Categorically Imperative

Tired

2006-06-27T07:09:00.001-05:00

Tired offers an inquisitive ear to anyone willing to complain. The design is non-existent and the
interface (if you can call it that) is inviting. There's a lovely article on how it was conceived and why it works.

It's a lens, baby!

2006-06-05T04:07:00.000-05:00

This looks like a really cool lens ; and it's pretty cheap too.

Macroscopic

2006-04-13T09:48:00.000-05:00

The power of emacs macros.

eMax

2006-03-30T07:15:00.000-05:00

I've been struggling to cope up with the emacs learning curve for quite some time now. It is certainly very different from vi and not at all intuitive for the enthusiastic beginner. I even started learning elisp a bit, but then time and effort were not on my side. I'm still using emacs, but not as effectively as I would want to.Maybe this will help.

WAF

2006-03-30T07:11:00.000-05:00

Are you sure you got this covered before buying that next 51" HDTV for the apartment?

Droste Effect

2006-02-21T08:16:00.000-05:00

The Dutch chocolate maker Droste has a unique and appealing image on all its chocolate boxes. The image shows a nurse carrying a plate on which there is a box with the same picture on a smaller scale. This is known as the Droste Effect.

A compromise

2006-02-21T05:29:00.000-05:00

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

S. Kelly-Bootle

Programming - A Life Form

2006-02-21T05:24:00.000-05:00

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

F. Brooks

[courtesy reddit]

Diving In Salty Waters

2006-02-20T04:16:00.000-05:00

After a long time of swinging back & forth over whether to use the Blogger plugin for Word, I finally took the plunge in the hope that I won’t waste too much time over posting. After having recently started using FeedDemon for all my RSS subscriptions, I realized how efficient well-designed software can be ; it drastically reduced the time I was spending on switching between many feeds. My only regret is that it uses IE as the default browser framework, instead of Opera or Firefox. Anyway, just glad that I found an aggregator of my taste, after a long time of searching around the web.

Trepanation

2006-02-08T03:06:00.000-05:00

The practice of making a hole in the skull using an instrument called a trepan, to get more blood flowing in the vessels . Can it get more wierd than this?
[link]

Miura

2006-01-08T14:42:00.000-05:00

Celebrated as one of the most beautiful cars to have ever been created, the Miura lasted a mere 7 years (1966-72), before production stopped. Now, in 2006, on its 40th anniversary, its creator Lamborghini, parented by Audi, will once again try to revive the masterpiece and hopefully unleash this beast upon us. The new Miura is still a concept though and looks as good a super-car as any. Either way, Enzo better be on the lookout for another Lamborghini rampage on the streets.
[picture: courtesy AutoWeek]

Pi

2006-01-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
[1 Kings 7:23]

This apparently harmless statement from the Bible suggests that the value of pi is not 3.14..., but infact a whole number 3. Probably one of the most celebrated and hoaxed pranks in the field of science was the bill to change the value of pi from an irrational constant to the more religiously-inclined number "3", which created a ruckus in the community at the time.

Hilbert's Hotel

2005-12-31T05:44:00.000-05:00

David Hilbert was an eminent mathematical personality of the 19th century, who put forward this paradox to better illustrate the intricacies of infinity.

My Dream

2005-12-26T10:01:00.000-05:00

The Paranoid Webpage

2005-12-21T03:00:00.000-05:00

This is a hilarious 404 page, modelled on Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
I could'nt keep myself from rolling on the floor after reading it. Really good.
Keep it up guys.

The Danger Triangle Of The Face

2005-12-21T01:57:00.000-05:00

Due to the special nature of the blood supply to the human nose and surrounding area, it is possible for retrograde infections from the nasal area to spread to the brain. For this reason, the area from the corners of the mouth to the bridge of the nose, including the nose and maxilla, is known to doctors as the danger triangle of the face.
[Wikipedia].

The Global Consciousness Project

2005-12-13T08:28:00.000-05:00

The Global Consciousness Project(EGG) is one of the most significant of current research projects into parapsychology. Based at Princeton, it researches into the theory that the human consciousness may create an external field which is not detectable via conventional means. Involving, is'nt it??
Princeton
Wikipedia
(through Damn Interesting)

inotify

2005-12-08T05:02:00.000-05:00

inotify is a replacement for dnotify that overcomes the latter's limitations, such as the inability to unmount the file-system on which we are dnotifying on, the requirement of opening a file-descriptor for every directory we want to be informed, the shortage of the number & type of events and not getting to know the exact file/directory that has changed on disk. inotify overcomes all this by providing a much cleaner interface and is a part of the 2.6.13 kernel. The kernel Documentation is at Documentation/file-systems/inotify.txt.
[Article].

Paradox

2005-12-05T12:29:00.000-05:00

This is a quote from E.R.S. (Eric.S.Raymond) in his famous "The Cathedral And The Bazaar" that was on my blackboard for quite some time.
"Egoism itself is a form of self-satisfaction for the egoist".

Hollow Earth

2005-12-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

Well, the past week was kinda hectic for me. Let's see, first I attended FOSS.in, visited a coupla places in TN, watched quite a bit of movies & finally started on 2 books; a Virginia Woolf novel & a Physics book. This one's really good....I mean really. Anyway, I'm at a loss for words today. Hopefully, I'll be writing a lot about this book later. Let's kickstart with the Hollow Earth Theory. An excerpt from the book -
"Space and straightness pose subtle challenges. Some strange people maintain that all humans
live on the inside of a sphere; they (usually) call this the hollow Earth theory. They claim that the Moon, the Sun and the stars are all near the centre of the hollow sphere. They also explain that light follows curved paths in the sky and that when usual physicists talk about a distance r from the centre of the Earth, the real hollow Earth distance is: R_hollow_earth = Square(R_real_earth)/r."
Wikipedia Entry.

Mamihlapinatapai

2005-11-28T03:53:00.000-05:00

A condition where two people look at each other, hoping that either will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do.

The Escherization Problem

2005-11-25T03:03:00.000-05:00

The Escherization problem is stated as follows:
"Given a closed figure in a plane, find a new closed figure that most resembles the given figure and which tiles the entire plane."
Escher was a dutch artist who created a large number of tesselations by hand.

The French Paradox

2005-11-22T00:42:00.000-05:00

The paradox that French people remain slimmer and healthier than the Americans, even though their consumption of fat is higher. Noted by physician Samuel Black.

Social Genetics

2005-11-18T09:27:00.000-05:00

Dendrochronology

2005-11-16T09:37:00.000-05:00

Simply put, dendrochronology is the dating of past events like climatic changes through study of tree ring growth. Botanists, foresters and archaeologists began using this technique during the early part of the 20th century, when it was discovered that the wide rings of certain species of trees were produced during wet years and, inversely, narrow rings during dry seasons. Each year, the tree adds a new layer of wood to its trunk, thus creating these annual rings. Hmm, do I remember reading all this in college?
[Link]