30 years of K&R is being celebrated.

This is an important book our life time and Inform IT has an article on "Leading Programmers Remember the Impact of The C Programming Language"

Roughly around 10 years ago to get myself into Software Development, I started solving all the problems at the end of the K&R book and bootstrapped my Project Uthcode for the third time.  I can safely say that it turned out be successful and I owe greatly to this one book.

Later when I started contributing to Python, I focussed mostly on Python and standard library which is written in Python.  Noticing how other programmers went about with CPython core, I wanted to re-read it to get into K&R get into implementation and design. That has not happened yet, but I am planning for it sometime soonish. I can get back and rely on K&R, plus I will have my experience to draw upon.

Every once in a while you come across some amazing and something insanely creative by unknown folks in the internet. I have decided to capture those moments by title "The Incredibles" series.

Today, it happened to me. After doing a basic drawing tutorial at Khan Academy I saw a spin off program which I thought is a image loaded. I wondered why some one spun off a simple drawing tutorial and then loaded image for practice. But I was wrong. This whole image was drawn using rects and fill.

See it for yourself. The Incredibles super hero of this creation is to Mr. Peter Collingridge

Mona Lisa

Made using: Khan Academy Computer Science.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMkBphtQRxs

Father: The fact that the design uses inheritance in polymorphism doesn't make it a good design.

Child: Daddy, are there monsters in the story?

Father: Yes, it's okay. There is a firewall.

The bedtime story book is Code Complete

These are Isaac Asimov's words as he wrote it in Science Past, Science Future. This wonderful quote had intrigued me and I set to find out in which book it had appeared.

During PyCon Sprints, I met Bram Cohen who had come down to talk to Guido and have a word on networking protocol world. It was interesting to see two experts talking. Later I invited Bram to give a tech talk at Twitter. Bram gladly accepted it and came to Twitter office to talk to us about his latest invention http://live.bittorrent.com He had been working on Distributed Live Streaming for few years and thought it was a hard problem to solve. He could dedicate himself to it and came out with live.bittorrent.com - Using this anyone can live stream a video. You can become a live video publisher too and people all around the word can see your channel in real time. This is a huge break through. My experience at Akamai helps me realize the kind of break through this can bring to real time live streaming.

Bram went with the technical aspects of the design of the live bittorrent technology and how to keep the delays as minimum as possible. He was talking at the network packets level and explaining how the packets need to be distributed from one node to another so that delay can be as minimum as possible and what are the bottlenecks that exist during the packet transfer. The innovative solutions that he had use to make these possible. He started by giving a pitch to Dan Bernstein's ciphers and explained about the TCP handshake and udp transfers and how uTP goes in the background during transfers and not affect peak real time traffic. The details could by got only if I read through his spec a couple of times.

One interesting thing that struck me was. One engineer asked the question, "how did he test his development of live bittorrent system?". Bram got excited to share his valuable experience in doing that. He said, few years ago he made a point saying "Remove all psychic powers in software development" - by this he meant, remove all assumptions that a software will work "magically", "assume" that it work under all conditions, but rather encode the scenarios and simulate all the possible scenarios under which you want your software to work and then run your software through it. To this effect, he seemed to built a small simulator which can help him test the system. That was a good learning and major take away for me from this session.

Here are many instances of "We are sorry to inform you" letters. We all have a bunch of them, this one is a very nice collection. Keep them coming!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is from the CEO / Co-Founder of a Web 2.0 company, LinkedIn and goes a great detail into the culture and professional aspects of similar companies that existing in silicon valley. Reid Hoffman gives the examples of many startup founders and sets the stage for how and why started their respective ventures. The stories which I did not know earlier and which caught my attention were the stories of Netflix and Zappos. Both were amazing. The best part the book in my opinion is the many examples that Reid and Ben provide as examples to support the point they were trying to say.
I also liked the chapters in which the authors give sufficient focus on the failed auto industry business in US and what the computer industry and the leaders of computer industry can learn from that episode.

Most part of the book is no-frills, bare minimum good practical advise which many should follow and I believe, it is obvious to everyone. But reinforcing and giving concrete shape to those abstract ideas still helps and this book does a great job at it. Since I am enthusiastic about startup and their stories, I found this book easy to read, it caught my attention quickly and I could finish it without any lag. The final list of the reference books many a good one to follow up and keep the interest in the subject going. This book is about Internet business and your career when the Internet is always ON. I would say it should be categorized under "popular-business" similar to "popular-science" genre.

View all my reviews

Since I like CS and I have not really cracked the Subject Test, I wanted give it a try again. Then I thought I will go through all the aduni.org videos that I have not watched and I have always wanted to watch. Then my thoughts lead me to stuff like topcoder, which I have not competed in for a while and trying to improving my ranking.

But at last, when clearing my Python emails, I saw so much of pending work that has accumulated that I want to work only on Python in a planned manner and not on anything else.

My wife surprised me on my birthday ( 6th Jan, 2013) with a cleverly implanted, very exciting treasure hunt to my gifts. Here is how it went.

Greetings on the Mirror!

I opened the shelf and found the first clue.

First Clue. I knew what it was.

Double Choco Cookie Box

Found the second clue inside here.

Who is the tall dignified lady?

I had to make tintin my guide.

Oh Found it. This was the decor in my bookshelf. Now what is stressed when separated from the group?

A Sheep!!

Clue 3. Attached to the Sheep.

Okay, I have find it here!

Looks like it! I saw a small paper inside.

Oops. This is not used for Sambar.

This is the dal, which has slightly bigger dal grains which is used for sambar. Hurray! found it.

It's the lamp. How simple!!

I opened the lamp to find the next clue.

Who are those celestial siblings?

That's Senthil Kumaran (the other one.) and Mr. Ganapathy Babba!

That's my favorite dialogue from Kamal movie. So it should be inside a Kamal movie cover!

I walked 6 foot and found this cover near the TV. Hurray! :)

Bravo - The final clue. Okay, that's in our Patio!

That's the video from patio.

It must be inside this.!

Final note and my birthday greeting. :)

Birthday Gift. Book 1.

Birthday Gift. Book 2.

I felt, I was the happiest man on the planet. Love you very much my wife!