In the Australian Capital Territory: 367 days and Counting

This is Canberra, a view atop Mt. Ainslie, one of my two favourite places in Canberra:

A view from Mt. Ainslie, Canberra, Australia

and this is my second favourite place here, the Lake Burley Griffin

Nearing sunset on the shores of the Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australia

I saw nature becoming colourful, then barren and then slowly becoming colourful again:

Canberra in Autumn, April, 2011

Dying to be born again

The harbinger of Spring!

hey, look! Spring is here!

So how is Life here?

Depending on how you define the presence of life, you may love it or hate it. If you like to wander lonely as a cloud, it is quite perfect. If you want to mix and mingle, I think its quite OK too. Yes, it does sleep early. The shops close by 6.00 PM on weekdays, but I think its quite easy to adapt to these things.

Buzzwords I would use to describe Canberra

Peaceful and Beautiful.

I am looking forward to the next 365 days. Spring is almost here. Its a beautiful day, the outdoors beckon.

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Write your next program on Linux

UPDATE:: This article is now available on line at http://www.linuxforu.com/how-to/write-your-next-program-on-linux/

Given the chance, (and the intellect) I would clone( ) myself into N different avatars and do all the things that everybody does and excel in them too.

I have made a humble beginning with my article Write your next program on Linux. This article published in the Indian monthly- Linux For You (May, 2010) is targeted to Indian college students/teachers to help them come out of the grossly-outdated DOS/Windows based programming environment and start programming in C/C++/Java on the shiny happy Linux operating system.

If you want to take a look at the article, please drop a comment here and i can share a pre-print PDF of the same.

New Article: Open Source tools to aid your research

Its often the case that we do not know of a great tool which would simplify our work as we go about our research work everyday. My hope as a novice researcher with this article is to acquaint the kind of software tools available in the Open Source world which are very useful, capable and fun to work with and we have looked at some of these today. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive here. There are a lot of other tools out there, which I haven’t yet used, so I have refrained from writing about them. I hope you have enjoyed reading this article as much as I have writing this one!

Read the full article at http://linuxgazette.net/174/saha.html

LaTex in your WordPress posts

• A circle at centre (0,0) with radius 0.0 or a point in 2D?:
  • 
• How beautiful are you? Golden ratio:
  • 

No trivial trivia this post, but just a sample post to try out LaTex in WordPress. See here for help.

A primer on Ext4

Now that almost all distributions offer ext4 as the default file system, it’s high time we looked at the most compelling feature set of the file system and understood how to migrate from its predecessor. Now that almost all distributionsoffer ext4 as the default file system,it’s high time we looked at the most compelling feature set of the filesystem and understood how to migrate from its predecessor.

The January 2010 issue of Linux For You has published my article on Ext4 which, as the name suggests is a primer on Ext4 focusing on the geek user. If you happen to have a copy lying by, let me know how you find it!

‘Typesetting’ Presentations with Beamer

Do you use LaTeX for your document processing requirements? Then why switch to any other application when you need to create presentations? Try Beamer instead.

My article on Beamer is out in the November, 2009 issue of Linux For You. By next month, the article will be available at http://www.linuxforu.com. If you want to take a look at it, email me and I might be able to share a personal copy.

A Primer on Recursion

The study of Recursion abounds in such statements as:

“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. ” —Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

They are amusing and thought provoking at the same time. The idea of recursion is simple when you think of expressing something complex in terms of simpler versions of itself. You will then see recursion in action in the simple things we do everyday, the music we create, the language we speak and the things that happen at sub-atomic levels. In the chapter titled “Recursive Structures and Processes”, of Gödel, Escher, Bach ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach ), Douglas Hofstadter ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter )takes you into a World of Music, Art, Physics and Programming where recursion abound. The underlying concept is to decompose a big problem into indivisible sub-problems, solve them and then combine each of these partial solutions to get the holistic solution. This combination operator is not a universal operator and is specific to the problem at hand. As a crude example, consider the factorial function, fact(N). It is elementary to observe that  fact(N)   = N * fact(N-1) = N * (N-1) * fact(N-2)…

As is apparent, we are combining smaller fact()’s by the multiplication operator to obtain fact(N). Here our combination operator is multiplication operator- ‘*’. In the rest of this paper, I shall touch upon recursion in Formal Languages, Linguistics, Mathematics and Computer Science. Except for the last one, in which I have had my education, I am just a guy who takes keen interest in these fields.

The rest of the essay is available in PDF here or html here

Suggestions/Comments welcome.

Review of Commonsense Reasoning

Finally, I have uploaded my review report on Commonsense Reasoning. You can get the PDF here

It is intended to be a gentle, but detailed  introduction to the topic. Comments/Suggestions/Doubts welcome.

Perchance

If you have arrived here perchance, Welcome! I am trying to ‘re-set’ this blog up and will be the the one going into the future, as Google is giving up on Google pages ( a wonderful service!) and WordPress.com will allow me to me to have a blog which looks more like a proper website. I am too lazy to maintain my own domain. :)

For now, yuo may want to look at the pages here or browse through my current blog, http://amitksaha.blogspot.com and homepage http://amitsaha.in.googlepages.com