Moving

Hello reader, I am moving to wordpress: http://amitksaha.wordpress.com
All my blogging continues there.

Book Review: Embedded Linux Primer

My review of Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical Real-World Approach is now in the stands - April, 2009 issue for Linux For You. Thanks to Linux For You and Pearson Higher Ed. for the review copy.

Quick Tip: Using the 'parsec' Haskell library

You will have to do a sudo apt-get install libghc6-parsec-dev and sudo apt-get install libghc6-parsec-doc on Ubuntu/Debian systems if you are going to use the parsec library with ghc installed via apt-get

Once you have installed both, you should be able to use the library in your Haskell code and also view the library documentation.

Logo, Lisp and Me

By the time I moved to a new school (Don Bosco School, Siliguri) in Grade 5, they had stopped teaching LOGO. So, my journey with computers in any form started with GW BASIC. So, I had no idea about what LOGO was except that it was fun. I did not have a computer so early and by the time I got it, I was too old (!!) for learning LOGO.

Some things have changed now, however. After 14 years have passed, I don't think that I am too old, any more! My 10 year old sister is learning LOGO in her 4th grade (Saint Joseph's School, Matigara) and I want to teach her to program LOGO on the computer. So I began my LOGO learning journey..

The first things I saw startled me:

• Its a dialect of Lisp
• Seymour Papert was one of the developers

To top it all:

"Logo is the name for a philosophy of education and a continually evolving family of programming languages that aid in its realization."

- Harold Abelson
Apple Logo, 1982

Never lose the child like wonder- said Randy Pausch in his last lecture. Well, I am 24 and I hope computers will continue startling me for many years to come!

Book Review: The Last Theorem

I finished reading The Last Theorem, Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl. Its a story of Ranjit Subramanium and his life after he finds a proof to Fermat's Last Theorem

There is also a parallel storyline in the book which involves characters from other parts of the universe- Grand Galactics, One point fives and machine-stored creatures. The two storylines have common strings attached at various points and finally converges in the end with both Ranjit and Myra (his beloved wife) ending up as machine-stored long after their deaths.

My main motivation in reading this book was its fictional relationship to the theorem. Considering that, I am a tad disappointed as it doesn't really justify my choice as it has a somewhat cursory in its treatment of the theorem.

However, taking that out of the equation, this book is a enjoyable read as it takes you on a voyage in a solar sail and more. To the math lover's delight there are references to Sophie Germain and Lady Ada Lovelace.

For a detailed review of the book, please visit http://www.sfsite.com/03b/la292.htm

CS17 at Brown University: A great CS foundation course

I just finished going through bulk of the lecture notes published as part of the CS17 course of Brown University.

The course begins by introducing functional programming via Scheme and moves on to OCaml in later stages. By introducing the two languages, the students get a flavor of a static and a dynamically typed language. An important point inferred is: static typing is not simply about prefixing the data type of the data during its declaration.

Just as a basic foundation course should, the course also introduces algorithmic analysis, Abstract Data Types or ADTs- the reason for calling them abstract is very well clarified with illustrations.

There are really great lecture notes in there and they are enjoyable too. If you are a CS student work the assignments out. If you are no more a student with at least a faint interest in good CS and if you haven't taken a look at this course, please do.

I would also be interested in knowing some more such delightful courses. If you know one, please let me know in a comment. (I am aware of SICP, and currently have planned a schedule for working through them)

SoM: Amnesia of Infancy

(Image Source: http://www.medicirc.org/images/infancy_off.gif )

Marvin Minsky in in the prologue of his book- The Society of Mind, describes common sense as an amnesia of infancy, which makes human beings forget the way they learned to do simple things such as putting blocks together to form a tower.







Its insanely hard to tell more than a I don't know, when confronted with the How of knowing certain things:

Q: How do you know that if you fall, you get hurt?
A: I fell for the first ever time in my life and I got hurt, so I know that.

Q. How do you know that?
A. I learnt it the first time

Q. How did you learn and how did you remember?
A. I don't know much except that I, like most sane living beings, including animals have something called a brain which tells me these amazing things, which I now would classify under common sense.

Not perhaps the best example to prove my point. But, the idea is that most things that we know today, as adult human beings converges to a point, where all seems to be common sense, the origin of which we don't know.

Perhaps, that is amnesia of infancy.