Abacus Rapid-Mathematics

Been quite long since I added something here! Although I've been doing many interesting things around. There's a wonderful academy called ABACUS which trains young minds to master the art of logic and rapid-mathematics. Sadly enough - the older lot are deprived out of the fun it can be!

Recently, there was a contest in my city which had about 7000 participants in and around the city. This was the Abacus rapid-addition contest. Rules were simple: 150 questions, 2 marks per right answer, 5 minutes and the bombshell 100+ questions (a score of 200) is minimum to qualify! There were batches and batches of people - why? - simple, one round was only 20 mins. 5 mins warm up, 3 mins break, 5 mins actuals and the remaining time to packup! This thrilled me.

Thanks to a colleague of mine who courteously brought me a couple of the question papers as her daughter had been to the test. Me and my wife tried it one Sunday afternoon and I was aghast - I cracked only 58 and her 65. We tried again - Still we scored only 60 & 68. Soon, it caught the attention of the people around. In about 15 mins; I had almost 12 people solving the paper - we were timing it. Interestingly - all elders (50+) had answered between 88-98 questions, while us the younger generation <30 could only do 60-75. In the next round - an uncle and my mother-in-law qualified by hitting 100 answers. That was astounding!

Alright - they are better at this! But - I can do something which probably they cant! Write a Generator for the Question Paper - Spread it around. I spent thinking about it for 1 day in the background. The first version came through in about 4 hours in an Excel Sheet. But I couldn't get the macro working in OpenOffice at home - shucks. So, the next day replicated the logic in a Javascript; why didn't I think of that in the first place - thats portable & convenient!

So, here it is - Generate Abacus Test

BSNL Dataone & Wireless WRT54G

Excited as I was, that Im finally taking the plunge into the wireless arena. Simply was obsessed with the idea of browsing the Internet in front of the TV on my brand new Dell Laptop!

I have my good old PC connected over Ethernet to the ADSL Modem with BSNL as my Broadband-ISP. Got a Linksys WRT54G which I rounded up as one of the simple, robust choice for a Wireless Router. For once, I wanted to do it as said in the "manual"!

I first hooked up my PC to one of the Ethernet ports of the router and connected the router to my ADSL modem. Fine.. set my machine to use DHCP and restarted my PC. (although I new ipconfig /release and /renew would work)

Now, the problem started; I was unable to browse the internet! That was my basic purpose, wasn't it?!  Ok, time to take on reins - I soon figured out that I was unable to reach the modem's administration page OR in other words, Im unable to resolve the IP address of the modem.

Simple problem - Both the Router and the Modem had the same default addresses - 192.168.1.1

Simple solution - Change the IP address on the Router to 192.169.1.1 through the management page. Zoom - it worked!

Just was inquisitive to see whether other wireless comrades had done the same thing... Yes many had!