Posts from — November 2007

I just returned from iLugHyderabad’s meeting. It was fun. I met a lot of interesting folks who had dabbled with the new release of Fedora. It is not like I am tempted to try out fedora but it was fun meeting the Fedora enthusiast Rahul Sundaram. Let me recollect what happened during the meet.

The venue for the meet was the astronomy building at Osmania University. The building was being renovated and I managed to whiten my navy blue coloured jacket by plainly brushing against the walls of the building. There was no electricity in the building too. We were discussing about moving to a different room when a professor who was there to attend the talk (teaches at Osmania and has been using Linux for 12 years !!) used an extension cord that somehow could span the length of two floors. The basic infrastructure needed to conduct the event was now complete. We waited for a few more people to arrive but not many turned up. Seemingly many students had exams the very next day and chose to stay back at home/hostel to study. I began discussing about Django newforms with Theju (I met him at mukt.in . He was one of those who did a project on server side validation at the google summer of code. I will take part in this when I go to college for sure. They give out some excellent projects and help in improving one’s coding skills.). Seemingly in December, django’s creators will launch newforms (or is it newforms admin?). Theju promised to teach me how to hack up the admin interface that comes with django.

Someone at the meet with long hair had a lot of troubles with Fedora 8. Seemingly his laptop wouldn’t boot into fedora and grub would get stuck at the “Loading Grub, Stage1.5″ stage. I also remember that I had some troubles with the new linux kernel way back when I used feisty. I placed a bug report here.

After that the talk began. Rahul explained about his association with linux since the days of Red Hat Linux. So automatically becomes part of the elite FOSS gang in Hyderabad.

Rahul turned out to be a jovial speaker and his speech was littered with comic examples dating back to his stint as the “font guy”, “the support guy” for Fedora and Red Hat Linux. Seemingly on one occasion, he was called up by a Fedora user from Greece who claimed that Greek didn’t look good in the Bitstream fonts but looked better in DejaVu Sans. Rahul’s reaction was “Which one is what and what looks better?”. We all had a hearty laugh at this. At the end of the meet, we all had an “introduce yourself” kind of session and there was this guy who worked at google and was all smiles. I just adore google employees. They seem to be in love with what they do and genuinely are “good” at what they do. Krish (mukt.in organizer). So we began talking. I voiced my anger at google’s choice to make us write applications using android in java and to provide an eclipse plugin to top it all. Now eclipse is a PITA. My experience with it lasted 30 minutes. 10 minutes it took to start, 10 minutes to install the pydev plugin and another 10 to close. Rahul then came in with his comment, “Some time back, your computer was considered very robust if it could run quake at 50 fps. Nowadays, if you can run eclipse at 50 fps, your box is top of the line.”. He earned another round of applause. That is the true FOSS spirit.

I did attend a Ruby on Rails session as well sometime back at TWINCLING. Mr. A.P. Rajshekhar gave a talk on ROR and it was one of the best sessions on web development (I attended one at mukt.in. It was conducted by Thyagu) that I had attended. In a span of two hours, Mr. Rajshekhar covered a lot about Ruby, MVC and also showed us a working application by the name talewiki. Mr. Rajshekhar is also writing a book on ROR and he plans to use talewiki to teach ROR. I promise you Mr. Rajshekhar that I will be the first to purchase your book.

Krish and I are coming up with a web application of our own. I will talk about it later as we are yet to come up with a working model.

I have to still figure out how to generate thumbnails for my firefox extension. I have discovered that nautilus uses a thumbnailer that picks a particular frame of a video, the first page of a file and so on. I think I will freeze the development of filerfox and do something else with firefox. I have to scout for them though.

Anyway, See you later.

I am extremely busy nowadays. I am writing those essays, perfecting them bit by bit. I still won’t let go of my love for Python :D. I came across this site called projecteuler.net (no pragmatic programming for about 2 months, got to stick to something else see). It is basically math problems aiming to increase logic etc. etc. Since I am in a hurry now, let me plainly put up two scripts I wrote to solve two problems. These were problems that really troubled me.

A palindromic number reads the same both ways. The largest palindrome made from the product of two 2-digit numbers is 9009 = 91 × 99.

Find the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers.

Here is the solution I finally managed to hack up. The first one I wrote took me 3 minutes to get to the answer !. I won’t put that one here

#!/usr/bin/python

def checkPalin(string):

    """Returns true if a string is a palindrome"""

    begin = 0

    finish = len(string) - 1

    while end > begin:

        if string[start] != string[end]:

            return False

        begin += 1

        finish -= 1

    return True

def returnPalin():

    """Finds the largest palindrome that is the product of 2 3-digit numbers"""

    num1 = 999

    result_arr = []

    while num1 > 100:

        num2 = 990

        if num2 > num1:

            num2 = num1 - (num1 % 11)

        while num2 > 109:

            if checkPalin(str(num1 * num2)):

                result_arr.append(num1 * num2)

            num2 -= 11

        num1 -= 1

    result_arr.sort()

    print result_arr[len(result_arr) - 1]

returnPalin()

a full week of hardwork has paid off !

Got to scoot, bye !

Hello,

I enjoyed what can be called a sound-proof diwali. A few sparklers and a few flowerpots made up most of my 15 minute long diwali celebration.

I am not too sure I did a lot yesterday and the day before. I have a FIIT-JEE phase test coming up soon and I have a lot of coding etc. to finish. Terrific example of putting your feet in too many places at once.

I found a new album on the free albums galore blog. I have to yet listen to it. I also have a podcast to spit out soon (considering people were causing an earsore the past two days, recording became impossible). I’ve got to finish filerfox too.

Lots of work but only 24 hours in a day.

If I haven’t mentioned already, I do like music and I like melodious music. One that fills me with satisfaction once I listen to it. I was an avid follower of SaReGaMaPa for a very long time and in the senior’s edition which concluded some time back (should be back next year or so) I was a big fan of Mussarat Abbas (sufi singer who sang Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Songs) and Amanat Ali (ghazal expert. Jagjit Singh said he had a terrific future). The kids version however seems a bit senseless to me. First of all they call these kids from all over the world and make a competition out of it. Hence we get to see a five year old crying over something that he can’t even announce about proudly ten years from now. Immature voices, overtrained kids, parents who feel that the judges have wronged their children. It is not comforting too when a child makes a complete mess of a song and when I frown, I am told that he is just a 7 year old. The point is why should I be wasting my time listening to mediocre performances.

I am going to conclude with this rant and I shall write again later

I made a post about my own file manager extension for firefox that would make uploading things easy. I think I am done with the basic UI. Here is the link. I am going to make a new blog for this.

I have not been able to post a lot these days as I am all tensed about applying to colleges and so on, it is indeed a very stressful process. I have shortlisted a few but I think it is better I don’t shoot only for the top few and also look at tier 2 colleges with decent research prospects.

Now I am an individual who is eager to play with things. After the LUG meet I decided to make my own file manager extension for firefox that would enable me to easily pick the pictures that I would like to upload. I have made a basic UI for it and I will soon come up with a working version of it in about a week.

Apart from that I got to play with BSD again courtesy a generous gift from Deependra Shekawat ( a great friend who is a freenode regular ). He sent me the PCBSD installation cd. Let me recollect the process.

I put the cd in and up came a very good-looking screen that enabled me to cruise through the process and I kept encountering worthless pics that claim its capability to play all my music and edit all my files and whatnot. Typical “BSD on the desktop is finally here” kind of presentation. After a few minutes the installation finished and I was staring at KDE (oh how those jumping icons irritate me). Surprisingly everything works including my wireless. Even the distracting LED (ACER’s innovative design. They place the radio kill switch under the touchpad so that I can always hit it and see the Network Manager applet tell me that no wireless networks exist). I decide to experiment. The .pbi method of installing things irritates me further.

I recollect that a very dear friend who uses freebsd had told me about the complaints bsd threw when a device was not unmpunted correctly. I plug my external drive in and yank it out immediately. I plug it in again and type `mount /dev/da0s1 /mnt/external_disk` at the shell and get some stupid error report. I investigate further.

Tune2fs seems to be a good utility to look at ext3 fs parameters (my external drive is ext3 formatted, I know it is not smart but who cares). I notice this :

Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file

Bingo! So all I need to do is remove the ‘needs_recovery’ “feature” (stupid I know).

Being the MIT appreciator I pick debugfs which according to its manpage is written by someone from MIT (woohoo!!). So here goes:

[root@psp-laptop /root]# debugfs
debugfs: open -w -f /dev/da0s1
debugfs: features
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
debugfs: features -needs_recovery
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype sparse_super large_file
debugfs: quit

So there we are. I would however recommend that one runs e2fsck on the drive. That will also remove the troublesome “feature”.

Work, work and more work. I need to draft those essays now.

I will write again later