The 3rd CyberPlus Private Hackathon draws to an end with the participants – Rahul Metri, Amrith Nayak and Nagesh Rao – having explored something new using ImageMagick!

While Rahul Metri used his expertise of Bootstrap to come up with a responsive UI for image effects, Amrith Nayak was all over the place, getting involved in everything, designing some cool effects and transformations, and helping with the debugging. Nagesh Rao was primarily involved in textual effects.

The project will be hosted online soon for the world to try out, but till then, here’s a sneak peek to what you can expect:

Image Effects:

Collage Effect

Lomo-CameraRoll Effect

Text Effects:

Website:

Some snapshots of the web pages we are building to showcase and present these transformations to users:

CyberPlus announces it’s third Private Hackathon on “Dynamic Image Manipulation”. The goal of this hackathon is to develop a solution that allows web developers to create images on the fly just by providing instructions, rather than use an image editing software and creating the images manually.

Users will be provided with a web page where they can try and test out various effects by adjusting various parameters. They will also be provided with an URL where they can submit the instructions, and the image will be generated and sent over!

Pre-requisites: Working knowledge of at least one of the following:

1. HTML, CSS, JavaScript
2. PHP
3. XML & Java
4. ImageMagick

Participants can also learn and experiment with ImageMagick on the first day of the event in order to develop custom effects using their imagination!

Participants need to bring their laptop for the event, preferably with Linux!

Dates: July 5-6, 2014 (Saturday, Sunday)
Timings: 9:30 AM to 9:30 PM

If interested, get in touch with Nagesh Rao personally.

Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language known for extreme minimalism, created by Urban Muller in 1993. An esoteric programming language is one that is not developed keeping practical applications in mind, and is developed to demonstrate or try out something or just for entertainment or show off.

Brainfuck is so minimalistic that it comprises of just 8 valid characters (instructions), each of which imply something, to build programs! White-spaces are ignored, just like the majority of commonly used programming languages.

To give you a taste, here is a Brainfuck program to print “CYBERPLUS”:

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

In a separate blog article I will explain how this program works, how to make sense out of it, and how to write programs like this!

Oh, and just before I end this article here, since the majority of you are “programmed” to learn any new programming language using the standard “Hello World!” example, here is a Brainfuck program to do so:

It occurred to me yesterday that I better have a list of the names of all my friends who like the CyberPlus Facebook Page. I was surprised that Facebook did not have any provision of allowing me to download it. The next option for people like us is to do some hacking, given the fact that it should be logically possible, albeit indirectly. What’s the use of programming skills if you can’t use it to conquer problems? 😉

So these are the steps I took:

1.Clicked on “Likes” in the CyberPlus Facebook Page. It showed 3 rows of photos of friends who like CyberPlus and “Show all 240”. Clicked on “Show All 240”.

2. Obtained the HTML source of the web page. Searched for “Friends Who Like CyberPlus”, because the photos were immediately after that.

3. Saw that the name of the first person was “Abdul Ahmed” and the last person was “Visweswara Reddy”. Copied everything between these two.

4. Observed that each person was listed with the following code:

<li><a data-hover="tooltip" aria-label="Abdul Ahmed" class="link" href="https://www.facebook.com/tausif.ahmed.5648" data-jsid="anchor">
<img src="https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-ash2/t1.0-1/c0.11.50.50/p50x50/1493206_10203154221643913_464314181_t.jpg" alt="Abdul Ahmed" data-jsid="img" />
</a></li>

5. Realised that the name of the person is present in the “aria-label” and “alt” attributes, and the profile ID is also present, if required.

6. Took everything from <ul> to </ul> and saved it as an XML file. Opened the file in the browser to verify that it is indeed well-formed and contains details of all people. It did!

7. Now the next step would be to extract details from an XML file – which should be simple. This is where there is a wide wide gap between Perl and Java. In Java, we would have to deal with SAX or DOM, import packages, define classes, implement interfaces, add listeners, handle exceptions, override methods, create objects, and what not! Wrote a Perl script like this:

while (my $line = <>) 
{ 
	while ($line =~ /label=\"([^\"]*)"/g) 
	{ 
		print $1,"\n"; 
	} 
}

8. Job over! This printed out all the names!

That’s why I love Perl! And hate Java!

Oh, of course your Java code will be far more readable, but hey, I just wanted to do a small simple thing!

9. And then I did what I do after I get some free time after Perl coding: reduce the code! This is the next version:

print $1,"\n" while (/label=\"([^\"]*)"/g)

And ran it like this:

perl -n likes.pl < likes.xml > likes.txt

(where likes.pl contained the above Perl code, likes.xml was the html file from <ul> to </ul> and likes.txt was the target file that would eventually contain the names of all friends who like CyberPlus)

So then I thought, just to prove the point, why not write a Java program to do the same? Here it is:

import javax.xml.parsers.*; 
import org.xml.sax.*; 
import org.xml.sax.helpers.*; 
import java.io.*; 

public class Likes extends DefaultHandler 
{ 
	public static void main(String args[]) throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, IOException 
	{ 
		new Likes(new File(args[0])); 
	} 

	public Likes(File f) throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, IOException 
	{ 
		SAXParserFactory.newInstance().newSAXParser().parse(f, this); 
	} 

	public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException 
	{ 
		if (qName.equals("a")) 
		{ 
			System.out.println(attributes.getValue("aria-label")); 
		} 
	} 
}

Java supporters would be very angry with this comparison now! I totally agree that Java is a far more organised programming language that prevents programmers from going wrong. I also admit that Perl code is highly un-maintainable. But hey, 1 small line of Perl code here is equivalent to 20+ long lines of Java code! I rest the case!

Oh, and in the process, I did find something else interesting about facebook. But more on that in a separate post!

Another 2 days of coding sessions, and now CSS support has been added to WPL! While Saurabh Gupta and Nagesh Rao worked on CSS recognition and generation, Prasanna Bhat worked on adding features to the WPL compiler, making it support various options, because of which we are now ready to start working on WPL makefiles and a WPL make utility! Chetan Joshi tried his hand at CSS optimization, a feature that WPL will be able to boast of eventually!

The first CyberPlus Private Hackathon was organised on March 22-23, 2014. The topic was “Invention of a Web Programming Language”. The goal was to invent a language that can makes it easier for web developers to code in. To that end, we now have a functional WPL compiler for the language invented, which can convert WPL programs into HTML code. WPL makes it easy for web developers to look at websites in an object-oriented manner, and create code that is highly reusable! WPL allows programmers to invent tags, just like in XML, but make their code look like programs instead of XML documents, and add meaning to the tags in any language (right now only WPL and Java are supported, but hey, it’s only a start)!

The second CyberPlus Private Hackathon will now concentrate primarily on adding CSS support to the language. The coding will predominantly be in Java.

Are you good in Java? Do you want to put your expertise to good use? Do you want to contribute to a project by working just one weekend? Do you want to polish your programming skills and prove to yourself (and others) that you can construct something usable in just 2 days of coding? Participate in this hackathon!

Dates: May 3-4, 2014
Timings: 9:30 AM to 9:30 PM

If interested, get in touch with Nagesh Rao personally (FB msg, LinkedIn msg, email, whatsapp).

Since C++ is based on C, and C is a direct language that does not attempt to hide anything from the programmer, C++ also has simple rules that the programmer can learn and employ. For instance, when objects are stored in memory, it is possible for the programmer to directly access the memory region and interact with the object, without the knowledge of the compiler! Some of the possibilities include:

• It is possible to access even the private and protected data members of the object!
• It is possible to access the data members of the base class, or it’s base class, any number of levels up the chain of inheritance!
• It is possible to invoke member functions of that object without the compiler being aware!

We will now see the rules that govern organisation of objects in memory.

continue reading "Memory Organisation of Objects in C++"

As programmers, we are experts at logical thinking, and strive to find logic in everything and anything we do! After all, computers work only on logic, and nothing else will do! There are times when we get stuck in our thinking process and face a problem that we struggle to solve logically. Sometimes we don’t understand the problem at all, and at other times we fail to get a satisfactory logical answer in spite of having understood the problem.
continue reading "Lateral Thinking vs. Logical Thinking!"

Perl is a magical language! The addition or omission of a single character can result in a dramatic change in the working of the script!

Try writing a C program and intentionally add an extra character or remove an existing character from the program. What do you get?

Most certainly a syntax error, of course!

Now try that in Perl. What do you get?

Most probably, a script without any syntax errors!

Why?

Perl has a whole lot of implicit rules that “try to make sense” out of “whatever given”! Just to give you an idea of how a single character can drastically change the meaning in the script, here’s my compilation of various identifiers in Perl with the same basic name “x”, but with completely different meanings!

continue reading "The Magic of Perl Identifiers"

Here’s a fun Java demo program that displays a smiley using Java’s painting API.

Furthermore, we track the mouse movement using MouseMotionListener and make the smiley always “look at” the mouse cursor! To make it more “realistic”, the mouse cursor is changed to a fly!

Have fun with this program!

To run, use the following command:
java -jar Smiley.jar