Suren's Weblog » programmin

In Trance

suren — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:42:30 +0000

Have you ever been in a state where you don’t know what day/date is it and seriously have no idea of knowing it ? Have you been where nothing matters and you are totally impervious to everything that happens around you ? It is as if you realize nothing matters and so you let go of everything ? That is a dangerous place yet a really happy place to go to ! I know it drives you crazy to be there at times and at others its really enjoyable. You pass out of the college, you are supposed to feel bad. But You are as if you never lived there. You are going to a job of your dreams, you are supposed to feel good. But You are as if it never mattered and then you start wondering if that is really a job of your dreams ! All you care about is the boost that you get in the morning – is it hot enough ? does it have enough sugar ? and even that, most of the times is perfect and you tend to not care about that !

May be too much of leisure does not do good on you ! But that again sucks ! You don’t want to be the workaholic everyone knows you to be ! Then you are clearly confused what to do next. You both love and hate what you do and what kind of person does that make you ! You love doing night-outs but don’t want to do them because that makes you not normal. How can you possibly both love and hate topcoder at the same time ? Or is love and hate the same thing ? Is that all it comes down to ? May be its tough to love and hate a thing; but maybe its not that tough to like and dislike the same thing ? And what is liking and what is loving ? Where do you draw the line ? and why should it be a line and not a curve ? And why the heck do you use so many smiley-s ?

You know you are in trance and you want to get out of it. You think/wish that it will change when you go places, but that is yet to be seen. I wish it changes for you, that you don’t get into this stupid trance once again and you laugh at this post that I even cared to write it for you!

Peace ! Vaazgha

Improve your blog audience.

suren — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:46:30 +0000

Though I don’t write blog to be followed, It will be happy for me to know that many people are following. So out of boredom (once again ) googled for sometime to improve my blog hits and did the following steps.

1. Install All in one SEO plugin for wordpress. I am not sure what this does but just followed what the wordpress codex site had suggested.

2. In my wordpress Dashboard, Settings->Writing added the following url’s to the update services coloumn list.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

3. Went to Pingomatic site and selected the list of sites that should ping my blog site.

And it worked. My blog hits raised by a very nice number inspite of me posting nothing. If you have found your niche and already there are lot of followers I guess you can increase your ratings this way.

Streaming from Amritapuri

suren — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:31:11 +0000

Our team, LRSL ( named so after Last Row of Sun Lab , sort of a cult back in college) consisting of Abilash , Natraj and myself qualified for ACM ICPC Amritapuri regionals round. Its on 6th and here we are at Amrita Kerala Campus. The place is so wonderful and the hospitality of this place is so stunning. The food, hostel and everything else are too good. The Organisers have also planned for trip around to the local beach house and so on. So three days filled with coding, superb food, fun at the beach and superb people around, What better way could I have started the Holidays with

PS: Probably Life is a roller coaster ride, One day you are at the bottom and the other day you are at the top

Merging multiple PDF files in Linux

suren — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 07:15:52 +0000

I always had trouble maintaining multiple PDF’s of same genre. A simple command – pdftk will do the trick of merging them together into a single PDF file. pdftk is present in Ubuntu repository itself.

Using the command is also very simple.

pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf … cat output output.pdf

so if a.pdf, b.pdf so on are the pdf files u want to merge and the output file is combined.pdf then the command will be

pdftk a.pdf b.pdf cat output combined.pdf

Now if you a folder full of pdf files that you have to merge into a single pdf file , you can give something like

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

The only problem being that *.pdf might not take the input in the order you want. So you have to name the files such that doing an ls in the directory gives the files in the order in which you wanted them to be merged in the final output pdf file. say file00.pdf file01.pdf and so on.

Google Summer of Code !

suren — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:26:15 +0000

Well , this is something I am looking forward to get into. More than anything it gives the soc tag name which is so good to start with if someone is looking forward for an open source career. I am putting few applications in Gnome , KDE and Joomla and Ogre.

Whats more interesting and exciting is the big contacts one gets into. Now people like Naba Kumar, Anjuta IDE’s lead developer and project head and the always helpful Nags(author of LDTP ), is in my google chat list. Isn’t it just wonderful ? I wish , the list will increase in the coming years . To see your application/code being used by others and people raising comments/requests on it – the sense of satisfaction that arises out of it – I just love it . But one has to have some patience

PS : who said open source is charity ??

Pengufest ‘08

suren — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:47:23 +0000

Too much happened during Pengufest ‘08. Lots of fun and lots of kelaas aka damages ! I cannot thank enough all the people who were a part of pengufest and the list is whole of GLUG-T! I really loved working with you guys and it was a wonderful learning experience for me conducting an event of this scale ! Wish I did more justice

If I go into details , this would become a really very big post and so lets just skip all the stuff and all I will say is Pengufest 08 went well!

Yeeey !! Exams over !!!

suren — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:30:49 +0000

Exams over! By far the worst exams i have given. Whats more ?? I dont feel bad about it !! In fact this time it never gave the feeling of exams. Guess i have grown up enough that i dont take exams that seriously .

And for the holidays the major part i will be doing a project in IIIT hyderabad continuing what i did last sem but this time hari, yazhini and vinod . And so this is going to be lots more fun with them. And manas says we are gonna work with him too !! Guess hols are going to be exciting

Brain F**k, White Space and Intercal

suren — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:01:00 +0000

First of all : i am not swearin at you. For People who dont know these are the names of programming languages meant to toughen a programmer’s life.

Brain F**k : This is world’s most horribly smallest programming language.
Its compiler can just understand 8 symbols :- + – . , [ ] Thats all.
all your logic has to be converted to this. Search Wikipedia for more about this abnormally fast language. More whoopier is the size of the compiler: just 16kb !!!

And INTERCAL – The full name of the compiler is “Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym”, which is, for obvious reasons, abbreviated “INTERCAL”.
I mean how vetti people can be to create a programming lanugage just for the sake of it, when it has no advantage than any other programming language !!!(no offense)

So Next time if you hear u think some one is swearing ,be careful,actually he/she may be mentioning a programming language’s name

PS : i am not giving the exact links because i dont want my blog to be blocked from my college, but u can get them very easily by googling them!!!