The first programming language I coded in is QuickBasic. I loved the simplicity and especially the IDE. It made things simple for a starter. Later I discovered Visual Basic which extended the same simplicity and added the “Visual” element with a splendid editor for GUI.

In between I did some projects using Java, C#, C, C++. None of these impressed me too much. I hated Java’s imposition of stiff rules and it’s dogged adherence to “everything in a class” attitude. C# was better. C++ just turned me off because of the monster it is. I did not like C at all because of its total lack of automated memory handling (like GC). I’ve been doing a lot of coding in C now-a-days as part of my job and I must admit that I like it a lot for its simplicity in primitives and promise of “closeness to hardware” and hence the predictability and performance.
Continue Reading »

vikraman: hey!
me: hey, solra.
vikraman: just to say hi
me: hi
vikraman: hi
me: okay. bye.
vikraman: bye

If you want to have more interesting conversations with my friend Vikraman, head over to his blog.

Firefox 3 has been getting rave reviews ever since it got in to beta. The blogosphere was abuzz with reports on how much more efficient and snappier FF3 is compared to its earlier incarnations and more so with respect to the competition (Opera, IE7, Safari).

Features like “Places” (Bookmarks on steroids), Cairo for rendering and OS specific widgets have made the best browser better. At the time of writing of this blog post 6 million plus downloads from around the world have already happened.

Everywhere I look at work, I see the “Download Day” certificate from Mozilla corp … I got one myself too

But the question is ….

Do you know who else got the certificate ???

Continue Reading »

What, why

I’ve been reading up on TDD and it has struck me as particularly useful methodology to achieve “clean code that works”. TDD encourages writing unit tests to cover all the code (because by definition, you write a test before a line of code is written). Because all your code is covered you are freed from the fear of breakage due to change and can instantly be more confident and productive. Also, the test cases act as a specification in code - very useful.
Continue Reading »

In my earlier post, I’d posted links to the Project Gutenberg Ngram data I had computed for e-books of all languages. If you are interested in only the English data, get these files instead.

These two files are splits of a compressed file which contains all of the Project Gutenberg English e-books downloaded about a week before the date of this post.

gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2.0 (2.0GB)

gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2.1 (1.4GB)

Unigrams along with frequency count from the text data above

gutenberg_en_unigrams.tar.gz (7.4MB)

Bi-grams and Tri-grams along with frequency count from the text data above

gutenberg_en_bi_tri_grams.tar.gz (493MB)

I had to split the files because my webserver has a limitation in serving out files larger than 2GB. After downloading the files, do this

mv gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2.0 gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2
cat gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2.1 >> gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2
rm gutenberg_en_files.tar.bz2.1

If you find the data useful, I’d be delighted to hear the context in which you made use of it.

I’ve been working on Wordza.com for which I needed Ngram data from a sufficiently large corpus. Initially, I thought of using Wikipedia data which I already have on my disk, but decided on using Project Gutenberg data as it is more representative of the general usage of English language.

Continue Reading »

I’d thought of making a word quizzer as a web application to improve my vocabulary when I took the GRE test a couple of years back. I’d written one in Visual Basic 6 when I wrote SAT :), but desktop applications are boring!

I got inspired to bring my long standing idea to fruition and the outcome is Wordza.

Continue Reading »

What is Alexa rank?

Alexa collects statistics about visits by internet users to websites through the Alexa Toolbar. Based on the collected data, Alexa computes site ranking. By examining the Alexa rank of a site, you can get a rough idea of how popular the site is. Many argue that Alexa rank is misleading but it has its uses.

The Alexa rank script

You can find out the Alexa rank for any site by using this page. However, if you want to programatically get the Alexa rank, you can do it using this script.
Continue Reading »

I have come across more than one instance when I had to select a random record from a table in a MySQL database. Here is how to do it.

Continue Reading »

One of the trickiest and enjoyable parts of starting something new (be it a website, project, band) is naming it! Sometimes a good name can be quite elusive and cause more than the deserved share of brain ache. Here is a list of automated services around the internet that will help you get name suggestions.

Let us name a domain!

http://www.domaintools.com/

DomainTools takes a concept as input and comes up with domain name suggestions. Let us say you are starting a website about “Vacations in Mexico”. Go to their website and type in “Mexico Vacations” in the text box and click on the button to get suggestions.
Continue Reading »