What's new and geeky on the web (30 May 2006)

1. Jeff Ullman has put up new lecture notes on Advanced Compiling Techniques
2. Chirstos Papadimitriou is working on an undergraduate book on Algorithms. Here is the preview
3. Stroustrup has an article on Specifying C++ Concepts
4. Bruce Eckel Interviews Software Luminaries: Thinking in Code
5. Ronald L Rivest has an interesting set of links for cryptography
6. Bruno R Preiss's collection of Data Structures and Algorithm keeps growing (PHP, Ruby, etc)
7. Ulrich Drepper has an article on SELinux Memory Protection Tests
8. Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced a new Linux Device Driver Kit
9. Scilab has announced version 4.0

Think your stuck with a problem?

There are several ways of creatively solving problems. Here's a list of interesting links

1. http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques
2. http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/crashcourse.html
3. http://www.winwenger.com/mind.htm
4. http://www.cpsb.com/resources/download.html

If you've got any interesting links, send them across and I'll add them here

New web page (work in progress)

I am also trying to setup a web page at http://bsingharora.googlepages.com/
I plan to use it as a support site to this blog initially. The site would contain supplementary material, source code, papers, etc

Picasa on Linux

Picasa for Linux is available from google labs. Wow! way cool. Now I can edit and upload pictures from Linux itself (isn't that way cool)



The interesting part of the Linux distribution is that it runs on wine.

What are you waiting for go? Download it!

Coke -- No more!

I am a big fan of diet coke and diet pepsi. I made the mistake of trying to chill my diet coke by putting it in the freezer. Why a mistake you wonder - look what happened



Yes, the cans exploded (almost ruining the freezer). Surprisingly, there is nothing on the can that says "Do not freeze"

My theory for what we saw is simple

The water froze, causing the gas mixed in the water to pressure out and explode the cans.

If anybody else has a better theory - I am all ears

Now, it might be Linux's turn

The TCP Compound patch talks about a Microsoft research technical report from which the idea is being used. Don't know if it will get in, but its interesting to see ideas being shared.

Eric S Raymond in EULA

There is a very interesting article In the Belly of the Beast at Eric Raymond's Weblog
Read it!

What have I been upto in pictures (Quiz)

These pictures show you what I've been upto today. The first person to guess it correct gets a treat from me (if you live in my city), else you get credits for getting it right. Seriously, it is not that hard. I need complete details of what I did, the more complete the details, the higher your chances of winnng and FCFS of-course (you win because you came to my blog earlier :-))

Hint: I am not violating any license agreement and the pictures themselves are links

Smart Browser Client Applications

I have almost migrated to using only Linux. Some of the biggest challenges I face with the migration are

1. Web Browsing
2. Multimedia

Firefox and mozilla did solve the first problems for me ages ago. I was recently frustated with my internet banking. My problem was

It worked well with all browsers on Windows (including firefox) and it just would not work with firefox on Linux.

Message from internet banking

After debugging the problem for a couple of hours (thanks to the built-in javascript debugger that comes along with the mozilla suite). I finally figured out the exact cause of the problem. The problem was that the banking js code was trying to be smart in trying to support browsers.

If you have the same problem, then add the following code to your $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/.../prefs.js

user_pref("general.appname.override", "Microsoft Internet Explorer");
user_pref("general.appversion.override", "4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0+;
Windows NT 5.1)");
user_pref("general.platform.override", "Win32");

What these preferences do is that they change the navigator.appName, navigator.platform and navigator.appVersion returned by the javascript code running in the browser.

Login screen visible after making the changes suggested above

If you think of this as hacking, please read Forget Your Password: Be Google
for a very tempting hack.

Disclaimer: I do not advocate hacking for illegal purposes, hacking is supposed to be harmless, fun and learning experience.

Interesting links

Here are a couple of must read interesting links (especially if you are fond of India)

Software for palaeograpy of Indic scripts (I met Harald at FOSS.IN, where he happend to mention the the same thing). I found the project to be really cool!

I got a linux kernel trend URL from Jaya Kumar. Also, check out the Processor (AMD, IA-32, IA-64, PowerPC, Xeon Trends. Isn't the trend analysis amazing?

If you are found of Photography, visit Sanjay Arora's work at flickr. Also check out Beyound Shotz.

I hope you love the links. They have been collected from other blogs I read of the internet, I hope you find them worthwhile.

If you like the concept, I can do this more often

Operating Systems interesting papers and slides

This is a small set of URLs I find useful to lookup any operating systems clarifications I need. This list also includes some current research papers I am reading. This blog entry will continue to grow. Please feel free to contribute links and keep this list healthy :-)

Deitel OS 3rd Edition Slides
William Stallings OS 5th Edition Resources
Virtual Time Round Robin Scheduler

New version of MMIX

Don Knuth's MMIX simulator has a March 2006 version. Download it and play around with it.

Microprocessor Manuals

Here are links to most commonly used processors and their technical manuals. Feel free to notify me if you need other processor manuals added.

• ARM
• Intel IA-32
• Intel IA-64
• AMD64
• UltraSparc
• PowerPC
• Alpha 21164

Related Manuals (for programming on these processors)

• LSB specification (includes ELF ABI)
  
• Dwarf specification
• Windows PE specification
• Common Object File Format

Mathematical Links (Control Theory)

Control Theory Course Notes and Book by Murray on Wikipedia
Design and Analysis of Feedback Systems
Feedback Control Theory

Balbir's Blog: RFC : Understanding components of the kernel

I promised to post some articles on the internals of the Linux (TM) Kernel in my blog post at Balbir's Blog: RFC : Understanding components of the kernel

I thought I could make up for the false promise by posting links on good articles on Linux. The first one is on the working of the Linux scheduler.

Here are a couple of links

1. Scheduler improvements in 2.6
2. Whats new in 2.6 scheduler
3. Understanding the 2.6 scheduler (might be down currently, read using google cache)

Some interesting links

The busy virus seems to leave hard. Meanwhile, here are a few interesting links

delay account utilities
http://lwn.net/Articles/176543/
http://lwn.net/Articles/182133/