Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 19, 2015

University Computer courses available online for free

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 12:27 AM

Thanks to the whole push on elearning, there is a whole trove of courses made available online for free by various universities like UCLA, Stanford etc. Unfortunately till now there was no consolidated list of these courses available so you would have to search through each of the university’s website to find a course that you liked which you can imagine was quite painful and manual. Fortunately those days are over now thanks to the effort of someone called ‘prakhar1989’ who has compiled a list of ‘Awesome Courses’ available online for free and posted it online on Github so that folks can maintain it easily.

There is a lot of hidden treasure lying within university pages scattered across the internet. This list is an attempt to bring to light those awesome courses which make their high-quality material i.e. assignments, lectures, notes, readings & examinations available online for free.

Some of the Courses from the list are:

  • CS 61C Great Ideas in Computer Architecture (Machine Structures) by UC Berkeley
  • CS 140 Operating Systems by Stanford University
  • CS 162 Operating Systems and Systems Programming by UC Berkeley
  • CS 425 Distributed Systems by Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • CS 2043 Unix Tools & Scripting by Cornell University
  • CS 5412 Cloud Computing by Cornell University
  • CIS 194 Introduction to Haskell by Penn Engineering
  • CS 421 Programming Languages and Compilers by Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • CS 5114 Network Programming Languages by Cornell University
  • CS 61B Data Structures by UC Berkeley
  • CS 97SI Introduction to Competitive Programming by by
  • 6.851 Advanced Data Structures by MIT

The list goes on and on. Some of the courses are quite interesting. I did go through the first lecture on Introduction to Haskel and for the first time the language actually made some sense to me. Unfortunately doing the course requires time and effort and at this time by the time I get home I am in no mood to study. Hopefully this will change of the next few weeks as things settle down.

Check out the site if you want to do some learning on your own time and pace.

– Suramya

August 18, 2015

Dumping plastic balls in water can at times actually be beneficial

Filed under: Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:10 PM

When I first read about this my reaction could be summed up with the follow phrase “say what now?”, but then I read the science behind it and it kind of makes sense after a bit of thought. Basically California is suffering from a severe drought and LA’s city reservoir was loosing about 300 million gallons of water every year due to evaporation. So they came up with this novel idea of dumping 96 million hollow balls into the 175 acre man made lake. These so called ‘shade balls’ Shade balls deflect the Sun’s rays keeping more of the water in liquid form. They also help protect the quality of water by preventing formation of bromate which is created when bromide (which occurs naturally) mixes with sunlight and chlorine (from disinfectants).

LADWP is the first utility company to use this technology for water quality protection. Today’s deployment marked the final phase of an effort that involves the deployment of 96 million shade balls to the 175-acre reservoir — the largest in-basin facility of its kind owned and managed by LADWP. The small, black plastic balls protect water quality by preventing sunlight-triggered chemical reactions, deterring birds and other wildlife, and protecting water from rain and wind-blown dust.

A cost-effective investment that brings the L.A. Reservoir into compliance with new federal water quality mandates, the shade balls are expected to save $250 million when compared to other comparable tools considered to meet that goal. Those alternatives included splitting the reservoir into two with a bisecting dam; and installing two floating covers that would have cost more than $300 million. In addition, the shade balls will also prevent the annual loss to evaporation of about 300 million gallons of water.

It’s good to see folks thinking outside the box to help save water and our environment.

– Suramya

Source: Science Alert

August 13, 2015

Online Tools help share details of NASA’s Journey to Mars with us mere mortals

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 12:30 AM

This month marks the three year anniversary of Curiosity rover’s arrival on Mars and what better birthday present can NASA give to the rover than releasing two new online tools that allow casual users to explore Mars from the comfort of their homes.

First off we have Mars Trek, which is a web-based application providing high quality visualizations of Mars using data collected by NASA during the past 50 years of exploration. The second offering is called Experience Curiosity that allows viewers to journey along the Curiosity rover on its Martian expeditions. It simulates a 3-D version on Mars based on data from the rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

These are not the only tools that NASA has made available. A few months ago they also opened up a whole bunch of data to the public using free API access points so that people can consume the data and come up with innovative uses for the datasets. Their About Me section pretty much sums up what they are expecting to achieve with this site so I am just going to quote it instead of trying to think of sometime impressive to say:

We have a new Open Innovation team to continue NASA’s efforts to meet the White House mandate to set our data free – in a format that is useful for you. In doing so, we hope to spark your creative juices and equip you with tools to innovate your world – whether local, global, or interstellar – leveraging our digital assets. We may not be able to offer you the ride-of-your-life on a spaceship (at least for now), but we can certainly work together to solve looming challenges here on Earth – using NASA data, tools, and resources.

If you think you have an interesting application for the data then check out NASA’s data portal and the list of API’s they have made available.

Source: New Online Exploring Tools Bring NASA’s Journey to Mars to New Generation

August 12, 2015

Taught my nephew how to call people using voice dialing

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 12:49 AM

So while I was at my sisters place over the weekend I decided to show Vir (my nephew) how to call people using voice dialing on the Moto 360. I used the command ‘Ok Google call Mom’ to have the phone call Mom as an example.  Then we decided to let Vir try it out and surprisingly the phone actually did call Mom when he tried it. (At least it did till he insisted on saying OK boogle instead of OK Google).

The fun started when he wanted the phone to call his mom (my sis) using the command ‘call mom’ and was unhappy when it kept calling my mom. So then I had to explain to him that since it was my phone it was calling my Mom and not his. Over all it was interesting to see how quickly he picked up how to use voice dialing.

Though in hindsight it might not have been the best idea since he will insist on using voice dialing to call people when I visit next. Ah well. Joys of playing with kids. 🙂

On a side note majority of this post was written using voice typing on my moto x. Now if only I could figure out how to add a full stop when dictating things would be perfect.

Well this is all for now I’ll write more later.

Cya,

Suramya

– Suramya

August 7, 2015

Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand Quantum Physics

Filed under: Interesting Sites,Quantum Computing — Suramya @ 1:37 AM

If you have ever wanted to understand Quantum Physics but found that all the physics gobbledy gook went over your head then you should check out this list of books by Chad Orzel that try to explain Quantum Physics to non-physicists.

Chad has also written a book on how to How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog (Not sure why you would want to do that, but hey… who am I to judge). The title is interesting enough that I am tempted to buy it to check it out.

Example entry from the list:

How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser is, as the title promises, a highly readable look at the role counterculture and “New Age” thinking played in sparking the renewed interest in quantum foundations that started in the 1980′s and has exploded into the modern field of quantum information. While none of their colorful attempts to explain ESP through quantum phenomena actually pan out, showing why they can’t work proved surprisingly fruitful.

Check it out if you have some free time and want to learn.

– Suramya

June 29, 2015

I have a new niece!!!

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 6:13 PM

At 4:32pm Sara Bhansali was born. Both mother and baby are doing great.

Will post pics later when I have a better net connection. For some reason my phone is refusing to upload a pic.

– Suramya

And the wait begins..

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 8:34 AM

At the hospital waiting to find out if I will have a new niece or a nephew.

Hopefully this time it will be less of a wait, but I am fully prepared in any case 🙂

Will keep folks posted.

– Suramya

June 25, 2015

Life in Bangalore’s fast lane with 3.8km/h speedy drives

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:56 PM

Today just as I was leaving for home Google Now messaged me that it would take me 53 mins to get home if I drove which was 14 mins more than normal. What makes it interesting is that I live 3.4 kms of driving and 1.6 km walking from work. This means that I would have been driving at an amazing speed of 3.8km/h tonight. How is that for a fast drive? No wonder it took me 2 1/2 hours to get back from Whitefield the last time I drove there.

We really need to do something about the traffic situation in Bangalore. The Roads in Bangalore are some of the most haphazard and ridiculously designed roads that I have ever seen. However the situation does seem to be improving a bit thanks to the newly built St Marks road which is very nicely done and for a change seems to be following a logical plan.

In case you are wondering, I decided to spend an hour more at work and then did the trip in 15 mins. Yes, I had the car today. It’s raining and once it rains the ‘sidewalks’ can be re-branded as swamps so I prefer to drive instead of walking.

– Suramya

June 16, 2015

Watch an 8-Bit recreation of Jurassic Park

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 10:30 AM

If you don’t remember the original Jurassic Park movie (or weren’t around when it was originally released) and want a refresher of the movie before you watch Jurassic World then you don’t have to watch the entire movie again (although you should do that anyway because the movie is awesome), you can get the highlights by watching this 8-Bit recreation of Jurassic Park:


Click to watch 8 Bit Jurassic Park on YouTube

Thanks to NerdApproved.com for the link.

– Suramya

June 15, 2015

Winners for the 2014 Underhanded C Contest are announced

Filed under: Computer Security,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:45 AM

The underhanded C Contest is an annual contest where developers are asked to write code which is clear, readable and as straight forward as possible while doing something evil in a very subtle manner. The goal behind the contest is to make people aware that even code that looks completely benign can be doing something bad either intentionally or accidentally. The contest has been around for 7 years and the solutions people have come up with are amazing. This years winner was Karen Pease and trying to understand their code made my head hurt.

Here’s an extract from the site that explains how Karen gamed the system:

  • We get the cur_time = localtime() and we want to check if
 cur_time->tm_year is a leap year
  • We call __isleap( cur_year = AUDIT(cur_time->tm_year) )
  • this expands into a line of code from nested macros
  • The first thing that happens is a call to check_clock_skew() that calls localtime() on a teensy time interval, overwriting our time structure
  • cur_time->tm_year is now 0, which satisfies all three clauses in the __isleap() macro,
  • Causing AUDIT() code to be evaluated thrice
  • Ow my head, and
  • The year (or rather, the number 0) is written to the audit record three times. This overfills the audit buffer.

    • …

  • Thus the final AUDIT call zeroes out a user’s created time, if the user was surveilled.

Looking at this code, it explains how difficult it is to prevent a skilled programmer from adding backdoors or Easter eggs in software and why code reviews are so important.

– Suramya

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