Random Bits

Tonight I watched the movie “Vantage Point“. The movie is on a terrorist attempt to assassinate the president of U.S.A. during a global peace summit. This movie is kind of unique as it is shown as a sequence of events as seen by 8 different characters, which collectively solves the conspiracy. Its a good movie but kind of gets boring with same events being played over and over again. It is like sampling a random process over multiple runs. All those boring repetitions could have been avoided by Poisson-like sampling of the events ;-).

Found this interesting article on Justin Frankel - the man behind Winamp, Gnutella etc. It traces the events in Justin’s life around the invention of winamp, release of gnutella and the constant suppression of his ideas in AOL.

Ever wondered what inspired the name Gnutella?

Video describing idea behind creative commons licensing.

The above link is a MagnetURI, which was listed in MagnetMix. You need to have a p2p client like LimeWire to download and view the video. MagnetURI is a nice way to publish content from your local machine. It is kind of similar to a torrent file, but works across different p2p clients and is convenient to handle URI strings when compared to meta-files.

Having heard a lot about the Second Test between India and Australia, I checked out the highlights and am convinced beyond doubt that bad umpiring decisions cost us the match. Of all those controversial decisions the one that stands out was that of Ganguly’s dismissal. Firstly Ganguly seemed to be in good touch and was very unfortunate to be given out in such a fashion. Watching the replays of the incident and listening to all the expert comments, I am wondering who should be blamed for this poor decision.
Lets play the blame game:-

1. Mark Benson - The man in-charge(well, almost). In this situation he could have called for the third umpire or atleast asked the square leg umpire, when he was not sure about the catch taken. Instead he asked for Ricky Ponting’s opinion and based his decision entirely on that. But the pre-match agreement between captains of the two sides to non-referral of such decisions to third-umpire and instead go by the word of the fielder should have prompted this. And also the incident in first innings, where Ponting had restrained from appealing in a similar situation, when he had not completed the catch clearly, should have also influenced the umpire.
2. Ricky Ponting - The actual man who made the decision. Well we have heard a lot about his credibility, or rather lack of it. But in this case, one thing that goes in his way is that he supposedly asked Clarke if he was sure of the catch and he just conveyed the same to the umpire. Well its a different thing that earlier in the innings he had appealed for a catch that he had not taken cleanly and which moreover seemed to have clearly come off the pads.
3. Michael Clarke - The man who claimed the catch. Going by the “spirit of the game” this was clearly wrong. But given the situation of the game and the fact that we are used to batsmen standing their ground even after “nicking the ball”, he may justify his act.
4. How about Anil Kumble!! - He should not have agreed to the seemingly stupid “go by the fielder” policy, especially when playing the Aussies. As Sunil Gavaskar put it, “Why don’t you trust the batsmen when you can believe a fielder”. Moreover lets put the third umpire to use - he is not paid for nothing. Anil Kumble is no doubt a tough cricketer but he plays his game in the true spirit. Unfortunately many don’t and he should have realized it by now.
5. … we can go on with this list

What amazes me about the game of cricket is the amount of passions involved. Like everything else, here you should be driven to bring out your best. Now that India have won the third test, breaking the Australian domination, they have clearly made a statement.

If you haven’t yet already seen these videos many times over, here are some links:-

All those umpiring goof-ups in the test
Pointing’s interview at the end of the match
Furious Sunny

Wikicharts is a tool to get the most viewed pages of the month in wikipedia. No points for guessing the most viewed page of Wikipedia: the Main Page :). Wikicharts can be embedded into a wiki to get its usage statistics. Check out the wikicharts wikipedia page for details of how it works.
List of all the wikimedia tools.(takes some time to load)

A New Way to look at Networking - Van Jacobson

Zero configuration networking with Bonjour - Dr. Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer

Scalable Internet routing table using Locator/ID Seperation protocol(LISP) - Dino Farinacci

Everything is miscellaneous - David Weinberger

Yesterday we* released the code of “AniGraph” - A visualization tool for Graph based Algorithms. This project was done a couple of years back for IEEE Indicon Student Design Contest conducted by IIT KGP branch of IEEE.

Using AniGraph one can playback the execution sequence of any Graph based Algorithm. It provides a C++ API, which can be used for recording visualisation events at key stages of the program implementing the algorithm. On executing this “AniGraph-Instrumented code”, specified events are recorded into a log file. This file can then be “played” in the AniGraph visualizer, which internally uses the “Dot” system for generating images of the graphs.

AniGraph can be used as an aid for teaching Algorithms. Since AniGraph is agnostic of the algorithm being visualized, it can be used to animate any Graph (or Tree) based algorithm.
* - Myself, Srikar and Praveena developed AniGraph during our final year in NITK, Surathkal.

Team:
Srikar Yekollu, Shobith Alva, Chandan Reddy

When?:
June 16th - 25th, 2007

Route:
Bangalore - Delhi - Manali - Sarchu - Paang - Leh - KhardungLa - Nubra Valley/Diskit - Hander

Base stations:
Kshitij’s house - Delhi, Room in Manali, Guest house - Mandi, Sarchu Tent, Paang Tent, Hotel Zar-la - Leh, Snow Leopard - Nubra Valley

Passes:
Rohtang La (3,978 m, 13,050 ft), Baralacha La (4,892 m, 16,050 ft), Lachulung La (5,059 m, 16,600 ft), Tanglang La (5,325 m, 17,470 ft), Khardung La (5359 m)

Transport:
Air Deccan (Bangalore - Delhi, Delhi - Bangalore ), Raj Travels Volvo ( Delhi - Manali ), Bullet 500 cc from Anu Motors ( Manali - Manali ), Sonu’s Oil Tanker ( Sarchu - Leh ), A Pickup truck ( Army station after Hander - Manali ), Some shitty Volvo ( Manali - Delhi )

Adding spice:

• AMS - Acute Mountain Sickness in Sarchu, Diamox + Disprin
• Running out of fuel while going back to Leh from Hander

Photos:

• Srikar’s Leh-Ladakh Album on Picasa

Resources:

• Yogesh Sarkar’s BCM Touring

PS: Wanted to write a travelogue but ended up scribbling notes. Posting this to archive stuff, before things fade out…

Link that saved my day’s work:
http://recover.sourceforge.net/linux/

Interesting fact about ext3(from Linux ext3 FAQ):

Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?
Actually, you can’t! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it:
In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as “deleted” and leaves the block pointers alone.
Your only hope is to “grep” for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.

Other related Links:

• DataRecovery - Ubuntu Documentation
• Recovery Is possible

If( “Got a new laptop” && “Want to try Linux” && “No partitioning and installation pains” )
{

Try this nice Linux VM: “KDE 3.5.5 on openSUSE 10.2″ for VMware Player”
}