Pandy

To the Web and Back

2011-06-30T21:09:00.003+05:30

Before the WebBefore the initial releases of Netscape and Internet Explorer in 1994, most people did not have access to the web. They were satisfied with the desktop software available at the time which ran on DOS/Windows or well, Unix. Commonly used applications were word-processors, editors and some games for fun.With the advent of Win32 API lot of software companies started investing heavily

Angle Sum Formula for Polygons

2010-12-02T13:39:00.004+05:30

We are all familiar with the fact that the sum of all the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. And for quadrilaterals the sum of its angles comes to be 360 degrees. This can be generalized to prove that the sum of angles of polygon of n sides is (n - 2) * 180 degrees.A simple proof of this angle sum formula can be provided in two ways. First we can divide the polygon into (n - 2) triangles using

Another Proof of Pythagoras Theorem

2010-11-29T16:25:00.006+05:30

Pythagoras Theorem is one of the most important theorems in elementary geometry. It states that in a right angled triangle the square of the largest side is the sum of the squares of the other two sides.There are a large number of proofs available in textbooks and online articles. I will show here a very simple proof that uses only two concepts:1) Area is additive.2) Congruent figures have same

The Legacy of getch()

2009-08-21T21:08:00.010+05:30

Many software engineers of my age (including me) started C programming using the Turbo C/C++ IDE. Most of us had no idea of computer usage in the school time and therefore no one really understood deeply what Turbo C/C++ (shortened as TC in what follows) was. It was just more or less equivalent to C programming. So we will go back in history and write our first C program in TC:#include

New Blog for Mathematical Topics

2009-08-04T14:48:00.001+05:30

I have started a new blog on WordPress to discuss mathematical topics. Please check it out here.

Hacking Passwords

2008-05-18T13:32:00.005+05:30

There was a time (well, 8-10 years ago when I was in college) when there were many vulnerabilities in common UNIX systems (Sun Solaris/HP-UX/Linux/Digital Unix and what not!) which allowed someone to get superuser (root) privileges.Normally the college geeks would download some shell script or a C program which would exploit some vulnerability and land you in a shell with '#' prompt and it

Programming: Pearls of Wisdom

2008-05-18T12:55:00.002+05:30

Recently I happened to visit this great site which contains excellent advice on programming techniques and common pitfalls. Plus its an enjoyable ride. I won't give further details and would let you explore the website yourself.Thanks to Alex Papadimoulis for "The Daily WTF"!!

Kudos to NCERT

2008-05-15T20:05:00.003+05:30

For those not of the Indian origin, NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) is a government body which publishes textbooks for students upto 12th grade apart from doing 'educational research and training'.When I was in my high school years (9-12th grade) I enjoyed reading NCERT books. Being quite concise they took less time to study and most of all they were not at all

Being Smart - II

2008-05-15T19:02:00.002+05:30

Last time I had shown you the brighter side of 'being smart', but I guess its fair only to balance it with the darker side too. The following is an account of what happened to me recently in the presence of smart people.This time I was traveling from Bokaro to New Delhi by Ranchi Rajdhani Express. I was accompanied by my sister who is currently studying in Delhi. And this was her first visit to

Nostalgia

2007-07-12T23:09:00.000+05:30

Last weekend, I met an amazing person on the Orkut Mathematics Community. He has just passed 12th standard and is heading for IIT. From the solutions he provided in the community, I could sense that this person has to be a genius. The methods used by him were highly efficient and I would say that he possessed great problem solving skills (both drilling / thinking type).I was reminded of my

My Google Rank

2007-05-12T18:53:00.000+05:30

Finally my blogging has paid me off. Well, not in the monetary sense! The rankings of my blog page have improved somewhat both on Google as well as on Yahoo search. Sometime last year I had googled my name and the first result turned out be about a professor from IIT Chennai. My page was not even listed on the first page of search results (but not too bad, it was on the 2nd page).Today, just out

WWGHA?

2007-01-01T22:30:00.000+05:30

Yeah right! You are wondering what the hell is WWGHA. I will just give you a link to this most inspirational and thoughtful website on WWGHA and let the site speak for itself rather myself giving a review of it.

Book Review: Breaking the Spell

2006-11-18T11:15:00.000+05:30

Almost every culture on this planet has some version of religion being followed by its people. And almost all the religions have a basic feature: it is supposed to be above debate or scrutiny. You can argue about any other aspect of a culture but not religion. Somehow arguing about religion, or criticizing the religious beliefs of a person is supposed to be an indecent behavior. The taboo has

Algebra vs. Calculus

2006-09-30T10:05:00.000+05:30

While interacting with some students of 12th grade (possibly some undergraduates also) in Orkut Math Community, I found something about which I feel very sad. This has something to do with their approach of problem solving. What I found out was that their brains have been so trained to a formula based or rule based approach. They don't understand the concepts and their meaning. The whole

Being Smart

2006-09-21T17:27:00.000+05:30

A month ago, I was traveling to my native place Bokaro by Rajdhani Express. Rajdhani Express is the best train provided by Indian Railways in terms of speed and services. So the fare is also the highest here. So I was expecting that the passengers will be more or less decent enough compared to those traveling in some other class of trains. But this is what I actually experienced.There was a guy,

Infinity Causes Infinite Confusion

2006-08-29T22:51:00.000+05:30

For last 3-4 weeks I have been spending a hell lot of time on Orkut Mathematics community. And for last few days I have been finding a lot of posts on the topic of infinity. The confusion around the word infinity is so great that I was in total awe. Almost all the posts were way wrong about infinity. (I think most of the smart people who had no confusion probably did not bother to post.)There was

Math @ Orkut - II

2006-08-06T12:49:00.000+05:30

Orkut is gr8! Just gr8! When I joined the mathematics community 2 weeks back the membership was around 35800 and now its gone upto 36942. More than 1000 members in just two weeks. This proves that, contrary to the popular belief, mathematics is really one of most interesting subjects. This belief/myth seems to be popular only among those who never had any interest in studies as such.The community

Meebo Me

2006-08-02T22:06:00.000+05:30

Now you can contact me if I am online at Meebo. Please send your message using the widget named "Parama" on the right sidebar. This is an important feature provided by the Meebo guys.

Math. @ Orkut

2006-07-29T20:05:00.000+05:30

Two days back I was visiting some communities on Orkut, and I came across the Mathematics community. I was surprised to see the number of members it had. Roughly 36000! This is much more than many other communities on Orkut. I was really excited to know that so many people on Orkut are interested in mathematics.With a single mouse click I joined the community and found lot of interesting posts.

PDF War

2006-07-15T18:30:00.000+05:30

In one of my previous posts I mentioned about the clash between Adobe and Microsoft over PDF creation functionality. This post can be taken as a sequel to that and I am going to delve deeper into the reasons for this clash.First of all let us talk about the PDF file format itself. PDF was created by Adobe to primarily meet the needs of printing industry. And to that end PDF is the best format

Rise of Double Standard

2006-07-09T11:30:00.000+05:30

When I stepped out of my home for the first time during my college, I had a chance to meet people with different backgrounds (and different cultures too!). The hostel life in college provided ample opportunity to interact with people of various sorts and I began to understand that there is a world beyond books (earlier I was much engrossed in my studies and did not care to interact with people

Tabbed Interfaces

2006-07-07T10:14:00.000+05:30

Tabbed interfaces were a major revolution when they first appeared on UI scene. From then on, practically every configuration/options dialog became tab-based. The fundamental feature of tab based interfaces is that they can present to the user a number of dialogs together without cluttering the screen.Tab-based interfaces are inherent in the Windows Taskbar design although the task bar is a

Microsoft vs. Adobe

2006-06-03T11:38:00.000+05:30

Recently Adobe is making a lot of uproar about suing Microsoft for bundling PDF export and XPS document format in Office 2007 and Windows Vista. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is Microsoft's answer to Adobe PostScript format and as Microsoft is saying is going to be a better technology.Microsoft plans to integrate XPS tightly into its upcoming operating system Windows Vista. Together with this

Quotes by Ayn Rand

2006-05-21T16:07:00.000+05:30

I have read most of the novels by Ayn Rand and have been impressed by each one of them. I felt like quoting some of the statements in her novels which appealed me most. Hope someone out there likes some of these:Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it.Francisco d'Anconia, Atlas ShruggedThey, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on this earth, theirs is

Perils of Windows XP Home

2006-05-06T10:02:00.000+05:30

Before getting my laptop, I had worked only on Windows 2000 and XP Professional editions of Windows. With my Sony VAIO they provided me with XP Home edition. I thought that the underlying OS is the same and so things would not be quite different. True, the User Interface is the same as XP Pro.So I was satisfied with XP Home for 2 or 3 days. Until I had internet connection. With internet

My Laptop

2006-05-04T19:46:00.000+05:30

After a long time I finally managed to post something on blog. Thanks to my new laptop and the internet connection which I have right now. Now no more weekends spent in office writing blogs. And the Sony VAIO looks great enough to deserve a mention in my blog. Not much to say about it, the pictures themselves would speak better.The wallpaper you see is me and the next pic shows the internet

Intelligent Design: Update

2005-12-22T13:06:00.000+05:30

Those who have been following my blog for the last few months would have come across my article "To Hell With Intelligent Design". They would be glad to know that finally the ID theory has been sent to hell. Thanks to judge John Jones of Pennsylvania, who has banned the teaching of intelligent design at schools in Pennsylvania. For more details read this news article from The Register.

PDF Generation: Adobe vs. Jaws

2005-12-02T19:11:00.000+05:30

Adobe PDF file format is currently the de-facto standard for viewing documents, but as far as creation of documents is concerned, it is the MS Office DOC format which tops the charts. There are other formats like the FrameMaker FM format, plain HTML, CHM, but none of these are comparable anywhere to PDF/DOC formats.But since PDF file format is not optimized for creating and editing documents, the

In Defense of Google

2005-11-26T12:26:00.000+05:30

Last week, I noticed an article on The Register about Google ills. In the article the author, Otto Stern, talks about the problems with the search giant. The article does not have much technical content and I wonder how can one blame a tech company solely on the basis of "social" arguments, without looking at its technological achievements. Being an ardent fan of Google, I found it necessary to

Book Review: A Course of Pure Mathematics

2005-11-19T13:54:00.000+05:30

This is one of the two great books which influenced my life deeply. And reading it for the first time I came to know what does a masterpiece look like. I will never forget the excitement with which I read "Pure Mathematics" for the first time and then over and again for quite a number of times. So what's this book all about? Well, it is an introduction to mathematical analysis (in crude terms:

The Anti-Microsoft World

2005-11-19T10:02:00.000+05:30

Nowadays it has become fashionable to blame Microsoft for almost any problem with your PC, be it software or hardware. People think it is prestigious to hate Microsoft. By hating them you think that you belong to the Linux/Unix geek group. And since being geek is thought of like being sexy, many people are using this anti-Microsoft propaganda to prove themselves that they are geeks.Hey, I too

No Time for Blogging

2005-11-13T14:11:00.000+05:30

Last-to-last week I was on Deepawali vacation, and I could not put up any stuff on my blog. On coming back to Noida many friends started asking me about my blog. It seemed liked they were waiting for some posts during the vacation period also.Just to remind these impatient friends of mine, I am posting here the reasons for not blogging for past few weeks. So here they are: First and foremost, I

Bug Tracking "OnTime"

2005-10-25T12:22:00.000+05:30

Google ads are gr8. Yesterday, when I was showing my blog post to some of my friends I happened to click on one of the ads about a "Visual Studio Add-In". This took me to Axosoft, a company which makes the bug tracking software called "OnTime." Before this, I only knew about two such tools, one is FogBugz by Joel Spolsky, and another is Visual Intercept which our company uses.The distinguishing

Book Review: Just For Fun

2005-10-23T12:24:00.000+05:30

A few days back, I read this amusing book "Just For Fun". I just noticed the author "Linus Torvalds" and that was reason enough to issue the book from my company library. And true to the title, reading the book was fun.So what does Father of Linux want to say to all geeks (and non-geeks too)? You think he would describe the birth of Linux in all gory and geeky details. Yeah, he does that and a

Source Insight

2005-10-19T12:31:00.000+05:30

Finally I have reached the Holy Grail of source code browsing. Yesterday I saw one of my colleagues running an evaluation version of Source Insight 3.5 and I was amazed by the way it displayed all the symbols (similar to Class View in Visual Studio). The impressive feature which made me consider this code browsing tool was that it was able to generate the symbols without using any project or

Darwin Revisited

2005-10-08T19:45:00.000+05:30

In one of my previous posts I mentioned a thing or two about Intelligent Design (ID) Theory of Origin of Life. The ads displayed by Google on my blog had links to many sites on ID theory. Although being an ardent believer of Darwinism, I thought why not have a look at the views of the other side. And so I clicked on one of these links displayed by Google.The arguments against Darwinism on that

Book Review: Don't You Have Time To Think?

2005-10-08T17:41:00.000+05:30

Two weeks back I happened to come across this book "Don't You Have Time To Think?" by Richard P. Feynman. Being a Feynman fan, I bought the book then and there. After reading the book for a few pages I came to know that it was not a book by Feynman, rather it was a collection of his letters edited by his daughter Michelle Feynman.Since the letters reveal much more personal details compared to

To Hell with Intelligent Design

2005-09-27T11:24:00.000+05:30

Today I came to read a news article, which mentions about a case in court about whether Intelligent Design (ID) theory should be taught in schools or not. To place everything in context let me mention that ID theory is an alternative to the standard "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection". The basic tenet of this ID theory is that the complexity of life seen on earth is the result of some

My First Flight

2005-09-25T13:04:00.000+05:30

Two months back I went to Bangalore to meet one of my friends from college. One of my friends had come back from US for around a month here and we two had plans to meet our common friend in Bangalore. Since we did not have much time, we had to plan for a flight. I was damn excited about this because it was my first flight (till now its my only flight). I had told my friend, while in the plane,

Square Roots (Contd...)

2005-09-21T18:34:00.000+05:30

After waiting for a week, I found little response from readers. Perhaps you don't find square roots interesting enough to delve into, and may be you would like to handle bigger challenges. Anyway since I promised that I would explain the rationale behind the long division process of square roots sometime, so here in this post I discuss something about that.It is pretty obvious (and not difficult

Dilbert's Universe

2005-09-17T18:42:00.000+05:30

Last week I had the experience of being in a Dilbert's Universe. Some big shot of our company had arrived here and we had a big gathering of around 1200 or so employees in a cramped place to listen to his gibberish. In fact people were flown in from various offices in the country to attend this meeting.To be frank, the entire programme seemed to be a fiasco. Not to mention the boring speech by

Square Roots

2005-09-15T21:07:00.000+05:30

I hope most of you are familiar with the process of long division of finding square roots. Have you ever wondered why the method works? If yes, probably you would have figured out the answer to that query, and you need not waste your precious time reading this post further.However, if you haven't pondered over this matter, then its nice for me, as I have some people to read this post. Well, I

Musings on 1, 2, 3 ... (contd...)

2005-09-15T20:06:00.000+05:30

For those who find my previous two posts a bit abstract, I ensure that this one is the last piece and completes the "Musings" trilogy. And yes, I would keep it short.We invented the naturals and the integers in the previous posts and we next proceed to the rationals. Let's assume then that a, b, c, d etc. stand for integers. We know that division is not always possible in the system of integers

Musings on 1, 2, 3 ... (contd...)

2005-09-11T19:35:00.000+05:30

In the last post I discussed the basic properties of the natural numbers. This approach to natural numbers was first adopted by Peano in 1889, and as such these properties of the natural numbers are known as Peano's Axioms. Since then the natural numbers have been put on sound and rigorous footing.Let's continue from where we left in the last post. We turn our attention from natural numbers to

Musings on 1, 2, 3 ...

2005-09-11T16:42:00.000+05:30

Kronecker once remarked, "God created the integers, all else is the work of man." Being a Bright I think that integer arithmetic is also the work of man. In the following paragraphs I would explain how this work was done.Let's begin at the beginning, and assume the concept of unity i.e. there is a thing called 'one' or 'unity' and is normally denoted by the symbol '1'. Another fundamental concept

Design in C++, code in C

2005-09-10T20:47:00.000+05:30

When I came fresh out of college, I was a huge fan of C language. Actually, to be frank, I was in love with C. I had the attitude of discouraging Java programmers in college (this attitude is still there and I will justify it in some other post). Not much emphasis was there on C++ in my college and nobody bothered to learn C++. I just wrote a few programs in C++ because I was learning Qt GUI

T-Shirt

2005-09-09T13:26:00.000+05:30

Finally, I have started wearing T-Shirts, a move which (I hope) will be liked by many of my friends. However don't hope for jeans as of yet, that might be for never.To those who are following my blog seriously, I have unloaded one more DLL.

Review: Hindi Movie "Dansh"

2005-09-06T06:05:00.000+05:30

Yesterday evening I went out with my roommate to watch a movie named "Dansh". There wasn't much advertisement about the movie, but we thought it would be somehow better than the Salman crap "No Entry" and the disgusting "Ramji Londonwaley". Spending 150 bucks for cheap comedy isn't my style.When we were entering the theatre, the security guard asked during checkup, "Didn't you guys get tickets

Synchronization Mechanisms and Yahoo! (contd...)

2005-09-06T01:50:00.000+05:30

Hey, we are back to Yahoo! Messenger stuff. My earlier entry contained details about a Yahoo! Messenger client for Linux. That was done way back in 2001-2002 when I didn't have much programming experience (I mostly wrote console applications and that too were mainly mathematical or network oriented).Now, after some years of experience working under Windows/WinCE, I look back on the Yahoo! client

Synchronization Mechanisms and Yahoo!

2005-09-05T07:54:00.000+05:30

From the title you must have guessed that this one is going to be a damn technical entry. To be fair enough, if you are not a computer geek you might have some difficulty in getting to the point which I am trying to make. But then you can always google up and learn things which you don't know.Anyway I assume that the reader has some idea of synchronization mechanisms used by various operating

DLLs

2005-09-05T05:28:00.000+05:30

In my last post, I introduced the concept of Best Friend. In this entry I will add another term to your vocabulary.DLL is actually a computer jargon (which stands for Dynamic Linked Library about which I will talk some other time), but I and my friends (mostly my wingmates from college) use it to convey a totally different meaning.The term arose with its new meaning during my college days. I

My Best Friend

2005-09-05T03:27:00.000+05:30

This entry is going to a bit personal, but I would try to make it interesting to a general reader as well. So you must be guessing that I would introduce you to my Best Friend and would bore you with some sentimental stuff. Well, I will definitely introduce you to Best Friend, and instead of boring you, I will introduce him in an illuminating way.Our first meeting happened 3 years ago. I was

The Da Vinci Code and others ...

2005-09-05T02:54:00.000+05:30

I met Dan Brown through one of his books which topped NYTimes bestseller list when it was published. I am talking of "The Da Vinci Code". I bought the illustrated version and frankly speaking devoured it for 2-3 days. The illustrated version brings to you all the art/architecture details. You would feel that instead of Robert Langdon you are visiting Louvre. Do spend some extra bucks to get that

Change, Change, Change ...

2005-09-04T07:16:00.000+05:30

I wrote this article long back (about a year ago), when one fine morning I woke up at 5.00 AM out of frustration. Hope the topic does not frustrate anyone anymore.Change is the law of Nature. Nobody denies this fact. Had there been no change there would not have been the concept of time and all physics would have been dead. Thus change is inevitable. Some changes are favorable to us while others

Finally I too started blogging!!

2005-09-03T10:15:00.000+05:30

After an year or so, I have started blogging. After lot of password recovery through email, I have managed to start using this blog account. Watch out for interesting stuff in topics like: computer programming, maths, science, philosophy, book reviews and finally sex... (how could I miss that?)