June 2006

How to safely land a plane - by blowing one of its wings off. Strangely, that’s what Superman does in Superman Returns. (see video of Superman saving a plane).

In his article on The Power of the Marginal, Paul Graham suggests (among other things) a way of picking courses at college. One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.” ...

In the long run, people tend to regret having missed out on opportunities for pleasure – and they wish they hadn’t been so diligent about working. Based on research at Columbia University. Clive has a nice article about it titled In the long run, we regret virtue more than vice. Comments joe bosco 3 Jul 2006 1:12 am: finally - some math that buttress my arguments. enjoy maaadi :) - indulge in sinful pleasures

McDonald’s video game is a full-fledged business simulation game (like SimCity) based on McDonald’s. It’s written entirely in Flash. You don’t need to download it – just play the game on your browser. Comments emily burns 28 Feb 2007 8:33 pm: i think that this game is awesome.. i love it soo much love emily burns

I work across multiple computers (my office laptop, home laptop, client desktop) on a daily basis. I used to transfer data across these by e-mailing them before I travelled. (I often forgot to do so.) Mostly, these are notes – like telephone numbers, things to buy, places to visit, etc. Google Notebook solves the problem. But not entirely. I store a lot of my notes on spreadsheets, as lists. For example: ...

Funny ads in London. To My Mugger: Last night you stole my phone on Holloway Road, you also stole my heart. I was the tall brunette in dungarees and psychedelic t-shirt, you were the hooded man on the bike. I was captivated by your white teeth and hypnotic eyes. My home number is stored on my contacts under “me”. (Please don’t call me at “me work”, or my boyfriend, “Josh”.) ...

Are video games going the TV show route? Will we have game mega serials? Is this the next wave? Personally it would be a welcome relief. I don’t often have the time to complete a full session of Age of Kings these days. Chunks of half-hour scenarios would be great.

Fred Gratzon’s advice on work I just do what I want to do and learn what I want to learn and enjoy what I want to enjoy and sometimes I get so wonderfully and powerfully caught up in some project and I start dreaming expansive daydreams and I go for it with every ounce of energy and enthusiasm and love that I can muster. And the money . . . it just takes care of itself. ...

Microsoft adCenter Labs has a demographics prediction engine. Based on a person's search queries and web sites visited, it can predict their gender and age. So I tried that on parts of the body, to see what men were interested in vs women. topicmalefemale hair25%75% eyes33%67% cheek33%67% hands33%67% lips36%64% ears39%61% fingers40%60% forehead42%58% nose43%57% neck46%54% beard55%45% moustache58%42% leg60%40% palm61%39% toe64%36% While I can understand men being more interested in beards and moustaches (perhaps even legs), why are they far more interested in toes than women? ...

How to remove carpet impressions. Just steam iron the carpet. Comments ankit 24 Jun 2006 5:58 pm: it really works.. http://virtuously.blogspot.com/ S Anand 25 Jun 2006 8:52 am: You actually tried it? I was planning to, except without using steam.

55 ways to have fun with Google. Comments Dhar 25 Jun 2006 7:59 am: Just finished the book, didn’t find it too interesting. :(( S Anand 25 Jun 2006 8:52 am: Me neither. :-(

Mathematics, marriage and finding somewhere to eat has a simple solution to all these problems. Whether you’re hiring someone, or picking a partner, or finding a house – or any problem that requires you to pick the best among N choices – here’s the rule. Scan the first 37% of choices. Then pick the first one that’s better than anything you’ve seen so far.

According to the hygiene hypothesis, exposure early in life to infections from household dust, germy siblings or surfaces may reduce the risk of developing disease in adulthood.

Cut and paste has become easier. So we make less effort to understand. We don’t need to. Like when we pay less attention if we’re recording a lecture. Solution? I suggest the Tunnel in the Sky strategy. Rod Walker is going for survival training on an alien planet, and asks his sister, Captain Walker… “Uh, Sis, what sort of gun should I carry?” “Huh? Why the deuce do you want a gun?” ...

Classic texts in computer science. Worth reading for the sheer insight. Update: The link didn’t seem to work in Feb 2007. Here’s the list. An axiomatic basis for computer programming by C. A. R. Hoare Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) by C. A. R. Hoare Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the lambda calculus by Gordon Plotkin Towards a theory of type structure by John C. Reynolds Definitional interpreters for higher-order programming languages by John C. Reynolds An APL Machine 1970 by Philip S. Abrams Henry Baker’s Archive of Research Papers (many classic Lisp papers) The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engin by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering by Frederic P. Brooks, Jr. A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon Bayesian Networks without Tears by Eugene Charniak A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks 1970 by Edgar F. Codd Let’s Build a Compiler 1988-1995 by Jack Crenshaw Gauging Similarity via N-Grams: Language-Independent Sorting, Categorization, and Retrieval of Text by Marc Damashek Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel Hints on Programming Language Design by C.A.R. Hoare Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes The Design of APL by Kenneth E. Iverson The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay Computer Programming as an Art by Donald E. Knuth The next 700 programming languages by Peter J. Landin Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I) 1960 by John McCarthy FORTH - A Language for Interactive Computing by Charles H.Moore Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years 2001 by Peter Norvig Parenthetically Speaking, a collection of essays from the 1990s by Kent M. Pitman The Definition and Implementation of a Computer Language based on constraints by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Growing a Language by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Epigrams on Programming by Alan J. Perlis The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures by Stephen A. Cook Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence by Marvin Minsky The Original ‘Lambda Papers’ by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems by R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman The UNIX Time-Sharing System by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson Comments jawahar 6 Feb 2007 5:52 am: anand this link is not working !! Classic-texts-in-computer-science – maxviv 5 Jun 2016 7:15 pm (pingback): […] Classic texts in computer science […]

Google has released Picasa Web Albums and I managed to sign up. See my web albums. The bad part about Picasa Web is that it’s a long way from Flickr in terms of tagging and sharing. But it probably wasn’t built for that. The good part is that it’s integrated with Picasa (integration with Flickr was my top wishlist item for Picasa) and best of all, with Google Earth. You can geotag photos on the new Beta version of Picasa. ...

New in Picasa’s beta: geotagging (place photos on the map) search by colour (find photos with red and yellow) hide pictures: that’s useful, sometimes… upload to Google video and to Picasa Web FTP your photos Comments Anand 15 Jun 2006 11:39 am: I got an invitation from Google to try Picasa Web Albums. How does one selectively share some photos and not all in an album ? I do not want to mail these photos instead would like to make only some public. Could you highlight the major differences between this service and that from Flickr ? S Anand 15 Jun 2006 8:51 pm: You can select photos from your Picasa album to upload – you don’t need to upload all of them. When compared with Flickr, PWA is more for sharing with friends and family than for photo discovery. So no tagging, no groups, no top-10 photos now browsing for other users. Anand 16 Jun 2006 1:52 pm: I know I can selectively upload photos from Picasa to web albums. I may want to recover space on my PC by uploading all the photos from my hard disk to web albums. from that collection of photos online i may want to share only some publicly. I suppose then I have to create a pair of albums online for every album in Picasa so that one album online can have the private pictures and the other can have the public pictures S Anand 17 Jun 2006 10:25 am: Yes - you can’t mark individual photos as private. Actually, PicasaWeb doesn’t have any such thing as private. Even if you mark an album as unlisted, if a person knows its URL, they can always access it. Anand Srini 17 Jun 2006 4:33 pm: If a user has not chosent to make any album public then knowing the URL does not reveal those pictures. try it out. make all your albums unlisted and see for yourself what you can see using your URL.I have tested it. the only solution to my problem is to move private pictures from one album to another album and make it unlisted S Anand 25 Jun 2006 8:54 am: Oh, OK. But looks like privacy problems will continue to plague Picasa Web Albums for a while. Just do a google search for site:picasaweb.google.com

Teenagers use it in classes, to avoid detection by teachers. Shopkeepers use the same technology to drive away rowdy teenagers, by creating a loud sound that doesn’t affect adults. This works because adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds. (via NY Times) Comments Livy 12 Nov 2006 5:33 pm: I can here the sounds up to about 18KHz.

I almost fell for this piece of spam.

If you’ve forgotten your Windows password, but you’re still logged in as an administrator, you can change your Windows password without confirmation of the old password. If you’re forgotten your Windows password, and not logged in, you can still access your system using a little known hole in Windows XP. Check Vic Ferri’s article on I Forgot My Administrator Password. Comments windows 7 Mar 2009 2:51 am: Forgot Your Windows Password? A lot of people think that after having lost their Windows admin password, they absolutely have to reinstall their OS. Let me tell you something: They are wrong! Here I’m posting a few methods / utilities which can be used to recover Windows password: 1st Method: The first thing which you check if you forget login password. When we install Windows, it automatically creates an account “Administrator” and sets its password to blank. So if you have forget your user account password then try this: Start system and when you see Windows Welcome screen / Login screen, press + and Del keys twice and it’ll show Classic Login box. Now type “Administrator” (without quotes) in Username and leave Password field blank. Now press Enter and you should be able to log in Windows. Now you can reset your account password from “Control Panel -> User Accounts”. Same thing can be done using Safe Mode. In Safe Mode Windows will show this in-built Administrator account in Login screen. 2th Method: There are many 3rd party utilities which claim to recover forgotten Windows password: Windows Password Recovery Tool Service: windowspasswordsrecovery.com Windows Password Recovery Tool is a program that works instantly to remove any lost or forgotten password. Simply boot your PC from the supplied Boot CD, and get access to forgotten Windows and administrator passwords in just seconds. Their method is so much faster/easier, and works great! http://windowspasswordsrecovery.com zhuismile 13 Jun 2010 8:36 am: Can’t remember your windows xp admin password?Windows password key 8.0 has a neat trick that will get you back in.This method is easy for everyone to follow. Download the utility from http://sn.im/xd5sa and install it then burn the software to a CD/USB drive,then insert the newly created CD/USB drive to your locked pc and reboot your computer,then press “F2” to enter your BIOS setup,following the instruction to reset your lost windows password.