Harsh J

Results for all even semesters B.E. and B.Tech (Engineering Degrees, for IT, CSE, ECE, EEE, ME, E&I, etc.) (2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th) will be out in the coming weeks of July 2009, as most rumours go. These are for the exams that stretched from April/May 2009, to June 2009.

(So far only final year results are out – 8th semester)

Here’s a list of potential websites you can check for your results. Comment if you know some other ones!

(I shall keep updating the links once results are out)

1. Anna University Official Website (Results Page) for 2009 Even Semester (B.E./B.Tech)
2. Anna University Official Website Links (Site I, II)
3. Webdunia Anna University results for UG 2009
4. Chennai Online Results for Anna University UG 09
6. WinEntrance Online Results for Anna University UG 09
7. India Results results page for Anna University UG 09 May June
8. WorldColleges results page for Anna Univ. UG 2009
9. Sivaji TV results for Anna Univ UG 2009

More will be added once results get out.

If your mplayer doesn’t seem to be zooming into, or expanding a video to fit the screen under fullscreen mode (Shows black bands all around the video, preserving its actual size), then it’s probably because of the video driver your mplayer is using. I had set mine to xv sometime back in order to play a few Real media files, and though it did zoom in on those files it confounded me when I tried other normal video files like AVI, etc on it.

The solution is to switch the video driver (Preferences – Video tab) to x11, which supports zoom.

There’s a great feature in Python versions 2.6 and up that I hardly see being used; it’s the ability to install modules and packages in a per-user local directory. I like this feature since it doesn’t have any super-user power requirements and lets me install packages, modules and even scripts in my own Home directory and use it just as normally as the other global files.

To do so, one must first create the local site-packages directory, and then place the required package or module file or folder under it. The following commands are all for UNIX. ~/ expands to the user’s $HOME automatically.

# To create the required directory
mkdir -p ~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages

Now place the module or package folder under this directory, or link to it for achieving the same installation effect as you would with a global site-packages directory. For example, for my django copy from svn I’d do:

ln -s ~/.django-svn/django-trunk/django ~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django

Running the Python interpreter (in the same user account) will show this working:

Python 2.6.2 (release26-maint, Apr 19 2009, 01:56:41)
[GCC 4.3.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import django
>>> 

So there you have it, when you want a package just for your user account while developing just put it under the local site-packages directory. Python automatically adds this to its path (PYTHONPATH).

References: PEP 370 (Has notes for OS X and Windows users)

Stupid things you end up writing when you worry about filling disk spaces at 3 AM in the morning of the day right before your exams begin. The following will delete all your log files in a safe manner, by simply rewriting them to null.

cd /var/log
for file in `find .`
do
	if [ -f $file ];
	then
		cat /dev/null > $file
	fi
done

Suggest better methods if known, and thank you!

Optionally, get in there and delete those now-stagnant .gz files with the following:

find /var/log -name "*.gz" | xargs rm

P.s. So much for BS code highlight plugins printing angled brackets in HTML notations when asked to do bash.

You might think, like I did: Isn’t OSS dead? Didn’t ALSA replace it ages ago?

Open Sound System - Much better!

The answer, as I learnt, was both yes and no. It did die, only to be revived later by 4Front Technologies who developed it under a commercial license for quite sometime. It went GPL only recently, although with a paid premium-support and on certain platforms only. The improvements made in it are simply amazing. I’ll leave the rest of the mystery to be covered by 4Front’s own blog post. It’s a nice read

The following guide on how to shift to OSS from PulseAudio/ALSA is for Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope, 9.04*) users alone. A proper guide to ArchLinux’s solution might be found here.
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