Intelligent IITians

A few people I admire most

	Abhiram Natarajan - For his never ending repository of algorithms and swear words
Anup B Prakash - Simply awesome at everything he does
	Chaya Ganesh - For being such a wonderful person
Rama B - For shamelessly lying about his academic abilities all the time
	Netra Malagi - For being a geek, and an open source enthusiast right from the beginning
Prashant Borole - Coder++, writes his own kernels, file systems and what not. IMO, one of the best systems guys in the world
	Sriram Kashyap - An extremely helpful Geek++

A lecture series on Analysis and design of algorithms

A lecture series on Analysis and design of algorithms

Just happened to find it on youtube :) .The above set of videos is from the under grad algorithms course offered by Prof. Abhiram Ranade and Prof. Saisundararaman Vishwanathan at IIT Bombay. More subjects here

Bought an Acer 5738 :)

Comes with Linux, 3GB DDR3 RAM, Core 2 Duo T6500 2.1GHz, 320GB hard disk, Gigabit ethernet card, fingerprint reader, an HDMI port (pretty useless unless you have a decent graphics card), multi touch touchpad (allows to zoom using a 2-finger motion), laptop bag, and the usual stuff. More here.
Price: Rs. 34,000

About IIT profs and exams

In my last post, I said that I would post something about SVN clients. Since it's pretty boring, I'll do that some other time :)

Now, coming to the topic, there are different kinds of exams...the general idea is that nothing from the allowed material comes in the exams.

• Closed book: Nothing allowed. The easiest kind of exam.
  
• Open notes: The most common type of exam. We are allowed to take our notes, print outs of slides and a few research papers.
• Cheat sheet: 1 or 2 A4 size sheets are allowed. Contents must be handwritten. The number of sides that can be used is pre-specified.
• Open book: The toughest. You can take any book (any number of books) you want.

There are some other more interesting types. One prof actually had the first 15 minutes of the exam as "discussion time". One is allowed to discuss the answers with the others in the first 15 minutes. But sadly, people discovered that 15 minutes were not enough to understand any of the questions.

Another prof usually doesn't have a time limit on the exam. People come to the exam hall, think....think....think, write whatever they can figure out, and leave when they are too tired to think any more, or just get hungry. And there is a certain prof who said, "Leave the exam hall in <=2 Hours, get 3 bonus marks!"

There are some profs who give "unrelated questions" like "Do you think Obama will be a better president than Bush?", just so that students can take a break from thinking, and relax. These questions, of course, do not carry any marks.

Though weird, the good thing about all these exams is that it's "marks for thought", rather than "marks for how well you can mug or how much you can write".

How to set up SVN

I wanted to set up an SVN server for my project recently. Here is the small script that I wrote for configuring SVN. Just copy-paste it in a file and run it. It'll guide you through the configuration process.
-------------------------------------------

#!/usr/bin/bash

svnadmin create svnrepos  #creates a directory called svnrepos 
#in the current directory, and 
#creates the config files

printf "[general]\nanon-access = none\nauth-access = write\npassword-db = passwd\n" > svnrepos/conf/svnserve.conf
printf "[users]\n" > svnrepos/conf/passwd

while [ 1 -gt 0 ]
do
    printf "Username: "      #create username,password for 
    read user                #whom access is required  
    if [ $user == "q" ]      #press "q" to stop accepting username, passwords
    then
       break
    fi
    printf "Password: "
    read pass
    printf "$user"" = ""$pass\n" >> svnrepos/conf/passwd
done

-------------------------------------------------
To start svnserver,

svnserve -r /users/proj/prashanth.kamle/svnrepos -d

/users/proj/prashanth.kamle/svnrepos is the path of the directory in which the SVN repository would reside (/users/proj/prashanth.kamle is the current directory).

To stop the SVN server, just kill the process (or use the script below)

#!/bin/bash
pid=`ps -A|grep svnserve| cut -d" " -f1`
kill $pid

In my next post, I'll explain how to access SVN from eclipse. Till then, happy subversioning :)

Coolest web app ever

http://wave.google.com/
I simply can't wait till it comes out!