I loved Google Domestic trends (Though US data only). It was quite interesting to relate them to actual data/market.  You can check out Google Data explore’s  interesting statistics here. Pretty cool and informative.  huh !

You can also have a look at  information aesthetics : (Where form follows data) (great blog if you are fan of interesting charts.) and Flowing Data. Also do share if you know any similar/interesting data/statistics visualization blog.

PS: post after long time, Actually since google reader, Buzz, twitter came into picture I can directly share stuff I like with friends there only. So quite a few things to post here.

Yahoo search gallery provides you many existing search enhancements that you can add after logging to yahoo. [Via labnol.org].Try various enhancement like LinkedIn Profile, IMDB results, StumbleUpon Reviews and other popular ones.

And you can also create your own search enhancement using step by step method using Presentation application (SearchMonkey Guide).

SearchMonkey API unables you to modify how particular links appears in search results. You can add images, related links and other html formatting but it does not unable you change position of a page in search result. I was unable to find feature which will enable us to filter sites which requires you to login or sites like ebay and amazon which may not be relevant to us by making their appearance farther in search results.

But still these enhancements provides you little summary of search results which is very useful like in case of movie reviews, people profile via linkedIn, stock information etc thus sometimes making opening the actual webpage unnecessary.

But what drew my attention again? Yesterday I was watching 21 movie, Its based on real story of six MIT students cashed in millions in Vegas Casinos by counting cards. Here comes the puzzle, In a classroom scene Prof Micky asks one of the student (Jim, our hero)

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

I’m sure you will be left puzzled for a moment, when you hear the solution by Jim, at least I was. Its a tricky one, But you can get through it . So what choice would you have made, I’ll update the post with answer after few days.

Update:

This is famous puzzle known as Monty Hall Problem. Wikipedia has very good explanation for this.

Because there is no way for the player to know which of the two unopened doors is the winning door, most people assume that each door has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter. In fact, in the usual interpretation of the problem the player should switch—doing so doubles the probability of winning the car, from 1/3 to 2/3.

Also Read: Classic Computer Science Puzzles

Related Post:

Orio’s Riddle Completed
Twisty Puzzles

PHP date(output format, epoch); Output format example: ‘r’ = RFC 2822 date
Python import time first, then time.gmtime(epoch)
MySQL from_unixtime(epoch, optional output format)

So the puzzle was supposed to release at
Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:15:00 GMT, for India: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 4:45:00 AM (middle of the night).

Forth Puzzle is available here. Its a bit tricky, but i wrote a c program to calculate the number using brute force method…and it worked.(Share how you did it or is there some shortcut which works without any programming). Problem is to find a prime number which in turn can be expressed as sum of of n consecutive prime numbers. Your answer should satisfy 4 such list of prime numbers of given length.

So its over for now and soon they are going to contest winners and rewards. Hope i could have been one . But I have submitted this puzzle after long delay.(Was sleeping when it was released)

• Puzzle 1 (Robot in a maze) : Find it here
• Puzzle 2 (getting lines from specific files in zip archive) : Find it here
• Puzzle 3 (Network routing table) : Find it here

This week’s puzzle is set to be released on Tuesday, May 27 at 10 a.m. PDT.

PDT is 7 hours behind UTC, so its around 10 PM, 27th May in India.
So the 3rd puzzle is live now. I have given it a try and submitted my answer, I think (!) it should be correct.
This time question is related to networking. You have to find the path followed by a packet given its destination and routing table for the network.

The nodes are hosts on the network, and the lines between them are links. A packet is sent out from host O with a destination of 46.44.187.63. Which nodes does the packet pass through on its way to the destination?

To refresh your concepts read (Routing tables, On wikipedia). If you got the idea, then it shouldn’t be difficult. Intuitively also you should be able to find your way through routing table. Give It a try..and but you will only get to know your answer status after 23hrs from now.
Previous Puzzles:

• Puzzle 1 (Robot in a maze) : Find it here
• Puzzle 2 (getting lines from specific files in zip archive) : Find it here

• Aksimet: filters spam comments and tracksbacks. You don’t want your post to be filled with useless comments.
• WordPress.com Stats: Its a light weight plugin but still provides detailed representation of important statistics
• Google Sitemap Generator: Generates sitemap for your wordpress blog which is by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
• Get Recent Comments: Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith: It redirects your wordpress feeds to feedburner so that you can easily track your subscribers.
• Plugin Central: Automatically installs and updates WordPress plugins.
• WordPress Data backup: Its a necessary plugin to backup your blog. I still haven’t restoring posts from backup though.

For some specific users plugins like wp-latex, are also useful. It generates PNG images from inline $\LaTeX$ code in your posts and comments. I have installed latex on my hosting service( hostmonster) and still working on making simliar plugins(LatexRender) to work.

You can find many more such list on web if you do a google search. But Lorelle has a nice compilation of list of favorite wordpress plugins.

Why do I Blog ?

• Because I wanted to blog, seeing so many on internet.
• Then as catalog of stuff I’m doing, for me and may be for others to know.
• And with time it changed to showcasing what I like, what I’m doing, sharing tips and then taking readers opinion, discussing with them. (at leasts thats the aim)

In all above cases common things can be to pass time and share experience plus along with we are (I am) also always looking for recognition and admiration.

And about change in my blog content:

• May 2005, Posted some pictures, wanted to avoid much writing.
• June 2005, Just write about your projects, so that you don’t have to dwell for blog content.
• November 2005, You try to write some good posts(Solving Rubik’s Cube, Speed up firefox) but you end with posts like Unnatural laws whose content is generally a email forward or similar.
• February 2006, You try your best looking for good content to post but most of post were result of “submit to blog” button on digg.
• July 2006, Most of blog post consists of linking to stories of others blogs or quoting parts of posts from other blogs.
• September 2006, Now blog posts are mixture of posts from above categories.
• January 2007, Now You are improving with some good posts (sharing knowledge firefox: about pages). Also tried covering some events in IITB (Techfest 2007: Feeding the Fish, Creative Commons, India launched on 26th Jan at IIT Bombay)
• Then there is also a time when you stop blogging for some time (for me this hibernation period was from May 2007 to Nov 2007)
• Decemeber 2008, January 2008: You are trying to get back in form and you want to write good posts now)
• February 2008, Some good posts which includes what new you tried Adobe AIR: Web to Desktop, Trying hands on Google gadgets) or tips you want to share(Google movie search tricks).
• Now I feel, I have a good enough blog which people (atleast some) want to read. And I’m always ready to try, explore new things and share with my viewers and always waiting for there feedback. (Check my posts for this month)

In all these time periods you will always have some good posts and some just blog posts.

Share with your motivation behind blogging and how you pick up content for your blog. I’m not a good writer (I try to share mostly technical, geeky stuff through my blog) so any suggestion/feedback to writing style are always welcome.

Sum of line n for all files with path or name containing pattern and ending in particular extension. Similarly Sum of line m for all files with some pattern.
Hint: If the requested line does not exist, do not increment the sum.
Multiply all the above sums together and enter the product below.

for a given set of files contained in a zip archive. I have already submitted my answer , but this time I will have to wait for 24hrs to check the status of my answer . I thinks its a good puzzle to test your quick shell script abilities. (Can also be done easily in perl/python).

For the solution part, I wont give the actual solution (As dont want it to spoil for others who are actually trying) but you can use shell commands [grep, find ,sed and pipe (|)] to get to solution. You can get all the required numbers in 2 lines on shell.

Related Post:
Google Treasure Hunt
Orio’s Riddle Completed
Twisty Puzzles

The Google Engineering team is launching its first ever Treasure Hunt, a contest designed to challenge your problem-solving skills.

Find more details at Google Australia blog here
They will be releasing first four puzzles in the next consecutive four weeks, one is alread released.
To get the URL of the contest you have to decode:

aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=

And yeah, I was able to that do that. I’ll tell you the answer its http://treasurehunt.appspot.com/, as its already on Google Blog
Actually its the base64 decode of the given code.

You can find the first puzzle here.

A robot is located at the top-left corner of a 34 x 49 grid.
The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid. How many possible unique paths are there?

I have solved this one. Give it a try, its not that difficult. Any way I’m there to help
Here is the solution to the problem :
The number of paths for n x m grid (n-1 down blocks and m-1 right blocks) is equal to number of ways of arranging n-1 D’s (Down move) and m-1 R’s (Right move). So it’s

(n-1+m-1)! / ((n-1)! * (m-1)!)

You can calculate it using calculator in Windows/Linux.
I’m waiting for the next to come.

The second puzzle will be appearing soon — to be exact, 936266827 seconds before Y2K38,

Update:

Unix internal time is commonly stored in a data structure using a long int containing the number of seconds since 1970. This time is used in all time-related processes such as scheduling, file timestamps, etc. In a 32-bit machine, this value is sufficient to store time up to 18-jan-2038. After this date, 32-bit clocks will overflow and return erroneous values such as 32-dec-1969 or 13-dec-1901. Read More about Y2K38.

According to wikipedia The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. So when you calculate specified 936266827 seconds before that next puzzle should come around 19may2008 17:07:58 (The puzzle is alread there)(UTC) .

I have removed exact timing for you to get it on your own.(or is it still there ..haha ). And still if you need it, you can request in comments.
I calculated it using stata. You can easily calculate this in two lines in python:

>>> import time
>>> print time.ctime(2**31 – 1 – 936266827)

Related Post:
Orio’s Riddle Completed
Twisty Puzzles

Earlier I used backpackit to write down notes, links etc. But It was cumbersome, I had to go to my backpackit page and than add the required thing still It allowed you to add notes, check lists, links etc.
Now a days I’m using Google Notebook. It allows you to add text clippings, images and links to your notebook. And you can access it on any machines. It becomes more useful and productive with the help of firefox extension for google notebook where you just select the text (or link, image) and right click and Note this! (Or Clip it) And you are done. Now you can access the notes on any other machines.

It also allows you to comment, tag your ideas along with providing the functionality of sharing the notebook and many new improvements.

Tell me how do you share notes when working across multiple machines.