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The Adventures Of A Unix Programmer

ASMs and Random Things

Yuri Gurevich from Microsoft Research [1] gave a very erudite and somewhat interesting Google Tech Talk on the Church-Turing thesis today. The reward for patiently listening to a poor video quality H.323 session across the Atlantic at midnight was the discovery of something totally new: Abstract State Machines.

Update (The Video is Up):


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Filed under: Computer Science, DEK, Humor

Pony Fail

Read this on Jonathan’s blog: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/will_java_be_the_world

Its a great idea, no doubt. Just 11 years too late for Windows 98 – Long after people abandoned writing lousy desktop applications with ugly AWT or less ugly Swing. This time around Sun has a new secret weapon: JavaFX. But why would developers abandon Flash, AIR, Silverlight, OpenLaszlo, XUL and jump to a new platform ?

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Filed under: Rants, Sun

True IPL TRP Stats

Doug Hofstadter might find it amusing. But I find it incredibly annoying that when I want to read news online, I see news about news or media reporting about media or celebrity gossip about media celebrities. Talk about self-serving institutions. Being very interested in Statistics, all this recent Trash-Talk about Television ratings for the Indian Premier League got me interested in the methodology used for measuring TRP ratings.

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Filed under: Computer Science, General, Mathematics

Turing: Complete, Godel: Incomplete

Far too much of my time in recent years has been spent by an all consuming obsession to understand Turing’s original proof as outlined in “On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”. Much like Alice in Wonderland in pre-teen years and Super Mario Bros. of teenage yore, I suspect there was very little value in spending time thusly. But there is light at the end of the tunnel and for some vague definition of “complete”, I call my study of Turing’s paper done for the time being.

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Filed under: Computer Science, Mathematics

Gulliver and the Markov Chain

Long long ago, before Claude Shannon modeled the distribution of English Words as a Markov process, before Larry and Sergey modeled the Random Surfer as a Markov Chain on the Graph of the Internet, before SciGen made Markov Chains the legend of Slashdot, before even Monte-Carlo and Metropolis-Hastings, there was Jonathan Swift.

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Filed under: Books, Computer Science, Dublin, Mathematics

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  • After several years of disgust with Python's subprocess and its numerous bugs, I finally wrote my own extension module in C. Unix FTW ! 1 day ago
  • Celebrated 1st year in Google by keeping awake all night to solve a nasty SWIG preprocessor issue and a readline escape sequence parsing bug 1 day ago
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