2005-04-22

I'm on Slashdot!

Finally I got a story published on /. . I went to Paul Grahams web site and noticed he had written a new interesting essay on PR firms. Check out the /. story.

I've been trying to get stories posted on /. before but failed. It has felt a little frustrating so this feels like a relief.

2005-04-19

Too little ice cream?

Did I mention I like quotes? Here is one of my own sayings which I was asked to put here by a friend of mine:
There is nothing as frustrating as too little ice cream.

OK, let me get this straight. It's not that I eat tons of ice cream. In fact I don't eat ice cream that often. But when I do I don't want too little. I like ice cream very much and having just a little less than enough is simply not enough. Too much ice cream is not good either. But the most frustrating thing is too little ice cream.

2005-04-16

OK, I haven't been blogging much lately, but seeing this quote on /. I just had to.
Beware of the Turing Tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.

I should have recognized this. A little googling revealed that it is one of Alan Perlis' beautiful epigrams.
The epigram summarises very nicely my research and in fact any research in programming languages. All interesting properties about programs turn out to be undecidable. This might seem like bad news. But I wouldn't be so fast. This is precisely what makes my field of research exciting. Instead of finding the exact answer we have to find good approximations which can be computed in reasonable time.

It seems that the term "Turing Tar-pit" has a pretty interesting meaning nowadays. Quoting from answers.com:
A Turing tarpit is a programming language designed to be Turing-complete while minimizing the number of distinct instructions. Such a language gives up practicality (such as ease of coding, performance, etc.) but is often useful in theoretical computer science.

2005-04-11

Licence wizard

Here's a very simple yet helpful web application for those confused with the free software licence jungle. It's a small and ugly looking wizard that takes you through a number of questions to help you determine which licence you may want to apply to your code:
Licence Wizard