“The next application round for NordSecMob programme begins 3rd November, 2008 and ends 9th January, 2009” – while reading this during my application days, I didn’t have no clue that I would be writing this post as a NordSecMob scholar

“Congratulations on your successful application. Competition for Erasmus Mundus scholarships has been more intense than ever this year, with over 22 000 applications from 166 countries around the world. Of these applicants, only 8% were selected. We hope you will decide to accept your offer of a scholarship….” – it wouldn’t take me more than 139.889 milliseconds to accept such an offer ni hoina

G5 – Grand and Garlanded Gratitude to Goodness Grace, I mean.

http://nordsecmob.tkk.fi/index.html is the link that should provide you with all the necessary information on this course. There are 5 partner universities viz. Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) in Finland, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University of Tartu (UT) in Estonia. You have to choose two among these and your specialization will vary based on your choice of universities. I had chosen TKK and KTH. That means my first year is in Helsinki and second year is in Stockholm. Both these universities are highly esteemed and I am grateful that my chosen mobility was granted

TKK is the coordinating university with which you will communicate all along the application procedure. The process is to first fill in the online application and then courier them the printed application form along with other supporting documents. Don’t worry, all these things are mentioned in the site above. I used FedEx to courier them the documents, nevertheless, you can also use Linkage or other brokers which provide the service in low prices.

About Documents:

• BE Original Certificate or BE Provisional Certificate – Must. I had to improvise with Provisional since Original was not issued by then.  Attest it in Balkhu.
• BE Transcript – Must. Everyone already has this, I guess . Attest it in Balkhu.
• +2 or ISC Transcript – Must. I attested it in my +2 college.
• Letter of Motivation – Must. Take time and effort in crafting this. Limited to 4000 characters.
• CV – Must. Put your achievements and portfolio here.
• Letter of Recommendation – Must. Two of this is required. I took one from HOD and one from my major project supervisor.
• BE syllabus – Must. Limit it to some 20 pages. Exclude subjects like Mechanical Drawings, Applied Mechanics and other not directly related to Computer Engineering.
• Passport – Must.
• English Proficiency – Must. I took TOEFL test on 23^rd November. Better take it earlier than this.
• Work Experience – Optional. I didn’t send any experience letter from my workplace. However, you can include this, if you don’t want to take any chance.

Letter of Motivation is very important in the sense that, this is your chance to say “Why choose ME?”. So don’t do no hurry. Collect yourself and remember all your achievements and vital milestones you have achieved. Since the letter limit is 4000 characters, make it short and sweet. Simple but Sample, I mean I had the following things in order in my motivation letter.

1. Who I am.
2. My aptitude and activities on communication and security during my college.
3. Hands on experience and knowhow on scope of security and wireless communication during my professional tenure.
4. How this course can help my career.
5. My plan after this graduation.

CV or Resume is also equally important. Mine was only 6 pages and contained following sections.

1. Education
2. Work Experience
3. Other Experience
4. Technical Skills
5. Professional Projects
6. Academic Projects
7. Awards and Achievements
8. Publications
9. Personal – Marital Status is Single wala he he

Your Letter of Recommendation also needs to be good. Since this involves our teachers, who are always so so busy, make sure that you initiate this process very early. It might take you some weeks to get just 2 recommendations. I alert.

“… I have the motivation to learn, diligence to contribute and endurance to face the challenges of graduate studies. If provided with the opportunity I am confident that I will live up to the academic and research standards set by the partner universities …” I said this during my application and now I just can’t wait to experience the scope of foreign study, fun of cultural exchange and drama of my first-ever out-of-home life.

With good regards to future NordSecMob students

Some links you can use:

• http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus_mundus/results_compendia/selected_projects_action_1_master_courses_en.php
• http://www.nepalfinland.com/2008/11/european-scholarships-for-master-and.html
• http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/mundus/projects/index_en.html

Cheese and Cheers

Prajwol

Open Software Challenge Nepal 2009 was announced somewhere during early 2009. And somehow, computer-half of the CSIDC team (me-Prajwol and Dipesh) decided to participate in it.

Screen blurred, grayscale stars – To talk about CSIDC, it was CSIDC 2006, organized by the IEEE under the theme of “Preserving, Protecting and Enhancing the Environment”. Saurav Ratna Tuladhar and Nilesh Shakya (electronics), and Dipesh Karki and Prajwol Kumar Nakarmi –me (computer) were selected from Pulchowk Campus to participate in it. We had presented our project “iForest – A Monitoring and Management System for Sustainable Forestry”. The certificate of participation of this competition has definitely increased the weight of our CVs – Screen normal, colorscale resumes. he he

Dipesh and I talked in phone, texted in MSN, brainstormed in Eiden Garden and came out with what we christened “Computational Intelligence in Inflation Forecasting” (CIIF). Of course Carlsberg was there to accompany us whenever possible. LOL

Now on August, we both are proud to say that we made to the prestigious TOP 10 among some 80+ projects. My heartfelt congratulations to the guys who made it to the TOP 3 (Y).

Many were expecting our project to do better before the result announcement, and of course, we were hopeful too.  But probably, the fact that our development platform was .NET pulled our legs and we didn’t make till the TOP 3 mark. We had some people asking “how can your software be open when I have to pay for it” LOL LOL a big disgrace to such a question. We tried to explain – they seemed to agree – it was apparent that they didn’t understand :’(. May the true meaning of Openness of the Software come to light to all of us, AMEN.

Let me, now, say some about CIIF. As we know, Inflation is a persistent and significant increase in general price level and it is calculated by averaging the percentage growth rate of the prices of selected sample of commodities. It is one of the most essential macroeconomic indicator as many other economic variables like wage rate, salaries , gross domestic product, interest rate are either directly or indirectly related to change in price. However the inflation can be calculated only in hindsight by comparing present commodity price with the past. As this isn’t much help while formulating the future pricing policy, a forecasting mechanism must be introduced to estimate the future expectation of the inflation rate.

In this light, the software, that attempts to forecast one of the key macroeconomic indicator- ‘Inflation’ using both Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm, was developed. Ladies and Gentlemen, we give to you CIIF . The system consists of two main engines, viz. Artificial Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm. Two flavors of the later are available as Encoding and No Encoding. Statistics are present to measure the fitness of the predicted data. For easy visualization of the output, Graph component is also available.

The input data consisted of inflation rates of USA for last 1143 months, dating back to January of 1914 to March of 2009.  Before beginning the training, the data set is divided into the training set and the validation (Prediction set). First 1043 months data are kept in training set while last 100 are kept in validation set. The application is supple in sense that by simply changing the parameter in the input file the size of validation set as well as training set can be changed. The value of R2 >= 0.5 is acceptable for our system, which implies that at least 50pc of total variation in the data should be explained by the system. Our tests show that the results are over par.

You can follow CIIF under http://collaborate.d2labs.org/projects/ciif/

Cheese and Cheers

Prajwol

Technology: C# ASP.NET

Level: Expert

Depth: Medium

I, once, had to present a save-as dialogue that would export the content of a GridView into csv and the database would contain Japanese texts. Export was all fine and the file was read fine from Visual Studio itself. However, when the csv was opened from Excel, the Japanese texts came all garbage.

This could have been for my PC doesn’t have Japanese locales and fonts. But the PC with such features also read it same. Here I present a way that solved this problem.

protected void ImageButton_CSV_Click(object sender, ImageClickEventArgs e)

{

…

MyDataSet.MyDataTable exportTable = …

HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;

context.Response.Clear();

context.Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(“shift_JIS”);

for (int i = 1; i < exportTable.Columns.Count; i++)

{

context.Response.Write(exportTable.Columns[i].ColumnName + “,”);

}

context.Response.Write(Environment.NewLine);

string orig_string = “”;

byte[] unicodeBytes = null;

byte[] codBytes = null;

char[] codChars = null;

string codString = “”;

Encoding cod = Encoding.GetEncoding(“shift_JIS”);

Encoding unicode = Encoding.UTF8;

for (int i = 1; i < exportTable.Rows.Count; i++)

{

for (int j = 0; j < exportTable.Columns.Count; j++)

{

orig_string = exportTable[i][j].ToString().Replace(“,”, string.Empty).Replace(“&nbsp;”, string.Empty) + “,”;

unicodeBytes = unicode.GetBytes(orig_string);

codBytes = Encoding.Convert(unicode, cod, unicodeBytes);

codChars = new char[cod.GetCharCount(codBytes, 0, codBytes.Length)];

cod.GetChars(codBytes, 0, codBytes.Length, codChars, 0);

codString = new string(codChars);

context.Response.Write(codString);

}

context.Response.Write(Environment.NewLine);

}

context.Response.ContentType = “text/csv”;

context.Response.AppendHeader(“Content-Disposition”, “attachment; filename=my_file.csv”);

context.Response.End();

}

The codes in the bold do the actual trick. The content encoding and writing to the response in the correct manner is all that needs to be done.

This, however, is not limited to csv exports. You can try with other file formats too.

Cheers and Cheese (Y)

Technology: C# WinForm

Level: Expert

Depth: Medium

There are times that we display data in DataGridView or ListView. When the data flows beyond the size of the control, vertical scrollbar appears that we can use to navigate to positions of our choice. So good so far.

Now suppose that the data needs to be refreshed every 1 or 2 seconds. And we are viewing the bottom row or the bottom item, which means that the vertical scroll bar is at the bottom. Now, when the refresh method finishes execution, the data is repopulated and we notice that the vertical scroll bar jumps to the top. For constantly changing data with large number of rows or items, this poses a serious problem because the scrollbar is not locked to its position. Since the data refreshes very fast, dragging the scroll times 60 times a minute is also not plausible.

In this page, I put in my approach to counter the above problem. It’s simple and working.

The code goes like this:

public Form_ClosedPosition()

{

InitializeComponent();

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

dataGridView_Closed.Rows.Add(i.ToString(), DateTime.Now.ToString(“HH:mm:ss”), i.ToString());

}

ReloadList();

}

private void ReloadList()

{

this.SuspendLayout();

dataGridView_Closed.SuspendLayout();

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

dataGridView_Closed.Rows.Add(i.ToString(), DateTime.Now.ToString(“HH:mm:ss”), i.ToString());

}

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

dataGridView_Closed.Rows.RemoveAt(0);

}

dataGridView_Closed.ResumeLayout(false);

this.ResumeLayout(false);

}

private void timer_Refresh_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

ReloadList();

}

What I am doing in the above code is appending the new rows and then removing the old rows from the beginning, instead of clearing the rows and then adding new rows. Doing the later, as we know, produce the flickering and jumping scroll bars as we have discussed intially.

The bottom line is: Don’t clear the rows and fill the control, instead, Append the new rows and remove the old ones.

Cheers and Cheese.

Technology: JavaScript

Level: Intermediate

Depth: Brief

For any form, clicking the “Submit” button twice results in the submission of  the form two times. This results in the duplicate backend logic and is so a flaw. 

This situation can be safeguarded with either client-side or server-side logic. Depending upon the server-side programming language, we can employ our back-end logics to detect the multiple submission of the same form and act similarly. This should not be of any problem. So in this post, I will throw in some code related to client-side JavaScript.

Some useful links:

1. http://www.willmaster.com/library/web-development/multiple-form-submission-prevention.php
2. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/12/10-useful-web-application-interface-techniques/

This is it. Almost after 4-5 months I am with my college friends at our all time favorite JWAGAL room, celebrating the last night of 2008. “31st december” is a night to remember. Nirmal, Narendra, Pasang and Me, 1 “Miracle Mile”, 2 “Carlsberg”, 1 “Antiquity” and 1 “Coca Cola”. ”Jahan char yaar, wohin rat ho Guljar”, he he. 

We started the ending of 2008 at Thamel. “Maya Cocktail and Bar” has been our favorite since some months and we decided to hang out there. No Long Island Iced Tea this time. :’( We settled with some drink I can’t remember now. Then was the mighty Tacos. “TACOS with LACOS”; it was fun. We then headed to the room with full pack shopping from the Bijay Store. BAAL HO. We almost bought the Teacher’s KIT. Thanks to Naren that he stopped me.

Admist the Maya and the Room, D-Lacoste trusted me to tell something that I was shocked to hear. I honestly hadn’t guessed that. World is unpredictable and full of surprises. I know now. I see now. May be I am not good at guessing the things right. hehe. Anyway Lacoste had his heart light. I wish him peace and success all long his life. Thank you Lacoste for all the great times and projects we did together. And the tropies we won. Cheers!

At room, we started with the discussion of our crushes. On our classmates, teachers (female- we all are straight), neighbours and other girls. Not surprisingly, Kunga-Pasang was the hero of the story-telling. His unique blend of hindi and english made every sip of our drinks a memorable one. I recall one of his so called love-story. Spare me for mistakes. I am only one awake as of now.

“Woh kya waht thah. Mein class me padhta than aur yoh class ki monitor thi. Jab bhi koi halla karta thah, yoh uska naam blackboard me likhti thi. But, no matter how much i guffed, yoh kabhi bhi mera naam blackboard mein nahin likhti thi. I had a guess that yoh mujhe pasand karti thi. Cheerrssssss. Par mujhe nahin maloom ki kya woh mujhe sachmuch pyar karti thi.

Ab etne salon ke bad, maine usko everest bank me dekha. I pretended if i didn’t recognize her. I and mera father went there for opening an account. Dono ke signature compulsory wala account. There was some mistake in the form. Aur bakin log kehe rahe thee ki hum ko dusra form bharna hoga.

Par usne kaha ki, we can manage with this form by taking the signature at this this points. Tab mujko laga ke woh ab bhi mujh se pyar karti hain. Lekin wahan se nikalne ke bad mein ab tak ussee nahin mila hun. USKIIIII AAAANKHHHH“

“Uskiii Aaankhhhh” is our recent favorite dialog, by the way.

We all had our stories shared. We started from our school times till the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering. When my friends reached the BEng, I was still at my school. haha. I probably had too much at my school. LOL. Darsana, Manisha, Deepa etc etc etc. I don’t remember who talked about whom. But it was fun. Pasang should get a special award for making all his story a unique one with lots of fun and his trademark speech.

Narendra tried to express his heartfelt stories but everyone was made a damn joke to laugh out. Guess by whom. he he, yes it was the sultane-kunga-pasang. Naren was hopeless; as every of his story turned into a masala to laugh at. Locus, “without what”, darsana, “naitikta”, etc etc naren could not make it a serious one. Kunga was sitting by his side and in FULL FORM. poor naren. better luck next year, hehe.

We downloaded “Tear drops on my guitar” and had lacoste sing that. Believe me, he is a miserable singer. haha. After this and that guffs and the stamina pushed to limit, lacoste, naren and kunga are asleep. But I want to stay awake. We have made a plan to get up early and go biking and take some pics. As others are asleep, I am writing this post. Just to pass time. I have a bottle of Carlsberg to hang out with. Thank my goodness.

I am tired too. I don’t know how much can I withstand. Sandman is dominating my will. Before leaving, Wish you all Happy New Year 2009.

Always stay cheese and happy.

Remember that there is only one person you should satisfy in your life – it is you.

Cheers Everybody.

I don’t know why I remember that one line even now. Tesaiko haq ma ho yo post

During my academic years in Pulchowk Campus, I had, once, chance to work as a RA for one of our professors. My role was to develop a tool to automate certain analysis portion to help improve the quality and accelerate the research. I was using C# and SQL Server 2005.

During the prototype development, I used small sets of data and everything was going so well. Docking panels, scrolling toolboxes, office 2005 toolstrip renderers and cool icons; the professor was quite impressed with all the presentation and working of the tool. So good so far .

Tough times were ahead, however. The actual data to be analyzed was very huge; something I underestimated to be honest. Quite easily, tables in the database got so large that data extraction time was almost inadmissible for the intended purpose. The tool had to extract the data and plot the time-series chart for one of its modules. The tool used to be irresponsive for about 1 minute and all the operations were very slow. It didn’t take much time for the professor to get irritated and me to get frustrated . Upon the analysis, I found that the data-extraction routine was taking about 20-30 seconds and the chart-plotting was taking about 15-20 seconds.

“Prajwol! Arrange to make it as fast as in the prototype and note that we have less time for it.”

Yes, this was that one line which made me go through so many lines of codes; days and nights; again and again and again.

So far as the chart was concerned, I had managed to cut down the plotting time to about 3 seconds, by suppressing the tooltips for huge data. Nonetheless, the data extraction was helpless. Luckily, I came across partitioning that was life saver for me. Partitioning was just introduced by Microsoft for SQL Server 2005. Nice timing by MS. There are other ways, though, to improvise the job. But, believe me; partitioning can make life very easy. Thanks to goodness that everything ultimately went alright.

Find my article on partitioning here.

Technology: Database, SQL Server 2005

Level: Advanced

VLDB, very large database, doesn’t necessarily indicate the size of tables within it. This article assumes that the table, itself, is very large and has huge number of rows; so huge that the performance is severely degraded. To the rescue, partitioning is a technique, introduced in 2005 version of MS SQL Server family, which helps distribute the data into smaller, more manageable sections. Sections, here, refer to horizontal partitioning, in which large groups of rows will be stored in multiple separate partitions.

Please note that you need Enterprise Edition or Developer Edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for following the codes herein.

As an example, let us take a table ‘Activity’ that should store daily activity of students. Students are identified by their roll numbers and activity by text descriptions. We will see how the rows can be stored in multiple partitions w.r.t. student roll number.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

The above 4 steps first create two files groups and two files. Since the database already has the primary file and file group, there are now three file groups. The partition function is created such that there are three partitions, viz. [values <= 50], [values > 50 and <= 100] and [values > 100]. The rows are now distributed depending upon the roll number of the student.

All the CRUD operations are done with the same statements as they are done for an unpartitioned table. Quite nice, isn’t it. Please note that SQL Server 2005 only supports up to 1000 partitions including the primary partition.

To determine how many rows are stored in each partition, fire up the following query:

Technology: ASP.NET/C#, JavaScript

Level: Intermediate

Depth: Brief

Once I faced a requirement to disable copy and paste functionalities on the text boxes. While there are lot of examples and sample codes for doing this in the internet, there are only a few that work well in cross browser platform. Luckily, FF and IE were enough for me to do the job.

Having googled a lot of pages and tried on that much of codes, here is the one that worked fine for FF and IE. Here is the link for the original post. I claim no credit and/or responsibility for the code.

Step 1: Define following JavaScript function.

STEP 2: Add the following attributes for the textboxes that you want to disable ctrl + [key] combination on.

Hope this was useful. One more time let me put the meta-reference, original source.

Hatts off to Chelsea

It began with Arsenal (Ars-anal, as some would say) and ended with Liverpool.

Or let me say,

It began with the Gunners and ended with the Reds.

As a matter of fact, I would have been much happy if the Reds were Devils too. Nevertheless, it was the Reds; it had to be the Reds ;D.

THERE IS ONLY ONE UNITED !, I chant frequently.

THERE IS ONLY ONE COLOR !, has been recently added to my list

There is only one Color!!!

To my surprise one of my friends (Soltee, as I would like to call him), had challenged me a Bet for this match. Reluctantly, I agreed. Happily I depict “you’ll never walk alone“. ha ha.

Hey Soltee, I am waiting for the khaja, dear.

Alonso is RED.