On August 7th I received an email stating that Vinay Deolalikar from HP labs has proven that P in fact does not equal NP. What does that really mean? In layman terms it checks if a solution to a problem can be efficiently checked by a computer, then the computer can efficiently solve the problem. The problem was introduced by Steve Cook in 1971. In this email it stated: "... And Steve Cook says that it is to be taken seriously".

http://mashable.com/2010/08/24/bing-powers-yahoo-search/?utm_source=feed...

Could this be the demise of Google? I doubt it. With a 65% search market share it will take some time for Microsoft to catch up to Google. Google's primary business is in search and ads while Microsoft is touching every sector of IT from OS, Browser, Search, and so on. It wouldn't shock me if Microsoft decides to buy out Dell to touch a little on the hardware side as well.

My masters supervisor Dr. Jian Pei had forwarded this to his students: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/. Its an article on a graphical representation of what PhD is. I must say its definitely a good representation :) A must look.

Thusjanthan.

So the other day I was on facebook and noticed my sister-in-law had posted something about Groupon. Ofcourse I had to go see it. I saw this amazing deal for $40 voucher to this restaurant called 'Shaken not Stirred' in downtown vancouver for a mere $15 dollars. I looked into the restaurant and the reviews were amazing. So I went ahead and bought the voucher for $15.

For my thesis I have been coding in C++. Having to workthrough another persons c++ code is quite the trying task. Especially one that chunks away millions of tuples of just raw numbers. So finding out the stack trace when your c++ code throws the very nice and useful "Segmentation Fault" would be good.

After digging through the net I found a nifty alias for your ubuntu that runs the app in gdb and will throw out the stacktrace if seg fault happens.

Add the following to your .bashrc, source it and your good to go:

Li, J, Liu G, Wong L.  2007.  Mining Statistically Important Equivalence Classes and Delta-Discriminative Emerging Patterns. Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. :430--439.

During extra time 116 mins in to the game. Spain Scores!!! What a goal it was by A.Iniesta. What a kick. Well played game. Only one shot on goal by Iniesta and he makes it count. Well done Spain.

So I got home and tried login in again. Guess what the login was broke again. So was talking to Scott and he suggested to reverse all the changes. I went one step up and just untared a new version of drupal 6.17 over my installation and magically it worked again. Interesting... Why wasn't it working before? No clue... But the most important thing is it works now :)

So I upgraded to drupal 6.17 a week or so ago and guess what my hosting company decides to upgrade their PHP to 5.2. Ofcourse as you would know it my drupal instance decides to not work any more. I would try to login as an admin and get prompted right back. I searched for quite a while and finally found a combination that fixed it. I believe the following will fix:

Drupal 6.17
Php: 5.2.13

Add following at the very bottom of index.php:

Also following dirty patch for includes/session.inc

Today I implemented the pdf output of the CS outlines. I must say the reportlab was much easier to work with than the java based com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfWriter. It only took me a few hours to completely reimplement the export to pdf's in python/django. I will post the code below for those interested in exporting to pdf using django.