Want to test your coding strength? Check out these websites!!

Hmmmm.....so are you a code champ in your school? A proud code hunk in your class? Well, that might mean you understand a little bit of coding merely, unless you take the real test on the real ground of coding. That's right. In the web nowadays we have numerous websites to test the skills of the coders & trust me they'll make you feel the pain.In this blog we are going to show you few of those.

1. TopCoder.com  :

 Right at the top of the list & let me put it straight, they deserve it. How can you possibly know whether it's good or not? Off course by the number of people, who participate in it. Guess what ! This is the figure 258129, today on 9 th August , 2010. It's an initiative by the TopCoder Inc., itself. There are various types of competition are available. A kind of variety, I haven't seen anywhere else. Algorithm challenge, Bug tracking, component designing, testing,Rich Internet Application building are only few of it. All consist of real life problems. So, if you compete & accomplish your job, you'll be rewarded, like they reward in real life.

                                                             Yup!! A great deal of cash prizes are there. But make no mistake, it's not for newbies. Right now when I'm writing this , there are 79 active competitions with $ 51,865 of cash prizes. TopCoder users are sometimes given opportunities to participate in real life solution development for eminent companies & organizations like Facebook , Nasa. Last month Topcoder declared the success in completing the Nasa TopCoder challenge. Conducted by Harvard Business School & London Business School, the Nasa TopCoder Challenge asked Topcoder members to create improved mathematical algorithms to determine the optimal contents of medical kits for future human exploration missions. The experiment delivered a cost effective set of improvements to a critical NASA Space Life Science Directorate application, which will be used to reduce the risk associated with manned space flight. So, I hope that explains, why TopCoder is the undisputed topper in the list.    

2. Codechef.com  :

It's non-commercial,multi-platform online coding competition site & a great initiative by Directi. Competition is hold on the first 11 days of every month. Cash prizes are given to the top coders. Six problems are generally given. Don't worry about the language. Unlike other contests, Codechef supports 35 different programming languages !! The problems are categorized in easy, moderate & hard levels. Recently they are coming up with new short period challenges.  Besides competing on the challenges, you can practice on the huge number of problems given out in the site. Overall, Codechef is truly a good kitchen to cook your code.

3. ProjectEuler.net  :                    

ProjectEuler is one of the oldest members in the block. It was started by Collins Hughes (a.k.a euler) in October 2001 as a subsection on mathschallenge.net. It's intended audience are mainly people, who are interested in both mathematics & computer programming. A series of mathematical cum computer programming problems , that requires a little more than mathematical insights, are given. You also have to take care of the 'one minute rule' while programming. The rule is that your program should give an output within a minute. Depending on the number of problems you solve, they give you a honorary level. There are six such levels. You have to solve at least 100 problems to become a novice!!  :)

4. Sphere Online Judge (www.spoj.pl)  :             

More popular as Spoj, Sphere Online Judge is a favorite venue to play, for many coders. It supports 40 different programming languages. It consists of a rapidly growing problem set of about 6600 tasks. Other than English, problems are also available in  Polish,Vietnamese,Portugese & some other languages. Powered by Spoj online assesment engine by Spoj Research labs, it provides you a good service in terms of evaluation of your program. This is the same engine that Codechef uses for evaluation & it's pretty good.

5. CodeGolf.com  :

A moderately good site, I'll say.But only for perl, php, python & ruby developers. Problems are good & standard though. 

6. UVA Online Judge  :

Well, UVAOJ has a vast collection of problems. They have the collection of problems from different prominent competitions. Some problemsetters are also there. But this site also has limitation in terms of programming languages. Only ANSI C, Java, C++ & Pascal are allowed.

7. You can also check out some other such sites like  Code4jobs.com, Devsquare.com.

So, happy coding !! 

How to access more than one GMail account in the same browser

At last !! Google heard you. All this time it was really tough for most of us, who has more than one GMail account. You had to sign out from one account first, in order to sign in to the other one. Now, you can switch between the accounts easily.

1.  First  go to google.com/accounts  &  sign in.
2.  Click on the 'edit' , beside the 'multiple-sign in'.
3.  Select 'on' & check the boxes after reading, how to use multiple sign in.
4.  Save it & get back to the dashboard.
5.  Look at the top-right corner of the page. You'll come to see an arrow beside your account id. Click it      & sign in to your second account.

But remember,

1.  multiple sign in doesn't  work with all the Google services. If you choose to select a service that doesn't support multiple sign in, then the id you signed in first will be used to provide you that service.

2. This feature can be used in desktop browsers only. So mobile users have to wait a little more.
3. Multiple sign in doesn't work in offline mode.

  
Hope that helps !!

End of Google Wave

No more wave riding for Google wave users!! Yes, Google has announced the full stop to the 'wave' yesterday. On his statement Mr. Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, said, "We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."
Last year Google launched Wave at Google I/O. The response was highly positive. After the launch of products like GTalk, Orkut, the expectations were high from another Google web product. It was meant



for real time communication & collaboration among people. Google wave consisted of some cool sophisticated features like, easy drag n drop of files from desktop or other parts of the web app,live typing, easy mass sharing of files like presentations, pictures, managing schedules etc. It was a all-in-one. It had a blogging sort of feature in it. It got a look of an advanced e-mail.There was something for everyone. Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager of the Google Wave Team wrote on a blog , "Wave has been used in a great many interesting ways. It's clear from the invaluable feedback we've received that Wave is a great place to get work done, in particular for teams working together on projects that involve lots of discussion and close coordination."
Inspite of all this, this project has failed to fascinate the users or Google fans. A probable reason for that is the existence of other projects that perhaps less efficiently do a lot of jobs that wave do in a combined form. Products like Google BuZZ has become more acceptable to the users.
No doubt, the lack of reponse, have compelled Google to take such a decision. But Google CEO, Eric Schimidt put up a positive response on the matter. He said,  “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,”e celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that.” He also indicated that in future components & ideas of wave will be implemented in the products Google is yet to launch.

How to install firefox 4 beta in ubuntu

Firefox-4.0 is here with the beta versions & some brand new cool features. Try it in your favorite ubuntu.

Follow the given steps to install firefox-4.0.

1. Go to System->Administration->Software sources
2. Open 'other software' tab.
3. Add the following line
http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu

4. Close it.
5. A box will appear,asking you to reload the sources. select 'reload'.
6. Open the terminal. run 'sudo apt-get install firefox-4.0'.
7. Go to Applications->Internet->Mozilla developer preview web browser

This will give you the absolutely latest version of the firefox & it might be beta. Right now it's showing 4.0b3 version.

Another way to do this is:

1. Go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/
2. Download the firefox.
3. Extract it to the home folder.
4. Open terminal. then execute the following in the provided order.

cd ~
~/firefox/firefox

This is showing 4.0b2 right now.
Happy browsing!!

Find your free technical e-books in these websites !!

E-books are something,which we all need nowadays. But here is a point to note: we not only need it, we need it at free of cost. There is large collection of free book on the Internet & in this blog we are going explore that.Here, I'll talk about top 10 websites,where you will find engineering related e-books, specially on Computer science, IT & electronics. So here we go..

1. Pdfchm.net :

In my opinion, the best site for downloading technical e-books for free. They allow you to download at most 2 books in 48 hours. The colletion they have, is highly rich. You can get standard books on Computer science , IT , Electronics, Management & many more. But to download books, you have to register & Unfortunately,right now when I'm writing this blog, they have stopped allowing users to register to their site. The only few users who have this privilege, are very lucky indeed.

2. O'Reilly's CD Bookself

Here, you will find some good Computer related books, all of which are of O'Reilly publication. If you go to "http://docstore.mik.ua/" you will find some essential articles & books as well. A note to the reader, before you try to acces the website. the site appears in russian, you can easily translate it using Google Translate.

3. Freecomputerbooks.com

This site doesn't provide you e-books. rather, it provides you links to find & download books. It has a good collection of links, that you must check out.

4. Congloi.info

This site is perhaps an upcoming good alternative for those who don't have a pdfchm.com account.It has a moderate collection of e-books.The collection is also well categorized.


5. Freeprogrammingresources.com

If you are learning a programming language & need an ebook, perhaps this site has what you need.Though confined to programming language books, it's collection can not be ignored.

6. Freetechbooks.com

A well organized collection of ebooks.That's what you'll get here.Some ebooks can be downloaded & some can be read online through a link.



7. Freebookspot.in

A good site with good collection of books from standard publications.

8. Techbooksforfree.com

Though categorically the collection is limited, you can find books on linux,java,microsoft products,.net,c/c++,python,perl,database,networking,security.

9. Murach.com

Few books published by murach are available on this site. Murach is well known as a publisher of professional programming books. So, you should take a look into this site.

10. Scribd.com & Issuu.com

This two sites are the web portals,where people around the world, upload documents & ebooks.Therefore the collection is vast. You can search for anything & you can stay assured to get a good result.In addition to that, as this two sites are meant for book readers, both provide a rich interface to have a nice reading experience.

Hope, this will help you guys out there. Happy studying!!