Books I Could Read This Year

Books

1. Men Who Made New Physics It is the story of the physicists who heralded the new era of physics.

2. Five Dollar Smile One of the early writings of Shashi Tharoor Shashi Krishnan Chandrashekaran Tharoor (Malayalam pronunciation: [ʃɐʃi t̪ɐɾuːr]; born 9 March 1956) is an Indian politician, author, former diplomat and public intellectual, who has been serving as Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He is currently the Chairman of Committee on External Affairs. He was formerly an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and 2006 United Nations Secretary-General selection for the post of Secretary-General in 2006. Founder-Chairman of All India Professionals Congress, he formerly served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and on Informational Technology. He has about two dozen titles to his credit and was awarded by World Economic Forum as "Global Leader of Tomorrow". , perhaps when he was in college. Stories feature subjects that occupy adolescent minds. Subjects like friendship, love, sex, and politics are dealt with in a very comical way.

3. How I Taught My Grandma and Other Stories

4. Old Man and His God Both books by Madam Sudha Murty Sudha Murty (née Kulkarni; born 19 August 1950) is an Indian educator, author, and philanthropist. She is the Founder-Chairperson of the non-profit charitable organization Infosys Foundation. She is married to the co-founder of Infosys, N. R. Narayana Murthy. In 2024, Murty was nominated as Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha on 8 March 2024 for her contribution to social work and education. Murty was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India, for social work by the Government of India in 2006. In 2023, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India. . Most of the stories uphold values, virtuous nature in human beings, human dignity, and many ethical and philanthropic subjects.

5. It's Not About the Bike It is all about strength and courage by the cyclist and marathoner Lance Armstrong Lance Edward Armstrong (né Gunderson; born September 18, 1971) is an American former professional road racing cyclist. He achieved international fame for winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005, but was stripped of his titles in 2012 after an investigation into doping allegations found that Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs over his career. As a result, Armstrong is currently banned for life from all sanctioned bicycling events. , who defeated cancer to get back to racing and win the Tour de France five times.

6. Just Do It Very practical advice from Sir Richard Branson Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is an English business magnate who co-founded the Virgin Group in 1970, and as of 2016 controlled 5 companies remaining of once more than 400. . He just built the Virgin empire and encourages everyone to just do what one wants to do.

7. Bridges of Madison County A very romantic book. In fact, the best romantic book I have read so far. The writing is very good, and it is a subject that lies on the borderline of love and infidelity, but the author has dealt with it in a wonderful way that the reader can understand and sometimes agree with the borderline it portrays.

8. Guide to Earth, Moon, and Space Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov ( AZ-im-ov; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction. 's non-fiction writing. His writing is very lucid, and it tries to bring back the questions that a curious child wonders when standing outside and looking at the night sky. Questions like, "What are those shiny things? Why are they there? Why are they not falling? Why are so many of them there? Why is it dark now? Is the sun asleep? When we travel on a scooter, how come the moon is also traveling along with us? Can we race ahead of it?" Those are just fun and very valid questions. Asimov tries to answer them all in a way that can be understood by the child who asks those questions. The book is simply too good. I really loved it.

9. The Theory of Everything Stephen Hawking Stephen William Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world. explains science as it evolved from the times of Galileo to string theory. It is easy to read and presented in a very concise manner.

10. Revenge of the Baby-Sat

11. Calvin and Hobbes Calvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995. Commonly described as "the last great newspaper comic", Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed enduring popularity, influence, and academic and even a philosophical interest. (1st Book) Both of them feature lovable Calvin and Hobbes adventures.

12. Asterix Asterix (French: Astérix or Astérix le Gaulois [asteʁiks lə ɡolwa], "Asterix the Gaul"; also known as Asterix and Obelix in some adaptations or The Adventures of Asterix) is a French comic album series about a Gaulish village which, thanks to a magic potion that enhances strength, resists the forces of Julius Caesar's Roman Republic Army in a nonhistorical telling of the time after the Gallic Wars. Many adventures take the titular hero Asterix and his friend Obelix to Rome and beyond. Series

    • Asterix the Gaul
    • Asterix and the Golden Sickle
    • Asterix and the Goths
    • Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield
    • The Mansions of the Gods
    • Asterix and the Soothsayer
    • Asterix and Caesar's Gift

13. Fantastic Voyage Asimov's fiction, which is, in fact, based on the screenplay of a movie by the same name. The book came much earlier than the movie. Three men and a woman miniaturize themselves and enter inside the human body in a miniaturized submarine to perform an operation. They must complete the operation and get out of the body within a time limit; otherwise, even as their goal fails, everyone stands in danger of losing something very valuable—the information available with the person they are trying to save at any cost. Asimov has taken care to write fiction in a very logical way. For example, the team experiences "Brownian Motion" as they enter inside the body.

14. Out of My Comfort Zone Steve Waugh Stephen Rodger Waugh (born 2 June 1965) is an Australian former international cricketer and twin brother of cricketer Mark Waugh. A right-handed batsman and a medium-pace bowler, Waugh is considered one of the greatest cricketers of all time. Waugh was a part of the Australian team that won their first world title during the 1987 Cricket World Cup. As Australian captain from 1997 to 2004, he led Australia to fifteen of their record sixteen consecutive Test wins, and to victory in the 1999 Cricket World Cup. Waugh is considered the most successful Test captain in history with 41 victories and a winning ratio of 72%. 's biography. While reading this, I had many fits of laughter, moments of amusement, and wonder at this simple guy with a lot of character. Steve is definitely one of my favorite sportspeople. He is very plain and direct and a very bold person too, as we can see in his autobiography. Good lessons on leadership and management are presented in his book.

15. Krishna and Gopal

16. Savitri

17. Buddhist Tales From the Amar Chitra Katha Amar Chitra Katha (ACK Comics) is an Indian comic book publisher, based in Mumbai, India. The company was founded in 1967 by Anant Pai. Most of its comics are based on religious legends and epics, historical figures and biographies, folktales and cultural stories. series, based on folklore, mythology, and ancient Indian stories. They deal with moral values, justice, ethical leadership, and administration. I have more Amar Chitra Katha books to read.

18. The Hound of the Baskervilles

19. The Sign of Four

20. A Study in Scarlet These showcase the brilliance of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction. through Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes () is a fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in his stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard. and Dr. Watson. I read these for the second time, as I had completed the Sherlock Holmes series a long time back.

Many of these books, like Guide to Earth, Moon, and Space, The Theory of Everything, and the Sherlock Holmes series, I read along with my friend Avinash, and we both enjoyed them together.

Technical Books

Apart from these, there are a few technical books I could lay my hands upon. Note, technical books are not meant to be read; they are to be studied thoroughly and worked upon a number of times. So, I cannot put them in the "read" category.

I could get a chance to work with: - Version Control with Subversion by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick, and C. Michael Pilato - Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis - Cryptography and Network Security by William Stallings

Final Thoughts

My friend and I had thought at the start of the year to compete for the 50 Book Challenge. While that was my list of books, I am glad that we got started, and next year, I plan to read at least 50 books.

Let me know if you would like to read any of these books; I would be glad to share them with you. You can also have a peek into my online library at books.google.com.

Happy New Year 2008 to all!

Good list of books.If you have time watch the movie "Bridges of Madison Country".It starrs Clint Eastwood

Anonymous

Great Post this time, i have seen quality of books you read.The Buddhist tales from amar chitra Katha Books made me to think about it, as i have not been through it.I like the ack series the much.

geet_jain

I often forget the syntax and usage of lambda functions In mathematical logic, the lambda calculus (also written as λ-calculus) is a formal system for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. Untyped lambda calculus, the topic of this article, is a universal machine, a model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine (and vice versa). It was introduced by the mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of his research into the foundations of mathematics. In 1936, Church found a formulation which was logically consistent, and documented it in 1940. , the following examples should help as a reminder.

>>> def function(x):
...     return x*3
...
>>> function(2)
6
>>> func_with_lambda = lambda x: x*2
>>> func_with_lambda(2)
4
>>> (lambda x: x*2)(2)
4
>>>

First, Freed.in Conference.

Next, the fun-filled Manali, Himachal Pradesh Manali (Hindi: [mənaːliː]) is a resort town, near Kullu town in Kullu district in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. It is situated in the northern end of the Kullu Valley, formed by the Beas River. The town is located in the Kullu district, approximately 270 kilometres (170 mi) north of the state capital of Shimla and 544 kilometres (338 mi) northeast of the national capital of New Delhi. With a population of 8,096 people recorded in the 2011 Indian census Manali is the beginning of an ancient trade route through Lahaul (H.P.) and Ladakh, over the Karakoram Pass and onto Yarkand and Hotan in the Tarim Basin of China. Manali is a popular tourist destination in India and serves as the gateway to the Lahaul and Spiti district as well as the city of Leh in Ladakh. trip with friends.

Then, hacking something at the Y! Hackday.

It was a week full of fun.

I was at Hack Day too, too bad we didn't meet up, maybe next time :)

swaroopch

Hi Swaroop, remember that guy who approached you for help with " Beautiful Soup (HTML parser) Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents, including those with malformed markup. It creates a parse tree for documents that can be used to extract data from HTML, which is useful for web scraping. " Library. Yes, that was I, another Python (programming language) Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. programmer who has found your "A Byte of Python" very useful and has been constantly recommending that to everyone who wants to get started with python.

Nice to meet you. I hope we will have a lot of 'pythonic' things discuss. :)

Senthil

Oh! That was you :) ... Yep we should discuss, pythonic or otherwise :)

swaroopch

http://slashdot.org/anniversary.pl?view_id=583

{H,F}ello /. ers!

I will be at my home town, Madurai, on 13th October and I was looking for Slashdot Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments. Slashdot also offers a business software comparison directory with over 100,000 software products. party at Madurai and could not find one, so I decided to host one myself and invite Madurai geeks for the meet.

Location:

Anna Nagar Cafe Coffee Day Café Coffee Day (CCD) is an Indian multinational chain of coffeehouses headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It is a subsidiary of Coffee Day Enterprises Limited. Internationally, CCD is present in Austria, Czech Republic, Malaysia, Nepal and Egypt. .

Timings:

5:00 PM to 7:00 PM.

Party Link:

http://slashdot.org/anniversary.pl?view_id=583

If we get going, then we shall: - Have some fun discussions. - Cut the Cake. - Enjoy the evening.

Hope you will be able to make it, let me know if you have some ideas. (Either comment on this post or email me at orsenthil at gmail dot com)

Thank you.

Update

I convinced my sister and my cousin to come along for a coffee and we all went there. btw both of them can be considered geeks as I have seen my sister twidling with computer a lot before she decided to pursue her Dental Studies, and my cousin aged 11 was playing with Nintendo DS The Nintendo DS is a foldable handheld game console produced by Nintendo, released globally across 2004 and 2005. The DS, an initialism for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld games: two LCD screens working in tandem (the bottom of which is a touchscreen), a built-in microphone, and support for wireless connectivity. Both screens are encompassed within a clamshell design similar to the Game Boy Advance SP. The Nintendo DS also features the ability for multiple DS consoles to directly interact with each other over Wi-Fi within a short range without the need to connect to an existing wireless network. Alternatively, they could interact online using the now-defunct Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service. Its main competitor was Sony's PlayStation Portable during the seventh generation of video game consoles. lite in full swing. We had good time and had a cake cheering slashdot. :)

So you're getting the T-shirt. :) Have fun!

Oh that, and, deja vu. ;)

sajith

Came to know about the T-Shirt stuff later only, Sajith. As I would not be at blore on 13th, I wanted to 'be there with ww-/. folks' from mdu. :) Pass it on, if you have any other, madurai/tamil nadu friends.

Thanks,

Senthil

Avi, Sanju, and I watched The Chronicles of Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven portal fantasy novels by British author C. S. Lewis. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes and originally published between 1950 and 1956, the series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician's Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle. on DVD. Based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a portal fantasy novel written by British author C. S. Lewis, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1950. It is the first published and best known of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956). Among all the author's books, it is also the most widely held in libraries. It was the first of The Chronicles of Narnia to be written and published, but is marked as volume two in recent editions that are sequenced according the stories' internal chronology. Like the other Chronicles, it was illustrated by Pauline Baynes, and her work has been retained in many later editions. by C. S. Lewis Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–1954), and Magdalene College, Cambridge (1954–1963). He is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he is also noted for his other works of fiction, such as The Screwtape Letters and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, including Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. , this film is a fairy tale intended for children with a truly happy ending. It is a delightful movie that offers a hopeful reminder that things do end well.

Re: Chronicles of Narnia

Hi Loga,

Yes, it was indeed a very nice movie. very positive one. :) I like Harry Potter Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The main story arc concerns Harry's conflict with Lord Voldemort, a dark wizard who intends to become immortal, overthrow the wizard governing body known as the Ministry of Magic, and subjugate all wizards and Muggles (non-magical people). also. This time, I watched "Harry potter and the order of phoenix" twice in the theater and have been a potter fan now. I really liked the last dialog where in Harry says to Hermoine, "we have something that Lord Voldemort Lord Voldemort ( VOHL-də-mor, -⁠mort in the films) is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling. He first appears in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) and returns either in person or in flashbacks in each novel in the series except the third, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which he is only mentioned. does not have", thats friendship and love.

It was a nice one as well.

Senthil

Senthil

Chronicles of Narnia

I too enjoyed that movie rather than Harry potter..

Loga

Anonymous

Leading author and programmer, Bruce Eckel Bruce Eckel (born (1957-07-08) July 8, 1957) is a computer programmer, author, and consultant. , posted some of his concerns on Python 3000 The programming language Python was conceived in the late 1980s, and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to ABC capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system. Van Rossum was Python's principal author and had a central role in deciding the direction of Python (as reflected in the title given to him by the Python community, Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)) until stepping down as leader on July 12, 2018. Python was named after the BBC TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus. stating that python community is missing to address some of the important issues with this major, backward incompatible release. Problems he mentions are concurrency support on multi-core cpus, easy deployment support, a standardized user interface amongst others. He expresses his dissatisfaction at the post titled Python 3K or Python 2.9?. Guido van Rossum Guido van Rossum (Dutch: [ˈxidoː vɑn ˈrɔsʏm]; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer. He is the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election. , in a very pragmatic way addresses the concerns with his response to Bruce Eckel and calling out more for developers to contribute to Python to improve it further. Bruce Eckel concludes with his thoughts that he wants his favorite language to be better with his reply to Guido's reply.

I moved to

We had good fun that day. Our practice as a team and improved from then on.

If the slide show does not show up, here is the photo link.

Orange Belt

Congratulations...

Anonymous

Re: Orange Belt

Thank you. :-)

Senthil

My sisters and I called up our school maths teacher, Vijayaraj madam to wish her on teachers day. Also called up my college prof, Dr. K. Ramar to wish.

Its a nice tribute we give to our teachers who have influenced us in many ways.

My English teacher, Mrs. Padmini Vasanthan seem to have influenced me to strive for a patient and organized approach in all activities.

Ramar sir, when I recollect, all I can appreciate is his humility, ability to strive and achieve things, even when somethings presented are above our comprehension. One can learn a lot from this simple person. He is always learning from others.

--- Teachers Day from Wikipedia ---

September 5 is Teacher's Day in "India". It is the birthday of second President of India and teacher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan BR (; 5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975; natively Radhakrishna) was an Indian academician, philosopher and statesman who served as the President of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, he held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952. . It is considered a "celebration" day, where teachers and students report to school as usual but the usual activities and classes are replaced by activities of celebration, thanking and remembrance. At some schools on this day, the responsibility of teaching is taken up by the senior students as an appreciation for their teachers. The idea is to let teachers sit back just for a day and let the students have a glimpse into the life of a teacher. It is an occasion when a token or appreciation in the form of presents are given to teachers by students to show their love and respect. A central piece in Hindu scripture reads "Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru devo Maheshwaraha - Gurussaakshaath param brahma tasmai shree gurave namaha," which translates as "The Guru (Teacher) is the Lord Brahma Brahma (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मा, IAST: Brahmā) is a Hindu god, referred to as "the Creator" within the Trimurti, the trinity of supreme divinity that includes Vishnu and Shiva. He is associated with creation, knowledge, and the Vedas. Brahma is prominently mentioned in creation legends. In some Puranas, he created himself in a golden embryo known as the Hiranyagarbha. (the Creator), the Guru is the Lord Vishnu Vishnu (; Sanskrit: विष्णु, lit. 'All Pervasive', IAST: Viṣṇu, pronounced [ʋɪʂɳʊ]), also known as Narayana and Hari, is one of the principal deities of Hinduism. He is the supreme being within Vaishnavism, one of the major traditions within contemporary Hinduism. (the Preserver), the Guru is the Lord Shiva Shiva (; Sanskrit: शिव, lit. 'The Auspicious One', IAST: Śiva [ɕɪʋɐ]), also known as Mahadeva (; Sanskrit: महादेव:, lit. 'The Great God', IAST: Mahādevaḥ, [mɐɦaːd̪eːʋɐh]) and Hara, is one of the principal deities of Hinduism. He is the Supreme Being in Shaivism, one of the major traditions within Hinduism. (the Destroyer). To that Guru we offer our salutations."

Teachers Day

Jus got a glimpse of the teachers day I used to spend in my school days after reading ur post!!! Athoda Teachers Day Maranthu Pochu.. Gud that you keep remembering ur mentors...

Loga

Anonymous

Common sense Common sense (from Latin sensus communis) is "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument". As such, it is often considered to represent the basic level of sound practical judgement or knowledge of basic facts that any adult human being ought to possess. It is "common" in the sense of being shared by nearly all people. Relevant terms from other languages used in such discussions include the aforementioned Latin, itself translating Ancient Greek κοινὴ αἴσθησις (koinḕ aísthēsis), and French bon sens. However, these are not straightforward translations in all contexts, and in English different shades of meaning have developed. In philosophical and scientific contexts, since the Age of Enlightenment the term "common sense" has been used for rhetorical effect both approvingly and disapprovingly. On the one hand it has been a standard for good taste, good sense, and source of scientific and logical axioms. On the other hand it has been equated to conventional wisdom, vulgar prejudice, and superstition. is the most evenly distributed quantity in the world.

Everyone thinks he has enough.

-- René Descartes René Descartes ( day-KART, also UK: DAY-kart; French: [ʁəne dekaʁt] ; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650): 58  was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, and later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic. , 1637

While reading through Mark Pilgrim (software developer) Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authored a popular blog, and has written several books, including Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Formerly an accessibility architect in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group, he started working at Google in March 2007. In 2018, he moved to Brave. 's Dive Into Python Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authored a popular blog, and has written several books, including Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Formerly an accessibility architect in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group, he started working at Google in March 2007. In 2018, he moved to Brave. , stumbled upon this interesting thought, wherein he says that, when you 'plan' to develop a full -fledged feature for a software which will help in certain tasks, and if you end up coding a small version, make it just work rather than a completed polished 'as-per-plan' thing, then you are not only being inefficient, but you are being rude (to your customers).

That's a very good thought. Most of times, I think of designing a software and when it reaches to level where it works, I stop there and move to next. The working thing, sometimes never goes past my computer.

1) Diff In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it is like Levenshtein distance in that it tries to determine the smallest set of deletions and insertions to create one file from the other. The utility displays the changes in one of several standard formats, such that both humans or computers can parse the changes, and use them for patching. -ruP original modified > patch

2) Patch (Unix) The computer tool patch is a Unix program that updates text files according to instructions contained in a separate file, called a patch file. The patch file (also called a patch for short) is a text file that consists of a list of differences and is produced by running the related diff program with the original and updated file as arguments. Updating files with patch is often referred to as applying the patch or simply patching the files. -p0 < patch

I watched the superstar Rajinikanth Shivaji Rao Gaikwad (born 12 December 1950), known professionally as Rajinikanth, is an Indian actor who predominantly works in Tamil cinema. In a career spanning over five decades, he has done 170 films that includes films in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, and Malayalam. He is widely regarded to be one of the most successful and popular actors in the history of Indian cinema. Known for his uniquely styled mannerism and one liners in films, he has a huge fan base and a cult following. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Bhushan in 2000 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2016, India's third and second highest civilian honours respectively, and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2019, the highest Indian award in the field of cinema, for his contributions to Indian cinema. He has won numerous film awards including one National Film Award, seven Tamil Nadu State Film Awards, a Nandi Award, one Filmfare Award and two Maharashtra State Film Awards. starrer Shivaji today. It was very enjoyable—a pleasant family entertainer. Fans of the superstar will surely love it. It's a movie to watch leisurely and savor, with plenty of stylish moments and entertaining dialogues. Truly memorable!

This is a Emacs Emacs ( ), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 30.1 , released February 2025. , viper mode. If vim Vim ( ; vi improved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. fans are threathened and forced to user emacs, then they might find this M-x viper-mode as a consolation somewhat akin to a family photo a prisoner has in jail. He will be missing his family for sure though.

:-)

its more like taking a heroin packet with u when u go to rehab.

sad!

Anonymous

power of VI

http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/vi.html

Anonymous

I was almost about to give up on Ubuntu Ubuntu ( uu-BUUN-too) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical and a community of contributors under a meritocratic governance model, Ubuntu is released in multiple official editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for IoT and robotic devices. , because after I installed the Fiesty, I was not able to download the packages from Repositories due to some proxy authentication issue. Tried various things for a week and when could not go any step further, I had thought let me get back to Fedora and was thinking about how new users of Linux will be feeling when they dont get support on what they need to get wishes satisfied with Linux. In my case, it was a particular distribution.

After a week, I setup my box again and wanted to give a final try. Instead of going to Synaptic (software) Synaptic is a GTK-based graphical user interface designed for the APT package manager used by the Debian Linux distribution and its derivatives. Synaptic is usually used on systems based on deb packages but can also be used on systems based on RPM packages. It can be used to install, remove and upgrade software packages and to add repositories. and meddling with Repository sources, I thought let me try Add/Remove application to Install software and see what happens.

The basic install of ubuntu (from the CD) did not have things which a regular Linux user would desire. Well, what the heck, gvim was not there! Browsing through the software list I checked Emacs Emacs ( ), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 30.1 , released February 2025. 21 for Installation and pressed Apply. Something interesting started to happen. It started downloading automatically from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/feisty/main/

I felt a kind of relief that I will be able to spend more time with ubuntu now.

There is a tricky bug with Ubuntu package manager, I think. The following was my setup with package installation from repos worked.

1) Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. Firefox is available for Windows 10 or later versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, such as reactOS. Firefox is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser. configured with proxy and proxy authentication details. 2) Gnome Network Preferences, Proxy NOT configured. 3) Without adding any repos, archive.ubuntu.com which is kind of a default repo is only working thing.

If I configure, Gnome Network Preferences with proxy details, the package manager fails with Proxy Authentication message.

The following tests might help.

1) Without Firefox Proxy, try with package manager. 2) Test Gnome Network Preferences for other applications. Epiphany (web browser) GNOME Web, called Epiphany until 2012 and still known by that code name, is a free and open-source web browser based on the GTK port of Apple's WebKit rendering engine, called WebKitGTK. It is developed by the GNOME project for Unix-like systems. It is the default and official web browser of GNOME, and part of the GNOME Core Applications. can be used. 3) Try other repositories.

I shall try that and figure out the exact issue.

Now that I was able to configure the package manager, I got a wealth of neatly arranged package to choose from and Install. The Installation procedure was totally homogeneous. Neat, easy is what I can say of Ubuntu. Hey, you might hear those two words from many of the Ubuntu users, but you will appreciate only when you "feel" it.

Even Picassa download in deb format was handled properly by gnome deb package installer. I had never used deb and always thought deb format is difficult than rpm.

I had transfered my camera shot movies of Bungee jump to Ubuntu machine, first surprised to see the thumbnail of avi file and next Totem (media player) GNOME Videos, formerly known as Totem, is a media player (audio and video) for the GNOME computer desktop environment. GNOME Videos uses the Clutter and GTK+ toolkits. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 (released in March 2005), but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. Totem utilizes the GStreamer framework for playback, though until version 2.27.1, it could alternatively be configured to use the Xine libraries instead of GStreamer. player played that avi file. I felt wow!. Because, its first time Totem player had worked for me (apart from the live cd demo)

Then I spent looking at all the interesting programs that default, multiverse, and universe repositories could offer. There are tons of python language packages to install directly from the repos.

But the sweetest of all surprises came, when I thought let me search for rapple and nanoblogger. I know, there were debian maintainers for these to two projects. But it was really nice, to see a the project I have contributed to as being listed from the repository and choosing them to install it!

Python (programming language) Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. - why settle for snake oil when you can have the whole snake? —From Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. posting by Mark Jackson, June 1998

Mentioned at the Python Development page. Its a good fun! :-)

/**
 *Without using /, % or * operator, write a function to divide a number by 3.
 **/

#include



int divideby3(int);



int main(int argc,char **argv)

{

    int res;

    res = divideby3(9);

    printf("%d",res);

    return 0;

}



int divideby3(int aNumber)

{

    div_t d = div(aNumber, 3);

    return d.quot;

}

Never have explored the capablities of stdlib The C standard library, sometimes referred to as libc, is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard. Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it was developed at the same time as the C POSIX library, which is a superset of it. Since ANSI C was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, the C standard library is also called the ISO C library. . Infact, with C Programming Language out of touch for so many months, I was thinking this program will seriously fail, thinking kind of how come div_t datatype, d.quote (object.property ?) etc. gcc The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain which is used for most projects related to GNU and the Linux kernel. With roughly 15 million lines of code in 2019, GCC is one of the largest free programs in existence. It has played an important role in the growth of free software, as both a tool and an example. will crib saying dont using c++. But it worked perfectly fine.

umm, structs In the C programming language, struct is the keyword used to define a composite, a.k.a. record, data type – a named set of values that occupy a block of memory. It allows for the different values to be accessed via a single identifier, often a pointer. A struct can contain other data types so is used for mixed-data-type records. For example a bank customer struct might contains fields: name, address, telephone, balance. are part of standard C.

div_t is a struct:

/* Returned by `div'.  */



typedef struct



{



int quot;                   /* Quotient.  */



int rem;                    /* Remainder.  */



} div_t;

bluesmoon

Yes , I realized about struct datatype in C and unfortunately forgot the mention that in the post. All I was thinking about is, it was so out-of-mind (due to out-of-sight) and all obj.property and obj.method was what coming up.

Senthil

I completed and submitted my project "N-Puzzle Problem Solver". I wrote it in Python, and it was a lot of fun. I learned about the similarities between Lisp and Python, and discovered why Lisp is so powerful and how quickly things come together once you understand the language.

When solving the N-Puzzle The 15 puzzle (also called Gem Puzzle, Boss Puzzle, Game of Fifteen, Mystic Square and more) is a sliding puzzle. It has 15 square tiles numbered 1 to 15 in a frame that is 4 tile positions high and 4 tile positions wide, with one unoccupied position. Tiles in the same row or column of the open position can be moved by sliding them horizontally or vertically, respectively. The goal of the puzzle is to place the tiles in numerical order (from left to right, top to bottom). problem, I initially tried with no fundamental algorithms, and it was extremely challenging to derive a solution. However, after discovering the strategy of using Manhattan distances Taxicab geometry or Manhattan geometry is geometry where the familiar Euclidean distance is ignored, and the distance between two points is instead defined to be the sum of the absolute differences of their respective Cartesian coordinates, a distance function (or metric) called the taxicab distance, Manhattan distance, or city block distance. The name refers to the island of Manhattan, or generically any planned city with a rectangular grid of streets, in which a taxicab can only travel along grid directions. In taxicab geometry, the distance between any two points equals the length of their shortest grid path. This different definition of distance also leads to a different definition of the length of a curve, for which a line segment between any two points has the same length as a grid path between those points rather than its Euclidean length. on Norvig's site, coding the solution became much more enjoyable. It really gave me a sense of what Toy problem In scientific disciplines, a toy problem or a puzzlelike problem is a problem that is not of immediate scientific interest, yet is used as an expository device to illustrate a trait that may be shared by other, more complicated, instances of the problem, or as a way to explain a particular, more general, problem solving technique. A toy problem is useful to test and demonstrate methodologies. Researchers can use toy problems to compare the performance of different algorithms. They are also good for game designing. AI problems are like.

help needed

hi,

i m amazed to see that in ISSc,this problem (N-puzzle) was a one semester proj and here in my university(Goa university),our teacher has given this prob today told us do this prob till tomorrow.

can u help me ?? i have to do this in C/C++ or JAVA.

thanks

abhi (abhishek.luck@gmail.com)

Anonymous

Re: help needed

Thats one of the toy- AI problems. We started off without the algorithms and tried it as we might think to solve.. I could implement it say in a week, only after the algorithms were known. It was assignment too (or rather class discussion), but I did with some explanation and analysis as a project.

Senthil

Coding and Karate Karate (空手) (; Japanese pronunciation: [kaɾate] ; Okinawan pronunciation: [kaɽati]), also karate-do (空手道, Karate-dō), is a martial art developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom. It developed from the indigenous Ryukyuan martial arts (called te (手), "hand"; tī in Okinawan) under the influence of Chinese martial arts. While modern karate is primarily a striking art that uses punches and kicks, traditional karate training also employs throwing and joint locking techniques. A karate practitioner is called a karate-ka (空手家). are similar. They both require enormous amount of self-discipline, which is a key aspect of Martial arts Martial arts are codified systems and traditions of combat practiced for a number of reasons such as self-defence; military and law enforcement applications; competition; physical, mental, and spiritual development; entertainment; and the preservation of a nation's intangible cultural heritage. The concept of martial arts was originally associated with East Asian tradition, but subsequently the term has been applied to practices that originated outside that region. training.

Lundblad is a leading contributor to the Apache Subversion Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a version control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). open source code project, which has produced a widely adopted code management system. He was one of five open source leaders recognized in August at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) was an American annual convention for the discussion of free and open-source software. It was organized by publisher O'Reilly Media and was held each summer, mostly in Portland, Oregon, from 1999 to 2019. . Unlike the others, Lundblad is blind—a fact that did not concern Google, his new employer.

I'm just amazed.

Free Speech Flag

The flag represents Digital rights Digital rights are those human rights and legal rights that allow individuals to access, use, create, and publish digital media or to access and use computers, other electronic devices, and telecommunications networks. The concept is particularly related to the protection and realization of existing rights, such as the right to privacy and freedom of expression, in the context of digital technologies, especially the Internet. The laws of several countries recognize a right to Internet access. and freedom of expression in the digital age.

well, i first thot it is called fs flag coz it looks so gay :-D

Anonymous

And you got interested... :) ??

Anonymous

vimplugin for Eclipse

• Install it using the Eclipse plugin installer and point it to: http://vimplugin.sf.net/update
• In Window Preferences, locate the vimplugin settings and set the path to your Vim installation (not gVim). (Note: This might not work immediately—ensure you also configure General > Editor > File Associations for the file types you wish to open with Vim.)
• Open a file and click to focus on it. (I found this workaround in the known issues.)

Re: VIM Sucks

shortly thereafter, VIM returned carrying a shotgun and wearing steel-toed boots. VIM shot emacs in the chest and then kicked Emacs in the head and in the groin. Emacs never was the same again. To this day, Emacs plays with his toy towers of Hanoi puzzle and always has a psychiatrist around in case he feels scared.

Anonymous

Re: VIM Sucks

Not really.vim is a useful editor when u know how to use it. So is emacs.

Senthil

VIM Sucks

vim sucks, alrite?

why not browse right from inside emacs? u get ALL the functionality of emacs right away and it is extensible like crazy and u can do whatever u want!

Anonymous

Re: VIM Sucks

i once went to a bar. the night was young. the crowd was crazy. the air was electric. and then it happened. emacs kicked vim's ass and threw him on floor. vim 'whim'pered and ran away in shame.

Anonymous

1. Place the ptags.py file in your $PATH.
2. From the project directory containing your Python project, run the following command:

find . -name "*.py" -print | xargs ptags.py

I was previously using various inefficient methods to achieve this. The ptags.py script is similar to Ctags Ctags is a programming tool that generates an index file (or tag file) of names found in source and header files of various programming languages to aid code comprehension. Depending on the language, functions, variables, class members, macros and so on may be indexed. These tags allow definitions to be quickly and easily located by a text editor, a code search engine, or other utility. Alternatively, there is also an output mode that generates a cross reference file, listing information about various names found in a set of language files in human-readable form. but specifically designed for Python code.

Wow! My Google Soc application to the Python Software Foundation got accepted. My mentor will be George D. Montana. Thank you, G-SOC and PSF.

Whee! Have fun, mister.

sajith

Awesome!!!

Great news da! All the best.

~Kirubakaran.

Anonymous

oh sure, thanks sajith.

Senthil

Re: Awesome!!!

Thanks kiruba, brother.

Senthil

Wow! Congrats! I was using urllib2 recently and felt it can be made easier. I like Java's

pramodbiligiri

thanks pramod. just got started with. thanks for the pointer, have never used Apache HttpClient, but once familiar with the task, should be a good idea to look into it also.

Senthil

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born 14 December 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is the co-author with Stuart J. Russell of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. has written a very interesting article on Spell checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine. and 20 Line Spellchecker in Python, which is really cool.

Syntax and Semantics

What's with All the Parentheses?

• Extensive use of parentheses and prefix notation.
• When John McCarthy first invented Lisp, he intended to implement a more ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years. -like syntax, which he called M-expressions.
• The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who preferred [S-expressions] to any FORTRAN Fortran (; formerly FORTRAN) is a third-generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. -like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised.

Breaking Open the Black Box

• In most programming languages, the language processor--whether an interpreter or a compiler--operates as a black box.
• Language processor is divided into three subsystems:
• A lexical analyzer breaks up the stream of characters into tokens.
• And feeds them to a parser that builds a tree representing the expressions in the program, according to the language's grammar.

• This tree--called an Abstract syntax tree An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a data structure used in computer science to represent the structure of a program or code snippet. It is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the text. It is sometimes called just a syntax tree. --is then fed to an evaluator that either interprets it directly or compiles it into some other language such as machine code.

• Common Lisp defines two black boxes, one that translates text into Lisp objects and another that implements the semantics of the language in terms of those objects. The first box is called the reader, and the second is called the evaluator.

• Each black box defines one level of syntax. The reader defines how strings of characters can be translated into Lisp objects called s-expressions.

• (foo 1 2) is legal s-expression whereas ("foo" 1 2) is not, because a list starting with string has no meaning.

• This split of Black Box into two has a couple of consequences:

• One is that you can use s-expressions, as an externalizable data format (remember the file database example) for data other than source code, using READ to read it and PRINT to print it.

• The other consequence is that since the semantics of the language are defined in terms of trees of objects rather than strings of characters, it's easier to generate code within the language than it would be if you had to generate code as text.

• Generating code completely from scratch is only marginally easier--building up lists vs. building up strings is about the same amount of work. The real win, however, is that you can generate code by manipulating existing data. (This is the basis of macros in lisp)

S-expressions

• Elements of s-expressions are lists and atoms
• Lists are delimited by parentheses and can contain any number of whitespace-separated elements. (Recursion here)
• Atoms are everything else.

• Comments--which aren't, technically speaking, s-expressions--start with a semicolon, extend to the end of a line, and are treated essentially like whitespace.

• Since lists are syntactically so trivial, the only remaining syntactic rules you need to know are those governing the form of different kinds of atoms (numbers, strings and names)

• Numbers are fairly straightforward: any sequence of digits--possibly prefaced with a sign (+ or -), containing a decimal point (.) or a solidus (/), or ending with an exponent marker--is read as a number. E.g: 123, 3/7, 1.0, 1.0e0, 1.0d0, 1.0e-4, +42, -42

• All rationals are internally represented in a simplified form.

• On the other hand, 1.0, 1.0d0, and 1 can all denote different objects because the different floating-point representations and integers are different types.

• Strings are enclosed in double quotes. Within a string a backslash (\) escapes the next character, causing it to be included in the string regardless of what it is. The only two characters that must be escaped within a string are double quotes and the backslash itself.

• Names used in Lisp programs, such as FORMAT and hello-world, and db are represented by objects called symbols.

• Almost any character can appear in a name. Whitespace characters cannot appear, because the elements of the list are separated by whitespace.

• No periods only name.

• Open and close parentheses, double and single quotes, backtick, comma, colon, semicolon, backslash, and vertical bar are for syntactic purposes in lisp. If wish to include them in name, precede with backslash or two vertical bars.

• While reading names, the reader converts all unescaped characters in a name to their uppercase equivalents. That's why REPL prints the upper case name.

• Standard style, these days, is to write code in all lowercase and let the reader change names to uppercase.

• The reader interns symbols--after it has read the name and converted it to all uppercase, the reader looks in a table called a package for an existing symbol with the same name. If can't find one, create a new symbol and add it to the table or return the symbol as already in the table.

• Hyphenated names is a convention.

• Global variables are given names that start and end with *
• Constants are given names, starting and ending with +.

• Few programmers, define name starting with % and %%.

• The syntax of list, number, strings and symbols represent a good amount of lisp programs.

x             ; the symbol X
()            ; the empty list
(1 2 3)       ; a list of three numbers
("foo" "bar") ; a list of two strings
(x y z)       ; a list of three symbols
(x 1 "foo")   ; a list of a symbol, a number, and a string
(+ (* 2 3) 4) ; a list of a symbol, a list, and a number.

An only slightly more complex example is the following four-item list that contains two symbols, the empty list, and another list, itself containing two symbols and a string:

(defun hello-world ()
  (format t "hello, world"))

S-expressions as Lisp Forms

• Common Lisp's evaluation rule defines a second level of syntax that determines which s-expressions can be treated as Lisp forms.
• Any atom--any nonlist or the empty list--is a legal Lisp form as is any list that has a symbol as its first element.
• For purposes of discussion, you can think of the evaluator as a function that takes as an argument a syntactically well-formed Lisp form and returns a value, which we can call the value of the form.
• The simplest Lisp forms, atoms, can be divided into two categories: symbols and everything else.
• Symbol, evaluated as a form, is considered the name of a variable and evaluates to the current value of the variable.
• For instance, the symbol PI names a constant variable whose value is the best possible floating-point approximation to the mathematical constant pi.
• All other atoms--numbers and strings are the kinds you've seen so far--are self-evaluating objects.
• It's also possible for symbols to be self-evaluating in the sense that the variables they name can be assigned the value of the symbol itself. Two important constants that are defined this way are T and NIL, the canonical true and false values.
• Another class of self-evaluating symbols are the keyword symbols--symbols whose names start with :.
• To determine what kind of form a given list is, the evaluator must determine whether the symbol that starts the list is the name of a function, a macro, or a special operator.

Function Calls

• The evaluation rule for function call forms is simple: evaluate the remaining elements of the list as Lisp forms and pass the resulting values to the named function.

(function-name argument*)

• Thus, the following expression is evaluated by first evaluating 1, then evaluating 2, and then passing the resulting values to the + function, which returns 3:

(+ 1 2)

Special Operators

• Because all the arguments to a function are evaluated before the function is called, there's no way to write a function that behaves like the IF operator.
• To solve this problem, Common Lisp defines a couple dozen so-called special operators, IF being one, that do things that functions can't do. There are 25 in all, but only a small handful are used directly in day-to-day programming.
• The rule for IF is pretty easy: evaluate the first expression. If it evaluates to non-NIL, then evaluate the next expression and return its value. Otherwise, return the value of evaluating the third expression or NIL if the third expression is omitted.
• An even simpler special operator is QUOTE, which takes a single expression as its "argument" and simply returns it, unevaluated.
• QUOTE is used commonly enough that a special syntax for it is built into the reader. Instead of writing the following:

(quote (+ 1 2))

you can write this:

'(+ 1 2)

This syntax is a small extension of the s-expression syntax understood by the reader. From the point of view of the evaluator, both those expressions will look the same: a list whose first element is the symbol QUOTE and whose second element is the list (+ 1 2).15

Macros:

• While special operators extend the syntax of Common Lisp beyond what can be expressed with just function calls, the set of special operators is fixed by the language standard. Macros, on the other hand, give users of the language a way to extend its syntax.

• The evaluation of a macro form proceeds in two phases: First, the elements of the macro form are passed, unevaluated, to the macro function. Second, the form returned by the macro function--called its expansion--is evaluated according to the normal evaluation rules.

• For instance, when you compile a whole file of source code with the function COMPILE-FILE, all the macro forms in the file are recursively expanded until the code consists of nothing but function call forms and special forms. This macroless code is then compiled into a FASL file that the LOAD function knows how to load.

• Since the evaluator doesn't evaluate the elements of the macro form before passing them to the macro function, they don't need to be well-formed Lisp forms.

• In other words, each macro defines its own local syntax. For instance, the backwards macro from Chapter 3 defines a syntax in which an expression is a legal backwards form if it's a list that's the reverse of a legal Lisp form.

• Macros (while syntactically similar to functions) provide an exciting hook into the compiler.

Truth, Falsehood and Equality

• T for True, NIL for False value and everything else is True.
• The tricky thing about NIL is that it's the only object that's both an atom and a list: in addition to falsehood, it's also used to represent the empty list.
• nil, (), 'nil, '() evaluate to NIL.
• t, 't evaluate to T.
• Common Lisp provides a number of type-specific equality predicates: = is used to compare numbers, CHAR= to compare characters, and so on.
• EQ tests for "object identity"--two objects are EQ if they're identical. (Don't use as they are implementation dependent)
• Thus, Common Lisp defines EQL to behave like EQ except that it also is guaranteed to consider two objects of the same class representing the same numeric or character value to be equivalent.
• EQUAL loosens the discrimination of EQL to consider lists equivalent if they have the same structure and contents, recursively, according to EQUAL. EQUAL also considers strings equivalent if they contain the same characters.
• EQUALP is similar to EQUAL except it's even less discriminating. It considers two strings equivalent if they contain the same characters, ignoring differences in case.

Formatting Lisp Code

• The indentation should reflect the structure of the code.
• Macro and special forms that implement control constructs are typically indented a little differently: the "body" elements are indented two spaces relative to the opening parenthesis of the form.

(defun print-list (list)
  (dolist (i list)
    (format t "item: ~a~%" i)))

• Re-indent a whole expression by positioning the cursor on the opening parenthesis and typing C-M-q.
• Or you can re-indent the whole body of a function from anywhere within it by typing C-c M-q.
• Finally, comments should be prefaced with one to four semicolons depending on the scope of the comment as follows:
• ;;;; four colon comments for file header.
• ;;; three colon for paragraph.
• ;; for the code following, which is indented along with code.

I submitted my proposal on clean up urllib in python to PSF The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is an American nonprofit organization devoted to the Python programming language, launched on March 6, 2001. The mission of the foundation is to foster development of the Python community and is responsible for various processes within the Python community, including developing the core Python distribution, managing intellectual rights, developer conferences including the Python Conference (PyCon), and raising funds. . Was reading the mails in the list and interacting with few mentors and found that folks are very helpful.

It kind of amazes me to know about these wonderful developers. It will be very inspiring indeed to work along with them (be it SoC The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. As of 2022, the program is open to anyone aged 18 or over, no longer just students and recent graduates. It was first held from May to August 2005. Participants get paid to write software, with the amount of their stipend depending on the purchasing power parity of the country where they are located. Project ideas are listed by host organizations involved in open-source software development, though students can also propose their own project ideas. or not).

As I had recorded in my old blog, I started learning Karate Karate (空手) (; Japanese pronunciation: [kaɾate] ; Okinawan pronunciation: [kaɽati]), also karate-do (空手道, Karate-dō), is a martial art developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom. It developed from the indigenous Ryukyuan martial arts (called te (手), "hand"; tī in Okinawan) under the influence of Chinese martial arts. While modern karate is primarily a striking art that uses punches and kicks, traditional karate training also employs throwing and joint locking techniques. A karate practitioner is called a karate-ka (空手家). , two years ago starting 22nd of March. While I am enjoying everybit of it, I have lot of ground to cover.

The three main components of karate training are Kihon Kihon (基本, きほん) is a Japanese term meaning "basics" or "fundamentals." The term is used to refer to the basic techniques that are taught and practiced as the foundation of most Japanese martial arts. , Kumite Kumite (Japanese: 組手, literally "grappling hands") is one of the three main sections of karate training, along with kata and kihon. Kumite is the part of karate in which a person trains against an adversary. , and Kata Kata is a Japanese word (型 or 形) meaning "form". It refers to a detailed choreographed pattern of martial arts movements. It can also be reviewed within groups and in unison when training. It is practiced in Japanese martial arts as a way to memorize and perfect the movements being executed. Korean martial arts with Japanese influence (hapkido, Tang Soo Do) use the derived term hyeong (hanja: 形) and also the term pumsae (hanja: 品勢 hangeul: 품새). .

Practical: A Simple Database

• In this chapter you'll write a simple database for keeping track of CDs.
• Common Lisp provides three distinct kinds of operators: functions, macros, and special operators.

CDs and Records

• To keep track of CDs that need to be ripped to MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners; for example, compared to CD-quality digital audio, MP3 compression can commonly achieve a 75–95% reduction in size, depending on the bit rate. In popular usage, MP3 often refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 file format (.mp3) on consumer electronic devices. s and which CDs should be ripped first, each record in the database will contain the title and artist of the CD, a rating of how much the user likes it, and a flag saying whether it has been ripped.
• We need a way to represent a single database record.
• User defined class - Common Lisp Object System The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the facility for object-oriented programming in ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such as C++ or Java. CLOS was inspired by earlier Lisp object systems such as MIT Flavors and CommonLoops, although it is more general than either. Originally proposed as an add-on, CLOS was adopted as part of the ANSI standard for Common Lisp and has been adapted into other Lisp dialects such as EuLisp or Emacs Lisp.

CL-USER> (list 1 2 3)
(1 2 3)

• A plist is a list where every other element, starting with the first, is a symbol that describes what the next element in the list is. Symbol can be thought of as a name.
• For the symbols that name the fields in the CD database, you can use a particular kind of symbol, called a keyword symbol.

CL-USER> (list :a 1 :b 2 :c 3)
(:A 1 :B 2 :C 3)

• Function GETF, which takes a plist and a symbol and returns the value in the plist following the symbol.

CL-USER> (getf (list :a 1 :b 2 :c 3) :c)
3

• make-cd that will take the four fields as arguments and return a plist representing that CD.

CL-USER> (defun make-cd(title artist rating ripped)
       (list :title title :artist artist :rating rating :ripped ripped))
MAKE-CD

• DEFUN tells us that this form is defining a new function.
• When make-cd is called, the arguments passed to the call will be bound to the variables in the parameter list. For instance, to make a record for the CD Roses by Kathy Mattea, you might call make-cd like this:

CL-USER> (make-cd "Roses" "Kathy Mattea" 7 t)
(:TITLE "Roses" :ARTIST "Kathy Mattea" :RATING 7 :RIPPED T)

Filling CDs

• Larger Constructs to hold records.
• Also for simplicity you can use a global variable, db, which you can define with the DEFVAR macro. The asterisks (*) in the name are a Lisp naming convention for global variables.
• You can use the PUSH macro to add items to db. But it's probably a good idea to abstract things a tiny bit, so you should define a function add-record that adds a record to the database.

CL-USER> (defun add-record (cd) (push cd *db*))
ADD-RECORD

• add-record and make-cd together to add CDs to the database.

CL-USER> (add-record (make-cd "Fly" "Dixie Chicks" 8 t))
((:TITLE "Fly" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 8 :RIPPED T))
CL-USER> (add-record (make-cd "Roses" "Kathy Mattea" 7 t))
((:TITLE "Roses" :ARTIST "Kathy Mattea" :RATING 7 :RIPPED T)
 (:TITLE "Fly" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 8 :RIPPED T))
CL-USER> (add-record (make-cd "Home" "Dixie Chicks" 9 t))
((:TITLE "Home" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 9 :RIPPED T)
 (:TITLE "Roses" :ARTIST "Kathy Mattea" :RATING 7 :RIPPED T)
 (:TITLE "Fly" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 8 :RIPPED T))

• Current value of db by typing db
• dump-db function that dumps out the database in a more human-readable format.

CL-USER> (defun dump-db()
       (dolist (cd *db*)
         (format t "~{~a:~10t~a~%~}~%" cd)))
DUMP-DB

• Looping over all the elements of db with the DOLIST macro, binding each element to the variable cd in turn. For each value of cd, you use the FORMAT function to print it.
• In format, t is shorthand for the stream standard-output.
• Format directives start with ~ (much the way printf's directives start with %).

One of the coolest FORMAT directives is the ~R directive. Ever want to know how to say a really big number in English words? Lisp knows.

CL-USER> (format nil "~R" 42424242424242424242424242424242424242424242424242)
"forty-two quindecillion, four hundred and twenty-four quattuordecillion, two hundred and forty-two tredecillion, four hundred and twenty-four duodecillion, two hundred and forty-two undecillion, four hundred and twenty-four decillion, two hundred and forty-two nonillion, four hundred and twenty-four octillion, two hundred and forty-two septillion, four hundred and twenty-four sextillion, two hundred and forty-two quintillion, four hundred and twenty-four quadrillion, two hundred and forty-two trillion, four hundred and twenty-four billion, two hundred and forty-two million, four hundred and twenty-four thousand, two hundred and forty-two"

• ~a directive is the aesthetic directive; it means to consume one argument and output it in a human-readable form. This will render keywords without the leading : and strings without quotation marks.

CL-USER> (format t "~a" "Dixie Chicks")
Dixie Chicks
NIL
CL-USER> (format t "~a" :title)
TITLE
NIL

• The ~t directive is for tabulating. The ~10t tells FORMAT to emit enough spaces to move to the tenth column before processing the next ~a. A ~t doesn't consume any arguments.

CL-USER> (format t "~a:~10t~a" :artist "Dixie Chicks")
ARTIST:   Dixie Chicks
NIL

• When FORMAT sees ~{ the next argument to be consumed must be a list. FORMAT loops over that list, processing the directives between the ~{ and ~}.
• The ~% directive doesn't consume any arguments but tells FORMAT to emit a newline.
• We could have removed dolist macro call and used the format directive itself:

CL-USER> (defun dump-db()
       (format t "~{~{~a:~10t~a~%~}~%~}" *db*))
DUMP-DB

Improving User Interaction

• Need some way to prompt the user for a piece of information and read it.

CL-USER> (defun prompt-read(prompt)
       (format *query-io* "~a: " prompt)
       (force-output *query-io*)
       (read-line *query-io*))
PROMPT-READ

• Format to emit the prompt.
• FORCE-OUTPUT is necessary in some implementations to ensure that Lisp doesn't wait for a newline.
• Read a single line of text with the aptly named READ-LINE function.
• query-io is a global variable, can be recognized by the query-io naming.

Combining make-cd with prompt-read:

CL-USER> (defun prompt-for-cd()
       (make-cd
        (prompt-read "Title")
        (prompt-read "Artist")
        (prompt-read "Rating")
        (prompt-read "Ripped [y/n]")))
PROMPT-FOR-CD

• prompt-read returns a string, for converting the value to integer, lets use lisp's parse-integer function.
• parse-integer takes an optional argument :junk-allowed which tells to relax the conversion, if there is any exception.
• junk-allowed returns nil, if that cannot find the integer, to get over and set it as 0, we use the or macro.

CL-USER> (parse-integer (prompt-read "Rating"))
Rating: 10

10
2
CL-USER> (parse-integer(prompt-read "Rating"):junk-allowed t)
Rating: 10

10
2
CL-USER> (parse-integer(prompt-read "Rating"):junk-allowed t)
Rating: Senthil

NIL
0
CL-USER> (or(parse-integer(prompt-read "Rating"):junk-allowed t)0)
Rating: Senthil

0

• For y or n prompt, we can use common lisp function Y-OR-N-P, that will reprompt the user till something starting with Y, y, N, n is entered.

So, the final prompt-for-cd will be:

CL-USER> (defun prompt-for-cd ()
       (make-cd
        (prompt-read "Title")
        (prompt-read "Artist")
        (or (parse-integer (prompt-read "Rating"):junk-allowd t)0)
        (y-or-n-p "Ripped [y/n]")))
PROMPT-FOR-CD

• Let's go for adding a bunch of CDs.
• You can use the simple form of the LOOP macro, which repeatedly executes a body of expressions until it's exited by a call to RETURN.

CL-USER> (defun add-cds()
       (loop (add-record (prompt-for-cd))
         (if (not (y-or-n-p "Another? [y/n]"))(return))))
ADD-CDS

Saving and Loading the Database

• save-db function that takes a filename as an argument and saves the current state of the database.

CL-USER> (defun save-db (filename)
       (with-open-file (out filename
                :direction :output
                :if-exists :supersede)
         (with-standard-io-syntax
           (print *db* out))))
SAVE-DB

• WITH-OPEN-FILE macro opens a file, binds the stream to a variable, executes a set of expressions, and then closes the file. The list following WITH-OPEN-FILE is not function, but list of parameters to WITH-OPEN-FILE, defines the file to open to out stream, direction, output and if the file exists, then supersede.
• After opening the file, we need to print the content using print command, which is different from format, it prints in lisp recognizable objects which be read back by lisp-reader.
• WITH-STANDARD-IO-SYNTAX ensures that certain variables that affect the behavior of PRINT are set to their standard values.

CL-USER> (save-db "~/my-cds.db")

If open my-cds.db, we will find the output as in db at CL-USER> prompt.

The function to load the database back is similar.

CL-USER> (defun load-db(filename)
       (with-open-file (in filename)
         (with-standard-io-syntax
           (setf *db* (read in)))))
LOAD-DB

• The SETF macro is Common Lisp's main assignment operator. It sets its first argument to the result of evaluating its second argument.

Querying the Database

• Query database.
• Something LIKE (select :artist "Dixie Chicks")
• REMOVE-IF-NOT takes a predicate and a list and returns a copy of the list, containing only the elements that satisfy the predicate.
• The predicate argument can be any function that accepts a single argument and returns a boolean value--NIL for false and anything else for true.

CL-USER> (remove-if-not #'evenp '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10))
(2 4 6 8 10)

• The funny notation #' is shorthand for "Get me the function with the following name." Without the #', Lisp would treat evenp as the name of a variable and look up the value of the variable, not the function.
• We can also pass, remove-if-not, an anonymous function.

CL-USER> (remove-if-not #'(lambda (x)(= 0(mod x 2)))' (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10))
(2 4 6 8 10)

• The anonymous function here is (lambda (x) (=0 (mod x 2))) which returns true when x is even, else false.
• Note that lambda isn't the name of the function--it's the indicator you're defining an anonymous function.
• To select record using artist, we use the property of plist, getf, and equal to compare and put them all together in a lambda expression.

CL-USER> (remove-if-not
      #'(lambda (cd) (equal (getf cd :artist) "Dixie Chicks")) *db*)
((:TITLE "Home" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 9 :RIPPED T)
 (:TITLE "Fly" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 8 :RIPPED T))

• To wrap the whole expression in a function.

CL-USER> (defun select-by-artist (artist)
       (remove-if-not
        #'(lambda (cd) (equal (getf cd :artist)artist)) *db*))
SELECT-BY-ARTIST

• Anonymous functions embed the required details like artist.
• More general select function, with Anonymous function at the next stage.

CL-USER> (defun select (selector-fn)
       (remove-if-not selector-fn *db*))
SELECT
CL-USER> (select #'(lambda (cd) (equal (getf cd :artist) "Dixie Chicks")))
((:TITLE "Home" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 9 :RIPPED T)
 (:TITLE "Fly" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 8 :RIPPED T))

• Anonymous function creation can be wrapped up.

CL-USER> (defun artist-selector (artist)
       #'(lambda (cd) (equal (getf cd :artist) artist)))
ARTIST-SELECTOR
CL-USER> (select (artist-selector "Dixie Chicks"))
((:TITLE "Home" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 9 :RIPPED T)
 (:TITLE "Fly" :ARTIST "Dixie Chicks" :RATING 8 :RIPPED T))

• Write a general purpose, selector function generator, a function that, depending upon what arguments is getting passed, will generate a selector function for different fields, or different combination of fields.
• Keyword parameters
• Write functions with varying number of parameters, which are bound to the corresponding arguments to the call to the function.

(defun foo (&key a b c) (list a b c))

The only difference is the &key at the beginning of the argument list. However, the calls to this new foo will look quite different. These are all legal calls with the result to the right of the ==>:

(foo :a 1 :b 2 :c 3)  ==> (1 2 3)
(foo :c 3 :b 2 :a 1)  ==> (1 2 3)
(foo :a 1 :c 3)       ==> (1 NIL 3)
(foo)                 ==> (NIL NIL NIL)

• Need to differentiate between NIL assigned when no value passed vs explicitly assigned NIL.
• To allow this, when you specify a keyword parameter you can replace the simple name with a list consisting of the name of the parameter, a default value, and another parameter name, called a supplied-p parameter.
• Supplied-p parameter will set to true or false if an argument was passed to the function call.

(defun foo (&key a (b 20) (c 30 c-p)) (list a b c c-p))

Now the same calls from earlier yield these results:

(foo :a 1 :b 2 :c 3)  ==> (1 2 3 T)
(foo :c 3 :b 2 :a 1)  ==> (1 2 3 T)
(foo :a 1 :c 3)       ==> (1 20 3 T)
(foo)                 ==> (NIL 20 30 NIL)

• A general selector function, based on the above discussions will be:

(defun where (&key title artist rating (ripped nil ripped-p))
  #'(lambda (cd)
      (and
       (if title    (equal (getf cd :title)  title)  t)
       (if artist   (equal (getf cd :artist) artist) t)
       (if rating   (equal (getf cd :rating) rating) t)
       (if ripped-p (equal (getf cd :ripped) ripped) t))))

• Updating Existing Records--Another Use for WHERE

(defun update (selector-fn &key title artist rating (ripped nil ripped-p))
  (setf *db*
        (mapcar
         #'(lambda (row)
             (when (funcall selector-fn row)
               (if title    (setf (getf row :title) title))
               (if artist   (setf (getf row :artist) artist))
               (if rating   (setf (getf row :rating) rating))
               (if ripped-p (setf (getf row :ripped) ripped)))
             row) *db*)))

CL-USER> (update (where :artist "Dixie Chicks") :rating 11)
NIL

• Function to delete rows.

(defun delete-rows (selector-fn)
  (setf *db* (remove-if selector-fn *db*)))

• Remove Duplication and winning Big
• When a Lisp expression contains a call to a macro, instead of evaluating the arguments and passing them to the function, the Lisp compiler passes the arguments, unevaluated, to the macro code, which returns a new Lisp expression that is then evaluated in place of the original macro call.
• The main syntactic difference between a function and a macro is that you define a macro with DEFMACRO instead of DEFUN.

CL-USER>(defmacro backwards (expr) (reverse expr))
CL-USER> (backwards ("hello, world" t format))
hello, world
NIL

When the REPL started to evaluate the backwards expression, it recognized that backwards is the name of a macro. So it left the expression ("hello, world" t format) unevaluated, which is good because it isn't a legal Lisp form. It then passed that list to the backwards code. The code in backwards passed the list to REVERSE, which returned the list (format t "hello, world").

March 14 (written as 3-14 in the USA date format) is celebrated unofficially as Pi Day Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (the 3rd month) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant figures of π, and was first celebrated in the United States. It was founded in 1988 by Larry Shaw, an employee of a science museum in San Francisco, the Exploratorium. Celebrations often involve eating pie or holding pi recitation competitions. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day. UNESCO's 40th General Conference designated Pi Day as the International Day of Mathematics in November 2019. .

I started using Google Code project hosting for the ngwallpaper project. This Python script fetches the wallpaper of the day from the National Geographic National Geographic (formerly The National Geographic Magazine, sometimes branded as Nat Geo) is an American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal, nine months after the establishment of the society, but is now a popular magazine. In 1905, it began including pictures, a style for which it became well known. Its first color photos appeared in the 1910s. During the Cold War, the magazine committed itself to present a balanced view of the physical and human geography of countries beyond the Iron Curtain. Later, the magazine became outspoken on environmental issues. website and sets it as your desktop wallpaper.

It currently works on Windows by leveraging

Future improvements include: 1. Making it platform-agnostic (support for Windows, Linux, and Mac). 2. Refactoring the code for better structure. 3. Implementing the program as a service or scheduled task. 4. Fixing the issue where the wallpaper resets after a few hours on Windows.

Some time back, there was a story in Slashdot Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments. Slashdot also offers a business software comparison directory with over 100,000 software products. science section which dealt with "Human beings believing in God was necessary for adaptation, survival and reproduction". This was a study of genetic theory about how humans came to believe in God. One of the scientists got curious at the fact (which surprised me too) that "started looking at history, and I wondered why no society ever survived more than three generations without a religious foundation as its raison d'être."

The article details that humans are hardwired to believe in god, it has supported the survival of the race and various different theories of existence and normal human understanding. It also gives account of how atheists Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists. view the fact and they have to work hard to get the details rather than just leaving it unexplained.

The slashdot story as usual was interesting.

I missed watching this Lunar eclipse A lunar eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when the Moon moves into the Earth's shadow, causing the Moon to be darkened. Such an alignment occurs during an eclipse season, approximately every six months, during the full moon phase, when the Moon's orbital plane is closest to the plane of the Earth's orbit. on March 4 morning. I was in deep sleep.

Picture from Astronomy Picture of the Day Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a website provided by NASA and Michigan Technological University (MTU). It reads: "Each day a different image or photograph of our universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer." .

Subsequent to Lisp Notes 1, these are my notes for the Chapter 2 "Lather, Rinse, Repeat: A Tour of the REPL" in the Practical Common Lisp Book

• Lisp provides an interactive read-eval-print loop A read–eval–print loop (REPL), also termed an interactive toplevel or language shell, is a simple interactive computer programming environment that takes single user inputs, executes them, and returns the result to the user; a program written in a REPL environment is executed piecewise. The term usually refers to programming interfaces similar to the classic Lisp machine interactive environment. Common examples include command-line shells and similar environments for programming languages, and the technique is very characteristic of scripting languages. .

• Lisp can be used in Automated Theorem proving, planning and scheduling and computer vision. Large scale battlefield simulation, automated planning and natural language interfaces.

• Help in EMACS, Press CTRL Key, type h, release CTRL key and press t. This key combination called key-chord is represented like this. C-t h

• Info system is available by C-h i

• C-h ? brings complete list.

• C-h k lets us type any key combination and lets us know the command which will be invoked.

• C-h w lets us enter the command and returns the corresponding key combination.

Crucial bit of emacs terminology is a Buffer. While working with EMACS, each file you edit will be represented by a different buffer, only one of which is current in any way.

Buffers:

• C-x b is command to switch to buffer.

Some key combinations may be available for switches to certain buffer.

For e.g. to switch to lisp source file.

• C-c C-z switch to buffer where you interact with lisp (REPL)

CL-USER>

This is the lisp command prompt. Lisp reads the lines of lisp expressions evaluates them according to the rules of lisp and prints the result.

The endless cycle of reading, evaluating and printing is why it is called read-eval-print loop or REPL for short.

It's also referred to as top level, top level listener, lisp listener.

From REPL we can: - Define or redefine variables, functions, classes and methods. - Evaluate any lisp expression. - Load files containing lisp source code or compiled code. - Compile other files or individual functions. - Enter Debugger. - Step through the code. - Inspect the state of the individual lisp command.

CL-USER>10
10

R - Reads "10" and converts to lisp object "10" E - Evaluates to itself. P - Prints "10"

CL-USER>(+ 2 3)
5

+ symbol is converted to + function which takes 2 and 3 as parameters.

CL-USER>"hello,world"
"hello,world"

That was a "hello,world" value.

Format function:

Format takes a variable number of arguments, but the only two required to send the output a string.

CL-USER>(format t "hello,world")
"hello,world"
NIL

• t sends the output to stdout.
• NIL is the return value of the function.

CL-USER>(defun hello-world() (format t "hello,world"))
HELLO-WORLD
CL-USER>(hello-world)
hello,world
NIL

Saving the file:

• C-x C-f type the file name with extension as .lisp or .cl

• Inside the SLIME SLIME, the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, is an Emacs mode for developing Common Lisp applications. SLIME originates in an Emacs mode called SLIM written by Eric Marsden. It is developed as an open-source public domain software project by Luke Gorrie and Helmut Eller. Over 100 Lisp developers have contributed code to SLIME since the project was started in 2003. SLIME uses a backend called Swank that is loaded into Common Lisp. mode, C-c C-q invokes the command slime-close-parens-at-point which will insert as many closing parenthesis as necessary to match all the open parenthesis.

• To get the source file to lisp environment:

  • C-c C-c (slime-compile-defun)

  Or switch the REPL Buffer: * C-c C-z (directly from SLIME to REPL)

  Or * C-x b and all the buffer.

Make some changes and type again.

(defun hello-world()
        (format t "Hello,World!"))

• C-c C-c

Or

• C-c C-z

(hello,world)
Hello,World!
NIL

Save the changes to hello.lisp by typing C-x C-s in EMACS which invokes (save-buffer)

Exit SLIME, which is in REPL type ',' - a comma.

Invoke again:

M-x slime
CL-USER>(hello-world)

Will not get invoked because REPL is not aware and it will put you in the debugger mode. Pressing 'q' will exit the debugger.

CL-USER>(hello-world)
;Evaluation aborted
CL-USER>

Letting the REPL Know:

1) C-x b hello.lisp and then compiling using C-c C-c

2) Load the whole file:

(load "hello.lisp")
; Loading file
T

T- means loaded correctly. FASL The Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (abbreviated FASL, pronounced [ˈfæsəl]) is one of the most reputable international academic conferences in the field of formal Slavic linguistics. Each meeting is hosted by a United States or Canada university in May. From the beginning through FASL 27, the proceedings were published by Michigan Slavic Publications of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. From FASL 28 on, the proceedings are published as an extra issue of Journal of Slavic Linguistics. - Fast Load file

(load(compile-file("hello.lisp"))

From the SLIME environment itself, the following features are available:

• C-c C-l (slime-load-file)
• C-c C-k to compile and load the file represented by the current buffer.

using emacs like it shud be...

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

[kirubakaran]

Anonymous

Notes from AI Class

Any solution goes from (0,0) state to (goal state).

• Reasoning.

• AI stands for positive thinking.*

• Chess playing, alternative choices, multiple choices.

• Humans can think simultaneously different things.

• Machine intelligence revolution.

What is A.I?

Artificial: Produced by art. Not genuine or natural, not pertaining to

    the sense of matter.

Synonymous: Synthetic, fictitious, pretend, simulated, spurious,

    unnatural.

Antonyms: Actual, genuine, honest, real, natural, truthful and

    unaffected.

Intelligence: Endowed with a faculty of reasoning, quick of mind, well

    informed and communicative.

• Marvin Minsky's initial writings provide a very good introduction.

• Do plants think?

Objectives of AI?

Primary Goal: To Make the computers smart. (CS)

Secondary Goal: To understand the nature of human intelligence.(psychologist)

Entreprenuers" To make machines more useful and economical (eventually

    replace humans)

Japanese tried to create machines that will help humans when they fail.

• Fuzzy logic Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. By contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0 or 1. in washing machines.

• Inacessible to humans? Machines with intelligence needed.

Normal missiles will be shot, but missiles with intelligence have chances of

hitting the target.

Virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), education (such as medical, safety, or military training) and business (such as virtual meetings). VR is one of the key technologies in the reality-virtuality continuum. As such, it is different from other digital visualization solutions, such as augmented virtuality and augmented reality. system help in designing the A.I system.

What is an A.I problem today may not be same 20 years down.

Definition:

AI is the study of how to make computers do things at which at the moment,

human beings are better.

(2) AI is the study of mental faculties through the use of computational

methods.

Questions:

1) What are our own underlying assumptions about intelligence?

2) At what level of details are we going to model and mimic intelligence?

3) What kind of tools and techniques we have at present for study of AI?

4) How will we know that we have succeeded in building an intelligent system?

5) What computers can and cannot do?

6) Can machines think?

7) Can a machine fool a human being into thinking that (s)he chatting with

another human being?

Computational methods:

• Number crunching.

• Heuristic programming In mathematical optimization and computer science, heuristic (from Greek εὑρίσκω "I find, discover") is a technique designed for problem solving more quickly when classic methods are too slow for finding an exact or approximate solution, or when classic methods fail to find any exact solution in a search space. This is achieved by trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed. In a way, it can be considered a shortcut. .

• Automatic programming.

8) Why we think that machines cannot?

9) For that matter, do humans think? and How do we think?

Chart:

A Modern AI Lab.

    * Reasoning about objects.

    * Programming [ lisp, prolog ]

    * Architecture [ fifth generation, parallel]

    * Design and Analysis Systems [ knowledge based expert AI

      systems, decision support systems]

    * Speech and Language

    * Learning.

    * Vision and Speech

    * Robotics

Intelligent Behaviour:

Use of huristics: using some rules of thumb for deciding any of the several

alternative choices.

Huristic:

Best first search, breadth first search and depth first search.

• Huristic should help us in dramatically reducing the search for solution in

the large problem spaces.

• No guarantee of optimal solution.

Two approaches to Designing AI Based Computers.

Top-Down Approach

        A.I. Application

        *

    * Predicate Logic

    * Frames

    * 
        Semantic Nets
            
            
              
            
            A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges, which represent semantic relations between concepts, mapping or connecting semantic fields. A semantic network may be instantiated as, for example, a graph database or a concept map. Typical standardized semantic networks are expressed as semantic triples.
            
        .

    * Knowledge Representation



        A.I. Languages

    * Lisp

    * Prolog

    * Smalltalk

Bottom Up Approach

        Computing Model

    * Control Flow

    * Data Structure

    * Data



        A.I Architecture

Assignment:

To Reach IISc from your Home.

Parameters: Vehicle, Mode of transport, Map.

Time and shortest path constraints.

Between own vehicle and public transport, which one is preferable?

Knowledge:

Search Engine, algorithm is intelligence and database is knowledge.

Human information processing.

All knowledge structures are Tree Structures.

Reasoing:

Reasoning refers to the different kinds of activities:

• Drawing conclusions from different set of facts.

• Diagnosing possible cause of conditions.

• Making assumption about a situation.

• Analysis of organizing facts and data about problem

• Solving a problem or a puzzle.

• Arguing with a person with a particular point of view.

Classification of Reasoning activities:

Based on Degree of perception

• Deductive reasoning.

• Inductive reasoning.

• Default reasoning.

Based on level of reasoning.

• Problem level reasoning.

• Meta level reasning.

Based on generality

• Casual

• Common Sense.

• von monotonic

• Plausible

• special

• Temporal

• Reasoning systems involve the representation of information and word.

celpjefscycle

Thanks for information.

many interesting things

Celpjefscylc

Anonymous

Found two comments which are very insightful and written by people whose thoughts were along the same direction as our discussions in proficience course over the weekends.

Quotes:

While much of the "traditional AI" hype could be considered dead, robotics is continuing to advance, and much symbolic AI research has evolved into data-driven statistical techniques. So while the top-down ideas that the older AI researches didn't pan out yet, bottom-up techniques will still help close the gap.

Also, you have to remember that AI is pretty much defined as "the stuff we don't know how to do yet". Once we know how to do it, then people stop calling it AI, and then wonder "why can't we do AI?" Machine vision is doing everything from factory inspections to face recognition, we have voice recognition on our cell phones, and context-sensitive web search is common. All those things were considered AI not long ago. Calculators were once even called mechanical brains. by SnowZero.

Personally I don't think it's quantum computers that will be the breakthrough, but simply a different architecture for conventional computers. Let me go on a little tangent here.

Now that we've reached the limits of the Von Neumann architecture The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, written by John von Neumann in 1945, describing designs discussed with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer made of "organs" that were later understood to have these components: , we're starting to see a new wave of innovation in CPU design. The Cell is part of that, but also the stuff ATI [amd.com] and NVIDIA [nvidia.com] are doing is also very interesting. Instead of one monolithic processor connected to a giant memory through a tiny bottleneck, processors of the future will be a grid of processing elements interleaved with embedded memory in a network structure. Almost like a Beowulf cluster A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed that allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware. on a chip.

People are worried about how conventional programs will scale to these new architectures, but I believe they won't have to. Code monkeys won't be writing code to spawn thousands of cooperating threads to run the logic of a C++ application faster. Instead, PhDs will write specialized libraries to leverage all that parallel processing power for specific algorithms. You'll have a raytracing library, an image processing library, an FFT A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). A Fourier transform converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in the frequency domain and vice versa. library, etc. These specialized libraries will have no problem sponging up all the excess computing resources, while your traditional software continues to run on just two or three traditional cores.

Back on the subject of AI, my theory is that these highly parallel architectures will be much more suited to simulating the highly parallel human brain. They will excel at the kinds pattern matching tasks our brains eat for breakfast. Computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing; all of these will be highly amenable to parallelization. And it is these applications which will eventually prove the worth of non-traditional architectures like Intel's 80-core chip. It may still be a long time before the sentient computer is unveiled, but I think we will soon finally start seeing real-world AI applications like decent automated translation, image labeling, and usable stereo vision for robot navigation. Furthermore, I predict that Google will be on the forefront of this new AI revolution, developing new algorithms to truly understand web content to reject spam and improve rankings.

While shifting my house from Jeevan Bhima Nagar to C.V.Raman, my roomie Marcus ha d emphasized many a times not to loose the Indane Indane or indan is an organic compound with the formula C9H10. It is a colorless liquid hydrocarbon. It is a petrochemical, a bicyclic compound. It occurs at the level of about 0.1% in coal tar. It is usually produced by hydrogenation of indene. Gas Customer Receipt as that was the only proof that Marcus is the customer of Indane Gas Agency and any transfer of Gas will be possible.

As much as he insisted, I had lost it. We lost hope of finding it also.

Today morning, he called me and said that I had left it in a one old book of his given it to me. Today while he was cleaning stuff, preparing for his movement to Chennai Chennai, also known as Madras (its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian census, Chennai is the sixth-most-populous city in India and forms the fourth-most-populous urban agglomeration. Incorporated in 1688, the Greater Chennai Corporation is the oldest municipal corporation in India and the second oldest in the world after London. , found the lost Gas Customer Receipt by surprise! Thats a good news for me today.

Yesterday night, the dinner at Suswaad hotel (Near Timex showroom in CMH Road) did not go well with me. Especially the oily parotha and ghee roast. My dad feels it could be pasta I had in the afternoon also which did not go well.

At the Karate Karate (空手) (; Japanese pronunciation: [kaɾate] ; Okinawan pronunciation: [kaɽati]), also karate-do (空手道, Karate-dō), is a martial art developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom. It developed from the indigenous Ryukyuan martial arts (called te (手), "hand"; tī in Okinawan) under the influence of Chinese martial arts. While modern karate is primarily a striking art that uses punches and kicks, traditional karate training also employs throwing and joint locking techniques. A karate practitioner is called a karate-ka (空手家). class in the morning, was fighting non-digestion and inflexiblity with the body and stomach. Constantly thinking to give up and go home. But carried on, held and streched with great difficultly till the end. Felt good at last that I did not give up. Got to be more careful with the food now.

I have put on a lot of weight due to irregular practise of karate after shifting my home from Jeevan Bhima Nagar to CV Raman Nagar CV Raman Nagar is a neighbourhood located in the eastern part of the city of Bangalore. It is at a distance of 13 km from Majestic. It is bounded by Indiranagar, Kaggadasapura and Baiyappanahalli. It is an upmarket area and also known as Greater Indiranagar. . When at Jeevan Bhima Nagar, I used to run daily to New Horizon School in the morning and on alternate days practise karate. But distance from C.V.Raman nagar to New Horizon School at 100ft road is bit too far for running. Once I tried, just walked, but ended up completely exhausted. I have got back with running now covering only the CV Raman nagar area and then on alternate days taking my bike to karate clases. My friend, Sharma helped me in getting back to the classes by giving a wake up in the morning, that really worked and I will be thankful to him.

So far so good. But I still have align my work habits, night workouts with getting up early and going for karate. If I work bit late (later than 12:00 am in the night, leave alone 2:00 and 3:00 am night outs),I find it very difficult to getup at 5:30. Got to somehow work that out as well.

The nearest thing Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018) (formerly X3.226-1994 (R1999)). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived from the ANSI Common Lisp standard. has to a motto is the koan-like description, "the programmable programming language." While cryptic,that description gets at the root of the biggest advantage Common Lisp still has over other languages.

Ideas first introduced in Lisp include the if/then/else construct,recursive function calls, dynamic memory allocation, Garbage collection (computer science) In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector attempts to reclaim memory that was allocated by the program, but is no longer referenced; such memory is called garbage. Garbage collection was invented by American computer scientist John McCarthy around 1959 to simplify manual memory management in Lisp. , First-class function In computer science, a programming language is said to have first-class functions if it treats functions as first-class citizens. This means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures. Some programming language theorists require support for anonymous functions (function literals) as well. In languages with first-class functions, the names of functions do not have any special status; they are treated like ordinary variables with a function type. The term was coined by Christopher Strachey in the context of "functions as first-class citizens" in the mid-1960s. s, lexical closures In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment. The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function (variables that are used locally, but defined in an enclosing scope) with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created. Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those captured variables through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope. , interactive programming, incremental compilation and Dynamic typing In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type (for example, integer, floating point, string) to every term (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various language constructs of a computer program, such as variables, expressions, functions, or modules. A type system dictates the operations that can be performed on a term. For variables, the type system determines the allowed values of that term. .

Last weekend, I went to watch the finals of the WTA The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) is the principal organizing body of women's professional tennis. The association governs the WTA Tour, which is the worldwide professional tennis tour for women, and was founded to create a better future for women's tennis. The WTA's corporate headquarters is in St. Petersburg, Florida, with its European headquarters in London and its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Beijing. Womens championship held at Bangalore. Doubles match between chinese teipei pair and russian/chinese-teipei pair was ok. The Russian (Kurd) did not play very serious and from the body language it looked she was okay with losing.

The best match was Yaroslava Shvedova Yaroslava Vyacheslavovna Shvedova (Яросла́ва Вячесла́вовна Шве́дова; born 12 September 1987) is a Kazakhstani former professional tennis player. Before 2008, she represented her country of birth, Russia. vs Mara Santangelo Mara Santangelo (born 28 June 1981) is a former tennis player from Italy and Grand Slam champion in doubles. She won a decisive match in the final Italy vs Belgium against Kirsten Flipkens allowing her national team to win the 2006 Fed Cup. .

Santangelo, the defending champion had defeated India's heart throb Sania Mirza Sania Mirza ([ˈsaːnijaː ˈmirzaː]; born 15 November 1986) is an Indian former professional tennis player. A former doubles world No. 1, she won six major titles – three in women's doubles and three in mixed doubles. From 2003 until her retirement from singles in 2013, she was ranked by the Women's Tennis Association as the No. 1 Indian in singles. Throughout her career, Mirza has established herself as one of the most known, highest-paid, and influential athletes in India. to come to finals.

Santangelo is a 16th ranked player from Italy, while Shvedova who got an entry to this tour due to absence of another Russian player is a ranked 119 and was playing her first big tournament.

From the very start, Shvedova looked impressive and agile. When the match started, her shots were more powerful and she tried for aces.

But Santangelo being a professional player was able to play effortless against the novice and she made Shvedova run all over the court.

We began to guess that Shvedova would soon run out of energy and Santangelo will take the match towards her side.

But this did not happen, Shvedova never got tired, she was able to play with a top seeded player running all over the court and at last defeating her! Many a times Shvedova won the set with Santangelo having the advantage. This shows her energy the practise she must have put in.

It was a wonderful match and a great lesson to learn for a newcomer in any sport that practise is the key to winning.

My friend and I are participating in the 50bookchallenge and I have started enjoying reading one book after the other.

After Men who made new physics, I started reading Shashi Tharoor Shashi Krishnan Chandrashekaran Tharoor (Malayalam pronunciation: [ʃɐʃi t̪ɐɾuːr]; born 9 March 1956) is an Indian politician, author, former diplomat and public intellectual, who has been serving as Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He is currently the Chairman of Committee on External Affairs. He was formerly an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and 2006 United Nations Secretary-General selection for the post of Secretary-General in 2006. Founder-Chairman of All India Professionals Congress, he formerly served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and on Informational Technology. He has about two dozen titles to his credit and was awarded by World Economic Forum as "Global Leader of Tomorrow". 's "5 Dollar Smile". This is a compilation of early writings of Shashi Tharoor in his adolescence. So, you might find him attracted towards pretty girls, interest in sex topics and many things which disturb young adults. His writing style is good and it's really funny. He in his college days might be a kind of leader who must have been along with friends teasing, having fun, understanding junta and yet a leader, not the all prefect high standards that comes in book definitions.

The last one act play of a "Life of a Kutta" was amazing, it's set in the period of The Emergency (India) The Emergency in India was a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency across the country by citing internal and external threats to the country. when forced sterilization was done on males. This presents the time from the eyes of a dog who is converted to a man.

The title "5 Dollar Smile" refers to UN Post card featuring photo of a child from India, which seeks to donate 5 dollars and make him smile. It's a simple story of a boy with a charity. The stories are not conclusive, but many of them are thought provoking and sometimes reflecting with real world incidents as they happen and pass by.

Next book I read was Sudha Murty Sudha Murty (née Kulkarni; born 19 August 1950) is an Indian educator, author, and philanthropist. She is the Founder-Chairperson of the non-profit charitable organization Infosys Foundation. She is married to the co-founder of Infosys, N. R. Narayana Murthy. In 2024, Murty was nominated as Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha on 8 March 2024 for her contribution to social work and education. Murty was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India, for social work by the Government of India in 2006. In 2023, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India. 's "How I taught my Grandma and Other stories."

A very good book stressing on moral values and principles in life. Sudha Murty has narrated the incidents in her life in a very simple style for others to understand and follow.

The title refers to the story of her youth, when she used to say featured monthly story to her grandma and once in her absence her grandma felt helpless with her inability to read. Her grandma took a resolve to start learning and made young Sudha Murty as her guru. This has a very emotional touch at the end which relates to a student respecting her guru.

Another thing imprinted in mind is, she learnt from a charity work of not delaying things when helping people as help at the right time is proper and delay with it is not good.

Her story about meetings with J. R. D. Tata Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata (29 July 1904 – 29 November 1993) was a French born Indian industrialist, philanthropist, aviator and former chairman of Tata Group. and A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam ( UB-duul kə-LAHM; 15 October 1931 – 27 July 2015) was an Indian aerospace scientist and statesman who served as the president of India from 2002 to 2007. was very inspiring.

Re: Hi

Thanks, Vijay.

Senthil

Hi

All the best for your quest!

Anonymous

I knew it by " Chinese New Year Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival (see also § Names), is a festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar. It is one of the most important holidays in Chinese culture, and has been added to the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2024. Marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, this festival takes place from Chinese New Year's Eve (the evening preceding the first day of the year) to the Lantern Festival, held on the 15th day of the year. The first day of the Chinese New Year falls on the new moon that appears between 21 January and 20 February. " only and this year is " Year of the Pig Doctor Who: The Monthly Adventures, formerly subtitled as the Main Range, is a series that consists of full-cast audio dramas based on the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. They are produced by Big Finish Productions and star one or more of the original actors to play the Doctor on television in the classic era of the programme. " with increase in birthrate projected in China as they believe children bring prosperity in this year.

Found googles doodle linked to " Lunar New Year Lunar New Year is the beginning of a new year based on lunar calendars or, informally, lunisolar calendars. Lunar calendar years begin with a new moon and have a fixed number of lunar months, usually twelve, in contrast to lunisolar calendar years which have a variable number of lunar months that periodically resynchronise with the solar year. The event is celebrated by numerous cultures in various ways at diverse dates. The determination of the first day of a new lunar year or lunisolar year varies by culture. " instead of "Chinese New year". Globalization or lessons learnt for Chinese market? :-)

Wikipedia says,Lunar New Year is Celebrated by: China, Taiwan, South and North Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Singapore.

Happy New year all of you guys.

At HowStuffWorks HowStuffWorks is an American commercial infotainment website founded by professor and author Marshall Brain, to provide its target audience an insight into the way many things work. The site uses various media to explain complex concepts, terminology, and mechanisms—including photographs, diagrams, videos, animations, and articles. , I found an interesting article titled "How Love Works". According to the article:

• People often fall in love with those in whom they see traits of their parents or siblings—figures they have known since childhood.
• Eye contact and deep gazes can spark the beginnings of love.
• Love, relationships, lust, passionate love, and even infidelity are explained as chemical phenomena involving adrenaline, Dopamine Dopamine (DA, a contraction of 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) is a neuromodulatory molecule that plays several important roles in cells. It is an organic chemical of the catecholamine and phenethylamine families. Dopamine constitutes about 80% of the catecholamine content in the brain. It is an amine synthesized by removing a carboxyl group from a molecule of its precursor chemical, L-DOPA, which is synthesized in the brain and kidneys. Dopamine is also synthesized in plants and most animals. In the brain, dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter—a chemical released by neurons (nerve cells) to send signals to other nerve cells. Neurotransmitters are synthesized in specific regions of the brain but affect many regions systemically. The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior. The anticipation of most types of rewards increases the level of dopamine in the brain, and many addictive drugs increase dopamine release or block its reuptake into neurons following release. Other brain dopamine pathways are involved in motor control and in controlling the release of various hormones. These pathways and cell groups form a dopamine system which is neuromodulatory. , Norepinephrine Norepinephrine (NE), also called noradrenaline (NA) or noradrenalin, is an organic chemical in the catecholamine family that functions in the brain and body as a hormone, neurotransmitter and neuromodulator. The name "noradrenaline" (from Latin ad, "near", and ren, "kidney") is more commonly used in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world, whereas "norepinephrine" (from Ancient Greek ἐπῐ́ (epí), "upon", and νεφρός (nephrós), "kidney") is usually preferred in the United States. "Norepinephrine" is also the international nonproprietary name given to the drug. Regardless of which name is used for the substance itself, parts of the body that produce or are affected by it are referred to as noradrenergic. , and Phenylethylamine Phenethylamine (PEA) is an organic compound, natural monoamine alkaloid, and trace amine, which acts as a central nervous system stimulant in humans. In the brain, phenethylamine regulates monoamine neurotransmission by binding to trace amine-associated receptor 1 (TAAR1) and inhibiting vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2) in monoamine neurons. To a lesser extent, it also acts as a neurotransmitter in the human central nervous system. In mammals, phenethylamine is produced from the amino acid L-phenylalanine by the enzyme aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase via enzymatic decarboxylation. In addition to its presence in mammals, phenethylamine is found in many other organisms and foods, such as chocolate, especially after microbial fermentation. .

The review seems interesting with comparision to cavemen and cavewomen for our behaviorial traits. Shall read this book sometime. for sure. :-)

Thanks!

Senthil

You might be interested in Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps.

mannu

On Self-Purification

Love and non-violence ( Ahimsa Ahimsa (Sanskrit: अहिंसा, IAST: ahiṃsā, lit. 'nonviolence') is the ancient Indian principle of nonviolence which applies to actions towards all living beings. It is a key virtue in Indian religions like Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. ) are unparalleled in their impact. They require no fanfare—only self-confidence that arises from self-purification. People of impeccable character naturally inspire and elevate those around them. – Mahatma Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (from Sanskrit, meaning great-souled, or venerable), first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world.

Today, 59 years ago, Nathuram Godse Nathuram Vinayak Godse (19 May 1910 – 15 November 1949) () was an Indian Hindu nationalist and political activist who was the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. He shot Gandhi in the chest three times at point blank range at a multi-faith prayer meeting in Birla House in New Delhi on 30 January 1948. bowed before Mahatma Gandhi, wished him well, and then tragically shot him with a Beretta Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta (Italian pronunciation: [ˈfabbrika ˈdarmi ˈpjɛːtro beˈretta]; "Pietro Beretta Weapons Factory") is a privately held Italian firearms manufacturing company operating in several countries. Its firearms are used worldwide for various civilian, law enforcement, and military purposes. Sporting arms account for three-quarters of sales; Beretta is also known for marketing shooting clothes and accessories. Founded in 1526, Beretta is the oldest active firearm manufacturer and one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the world. Its inaugural product was the arquebus barrel; by all accounts Beretta-made barrels equipped the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Beretta has supplied weapons for every major European war since 1650. pistol.

Most of the world thinks George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Bush family and the Republican Party, he is the eldest son of the 41st president, George H. W. Bush, and was the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. sucks

Bush and the Republicans were not protecting us on 9-11, and we aren't a lot safer now. We may be more afraid due to george bush, but are we safer? Being fearful does not necessarily make one safer. Fear can cause people to hide and cower. What do you think? What is he doing to us, and what is he doing to the world?

Are we safer today than we were before?

The more people that the government puts in jails, the safer we are told to think we are. The real terrorists are wherever they are, but they aren't living in a country with bars on the windows. We are.

Anonymous

Thanks

Your post inspired me to yet again give this a go too!

I found that I turned all other proxies off, then opened Synaptic and configure the proxy it worked!!! My Firefox was off too, so it is likely a conflict between the gnome proxy settings and the Synaptic proxy settings.

Note to others, if you need to configure your Gnome proxy settings, ensure you then restart Synaptic ;)

-E

Anonymous

Thank You for site

Thank you for your site. I have found here much useful information.

Good site ! ;)

Anonymous

nice quote

Only jarring note I have heard about Walt Disney is that he was a control freak. But that might be both his plus and minus. Steve Jobs could well become a worthy successor.

Anonymous

You are right

Hello! Author, interesting thoughts...

And a very nice design, interesting site name phoe6.livejournal.com :), I see you you're are not newbe. Go on with the astonishing work!

Anonymous

Re: Teachers Day

Thanks Loga. Even I too recollected my Kendriya Vidyalaya School days. It was fun on the teachers day wherein the teacher would also come and enjoy the class from the last bench. :-)

Anonymous

Re: You are right

Thank you, Sir. But u forgot to leave your reference, if I wish to know more about you.

Senthil

I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development That' to get to gcc The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain which is used for most projects related to GNU and the Linux kernel. With roughly 15 million lines of code in 2019, GCC is one of the largest free programs in existence. It has played an important role in the growth of free software, as both a tool and an example. , Emacs Emacs ( ), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 30.1 , released February 2025. , and gdb The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Haskell, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, and partially others. . Thank you.*

I watched Guru (2007 film) Guru (transl. Teacher) is a 2007 Indian Hindi-language drama film directed by Mani Ratnam. Produced by Madras Talkies, the film stars Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Mithun Chakraborty, R. Madhavan, and Vidya Balan. The score and soundtrack for the film were composed by A. R. Rahman. for the second time. Believe me, the movie was a lot better the second time, and its point about capitalism was more convincing than before, especially when one already knows what the movie is about. On the second viewing, thoughts of Dhirubhai Ambani Dhirajlal Hirachand "Dhirubhai" Ambani (28 December 1932 – 6 July 2002) was an Indian billionaire businessman who founded Reliance Industries in 1958. Ambani took Reliance public in 1977. In 2016, he was honoured posthumously with the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour for his contributions to trade and industry. Ambani faced numerous accusations of market manipulation, tax evasion, and cronyism. or Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), Gates became then the youngest ever billionaire in 1987, at age 31. Forbes magazine ranked him as the world's wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, his net worth stood at US$115.1 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world. did not come to mind, while the rationale behind the arguments and thoughts of Gurubhai stood out more prominently.

plz don't make bill-g the icon of capitalism. he is hated for his slimy, unhackerly, unethical behavior. the same crowd doesn't hate Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. & Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members. As of May 2025, Brin is the tenth richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $142 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and 132.2 billion, according to Forbes, making him the eighth-richest person in the world. .

bill became rich coz ibm was stupid. not coz he "created wealth" of that magnitude.

i am all for capitalism. ' Atlas Shrugged Atlas Shrugged is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand. It is her longest novel, the fourth and final one published during her lifetime, and the one she considered her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. She described the theme of Atlas Shrugged as "the role of man's mind in existence" and it includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance. The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism, including reason, property rights, individualism, libertarianism, and capitalism and depicts what Rand saw as the failures of governmental coercion. Of Rand's works of fiction, it contains her most extensive statement of her philosophical system. ' ( Ayn Rand Alice O'Connor (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum; February 2 [O.S. January 20], 1905 – March 6, 1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand ( ), was a Russian-born American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, Rand achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays. ) is my fav. bill is just a negative example.

kulalosai

Vaish,Shiva,Parthiban,Priya and I visited flower show at Lalbagh Botanical Garden Lalbagh Botanical Garden or simply Lalbagh (lit. 'red garden'), is a botanical garden in Bengaluru, India, with an over 200-year history. First planned and laid out during the dalavaiship of King Hyder Ali, the garden was later managed under numerous British superintendents before Indian Independence. It was responsible for the introduction and propagation of numerous ornamental plants as well as those of economic value. It also served a social function as a park and recreational space, with a central glass house dating from 1890 which was used for flower shows. In modern times, it hosts two flower shows coinciding with the week of Republic Day (26 January) and Independence Day (15 August). As an urban green space along with Cubbon Park, it is also home to numerous wild species of birds and other wildlife. The garden also has a lake adjoining a large rock on which a watchtower had been constructed during the reign of Kempegowda II. on 26th Jan. Variety of flowers were displayed, and I can hardly remember the names. Few of the Bonsai Bonsai (; Japanese: 盆栽, lit. 'tray planting', pronounced [boɰ̃sai] ) is the Japanese art of growing and shaping miniature trees in containers, with a long documented history of influences and native Japanese development over a thousand years, and with unique aesthetics, cultural history, and terminology derived from its evolution in Japan. Similar arts exist in other cultures, including Korea's bunjae, the Chinese art of penjing, and the miniature living landscapes of Vietnamese Hòn non bộ. costs Rs.5000/- and above. But bonsai was very nice. You could see a full grown dwarf trees. :-)

I captured few the flowers with my camera till my batteries went down and I could not buy a new set of batteries inside lalbagh.

The history department of Middlebury College Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college in Middlebury, Vermont, United States. Founded in 1800 by Congregationalists, Middlebury was the first operating college or university in Vermont. has taken measures to stop citations from Wikipedia for student research papers. Yeah, that's in fact the correct thing to do. For research, we should always go to the primary source, and if that's not possible, a well-researched secondary source related to the primary source.

Wikipedia is so useful that students ended up citing it in their papers. However, when there was misinformation on Wikipedia, the students were unaware, and their papers contained errors. The teachers made the correct move by saying, "Cite Wikipedia at your own peril."

yes, citing Encyclopædia Britannica The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for 'British Encyclopaedia') is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia. is also not allowed (as per their policy). But things with wikipedia hit when number of students cited the same wrong information.

Senthil

the same should hold for citations from Brittanica Encyclopaedia then.

bluesmoon

I finished reading this book on Monday. It is an excellent book that tells the stories of many physicists working during the prime era of physics. It starts with Ernest Rutherford Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand physicist who was a pioneering researcher in both atomic and nuclear physics. He has been described as "the father of nuclear physics", and "the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday". In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances." He was the first Oceanian Nobel laureate, and the first to perform the awarded work in Canada. 's story about his rustic nature and how he used to work in his lab.

I was amazed by the story of Max Planck Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (; German: [maks ˈplaŋk] ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. , and I have decided to keep Max Planck as an example of being organized and disciplined in life. Max Planck was very organized, it seems. He used to come to the lab almost at the same time every day, and he had set aside half an hour daily for learning piano. His work style was appreciated by many. Albert Einstein Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. and others respected and loved him, addressing him as "our Planck." Later, in Einstein's story, I learned that Einstein resigned from his post in Germany during the troubled Nazi era, knowing that it would fall upon Planck to make the decision of removing Einstein. Einstein understood that Planck would feel uncomfortable doing it. Einstein then moved to Princeton University Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The institution moved to Newark in 1747 and then to its Mercer County campus in Princeton nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University. as the political situation in Germany worsened under Hitler.

One funny thing I can recall is that during one of the anti-Einstein meetings, Einstein was present in the audience and enjoying it.

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (US: , UK: ; Danish: [ˈne̝ls ˈhenʁek ˈtæːvið ˈpoɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. is another scientist we come to know in detail. He, along with Einstein, was one of the primary characters in this book. Bohr had established an institute where many young physicists loved to study and conduct experiments. Physicists who had been there felt it was a golden era.

The final topic is on Einstein and Bohr's debate. Einstein believed that there is an organized approach in God's design of the universe, whereas Bohr's point of argument (as I understood) was that we have not yet understood the organization of the universe enough to comment on it. Bohr was an athlete and used to go for short sprints between scientific discussions and debates, it seems. :-)

Many of my friends will enjoy this book. Jonathan gifted it to me while I was in college, and Kannapan feels this is one of the best books he has ever read.

I took some snaps of the middle-page pictures using my Nokia 6600.

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From Spastics Society of Karnataka Recreation club we all went to movie Happy Feet Happy Feet is a 2006 animated jukebox musical comedy film directed and produced by George Miller and written by Miller, John Collee, Judy Morris and Warren Coleman. It stars the voices of Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Hugo Weaving, Anthony LaPaglia, Magda Szubanski and Steve Irwin. An international co-production between the United States and Australia, the film was produced at Sydney-based visual effects and animation studio Animal Logic for Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and Kingdom Feature Productions. It is the first animated film produced by Kennedy Miller and Animal Logic. Set in the cold land of Antarctica, the film follows Mumble (Wood), an emperor penguin who is able to tap dance brilliantly despite lacking the ability to sing a heartsong to attract a soulmate. After being continuously ridiculed and rejected by peers and his own father (Jackman), Mumble departs on a journey to learn what is causing the local fish population to decline — and to find himself along the way. today.

Its a wonderful movie and one of the very good ones i have seen ever. The imagination of the animators will always bring a smile (an expression of wonder) in your face when you are watching the movie. With the first half filled with loads of fun, the second part takes a more serious turn where it appeals to human a concern for nature and shows the damage are doing. While watching the movie, you will being to show a lot of concern for mumble, the protognist, and wish him that he succeeds in his mission which you have begun to appreciate.

The movie has a star studded voice cast and the animation is just amazing! Kudoes to the australian team which worked on that.

Everyone of us who went, tried the tap dance at the end of happy feet.

Had a good time.

btw, I got into a habit of reading wikipedia article on the movie after I watch any movie. They provide a lot of interesting information and trivia.

We were discussing that LoveLace is voiced by Robin Williams Robin McLaurin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014) was an American actor and comedian known for his improvisational skills and the wide variety of characters he created on the spur of the moment and portrayed on film, in dramas and comedies alike, Williams is regarded as one of the greatest comedians of all time. He received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, five Grammy Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. Williams was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2005. , but Ramon is also Robin Williams. And mumble is Elijah Wood Elijah Jordan Wood (born January 28, 1981) is an American actor and producer. Wood made his film debut with a minor part in Back to the Future Part II (1989) at the age of eight and achieved recognition in the early 1990s as a child actor with roles such as Avalon (1990), Forever Young (1992), The Good Son (1993), and The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993). As a teenager, he starred in the films North (1994), The War (1994), Flipper (1996), The Ice Storm (1997), Deep Impact (1998), and The Faculty (1998). Wood achieved international fame in the early 2000s for playing the hobbit Frodo Baggins in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003), based on the classic fantasy novel of the same name by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. (Frodo in The Lord of the Rings The Lord of the Rings is an epic high fantasy novel written by English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's book The Hobbit but eventually developed into a much larger work. Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold. ), Ramya had forgot his name but she pointed out that its main character from LoTR. The group 4 fun-loving group of small penguins who call themselves amigos in the movie is a category called Adelie Penguin The Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is a species of penguin common along the entire coast of the Antarctic continent, which is the only place where it is found. It is the most widespread penguin species, and, along with the emperor penguin, is the most southerly distributed of all penguins. It is named after Adélie Land, in turn, named for Adèle Dumont d'Urville, who was married to French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville, who first discovered this penguin in 1840. Adélie penguins obtain their food by both predation and foraging, with a diet of mainly krill and fish. . Mumble and others are Emperor Penguin The emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and is endemic to Antarctica. The male and female are similar in plumage and size, reaching 100 cm (39 in) in length and weighing from 22 to 45 kg (49 to 99 lb). Feathers of the head and back are black and sharply delineated from the white belly, pale-yellow breast and bright-yellow ear patches. s and emperor penguins in reality get together with their soul mates using songs only! :-) The movie is decided to Steve Irwin Stephen Robert Irwin (22 February 1962 – 4 September 2006), known as "the Crocodile Hunter", was an Australian zookeeper, conservationist, television personality, wildlife educator, and environmentalist. .

Happy feet is another good one from Australia.

From the Recreation Club of the Spastics Society School (Spastics Society of Karnataka), we are heading to Happy Feet Happy Feet is a 2006 animated jukebox musical comedy film directed and produced by George Miller and written by Miller, John Collee, Judy Morris and Warren Coleman. It stars the voices of Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Hugo Weaving, Anthony LaPaglia, Magda Szubanski and Steve Irwin. An international co-production between the United States and Australia, the film was produced at Sydney-based visual effects and animation studio Animal Logic for Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures and Kingdom Feature Productions. It is the first animated film produced by Kennedy Miller and Animal Logic. Set in the cold land of Antarctica, the film follows Mumble (Wood), an emperor penguin who is able to tap dance brilliantly despite lacking the ability to sing a heartsong to attract a soulmate. After being continuously ridiculed and rejected by peers and his own father (Jackman), Mumble departs on a journey to learn what is causing the local fish population to decline — and to find himself along the way. this morning at Inox. I hope we have a great time.

The Adventures of Tintin The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film. was the Wikipedia Featured Article on January 5th. I highly recommend reading it—it is well researched and offers many fascinating details for Tintin fans worldwide.

The comic strip series is celebrated for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé Georges Prosper Remi (French: [ʒɔʁʒ pʁɔspɛʁ ʁəmi]; 22 May 1907 – 3 March 1983), known by the pen name Hergé ( air-ZHAY; French: [ɛʁʒe] ), from the French pronunciation of his reversed initials RG, was a Belgian comic strip artist. He is best known for creating The Adventures of Tintin, the series of comic albums that are considered one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. He was also responsible for two other well-known series, Quick & Flupke (1930–1940) and The Adventures of Jo, Zette and Jocko (1936–1957). His works were executed in his distinctive ligne claire drawing style. 's distinctive Ligne claire Ligne claire (French: [liɲ(ə) klɛːʁ]; Dutch: klare lijn [ˈklaːrə ˈlɛin]; both meaning "clear line") is a style of drawing created and pioneered by Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist and creator of The Adventures of Tintin. It uses clear strong lines sometimes of varied width and no hatching, while contrast is downplayed as well. Cast shadows are often illuminated, and the style often features strong colours and a combination of cartoonish characters against a realistic background. The name was coined by Joost Swarte in 1977. style.

On June 1, 2006, the Dalai Lama The Dalai Lama (UK: , US: ; Tibetan: ཏཱ་ལའི་བླ་མ་, Wylie: Tā la'i bla ma [táːlɛː láma]) is the head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. The term is part of the full title "Holiness Knowing Everything Vajradhara Dalai Lama" (圣 识一切 瓦齐尔达喇 达赖 喇嘛) given by Altan Khan, the first Shunyi King of Ming China. He offered it in appreciation to the Gelug school's then-leader, Sonam Gyatso, who received it in 1578 at Yanghua Monastery. At that time, Sonam Gyatso had just given teachings to the Khan, and so the title of Dalai Lama was also given to the entire tulku lineage. Sonam Gyatso became the 3rd Dalai Lama, while the first two tulkus in the lineage, the 1st Dalai Lama and the 2nd Dalai Lama, were posthumously awarded the title. bestowed the International Campaign for Tibet's Light of Truth award upon Tintin, along with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu Desmond Mpilo Tutu (7 October 1931 – 26 December 2021) was a South African Anglican bishop and theologian, known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist. He was Bishop of Johannesburg from 1985 to 1986 and then Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996, in both cases being the first Black African to hold the position. Theologically, he sought to fuse ideas from Black theology with African theology. . This award recognized Hergé's book Tintin in Tibet, which ICT Europe's Executive Director Tsering Jampa described as an introduction to the awe-inspiring landscape and culture of Tibet. Accepting on behalf of the Hergé Foundation, Hergé's widow Fanny Rodwell remarked, "We never thought that this story of friendship would resonate for more than 40 years."

Charles de Gaulle Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (22 November 1890 – 9 November 1970) was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 to restore democracy in France. In 1958, amid the Algiers putsch, he came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister by President René Coty. He rewrote the Constitution of France and founded the Fifth Republic after approval by referendum. He was elected President of France later that year, a position he held until his resignation in 1969. once said, "My only international rival is Tintin."

There was an Intersegment Level Xmas Tree A Christmas tree is a decorated tree, usually an evergreen conifer, such as a spruce, pine or fir, associated with the celebration of Christmas. It may also consist of an artificial tree of similar appearance. Decoration Contest and I participated in that. Our Decoration won the 3rd prize. It was fun!

Neena's Marriage, Cochin Trip, and Bannerghatta NP Visit

Austin and I went to Cochin Kochi ( KOH-chee, Malayalam: [kotˈt͡ʃi] ), formerly known as Cochin ( KOH-chin), is a major port city along the Malabar Coast of India bordering the Laccadive Sea. It is part of the district of Ernakulam in the state of Kerala. The city is also commonly referred to as Ernakulam. As of 2011, the Kochi Municipal Corporation had a population of 677,381 over an area of 94.88 km2, and the larger Kochi urban agglomeration had over 2.1 million inhabitants within an area of 440 km2, making it the largest and the most populous metropolitan area in Kerala. Kochi city is also part of the Greater Cochin development region and is classified as a Tier-II city by the Government of India. The civic body that governs the city is the Kochi Municipal Corporation, which was constituted in the year 1967, and the statutory bodies that oversee its development are the Greater Cochin Development Authority (GCDA) and the Goshree Islands Development Authority (GIDA). to attend Neena's marriage. It was one of the shortest marriages I have ever seen. The entire marriage ceremony took just 30 minutes to complete. This was my first time witnessing a Malayali marriage.

After the marriage, we went to the Cochin Harbour to spend some time. At Cochin, I discovered that they use boats as a mode of public transport! That was quite interesting.

Back in Bangalore, this weekend, I visited Bannerghatta National Park Bannerghatta National Park is a national park in India, located In Bengaluru and Ramanagara District, Karnataka. It was founded in 1970 and declared as a national park in 1974. In 2002, a small portion of the park became a zoological garden, the Bannerghatta Biological Park. with Vaishnavi, Shiva, and Dad. Vaishnavi wanted to see the new Butterfly Park opened at BNP, but after the Grand Safari and Zoo visit, by the time we reached the Butterfly Park, it was already 5:30 PM, and it had closed. Next time, we plan to visit the Butterfly Park exclusively.

During the Grand Safari, I managed to capture some great snaps of tigers. The cab driver helped me with some of the shots, and he even captured a few himself. I paid him Rs.10/- for this extra service. :-) However, I wasn't entirely satisfied as I had hoped to improve my photography skills with some wildlife shooting.

Tihs is a pelicaur pproetry that if the fsirt and the lsat ltteer of the wdros rmiean the smae, and the rset is scbelmard, then you mhigt siltl be able to ierreptnt it. Tihs is very fnnuy. :-)

Inrpeisd from jwz scrmable: http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl

Comments

lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. where r u on the lisp challenge?

Re: lisp Not started yet. Left after the first reading. Will get back and gain speed from this week onwards.

Re: lisp


        CLIPS
            
            
              
            
            CLIPS (C Language Integrated Production System) is a public-domain software tool for building expert systems. The syntax and name were inspired by Charles Forgy's OPS5. The first versions of CLIPS were developed starting in 1985 at the NASA Johnson Space Center (as an alternative for existing system ART*Inference) until 1996, when the development group's responsibilities ceased to focus on expert system technology. The original name of the project was NASA's AI Language (NAIL).
            
        > (print "hello,World")

[EXPRNPSR3] Missing function declaration for print.

CLIPS>

:-( Will come back tonight and try again.

I on Linux, using clips.

Re: lisp lets c.

Re: lisp Well, started today and effectively at the 3rd chapter. :-) more to go, well, began to feel the path ahead. lisp is a totally different beast unlike C or python and its going interesting.

Re: lisp :-) ur real conceptual difficulty will lie in macro. lemme know what u think when u get there.

Clerks II Clerks II is a 2006 American black comedy film written and directed by Kevin Smith, the sequel to his 1994 film Clerks, and his sixth feature film to be set in the View Askewniverse. The film stars Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, Trevor Fehrman, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Jason Mewes, and Smith, and picks up with the original characters from Clerks: Dante Hicks, Randal Graves and Jay and Silent Bob ten years after the events of the first film. Unlike the first film, which was shot in black and white, this film was shot mostly in color. dude u shud really 'Clerks II' asap. i know u love lord of the rings and i just hate it. i like star wars. there is a beautiful LoR vs SW srguement in Clearks II that i really enjoyed. u shud see the movie.

pyljvim is a LiveJournal LiveJournal (Russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. plugin for Vim Vim ( ; vi improved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. . With this plugin, you can post to LiveJournal directly from Vim! :)

In fact, I am posting this entry from Vim.

You can find it here: pyljvim on Vim.org

Installation is straightforward, and the usage is simple as well.

Thanks, Senthil

"Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's console." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio sitcom broadcast over two series on BBC Radio 4 between 1978 and 1980, it was soon adapted to other formats, including both novels and comic books; a 1981 BBC television series; a 1984 text adventure game; stage shows; and a 2005 feature film.

Comments

Very interesting way to use Vim, very nice. ;) As I can understand, Python Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. must be installed (on Windows, of course)? Well, I think I'll try it. Thanks and good luck.

Interesting, but would it be possible to preview before submitting an entry?

Thanks. Yes Python must be installed on windows to work. This version relies on python to do the posting, but I would like to convert it to vim scripting itself so that vim should be enough. btw, support for unicode is also poor in this version.I would like to add the unicode support in the next release. The intial release had a bug, where I stored my credentials in the file and zipped it, I have uploaded a new one and it works fine. :-)

hmm.. preview as in converted to html? Nope, It is not possible. I did not feel the need for it, but as you say, instead of preview ( I never preview!) but verifying the syntax be a good thing to TODO? What do you say?

Nice to hear about the native Vim scripting instead of Python. I don't mean that using of Python is the wrong way, but the Vim scripting might be much better in this case. :-) Well, support for Unicode might be useful too. But it's not an urgent matter. Maybe it would be more pleasant to use the usual 'iconv' for text converting (with 'on-the-fly' converting, too), or not? Another question is this — the saving of the user's drafts. For example, one have wrote some stuff and have not published it. What about the draft, whether it's stored in the one's home directory or elsewhere?

Nice work saar!

I thought about the Draft thing. It is not yet present. It currently saves the entry with a temporary filename in the TEMP folder. One can retrieve it he remembers the name of the file,but is not implemented as a feature yet.

Thanks for your feedback.

thanks sajith. :) Time for lispljemacs? btw, I did not completely write it from scratch, 0.0.1 was implemented by Wartan Hachturow and I took the maintainer ship from from and enhanced it further. Hope to make it more usable.

Well, there is ljupdate - I often use that.

blogger and vim BTW I am planning something like what you have done for lj with blogger. Blogger and vim :) //Navtej

Re: Barcamp Presentation Hi Navtej, I didn't know that Barcamps are usually for webbased stuffs. I thought it was just a hacker meet, to share things and show 'their cool stuff'. The thoughtworks pulled lot of webbased talks only.

You know what, pyljvim pulled only one person :-) as it was the last presentation of the whole camp. I just went ahead explaining the details to him.

was quite amused at the the topic and took some snaps, got to see if he has uploaded any. Yeah, looking forward to the mini pycon. Hoping to python talks on topics other than web technologies. c u there,Navtej.

Re: blogger and vim yeah,that would be a good idea too. Just see if there if Blogger provides an interface for clients. Rest should be workable.

But, why not move to livejournal itself Navtej? positives are: comment notification( which I requested in blogger number of times,but it did not come up till I moved) and other positive things of open source software.

LJ's community and friends feature is its backbone (IMO).

I was trying to post entries directly from Vim Vim ( ; vi improved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. , but the text is not displaying properly. I need to figure out the problem and fix it. It's been pending for some days now. Once it's resolved, it will be so comfortable to post to LiveJournal LiveJournal (Russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. directly from Vim.

Reviews

I watched The Departed The Departed is a 2006 crime thriller film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by William Monahan. It is both an English-language remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and also loosely based on the real-life Boston Winter Hill Gang; the character Colin Sullivan is based on the corrupt FBI agent John Connolly, while the character Frank Costello is based on Irish-American gangster and crime boss Whitey Bulger. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Mark Wahlberg, with Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Alec Baldwin, Anthony Anderson and James Badge Dale in supporting roles. , and I liked it. It's a very good movie with a good story and excellent direction. It might keep you on the edge of your seat while watching. The actors Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and others have done an outstanding job. Well, you're going to hear the 'F' word at least 100 times in that movie, but you won't mind it. The movie is a kind of chase where a rat is implanted on both sides (a gang and the police), and they try to find out who the rat is, while both rats are very clever.

FOSS.IN

Visited FOSS.IN today. Well, I was a bit disappointed as the quality of talks seems to be going down. A few were good—I enjoyed bluesmoon's talk, and the intro by Suparna was okay. But the rest were disappointing!

Atul Chitnis, if I were you, I would just pick quality speakers and fit only as many as the schedule allows (one day or two days). I would not compromise quality in favor of "let's do grand" things. But hey, you're doing a fantastic job (a few quality talks spread over three days) for the minor amount you're collecting from the delegates.

Kudos, keep going, but please check for quality now and then.

Hi Atul,

Yeah, I was bit hard in using that word. But my first day's general feeling was about some talks missing 'quality'. The quality we have come to expect at FOSS with speakers like Alan Cox, Nat, Mugiel and Naba Kumar delivering excellent presentations at previous meets.

I replied to your comment on the second day while watching Christoph Hellwig speaking on Linux Kernel, but the connection failed and the reply did not come up.

So the talks which did not particularly impress me (and many of my friends too):

sUSBix - stick to it !:

Seriously dont know what he was trying to say! He didn't have knowhow on the related area as well.

USB boot of Belenix, nearly covered his whole topic with much ease on the last day.

But, you see sUSBBix was the first talk after the intro by Suparna, got to be careful when audience will be flocking for a good talk at the peak timings.

A FOSS Bridge to Cross the Digital Divide

Man, he did not talk anything related to Digital Divide! Explaining about language, search technology etc etc.

Few the panel discussions at FOSS.IN 2005, with sunil from mahiti.org and others were much better!

Open Source Product Documentation Framework

Another guy beating around the bush. Says OSS guys have all the time in the world discussing on forums, having blogs etc etc, so we should provide them a 'wiki' like thing to write! Excellent thought! But why 2 hours!??

Creating a Flexible Robot Controller using Python

Python is portable, so we are using it. Knowledge!

Well,I know from python.org that it is used in industrial automation and I am not wrong in expecting to know in which processes and how python is plugged into ABB. I didnt get an answer for first 30+ minutes I attended.

These were the few talks on the first day which did not particularly get good reception and might have left a bad impression also.

Few good ones were:

Russell Nelson's on hacking, Philip's share of thoughts in contributing to OSS through his libyahoo experience, Suparnas thought software engineering and it ok ( am not into linux kernel so).

Second and Third day talks were much better ( I choose speakers over the topic).

But there is a long way to go before we can think of anything like what CCC does. Tim Pritlove's talk was amazing!

Thanks,

Senthil

Senthil

Bullshit? Bit hard, aren't you? Just how many of the 23 talks that happened yesterday did you actually attend to judge them?

You are seriously telling me that Christof, Harald, Jamal, Sirtaj, Jayakumar, Andrew, Russel, etc. - who all had house-full talks, and that everyone raved about - were "bullshit"?????

Since you made such a sweeping statement, it would really help your readers if you would actually state which talks you attended (you physically could not have attended more than 6 of the 23 talks, of which 2 you have already tagged as "ok"). It would also help us if we could get more specific comments rather than blanket condemnation.

Thanks.

achitnis

Steve Yegge posted an entry on Maths for Programmers.

That article is very insightful. It analyzes how mathematics can be useful to any programmer at any time.

We have all lost touch with basic mathematics and need to gear up. His suggestion is that mathematics should be learned breadth-first and not depth-first. By knowing different mathematical solutions, we can identify which section a problem belongs to and approach it correctly.

Another suggestion for all of us is to start with any math section on Wikipedia, follow it until we understand it, and make it a daily habit.

I had heard from my friend Ashok that Mahatma Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (from Sanskrit, meaning great-souled, or venerable), first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world. wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims. , asking him to stop the war and teaching him about Ahimsa Ahimsa (Sanskrit: अहिंसा, IAST: ahiṃsā, lit. 'nonviolence') is the ancient Indian principle of nonviolence which applies to actions towards all living beings. It is a key virtue in Indian religions like Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. . I stumbled upon a link discussing that letter in the Wikipedia article on Mahatma Gandhi.

Here is an article that discusses Gandhi's letters to Hitler. We learn that Gandhi addressed Hitler as his friend and emphasized that it was not just words—he truly believed in universal friendship and extended it to Hitler as well. This was during a time when Hitler was suggesting to the British that killing Gandhi would suppress the Indian rebellion.

The article discusses various political instances where Gandhi's ideologies could have been applied. One can notice that the author gives a favorable treatment of Gandhi's ideologies in these situations. The last paragraph of the article was particularly impressive.

To quote from the article itself:

It is not certain that this would have worked, but then Gandhism is not synonymous with effectiveness. Gandhi's methods were successful in dissuading the British from holding on to India, not in dissuading the Muslim League The All-India Muslim League (AIML) was a political party founded in 1906 in Dhaka, British India with the goal of securing Muslim interests in South Asia. Although initially espousing a united India with interfaith unity, the Muslim League later led the Pakistan Movement, calling for a separate Muslim homeland after the British exit from India. from partitioning India. From that angle, it simply remains an open question, an untried experiment, whether the Gandhian approach could have succeeded in preventing World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies and the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world's countries participated, with many nations mobilising all resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of 70 to 85 million people, more than half of whom were civilians. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were tried for war crimes. . By contrast, there simply cannot be two opinions on whether that approach of non-violent dissuasion would have been Gandhian. The Mahatma would not have been the Mahatma if he had preferred any other method. Our judgment of his letters to Hitler must be the same as our judgment of Gandhism itself: either both represented a lofty ethical alternative to the more common methods of power politics, or both were erroneous and ridiculous.

Avinash and Karthick from Spastics Society of Karnataka participated in the Jack Kilby Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 – June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who took part, along with Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958.: 22  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on December 10, 2000. Quiz conducted by Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog chips and embedded processors, which account for more than 80% of its revenue. TI also produces digital light processing (DLP) technology and education technology products including calculators, microcontrollers, and multi-core processors. .

Finished reading The Hobbit The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. It is recognized as a classic in children's literature and is one of the best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. today and subsequently became a fan of J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. . It was my first J.R.R. Tolkien book. I had purchased it in 2005 and started reading it a few months ago. After some breaks, I finally had time to finish it today.

Tolkien's English is superb! Now, I understand why he has so many fans worldwide. The book captures your imagination and transports you to the world of hobbits. The descriptions of events are vivid and engaging, creating a strong interest in the reader.

Recommended reading for anyone who has not yet explored J.R.R. Tolkien's works.

Python (programming language) Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. 2.5 (FINAL) is now available.

Stumbled upon this link about the Whitespace (programming language) Whitespace is an esoteric programming language with syntax where only whitespace characters (space, tab and linefeed) have meaning – contrasting typical languages that largely ignore whitespace characters. . It's really funny!

It's been some time since I worked until 04:20:28. I had some discussions with friends, completed my work, and handled project management tasks as well. Python (programming language) Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. is catching up well—it's really a cool language. Once I become sufficiently familiar with it, writing Python should feel like writing English.

Questions to myself:

• Find the difference between re.search and re.match.
• Read the Python FAQ.

Some Python Notes

Part 1:

Is Python "powerful"? :-)

http://www. Paul Graham (programmer) Paul Graham (; born November 13, 1964) is an English-American computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor. His work includes the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, a number of essays and books, and the media webpage Hacker News. .com/power.html

Part 2:

Something to think about... Every new release of Python implements more and more features of Lisp (programming language) Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. . So, why not just use Lisp now instead of waiting for the developers of Python to slowly make Python into Lisp?

(adapted from 1(pg's arguments))

Part 3:

What is your opinion on Python not having higher order functions? Do you think programming languages need to be dumbed down so that some users of the language (ie.developers) don't shoot themselves in the foot?

kulalosai

Re: Some Python Notes

yep i've read this article b4, when i was evaluating different languages to use for webapp.

so far, my belief is that lisp is superior to everything else. pretty soon i think (and i hope) i'll know for sure. i'll keep u posted on what i find out ( subjectively... can't assure an objective view... :-) ). i'm very curious about what u find too...

kulalosai

Re: Some Python Notes

I read the article last week. Though it was thought provoking, it did not much disturb me as not to dive deeper into python. I dont know, sometimes I stumble upon few limitations but they are more due to lack of knowledge than anything else. Python I have found to be easy to write a program in. esr has some of his thoughts on python here.

An important measure of effort in coding is the frequency with which you write something that doesn't actually match your mental representation of the problem, and have to backtrack on realizing that what you just typed won't actually tell the language to do what you're thinking. An important measure of good language design is how rapidly the percentage of missteps of this kind falls as you gain experience with the language.







When you're writing working code nearly as fast as you can type and your misstep rate is near zero, it generally means you've achieved mastery of the language. But that didn't make sense, because it was still day one and I was regularly pausing to look up new language and library features!







This was my first clue that, in Python, I was actually dealing with an exceptionally good design. Most languages have so much friction and awkwardness built into their design that you learn most of their feature set long before your misstep rate drops anywhere near zero. Python was the first general-purpose language I'd ever used that reversed this process.







Not that it took me very long to learn the feature set. I wrote a working, usable fetchmailconf, with GUI, in six working days, of which perhaps the equivalent of two days were spent learning Python itself. This reflects another useful property of the language: it is compact--you can hold its entire feature set (and at least a concept index of its libraries) in your head. C is a famously compact language....

Let me put somemore points. Btw, try the Trip on the funny boat. That was a nice one.

Senthil

Recent Books

• Comics: The Adventures of Tintin The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name Hergé. The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth in 1907, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film. : Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon A good entertainer. I am a long-time fan of Tintin.

• The Mythical Man-Month The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. Excellent essays on software engineering by Fred Brooks. His experience managing a large software project is evident in this book. The book provides valuable insights into the software development process. If you are a software developer, tester, or manager, you should read this book.

• The Code Book The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography is a book by Simon Singh, published in 1999 by Fourth Estate and Doubleday. by Simon Singh This book explores the history of cryptography and shares many stories from the field. It sparks interest in cryptography and helps you appreciate the efforts of those who have contributed to its development.

Recent Movies

• Munich (2005 film) Munich is a 2005 epic historical drama film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, co-written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. It is based on the 1984 book Vengeance by George Jonas, an account of Mossad assassinations following the Munich massacre. It was okay. You can watch it once. It felt like a standard Spielberg movie.

• The Incredibles The Incredibles is a 2004 American animated superhero film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. Written and directed by Brad Bird, it stars the voices of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox, Jason Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, and Elizabeth Peña. Set in a retro-futuristic version of the 1960s, the film follows Bob and Helen Parr, a couple of superheroes, known as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, respectively, who hide their powers in accordance with a government mandate, and attempt to live a quiet suburban life with their three children. However, Bob's desire to help people draws the entire family into a confrontation with a vengeful fan-turned-foe. Excellent movie. I don't know why I missed watching this in the theater. I enjoyed it a lot. Dash's run was particularly impressive.

• Ice Age: The Meltdown Ice Age: The Meltdown is a 2006 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Blue Sky Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It is the sequel to Ice Age (2002) and the second installment in the Ice Age film series. The film was directed by Carlos Saldanha from a screenplay written by Peter Gaulke, Gerry Swallow, and Jim Hecht, and a story by Gaulke and Swallow. Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, and Chris Wedge reprise their roles from the first Ice Age film, with newcomers Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, and Queen Latifah joining the cast. In the film, Manny, Sid, and Diego attempt to escape an impending flood, during which Manny finds love. I watched it twice. I enjoyed it very much the first time. The scenery is well-made, and the storyline is okay, but still very enjoyable.

• The Da Vinci Code (film) The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard, written by Akiva Goldsman, and based on Dan Brown's 2003 novel of the same name. The first in the Robert Langdon film series, the film stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean Reno, and Paul Bettany. In the film, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious symbology from Harvard University, is the prime suspect in the grisly and unusual murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière. On the body, the police find a disconcerting cipher and start an investigation. Langdon escapes with the assistance of police cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and they begin a quest for the legendary Holy Grail. Sir Leigh Teabing, a noted British Grail historian, tells them that the actual Holy Grail is explicitly encoded in Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting The Last Supper. Also searching for the Grail is a secret cabal within Opus Dei, an actual prelature of the Holy See, who wish to keep the true Grail a secret to prevent the destruction of Christianity. A good movie. I initially wanted to watch it after reading the book but decided to watch it anyway. I found it very interesting. The movie is gripping even if you know the story. It presents an alternative history suggesting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, they had a child, and their lineage continues to this day.

That's all I can remember for the recent past.

Happy Pi Day Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (the 3rd month) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant figures of π, and was first celebrated in the United States. It was founded in 1988 by Larry Shaw, an employee of a science museum in San Francisco, the Exploratorium. Celebrations often involve eating pie or holding pi recitation competitions. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day. UNESCO's 40th General Conference designated Pi Day as the International Day of Mathematics in November 2019. to you!

Rapple 1.0 Released!

Project Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rapple

Home Page: http://rapple.sourceforge.net

From: Alan Moran

Mailed-By: lists.sourceforge.net

To: rapple-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

Date: Nov 27, 2005, 6:06 PM

Subject: [Rapple-devel] Rapple 1.0 Released!

I have just released Rapple 1.0 via FRS onto SourceForge.net. This release (along with tests, resources, and website docs) has been tagged Release-1_0.

Many thanks to all involved in meeting this deadline. There are still places where we can improve and features we can add, but I think it is important that a functional version is made public so that we can begin to understand how end users see the tool. The progress we have made so far in quality (e.g., unit test framework) and documentation (e.g., Doxygen and website) is great and gives us a good basis to start from.

I have tentatively put together a roadmap for release 1.1 (you can see this on the website now), so let's put some ideas together for what should be done and what we need to fix or improve on in the current implementation!

Thanks for all your input!

Regards, Alan

I made my first contribution to https://github.com/dell/ libsmbios In computing, the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification defines data structures (and access methods) that can be used to read management information produced by the BIOS of a computer. This eliminates the need for the operating system to probe hardware directly to discover what devices are present in the computer. The SMBIOS specification is produced by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), a non-profit standards development organization. The DMTF estimates that two billion client and server systems implement SMBIOS. with the patch to checkSkipTest for Skipping unit_test failures.

Now links:

[

In the C Source Code Resources Directory.

Thanks! And a good step forward.

Good Job! :).:|Kirubakaran|:.

Kirubakaran

"I see myself as an average guy who tries to help out my mates and loves my sport. I think in some ways, I'm sort of an underdog and a bit of a battler. I've always had to fight hard for my spot and to achieve what I have, and I've had to give 100%. I think Australians like to see that in people, and they like to recognize it." — Steve Waugh

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in September 1934 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1935 under the title of The Boomerang Clue. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00. " src="http://www.waidev4.com/php/IMAGES/AGATHA_Stories/89---Image.jpg">

That's an Agatha Christie Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English author known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime"—a nickname now trademarked by her estate—or the "Queen of Mystery". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. She is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies. title! I read the book over the weekend and got a glimpse of the talent of the Queen of Crime. This was my first entry into the world of Agatha Christie. She has a very nice writing style, great attention to detail, and is an excellent storyteller. :)

Maheswata is a story of a beautiful girl named Anupama, who suddenly has to face life in all its cruel possibilities. After enduring immense suffering, she begins to take things in stride, fights back with courage, and ultimately finds meaning in her life.

This novel is filled with numerous life lessons. It delves into many subtle issues of the human mind regarding beauty, the security of women in a male-dominated society in India, and what a man's love for a beautiful woman might signify. It also explores the plight of a talented, motherless girl born into a poor family and how sometimes good people endure immense suffering through no fault of their own. Despite these bleak circumstances, the novel reminds us that there are still good people in the world.

The story encourages introspection on many issues. Thank you, dearest Madam Sudha Murty Sudha Murty (née Kulkarni; born 19 August 1950) is an Indian educator, author, and philanthropist. She is the Founder-Chairperson of the non-profit charitable organization Infosys Foundation. She is married to the co-founder of Infosys, N. R. Narayana Murthy. In 2024, Murty was nominated as Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha on 8 March 2024 for her contribution to social work and education. Murty was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India, for social work by the Government of India in 2006. In 2023, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India. , for such a wonderful novel.

Imagine a world covered with a dark atmosphere, choking with smoke and clouds, air so thick that no light can glimmer through it. This is what our earth could soon look like. The black background symbolizes this darkness, pollution, smoke, and all the harmful elements arising from human activities.

With rising temperatures, increasing Global warming Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth’s climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the primary gas driving global warming, has increased in concentration by about 50% since the pre-industrial era to levels not seen for millions of years. , and Ozone layer The ozone layer or ozone shield is a region of Earth's stratosphere that absorbs most of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation. It contains a high concentration of ozone (O3) in relation to other parts of the atmosphere, although still small in relation to other gases in the stratosphere. The ozone layer peaks at 8 to 15 parts per million of ozone, while the average ozone concentration in Earth's atmosphere as a whole is about 0.3 parts per million. The ozone layer is mainly found in the lower portion of the stratosphere, from approximately 15 to 35 kilometers (9 to 22 mi) above Earth, although its thickness varies seasonally and geographically. depletion, the earth is becoming a ball of fire. The varying shades of yellow, orange, and red in concentric circles depict the exponential growth of the intensity of fire over time.

To prevent his cherished creation from perishing, God comes to the rescue. This superhuman power extends his hand to help humanity. His touch creates a spark, giving rise to a strong thought of a new Green Revolution The Green Revolution, or the Third Agricultural Revolution, was a period of technology transfer initiatives that saw greatly increased crop yields. These changes in agriculture began in developed countries in the early 20th century and spread globally until the late 1980s. In the late 1960s, farmers began incorporating new technologies such as high-yielding varieties of cereals, particularly dwarf wheat and rice, and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers (to produce their high yields, the new seeds require far more fertilizer than traditional varieties), pesticides, and controlled irrigation. on earth. Humanity needs to be aware of this to bring back the old, greener earth where we once lived. As this small thought takes root in each human mind, beautiful twigs sprout into tender green leaves.

Let this GENESIS of thought for a "green revolution" be deeply rooted in the human mind.

Collage by Praveen, Aarthi, Raj, and Senthil, prepared for Environment Day.

Good job. The idea is simple & traditional. Good Aesthetic sense

Kannappan

Thanks a lot for the wishes! :-)

phoe6

Rapple is a lightweight XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML. -based transformation tool written in C. It builds upon Expat (XML) Expat is a stream-oriented XML 1.0 parser library, written in C, more precisely C99. As one of the first available open-source XML parsers, Expat has found a place in many open-source projects. Such projects include the Apache HTTP Server, Mozilla, Perl, Python and PHP. It is also bound in many other languages. , HTML Tidy HTML Tidy is a console application for correcting invalid HyperText Markup Language (HTML), detecting potential web accessibility errors, and for improving the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. It is also a cross-platform library for computer applications that provides HTML Tidy's features. , and XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text, or XSL Formatting Objects. These formats can be subsequently converted to formats such as PDF, PostScript, and PNG. Support for JSON and plain-text transformation was added in later updates to the XSLT 1.0 specification. to transform authored web content (including word processor-generated HTML) into styled web content suitable for publication.

It's a nice feeling to become a member of a SourceForge project. Thanks a lot, Alan, for including me in the development list.

Try the Rapple Demo now!

rappled a small html page. seems intresting

Kannappan

Somewhere I seem to have read that doing something regularly for 21 continuous days forms a habit in you. Well, I am going to try it from today. It's a long-desired habit and somewhat tough.

So, I am trying to get myself accustomed to sitting in the same place continuously for a defined number of hours.

i've improvised from the original blogger's template in the css style.

jeffry

You have a WP theme. How could you do that? It's cool man. All the best.

jeffry

Thanks Jeff, Stumbled across this Template and liked it and more information here.And how abt your Shiny Metal Template of your blog?

phoe6

I did a Bungee jumping Bungee jumping (), also spelled bungy jumping, is an activity that involves a person jumping from a great height while connected to a large elastic cord. The launching pad is usually erected on a tall structure such as a building or crane, a bridge across a deep ravine, or on a natural geographic feature such as a cliff. It is also possible to jump from a type of aircraft that has the ability to hover above the ground, such as a hot-air-balloon or helicopter. The thrill comes from the free-falling and the rebound. When the person jumps, the cord stretches and the jumper flies upwards again as the cord recoils, and continues to oscillate up and down until all the kinetic energy is dissipated. today with Raj.

The first free fall from 140 meters above was exhilarating. As I ascended, I looked at the surroundings—the night lights, the traffic, the roads, and the people far below. Just as I was preparing myself, the jump operator gave me a push, and i was like Whoa...

Well, it's like being there during 22/2/2222! Just for a rough comparison to Gagan, whom I found very difficult to persuade as to what's so special about this.

Unix time Unix time is a date and time representation widely used in computing. It measures time by the number of non-leap seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, the Unix epoch. For example, at midnight on 1 January 2010, Unix time was 1262304000. 2222222222 will be on Sat, 02 Jun 2040 03:57:02 GMT.

perl -e 'print scalar gmtime(1111111111), "\n"'

Anonymous

Unix Time Script

This script waits until the Unix time reaches a specific value (1111111111) and then prints the current time and date.

#!/bin/bash

while [ $(date +%s) != 1111111111 ]
do
    echo "Not Yet!"
done

echo "Unix Time"

date +%s

echo "on $(date)"
echo "so we captured the history!"

exit 0

Ode to a School Computer

By David Ahl

I was stay'in after school a week or so ago 'Cause I told a teacher where she could go

She had me settin' in this big old room With a bunch of machines that just looked like doom

There's this big Mutha machine with flashing' lights And a couple of funny-looking' electric typewrites

Well I thought I'd type somethin' for the fun of it So I hunted and pecked out just one word - "shit"

Before I could lean back in my chair and get steady That machine typed WHAT, and then it said READY

So I typed a whole line of them four-letter words But it just replied WHAT and READY like it hadn't heard

Well I figured since I couldn't go out fishin' I'd teach that stupid machine to listen

So I picked up this book called Teach yourself BASIC And sat down at that Teletype prepared to face it

First I found to make that machine type my bit I just had to put a PRINT in front of it

And then I found out that thing could add And subtract and multiply and divide like mad

I found out too it knew all kinds of games Like craps and blackjack and a cannon to aim

I was havin' all kinds of fun when that teacher walked in She just looked at my output and started to grin

I kind of sheepishly asked if I could stay a while more She said: "Sure; when you just shut the door".

I tried some more games like football and poker And a parachute jump written by some kind of joker

There was one where I could try to land on the moon It would crash and blow up if fired the engines too soon

Well, I played on through supper and into the night And then finally quit when I saw dawn's first light.

Some girls, I know are a whole lot cuter But I found a new kind of high with that computer.

"Concern for man himself and his safety must always form the chief interest in all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations." — Albert Einstein Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

I stumbled upon detailed information about this incident on December 3, 2004, through a Bhopal disaster On 3 December 1984, over 500,000 people in the vicinity of the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India were exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate, in what is considered the world's worst industrial disaster. A government affidavit in 2006 stated that the leak caused 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries. Estimates vary on the death toll, with the official number of immediate deaths being 2,259. Others estimate that 8,000 died within two weeks, and another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases. In 2008, the Government of Madhya Pradesh paid compensation to the family members of 3,787 victims killed in the gas release, and to 574,366 injured victims. , which inspired me to read this book.

The story begins with Ratan Nadar, a typical Adivasi Indian peasant, and follows the fate of his family. Without any rhetorical exaggeration, the narrative presents most of the information objectively. Ratan Nadar's children, aged 5, 6, and 8, work in a match factory handling toxic chemicals. One day, a fire breaks out, and Padmini, the eldest, tragically discovers her brother dead.

Ratan, like many others, continuously faces hardships in his village. Seeking a better life, he moves to Bhopal, a bustling city, and secures a job as a worker constructing the Bhopal Railway Station.

Union Carbide Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) is an American chemical company headquartered in Seadrift, Texas. It has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company since 2001. Union Carbide produces chemicals and polymers that undergo one or more further conversions by customers before reaching consumers. Some are high-volume commodities and others are specialty products. Markets served include paints and coatings, packaging, wire and cable, household products, personal care, pharmaceuticals, automotive, textiles, agriculture, and oil and gas. The company is a former component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. develops Sevin pesticide, which promises to improve crop productivity, and plans to establish a factory in Bhopal, India. Eduardo Munoz, the chief architect, questions the necessity of such a factory in India, given the country's unique challenges. However, Union Carbide's board of directors dismisses his concerns, driven by profit motives.

While the motives are profit-oriented, the story also highlights several earnest individuals who establish and work at the Union Carbide plant in India, portraying it as a dream company for many.

Things take a darker turn.

The book delves into the lives of people living in Oriya Bustee and Kali Ghats, exploring their customs, work, and relationship with Union Carbide. It examines how circumstances evolve, how people come together to support one another in times of real need, and how indifference can sometimes lead to devastating consequences.

The Right to Read

By Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( STAWL-mən; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.

This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). (Volume 40, Number 2).

(From "The Road to Tycho," a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096.)*

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as the computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment—for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the research papers he read. (Ten percent of those fees went to the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to repay this loan.)

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay. There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually, a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his computer. But he couldn't refuse to help her, because he loved her. Every chance to speak with her filled him with delight. And that she chose him to ask for help—that could mean she loved him too.

Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more unthinkable—he lent her the computer and told her his password. This way, if Lissa read his books, Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It was still a crime, but the SPA would not automatically find out about it. They would only find out if Lissa reported him.

Of course, if the school ever found out that he had given Lissa his own password, it would be curtains for both of them as students, regardless of what she had used it for. School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students' computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn't matter whether you did anything harmful—the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this—not directly. Instead, they were banned from the school computer systems and would inevitably fail all their classes.

Later, Dan would learn that this kind of university policy started only in the 1980s, when university students in large numbers began using computers. Previously, universities maintained a different approach to student discipline; they punished activities that were harmful, not those that merely raised suspicion.

Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to help her led to their marriage and also led them to question what they had been taught about piracy as children. The couple began reading about the history of copyright, about the Soviet Union and its restrictions on copying, and even the original United States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where they found others who had likewise gravitated away from the long arm of the SPA. When the Tycho Uprising began in 2062, the universal right to read soon became one of its central aims.

Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

There is also an author's note and some references in the main article.

Well, it shouldn't have taken so long to finish reading it. But I got the book at a time when I wasn't in the habit of reading.

I met Manish at one of our BLUG meets, and he had the book. I was curious about this new book and started flipping through it. I just hoped it wasn't another "Count Your Eggs Before They Hatch" kind of self-help material. I haven't read those kinds of books, but I don't really like them for some reason. Maybe I should give them a try someday.

Manish's review was that if you enjoyed Dil Chahta Hai, you might like this book as well. He kindly offered to lend it to me. I'm sorry, Manish, that it took me so long to read it, and I haven't had the chance to meet you again since.

A lot of friends seem to have enjoyed this book, and I did too. Gowri currently has it. I'll check with Zulfi and pass him a copy if he doesn't already have one.

Hi Ramesh, better get hold of copy yourself.It costs only 95/- and you will be sharing it with lot of friends of yours after reading it for sure :)

phoe6

I am also, thinking of reading that. Probably I've to check in the lending libraries of Adyar here.

Ramesh

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( STAWL-mən; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License. : Your last question embodies the assumption that innovation is what we want and freedom is secondary. I think it's just the opposite: freedom is most important, and innovation is nice as long as we maintain our freedom.

What Linux myths or misconceptions do you find particularly galling?

I don't get upset that easily, so I can't say that there is any in particular that I find galling. One myth that I find interesting, but which has nothing to do with Linux or even the IT sector in particular, is the myth of how a single person or even a single company makes a huge difference in the market. It's the belief that things happen because somebody was visionary and "planned" it that way. Sometimes the people themselves seem to believe it, and then the myth becomes hubris.

I have to continually try to explain to people that no, I don't "control" what happens in Linux. It's about having an environment that is conducive to development, not so much about any particular leader. And I think that is true in most cases, be it the "great sport coach" or the "great spiritual leader."

Uthcode is back!

I was finally able to upload the files to the sarovar server. So, uthcode can be accessed using a friendly, easy to remember URL http://uthcode.sarovar.org

Edit: This is now https://www.learntosolveit.com

I had planned to complete a lot of extra work over the weekend, but everything vaporized. :)

I did glance through some tasks, like reviewing the patent application from Ed and quickly going through the 1855MC presentation, which I have to give on Tuesday. However, I missed reviewing the RPM documentation, revising test cases (there are about 22 comments), and completing some office work.

I went to the office on Saturday for a brief period and managed to reproduce one issue, which required quite a lot of setup time. Afterward, I started playing one of my favorite games: Blade of Darkness. I remember playing this a lot when I was at home, and my sisters enjoyed it too. The Codemasters, the company that develops the game, has the tagline "Genius at Play." :)

I was thinking about calling Gowri and Susila, but I missed it again. I have put the SIM in my mobile, so probably the first thing tomorrow should be to make that call.

I got two VCDs: Anbe Sivam and I, ROBOT.

Anbe Sivam was interesting. I enjoyed the initial jokes between Kamal and Madhavan a lot. For instance, Madhavan is frantic about making a call and is already annoyed with Kamal, who keeps interrupting him with his chatter. Madhavan, having damaged his cell phone by plugging in a wet battery, speaks to the hotel receptionist to arrange a call.

Madhavan: Can I make a STD Call? Other end: No Sir,

Trunk Call? No,Sir.

Fax? No,Sir.

Email? No,Sir.

Courier? No,Sir.

M:Post Man? No,Sir.

Kamal Interrupts: Pura ( Pegion). Madhavan: Pura? Madhavan turns;looks at Kamal, wondering!

These are funny moments, but the film as a whole has many scenes with very deep meaning. While reflecting on this later, I thought Kamal could have given his role to someone else; the story might have resonated more with the audience.

I am by no means denying Kamal's role, but I felt that prioritizing the film and its meaning above everything else might have been better. Kamal, as we know, is an accomplished actor, and this was yet another excellent performance. However, how would it have been if Nalla Sivam was portrayed by another actor alongside A. Arasu? Hard to imagine, right? I am merely exploring ways in which the movie's message could have been conveyed more prominently.

Saturday started with a bit of Uthcode, and Sunday's morning till afternoon was spent on the same. I am glad that I have completed Chapter 5 of K&R. The Recursive Descent Parser problems had me gasping for a long time, but I have finally gotten past them. Revisions on it will probably make me more comfortable with the topic.

I called Giri, but he was already roaming with other friends when I called. I slept a little at home and thought, "If I don't enjoy today (go out today), then it will be a tough week ahead!" So, I called Parthi. We had planned to go to Giri's home this Sunday but missed it. Instead, we went to MG Road, watched Shark Tales, had popcorn, a burger, and two coffees in between. After the movie, we went to Amoeba, tried Dance Dance Revolution Dance Dance Revolution (ダンスダンスレボリューション, Dansu Dansu Reboryūshon) (DDR) is a music video game series produced by Konami. Introduced in Japan in 1998 as part of the Bemani series, and released in North America and Europe in 1999, Dance Dance Revolution is the pioneering series of the rhythm and dance genre in video games. Players stand on a "dance platform" or stage and hit colored arrows laid out in a cross with their feet to musical and visual cues. Players are judged by how well they time their dance to the patterns presented to them and are allowed to choose more music to play to if they receive a passing score. , and watched the bowling there for some time. We then visited Food World and had coffee again, this time at Barista (company) Barista is a chain of espresso bars and cafes that operates in the Indian subcontinent. It is headquartered in Gurugram, India, and maintains outlets across India, and in other regional countries such as Sri Lanka, and Maldives. It is the second oldest coffee house chain in India and is currently India's second-largest coffee chain with over 425 cafes as of March 2024. It also sells a number of FMCG products through Modern & General retail stores across multiple locations. :). We spent some time talking, and it was already 10 PM by the time I returned home.

Returned home and scribbling this.

Hey, someone reading till this line: Read the book "Five Point Someone." It is very interesting! I spent some time on it as well. :)

(Hope this blog answers everyone—mom, aunt, sisters, friends—who might be wondering what I was doing without giving a call.)

I wrote my first Industry publication in the Dell PowerSolutions Journal.

It is titled - Using Log Messages and alert actions in Dell OpenManage Server Administrator. It is helpful to the system administrators using OpenManage Server Administrator software.

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.

And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux Linux (, LIN-uuks) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries—most of which are provided by third parties—to create a complete operating system, designed as a clone of Unix and released under the copyleft GPL license. , it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should not try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.

In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had expected to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.

• Linus Benedict Torvalds

>>Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. >>If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's >>almost certainly over-designed. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil. - Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".

Kannappan

Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds ( LEE-nəs TOR-vawldz, Finland Swedish: [ˈliːnʉs ˈtuːrvɑlds] ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git. has written a nice article at Linux Weekly News.

It is interesting to read, and it is about management. It is titled "Linus on Kernel Management" and deals with management in general. He often says (I have read him saying) that he is more of a manager for the kernel now rather than a core developer. It goes: First off, I'd suggest buying " The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a business and self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. First published in 1989, the book goes over Covey's ideas on how to spur and nurture personal change. He also explores the concept of effectiveness in achieving results, as well as the need for focus on character ethic rather than the personality ethic in selecting value systems. As named, his book is laid out through seven habits he has identified as conducive to personal growth. " and NOT reading it. Burn it.

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), Gates became then the youngest ever billionaire in 1987, at age 31. Forbes magazine ranked him as the world's wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, his net worth stood at US$115.1 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world. and his company get a lot of people at Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. up in the morning. Scott McNealy Scott McNealy (born November 13, 1954) is an American businessman. He is most famous for co-founding the computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim. In 2004, while still at Sun, McNealy founded Curriki, a free online education service. In 2011, he co-founded Wayin, a social intelligence and visualization company based in Denver. McNealy stepped down from his position as CEO of Wayin in 2016.

I am not against Bill Gates the man, but he's playing a historical role that demands a harsh critique. Within his lifetime, Bill will have probably acquired, by accident, a kind of power that has been rarely sought and never before achieved. The medieval popes sought to be the intermediaries for all thought and communication, even as they were the patrons of the elite intellectuals of their day. They serve as the best precedent we have for what is truly an unprecedented situation. In twenty or fifty years, when most human affairs, intimate and grand, are conducted via computer operating systems, Microsoft could become the universal gatekeeper of thought. Microsoft has so far not been malevolent when it has exercised editorial power. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Microsoft could well end up with a new type of absolute power. Jaron Lanier Jaron Zepel Lanier (, born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.

Bill Gates is a prime example of the power of a smart person being focused on exactly what he wants. He accomplishes his goals while the rest of us are just muddling around. Watching Bill operate makes me realize, for better or worse, how unfocused I am.Danny Hills

operating system

( LILO (boot loader) LILO (Linux Loader) is a bootloader for Linux and was the default boot loader for most Linux distributions . Unlike loadlin, it allowed booting Linux without having DOS on the computer. As of 2009, most distributions have switched to GRUB as the default boot loader. Further development of LILO was discontinued in December 2015 along with a request by Joachim Wiedorn for potential developers. ) A boot loader for Linux Linux (, LIN-uuks) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries—most of which are provided by third parties—to create a complete operating system, designed as a clone of Unix and released under the copyleft GPL license. . LILO does not depend on a specific file system, it can boot Linux kernel images from floppy disks and hard disks and can even boot other operating systems. One of up to sixteen differernt images can be selected at boot time. Various parameters, such as the root device, can be set independently for each kernel. LILO can even be used as the master boot record.

On Friday, I called home, and Ashwini picked up the phone. Immediately, I recognized her good mood as she shared the news that Vaishnavi got placed at Futuresoft. That's very nice of her. Congratulations, Vaishnavi! Cheers!

Congrats To ur sis on getting selected!

Mohd Reza

Tell me what I should do in order to keep strong feelings towards C (programming language) C (pronounced – like the letter c) is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems code (especially in kernels), device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. .

Permit me to babble out a few random thoughts ...

Write programs for other people.

Where possible, openly publish your code, perhaps on your web site. The Freshmeat Freecode, formerly Freshmeat, was a website owned by BIZX, Inc., hosting mainly open-source software for programmers and developers. Among other things, the site also hosted user reviews and discussions. While a majority of the software covered is open source for Unix-like systems, Freecode also covered releases of closed-source, commercial and cross-platform software on Mac OS X and handhelds. Freecode was notable for its age, having started in 1997 as the first web-based aggregator of software releases. site is a good place to announce new code. (It is a strange web site name, but they are legit and THE place to announce new code). Support the code that you publish. Start small and work your way up ... Some of my more popular code is actually small code fragments that are used by others over and over again. Don't be discouraged if nobody (or if only a few people) uses some of your early programs. What is important is to practice writing quality, well commented code ... to maintain and fix that code.

I found this really useful and inspirational once again. http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/c/expert.html

Thanks Chongo!

Keep posting ur codes

Kannappan

Out of Context : Meaning(chongo) := jest

Kannappan

Was glancing through a Espanic dictionary hard.copy where this meaning was found.However on the internet the closest i could get to this meaning was the fourth meaning below on http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/search/ligans_se?lb=e&p=num%3As6749chon·go m. 1. GUATEMALA: - curl, lock (of hair) 2. MEXICO: (moño) - bun, chignon 3. (dulce) - sweet, dessert 4. colloquial (broma) - joke 5. PERU: (querido) - darling

Kannappan

In Espanol

Kannappan

interesting :) where did u get the meaning? Google,Dictionary.com,m-w does not seem to know.

phoe6

When I finish my work quickly, I am usually finding that I get more interest and I devote myself more to the work. I should take a hint here. - O.R.Senthil Kumaran

Josephson effect In physics, the Josephson effect is a phenomenon that occurs when two superconductors are placed in proximity, with some barrier or restriction between them. The effect is named after the British physicist Brian Josephson, who predicted in 1962 the mathematical relationships for the current and voltage across the weak link. It is an example of a macroscopic quantum phenomenon, where the effects of quantum mechanics are observable at ordinary, rather than atomic, scale. The Josephson effect has many practical applications because it exhibits a precise relationship between different physical measures, such as voltage and frequency, facilitating highly accurate measurements.

A type of {electronic} {circuit} capable of switching at very high speeds when operated at temperatures approaching Absolute zero Absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature, a state at which a system's internal energy, and in ideal cases entropy, reach their minimum values. The absolute zero is defined as 0 K on the Kelvin scale, equivalent to −273.15 °C on the Celsius scale, and −459.67 °F on the Fahrenheit scale. The Kelvin and Rankine temperature scales set their zero points at absolute zero by design. This limit can be estimated by extrapolating the ideal gas law to the temperature at which the volume or pressure of a classical gas becomes zero. .Its low power dissipation factor makes ituseful in {high density computer circuits}.

To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are. When Earth is ruled by master-machines... when robots are more human than humankind. - Dr.Susan Calvin.

I was spellbound by the genius of Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov ( AZ-im-ov; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction. , when I read his I, Robot I, Robot is a fixup collection of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The stories were then compiled into a single publication by Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies. and especially fascinated by his Three Laws of Robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I added clause to FOLDOC

logic

A logical formula in Conjunctive normal form In Boolean algebra, a formula is in conjunctive normal form (CNF) or clausal normal form if it is a conjunction of one or more clauses, where a clause is a disjunction of literals; otherwise put, it is a product of sums or an AND of ORs. , which has the schema

p1 ^ ...^ pm => q1 V ... V qn.

or, equivalently,

~p1 V ... V ~pn V q1 V ... V qn,

where pi and qi are atoms. The operators ~, ^, V, => are connectives, where ~ stands for negation, ^ for conjunction, V for disjunction and => for implication.

grammar

A part of a sentence (or programming language statement) that does not constitute a full sentence, e.g. an adjectival clause in human language or a WHERE clause in a SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced S-Q-L; or alternatively as "sequel") statement.

I added this entry for Foldoc.

fourth generation language

(4GL, or "report generator language") An "application specific" language, one with built-in knowledge of an application domain, in the way that SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced S-Q-L; or alternatively as "sequel") has built-in knowledge of the relational database domain. The term was invented by Jim Martin to refer to non-procedural high level languages built around database systems.

Fourth generation languages are close to natural language and were built with the concept that certain applications could be generalised by adding limited programming ability to them. When given a description of the data format and the report to generate, a 4GL system produces COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. Many large financial institutions were developing new systems in the language as late as 2006, but most programming in COBOL today is purely to maintain existing applications. Programs are being moved to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages, or replaced with other software. (or other 3GL) code, that actually reads and processes the data and formats the results.

Some examples of 4GL are: database query language e.g.SQL; Focus, Metafont, PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it can be used for many other purposes as well. PostScript was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984. The most recent version, PostScript 3, was released in 1997. , S, IDL-PV, WAVE, Gauss, Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting functions and various types of data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other programming languages. It was conceived by Stephen Wolfram, and is developed by Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois. The Wolfram Language is the programming language used in Mathematica. Mathematica 1.0 was released on June 23, 1988 in Champaign, Illinois and Santa Clara, California. Mathematica's Wolfram Language is fundamentally based on Lisp; for example, the Mathematica command Most is identically equal to the Lisp command butlast. There is a substantial literature on the development of computer algebra systems (CAS). , and data-stream languages such as AVS, APE, Iris Explorer.

In the early and initial days (when open source, free software, and Linux were the same for me), I used to think of Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( STAWL-mən; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License. , known as RMS, in comparison with Mahatma Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (from Sanskrit, meaning great-souled, or venerable), first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world. . One math professor there (at Cochin University of Science and Technology) gave a brief introduction and said that he feels RMS is comparable to Mahatma Gandhi.

RMS closed his eyes with shyness.Then he came to the microphone and said, "Well, I and my movement cannot be compared with Gandhi's because I do not have the courage that Gandhi had {I clapped here}, and the free software movement is not yet as successful as Gandhi's movement was."

Then it started with an explanation of the Free Software Movement and the GNU GNU ( GNOO) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages as of June 2024), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL). operating system. There was a lot of hackerish humor in between. For example: RMS said, "If you know how to swim, and you see a person drowning in a pool, and it is not Bush, wouldn't you save him?" This was in reference to helping your neighbor by sharing software, which is one of the freedoms provided by free software.

Moving on to serious issues, RMS said, "Idealism is practical. The people who say that idealism is not possible are wrong. If you have a long-range goal, you either need to have an ideal or lots of money. It is because of idealism that nations like India and the US exist."

The Q/A session followed. I had noted a few points to be asked/discussed:

• About Don Hopkins.
• About the MIT lab allowing RMS to program and start GNU after he had quit MIT.
• About the teaching profession instead of being a waiter (as he mentioned in his speech).
• Thanks for GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. .
• About Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( kə-NOOTH; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms". and his perception of computer science, which is different.
• Why not GNU Hurd GNU Hurd is a collection of microkernel servers written as part of GNU, for the GNU Mach microkernel. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation, designed as a replacement for the Unix kernel, and released as free software under the GNU General Public License. When the Linux kernel proved to be a viable solution, development of GNU Hurd slowed, at times alternating between stasis and renewed activity and interest. ? Why is it still not happening?
• Argentina and Germany, where lots of politics have crept into software.
• Free software having a free market.
• Bash (Unix shell) In computing, Bash (short for "Bourne Again SHell",) is an interactive command interpreter and command programming language developed for UNIX-like operating systems. Created in 1989 by Brian Fox for the GNU Project, it is supported by the Free Software Foundation and designed as a 100% free alternative for the Bourne shell (sh) and other proprietary Unix shells. - the best shell.
• The GNU C library was developed by a 17-year-old - RMS didn't name him in the speech; I need to find links on it.
• Which search engine do you use?
• The fun of computer science is lost in the preaching and politics of free software. - Read this thought, and so on.

I started by asking, "Which search engine do you use?"

RMS replied: "None."

I could not proceed further, so I elaborated,

"When on cyberspace and you want to find something, which search engine do you use?"

He said: "I don't use any search engine because it is software running on their computer on their server, and I do not have any control over that."

I responded, "But many people, including me, use a search engine."

RMS replied: "It's up to you. I have chosen not to use any proprietary software and only use free software."

"By using search and the internet, I could locate information like OpenCourseWare provided by MIT."

RMS replied: "OpenCourseWare is not under a free license."

"But it improves the life of humanity."

RMS responded: "Yes, it improves the life of humanity, but it is not under a free license."

Later on, it became apparent that many more questions were to be asked by the audience. Questions about HURD followed, and he said that they are technical questions and that you should solve them. After having gotten an autograph in the GNU GPL and Free Software, Free Society book,

Do you still have contact with Don Hopkins?

RMS: At times.

What is he doing now? RMS: I don't know.

Do you think that things like WSF (I think, World Social Forum) will be able to combat Bush's policies? RMS: I don't know, but I am just doing it.

According to Indian philosophy, you need strength to combat strength.

RMS: (Agreeing to Indian thought) Yes, there should be more people. Why not you join in?

Hope you do more programming this year. Have fun with programming.

RMS: I need to talk about the free software philosophy. I don't get time to program these days.

But you are a guru, a master programmer.

RMS: (Nodding) Yes, but there are a lot of people programming, and very few talking about these matters.

• Happy hacking.

RMS does not use anything other than free software. I do not know much about myself. I am not completely aligned with his views, but I respect RMS a lot.

There were newspaper articles regarding the Malayalam font released on that day. I just had a brief talk with the person. This Hindu article is about Maddog visiting India at SGI premises, Matthew Scheulk having a phone conversation with President APJ Abdul Kalam, and visiting India and RMS at WSF and Kerala.

I was introduced to Alice by one of my friends, Kiruba. Since then, I have been highly fascinated by these linguistic chatting entities. I found a number of others like ELIZA ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party. Whereas the ELIZA program itself was written (originally) in MAD-SLIP, the pattern matching directives that contained most of its language capability were provided in separate "scripts", represented in a lisp-like representation. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient's words to the patient), and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots ("chatbot" modernly) and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing test. and many others having egos of some singer or actor. But the best surprise came to me from Alan. He is really interesting. Whoever I introduced him to became really fascinated by him. Alan is from an Israeli company.

At Alice bot, you will often see mentions of the Loebner Prize The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously held textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge would attempt to determine which was which. . In fact, Alice has won the Loebner Prize previously. However, I did not find such information at Alan's place, and he is better at holding conversations than ALICE. When Dr. Rich posted his observations regarding the Loebner Prize, I raised a question: If given a head-to-head competition between ALICE and ALAN, I am sure ALAN has better chances of winning. The major difference I have found between ALICE and ALAN is that ALAN can continue with its sentences (it is one of the drawbacks as well, since it can't switch topics while continuing sentences), whereas ALICE is somewhat like a one-liner. I have always wondered why ALAN is not featured in Loebner Prize contests. If you ask these things to ALAN, you may get some "political responses." I don't know what the actual story is, but don't you all agree that ALAN is better than ALICE? What are the reasons? What are the tradeoffs?

To me, the race is: can ALICE match and beat ALAN in conversational skills?

These were answers by Dr. Richard, the creator of alicebot.org:

Someone posted a question about the ALAN chatbot, so I went to have a look. This bot evolved from Jason Hutchens' Megahal project, a former Loebner Prize winner. I must admit, when I engaged ALAN in a conversation about ALICE and the Loebner contest, the results were impressive.

That being said, it must be remembered that ALICE and AIML AIML may refer to: are free, open- source technology, and the company a-i.com is developing a proprietary "black box." If you ask ALAN, "How do you work?" he explains, "My brain consists of a large content tree: a single 'agent file' and a set of 'handlers,' which govern a variety of conversation topics." He also admits, "My brain is still quite small: less than 350 handlers and a few hundred variables. But I'm still a young bot. Think how smart I'll be when I have thousands or more!"

Their website is impressive and contains a lot of useful links, but there is nothing equivalent to the free AIML software that you can download and create your own bot. (They have, however, announced a program that allows people to create so-called Private Virtual Personalities.)

The ability of ALAN to stay "on topic" for (apparently) longer than ALICE is an illusion that could just as well be created using the tag of AIML. It happens that the ALICE brain has a wider range of "one-liner" responses and uses the tag very little. But there is no reason in principle that another AIML bot could not carry on a conversation just like ALAN.

Has anyone tried teaching ALAN? It is really cool. Ask it, "What is logical?" and if there is no definition for it, it asks you to define it. So you reply, "Logical is when the world blows up because it is run by chatterbots," and from then on, that will be the definition. If you want to delete it, say, "Forget logical." I tell you, you can have a lot of fun redefining a whole bunch of definitions. :-)

I wonder if there is a way to teach ALICE through talking to her?

I can't imagine it would be too hard... hmm, do any of the interpreters allow for variable expansion in the XML? I don't think that that would be normal XML, though... I know with embedded JavaScript or embedded Perl (ProgramV), it would be fairly simple to do that.

The problem is that random clients can't be trusted as teachers. They can teach the robot all kinds of nonsense like, "The Indianapolis Speedway is located at the North Pole." In principle, you can teach a bot by talking to her, but you have to figure out which teachers you can trust first.

I always say it's like teaching a child language by telling him to go out on the street and believe everything he hears. Sure, he may learn to talk, but without supervision, he won't learn right answers from wrong ones.

I had a version of targeting working in SETL for a while that could pick out targets for the botmaster and carry on a natural language conversation like, "Someone said, 'How do fish swim?' and I said, 'I didn't even know they could.' What should I have said?" And then the botmaster could write the new reply in natural language. Unfortunately, that code was lost, and it hasn't been re-implemented in any of the other AIML software that I know of.

Teach ALICE through talking to her?

Sure, done before many times. Not many interpreters provide a mechanism for real-time learning. J-Alice is one of the few still-supported interpreters that does. TinyAlice was perhaps the first to introduce a working version of the concept.

I will make phoe6 smart. ;)

My sister asked me, why every email client has the name John Smith as example. Interesting indeed. I dunno, I said and said. Let's post the question at usenet

In any Email Client, the example name is used as "John Smith". Who is this John Smith, and why are all the clients using this same name for example setups.

It leaves a better impression than "John Doe".

The Brit who established the first permanent British colony in North America. (1607, Jamestown, Virginia). An explorer, writer, soldier.

It is simply used in America as a generic male name, like John Doe, who was the first man in America to be trampled to death by a female deer. Smith means common, and Doe means anonymous, to get technical.

(John Doe was so messed up they couldn't identify him)

(see below)

(just kidding about the deer thing :-)

I have always assumed that it was because Smith was the most common "English" surname and John was the most common given name. Consequently, the example was "real" but could not be associated with an individual.

The Brit who established the first permanent British colony in North America. (1607, Jamestown, Virginia). An explorer, writer, soldier - John Smith (explorer) John Smith (c. 1579 – 21 June 1631) was an English soldier, explorer, colonial governor, admiral of New England, and author. Following his return to England from a life as a soldier of fortune and as a slave, he played an important role in the establishment of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America, in the early 17th century. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony between September 1608 and August 1609, and he led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, during which he became the first English explorer to map the Chesapeake Bay area. Later, he explored and mapped the coast of New England. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, and his friend Mózes Székely. .

My first open source community contribution came through editing entries for FOLDOC. FOLDOC is a free online dictionary for computing. Denis Howe gave me an opportunity to (guest) edit some of the definitions at The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing. I added entries for 4GL and RPG-II.