GREP

Many of us regularly use "grep" command day in and day out. It is such a common command. Do you know that grep is an acronym.

GREP - Global Regular Expression Print

Regular expressions are invented by Steven Kleene and "*" used in reg-ex is called "Kleene star".

Google Talk - Audio components

Have anybody checked Google Talk About box.



First thing, they include audio components from Global IP Sounds, seems they are pioneers with VoIP and voice over packet network. See their partners and customers page.

Secondly what is that about play 23 21.....

Hodophobia

I never came across this phrase until now.

Hodophobia - refers to an abnormal and persistent fear of road travel.

And because of which one of my friend doesn't drive vehicles. It seems to be a worthy decision considering the hetic bangalore traffic.

Respite from spams in comments

Couple of weeks back I reported some spam being left in my comments. Blogger's jumped up to give us a respite sooner than expected. Go to your blog settings -> Comments tab and turn on "Show word verification for comments". By default it is turned off I guess.

This will help you to open up the gates for unregistered people to leave comments in your blog.

Google Ads in Yahoo Flickr

Incidently got noticed that Yahoo! Flickr shows Google Ads. Where is YPN?


But for some pages I could see Ads by Yahoo too. What a mess!


Do users have control over these or is it just by mistake?

Google Talk - Voice chat

Yesterday I tried using Google Talk to do a voice chat with a friend in US (Ann Arbor, Michigan). I am spell bound and awe-stuck by the voice clarity. There is very little unnoticeable lag and the clarity is much more superior than I expected. Evidently Google has added another feather to its rich haul hat.

Google Talk is based on open source jabber (XMPP) spec. The interesting point to note is that the spec has been available since 1999 and google has implemented it to get it noticed.

Also the first line in the Google talk page is interesting.
"They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free."

Which is India's first Wi-fi city?

Nowadays, my office hour opens with a little tech-geek talk with Abhinav. We share little tit-bits about the tech stuff each day we come across. Our today's chat was about Google talk and Wi-Max technology.

In the course of the chat, he pointed out two things.

Mysore is the India's first Wi-fi enabled city. It beats India's Silicon Valley Bangalore and other metros.

Secondly, India is much ahead in mobile-telecom and Wi-fi incomparison to US. The reason being that we haven't invested much on the conventional wired lines and we are free to embrace mobile and wi-fi now.

Google spreading its wings

The much rumored thing is happening again. According to news reported by Reuters in LA Times, it seems that Google is entering IM and VoIP space.

When there is a healthy competition, quality is on the rise. The end users of these services are going to benefit largely.

courtesy: Plaxoed

Update: Till midnight yesterday, it was rumor, but today it is a reality.
http://www.google.com/talk/

Web Popularity

You need not be a celebrity to be in a limelight, ofcourse it is a different kind of limelight. Being popular in Web world enthrals the same kind of experience.

With the search engine wars picking up, I tried to nail down "How popular am I in the web?", just by measuring search rankings of my petty blog contributions.

Search Engines:
Google
Yahoo

Preface:
I have been keeping this blog active with my own musings about the interesting stuff that I come across day in and day out. I haven't used any paid services or through other means of improving traffic to my blog. I have taken measures to popularize my blog only among a selected group of pals. I have added up Google Adsense to my blog which has started showing context sensitive ads very recently. Though I cannot confirm, google does seem to have a slight edge over other search engines in indexing my site.

With this setup, I used the same keywords in both google and yahoo search to analyze the search results. I have used both Web wide search and site specific search.

Keyword used:
rajakumar blogspot

Search Results:
Google Web wide search:
The first hit is a comment that I had posted in Govar's blog.


This blog came up in third place (Hurray, I am not doing bad in ranking it seems)

There were total 19 results, out of which just these two were related to me.

Yahoo Web side search:
The first hit is my bloglines subscription export xml url


The fourth hit is a comment that I had posted in Govar's blog


And on sixteenth hit is this blog


On the whole, the total results were 26 out of which 8 is related to me. To my surprise the index page of my blog has been indexed by Yahoo search and I could see my comments in Gops, Vig and Smart Senthil's blog.
Thanks to Vig for exposing my CGPA to world wide audience and I need not blow my own trumpet :-)

Google site specific search:
In Google's index there is just one entry related to my blog.

This proves that Google adsense doesn't have any relation with search index.

Yahoo site specific search:
Yahoo wins hands down here. There are 7 entries related to my blog


The analysis that I had done doesn't consider factors that influence any of the search engines facility. All I did is from layman perspective. With the results I do not denounce or appreciate google/yahoo. It is just an exercise to find the popularity of my blog with respect to search index.

Comments are welcome.

SuDoKu Program

I had posted couple of weeks ago about my intention to write a program to solve the sudoku puzzle. Now I have implemented it incorporating the Elimination, Naked Pair and Unique Member technique. I have also created a UI for the program to enable users to enter and solve the puzzles. I have to accept the fact that the UI is not that snappy, but it is good start to begin with.

Lang: Java 1.5
UI: Java Swing

UI Snapshots:
Puzzle fromThe Hindu (Dated 17-Aug-2005)

Shown are given values and the possibilities for the rest of the cells


Solution by using elimination technique

If you want to try your hand, do drop in an email/comment, I will mail you the binaries and the src code.

Spam in my blog comments

Oops! I got a spam in my comments section. Though I had intentionally prevented anonymous users from commenting, this registered spam user somehow slipped in. Hey blogger guys, are you listening :-(

Bloging captures Mangal Pandey

Mangal Pandey - The Rising is the latest historic movie from the bollywood releasing this week. It is no surprise that such a big-budget movie getting in all the hypes before reaching screens. The lead actor Aamir Khan has a blog about Mangal Pandey. Check it throu'

HSBC Preapproved Personal Loan

Today HSBC sent me a letter with a calligraphic certificate stating that being a priviledged customer, I am afforded a pre-approved personal loan. In that certificate they have stated my bank account number. Given the fact that this being sent in a snail mail/courier, it could have well landed in some wrong hands, exposing my account number.

For the sake of their marketting campaign, I cannot afford to loose my credentials. On the part of the bank's security lapse, I seriously condemn their carelessness in revealing customer credentials.

MS vs Google

I wonder why Microsoft is competiting against Google in all segments. I could see some relevancy related to Desktop Search. But not in mapping and other services. I guess that these services does not pull any major revenue.

Is MS afraid of loosing its reputation and ground to Google? Or does it sound MS to be incompetent in terms of services? What is that they are going to achieve?

Mapping service for India

In the recent times there has been a spurt in the mapping services all over the world. Mapping service is also the recent buzz word of the technology domain. First there were yahoo maps, then came the Google maps, and their hybrids. Google Earth was launched later. More recently MS launched its Virtual Earth to add to the competition.

Not just the mapping service providers has increased in the course of time, but also their content of the service. Initially yahoo maps were used for the travel directions. Now mapping services has advanced to show you real pictures of the places along with the road directions. Even traffic updates could be got through these mapping services, so that we could take up alternate routes. In the blog sphere, these mapping services are used to locate blogger community in the neighborhood. Probably this led to the trend of Blog-Geek-Dinners!

When are these services going to come to India? Are there any organizations heading up that way! I have no clue.

On a lighter side, I could not comprehend the complexity and confusions that will arise when we try to map bangalore using the addresses. The street where I live is addressed as 4th Main, 1st Cross, Maruthi Layout. The street opposite to mine is addressed as 3rd Main, Kurupanpalaya. Not to mention there are already two 1st crosses in the same area. God Save!

Gops states that Europeans are much ahead in mapping services from the rest of the world. He states that Taxis in Finland run with a mapping service and GPS installed!

Adsense magic

Hurray! Google adsense that I added to this blog has started working. It has started showing relevant text ads related to the first post I have in the page.

I need to reposition the adsense from the bottom left of the page to some where in the top. This should increase its visibility and usability (as adsense shows ad related to the first post in the page).

The ad-revenue share I have earned till now 0.17$ :-)

Wi-fi Hotspot at our house

Yesterday was a grand day(night) when we finally enabled Wi-fi hotspot in our house. As I posted early about our intentions of enabling Wi-fi in our house, it all got resolved yesterday.

Machines:

• AMD Athlon based Desktop PC (using ethernet connection)
• Dell D 600 laptop (Wi-fi connection)

Routers:

• Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B Cable/DSL Router
• Huawei Router (BSNL DataOne router)

WiFi on HowStuffWorks.
Blog post from Atul Chitnis on W-B setup using similar topology.

The network topology at our house











Until now, I haven't come in close proximity of configuring any network, this time I had lot of surprises and learning. The end result is that I understood all the basics of network setup and configuration of routers. Thanks to Gops for patiently answering all the intriguing questions that I had thrown to him.

The basic purpose of a router is to route the network traffic according to a fixed set of rules. In our case the Huawei Router (BSNL DataOne router) acts as interface between the public internet and our private network. The Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B Cable/DSL Router is used as internal router to enable Wi-fi. The linksys router acts as interface between the Huawei router and our PC/laptop.

The private network IP of Huawei router is 192.168.1.1 (default for most of the routers) to which the linksys router connects to. The linksys private network IP is set to 192.168.10.1 (luckily linksys allowed us to configure its private IP from default 192.168.1.1, otherwise our wi-fi intentions would have been grounded).

Routers provides a web interface to setup the configurations. The web application is a servlet/jsp application running at its private IP (192.168.xx.1). One needs to login as admin to change its configurations. The router comes with preinstalled OS which is used in routing the traffic (Cisco's Router OS is called IOS - Internetwork OS). Apart from the easy to use web interface for the configuration, the router also supports CLI (command line interface for configuration, mostly for advanced professionals) You can telnet to the private IP (192.168.xx.1) and connect as admin to get the CLI.

More updates will be posted as we explore the options in the routers...

Updates:
Now we are roaming around with 11 Mbps wireless connection. Configuring the Dell D600 laptop was bit tricky. You need to enable the WLAN adapter in the laptop using Fn+F2 key which failed to work. Finally we managed to install the QuickSet application provided by Dell to make it work.

Caveat:
Cisco VPN client failed to work with the WLAN for the first time. We need to uninstall and reinstall to make it work with WLAN.

Things to do:

• Enable security options in the Wi-fi (IP based filtering and encryption)

Gops,
Let me know if I have missed anything!

TOI bashing

I feel elated when people bash TOI. It is no worth to call it a national newspaper or even a newspaper for that matter. They make and retain huge subscriptions to their newspaper by thier tabloid supplements. The supplements pull all the strings on the celebrities and cover all the gossips going around. The classical example is the Bangalore Times which is added as a supplement almost everyday. If TOI stops their supplement, their newspaper revenue will fall down to earth.

It is no wonder that TOI published a half-a-page article on celebrities comments on not receiving TOI on 27th July when the whole mumbai realed under torrential rains. TOI nowhere reflects the sentiments of the people!

We all share the same sentiments that TOI is not even worth to use as TOI(let) napkin. Such is the shoddy nature of the paper.