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

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)

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?)

More here

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.

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!

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

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.

Next stop, Mt. Everest!

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

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

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.

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

Thanks!

But how about driving while black?

In the United States today, driving while black—or shoplifting while black, or taking illegal drugs, or hitting schoolmates—often carries the greatest risk of incarceration, in comparison to the risk faced by whites…

Disgraceful.

[link]

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!

Aravind: My lord?

Akshay examined his laptop, holding it as delicately and precisely as a conductor’s baton.

Akshay: Why doesn’t it work for me, Aravind?

Aravind: My — My lord? I do not understand. You — You have written extraordinary code with this laptop.

Akshay: No. I have written my usual code. I am extraordinary, but this laptop….no. It has not revealed the wonders it has promised.

The future of India?

From: CNN

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.

Link

As part of the ongoing campus placement program in our college, Microsoft recently came hunting for CS/IT students for its’ Development Center in Hyderabad. The process ran its course over Wednesday and Thursday this week. The pre-placement talk was held Wednesday afternoon, and the final results were announced almost exactly 24 hours later. The process consisted of two written rounds, and three rounds of personal interview. I am reproducing the questions I was asked below.

Written Round 1

1. Find the median of a Binary Search Tree. You are passed the root of the tree, and you should return the median which is the middle element, if the number of elements is odd, or the average of the two middle elements if the number of elements is even.

2. Write a function to check if the two passed strings are anagrams of each other.

3. We want to implement the functions allocstring, freestring, concatestring, and stringlength. We need to optimize the functions in this order : stringlength, allocstring, freestring, concatestring, with stringlength requiring the most optimizations. We are also given that the memory consists of a buffer of fixed size. We have to design and describe a data structure which would enable the above operations to be performed in an efficient manner.

Written Round 2

In this round, we were taken to a room, and each student was assigned a supervisor. The question would be written on the board, and we must write “tight” code to solve the given problem. Before writing the code however, we had to describe our algorithm to our supervisor, and convince them that our algorithm is correct and would work. Tight codes basically means that we had to check all the boundary conditions of our algorithms, and make sure that no test case crashes our program.

1. Implement the function bool isRegex(char *reg, char *string); This function is passed two strings : a regular expression, consisting of the [a-z] and the * and ? characters. We had to check if the string matched the supplied regular expression. For example, if reg is a*b, and string is acbcb, we should return true. And if reg is a?b and string is accb, we return false.

2. Implement the function : node * add(node *l1, node *l2). The lists L1 and L2 are linked lists where each node of the linked list contains a single hexadecimal digit, represented as a char. The whole list thus represents a hexadecimal number. We had to add the two hex numbers represented in l1 and l2, and return the head of the linked list representing the answer.

Personal Interview 1

1. Given an array consisting of only 0s and 1s, sort it. He was looking for highly optimized algos.

2. Given that an array consists of only 0s, 1s, and 2s, sort it. Again, only very efficient code was accepted. Good old counting sort was sneered at. He wanted an algo to do this in one pass of the algorithm without using any extra space, and which performed the minimum number of manipulations of the array.

Personal Interview 2

1. Implement a Queue using a Stack ADT. He told me to write “tight” code for this as well. He wanted optimized methods for this, and asked me to enumerate different ways of optimizing this data structure, and to analyze each one. After I did that, he asked me whether my code would handle multiple simultaneous access to the data structure, and asked to handle that case as well.

2. You are given a binary tree where each node consists of a left pointer, a right pointer, and a sibling pointer. The left and right pointers are initially populated and the tree is a normal binary tree. He wanted a function to populate the sibling pointers such that they point to the node to the right of the current node in the tree, and which is on the same level. If there is no such node, the sibling pointer must be set to NULL. He again wanted an optimized solution, optimized for space.

Personal Interview 3

This guy was a through and through OS guy I think.

1. What is a process.

2. How is it different from a thread.

3. How is common data shared between threads.

4. Semaphores and other locking mechanisms.

5. Code for some of the locking mechanisms.

6. Design a data structure which will support the following operation : given a seven letter word, return all valid words which are anagrams of this word. He wanted a data structure which would be optimized for space, and another one optimized for time.

7. Write the code to implement the aforementioned function given the data structure.

8. How does malloc work?

9. How is heap space managed in a C/C++ environment.

10. Explain paging.

A bunch of other OS related questions.

Now, if you wanted to make Windows look like Mac OS X, thats a noble goal. First, OS X looks amazing (no, really), and second, you can’t install it on anything other than Apple hardware.

I’ve done this with my Windows (erm…yes…I use Windows, but more about that in another post). Check out how it looks here. I used a couple of msstyles to achieve this look,namely, OS X Tiger (imaginative name, I know) and SS4. A simple Google search will yield these styles. Next, copy the file into the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\ directory, where C: is the partition on which Windows is installed. Next go to Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance and select the style you downloaded in the Windows and Buttons drop down menu, and, viola. Mac OS X on your computer!

Post your own screenshots in the comments, or recommend any other style that you like.

*Sigh*. Maybe after I start earning.

A couple of pictures of Sun Microsystems are up here.