Praveen’s Journal

What is the smallest number of red balls that must be moved to transform the red triangle into the green triangle?

Finally the long time pending task of bringing my gallery to production and unifying (to certain extent) the look of my journal and gallery is complete. I am happy that this weekend has been somewhat useful! Need to do some Google analytics and adsense work still. Also need to upload a lots of images to the gallery and update the image name and description. Oh! Still a lot more to go. Let me finish the puzzle of the week and go to the rest…

There are ten coin machines. Each machine produces coins that weigh 10 g, expect one faulty machine which produces coins that weigh 9 g. You are given with an electronic weighing scale. You can take any number of coins from any machine and use the weighing scale. What would be the minimum number of usage of the weighing scale to find out the faulty machine?

I had to connect to a Cisco 3000 VPN gateway for establishing a VPN with my office network. Cisco provides VPN clients for Microsoft Windows and RPMs for Linux. I am basically a Debian user. When I tried alien for converting the RPM into deb file and installing it, the installation succeded. But there was some problem with the configuration files and locations. I was too lazy to figure out what is happening. So I did googled for an alternative solution. This post describes what I have found and may be helpful for others as well.

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In the period of 8 months stay in Bangalore, it makes me to feel sick that we spend a lot of money to dine out still spoil the health. Most of the time, we don’t like the taste of the food here. After much thought, we have finally decided to do the cooking magic at home thereby saving money and health. We have bought almost all the cooking gears and started it today. To start with some traditional south Indian food in the menu today. Rice, sambar, rasam and curd. Take a look at some pictures of the first cooking here. My mom is now happy that we started cooking at home. We too are!

You have sixteen coins. One of them is a counterfeit, and the other fifteen are genuine, but identical in appearance to the counterfeit. The counterfeit’s weight is different from that of a genuine coin, but you don’t know if the counterfeit is heavier or lighter than a genuine coin. You also have an unusual balance (the picture shows a top view of it), with three pans instead of the usual two. Any number of coins can be placed in each of the three pans, and the balance will tilt toward the heavier pan or pans if the weights are unequal.

What is the minimum number of weighings needed to identify the counterfeit? (You may put coins in all three pans in a single weighing.)

The complete migration of the site to a new host is over. Here are the new changes that are done to the site.

Journal: The URI of the journal is changed. http://journal.praveen.ws is the new URI for the journal. The old URI may still take you here but due to some problems with mod_rewrite, you will not be able to use that to browse. The Wordpress is upgraded from 1.5 to 2.0. The theme is modified. A lot of plugins were disabled for the migration sake. I may enable the plugins later on. Also tweaking of the new theme is going on.

Gallery: There is a new addition of Gallery 2. http://gallery.praveen.ws is the URI for the gallery. It is the basic installation and a lot of tweaking is still more to come.

Calendar: There is a new addition of PHP Webcalendar. http://calendar.praveen.ws is the URI for the calendar.

Please let me know if you face any issues with the site.

PS: The f**king DNS update took almost 24 hours this time. The worst ever case faced in my life so far.

Had to migrate the site to a new server again due to unavoidable reasons. Comments after this point until notified further will be lost. Sorry about the inconvenience!

The planet Pfooey is inhabited by robots. Half of the robots always tell the truth, but the other half have been affected by a bug in their software that causes them to lie at all times. All of the robots look exactly alike, so it can be confusing to figure out which robots are truth-tellers and which are liars.

One day, a visitor to Pfooey stopped at a fork in the road. Two robots approached the tourist from the road on the left. The tourist said, “I’m on my way to Bitborough. Which road should I take?”

One of the robots replied, “We’ve just come from Iteropolis. If you asked me, I’d say Bitborough is to the right.” The other robot pointed to the first and said, “That one’s a liar. Bitborough is to the left.” The tourist thanked the robots, then continued on the road to the left until she reached her destination a short time later.

How did the tourist figure out which way to turn?