preconsciously though, I was a part of this specie (well I still am, although the name has changed). Even in this case I used to be pretty sure about, what is right and what is wrong, although doing "wrong" was not even so "wrong". People still used to be either "good" or "bad", but now they were according to my own limit of wrongness, If their deeds were "wronger" than me then I used to consider them as "bad" else "good". Also, there was an added category of "no comments", which used to consist of very small population though.

Finally, came the latter half of college life, when all these categories seemed to merge with each other. I went on to the most basic thing, the rules. Who defined those rules that we follow. Some of them were defined by my parents, some other were defined by teachers, some were defined by my peers. Well the problem was that, it wasn't even them who defined those rules, they just told those rules to us, and god knows who else defined those rules for them. Obviously these rules trickled down to me with some modifications(modifications which my parents, teachers etc would have made to make their life better).

Then came the question, shall I follow all these rules or trash all of them. Well I have already been following these rules, and probably my life hasn't been flowing that smooth by following these rules. I guess that was the reason why I was thinking so deep about this matter. So this option was auto canceled. Then came the option of redefining rules, I soon realized that one cannot define all rules by himself, probably I didn't had that much experience about things. So, I started changing those rules which I thought were wrongly created, according to me(This decision making was based on my previous experience as well as on the solution to the situation at hand).

So now there is nothing defined as "right" and nothing defined as "wrong". Its just "right for me"(at that time) or "wrong for me". No person is "good" and no person is "bad". Its just "good according to me" and "bad according to me". But these lines are very very bleak, heavily mixing with each other. Because, whenever I am at a stage to tag a person "bad" in accordance with some action of that person, I happen to think "okay, maybe it isn't wrong according to him".

I guess the best thing of this approach till now has been this only, "None is good, none is bad, its just that some people are compatible with me and some are not". Also, I believe that the converse of this is also true, "None hates me, its just that I am not compatible with some of the people".

Your own home made Youtube Video Downloader

2010-02-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

Well , till quite some time back I have been using some Youtube video downloader application, most of which have stopped working now. So, there was this one awesome video which I wanted to download.

Suddenly, I come to stuck with this simple logic, that hey if firefox is playing this video then it must be downloading that video onto the memory and then playing it. So why don't I pick up this video from there. So the most obvious place to check for such a thing was the /tmp/ folder ( I am on Ubuntu currently) and voila here it was resting in peace waiting for me to close the tab and get deleted.

So all that one has to do for his home made Youtube Downloader to work is to cut this video from your temp folder and save it at some good place before you close the tab and here you go, you home made Youtube Downloader is ready.

First day in Final Semester

2010-02-09T16:30:00.000-08:00

I have a small peek into the classroom 312 and then look at my watch, its 11:15 probably a bit late to go into a 10:30 class, I am still breathing fast as I have been running from admin to COE block. Pallavi sitting inside the class waves a hand to say that yeah come in no issues. I went into the class, the teacher was looking on the board, as I enter the class there is some tidy-bidy noise by people.(Probably they wanted to yell, "heylo we r sitting from past 45 mins for the attendance and u enter 5 mins before the end of class and u too get the attendance). Still I manage to enter the class and as soon as I sit on my seat, teacher starts taking attendance and I get the attendance. After which I realize that it was the last class of the day and we are free now...

Approximately four hours before this I was in my bed and my phone's alarm was ringing, I get up to see that its 7:30 and I am like, okay I ain't feeling sleepy, nor it is time to get ready for college, it isn't too good to be on time on the first day itself. I decided to go for jogging, after jogging for a long distance and then realizing that I have come too far to jog back home, I had to walk down the whole distance which made me reach back home at 8:15. After which I was whiling away time so that I can dry up the sweat due to exercise so that I can have a bath. Finally after doing a lot of vellapanti , I left home at (:30 the time at which the classes start.

And now its 4:30 and I am sitting infront of my desktop writing this post. From the first day it seems that this sem is going to be a lot vella.

OpenCv 2.0 with Ubuntu 9.04

2010-02-03T05:14:00.000-08:00

Recently I have started working on my final year project, and I got stuck with a pretty nice idea of documenting it on my blog.
I am working on 3-D Modeling using Videos. As usual the first steps of doing a project is to get the development environment settled up, and doing the feasibility study. In our case we had decided to use OpenCV for video manipulation, because of two reason :
1.) It's faster than any other library present out there for the same purpose.
2.) Its pretty advanced(read as a lot of inbuilt functionality) and optimized.

I am just documenting the method which worked for me, there were other easier one's which didn't worked for me :(.

First of all one needs the ffmpeg (for video support) and GTK 2.0 for OpenCv to work properly. Sadly, one needs to check out ffmpeg from trunk and compile it for his own platform, no binaries in Ubuntu repositories.

1.) Check out ffmpeg from their svn repo:

cd ~
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg

2.) Then for sure one needs to compile ffmpeg and install it:

./configure --enable-shared
make
sudo make install

This thing takes its own sweet time, So you can go and get some coffee for yourself.

3.) Then you need to get GTK Development libraries:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

4.) Finally one needs to download code for OpenCV 2.0 and Compile and install it :

cd ~
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/opencvlibrary/opencv-unix/2.0/OpenCV-2.0.0.tar.bz2
tar -xvf OpenCV-2.0.0.tar.bz2
cd OpenCV-2.0.0
./configure --with-ffmpeg --with-gtk --with-quicktime=false
make
sudo make install

This is again a thing which will give you ample of time to take a break and make some calls to your fiends.

After you are done installing OpenCv, then comes the issue of how to use it. I was using openCV with C++ and tried some sample examples of O'Rielly book.
After a little searching I figured out that to include the OpenCv files while compiling my C++ files I need to use :

g++ `pkg-config --cflags opencv` `pkg-config --libs opencv` filename.cpp -o test

Now, this is neither easy to remember nor easy to type every time I compile some code. So, I found this nice little hack of adding aliases.

There exists a .bashrc file in your home folder. It is basically a config file for your login profile. One can add aliases for terminal commands in this file and then use them :

alias gcv="g++ `pkg-config --cflags opencv` `pkg-config --libs opencv`"

Now whenever, I type gcv in my terminal , it is interpreted as g++ blah blah blah.

I will keep adding the progress of my project to this blog, so stay tuned.

The Laziness Prevails..!!

2010-01-04T09:47:00.001-08:00

Finally another day passes by.. And I probably did, nothing. At the same time, when I recall those days when each second used to matter like anything. I am just wondering where's the motivation gone.

Probably its time to figure out the sources. Probably, at that time the source of motivation used to be, excitement to know, to learn, to work in a sort of professional environment. Although the environment was not all that professional, but the work I was doing was surely pretty much professional. Btw, for the unaware ppl (if any, reading this blog) I am referring to the summers of 2008, while I had started working on FoodForce2.

Things now have seemed to change, the interests have changed. It seems that now I am tending to become more and more materialistic, instead of thinking about what I can learn from things, I tend to think what can I earn from those things. Probably its the fact that everyone around too seems to think in the same way.

The consequences of the above thinking seem to be pretty clear. There are 100's of tasks (count as 3) that I should have been doing, but I seem to be uninterested in most of them because of the reason that they don't give me any materialistic benefit in the very near future. All that I am doing is sitting like a Dumb A##, wasting my time, waiting for some good( nowadays, good means with a high package) company to visit the campus and hire me, just because on some lucky day, I might be able to prove that I am good at solving puzzles. Sounds lame but yeah its the truth.

Renaissance

2009-12-31T10:40:00.001-08:00

Finally the damn year is over...
Probably this was the sickest year of my life. A full damn year wasted. There are two ways I can write this blog, I can either cry about all the shitty things (believe me its a long long list) that happened in 2009 or maybe I can hope for the good things to happen in 2010.

I will probably go with the latter. Lets first go for the wish list, what I want from 2010 -:

1.) The first thing I want in 2010 is the ability to think clearly. I am sickin tired of living like an idiot.
2.) I want to figure out, what do I want to do in future, and be sure of it. Also, I want to generate the courage to follow my decision and work hard for the same.
3.) I want to have a better social life, I have been living life like a scientist who is busy with nothing in his basement. I probably deserve something better. I need to make more friends, and also like them.
4.) Finally a list of a few materialistic things,(which are optional) a better computer, a few good friends, and a nice girlfriend.

Now for the things I want to follow or implement in my life :

1.) I will think good about everyone. I will never think bad for anyone.
2.) I will stop running for doing things that I actually don't want to do, but I do them just for the sake of proving others that I am capable of doing them.
3.) I will try to figure out whats the thing I love to do and try and do that.
4.) I will be brave!!

Thinking Nothing

2009-10-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

Finally, I have got out of my place and breaking the sad daily schedule of college-home-college after a long time. And probably this would be my first experience of writing a blog on a train.

Sadly, Rupi and Rohil have sat on a separate two seater and are chatting there ass off like a happily married couple, and I have got bored after listening to radio, playing games on my cell phone and probably looking out of the window too.And also I am sitting with this fat guy who is busy looking out, sleeping and talking on his phone.

So, finally I thought why not lets write a blogpost, and here I am back to torcher people with my thoughts. Well coming to thoughts, I have been lately thinking that how can one "think nothing". Well first of all according to me thinking nothing means, to reach a state of mind in which there are no computations going on. Probably this is very difficult stage to reach for any brain.

The first time I practiced thinking nothing ,I ended up thinking a lot about how to think nothing, which led me to think about a lot of things. So, effectively in a quest to think nothing, which could have been considered partially successful if I would have decreased the number of computations going on in my brain, I ended up increasing the number of computations in my brain. So, this can be considered as a total disaster.

The learning which I learnt from the above exercise was that one can never think nothing, by thinking that he will think nothing. So, the immediate consequence which comes to the mind is that probably one can think nothing, if he forgets about thinking nothing and lives his normal life and wait for such a moment to come when he is thinking nothing. But sadly there is a bug with this scheme too. Firstly, this state of thinking nothing is too unlikely to happen. Secondly, even if we suppose that this scenario occurs and your mind goes into a state in which it is thinking nothing, there would be no way in which it can register an event somewhere so that it can recall that at some time it was thinking nothing. Neither you would be able to know that you are thinking nothing because to come to know about this state of your mind you would be required to think, but you are thinking nothing. Thirdly, one also can't take help from a friend to record the instance when you would be thinking nothing, as he can never know that whether you are thinking something or not.

So probably this bring us to a point where we can safely assume that you can never "think nothing".

Any comments about your theories and experiments of thinking nothing are most welcome.

The tale of two Minds

2009-08-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Finally my blog has waken up after a long long night. Now, as I am writing after a long time, I thought I should write about my experience during that time.

During these two months I went on a trip to Hyderabad, for an internship. And yeah, it was another great experience in my life. I wouldn't like to talk about all the pleasures that they provided to us, instead I should be talking about all the things that I learnt from this experience of mine.

I would first start with the positives or say apparently the positives. Well, Its been two days in Delhi. And now I feel that we have been living " A perfect life in a perfect world" in Hyderabad. Almost everything that one could take tension about was being handle by them. Our almost only tension was to code and complete our work. Well these were the thoughts of a lazy and greedy Mohit Taneja inside me.

There was another idealistic and perfectionist Mohit Taneja inside me and sadly his thoughts were totally different. According to him all these luxuries and benefits which made one believe that he is living a perfect life, were there just to distract him from the fact that one is working on things which any guy with a graduation in computer science can do. The luxuries were there to make the geeks so used to them that they never leave the company, and start doing something more useful, which could be potentially competitive to company.

Then there was a nature loving Mohit Taneja, who was always busy enjoying the weather in Hyderabad, and the well maintained pahaadi of company. And yeah how can we forget the innumerable visits to the sarowar. Well in any case this Mohit didn't gave a damn about the rest of the things concerning the above two Mohit's so no point discussing his thoughts.

Now coming back to the present situation with these two Mohit Taneja's ,(The idealistic one and the greedy one), they are now creating two different threads of thought in my mind. The idealistic says that forget about all the comforts that company provided (or say would be providing) and try and realize your own potential, go on for something like a masters degree from some amazing university or say go on to start your own startup. On the other hand the greedy boy says, just get a job in some good company, pataofy a nice girl, wouldn't be too tough (I guess) after getting a job in a great company. Settle down nicely and enjoy your life with the awesome income that the great company is gonna give you. And not to forget the luxuries which makes one's life almost perfect.

And as usual, I am spending time writing this post and thinking about who of these two are correct.

[Guest Blog] Reddy goes on.....

2009-07-09T03:22:00.000-07:00

Taneja....Tanu...Thats his name...
The first time i met him was at bhangra practice for the cultural event at MS.....
N thats the last thing he shud be doing on earth....DANCE!!!! It looks as if he's fighting with some1.....
Par haan....He's the pretty much similar to me..Happy Go Lucky sorts...Though he's more hawabaaz than me.......
We connected pretty well since day1 and came up with a back up plan if we forget steps on stage...The frog jump....That was awesome...I miss all those bhangra practice sessions.....

Coming to kind of guy(gay) he is.....Friendly,Hawabaaz,Fun to be with......
Though I have been with him jus for 3-4 weeks,I can say he's a very nice guy and a true friend....
The kind of friend u'll need during ur bad times....Always there to support u...
But ya...That support has an expiry date(as happened with rathi)..then he'll start pulling ur leg...

So this is Taneja from my perspective......
So tanu...Hamesha aise hi rehna....Friendly,Hawabaaz,down to earth....
Will miss u.....
Hope we get to meet again...
Keep in touch....

Reddy

[Guest Post] Mr. Neta describes his chela

2009-05-31T03:04:00.000-07:00

This is a guest-post by the all too famous "Neta" writing about the author of this blog. In my humble opinion, the author of this blog is a very diligent, hard-working and intelligent person. He also knows how to maintain a work-fun balance and can be ascribed to have a good sense of humor. Ahmm... too diplomatic.

Well, you know what, Mohit has been a great friend all these times. Although, I was supposed to mentor him, I have myself been taught a lot in the past 15 months or so. We have bickered, quarreled and had fun for a long time. Let us start with the work relationship, coz that was how we got to know each other. The first time I got to know Mohit was when he came in as a volunteer to work for AI Challenge while he was in his second year. I was impressed with his intelligence at that time, and he went on to spend a lot of time on the event along with others. The event was ahmm kindda ok.. we fluked at many places.. all thanks to my amateur leadership and our combined relative in-experience. Afterwards, I approached him to work with me on FoodForce2. He joined in coz he had nothing better to do with his time. I offloaded all the work to him to go intern in Hyderabad, while Mohit was left juggling between FoodForce2 and girlfriend :). Regarding work, we used to have no half measures, even now! You can see that even in the quality of the beta release of Foodforce2 project. If I ever ask Mohit to work on a deadline, he will make sure that the deadline comes through even if it means spending nights working on it. He has this amazing knack of learning new things at breath-taking pace. He can hack around stuff, be patient with things and has the strength to work in difficult circumstances(remember your sucky computer and long hours of power outages). He has got a good way of talking with people and knows how to do masti in life.

I have been writing a lot of good things. You must be thinking, is there nothing bad about this guy? Well the bashing starts now! First of all his coding really sucked when he started out, its not the case now though. His writing is not too good either, but he is working on it. He is either too confident sometimes or is too weak to take decisions at other times. He has the moments when he really deserves praise, which I make sure I never give to him :P. Although, I know I am evil, but I have always believed that with Mohit, too much praise can sometimes go to his head.

All in all, although we started as a senior-junior coming together to work for mutual benefit. Now, its kindda different (Ahh!! how I long for those days when he used to hang onto every single word of mine, however stupid it used to be...) I like it better this way though. Wishing you all the best for your internship and for the wonderful life ahead of you.

My Visit to St. Stephens

2009-05-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

The wheel of memories revolves back to those golden days of holidays after class XII. I had managed to get quite a decent marks (93% , at that time they sounded like 'awesome dude'). Although I knew that I was meant for doing an engineering, but still my cousin (he was in Khalsa College at that time) compelled me to fill the application form for St. Stephens and asked me to come for the interview.

I still remember that day. I was totally unprepared, early morning I was rushing to get photocopies of my certificates. It was a hot day in the summers of '06. I finally reached St. Stephens from my house (which in itself was a big enough task for me). My cousin had came there to accompany me or maybe enjoy the pleasure of encountering the selection process of St. Stephens( As the college was presented in such a way to me, he and his friends considered me 'lucky chap'). Anyways, we went into the institution, which was supposedly good ( I felt so when I searched the pic displayed above, lol..). We entered the room where the people who had came for the interview were to report. I got a spooky feeling in that room. Even on a hot summer afternoon, I was feeling the need for more light over there.

The person in charge asked us to fill a form about personal details, credentials and marks and all (which I had already filled in the form submitted earlier). And then it was the time to submit the photocopy of the documents and get them attested by also showing the originals. Then was the time when things started going wrong, I had the photocopy of my character certificate but the original was missing (most probably I had left that on the photocopy shop). Well in any case he somehow allowed us to sit for the interview after writing "Original Character not there" on the form that I had just filled. And that form was handed back to me , for referrence purposes to be used by the interviewers. I was just wondering that whether the interviewers sitting in there would be checking my credentials (which according to me were very limited) or enjoy the shit created by this guy.

Soon we joined a group of people who were waiting for giving an interview to get admission into physics honors. Almost all of them were like going through some book of physics or reading from some register or looking out for some advice from the students of the college. Well there were also those who were just relaxing to get over the tension in their mind regarding the interview. Well my cousin and I were among the ones who could be noticed from almost a mile that they are either trespassers or they are here just for having fun with the interviewers. We both were discussing topics like " Are you know NFS most wanted has been released, I got a pirated cd yesterday". And he was busy telling me tales of Khalsa college. Soon we had attracted everybody's attention towards ourself. I guess our talks were also helpful to them in releiving tension.

Soon it was time, my name was called for the next student to get into the danger room. I stood up with full confidence, my cousin wished me luck and I was all geared up to enter the game. As I entered the room, the dullness in the environment overcame the confidence inside me. They first started to complaining about some discrepancies in the compilation in my result, the marks in the form filled by me and those in the list compiled by them were not the same. Well this thing got me confident as it was the mistake of those idiots who were given the task of compiling the list for them. Then came the question "What are your favorite topics of interest in physics?". Well since I was quite beefed up with the confidence inside me, I came up with an answer "You know, I like physics as a subject, you can ask me anything." Just after finishing my sentence I could hear the warning bells ringing loud in my head. They were dazzled at first but as I was sitting in north campus and not some engineering college, I was asked the question "Okay, tell us something about the thermocouple?". Now this was the most unimportant topic in the whole damn syllabus of physics. And they were interested in its theory, but still I was able to give them an answer which was like okay. I guess they were expecting me to vomit out the whole one page of the CBSE book.

Than after knowing quite well about my screwed up knowledge of the subject they came to the topic of "Why haven't I applied for hostel?". The answer was simple "Because I am not serious about getting admission in here". But I thought it wouldn't be good to be outright blatant. I tried to fool around by saying that there is a cousin of mine who travels from Gurgaon everyday. Just after that they were on "Which course is he doing?" well I wasn't that good at lying but still I replied fast enough to keep them away from guessing that I was bluffing , "Eco Honors". The next one was a tricky one "Which college??". Well I wasn't aware of much of the colleges in North Campus at that time. So... I named a college which didn't had Eco honors as a trade (I don't remember its name as of now). Well I guess they had evaluated enough out of me by that time. I came out happily and before I had even closed the door, my cousin asked "Hey, how was it??" and well even I was more interested in replying to him that according to me my first interview went great, I replied "Mast". I got so engaged in replying to him that my leg got stuck into the door and I almost tripped. And yeah my voice was loud enough to be heard by all the people waiting outside and even the interviewers inside. And as soon I got the balance in my body, I realized a big noise of the door banging against the wall. Well I was expected to close the door by my hand as the spring attached to it was quite tight which made it banged against the other one. After that I got a feeling that, maybe those creepy rooms were so because they were meant to be.

Anyways, I had machaofied at one of the premier institutes in Delhi University. and even after that I was walking proudly in the lawns of the institute. I guess NSIT was written in my destiny...

Jab Tak Sooraj Chand Rahega, Hamaara Neta Deepank Rahega...

2009-05-25T04:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, guys after a lot of requests from our dear mate , Deepank Gupta, I have finally agreed to write a post on this guy. Many of you would be familiar with this face.
Yes, this is the same face that many of you might have seen in Admin, with his tiny neck hidden between a huge crowd of juniors, carefully listening to the bhashan by the great personality, our honorable Mr. Neta .

I guess most of the people visiting this blog would be quite familiar with the highly diplomatic behavior of our dearest Mr. Neta. He always has some bhashan ready for everyone in every situation. And not to forget he is not like the others, in the sense he knows how to captivate your attention. And make you feel like say, "Dude he definitely knows a lot "(I have started appending 'of bullshit' to the above line). But yeah thats after spending a long time of 1-2 years of bhashanbaji. Infact I myself have got into this bhashanbaji and you know who to blame...

In the early days his bhashans seemed like useful. Infact, I would have to admit that yes they were useful. In those he used to address issues like, 'How to coordinate??','How to be patient about the results? (Yes they dont come instantly)',And yeah the great funda how can I forget it 'If you think everything is going right, then very soon you will realize that you have messed up everything'. This thing goes specially for the coding. And as far I can recall the answer to all my technical queries from him, there used to be a very standard reply 'Google it yaar!!'.

Then came the big and the most important bhashan. I must accept that it is due to this one that I would be soon leaving to Hyderabad. This one was regarding my messed up 'attitude towards work'. I can still recall there were news of Amazon coming to campus for internship. And after a lot of revisions of my crappy resume, I finally asked him 'What do they ask in interview?' and the reply was 'Why dont you give me a demo interview??' . Trust me I was teared apart in two pieces. Within 5 minutes I received a call, and i gave 'The Interview'. Which according to me went quite fine, but after some more time I was made to realize that it wasn't, even though I had answered quite a number of questions, the 'attitude' was very very wrong or said to be wrong. Okay it was wrong, I can bet that even you might be having the same attitude towards an interview. Then came the long long bhashan, which was later documented here for public use.

Obviously, how can we forget the brainwash session of our dear junior Vijit. Bechaare ke MBA karke, lambi gaadi khreedne ke, bada bangla banane ke, 10 logon ko aage peeche ghumaane ke plans par paani pher diya hamare Mr. Neta ne. Within 30 minutes he was made to realize that he was not meant to be an MBA type of a guy, even though he had the caliber to crack CAT. But I had already told you Mr. Neta is very much impressive. So within an hour or so, we had Vijit thinking of masters in MIT, the techie things and blah! and blah! and blah...... (yes the list was as long as this streak of dots)

But still at the end I would like to thanks Mr. Neta (as he will be soon leaving us alone, thank god :P) for giving those few (1 out of 10) bhashans which were really very helpful.

Keep Rocking Deepank!!