As the url says, me wants to be a GEEK, duh!

Easy Mobile Shopping (contd.)

2010-06-11T19:05:00.000+05:30

So here's an update about the previous post. I succeeded in making the Android app (yay!). Integrated it with ZXing's Barcode Scanner and added the functionality for the shopkeepers to update their shop location and for the customers to do a location-sensitive search.
I cannot post the app as of now, as the server isn't up and running anywhere. So am still looking for a domain and webspace to host the server. Not sure if its really feasible enough but if someone's game for it, don't hesitate to contact. The server was developed by my partner in the competition and its in a very crude stage and would need a lot of rework and styling.
Wasn't able to win the competition but the learning experience was really nice. Also, it made me realise (once again) that Eclipse is one of the awesomest IDEs in existence!

QRCode + Location Awareness = Marketing awesomeness!

2010-05-28T01:15:00.001+05:30

Took part in an Adobe internal application development competition and working on revolutionizing the Indian shopping industry :D
Thanks to a really nice and innovative idea by Ishan am currently busy exploring the Android SDK these days. Well, the idea is to make use of QRCodes and location-awareness into an android app and web server combo. Using the web server, the shopkeepers can register their shops by creating a profile and get a unique QRCode which will point to a URL which will contain a description of the products sold in the shop. The customers can flash their mobile on the shops's QRCode and can browse through the list of products at their leisure.
The location sensitivity part comes into play as the shopkeepers can use the app to provide the location coordinates of their shop and when someone sends a search query for any item the server will show the result displayed in the order of proximity of the shops based on the customer's location.

Thats pretty much it. Been exploring new technologies and the QRCode Scanner by ZXing is a huge blessing. Wait a little to see how it turns up :)

Back

2010-05-19T14:47:00.001+05:30

I guess I will start writing blog posts again after a very long hiatus. Wonder how your day-to-day work doesn't offer much scope to writing anything new. My last talked up project was the location-aware thingy for GSoC.
Then job didn't offer me anything exciting to blog about without breaking the NDA. So there was quite a bit of silence. I have again started experimenting and hopefully these would continue so you can see my random bursts about my successes/failures. :)

Import This

2009-09-23T14:46:00.004+05:30

Following is the output after typing import this on a Python terminal (via @l0nwlf). Enjoy :)

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

OneWebDay

2009-09-19T15:58:00.003+05:30

So I decided to help promote & support the OneWebDay cause :) As my office printers were all black and white I decided to have this poster. My cubicle was already adorned with a "Mozilla - 10 years" coloured poster (courstesy l0nwlf) and now I had this brand new OneWebDay poster beside it too. As the poster was pretty dull, I decided to show off a lil creativity and used some pink highlighter on it :P Here's a snap with /me in my fav Firefox T and the OneWebDay poster in my cubicle.

As the Imac, from which I clicked the pic was pretty far, here's a close up of me with the poster in my hand.

P.S. I havent yet figured out how to correct the lateral inversion caused by PhotoBooth :(

Yet Another Hello World Post

2009-09-14T20:39:00.001+05:30

I am not dead. Yet.
I wasnt hibernating either.
I just got a lil too busy with Twitter.

Geoclue

2009-05-24T02:46:00.007+05:30

I nominated GeoClue for Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything in the SouceForge Community Choice Awards. Its your turn now, go nominate!

Allahabad FOSS Shuudan

2009-05-12T19:52:00.003+05:30

Much inspired by yesterday's meetup and hoping for more, I created a Google group for us. Looking forward to getting to know more geeks in the nearby locality. For starters here is a promotion button. Use it to promote the group :D

Allahabad FOSS Shuudan

Visit this group

Also added a subscribe box to the right side column :D

FOSS+GSoC Meetup at Allahabad, May 11th 2009

2009-05-11T23:53:00.010+05:30

Front: Ishan Chattopadhyaya, Kalpana Roy, Shalin Mangar (AOL), B.S. Sanjeev (Faculty, IIITA), Kapil Mishra Back: Shashwat Anand, Anshul Kesarwani, Rajeev Kumar, Aman Aggarwal

As decided through the poll embedded on the blog earlier, we had the first FOSS+GSoC meetup in Allahabad today. The meetup comprised of 3 GSoCers selected for this year (kr0y, l0nwlf & Ishan) alongwith FOSS enthusiasts (Anshul, Kapil, Aman, Rajeev) and our celebrities Shalin Mangar (AOL S/W Engineer and Apache Solr committer) and Dr. B.S. Sanjeev (Faculty, IIIT Allahabad).
The meetup started with formal introductions and stating the favorite Linux distro (Fedora users in majority) followed by a round of coffee. Then we moved onto discussion on FOSS and latest technologies in open source. Shalin and BSS did most of the talking but we gained a lot of information about new open source projects and languages including (but not limited to) Solr, Lucene, Hadoop, Scala, Erlang, Mahout and Onyomo. Then l0nwlf, Ishan and I explained about our GSoC projects and the group had a discussion on each. How-to-start-contributing-into-FOSS (and-eventually-get-into-GSoC) formed the next round of discussions. Ishan, who is kinda a child prodigy for starting the same at the age of 15, shared his experiences. Shalin added on the same by suggesting some new technologies which are really exciting and need contribution. Bug posting, documentation, installing the software from scratch and source code understanding emerged as a few points through which newbies can easily get into open source contribution and development.
After another round of coffee, with l0nwlf having 3&1/2 cups (how much can this guy ~~eat~~ drink?), we moved onto query solving session and our future plans. Apart from completing our GSoC projects, l0nwlf and Ishan will be doing an internship at NTRO and AOL respectively while I will be joining my job at Adobe in the summers. Anshul is currently working on the site Allahabad 360 and showed interest in using Onyomo as a local search engine; Aman & Rajeev expressed their desire to attend an NVIDIA CUDA workshop in IIT Chennai later in the year while Kapil was seen to be pretty impressed by FOSS and promised to start contribution to open source, starting in the summers itself. BSS favored introducing bug fixing in some simple FOSS projects at B.Tech. level for the interested students (yay!) and Shalin stated that contribution to already existing open source softwares/solutions can be much better than being a regular participant of TopCoder/ACM/SPOJ etc. in terms of fetching a job. Quoting him, "A lot of people can solve problems fast and move on to the next one quickly. Very few have the patience and the will to go through the F/OSS experience. The good thing about both is that it shows the person is interested enough in this field to do it for free."
Turned out to be a great discussion which was extremely knowledgeable and fruitful for all of us. Was great to meet so many enthusiasts and know more about their experiences and views about FOSS. Shalin paid the bills which brought an additional bunch of smiles on our already glistening faces ;) FOSS FTW!!!

P.S. : Additional pics can be seen at Ishan's Picasa album. /me seems to be frowning everywhere.

10 Ways of contributing to GNOME

2009-05-11T23:26:00.002+05:30

Extremely good guide for people who are looking for a niche to contributing to GNOME or FOSS in general. It wasn't a long time back when I also belonged to the group of FOSS enthusiasts who wanted to get into FOSS development but didn't know how. Now you have a great article, to give you a start. You should read the full article as I am just pasting the 10 points :

Use of distributed FFT for writing fully distributed N-body code for cosmological applications

2009-05-02T00:55:00.003+05:30

Yep, that's the topic of the project I am currently working on. Sounds a lil intimidating, doesnt it?
I had my mid-semester project evaluation last Sunday on 15th March. It was supposed to be a wake-up call for all the final years so that we can start searching about the project, if we haven't started already. Well, I have no issues with procrastination this year, thanks to my mentor. *Old news! I saved the draft of this post on March 18 but was too lazy to publish. Some people never change. I didn't take a look at my project for more than a month and now I am in deep shit :D* As I had already made a report and presentation for the evaluation, I thought of sharing them on the blog.
My presentation is embedded in the blog while my midterm report can be found here.

Writing distributed N-body code using distributed FFT - 1

P.S. So its more than a month after I took up my final semester project. I want to blame the procrastination on GSoC but that aint a good excuse. My mentor is mighty pissed and all I can say now is Dear God. One word. Graduation. Amen!

Time Scheduling :-)

2009-04-24T20:51:00.003+05:30

A small reminder to my hopeless self which is an email/twitter/chat/anime addict.

Gotta finish my final semester intern before the GSoC coding period (May 23rd) starts.
Gotta finish the how-tos and to-dos of the GSoC project before that time.
Give atleast 5 hrs a day to intern project and 2 hrs to GSoC (does not include writing blogs about the project)
Finally, gotta follow this during the office hours/intern work:

Pic Source : http://www.flickr.com/photos/caterina/3270176074/

Google Custom Search Engine

2009-04-23T23:17:00.002+05:30

I made a few modifications to the layout of the blog, as can be seen. Added a newsreel with FOSS and GSoC related news and decided to add Google Ads hoping that I might make some profit ;)
The modification which I would like to mention here is the Google custom search engine box which is seen on the top of the right column. I designed that custom search engine last night to give better FOSS, GSoC and internship related searches. For the few keywords I checked, it gave better results than the normal Google search.
As the CSE is still extremely new, it needs a lot of improvement. I am planning to add sitemaps, include related sites and further refinements to make the search better. Volunteers are welcome, you can do that by clicking here or by visiting the homepage of the CSE.
So with the hope of getting a few volunteers to improve this search engine and with the promise of refining the results, I urge you all to use it and tell me if it makes your life any easy. Happy searching :-)

GSoC '09

2009-04-22T16:46:00.003+05:30

Well pretty late news, and most of you must be knowing already but I am pleased to announce that both kr0y and l0nwlf sneaked their way into GSoC '09.
I am seriously surprised about l0nwlf who submitted just 1 application and was accepted in his 1st attempt! Lucky bastard. Dude you owe me a *grand* treat :D
I had submitted 3 applications, duplicates to Gnome and Linux Foundations and another to Systers. Was selected by LF. I am supposed to work under two wonderful mentors, Luis Rodriguez from LF and Dan Winship from Gnome. My project synopsis can be found here, and the application can be viewed here. GeoClue had intrigued me thoroughly when I first read the idea on the Gnome GSoC Ideas site and now I am extremely glad that I can work on the same. Seems like a dream come true :) 'Tis true that my FOSS development experience isn't all that good nor do I have any prior working experience of working on Gnome desktop, but I am sure I will manage. Failing in GSoC is even worse than not getting through and I cant simply waste my first and last chance. So all my friends and foes, do pray for me.
101 Indian students were selected in GSoC '09 making our country the second highest in terms of selected candidates. For those who wanna get to know the successful Indian students, you can get information about some of them here.
A number of my IRC and twitter friends also got selected. Congratulations to lifeeth, devilsadvocate, mavu, ajuonline. Sorry am not in a mood to hunt their blog urls so for now be satisfied with their IRC nicks and keep guessing their identities ;)
Enough of I-am-on-top-of-the-world rants. Long story short, I am selected, I have no experience about the project I am selected for, I need to work hard or I will be in deep shit.

P.S. The wiki will serve as my regular technical guidebook and this blog will be for all the my-gsoc-project-is-awesome-yay publicity.

FOSS spreading its wings

2009-04-02T14:24:00.006+05:30

Just when I thought most of IIITians run after acads (mugging stuffs) or after silly gaming one of them gave me the link to his Blog-post about FOSS and I was happy , atleast I'm not the only one here who is crazy about FOSS and Stallman [;)].
Here is the link if you wish to go through it :
http://kumaranik.blogspot.com/search/label/FOSS

So in response I wrote a BIG comment and when I realised I was going overboard I stopped but i can't restrain posting the same comment here [:D]

FOSS is a glorious concept. I had seen people on net for whom FOSS is not only a term , It's a way of life for them those so called geeks. The major problem in India is that the majority of us are easy-going fellas for whom comfort had always mattered more than ethics and we are the witness of the so called behavioural pattern of our society quiet often...isn't it?
The line which differentiate open-source from close-source is not ease of use, comfort ,better products...blah..blah..blahh but it's the 'power to change' , You can play with the source and understand the indepth-working, you can toy with the software customize it according to your will and it gives gratification which is second to none - The true joy of engineering !!
But why will people even bother so much, most of them thinks computer as synonymous to windows(bsod lol). Again I'm not starting bashing MS but competition helps evolution , the greatest example being browser-war. When IE used to dominate we had to bear slow-javascript, loads of windows, a new bug almost weekly and then firefox came and captured a fare share of the market and then people in business get to knew what can be the benefits of browser and later opera,avant,konqueror,chrome followed the legacy and it was beneficial for win users too for they got a better, polished , refined IE.
Ahhh..i see my ranting is making this comment more of an essay..so i should keep my pen down here but it's really good that atleast some of the Elite class [:P] people are getting into the skin of FOSS.
PS. Don't just use free s/w but contribute too.
PPS. a joke -> Richard Stallman wrote the compiler God used. The Big Bang was the Universe's first segfault.

Conclusion :
i. Don't just use free s/w but contribute too ( Oophh not again , you must be thinking this guy is a complete jerk [:P] )
ii. Never get sentimental over a post ( Else you will end up throwing your views even in unwanted places )
iii. If you do not understand Stallman's joke don't worry. Try santa-banta jokes. Here it is: http://www.santabanta.com/jokescat.asp (thank gawd you gave me santa-banta link , stallman was all latin for me [:D])

How to create a patch

2009-03-20T17:52:00.008+05:30

Okay, this might seem a silly post, but as I learnt how to patch just a few minutes ago and am jumping with excitement, I decided to make a post. I do not know the internal basics of the commands yet but whatever I am posting here will get the work done. So this can serve as the first step to learning patching for n00bs :D

Create a new directory (say patchtry) and create to files in it old.txt and new.txt
Write some content in both the files.

This is the common line.
This is the different line.

:
This is the common line.
My name is kr0y.

Now we need to replace the old.txt file with the contents of new.txt. In this case it is extremely easy to copy the contents of new.txt and paste it into old.txt, but if there had been multiple files available for replacement then this wouldn't have been the smart way out. So we use commands to replace old (generally buggy) files with the new ones. This automated replacement is called patching. I learnt two ~~almost similar~~ ways of patching. In both the cases we generate the patch file which contains the difference between the new and the old files. So moving on,

diff old.txt new.txt >patchfile.patch

patch old.txt -i patchfile.patch -o old.new.txt

This patching method is same as above with the difference that it patches the original file itself. There is a slight modification in the commands, as listed below :

diff -Naur old.txt new.txt > patchfile.patch

patch old.txt < patchfile.patch

Lo and behold! patching is done. So now as I get back to explore and utilise my newly acquired knowledge, you can try things out too. Any mistakes/improvements/suggestions, comments most welcome. Till the next post, happy patching :D

P.S. : 1 small note of acknowledgement to bheekling and this site (great post, read it for clarifications/explanations which are missing above) for whatever is written in the above post. Arigato!

Open64-4.2.1 Installation Guide on Ubuntu

2009-03-01T21:06:00.008+05:30

As promised, the next GSoC post dedicated to Open64 is here. The latest version is 4.2.1 available in both precompiled binaries (tar.gz file and rpm) and the source. Installation is pretty much easy and straight-forward but because of compatibility problem of the open64 C++ compiler and the gcc-4.3 version, which comes as the default gcc in Intrepid Ibex, I faced a lot of problem while installation. It actually took me three days (which I am ashamed to admit) before a successful installation on my Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex running on I386 arch processor.
While installing I found quite a few installation guides, some dedicated specifically to Ubuntu installation but found none of them to be helpful enough. Also few of the files in the source file of the version were missing a few headers because of which it was giving errors while running . So I am posting here, a step-by-step guide on successful and hassle-free installation of Open64-4.2.1 on Intrepid Ibex systems.

Download the binary depending on the architecture of your own; I had downloaded the I386 arch binary. (Also do not download the src file which is buggy. However, if you are able to perform a successful installation using the src, please inform me too.)
Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file. Save and exit.

export TOOLROOT=~/compiler
export PATH=$TOOLROOT/bin:$PATH

Now, source the updated bashrc file by the command.

source ~/.bashrc

Make a new directory compiler in the home directory.

mkdir ~/compiler

As the gcc-version pre installed in Intrepid is version 4.3 and Open64-4.2.1 has compatibility issues with it, we need to uninstall gcc-4.3 and install gcc-4.1. The easiest way is using Synaptic Packet Manager (System>Administration>Synaptic Packet Manager, of the desktop panel).

In the same manner, mark gcc-4.1 for installation, in the Synaptic and Click on Apply. The changes will take place.
Similarly, follow the above process to remove g++-4.3 and install g++-4.1
Now in order to make the commands and work, we need to link them to the 4.1 version compilers.

sudo ln -s gcc-4.1 gcc
sudo ln -s g++-4.1 g++

Now extract the binary using the tar xjvf name-of-the-tar-file.tar.bz2 command. to the extracted directory and run ./INSTALL.sh
Now opencc (C compiler), openCC (C++ compiler) and openf90 (Fortran compiler) are installed and can be used.
Optionally, gcc-4.3 and g++-4.3 can be installed again. The compilers will work regardless :D

The above mentioned steps perfectly installed Open64 compilers on my system. So if anyone faces a problem while installation or any error, feel free to discuss on the mailing-list or join us at #open64 at irc.freenode.net

Hopefully, a Fedora installation guide will come up very soon by l0nwlf. Will be back with more developments on both the projects when any significant progress will be made.
So, Happy GSoC-ing to all potential applicants. Indeed, life is good!

Making the GNOME desktop location-aware

2009-02-26T22:24:00.009+05:30

Here comes the first GSoC '09 post of the blog, from kr0y. Hopefully more of these will follow, from both l0nwlf's and my contribution.
Being a silent watcher last year, I decided to gear up for participation in this year's GSoC partly due to the fact that its my last year in college and I won't be officially a student anymore. GSoC has been a great experience so far in the sense that I have actually begun to appreciate and understand the real steps that need to be done which can help you contribute to the FOSS movement. After going through the list of tentative organisations which might be participating this year, I have been happy to be introduced to two, Gnome (which needs no introduction to Linux literates) and Open64. It doesn't matter whether or not the project ideas I am going to submit under these two, get selected in GSoC, but because of the event I have finally given my shot at open-source development and am absolutely loving it :D If selected, I'll get luckier but if not, I am still lucky.

Starting with the Gnome project which was mentioned in the list of ideas for 2009 and caught my attention was "Making the GNOME desktop location-aware". The project, as the topic states, will help the Gnome-desktop know the location of the machine, and hence the user, through the use of smart technologies (GPS, GSM, IP Address, WiFi, User Tracking, Proximity etc.) Although initially proposed to just help the clock get automatically updated about the location and hence change the time and weather settings accordingly, it can be extended to include various other Gnome applications as well, as suggested by Henri Bergius & Jussi Kukkonen. The other functionalities which are proposed to be considered in the project are listed as follows:
1. Tracker can store the edited documents in the location-specific order.
2. Clock can not only automatically update the time & weather settings but also display the appointments specific to a location.
3. Evolution can show where the contacts are present and their local time.
4. Setting the Internet messengers' default status, location dependent on the location (Available at home and Busy in office, for eg.)
5. Displaying map of the locality (using Google maps or OpenStreetMap).

Jussi has already worked on the implementation of automatic updation of clock depending on location. A screenshot of the same from here:

More about the same can be found here and here.

Coming to Open64, all I can say for now is that working on compilers is challenging and exciting at the same time. The proposed list of ideas can be found here. More will be said about it later. So keep watching this space.

Hotelescape

2009-01-08T10:00:00.001+05:30

This might not be dubbed as a technical post but as both the authors are extremely interested in riddles/puzzles/escape room games etc. so we would like to talk about one of the most exciting puzzle game we played Hotelescape. The game is the 4th in the Pick-a-Path series of puzzle games and is significantly different that in this, you are not only supposed to get out of the hotel you are trapped in by remembering the various paths and how each room is linked to the other(s) but also by solving the puzzles for getting entry into each room. Its point&click combined with puzzles and hence, all the more challenging to crack. Presently there is a Windows installer only but sincerely hope that we soon get it for non-Windows as well. We highly recommend this to all the puzzle lovers out there. Also, do check out other games by Mr. Logic, some of which are really appealing. Will deal with them as soon as we are able to spare some time.

P.S. Inspite of our humbleness, we can't help but ask you to check this. ^_^

Vpython GUI -2

2009-01-06T16:43:00.005+05:30

Yep, long time!!!

So here goes away the short apology and here comes what the topic says. Well the supposedly *innovative* GUI for VPython which I was trying to work on was not so new afterall. Brad Longo, whom I met through the visualpython mailing list had already worked on something similar. His is more of a text editor, which he calls VPython Design, and is built using PyGtk and VPython (of course!). The VPD is not yet complete and when I got to know about it, I discovered that it accomplished the limited functionalities it provided very well. Also, the text editor proved to be more usable (& feasible) compared to the GUI idea which I was planning to implement. I made certain changes in the original VPD and added some new functionalities (open source :-D ). The rpms maintained on Brad's site dont have the changes I made so if anyone wants to check out my little contribution, I can mail you personally. Oh yeah, and if you are interested in/planning to/might happen to use VPD, just drop a note of thanks/comment to bjlongo@ncsu.edu because he promised to start working on VPD if more and more people become interested in his project.
A few technical roadblocks which I think are absolutely necessary to be mentioned:

As VPD uses PyGtk, hence it suffers from the portability problem of PyGtk. So VPD will NOT work on Windows (certain dll files seem to be missing in the PyGtk installation for Windows).
The rpm works very smoothly on Fedora Core 7.
Do not try it on FC 8.
For FC9, there are certain missing files. These files "gtksourceview.so" and "gtkspell.so" need to be pasted in /usr/lib/python-2.5/site-packages/gtk-2.0 folder. (If you need these I'm there for help!).
I haven't tried it on any other Linux distro, so if anyone does, kindly enlighten me.

More will be said later. Will come up with information about my semester long internship (ongoing) , Google, Got the Apptitude, prolly some old project of mine and will seek a little help on GSoC. Till then, sayonara!

Intro

2008-11-07T00:37:00.007+05:30

Hullo all...
I'm the 2nd author who is quite a lazy bump but i'm writing this post as of now under tremendous pressure from the 1st author else my butts will be kicked.
I'm witty,charming and single : my mail id is anand.shashwat@gmail.com so all my female fans are welcome.
Jokes apart, my interests include Linux (especially Fedora), Online Riddling, Hacking (mostly penetration testing tools but currently its in hibernation mode), Gaming (especially Quake and Prince of Persia series), Solving Mathematical Problems, Animes & Movies.
I hope I could contribute this blog with my area of specializations.

Google Got the 'App'titude Challenge

2008-11-06T02:13:00.003+05:30

If you haven't already heard about this, then you should check this.
Hah! so me is the team leader of my ~~5-man~~ 4 man & a woman team. Well, the challenge ain't that challenging but for a college which doesn't have its webpage and mail, I guess it is pretty exciting.
To-do's:

Get the admin rights for the domain rgiit.ac.in (Arghhhhhhh!)
Build the webpage, mail service, blah-blah in 7 days (But that can't be done without 1.)
Do the testing in next 3 days.
Release and try to achieve a really high app usage.

Neat!

VPython GUI

2008-11-05T01:12:00.001+05:30

I have the project of building a GUI for VPython and demonstrate its usage as a tool for data structures demonstration. So I am planning to provide buttons which will help the user select the basic VPython shapes.The buttons will allow the user to select, drag and drop the objects on the space provided. There will be a separate space for editing the properties of the shape. As my main purpose is to explore the usage of VPython as a tool for data structure demonstration, I also need to provide certain simple commands which can help a teacher, who knows the pseudo code of any data structure property he wants to demonstrate, to generate the code, without knowing the Python syntax for the same.
Since I need to automatically generate VPython in the background, so it will serve as the backend of the project. For GUI building, I am using PyQt and Qt designer.

I built the bubble-sort program manually. Know its a bit clumsy especially generating labels over labels leaves it a little dirty. A little bigger version can be found at youtube, here. Anyway the main problem is how and what commands should I provide which can help a person to code VPython programs with the help of GUI itself and maybe some extremely simple commands. Hoping to be helped; thanks in advance.