- Anatomy of a program in memory
- Rediscover the expect script. I had forgotten all about it.
- What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic
Archive for January, 2009
Programming links
Jan 27
Thattai
Jan 26
Ingredients:
Rice Flour- 240 ml
Urad flour- 60 ml (dal roasted, powdered and sieved)
Ghee or butter- 60 ml
Channa dal – 1 tablespoon
Coconut grated- 1 tablespoon
Chilli powder- 1/4 teaspoon
Salt- 1/2 teaspoon
Asafoetida powder- 1/4 teaspoon
Oil for frying
Method:
Soak channa dal for one hour. Take a wide basin and mix salt and asafoetida powder in 1/4 cup of water. Add the flours, chilli powder, drained channa dal, coconut and butter and mix well. Add more water as needed and make a firm dough. If the dough is too dry, cracks will form on the thattai and it will break. In that case, sprinkle a little water and mix well. Adjust salt if needed. Divide the dough into small balls- bigger than marble but smaller than a small lemon.Keep covered.
Spread a smooth cloth, keep a ball of dough on it. Place an oiled polythene paper on the ball and press with a flat bottomed cup (dabara would be ideal). Remove the paper and repeat with 3 more balls. Heat oil in a frying pan and when hot enough to fry, take and slip 4 or 5 thattais gently into the oil. Fry on medium heat, turn both sides and remove when golden and the noise subsides. Drain on paper. Repeat with the balance dough. After the first batch is over, check for crispness. If not crisp, add a little more of butter.
Cool and then store in a air-tight container.
Obbattu
Jan 26
Ingredients:
Maida- 120 ml
Channadal- 60 ml
Coconut grated- 45 ml
Jaggery powdered- 60 ml
Oil and ghee for smearing, cooking
A pinch each of salt and turmeric powder
A pinch of cardamom powder
Method:
Take maida in a bowl, add salt and turmeric powder, 2 spoons of oil and mix well. Add water and make a pliable dough. Pour two teaspoons of oil over the dough and let it soak for an hour at least.
Soak channa dal in water for 30 minutes and then pressure cook. Drain and grind in mixer till powdery.
Heat jaggery with a spoon or two of water in a pan, add coconut, channa dal powder and cardamom and keep mixing until a homogeneous mass is formed. Take care not to let the jaggery burn. If needed a little ghee can be used. Cool and divide it into 10 balls for filling.
Divide the dough also into 10 balls. Take one ball of dough and pat it with hand on a plastic sheet smeared with oil into a 3″ diameter circle. Put one ball of filling. Bring the edges of the dough over the filling and fully cover it. Pat this ball into a 5″ circle using oiled fingers or use a flat bottomed cup to press and make the obbattu. Heat a tawa. Take the made obbattu carefully and cook on both sides on the tawa using a little ghee. Repeat with the rest of the balls of dough/ filling. Spread a little melted ghee when serving.
iPhone Apps
Jan 21
All apps that can filter calls and SMS are not available on the App store. Only available for Jailbroken iPhones.
Call and SMS filtering:
- Pysl: It is free but did not work well for me. The UI is clunks
- Mcleaner: This worked. UI is not very intuitive but ok. Has a 15 day free trial
- iBlacklist: Havent tried it. Trial version can block limited number of numbers (2!!)
- SMS2Mail: Free app to email SMS messages (Cydia Categories->Messaging)
Chess and other games:
- Black and White: Reversi for iPhone. App store (FREE)
- Chess Puzzles: Free iTunes store app with 50 puzzles
- Chess game and Chess puzzles from Shredder (FREE). Excellent puzzles refreshed every day.
- Tetsuki: Allows you to connect and play on GO servers (GO, Baduk, WeiQi)
NYT: Love potion article
Jan 17
Interesting NYT article about a love potion.
- In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events”
- “Love was correctly identified as a potentially fatal chemical imbalance in the medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde, who accidentally…”
Astronomy articles
Jan 11
- NYT article: Milky way Galazy is bigger then Andromeda
- Supermassive blackholes discovered (dailygalaxy.com)
- NYT: Postcards from Mars – Photos from NASA’s Mars orbiter
You and Your Research
Jan 10
Transcript of a talk by Dr. Richard Hamming (1915-1998).
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…true greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier – when it’s spelled with a lower case letter.
I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It’s all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn’t it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn’t do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things.
…I’ll remind you, “It is a poor workman who blames his tools – the good man gets on with the job, given what he’s got, and gets the best answer he can.”
I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling’ to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It’s very ugly; you shouldn’t have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, “Yes, that was good.” I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won’t just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don’t stop and read it, you won’t get credit.
You can educate your bosses. It’s a hard job. In this talk I’m only viewing from the bottom up; I’m not viewing from the top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
You find this happening again and again;good scientists fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No’, you just go to your boss and get a `No’ easy. If you want to do something, don’t ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don’t give him a chance to tell you `No’. But if you want a `No’, it’s easy to get a `No’.
When they moved the library from the middle of Murray Hill to the far end, a friend of mine put in a request for a bicycle. Well, the organization was not dumb. They waited awhile and sent back a map of the grounds saying, “Will you please indicate on this map what paths you are going to take so we can get an insurance policy covering you.” A few more weeks went by. They then asked, “Where are you going to store the bicycle and how will it be locked so we can do so and so.” He finally realized that of course he was going to be red-taped to death so he gave in. He rose to be the President of Bell Laboratories.
Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody’s has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
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