Cause or effect?

From an interesting article on the practice of tipping:

 It’s not that we tip waiters because they are paid so little; they are paid so little because they can expect to make up the difference in tips.

No shuttlecocks – national camp called off

This is one of the funniest things I have read this year. 32 top badminton players from the country come down to Goa for a camp and they are send back – because the bureaucrats could not arrange a supply of shuttlecocks .. and we are sending a team to for Thomas and Uber Cup qualifiers starting on Feb 19th. Darn!

Streambox TV – Frustrated

I recently took a Streambox TV account. Since taking the account 3 days ago, I have not yet been able to watch anything on it

Streambox folks say that some channels are not working and they are working on it. But from what I have seen so far, the only part working on their website is the credit card billing I am not even able to open a ticket with them as their issue tracking system goes into a loop between pages. I should have known when they were not able to give me a preview of any of the channels before I signed up.

So if you are considering taking a new Streambox TV account here is a friendly piece of advise – wait until they are able to show a decent preview of the channels you want to watch.

Its a year for world championships!

After 20/20, this one.

Vishy won the FIDE World Chess Championship! Congratulations!

The morning after

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Misbah.

Misbah who?

Mis bah five runs.

Want a good Lisp tutorial?

Here is a great Lisp tutorial.

I first heard of Lisp in my programming languages class, but never paid much attention to it. Well, you could still pass that exam if you never learned a thing about Lisp (or any of the programming languages “taught” there), so I never bothered. Later when I started reading blogs and technical articles, I started hearing more about Lisp.

My first attempt at learning Lisp was from David S. Touretzky’s online book Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. The book did not interest me and I never completed it. Later that year, I spotted Stephen Slade’s Object-Oriented Common LISP at Gangaram’s and bought it. That book went way above my head and I still did not get Lisp.

It was in late 2004 that I heard of Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp. Peter was in the process of writing the books and he had put the content on the web. I started reading the online copy of the book but without much hope. I was pleasantly surprised! The book was actually a very good read and all those parenthesis started to make sense finally. Later when I ran into difficulties with a few examples in the book, I wrote to Peter. He was kind enough to reply and make minor fixes to the code in the book.

I still haven’t programmed much in Lisp besides a few toy programs. But I understand why people rave so much about Lisp – and I am grateful to Peter Seibel for opening my eyes. So when he made this request, I thought I owed it to him.

PS: Someone, I can’t remember who, borrowed the Slade book from me in 2004 and never returned it. If anyone reading this have it, please drop me a note.

It is tough to be a bowler

I expect this feat to be repeated many more times in 20/20 if the format ever catches on. I wish some minor modifications were made to the rules so that we have at least a semblance of an even contest.

Nonetheless, congratulations to Yuvi!