neolateral

Got thinking with this old article on wired: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Fascinating!

I have recently had trouble remembering things because of my interest in so many fields. This looks promising as a strategy to learn more and more.

Excellent quote from above article:
"You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life. It is a severe …

Today I created my own library at the Google Books site. Its publicly accessible at Abhishek's Library.

I have added some of the books I recently bought to the library. Some comments/observations about the service:

1. The "Import Books" feature is excellent. It uses the ISBN number to look for books and add them to your library. But, it failed to find some of my books. These I had to add using the book search option.
2. The following two books, I could not find even after a search.

97801433335818 The Exploits of Professor Shonku
81-87-98118-0 The Best of Saki

stretching abstraction very far.... at any moment in time (say t), one could think of one's life as a cons pair of time gone by and the future.

such that:

(car life) -> past
(cdr life) -> future.

(cons past future) -> life

and now at the time t+1, one could recalculate life as
(cons (+ past 1) (- future 1))

if expected age is a constant *FULL-LIFE*, then in the beginning we are
(cons 0 *FULL-LIFE*)

and in the end
(cons *FULL-LIFE* 0)

and mid-life crisis is when
(eqlp (car life) (cdr life))

A recently compiled list of films in the psychological sci-fi genre, which I would like to watch.

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 film)
2. 12:01 PM (1990 film)
3. Equilibrium (film)
4. Primer (film)
5. A Scanner Darkly (film)
6. K-PAX (film)
7. It Happened Here
8. Avalon (2001 film)
9. Fantastic Planet
10. Donnie Darko

A new release of lambda-tube is now available - version 0.2 alpha. Release notes are here Release Notes for lambda-tube.

Downloads are available here lambda-tube downloads. (Download the latest files - executable installer for Windows XP and tgz for Ubuntu 8.04).

The most significant changes since the last release are:

• A new NSIS based installer for the Windows XP version. NSIS is Nullsoft Scriptable Install System - an open-source install system.
• Connections through unauthenticated http proxies are now supported.
• I18N changes. lambda-tube is now available in Hindi apart from English.

Screen-shot of lambda-tube in Hindi

Comments:

hi , i downloaded the version …

Its the beginning of the monsoon season. Yesterday (23rd May 2008) around 4 in the evening, we had heavy rains in Bangalore.

Look at some photos I took using my phone camera.

मानसून की बारिश - २३/०५/२००८

Looking forward to a great monsoon!

I have been working for the past month on an application to search and download videos from youtube. This application now has most of the featues that I had initially planned. In the spirit of “release early release often”, I have released an alpha verson of the software. You can get it at http://code.google.com/p/lambda-tube/.

A little about why I wrote this program. It is actually a coming together of a few favourable factors.

1. I have been learning Scheme through books like “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”, “The Scheme Programming Language” etc. In learning every …

Learning the "Programming Language Scheme"

Recently I began learning the how-to program in Scheme[wikipedia.org]. For the reader it might be interesting to note that I already program in Java, C, and Python. In the past I have also programmed in C++, Pascal and BASIC. Learning at least one dialect of LISP had always been on top of my TO-DO list. I had seen some LISP in action during my college years as part of the "Programming Languages" course, but never learnt it fully.

I finally began this endeavour after having read "Paul Graham's" essays on LISP and programming …

My New Mobile Phone: the Nokia E51

Last month I bought a new mobile phone, the Nokia E51.
The only reason I bought it is that it seems to be the cheapest WiFi device in the Indian market.

The Nokia India page for the phone is here http://www.nokia.co.in/A4598140.

My Ubuntu Linux Desktop

Let me introduce you to my desktop today. Its an Ubuntu Linux (version 7.0.4, codename "Feisty Fawn") system. I've been using this Ubuntu installation for a few months now, and I'm very happy with both the ease of use and power.

And it looks so good, here's a screen shot (click to enlarge).

If you are unfamiliar with Gnome Linux desktop, they you will notice some unique features:

1. Multiple panels(top & bottom)
2. There are 5 desktop pages (bottom right)
3. There's a host of applets added (like weather, mail, network etc) on the top panel …