Mahboob's Journal

The training program for campus hires is still going on, with Narayana Reddy from Architecture group and Swapna Shetty from training department driving the program well. I stepped in for one class in which in order to drive a better understanding of Priority Queues, I presented a small example. But first, what exactly is a Priority Queue? It is an abstract data type which is like a regular queue or stack data structure, but where additionally each element has a “priority” associated with it [Source: wikipedia]. After telling this definition, I asked the trainees, how do you find the five largest sized files in eTrans (one of our products)?

As you spend a lot of years in your career, you would be working on preparing and discussing plans, making choices from the available options, reviewing others’ work products and monitoring progress of plans. When I think I am becoming too strategic and too managerial, meaning not doing much myself, I pull myself back and try to go down to lower level, meaning do something myself. Ideally it would mean going all the way to the bare metal level on the computer, but having spent almost all my career in commercial / business application programming, I rarely venture even into the operating system code. But doing stuff with Java, is surely well within the realm of my fluency.

This post is a quick tip on Eclipse usage. Suppose you are running a java application that reads in a file whose name is supplied at the command line with the Example : java TopM 5 The code to process the data in tinyBatch.txt is :

News item, as reported in India Today dated 30-Oct-2012 - Sharp differences came to the fore between Finance Minister P. Chidmabaram and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor D. Subbarao on Tuesday as the central bank stuck to its hawkish monetary stance in refusing to reduce key rates. While controlling inflation remains uppermost on Subbarao's mind, Chidambaram is in favour of lowering interest rates to spur growth.

On this Eid holiday weekend, my post is on getting this whole thing about existentialism right. For long, it has been gnawing on my brain cells and it’s time to let it out in words. First of all, being a person of faith means I’m an existentialist. But I don’t want to, at least for now, juxtapose Islamic tenets and way of life with existentialism. I might do that in future writings. Suffice here to say that religion has always been existentialist having most, if not, all the elements of how I’m going to define existentialism.

If you thought social media is there to enable you to know about what your friends and family are doing, then it will be ironical, maybe even unbelievable, to know about a site that enables you to meet your friends because you only meet them online. That’s precisely what LetsDine does. It’s founder was the first speaker at the Startup Saturday event of 15-Jul-2013 that was held at LaMakaan. Theme this time was convincing you first customer. Here’s what the presenters talked during the event.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am working through two chapters, 7 and 8 of Matthew Russel’s eminently fun-filled book Mining The Social Web (MTSW). As a first step, I took a go at blogger posts. Example 8-1, blogs_and_nlp__get_feed.py gets blog posts from their feeds and saves them in json format.