Mukul Sabharwal's Blog

Detecting dyslexia; via programming?

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:28:00 +0000

A lot has been written about it (in/outside the medical community); a movie in recent memory as well, but ... detecting it through code? WT..!

I have a few dyslexic programmer/coder/tech buddies and a mistake they commonly make while looping through two dimensional arrays, or such outer/inner loop combos:

for (int i = 0; i < ROWS; ++i)
    for (int j = 0; j < COLS; ++i)
        // pwned

or it's cousin:

for (int i = 0; i < ROWS; ++i)
    for (int j = 0; i < COLS; ++j)
        /* these comments look more attractive */

I'm tempted to analyze the reasoning, rather the inclination for doing this, but I'll refrain.

Curious, how many of you do this?

लमबी जुदाई (Lambi Judai)

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:55:00 +0000

Another great Hindi song, from the forthcoming movie जन्नत (Jannat). It's slightly melo; nice voice though! Anyway, I need a better way to share songs, any ideas?

लाष्मी नारायण (Lakshmi Narayan)

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:18:00 +0000

A really, really funny song from a Hindi movie, One Two Three. The lyrics (if you understand the language) are hilarious!

Tell Me You Love Me: Hindi Writing?

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:33:00 +0000

I've been keeping myself busy (the semester has just started ...) on the weekends (and weekdays) by watching this not-so-conventional drama series, Tell Me You Love Me. I won't digress from the post and tell you details about this series; tune into HBO on your Tele, or view it through other visual instruments ...

Michelle Borth (« that's a link worth checking out), a pivotal character in the show has a tattoo (or something) on her wrist; I did a little capture of it, and I can't seem to understand/make out what clearly looks like a word in Hindi/Sanskrit (alright, it could be any language that uses Devanāgarī) :

Anybody know what it means? (UPDATE: Michelle does say it means to heal, but she in another episode says it's something else, so I'm not quite sure)

Michelle Borth sporting a tattoo with a word written in Devanāgarī script in HBO drama series — Tell Me You Love Me

Comic relief: SUNW to JAVA

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 04:59:00 +0000

So, I read about this on Slashdot about a month back, when this happened. But really, only after revisiting the Sun CEO's blog today did I realize how ridiculous it all sounds.

Read the blog entry, then hover down to the comments, they'll just crack you up. Jonathan (CEO) probably spent an entire evening preparing the entry, and much to his chagrin, not a lot of happy people!

From SUNW to JAVA

PHP6, Magic quotes & the “best practice“

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:30:00 +0000

All the code that was employing the considered “best practice“ for Magic Quotes in PHP, apparently fails when it comes to PHP6, since magic quotes has been officially removed from the sources; a good thing, of course. I discovered this as we moved to a new version of PHP @ work.

So an updated version of what I think would be “best practice“, and backwards compatible.


<?php
     function stripslashes_deep($value)
     {
          $value = is_array($value) ?
          array_map('stripslashes_deep', $value) :
          stripslashes($value);
          return $value;
     }

     if (function_exists('get_magic_quotes_gpc') && get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
          $_GET = stripslashes_deep($_GET);
          $_POST = stripslashes_deep($_POST);
          $_COOKIE = stripslashes_deep($_COOKIE);
          $_REQUEST = stripslashes_deep($_REQUEST);
     }

Web Standards Project (WaSP) website; doesn't validate

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 05:10:00 +0000

Interesting name, the "Web Standards Project (WaSP)". Apparently, the leading authority in pushing for Web Standards.

One would expect, at least, their website to validate! Especially if the page title reads: Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms: Beginner Level or Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms: Intermediate Level

Validate WaSP

The future of web standards is at risk! Act Now! ... Just kidding, sloppy coding on WaSP's part, maybe they'll fix it.

India's hand written daily, The Musalman

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 20:24:00 +0000

And I complain that typing English papers once a week is time consuming!

© Wired.com

Writing a daily in Urdu calligraphy? Hand writing? Insane, but of course very beautiful!

India, in many ways is the forerunner in the digital world; perhaps not contributing to compelling changes, but embracing technological innovations faster than most nation states; and for the record, the digital world (as it is meant here) isn't just outsourcing; 200 million mobile phone subscribers, outstripping China in PC demand, $40B software & services export ... do I really need to add more links?

I went off topic ... But even with these major strides in technology, some people choose to follow their heart.

Great article at Wired; shows India is still living up the culture.

RapidShare downloading made easy

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:06:00 +0000

Download gRapid | Digg It

I've recently been downloading quite a few files off RapidShare, enough to make me cry when I have to manually copy links, click "Premium" or "Free", and then proceed to select which server to download it from, and then actually download the file.

So in short, to download a file, I have to perform about three mouse clicks, and three page loads, before the download starts.

This is alright, if you only need to download one odd file.

But with RapidShare imposing a 100MB limit on a single file, sometimes people who'd like to upload larger files (be it video, audio, etc.) have to split files into smaller chunks, and then upload them individually.

I recently had to download Fedore Core 6 and was not in the mood to first open 50 links in Firefox, then click on those buttons, and then wait for Firefox to queue a few downloads at a time, making me wait until I had successfully queued all the 50 downloads!

So I decided to code something to ease the pain of downloading from RapidShare.

Voila, gRapid!

It's written in Java (eek!) and uses GNU Wget to actually download the files. It's quite simple actually, you harvest all the links you need to download from your source (whatever it may be), copy it into a text file, one link per line, save it for example as "in.txt", and pass it on to gRapid.

In short,
java gRapid username password in.txt out.txt 8

A few notes about the above command. It assumes you have JRE 1.5 or higher installed. Secondly, you need to have a Premium RapidShare account, a file containing valid Rapidshare links one per line (in.txt), an irrelevant text file (out.txt, you don't need to create this), and a number telling gRapid how many simultaneous downloads to process out of the input file.

Download gRapid

Vista is slick

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:06:00 +0000

So they finally released it, huh!

Windows Vista, an overdose of it. Since morning, and till tonight, from New York Times to the Iowa State Daily, in the Union Drive Community Center, on CyRide, in Differential Equations "and" the men's room! (Not sure what the consensus was on the "other" side)

A hefty majority of the campus (the males, 53%) was investigating Vista, it's features and flaws; and the remaining (47%, the more attractive populace) were trying to decipher what's going on with the rest of the 53%.

Not an insult to women; Today, there couldn't have been anything sexier than a female talking about Vista; on most other days, it's slightly different!

Now that we've covered the local reaction at the Iowa State campus let's see what the world has to say.

Wall Street Journal, CNET, BusinessWeeek and most other editorials gave it a fair assessment; criticizing it's flaws and underplaying it's strong points. Confused?

That's what editorials do.

I'm on a different trip. I enjoy the simple things in life. Can I still double click an icon and open Internet Explorer? Can I without any effort (on my part), restart the computer, giving me eyes respite; Or will I have to look for icons resembling Apples and/or Oranges on my desktop? Will Macintosh users still humiliate me on my choice of an operating system? Will I still be able to mock the minorities (Mac's), even though they have a better (allegedly) operating system?

The answer to all but one of the above remains constant.

Windows Vista could have flaws (like most other software), it could even have the most dire of security holes, complicated and non-intuitive windows, or poor stability.

It "could". It doesn't. At least, not yet.

The Microsoft Campus Agreement Website at Iowa State University allowed me to download Vista Business, the only edition available on MSDNAA. The installation was blazingly fast; MUCH faster than Windows XP, hardware detection was flawless, with the exception of the sound card.

Vista rated my computer with a 3.0 Experience Index (out of 5). However, it performed quite well, for most of the daily applications, and WoW seems to run fine too.

What I'm most happy about is the eye candy Vista brings; effectively eliminating what has clearly been the only advantage the fruit basket company (Apple) has had in it's operating system. Though the Apple adverts about Vista are quite funny.

I have nothing against Apple; I just prefer Guavas.

How to shoot yourself in the foot using a programming language

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:14:00 +0000

This is geek stuff.

OK ... I admit; it's lame. But it's fun for those who can understand, which I might add are quite a few readers of this blog.

In short, it's a list of languages followed by a snippet of how you can shoot yourself in the foot. My favorite is Perl, and the best part is that it's true!

Perl - You shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you.

Shooting article on Fullduplex

ColourFUL

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:33:00 +0000

This literally puts the festival of Holi to shame. It's the new Sony Bravia advert.

Figure this,

70,000 litres of paint, 358 single bottle bombs, 33 sextuple air cluster bombs, 22 Triple hung cluster bombs, 268 mortars, 33 Triple Mortars, 22 Double mortars, 358 meters of weld, 330 meters of steel pipe, 57 km of copper wire

High Resolution @ Sony

IE 7, get on the bandwagon

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 06:31:00 +0000

If you're still using IE 6, shoot yourself in the foot (in fact, I'll be posting an entry on how to use programming languages to do so, but that's later).

Microsoft has just released Internet Explorer 7 today. It is a high priority update, so turn on your automatic updates and let the magic (whatever little IE 7 brings) begin.

It's been 18 months since IE 7 was announced with semi-periodic releases of it's beta versions, most recently, RC1.

IE 7 doesn't promise a standards compliant browsing experience, but it does offer respite for hundreds of web developers (including myself) who can divert their attention (from writing hacks, etc.) to more pressing issues ... like sleep.

IE 6 had become just as (or more) notorious as Netscape 4 in terms of complying to standards and the hacks it took to make the page look decently acceptable. It's sad though, that IE6 won't disappear any time soon, but it's a step forward.

Upgrade to IE7

Leaning tower of Pisa ...

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:03:00 +0000

I would NOT want to be that reporter! What can you say ... shit happens.

It's been 5 months ...

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:41:00 +0000

Today, five months ago was my last post until today, five months hence. That sounded a bit odd.
I've been cranking away at this new template for mjsabby.com, and I'm finally done, or rather just getting started!

A few things don't work properly yet:

Links on the left columns
Search bar on the top, though you can demo it to see ...
Comments, and the cool form
CSS2 compliance

This also was a post to reiterate my commitment on continuing to publish my blog :-)

Ajax Google Search

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:27:00 +0000

I've fixed the search function for the blog. It uses Google Search to query the keyword, with a site wide limitation.

The coolest part is the XmlHttpRequest (Ajax). The search is performed using the asynchronous function and the response is written to a hidden div, just above the first post, and a message, saying Searching ... is also notified for informing the user of the pending action!

Feel free to look at the source :

ajax.js
google.js
search.php

Look at the source of my blog, to see further details about the elements and html involved.

Google Maps, GPS, ASP.NET

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 14:03:00 +0000

[UPDATE, April 7 2006]

I've got it to work with Google Maps API Version 2.44, works in both IE6 and Firefox, and hopefully IE7 Beta. Anybody has IE7 to check this?

[/UPDATE]

It sounds trivial, and it somewhat is.

I was an ASP.NET virgin until a couple of days ago, when I programmed my first C# program that plots points on Google Maps :-)

The idea is to understand an underlying protocol that GPS receivers (and many other equipment) use to transmit data to a computer through the serial port; the NMEA Protocol; pioneered in the US Navy for a limited set, fixed baud rate communication protocol.

Basically the GPS receiver at a rate of 4800 bits per second, or 600 letters per second sends lots of data, including the information needed to plot points on Google Maps, latitude and longitude.

For my purpose, which is a class project essentially, I just sufficed with lat/long details out of all the data that was sent, which includes speed, satellites in use, fix, and other bunch of information which I could least bother myself with, maybe I will in sometime, but for now I'm sticking to the basics :-)

For a quick look, head over to the .NET GPS Webpage, make sure you have NMEA files to upload. If not test drive these;

car01gps.txt
car02gps.txt
car03gps.txt

Upload the file, wait for a minute or so, and see the results :-)

The Inside Man : Chaiyya Chaiyya!

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:35:00 +0000

Go watch Inside Man. Great Movie. Plus it's got Chaiyya Chaiyya (and a remix of it) during the movie opening and end credits also :-)

V for Vendetta; Freedom Forever

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 14:32:00 +0000

Brilliant! Exhilirating! Stupendous ... Get me a thesauras!

Fantabulous! Super Amazing! Extra Awesome ... Calm me down!

V for Vendetta, go ahead, and see it's rating. It's been less than 10 days since it's release, and it's garnered more than 17,000 votes, 50% of those ratings are 10/10!

This is crazy! Wachowski Brothers are not licensed to make drama so powerful, heart boiling, intense, amazing. This movie should have been 10 hours longer, I'm willing to see it again, I'm going to see it again.

Based on a DC Comic small 10 issue hack, the movie is set in a totalitarian England around 2015. It's got the same super hero element, something goes wrong, and emerges a hero; but this comic differs, the guy isn't a superhuman flying spider or any animal that satisfies your fantasy, he's a human behind a mask, with a superhuman agenda and god like charisma, basically a facless revolutionary, all of which is brilliantly portrayed in the movie.

Natalie Portam as Evey Hammond is the female lead, who invariably gets influenced by V, the codename for the charismatic masked man. The movie starts off with Natalie Portman being eve-teased by a couple of finger men (government police or something), enter V, karate and fantastic dialogues, rescues Evey and persuades her to witness a music show, and the big bang begins, the movie moves pretty fast, but maintaing flow.

Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith from Matrix) does an absolutly brilliant job personifying V. Did I say nobody could have done it better? I didn't ... now I did. His voice, his skills, it's just adrenaline pumping.

V is about to push the dictator government, and the movie entails his successes and how Evey in a span of one year, from one November 5th to the next November 5th becomes the most instrumental part of his life.

Enough said, the movie is a as many thumbs up as it can be! Don't miss this one, I mean it, you're going to regret it!

V says this on rescuing Evey Hammond :

Voil�! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-�-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V

Evey: Are you like a crazy person?

P.S. - Desis watch the credits in the theater :-)

System Compromise

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 23:55:00 +0000

Just so that you guys know, I got hax0red over Spring Break week. On Monday, March 13th around 11:30AM somebody from Sweden broke into the system (obtained root access) through a known security exploit in phpBB running on SitDPS.com, a site running on my server box.

The attacker (rather script-kiddie) remotely executed (buffer overflow problem in phpBB) a couple of commands to obtain superuser privileges and ran IRC bot scripts generating over 4.3GB of data transfer in 12 minutes.

I quickly noticed (I was logged in) the crippled system performance, load overages were over 80 and over 85% physical memory was being used apart from 2GB of disk swap space. Heavy network I/O was recorded at Iowa State University's outbound router and in a couple of hours after the event ISU blocked my machine from the internet.

The block affected :

mjsabby.com
devhome.org
SitDPS.com
ExunClan.com
lnexun.com

The machine was inaccessible for 91 hours due to forensic obligations.

I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Microsoft Office 2007, Gorgeous

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 07:14:00 +0000

Microsoft has a preview (images) of the new Microsoft Office Suite. I hate to tell you, it's looks gorgeous!

Have a look at Microsoft's Preview Site.

Smooth n' Silky UI.

Jensen's Blog Post regarding it. (More images)

Ofcourse, it still remains to be seen (pun intended) how Office 2007 will fit into the the Windows Vista scheme of things.

Will it cost more since it looks better now? Nevermind the cost; Ares. :-)

India Going Steady

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 08:46:00 +0000

I couldn't have not blogged about this. Bush in India, The Nuclear Deal, etc. It's probably the most delirious time for India as the USA bend their most ordained rule of Nuclear Energy et al.

On March 2nd, The President of the United States (claimed to be the most powerful man in the World) signed a deal with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to acquire Nuclear Expertise for India's Civilian Nuclear Energy Program. The deal does not require India to sign the NPT (Treaty on Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons). In short, India can continue strengthening it's military Nuclear technology and arsenal, of course keeping the reactors separate from civilian power reactors, and making all future civilian nuclear-power generators to the permanent supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

India has 22 nuclear power reactors, according to the deal, 14 of them need to be classified as civilian, and the remaining 8 will be military installations. The deal isn't just good for India, despite what US Congress believes; USA benefits too; reduced petrol costs, and less burden on US providing energy are the key ups for the United States.

The deal still needs to be approved by the US-Congress, which it most likely will, but it'll be quite a ruckus.

India is Rising, rather is Rising Above others, as a Sardarji in this ABC video says, India isn't catching up, it's already with you!

My Desi Gang (Couching Tigers)

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 23:00:00 +0000

High Res

L to R; Bharat Goel, Manu Kapoor, Jobin, Sandhu Saheb, Jawandha

Serializing Firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 00:11:00 +0000

I many times discover the need to get something done while I'm researching some random topic on Google like I was before I began writing this; what I mean is I have 20 tabs open!

It's quite frustrating for me to close all the tabs (or the window), and go off doing that urgent errand (yes they exist on the internet too!) and finish it (or not) and return to my Google research! Grrr...

From the lucid and wonderful world of PHP comes a very promising idea! Serializing. Yes I know PHP wasn't the first language to introduce it, first for me though.

I'm sure some of my blog readers might be familiar with Serializing Objects. Some interpret it as writing a class to file, others recognize it as a way of stream writing memory values in a program / script whatever; which is exactly what it is.

The idea is simple; Serializing Firefox.

Basically writing all the tabs (and ALL it's contents, images, styles) from the memory state (i.e. in the running Firefox state), and write it to a file, which can then be re-opened by Firefox to unserialize it.

Does this sound familiar, maybe like Hibernation on Windows based PC's? :-)

The advantage is simply that you can serialize your windows, exit Firefox, revisit the file a week later, to have all the same tabs you had open, even be on the active tab you were when you quit Firefox ... with the same fresh smell. Well some information might go stale in a week, i.e. session based data, like logins etc. which I think is fine. Don't you?

Yes I know; It's a fantastic idea!

Religion 105

noreply@blogger.com (Mukul) — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 05:45:00 +0000

Introduction to World Religions, the premier class offered by the Department of Philosophical and Religious Studies at Iowa State University, seems a bit too daunting in the first week, when the syllabus is handed out, outlining the couple of quizzes, some response papers, group discussions, exams, projects, and what not! Enough to make a few students contemplate their decision of continuing the class.

I guess that's what the first week is for, contemplation.

However, Religion 105 (it's official course name & number) is much easier to handle once the syllabus is tightly nestled inside your Calculus book, and your attendance is fairly regular.

My particular class, taught by Whitney Sanford emphasizes a lot on Religions from and around India, almost 50% of the course is that (at least in the syllabus). I have a paper due on Monday, to be written after watching the very popular Indian movie, Monsoon Wedding and read an equally interesting book, Holy Cow.

To be honest, the best part of the class is the attention it gives to India. I love India, and when someone talks praises, or is inquisitive about it, I am thrilled. We had a class discussion on Monsoon Wedding once everybody had seen it. For the most part, everybody enjoyed the movie, probably because it wasn't an educational film, but because it was a Bollywood hit, which is geared towards the upper class Indian Diaspora not to mention foreigners too.

They tingled on subjects like why the marriage is arranged, and why the father has so much say, to things like the abuses in the movie and the final song of the movie "Aaja Nachle".

It was over joying, one Indian and so many 'firangs' (foreigners, in this case Americans) just wanting to know what India is about. I was referred to on many occasions by Dr. Sanford as a corroborator to what she said! It felt great, after every odd question, people looked at me, as if I would have something to say.

So every 'desi' (Indian) @ Iowa State should take Religion 105, that also from Dr. Sanford, she seems genuinely interested in Indian religions, and makes it very enjoyable.