Impetus and Concepts- DAY1

Impetus and Concepts or known as InC technical fest of PICT college started today with a small inauguration ceremony at our multi-purpose basketball ground with few famous people, something i remember from that is "Shayari's" by our Vice-Principal G.P.Potdar and the chief guest was from Sun-Gard.

I was part of OPUS competition so was there almost whole of the day. The judge of the same were our very own Colloquium Founder- MR. Atindriyo Sanyal.

Near by in the Computer Dept. was NIPUN(the gaming competition),, but sad was PC's provided by the college which cannot play the games even in low graphics settings( they had to manage with the same anyways) but the Xbox room was looking hot with that green lights.

Pradanya(c- competition) i guess had the maximum entires today with LOTS and LOTS of re-registration they earned handsome :)

Impetus was also going on somewhere in the college. Day 1 lacked enthusiast in the college..it was not looking like we are having a fest in the college.

Waiting 4 SHASTRA (the robotics competition) which i was part of last year and we have 2-3 bots from colloQuium this time also.

The power of open source software

Open Source Software(OSS) is a software for which the source-code is issued under a license which permits it's users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. Most popular of such licenses is the GNU General Public License. Under the terms of the GPL, any person may obtain and change the code covered under the license, but must make those changes available at no charge to the world.

Open Source started out as a challenge to the monopoly of vendors of proprietary software. The movement started with GNU (which is, Gnu is Not Unix). In earlier days, UNIX was perhaps the most well known operating systems of the 70's in both academic and commercial circles. But given it's exorbitant price, very few institutions could afford it. Then, Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, intending it to be a UNIX-like system, but without a price-tag. He made his system available for free to anyone who wants to use or develop it.

Since then, groups such as the Free Software Foundation have come up, and make software available to users for free. There is no single expert body looking after such software, but a whole community of every-day users who fix bugs and make their findings available to the entire community of open-source users .

For those new to the idea of open source or unfamiliar with the way software gets developed, here's how it works most of the time:

• One or more developers--meaning people who have the skills to create software--get an idea about creating software to solve a problem.

• The developers start writing code to create a solution. This is frequently called "scratching an itch."

• The developers put this code where other developers can find out about it, download it, and play with it. There are many locations, such as SourceForge.com, where people post their projects.

• Usually the source code is published under one of several popular open source licenses that ensure that the source code and any derivative works remain open source.

• Through an informal process of sharing ideas, fiddling with each others' code, and trial and error, the software gets better and better, sometimes changing direction to solve new problems as new people discover the software.

• At some point, the software gets finished or doesn't. It becomes popular, stays obscure, or fades away. Programs like Linux and Apache have had thousands of contributors. Other projects have been created by one or two people.

• As time goes on, developers come and go, and projects become active or dormant.

A huge amount of amazing software has been created through this loose process. All developers may not be experts- most are amateurs, but as the open source adage goes, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" .

Running Graphics-C in windows 7 or Vista

DOSBOX VIEW


I have seen many people struggling over this so just thought to write a small post over this. Most of the SE students are working with the C-graphics and must be finding problem because of the operating system they are using.

One of the two ways is(that i know):

1. Install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 which is free of cost and plant MS XP in that. Dos mode works fine in XP.

2. I feel this one is better than the 1st one

Download a freeware Dos-box from here .

It's a emulator for dos ....provide a 16bit envoirment. Install the dos-box and open it.

You have to write following lines whenever you start the dos-box which opens just like a normal app.

-- Mount the drive in which you have turbo-C

For example i have turbo-C complier at location C:\tc\bin

so i write

mount c c:\

c:

cd tc

cd bin

tc

Have attached a pic of the same at top.

and you are done with it.

Use the Compiler as you use on a 16-bit machine.

Refining your Google Search

Ever 'Googled' something, and found that most of the links are plain useless?
Here are quick tips to refine your searches:

1. to search within a particular website (from your google home-page), type the keyword to be searched for, followed by "site: www.mysite,com", without the quotes ;) . The site, 'mysite.com' will be searched for the keyword.

2. searching for definitions?, type "define: word", you'll be given links to all the available definitions of the word on the web.

3. to find a phrase, enclose it within " ", and the exact phrase will be searched for.

4. type a + sign before a keyword to search for that specific word only, and not it's variations like plural or any tenses or synonyms.

5. search with a ~ (tilde) before a word, and get results for the word, and it's synonyms. "~auto" searches for both the word auto and its synonyms: truck, car, etc.

6. search for "virus -computer" to get results for virus, but not related to computer.

7. "info: www.mysite.com" searches for information about the given site.

8. "related: www.mysite.com" searches for pages related to the given site.

9. " [#]...[#] ", ([#] represents a number) searches within a range of numbers, e.g. laptop Rs.30,000...60,000 to find laptops within this range.

10. xyz * abc searches for the words xyz and abc separated by a word or two.

P.S. @ d3mOn, I did StumbleUpon it.

Do you Stumble?

StumbleUpon is a social Link sharing site. If you are an information seeker like me, but are tired of searching google for finding interesting site, then worry no more, StumbleUpon will help you discover and share great websites. The coolest thing about StumbleUpon is that, with just a click of a button you will be taken to an interesting site from the list of categories that you choose. And trust me its quite addictive.

The StumbleUpon toolbar is a must to have in your browser. If you dont have it, you are missing some fun of internet.

Apart from using StumbleUpon for surfing, you can also use to meet like minded people.

StumbleUpon is also cool, if you want to surf through the numerous videos that have started flooding on the website due to the popular emergence of social video sharing sites like youtube and googlevideo.

Other popular choices include to surf random news, pictures, blogs, wiki etc. You can also write reviews of these pages/sites which other users can read.

Currently there are above 7 million users of StumbleUpon.

Read more about StumbleUpon and how it works, here.

Due to high popularity of StumbleUpon, there was a rumor that eBay is going to buy StumbleUpon for $40-45 million in 2007 when total number of users were 2 million.(not conformed though)

Happy Stumbling!

Puzzle-2: Burn the Rope...

A classic puzzle involves being given 2 ropes and a lighter. The burning of one rope from end to end takes 1 hour, however the ropes do not burn in a uniform manner (ie: if you light it at one end, the first half of the rope could burn through in one minute while the second half may take 59 minutes to burn). Your goal is to measure out 15 minutes using the two ropes and the lighter.

You can assume that lighting a rope takes zero time.

Hint: You can break the rope with your bare hands..

Puzzle-1: What is the radius of the circle?

A simple geometry problem. Shouldn’t take more than a minute to come up with the answer.

The following diagram (not to scale) shows a circle with the center at point C. What is the radius of the circle?




Give proper explanation with your answer.