Blog
Miscellaneous thoughts, musings and updates.
Posts
An introduction to JAX
What is JAX? JAX is NumPy but more with various functionalities designed to make machine learning research faster. It introduces a functional programming paradigm and has other valuab...
In tech, Apr 04, 2021
Introducing smarter.blog
I started a new blog called smarter.blog at the beginning of the year.
In blog, Apr 04, 20212020: It's a wrap!
Looking back at my blog, I am disappointed that my last post was in 2018. In fact, my 2018 resolution was to write 50k public words, but I barely got to a few thousand.2019 seems to h...
In blog, Dec 29, 2020
Finding Passion
One would think that Jeff Bezos’s passion has always been Amazon and online retail, but turns out his passions areRockets, space travel and propulsion.
In mind over matter, Jul 11, 2018
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I recently finished this book (should have read it long back!) and I must say, what a great read about a great and a curious mind!
In mind over matter, Jan 04, 2018New Year's resolutions
2018 is actually here (and that’s bad because it looks like time is crunching through years faster than I would like). And that also means it is time to set new year’s resolutions.
In mind over matter, Jan 01, 2018
Understanding TensorFlow Graph Execution with a Simple Example
This post is for absolute beginners. I hope to be able to explain complicated concepts in simple terms to benefit a wider audience (see dummies guide to erasure coding post for a diff...
In tech, Jul 10, 2017Procrastination Filter
Have you ever noticed drowning into a sea of articles that you opened via Hacker News? Did you end up buying those nine little things from Amazon of which you don’t use any? If you t...
In mind over matter, Oct 14, 2015Popular Weekend Programming Languages
What are some languages used most often during the weekends? Are there some languages that are inherently more ‘hobbyist’ than others?
In tech, May 27, 2013
XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data
This is a post that has been long overdue.
In tech, Apr 23, 2013
Eight Queens Puzzle
I came across a very nice puzzle called the Eight Queen Puzzle a few days back. Although, I must agree at the outset that it is somewhat sad that I have not heard this one before.I ca...
In tech, Mar 29, 2013Kneser Graphs and the EKR Theorem
In the last post, I briefly talked about vertex cover, edge cover, maximum matching and independent sets. The fractional versions of these problems are not too far away from the integ...
In tech, Jan 27, 2013A few notes on graph theory
I would like to summarize very briefly a few of the most basic problems in graph theory. It is my hope to write more about these and about graphs later, so I can refer to this page wh...
In tech, Jan 24, 2013The Two-Subset Sum problem
One of the classic questions is the two sum problem or the two-subset problem:
In tech, Jan 22, 2013No more rush hours: An introduction to vehicular networks
Imagine doing a 70 on a highway on your convertible and imagine the loud music blaring through the wind. Imagine a sunny saturday when you are making your way to the beach, when sudde...
In tech, Nov 29, 2012Surfing analogy for startups
There was an interesting talk a few days back in USC by Michael Sheha (his bio at the end of the post).
In tech, Oct 13, 2012Liveblogging OSDI2012 - Tuesday
There are four main sessions today. Looking forward to the Google talk on Spanner. Day 1 was great (including the food, of course). Looking forward to a great second day. I will blog ...
In blog, tech, Oct 09, 2012Liveblogging OSDI2012 - Monday
I am attending OSDI 2012 here at Hollywood, CA. Lots of interesting papers here and I will try to blog about this event. In particular I am excited about attending Google’s spanner ta...
In blog, tech, Oct 08, 2012LaTeX Tips and Tricks
There seem to be quite a few techniques to embed the fonts while generating PDFs from LaTeX sources, and I just wanted to collate a few in one post. Further, I wanted to share my comp...
In tech, Aug 17, 2012Difference between that and which
I did not really know the difference, until I started reading the book On Writing Well. The author William Zinsser writes:
In blog, Aug 15, 2012Life as an MDP
On one particular day when I was working towards a deadline, I ended up doing two things effectively - bunch of simulations on Markov Decision Processes and a debate with my friend ab...
In mind over matter, Jul 31, 2012Failure and the Future
Failures can be debilitating. You got badly injured while skiing and now you do not want to skii again. Your past venture into a startup was a failure and you are scared of starting a...
In mind over matter, Jul 27, 2012Dummies Guide to Erasure Coding
If you read this Wikipedia article on erasure coding, you will be more prone to a headache than a person with migraine. Fortunately, there is help. Unfortunately, this article will be...
In tech, Jul 01, 2012Reinforcement Learning
Even though I have used Markov Decision Processes and I know of the bandit problem framework, suddenly I realized that I could not relate these together with reinforcement learning. T...
In tech, Jun 30, 2012Save an applet to an image in Java
Have you ever wanted to save a frame from a Java applet to an image file? In this quick piece of code, I will show you how to save an image produced by an applet to a file. Although i...
In tech, Jun 27, 2012The road to wisdom
Piet Hein, a Danish polymath, who is famous for his short poems (also known as gruks or grooks) puts it tersely:
In mind over matter, Jun 22, 2012