My first game

I had been playing around with SDL and OpenGL for the past few days. It was about time that I did something constructive with what I had gained. So I came with an idea for this game where you have to shoot randomly moving balls with the help of a mouse. I sat down and started coding. At the end of an hour I had a playable game. The balls, well, didn't look like balls. They had turned out to be square ! But rest of the things were fine. The cross hair did look like a cross hair. When I clicked the mouse it did give me the sound of a gun shot. So all in all I'm satisfied with my ugly looking game which has no future whatsoever. The source code and executables are (as always) available. The program was written using Bloodshed Dev C++ IDE and xemacs. You will be needing SDL.dll and SDL_mixer.dll to compile the file under windows and the same corresponding libraries under Linux . These dlls are provided with the executables or you can get them from here.

Harry potter - 6

After a lot of debating with myself I came to the conclusion that it would be a waste of time to read the book. The main reason to read the book, for a lot of people would be the popularity of the series. I guess thats why I read the first five. But, I guess I have grown a bit more impatient these days. So, instead I just read the whole plot summary on wikipedia. After reading the summary I would give it a 3/5, but certainly not worth Rs 900.
Amongst other things I have a new found respect for the Arctic Warfare Magnum (aka AWP).


Currently my favorite weapon in Counter Strike.

Cross compatibility with OpenGL and SDL

I was trying to make OpenGL work through SDL. It took me some time to get things right and I was able to make a small program which animated a multicolored triangle. The rotation of the triangle is controlled by the mouse.
The beautiful thing about it was I was able to compile and run the program in both Windows and Linux without a single modification. Neither did I run into any trouble during the build process. Here is the source and Windows executable. Call me crazy, but I then tried to run the Windows executable in Linux through wine and it worked again.

War of the worlds

I had heard that "War of the worlds", Steven Spielberg's latest offering, was not upto the mark. They were all wrong. War of the worlds is in fact a well paced sci-fi movie. It has the common theme of aliens attacking the planet, but it separates itself from the others by showing that: In the face of danger not everyone can act as a hero and/or think morally. The graphics and sound effects are really nice. And yes the big alien machines did look like the striders of Half-Life 2 (look below).

Counter Strike

After a long wait, our house has been blessed by Counter strike Condition Zero (shame on you if you haven't heard about it). Now follow the sleepless nights with all the screaming and shouting, with gun fire in the background.

Seminars

So, I was sitting here happily thinking that no one would have done a seminar on DoS (Denial of service not MS-DOS), turns out that one person of the very first batch (1997) of CS CUSAT had done it. As repetitions are not allowed in our department, my seminar topic would be rejected. But, interestingly I could find a lot of topics which have been repeated, in the register.
I also recieved our seminar guidelines. Apart from the usual ones, I found the last one amusing.

5. Refreshments: Arrange for some refreshments during the seminar session
(Preferably tea/coffee +snacks) . Expenses should be met by the four persons taking the seminar on that day.

Efforts to create acceptable programs.

In a previous post I said that I will try to create stand alone python appilcations. So, I tried and failed. But the one thing which I did find out, was that when you try to create a standalone program (which basically means that you won't be needing python for it to run) you get a really bloated final package. The executable may be small, but the other pyd, pyc and dlls really take up a lot of space. The unfortunate part is that the python interpreter is not as popular as the JVM, so you have to try and create a standalone program for a larger target audience. The other alternative I guess would be to use Jython, to create bytecodes out of programs and run them on a JVM.
Talking about Java, I managed to find a blog entry of John Carmack (The guy who made the graphics engine of wolf, doom, quake, quake 2, quake 3, doom 3 etc) about his latest endeavor to make a doom-rpg on a cell phone. He talks about how Java restricts the speed of execution of a program. An interesting read.

The infinite mokey theorem

The infinite mokey theorem states that almost surely (i.e. with probability equal to 1) a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard will eventually type out the collected works of William Shakespeare.
So, does it really happen? Some people (who had spare PCs and spare time) tried it out. This quote from the wikipedia article

""In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon in England reported that they had left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month; not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.""

Come to think of it maybe even before "infinity" occurs, the monkey(s) could actually evolve into a more intelligent lifeform and then take over the world.

Game programming

I had been reading a few articles on gamedev, as well as reading the Black Book of graphics programming by Michael Abrash (and yes, penny arcade too). The thing which sets game development apart from other areas of development in CS, is that it has almost a little bit of everything.
Here is something which I dug up from an article in penny arcade.

"You have to understand, game programming is the hardest type of programming there is (although my friend Epistax claims that advanced accounting software is), and it makes perfect sense: while ordinary software has a very specific goal, games create a world, an experience, a virtual reality, and therefore incorporating a little bit of each programming domain: AI, graphics, database, math, optimization, etc. That will take more lines of code, more art sketches, more music... I really didn't think such a commitment could ever be achieved by me. But all that was about to change..."

The First class

Today was the first day of the 7th semester. I did a fabulous job of turning up late to class. We didn't have much of studies. We were given a list of our graphics lab cycle. The unfortunate part is that the lab will be done in Turbo C++, which I consider as outdated. We will be using the BGI library for our programs. It would have been nicer if he had some exposure to something like openGL. Some of the programs given involved animation.
I wrote a program which simulated a ball (gravity and stuff). It is written in python using pythoncard. Source can be found here and the resource file can be found here.
Unfortunately you need python, wxPython and pythoncard to run it. I guess I will try to write a standalone application next time.

A GUI for the SuDoku solver

At the request of Sourav, I have made a GUI for the SuDoku solver using pythoncard. The source code can be found here and the resource file is here. You will be needing python, wxPython and pythoncard to run it.
The GUI code is not pretty as this is my first day with pythoncard but it works all right.

A little bit of programming

I managed to dig up another programming challenge site which promises to be good : mathschallenge.net. I was able to solve a few of the problems with my new found knowledge of python.

Back to square one

I returned from Delhi to Cochin today. The two days of travel were not too uncomfortable given the fact that I was coming in AC and I had Venkat, Vikas, Siddharth and Sumit for company. Patni is in the campus today and as I speak Anshul and Addy have gone to give the GD. My lab exam is on 6th and I came to know that the college will open on 11th *damn* .

The Su-Doku solver improved

I improved the Su-Doku solver by adding some recursion and backtracking. It can now handle the really ugly puzzles which require backtracking. It can also solve ambiguous puzzles which can have more than one solutions. I am proud of it :)

A nice busy day.

I woke up to rain today :) which was a nice change after so much of heat. I had to go pick up Dad from New Delhi railway station in the morning. So I got to take out the car and go all the way till there, with mom. Dad's train was around half an hour late due to the rains. We had an "extended breakfast" at some restaurant in CP and then left for Lajpat Nagar to do some shopping. I got myself some shorts and t-shirts. Mom ended up buying a salwar suit for Rs 1,399 because when she saw the price tag she though that it was only Rs 399. We reached back home at around 2pm. I had my Lunch and left for Center Stage Mall (Noida) with my friend Rakesh to watch "Kung-Fu Hustle". It was not too great, the stunts were good but no story as such. After that we went to Superstars. It was pretty nice.

Su-Doku Solver

I was first introduced to Su-Doku a few days back by my friends Sujit and Addy. It was a daily feature in one of the newspapers: The Hindu. It is a placement puzzle and each puzzle could have only one solution. I could do the puzzles but it took me around 1/2 an hour to finish them. Now, this is good if you want to kill time and it helped me during the long tiring train journey from Cochin to Delhi in June 2005. On the train I was wondering that it would be pretty easy to write a program which solves the puzzle.

When I reached Delhi I started learning Python, mainly because the language intrigued me and there were a lot of people ( Eric. S. Raymond and Bruce Eckel to name a few ) had given it a thumbs up. Now it has been around 3 days since I started learning it and I must say it is a beautiful language in it's own rights.

So, I wrote a Su-Doku puzzle solver today in the evening of 24th June because it was too hot outside and I wanted to learn python.

Here is the python code. I have just used two test cases for it, which can be found here and here.

[update 25th June] The solver is in fact broken. I guess I should have used more test cases. It solves easy puzzles but gets stuck in some of the medium to hard puzzles. I will try to get it working for them also.

[update 25th June]Took care of the problem. Now it is solving the hard and medium puzzles also. I will feed it some more test cases before announcing success.

Rahul's PC

Rahul's PC,
originally uploaded by [Rohit].

The cabinet has a giant fan inside which can be seen throught the window and imported blue case lights. The car on top of the monitor is a scaled replica of a Nissan Skyline. The other frills are: a wireless mouse, a bluetooth thingie, altec speakers and a nice graphics card.

Delhi heat

So the days are passing by without me getting too bored. I go and play basketball early in the morning at our school. Sleep or try to learn a bit of python in the afternoon. Evenings are again for excursions outside the house with friends. Thats about it.

Back at Delhi

I reached Delhi yesterday evening. The train journey was pretty tiresome due to the heat. Temperatures here are soaring. I got to meet most of my "old school" friends yesterday itself. I will have to book my return tickets fast as they too are drying up in the heat (whatever).

Exams over once again..

I finished up my 6th semester exams today. Today's exam (control systems) was not that great though. The paper was tough and I made some silly mistakes :( .
I leave for Delhi tomorrow. I hope to have some fun there although I don't have too much time ( The college reopens on 1st July *damn* ).

Last one..

I had my Microprocessor exam today. It went ok. I got soaked in the rain while coming back. The last and final exam is Control Systems Engineering two days from now. I just hope it goes of well. Then I am of to Delhi the next day.

Nearing the end..

of another semester exam and you get the same feeling all over again. Yep, not in the mood to study. Two more exams to go. When will wednesday come??

An AJAX hack gone bad...

The latest buzz over the web these days is AJAX aka XMLHttpRequest . I thought I should at least try to find out what it is, so I somehow managed to dig up this site . There are two files client.html and server.php which demostrate AJAX. Now what is interesting to note is, that the "server" need not be a PHP etc file as long as what it spews out is XML.
I thought this can be used to somehow serve content remotely. Suppose you have a web site and are running short of storage space, which is obviously expensive. What you could do is store your HTML document in an encoded format in one of the free web hosts found over the web and use XMLHttpRequest to fetch the page for you. Thus you don't need to worry about the ads of the free web hosting site (ads are placed on HTML documents and we will be using a text file).
The encoding could be the one like which we have at osix, meaning using a '[' and ']' instead of a '<' and '>' for html tags.
For an example check this

The client will request for the document using AJAX and then parse it, basically replacing each '[' and ']' with a '<' and '>' and then display the page by (maybe) using document.write .

It looked to me that it will work and it even did when I tried it locally on my PC. But unfortunately when I try to do it over the internet it doesn't work. In my case I uploaded the client over at geocities and the server (the document which has to be served, rather) here at osix. But when I run the client nothing happens. Is it because the request is coming from another domain name ? If I keep both the client and server in the same directory at geocities it works.

Anyone know what is going wrong. Is, what I am trying to do even possible??

Random thoughts

I have my Operating Systems exam tomorrow. Although it is not a tough paper, the amount of stuff we have to study is quite extensive. Hope it goes well..
I wrote another article. I guess I am getting a bit bored of all the exams, even though only one is over.
Slashdot had an article about a guy making a home brewn CPU. Pretty cool.

Pi

So, Rahul was telling me about Super PI a few days back, it basically allows you to calculate the value of PI upto a really large amount of precision. On my machine (Athlon XP 2000 + with 256 Megs of RAM) it took 1 min 26 seconds to calculate till 1 million (it can calculate upto 32 million max). Here is what is looks like.

Summer of code??

Google announced the summer of code a few days back. I would like to participate but I don’t know if I am upto the mark and with exams going on I really don’t know if I will be able to churn up any good ideas for a project.

See more progress on: Contribute to an open source software project

Exams started

My exams have begun. Today it was DSP for me. The exam went fine for me. The EC guys got screwed as they had a relatively tough paper. Next exam is OS on 7th. I will start studying for that in a few days... (hopefully).

Yahoo! Mindset

Yahoo! Mindset is a different kind of search service which gives you a choice to view the search results according to a shopping perspective or a research perspective. I gave it a go with the search query "google" (snicker) you have a bar on the top left with which you can adjust the relevance of your query. Needless to say, like all modern web interfaces, it uses AJAX and it caches the results as you adjust the bar. When I pushed the bar to the left (shopping) it showed me results from google-store, amazon etc whereas when the bar was on the extreme right it showed results from wikipedia , searchengineshowdown etc. A nice innovation from the yahoo labs.

India's supercomputer vs X-Box 360

I was just looking over the Xbox 360 Fact Sheet when I noticed that it would be performing at 1 TeraFlop. Compare that to India's supercomputer: Param which also offers 1 TeraFlop. It's really interesting to note that the game box from Microsoft performs calculations at the same rate as that of one of India's supercomputers. In fact the yet to be released Playstation 3 will perform at 1.8 TeraFlops.

[delicious-discuss] Banned ?

This explains why the link is there..

An easy way to ban yourself on del.icio.us

I was viewing the source of the del.icio.us bookmark page when I saw this hidden link at the bottom of the page.

<a href="/PleaseBanMe//roxtar"><span style="color: white;">.<span></a>

Out of curiosity I clicked on that link and I found out that I was banned for 30 minutes.
It is really odd why the del.icio.us people have put a link over there and why would someone want to ban himself (in my case it was pure curiosity)

AJAX - Javascript + Flash = AFLAX?

This article tells more. I guess Ajax is mainly becoming a brand name these days. If you look at it closely it is just a fancy name given to the XmlHttpRequest object.

Social bookmarking

Recently there was an article on slashdot about social bookmarking, I myself use del.icio.us to gather my bookmarks. The good thing about such services, except for that they let you organize your bookmarks with tags and let you view bookmarks of other people, is that it is cross platform. The reason I say this is because half the time I work on Windows and the other half on Linux. Sometimes I need a link which I have bookmarked on the other OS, which is really tedious to retrieve. It is much more convenient to set up a live bookmark to the RSS feed of your bookmark and then work from there. There is even a firefox plugin for del.icio.us

Conquered the top of ...ummm... Top Station 

Bollywood style heroes.. for more photos look here 

Us near the "Kashmir trees" 

A surprising day

You could call it outrageous or heroic or extremely foolish but I had a wonderful experience today.
The day started at 1:00 am when we were looking at Sujit's photos of his previous trip to Munnar, when I casually said that let's go there. As no one else seemed to have a problem we (Me, Anshul, Sujit, Bhatta and Rahul) took off instantly at around 1:40 am.

The drive was around 3 hours long and everyone, except me, took turns driving. We reached there at around 4:30 am and had Tea and had a small nap.

We woke up at around 6:30am and started for this place called "Top Station" which was supposed to have a Bird's eye view of everything around Munnar. It was 34KM from where we were stationed. The drive to "Top Station" was pretty nice and we got to take some snaps during the way.
When we reached there the whole scenery was mind blowing. We spent some time up there at the top took some snaps and started towards are next destination.

Our next goal was a dam (the name of which I fail to remember) which had facilities for boating in its reservoir. We reached there at around 10 AM at choose the "rowing boat" instead of the "peddling" one. It seemed to be a wrong choice in the beginning as none of us knew how to row and the boat was just rotating at one place. Me and Sujit were the one's doing the rowing. But after some time we gained rhythm and were able to make the boat move in a straight line (well almost straight). In fact we parked (if that is the correct term for a boat) it pretty nicely.

After our long trek to "Top Station" and the tiring (but successful) boating experience we needed to take some food, so we headed back to the Munnar town (as places near the tourist spots are too expensive) to have our brunch.

After that we left for the Rajamala which is the natural habitat of the Nilgiri tahr (looks like a grey goat). The drive to the place was pretty exciting. The road was very narrow, twisty, at a high altitude and two way. Somehow we managed to make it to the sanctuary (which is at a greater altitude than top station). The place was situated high above everything else and we could always see a steep drop nearby.
We were just able to take two or three snaps when Rahul's battery went dead. But we did get to see the goats (yeah Nilgiri tahr) and in fact some of them even posed for us to take their photos (no kidding). We spent some more time there and headed back to home.

Right now we are really tired and exhausted but happy that we made the trip.

Chugging along

I met mom and Rajeev mama and family yesterday. I had a nice time with my two little cousins (Rinee and Rohan). I have started studying a bit for my external exams from today.. hope to up the tempo.

Sharat and Sujit at Amoeba, Bangalore 

Me and Sujit on our Bangalore trip ( read as Subex interview ) 

Mono

I have been playing with Mono for the past few days, along with trying to learn a bit of C#. Mono is an implementation of .NET on Linux. One thing which I liked about .NET is the ease with which you can develop applications. I was able to make a working browser (it is not too cute) ,using the gecko engine, without any trouble. A lot of development is going in the mono community and I have joined its mailing list.
Yes among other things, I had my lab internal yesterday (8086 lab). It went pretty smoothly. I got output for my program in 20 minutes :D and the viva was also good, I could answer all the questions. I also got my sessional marks yesterday. I got 90.75 % and am currently 6th in CS (both should improve after I get my lab marks ;) )

Googlewhacking

You have to find two words which produce exactly one result on google.com to get a name in here:Googlewhacking: The Search for The One True Googlewhack. Another way to kill time :)

XML-RPC

A lot of web services, like flickr, livejournal etc, provide APIs for developers. Both of the above use the XML-RPC protocol to make remote procedure calls. I was trying to find a .net implementation for xml-rpc when I came across this. Unfortunately I was not able to make it run on mono :( So I moved over to PERL. I used the frontier API and it ran beautifully. I was not satisfied and wanted to try the java api. It didn't work :( Here is a nice XML-RPC HOWTO on it.
[Update] The java xml-rpc worked. I was stupid enough not to include the files in the CLASSPATH.

Ajax

I was looking over some of the blogger api documentation when I came across ajax . Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML and is used in things like Google suggest, Google maps etc. Pretty cool and a nice read.
Yes, another thing, I got a phone call from the nice people at Subex. They told me that they will be sending the call letter by courier on monday. Isn't that nice :)

Spell with flickr

This is a nice word to pictuer thingie. Check it out :)

Pictures from words

A lot of work

It was a nice morning I had planned to work on something new: Mono. By the time it was evening I was actually enjoying the ride, when suddenly out of nowhere I came to know that we have to write the Lab record again. V.K is going to come for our external lab exam so we have to rewrite the whole lab record according to his format... (damn ..)

Back from Bangalore

As I had mentioned earlier I had to go to Bangalore for Subex's interview. I landed at Bangalore day before yesterday after a sleepless bus ride. Me and Sujit stayed at Sharat's place. That day was spent roaming Bangalore. We went to Forum, Commercial market, Amoeba and then Spinn in the night. We reached back at Sharat's place at 2:30 am (because we got lost). The interview was supposed to be the next day (yesterday i.e) at 9:30 am. I woke up at 7:30 am and left for the interview at 8:30 am.
The Subex office, although small, was pretty nice. The people working there also seemed nice. We were supposed to have 3 technical interviews then 1 HR interview. The interviews chugged along slowly because their Q4 results were going to be announced. Finally I came to know that I had been selected at 6:30 pm. Me and Bhalla were the only ones to get selected that day.
It was a nice trip :)

Project demo

I had my project demo today. I was given the first slot and had to be there at 9:30 am alongwith my P.C. Sujit dropped me there in his car. The presentation went of pretty smoothly and lasted about 45 Minutes.
I leave for Bangalore today evening, hope to have some fun there :-)

Having fun

Life is going on pretty smoothly, we went to F1 yesterday and had a blast. Finished my project report today and went to meet grandma at my uncle's place. We went out and had dinner, I had a nice time chatting with Neethu (my cousin). I have to submit my report tomorrow and my project demo will be the next day. I will be leaving for Bangalore the same day (for the Subex interview) hope to have some fun there. Cheers

6th Semester last class

Today was the last day of my 6th semester. Had systems programming lab in the morning. Then Sujit got his car from Delhi today (yep, good days are to follow soon) and yes I cleared the written exam for Subex systems, so I guess I will be off to Banglore in a few days for the interview. Anyway , in the afternoon there was a small scare that I had lost my phone, when it was actually safe with Sujit. We had a nice cricket match in the evening with more than twenty people coming to play, it was great fun. Still rolling around .. ;-)

Subex

We had Subex systems visiting our campus yesterday. It is one of the major telecom companies in India. Although the organization's workforce is not too huge, it has handsome profits. It doesn't deal with services, but rather product development.
It was given dream status, so I could write the exam. The exam consisted of one objective round of C questions. The standard was pretty nice and I could answer a few of them. The second round was a written programming test. I got a question where I was required to split a text file into other files of a fixed number of bytes and care needed to be taken that the file wasn't split between words.
The interview will be held in Bangalore (if I clear the written rounds). The company has a reputation of hiring very less individuals, so I don't know where I stand. Lets see what happens. Results will be announced the coming week.

Farewell

We had our senior's farewell party today at hotel seagate. It began at 4 pm. We had some contests for our seniors , food and cold drinks. Dance was to follow next and I was able to dance for the next two hours non stop. All in all it was nice.. reminded me of my school days, where parties like these kept on happening. :-)

Dirty cricket

It had been a long time since we had played cricket. Anshul somehow managed to find a bat and it was decided that we were going to play in the muddy ground at the back of our house. Sticks took the place of wickets. The only problems (except from the ground being soggy) was that: the ground was surrounded by houses with fragile windows and that there was a well in the middle of the ground. We played two matches. One of 6 overs and another of 3 overs. Our team lost both matches, but it was great fun. Addy managed to get his pants dirty and torn once more. I guess he is a compulsive diver.
Among other things, India managed to lose to Pakistan once again in spite of making a huge total of 315.

Offshore outsourcing: A view from both sides

Wired 12.02: The New Face of the Silicon Age, this wired article talks about outsourcing from the perspective of both an Indian programmer and her American counterpart. The article is a bit old and a bit long, but worth the read.

5th Semester results

I got my 5th semester results (10230062) today. I got 81% and am second in Computer Science. Shivendu is the topper with 851/1050. Sunita is 3rd with 847/1050.. Second again, I am getting tired of this.

India Vs Pakistan

India and Pakistan had a match today, here, at our very own Cochin. I could have gotten the tickets but me and Rahul decided that we will go to Park Inn and have a blast (they had a large screen T.V and A.C)... ;-) We went there at around 10:30 am when Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid were batting. Shortly we were joined by Sujit, who came after giving the written exam of Satyam Computers. At around 2pm Anshul was also a part of the party. We blasted off till India won.. it was great fun. We were ther for around 7 hours ;-D

Automating downloads

I had spare time so I wrote an article about automating downloads using Perl. Nothing great, short and sweet like perl :-)

More companies

The days seem to pass by without anything interesting happening. We had Sonata softwares on campus today. It is a small company and I think that making it come to the campus so early was a bad decision. It was offering Rs 2 lakhs p.a and you also had to sign a bond of Rs 1 lakh for a period of 2 years. IMHO it is not at all a good package. The share value of the company is around Rs 20, which, for an IT company, is not at all good. The impression they gave in the PPT was that the job was not going to be technical, so I don't think they will be attracting many people.

Back from NITC

These past three days were spent blasting at NITC. We had an inter college basketball tournament there. We had the first match on Monday evening with GEC Thrissur. Their team was below par so Thomas (our star player) didn't even play that match and we beat them with a comfortable 20 point lead. In fact we started showing off at the end of the match (which ,in retrospect, could have been limited ). Our next match (the semis) was to be against CET. We had two players from CUCEK, so they said that they will protest if we made them play against them and hence disqualify us. We respectfully obliged to their suggestion and beat them by more than 20 points. If felt nice ;)
The last match was against NITC (the home team). At the onset of the match we didn't play well and they had a 16 point lead before we scored our first basket. At the end of the first half we were down 21 points. Then we decided that we will strengthen our defense and give it all. Slowly and steadily we started to catch up and at one point we were just down by 3 points. Unfortunately at that crunch situation I missed two underbasket shots (and according to Thomas that cost us the game ). We lost by 7 points but we gave them a nice fight. The crowd there was very decent unlike ours and some of them also appreciated some of our shots and they didn't even abuse us. We got the certificate and the prize money and we blasted the night in the hostel, where we were staying. We returned the next morning.

The NIT campus was very nice and quite .... we changed all that for a period of two days ;)

Wipro

Wipro was here for campus placement yesterday. I gave the written exam and cleared it. Today was my technical interview, which I promptly took care of ;). The tech interview was smooth, I had a nice time bragging about my project. The HR interview was also ok. I'm right now impatiently awaiting the results. Hope I get through.
[update]
I got through all right yahoooooooooo.... it is a real nice feeling hope my other friends are also placed soon, then we can all go and freak out..

A late update

Its been a long time since I blogged anything (mainly because I didn't get time for it). I was resting for two weeks due to chicken pox. Then we had our internal exams (which still are not over) and now companies have started coming to campus for placements. The first one will be Wipro on 18th. Then we have two more companies coming on 20th and 23rd whose names haven't been disclosed yet. My preparation for campus placements is ok. I'm a bit apprehensive about the interview. Lets see how everything goes. Fingers crossed.

Chickenpox

I woke up this morning feel a bit weak and tired. I was feeling a bit feverish too. Then, I noticed that I had rashes coming on my chest. My worries were confirmed in the evening when the doctor announced that I have Chickenpox.

I have been asked to take 2 weeks bed rest. I guess I won't be able to give my internal exams.

Beach boyz

It was a real nice end to a rather boring day. The day started with the systems programming lab.. in which I couldn't even do some simple programs (I will take care of that). Fortunately we had only one hour in the afternoon.
We had some major plans for the evening... Me and Auto were going to give the guys our birthday treat. So we picked up some KFs and left for Cherai in one maruti and one Dio. We were having fun the whole time during the drive. When we arrived at the beach it was totally empty, it was like as if we had our own private beach. We had a nice time chatting, making tunnels in the sand, doing long jumps, doing cartwheels and somersaults and (my favorite) watching at the expanse of the ocean in front of us. We had our dinner (which was very nice) and spent some more time on the beach. We returned when we realized that it was getting to late and that the tide was rising too much.. all in all it was one of those days which I would never forget...

Time control in computer chess part 2

I finally managed to get around the problem which I was encountering in the time controlled search. The problem was that most of the time , even when the search was going deeper it was giving a bad move (due to time restrictions) than a shallow search. So what I did was modify the algorithm to something like this:

search(-INF,+INF,4,&line);

best_move=line.argmove[0];

for(i=5;i<MAX_DEPTH;i++) {

search(-INF,+INF,i,&line);

if(!timefail) {

best_move=line.armove[0];

continue;

}

else {

return best_move;

}

}

With this the computer had a shallow best move before going deeper.

Time control in computer chess

I hadn't made any major attempts at improving my chess engine. I had just added some features to the evaluation routine. So, I thought why not add time control to it ,so that it doesn't always do a fixed depth (4 ply) search. I looked up some texts and came up with a way to do an iterative alpha beta search with time control. I was able to implement it, but the results were bad. The chess engine started playing badly. So I reverted back to the older fixed depth search. (Sigh..)

Another finals

Finals seem to be unlucky for me. This time it was the university sports basketball finals (B.tech vs Rest of CUSAT). We had a fairly good team, but it was a bad day for us. In the first quarter , at one point , we were down 15-0. Somehow we started to catch up but we couldn't make the lead go away. For the rest of CUSAT team , anything they shot at the basket was falling in. For us it was the other way round. We were defending well and also playing well as a team, but the baskets were just not falling in. The ground support for the Rest of CUSAT team was also pretty prominent and I and everyone else got abused lavishly. I played the whole 4 quarters like my other team mates (Pylee, Steve, Kirtan and Arun Thomas). All in all we put in the best that we could, but we still lost. The final score was something like 49-26. I guess we will be able to take care of them next year.

I got a computer account..

I had waited for qutie long and finally now I got a computer account on FICS. The handle I got is BlueFlash.. Right now it is playing its first games...
Anyway we had a basketball match today.. we beat the opposing team but we didn't play a good game. Anshul also got into the team.. ;-)

A long week

This week has been really long and I hadn't got time to do all the things I was planning to. I havent even started on the GUI for my project.. then I was planning to study some of the subject which I'm not too clear. I fortunately made it into the B.tech basketball team and we have a match tomorrow.. hope we do well. Also the chess engine is playing on FICS pretty well. I haven't got a registered computer account , so it plays on a guest account.

Watching ..

Watching the computer beat other humans is eye candy.. except when the opponent is yourself...

Jumping horses.

The whole day was spent in testing, fiddling and playing with the chess engine. I decided to call it BlueFlash. I was able to remove some of its problems but there are still some issues which remain unresolved. It played some games on FICS (unrated) and it did win some of them... mostly by the opponent forfeiting on time.. but it did play well. I right now am collecting some mate in two/ three move puzzles which I may use in the demonstration. I also applied for a computer account on FICS ( I hope I get one).

Frankenstein

"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

So today, I lent a brain (pronounced as alpha beta pruning) to my creation (also better known as a chess engine) and it played its very first game against me. To my surprise it was actually beating me. I didn't like it so I quit the game halfway and went to tell Rahul what had just happened. Rahul, suggested that I match it up with crafty. I took that suggestion and ,as expected , crafty won. But I'm pretty happy that v1.0 of the chess engine is almost out. I am right now thinking of a good name to give it. BTW Frankenstein is out of question ;-)

The project gets a tiny brain.

I made a static evaluation function for the program, and now it doesn't play randomly.. it now plays stupidly.. Which is progress ( I guess).

The random chess engine.

We had class in the morning ... we bunked the last two hours but some suckers stayed back .. dunno why ..and we lost our attendance. I went to play Basketball in the evening.. After coming back, I started working on my project and I was able to make it play a random game of chess. I could also interface the chess engine to XBoard. The chess engine also played an extremely poor game against crafy on FICS (and lost, obviously). I guess I will start working on the thinking part now.

Work and play

I had class in the morning and in the afternoon (as usual). I came back and started debugging the move generator. I removed some of the bugs but I still am not getting the right result for the position:

r3k2r/p1ppqpb1/bn2pnp1/3PN3/1p2P3/2N2Q1p/PPPBBPPP/R3K2R w KQkq -

perft(1) is correct, but above depth 1 I'm getting incorrect results.

I and Anshul went to play basketball in the evening and after that we all went to Pizza hut.

I returned and have implemented the setBoard function which takes in a FEN
string and sets up the board according to it.

I should probably stop worrying too much about the bad perft results and start working on the other parts of the project, or maybe I should just go to sleep.

Perft debugging.

I said yesterday that the move generator was complete. Well, not quite. I wrote the perft test, for move generation,today, and found a lot of bugs. Right now I'm testing the perft values for other test positions so that I can remove the bugs. Really frustrating.

Project progress

Fortunately the project has picked up some pace in the past few days. I completed the move generator for the chess engine today. Which is almost one third of the work done. The other two third being the brute force alpha beta search and the static evaluation function. I am now planning to also design a java based GUI for the chess engine so that players can play the game online through a web based interface. If I am able to accomplish that, it would make for a good presentation.

A bit of work ..

My project ( a chess engine) which had been lagging for a while has finally taken off.. I did a bit of work on it. Although it is far from over..I should be able to get the move generator working before the end of this week, which means I will have a random chess engine. The search and evaluate part should take a bit more time. I was also planning to make a web interface for it (using java). It would be much cooler and I think the teachers would prefer that rather than just the command line.

The finals

We had class whole day.. I slept for most part of that. In the evening we had the basketball finals with IT. We played okay but lost 18-38. I was guarding Pylee, it was tough (he is quite tall) but I did my best. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the coordination right. Anyway ..life goes on..

The basketball match

We had a strike again today, so there was no class in the morning ( like the past few days ).
We had a basketball match with Mech in the evening. It was a really hard fought match. In the first quarter we were down 7-0. I scored 3 baskets after that and got our team close to their score. The match was too close for comfort. At the end of each quarter the scores were level. In fact we had 3 overtimes. In the first overtime the mech guys had a lead of 5 points. I scored a 3 pointer and then Diaz scored another 2 so we were level again. In the end we won the close fought battle by just 3 points. It was one helluva match, with all the crowd support and the resistance given by the opposite team. For us it was a real team effort, with each guy pitching in. The positives were that we never gave up at any point in the match. The only con was that, we could have converted a few more free throws. At the end of the day... I'm a happy man.

Another day...

Like the past 4-5 days we had a strike today also so there was no class. Which meant that we got to play age of empires again..I did a bit of work for my project.
We had a basketball match today..Electronics versus Safety. EC lost a match which they could have won.. My match is tomorrow with Mechanical. I hope that goes off well.

Long time

Well it has been ages since I wrote something.. I returned from Delhi around a week ago, a week were there were more strikes than classes.
I attended a project management symposium in Model Engineering college yesterday (in hopes that it will help me in my forthcoming project, which is going at a very slow pace ). We had a nice lunch buffet there and slept through the latter half of the symposium.
These days I am playing a bit of basketball in the evenings, which should help me decrease my increased waistline.
Today was wasted in playing age of empires on the LAN.

Does your car have enough personality? Can it do the jig?

Does your car have enough personality? Can it do the jig?: Really nice robo-car dance.. reminded me of the cartoon transformers ;)

2005: Happy new year

errr.. Nothing creative coming to my head right now.. I guess "Happy new year" should be enough, rather than doing recollections of what I have been doing in 2004 (the archives are there for that)

Number 20

Happy birthday to me.. I turned 20 and am no longer a teenager (who cares)..Morning I had my friends wishing me (some did forget about it.. and haven't calleda yet). In the evening me and my friends went to eat out. Had a nice time and got to click some photos with the new nikkon coolpix digi cam.

Tsunami hit India and other parts of South East Asia. Many people lost their lives and their homes. Hope their souls rest in peace and may god help those who survived this tragedy.

My first day.. in Delhi

I reached Delhi yesterday, the train journey was pretty boring. In fact the Train was delayed for 4 hours ( to add to the boredom ). Today, I went to Gurgaon with Mom, Dad and my brother. It is 40Km from my home place and I got to drive, so that was nice. We went to one of the malls to have lunch. The food was good and the place was designed with a retro North India touch. For example the place had an Auto Rickshaw inside the restaurant (granted, that autos can be seen everywhere in India,but this one was the kind which you see here.) My brother had a new nikkon camera so he took some snaps. We came back around 7:00 in the evening. Everyone else was very tired, but I went to see my other old school friends. It was a nice busy day.

Leaving for Delhi.

I have Christmas break and I'm leaving for Delhi today. I'm going alone.. (as rest of the guys have already left) the two day train journey promises to be a big bore (as always). I have packed everything.. and nothing left to do..

Microprocessor lab over

Today I had my Microprocessor lab. Although I was a bit apprehensive, the lab exam went on pretty smoothly. I got a comparatively easy question ( To generate two square waves depending on a mode bit 90° and 180° out of phase). Others were not as lucky as me.
One truth about lab exams is that, they are 70% luck and 30% hard work.
Well, it is a big relief that all my exams are officialy over now. I'm leaving for Delhi tomorrow. I hope I have some fun there. I'm really looking forward to driving the car and meeting my friends.

Language processor lab over

I had my language processors lab today. Although I hadn't studied much I was confident that I would do okay. I reached there at 9:10 am (courtesy Sourav), and came to know that the exam was supposed to begin at 9:00 am . Fortunately the exam only began at 9:30. I got a question to implement a symbol table for C in C. It wasn't too tough and I was able to do it. The other guys in my batch had to implement FIRST and FOLLOW. Initially I thought that they had to implement it for any grammar, which seemed quite unreasonable, but they had to do it for a given grammar. The algorithm for any generic grammar is a bit tough to implement and not easy to understand. The cases which we have to take care are the following.

• When there is left recursion.

• When there are cycles in the grammar

  A->B
  B->C
  C->A

• When there are epsilon productions.

My modded case (courtesy of Rahul) with a stealth drive and shiny lights. 

Believe it or not this is a PC cabinet.. made by zapwizard. 

My modified case

Yesterday night out of nowhere Rahul dropped by and said that he wanted to make me a stealth drive. I (obviously) didn't object and he went on to work. Not only did he managed to do the stealth drive very nicely (given the set of limited tools at his disposal), he also put in some lights inside the cabinet for me and it looks really nice. I will put up some photos, as soon as Rahul gets his PC in working condition (well the photos are in his camera.. and the camera is connected to the PC which is not working... blah blah).

MSN Search for language processor lab

Tomorrow is Language processor lab, so having nothing worthwhile to do I did a search for language processor lab on MSN. Guess what, my home page was second on the list. That is some progress that my site has made :))

Quantum computing

Quantum Computing is a field on which research is being done. It is a very promising field, as the advances in this field can increase the computing power of todays computers tenfold ( actually much more than that). The concept behind quantum computing is a bit hard to understand. I couldn't figure much about it. Quantum computers should be able to crack most of the current prevalent encryption standards such RSA etc pretty easily.In 1999, a group from Los Alamos National Laboratory and MIT constructed the first experimental demonstrations of a quantum computer using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology.Though these devices have had mild success in performing interesting experiments, the technologies each have serious limitations.

Exams over..

My exams are finally over. The fact is it never felt like exams. They came in a hurry and went in a hurry. But the funny part (or rather the sad part) is that I don't feel relaxed (not that I'm tensed up or anything, but usually one does feel relaxed in such a case). So right now I'm here all alone in the house.. I have watched Ocean's Eleven (nice movie) and I really don't know what to do.. Among other things I managed to dig up some funny irc logs .

The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

The Book of Mozilla, 7:15:
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Continuing on the emulator trip

Gentoo Linux Newsletter -- December 13, 2004. The Gentoo newsletter had a ton of emulators for (guess what) Linux. Of which I have only used User mode linux.

Bochs (pronounced box)

bochs: The Open Source IA-32 Emulation Project (Home Page). Some more of emulation stuff for me to work on .. will give it a go after the exams are over.

BrainF***k

Something to emphasize on what is going inside my head.. well no. This is actually a programming language (yeah right) for which one could write a compiler very easily (not joking). In fact the compiler for BrainF***k is around 171 Bytes large. By the way don't even think about writing programs in it.. It is a total waste of time. It consists of only 8 commands (originally posted as "operators") and was built to be turing complete (originally posted as "to simulate a turing machine"). To me the programs look nothing more than cute ASCII art.

Quines and bad exams

I had my Language processors exam today. The paper was lengthy so I couldn't write everything that I wanted to :(
I recently came upon this: Quines are programs that print themselves out. Now, this didn't sound that tough to me on first look but believe me it is not easy as it sounds. In fact a guy has even written a paper about it.