July 2006 - Posts

• Ever wondered why your salary is so low?

  Maybe the salary theorem will shed some light on the matter.  http://www.funtoosh.com/?dj.php?details=OFH~136 Posted Jul 31 2006, 04:14 PM by Sijin Joseph with no comments Filed under: fun

• Interesting reading for 31-July-2006

  Death of the command line - A.P Lawerence puts down his thoughts on the command line. Frankly my head is so full of other CS stuff that I could barely fit in command lines and their arguments. Command line tools tend to be less discoverable and need constant reinforcement to remember than the GUI counterparts simply because you can see what can be done if the GUI is designed properly. But when it comes to automation and chaining tools together nothing beats command line tools. Private offices Redux - Joel writes about the recent MS Workspace Advantage initiative mentioned by Adam Barr here and here. Personally I agree with Joel, a private office for dev/test makes much more sense given that even simple distractions can cause a huge dent in productivity. 433 examples in 132 programming languages - Nothing more to say. Disused stations of London underground - Interesting for someone staying in London or planning a trip. Django 0.95 released - The latest release of the cool Python based web development framework is out. It'll be interesting to see which framework ends up being the dominant one. Google does a sourceforge - Google is offerring free hosting for your open source code via a subversion repository and a custom built Ajaxy issue tracking tool. Knock some commands into your thinkpad - Ingenious use of the built in Active Protection System. Napoleonic Lessons for Google & Microsoft - A very interesting read indeed!! Krugle - The search engine for developers. Search specifically for code, docs and open source projects. I think specialization like this is the way search engines are headed. A programming.google.com would be even better. Posted Jul 31 2006, 01:23 PM by Sijin Joseph with no comments Filed under: General Software Development

• Treemaps for space constrained visualization

  I have been using WinDirStat for quite some time now to visualize my hard disk usage and to clean up when disk space was low. But it was just yesterday that I realized that the cool visualization that is used by WinDirStat actually has a name "Treemaps" and has a lot of interesting history behind it. It was created by Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland, here is an excerpt from the University site. During 1990, in response to the common problem of a filled hard disk, I became obsessed with the idea of producing a compact visualization of directory tree structures. Since the 80 Megabyte hard disk in the HCIL was shared by 14 users it was difficult to determine how and where space was used. Finding large files that could be deleted, or even determining which users consumed the largest shares of disk space were difficult tasks. Tree structured node-link diagrams grew too large to be useful, so I explored ways to show a tree in a space-constrained layout. I rejected strategies that left blank spaces or those that dealt with only fixed levels or fixed branching factors. Showing file size by area coding seemed appealing, but various rectangular, triangular, and circular strategies all had problems. Then while puzzling about this in the faculty lounge, I had the Aha! experience of splitting the screen into rectangles in alternating horizontal and vertical directions as you traverse down the levels. This recursive algorithm seemed attractive, but it took me a few days to convince myself that it would always work and to write a six line algorithm. Read more about the history of Treemaps at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml The site also has references to papers and other tools that use the Treemap visualization. In fact I remember that at TechEd 2006 Microsoft had shown a demo of a WinFS based application called Life Journal that used a variant of the Treemap visualization to show emails, pictures etc. on a timeline. Posted Jul 20 2006, 01:02 PM by Sijin Joseph with no comments Filed under: General Software Development

• Setting up wireless LAN

  I recently moved into my new house and wanted to setup a wireless LAN for my home. So I read through some sites on how to setup a wireless LAN and for the router I decided to buy the Linksys WRT45GS. My ISP in Delhi is Hathway and the provide internet over an ethernet cable, unfortunately the connection is not always active and requires me to use a client called 24online to login to the server before I can start using the Internet. When I had decided to buy the Linksys router I had assumed that I would be able to somehow use my PC as a gateway for the router. I had already bought an extra network card anticipating this requirement. Ultimately I was able to use my PC as a gateway even though I did not have a direct connection to the Internet but the journey was a treacherous one. I spent a good number of hours reading through networking and windows xp sites on how to set up my wireless LAN environment, also had a lot of false starts like trying to bridge the two network cards on my primary PC. Finally I stumbled upon the answer, it was so obvious. Internet Connection Sharing!! Here is how I set it up. My Primary PC that is connected to the internet is Windows XP, it has two Network cards, one of which is connected to my ISP and the other is connected to the "Internet" port of my linksys router. The ISP facing card has a static IP address. Windows XP has a cool little wizard called the Network setup wizard, it is accessible via the task panes on the left when you are in the network connections window. Using the network setup wizard, you can tell xp to setup internet connection sharing, basically I selected the ISP facing interface as my public interface and the router facing interface as private. XP will automatically give 192.168.0.1 as the IP for the private interface and enable DHCP on that interface along with routing services. And would you believe it that's all there is required. Any wireless clients connected to the router should now be able to access the Internet. After that I just needed to enable security on my router for which I chose WSA-PSK(WiFi Secured Access - Pre Shared Key) with TKIP. Posted Jul 18 2006, 03:42 PM by Sijin Joseph with 2 comment(s) Filed under: general