Random musings
Problem: Women in India go out at night, get assaulted. Solution: Women shouldn’t go out at night, shouldn’t wear lipstick, shouldn’t wear revealing clothes — where the observer decides whether it is revealing or not. Reminds me of Justice Potter’s remark “I know it when I see it” regarding pornography. Problem: A bunch of hooligans … Read more
There was an article in the news from some nobody in Bollywood that Salman Khan is much much bigger than Sachin. I would have to agree strongly. However, the Salman Khan I am thinking of is not a Bodyguard but someone who has truly unleashed the potential in so many peopele — a teacher who … Read more
If you are not using lastpass to manage your passwords, you should. I had written some blog articles on lastpass. Now lastpass has added support for using Google Authenticator as the second factor in multi-factor authentication. The first factor in the 2-factor authentication is "what you know" which is a password — the master password … Read more
About a year ago, I had sung praises of lastpass in my blog article. Yesterday, lastpass said that based on some traffic anomalies, they suspect that part of the encrypted database may have been retrieved by the bad guys. You may know about this as lastpass is asking every user to a) validate their email … Read more
Osama was on the top of the 10 most wanted list. Wanted dead or alive — preferably alive. US prefers to capture wanted criminals alive — if required via the extraordinary rendition — treat them as enemy combatants, interrogate, try and convict them. For e.g., US pulled Saddam Hussein from the hole he was hiding, … Read more
Happy Birthday Sachin Tendulkar. You have done a fantastic job entertaining millions over past 2 decades. But please retire now from all forms of the game — except IPL. When it came to retirement of players like Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid it was an easier decision as their performance went down significantly from their … Read more
A few years back I had gone to the end-of-the-year function at my kids’ school. Some performances — singing, dancing, skits — were scheduled. There was a delay in the start of the program. A VIP was supposed to make a speech and as usual he was fashionably late. We were told that it was … Read more
You don’t use Chevy and Car of the Year in the same sentence. But the Motor Trend 2011 Car of the Year is the Chevy Volt. Unlike the Toyota Prius, the Volt can be used like a plugin-hybrid if you charge the batteries overnight and drive no more than 40 miles (64 km) per day. … Read more
Indian classical music is based on ragas (melodies). The classical music that originated in South India is called Carnatic music. I have written a web application that can be used to listen to about 100 ragas. You can choose to play a raga that is randomly chosen; or you can select the starting letter of … Read more
Note 1: This article is executable code. You can copy and paste this article in a file with extension .lhs (say crypto.lhs), load it in a haskell interpreter and run the examples! You can get started by installing the haskell platform on Windows, Linux or Mac. You can learn Haskell by reading the excellent tutorial … Read more