Directed Digressions

I have moved!

scalar — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:40:48 +0000

I have decided to get a domain of my own finally. You can catch me at http://chaoticity.com !

What not to index

scalar — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:27:04 +0000

Reading 27 Pakistani scientist being included in a swine list on a comment sort of got me curious. You can see the exact text in the upper portion of the image (or here).

Clicking on the actual link however takes you to Tech Lahore’s story page where the bread crumbs were indexed as a part of the comment summary. While it did introduce a funny (and I am pretty sure, unintentional) comment, it should not have been indexed in the first place. The reason ‘might be’ that the navigation list was not assigned a separate div in the template. I wonder if it can be avoided by updating the template.

Structural Ambiguity

scalar — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:00:43 +0000

I have a mail in my inbox which goes like this.

Can any body inform me about a good girls hostel near Govt College / District Courts/Secretariat Lahore.

Ignoring the lack of a apostrophe, its one of the rare occasions that I actually notice structural ambiguity in a mail. I am sure the sender intended to ask about a good girls’ hostel and not a good girls’ hostel. Good girls go to heaven.

(This post was posted using Deepest Sender, a Firefox WordPress plugin, just want to check if it works.)

Musharraf resigns

scalar — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:19:02 +0000

yeah, everyone knows this. What I am wondering is how long would it take for this news to get on blogs and indexed. If you atually want a post like this to be crawled, its probably a good idea to include the words like ‘Musharraf’ and ‘resign’ inside the text (which I just did).

Life = Math ? true : false;

scalar — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:59:12 +0000

Coincidentally (if there is such a thing), I had two web pages about math and life and its meaning (it being deliberately ambiguous here) opened side by side today.

The first one tells the story/urban-legend of how Igor Tamm, the Nobel Laureate, saved his life by calculating the error when the Taylor series approximation of a function is truncated after n terms.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~djm2/archives/sent.1998.03/math.bandit

The other one is a hilarious xkcd comic that most ‘scientists’ wont like. http://xkcd.com/435/

So the next time you decide a career or ask someone to do so, keep the stakes in mind

What a Desi Linux Distro Logo Should Look Like

scalar — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 01:57:45 +0000

The nick PaindooPenguin got me thinking how it should be…(time.kill())

Using BBCUrdu Font on Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)

scalar — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:06:15 +0000

sudo apt-get install language-pack-ur language-pack-ur-base language-pack-gnome-ur language-pack-gnome-ur-base language-support-ur openoffice.org-l10n-ur-in
wget http://www.urdulife.com/font/asunaskh.ttf
sudo mv asunaskh.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/
Save if necessary and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (restarts X)
Pat yourself on the back

I am using SwiftWeasel and it works there too ofcourse.

Microsoft Reader on Ubuntu

scalar — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:38:30 +0000

I just finished installing MS Reader on Ubuntu (Hardy Heron), here’s how

Followed steps given here
Downloaded msvcirt.dll and copied it in the directory where MS Reader was installed

It creates a shortcut and desktop which works! Had to enable subpixel smoothing to get the correct cleartype fonts. Drag-drop a lit into reader and it opens. The only problem fornow is that I cant switch to full screen.

Steven Pinker’s Lecture

scalar — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:58:33 +0000

I just came back from a very interesting lecture by Steven Pinker on The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. A recording of a similar lecture is available on YouTube, minus most of the snickers and laughs from the audience. The YouTube version seems more like a read-out-the-slides kind of stuff but its a lot more engaging IRL. He must have gone through this lecture so many times, I cant tell any content difference in at least the first 20 minutes or so. Coincidentally, he mentioned one of Groucho’s quotes that I had read just yesterday.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

It would interesting to see if the concepts described here can be applied to other languages (say Urdu) without any changes. For example, an audience question that came up was why do bilingual people react to swearing in their first language more emotionally than their second one. IMHO, it might be a bit subjective. My mind, at least, works the other way around. Also, the audience comment about taking language as a window into humane nature can be viewed as a cyclic problem makes a lot of sense to me. Gives me lots to think about and write perhaps… but that’s for later.

P.S. He uses a ThinkPad too!

P.P.S. don’t watch the video if you get offended by swear words.

Speech to Text: Star Trek Style

scalar — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:43:34 +0000

I was watching an old star trek episode, Assignment: Earth. The episode was aired in 1968 and showed a type writer which had speech to text built in. They used a normal type writer as a prop but it still was interesting to note that it was 10 years before an actual speech recognition system was built. Moral of the story: Science Fiction gives you vision of ‘the shape of things to come’.