If you are using Ubuntu(or any Debian based Linux distro), installing LAMP is easier than you can imagine. Just open a terminal and run-

sudo tasksel

This should show you a list of prefined software collections. Just select LAMP server and select OK. That’s it. Just sit back and relax while your LAMP server is being installed

When my 3rd semester commenced in July, Network Theory lectures were free for a week as no teacher was alloted. That was probably the best week in college for someone who attends classes regularly. Once Network theory lectures started, there was nothing more boring than it. I don’t want to blame anyone for it, so I guess I should blame the subject for this. My memories of Network theory lectures have an image of a class pretending as if everyone is understanding every bit of what is being taught. I spent most of the lectures calling every person in class hoping that their phone rings in class . I was successful twice, thanks to my classmates who forget to set their phones to silent mode before class. Network Theory lectures were like 50 minute endurance tests.

As far as exams are concerned, I didn’t find the subject too tough but I know nobody who can confidently say that he’s good at Network Theory. Network theory was always the first exam (in both the Minors and the Majors) so that gave me ample time to prepare but due to the nature of the subject I found it a little tough to score well. I had my Network theory Major today and it went pretty well. The questions were easy and most probably I bid a really sweet farewell to a horrifying subject. I’m really glad that I won’t have to study Network Theory ever again (still left with practicals though) and finally I can say goodbye to Network Theory.

3rd November- Network Analysis
5th November-Electronic Devices and Circuits
7th November-Numerical Analysis
10th November-Digital Electronics
12th November-Discrete Structures
14th November-Data Structures

The first two are the ones I’m worried about. Rest of them are pretty simple and live up to the reputation of IT subjects . I’m not sure about the practicals time table as yet but most probably the practicals will be over by 18th November. This year, the majors contribute to 60% of the overall grade (used to be 40% earlier) which makes it more important to score. I can cover up for the minors I messed up.

I won’t write things like don’t expect too many posts because I generally end up contradicting myself and update my blog regularly during exams. One thing I’ve learnt is that being busy is just an excuse for not updating your blog when you have nothing to write. Anyways, got to study now, so I’ll cut this post short, wish me luck.

Here’s a simple solution to get your Dell Studio brightness control buttons working if you are using GRUB 2-

1.Edit the GRUB 2 default options file by running the following in a terminal

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

2.Look for the line-

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”

and change it to-

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash noapic”

3.Now update GRUB by running-

sudo update-grub

4.Reboot your laptop. Your brightness buttons should work perfectly fine now.

Basically, you’ve made the same edit to the GRUB configuration file here too but the method to do it with GRUB 2 is slightly different.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is just about to be released. It uses GRUB 2 as the bootloader by default. Although when you upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic, your bootloader won’t be upgraded, curiosity can be tough to handle at times. I feel confident that I know my way around GRUB (and trust the great community support) and can handle any bootloader related problems so I decided to go for the upgrade. Here’s a warning before you try doing anything with your bootloader, upgrading a bootloader is risky and can get messed up at times.

This post is specific to Ubuntu, and some of the parts are specific to Ubuntu 9.04 and later versions.

Installing GRUB 2

It is suggested that you test GRUB 2 before replacing your GRUB installation completely with GRUB 2. You can test GRUB to by installing it as a chainloaded sub-bootloader if you are using Ubuntu 9.04. To get started with testing and installation, open a terminal and run this command-

sudo apt-get install grub-pc

Select “Yes” at the “Chainload from menu.lst” prompt and at the “Linux command line:” prompt just press enter. This should install GRUB 2 and modify menu.lst accordingly.
If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you will face a bug which modifies the menu.lst incorrectly. So most probably you will face a problem when you try to boot using GRUB 2 chainloaded. To correct this problem, when the GRUB menu appears, at the “Chainload into Grub 2″ menu item, press ‘e’ to edit the configuration. Press ‘e’ a second time to edit the top boot line and change:

root xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

to

uuid xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

press Enter after making the change and press b to boot GRUB 2. If everything goes fine, you should be able to boot using GRUB 2 and you are ready to replace GRUB completely by GRUB 2 as the main bootloader. To do that, use the command-

sudo upgrade-from-grub-legacy

IMPORTANT: Make sure that you hit the space bar to select /dev/sda when it asks you the location where grub needs to be installed. If you hit enter on this screen it will not install grub on /dev/sda and your system will not boot.

For any other kind of troubleshooting related to GRUB 2 problems, you can check out this Ubuntu wiki page.

Editing the GRUB 2 Menu

After I installed GRUB 2, I started taking a look around its files. Editing the GRUB menu was really simple. You just needed to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. GRUB 2 is a bit different in this regard. The GRUB 2 configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg. This file is not supposed to be edited directly. It is an automatically generated file. You can actually make out from the comments what part of grub.cfg is generated by which file. The files that are used to generate the grub.cfg file are those located in the /etc/grub.d folder and the /etc/default/grub file. Editing these files isn’t as simple as editing menu.lst. You need to have some programming knowledge to understand these files. But you don’t need to worry, I’ll be posting ways to implement some common menu.lst edits in grub.cfg using the GRUB 2 files in some other posts.

My first experience of working with GRUB 2 was fun. Had a good time experimenting with stuff. You can also experiment a bit but always remember to keep backups before editing any file and playing around with your bootloader can be dangerous and is not recommended.

This post is just a small update to notify all of my readers that recently, I updated my photo gallery. An old school friend of mine, Varun Sood recently scanned and uploaded class photographs on Facebook. That was followed by a few days of nostalgia and remembering school days. My college friends just couldn’t recognize me in the pictures. Well, I decided to share the pictures on my photo gallery. So head to the school album where you can see how I looked as a kid. Special thanks to Varun Sood for the pictures.

22nd September- Network Theory & Numerical Analysis
23rd September- Electronic Devices and Circuits & Digital Electronics
24th September- Discrete Structures & Data Structures

The timings for the exams are most probably, 9am to 10am and 2pm to 3pm. To cut the story short, I’m ready for three long days followed by a trip back home to Delhi. I’ll be leaving for Delhi on 24th September and will stay there for a week or so. I’ll probably publish my next post from home.

Noesis 2009 was organized by Vision, the technical society of MANIT Bhopal on 5th and 6th September 2009. It was a two day inter-college mega event. The event consisted of different events addressing different faces of technology. Every department had its own events. The events were-

1.Crime Scene Investigation (General Event)
2.Chem-Zone (Chemical Event)
3.Contrivance (Civil Event)
4.Cryptex and Codecraft (CS and IT event)
5.Didactronics (ECE Event)
6.Ecotecture (Energy Event)
7.Genestein (Bio Informatics Event)
8.Mechatreak (Mechanical Event)
9.Tatva Bodh (MSME Event)
10.Trical Bykes (Electrical and Energy Event)
11.Sci-Tech Quiz
12.War-Zone (Gaming Event)

The events I, being an IT student and a programmer by, was bothered about were CSI, Cryptex and Codecraft. Codecraft was an online submission event. There were around 15 programs to be submitted and I didn’t notice the deadline on time so I didn’t bother submitting the questions. Anant Khaitan (aka GNUger), 3rd year IT bagged the first place in Codecraft. My team managed to get a 2nd place in Cryptex, read on to know the full story.

Here’s a description of Noesis 09 from my perspective-
Noesis was a team participation event. Each team comprised of 3 people and registration fees was Rs 200 per team. I chose two of my good friends and classmates Shilpesh Mishra and Nishant Maloo as my teammates. I, for some reason, had decided that I wasn’t going to look for a winning combination while selecting my teammates so I chose my friends over anyone who could add better value to the team.

Day 1: I reached the registration desk on time and there were loads of people who reached there according to Indian Stretchable Time. The event was bound to get delayed by a couple of hours and it did happen. The day started with a short opening ceremony in the SAC. It was shortly followed by the first event, CSI.

Crime Scene Investigation was an interesting concept, a fun event but I feel it the alloted time wasn’t enough and my team didn’t feel like using our brains early in the morning over solving a murder mystery. I and Shilpesh didn’t take CSI seriously at all. Nishant was comparatively a bit involved in the event. We used the CSI time to have our lunch and gear up for Cryptex which was supposed to be held after lunch at 2:00 PM.

Now it was time for the most important event of Noesis, Cryptex. Cryptex was an event that was designed to test participants in every domain of the CS-IT field. On Day 1, the preliminary rounds of Cryptex were conducted in the SAC. There were 3 rounds on Day 1 of Cryptex. The first round was Techno-tale which was a Cryptography related event. It had a tech crossword and decoding questions too. People in general found round 1 a bit tough and I guess the scores would’ve been pretty close in the round. Round Two was Iconizer which was about identifying logos, tag-lines, pictures. It was extremely easy and the toughest it got was the logo of Debian. I managed to get a great score in that round. Round Three was Conundrums. It was a 75 question quiz that had 70 MCQs and 5 subjective questions related to programming in C, C++, Java and there were questions related to UNIX and Linux. This was supposed to be done in 30 minutes. I manged to do pretty well in this round too. A good question I can recall is

Write a Hello World program without using semicolon

At the end of the 3rd round, we were told that the top 30% teams would qualify for the Second Round of Cryptex. After the preliminary rounds of Cryptex, there was a performance by the college band Paradox and dance performances by the members of the society Roobaroo. It was followed by a Teacher’s Day special event for the teachers. That was all for Day 1 of Noesis. By the end of the day, I was confident of qualifying for the second round and my teammates were more confident than I was .

Day 2: The first thing we did on day to was to confirm that we had qualified for further rounds. 30 teams had qualified and my team was one of them. For the rest of the teams, an auxiliary event was conducted through which 2 teams were given Wild Card entry to the Grand Finale.

The day 2 main event was Codex. It was a 90 minutes long event completely based on coding. The paper had three sections, the first one had MCQs and objective questions based on coding. A really nice question I remember and could solve was-

Write a fast way to multiply a number by 7 without using * and any loops

There were other output questions including tricky ones like one on the Lexical convention. Section 2 consisted of two programs that were not too tough but not too simple either. Section 3 was a cryptography section that had a long program that was supposed to be understood and we needed to find the input for which the given output would be generated. It was a nice section and I managed to do that one easily. After Codex, the top 5 were supposed to be selected from the 30 shortlisted teams. I had just a slight hope of making it to the Finals. The result of Codex was out at around 1:30 PM and my team had made it to the Finals.

Now it was time for Seven teams to battle it out in the finals of Cryptex at 2:00 PM. The Finale had 2 parts-Testing and Programming and Hardware Trivia. Testing and Programming had 9 questions- 7 questions were testing questions in which we had to check the conditions where the given code would run abnormally or would not perform the desired operation. There were 2 programming questions which were not too tough. The total time alloted for the Finale was 2 hours. Hardware Testing was an interview type round. Teams were called one by one and asked to identify the different parts of a Motherboard. Hardware Trivia was very simple and my team did pretty well.

I attempted almost all questions in the Grand Finale but for some reason, I felt that we weren’t going to get a podium finish. I had a word with other participants but none of them seemed to be confident except for GNUger and his team which everyone predicted would grab the first place. All I had in mind was that I was going to get a certificate for being a finalist. I was having an ice-cream with a friend when the results were announced and I was shocked to hear that my team bagged the second place. That was followed by a very excited me jumping around in public to meet my teammates and celebrate. The third position was bagged by another team from my class- Ayush Agrawal, Prateek Gupta and Amit Gupta. I was considering those guys to be good competition and they didn’t disappoint me. Congrats guys, you did a good job .

Then I went to the SAC and saw the finals of the Sci-Tech quiz and a play on Sherlock Holmes waiting for the prize distribution. Finally when it was time for the prize distribution ceremony. My team got a cash prize of Rs 600, two free courses on Ethical Hacking by HCL CDC and a 20% discount coupon on CCNA/Linux by HCL CDC.

Noesis ended up to be a big success in all terms. The participation was high, the events were really good, it was well organized, I had lots of fun and last but not the least, the prizes were nice. In short, I had a great weekend and the credit goes to Noesis.

III Semester Computer Science Paper

Each part carries 2 marks
1.A Calculate the time complexity function for the following code.
Func (int n)
{
if(n<=2) return;
else
Func(sqrt(n));
}

1.B Write an algorithm for finding minimum & maximum element among n elements stored in an array A. Calculate the frequency of execution of each statement.

2. A number is entered through keyboard. Write a program using array to find whether the number is even or odd. (Without using if-else, switch statement, loop or conditional operator).

3.A Explain with syntax how static and dynamic array are created in C programming language.

3.B Write a program to check the balanced parenthesis using stack.

III Semester Bio Informatics Paper- Note that Linked Lists are not a part of the IT syllabus for Minor 1

1. (a) What are primitive data structures? – 1.5 Marks
1. (b) Differentiate between static and dynamic storage with the help of an example.

2. Discuss the merits and demerits of binary search algorithm. Also write the algorithm for binary search in an array of 20 elements. -2 Marks

3. What do you mean by a two way list? Write an algorithm to insert a node in a two way list. -2 Marks

4.(a) What do you mean by a circular header list? Write an algorithm to search an item in a circular header link list. -2 Marks
4.(b) Explain overflow and underflow in a linked list. -1 Mark

Update: Here’s the III Semester Information Technology Paper

Each question carries 2 marks
1.A Calculate the time complexity function for the following code
Func (int n)
{
if(n<=2) return;
else
Func(sqrt(n)) + Func(sqrt(n));
}

1.B Write an algorithm that finds minimum & maximum element among n elements stored in an array A that uses O(log n) comparison.

2. Write an algorithm to implement multiple stack of variable size using single array of size n.

3.A Write a program to create an array dynamically. and then enter input to that dynamically created array & display them.

3.B Show stepwise how stack is used to solve recursive problem of factorial.