Joined the wave

Hi
I too joined the wave, that is Google wave today.(Thanks to Cyriac and Ribu for sending me one invite each in an interval of two minutes :) ).
Initially I found it highly confusing and nonsensical. I had already got a few opinions of the wave being just a hype and it being a bore. But I was more interested in spending my afternoon trying out the new tool. I didn't find it to be something of interest after spending 10 minutes in it and went back to my other tasks.
Then my friend Anil popped up in Wave and gave me tips on how to use the features and we even played a couple of games collaboratively. That caught my interest and I started getting comfortable with the wave concept and interface. To my opinion both are flawed(yes I do mean it). Anyways, as with all Google products, its in development mode..(this is in Preview which is buggier than beta).
I found it to be very useful for collaborative activities,and having group chats like we have for our class group. Its great when there are a lot of people involved at the same time. Other than that, currently I don't see much of a use for this.
The extensions are cool and it alone made me stay for a while in the site.
I found the interface highly cluttered and difficult to handle.I was using my room-mate's laptop,making it even harder to move around all those windows. Also,I found out that in Chrome, the interface gets stuck when you select two waves one after the other. The number of unread wavelets in a wave also tend to change and it returns to normal only when the "Sync completed" message appears on top left.In a system with 256mb ram running Chrome, I got an error asking to stop an unresponsive script about 5 times in 10 minutes. Even while I type this, my wave interface is not responding. :D
I haven't tried Wave in FF,so I don't know if its some problem with Chrome (what an irony ).

Anyway for its initial stage,it does provide something different from the various other 'socializing' tools available out there. I wonder if it would just be another site you open as soon as you fire up your browser...Lets wait and see whether this tool becomes a communication wave or would require us to wave it goodbye...depending upon how much more value Google is able to add to its much hyped new product...happy waving..

Amusing Text Classifier

I just happened to visit Kuklutzklan and found a link to Gender Analyzer

It is a site that allows you to feed a blog's url and they try to tell you whether the author is a male or female.Now, ain't that amusing??(though I admit that it is pretty useless as it is)

What is more interesting is the technology that runs the site,uClassify.This site allows anyone to create text classifiers using their APIs. Now this should be interesting to CS people involved with information retrieval(me for eg.),artificial intelligence(me again),neural networks(me,me..),natural language processing(should i repeat?) and ..blogging(of course me). The gender analyzer doesn't seem to work for both my blogs, but then its not that easy to make classifiers for all kinds of people out there, who write in various fashions.They claim that it works perfectly in their labs ;)

A visit to uClassify showed that there are many other products based on this service,one for guessing mood of author,another for analyzing personality type,love type and sports type(??) of the author. The first one never worked for me with urls,but does work for plain text that I copied from my posts(which means text classifying is working,but not parsing maybe).Mood Analyzer

I liked Typealyzer as it does work properly for my blogs,each turning up different results(naturally based on contents or rather nouns).Its derivative ie. Sport and Love are pretty much the same as the original with some differences in wording(meh..didn't impress).

There is one more service which I found very interesting and pretty different,which I want every blogger/non-blogger to test(bloggers would want to check their own blogs first in all these tools).ofaust, as they claim, is a literature expert that parses your url/text and tells you which famous author you resemble and in case of text,it highlights similar patterns(wow)..I was more like Jonathan Swift for some of my entries.Check out who you resemble the most...

So bloggers,try out these interesting services and amuse yourself(or maybe learn something about yourself/blog) and definitely its a great idea to work upon for people interested in those early mentioned fields(in which I was present..remember?). It would be interesting to see more accurate and innovative services being built out of these APIs in these coming days....adios

Flop Quiz

I was restraining myself from posting about this..but I guess I am doing the right stuff..

This is about the Free Software Quiz conducted by CUSAT during the Free Software Conference they are having over the weekend.The entire event is pretty large and well organized, with lots of dignitaries and loots of politicians pouring in...there is a good exhibition as well...featuring lots of stalls by companies,organizations,colleges etc for promoting free software related work...though I must mention my inability to understand how some of those stalls are even remotely connected software(free/proprietary).

The Quiz in itself is something to be mentioned.We were invited many times..lots of papers were circulated,we were even asked in person to register.So me and my friend Cijo, left the stall duties our juniors and came early for the prelims at abt 9..which finally began at 10.30 in a hall filled with only school students !!Later some college students also poured in..and the question papers were given.We were awaiting a standard type quiz on open source and free software movement,personalities,licenses,projects etc...but it turned out to be what I call 'Free' Software Quiz.It was like some school level paper on computers..definitely hard for the kids..but I finished it in 5 minutes,though not answering all questions correctly as they were very specific into technical details,nothing on the line of the entire Free Software Movement as a whole.We weren't allowed to leave the hall until about 25 minutes passed :(.Results were to be announced at abt 1.30 with finals at 2.

After leaving the hall..we were sure to get in..coz it was really a crappy paper.We went onto our jobs with stalls..until afternoon and finally at there Open Air Auditorium..the results were announced after some waiting.We were in first.Total 5 teams from junior and senior sections respectively were chosen.One junior team was from my school as well(10th std).

What followed later on in the name of Free Software Quiz was the biggest flop quiz I have ever seen...off the topic...too complicated and into internal details of specific linux flavours...asking unrelated questions on some god-knows-what technology and many more on exact dates and years!!! In addition to all this...they repeated many questions which were answered earlier by either participants or the crowd(still some didnt answer those..wonder why).The quizmasters themselves having no idea on the topic relied on a guy called the 'judge'.. another fellow who wanted answers by the way it was written down!

After the juniors' quiz came ours...almost on the same lines..asking unknown details of unknown stuff...RNDC,how many mails can be sent by qmail(wtf)..and asking abt configuration files that exists in fedora only and not in other flavours like the common Debian(anyway the entire quiz was off track from being a free software related one to one which was half cooked and some tech stuff added to maybe increase difficulty just for the sake of it)..and again asking questions asked to and answered by junior teams over and over and even mixing tough ones with very simple ones like GNU's full form..blah
We had discussed two things before coming stage..one abt Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame and about the year Linux came out( I said '91,Cijo corrected me as '92).The first question was asked and I got it correct after it was passed by other teams.The second one was asked in a rapid fire round at last ...where I said '92 and ans turned out to be '91.:D The team from MES got away with first prize as they ans one question more than us(they were at tie before that) which was full form of GNU!!! Can u believe it..I can't ..this could be the crappiest quiz I have ever participated or even seen in my life..that too conducted by BTech students of CUSAT...to say the truth..I feel sorry for those guys..so I didn't criticize them there...and the prize didn't involve any money..so its all the same for us.. :D

Anyway it was a funny incident ...we r still trying to put the blame on each other for not winning this crappy quiz...
Site for the conference

Command line fun

In Ubuntu,press alt+F2 to get the Run Application window.
Type "free the fish" and enjoy...

Try these if u want a laugh
1)apt-get moo
2)aptitude moo
3)aptitude -vv moo
4)aptitude -vvv moo
5)aptitude -vvvv moo
6)aptitude -vvvvv moo
7)aptitude -vvvvvv moo

Really these guys have no other work it seems..but its nice to see some fun in the otherwise "Why so serious" attitude of CLI....

Enjoy

My first ILUG

Oh God!What a day it was....

On Sunday the 26th of November 2006,I and Nikil went for our first ILUG Cochin Chapter meeting.I had raised great objections to this meeting from the start as our exams were set to begin by 5th dec and I haven't covered portions enough.But by Nikil's pressure I accepted the offer and we met at Menaka by 2 pm.

The it was a tough job to find the old building in which the meeting was held...

When we entered it,what I saw was an old fashioned building housing an internet cafe` with many old furniture and wooden roof.The lighting suggested a kind of intellectual workplace,which actually it was.Two guys looking like nerds,one bearded and the other with a kinda stressed look were talking.We introduced ourselves and entered and took our seat.We had expected a large hall with lots of tech enthusiasts of our age asking doubts and solving tech problems..but this was too different.

I tried to observe the surroundings and the atmosphere...Many empty packs of AMD processors and graphics cards were stacked at one place and the cafe` was like a club with many machines strewn along with lots of cds,books..posters ....all such stuff.Then entered Jay Jacob(the Cafe` is named Jay's Internet Club),the co-ordinator.
He looked intelligent and techy with his stout and fair face.He was a very lean guy but his eyes had the glow of an intelligent person.

That day's meeting was important as I later came to know that the Asst. commissioner of Kerala Police was visiting them to talk about the transfer of all computers in the police dept to Linux OS.

Then came the most astonishing and different person,Balakrishnan sir.He was a old person(maybe in 60s)with thick white beard like that of a saint.He entered with two packs one which he revealed to be Ubuntu cds.He seemed to be the intellectual lighthouse of the ILUG cochin chapter.

Two-three more guys entered the room and took their places.We were quickly introduced to them and the matters in the agenda were put forward to discussion.The first one was the transfer of JAVA to GPL.I didn't understand much at first,but soon I was in the stream.According to them,it was a reason to celebrate also...so I feel I am getting into the mainstream linux discussion now.That is fine and I am happy about that.I was really enthusiastic about the ideals and the methodologies they discussed though the technical parts were not all too easy.But we two didn't open our mouths in the meeting,it would be too early.I wanted to wait and know each of the members and then start working actively by S4.

Then came the tea break,when tea was ordered for all and the second pack from Balakrishnan sir was opened.It had cream biscuits.We all ate it and soon we two were mingling with the team.

The next topic was quite sticky and tough to understand.Through his meticulous explanation Jay sir made the history of things clear with frequent clarifications from Bala sir.It was the possible inclusion of MS coding into Suse linux.This is seen as a serious threat by the community.They were holding many hypothetical situations to suggest foul play by MS.But I didn't think like them.MS may have a foul play int he deal with Suse,but then it can't be as serious as they were suggesting.Well,my inexperience in this field could be the reason for such judgements..so I decided to keep quiet.

Anyway by 4.00 the commissioner called up to inform that he would be there immediately.Me and Nikil felt that we had enough for a day so he was pricking me for some time.Many other members were outside talking in their mob phones,and 2-3 were inside discussing about their suspicion and contempt of MS and its tie up with Indian Govt(donno why this ppl 'hate' MS).Their attitude seemed to hostile to any corporate..(so I even doubted their communist side of thinking)

I got a call from home and had to go.So I went inside and told Jay sir that I need to go.He inquired whether I could be available for the expo on 30th.I informed him of our tight exam schedules due to which we couldn't help him and made our way out.

The stress of all that made me sleep for long and I studied ET(alternators,1phase induction motors) at night and went to sleep.

Edited note: These r my feelings of the first meeting at ILUG, which I soon began to respect and co-operate with.Now we are in good contact with many active members.