I wanted to manipulate a few PDF files recently and was on the lookout for suitable tools. More specifically, I wanted to convert a few double-page PDF files (containing two pages of text on a single page) into single-page PDF files. I also wanted to drop some of the pages in order to have the files contain just the text that I was interested in. Fortunately for me, there are several freely-available tools that do the job well.
2009-09-23
2009-09-01
"Capital Gains"
The latest issue of Granta has an article by Rana Dasgupta titled "Capital Gains". It talks about the huge wealth and power recently accumulated by a few in Delhi, their unabashed flaunting of this new-found wealth and power, their displacement of the previous elite who are now disgusted and the resulting class divisions in the society. It is a long article, but well worth the read.
2009-06-30
ICFPC 2009
I spent this weekend participating in the ICFP contest. This year the task was a series of problems of increasing difficulty in which we had to steer a satellite orbiting the Earth in order to accomplish various objectives. Like the task last year, it depended heavily on physics, mathematics, your knowledge of a particular domain and the stability of your numerical calculations, not to mention the need for the occasional compensating manoeuvre. It was fairly tedious and I didn't quite enjoy it as much as I did the tasks from some of the previous years.
2009-06-21
Up and Down
Are you better off if your investment first gains 10% of its value and then loses 10% or if it first loses 10% in value and then gains 10%? Many of us immediately tend to think that we're back to where we started in both the cases, but a little thought would reveal that we have lost money in both the cases.
2009-05-31
Readability
I get to read a lot of articles on-line thanks to feeder web-sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News and Arts & Letters Daily. Many of these articles have web-pages that are very "noisy" in that they have advertisements, logos, unrelated links, snippets of arbitrary text, etc. In addition they often have uncomfortably small fonts and are broken into several short web-pages. These make it quite difficult to read such articles. Fortunately there is now a magic wand I can wave over them to make them more readable.
2009-05-20
Reynolds Liquiflo
It seems silly to gush about a pen on a blog, but I can't help it: the Reynolds Liquiflo pen seems to actually live up to its claim of having an "ink that glides on paper" and it's a delight to write with this pen. At just Rs 10, it's surprisingly affordable as well. It's the kind of pen that makes you want to write on paper simply for the pleasure of writing with it. I am tempted to keep an old-fashioned diary just to have an excuse for using this pen every day.
2009-05-10
Extreme Demos
One of the goals in creating a demo is to push hardware to its limits. With PC hardware getting more and more powerful, watching a demo on a PC is getting more and more underwhelming. Some demo coders seem to have decided to go back to minimal platforms where you can readily appreciate the effort and skills needed to produce the respective demo.
2009-05-05
Driving Directions for Bangalore
Some time back I noticed that Google Maps has now started provided driving directions for Bangalore (and some other Indian cities). This is a very useful feature if you live in Bangalore and wish to avoid its awful traffic as much as possible. It's invaluable if you are new to the city and trying to figure your way around it.
2009-03-01
The Tormentor
About ten years ago, I was assigned as a mentor for the "Data Structures and Algorithms" course in a boot camp for freshers who had joined the company that I was working for at the time. My task was to answer any queries that the students might have had about the concepts taught in the course and then to test their understanding by giving them a related assignment. Looking back at one of these assignments, I can understand why I was nicknamed the "tor-mentor".
2009-02-21
Color Junction
I came across an interesting and addictive puzzle game recently called Color Junction. It was created by Mihai Parparita of Google and is based on SameGame (formerly Chain Shot!) by Kuniaki Moribe.
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