tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3425710101656484332024-09-06T09:11:13.838+05:30... a place for my random thoughts, musings, ideas et all. There is no fixed topic or content ... its all about what I like at the moment.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.comBlogger149125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-37713520005566753122015-12-07T10:22:00.000+05:302015-12-07T10:22:31.963+05:30

Because of being employed by world's largest online retailer, I was aware of the custom of Thanksgiving as celebrated in USA. Mostly along the lines of large sales volume and other retail details. Its only after coming to the country, I realized it is indeed a big deal for folks here. People queue up, often overnight, in front of stores. The stores themselves have deep discounts on large

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-31756136327505705312015-06-24T11:59:00.001+05:302015-06-24T12:11:55.679+05:30

Aren't you bothered when talking to people wearing dark sunglasses? You know what I am talking about. The ones so dark you can't even make out the eyes. Its weird to talk to a person without being able to see their eyes. In India, like many other places, its customary to greet someone with a smile and raise eye-brows. It spooks me out when people do this wearing dark shades. Then during

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-31641380429240158892015-06-11T11:39:00.000+05:302015-06-11T11:39:38.640+05:30

It’s only because ice floats in water that we can add ice to a drink in room temperature and instantaneously get a chilled effect. The ice melts and you taste the cold water. Well you might think it’s obvious. And you are right. It is. But just pause and think for a bit. Except for water, all other solid materials have higher density than their liquid counterparts! Now think what happens when

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-29354902241079392822014-10-26T09:39:00.002+05:302014-10-26T09:42:41.841+05:30

I am sitting here in my balcony. Sipping coffee while looking at the rain outside and thinking: Its raining again! Somehow it has to rain whenever I switch on the washing machine. Is there a link between the machine and the clouds? Well you never know. Maybe it will be the next big news in Scientific American, Scientists find strong evidence linking washing machine usage and rainfall  .

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-54353075026292791042014-02-08T11:31:00.001+05:302014-02-08T11:31:56.573+05:30

Heard the following story from a colleague at Amazon: This happened during the time I was at Amrita University. Back then the hostels did not have power sockets. This was the time when cellphones and laptops were beyond the reach for most Indian students. One day some guy managed to get his hands on an electric heater and wanted to cook in the hostel. Some searching led the guys to a

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-62237833765669936502014-02-08T11:07:00.001+05:302014-02-08T11:09:58.938+05:30

Bogmalo Beach, Goa, a set on Flickr. Some pictures of Bogmalo, Goa from August 2013. Went there from Amazon for a branding event at BITS. Wonderful campus, great beach and awesome seafood made this a very enjoyable off-season trip to Goa.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-891868604241196012014-02-03T19:53:00.001+05:302014-02-03T19:55:26.597+05:30

Squirrel, BTM, a set on Flickr. Here are some of the non-blurry pics of these cute, super busy furry animals. Clicked from the verandah of my BTM home in April 2013.

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-46338215219991057792014-01-30T08:01:00.001+05:302014-01-30T08:04:55.850+05:30

Mysore Trip with ml-bln, a set on Flickr. Pictures from my trip to Ranganathittu bird sanctuary and Mysore palace with my colleagues from Amazon India and Berlin.Via Flickr:5 of us from the ML-Blr team went on a day trip with some members of the Berlin team. We stopped at Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary and Mysore Palace.20140125

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-67324881303063610222014-01-19T08:49:00.001+05:302014-01-19T08:49:40.909+05:30

Will start this post with an apology. Its been more than a year since I last posted. Lots of things have happened since my last post. {got married, moved to a different work team, changed house twice}. The principle reason however is different. My recent posts have been mostly along lines of "how to do X" where X is some interesting thing which I stumbled upon recently. There is no central

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0Bangalore, Karnataka, India12.9715987 77.59456269999998312.4764182 76.949115699999979 13.4667792 78.240009699999987tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-4864702206768559172012-08-25T19:12:00.000+05:302012-08-25T19:13:02.611+05:30

Bash is capable of generating a huge spectrum of colors for text. Here is a small code in shell script which generates all the 256 different colors bash can render: for i in {0..255}; do printf "\x1b[38;5;${i}mCLR-${i}\t"; done; echo; reset; The last echo is for printing a blank like after the output, without that the command prompt would appear at the end of the output. More import is reset

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-74273801930675311572012-07-22T19:20:00.000+05:302012-08-25T19:21:45.951+05:30

My recent work related to Text Classification got me introduced to ROC Curve which is a very effective way to compare classifiers against each other and decide on the cutoff value for classes. Its best defined with a simple example. Say you have a binary classification problem. You have generated 3 train-test datasets from the original data. Say you are using Support Vector Machine (SVM) as

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-37743816116474924542012-05-24T22:50:00.004+05:302012-10-11T17:11:45.403+05:30

Recently I encountered a program called tmux which claims to be better at "terminal multiplexing" than screen. I did not have any idea about "terminal multiplexing", but I had been using screen for quite a few years now. tmux promises to be better that screen according to the tmux sourceforge page. This got me interested. I installed tmux, and have been using it since last 2 weeks. My

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-61086369644507336702012-05-23T23:50:00.000+05:302012-05-23T23:52:01.503+05:30

If you have been playing around with bash for some time you must have changed the file .inputrc sometime. I have changed it several times mostly for Del key and auto-completion trick. However every time I change it I have to logout of bash for it to take effect. Here are two different ways to do the same without logging out of the shell. Keyboard shortcut : Ctrl+x followed by Ctrl+r Script :

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-69556747387151081002012-04-17T19:09:00.000+05:302012-04-17T19:09:36.428+05:30

Wikipedia defines quine as: A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. In layman terms, it is a program that when executed outputs itself. Like a C program outputting its own source code. Kleene's Recursion Theorem proves the existence of quines in any Turing Complete Language. Its a good exercise to write one in your

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-65263091006195889532012-04-03T15:43:00.000+05:302012-04-03T15:45:38.630+05:30

I do not know about you, but I am bothered by the lack of a proper command line calculator for doing small single line calculations in Linux (or any other UNIX or Mac system). Sure bc is there but it does not support floating point by default, so one ends up writing things like: echo "scale=3; 22/7" | bc which is quite cumbersome for day to day work. To subvert this trouble, I wrote the

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-87187320663685949552012-03-26T14:24:00.001+05:302012-03-26T14:24:56.916+05:30

As you know, I'm trying out Ruby. While solving one of the exercise problems I felt the need for a do-while loop. Unfortunately ruby has no documented do-while loop. Thankfully, somebody has already asked this same question in stackoverflow : Is there a do-while loop in ruby? Here is a demonstration of a do-while code in ruby: Remember that using undocumented features is always ill-advised

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-82110042943568704272012-03-24T10:39:00.002+05:302012-03-24T10:41:20.248+05:30

I have always been interested in programming languages. After coding in a plethora of mainstream procedural languages C, C++ and Java, last year I tried my hands on Python. Apart from being an enjoyable experience, learning Python has paid off quite well while building prototypes in my work. This prompted me to try learning some other languages. While searching for a cool language to try out,

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-71973257114071918542012-03-02T22:51:00.000+05:302012-03-07T13:52:23.855+05:30

With the high penetration of mobile phones, companies have started sending out automated sms. I have always wondered about the cryptic sender names. Careful observations about the sender name reveals: all letters are in capitals name format is **-****** the first two letters seem random followed by an hyphen followed by a six letter last six letters seem to identify the sender name for

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-40980212911180840082012-02-18T15:05:00.000+05:302012-02-24T21:04:13.659+05:30

I had appeared in GATE 2008 and 2009. After that I had not been interested much in GATE. However this time (GATE 2012) a close friend of mine appeared for the same, which got me interested again. Here is a solution set to the GATE 2012 Computer Science paper. I have solved question from Algorithms, Automata, C programming, Probability ... in short, the topics that I enjoyed enough to remember

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-39271607225840750622012-02-15T15:00:00.000+05:302012-02-15T15:00:25.370+05:30

Linux (and all other unix clone OSs) have a handy way to let you know who are the users who have logged into your system. The command is "last". This command uses the file "/var/log/wtmp" and displays a list of all users logged in since the file was created. I use it as: last | grep -v -e bigyan -e reboot | less Grep -v gives the complement of the results that it returns normally. The output

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-57326917155937179622012-01-31T22:43:00.000+05:302012-02-15T15:02:05.932+05:30

I am a big fan of TED talks. Usually I like to listen to them while traveling. So far I have been downloading using the "download" button in their website. Today I found a very interesting website which gives links to all TED talks in Metalink standard file format. This can be used directly to search and download videos in high quality using any downloader that supports metalink. The Metalink

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-89770296136831014282012-01-18T08:46:00.000+05:302012-04-18T09:06:00.246+05:30

One thing I have always liked about emacs is its ability to open a terminal within it. This makes writing programs a lot easier as you can both compile/debug and write a program without leaving your editor. There exists a few plugins to achieve the same in vi, but none of them are stable and platform independent. Yesterday while going through the gnu screen man page, I found that it supported

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-59863651644683468382011-10-06T15:30:00.000+05:302011-10-07T11:55:23.931+05:30

ঢাকের উপর ছিল কাঠি, পুজো হল জমজমাটি, আজকে মায়ের ফেরার পালা জানাই তাই এবেলা শুভ বিজয়া

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-80398124242102903292011-10-01T10:27:00.000+05:302011-10-01T10:27:05.469+05:30

The spreadsheet program, Calc (equivalent of MS Excel) in Open Office does not have a function to count the number of unique numbers in a range. Here is a quick hack that I have been using for quite sometime for doing the same: SUMPRODUCT((Data<>"")/(COUNTIF(Data;Data)+(Data=""))) When using this hack, replace "Data" by the range of values from which you want the number of unique values

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-342571010165648433.post-90003471155640094482011-09-24T01:28:00.000+05:302011-10-03T01:32:11.617+05:30

Mac OS X 10.6 does not come with default support for Indian languages. Being a Bengali, I want to read and write in my mother tongue. Here is a step by step procedure to get Bengali support in Mac OS X 10.6. Get bengali fonts in a format supported by Mac OS by default Mac supports the ttf format and not the newer Open Type format one of the best in terms of readability is "Ekushey Lohit" (একুশে

Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08220053167514404524noreply@blogger.com1