Higher Computer Education Online

Who says higher technical education is costly in India??? lol Many say!! And it is true to a large extent. Most of the talented students never get a chance to get themselves enrolled in IITs or NITs for a reason or another. But still the talented ones have passion to study and get what they deserve, through a bypass route. Admission to private engg. institutions is pretty easy but they charge loads of money. And, barring a few, most of them have pretty low grade quality of education.
SOciety apart, let me come to the point. Ambitious and passionate create their own paths to success! I'm writing this post to help such students find appropriate targetted study stuff online. Most of the stuff pertaining to the syllabi of B.E./B.Tech is available online but scattered quite badly. On performing a few searches, I found lots of stuff online that I'm enumerating here.

0. NPTEL Online Stuff
NPTEL stands for National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning and is an initiative from various IITs to provide IIT lecture notes and videos to non-IITians online. So, far the best congregation of online study material for engineering students.
http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/

1. Rai Foundation Open Courseware
Rai university has its lecture notes online as per its open courseware program. Here's the link to the stuff for B.E./B.Tech in CS/IT and BCA/MCA:
http://www.rocw.raifoundation.org/course-computing.htm
Almost all the subjects of most of the university syllabi are covered. AICTE already has recommended a uniform syllabus for all technical universities.

2. Springer Link
Springer link has a congreagation of high level papers related to all the fields of engineering. Here's the link to computer science section. Use the search box in the right pane to find your desired syllabus.
http://www.springerlink.com/computer-science/

3. FreeTechBooks
FreeTechBooks.Com has open source public domain books for computer science and IT branches. A really good one:
http://www.freetechbooks.com/

4. IIT Lectures on YouTube
Recently IIT launched a program according to which all the classroom lecture videos will be made online on YouTube. Follow the link and search for ur subject. Now, you don't need to be in IIT to study in IIT
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=iit+lectures&aq=f

5. WikiPedia
Leaving WikiPedia in the list will be a big blunder! WikiPedia has the largest congreagation of human knowledge on the Internet. To search for a particular topic on WikiPedia, type the following query in Google Search box and hit the I'm Feeling Lucky button:

site:"en.wikipedia.org" <topic name>

Example:

site:"en.wikipedia.org" Dynamic Programming

Thats enough dose for now! Study well, and bring up a bright future for yourself and for India. Jai Hind!!!

Restore Ubuntu GRUB After Windows wipes it out

This is a common problem with most new Ubuntu(or any Linux) enthusiasts. You install Ubuntu with a dual boot with Windows. Due to some freaking reason, you have to perform a Windows reinstall and what the !!!! Now you can't see Ubuntu in the OS's choice while booting your computer, kore precisely you don't get an OS choice menu.
Ok, here's a simple straight forward trick to regain your lost GRUB bootloader.

1. Boot your computer using an Ubuntu Live CD.
2. Press Alt+F2, type xterm and hit enter.
3. Now enter following commands:

sudo grub

find /boot/grub/stage1

4. The output of previous commands will be like (hd0,0) or (hd1,2) depending on where you had installed your Ubuntu.
5. Type

root

example:

root (hd1,2)

6. Then type:

setup (hd0)

and you're done.

The above tutorial was for newbies only, and I considered the most common circumstances. Experts already know what's wrong with their system and they play well with the circumstances :)

Receive your e-mails through SMS for free

This post is beneficial for Indian people only.
MyToday.com provides free, instant, e-mail alert notifications via SMS. I discovered this just a week ago, although it existed since quite long and many of my friends were using it and me being totally ignorant about it!!!
To use the service, you just need to carry out the following two steps:

1. Send an SMS to 575758 with the following text MAIL START <your city name>
For example: MAIL START DELHI
or
MAIL START CHANDIGARH
If you live in a small city/town, then you may send your state's capital city name.
2. The next step is to login to your e-mail account and set an autoforwarder that sends every incoming mail to 91<ur 10 digit mob. no.>@m3m.in
Example: 919876543210@m3m.in

Now whenever any e-mail arrives in your inbox, your mail provider will forward a copy of it to mytoday, and they'll in turn send it to you immediately through SMS.

There are several applications of this service. It depends on your thought power and creativity to tap them. One simple one is instant sms alerts for orkut scraps.

For that, just login to your orkut account from PC and click settings. There in notifications set scrap notifications to be sent by e-mail. And thats it!!! Now, whenever anyone scraps you, you'll immediately receive an SMS.

This service is absolutely free, except for the first activation SMS that you sent. Airtel charges Rs.3 for that. I dunno about other operator charges.

Enjoy!!!

Opera Turbo

And finally there's some relief to the people blessed by slow connection blues!!! I'm one among you, if you're a victim of turtle/earthworm slow net connections. I use Airtel Mobile Office, which here provides a maximum download speed of 5.4KB/s!! Browsing is even slower than that because of lethargic response times. If I try to view a site with lots of page elements, graphics, flash content, it takes several minutes to load. If I'm in a blog or a forum and click a few links while holding CTRL+SHIFT(new tab for opera), it'll take ages to load all the pages fully. But now Opera has brought a solution especially for me and the likes! There's no downloading speed boost but there's surely a multi-folds browsing boost. The browsing experience is streamlined several folds. The product name is Opera Turbo. For windows it can be downloaded right here and it is just a 6.2MB download.
So, what's special about it??
First thing, Opera Turbo doesn't connect to the site you wanna view, directly. Instead it uses its separate proxy server labs1-turbo.opera-mini.net to download the page for you. When you request a site say google.com from turbo, it connects to labs1-turbo.opera-mini.net where they've zillion times fast connection than yours. Google.com page is downloaded there, compressed and then sent to your computer! Now that's something rapid!!! But there's a con. The images are converted to save size, and the images look crippled while browsing through turbo. But who cares? Second thing is that, you don't have to compromise on security because secure connections are setup through your own computer and opera-mini server isn't going to perform any man in the middle attacks! ANyways, I trust Opera guys. They won't try eavesdropping my e-mail conversation, nor they've any time for that. lol
Ok, here are two reasons I found why it gives an ultra faster browsing experience for lethargic ISP users:
1. Compressed data download, as Opera designed it to do.
2. Instead of resolving several hostnames and connecting to several servers, it just connects to a single server and downloads all the stuff in one go.

I'm explaining the second one with a simple example. Suppose you wanna view a blog or a forum post with several images, frames, google ads, and several other page elements hosted at different servers. Like, your site is blah.com/blah and the page markup needs to connect to css.blah.com, static.blah.com, img1.blah.com, img2.blah.com, page2ad.googlesyndication.com etc....to display everything correctly Then on any other browser, separate connections to these servers will be opened hence crippling your already slow internet connection. Lots of bandwidth will be wasted to connect, download, manage error/flow control(if required) to each of these separate servers. But with turbo, a single connection will be made to opera-mini server and all data will be downloaded in one go and that too compressed hence giving you a smooth and fast browsing experience.

In the status bar there is a turbo button to enable turbo browsing or disable it. When red, turbo is enabled. When gray, itz disabled. When you hover your mouse pointer over the button, it'll show how much bandwidth you've saved by now.


What Opera have written about it on their blog can be read at http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Turbo will be a feature of Opera 10, which is still beta. I noticed some issues in it being beta. Here are the two:
1. If you toggle turbo anytime, the change will be available in all tabs you open afterwards. It won't be visible in the tab you toggled it or all the ones opened before.
2. The Transfers tool is buggy. Stopping and resume a download corrupts the file.

They'll surely fix the issues in the subsequent versions.
Enjoy fast browsing with Turbo and turbocharge yourself!!