BiGYaN's Random Thoughts

Subho Bijoya

2011-10-06T15:30:00.000+05:30

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

Counting unique values in Open Office

2011-10-01T10:27:00.000+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 like

Bengali font on Max OS X 10.6

2011-09-24T01:28:00.000+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

Organizing clothes using Data Structure

2011-08-06T12:57:00.000+05:30

Due to lack of hanger space in my present wardrobe, I have to keep my clothes folded. I usually pick up something from the top of the pile for wearing. Which means I keep wearing the a small subset of my clothes repeatedly. Ideally I would have liked to wear all the clothes. But its too much trouble to take a tshirt out from middle of a pile; the entire pile gets disheveled. The solution is

Confessions of an Ebook Pirate

2011-07-16T09:25:00.000+05:30

Today I found this article, titled "Confessions of a Book Pirate". Its an email interview with a bibliophile who is also a book pirate. The person in question has a name "The Real Caterpillar" in one of the many book sharing communities that he participates. He makes quite a few points which seemed logical and worth noting. The article is a definite recommend from me for anybody who loves books

Follow links to land in Philosophy

2011-05-31T21:43:00.002+05:30

A couple of days back, the a cartoon was posted on xkcd titled "Extended Mind". In the mouse-over text, Randall Munroe wrote the following: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy". I decided to test this theory and indeed managed to land to Philosophy

Why do people latch doors without lock?

2011-05-26T17:05:00.002+05:30

I often see people pulling the latch of a padlock without actually putting in a lock. This is usually done when the person intends to come back after a short time. However I have always wondered about this practice. The only plausible reason I find for doing this is preventing infants, toddlers or small animals from entering the room. However, in places where I observe this behavior (hostel

SSH without password

2011-05-20T10:07:00.001+05:30

Ever since I joined IISc, ssh-ing into other machines seems to be a daily task. Its hard to type in passwords every time. So this is what I did to avoid typing passwords for ssh. Lets call the machine you are connecting from as "home" with your user name "homeuser" and the machine you are connecting to as "server" with your user name as "serveruser". Please note that in case the account in

Cell array to matrix in Matlab

2011-05-17T23:01:00.000+05:30

Having used Matlab for machine learning work, I often face this problem. Typically while working with some classifier like "TreeBagger", the "eval()" function for computing labels of test data returns a cell array where each element is '1' or '-1'. The problem is that my original labels were numeric {1,-1}, so comparing these become a big problem especially if one is interested in things beyond

replaceTab, an utility program

2011-05-10T11:36:00.000+05:30

I use PasteBin for all my online code snippets. However there is one small problem which I find about their service: Tabs expand to 8 spaces While many might not understand the fuss, I find this quite annoying. I use Tabs for my code and the default number of spaces I use for Tab is 4. Expanding Tab to 8 spaces, makes my code look ugly (kind of stretched). Being a programmer, I wrote this

Generate Palindrome by Appending Characters

2011-04-21T10:45:00.001+05:30

I was recently asked this programming puzzle at an interview: Given a string as input, construct the smallest length palindrome from that string by adding 0 or more characters at the end of the string. So for input "abb" it would be "abba" with only one character added at end; for "abcdaad" it would be "abcdaadcba" with three characters added to the end. Of course in the worst case all n-1

Adding until and unless to C

2011-04-16T10:04:00.001+05:30

I have been looking into Ruby recently and find its keywords "until" and "unless" very interesting. So I thought what was a good way to add similar keywords into C/C++. Initially I attempted writing functions and then it struck me that this can be done with a simple macro. This is what I came up with: #define until(x) while(!(x)) #define unless(x) if(!(x)) To illustrate my point here

Computing Pi to trillions of digits

2011-03-19T23:30:00.002+05:30

Some fellows attempted a world record for computing Pi to 5 trillion digits. The page gives a fairly detailed outline of how they achieved this feat. The detailed specifications of the hardware and software used have also been included. Contrary to my assumption, this attempt ran on a PC with server class components instead of some cluster. Although they did use software for bit error

Happy Holi

2011-03-17T16:56:00.000+05:30

Wishing you all Happy Holi. May this festival of colours bring new hues to you life.

Fountain pen of a left-hander

2011-03-06T23:46:00.000+05:30

These days its becoming increasingly rare to see fountain pens. Very few people seem to be still using them on a regular basis. Personally I like the comfort associated with it, but dislike the fact the ink is not waterproof. So one drop of water in the paper, and whatever you have written is gone. It was a pleasant surprise for me to find out that a PhD student of IISc, Abhijit Khopkar uses

Project Euler Level 1

2011-02-26T12:10:00.004+05:30

I have been interested in puzzles since I was little. After learning programming I would search out puzzles that could be solved by coding. Few years back while I was pursuing my B.Sc. I encountered Project Euler: Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help

Feynman's answers to Lateral Thinking puzzles

2011-02-18T11:55:00.003+05:30

Late physicist Richard P. Feynman was well known for answering questions in a typical manner unique to him. Here are a few humorous takes on what he would have replied to the so called "lateral thinking" questions that are asked routinely at software company interviews these days. Here are two examples of the quirky answers that he might have given to these trick questions: Why are manhole

Algorithm for finding square-root

2011-02-15T09:12:00.000+05:30

It always intrigued me how one could find the square-root of a number. In school I was taught a digit-by-digit method to calculate square-root. I did implement it using BASIC in Std IX, but the solution did not seem elegant enough. By Std XI I had actually figured out the Bisection method by myself and used it to find any root of a number. This again was implemented in C++ (... and I still have

My first Python program

2011-02-12T14:46:00.002+05:30

I heard of Python in my final year of B.Tech. at CU. Since then I have tried many times to pick up the language. Unfortunately most of the efforts have not gone far mostly due to lack of a particular problem to attack. This time however it went differently. First I came across this brilliant and simple way (Monte Carlo technique for computing Pi) to compute the value of Pi from some CS magazine

Weird Idea

2011-02-06T09:45:00.000+05:30

I have a trolley with small plants. When I feel mischievous, I often take out the trolley to the verandah. Then I watch it from a distance. After a some bee find the flowers on the small plants. He goes back to the hive to inform the other bees.When he is gone I take the trolley away. I love watching the swarm of bees coming to my verandah for no reason. I imagine they must be cursing the

Be Rational, Get Real

2010-11-10T23:00:00.000+05:30

I think the picture conveys it all !! - - [edit, 2011-12-05] - - A fellow blogger after seeing the above pic, promptly forwarded me this picture This is aptly titled, "Keeping it real"

Happy Diwali (software engineer style)

2010-11-06T08:21:00.000+05:30

In this auspicious day, may you get, independence of JAVA popularity of WINDOWS security of LINUX luxury of .NET efficiency of C simplicity of HTML vastness of GOOGLE robustness of IBM Happy Diwali

Bash Auto-Completion Trick

2010-10-09T12:48:00.001+05:30

Most of us who use the bash shell in *nix environments, often find the Tab-key auto-completion to be a very helpful timesaver. But one of the main problems is that he feature is not adaptive, i.e. it does nothing to learn from my previous commands. For example in my home directory I have two folders: “picture” and “programming”. Usually there is no reason for me to traverse the “picture” folder

12 Coins puzzle

2010-10-03T17:06:00.001+05:30

The puzzle goes like this: A set of 12 coins of similar shape and size contains one counterfeit coin, whose weight is different from that of the other coins. Find the coin using a balance and minimum number of weighing. The catch of the problem is that it is not mentioned whether the counterfeit coin is lighter or heavier than the rest of the normal coins. Lower Bound Let us first examine what

Modulus Operator on negative numbers in C

2010-09-09T19:33:00.002+05:30

I had been introduced to the C language in the very first day of my B.Sc. course back in 2003. Since then I have been using it for doing quite some varied kinds of programming jobs. But even after so many years, its every now and then that I find out something I did not know before. Here is one such thing that I encountered few days back. I was taught by both my C teachers in B.Sc. as well as in