*** MOVED ***

NOTE: I have merged the contents of this blog with my web-site. I will not be updating this blog any more.

2007-08-21

Tools for Indians by Google Labs India

The Google Labs India folks have just announced a couple of cool new tools for Indians. This includes being able to search in a number of Indian languages as well as a transliteration tool for easily typing in Devanagari using an ordinary keyboard.

The transliteration tool is especially nice. For example, it automatically converts "ramesh" to "रमेश". If you did not want the word automatically put in by the tool, you can select the desired word from a set of alternatives or explicitly type it out yourself.

Note that you might have to tweak things a little to correctly display Indic scripts.

Update (2007-08-23): QuillPad seems to have been in existence for some time now and has support for more Indian languages than the Google transliteration tool (which only supports Hindi at the moment).

Update (2007-08-29): Raftaar also allows you to search in Hindi using a transliterating interface.

2007-08-20

Calculating Interest Rates

You want to buy that fancy LCD TV that costs Rs 60,000 but you do not have that much money with you. You see an advertisement in a newspaper for the TV from a dealer who offers to sell it to you if you make a down-payment of Rs 10,000 and pay Rs 4,380 every month for one year. You see another advertisement in the newspaper for the same TV from another dealer who offers to sell it to you if you make a down-payment of Rs 20,000 and pay Rs 1,330 every month for three years. How do you calculate the rate of interest each dealer is charging you for what is, in effect, a loan?

In "Calculating EMIs", we derived the formula for calculating the "Equated Monthly Installment" (EMI) on a loan. If "E" represents the EMI, "P" represents the principal amount in the loan, "r" represents the monthly rate of interest (one way of arriving at it is to divide the annual rate of interest, quoted as a percentage, by 1,200) and "n" represents the number of months in the tenure of the loan, then:

     E = P × r × (1 + r)n / ((1 + r)n - 1)

In the current example, we know the values for "E", "P" and "n" and wish to calculate "r". Unfortunately it is not that simple to calculate "r" using just the high-school algebra that most of us manage to remember. Fortunately there is a simple algorithm that can help us in this situation.

Let us first rewrite the formula above as an equation:

     P × r × (1 + r)n / ((1 + r)n - 1) - E = 0

Our task now is to find the roots of this equation - that is, the values of "r" that will make the left-hand-side (LHS) of this equation evaluate to zero.

To find the roots of a given equation "f(x) = 0", the algorithm in question can be described as follows:

  1. Find a value "a" for which "f(a)" evaluates to a negative value.

  2. Find a value "b" for which "f(b)" evaluates to a positive value.

  3. Let "c" be the average of "a" and "b".

  4. If "f(c)" is close enough to zero, "c" is the desired root.

  5. Otherwise, if "f(c)" is a negative value, substitute "c" for "a" and repeat the procedure from step #3 and if "f(c)" is a positive value, substitute "c" for "b" and repeat the procedure from step #3.


Note that this is just a binary search algorithm. By "close enough to zero", we mean that the absolute value of "f(c)" is less than some value, usually called "epsilon", that can be as small as we please. The algorithm given above can be rewritten as a function in a pseudo-language as follows:

guessRoot( f, a, b)
{
c := (a + b) / 2;

if( absoluteValue( f( c)) < EPSILON)
return c;
else if( f(c) < 0)
return guessRoot( f, c, b);
else
return guessRoot( f, a, c);
}

You can implement this in your favourite programming language along with a function that calculates the LHS of the equation given earlier. You can choose a value of "epsilon" according to your preference - the smaller the value of "epsilon", the more accurate is the result and the longer it takes to compute it. The time taken for the computation is also affected by how wide is the range between "a" and "b". Note that Newton's method is a much faster way of computing the roots of such equations, though it involves calculating derivatives.

How do you arrive at the values for "a" and "b"? This differs for each function. For our example, we can start with a low guess of "0.001%" ("0%" gives an undefined result) as the annual rate of interest and a high guess of "100%" and this gives us a negative and a positive value for the LHS respectively. With an "epsilon" of "0.00001", a C programme computes the answer in around 25 iterations.

In our example, the first dealer is offering us an effective loan of Rs 50,000 for 12 months with an EMI of Rs 4,380 and the effective annual rate of interest comes to about 9.32%. The second dealer is offering us an effective loan of Rs 40,000 for 36 months with an EMI of Rs 1,330 and the effective annual rate of interest comes to about 12.08%. In terms of the interest rates being charged by the dealers, you should now be able to tell that the first dealer has a better proposition for you when compared to the second dealer.

2007-08-15

Advogato Diary Imported

I have imported all the old entries from my Advogato diary into this blog. These entries are labelled "advogato diary".

It was very simple to do since Advogato used to provide a simple way to import all my entries as an XML file (it does not work any more) and Blogger has a nice and simple API that allows me to post entries automatically, even allowing me to back-date and label them appropriately.

However, I did encounter an unexpected problem during this import. It turns out that if you post too many entries in a single day (in my case the limit seems to be 50), Blogger thinks that you are creating a SPAM blog and turns on "word verification" for posts (a CAPTCHA). While you can still post entries manually, the API provides you no way of retrieving and resolving the CAPTCHA using human input. After 24 hours the word verification is automatically switched off and you can again post using a programme. I had to therefore spread out the import over 5 days since I had 231 entries to import.

By the way, if you worry about search engine rankings for your pages, you might want to note that such mass imports cause Google to downgrade your site for having duplicate content if the old blog is still accessible.

Finally, Advogato is still alive and being maintained.

2007-08-09

Blog Tweaks

I tweaked this blog in the last couple of days in the hopes of making it a little better - a little better-looking and a little better-behaved. Read on for the details.

The tweaks include:

  • Using a better-looking template. The old template was a bit boring and quite minimal. It made it hard for most people to read all the text I was spewing. The new template looks better (at least to me). It has a narrower column width to display the text, somewhat similar to those in newspapers and magazines, which makes it easier for most people to read the text.

  • Showing only the initial paragraph from each post on the main page. You can read the full post using the "Read More..." link at the bottom of each such paragraph. This makes it easier to skip over posts that you are not interested in reading.

  • Showing only a preview of the post in the feeds. I used to feel bad about my banal verbiage eating up lots of space on Planet Classpath and other such "planets". This change should let people easily skip over my posts if they don't care for what they see in the preview and navigate to the page containing the full post if they do. It should also benefit people who have subscribed to this blog using a blog aggregator. To do this a bit better than what was possible with Blogger's own feed mechanism (but still not entirely satisfactorily), I have had to redirect the Blogger feed for this blog to the FeedBurner feed for this blog.

  • Giving at least something back to Google for providing this great service for free. I used to feel bad about being yet another leech on Google's resources. I signed up for Google AdSense via Blogger. Now each page on this blog shows textual advertisements relevant to the context of the page.

I do realise that there are negative aspects of each of these changes that some folks are not going to appreciate. However, I believe that each of these changes is for the better, all things considered.

Update (2007-08-10): Anusha did not like the fact that you navigate to a different page when you click on "Read More...". It is also not fair to the reader since the entire post is already there on the main page, but hidden from view. So now I have changed the blog template to expand and collapse the rest of the post in place using a combination of techniques shown here, here and here, with a few adjustments of my own.

Update (2007-08-29): The feeds now have the full contents of the posts once again.

2007-08-08

Disabling atime Updates

A recent article on KernelTrap highlights the high cost of supporting atime ("last-accessed time") updates on Linux file-systems. It has been suggested that desktop machines should just mount their file-systems using the "noatime" option to avoid this overhead.

Each time you read a file, its atime has to be updated. This can quickly become costly if you have applications that access a lot of small files. Most modern desktop environments, office suites, compilers (think of C/C++ headers), browsers, etc. fall into this category, so Linux takes a lot of unnecessary performance hit for data that is of interest only to a very small set of applications like tmpwatch. (Apparently even Windows has the same issue with NTFS.)

I have now changed the "/etc/fstab" on my PC to mount its file-systems using the "noatime" option. It does seem to have slightly improved the responsiveness of the desktop, though this could just be a placebo effect. On the other hand, in the KernelTrap article people have presented measurements that demonstrate the actual performance improvements brought about by using this option.

2007-08-06

Blog Comments

Joel Spolsky links to a post by Dave Winer on blog comments as well as providing his own views on the subject.

Dave opines:
If it was one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think -- then it was a blog, no matter what form it took. If it was the result of group-think, with lots of ass-covering and offense avoiding, then it's not.
[...]
Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.

while Joel adds:
When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.
[...]
Dave is absolutely right. The way to give people freedom of expression is to give them a quiet place to post their ideas. If other people disagree, they're welcome to do so... on their own blogs, where they have to take ownership of their words.

The timing of Joel's post couldn't have been better as I was recently wondering about the same issues myself. I was seriously considering disallowing comments on my blog posts. Some of the main reasons were:

  • Impurity - it no longer remains purely my own ramblings (Dave makes the same point). My utterly inane ramblings get combined with the inane ramblings of other, mostly anonymous, folks. It starts to look like a mailing list where I start a thread and others join in.

  • Overhead - I have had to review and moderate every comment since the time spammers discovered this blog and started abusing the comments facility to post links to their sites in order to boost their ranks with search engines (CAPTCHAs don't seem to deter them). I would like to avoid this unnecessary overhead.

  • Liability - I seem to unnecessarily become liable for the contents of the comments since they are available from my blog. I moderate comments simply to weed out spamming efforts, not to censor or alter them. Reasonable folks would agree that the respective posters of the comments should be liable for their content, but as we all know, reasonable folks are a sad minority in this world.

  • Noise - while I try to put some thought and effort into the material posted here, it gets diluted by the utterly trite comments that sometimes follow it, especially when people post under the cover of anonymity (Joel makes the same point). Insightful or interesting comments are a sad rarity on my blog.

  • Lock-in - the ability to collect and collate comments is one of the major reasons I am forced to be with Blogger or similar blogging platforms. I would ideally like to be able to merge this blog with my web-site and only upload static pages to my web-site. I would then not depend on anything other than the very basic hosting facilities and this would let me easily switch hosting providers.

However, comments are not all bad, of course. Some of the main reasons I continue to allow comments on this blog include:

  • Feedback - at worst, it tells you that at least some people took the trouble of navigating to your blog and reading your blog post. At best, a "Thank you!" warms your day up and a "This sucked!" goads you into writing better. In any case, you get to know that your efforts have not entirely been wasteful.

  • Ease - comments allow a reader of your blog to quickly and easily leave feedback for you. Emails are a little burdensome for this purpose, not to mention a bit formal. Making everyone respond to your blog post via their own blog posts (as Joel seems to suggest) looks too awkward to me - you would have a very hard time keeping up with the responses and most readers would just give up trying to leave feedback for you (perhaps that is indeed the effect Joel intends).

  • Scale - as Clay notes, if you are a small-time blogger (like yours truly), the signal-to-noise ratio in your comments is very likely to be much better than that on more popular blogs and web-sites that allow comments. For the same reason, the volume of comments is also likely to remain manageable enough for you to be able to moderate them.

  • Anonymity - some people are just not comfortable with revealing their identities to you, but would still like to leave a comment for you - perhaps anonymity provides them the security needed to provide frank opinions, perhaps they are shy, perhaps they don't want to sign up with Google just to be able to leave a comment for you, perhaps they just don't want to be seen as a person caught reading blogs in general or your blog in particular, etc.

  • Enhancement - some of the best comments are those that expand on the blog post by providing further information, clarifications, alternative ideas, etc. This enhances the value of your blog and makes it more appealing to your readers.

On the whole, blog comments appear quite useful to me despite their obvious warts. I will continue to allow comments on this blog, even those posted anonymously, as long as it remains manageable. I hope I continue to remain small enough to escape the attention of the trolls.

Comments?

2007-08-01

The Amiga

Ars Technica has just published Part 1 of what looks like a very interesting series of articles on the history of the Amiga series of personal computers.

The Amiga was quite unlike the other PCs of its time and could supposedly handle multimedia with an ease that put the IBM PCs of that time to shame. Sadly, I never had the chance to work with an Amiga myself. As is usual in the computer industry however, mere technical brilliance does not guarantee survival and popularity and in the end the IBM PC prevailed, while Commodore, makers of the Amiga, went bankrupt. Being an early user and fan of the BBC Micro, I can also bitterly attest to this sad turn of events that made the IBM PC the overwhelmingly dominant PC. Even though the Intel 8086 CPU was awkward to work with, DOS was an abomination for an operating system and the IBM PC was quite limited in its capabilities, none of this could hold the IBM PC back from reigning supreme and from killing off other personal computers (the Apple Macintosh being a notable exception).

Some time back, I saw the second volume of MindCandy. This volume was about the Amiga demo-scene while the first volume was about the IBM PC demo-scene. I had been following the IBM PC demo-scene since about 1993 to about 2000, so the first volume also evoked nostalgia apart from being fun and awe-inspiring. The second volume was no less awe-inspiring - watch Lapsuus by Maturefurk and then consider the fact that it was running on an Amiga with a Motorola 68060 CPU that was running at 75 MHz at best! Amazing coding skills at display on an amazing piece of hardware.

Update (2007-08-14): Part 2 is now on-line.

Update (2007-08-22): Part 3 is now on-line.

Update (2007-10-22): Part 4 is now on-line.

Update (2007-12-12): Part 5 is now on-line.

Update (2008-02-11): Part 6 is now on-line.

Update (2008-05-13): Part 7 is now on-line.