A Dream Undergrad Computing Institute

At last we had weekend that we termed as a creative one. The reader may find it even crazy on reading this blog-post further! Me and @Devji were thinking about a dream institute offering an undergraduate program in Computing.

We imagined one of those all time great people teaching a course of their respective specialisation in this institute. Later on Sunday i.e. today was spent in crunching for more people in this institute. Check the below mentioned image out and comment for modifications if any.

Sr.	Position	Position Held By
1.	Principal Director	Prof. Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
2.	Research Director (Software Projects)	Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum
3.	Research Director (Hardware Projects)	Mr. Steve Wozniak
4.	Laboratory Coordinator	Prof. Ken Thompson
5.	Laboratory Assistant	Mr. Linus Torvalds/ Mr. Bram Cohen
Sr.	Course	Taught By
1.	Mathematics	Prof. Srinivas Ramanujan
2.	Technical Communication for Computing Science	Prof. Donald E. Knuth/ Prof. Tim Berners-Lee
3.	Computer Architecture	Prof. John von Neumann/ Prof. Seymour Cray
4.	Theory of Computing	Prof. Alan Turing
5.	Algorithms	Prof. Ronald Rivest
6.	Operating Systems	Prof. Denis Ritchie/ Prof. Rob Pike
7.	Compiler Design	Prof. Brian Kernighan/ Prof. James Gosling
8.	Object Oriented Programming	Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup
9.	Computer Networks	Prof. Leonard Kleinrock
10.	Database Systems	Prof. Edgar F. Codd
11.	Artificial Intelligence	Prof. John McCarthy

Missing dmr!!

(Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie)

dmr - Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie silently left this world on October 12, 2011. Internet fraternity came to know about this sad news through Rob Pike's google+ status. Though, people were still overwhelmed by the Steve-mourning phenomena on different social networking sites. dmr has left a strong and unavoidable legacy of UNIX and C. We will really miss you Dennis for all these, you were, are and will be counted as one of the fathers of computing! Rest In Peace dmr.

Nostalgic Devices!

After more than two and a half years, very abruptly I am back to the Blogger dashboard. The Dussera holiday began with the hot saffron flavored Jalebies however, there were a sad news of the demise of Steve Jobs.

Coincidentally, these days I am reading iWoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith a late-birthday gift by a student turned friend turned colleague Prof. Devji Chhanga.

This text reminded me of my memories of the past. I try to enlist those devices, which I have had a chance ever to work with.

CASIO FX 795P

CASIO FX 880P

BBC Micro

AMD 100 MGHz DX/4

So beautiful were those days! I thank my dad and my historic high school Alfred High School for allowing me the access to all these and I also thank the image-sources for the post.

The Grid Approach Towards Fighting Swine Flu

It has been unanimously agreed that Computational Grids are proven tool for complex and resource consuming computational challenges. It is evident that these challenges need not to be a routine laboratory experiment always.

Today's one of the similar challenge for the human race is to fight against the pandemic Swine Flue or Influenza H1N1. An adorable initiative has been started to delegate and utilize the idle computational cycles of voluntary contributor computers to find the best matching chemical compounds to fight against the virus.

For more information the visitor is requested to visit http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/flu1/viewFlu1Main.do . Even you can contribute in this and other projects that are helpful for the entire human race, just by downloading a small program and voluntarily contributing the idle computational cycles of your computer from http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do .

List of Globus 4.2.1 Commandline Tools

A very handy list of Globus Toolkit (GT) 4.2.1 Commandline tools can be downloaded in PDF format from http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/4.2/4.2.1/commands/gtCommands.pdf with due thanks to http://www.globus.org.

Connecting A USB Mobile with AIRTEL GPRS connection to Internet in Linux

Though the newer versions of Linux come with a GUI configuration utility (A NetworkManagerApplet) to configure a USB compatible phone to connect to the Internet still, in many contemporary as well as older versions do not have a graphical utility. So, in this post we try to tweak a USB phone by connecting it to the Internet. The Major part of this how-to is inspired from Dave's Blog (http://davestechsupport.com/blog/2008/02/28/how-to-connect-linux-to-your-cellular-internet/) and some more tweaks are also made later on based on heuristics.

The steps to be followed are as under:

1. edit /etc/wvdial.conf in your favourite text editor and make these changes:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com"
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = *99#
Password = pass
Username = user
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

2. In the 2'nd line Init1 shows the initialization string for your phone. airtelgprs.com will be the acceess point of you are using Airtel GPRS. For other carriers kindly contact your Internet Service Providor. The second last option Modem is the USB device, which may be traced by supplying the command dmesg | grep "ACM"

3. issue the command # wvdial and note down the DNS addressses. Now just disconnect by pressing Ctrl + C or somthing similar.

4. now some extra tweakings, despite doing these changes I was unable to browse the Internet, and heuristic worked here:

edit the file /etc/resolv.conf and append it with obtained Name servers, something like this:

search xxx.yyy.ppp.qqq
nameserver xxx.yyy.ppp.qqq
nameserver xxx.yyy.ppp.abc

5. Now it is almost ready to surf, just open a console and issue command # wvdial

6. Open Firefox and go to File -> Uncheck on Work Offilne option.

Now it is ready to!

Google's Summer Double Bonanza Offer!!

Freinds, this time we are talking on something else and no linux, no PI, no supercomputing.
On March 19, 2008 around 5.20 pm IST, (GMT +5.5) the orkut server suddenly seemed to have started a double bonanza offer and the number of scaps and fans was doubled. However, this lasted for only 10 minutes and hats off to the google people as the problem was resolved !! Can't beleive?? See the following screenshots.

(Original)

(Double Bonanza!!)