Samik's Blog

Joined Cognizant

2010-01-09T14:50:00.000+05:30

Last week, I joined Cognizant as a Program Analyst Trainee. With this, I began my professional life as well. Now, we are going through the training program. Some more studies and exams for the next 3 months. So, I am very busy these days. My lazy life has been completely rescheduled. I am getting very little time now to spend on the blogosphere.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-02T11:14:00.000+05:30

Wish everyone a Happy New Year. 2009 had been a significant year for me. Most importantly, I graduated in that year as well as began my professional life.
I hope 2010 will bring new hope and happiness to everyone's life.

Bardhaman Book Fair 2009

2009-12-15T22:47:00.013+05:30

I have been to the 32nd Bardhaman Book Fair today with a friend of mine. We roamed for an hour or so and browsed through many old and new books. I bought a Douglas Adams book (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), I was wanting to buy for a while. I am wishing to visit it again later this week.

The book fair is running from December 11 to 20 at Shankari Pukur Utsav Maidan. So if you are in Burdwan, be sure to visit it on or before the next Sunday. Apart from books there are some cultural festivals almost everyday during the fair.

Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks on Dec. 13th

2009-12-11T21:00:00.002+05:30

Just to let you know, the Geminid meteor shower is underway. You should be able to spot some meteors if you look long enough at the sky, say, for 15 minutes. The meteor rate will increase, of course. Though, it is quite cold outside at night, you might not want to miss the peak on Sunday night, Dec. 13th. More than 100 meteors are expected per hour.

A Day in the Internet

2009-12-10T14:30:00.005+05:30

Created by Online Education

Create Beautiful Photo Collage Online

2009-11-19T11:39:00.003+05:30

Here is a great web service from Shape Collage that lets you pull images from webpages and turn them into a nice photo collage. It also supports Flickr or Picasa Web Album links. Below is a butterfly-shaped collage of my Flickr photos!

They also have a desktop software which has additional features like, bigger and better quality collages, more shapes and other options to customize your collage.

Both the online service and the software are free.

Here are some more collages --

My Picasa Web Albums

2009 Durga Puja

Google Image Search - Hubble Space Telescope

Shape Collage Online

Install Go Compiler on Ubuntu

2009-11-13T21:35:00.006+05:30

Google released a new 'experimental' programming language called Go. It's simple, fast, safe, concurrent and fun. All of these were hard to find in the same programming language. And also, Go is open source.

The installation guide for Go is pretty straightforward. Still, I am going to rewrite that specifically for 32-bit Ubuntu (9.10) system.

First you need the set the environment variables. Open the .bashrc file from your home directory. Add the following lines at the end.

export GOROOT=$HOME/go
export GOOS=linux
export GOARCH=386

Next, install mercurial. To do that use the command

$ sudo apt-get install mercurial

You are now ready to download the source code for Go.

$ hg clone -r release https://go.googlecode.com/hg/ $GOROOT

You need to compile the source code. For that you will require gcc, the standard C libraries, the parser generator Bison, make and the text editor ed installed. Run the following command. It will install these things if they are not already installed.

$ sudo apt-get install bison gcc libc6-dev ed make

Create the directory bin in your home folder. You can use the command:

$ mkdir $HOME/bin

Make sure the $HOME/bin directory is in your path. You may have to just log off and re-login after you create the bin directory. The bin directory in your home will be automatically added to $PATH.

To check the contents of PATH variable, use the command

echo $PATH

Now, start the compilation

$ cd $GOROOT/src
$ ./all.bash

That's it. If everything goes well, it will finish by printing

--- cd ../test
N known bugs; 0 unexpected bugs

N will vary from release to release.

Now lets write a simple program.

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
  fmt.Printf("Hello, World\n")
}

Save the program in a file hello.go.
Compile, link and run the program.

To compile:

$ 8g hello.go

To link:

$ 8l hello.8

And to Run:

$ ./8.out

That should print the phrase "Hello, World".

To learn more about the Go Programming language read the tutorial here http://golang.org/doc/go_tutorial.html

Internet Users in India

2009-11-12T08:48:00.003+05:30

The following graph shows internet users as percentage of population in India. You can see how number of internet users has increased from almost 0% in 1994 to 7.2% in 2007. The graph will update itself as more data is available.

And here is a comparison of the same data with other countries.

These and many other interesting public data are made available by Google and can be easily accessed through Google Search.

Google ASCII Art Logo

2009-10-25T20:34:00.005+05:30

  ___                _
 / __|___  ___  __ _| |___ 
| (_ / _ \/ _ \/ _` |   -_)
 \___\___/\___/\__, |_\___|
               |___/

Did you see this? The Google logo changed to an ASCII art version when I searched for "ascii art" in it. A fine piece of easter egg. Google continues to amaze me everyday!

NGC 2623 Merger

2009-10-22T12:35:00.006+05:30

The Hubble Space Telescope took this beautiful image of two spiral galaxies smashing together at breakneck speed. It is 250 million light-years away located in the constellation of Cancer.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0912.html

Goddess Durga is Here Once Again!

2009-09-25T14:42:00.016+05:30

It's durga puja again. A time for fun and entertainment. Celebrations are going on all around. Let me show you some photos of the beautiful puja pandals and durga idols my friends and I took here at Bardhaman. They put huge effort in designing those pandels. There are pandals made of chocolates, earthen pots, and other such bizarre materials to pandals that resemble a temple on a hill!

	Padmashree Sangha Pandal পদ্মশ্রী সংঘ প্যান্ডেল
	Sabuj Sangha (সবুজ সংঘ) Pandal - This pandal is made of earthen bowls. Some 90,000 of them have been used.
	Durga Idol Somewhere Photo by Somnath Sutradhar

Control Music Players from Panel (Ubuntu)

2009-09-24T10:25:00.004+05:30

Music Applet is a great program with which you can control your music player right from the panel. Music Applet shows notifications when new song starts, places useful controls on the panel like, Previous track, Next track, Play/Pause, Rating etc. And it is highly configurable. Many music players are supported by Music Applet, like Rhythmbox, Audacious, Banshee, vlc and others.

You can install Music Applet from Synaptic Package Manager or any other package manager you have on your system. The package is named music-applet. Search for it.

After you have installed it, you can add it to a panel by right-clicking on the panel and selecting "Add to Panel..."

Chandrayaan-1 mission comes to an abrupt end

2009-08-30T11:23:00.011+05:30

Today's headlines have some bad news of the Indian Moon mission. The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has lost contact with its controllers earlier yesterday. Soon after, ISRO announced that the mission was over.

The ISRO press release says

Radio contact with Chandrayaan-I spacecraft was abruptly lost at 0130 Hrs (IST) on August 29, 2009. Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore received the data from Chandrayaan-I during the previous orbit upto 0025 Hrs (IST).
Detailed review of the Telemetry data received from the spacecraft is in progress and health of the spacecraft subsystems is being analysed.
It may be recalled that Chandrayaan-I spacecraft was launched from Satish Dhawan Space Centre Sriharikota on October 22, 2008 .The Spacecraft has completed 312 days in orbit making more than 3400 orbits around the Moon and providing large volume of data from sophisticated sensors like Terrain Mapping Camera, Hyper-spectral Imager, Moon Mineralogy Mapper etc., meeting most of the scientific objectives of the mission.

Chandrayaan-1 launched on October 22 last year was expected to last for 2 years. Nevertheless, according to the project director, Chandrayaan-1 "has done its job technically 100% and scientifically almost 90-95%" in its less than one year lifetime.

Experts said, the reason behind this loss of contact could be a power problem on the spacecraft, or may be it was hit by some space object.

Longest Total Solar Eclipse of the Century

2009-07-15T18:22:00.006+05:30

The Total Solar Eclipse on 22nd July will be visible from parts of India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. What is special about this eclipse is its duration. The maximum duration of totality reaches 6 minute 38.7 second, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean southeast of Japan. It will be surpassed in duration only by the solar eclipse of 13 June, 2132!

In India the eclipse will be seen in the early morning and the duration of totality will range from 3m 14s at Surat in Gujrat to about 3m 47s at Siliguri in West Bengal.

It will be the first total solar eclipse visible from India in this century. And it will have to wait 25 years for the next total solar eclipse.

From Kolkata, a partial solar eclipse of magnitude 0.911 will be seen. That means 91.1 % of the Sun will be covered by the Moon. Here it begins at 5:28 a.m., reaches maximum eclipse at 6:26 a.m., and ends at 7:30 a.m.

For other cities in India take look at this article [pdf].

Here are some more links:

This month's issue of Science Reporter covers this solar eclipse with detailed information and discussions about several related topics, like geometry of eclipses, types of eclipses, shadow bands, the saros cycles, famous historical eclipses etc. It also carries an article on how to photograph a solar eclipse. There are also other excellent astronomy articles as well. They devoted this issue to astronomy to mark the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Update: Clouds spoiled most of the Eclipse. I could only take this picture with my mobile camera.

Well, the clouds did something good. The thinner clouds acted as a natural solar filter!

ISS Visible in Broad Daylight

2009-06-18T11:16:00.005+05:30

Yes, the International Space Station has become so bright, it can now be seen at daytime. Of course, you need to have the right condition for that, like a clear blue sky.

The photo was posted on SpaceWeather.

After 11 years of construction, the International Space Station has grown so large you can see it in broad daylight. "On June 13th, I was watching a red-headed woodpecker's nest when the ISS passed overhead," says Brooke O'Klatner of Charlotte, North Carolina.

You can get exact timings for flybys of ISS and other satellites from Simple Satellite Tracker or Heavens Above.

So, next time you spot a white light flying high above the sky, don't take it as a UFO! It could be just the ISS. Though, it may not be as exciting as spotting a UFO, it is still worth seeing!

Use Zemanta to Blog Smarter

2009-06-14T11:06:00.001+05:30

Image by chucks via Flickr

The Blogger Buzz featured a post about Zemanta, a service that helps you to easily put related images, videos, links etc. in the blog post you are writing. It turned out to be very helpful. It puts a sidebar next to the post editor. After you have written a few sentences, it suggests images, videos relevant to your post. With one click you can insert them into your post.

Besides, Zemanta looks for familiar words and phrases in the post and suggests links for them. In Blogger, the links appears at the bottom of the text editor.

You can install Zemanta in several ways. They have got Firefox extension, IE plugin, and bookmarklets. The bookmarklet is of course the most easy and fast to install and use! If you want to try out, head to the Zemanta website and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar. Now, open the post editor and click the bookmarlet. And voila! All the treasures of the internet are right in front of you to use.

Zamata also works with other blogging platforms like, Wordpress, Live Journal, and the rest.

Google Provides Bengali Transliteration

2009-05-19T21:56:00.007+05:30

Google has now added Bengali to their transliteration service along with three other Indian languages - Gujarati, Marathi and Nepali. Google already provides transliteration services for Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
Transliteration allows users to type words phonetically using an English keyboard. Such as you type 'aami' to get আমি and so on. I was very much eager to have Bengali transliteration service from Google, so that I can sometimes write in my own mother tongue. Besides the transliteration labs page, there is also a iGoogle gadget available. You can try the gadget below.

Update: Now you can use Bengali transliteration on any website. Drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar.

[অ Type in Bengali]

Now when you want to enter text in Bengali on any website, click that bookmarklet. Wait until the message "Transliteration is enabled ..." is displayed. Now click on any textbox to type Bengali!

I am already using it in GMail Chat.

Look here for more information and detailed instruction.

Amazing Photo of Space Shuttle Atlantis

2009-05-16T08:47:00.002+05:30

This is not just a nice photo of the Sun. See the black dot at the lower left corner? That is no Sunspot. It is the Space Shuttle Atlantis. See the cropped image below.

A photographer in Florida has taken this amazing photo of the Space Shuttle Atlantis passing in front of the Sun. This photo is taken just before Atlantis caught up with and captured the Hubble Space Telescope for its last servicing mission. The smaller black dot is the Hubble.

Read Some Poems

2009-05-09T10:22:00.009+05:30

My friend Bilwatosh has started a blog Mycreations and is posting beautiful poems he wrote over the years. It is in Bengali. So you all, bengali poem lovers, do visit his blog.

Here is a sample poem called "অনুভব" ("Feelings")

কল্পনার ঐ অতল তলে/
আকাশ নীলের মাঝে/
লক্ষ শিশুর মন ভেসে যায়/
সকাল-দুপুর-সাঁঝে।/
কাজ মানে তার অকাজ মাঝে/
পায় সে মনের স্ফুর্তি/
দিক ভোলানো রোদের মাঝে,/
সে মন ভোলানোর মূর্তি।/
অভ্রলেহী স্বপ্ন নিয়ে/
চেয়ে দেখে নভঃলোক/
চেয়ে দেখে রূপ,কত অপরূপ/
বিস্ময়াতুর চোখ।/
হরিত্‍ মনের বিস্তার মাঝে/
নীল আকাশের ডাক-/
ডাকে ঐ সাদা,ছোট-বড়,লাল/
দূরে মেঘেদের ঝাঁক।/
ঐ ডাকে সাড়া দিতে আজ মন/
যায় ছুö3;ে ঐ দূরে,/
রূপের আলোকে ঝলসিত/
কার ঐ অন্তঃপুরে।

Cannot see bengali?

Last Mission to Fix Hubble

2009-05-03T21:46:00.006+05:30

Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to launch on May 11, 2009. It is the fifth and last servicing mission to Hubble Space Telescope. This mission will include seven crew members. Astronauts will make five spacewalks to complete to improvements.

Image: From the left are astronauts Michael J. Massimino, Michael T. Good, both mission specialists; Gregory C. Johnson, pilot; Scott D. Altman, commander; K. Megan McArthur, John M. Grunsfeld and Andrew J. Feustel, all mission specialists. Image credit: NASA

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and still functioning perfectly well. It now holds the record for longest continuous orbital observations. To date there has been four service missions to Hubble respectively in 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2002. This mission is called Service Mission 4 (SM4), because NASA split the previous mission SM3 into two parts, SM3A and SM3B, after the third of the six gyroscopes failed. The main objective of this mission is to deliver two new instruments, Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the enhanced Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Both instruments will improve observations of faint light from the youngest stars and galaxies.

Below is the Hubblecast video made for this special occasion.

NASA Website

Ubuntu 9.04 is here

2009-04-24T14:20:00.005+05:30

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope was released yesterday (It's 2009.04.23). You can download it here http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. You can also buy ubuntu CD or DVD or request a free CD. If you are familiar with torrents then consider the Bittorrent download options. It is a more fast and reliable option, I believe.

Ubuntu continues to be my favourite linux distribution for a long time. And now let's see what are the new features in the current upgrade - ext4 file system support, improved boot performance, OpenOffice 3, new notification style and a lot more visual and performance improvements.

Power On Your Computer by Keyboard, Mouse or Alarm

2009-04-24T14:19:00.002+05:30

I found these useful options in the bios settings of my computer. In the Power Management Setup you can enable the Power on by Keyboard and Power on by Mouse options. Then, when you want to power on your computer or wake it up from sleep or you can just double click your mouse or press some key(s) on your keyboard.

Another exciting thing I discovered is that I can start the computer by alarm. You specify a time and date, and the computer starts automatically at that time. It is particularly useful for me for downloading things from the internet at night (I have a broadband plan that provides unlimited night time usage). I don't have to keep the computer On all the time. It now automatically starts at 2 a.m. in the morning, boots into the default OS (which is now Win7), starts the download manager (I have put it in the startup list) and begins downloading!

These options may not be available on all motherboards or bios though.

Back from Vizag

2009-03-18T12:24:00.005+05:30

I have been on a trip to Vishakhapatnam recently. “The jewel of East Coast” is what is said about Vizag. Of course it is. We are on a two day tour, which is a very short time to see everything properly. On the first day we visited Araku valley, tribal museum, Galikonda viewpoint, Anantagiri, Borra caves on a ‘train cum bus’ tour package from APTourism. We also saw the tribal dance (‘Dhimsa’). On the second day we did local sight seeing by Bus (also from APToursm). We visited Simhachalam temple, Thotlakonda, Rushikonda beach, Kailasagiri hills, Submarine museum, Vishakha museum etc. Also, on that day, we did boating in the Bay of Bengal.

	Our train enters a tunnel From Vishakhapatnam to Araku was a 4 and a 1/2 hour train journey. The train moves through 52 such tunnels.
	Gardens at Araku valley
	The tribal museum It portrays the daily life of the tribals
	Galikonda Viewpoint 4000 ft above sea level. Second highest point in the eastern ghats
	Borra caves Discovered by William King George in 1807 in a geological survey. It is a natural cave made of limestone.
	Simhachalam temple
	Thotlakonda 3rd Century BC buddhist ruins
	Rushikonda Beach
	Vishakhanam city from Kailasagiri Hills
	Submarine Museum The Kursura submarine was bought from Russia in 1969. After her decommissioning it was converted into a submarine museum in 2002

Also read my elder brother's blog entry about this trip.

Comet Lulin Comes Closer

2009-02-22T16:59:00.013+05:30

Comet Lulin will be on its closest approach (.41 AU) to earth on 24th February. It will not be much bright though (Max. magnitude 4.0 - 5.0). Still on a dark sky you may be able to spot it as a white splotch against the black sky. Look for it in the constellation Leo [skymap]. It will lie only a few degrees from saturn. The comet actually looks green through powerful telescopes. This is because, its gassy atmosphere, of the size of Jupiter, contains cyanogen(CN) and diatomic carbon(C₂), both glow green in sunlight.

Lulin's orbit is nearly a parabola and it's motion is opposite to that of the planets. So, this particular comet once leaves the inner solar system will never come this way again.

Lulin was discovered in July, 2007 by Ye Quanzhi in a photograph taken at the Lulin Observatory. It's technical name is C/2007 N3. It means that it is the 3rd comet discovered in the second half of July, 2007. The prefix C/ denotes that it is a non-periodic comet.

Comets are designated by the year of their discovery followed by a letter indicating the half-month of the discovery and a number indicating the order of discovery. A prefix is used for denoting nature of the comet. See Comet nomenclature

For more photos and skymaps see here
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/highlights/35992534.html

eSpeak Speech Synthesizer

2009-02-18T20:49:00.005+05:30

eSpeak is a open-source text to speech engine that comes with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It can read text files or stdin inputs.

To invoke it open a terminal and type

$ espeak

Now each line you enter into the prompt will be read aloud.

If you want some long text to be read aloud, start eSpeak with the --stdin option

$ espeak --stdin

Now copy some text from anywhere and paste into the prompt (ctrl+shift+v). Then press Return and (ctrl+d).

If you have a text file, say example.txt, you can set the option -f <text file>

$ espeak -f example.txt