PatternExon

Craig Venter unveils “synthetic life”

// May 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // TED Talk, video

An Interesting talk by Jack Dorsey

// May 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // review, video

The founder of Twitter talks about designing, users, iteration and knowing when to stop!

A Games of Thrones – George R. R. Martin

// February 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // books, review

I believe it was 3 years ago that I bumped into SG at one of our favourite joints in St. Louis – UCPL. And while I was flipping through the foreign film section to find a Wooster and Jeeves DVD he pulled me to the sci-fi and fantasy section and thrust this book into my hands and the started ranting about it. And I checked it out and read two pages and then forgot about it. I wish I hadn’t, I wish I had read all the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series then, when I had more time. When I did not think that reading fantasy fiction was a total waste of time. But I could not keep this one down.

Its set in medieval Europe stylised world, where the land is divided into seven kingdoms brought under the rule of a feudal family after an uprising that partially obliterated the previous rulers of the land. The socio-political system of the land is the richest facet of the narrative. The society, styles and mannerisms are medieval European but the political  machinations are more akin to Japanese feudal systems with houses similar to hans and the head of a house equivalent to a daimyo and bannersmen similar to faithful retainers.

There is no sole protagonist, rather the story unfolds from the perspective of different characters. This is not a novel about a knight in shining armour who is always a breath away from certain death but survives ferocious monsters and unimaginative-yet-moderately-cunning siblings to win the hand of the fairest bimbo in the land. Here characters are born, they evolve and as soon as you start to admire or hate them they die. The story unfolds a breath taking speed leaving behind favourite characters and elaborating every strand of this epic into a vivid and enrapturing tale. To summarise the plot I fear would be unjust and unwise.
Only I should warn you that this series is incomplete. The last three books of this saga have not been published nor there is little hope that they will be. None the less, the book is worth reading. And I too have involuntarily joined this cult of George Martin fans who make a weekly virtual pilgrimage to his site hoping to find that the remaining books have been written.

This holiday I bought a Kindle

// January 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // books, kindle

In my quest to be a little different from everyone else I bought the most popular gift on amazon this holiday season. Kindle 2. Here are my comments in general:
Can you actual read for hours ?
Yes.
The screen is not LCD and it does not have a back light. You cannot read it in the dark, its just like a regular book. Kindle, like other electronic readers uses E-ink technology. There is no strain on the eye. In fact, the sharpness of the font makes it better than some of the LPE I proudly read. Its light in weight and I haven’t bought a cover yet so its actually lighter than most books that I am currently reading on it. The design seems stark and rudimentary at first with an old school QWERTY keyboard of circular keys and a simple joystick but it is surprisingly functional. The ‘Next Page’ buttons on either side of the screen are very helpful. In general pressing buttons need a little more effort than a good keyboard or a regular cellphone, so it takes sometime getting used. I am not a big fan of the ‘Read Aloud’ functionality where you can hear the book as an audio book and continue glancing as it flips pages automatically. When very lazy I do sometimes switch the read-aloud feature and not listen; it flips pages for me without press of a button! The battery life is amazing. If you switch off the wireless, it lasts for about 10 hours of active reading.
I like that it comes with a 3G service that I am not charged for ! Amazon aims to cover the cost of the wireless service when selling the books in its DRM format. The Kindle Store (the iTunes for books) has a decent collection of books. I am going to figure out exctly how many books I have to read (not just buy) to make a Kindle purchase profitable.
Yes, I agree it looks small but with the ability to control font size its a non issue.
There is some talk about releasing a sdk for some ‘Kindle Apps’ – that may be interesting.

Shashi Tharoor talks at TED

// December 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // TED Talk, video

This is amazing. I am generally skeptical of the ‘India – The Superpower’ bandwagon. But this is very good. I am going to dissect it soon. But for now, enjoy!!
The Soft Power of India

After a few days to driving all traffic towards them, TED is now ok with embedding this video elsewhere, hence:

I now own aksh.at !!

// November 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // website

I own http://aksh.at , thanks to JP. He couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t waste 15 bucks on buying this domain.
And initially he saw his future as a very special cyber squatter but later he (out of pity, i suspect) gifted me  aksh.at for a year. Initially I’ll just have it redirect to patternexon but I’ll be building something soon.
Finally, after about a year since I realised that the last 2 letters of my name are same as the TLD for Austria. And I know that hosting an Austrian domain out of a server in US is probably a bad idea. But I think its cute.

The summary of my current existence

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // webcomics

Oh ! this is truth, beauty and misery. Its captured all of it, theres nothing left for me to elaborate. Just pay homage and go to work tomorrow.

Polynoid – Awesome projects

// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // video

I remember seeing 458nm about 2 years, it was awesome then and its awesome now too. These are very good.

Sieve of Eratosthenes

// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // programming, ruby

To find all primes up to a limit or to check if a number is prime or not, the sieve of eratosthenes is famously used. There are many known optimisations to the basic algorithm, also should check for simple things like if number is even or not. Maybe not just if the number is divisible by 2 but also 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. I remember there is a graph that points this out. Namely, that when there are multiple algorithms each with different time complexities, the algorithm that has average best performance may not have best performance especially for smaller datasets. I cant find that graph right now, but I am looking.

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#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
# Tue Nov 17 00:06:30 EST 2009
# patternexon AT gmail
# Under GPL v3.0
class Integer
/*
Sift the Twos and sift the Threes,
The Sieve of Eratosthenes.
When the multiples sublime,
The numbers that remain are Prime.
*/
def primes_upto(limit)
  primes = Array.new
  putative = Array(2..limit)
  putative.each_index do |i|
    primes.push(putative[i])
    (i+1).upto(putative.size-1) do |j|
      putative[j] = nil if putative[j] % putative[i] == 0
    end
   putative.compact!
 end
return primes
end
def prime?
  if self == self.primes_upto(self).last
    return true
  else
    return false
  end
end
end
 
1.upto(100){ |i| puts "#{i} is #{i.prime?}" }

A Short Love Story in stop motion – Carlos Lascano

// November 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // video

This looks and sounds like an inspiration to an sequence in Up, also check out his gallery of illustrations

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.