Dappan koothu…….

My research has finally been approved and is ready to be published. The last few weeks have been pretty hectic juggling work and research at the same time. Any budding-researchers/desi-grad-students-in search-of-funding reading this blog remember, It’s not easy riding two horses at the same time unless you are Zorro!

I have now made a so-called significant contribution to the world of science and our proposed algorithm can now protect mobile agents from attacks by malicious hosts. I know it sounds convoluted, but then I myself share the same feeling. After being officially kicked out of grad school I can now dedicate all my time to work(ya rite!). Blogging and my playstation will now fill the void created by the completion of my research and that means more vetti hours.

It’s the time of the year when the big names come together to discuss what’s new in the world of object oriented programming, it’s that time of the year when we get to learn bout cool stuff, it’s time for OOPSLA. The beautiful city of Portland plays host to this years edition, and me put up with my friend who goes to at PDX.

8:00AM – 12:00 PM – Ajax: Introduction and Architecture
12:00-15:00 – I am currently floating as a student volunteer
13:30PM – 17:30PM – Making the Most of Eclipse

Stuart Halloway gave a kickass presentation on AJAX, with code examples, architectural desicions and why we should be using rails and prototype or using dojo and going the JAVA way.

neat stuff!

I’m of to the Eclipse tutorial now……

Update: Olaf Zimmerman gave a super cool presentation on using webservices in J2EE using Eclipse 3.1 and the Web Tools Platform. I forsee a huge market surge in the Java side of web services with IBM pumping money into it. There is a commercial product RAD but then you can use Apache Tomcat and Axis, along with Eclipse and WTP. The future is Web services, the future is SOA…….

Technorati: OOPSLA, AJAX, DOJO, rails.

If you’ve seen the latest TV commercial of music playing near some molten chocolate then stop guessing. It’s not a new chocolate bar from Hershey’s(that is what I was thinking when I saw a bar emerge) but a phone! Yes sir, the molten chocolate drips off the bar to reveal the brand new phone by Verizon and produced by LG.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘Chocolate‘

I’m not sure if the phone will come wrapped in a silver foil but it surely has generated a lot of buzz. Techblogs are screaming with reviews and comments are flowing in hundreds. I don’t wanna go into the phone as you can easily read it elsewhere, but instead lets talk of the ad.

You hear ‘Goldfrapp‘ in the background as you see ripples in molten chocolate. The music generates an earthquake effect and out comes a bar with chocolate dripping from it!(It’s super sexy too see so much chocolate!) Just when you are waiting for the Hershey’s logo you see something black on the bar. When all the chocolate drips away you see not a new chocolate bar but a phone in black with red lights.

It slides to show you the keypad and then you see the Verizon logo on your screen! Great advertising but can’t say the same for the product.

pros:

• mp3 player
• great looks
• $150 after rebate
• camera function

cons:

• no click-wheel
• end button (very small)
• no on-board memory card and 64mb internal memory
• doesnt recognise all unprotected mp3s
• doesn’t recognise all common pic formats
• kinda forcin users towards VCast

closing comments: Anything that looks good isn’t necessarily good

Technorati: verizon chocolate, LG, Goldfrapp, Hershey’s

Here are a few thingy’s to get your windows partitions on Ubuntu

mount Windows partition NTFS

sudo mkdir /media/windows
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=000

To mount Windows partition

sudo mkdir /media/windows
sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000

To unmount Windows partition

sudo umount /media/windows/

I got Ubuntu runnin on my lappie in early december and had configured wireless using NdisWrapper to load the. Owing to a lot of curiosity and requests I am postin this here.

• Identify the wireless chipset on your laptop, mine is BCM4318 from Broadcom Corporation.
• Try to locate your wireless card here and download the driver if found on the list
• Now go ahead and download NdisWrapper from here and then install it.(It has a readme file and installing shouldn’t be a problem)
• Now run the command ndiswrapper -i filename.inf from the terminal. Since I was using Ubuntu I had to use sudo to get administrative priveleges. The .inf file is the windows driver that you downloaded from the wiki page. Eg sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
• This copies all necessary files to /etc/ndiswrapper and creates the config files for your card.
• After installing you can run ndiswrapper -l to see the status of your installed drivers
• If you have installed the correct driver you should see something like this:
  Installed ndis drivers:
  bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present
• Then we load the ndiswrapper module with:modprobe ndiswrapper and sudo modprobe ndiswrapper if Ubuntu.
• you can have a look if the kernel sees the wlan nic:dmesg | tail -n 6

  which gives you a description of your wireless lan interface:

  [20457.536492] ndiswrapper version 1.1 loaded (preempt=no,smp=no)
  [20457.541643] ndiswrapper: driver bcmwl5 (Broadcom,02/11/2005, 3.100.64.0) loaded
  [20457.541803] ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:06:05.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
  [20457.546419] ndiswrapper: using irq 21
  [20457.800500] wlan0: ndiswrapper ethernet device 00:0e:9b:c0:d3:cb using driver bcmwl5, configuration file 14E4:4318.5.conf
  [20457.800522] wlan0: encryption modes supported: WEP, WPA with TKIP, WPA with AES/CCMP

• Now we configure the interface with:iwconfig

  which shows wether that the interface is available

• Now we can scan the wlan access point:iwlist wlan0 scan

  and use the following command to get network access:

  ifconfig wlan0 up and sudo ifconfig wlan0 up if Ubuntu
  dhclient wlan0 and sudo dhclient wlan0 if Ubuntu

• Acer users running FC4 can find help here
• This should probably help to get wi-fi access on most lappies and wireless cards. Just make sure that your kernel supports NdisWrapper

The father of the internet will asume the title “chief Internet evangelist” . Kai-Fu Lee and now the great Turing award recipient (see previous posts), Google is growin like wow! Cerf was earlier in MCI for 15 years. Well this means only one thing, bad news for Yahoo and Microsoft.. more here

It’s 21:30 here n i gotta head home 2 grab some grub.

The ACM turing award ceremony was held on Monday, August 22, 2005 and the webcast can be found here. Below is my report.

Assessing the Internet
Lessons Learned, Strategies for Evolution, and Future Possibilities

The lecture started out with Vinton Cerf talking about open architecture where the network has to find interfaces, protocols and objects thus enabling plug and play. He added “The internet is a logical architecture, and the effort to link systems produces something that is not itself”. A few points I noted that can sum up the talk.

• Layering is a very effective implementation strategy but is often misconstrued as a requirement. Also each layer is a stair step for people to interface with it.
• The concept of TCP/IP enables creativity and gives rise to further developments as the packets only need to know the start and destination points.
• There is a need to link nets together as well as the need to have systems self configured. Not to forget Cerf’s idea of “the Edge” of the Net, this was supported by SIGCOMM Chair Lyman Chapin.
• One cannot foresee an architectural change in the Internet but people are no longer interested in the architecture of the internet. It’s the functioning that matters to most and not how it functions.
• Cerf and Kahn both stressed on “Creeping incrementalism” where the Internet is incrementally evolvable and improvable.
• Kahn used analogies from physics where like in Computer Science, the Physics timeline had key points where major upheavals had occurred.
• There were mentions of “uniqueness & commonality” and how can I forget “interplanetary internet”!
• Challenges in security were talked upon and this gave a way for the word ‘terrorism’ to find its way into an ACM lecture.
• Lastly, the speakers cited the “everything is connected” nature of the internet that has two faces. This being the driving reason for VPNs.
• This was followed by audience questions; the best being “Is there a way to shut down the Internet?”

In my opinion one of main the reasons for the adoption of TCP/IP protocols was the lack of intellectual property claims (patent) by Cerf and Kahn. ‘It was an open standard that we would allow anyone to have access to without any constraints’ was what once Kahn said. The internet is certainly a marvel and all the best things in the world are those that are just left there for others to benefit from.

PS: It’s 5:30 AM here, am i mad?

I had given a seminar on thursday in the office on Blogs and named it ‘zen at the art of blogging’. It’s not that i consider myself a new age guru, but ppl felt I was in a gud positon to talk on it.

So I put up 15 slides on mine and then added a few frm the talk given by jace a week ago. The whole thing lasted for lil over an hour and my onstage antics kept the audience glued. There was a barrage of questions most of which which by god’s grace I managed to answer.

What was the most pleasing fact was that in the past 3 days many ppl have begun blogging and were thanking me for the much needed boost. Just imagine ppl take mayur as inspiration? this spells doom! take cover ppl as the sky is comin down…..

yet it’s kinda nice wen u run into sum1 in the cafe or the breakout area, and then that sum1 says ‘hey nice talk’ or “thnx 4 the inspiring speech” OMG, ppl like me?

Yup tis true, today my inbox read 1GB….

ever since Gmail upped the tempo with a 2GB giveaway Yahoo is desperately tryin 2 b in the race…

Partial die shot of the Intel Pentium III microprocessor showing a scribe line intersection running between solder spheres using oblique illumination with blue, red, and yellow gels

U might also like this…

will sum1 gift me one of these?

I believe this is a real story! nice one though!

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

This is the second time I have written to you, and I don’t blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a
tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night.
But the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we’ve eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it.

It’s also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice cream, when I start back from the store my car won’t start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine.

I want you to know I’m serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds: “What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?”

The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an engineer to check it out anyway. The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood.

He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn’t start. The engineer returned for three more nights.

The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start. Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man’s car was allergic to vanilla ice cream.

He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: he jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc. In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout oft he store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out the flavor. Now, the question for the engineer was why the car wouldn’t start when it took less time.

Once time became problem – not the vanilla ice cream, the engineer quickly came up with the answer: “Vapour lock”. It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still to hot for the vapour lock to dissipate.

Remember: Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution with a cool thinking.

Don’t just say its “IMPOSSIBLE” without putting a sincere effort…

Observe the word “IMPOSSIBLE” carefully… You can see “I’M POSSIBLE”…

What really matters is your attitude and your perception.