For bookmarking purposes

When you want to print the time from inside the kernel, you cant use gettimeofday or clock_gettime. You have to use getnstimeofday. This is because we can’t link the librt library when compiling. I think.

Star Wars on the Terminal

So, like the geek you are, you spend most of your time on the Terminal, hacking away at your code. Now and again, you feel the urge to watch a movie. But you have to fire up a whole new app for that! Fear not! For now, you can watch a movie from your beloved command line!

Just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl, and enjoy Star Wars IV: A New Hope in ASCII goodness! Thats right, the entire movie is rendered in ASCII text.

The first one to sit through the entire text movie wins the “Best Geek” award

PS. For all you non-geeks out there:

1. What are you doing on this blog?

2. Copy and paste the following “code” into your Terminal/Command Line:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

The Rhino Party

Apparently, there is (was?) a party in Canada which has named itself the “Rhinoceros Party of Canada”. Their main promise is a “a promise to keep none of our promises.”

Some of their other promises include:

Providing higher education by building taller schools

Ending crime by abolishing all laws

Adopting the British system of driving on the left; this was to be gradually phased in over five years with large trucks and tractors first, then buses, eventually including small cars and bicycles last

Despite such great propaganda, they never won a seat in parliament. I wonder why? I would have voted for them…

(via The IIM Thalleh, and Wikipedia)

Join and split pdfs on the Mac

Just another one of the Mac’s awesome semi-hidden features: OS X has Python script that merges pdfs from the command line.

Located at “/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources”, the join.py script takes the pdf file names as input and produces a merged document!

Usage: ./join.py –o <file> <inputfile1> <inputfile2> [--append] [--shuffle] [--preview] [--verbose]

Macs rule!

(I remember reading somewhere that UNIX has a similar script. Can anyone confirm/locate it?)

The Girl Effect

More here

Life is all about…

Life is all about breaking the rules. Take this bird here for example. He really gets it

(Happy) Diwali

I get more and more homesick every time someone wishes me Happy Diwali. *sigh*

I spoke to Donald Knuth…

I spoke to Donald Knuth today, though not about anything related to Computer Science He offered me his bicycle parking spot. But still! Donald Knuth!

J K Rowling’s Commencement Address at Harvard

Rowling recently addressed the Harvard students on Graduation Day, and wow, what a speech. She has such insight, and such a command over the language, that it is something that every fresh graduate _has_ to read.

Some amazing excepts:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

What a line!

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

 

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

 

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

(via Harvard Magazine, Akshay)

IRC Tutorial – How to set up Pidgin in 5 easy steps

IRC is a great way for a lot of people to come together to chat. However it is often seen to be, for want of a better description, “geeky”. This tutorial is for those people who see it that way. I’ll show you how easy it is to set it up with Pidgin, a great piece of open source software.

In IRC, chat rooms are termed as “channels”. Channels are identified by the pound(#) symbol that can be found in front of the channel name, and an IRC server can host many such channels. In this tutorial we will join the #test channel on the “irc.foonetic.net” server.

1) Download and install Pidgin.

2) Create a new account:

1. Click on Accounts -> Manage
2. Click on Add. You should get to the following screen. Fill in the details as given in the screenshot below. You can leave the password field blank for now.

3) The account should connect automatically. If it does not, click on Accounts -> <username>@<irc_server> -> Enable.

4) Time to join a chat room! Go to Buddies -> Join a chat in the Pidgin menu.

1. Select your IRC account from the drop down
2. To join the #test channel, fill in #test in the Channel textbox.
3. Leave password blank for now.
4. Hit Join.

If the chat room doesn’t exist, it is created. See how easy it is to create your own chat room?

5) I didn’t really need this step. I didn’t want to edit the title again. So here it is.

Your screen name is called your “nick” on IRC. Some chat rooms can only be joined by those who have registered their nicks with the server. This is to prevent identity theft, because registered nicks are password protected.

To register your nick:

1. Type /msg nickserv register <password> (Replace <password> with your actual password )
2. After this, to log in to your nick, send /msg nickserv identify <password>
3. To avoid manually logging in each time using the identify command you can specify the password in the Accounts dialog as in the screen shot above.

Voila! See how easy it is? There are a bunch of cooler and more advanced stuff to do on IRC. Explore with Google!

For those interested, there is an #aucse channel on irc.foonetic.net. Do drop by!

Battle Scars!

Battle scars galore.

My first real accident on my bike in all 4 years of driving

Die Luft der Freiheit weht

The wind of freedom blows

Anna University ACM Programming Contests

The ACM Student chapter of CEG, AU, will host regular online programming contests. The contests will only be open to CEG and MIT students for now, while we get our server up and running. When it is stable, we hope to open it up to all Anna University students.

We hope this will help experienced coders hone their skills and maybe even introduce some new people to the Art of Programming. Check out and join this group.

Mountaineering is fun

Aravind and Barath, the intrepid mountaineering duo of CEG, scale the heights of Mahabalipuram.

Next stop, Mt. Everest!

Pidgin supports Yahoo file transfers – finally!

File transfers between Yahoo Messenger (yuck) and Pidgin (2.4) work completely and seemlessly. One less reason not to switch! It’s been a long time coming. 

Pah! Bollywood!

Watch this video, and tell me, does it look familiar?

Chennai at 3:11 pm

This is what I’m going to be doing at 3:11 pm on November 3rd.

Because:

This is not for any great worthy cause, this is not a competition, it may or may not help charity, it will not prevent global warming, you will gain no medals, no certificates but it is most definitely not a waste. – The guys at 311pm.com

Defining a moment in Chennai: 311pm.com

Not good

I asked Boris Yeltsin to tell me briefly what the situation in Russia was like. “Good,” he said. I asked for a longer version. “Not good,” he replied.

- John Major, former Prime Minister, reminiscing, November 1999

Ode to a Cellphone

I have been in mourning. Its a sad day for me. A sad day indeed. Recently, I lost part of myself. I lost my Razr.

Actually, lost is not the correct term. I, erm, murdered my phone. I drowned it, to be more exact. It spent 10 minutes in the washing machine. OK OK, enough laughing.

I didn’t actually realize it until someone called me on my landline and told me that my phone “was unavailable”. Immediately, I fished it out, and did what I could. I got out the hairdryer, the towel, I even held it out over the stove. I performed surgery, taking it apart and inspecting various organs. It was like a scene from ER, with my blowing air into my cell, and shouting “I’m not giving up on you!”. But it was to no avail.

In memory of my deceased cell, I will hold a funeral ceremony this weekend. All are welcome. Come pay your respects if you can. It would have appreciated it. 

So long, my Razr. We have had a long and memorable time together. You are in a better place now. May your soul rest in peace.

P.S. I also lost all my contacts, so please IM me your number.

Raj TV Golu Competition

Our golu (photos here) has been featured of Raj TV, and is part of a competition running this week.

If you like the Golu, or even if you don’t, SMS “GLU 7″ to 5600602 to vote for us.

Thanks!

Who says beauty and brains don’t go together?

Beauty pageants are a source of perpetual laughter and fun. You just have to listen to the contestants answer the questions asked of them to know what I’m talking about.

A recent example: At the Miss Teen USA pageant, Miss South Carolina was asked:

Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Her answer:

I can hadrly tpye, I’m laghuing so hard. For those who want a transcript:

“I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and uh, I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the US should help the US, or, or should help South Africa, and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”

And the say beauty and brains don’t go together!

Innocence

The future of India?

From: CNN

Monitor Mischief

Its a proven fact that multiple monitors increase efficiency.

Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized, or articles written, adding an extra monitor will give your output a considerable boost — 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

Speed is one reason computer game players use multiple monitors. “If you’re trying to take over the world, it’s rather helpful,” says Bill Blomgren, a computer consultant in Charlotte, N.C.

When I edit photos, the second screen lets me compare the copy I am working on with the original, or shows tool palettes and thumbnails of other images, and I can blow up panoramic shots for closer viewing (though with a bar down the middle, like the central pillar of an old car’s windshield). When I am shopping on the Web, my two screens let me compare products. When I work on tables or spreadsheets, I can see all the columns at once. When I expect important messages, I keep my e-mail program open on the side monitor while I work on something else.

Bill Gates uses three. So does Al Gore.

But some of the setups go beyond efficiency, and are just plain eye candy:

And then there was my setup. Its not much, but it works.

For those of you who have two or more monitors, but lack the graphics card to hook them up to one computer, try Synergy.

Wow, its big

The IceCube Neutrino Detector is embedded in two and a half kilometers of ice in Antarctica. Surely that can’t be good for global warming?