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Hi everyone, I just started reading “How to Design Programs” to get a better understanding of Designing of Programs and Scheme (a variant of LISP). HtDP is available for free online and if you are fan of books made of tree, you can find it on Amazon[ How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing ].
I’ve always wanted to learn LISP so thought I should start with HtDP before I start reading SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). Like Mathematicians say, to get a better understanding of something you have to read, write it down in your own words and then teach it to someone else.

My plan for the next couple of months regarding HtDP is:

1) Read the whole book.

2) Do most of the exercises in this book.

3) Do some project which utilizes the concept learned in this book.

I plan to blog about each chapter and exercises after i finish them(chapter wise). HtDP has close to 45 Chapters, so i am guessing it will take me 45 blog posts or more to finish this series. I am currently using plt-scheme as this book uses it and it is a really easy to use. Wish me luck to not procrastinate or lose focus. If you want to learn HtDP along with me, it would be great. (Two or more minds are better than one and a half mind (ok just one)).
OH, I have already started using too many parentheses in my sentences

I just read an article about a Chinese kid who is driven to suicide due to the pressure from his father, relatives and teachers. You can read the article here; it shows the side of two countries China and India which are growing enormously at the expense of the kids who are the future of a country. I surely can’t comment on China, as i have never been there nor ever met a Chinese kid but I can surely speak about things in India and believe me they are not any better than the Chinese kids story.

Some kids in India are pushed even more than this Chinese kid; a kid sister of my friend goes to private tuition so that she could pass the entrance test of another private tuition which takes in less students and trains them to write and pass the entrance exam of a reputed college in India (so in simple words, she is going through two levels of tuitions to get into another tuition which she might attend 4-5 years later). This is certainly not a one-off case; there is a generation which is growing up like these or much worse.

Every other week I read in newspaper that a school or college kid killed himself/herself because they failed or got lesser marks than their peers. The most recent I read was a girl killed herself because she got 4 marks lesser than the topper of her class. It is scary and it actually makes you wonder, does the cost of sitting in a cubicle coding a website really worth a life lost.

I have actually thought a lot about the reason “Why Parents are pushing their kids to the wall”, it is certainly not job uncertainty (there are plenty of outsourced jobs here and you can see almost anyone who is slightly not retarded getting one). The only answer I got was “Most of the parents in third-world countries lack good identities” because they are in some jobs which they are not very happy or proud of and the only way for them to escape from their ‘past or present’ is to change their future which they think is in the hands of their kids and not theirs. They constantly hear of stories of kids who studied well, got a job in some company and bought his/her parents house (which if he/she is lucky enough to hold on to a job might own it in next 20 years). As I have seen most of the pushy parents are highly incompetent who actually believe that their life is over, they can’t change it because they missed opportunities when they were young or some crap like that. A real person would go achieve what he wants at any age irrespective of anything else, but pushy parents are not real people because they are betting on their kids and that is much easier to do.

The other part of the problem is housewives (I am not sexist); this is a group which actually doesn’t have an identity. If you have ever been near one, most of their sentences start with “My son/daughter is…” most of these sentences end with an achievement of their kids which are incidentally better than other housewives kids. Now the housewives who were humiliated in the conversation go home force their kids to do well in whatever they do. It is certainly not limited to studies; it can be anything jumping a fence, throwing a ball or anything else. At the end of the day, their kid has to be better than other kids. It is kind of like playing WoW where they want their avatars to be better than others and they want their avatars to level up faster so that they can fight bigger battles. So the problem is certainly not the education system, it is actually the society (housewives and people who are not happy with their jobs). So my solution would be think about the kids later, create jobs for housewives (idle minds are devil’s workshop, they are the clear example of it) and create social programs to make people like their jobs or better yet preach Entrepreneurialism. Keep the housewives busy and you would automatically see an improvement in kids who are back to being creative and independent like they always were. Please leave the kids alone, nurture them and if you can’t don’t kill the creativity they have by putting undue pressure on them.

I have always believed that to be successful intellectually, you should be driven by curiosity rather than fear. — tigerthink

update: This is also being discussed on Hacker News and has some good and contrary thoughts on this particular topic. Check it out here.

I read Beginning Ubuntu Linux couple of months back and it took me a long time to blog about it. Also i have been wanting to review books i read, so i am starting with this book. Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Third Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional) is authored by Keir Thomas and Jaime Sicam. Like the name implies, it is a book for beginners who are interested in Ubuntu. I started reading this book as i had installed Ubuntu and wanted to know more about it. I was pretty disappointed by Beginning Ubuntu Linux, not because it is a bad book but because it is a book for total beginners. If you have just heard about Ubuntu and want to know what the noise is all about then this is a perfect book for you. I had clearly installed other variants of Linux before, read lot of Linux blogs so had outgrown this book much before i read it.

I would recommend Beginning Ubuntu Linux for beginners who don’t know much about Linux and are interested in slowly jumping from Windows bandwagon to Linux. The book is well written, keeps you interested in the subject and also has lot of screen-shots to make things easier for you. Beginning Ubuntu Linux looks pretty daunting with 729 pages but since it is fun to read and interesting, i am assuming you will finish it in a week or two.

The book is divided into 8 parts and some sections are good and informative and others are very basic. Part 1 and 2 mainly deal with the questions like Why Ubuntu, Why it is better than Windows and Installation of Ubuntu. Part 3 focuses on how to install softwares, adding hardwares, personalizing ubuntu and managing files. I would request you to concentrate on Part 4 because it teaches you the basics of shell scripting, permissions and gives you a feel of vim and grep. Part 5 is a boring section which concentrates on Multimedia where they just explain about the multimedia softwares, audio software, photo-editing softwares and Part 6 deals with OpenOffice.org and how to use it. If you are well versed in using multimedia softwares and using OpenOffice.org, you can skip these sections (that is 200 pages less for you to read). Part 7 is an important section in this book, it deals with how to install and remove softwares in various ways like synaptic manager, APT tools and compiling softwares. It also teaches you important things like Backing up data and scheduling tasks via cron and anacron. Part 8 deals with Linux terms and bash commands. All in all a good book to read but if you are taking more than 2 weeks to finish it, then you are wasting your time.

I just came across an amazing site called Academic Earth and I couldn’t help sharing it with everyone who reads my blog. As we all know MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale and other top institutes have put most of their educational materials online if not all. It is one of the most awesome gift from all these colleges to the world. All these while, most of the material was scattered around in different websites and was tough to go through. Academic Earth aggregates all the courses and lectures into one single website and makes it easier for people to learn with links to syllabus, practice exams etc. There are wide variety of subjects ranging for Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics and more. I think more subjects and lectures will be added soon to the site and I am hoping the site adds more social features like discussion about particular lecture and more interaction with other users which in-turn makes learning collaborative. I am currently following the Computer Science I: Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami. I will continue to blog as I learn, hope to make it easier for people reading here.

Well this was the first second OCC meet of the year 2009 and it was a great learning opportunity for everyone who was there. OCC meet-up was held in the office of CoreObjects, many thanks to them for being welcoming. The guest speaker of this meet-up was Mr. Neetibodh Agarwal, he has spent most of his professional life building software products. Currently he works at CoreObjects taking care of Delivery, Business Development and Strategy. It was a 2 hour talk on challenges people face while starting a business or developing a product. He touched on the subject of how Entrepreneurs should wisely choose co-founders and how they should be able to complement the qualities of each other when starting a business. He also spoke about how non-techies will find it very hard to start a software or technology startup and it is always better to have at least one techie co-founder who knows how the product works beneath. One of the good advices for non-techie was, if they want to outsource the development of their product, they should research and find people who have expertise in the specific product’s development. He also spoke at length about the differences in building Enterprise and Consumer Products. So all in all it was a good learning experience for people who want to build technological products.

I was also glad to meet Girish Rowjee and Sayeed Anjum of Greytip Software who co-founded the company back in 1994 and Girish shared some of the experiences and hardships faced while starting-up back in those days. It was really helpful to meet such mature Entrepreneurs who are willing to help youngsters like me and others who are part of OCC. I also got to meet Pranav Bhasin of Lifeblob who told me about OCC timeline which makes it easier for OCC community to share pictures and videos of OCC events. Last but not least, I want to thank Vaibhav and Amarinder for organizing OCC meet-up every fortnight and being helpful to all the members of OCC.

So if you are someone who is remotely or vividly interested in Startups and starting-up, I recommend you to be a part of the OCC community of Bangalore. You can find details about upcoming OCC meet-ups on OCC blog and also you can follow OCC on twitter.

If you guys didn’t already know, I had no internet for past 16 days. I started my year waking up to “no internet for you amigo!” sign on my browser. As an internet addict, I immediately called my ISP and was greeted by a sweet voice asking if they can help me. I was like “Please help me”, my internet is not working since the time I woke up and was assured that it will be back soon. But deep down I knew, the call-center agent who spoke to me didn’t have a clue what was happening, call center agents are in the business of listening to people’s problems and writing them down for future reference not actually solving them.



I waited for a day and called them again, now I was greeted by another sweet voice asking if she can help me, I was like “maam, I had called yesterday to complain about my internet and the problem is still not solved!” Again I was assured; it will be rectified soon and was given a new complaint number for future reference. I didn’t complain for couple of days as I got to know more number of people had the same problem as me, I got to know much later that almost 30-40% of phone and internet connections in J P Nagar were affected. It seems the problem started when some construction workers damaged telephone cables while digging to install some pipes and after damaging the wires, they covered the dug area unknowingly. Next day my ISP BSNL started receiving frantic calls from customers complaining about phone and internet. Now these BSNL dudes had to pay for someone else’s mistake and they had to first re-dug and look for damaged cables and replace it, it took them 16 days to do it but I am not complaining. It didn’t feel bad now about losing internet connection, just knowing that other people are facing the same problem as you, reduces your pain by 50% or more. I also came across many people who needed internet more than me, one guy had a download of a movie “Slumdog Millionaire” stuck at 95% and it was RAR so he had to wait for the download to finish before watching it and the other guy was worried about not leveling up his character on a MMORPG and was afraid his friends will level up and pwn him later. These are all serious problems if you are a geek or a gamer.

I also realized after couple of days that I didn’t need internet very much to learn or do stuff unless for occasional hiccups. I had all the pdf’s and doc files I needed on my Drive but I missed python doc which I had forgotten to store it offline. I just started learning GREP and BASH for next week and I didn’t miss internet one bit. Finally after a week, I went to my ISP’s office to enquire about the problem and a solution to it, this time I was assured by Divisional Engineer that it would be back in a day. 2 days passed by, nothing happened and on the 3rd day, phone starts working but internet does not. After a while I realize, there is cross connection and I have been assigned a different number which was rectified in 5 hours. Finally on 16th of January 2009 at 4.30 pm, I finally got to use internet and I was happy like before but saner and slightly more responsible.

If you have been reading my blog, you can easily tell that ‘I don’t blog often’. I go on months without blogging and when I do blog, it is really not something which I am happy with. There are many reasons why I am not blogging often; one of the important reasons is I wanted my blog posts to have quality instead of quantity; in simple words I wanted perfection in my blog posts, I wanted to have quality similar to Paul Graham’s essays. Yes that’s all talk and we know talk is cheap. A man who doesn’t have a good identity starts identifying himself in everything good he sees. It’s about time I write about what I feel instead of being silenced by the popular opinions of majority of people. I am going to blog more often from now on. I am not looking for perfection, I don’t promise to give you facts and also I will be ranting a lot more. I will also be blogging about programming, vim, Linux, Indie PC Games, Politics, world issues etc.

I have always believed only two kinds of men live in this world, the ones who try difficult things and the ones who don’t. Society calls them by lot of names; the men who try and succeed are called as Winners, Champions, and Achievers; the men who have tried and failed are ridiculed with names like Losers, Failures or nonstarters. But what about the people who haven’t tried nor do they intend to, aren’t these people much worse that the people who have tried and lost. Let’s call these people spectators for lack of a better insult.

Spectators live their life observing the participants, cheering for them, criticizing them and also thinking they are them. In reality, Spectators are really insignificant to human evolution, they don’t change things, and they don’t improve things, even for themselves. Their whole journey of life begins with a search of a benevolent leader who is a solution to all their problems and misfortunes; they keep searching until they are wrong and when they are wrong, they are quick to blame the system for not being right. Spectators also don’t understand that system is not a will of god but a will of men, men who went ahead, tried difficult things and succeeded enough to put in place a set of rules which are favorable to men not spectators. System by itself does not hold any intrinsic value; it is altered by men to suit their needs and they gradually make the system resilient enough to not harm them at all. The system is also planned keeping in mind the opportunities it provides for smart people to be in the class of men, instead of being lost in the artificial world of spectators.

This is how the world works, a minority few men control or set rules for masses or spectators; they make the decisions so that spectators don’t have to. Will there be a world where everyone will have equal rights, my answer would be No. System is designed to reward people who have undergone difficulties; the people who have succeeded will be the ones who will obtain a chance to alter the system for their benefits. So next time when you talk about how a government bailed out a corporation with tax-payers money or how millions are losing jobs every quarter because some men made decisions for you, don’t blame the system or government. Blame yourself for being a spectator.

What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds. A parasite asks ‘Where is my share?’ A man creates. A parasite says, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ A man invents. A parasite says, ‘Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God…’ – BioShock.

If you don’t already know, Half-Life was born today 10 years back to Valve and Sierra. If you have not yet been invited to the party in Black Mesa East, don’t worry there is something to be happy about. Half-Life is selling today on Steam for only 98 cents and this offer is open only till November 21st 12.01 PST. I think they are selling it for 98 cents because Half-Life was launched in 1998, do you get it.

I have been a huge fan of Half-Life series and Gordon Freeman and I am looking forward to playing the next chapter which is Half-Life 2: Episode 3, until that games arrives let me spend some more time in Black Mesa Research Facility. So I would totally recommend you to buy this game, if you have not yet already, it is one of the best games ever made. Ok, enough of my fanboy antics, i will stop now.

Microsoft’s new ad called Shoe Circus featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates is making lot of buzz on the internet and one thing you commonly hear from everyone is “That ad does not make sense”. It is a pity though that such a smart ad is not understood by people or they are just too narrow minded with their hatred for Microsoft to understand it. I personally find the ad funny and does well what it was meant to do.

Let me explain the ad better here.

Scene 1: It starts off with a scene where Jerry Seinfeld is shocked to see Bill Gates (one of the World’s richest man) buying shoes at a discount store and realizes Bill Gates is having problems with buying shoes which does not fit well and shopkeeper is convincing him that it would stretch and get better.

Bill Gates is shown as just a normal guy who buys shoes at a discount store just like other normal people would. It shows one of the World’s richest man buying shoes which other normal people can afford. This is telling Apple in the face that their prices are high and only privileged few can afford to buy Mac and PC is affordable to almost everyone.
Also it clearly shows since Bill Gates is having problems with shoes which means “One size does not fit all” just like everyone’s computing needs are different and different people need different computers. Another jab at Mac for not giving users enough choice on what they need in terms of hardware.


Scene 2: This scene starts off with Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates choose the right shoes and trying to warm up the shoes so that it would fit him well. Finally after trying many, they choose a shoes which fits perfectly well and also Spanish people outside the shop know what shoes it is and have the same view of the shoes as Jerry Seinfeld has (they run very tight).

This is how we have always bought PC’s, we just don’t go to a shop and say ‘Give me that’.
We check out many manufacturers selling PC’s like DELL, HP, Sony, Toshiba etc and then choose the hardware which best suits our needs. We do research, ask our friends and family and choose the ones that really suits us and our computing needs. Like those Spanish people outside the shop, everyone knows what PC is because they have all used it irrespective of which country they are from or the language they speak.

Scene 3: Checkout, Bill Gates has chosen the right shoes and is about to pay for the shoes. It is funny, there is a mugshot of Young Bill Gates on the Shoe Circus Card. Seinfeld and Gates walk out of the store talking about Microsoft’s future and how delicious their future products will be. Watch out for Bill Gates signal to Seinfeld’s question.

This scene is just fun with both Seinfeld and Gates talking about the future of Microsoft and where it is heading. We clearly know, they are onto something delicious.

I am clearly happy with this ad mainly because Microsoft did not stoop down to Apple’s level by making it personal instead they gave it back in metaphors. I am sure the follow-up of this ad will be even better than this ad. In simple terms, the ad says “One size does not fit all”, so try many before you find the best fit. It is very true with respect to buying computers. This is what i have understood from the ad. If you have understood the ad better, I would like to know your view too.