2007-07-04
Expiry Dates
If medicines and food items become dangerous to consume after their expiry dates, shouldn't pesticides become more powerful after their expiry dates?
2007-07-02
Dragon Ball Z
Many years ago, a cartoon TV channel in India started showing Dragon Ball Z. They showed 53 episodes of this series comprising the Vegeta Saga and the Namek Saga. Just as the series got really interesting, they yanked it off the air without notice and without even a word of apology.
Loyal viewers of the series were aghast. They pleaded with the channel to show them the rest of the series as well, rather than leaving them on tenterhooks. The channel could not care less. The viewers were frustrated and cursed the channel using the choicest of expletives. They did not have much choice.
Several years later, the same cartoon channel starts showing Dragon Ball Z once again. Some of the old viewers hope the channel would show the entire series this time and watch the episodes once again to revive their memories.
They were naïve. The channel showed the same 53 episodes of the series and then abandoned it yet again at the same critical point in the story.
They were idiots. The channel as well as the viewers.
Loyal viewers of the series were aghast. They pleaded with the channel to show them the rest of the series as well, rather than leaving them on tenterhooks. The channel could not care less. The viewers were frustrated and cursed the channel using the choicest of expletives. They did not have much choice.
Several years later, the same cartoon channel starts showing Dragon Ball Z once again. Some of the old viewers hope the channel would show the entire series this time and watch the episodes once again to revive their memories.
They were naïve. The channel showed the same 53 episodes of the series and then abandoned it yet again at the same critical point in the story.
They were idiots. The channel as well as the viewers.
2007-06-23
Data Visualisation with Gnuplot
Visualisation of data using charts and other types of plots is immensely helpful in getting a feel for it without carrying out detailed analyses. Gnuplot is a freely-available tool for data visualisation that is also very simple to use. The article "Visualize your data with gnuplot" is a nice introduction to this tool. Gnuplot proved to be quite handy for me recently.
I wanted to find out whether the Unit Price of a particular fund varies in line with the popular equity market indices in India, the NSE S&P CNX Nifty and the BSE Sensex. The current values of these indices are always readily available in the newspapers and on television channels, while I have to use the web-site of the fund to get its current Unit Price. If the Unit Price of the fund varied in line with the values of the equity market indices, it would save me some effort in determining its current worth.
The portfolio of the fund in question is almost entirely based on equities. It holds the shares of some of the biggest and the most stable companies across a variety of industry sectors. It was therefore reasonable to suspect that its Unit Price would vary in line with the values of the indices. However, it is not as diversified as the indices and it might not have invested across sectors in the same proportion as that represented by either of the indices.
It was easy to obtain the historical closing prices of the two indices and the Unit Prices of the fund. To keep things simple, I only considered the current month for making this comparison. To simplify things further and to improve the visualisation, I normalised the first value in each series to "100" by scaling all the values appropriately. (This is a technique that I have often seen put to good use in The Economist.)
Using Gnuplot, I obtained the following chart:
This gave me the desired answer right away!
In case you're curious, here are the Gnuplot commands I used for creating the chart above:
By the way "Junk Charts" seems to be a blog devoted to criticising charts that appear in various magazines and web-sites in general and in The Economist in particular.
I wanted to find out whether the Unit Price of a particular fund varies in line with the popular equity market indices in India, the NSE S&P CNX Nifty and the BSE Sensex. The current values of these indices are always readily available in the newspapers and on television channels, while I have to use the web-site of the fund to get its current Unit Price. If the Unit Price of the fund varied in line with the values of the equity market indices, it would save me some effort in determining its current worth.
The portfolio of the fund in question is almost entirely based on equities. It holds the shares of some of the biggest and the most stable companies across a variety of industry sectors. It was therefore reasonable to suspect that its Unit Price would vary in line with the values of the indices. However, it is not as diversified as the indices and it might not have invested across sectors in the same proportion as that represented by either of the indices.
It was easy to obtain the historical closing prices of the two indices and the Unit Prices of the fund. To keep things simple, I only considered the current month for making this comparison. To simplify things further and to improve the visualisation, I normalised the first value in each series to "100" by scaling all the values appropriately. (This is a technique that I have often seen put to good use in The Economist.)
Using Gnuplot, I obtained the following chart:
This gave me the desired answer right away!
In case you're curious, here are the Gnuplot commands I used for creating the chart above:
# We want PNG output.
set terminal png
set output "plot.png"
# Specify how and where the key (legend) for the chart should
# appear.
set key bottom right
set key width 2 box
# Tweak the look of the chart.
set title "Fluctuations in Unit Prices Relative to Market Indices"
set xlabel "June 2007"
set ylabel "Normalised Value"
set grid
# The data on the X axis represent time values.
set format x "%d"
set xtics "01-Jun-2007", 3600*24
set xdata time
set timefmt "%d-%b-%y"
set xrange ["01-Jun-2007":"22-Jun-2007"]
set yrange [95:100]
# Plot the chart using data files normalising the values in
# each case.
plot \
'nifty.dat' using 1:($5)/42.9705 \
title 'NIFTY' with lines linewidth 2, \
'sensex.dat' using 1:($7)/145.7075 \
title 'SENSEX' with lines linewidth 2, \
'fund.dat' using 1:($2)*100.00/57.0337 \
title 'FUND' with lines linewidth 2
By the way "Junk Charts" seems to be a blog devoted to criticising charts that appear in various magazines and web-sites in general and in The Economist in particular.
2007-06-12
iTunes and QuickTime
iTunes and QuickTime would probably be the applications by Apple that most non-Mac-OS-X users get exposed to and it is a shame that these applications are so frustratingly unintuitive, not to mention bloated and slow. Are these really made by the same company that is famous for putting a lot of emphasis on the usability of its hardware and software products?
2007-05-26
Indic Scripts and Linux
If you have the fonts for Indic scripts (for example, the Lohit fonts), Firefox on Linux is able to display the Devanagari text on sites like BBC Hindi and Google News in Hindi. (Devanagari is the primary writing system for languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, etc.) However, if you are using the builds released by mozilla.com, you would notice that the matras (diacritics) are not applied properly to form the correct ligatures. For example, the word "हिन्दी" ("Hindi") itself is not rendered properly. Konqueror does not suffer from such problems.
It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)
On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:
By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)
It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)
On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:
- Install the fonts for the Indic scripts you are interested in. For example, "sudo yum install fonts-hindi" , "sudo yum install fonts-malayalam", "sudo yum install fonts-kannada", etc.
- Install a Firefox build for Fedora using "sudo yum install firefox". Note that FC6 installs Firefox 1.5 by default - if you prefer Firefox 2.0 instead, you can install it using "sudo yum --enablerepo=development install firefox".
By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)
2007-05-23
ICFP Contest 2007
The 10th ICFP Contest is scheduled for the weekend of 20th July 2007. I hope it turns out to be as fun as the one held last year.
There is already a blog written by one of the organisers that contains some teaser puzzles. (Do these images use some form of steganography or can we simply work out the graphical transformations applied to the original image and apply them in reverse to obtain the desired image? I wonder.)
There is already a blog written by one of the organisers that contains some teaser puzzles. (Do these images use some form of steganography or can we simply work out the graphical transformations applied to the original image and apply them in reverse to obtain the desired image? I wonder.)
"Superstition Reigns"
"Superstition Reigns" by Rahul Singh, published in The Times of India today:
"Amitabh Bachchan, an icon for tens of millions of Indians, makes his daughter-in-law [Aishwarya Rai] perform outlandish ceremonies because she is supposedly under the evil influence of Mars. Politicians routinely consult astrologers before taking important decisions, despite abundant proof that astrology is no science at all, just quackery. Horoscopes continue to be cast in most families and palmists consulted. A newly-inducted cabinet minister insists that her bungalow be completely redesigned because it does not follow vaastu principles, a system nobody had heard of till only a few years ago."
Superstition in all its ugly forms is sickeningly pervasive in India, even among educated people who ought to know better. We waste a lot of time and money and unnecessarily make life difficult for ourselves as well as others, all in the name of something that doesn't withstand rational scrutiny.
2007-05-19
Firefox 3 and Linux
Mike Connor blogs about the proposed requirements for Firefox 3 to run on Linux. A nasty surprise for me was the inclusion of GNOME as a dependency. While the GTK/Pango/Cairo/etc. requirements are quite understandable, I don't understand why it should need GNOME. Many of us are happy with KDE or Xfce and would like to avoid the bloat and the dependency hell of GNOME for the sake of running a browser.
As an aside, Firefox on Linux also seems to behave quite differently from Firefox on Windows. For example, on Linux Firefox seems to consistently consume more CPU time and memory than on Windows. Some pages are rendered differently on Windows and Linux (perhaps due to the availability, or otherwise, of the fonts requested by the page designer and the rendering infrastructure). I have personally also noticed bug-337093 on Windows but not on Linux.
As an aside, Firefox on Linux also seems to behave quite differently from Firefox on Windows. For example, on Linux Firefox seems to consistently consume more CPU time and memory than on Windows. Some pages are rendered differently on Windows and Linux (perhaps due to the availability, or otherwise, of the fonts requested by the page designer and the rendering infrastructure). I have personally also noticed bug-337093 on Windows but not on Linux.
2007-05-14
VU3RDD Gets $2.56 From Donald Knuth
Mohan Embar
I met Mohan Embar this weekend. He used to maintain the Windows port of GCJ. It was nice to finally be able to associate a face and a voice with the name, since our interaction so far had only been over email. He turned out to be much thinner, more soft-spoken and more boyish than I had imagined.
I think I ended up asking him a bit too much about how he managed to remain a freelance programmer for so long, that too in Milwaukee, since it is something that interests (as well as scares) me.
I think I ended up asking him a bit too much about how he managed to remain a freelance programmer for so long, that too in Milwaukee, since it is something that interests (as well as scares) me.
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