Friday, May 31, 2013

How to identify directories and executables in Linux

We can use the below command:

ls –Fx

The option “F” is used for segregating executables and directories and x is for multicolumn output.

 

Linux_ls

Here / refers to directories and *refers to executables.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Connected movie: Better than the original



Whenever a movie is remade, viewers always compare it with the original and mostly understate it.This infact is true to some extent as well. I remember the remake of The Omen, how inferior it was compared to the original, though there had been such technical advancement in movies.
But here is a nice treat from the makers of the runaway hit of the 2004 movie “Cellular” starring Kim Basinger , Chris Evans and Jason Statham, a remake of the movie in cantonese aptly titled “Connected”. The movie was released in 2008. (I watched only sometime back).I expected it wouldn’t match up to the original, but surprisingly it was much better with some spectacular action scenes and some very good acting by the lead characters.
The story is mostly the same as that of the original, a woman kidnapped by gangsters and how she contacts a stranger with a broken phone that she assembles.Here the character of the stranger is replaced by a father (who is a debt collector),showing maturity in the role. Bob also has a strained family relationship which he is struggling hard to build. The rest of the story revolves around how Bob helps the woman out from the crisis also with the involvement of low ranking police officer.
Though the story line is similar, what I liked most was the presentation. The characters had more depth, and more emotions than that of the original. The antagonist also played the part very well.Overall I would rate it 3.5/5.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Sunday, May 19, 2013

The Maltese Falcon

Falcon

Started reading the book “The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett. I will post the review soon!

My Favorite Eminem Song

The Magnificent Seven: A classic must watch movie

 The Magnificent seven 

A village where people toil their sweat in the fields to get one meal a day to feed their beloved ones.

And the village being raided by bandits periodically, looting their hard earned food.

And one fine day, realization dawns them to fight the evil.

This is the backdrop of the classic movie “The magnificent Seven”. Inspired by a Japanese movie called The Seven Samurai, the movie makes us feel why we donot have such movies any more. A simple innocent story interwoven with an ensemble cast, yet proves to be one of the best action movies of the olden times. The movie was one of the starting phases of the “Sphagetti western genre” movies. We can find lot of cow boys, gun slings, good vs evil battles and so on.

As I mentioned the story is quite simple. A mexican village is constantly being troubled by a a group of bandits. They raid, loot grains and kill people who come their way. The rural police are of very less help. When the situation becomes unbearable, group of villagers decide to fight back. They approach an elderly man of the village, who advises them to go to the “border” and get weapons to fight the baddies back.

Once at the border, they happen to find a young man from the city called Chris, who happen to be a gunslinger. Observing his skills, they approach him for help. Though he denies initially, he decides to help the poor villagers. He begins a quest of finding six best men and forms a group : The magnificent seven. The rest of the movie is how the magnificent seven defend the village, finally defeating the bandits.

Finally the movie meets the moral : Unity is strength.

The music score of the movie is one of the best I ever heard and breaths life to the story.

 

The magnificent seven 1

Main cast

Yul Brynner as  Chris Adams

Eli Wallach as  Calvera

Steve McQueen as  Vin Tanner

Charles Bronson as  Bernardo O'Reilly

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Two Best compilers for C

Borland C compiler

Despite advances in IDEs and Intelligent compilers for programming languages, the Borland C has still stood its test of time. Its simple to use but is inherently powerful. We require a DOS emulator for running it currently due to processor speed constraints.

borland

 

Borland 2

borland2

borland3

For running the code, press F9. The code will get compiled, linked with the standard library and will create “.exe” file and execute, all in one go.

This is extremely useful for writing and executing code faster.

 

Bloodshed Dev C++

Dev C++ is a free IDE developed by Bloodshed Software. It has several integrated features such as code completion, syntax highlighting, tool manager, Find and replace utilities etc. It can be downloaded from the link:

http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html

Dev C   1

Dev C  2

Once the source is written, it should be saved as a C source file. We can compile the file by pressing Control F9 and run using Control F10. or else we can compile and run together by just pressing F9.

The compilation progress will be displayed in a window

compile

 

In case of any syntactic or semantic errors, they would be displayed under the complier tab. In this case we can notice that the function “print” is not defined, hence it results in an error.

Compiler2