Anurag Jain's Blog

My subjects....

2009-06-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Hey people this time in my fifth semester I m gonna study all these subjects :

1: Theory of computation

2: Database management system(DBMS)

3: Java programming

4: C# and .Net programming

5: System Software and compiler design

6: Design and analysis of algorithms

With these six subjects I have two labs for Java programming and DBMS.

And for my honours I've choosen Java for bioinformatic.

With all these there is an open-elective course on Geographical information systems.

Hope I'll be able to cope up with all these subjects well :D.

Can't wait.. wanna go to class....

2009-06-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back on track after a good inplant training in Sun Microsystems, Bangalore and waiting for my college to reopen. This time I'm alone in a single room, may be I can concentrate more and hope to get good grades. My class is quite good this time as I know some of the teachers and yeah most important I've got some good friendies :)) My college will be starting from 24th of this month. So lets see how things change in my third year @SASTRA.Well here are some snaps from my trip you can have look at.....

Good Bye 2nd year...

2009-06-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

Today my last day in this hostel room (I'll be missing it a lot) as my semester has ended after "do or die" kinda exams.With this I will be entering my 3rd year of my engineering. Also I stayed in college for some ten days for Visual Basic certificate course and yeah I got an "S" grade in that(atleast I didn't screw this exam like end sems...:P ). Today I'll be leaving to Chennai and from there to Bangalore by tomorrow evening. I'm going to Bangalore for an Inplant training in Sun Microsystems. Well I hope for best over there and yeah of course this time I miss my family as I won't be going home in these holidays. Its been more than six month since I've met my parents. But its gonna be a great experience to go and get trained in such a big company. Hopefully I will be meeting with lots of engineers and computer nerds. And that too Bangalore has lots of sight seeing spots. So I've got lot of plans for there and as far now I'm packing my stuff and single mindedly thinking of a great trip.

Thank you Chennai...

2009-06-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Well I like to check statistics of my blog related to number of daily visits and the region through Google Analytics. But it seems that people from Chennai are quite interested in my blog and daily my blog gets some around 20 hits from here with an average time of 8 minutes...

Its nice to see my blog getting famous and read by may people around the world. Guys please stay tuned and I'll be writing on various tech-n-non tech topics....

"Happy B'day Tetris "

2009-06-06T04:55:00.000-07:00

Today when I opened Google.co.in; instead of the usual Google image I saw something resembling my old hand video game. Ya! Its 25th B'day of the famous video game Tetris.

"Tetris" was designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov on June 6, 1984 while he was working in Academy of science of USSR. The name has been derived from a Greek numeral prefix "tetra"—as all of the game's pieces (known as Tetrominoes) contain four segments—and "tennis", Pajitnov's favorite sport. It was created on
Electonika 60 and later ported to IBM PC.

Screenshot of the 1986 IBM PC version

Spectrum Holobyte was the one to get the rights for the game and released the IBM PC version of Tetris in US in 1986. The game's popularity was tremendous, and many players were instantly hooked—it was a software blockbuster with reviews such as in Computer Gaming World calling the game "deceptively simple and insidiously addictive". For Amiga and Atari ST, two different versions by Spectrum HoloByte and Mirrorsoft became available. The Mirrorsoft version did not feature any background graphics while the Holobyte version had a background picture related to Russian themes for each level.

By 1989, half a dozen different companies claimed rights to create and distribute the Tetris software for home computers, game consoles, and handheld systems. Elorg, meanwhile, held that none of the companies were legally entitled to produce an arcade version, and signed those rights over to Atari Games, while it signed non- Japanese console and handheld rights over to Nintendo. Nintendo released their version of Tetris for both the NES and the Game Boy and sold more than three million copies; some players considered Nintendo's NES version inferior because it lacked the side-by-side simultaneous play of Tengen's version, but Nintendo's Game Boy Tetris became arguably the most well-known version of Tetris, selling over 33 million copies. Later in 1996, The Tetris Company (TTC) was formed reverting all the rights of the game from Russian state to Pajitnov himself.

Presently there are many variant of this game for different platform; from Nokia to Chinese handheld video games or Apples 5th generation ipods and various genome based Linux distros have Tetris bundled with them.

A 5th generation iPod featuring Tetris

As we all know about the game play; question arise "would it be possible to play forever ?". The conclusion reached was that a player is inevitably doomed to lose. The reason has to do with the S and Z tetrominoes. If a player receives a large sequence of S tetrominoes, the naïve gravity used by the standard game eventually forces the player to leave a hole in a corner. Thus game ends....

My activities in summer holidays....

2009-06-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

Yeah! this summer holidays I am still in my college hostel and but there are certain reasons for my stay. But I need to kill time here and do the best I can not to get bore and keep myself busy. Well there are certain things which I'm executing these days....

!: I wake up and attend my VB class from 9 to 12:30 and after lunch go for second session till evening 4:30

@: Watching Movies from 9PM to 11PM-"No compromise on it"... Twilight, Australia, Click and 21 were some good ones and now I'm out of stock.

#: Solving some programming exercise from spoj.pl.

%: Preparations for GLOSS websites going on.

^: As I'm not used to reading novels much, so for a change, trying to finish the one and only "Godfather" by Mario Pujo. I got it from my friend. And yeah I feel it interesting.

&:Washing my clothes and packing my stuff in order to go to Banglore..."The worst things I had to do".

*:Writing blogs sitting hours in front of my laptop... "paining my eyes...!"

Oh sorry! I feel soo sleepy at 5:37 AM writing a lot of posts that I kept pressing 'shift' at starting of every line :P...
Soon I'll be down and hope I'll attend the class.... :)

Coldplay: Scientist lyrics

2009-06-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

Well I really enjoy listening music and its a great mean for me to get rid of my bore and tensions... here I'm giving the lyrics of one of my favourite song : "Scientist" from the band Coldplay....

Come up to meet ya, tell you I'm sorry
You don't know how lovely you are
I had to find you, tell you I need ya
And tell you I set you apart
Tell me your secrets, and nurse me your questions
Oh let's go back to the start
Running in circles, coming in tails
Heads on a science apart

Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start

I was just guessing at numbers and figures
Pulling the puzzles apart.
Questions of science, science and progress
Don't speak as loud as my heart.
Tell me you love me, and come back and haunt me,
Oh, when I rush to the start
Running in circles, chasing tails
coming back as we are.

Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy.
No one ever said it would be so hard
I'm going back to the start.

.....................................................................................................................................
A nice one to dedicate someone special... :)

Cool down your Linux PC

2009-06-04T14:53:00.000-07:00

Hey guys if you feel that your linux system throws a lot of heat and its battery expires very soon or you need some automatic power manager, here is the solution. We have got some laptop mode tools. Laptop mode tools is a package mainly designed keeping the power requirements of laptop machines. It helps in extending the battery life and enables the laptop mode in the linux kernal , letting your hard drive spin down.

The inner thing is that laptop mode is generally disabled by default. To reenable it we need to edit the file
/etc/default/acpi-support
and set
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true.

The great thing is that this package is available in Ubuntu's repositories and can be installed directly from synaptic package manager or by typing these commands

sudo dpkg -i laptop-mode-tools_x.y-z_all.deb

and give the required root password. Before installing make sure that your linux kernel supports laptop mode. To check it see if this file exists

/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

There are other lots of tweaks available like
ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC, ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_WHEN_LID_CLOSED,
DISABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_CRITICAL_BATTERY_LEVEL.

These options can be changed by editing the file

/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

You can read more on laptop mode configuration here

man laptop-mode.conf

I hope next time you don't complain..... :P

Crazy Engineers

2009-06-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

Engineers change the world.... we are going to be engineers... so we are supposed to changes this world....

Linus Torvalds created Linux when he was student. Facebook was the result of someone's hobby.

If you guys get want to know more about the persons behind some great things, go and have a look at this site
http://www.crazyengineers.com

Yeah the creator of Gmail never thought that his own mail client will drive the world and moreover he never knew Javascript before then. Also his main punchline "Don't be evil" will be associate with GOOGLE...

There are many more such heroes you can know, from an entrepreneur to a programmer; who make things happen...

WiFi @SASTRA...

2009-06-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

Well this is a quick one though after a long time. Its 2:35AM and my browser is really rocking at a great pace. SASTRA's Wifi having a 18Mbps connection seems to be at speed of thoughts and I am able to feel that the whole Internet is in my hard drive....

Believe me I'm the only one of the two accessing wifi at this unusual time and I downloaded 149 packages of KDE(K desktop environment) totally about 800Mb within 10 mins at an avg download speed of 375Kbps...Unbelievable.!

Fixing MBR and removing Linux

2009-05-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

Well its been a substantial gap since I've written my last post. People out there, when start trying Linux feel initial difficulties with it and may complain. Some say "Oh!! my wifi driver is not working and I can't get softwares for it or have trouble updating it!" and some say "I don't like the way it looks; windows looks good". They may install Linux dual booted with windows (Vista) but later may think of getting rid from it. So for the sake of sympathy with such people I am going to tell how to remove Linux without losing any data or any re-installations. First you need to know about MBR (Master Boot Record). MBR is the first 512 -byte boot sector and is the first sector of the hard disk. It is mainly used by the computer for

Bootstrapping operating systems after the BIOS has been loaded
Holds the primary partition table of system
Identifying storage medias individually

So when ever we go for multiple boot an entry is made in the MBR, which includes the required information about various partitions in which different operating systems reside. This information is helpful to identify the different boot sectors and come up with a menu (Grub Loader). Grub Loader or Boot Menu enables the user to boot the OS of his choice when system starts. So when we dual boot our system an entry is automatically made in MBR containing information about the current operating systems (Linux and Windows) installed in the system.

Problem comes when because of lack of knowledge; inorder to remove Linux from our machine we formats the Linux partition along with the swap and end up with nothing getting booted. The reason is that the MBR resides in the partition in which Linux is installed, which gets removed when we format the Linux partition. So when system boots it doesn't have sufficient information. So in this case we need to fix the MBR. Just follow these steps :

1.Insert the vista cd and boot from it.

2.When the the install screen comes press repair windows

3.Open the command prompt and type the this command

Bootrec.exe /FixMbr

4. Reboot and you are done.

But at last I'll say that you need to give some more time when using Linux . There is a quote
"Linux is a user friendly OS ; But it's very selective in choosing its users.."

Installing Ubuntu Linux.....

2009-04-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

People those who are curious about learning Linux and want to give a try to it but don't know where to start fro them I'll just try to organize things here for them. I'll try to give you all possible resources which can help them out in their learning process. Ubuntu is one of the famous and much more user friendly Linux distro out there and has got a very cool eye candy too. So we'll start with downloading Ubuntu.

1: Click here to download Ubuntu 8.10. You can easily burn
the ISO image to a CD.Take care while choosing your processor
architecture (i386 or x86 for all Intel based processors and x64
for AMD64 and Intel core 2 duo processors) .

2: Installation guide is here . After restart the login screen will appear an you need to give the user name and password which you decided while installation and after login the desktop will look like this.

3: After that you need to check for an Internet connection and need to enable the repositories. from panel click System>>administration>>Software Sources. It may ask for the password and will open new window with different tabs. Select all the check boxes(They represent the type of repositories). Move to next tab(Third-party software) and there will be two more default repositories from Canonical. You need to check them also and close. It will ask for an update and new packages will be getting added.

4)Then in order to install new software goto Applications>>Add/Remove and you will get a new window like Here you can see a long list of software divided into different categories. You can easily install new software. You need not worry about any kind of 'dependency' errors. So in order to resolve any dependency , you can install necessary packages from Synaptic Package Manager . And at last I want to assure every body that there are really cool software available in Linux as an alternate to any windows software.

I think this has been useful to for you guys and comments are invited. Keep reading keep learning and I'll keep writing...

A helping hand....

2009-04-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

It started like that lots of people asked me to start blogging but till now I use to feel lazy to come here and just type in my views. Today with start of Worldwide Volunteer's Week, I decided to do something which can give others some happiness and really it proved to be one of the important day of my life when I shared my day with those who have got a life but they can't be like us all and do not have all those comfort of life which a normal person gets. Moreover they are deprived of the love and affection of their parents. But in spite of all the odds in their life they have a great zeal to live life in their own way and also they were happy when we get there to share time with them .
Actually this whole program was powered by GLOSS (GNU/LINUX open source @ SASTRA ) ; an open source community in my college . We (J.Dwarakanath-Sun CA, Amarnath , Uday and ofcourse me) began in morning and took a bus to Thanjavur, had a one hour journey, followed by a twenty minutes walk till our destination.
At 11:10 we were there . It was a school for
orphan and mentally retarded children.

We met warden there and came to know that inmates have started going out for holidays to their home , but there were enough to have a get together(around 30). We asked them to gather in the prayer hall and it was nice t o see those little guys singing prayer being very pure and innocent at their heart. We got them sweets and some stationary items and their happiness was on seventh sky. Then we talked with them and shared their view. After that it was tech-time cum play-time as we let them try their hands on some coolJAVAFX and Flash games. It was so nice to see them happy and they felt that very much enjoyable, which was clearly seen through their curiosity. Although this was the first time for me to visit such a place and it was a great experience for me. I really loved the journey and felt bit proud to work for a social cause. All this was arranged by Sun Campus Ambassador J.Dwarakanath and I am thankful to him to consider me to be the part of this event.

Well I think its enough for my first post and I hope I will continue writing and please, you continue reading my blog...