Journalists are funny people, just ask Juhi Chaudhary, reporter for the popular English-news channel CNN-IBN. A graduate in science from Delhi, she believes she’s not really a journalist. She also believes that journalists have just as much to crib about as us engineers, and warns all those who believe that they could make the transition from lathes and arduinos to popular media houses, that the life of a television journalist is no rosier than that of the average engineer. And despite her initial discomfort at being interviewed, we managed to make her sit around for a short discussion on her life story.
After having worked for a couple of years on the save the Tiger campaign, she felt her life had hit some sort of roadblock. Her efforts at saving those wonderful beasts not bearing the kind of results she had really expected, she started looking for new avenues to do her bit for the tigers, and indeed, the entire environment altogether. Her immense passion and strong principles lead her straight to the offices of CNN-IBN, where she has been working for nearly the last four years.
Her trip to the BITS Pilani K K Birla Goa Campus was nothing short of adventurous, as she ran a show with extreme vigour and passion, only to return at midnight to head-bang to Faridkot’s beats. Truly, a Quark guest with a difference.

AKSHAY VIKAS

An Interaction with Dr. Ravi Kuchimanchi, inspiration for the popular Shah-Rukh Khan starrer ‘Swades.’

“The best part of my stay in the festival? – undoubtedly the mime club performance in the inauguration” says the NRI who returned to India to develop pedal power generators to light remote, off-the-grid village schools and the founder of the Association for India’s development. He claims that the best thing that any talented and innovative member of the Indian youth can do, both for his own sake and that of the country, is to follow one’s heart, a sentiment wonderfully tapped by that particular performance. A set of failures would always accompany those who tread the arduous path of innovation, he says, while picking up examples from a variety of incidents from his own life.

The Moment of Truth

A graduate in Physics from IIT Bombay, he clearly identifies with the ingenuity of all BITSians who wish to explore the domain of entrepreneurship and money-minting with their various innovations. He explains in detail a similar incident from his own life, wherein he started work on a new adaptation of the popular Rubik’s cube in his time at IIT Bombay, which later garnered recognition by The New York Times. Enticed by the infinite attraction of money-making and power, he ventured out to make this particular innovation a marketed product, only to be rejected by every single toy manufacturer in the US. After months of struggle and no fruits to his bright idea, he was suddenly hit by the realization that there was more to life than just money, a realization that he claims will hit every innovator at some point in his life.
Badly hit but heavily inspired, Ravi was struck by another idea, occupying yet another domain altogether. He sent out a mail to all his friends, asking them for a $10 a month support, something one would gladly spend on Pizza every week, to help provide basic education (a teacher and basic facilities for teaching) to any village in India. Much to his surprise, he received a dozen or so positive replies immediately and his email was forwarded to several hundred other contacts.
The moment of epiphany arrived when he received an email from a total stranger, asking Ravi if he could help him light his village, which had never seen electricity, let alone any education. For Ravi, who until then had never even seen an Indian village, this was a very pleasant surprise. It was only then that Ravi realized the true impact of his one email, and set about with establishment of AID , the gradual success of which slowly prompted him to come back to his homeland for the general good of the entire country.
The establishment of AID may have been no short of a total fluke, but Ravi’s undying commitment towards the idea has now helped light up dozens of villages in the country, certainly some food for thought for all of us.

 
AKSHAY VIKAS

Considering how your computers and laptops almost virtually replaced all your best pals, this comes as no wonder that the article is on them. Everyone must have heard the word “Cache” sometime or the other. So I take you a level deeper into the architecture of our computer to understand a tad bit more about it.

We are so used to our computers just doing all the things within seconds that i guess we have started taking it for granted. A major reason for this speed is your Cache Memory. You each say it is the little personal deposit of data and instruction the CPU keeps close at hand.

Hard disk is a mechanical device. Therefore, the time taken for the bits & bytes to travel from there all the way to the CPU could be a heavy compromise on the speed. Main memory although a little bit closer, still takes relatively longer to transfer the data.

So, came the cache. Being on the same chip as the processor itself, we don’t have to be a tech geek to deduce the results. Intel currently uses microprocessors with an architecture nicknamed “NEHALEM”. It uses 3 levels of caches. Usually cache sizes are smaller, given the higher cost & limited area available.  (That tiny chip of microprocessor you have has got millions of transistors on it!)

The memory is accessed only if the data is not present on any of these cache levels (commonly known as a cache miss). The Intel i7 3960x uses a 32KB each of instruction & data cache, 256KB of unified instruction/data L2 cache for core while 15MB of L3 cache is shared among the cores (for desktops).

Just to give a feel of it here are some actual figures: L1 can work as fast as 2 ns (1 clock cycle), L2 at around 5 ns ,L3 at 10 ns. A memory operation may take around 100ms while the hard disk is stuck at 200ms.

Caches use SRAM technology in comparison to your RAM which uses DRAM. Just like in a memory, we need a mapping to know which data goes where. The core i7 uses 20 way associativity for its L3 cache. What does it mean? Well the cache is divided into sets each having 20 blocks. Now the data is mapped to a parameter set (i.e. can go anywhere in that set) instead of 1 block.

Going into the technicalities of all these right now, what it means is that higher the associativity, better the possibility of finding your data in the cache.

Seeing as there is only so much I can fit into this article without losing your interest, I’ll end it here. While the engineers are still racking their heads over how to increase the speed, the battle between power management and better speeds will always go on.

MEGHNA MEHTA

My association with Quark is about three years now, the most eye-catching aspect is the wide array of events at showcase. Generally when you look upon participating in a techno-management festival like Quark, you are expected to be either technically very sound so you compete with one of the best minds in the country. However unlike most of its counterparts, Quark features events where innovation in technology isn’t the only judging criteria rather your quick thinking, creativity, decision making skills may eventually land yourself to be the ultimate winners. Events such as QuEsT, Wall Street Revolution, MAD, Num3rs are some where on-the spot thinking is the narrow margin between success and failure.

Here I will be discussing about modern day advertising. Basically the event MAD in QUARK compromises of rounds where a participant is judged on the basis of skills involved in an ad-campaign. So why is advertisement the judging criteria? In today’s world advertising has become a household entity, whether it’s the print ads or television promos, companies are coming up with new strategies daily to attract customers towards their products. Most of the times customers are able to identify the key behind the campaigns and clearly all companies have a USP. However at the same time aspects of advertising such as SUBLIMINAL are difficult to get noticed by the naked eye. Let’s see why the glaring mismatch in viewing?

What exactly is Subliminal Advertising? I first heard the term when my favorite F1 team Scuderia Ferrari and their title sponsor the Marlboro were accused by some British doctors for illegally advertising tobacco through their F1 cars. Despite my best efforts I has unable to catch the link, eventually my dad brought to my eyes the bar code on the cars which resembled the bottom half of a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. I was I was stunned when I saw it and looked upon references behind the concept. The basic funda behind a Subliminal video is that the words appear for a single frame, allegedly long enough for the subconscious to pick up, but too short for the viewer to be aware of it. The phrase subliminal advertising was coined in 1957 by the US market researcher James Vicary, who said he could get moviegoers to “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” by flashing those messages onscreen for such a short time that viewers were unaware.

Bar Code behind a Ferrari Car                                                     A Marlboro Cover

In order to understand the concept behind subliminal advertising Professor Lavie and colleagues showed fifty participants a series of words on a computer screen. Each word appeared on-screen for only a fraction of second – at times only a fiftieth of a second, much too fast for the participants to consciously read the word.The words were either positive (e.g. cheerful, flower and peace), negative (e.g. agony, despair and murder) or neutral (e.g. box, ear or kettle).

After each word, participants were asked to choose whether the word was neutral or “emotional” (i.e. positive or negative), and how confident they were of their decision. The researchers found that the participants answered most accurately when responding to negative words – even when they believed they were merely guessing the answer.

Professor Lavie believes that the ability to subconsciously pick up fleeting signals could have developed as a way of picking up fleeting warnings. We can’t wait for our consciousness to kick in if we see someone running towards us with a knife or if we drive under rainy or foggy weather conditions and see a sign warning ‘danger’.

So it’s quite clear that since our minds subconsciously pick up negative words, and so the advertisers target this tendency of the customers. The following series of ad pictures will show how a particular word which is taboo among the youths is highlighted to attract the subconscious mind since most of these products target the youths.

The Subliminal effect !!!

AMIT RAJ

This post is about something I contributed to a larger Neural Networks project.This isnt a proper tutorial on image processing,and the code discussed is also specific.And in my humble opinion,MATLAB isnt the best choice for Image Processing(OpenCV would be the way to go) anyway.Here it was the only choice since rest of the project was implemented in it.

The idea was to read an RGB Image which has the following characteristics:
– 400x400px
– RGB
– has only one shape,any of a Triangle,Rectangle,Pentagon or a Hexagon,with a solid color fill.
– has a colored background.

The project required my code to output:
– The Identity of the shape
– 2 Images,each of 400×400 px and each with a solid color fill,where one would be of the Shape’s fill color and the other of the background color.

So heres my function .m file,all commented.It isnt very clean,and probably not very optimal too,processing wise.Its also not robust(then what use is it? :-/ ) so do tweak it for your specific application.If you spot any areas of improvement,do mention it in the comments below.

I’ll briefly explain the shape characterization part,since the rest is pretty much straightforward and already commented.
I’ve used the Extrema property of the regionprops function and used the relative positions of the various extrem(a)e vertices to identify the shape.See the picture below for a better idea.

So,if we check for the equality(actually closeness of points.Since the left and right points detected will differ by a few pixels,even though the image is perfect.) of the extrema vertices ( whose co-ordinates are stored in the 8×2 Extrema matrix returned by regionprops) we can characterize a shape.

Heres the hexagon case:

Similarly,we can also see what extreme vertices are on the triangle,rectangle and other polygons.

See the Attached Code. In the following link

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9KhJo82_GuuZTQ0ZTkxOTYtZjQ3Yi00YTYxLThiNWEtOTAzNjI4MmM2NGZk&sort=name&layout=list&num=50

KARTIK MANKAD

Get them before they get you.

This has been the operating premise in use ever since means of communication other than person to person conversation were devised. What started out as mere letter substitutions in documents has evolved into a fully fledged discipline in itself. Almost every government in the world devotes money by the truckloads annually in an effort to make their communications secure and break into everyone else’s.

At its most fundamental level, cryptography involves the act of successfully conveying a message to an intended receiver without being intercepted by eavesdroppers. The original message, known as the plaintext, is transformed to ‘ciphertext’ using a suitable key and is sent to the intended recipient through an insecure means of communication . This is then converted back to the plaintext by the receiver using a key (that is not necessarily the same as the first key).

The question then arises as to how the ciphertext is generated using a key.  For this purpose, there exists a myriad of algorithms with great variation in sophistication, expediency and reliability – From primitive XOR functions that would keep out none but the most oblivious to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) which has withstood the test of time with over two decades of rigorous scrutiny. Despite the immense advances, no single algorithm can claim to be completely secure.  This is owing to the fact that, regardless of the ingenuity of the algorithm, there will always be patterns that the discernible cryptanalyst can potentially detect.

Among the more common misconceptions among novices is that the security of a cryptosystem lies in its algorithm. This cannot be farther from the truth as assuming a lack of information on the part of the attacker can be fatally dangerous. This, in fact, falls under a category of tactics called ‘obscurity’ which thrives on denying specifics to outsiders and pining hopes on them not being uncovered by other techniques. One of the starting assumptions, therefore, is that all particulars of an algorithm is known to all potential attackers and hence the security lies entirely in the key and how well it is guarded.

The question then arises, if this is the case, then why bother finding better algorithms? The straightforward answer is to eliminate all forms of attack other than ‘Brute Force’ which is simply the usage of all possible keys that the algorithm can accept until an intelligible text is obtained. A good algorithm, therefore, is one which an attacker cannot crack despite having at his disposal all information regarding the intricacies of its inner workings.

While at first glance, it may seem to be a topic confined to the realms of military intelligence and espionage, cryptography commands relevance in almost all walks of life. Some of the more well known applications include Authentication of Identity, Credentialing Systems and Digital Signatures. Indeed, very nearly every electronic transmission makes use of cryptography.

Here is an application of cryptography that the more fortunate amongst us can potentially make use of in real life.

ARJUN MATHEW ERANACAL                    

E-Dorado is going to start soon and I might not have mentioned this before but I have been working on the platform for it lately!

It’s one neat online event purely dependent on searching and looking for hints to relate some images. The objective is to stay at the top while the administrators pour questions over questions on you and you can’t sleep.

The History

I do not know much about the history of E-Dorado as such apart from El Dorado the fabled gold city and my senior who hosted the event when I was in my first year. It was a nice experience to play the game and compete against the rest. But this year I decided to step it up and take it to a new level.

I started with the coding and the platform was ready for a three-day event in my college’s inter hostel fest Zephyr. It took me roughly three hours to do the job and it was a good time to make it.

What I Made

Following the old tradition of having an interesting opening page, I created this.

Figure This Out

And this was it! The opening page and the players had to figure out a way to get through. The only thing I forgot that the link was in the source (my bad).

The way to solve this was that you had to move ahead and re-size the page. And a simple media query was initiated to display the button. Some people got this, but most didn’t.

Moving onto the interface, I created a very simple UI using Bootstrap, from Twitter and a little styling myself (a three hour job it was in the end).

The New Version

After putting in a little time on the new version, I have included an administration interface for myself and my other team members. And for the users, we have some analytics, a new banner and some minor changes in the UI like a 960 grid unlike the 1140 earlier.

I assure you that you’re going to love it a lot! E-Dorado starts Friday the 13th (January).

You can read the actual post here.

ANIKET PANT

1. Install a new kernel

Well, the default kernel should work fine for most people, however, if you’re the kind who wants to eke out the max from your computer and/or reduce boot times etc. well, you can install a custom patched kernel specifically optimized for your processor family. Con Kolivas’ patchset with BFS CPU scheduler, is quite the rage on machines with 16 CPU’s or less, in addition to TuxOnIce for enhanced hibernating features. Or, you can just compile your own after removing unwanted features from the configuration resulting in a tiny kernel size.

2. Customize every nook and cranny

Don’t like the look of your default shell (Ubuntu)? Don’t have a GUI (Arch Linux)? Think that your shell is made specifically so that old grannies won’t have problems surfing Facebook? Well, this isn’t Windows, man. Rip off that old bloated interface and install something that suits your purpose. Linux has tons of Desktop Environments/Window Managers (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Openbox, Awesome, Fluxbox etc).

Still aren’t happy? You can take up the dirty work yourself and modify whatever you don’t like about your interface. Panel height, fonts, font size, colours etc. can all be changed to suit your needs. You can also, install Compiz to make every other system blush with embarrassment

3. Build the ultimate Home Theater PC

With the advent of an awesome little thing called XBMC, it’s now damn easy to make a sharp looking HTPC out of rugged old hardware. Install XBMC, slap on a new skin (AEON looked awesome last time I checked), setup Bittorrent (Deluge/rTorrent/Transmission) and automate the hell out of downloading videos – i.e. add RSS feeds for auto-downloading, transfer completed downloads to a place of your choice (HDD/NAS), and auto-add to XBMC’s library. Obviously, all this hoopla is useless without that 50” HDTV and a fast internet connection.

4. Make your own Networked Attached Storage (NAS) system

A NAS is a file server on a network, hence suitable for people with multiple computers wanting to share HDD space. A perfect example would be a torrent downloading machine in your garage coupled with a Home Theater PC in your bedroom. With NFS (Network File System) built into the latest Linux kernels (or Samba if you’d like to share with Windows PCs) it’s possible to implement this on your own Linux machine.

5. Experiment with new file system

Common file systems like ext4 are like the jack-of-all-trades, however, if you know that you’ll be using a particular partition for a specific purpose (for example, storing movies etc. i.e. large files) you can use file systems like ReiserFS or XFS which are specifically fast for small or large files respectively. Something else that you can do is split up your /boot, /var, /home folders and store them in separate partitions. Sample guide is here.

Another cool thing to do is to mount your /tmp in unused space in your RAM that is begging to be used. You can even take it a step further and use your VRAM if you want.

Obviously, there are many, many more things that you can do with your Linux machine, but these here are the ones straight off the top of my head. Have fun!

ADITYA PANT

There are two kinds of people: those who use their computers, and those who turn their computers into mean machines hard tweaked for a purpose, be it creating a NAS server, or a number crunching Linux cluster or maybe an old hacking machine with just a P3 and Backtrack installed. It may seem a bit too much work at first look; however, Linux was never made for people who can’t read documentation. The level of customization and the learning experience come at that price.

Let’s go through some of the most popular and the not-so-popular Linux distributions.

Ubuntu

Ok, I’ll admit it, most people nowadays know about Linux because of Ubuntu (no surprise, as it holds about 50% of the Linux market share. It is an immensely popular Debian-based distribution, coming auto-configured for the general population. If you’re just switching from Windows or a Mac, this is the distro to go for. Its extremely easy to install popular applications with the in-built package manager handling .deb packages, as well the Software Center that comes pre-installed. The GUI is user-friendly, and even a novice will have no problems in configuring the system.

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) also offers a server edition, as well as Ubuntu Studio geared towards graphics, audio and video enthusiasts.

Another distro called Linux Mint, mostly based on Ubuntu’s code, is another popular distro for beginners. It comes with even more applications pre-included with the operating system (LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Pidgin, XChat).

Fedora

Fedora is a community developed distro, backed by Red Hat, serving as a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora packages are RPMs with YUM as the package manager. It boasts of a massive community, and excellent support. Fedora offers both a graphical and a text installer which provide a desktop environment (GNOME3) including a very modest assortment of default packages to build upon or customize. The OS itself is very easy to use.

Arch Linux

Ok, so you’ve been using Ubuntu for some time now, getting irritated by the new Unity interface, or maybe want to know more about Linux, or you want to make a 24×7 torrent downloading machine (updating according to RSS feeds) out of that old laptop stuffed in the corner, OR maybe that NAS machine we just talked about. The main point is, you want a machine tailor-made for YOU. This is where Arch Linux comes in.

Arch aims to be an efficient, user-centric, open, elegantly coded distribution that doesn’t sacrifice anything for convenience. Instead of being idiot-proof, it forces you to learn what each configuration file does, which begins during the installation itself. The Arch installation doesn’t have a nice little GUI, and consists of the command line and you using the Beginner’s Guide and the ArchWiki. However, in the process, you learn much more about Linux than you would with a GUI.

Arch Linux comes with a minimal base system with almost nothing included, not even a GUI. It however, includes a package manager (pacman) that lets you install everything that you want. There’s no bloated nonsense involved, just what you want it to be. You can install your favourite desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, xfce) or a window manager (Openbox, Awesome), in addition to other applications. The final result is a super-personalized super-fast system without any bloat, as well as the user learning more about Linux. Arch is a rolling-release system, which means that you’ll always have the latest packages as soon as they are updated.

The Arch community, as well as the ArchWiki is fantastic and you can learn tons about your system and Linux as a whole.

Backtrack Linux

Backtrack is something special: it’s a penetration-testing distribution customized down to every package, kernel configuration, script and patch solely for the purpose of the penetration tester. It comes built-in with an arsenal of security related tools consisting of the basic ones: Nmap, Wireshark, Kismet, Ettercap and utterly cool ones like Metasploit (go to Hak5.org for really cool stuff on Metasploit) and loads more.

This article refers to just 4 different distros, however, there are tons more: Slackware (similar to Arch Linux), openSUSE, Debian, Gentoo and many others. There’s lots of information out there and loads of cool stuff (Linux clusters, monitor-less servers) to learn and all of this starts with experimentation, and for that, Google is your friend.

ADITYA PANT