Google treasure hunt (Second puzzle)

Its about time (936266827 seconds before Y2K38) i.e 19may2008 17:07:58 (UTC) and the second puzzle is live (Check it out). You can still try the first question here. Second puzzle from google treasure hunt is to calculate

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.

May 19, 2008 | Filed Under programming, tech | 9 Comments

Google treaure hunt

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)

May 18, 2008 | Filed Under tech | 5 Comments

Installing latex on hostmonster

In continuation with my previous post (Some times yahoo is better), I followed the steps on how to install latex/tetex on my web host from here (You can also get the Installation steps from QuickInstall file in source code or access the same file from tug.org).

But the problem is that on web hosts like hostmonster you won’t have root access so you will need to modify some of the things and do a local install in your home directory.

For that you can specify –prefix accordingly while doing ./configure. So you need to do:

./configure --prefix=/home/username/local/teTeX
replace username with your account name

This step ended without any errors But while I was doing make world, the process exited with following error:

/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.a when searching for -lXt
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so when searching for -lX11

I found this thread, where they were discussing similar error and from what I got it was due to machine platform. So I checked my host system information with

uname -a
from there I got x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux which meant its a 64 bit architecture.

So after some tweaking to what I found here(CBLFS: TeTeX) to make it work for local install, you can do following to compile the package:

CC="gcc ${BUILD64}" CXX="g++ ${BUILD64}" USE_ARCH=64 \
./configure --prefix=/home/username/local/teTeX/ \
–enable-shared \
–without-texinfo \
–with-x=no \
–with-system-ncurses \
–with-system-zlib &&
[ -f texk/libtool ] && sed -i “/sys_lib_search_path_spec=/s:/lib:&64:g” texk/libtool;

And then you can do

make world
make all install

You can then add generated executable to your system path by:

PATH=/home/username/local/teTeX/bin/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu:$PATH;
export PATH

You can also configure your installation using:

texconfig

And its DONE Find all steps followed by me here
So if you want to install on 32 bit config the method at Microcontroller programming Blog should work fine.
Also read: The Tetex HowTo

You can download required packages using wget on shell account at hostmonster from ctan.org

Dilbert in new flavor

New design and features @ www.dilbert.com

Read more about it: Dilbert.com relaunches with Web 2.0 flavor.
They have added comic strips as flash content. But I liked the old format..more simple. And now all comics are colored too.

An IITian’s super power strikes again in new comic strip.

Super powers of Asok (Used till now):

Guided reincarnation
Advance shape shifting
Telekinetic powers (used to cause remote explosions, just by thinking)

Please add ..if i misssed some. (for reference of above mentioned powers see my collection)

Read My collection of strips featuring IITs and Linux

April 22, 2008 | Filed Under humor | Leave a Comment

Double century of posts : A comic break

I found this Best of Blaugh through webyantra. So enjoy…

Here are the other webcomics that i love:

My collection of dilbert comics: Dilbert, IIT and Linux
Related Posts:
Great Amul Ads !
Damned funny Unix humor

April 24, 2007 | Filed Under blog, humor, listing, web | Leave a Comment

.Net apps on linux

Actually i had to do some assignment in C#, so first i thought of going to windows and do it with VisualStudio (IDE)..but voila… i found its alternative for linux : mono
It allows you develop and run .net framework applications.
I was able to install it easily in ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mono
sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs

Now you can compile .cs files {extension for c#} using

gmcs file.cs

and run using

mono file.exe

More details about Csharp compiler :gmcs
See these links for more details and examples:
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page
Mono brings .NET apps to Linux
Introduction to Mono - Your first Mono app

April 9, 2007 | Filed Under programming | Leave a Comment

Open source is key to reaching 500 million Indian children

An interesting article by Mark Rais on role of open source in making education available to the large youth population of india. And a greta initiative by CII-Shiksha.

To support more than 650,000 villages and one half billion youths who need education, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) created a nonprofit organization called Shiksha India in 2001. One of Shiksha’s primary initiatives was the creation of a collaborative online Web portal, which the president of India launched in a formal ceremony last month. The new e-learning and collaboration portal uses open source technology such as Moodle, Drupal, and MediaWiki.

In my opinion the reason behind its success can be attributed to mainly: its free of cost availabilty which is big issue in regard to country like India, where population(half billion) which need attention is much higher and money involved if proprietary softwares are being used. And other important aspect which article mentions is in the ability to customize and provide products in local languages (including Hindi and Tamil) along with chosing most suited among vast available resources.
Another important issue which can be solved with open source is large scale piracy, currently software piracy laws are not so strict in india but still piracy is a getting a major issue.

“The bad side is that with so much available, a newcomer to OSS is bound to get confused about what to use.” He says this is often exacerbated due to some projects being fixated on proving that their product is best.

Other than that at present, their are linux distributons like Ubuntu, which is quite user friendly and its available in many flavours. Also earlier there has also been efforts in shifting towards linux and other open source mediums like :
LIC opts for Linux
Taking Free Software to the Farmers and Fields of India
Kerala logs Microsoft out

Linux.com : Open source is key to reaching 500 million Indian children
Program Details for Shiksha India

February 26, 2007 | Filed Under india, linux | Leave a Comment

The Dilbert Principle

Did you know about Dilbert Principle..

The Dilbert Principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage that they’re capable of doing.

Now i understand it all ..

The Dilbert Principle is a takeoff on the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle addresses the practice of hierarchical organizations (such as corporations and government agencies) to use promotions as a way to reward employees who demonstrate competence in their current position.

what do you think ??
Related links :
Dilbert, IITs & Linux

February 14, 2007 | Filed Under humor, offbeat | Leave a Comment

Some useful command line tricks

SEOmoz.org has listing of linux commnad that may be useful in web development but they are uerful otherwise too.
Some of them are here:

ln -s /some/destination name_of_link
ctrl+z and bg
scp : scp user@example.com:~/dir /destination

Read More : Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks
Some other Miscellaneous Tricks:

ls -lSr List files (sorted by size)

df -h Show available disk space in human-readable format

du -sh /some/dir Show how much space /some/dir is taking up

February 6, 2007 | Filed Under linux, listing | Leave a Comment

Cleaning up a Ubuntu GNU/Linux system

I’m using ubuntu dapper, and i came across this nice ubuntu blog : Ubuntu Tutorials, having post on how to clean your ubuntu system to remove residual config packages, partial packages to free up your disk space. it also provides screen shot to help you follow the process. it also explains how to use localpurge, deborhan and other tools.

Read more >> Cleaning up a ubuntu system

Related post : How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!

January 30, 2007 | Filed Under linux, tips | 1 Comment