Google v2

Been a long time since I wrote, and as comments to my last post prove that I have a fan following of critics now, waiting for new posts, here it is:

The previous month has been really hectic, as we're working very hard (and at great speed) to complete our project for the finals of Google Product Prodigy '09. BTW, I should first inform you that we guys got selected to the finals of the Google Product Prodigy contest (again, for me) from the entire Asia-Pacific region! People who've read my previous blog (at awardspace.com, which seems to be dead now) would recall the post I made describing the fantastic experience I had at GooglePlex Bangalore last year. We're pretty excited at being able to go through that again!

The other interesting project me and my friends are working on presently are an Adaptive Web Search engine, that adapts to a user's search-usage pattern over a period of time, so that after a while, the search engine starts delivering results tailored to the trends the person has set over weeks.

We're also about less than a month now to the launch of Flare (our Google project), which will be launched as a web service! It will initially be invite-only. :-)

Cheers!
Shashank

LSJ: The Blue Screen of Megadeath

Shudder. For those of you who have used Microsoft Windows XP, be afraid, be very afraid. Because the British Navy has just upgraded its nuclear (powered and deterrent) submarines to the state-of-the-art control technology -- Microsoft Windows XP. A stripped down version of it, if that be any consolation, which it is not.

Check out the Linux Journal article: Blue Screen of Megadeath

"We can't speak for anyone else, but the thought that somewhere floating out there are two hundred nuclear warheads under the control of Windows XP scares the living daylights out of us. If anyone needs us, we'll be building a bunker in the back yard before one of the boom-boom boats throws a blue screen of death and blows us all to kingdom come."

Boo!

~Shashank

Mounting ext2/ext3 partition in Windows

Having no Linux disc at hand in order to live-boot and see my "Back2Basics" root filesystem files in X Windows (I removed X Windows as well, remember?), I found this interesting tool for accessing the Linux ext2/ext3 partitions from inside Windows. It works with almost all versions of Windows, but doesn't do reiserfs, and others.

Check this post out: Post

Download the tool from here: Download

Cheers

Shashank

Real-time color scheme generator

Here's a very interesting and ingenious tool I found on the Internet: A real-time color scheme generator that does a Yahoo Image search for the term you search and returns the most prominent colors in the images returned.

Here's what they say:

"We take 5 related images from Yahoo Image Search and then show the most prominent 6 colors from each image. Each column of colors is taken from a single image."

Check it out: link

Cheers

Shashank

PS: Why the hell is Google displaying Visual Ads now? It is just going the same way as the other old internet-advertising agencies went - ugly, intrusive and heavy picture ads, and some of them even Flash-based! So much for light, elegant and unobtrusive text ads.

Day two: Back2Basics Linux

Having vowed not to spend my 10-day winter vacation doing anything serious, I decided to play a bit with Linux, apart from reading the novel "She" by H. Rider Haggard (of Allan Quartermain fame) and revisiting the Beatles' album collection I got hold of just before setting off from college.

Anyhow, one of the first things I did when I got home was to strip off /everything/ from my ancient Ubuntu installation in the PC at my home, and essentially removed ALL the packages other than the important core and base and essential ones. This brought me down to the beautiful command line at the next reboot, and then I to do a little tweaking with the /etc/init.d/rc to display some messages and request for user login, instead of asking for root login (it was configured to spawn /sbin/sulogin, instead of login) and such. All this led to a cool "Back2Basics" Linux, which still takes around 800 MB because I haven't removed a LOT of unneccesary libraries incase I break something (I've done that once before). So I'll proceed to do the stripping work soon (hehe). I got hold of this O'Reilly book on Building Embedded Linux Systems sometime back and it lists this minimum required directory structure for the root (/) filesystem, and another book on Embedded Linux (whose publisher I cannot recall) which listed the bare essential binaries and the corresponding libraries required. So I'm planning to base the stripping-down on the guidelines in these books, and of course using the ldd command to find the dependencies of the desirable binaries incase I want something extra. I replaced the GNU utils with Busybox yesterday. My target is to just have the Kernel Image, Busybox, Perl, and Java. Lets see what comes of it. ;-)

Also, I'm working on a new categorized layout for this blog, something I'd developed two years back but never implemented. Its going to automatically pick the most popular categories and show posts filed under those in square boxes, and the more popular categories will be higher up in the boxed, 3-column layout.

Cheers
Shashank

Network scanner script

One of the more useless handiwork of a wasted 2 hour lab session:

A shell script for scanning the network with Class C IP Addresses from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.255.255 and listing the active IP addresses. It writes it to a file called IP_list as well as echoes it.

ip_scan.sh:
-------------------------------------------------------------------

#!/bin/bash

# A Useless network scanner
# by Shashank Shekhar
# - Scans the Class C network from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.255.255
# - Note: Ping doesn't always return the true state of a network node
##

for ((i = 1; i < 256; i++))
do
 for ((j = 0; j < 256; j++))
  do
   ping -c 1 -w 1 192.168.$j.$i > opFile
   cnt=$(grep -c -i " 0% packet loss" opFile)
   if test $cnt -eq 1
   then
     echo "192.168.$j.$i is there" >> IP_list
     echo "192.168.$j.$i is there"
   fi
 done
done

Cheers
~Shashank
PS: I was so bored.

Edit: Evil text-garbling spirits, Stay Away!

Life in other places. What is Life?

The question of whether there is life in other places in the Universe requires a fundamental question to be answered: What is the definition of life?

This is not a spiritual discussion on Life and its meaning, but for those who thought it was, do read on. Fresh viewpoints are always stimulating for spirituality.

People tend to have very varied and often biased views with regards to their definition of Life. Most would think of a grotesque humanoid form with a head, two arms, two legs as an instant reaction to the question, while others might take more colorful forms: octopuses, crabs, giant ants etc. These have been covered extensively by countless science-fiction material, books, movies etc. These view points are flawed at several places:

a) These replies do not even answer the question: "What is the definition of life". These just provide the answer to the specific question: "What would living beings look like in some alien planet". A sea of difference.

b) They all assume that the physical and environmental conditions required for life are similar to that of the Earth. The fact that life could exist at 12,000 degree centigrade is just absurd, in these viewpoints. But living cells have been found on Earth in the most extreme conditions [1].

c) They all assume that "Life" is Carbon-based, and in-fact, material. What I mean is, they assume that the dependence of Living beings on Water, Oxygen and Nitrogen is universal. This "life" that people talked about involved Amino acids and nitrogenous compounds forming the basic genetic material and cell structures that coordinated to form the diverse life-forms that we know of. But this entire set of known life-forms are mostly based on Nitrogenous compounds with dependence on Hydrogen, Oxygen and Carbon. Assuming that life could evolve only from these is a precarious one.

I do not claim to have the correct answer. The purpose of this article is just to try to broaden the scope of thought and opinion of what is living and what is not.

What is Life? The property that makes entities living. Thus if a set of rules determine that the entity in question is "living", then it has "Life". Hence the question narrows down to determining the set of rules that declare an entity living or non-living.

This is where things get fuzzy. I'm afraid there will never be a conclusive, definitive and "correct" answer, but just our viewpoints. Just like our viewpoints of what is "right" or "wrong" determines laws and so-called morality.

I think an expanded and relatively broad-minded checklist for a single "living entity" would be:

a) Should be responsive to external environments and stimuli
b) Should be able to self-sustain for as long as possible in the environment
c) Should be able to change itself and adapt in order to continue existence

Is reproduction a necessity to certifying something "living"? Probably not. Because a single male or female of the human species, or any sexually reproducing species, cannot reproduce without involving two entities. Thus a single man would not be able to reproduce alone, and would hence be declared non-living by following that logic.

Note: Do not read the following lines if you have had enough mind-expansion for the day.

This expanded view brings us to a series of interesting ideas. Could life forms exist in electromagnetic waves? Why make the assumption that life needs to have material composition? Electromagnetic waves are doomed (in a way) to keep propagating ahead in space until their energy is absorbed by any entity they collide with. But what prevents us from calling a man who keeps running non-stop until he vaporizes by running into a blast furnace as living? You'd say he's living even though he's constantly running non-stop because he can change himself, he's interacting with the environment and external stimuli, and because he is... well a man!

But similar is the case of an electromagnetic wave. Its a bundle of energy, like every man or for that matter, "matter". If some quirks of nature in some part of the Universe would cause these bundles of energy to self-sustain on loss of energy, and suit themselves to the surroundings, all while running along at the speed of light constantly, would they be called Living? I believe they would, and should.

Cheers
~Shashank
PS: Image: X-ray of the left hand of a ten year old boy with polydactyly.