Google Hunt Image Search Solutions

Its a fortnight now since Techtatva got over, though a LOT of people have not gotten over it yet. I have received quite a few mails regarding the solutions of Google Hunt Contest. The contest was won by Ankit Sinha, who successfully found the solutions to all the four images, apart from finding the solution strings foe the ten URLs provided in Round I. I provide here some thinking that went into finding the solutions to the image search :

Image I

The pictures speak for themselves.The Google speheres pointing to each other, with the sphere receiving the most incoming links being the largest (and the most important! ) refers to the famous Google PageRank algorithm. Hence the solution PageRank.

Image II

Take a close look. The ascending stairs and the cycle represent improvemen. The Japanese alphabets on the left stand for “Kaizen“, which means continuous improvement.

Image III

My personal favourite. To blog or not to blog. (wink!)

Image IV

Think. Grub.

Cheers !

Techpron – The Mystery Unveiled

Neyawn called me the sard with brains, he was atleast right abt the sardar part, but as far as the brains are concerned KUDOS to the all the ppl who cleared the first 10 levels, you are the ones with brains. Coz its always easier to make questions when u have the answers, but answering them is the problem. But now the time has come to unravel the mystery , before vodafone sues me for receiving too many messages or some parents sue me coz of the ill health of their techpron addicted child i shall give you the answers ( 5 at a time) here are the first 5
1.) What you can see you may not need to see What you need to see is what you have to see. – This basically means that the answer lies someplace where one can see it …. on this screen press ctr + A and another line is now visible. “The Reply rEally depends on whAt iS lifted up and what is nOt so start thiNking” – which gives the answer TREASON

2.) hello.mp3 is actually a zip file change its extension to zip and extract it to get a picture . answer – PARLIAMENTARY

3.) Download a free bar code reader and save the bar code pic. Read it using the software and the answer is – GOOGLE

4.) Download the song open it using windows sound recorder play the song after reversing it and you will hear Maeri by – EUPHORIA

5.) Read Between The lines and the answer will be clear – FISSION

Stockastica Reloaded..

Great job, rookshop ! Stockastica has been really sensational with over 300 people playing it online right now. Today is the Day 4, or i would say Night 4 of the event, and we’ve had over 400 registrations.

gexic was the winner of Day One, and was a close second on Day Two, though himanshu made it on day Two. Shikhar2008 is the winner of Day Three. The winner for today will be declared at 0130 hrs, IST 13th October, so keep checking this space to keep yourself updated…

(rookShop is the *second year Einstein* who single handedly developed the Stockastica software .I’ll try my level best that he not be flogged and tortured for any bugs that he left out, in the capacity of an ordinary computer generated program )

TechPron’07 is On..

All you need is common sense, mental acuity and a little ingenuity. Requires 0 coding. Click to play. Prizes worth Rs. 2000 to be won ! Registrations close13:00, Friday 12th, October 2007.

Google Champ is Now Google Hunt

Internet Mania is back ! Google Champ is now Google Hunt. All you have to do is enter the smallest string in Google.com (different from google.co.in. If you’re automatically diverted to google.co.in on opening google, you have an option of going to google.com international page just below the search space.) to list the listed website as the first entry in the result page. Alternatively, the required site in the problem statement should open up directly when you’ve entered your solution string and clicked on I’m feeling lucky !

We have two different episodes, the first episode having two levels. Tier 1 is the initial level and tier 2 is the second level, the ratio of points distribution being 7:10. Submit as many entries as you can before Oct 13th, 12:00 noon.

Episode 2 has four images grouped together to form a single image. What string would you enter in Google image search to get the four images listed in the search results. Use your brains and utilize the cryptic clues given in the images to serach the one word..

Tip: We have tried paying tribute to the open source community in every possible way, albeit hidden.

Click here to begin your search for the ONE.

Some people are well read, some are well travelled. If you’ve surfed the www enough and have loved computers, try out these questions. We’ll calculate your iNternet Quotient and let you know. The person with the highest IQ wins goodies worth Rs2000.

For the budding managers, who think they can predict the market, a game of virtual stock market awaits. Click here to play Stockastica. Ita a real time game wherein you have listings updates frequently from NASDAQ. You have an initial capital of $100,000. Fight it out among bears and bulls !

To get an updated list of events of Techtatva, click here

Play on.

So it begins…

Techtatva’07 has arrived. Curtains are drawn and the coming 5 days are going to be the real test of our efforts and zest. As ID aptly said, the brutal assault on our sleep schedules is going to be worse in magnitude, and we’ll only sleep when curtains fall on 13th October.

Mr. Dilip Chhabria is the chief guest on the occasion. Those who are blissfully ignorant, he is the man who designed the car for James Bond 007 in Die Another Day.

Keep checking this space for some LIVE blogging

Stockastica is Open !!! Click here to play.

Ubuntu Workshop :)

For people who have loved Ubuntu, here is a reason to smile. We are finally having a workshop on FOSS and Ubuntu at MIT. The workshop will be held on 6th October’07 and hope it”ll be fun. People who have used Ubuntu must have been looking forward to it. You could get more information about the workshop by clicking here.

RookShop, that wasn’t a rumour ! I am as happy as you.

As for the people who have been eagerly waiting for the Adobe Flex Workshop photographs, I”ll get them put here asap. After the workshop, I had to go 10kms away from Manipal in *pursuit of happiness* as most such havens (read heavens ) were closed in Manipal due to electioneering. And dozed off after coming back. You could check the pics out in a day or two.

Board Meetings..

Was at the receiving end of a board meeting today over a poster. He gave me a good bashing. And I am not even talking about the President of United States. It is over six months, and no one still seems to like me or my ideas. My opinion of a board meeting , henceforth is similar to the Indian Parliament or perhaps some lousy state legislative assembly. (ID is on gtalk, and has a status message that says- Why was everyone shouting? ) In fact you could assign titles to people out there. You have the know-it-all-guy who pulls all the strings unless of course a certain godfather starts doing it. Then you have the Main-Hoon-Na guy who takes up all the work and outsources it. (He is also facing charges of Nepotism, mind you! ). To top it all, you also have a know-nothing guy.(You could identify him by the *blank* look on his face. )

Its 3 a.m. now and I’ve been constantly chatting with ID and XS, taking in useful suggestions and reviews over the Adobe Flex Workshop poster. (a MIT has also been giving good inputs. ) I am gonna make version 10.02 now (huh !). I almost had a crash course on Adobe Photoshop CS3 for the last 10 hours, and I am glad I have come up with something good. ID had been a great help though a certain *escapegoat* gave me a good start. I am thankful to XS for his great idea. It was something I couldn’t let go. I hope everything goes off well for the next couple of days. i am sure the *no-frills-guy* will be happy to see this poster.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You could also see an earlier version here. Designed by ScAp3gOaT, it was outright rejected for lack of concepts. I hate to admit it, but the idea and concept was mine. The guy who designed it was only a scapegoat.

I had thought of an absolutely smashing political Quote Of the Day relating to what happened today, but startegy forbids me Meanwhile its nice to see so many international hits coming to this blog. I will make sure ID doesn’t have to turn poet to get me back on track regarding the quality of the blog.( Though I have noticed, whenever I have written a substandard article, I have gotten unprecedented hits.) Oh and by the way if any of you miss my ~Quote Of The day~ , let me know. I am only hibernating

Coming up : A Day in the Life of a Poster . (But thats only if I get a good response )

Adobe Flex Builder Workshop Notice

The Adobe© Flex workshop is scheduled on 29th – 30th September. You can download the official Adobe Flex Builder Workshop Notice

Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems. It is the latest cutting edge technology from Adobe towards the developement of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Interested candidates may apply by dropping a mail at adobe.flex@techtatva.com with their names , name of Institute,registration nos. (if any) and cellphone nos. Since the number of seats is limited, selected candidates will be intimated.

You can download the 30 day free Adobe Flex Builder 2 here . The beginner level Getting started guide can be downloaded here. As I said, the already *hep* ones can get the Developer’s guide by clicking here

You can also mail me at NeYawn@aol.com . I will try to send you the .pdf files via attachment

Keep checking this space for furthur details.

Goodbye Redmond, Hello Ubuntu !!!

Just heard a rumor that there is going to be a workshop on Ubuntu (The popular Linux distribution) sometime around Techtatva. I have had some experience working on Ubuntu. (My Ubuntu partition was, sadly, lost when I tried to triple boot XP-Ubuntu-FreeBSD. Still don’t know why I tried that..!!) I am currently trying to get Mac OS x to work on my x86 based PC (A “Hackintosh” as they call it! ). It isn’t completely legal to do so, but so far I have not been successful at it. Will let you know as soon as I am able to do it. ( I hope Apple doesn’t sue me )

Anyway, coming back to Ubuntu, I was impressed by the user-friendly nature of this Linux distribution. It was certainly better than what I had expected. Installation was a no-brainer and downloading the essential codecs and programs was just as simple.

The fun (or hassle, depends on how you look at it) lies in unlocking some of the more advanced functionalities such as File Sharing with a Windows computer, running Windows only applications and games (Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3 mainly), virtualization (running virtual XP or Vista machines on Ubuntu), etc..

Sometimes, even the most common tasks can get a bit frustrating. Your precious backup of all the Windows installables is totally useless and you will have to find open source alternatives for commonly used software. You will be amazed at how effective some of the open source alternatives are. OpenOffice.Org is an awesome replacement to Micro$oft Office. And I have already dumped Photoshop for GIMP (and also gotten some people to do the same !) . And it goes without saying that Firefox and Thunderbird have been popular substitutes for IE and Outlook .

All this work is not without reward. A fully setup Ubuntu desktop is truly a sight to behold. Thought Vista’s Aero effects were cool? Just check out the pimptastic shininess that is Beryl. Just search for “Ubuntu Beryl” on YouTube. Go ahead, i’ll wait. Still think Vista Aero is cool? And all these effects work on my Lenovo ThinkPad R60 with 512 MB RAM. The same machine can barely open a couple of applications on Vista before running out of memory. Searching for files and folders is a snap. ‘Nautilus’ is not too different from windows explorer. Looking for new software is great fun. I felt like a kid in a candy store going through all the applications in ‘Synaptic Package Manager’. The bonus is that all the application are free. You don’t have to worry about limited trials or those all important cracks and keygens. Oh, and did I mention that the threat of viruses and malware is almost non existent in Ubuntu? No more scanning for viruses and Trojans in pen drives before use.

And the future is bright for this OS. Dell is already shipping some of its laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. And there is a poll on the Lenovo blog asking people what their favorite distribution is. Ubuntu, with more that 20000 votes, is clearly the frontrunner. Also, there are rumors of a Google OS based on Ubuntu. (Wonder if it will be called ‘GooBuntu’ )

Clearly, this is an exciting time to a part of the great Open Source Movement. So, go ahead and give this OS a try. Canonical (The commercial arm of Ubuntu) ships CD’s of Ubuntu for free. You can expect them in about 3 weeks from the time you place an order. But only Ubuntu 6.06 i.e the LTS (Long Term Support) version is shipped. I would suggest downloading 7.04 a.k.a “Fiesty Fawn” (sounds geek, eh! ) which is the latest version from the Ubuntu website. There is also an update coming up in about a month 7.10 a.k.a “Gutsy Gibbon”, I believe.

And if you run into any problems at any stage you can always post your queries on ubuntuforums.org. It is one of the most helpful and friendly forums I have ever come across.

And don’t forget to post your experiences or comments back here…

~Quote Of The Day~

~” A research has shown that there is no intelligent life on earth…I am only visiting it “~