Newsletter of Computer Science Association, BITS Pilani

ISSUE 1 OCTOBER 9 2009 THE TEAM: Newsletter of Computer Science Association, BITS Pilani Anirudh Mangipudi Dharmik Kumar The news so far Google has announced a new open Joyneel Acharya source development platform called Google Wave, which will be available K.A.R. Shyam Sunder next year. Wave was created by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the Australian Karthik Sriram brothers who developed Google Maps. This Web application Mihir Patil from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs Saurabh Khanna and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called Shivam Rai a "hosted conversation" or a "wave".

Google demonstrated Wave at the Google I/O developer conference in Tanay Upadhyaya San Francisco, California, in May. Tech bloggers have largely cheered the release of the product. One of the questions which resounded from Umang Dhawan all their blogs is “What will Google Wave mean to SharePoint?” SharePoint can be used to host web sites that access shared work- spaces, information stores and documents, as well as host defined applications such as wikis and blogs. All users can manipulate proprietary WAVE POINTS controls called "web parts" or interact with pieces of content such as lists and document libraries. Users can chat about certain sections of Wave documents in real time, where all users Wave is early in its evolution, but there is some stiff competition for MS's see what a person is typing as much lauded business collaboration platform, SharePoint. However, de- it is typed. spite all the hype that is prevailing, Wave is not going to challenge Share- Point anytime soon. Although consumer markets jump at every new inno- If a person comes to the con- vation, business markets are known to be cautious and drag their feet. versation late, they can replay So it will be a while before enterprises actually use Google Wave. everything they've missed!

Will Wave replace Twitter? You can embed Google Wave No. And for one very good reason – Gadgets. Gadgets like iPhone apps conversations on any blog. will allow us to run our favorite programs inside our waves. Since gadgets are open source (OS) we will see tons of plug-in programs that work with Google Wave. You would be running your Twitter gadget inside Google wave window but never will stop tweeting. But the four decade INSIDE THIS ISSUE old email may be gone before you know it! IBM Tech Day ...... 2 Waves in Pilani! A Byte from History ...... 3 The Web 2.0 generation in BITS Pilani will no doubt be awaiting with Gaming Consoles ...... 4 bated breath to have a go at this all-new cool Google product. Indeed many of the BITSians using the micro-blogging site Twitter are real des- Hawkeye Technology ...... 5 perate to get a Google Wave invite. Many of them claim to have regis- Football Manager ...... 6 tered on the Wave website in the summer itself so as to give it a try be- Bitsmail01 Zimbra Switch..7 fore anybody else but with no luck. However, it is always good to keep trying: Only 100,000 accounts will be issued, demand one Coding Problem ...... 7 at: wave.google.com. Don’t be left out :) CSA corner ...... 8

IBM TECHNOLOGY DAY KEY PLAYER IN IBM RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT Date: 18th September, 2009

The IBM Technology Day was a part 2. Vivek Kumar: “High Perform- of the many University Relations ance Computing”

which IBM has with various universi- 3. Manish Gupta (Jr.): “Cloud Com- ties across India. BITS Pilani has puting” been a host to several of their talks Ambuj Goyal including the one on Cell Architecture 4. Kinjal.B.Shah: “Rational Soft- ware Architect Essential” Responsible for setting IBM's last year. This was an event organized by CSIS faculty and associations . long-term research direction in 5. (Audio conference) Kris Singh: computer sciences, as well as Speakers and their topics: transitions taking place in the IT ensuring that the best emerging sector, data handling, cost and technologies contribute to IBM's 1. Manish Gupta: “Building a different layers of IT sector. services offerings and software Smarter Planet” products. “If you were ploughing the field would you need two strong oxen or 1024 chicken?” Blue Gene: - Massive parallelism - Chicken instead of Oxen

ODIS: On Demand Innovation THE LECTURE Services Mr. Manish Gupta was the leader of the team which developed software for the EBO: Emerging Business fastest super computer “Blue-Gene”. He explained about the past innovations of IBM Research Lab in Delhi, India. His talk was not only interesting, inspiring Opportunities and informative but also innovative.

Some of the success mantras given were: FOAK: First of A Kind 1. Develop technical depth in your areas of interest and a certain level of breadth RISC: Reduced Instruction Set  Appreciation of problem and learning how to apply knowledge to solve Computer these problems.

LINPACK is a collection of  NEC's SX-9 supercomputer was the world's first vector Fortran subroutines that analyze

and solve linear equations and processor to exceed 100 gigaFLOPS per single core.

linear least-squares problems.  IBM's supercomputer dubbed Blue Gene/P is designed to GUPS: Giga-Updates per

Second Some of the cell applications which were highlighted once again were:  Finance FLOPS: FLoating  Aerospace  Amazing image rendering (hence used Point Operations Per Second  Medical Imaging in PS3)

CLOUD COMPUTING: A DISRUPTIVE NEW PARADIGM SOME CLOUD SERVICES

 A new model for consumption and delivery of IT-based services.  MS Azure

 Enhanced user-experience (self-service UI)  Google Application Engine  Flexible Price

 Enables flexible deliver and sourcing models (private, public and hybrid) Spoken Web: The “Spoken

Web” project aims to transform

A BYTE FROM HISTORY: SEYMOUR CRAY how people create, build and

interact with e-commerce sites A supercomputer refers to the class of most powerful computer systems on the world wide web using world-wide at the time of reference. the ‘spoken word’ instead of the The term supercomputer was first applied to the Cray-1 computer. Super- written word. Farmers need to computers can cost in the billions and look up commodity prices; have extremely vast capabilities. Fishermen need weather info In 1958, Seymour Cray built the first before heading out to sea; etc completely transistorized supercomputer for the Control Data Corpora- tion. In 1964, he developed the CDC 6600, which was the first architecture to use functional parallelism. Widely considered to be the founder In 1972, Seymour Cray founded Cray of supercomputing, Seymour Cray Research to design and build the was known for his passion for tech- world's highest performance general- nological creativity and his constant purpose supercomputers. His Cray-1 search for new ideas. computer established a new standard in supercomputing upon its introduc- All of Seymour's systems were tion in 1976. masterpieces of technology and The first Cray-1™ system was installed esthetic design. To him elegance of at Los Alamos National Laboratory in physical design was as important 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a as reaching the performance world-record speed of 160 million goals. FLOPS (160 megaflops) and an 8MB When told that Steve Jobs bought main memory. In order to increase the a CRAY to help design the next speed of this system, the Cray-1 had a Apple, Seymour Cray said, "Funny, unique "C" shape which enabled integrated circuits to be closer together. I am using an Apple to simulate No wire in the system was more than the CRAY-3." four feet long. To handle the intense heat generated by the computer, Cray developed an innovative refrigeration He died in 1996 in Colorado system using Freon. Springs, Colorado, from injuries suffered from a car accident.

“Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.” – Seymour Cray

TERMINOLOGY X-BOX

Console: electronics control panel: The console features a unique accept an Ethernet cable, 20GB a desk, table, display, or keyboard IBM PowerPC-based CPU unit hard drive, 802.11a/b/g wireless onto which the controls of an complete with three 3.2GHz networking adapter or cordless electronic system or some other cores, each sporting two hard- controller with equal ease, models machine are fixed ware threads. A custom 500 MHz are obviously manufactured with ATI graphics processor capable of hardcore gamers' and gadget Processor: the central processing supporting 48p shader pipelines freaks' every need in mind. a pair unit that performs the basic op- and pushing four times as many of USB ports hidden behind a erations in a microcomputer, polygons as the original Xbox. All hinged flap enables one to con- consisting of an integrated circuit contained on a single chip systems further feature an im- nect and communicate with MP3 pressive 512MB of RAM. All players, PDAs, digital cameras, ATI: ATI Technologies Inc. was A games are 720p minimum and laptops and other portable gadg- supplier of graphics processing optimized for 16:9 widescreen ets! units and motherboard chipsets viewing. Online gaming? Check. Streaming video? Yep. Ready to GPU: Graphics Processor Unit

Hardware threads: Implementa- tions of Hybrid Threads that run as separate cores on the system WII bus. t has been tagged as a "next-generation" console. However, the de- Polygons: Element of computer I graphics: a building block of com- vice's custom IBM-designed, PowerPC-based Broadway processor puter graphics and ATI Hollywood GPU won't go toe-to-toe with PS3 or even Xbox 360. On the plus side – physical gesture-powered athletics featur- Ethernet cable system: is used for ing baseball, boxing, bowling, golf and tennis challenges played by exchanging messages between computers on a local area network mimicking actual racquet swings or strike-scoring scooping motions. using coaxial, fibre optic, or Not only does it run quietly and coolly it can also be positioned hori- twisted-pair cables zontally or vertically as desired, with the mounting stand offering ad-

PDA: A personal digital assistant ditional stability. (PDA) is a handheld computer, also known as a palmtop computer PS3 Pixel shader: is a type of shader program, often executed Volumetrically, the 120GB PS3 Slim takes up approximately 33 per- on a GPU. These programs are typically used to perform complex cent less space than its counterpart, and at 7.05 pounds it's about 36 per-pixel effects. percent lighter, too. Like all PlayStation 3 models, the Slim includes a built-in hard drive for cutting load times, a Blu-ray player, built-in Wi- Blu-ray Disc: An optical disc storage medium designed to su- Fi connectivity, two USB ports for accessories and controller charging, persede the standard DVD for- and 1080p HDMI output. The lack of compatibility with PS2 games mat. Blue laser light is used here. and the missing media card reader remain a disappointment. On the

HDMI: High-Definition Multime- up side, new model supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Au- dia Interface dio for output to compatible receivers, which should satiate the audio-

DTS-HD: DTS-HD Master Audio phile crowd still eying the PS3 mostly as a Blu-ray player. Despite the is a lossless audio codec created by tummy tuck, the PlayStation 3 remains the capable, muscular box it's Digital Theater System. always been. And you'll get a cooler, quieter, greener PS3, too.

HAWKEYE TECHNOLOGY

A single wrong decision can alter the result of the match and can also spark tensions between two sides/individuals. In 1985, all the sporting committees of the world had decided to incorporate technology into sports to assist their judges, players and more importantly avoid incor- rect decisions so as to maintain the integrity of the sport. This lead to the birth and growth in “Hawk-Eye Technology” which brought about a Real Time “HAWK-EYE” Tracking revolution in the process of fairly adjudging a decision. All Hawk-eye demonstration on a Tennis Court systems use visual images and timing data provided by at least 4-10 (above and below) high speed video cameras located all around the play area. It not only shows the path of the ball, using the principle of triangulation, but also predicts the future path of the ball using various laws of physics already programmed in its database. First developed by engineers of “Roke Manor Research Limited” of Romsey, Hampshire in the UK, in 2001,and later taken over by “Hawk‐Eye Innovations Ltd.”

Hawk-Eye is a computer system used in cricket, tennis and other sports to visually track the path of the ball and display a record of its most statistically likely path as a moving image. It was developed To track the positions of In Cricket it can track by engineers at Roke Manor Re- the ball bowled by a the positions of the ball search Limited of Romsey, Hamp- bowler w.r.t the bats- bowled by a bowler on For decision making in goal line shire in the UK, in 2001. Later, man. the pitch. incidents in Football the technology was spun off into a separate company, Hawk-Eye The Football Association has declared the system as "ready for inspection by Innovations Ltd., as a joint ven- FIFA", after tests suggested that the results of a goal-line incident could be ture with television production relayed to the match referee within half-a-second company Sunset + Vine. Use in computer games On June 14, 2006, Wisden group The use of the Hawk-Eye brand and simulation has been licensed to Code- bought Hawk-Eye to strengthen masters for use in the video game Brian Lara International Cricket 2007 and Wisden's presence in cricket, and in Ashes Cricket 2009. A similar version of the system has since been incor- allow it to enter tennis and other porated into the Xbox 360 version of Smash Court Tennis 3, but it is not pre- international sports. Hawk-Eye is sent in the PSP version of the game although in the PSP Version features already working on implementing only a normal challenge of the ball which does not use the Hawk-Eye feature. a system for basketball. MacCAM (often written as MacCam, Mac-Cam or Mac Cam) is a system of According to Hawk-Eye's website, slow-motion cameras developed by FastCAM Replay LLC and DEL Imaging the system produces much more Systems LLC used during Tennis matches to replay close or controversial line data than that shown on televi- calls. The system named after "Johnny Mac" (John McEnroe), who was fa- sion. This data could easily be mous for contesting referee calls. CBS was the first network to use the Mac- shown on the Internet. Cam widely, as John McEnroe was one of their tennis analysts.

5 What first‐time IT managers really need to FOOTBALL MANAGER REVIEW FOOTBALL MANAGER We asked 5 accomplished managers the things they would’ve done It was released on PC, Mac and Play‐ differentlyEvolution at the rather onset of than their careers Revolution Station Portable on 14 November Here is a game that involves all behind- ing you throughout, tracking your every 2008 in Europe and on 18 November the-scenes action that every true foot- move. There are the usual transfer ru- 2008 in North America ball fanatic’s heart desires. Unsurpris- mours and the speculations about play- NEW FEATURES FM 2010 ingly in India, this has remained on the ers and clubs alike which have to be bench; the inquisitive aspect of the taken into perspective. There is of Release date: October 30th, 2009. game still being the actual play of ball course the interaction with the other Polish ‐ a year of polish, making the on match day. Have you ever wondered managers where you can pass negative/ game faster, more immersive, more what makes a really great manager? positive comments about them and realistic and easier to play Here is a game that turns your wonder- their team depending on the kind of ment to reality. Football Manager relation you want with them. This will Improved Match Engine ‐ improved 2009, hailed as the ‘Greatest job on play a huge part when you want a AI, over 100 new animations in 3D Earth’ is all this and more. player from his club! When the actual mode, new stadiums and crowds, match day arrives there is the necessity improved pitch degradations and A game that involves all the managerial of a team talk that is appropriate for better lighting aspects of the modern game like the your team’s situation. It is an opportu- tactics and the club rivalries, player Match Analysis ‐ a match analysis nity to bring your team’s morale up morale etc. and makes for a different tool that shows you where shots, from the depths and pull of a comeback gaming experience altogether. Although passes, crosses, headers, tackles, that seemed improbable at half time. in contrast to other games around the fouls and interceptions have been The transfers being realistic adds to the actual match is simulated which is un- made on the field for both teams. realism of the game and your interest in derstandable because you are now the New User Interface ‐ a completely a player can be expressed to the club to manager! Rated as the fourth best foot- new vibrant look and feel to the which he belongs or to him in private ball games ever and constantly being game, plus a navigational overhaul and every player has his own personal improved every year, this is something for easy access to all areas. attachment to a club which results in that has to be experienced. Football very few of your transfer dreams be- Tactical Overhaul ‐ a new tactics manager 2009 introduces a new 3D coming a reality even though you might module makes it much easier to game engine where the matches are be financially sound enough. A vast make your team play as you want shown in 3D with the player character- array of leagues with their respective them to. There are thousands of istics resembling those of the actual game structures and an international possible pre‐set options and touch‐ players around. As the manager you schedule that runs in parallel makes line "shout" instructions for making will be required to sift through an inbox your managing that much more diffi- instant changes to your teams play‐ full of mails from the media and other cult. The new game displays and the ing style. sources and also take care of the wages intensity of each game together with of the players already in the club and News Center ‐ a subscription based the constant interaction with the prom- also the club’s transfers every window newspaper. Get the news about the ising youth and the backroom staff thus keeping in mind of course the budget football world around you that you ensuring the smooth functioning of the allotted by the board. The game gives want, and not the news you don't club as a unit lend a much needed fin- you the choice of starting as the man- want. ishing touch to this dream of a job pro- ager of a club or a country and finally file. New Data Editor ‐ including a brand the challenge of starting unemployed new Competition Editor allowing where you are a manager with no previ- A must play game, if not for the sake of you to add competitions and extra ous history of achievements and have to football but as a challenge to be taken levels for leagues currently in the make your way up to the top through up; need to play your heart out even as game, and add completely new com‐ sheer grit and merit. the manager; appreciate the sheer bril- petitions and leagues all via a very liance of it all. So just get off the field A game where you must interact with for a while and realise what a great simple to use editor. Plus, the new every player individually (yes interact!) place the sideline is when you are editor allows you to keep your game so as to get the best out of him and then pacing it! Game on! up to date more easily than ever there is the ever present media hound- before. BY UDAY KOVUR, 2007B4A2481P 6 WEBSITE and SOFTWARE YOU MUST GIVE A TRY

http://dontclick.it/ : Designed with action script and the aim is to not click the buttons, just hover the mouse cursor. This is an awesome site to navigate and has hugely interesting facts to learn, the concept and design is bril‐ liant! Kudos to the designers.

Microsoft Vine Beta is used to keep in touch with family and friends and BITSMAIL ZIMBRA SWITCH be informed when someone needs help. Visit http://www.vine.net/ On a fine morning in August a route mail ity to store and search all messages that arrives mentioning that ‘bitsmail01’ will not were delivered to or sent by ZCS. Archiving be the http address to check out mail but is configurable on a per account basis. mailserver/zimbra. Now that was news, big When archiving is enabled for an account, Two versions of Zimbra are avail‐ news indeed! any email from or to that account is forked at the mail transfer agent (MTA) and a able: an open‐source version, and a An introduction to Zimbra: copy of the message is delivered to a prede- commercially supported version fined archive mailbox. The archiving proc- (Zimbra Network) with closed‐ Zimbra, a Yahoo! company, is hailed as the ess is transparent to account users. source components. leader in open source, next-generation mes- Syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail saging and collaboration software. Zimbra ZCS archiving can be set up to create archiv- email, contacts and calendars Collaboration Suite (ZCS) integrates the ing accounts that are maintained within entire organization. The focus is on com- ZCS or can be set up to work with third- No limit to the size of your email patibility with today’s diverse desktop and party archiving systems using SMTP for- storage and works online and offline application environments. This means, for warding to forward messages to a third- See your calendar schedule from instance, desktop users in Outlook can party archive server. For third-party archiv- within an email message if you hover share their calendar with peers who use ing, ZCS is configured to act as the forward- over a date Apple iCal or Zimbra Desktop on Linux. ing agent. Save attachments in Briefcase rather ZCS streamlines workflow and saves time. We suggest that you explore the various than as message attachments The browser-based AJAX client delivers a features of Zimbra, they are great! richer experience with a message conversation view and visual search builder that makes multi-gigabyte inboxes easier to use. BYTE Problem: Coding http://opc.iarcs.org.in/ Integrated 3rd party applications as “mash- ups” via web services enable to view CRM This problem is about sequences of positive integers a1,a2,...,aN. A subsequence of a data, maps, or anything else without leaving sequence is anything obtained by dropping some of the elements. For exam‐ the context of a message. ple, 3,7,11,3 is a subsequence of 6,3,11,5,7,4,3,11,5,3, but 3,3,7 is not a subsequence of 6,3,11,5,7,4,3,11,5,3 . The Zimbra Server is built with open tech- A fully dividing sequence is a sequence a1,a2,...,aN where ai divides aj whenever i < j. For nology and runs on Linux and Mac OS X; example, 3,15,60,720 is a fully dividing sequence. think of it as your open source Exchange Given a sequence of integers your aim is to find the length of the longest fully dividing alternative. Key customers include Fortune subsequence of this sequence. 1000 enterprises. service providers and Consider the sequence 2,11,16,12,36,60,71,17,29,144,288,129,432,993. It has two fully higher education institutions such as BITS dividing subsequences of length 5, Pilani :) 2,11,16,12,36,60,71,17,29,144,288,129,432,993 and

Zimbra Archiving and Discovery, an 2,11,16,12,36,60,71,17,29,144,288,129,432,993. And none of length 6 or greater. optional feature for the ZCS offers the abil- Input : assume N<=10000. Give your BEST algorithm. [email protected] 7

CSA in August-September  Flash COMING SOON A flurry of activities and a really  Puzzles and brain teasers great start to an academic year,  Cloud Computing Basics Apogee Project meeting 2: CSA has been actively conducting Future Storage & Flash Mem- events for all Computer Science Don’t miss it! Bring ory enthusiasts. The following topics along your ideas, and have been covered so far:  Free Open Source Software (FOSS) turn them into projects These topics have seen immense participation from students of all Turing talks: disciplines and years. The interest taken by first yearites has been Taking you a step further encouraging. Many of them came

into the depths of A7. back to us after going through the material themselves! ableandbaker.net

Weird and imaginative? How about letting your mind wander and coming up PLEASE PLACE STAMP with such a project idea for the next meeting? Advice: Don’t let creativityHERE sleep, COMPUTER utilize it. Problems need solutions and solutions need innovation! SCIENCE SOFTWARE FREEDOM DAY (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and ASSOCIATION Open Source Software (FOSS): to educate the worldwide public about of the

Arpit Agarwal benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! CSA is known to celebrate this event in Campus Coordinator, grand style each year. Turing Talk on Cloud Computing and Future Storage & [email protected] Flash Memory was conducted. GSOC Shrainik Jain, Project Forum In-charge GSOC (Google Summer of code) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software [email protected] projects. Google works as a mediator between open source organizations and people who love to code. Amey Parulekar and Yasir Khan were selected from BITS Pilani for GSOC this year. NOKIA ON CAMPUS OCT 6TH, LTC: Professionals from Nokia delivered a talk on mobile platforms and cutting edge technologies in the mobile world.