Carthik Sharma

The tide is turning, finally.
I never liked Google, from the moment I came to know that it sneaks up on me and leaves a cookie that expires in AD 2038, which tracks everything from what I click, my search terms, IP number and time-date!! I use AllTheWeb which, i have heard indexes as many, if not more pages than Google.

Read the big bro article at Google-watch” for starters.

The current criticism of google, though, is for its inefficiency in searching and indexing pages, among other things. Zawodny’s article explains why PageRank is dead. I found it interesting that PageRank gets its name from Larry Page, google founder, and not because it ranks pages. I am digressing. So yes, google is slipping. The Google Backlash , a Salon article, has more on this subject. People pay money only to put their ad on a page, not to generate traffic, but to increase their google rank!. Mr.Anti-google explains why he hates google.

In trying to understand the web, google has changed the way the web was. In trying to increase their google rank, people do stupid stuff, pay cash, detonate Google Bombs and since the whole world seems to be using Google exclusively, the most important information resource today, the Internet, gets distorted.

Alright, that said, now for some interesting news. The Google Zeitgeist page lists statistics regarding Google searches. I found it amazing that “India” is the top search for a country, as well as for news. I have also read that India contributes most of Gogol’s search traffic( I cant find a link, damn!!)

If you want to increase your Google rank, I think you should read the google secrets as also this page about google. Very useful. Always understand your enemies

Filed by Carthik at 1:55 pm under General No Comments

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I just realized for most of my student life I have only been a Knowledge Repository - A convenient vessel to hold knowledge (also stored in many other minds), for later retrieval by the way at large. I am trying to do something original and innovative (remember, I am a Ph.D. student?), and I find that the stored knowledge, and the way my brain has been programmed gets in the way of revolutionary thought. This is the only problem, and thats why I am not doing too good (by my own standards) right now.
I drink too much coffee. I realized this when I saw myself going for coffee, coming back to the engineering building and on the way, meeting a friend who was going for a coffee, and proceeded to accompany him for yet another cup. I was not at all alarmed at the increasing caffeine levels in the sea.

Say, talking about alternative career options, one that appeals to me a lot is to get involved with GreenPeace or WWF. But no, I stick to computers for the rest of this life.

Filed by Carthik at 1:15 pm under General No Comments

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At Daypop. I found this funny Victorian Internet page, ranked 6th on the Top posts page. Curious, I followed the white rabbit to find this!

I swear that is Dilip in that gif there. Just watch the gif and I am sure Dilip pops up!!

Here is a pic of Dilip for reference…

I got the “victorian” image from the Victorian Internet page.

Dilip, for all those who are interested is a funny Malayali actor!

Filed by Carthik at 6:37 pm under Time Pass - Humour 1 Comment

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I found Mycoted.com, a very interesting website that deals (almost entirely) with creativity.

There are these techniques to improve or promote creativity, and though I haven’t had time to read through all of it yet, I certainly know that I will keep going back to it, on bright sunny sundays like this day, when the mind feels invincible, and the body parks itself at one place, and lets the mind do the wandering. In other words, I am feeling lazy, warm and good today.

There are these puzzles and the list includes my current favourite, the coin balance problem, as they call it, or the counterfeit coin problem, as I would call it. The counterfeit coin problem is currently the focus of my research in evolutionary hardware. machine learning and genetic algorithms. Yes, thats right.

“Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.”
– Thomas Disch

is just one of the quotes in the quotes page.
Was I surprised to see the Einstein quote I referenced in my last post? Not at all.

I have often noticed that a thing (it could be a quote, a book, a movie or a person) often keeps coming back to me, over a period of a few days, in different forms and through different channels, leaving me feeling amazed at how small the world is, and how strong a magnet my mind is. How else do you explain this? I am not even surprised when this happens nowadays, but I will keep track of them here.

The previous occurence of this phenomena was the movie A Clockwork Orange.
There was post by theuglyvolvo about it (damn livejournal doesnt allow me to search journals), the night before that I saw the movie itself, and a day after her post, I saw a copy of the book on a shelf in a lab at school, among someone’s personal belongings.

There are many more I cant remember. Oh yes, Led Zeppellin. I heard the same song on three different radio stations on the same day. I happened to be wearing the Led Zep t shirt on that day, and a bank clerk remarked that I certainly wasnt born when the concert took place (I was the wearing the 1977 concert shirt). I ran into the weblog AirBag on this very same day, by accident.

Nothing remarkable in these coincidences, perhaps, just my mind trying hard to find something to rationalize about.

Filed by Carthik at 3:14 pm under Daily Links No Comments

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You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it — Albert Einstein

Me and my adviser were talking about fixing some problem with the path on his computer which prevented him from compiling some C++ code, and then it was that he quoted Einstein. He was saying that to solve the problems with today’s software, you cant use the same technology that created them. My first instinct, whenever I start using a new Microsoft application is to turn off the help, and all the automatic options off - the Auto Indent and the Auto Format options, for example. MS Visio’s “Glue” and “align to grid” options are prime examples. Whats funny about the quote though is the fact that it came after he said that he needed to turn the “Einstein Guy” off (the office assistant in MS Word masquerading as Einstein). This set me off thinking that if you want to promote hatred or disgust for an individual or thing, just create a new MS office assistant with a similar visage.
Jaron Lanier’s ideas regarding phenotropic software keep coming back to me.
For example, like he says, what if we never had the concept of files, and thus file format incompatibility? Quite possible, if only Apple had not changed their minds about not having or using files in the first Macintosh computer. Files were controversial when computing was nascent. The mind boggles.

And all this brings me to the classic question I was asked long ago, which started to get me interested in A.I. as a discipline, which is, “Why can’t we write a program to write programs?”. The answer I like till this day is that a program does not know what it is doing, or will be expected of it, so it can’t write a program, given a problem. A corollary is the fact that we have not been able to create an artificial brain, because we don’t fully understand how it works, because we cant see the meta-picture.
All these are thoughts that have long been active in my brain, and today when I heard what Einstein said, another block fell into place. You cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Filed by Carthik at 5:51 pm under Science No Comments

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Help Gayathri, a student at FIU, where my friend Vinay Puri Studies. She was hit by a speeding car, and the insurance cap of $250,000 has been exceeded. Her parents, like those of most Graduate Students cannot come to the United States to be with her. This is an authentic case, and I think she deserves all the help she can get.

I got to know this from Vinay, through the recw_usa yahoogroup, of which I am a member. The email conversation is as below, for those in doubt.

>>Vinay Puri
Yes Carthik, both the glz used to stay in the same building in which I stay, where u came.
we are contributing from here, the insurance cap of 250,000 dollars is already crossed, and the worst case is her parents can’t come here.
Plz do help by contributing.
Regards,
Vinay

“Carthik A.Sharma” wrote:
Hi,

Vinay, is this for real?? I could put in a little and help canvas support or something, but I just needed to ask you. This sounds so bad!!

Let me know,
Carthik.

Carthik A Sharma
Ph.D. Student, Computer Engg. Dept.
University of Central Florida

>>> Vinay Puri vinay_recw@ removethis yahoo.co.in wrote >> 11/18/2003 10:27:18 PM >>>
Folks,

In my university few days back a mishap took place with two girls of our community, one of them recovered but the condition of other one is critical. I want you to visit link below, and any help wud deeply be appreciated.
http://www.geocities.com/help_gayathri/

Regards,
Vinay

Filed by Carthik at 1:15 am under General No Comments

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Interesting, reminds me of quizzes back home in India. Could have used something similar to interest the audience in one of those quizzes, where one is asked to guess if foo bar baz is art or not.

Filed by Carthik at 2:54 am under General No Comments

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I don’t know why I have to sleep. It turns out no one knows, according to this article, scientists are still at it, trying to find out a good reason, that sounds more educated that “I sleep cause I grow tired.”

What I found funny in the article, though, was this scientist’s quote :
“While we sleep, we do not procreate, protect or nurture the young, gather food, earn money, write papers, et cetera,” Dr. Rechtschaffen wrote.

Write papers! — in the same breath as the other vital functions.

Filed by Carthik at 7:50 pm under Science 1 Comment

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This article seeks to explain the painful process of migrating from LiveJournal to MovableType.

The first thing I needed to do for this was to import all the entries from my LiveJournal (LJ) to my MovableType (MT) blog.

Amanita.net has an excellent guide on how to do this. I just followed it step by step. The only thing I did, that she did not tell me to do was to set the category for all imported post to “Livejournal” at the Import Entries page, by choosing the option from the drop down menu for the same.

Update : There is another alternative that I found over at ScriptyGoddess which allows one to drag and drop the exported LJ entries XML file, and get the MovableType importable files in a jiffy. It is javasript powered. The script and the instructions are available here. Pretty neat.

Now once I was done with importing all the entries, I needed to figure a way to reflect, or mirror the two blogs (LJ and MT).

There are several options, depending on your needs. You could :

1) Continue posting on LiveJournal (LJ) and have those posts updated on your MovableType (MT) blog via the MTRSSFeed plugin.
The problem with this is that it is static content on your MT page. It does not create a new MT entry. This cannot be archived. Also, if you are using this to have your entire LJ post show up on your MT blog, you might want to change the synopsis as follows :

find the required lines and change as shown in bold

I tried to include the whole code here, but when I post to the blog, MT thinks its valid code and so I cant see it there!! So I had to make it this way.

Once you have made these changes, You can include the code in your MT blog where you want to see the LJ post “imported”. If you want to import more than just the latest LJ post, you can do that by changing the lastn=”1″
to lastn=”x”, where x is the number of latest entries you want to display.

2) Start a syndicated feed of your blog at your livejournal synidcated feeds page, which ends up looking like my LJ syndication page (which I setup in the course of writing this article, and which might not have any articles, since it takes time to get going), or in general, like the Kuro5hin.org syndicated feed.

As you can see the problem is that it has to have a new LJ username, “carthik” in my case, and your friends will all have to add this feed as a friend, and you can not receive the comments in the mail, and it doesn’t look good.

3) You can post on MT and have that show up on LJ.

I found that this would be the best option, since
a) When I post on MT, I can decide the category and also archive it for later
b) I can continue to receive comments at the LJ, since updates show up as new posts, which can be commented upon.

To post on my MT blog and have it show as a new entry on LJ, I used the mtsyn perl script available at the GDS mirror. Mysteriously Sungo’s Sourceforge page does not have this script anymore. I don’t know why the author discontinued the script.

This script works fine the way it is. What you have to do is to login to an ssh account (or if you have a Linux terminal, you could execute the mt2LJ.pl script locally) and execute the script after installing all the modules it requires.

I made some changes to suit my needs.
a) As it is now, the program only checks for new posts to update to LJ in a specific category. I made changes to the script so that it updates the LJ with the new post, irrespective of the category.

b) I modified the program to run in the background, and added some code so that it checks for new updates every x minutes, where the value of x is decided by me.

UPDATE:
c) I modified the localtime(time) code in the posting to LJ section to
localtime((time() - (3600 * 6)))
to account for the fact that the localtime in the server that I use to execute this script is ahead of EST by 6 hours.

You could schedule a cron job to run the mt2LJ.pl script at a particular interval. I wrote the code I did because I found no way to have a cronjob run every 6 hours.

This is my first shot at perl programming, and I don’t know too much php either. So I could not make too much sense of an alternate method suggested by RevJim.Net. This is the php code he has made available.

I found this process very interesting, and I was overjoyed to see it all work, in the end. Programming is just another word for good magic

If you have any problems in doing any of the above, please let me know, and I will do what I can to help you out. I might revise this article in the future, based on feedback, if any.

Filed by Carthik at 2:36 pm under Blogging, Livejournal 3 Comments

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Finally, everything works like a dream.

I am going to stop using Livejournal actively. But I will still be using it passively, without probably ever visiting my LiveJournal again.

I once wanted to link to a previous article I had written on my LiveJournal, and without a way to search the previous entries, I was lost. I also miss being able to edit my layout and style in a simple way, as also the ability to organize my categories in a meaningful manner. The basic problem is that a LiveJournal is never like a website that is your own, under your control.

With MovableType you can do whatever you want to, with your website. Its free too.

I figured a way to update my LiveJournal with the posts I make on my MT blog. So from now on whenever I post to Carthik.Net, the post will automatically show up as a new entry in my LiveJournal. The easier, but less effective way of doing this would be to create a new syndicated feed on LJ. But I wanted to remain 2fargon and I wanted to continue to keep in touch with my friends on LJ. So I had to have a program which automatically updates the LJ using the latest MT entries, and I have it now. This post was not posted by me at LJ. It has been imported using a program from carthik.net. My paid LJ account expires in a couple of days. I could not have done all this at a better time.

All my previous LiveJournal Entries have been imported into Carthik.Net and are now searchable. I love it.

That said, I also setup MT to power my static pages on my site. Carthik.Net is now powered entirely by MovableType, which is just an added level of abstraction in the process of web design. Pretty neat tool, though. Once it is setup, it is remarkably easy to manage. I will have to write how I did it, lest I forget.

I have updated my site, and now all the links work, which means I had to write a few things that I had been intending to write since last May.

I installed Red Hat 9.0 on my laptop, and it is the best thing that happened to this laptop — and me. Better fonts, better performance, better sound than ever before. Its amazing how I was able to install it using the defaults and boot up without any problems. I have since changed the XFree86 configuration and tweaked a few things, but most of the devices worked without a hitch from since when I installed RH 9.0.

I have to write about how I did the MovableType setup and about the Linux installation. Boy, I had a tough time finding out stuff online for doing both, which is why it took so long - almost 4 days.

Dear LJ friends, on the surface, nothing has changed, my posts will still appear, you can still leave comments, and I will still read and reply to them. Life without you is like research without the internet.

Filed by Carthik at 9:04 pm under Blogging, Livejournal 2 Comments

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