http://neothebrute.blogspot.com

which the old-timers would remember was my first blog. Yeah so I’m returning to that finally, and this blog is to be shut-down. There are a lot of irritating problems with this awardspace domain, and I simply don’t have the time to run around testing other hosts and dealing with hosting problems anymore. Let blogger maintain it for me.

The current blog in blogger is pretty primitive-looking. Don’t worry, I’m in the process of re-designing it and giving it a pretty new look. Keep checking it if you have no other work.

One fine day I had simply no work in life, so I decided to calculate PI (22/7 = 3.142857…) to the millionth decimal place. Needless to say, I didn’t reach that mark, but I was astounded to see that not only did PI follow the sequence of 142857 after the decimal place; EVERY number possible did the same (except obviously multiples of 7, which don’t need the decimal point). Every number that I divided with 7 followed the circular chain of 142857 after the decimal place, some starting with 4 immediately after the decimal place and going through the following 2857 before restarting the 142857 sequence etc. But essentially everyone had the same chain, starting at different points in the circular chain. Observe:

22 / 7 = 3.{142857,142857,142857,142857,142857…}
227 / 7 = 32.{42857}{142857,142857,142857,142857…}
890 / 7 = 127.{142857,142857,142857,142857,142857…}
22792279 / 7 = 3256039.{857}{142857,142857,142857,14287…}

So I set myself an objective: Find out why numbers when divided by 7 present the same pattern of 142857. There is no conspiracy theory or ‘number of God 7′ in this. Maybe people have already figured out the solution to this problem, which proves that I’m not the only one with no work and loads of time to kill.

My explanation:
When any number is divided by 7, at each step of the long division method the remainder will be from the following sequence, maybe in a circularly, rotated way: 1, 3, 2, 6, 4, 5. Observe:

(By Long Division method)
22 / 7 = 3, and remainder = 1
put decimal point and bring down a ‘zero’ => 1 is now 10
10 / 7 = 1, and remainder = 3
bring down another ‘zero’ => 3 is now 30
30 / 7 = 4, and remainder = 2
bring down another ‘zero’ => 2 is now 20
20 / 7 = 2, and remainder = 6
bring down another ‘zero’ => 6 is now 60
60 / 7 = 8, and remainder = 4
bring down another ‘zero’ => 4 is now 40
40 / 7 = 5, and remainder = 5
bring down another ‘zero’ => 5 is now 50
50 / 7 = 7, and remainder = 1
bring down another ‘zero’ => 1 is now 10
… and the cycle begins again. Remainders thus cycle in the sequence 1, 3, 4, 6, 4, 5.

Also observe that this remainder sequence includes all the numbers less than 7, which means that whatever be the dividend, the remainder at each step of division HAS to be one of these (as 7 or greater can’t be a remainder while dividing with 7!), and therefore the answer will start at some point inside this quotient chain. Since these are all the possible numbers less than 7, this means that any number when divided by 7 WILL produce the remainders chain of 1,3,2,6,4,5 and thus produce the quotient chain of 142857. Hence this mystery has been explained.

Chapter 1: What is our hotshot “Google Product Prodigy Project” (try reading that phrase in quick succession!)
Chapter 2: GooglePlex Bangalore, India - Wow!

“Finally, our code is working.”

- Famous Last Words.

Note: I’m under a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement signed at the Google Bangalore office, so anything I might say in the following paragraphs may be a figment of my deranged imagination and entirely fictitious bearing no resemblence to any person or event occuring in the real world. Sorry.

Google India announced its Google Product Prodigy Conclave, 2008 and scheduled it for March 26th, 2008. Google graciously provided us (and the other finalists, along with its new recruits and some representatives from universities across the nation) with Air-tickets to Bangalore, a Cab to drive us around in Bangalore, and an ultimate 5-star hotel to stay in with cool luxury. I’m seriously glad those guys paid my food bills during the stay in the hotel as my frugal dinner consisting of two rotis and two vegetable items got billed to Rs. 715, and our later proper team-dinner got billed to Rs. 5000+, and I was close to heart-failure when the restaurant manager refused to acknowledge the existence of Google. Thankfully a quick call to the reception desk at the hotel (called Chancery Pavillion, by the way. Nice hotel, give it a try sometime if you’ve got the money) solved the crisis. The rooms were great, double bedded, and with a refrigerated mini-bar, complimentary chocolates, food and tea/coffee along with an electric kettle. There was a nice bath-tub, and finally I managed to try one out (believe it our not, never been inside one before!). Floating inside a bath-tub is definately on my “hobbies” list from now onwards.

We had WiFi Internet connectivity in our room, and we worked all night finishing up the project. I didn’t sleep at all, which is another story. The breakfast was nice, a buffet actually - pick up whatever you want, and was with best compliments from the hotel. A bus picked us all up at 8.30 am sharp and we landed at GooglePlex Bangalore. However, the surprising bit about the Google Campus is that there is no mention of Google anywhere around the building or the grounds it occupies. It is based on three floors and shares the building with other companies (maybe that’s ‘coz its just recently set up here). But they could provide a simple “Google Inside” board somewhere outside the building, so that people wouldn’t pass by the building a million times looking for the Google India Headquarters. Here is where we signed the famous Non-Disclosure Agreement, so beware of the factual accuracy of the following paragraphs!

At Sparta, their conference hall, we got initiated to the idea of Product Prodigy by a nice guy who gave the stage to another cool guy who talked about the Indian relevance of Google India. That cool guy happens to be the Engineering & Site Director of Google India, and the initiating ‘nice guy’ is the Head of Staffing I think. This was followed by a complicated seminar on a problem of cloud computing, that had something to do with “How to decide who the new master of the cloud would be if the current master was to be shot dead.” Wierd discussion ensued, and I got to eat a chocolate for being one of the three people to ask certain doubts and for making ‘beep’ noises amidst the general shocked silence.

Following this was a neat coffee-break where we could pick up anything from their refrigerators (Sodas, Cold Drinks, Juices, etc etc) or get awesome coffee from the Cafe Coffee Day outlet free of charge. And the fun part is that it wasn’t free just for us. The Googlers working there get to do that everyday and they can do it at any time of the day, as many times as they want! Free food! That apart, the Googlers had set up an exhibition of sorts of their latest innovations; the Translingua team, the Orkut team, the On-screen keyboard team along with others were there explaining their products, and we were free to eat their brain! How cool is that?!

Then we had our presentation, explained our stuff well. People thronged our kiosk, and people liked our idea, but the critical part of our code- the interface where the latest traffic feed is fed failed to work right that morning, and I was just too tired to think of any way to fix it. And therefore I had to shrug and explain to the judges that the proof that the traffic feed code did infact work was that we had used it to feed information for over 130 roads, which wouldn’t be possible manually. But I’m really lame at shrugging, and we lost a lot of points because of that I think. We made our own Google Maps-like draggable map with sections of the map loading as we dragged along, and the search box working like a Google Suggest, that suggested hot locations around the city as one typed the keyword in. I think people liked these nifty things. I for one really loved it, at being able to make stuff like that. I will release the code of my Google Maps-clone soon on this blog. Its not sophisticated, doesn’t have any API. Its the interface. People haven’t really shared any code of that kind anywhere I looked, so I think I’ll do it for the benefit of anyone else interested in making a GMaps-clone.

Then in the evening, we were blindfolded and taken to an unknown destination for the closing ceremony. We were told that we would be taken to Taj, but I thought we were lost in the wilderness. Oh wait, I think I’d slept off during the bus journey. Anyway, the important thing is that the ballroom was opulent, and we kept getting fed all through with cranberry juice and veg kebabs and other appetizers. There was a panel discussion between big-shot people - the Chief Scientist at IBM India (Mr. C. Mohan), the Head of Google Asia-Pacific (Mr. Deep Nishar), the CEO of Yahoo! India (Mr. Sharad Sharma), the MD of Helion (Mr. Ashish Gupta), an IISc Professor (Mr. Jayan Harista) and a Google Engineer (Mr. Lalitesh Katragadda) on various topics. Hey wait a minute, what was the CEO of Yahoo! doing at a Google Conclave? Anyway, the discussion was interesting, but quite stretched and we were quite hungry at the end of it, and that is what the Food people at the Taj (was it Taj?) were more than happy to satisfy. The Food was good. The food was good throughout this “Google Experience”, which led to my stomach refusing to digest the amounts of junk and non-stop trash I was sending in. Spent the following few days recovering from indigesion. Too bad, but the food was worth the trouble. That’s all I really care about. And people would be wonderstruck at that declaration of eternal love for food, looking at my relatively skinny frame.

Can’t write anything more. I’ve squeezed out most of my brain, and I think that’s all there is to say about the Google Experience. Loved it. 42.

“I love deadlines. I particularly love the sound of them whooshing by!”

- Douglas Adams

I (and my team) was one of the 12 finalists of the first Google India Product Prodigy Contest, which required us to submit a proposal for an awesome new product on an open-ended theme i.e. based on Google’s motto of making the world’s information universally accessible and searchable. I think out of them, only 8 teams (including us) managed to actually finish something and display it at the Google Conclave.

A friend of mine (and later my teammate) had convinced me to join up for one IBM’s “Great Minds” competition, and had more or less caught me at a particularly vulnerable point of time when I was dissatisfied with life in general and my not participating in any competitions in particular. So with great zest, we began to waste a lot of time in meetings that finally ended ‘coz everyone had slept off. Me being an ardent admirer of Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) follow the quote mentioned at the start of this post to the bone. That quote more or less summarizes how we worked for this Google Project. Everything basically got done a day or two before (often, after) the deadline.

The idea for our project: “Intelligent traffic routing”, later “iTraffic”, later “Smart Path-finder”, was decided after much deliberation, and then the proposal got prepared the night before the submission. Later as it turned out, life being heavy and hectic as it is usually for me, I got little time to actually do any substantial coding for this IBM project, and we ended up with a cartload of design ideas, and an awesome new path-finding algorithm which I believe could be much faster at giving an effective shortest-path than most of (or any) current path-finding algorithms (Side note: thereby suitable for AI in game development). To cut a long story short, we never really did submit our IBM project. Then the “Google India Conclave” was announced that changed everything. We submitted some dummy code that I concocted up in a few nights, and then we were told that we were supposed to actually present it in the GooglePlex Bangalore! That got me working finally, and I took a long 10-day break and went home (I stay in a hostel.. I’m in college remember?) and shut myself from the rest of the world and worked 18 hours a day like a maniac and generated work I’m really proud of with slick AJAX work and a neat 3-tier architecture etc.

Our project aspired to let the user select two points in on a city map, and provide the “smartest” path between those two points based on live traffic conditions. Its like Google Maps with the “live” element built in. Its NOT a mash-up as the GMaps API doesn’t provide sufficient node information required for any customized algorithm. The project basically has my sigmaServer whose sole purpose in life is to deal with traffic details, and using 13 commands it exposes through the HTTP protocol anyone can build traffic-based applications, websites, portals etc using ANY language and on ANY platform. I spent four frenzied days working on one example web portal that would graphically display the paths generated and also allow people to view important locations in the city, write reviews about places in the city, give ratings, read the latest City Buzz etc. The beauty of the sigmaServer technique is that I could have written a simple SMS based program in less than half an hour which would take two locations as an input SMS from the user, query the sigmaServer which would return the path in an XML or JSON format depending on the requirement, and send back a formatted list to the user through another SMS. Or millions of other such applications using just those 13 commands.

Ahh.. what a wish, I really wish I could do that for a couple of days more, like I’ve been doing for the past 12 days of my vacation.


I just hit upon this site (nicecupofteaandasitdown.com). I really like their mission statement, really can relate spiritually to them:


Our Mission Statement:

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely.

What a beautiful concept! This is the reason why the Internet still remains sane today…

Take a look at the site: OPEN SESAME!

Shashank

PS: This might make you hungry.

Recently while working on the Google Project, I was messing around with AJAX and figuring out how JSON works etc, so I decided to implement the much talked-about “Google Suggest” thing myself just to test my JSON and AJAX techniques. Turns out it indeed is really simple in concept and implementation, except that the amount of “bells ‘n whistles” you can add is endless.

“Google Suggest” in 5 easy steps:
1. Capture the onkeydown events of the text-box where the person is typing
2. Send the text typed to a server-side script (in ASP, PHP, Perl or any language you prefer). This you could do by passing the server script URL with the typed text to inline frames or XMLHttpRequest suiting your taste and requirements.
3. The server side script will search the database table for entries whose text starts with the text presently in the front-end textbox.
4. This list can be converted to a JSON object, or an XML feed or plain inline-frame javascript etc and will be received back by the client
5. The client will display the received list in a floating DIV or container below the textbox and permit the user to select an entry from that list by either arrow keys or mouse clicks.

So in my script, I wrote this Google Suggest-like tool that would read names from a database and display them as we type.

This code is really elementary with loads of features missing, and lots of optimizations possible. I wrote this script in like 2 hours in the dead of night so wasn’t thinking about lots of goodies and optimizations.

Download the ZIP file: Auto-suggest names

Minimum Requirements: ASP 6.0+ support, Microsoft Access 2000, IE 5.5+, FF 1.5+.

I’ll list out some things that can be added to this code of mine:

1. Add mouse handlers to the drop-down menu to enable mouse clicks on suggestions
2. Improve the elementary keyboard support it gives to include responses to several other keys
3. Optimize the feedback process to the server by inserting a “delay” before sending the typed value to the server-side script. That is, instead of sending the text “immediately” on “every” key-press, wait after a keypress for a second or two and see if the person stops typing. If the person hasn’t entered anything for, say, two seconds then send the text over to the server for searching. This will reduce the load on the server as its obviously wiser to wait for the user to atleast tell the client what he/she has to say before jumping off to suggestions. This is done by Google too.

I’ll add some more suggestions as I think of some more.

God bless keyboards, especially at times when the mice decide to go on a hunger strike. I’m sick and tired of wireless mice, and am half inclined to walk right tomorrow and purchase an ordinary optical mouse. The problem is that its far and I’m too lazy to do that as such. :-/

Its been exactly just a week since I replaced the old mouse batteries with brand new ones, and bam! they’re already dead! My mouse has stopped working right in the middle of the night at 12:29 am, when there is no chance that I can go around the house and humbly beg someone to lend me a battery, nor run out of the house and purchase some. And I was just beginning to get cosy with my work.

Damn! Today’s been a miserable day, loads of work planned, and almost none achieved. Overslept as usual.. had planned to wake up at atleast 10am for a change, woke up at 12:30pm. So then I thought, “Such is life”, and started up my system and began designing the new website of my college’s IEEE chapter (I’m its Secretary BTW), and Bang! at 1pm the power fails. With no signs of it returning anytime soon, I grumbled at the interruption of my once-in-a-lifetime, finally-sat-down-to-do-it, just-when-I-was-getting-warmed-into-the-subject initiative of my website, and decided to sit down and paint something instead! Yeah, as in real paint and paintbrush etc, which is something I managed to do atleast for a while, before I dropped off to sleep right there holding the paintbrush.

When I woke up a few hours later, I discovered that the power had returned, and therefore sat down to work again (after removing those wierd paint daubs on my clothes from that paintbrush I took to sleep with), when that stupid UPS repair fellow came. Another 2 hours wasted on that. Clock struck 8pm, and I desperately sat down to do some work atleast, when my sis called up and asked me to help her fix her system via phone and Yahoo chat. Grrr.. it was 9.30 before both of us ran out of patience and went off our own respective ways. Next, dinner and the usual running around the house insanely, before I finally managed to sit peacefully at 11pm (while that UPS fellow, and my sister, and the rest of humanity slept cosily in their respective homes) and worked for an hour or so, before my MOUSE IN A SUPREME BURST OF IRRITATING GAS……. DIED! Bah!

I’m going off to sleep like the rest of the the irritating world.
Good night.

Later edit: I didn’t sleep, sorry.

DynamiX Clan (Dec 2006)

There was one time when I was at school you know.. and I met two interesting guys called Roshan Shariff & Rahul Seth (in different ways.. Roshan because of an Intel project we did together, and Rahul ‘coz of one SchoolNet Website competition.. then me and Rahul jointly started and ran an online media portal called Big-Anda.com for a while). And before long we all met up and one thing led to the other and we setup up a Computer & IT Club/Klan called “DynamiX”! We were basically fed up with the lack of anything being done at school for identifying and encouraging talented students in the field of computers. The teachers had this attitude that our school wasn’t any good in computers, and that we didn’t have students here good at computers. We thought differently. My reasoning was that it physically wasn’t possible for them to know each and every student in the school and also know whether they’re any good at computers, or any particular field. So we decided to go deep among the students, of almost all classes and spot people with talent, and people with an aptitude for computers and a desire to grow and do things differently!

We had immense support from our Principal, Mrs. Meera Balachandran, and basically were permitted to do whatever it takes to get it running. We started off with Mr. Umakant Pandey as our chief mentor, who was the faculty in-charge of the Intel Lab, soon re-christened “The DynamiX Labs”. The rest was quite a rush, recruiting students, getting them to work, getting ourselves to work, competiting at the tech fests of many other schools (and winning several of them! ) and holding our own events & fests.

My point is that even though our fests never really played up to our expectations and planning, personally I have grown a lot as an organizer, manager as well as team-player, and the experience I gained due to DynamiX has been invaluable in my college life, ‘coz when we read about managing events, managing people, working in teams, division of labor.. for most of the folks here its just theory, whereas I can actually relate to it from my personal experiences and be better at organizing and working in teams.

Anyway, this post was just a bit of remiscence of my time at school and my “DynamiX Days”, and was sparked by the recently concluded (and very successful) “DynamiX 2007″, one that was almost entirely organized by the young talents (that the school believed didn’t exist before DynamiX started) with help from Rahul & Anshu. Kudos to the new DynamiX team! Don’t let DX die.

Shashank

Just felt that I should announce this.

Shashank