Techgyan

Know your Battery status the command line way

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:55:00 +0000

Well no big deal:-). The battery information can be easily got by clicking on the battery icon in your Ubuntu's taskbar. The good thing here is you will know from which file the information of the battery is fetched.
To know the current state of the battery:
pradeep@pradeep-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charging
present rate: 0 mA
remaining capacity: 3599 mAh
present voltage: 12578 mV

To know all the info regarding your laptop battery:
pradeep@pradeep-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present: yes
design capacity: 4400 mAh
last full capacity: 3789 mAh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 10800 mV
design capacity warning: 185 mAh
design capacity low: 129 mAh
capacity granularity 1: 56 mAh
capacity granularity 2: 3604 mAh
model number: VE06047
serial number: 453
battery type: LION
OEM info: STL-LG22

Ahh, 3789mAh/4400mAh = 87%, Not bad after 1.5 years of torture to my lappy;-). Let me know your' s too.

Twittering the command line way

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:26:00 +0000

As you might have noticed my previous post was browsing the command line. Now lets see how to twitter the command line way:-);-)
At first you need to install cURL.(a client for getting files from servers) to post to Twitter through the Terminal which can be installed using the following command:

pradeep@pradeep-laptop:sudo apt-get install curl

With cURL installed, you can post to Twitter from the terminal window by using the following syntax:

pradeep@pradeep-laptop:curl -u yourusername:yourpassword -d status="Your Message Here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

You will receive a response containing the XML coding for your post which acts as a confirmation that your post was submitted.

So have fun twittering the command line way:-)

Post in your reviews:-)

The command line way of browsing

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:41:00 +0000

One of the best things in Linux I like is the command line way of doing things. Well now I can do almost all my work from the terminal and the latest being browsing and chatting. The only thing I cannot do is viewing images and watching videos which soon might be possible:-).
So how do I browse from my terminal??? I thought was it possible? I have realised lately there's help for everything and anything on Linux. After doing a small research I found out this cute command line app called "Elinks"(command line browser)

Ever wondered how fast the browser Elinks is ??? No pop ups, no images, but absoultely cool plain test views,option to see images using eog(Eye Of Gnome) , tabbed browsing, history, bookmarks, history : everything one might need in a modern day browser. It doesn't crash , doesn't require any extra plugins for working. Actually above anything else its the speed of browsing is what that beats me ! Brilliant! Don know what adjective would describe the power of elinks. Check out the google page opened on elinks.
Accessing my Gmail account is fun in elinks. So damn fast!!
"finch" is a command line chat client which is the same as pigdin.:-)

elinks can be installed on your ubuntu as follows:
#pradeep@pradeep-laptop: sudo apt-get install elinks

PS: I agree that GUI way of doing things is friendly,easy and all. But after a few tries the command liners are easy to use , more productive and damn cool!!!

Always try and do things differently:-);-)

SMS Typing

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:25:00 +0000

Of late I have been solving a lot of problems. Here s a problem which you guys can solve.

Cell phones have become an essential part of modern life. In addition to making voice calls, cell phones can be used to send text messages, which are known as SMS for short. Unlike computer keyboards, most cell phones have limited number of keys. To accommodate all alphabets, letters are compacted into single key. Therefore, to type certain characters, a key must be repeatedly pressed until that character is shown on the display panel.

In this problem we are interested in finding out the number of times keys on a cell phone must be pressed to type a particular message.

In this problem we will assume that the key pad of our cell phone is arranged as follows.

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

| | abc | def |

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

| ghi | jkl | mno |

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

| pqrs | tuv | wxyz |

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

| |sp | |

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

In the above grid each cell represents one key. Here SP means a space. In order to type the letter ‘a’, we must press that key once, however to type ‘b’ the same key must be repeatedly pressed twice and for ‘c’ three times. In the same manner, one key press for ‘d’, two for ‘e’ and three for ‘f’. This is also applicable for the remaining keys and letters. Note that it takes a single press to type a space.

Input:
The first line of input will be a positive integer T where T denotes the number of test cases. T lines will then follow each containing only spaces and lower case letters. Each line will contain at least 1 and at most 100 characters.

Output:
For every case of input there will be one line of output. It will first contain the case number followed by the number of key presses required to type the message of that case. Look at the sample output for exact formatting.

Sample Input : Sample Output

welcome to ulab : 29

good luck and have fun : 41

Problemsetter: Shamim Hafiz

Special Thanks: Sohel Hafiz

You can download the solution done by me and my friend amruth at here.
The code was compiled and executed on a gcc compiler

Bash SpellChecker

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:46:00 +0000

Reason for this post is that i tend do a lot of typing mistakes while typing at the terminal:-).
Spell checking in bash can be enabled adding the following line below into your bashrc file

shopt -s cdspell

#pradeep@pradeep-laptop:gedit ~/.bashrc

Add the command mentioned above to the end of the file and save.

That’s all :)

If you want to enable this for all the users, then append this to your /etc/bash.bashrc (in Ubuntu) or /etc/bashrc (in Fedora). Of course, you need the root privilege to edit the files in /etc.

Now try these
cd /hoem
cd /hoe

Ain't it cool.

So by the way what is a bashrc file?
Ok in short it is a script which is run by the bash shell when ever a terminal is invoked once you login.
To know more please see /usr/share/doc/bash/INTRO.gz as in "Ubuntu 9.04". Not sure about other versions. It should be the same according to me.

Microsoft Visio

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Ok i don usually like writing about microsoft stuff:-). But saw my friend amarnath installing this software, so writing:-)

Microsoft Visio (pronounced VIZ-ee-oh, not VIZH-ee-oh) is a diagramming program for Microsoft Windows that uses vector graphics to create diagrams. It is currently available in two editions: Standard and Professional.

The Standard and Professional editions both share the same interface, but the latter has additional templates for more advanced diagrams and layouts as well as unique functionality that makes it easy for users to connect their diagrams to a number of data sources and display the information graphically.^[1]^[2]

Microsoft acquired Visio Corporation in 2000. Visio 2007 was released on 30 November 2006. Also released alongside version 2002 were Enterprise Network Tools, an add-on product enabling automated network and directory services diagramming, and the Visio Network Center, a Web site where users could locate the latest network documentation content and exact-replica network equipment shapes from 500 leading manufacturers.^[3] The former has been discontinued, while the latter's shape-finding features are now integrated into the program itself.^[4]

Microsoft has revealed that the next version of Microsoft Visio will feature the ribbon user interface
Source:Wikipedia

Vim plugin you must install

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Ok why I am writing this post.Two reasons for it:
1) We have a Web Programming Lab this semester
2) I hardly use windows now:-). Using windows has exponentially decreased:-)

Snipmate.vim is probably the best snippets plugin for vim. A snippet is a piece of often-typed text or programming construct that you can insert into your document by using a trigger followed by a tab. It was written by Michael Sanders.

Here is an example usage of snipmate.vim. If you are a C programmer, then one of the most often used forms of a loop is “for (i=0; condition ; i++) {}”. Without snippets you’d have to type this out every time. Even though it takes just another second, these seconds can add to minutes throughout the day and minutes can add to hours over longer periods of time. Why waste your time this way? With snippets you can type just “for tab” and snipmate will insert this whole construct in your source code automatically! If “i” or “n” weren’t the variable you wanted to use, you can now use tab and shift-tab to jump to next/previous item in the loop and rename them!

Michael also created an introduction video for his plugin where he demonstrates how to use it. Check it out:

snipMate.vim Introductory Screencast from Michael Sanders on Vimeo.

How to install snipmate.vim?

To get the latest version:

1. Download snipmate.zip.
2. Extract snipmate.zip to ~/.vim (on Unix/Linux) or ~/etc/vim (wherever vim is installed)
#pradeep@pradeep-laptop: sudo unzip snipmate.zip -d ~/etc/vim (provided snipmate.zip is in your HOME folder else provide the desired path)
3. Run :helptags ~/.vim/doc or ~/etc/vim/doc
4. Restart Vim.

The plugin comes with predefined snippets for more than a dozen languages (C, C++, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Objective C, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Shell, HTML, VimScript). Be sure to check out the snippet files in the “snippets” directory under your ~/.vim or ~\vimfiles directory.

If you need to define your own snippets (which you most likely will need), create a new file named “language-foo.snippets” in the “snippets” directory. For example, to define your own snippets for C language, you’d create a file called “c-foo.snippets” and place snippets in it.

To learn about snipmate snippet syntax, type “:help snipmate” and locate the syntax section in the help file.
Have Fun!
Post in your comments if any queries!

Install Apache webserver,mysql,perl and php

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:40:00 +0000

For all those who dont have apache server,mysql,perl and php on your Linux OS here's a way you can install.
People who have installed Fedora 8/9[Full installation] all the above gets installed automatically. But if you have installed other distributions like Ubuntu, Open SUSE, Red Hat etc, here is a way you can do.

If you install the above softwares separately its a very tedious job believe me. But you need not do that. The idea was suggested by my class mate Abdul Munim. There is a package by name XAMPP which installs everything including many cool things.So how do you go about it

So wat is XAMPP??
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

So how do you go about it?
At first you need to download the package file.You can find the file: here
Now copy the file to your home directory.Now you are three steps away:-)

Step 1: Installation
Go to a Linux shell and login as the system administrator root:
#su

Extract the downloaded archive file to /opt:
#pradeep@pradeep-laptop:tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.7.1.tar.gz -C /opt

Warning 1: Please use only this command to install XAMPP. DON'T use any Microsoft Windows tools to extract the archive, it won't work.
Warning 2: already installed XAMPP versions get overwritten by this command.

Step 2: Start
To start XAMPP simply call this command:
pradeep@pradeep-laptop:/opt/lampp/lampp start

You should now see something like this on your screen:
Starting XAMPP 1.7.1...
LAMPP: Starting Apache...
LAMPP: Starting MySQL...
LAMPP started.

Step 3: Test
OK, that was easy but how can you check that everything really works? Just type in the following URL at your favourite web browser:

http://localhost

Now you should see the start page of XAMPP containing some links to check the status of the installed software and some small programming examples.

You are done now. If you any queries/problems regarding the installation,please post in the comments and i will try to fix the problem:-)

Power of Yahoo Pipes

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:03:00 +0000

Was wondering from many days what is this Yahoo Pipes all about. Knew it is something special. When i used it i was completely shocked. Its such a powerfull tool!! How can i describe it???

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

Where does pipe come into play??

Suppose you are only interested in cricket and football news, Generally when you visit a sports website you see news associated with every sport. With yahoo pipes you can customise your results according to your needs with data inputs from various sports websites. The pipe i created is below:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=9532375934b692f6eccb152359e7b1cf

An another pipe which u guys can create is regarding movie theatres. There are many multiplexes/theatres in Bangalore like Inox,PVR,Fun Cinemas etc.. All of them will have their own websites. You can obtain data from all these websites and create a pipe which gives you info about which movie is in which theatre etc!

Well source of input need not to be from websites alone. It could be a data from feeds of a site, google search results ,yahoo search results and also data from online spread sheets etc.

Once u create your pipe you can publish it and add it google reader, google homepage, yahoo page or embedd in your webisite

Yahoo Pipes is so simple and powerful that any can use learn and develop their own application. This one blog post of mine is not enough to describe the Yahoo Pipes. The feel of you guys learnin and designing your own pipes is completely different. So go ahead and give a try.

To get you started with watch this intro video:

Learn How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes @ Yahoo! Video

Install VLC 1.0.0 in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:21:00 +0000

Earlier in ubuntu , on execution of the following command below you could have installed the latest version of vlc media player

#sudo apt-get install vlc

But doing the same now will not install the latest i.e 1.0.0 version.To install the latest vlc player in ubuntu follow the steps below:

=>At first edit the file : /etc/apt/sources.list file. To do it execute the command below

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

For Jaunty Users:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/vlc/ubuntu jaunty main
For intrepid users:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/vlc/ubuntu intrepid main
Save and exit the file
=>Install GPG key using the following command
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 7613768D
=>Update sourcelist using the following command
sudo apt-get update
=>Install vlc using the following commnd
sudo apt-get install vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc

Facebook Launches Developer Contest in India

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:26:00 +0000

Facebook has been very popular in India. Allmost everyone is on Facebook now.Considering the popularity facebook has launched a contest in India. All you guys have to do is develop cool apps for facebook.

India ranks second in the number of software developers with 3.9 million software developers and Facebook seems to want to leave no stone unturned in gaining their attention. The Facebook Developer’s Challenge focuses on Facebook Apps (on of the most interesting aspects of Facebook with high user retention and thousands of fans) and Facebook. Connect, an important useful tool which serves as a good platform for publishers and for social media in general.

Three prize winners in each of the two contest categories will receive cash awards. For each category (Apps and Connect):

First Place Prize : Four Thousand Dollars U.S. ($4,000.00 USD)

Second Prize : Two Thousand Dollars U.S. ($2,000.00 USD).

Third Prize : One Thousand Dollars U.S. ($1,000.00).

Which takes the total cash prize for this amount close to INR 3.4 Lakhs!

The Contest began on July 2, 2009 and will end at 11:29:59 AM Indian Standard Time on September 11, 2009. The contest is open to all legal residents of India who are over the age of 16 at the time of entry. For more information,

check www.facebook.com/developercontestindia.

Win Free Webdomain and Hosting

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:48:00 +0000

Please vist ChethStudios for more details. Check out its really cool.

Enable Root Login in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:02:00 +0000

Everytime i had to install any application in Ubuntu, i had to use sudo as a prefix. Recently i had installed a program which wass installed in the usr directory. Everytime i had to run the program, it was asking me for a super user priviledge. This was totally annoying me.By default when you install ubuntu, the root login is disabled by default. Follow the below steps and enable root login for ubuntu.

To enable root login:
1)Go to System->Administration->User and Groups
2)Click on Unlock and enter the password which you had given during installation
3)Select the root profile and click on properties, and set a password.
4)One last thing, after doing the above steps go to System->Administration->Login Window
5)Click on the security tab and click tick the checkbox which says "Enable System Administrator Login"

After doing the above steps, Logout and login as root.

PS: Be very careful when you are in the root profile coz you have access to everything. Any small mistake might crash your system.

World E Book Fair

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:07:00 +0000

There is this World E-Book fair (From 4 JUL 2009 Till 4 AUG 2009) where 2.5 million e-books in PDF& MP3 format are available free to download.

Hope you guys get what you are trying to find.

Have Fun!!

worldebookfair

Microsoft Vision of the Future!!

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Absolutely Hilarious!!!

Google Squared

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:35:00 +0000

I was just visitng the site labs.google.com and found this experiment intersting. It is called google square. So what is google square?

Google Squared is an experimental tool by google that takes a category(like digital cameras,mobile phones,US presidents etc) and attempts to create a square of information, automatically fetching and orgainsing facts from across the web. You can modify the square by adding and deleting rows/coloumns which you do not like. You can also save it and come back later.Hope you liked this post.

Google Squared

Google Translate

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Have u ever struggled of not understanding a language. Want a translation from one language to the other as in English->German or Vice versa. Check out Google Translate. Its cool.. Hope this helps you in some point in time.

Use Twitter to Spot ISS station

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:13:00 +0000

Long time coz its exam time for me. Well this article i read in the newspaper today and found it interesting and i am sharing it her..

Two journalists have built an online service that would let twitter users around the world to spot the Internatinal Space Station(ISS), without a telescope.

People using twitter can receive an alert on their twitter profile when the ISS passes the location mentioned in their twitter profile.

All you have to do is follow the twitter account www.twitter.com/twisst.

The service is operating in a testing phase now. Website accompaning the twitter messages will be launched in a week. As a very bright spot ISS crosses the sky in about three minutes.

Twisst may even be the first service on twitter to send out such a highly personalised information. It sends messages to every follower separately

Photopedia-Images for humanity

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Parts Flickr and Wikipedia, photo site and desktop application Fotopedia lets users create and upload topic-driven collaborative web albums complete with Google Maps information, Wikipedia entries, tagging, and more.

Fotopedia's desktop application helps you create and share your photo albums with friends. You can also upload photos from your desktop to the Fotopedia site, turning them into a slideshow web album complete with an associated Wikipedia entry and Google Maps information. Once there, you can browse other albums by topic (e.g., geography and travel), add relevant photos licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr, and follow other Fotopedia users. If you don't think a specific photo should be included as part of an album, click on the thumbs down icon to rate it accordingly.

Fotopedia also allows posting your albums to Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook.

Just visit once i feel its a cool one

PS:The database is yet to develop and it all depends on the number of users uploading the pictures..

Torrent2exe- convert ur torrent to an exe file and download

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:44:00 +0000

This one's a Beauty!!! True beauty. Have you ever wondered of converting ur torrent files to an exe file!! Yes it's possible and this wonderful site does it.

Well why convert a torrent file to an exe file??

One reason is because i use a usb modem for browsing, and if i download using bit-torrent or any other torrent client i hardly get a speed of 5 kbps.After converting it to an exe file and started the download i got a pretty good speed of 50 kbps and more depending on the seeds.

Second reason, you’ll find it hard to believe but there are a great number of people who are still not familiar with the whole concept of using and downloading with torrents. This popular file-sharing method has been around for sometime but I still get a lot of questions such as: “What now? I downloaded the torrent but nothing is happening.” I assume it’s because of the fact that downloading files via torrent is not as straightforward as downloading files directly from the server or from the web.Using this service, users can download files with the torrent protocol without the need to install a torrent client.

Well its very use to use. Go to the website torrent2exe, paste the link of the torrent or upload the torrent file already there on your computer and convert it to an exe file. Then download the exe file which is hardly 500kb. Double click on the exe file to start the download. You can also resume and pause the downlaod. No torrent clients required at all!! Isn't this cool!!Post in your comments and let me know about ur experience with this.

Torrent2exe

show RSS- download ur favourite Tv Shows

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:12:00 +0000

I had written a post on feed my torrents which kept track of the latest tv show torents and you could retrieve with your RSS reader. Unfortunately feed my torents is no longer working. Well no worries i found yet another one which performs the same task as feed my torrents. Its called the show RSS.

showRSS is a web service that allows you to keep track of your favorite TV shows from a website or from a RSS reader. After registering (and logging in!), you'll have to select what are the TV shows that you want to track and then you'll just have to subscribe to your feed with any RSS reader (Google Reader, your browser...) or even with your torrent client (for example, µtorrent supports RSS feeds for automatic downloads). You can also browse latest torrents for your TV shows from this website, instead of using the RSS feed, or you can use both as well.

ShowRSS

Futuristic Concept Laptop Designs

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:46:00 +0000

Well i had go this mail from one of my friends Ashu and thought of sharing it here coz i found it really cool..Here are some sexy laptop designs by various companies.

1)Vaio Zoom notebook features a holographic glass screen that goes transparent and a keyboard that turns opaque when turned off. Turn it on and the touchscreen holographic festivities begin.

2) DesCom is basically a two-in-one concept laptop which seamlessly integrates inside a desk.

3)LG Ecological laptop concept uses fuel cell batteries and features organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology, it received a Red Dot Award nomination for best concept design.

4)MacTab is the complement to MyBook in the high-end. The incredibly thin wireless keyboard is used as a protection cover for transportation. It stays in place with a combination of magnets and notches.

These were few which i liked..

Download English,Hindi,kannada,malayalam,telugu,tamil songs

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:26:00 +0000

Wow Wow!!! These were my reactions when i visited this site.. All credits to my roomate Nithin who enthusiastically downloads all the latest kannada songs!!..He happened to discovered this site.All credits to him.Okie whats so special about this site.

1)First thing you can find all the latest songs there.

2)Second thing English,kannada,telugu,hindi songs etc all in one place.

3)Download rate awsome.. As fast as a bugatti veron:-) trust me

4)High Quality Uploads.

Post in your reviews!!

BangaloreLiving.com

WolframAlpha-A Computational Search engine

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:15:00 +0000

Yet another discovery!!. This one is really cool guys. A

computational search engine. So whats this all about.. Let me give you guys an example

1)How many football fields would fit between the Earth and the sun?

2)What's the likelihood of getting 2 heads in 10 coin flips?

There are proper answers for all these questions.

One search engine calculates all that on the fly and more.It's Mathematician Stephen Wolfram's much-hyped "computational knowledge engine"

So what all you can do with this site?

You can compare two stocks,compare comapnies,conversions from one metric form to another,solve equations,calculate probabilities,interests, get a full detail about a country etc and there is no end to it.Please give this a try. I gurantee you guys will enjoy it.

WolframAlpha

Create your Google Profile

noreply@blogger.com (Pradeep Nayak) — Sun, 17 May 2009 19:58:00 +0000

when people search your name on google do they find you.. Well recently google showed google profile results at the bottom of U.S name search query pages.. So go ahead and create your profiles. Your profie can include all the links to your online photo albums, your blog addresses, your interests, where you are staying, what do you do etc........ and many more..

Create Profile