Mélange » Computers

Free online course on Artificial Intelligence conducted by Stanford

pc — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:26:27 +0000

Stanford is conducting a free online course on Artificial Intelligence taught by none other than Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. There are 2 tracks – basic and advanced. If you don’t have time for the assignments and exams take the basic track. You can switch between the tracks any time. You will receive a statement of accomplishment signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

The course is from Oct 10th to Dec 18th.

Here is the website for the course. Course overview is here. You can enroll here. Course schedule is here.

Jolt Award Winners

pc — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:05:38 +0000

The Jolt Award Winners have been announced.

Jolt Awards 2007 Finalists

pc — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:27:32 +0000

The books:

General Books
	Beautiful Code Edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson	O’Reilly
	Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software by David Rice	Addison-Wesley Professional
	Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Rothman	Pragmatic Bookshelf
	Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun	O’Reilly
	Outside In Software Development by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer	IBM Press
	Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael T. Nygard	Pragmatic Bookshelf
Technical Books
	Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk By Paul Duvall, Steve Matyas, Andrew Glover	Addison-Wesley Professional
	Fuzzing: Brute Force Vulnerability Discovery By Michael Sutton, Adam Greene, Pedram Amini	Addison-Wesley Professional
	Head First SQL Your Brain on SQL—A Learner’s Guide by Lynn Beighley	O’Reilly
	The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez	Addison-Wesley Professional
	WPF Unleashed by Adam Nathan	Sams Publishing
	xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros	Addison-Wesley Professional

The complete list is here.

Do You Like Vista ?

pc — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:44:52 +0000

Code Project is a website which specializes on development on the Microsoft Platform. So its kinda surprising to see their latest survey results (Click on the image to get a better view):

Joel Spolsky in Seattle

pc — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 23:03:17 +0000

Here are some pictures which I took when Joel Spolsky came to Seattle as part of his FogBugz Tour. He has written about the presentation in this blog entry.

It was a great presentation by Spolsky, who with his characteristic humor entertained the audience with lots of pokes at Microsoft. The presentation was well received by the 200 odd people who gathered. The croissant was tasty too .

Internet Cafes to be Monitored

pc — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:36:47 +0000

This is stupid.

Mr. Vijay Mukhi is intelligent enough to realize that terrorists wont be using their home machines, but does he think that they dont have an alternative ? Like a wi-fi hot spot ? Or tapping into somebody else’s connection ? Or just crack the monitoring software ?

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi.

Mukhi won’t be so enthusiastic if his personal computer is monitored too.

“The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screen shots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data.

The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter, which part of the world they operate from.This is the only way to patrol the net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age,” added Mukhi.

I just cringe.

Founders at Work

pc — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 18:51:54 +0000

This book is a collection of 32 interviews with founders of IT startups. The interviewer is Jessica Livingston who herself is a founding partner of Y-Combinator. The interviewees are:

Max Levchin (Paypal)
Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)
Steve Wozniak (Apple Computer)
Joe Kraus (Excite)
Dan Bricklin (Software Arts)
Mitchell Kapor (Lotus Development)
Ray Ozzie (Iris Associates, Groove Networks)
Evan Williams (Pyra Labs – Blogger.com)
Tim Brady (Yahoo)
Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion)
Arthur Van Hoff (Marimba)
Paul Buchheit (Gmail)
Steve Perlman (WebTV)
Mike Ramsay (TiVo)
Paul Graham (Viaweb)
Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us)
Mark Fletcher (ONEList, Bloglines)
Craig Newmark (craigslist)
Caterina Fake (Flickr)
Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet)
Charles Geschke (Adobe Systems)
Ann Winblad (Open Systems, Hummer Winblad)
David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
Philip Greenspun (ArsDigita)
Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software)
Stephen Kauffer (TripAdvisor)
James Hong (Hot or Not)
James Currier (Tickle)
Blake Ross (Firefox)
Mena Trott (Six Apart)
Bob Davis (Lycos)
Ron Gruner (Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com)

Most of the interviews follow this line:

Getting started.
Interactions with VCs.
Some of the more intense moments.
Turning Points.
Things that were surprising.
Felt like quiting at any time ?
Advice for people looking to start a startup.

Most of the interviews were good, a few were boring and a few came out to be outstanding. I dont want to specify which ones bored because you will be prejudiced in case you are planning to read it. The interviews I found most interesting were the ones with Steve Wozniak, Dan Bricklin, Mitchell Kapor, Craig Newmakr, Charles Geschke, Philip Greenspun, Joel Spolsky and Blake Ross.

Most of these startups had more than one founder and they all swear it would have been impossible to do it alone. There were one man shows also, albeit few. Another interesting fact is that most of these people knew each other during their college period or previous jobs. It makes one wonder whether you need to be in an elite circle to rise above the ordinary.Many of these founders came from Stanford or MIT and several of them previously worked at HP. It seems that HP used to be the ultimate dream company for engineers.

Another fact which might not surprise you is that most founders were young when they cut all the safety ropes at went for it. This shouldnt be surprising because that is the time when you have boundless energy and you dont have a family to take care of so there is less risk. Ofcourse there are exceptions to the young founder phenomenon, but very few.

In the interview with Blake Ross he talks about his new company called Parakey which was developing a new application which was under cover at the time of the interview. It turns out that they were developing an application platform for web and desktop – providing applications the framework to work online and offline. Parakey was bought by Facebook recently.

This book follows the style of a 1986 book from Microsoft Press called Programmers at Work. Interestingly Dan Bricklin and Ray Ozzie are interviewed in that book also.

My rating 8/10.