Image Editing Tools: Experiences- good & bad!

It was a great experience working on SM project. Shreyasi, Jahnavi & I decided upon this topic because playing with images seemed interesting. And in the end, it turned out to be even more interesting than we had thought! :)

The software we chose was Ulead PhotoImpact X3. We selected this because it is free, quite user friendly and provides large number of features. And its relatively unheard and unused as compared to Adobe Photoshop, so we were more enthusiastic to explore its features.

We demonstrated our project using 3 videos which showed use of various tools such as clone, blur, smudge, transform, etc.
Various processes we demonstrated were:
Video 1 - Resizing and multi-layering of three images.
Video 2 - Improving upon facial features of an old lady.
Video 3 - Cloning parts of different images into one.

There were various challenges in completing this project. It was difficult to find a free full motion recorder without watermark. The biggest challenge was to make project videos without any major mistake. We had to make each video at least 5 times to make them presentable. And even after that, some people questioned "Did you actually make these videos? Really? Seriously they are not from youtube?" :/

But it was an awesome experience- staying in college till late in evenings... working in group (with a bit of T.T. in between). Rather lots of T.T. with a bit of work in between! :D

The last few days before the presentation day were most hectic. Mailing the lab handout. Fixing time with others for lab training session. Completing the presentation. Practicing it.

Then came the presentation day. Nervous! But as the presentation moved on, confidence level rose.

But all is well that ends well. So in short, it was a nice experience- full of fun.
Thanks to Amarjeet sir for providing us with such an opportunity! :)

Nikita Juneja 2010057
Shreyasi Agrawal 2010080
Jahnavi Kalyani 2010032

Lab Session 9

I apologize for being late in writing this blog. Me and my partner Priyanka had an amazing experience.

First comes the training part (for which priyanka came straight from airport after CWG vacations).Only part that was time consuming was latex. It was like learning a new coding language all of a sudden.We had lots of queries as to why and how we have cover it in the lab because how can anyone expect us to learn the syntax in a single day. So we ended up learning the basics of it (though we were afraid as to what all and in what depth our group members may ask us about it?).

And ya, the trainers for web crawling were absent that day, so we missed that part.But thankfully Shayan tought us that on Monday during break. But overall, the training part went off well. The topics that we covered were:

• Web Crawling :We covered topics like visualizing a part of the web as a graph, save pages to disk, concatenate pages for printing, extract images from a set of pages.This was the part which seemed new to everyone.So, all of them were listening with patience and interest.
• Data recovery from mistakenly lost files: We used a software called PCrecovery.This task took some time because we first had to install this software in each PC.
• Shredding in Ubuntu : Very interesting and easy to understand.Actually the way kashish gave its training, it became crystal clear to all the leaders!:) 
• Latex : Making PDFs seemed interesting to all.But not too much formatting could be done while making the PDFs as we covered only basic commands.
• Backingup data : Windows has an inbuilt utility for backingup data whereas in Linux, we installed an application.                         

But anyways, the overall experience was very informative. I wasn't thorough with one of the topics but Priyanka proved to be a good co-leader and my group members too were very cooperative ;-) (in contrast to what i was expecting ). 

Thank You Sir for giving us a chance to experience of learning and then teaching.

We look forward to see other professors  try such innovative things so that learning becomes interesting.:)

ROLLTOPS-new generation laptops

My dream to roll my laptop seems come through , as i saw Orkin Design's for roll top laptop.The device has flexible display & allows a new concept in notebook design growing out of the traditional one.The major difference between a laptop and a rolltop is the physical structure. Unlike a laptop's two-fold, book-like appearance, one needs to unfurl the rolltop. It appears rounded when closed.This exact feature makes it totally bankable for computer enthusiasts. Business people and other computer users may now carry their computers.It has OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen .Screen is of 13 inches transforms into the "graphics tablet," which serves as the primary monitor. Computer accessories in a rolltop are all integrated making it an "all-in-one gadget." This quality extends from the power supply through the "holding belt" up to its stylus or piece of interactive pen.

Presentation on Tools for Web Crawling

We had initially tried to select 2 other topics but finally settled for this topic as those 2 topics had already been taken by the other groups(We don't remember which topics they were).
Initially we didn't like it as we thought this topic wouldn't have much information that we could learn and share with our classmates but over the course of our research, we found out that we were VERY much wrong! There was so much to learn and we had to decide what could be shared with the class without getting them confused as web crawling involved understanding the code that web crawlers use for crawling the web in their search for information.

In our presentation, we covered the definition of a web crawler, types of web crawlers, examples of known web crawlers and also gave a demonstration of two of them(one written by us)

There are 4 types of web crawlers - search engine crawlers, email harvesting crawlers, corporate crawlers and specialised crawlers.
Three examples of known web crawlers that we covered were Websphinx, Universe(Which we decided not to cover in the presentation) and python crawler(which as mentioned before, we made). We decided to make the web crawler using python as we had covered python in class and we found it easier to understand the logic behind the crawler than compared to if we had tried to do it using Java.

In the end, we enjoyed making this presentation and practising amongst ourselves to try and deliver that perfect presentation despite running into hurdles like spending 2 weeks away from each other due to the CWG break, understanding how the web crawler works using python coding, etc.


Samiran Roy (2010073)
Shayan Lahiri (2010078)
Apoorv Saini (2010020)