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Entries from geek stuff

  • December, 2005

  • making glossy, dark button

    Since del.icio.us is down, this a note to self. How to make glossy buttons with rounded edges - I tested it out and it really works :-) .
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  • The joy of programming

    Today, after a long time, I again felt the "joy of programming" - I was working on something absolutely trivial, but the difference this time was that I was not programming for someone else, but just for the heck of it (or simply, because I could).
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  • new sig

    I found 2 new ascii arts today -- for use in my sig. You can see them on my ascii art collection page

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  • November, 2005

  • Do violent games inspire people

    Originally posted on posted Fri, 17 Oct 2003

    Ownt has an interview with the Running with scissors' Vince Desi. The interview was posted on October 7th 2003, but I did not blog about it then. Vince is an all around cool guy, not because he uses a lot of fu** and shit (which Ownt has not censored graciously), but because he has his head in the right place and knows a thing about computer games. In case you do not know, Running with scissors made a wonderful game called Postal, which has helped to bring cheer into a lot of stressed out people(many of whom are programmers). It has lots of violence (you can burn people and there is lot of blood). Here is how they describe themselves at their site

    We are Running With Scissors, notorious video game developers despised by Senator Lieberman, the United States Post Office and the Australian legislature (to name but three), for daring to produce the tasteless and insensitive videogames POSTAL and POSTAL 2.
    . My favorite quote in the interview is
    Q: Back then did you think much about the fact that games could somehow "inspire" the player to commit acts that were portrayed in your game, or any game for that matter?
    A: First let me say that if I thought we could make a game that would honestly motivate people to do things in real life, then I would make a game about fucking, cause this world needs more sex than killing that's for shit sure.

    You can read the rest of the interview at Ownt. (link to archive.org's archive). Be warned beforehand if you have sensitive feelings.

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  • lunatech's immutable laws of life

    rshekhar@rshekhar$ dict hypothesis 
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
  hypothesis
       n 1: a proposal intended to explain certain facts or observations
       2: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that
          is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain
          facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives
          experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he
          proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted
          in chemical practices" [syn: {possibility}, {theory}]

    Here are some of my hypotheses, tentatively named lunatech's immutable laws of life

    1. All new PHP programmers want to write a content management system
    2. All new Java programmers will write a chat client
    3. All college students love complexity and will do everything to increase it (at least the amount of complexity in their lives)
    4. All college students want to do a project in 'networking'

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  • PHPCommunity Gazette third edition

    Yesterday Lig and me put out the third edition of the PHPCommunity Gazette. It has some very nice articles, do check it out. If you want to write an article for it, drop us a mail, but remember that we would not be able to pay you anything, except a nice "thank you" note - it is a voluntary effort :-) .

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  • October, 2005

  • bayesian filters

    Some weeks back, I was talking with my manager about AI and how it is such a bogus field. My manager replied that in a few years we will see applications that use AI in our daily life. However, I was quite skeptical - and I refused to agree to this. He then gave an overview of neural net and how they can learn to solve the problems. Here I pointed out that Bayesian filters can also be considered a form of AI, as they can learn from their previous data and they can make decisions, but Bayesian filtering is mathematics and not AI. At this he replied that most of AI is mathematics and only some part of it is hocus-pocus and hand waving.

    This brings me what I have been thinking for a long time.Joel write

    A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said.
    . I had always suspected this and had also felt that this was the way to go. A few months back, we had a presentation by a researcher (not a Yahoo! employee), who was working on extraction and summarization of documents. He had a formula that he was applying on the sentences of the documents to find the weight of the whole sentence and then finally if the weight of the sentence was above some limit, it showed up in the summary. I was skeptical about this approach - my belief is that the Bayesian approach can be used to classify documents. Luckily, there is a project that seems to provide a framework on which things can be built further.

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