Truth, Computing and Fail

Finally decided to get cracking on the aircrack-ng suite that was lying with me. But just setting it up was a heck of a task but as it is always with linux, a great learning experience too.

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I had my computer programming in C++ lab test this saturday (i.e. 24th) and there is no doubt about the fact that this test forced me to look at programming in a more serious way than I am used to. But then again, it was a great learning experience. So much so that the night before the test, I spent hours reading up on the Fibonacci numbers. Not that I needed to read that much to generate the sequence, but I found it interesting as I started digging deeper into it.

The Fibonacci sequence as some of us might be knowing consists of the numbers
1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21… and so on

The nth term of the sequence is of the form:

t_n=t_{n-1}+t_{n-2}

If I recall correctly, this sequence came to enter the layman’s lexicon with the wildly popular novel by Dan Brown: Da Vinci Code.

Without trying to pretend that I know quite a lot, I would advise you to rather head to Mathworld’s entry on this topic. These things are better left to specialists!

The sequence of Fibonacci numbers is present all throughout the nature and the Universe. This only adds to its mysterious nature.

Now coming back to Da Vinci Code, if you may remember Robert Langdon mentioning something about the ‘Golden Ratio’, also denoted as

\phi

(Phi). This golden ratio is also ubiquitous in nature occuring at the strangest of places like in the pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Parthenon at Athens and even in the human anatomy. Again head to its Mathworld entry if you want to know more.

This Golden ratio is also linked to Fibonacci numbers, both present in abundance in nature and universe’s creations.

It is related by an infinite series involving the Fibonacci numbers:

\phi=1+\sum_{n=1}^\infty\frac{(-1)^{n+1}}{F_n F_{n+1}}

After almost 6 hours of playing around with plugins and editing php files, I needed something else to relax. My friend Harsh gave me this certain link, retrojunk and its  one helluva site! Straightaway I went to the 80′s section in the TV shows and there they were, Knight Rider, Street Hawk et al ….. Suddenly all the memories came flooding back, with the typical 80′s techno, electronic music playing away with the protagonists being flawless, having that unabashed masculine quality about them, a time when TV series used to be far more engrossing than the ones on offer now-a-days.

Don’t be mistaken. I am not a 30-something uncle reliving his good old days. I am just a teenager and was introduced to these shows in the early 90′s. In fact they were one of the first shows I used to watch on TV.

Harsh again gave me a link totally devoted to Street Hawk. This one has all the theme music compositions, torrent links to all the 13 episodes of its short lived existence, wallpapers and what not! Recommended!!

Well, lets get to the point and admit that everybody wants to rake in some moolah from their AdSense susbscriptions. But the thing that bothers them the most would be the proper positioning of the ads. Imagine a new visitor coming to your blog to see it cluttered with misplaced ads, like one bang on top of the first post. Forget about clicking on the ad, he won’t even read your first post and there you have your potential $1 bidding you goodbye.

I got the idea of this trick from this post at Jake Jarvis’ blog. I had been on the lookout for such a thing for a long time.

In this post I will elaborate it a bit to make it easier for newbies at coding who may have difficulties finding out the start and end of loops.

The file you need to edit is index.php in most themes or like theloop.php in k2. Basically the idea is to put the ad block in the post loop. Remember that: the post loop.

Now open the required file in the Theme Editor from your wordpress admin and find the beginning of the post loop, the line containing if(have_posts()).

For example, in theloop.php you will find it in this manner:

if ( have_posts() ) {

Freshy makes life a bit easier for you, by including descriptions in the index.php file. Find out

<!--blog-->

Now that you have found this line, below this line declare a variable:

<?php $count = 1; ?>

Now go to the end of the post loop, to be understood by codes like

<?php endif; ?>

. After this line of code and just before the closure of the

</div>

tag, add this loop:

<?php if ($count == 1) : ?>

<!-- YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE -->

<?php endif; $count++; ?>

Now placing the adsense code becomes easier if you are using the AdSense Deluxe plugin. It keeps the coding neat. Just put in the following line of code in the loop:

<?php adsense_deluxe_ads('Ad_Name'); ?>

and you are done!!

The blog has undergone a total makeover. It is now running on the latest WordPress 2.1.2

I had to change the theme to the one that has witnessed phenomenal popularity in the past one year, Freshy. This was mainly due to problems with the k2 sidebar modules configuration.

And I did not care to restore the previous posts from the database as they were hardly informative.