R@hul@Research

Convert .tex to .pdf or latex2.09 to latex2e

2008-04-19T22:19:00.003+05:30

I had to convert an old .tex file into .pdf on a Linux Ubuntu machine
The utilities I first used were tex and dvipdf but got a loads of errors and a blank pdf file.
A number of lines like the one below were thrown by tex program at me.

! Undefined control sequence.

After searching a bit, I came to know that its a version change problem
The new latex version LATEX2E didn't seem to be compatible with the old LATEX2.09

First of all finding a file in version 3.142 (as shown below) helped me to correct my .tex file in the following manner

-----------------------------------------
\documentstyle[12pt,psSouv]{article}
was changed to
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{psSouv}
-----------------------------------------
\setlength{\textwidth}{16cm}
was changed to
\textwidth=16cm
-----------------------------------------

Even then I wasn't able to recover from the old to new latex format conversion problem.

latex program was throwing errors like the one below

Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 36--37
Overfull \hbox (45.60556pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 173--187

The statements above seemed more like a warning. Being curious about what is the generated output, I opened the dvi file using xdvi which displayed my content properly formatted

Now the path was straightforward
I went to File ->Print and chose the option "Print To file"

It gave me a file with extension .ps which I then converted to a pdf format using "ps2pdf"

I also came across the following program which might be useful to Windows users. (haven't tried myself)

Links that helped me
http://web.mit.edu/answers/latex/latex_2e.html
http://cs.anu.edu.au/software/shyster/output/report-1-tex.html
LaTeX Frequently Asked Questions

Links that may help you
Latex2.09 vs. Latex2e
TexPider program for Windows users to convert Latex2.09 file to Latex2e
Guide to TeX and LaTeX
Latex Terminology

Knols and knells

2007-12-18T18:39:00.000+05:30

After a long spell of buyouts Google seem to have awakened to a possibility of hatching a chicken in its own backyard, THE KNOL.
Though, from its screenshot, its doesn't seems to be just props put around wiki, it does seems to be another gold mine digging plan as per the following blog entries.

Despite of all these discussions, we cannot deny the possibility of Knol becoming due to google's cool brand status and other known factors.

If we go by Anil's and Michael's blog entries and the discussion thread following them, there seems to be a wonderful opportunity.
It would be great if some startup/software giant works on a knol like project where the authors are allowed to choose from a list of ad agencies (google, yahoo etc.) and the revenue can then be shared among the facilitator, author and the ad agency.

Till then, I hope that wiki is preparing itself for the coming storm.

Some handy links for SVN users

2007-12-03T12:28:00.000+05:30

CVS and Subversion : Combined Tutorial

Subversion Cheat Sheet

Setting Up A Subversion Repository Using Apache
(With Auto Updatable Working Copy)

SVNServe vs. Apache

Subversion repository data transfer

Tuned Untuned Ubuntuned

2007-11-19T12:40:00.001+05:30

Following some discussion threads on the distribution war between various linux flavors (as my professor used to term them), I have decided to tune into Ubuntu.

-------------------------------------------------

My evolution in Desktop OS in chronological order of usage -

Windows 95
Windows98
Windows 2K
Windows XP
Redhat Linux (7.2, 8.0, 9.0)
Debian
Ubuntu(OS to be)

Other OS that I have used as a client

Sun Solaris
Suse

Health Search Engines

2007-10-29T11:18:00.000+05:30

Health Search Engines - A compilation

Medstory bought by [Microsoft]
Healthline distribution agreement with [ Aetna , AOL, Ask.com]
Kosmix RightHealth
Healia bought by [Meredith Corp.]
Google Health [to be launched in Spring 2008]
CurbsideMD [Praxeon, online personal ]

Evidence-based answers to real-medical questions
Unique feature My Health News

WebMD

has host of other sevices ( eMedicine®Medscape®MedicineNet®RxList® )

Aetna
RevolutionHealth owned by [AOL]
TauMed - A recent start-up
Some more in Google's Directory Listing
A host of others are trying to build communities around health issues, but don’t focus purely on search per se. - VentureBeat
OrganizedWisdom
WorldHealthCare - Provides Information on Hospitals for various diseases
HealthCare - owned by Robert W. Monster - "goal .... new consumer-driven health experience"
Some more altsearchengines

HealthExcite
MedlinePlus
CognitionSearch
GenieKnows (Health)
MEDgle
ReleMed
MedWhat
Diagnosaurus
GoPubMed

comScore's health media metrics - as blogged by VentureBeat

Live presentations on web, WOW!

2007-10-23T12:52:00.000+05:30

I was frustrated at the problems encountered in virtual conferencing during seminars till I searched google for live web presentations.

A good review/compilation of the web services available in this arena saved me a lot of time.

If you want to make a live/remote presentation on web, try one of them

thumbstacks.com
zoho.com
slideaware.com

Cyborgs are not a distant dream

2007-10-08T11:49:00.000+05:30

Wired has a very insightful article writen by Clive Thompson on the gradual effect of the gS(google, gadgets) and iS (iPod, IMs) on our brain's memory power.
In the writer's words, "...we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us."

Though the concept of outsourcing has come recently in business, we have long been outsourcing our daily chores to machines at work or home. Memory is just one area where we have developed OUTBOARD counterparts. We have already become CYBORGS; its just that the machine part of ours is not onboard.

What earlier started as an exercise to ease off the physical burden seems to be reaching to a stage of human beings' mind and body being under-burdened to the extent of losing their potential gradually to the machines.
Thompson's article focuses on only one aspect of this evolution or rather devolution.
We have already seen our bodies slowly developing long term friendships with sweet diabetes and crunchy arthritis.
If just a simple memory stick can make us loose our capability to retain, what will happen when the agent technology succeeds in developing a virtual representative of our mind?

May be the Turing Machine test would have to be replaced by a Turing Human test!

Catch the captcha

2007-07-11T14:13:00.000+05:30

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

Though I had earlier authenticated myself through those visually distorted images, I first came across the term CAPTCHA while watching the google video talk by the genius Luis Von Ahn on Human Computation.

But after a discussion with my friend ishu on the same, I could not resist myself to check out the new developments in CAPTCHAS.

Here's something I came across -

A project whose goal is to demonstrate the inefficiency of many captcha implementations.

Captcha Decoder - PWNtcha
PWNtcha stands for "Pretend We’re Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist"

In a tug of war discussion thread on a PHP forum, Josh Storz came up with the animated captchas requiring users to solve a simple mathematical expression involving a binary mathematical operator and two random numbers, all presented as a sequence of animated pictures.

Credit: Josh Storz

I feel that the randomness associated with Storz's idea is very less for the following reasons

mathematical operations that most literate people are aware all over the world is limited
if we keep range of numbers beyond two or three digits, many users might have to use pen and paper to solve even a basic addition

May be we can encrypt the numbers in form of a crowd picture
Count how many objects of a particular type is present in the picture
I am alluding towards questions requiring both natural language understanding and image recognition capability of humans.

Artificial Intelligence Laboratories

2007-06-25T23:52:00.000+05:30

AI Laboratories at various universities
---------------------------------------

Stanford AI Lab
http://ai.stanford.edu/

MIT CS.AI.Lab
http://www.csail.mit.edu/

University of Michigan
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/

University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Imaging, Robotics and Inteligent Systems lab
http://imaging.utk.edu/

University of Pittsburgh - Intelligent Systems Research Groups
http://www.isp.pitt.edu/related_centers/research_groups.html

University of Arizona - Eller College of Management
into Dark Web Research
http://ai.eller.arizona.edu/index.html
http://ai.arizona.edu/

Vanderbilt University - Centre for Intelligent Systems
http://eecs.vanderbilt.edu/CIS/cishome.shtml

George Washington University - Centre for Inteligent Systems Research
http://www.cisr.gwu.edu/

Florida State University - Centre for Intelligent Systems, COntrol and Robotics
http://www.eng.fsu.edu/ciscor/people.htm

Wayne State University - Intelligent Systems and Bio-Informatics Laboratory
http://vortex.cs.wayne.edu/

University of Notre Dame
http://www.nd.edu/~isis/ - INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES in INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS
http://www.nd.edu/~isall/ - Intelligent Systems and Automation Lab

University of California, Riverside - Visualization and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (VISLab)
http://www.vislab.ucr.edu/
www.cris.ucr.edu/ - Center for Research in Intelligent Systems (CRIS)

Indiana University - CS Research - http://www.cs.indiana.edu/Research/
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition (CRCC) - http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/
Network and Agents Network - http://homer.informatics.indiana.edu/~nan/
Centre for Data and Search Informatics - http://dataandsearch.org/

Utah State University - Centre for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems
http://www.csois.usu.edu/

University of Southern California - Intelligent Systems Division
http://ai.isi.edu/

Princeton University - ROBOTICS AND INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS (RIS)
http://www.princeton.edu/~stengel/RIS.html

University of Texas, Austin - AI-Lab
http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab/
Research areas - http://www.cs.utexas.edu/department/research/areas.html

University of Massachusetts, Amherst - http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/groups_abc.html
Information Retrieval, Databases and Data Mining - http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/research/retrievalmining.html
Machine Learning - http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/research/machinelearn.html
Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems - http://www.cs.umass.edu/csinfo/research/agents.html

University of California, San Diego - AI Lab
http://ai.ucsd.edu/
Special Mention - Computational Statistics and Machine Learning Group (CoSMaL)
http://learning.ucsd.edu/

University of Missouri Rolla - Intelligent Systems Center (ISC)
http://www.isc.umr.edu/
More into Instrumentation Control

University of Idaho - Center for Intelligent Systems Research (CISR)
http://www.mrc.uidaho.edu/cisr/

University of California, Berkeley - Center for Intelligent Systems
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIS/

Case Western Reserve - Center for Automation and Intelligent Systems Research (CAISR)
http://dora.cwru.edu/

Griffith University - Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS)
http://iiis.griffith.edu.au/

Purdue University - Applied Intelligent Systems Lab (AISL)
http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~aisl/

Unviersity of Memphis - Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS)
http://fedex.memphis.edu/iis/

California State University, Chico - Intelligent Systems lab
http://isl.ecst.csuchico.edu/
more into Mechatronics

>>>>>>>>>>>>> Will update more later ...

Interesting Picks

References

Used following Google query to hunt down all university AI labs

"ai lab" OR "intelligent systems" inurl:edu

Best Thought Experiments

2007-06-14T23:51:00.000+05:30

Thanks to Greta Lorge for publishing such a valuable compilation of Thought Experiments.

1. Galileo's balls
2. Schrödinger's cat
3. Searle's room
4. Hawking's turtles
5. Einstein's light beam
6. Borel's monkeys
7. Maxwell's demon
8. Parfit's Teleporter

Hope to add more as and when I find them.

Status of Gmail Status

2007-05-31T16:47:00.000+05:30

One might have noticed the GIG sized storage that current email services are offering, a trend that gmail first kicked off and continuing but the gradual impact of messenger status facility seems to be going unnoticed or at least untalked about in the web community.

This blog is born out of my varied experiences of gmail statuses over slightly more than 8 months. Gmail statuses are slowly becoming one of the media to micro-share 270 characters
within your contact circle, sort of a non-bothering Twitter rather much more than that.

When you post a gmail status, you are not forcefully making somebody to read it as you do in other communication media like email, instant message(chat), SMS, phone call, twitter yet it receives more voluntary attention than any blog entry/news article/flashy ads.

Gmail Status can be

event in one's life
personal sporadic philosophical realizations/discoveries
as a publicity platform

link to a webpage, mostly one's own blog/flickr/youtube entry

Quotes from sources known/unknown famed/unfamed
Short Puzzle of various kinds
An excerpt from a book or any other material one is reading
used to organize parties and rendezvous

"anybody ready for a movie @ XYZ theatre today"

Current Song one is listening to
Can be an ad which people might click by choice/chance ;-)
In the hope that this list will self-complete itself by coming in touch with other blogger's comments, let me stop enumerating more.

I have personally discovered a lot of good quotes and few wonderful articles in gmail statuses. The day is not far when "gmail status" will become one of the important keys to recall information that one came across.

Suggestion - I would appreciate if Google allows me to show gmail status even when you are offline to the world. You see It's the little things that matter.

In the end, quoting from one of my friend's gmail status

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that i am right.
- GS of Eva

PS - I feel that in many ways, gmail status is not very different from any other messenger status. But as I haven't explored other messenger services as such, I can't comment on how and how much they are used the ways I described above.

Recover Google Adsense password

2007-05-19T14:03:00.000+05:30

Thanks to Angsuman Chakraborty for the solution to recover google adsense password.

Linkshire

2006-12-19T11:36:00.000+05:30

Computer Science Conference Ranking

20 greatest inventions by Muslim scientists

Evaluating Computer Scientists and Engineers for Tenure

Jesus Christ(s) of Philosophy

2006-11-21T17:35:00.000+05:30

Of all the reasons great philosophers have suffered death, Cantor's is the most painful. His only past professor became the reason for his mental breakdown.

Reason: Cantor's definition of inifinity and further propositions were in conflict with his less enlightened peers and the most vocal critic was Mr. Leopold Kronecker (his past professor) who dedicated himself to rubbishing Cantor's ideas and ruining him personally.

"I could confine myself to a nutshell and declare myself king of infinity".

- Cantor

To know more about history of Mathematical breakthroughs, visit this link.

Looping research

2006-10-12T00:47:00.000+05:30

X researches on economy, finds packaging can boost it.
Y gives a solution, invents plastics.
Z researches on environment, says plastics is an environment hazard.
After all the letters get their Phd they have realised how much destruction they have done...
Now they are doing R&D to build "TIME MACHINE" to return to olden days.

Edison said: i did not fail 9999 times i just invented 9999 ways how not to make bulb
Future Scientists will say: We didn't fail in making earth a better place. We just got better informed about things that can destroy earth - atom bombs, plastics, Smoke, CFLs etc.

Credit: Chat with my online friend, Catherine.

Edison also said that "For Every Wrong Attempt Discarded Is Another Step Forward."
Are we discarding our wrong attempts at making a world a better place?
Even after knowing about things that have destroyed and are destroying the environment around us, have we been able to discard them?

We say we are growing developing moving ahead....

Ending on a relevant quote from the movie Gandhi

Nehru: Bapuji, the whole country is moving.
Gandhi: Yes. but in what direction?

How a blog/homepage can act as a fishnet for information

2006-10-11T11:23:00.000+05:30

The revelation that I am going to discuss might already be existing among the blogging community but still it will be good to document it for the unawares who might find it useful.

For now I am currently putting my experience as a case study instead of giving a general method of how to construct personal fishnets of information. One more thing that I would like to add is that the method is not very effective and doesn't always work but still it can be one of the arrows in your quiver.

Here it goes:

A month ago, I was looking for a good information resource on a Concept titled "Association, Aggregation and Composition" (AAC). After trying all options ranging from search to books to people, whatever I got I posted it on my blog.

Today while digging through the visitor log of my blog, I came across a visitor who had come to my blog following search results in google on AAC.

Out of curiosity and sheer pleasure to see where my blog entry stand in relation to the topic, I traced the link.

And now the good part comes. I found a very good link to a discussion forum thread on the same topic. I immediately updated my blog entry with the link. Though this is not the first time I have got goodies in my visitor log but yes this is the first time I observed this phenomenon so closely and coined a term "Fishnet of Information". My blog acted as a "Fishnet of information"!!

So next time, if you are looking for some XYZ thing on which you land up getting partial information, just share it on your blog/homepage. Who knows, it may self-complete itself but only if you track the visitor logs properly.

Association, Aggregation and Composition

2006-09-07T17:59:00.000+05:30

Refer to

JAVA 2 Essentials by Cay Horstmann - Page 56-58
Developing Java Software by Russel Winder and Graham Roberts. - Page 184-186, 194-196
The best concise yet clear enough description is provided by VisualCase
UML User Guide by Grady Booch- page 5 of the pdf
What Java Technology Forum says...
Composition via aggregation

Some Ideas to Explore

2006-08-22T12:28:00.001+05:30

Like flickr that tags photos, is Tagging source codes a good idea? Why and Why not?
Number Prosody for better retention (natural text-to-speech systems)
Think about how to design a generic programming language platform using which people can transfer knowledge to machines. Merging Intentional Programming with Agent based architecture to create personal agents that can discover (similar) codes relevant to intentions of their master's (developer) project.
Idea of building neural networks at analog level instead of implementing it by hard-coding on a digital circuit or programming on a computer.
Moral based Story Generation
Multi-Agent Society Models

impact of community building

take N people. Divide them in groups of k people with one of them chosen as the leader of the group. What would happen when each person is a community in itself? How does communication between communities with leader as the point of interconnect affects stability in the world?

Security - Self-oriented vs community oriented

What if everybody thinks of protecting himself/herself vs. protecting his/her community?

Does being part of a community provides a better security shield? Justification?

Vocabulary enhancers (esp. for tests like GRE, CAT, SAT, GMAT etc.
- "5 Words A Wallpaper" that changes everyday
- Thesaurus linking within a wordlist
- Given a wordlist(to mug up), check how much words from the wordlist does a given text contain. That can define suitability of a novel to memorize a given wordlist with the words in some context.
- Mozilla Firefox Extension for Dictionary that shows you word meanings, synonyms etc. in context menu

Plan OS on Ninth Cloud

2006-07-24T10:59:00.000+05:30

Got to read these refreshing articles in the morning, out of which two were related to OS and hence my heading.

Driving Plan 9
YouOS - Web Based Operating System - An OS from MIT Labs with email client, Chat Function, RSS Reader, and Text Editor.
The Future of Computing - Power Worries may replace speed concerns

I had first come across Plan 9 while reading an article on Google's internal strengths. And now its out there for everybody.

For the ones being bugged by this alien OS Plan9 from Outer Space, let me tell you that the idea of /proc filesystem in Linux and UTF-8 text encoding has come from Plan9.

For more, read

"Why Plan 9 Distributed System Matter?"
Investigating the Plan 9 Operating System
An interesting point pointed out by Prasenjeet

Plan 9 also provides a good deal of documentation here.

Download & Try

Main Site
Mirror Sites
Plan 9 on Qemu - If you wish to try out Plan 9 without burning a CD and rebooting, Free OS Zoo offers an image of Plan 9 [oszoo.org] (108M) that works fine with theQemu emulator [bellard.free.fr].
You can also try Plan9port which is a port of many Plan9 programs from their native Plan9 environment to Unix-like operating systems.

Is India really meant for non-right brain activities?

2006-07-06T12:26:00.000+05:30

Shocking but ...

Pink says that most technologically based industries are telling engineering schools the same thing. "They are saying, 'Don't give us technicians, people who only do routine work; we can send that to India. We need people who can think across disciplines.'"

Came across this while reading an article on Beyond Technology that outlines a lot of good points supporting usage of one's right brain.

Possible Reasons for above para
A result of the image our mushrooming IT industries might have made or the myopic knowledge the writer/speaker has about India or may be the writer is trying to address the concern of his countrymen about outsourcing drains.

Dream Game

2006-06-23T12:10:00.000+05:30

Today early morning around 5.30 when I went to sleep, I got a vivid dream in which I saw myself playing a video game. Though its not the first time when I have played a computer game in a dream*, its the first time when my mind made me play a real game in a simulated environment.
I saw myself playing Hide & Seek in a computer environment.

I saw myself running and hiding behind trees, walls and bushes. There was a small screen that used to help me see from a range whether I will be visible from a certain angle.

When I got up, my head was aching like hell... has to be... after all my brain was simulating a Quake like 3D rendering environment. :)

When I Googled about it, I got to know that already Nintendo, Sega and Disney have come up with single/multiplayer games of this sort. But among these, Konami's Elebits on Nintendo.com also called Wii Hide You Seek seems to be very promising.

This idea of Hide & seek seems like an extension to my original idea of Camouflage based games that I had submitted in partial fulfillment of a design course requirement in my undergrad days.Seems like my unconscious brain is struggling for something original. Hope it succeeds. :|

*Earlier in my college days, I have played a lot of Age of Empires in my dreams.

Genuine [Dis] Advantage :|

2006-06-08T10:08:00.000+05:30

So Microsoft is becoming eviler than before.

Today I came across this news item and while discussing it with my friend Naveen B, I came to know that some 3-4 days back when he was updating his Windows XP, he saw the GeAd getting downloaded. Then, next day when he logged on, Zone Alarm warned of GenuineAdvantage trying to connect to net. But now he knows what GeAd was trying to do.

Understanding Language

2006-06-05T09:49:00.000+05:30

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

-Ronald Searle, artist (1920- )

More so for programming languages... :)

Open Source PDF Editor

2006-06-02T12:45:00.000+05:30

Just switched to Linux after 6 months or so. Searched for a Linux parallel of Adobe Acrobat Professional which I generally use for reading paper publications. Didn't find any :(

As Oscar's Web Graphics - Tips and Tricks says,

"[with] Adobe Acrobat Reader you are limited to only viewing a PDF you cannot create one with it. [But] [...] professional version [...] is like the Swiss Army knife of PDF programs. You can convert from and to and to and from file formats with it. You can also do some basic editing directly to the PDF document as well among many other things."

Anybody searching for a good open source project should definitely embark upon this. To me this is one of the best in-demand utilities that has missed the open source touch.

Update: Just got to know about melrosepdf.com that is an online PDF Word editor. But this is not a PDF Editor in true sense as it doesn't take .pdf file as an input.

Note: I tried lout but it seems to be far away from what Adobe Acrobat Pro provides.

Applications of Eigenvectors

2006-05-31T11:16:00.000+05:30

Just stumbled upon this wonderful discussion thread on Applications of Eigenventors. Thanks to Steven for starting this thread. Here is a pdf containing 2 applications in Graphics.

I think such things should be part of every mathematical book to arouse student's interest in Maths.

What am I doing? :(

2006-05-02T16:50:00.000+05:30

Was just enquiring about various A.I. domain keywords to build a domain tree for my project when I came across this piece. I am really disturbed about the way I spend my weekend. :(

In 1950, David Shepard, a cryptanalyst at AFSA, the forerunner of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), was asked by Frank Rowlett, who had broken the Japanese PURPLE diplomatic code, to work with Dr. Louis Tordella to recommend data automation procedures for the Agency. This included the problem of converting printed messages into machine language for computer processing.

Shepard decided it must be possible to build a machine to do this, and, with the help of Harvey Cook, a friend, built "Gismo" in his attic during evenings and weekends.

This was reported in the Washington Daily News on April 27, 1951 and in the New York Times on December 26, 1953 after his U.S. Patent Number 2,663,758 was issued.

Credit: Brief History of Optical Character Recognition [ Wikipedia ]

Smelling Research

2006-04-06T12:00:00.000+05:30

While arguing with my friend Venkata, I recalled one of my professors telling us in class that phonons are what distinguishes between various smells and they may be the clue to representing and synthesizing smells.

Here I list some good links to learn about research in senses.
I hope it will make some SENSE to you. :)

Sense of Smell Institute - The Fragnance Foundation, research and Eduication

Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition - A Book

Images of Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet by John D. Norseen
http://www.acsa.net/john2.html

HOLOPHONICS
http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/1WSW/Audio.4D.html

Olfaction - A tutorial on the sense of smell Compiled by Tim Jacob, Cardiff University, UK
http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staff/jacob/teaching/sensory/olfact1.html

The flair of research
http://www.expasy.org/prolune/pdf/prolune014_en.pdf

Smell and taste center
http://www.med.upenn.edu/stc/publications2.html

Synesthesia & Design: A Symbiosis
http://a.parsons.edu/~praveen/thesis/html/research.html

Update:
work on Electronic Nose
Learn what is an Electronic Nose
NASA developing Electronic Nose for space exploration
Advantage of two nostrils - Read Human 'Animal Instincts' Better Than Imagined

Oracle VC++ date format problem

2006-03-01T11:18:00.000+05:30

Came across this problem last night just 2 days before the D-Day (Delivery day) of the software(in VC++ and Oracle).

Let there be a table Xyz with following attributes (id number, title varchar2(30), Dday date));

now insertion into this table is made like this -
insert into xyz values(3, 'bug 2.100', to_date(sysdate, 'dd-mon-yy');

in the VC++ program, I accessed it using the following query
select * from Xyz;
Combo box was filled with the date directly from the table without changing format.
The interactive shell of database, SQLPLUS was showing the date in 'dd-mon-yy'. But when a query was fired through VC++ to Oracle to fill the combo-boxes, the date combo-box used to get filled with 'dd/mm/yyyy' format.

While querying, I assumed that the combo-box will be filled with 'dd-mon-yy' (as it behaved on SQLPLUS) but that assumption was valid till the internal sysdate format of WINDOWS was 'dd-mon-yy'.
Now on some other machine, when a query was fired through VC++ to Oracle to fill the combo-boxes, the date combo-box got filled with 'dd/mm/yyyy' format and the program crashed.

So, the problem was with the default format of system date in Windows.

1st soln : we changed the Windows settings
2nd soln : while querying change the format of the combo-box string to 'dd-mon-yy'
3rd soln : while filling the combo box itself, format the strings into the format you want to use while querying. (this is the most robust no matter what is the underlying sysdate format provided by the OS) . (Hint: use to_char)

For more on formatting in Oracle, refer below
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcdb/oracle/or-time.html

Redundant Attachment Detection in mails

2006-02-22T19:20:00.000+05:30

Here is an article about information architecture of email

I got across it while googling to inquire whether there is any mail technology taking care of storage wastage due to redundant attachment forwards/mass-mailing.

Don't know if gmail does anything close to it??

Here is my idea:

Many-a-times same attachment is forwarded and/or mass mailed to millions of users all over the world. If suppose a 1 MB attachment got chain forwarded across even 50,000 users, it will waste around 50 GB of space.

What if the mail technology is such that whenever the same attachment is forwarded within the same mail domain like gmail, yahoo, msn etc. it is not given separate space but a link to a location where that attachment is stored. The file will not be deleted until the number of owners of that file become zero.

In this way, a lot of storage space can be saved.

Now there are 2-3 points to be considered about the practicality of the
above idea.

1. How can we detect duplicate attachments?

Catch them young(the packets)!!
When a user forwards an email, email client keeps track of whether he has forwarded the attachment file as it is or not. If not then just pass the link in the mail message. If the receiver is from some other mail domain then the attachment will have to be downloaded from that link and then attached in the message.

Some checksum or other hashing mechanism
They are not 100 % reliable theoretically.

2. What is the proportion of forwards that travel within the same domain and also the size of the attachments usually mass-mailed and mass-forwarded (just to get an approximation of how much space can be saved and utility of the idea itself)

3. this is in extension of above point. private mail servers that are maintained within corporates can be made less space hungry and cost-effective. In such organisation, mass-mailing is an everyday phenomenon. (notices, announcements, documents, CCs done for communication within teams, departments etc.)

I searched for related stuff on google and came across something called file-aware differencing technology used for reducing bandwidth misuse. But whether it is being used in mail servers in their storage technology is my main concern.

I have also posted the same on Google groups for community feedback.

Got reply from David F. Skoll

MIMEDefang has been able to do that for years, with its "action_replace_with_url" function (though it expires stored attachments based on time.)

I believe the Cyrus IMAP server can also detect duplicate messages and make hard-links rather than copies.

n-Process Concurrency Problem

2006-02-01T17:17:00.000+05:30

Peterson was to be implemented for n-processes and not 2-processes.

Found the following,
For the n-process Peterson algorithm,
Refer http://www.electricsand.com/peterson.htm

Joju referred "Operating System: A Concept based Approach." by D.M. Dhamdhere for the same.

If you find it difficult, you can instead choose among Lamport's `Bakery' algorithm /Eisenberg McGuire's n-process concurrency solutions as an alternate to Peterson whose other papers are available on Informatik site.

Update: Came across this program for comparison between Lamport and Peterson approaches

People looking for Concurrency Algorithms might also be interested in a survey paper on Deadlocks.

How to create animated GIFs?

2006-01-24T14:08:00.001+05:30

I think cozycabbage can help you in making animated GIFs.

Other useful links are:

Oracle Export table Text File

2006-01-23T16:41:00.000+05:30

Problem: Had to export an Oracle table to a flat file

Earlier I used to make a .dmp file in Oracle's own binary format but this time the constraint that few receivers might not have the technical know-how to recover data from the .dmp file, I had to provide the dump in a format like .txt or .csv.

My journey finally ended in the online Oracle SQL*Plus: The Definitive Guide where How to unload to a text file and other format through Scripting has been discussed in detail.

My problem didn't end here. I was not able to write numbers to the text file properly. This link on COLUMN in oracle came very handy esp. the discussion about the number formats.

Also found an alternate solution Using Oracle PL/SQL for .csv format. Here is the script called dump_csv. If you are a techie, you might like to know more of Stored Procedures and Functions that will help you understand the script.

If you are exporting from Microsoft Access, you might encounter Number Precision Fomatting Problem while exporting from access.

This all exercise would have been futile had Microsoft not provided a record limit in EXCEL. Read Slow Response, Memory Problems, and Speeding up Excel for more on Excel.

Other things that I came across during my search,
Got these few links in my first search,

Read CLOB values into a text file,
php/MySQL OUTFILE to text - to pull the contents out of a mysql table and copy (not dump!) the data into a text file

and got this simple solution.

Code:

spool c:\temp\emp.lis
select id';'name';'to_char(start_date,'dd.mm.yyyy') from EMP;
spool off

Also got this contact which I think might be useful if somebody wants guidance. (haven't used it personally)

Oracle Certified Master
Oracle Certified Professional 6i,8i,9i,10g
email: ocp_9i@yahoo.com
http://www.dbasupport.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30345

For that matter you can contact me too. :)

Also tried to sift through the Oracle options with EXPORT but no use. Also looked for sqlldr but it was meant to load data from text files to Oracle and not the other way. Got to know that there is no utility that helps in Unloading the data to a text file and other formats. (For HTML, there is some provision).

A smile passed after seeing this Generic DATALoader image but the software was free just for trial version.

Mixed Feelings

2006-01-03T20:56:00.000+05:30

An Optimus Keyboard

Today, I found something which gave me a mixed feeling of loss and gain.

I came across a product based on the idea of a "LED based Customizable keyboard" that I had thought of as part of the final project in my undergrad course "Introduction to design". I went ahead explaining how it will be great for our multilingual India and inexpensive too. But I had to later give up because of discussion with one of my professors who told me about an optical keyboard projected from top(See projection keyboards) is already in the market and also keyboard skins already in use. Also the fact that not many users use more than 2 languages to write and therefore it will be harder to find a huge market/user group for the same.

I finally had to change my project proposal and chose for writing a thesis on "Games inspired by CAMOUFLAGE" which was not as clear in my mind and landed me a bad grade.

Now today when I see the same in implementation, I got enthralled and also felt somewhat bad too.

But the point still remains. whether it will find a good amount of users to fetch profit.
They have predicted its price around $200 which is too high compared to the existing QWERTY keyboards.
Let's wait and watch when it is launched in the market.

Credit:

Google on the Time Machine

2006-01-01T17:36:00.000+05:30

After reading through The Secret Source of Google's Power (reached via Google's Secret Sauce)), my interest in IR in general and Google in specific has once upon taken a leapfrog jump.

No doubt had InfoTame would not have been there, I wouldn't have developed the curiosity to search about how it is different from Google and where Google stands out and who makes them stands out (See partial list of papers written by people now at Google).

In this process, I also got to know about Plan 9, one of whose designers Rob Pike is working in Google now.

Some more interesting links for further read
--Google Filesystem

--to build a system that can monitor entire web sites effectively

--METIORE: A Personalized Information Retrieval System (2001)

--Learning Linkage

Credit:
Google's Secret Sauce by Aaron
The Secret Source of Google's Power by skrenta [Topix.net]
Citeseer

Accessibility

2005-12-27T11:49:00.000+05:30

Indians behind amazing invention

Anand Parthasarathy reports for The Hindu
... An ingenious electronic gadget that allows the owner to transfer the entire entertainment content available at home — all the television channels, as well as movies on CD or DVD — to a desktop or laptop computer screen anywhere in the world has become one of the biggest sellers in the U.S. ...

Credit: Paresh Kumar Jain's blog

Statistics paradox

2005-12-27T11:41:00.000+05:30

Some more Math jokes
Suso blogs

... A stats professor plans to travel to a conference by plane. When he passes the security check, they discover a bomb in his carry-on-baggage. Of course, he is hauled off immediately for interrogation. "I don't understand it!" the interrogating officer exclaims. "You're an accomplished professional, a caring family man, a pilar of your parish - and now you want to destroy that all by blowing up an airplane!" "Sorry", the professor interrupts him. "I had never intended to blow up the plane." "So, for what reason else did you try to bring a bomb on board?!" "Let me explain. Statistics shows that the probability of a bomb being on an airplane is 1/1000. That's quite high if you think about it - so high that I wouldn't have any peace of mind on a flight." "And what does this have to do with you bringing a bomb on board of a plane?" "You see, since the probability of one bomb being on my plane is 1/1000, the chance that there are two bombs is 1/1000000. If I already bring one, the chance of another bomb being around is actually 1/1000000, and I am much safer..." ...
smr wrote on 12/18/2005 18:35:49
a flaw..
the probability that there are two bombs on the plane given that there is already one bomb is still 1/1000 (approx..[1])

[1] approx because one of the passenger doesnt has it for sure.

Technorati tags: Statistics mathematics Joke Humour
Credit: Paresh Kumar Jain's blog

Artificial intelligence biography .ms

2005-12-27T10:23:00.000+05:30

Artificial intelligence biography .ms:

Whilst progress towards the ultimate goal of human-like intelligence has been slow, many spinoffs have come in the process. Notable examples include the languages LISP and Prolog, which were invented for AI research but are now used for non-AI tasks. Hacker culture first sprang from AI laboratories, in particular the MIT AI Lab, home at various times to such luminaries as McCarthy, Minsky, Seymour Papert (who developed Logo there), Terry Winograd (who abandoned AI after developing SHRDLU).
Many other useful systems have been built using technologies that at least once were active areas of AI research. Some examples include:

Chinook was declared the Man-Machine World Champion in checkers (draughts) in 1994.
Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer, beat Garry Kasparov in a famous match in 1997.
InfoTame , a text analysis search engine developed by the KGB for automatically sorting millions of pages of communications intercepts.
Fuzzy logic, a technique for reasoning under uncertainty, has been widely used in industrial control systems.
Expert systems are being used to some extent industrially.
Machine translation systems such as SYSTRAN are widely used, although results are not yet comparable with human translators.
Neural networks have been used for a wide variety of tasks, from intrusion detection systems to computer games.
Optical character recognition systems can translate arbitrary typewritten European script into text.
Handwriting recognition is used in millions of personal digital assistants.
Speech recognition is commercially available and is widely deployed.
Computer algebra systems, such as Mathematica and Macsyma, are commonplace.
Machine vision systems are used in many industrial applications ranging from hardware verification to security systems.
AI Planning methods were used to automatically plan the deployment of US forces during Gulf War I. This task would have cost months of time and millions of dollars to perform manually, and DARPA stated that the money saved on this single application was more than their total expenditure on AI research over the last 50 years.

Points to be noted My Lord

2005-12-23T14:14:00.000+05:30

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: by Peter Norvig

Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing".

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology.

The best kind of learning is learning by doing.

One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and through stock options is no doubt much richer than I'll ever be.

Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).

Alan Perlis put it more succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers".

How I reached:

Spotted techn0manc3r on Bloghub under section "Most recently added bloggers"
While browsing spotted "Peter Norvig" hyperlinked.

EA used to rescue fingers

2005-12-23T11:11:00.000+05:30

How I reached:

Got a Google Alert saying What Do You Think of the COLMAK Keyboard?
Searched for "evolutionary algorithm" on that page that landed up in the comments section where this research was qouted as

(see the fellow who set up an evolutionary algorithm [visi.com] to determine the best layout)

Experimental Blog Entry

2005-12-23T10:56:00.000+05:30

Some few keys were pressed to see the text appear on the CRT monitor.

In this blog, I will like to thank my friend and philosopher peeyush who first suggested ,e the idea of putting up a technical blog.