Devendra Laulkar

At a recent PLUG meeting, an idea was raised for creating a single page "CheatSheet" or Quickstart guide, to be given to first time users of a Linux distribution. To help them get started it should include popularly known applications, some basic commands, links to help websites and such.

After a bit of input from community, here's draft of the same:-

http://www.laulkar.com/files/flyer.odt

Other(pdf, rtf & sxw) versions are also available at http://www.laulkar.com/files/

swi-prolog package is not present in Debian etch. Steps to install it :-

1. Install libgmp3c2 if already not installed
apt-get install libgmp3c2

2. Download and install swi-prolog
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/swi-prolog/swi-prolog_5.6.14-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i swi-prolog_5.6.14-1_i386.deb

After some hacking around with Yahoo & Wikipedia API's, I have come up with a (alpha...) version of "Wiki Categorizer". The app is here http://laulkar.com/wiki_cat/

Basically, the aim is to find out the main "Subject" or Category of a given document. The app tries to determine this with help of wikipedia categories.

Of course this has its pros & cons. I am trying to improve the algorithm a bit.

So, the Pune GNU/Linux Users Group has decided to grow up :)

PLUG (www.plug.org.in) is organising a mashup camp / hack-a-thon on 13th &14th of October. We people decided that PLUG should move ahead from just creating awareness about Free Software & Linux. Of course, PLUG will continue to do that - we are planning to participate in upcoming CMDA expo, but its time to cater to geeks too ;)

The mashup website is here http://www.plug.org.in/mashup/
As with all PLUG events, registration is free.

I have put up 2-3 of my ideas on the PlugMash wiki, lets see if anyone of them generates interest. I am looking at Yahoo Web services SDK, and I am building up an application using Yahoo Search & Wikipedia (will post up details here soon)

Looking forward to have a great meeting of geeks

I am planning to give subject GRE in CS, and I have not found a good reference which gives a list of books to read. The study guide itself says "A general review of your college courses is probably the best preparation for the test." So, after having gone through the syllabus, I have come up with following topics to revise -

1. Discrete Maths & Graph Theory (C.L. Liu should do)
2. Theory of Computer Science ( book ? Automata Theory by Ullman ?)
3. Computer Organization (Zaky, Hammecher)
4. Programming Paradigms & Languages (Ravi Sethi, Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs)
5. Computer Networks, Data Communication ( Tannenbaum)
6. Operating Systems (Tannenbaum / Silberschatz )
7. System Software (Aho, Ullman, Sethi)
8. Software Engineering (ah well, bit older edition of Pressman perhaps ?)
9. Databases (Korth, SIlbershatz, Sudarshan)
10. Data Structures & Algorithms (Which book ? No specific book I guess, Sahani would be one. edit Apparently Tannenbaum also has a book, should check it out.)

These would cover about 90% of the portion. Rest 10% of the questions, well rightly cover anything under the sun.

CO covers 15% of the portion, and is my weakest point.
Data Structures, Discrete Maths & Graph Theory and TCS cover 40%.
OS, Databases etc cover 40%.

11 weeks left for the exam, & 11 subjects to go through. Well, here's to an interesting few weeks ahead.