HooeezBloggin

The puzzle below is the toughest Sudoku puzzle I’ve ever solved. For your enjoyment.

When I was in junior year of college in 1998-99, I worked on a project at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India under Dr Rajeev Sangal and Dr Vineet Chaitanya. My programming partner, Naoshad Mehta, and I collaborated on adding support for Devanagari script in X under Linux through ‘rxvt’. We called the modified version ‘rxvt-idev’. The results were so well received, that Naoshad and I received a Department of Electronics, Govt. of India grant to continue the work and add Indian script I/O capability to X in general. Read the rest of this entry »

To anyone who has used GMail, it would be a no-brainer. Hotmail is simply much harder to use. I enumerate some of my frustrations with Hotmail and how the experience compares against GMail. In a future post, I will show you how to move your main email account from Hotmail to GMail in an organic manner.
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Click on image to see it in full size
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A memorable scene from a memorable movie, The Princess Bride.
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If you are on Facebook, you have certainly been implored by a connection to join Mafia Wars or Farmville. I have, and I’ve joined both. Farmville’s interactivity is far more visual and engaging, so I actually spend time playing Farmville. Here are some thoughts on maximizing your returns from the game. Read the rest of this entry »

I am currently working on WAV file playback in an embedded device. To store WAV (PCM) sounds on an embedded device, you need to strip the headers and extract the uncompressed PCM data from the file. My previous post shows how to convert the binary data from the WAV file into a C array that can be included in a project as a source file. In this post, I show you how to figure out where the PCM data lies within the WAV file.
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Most small embedded devices do not have enough storage to justify a file system abstraction.  So, if you have to store binary data like an image or a sound waveform, the most common method is to embed it in the code as a linear array. In this article, I show you a Python script that can convert any binary file into a C array encoded in hex.

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The interactivity of Excel makes it a very handy tool for data analysis. But Excel excels only at numeric analysis. Unfortunately, tabular/set analysis is not inherently supported in Excel and you have to jump through hoops to do that. I’m posting the source code for a VBA subroutine (Excel Macro) that performs one of the most common tabular operations – a Table Join. The subroutine here takes 2 tables in the form of ranges, and the name of the join field as input and produces a new worksheet with the joined table as output.

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Tankman, Redux?

Iran is front and center in all major new outlets these days. Iran has been the errant relative of the international community the last few decades, and has shot into prominence since George W Bush’s moronic invention of the ‘Axis of Evil’. Iran fared prominently in the last major international political event – the US Presidential Elections. John McCain chanted ‘bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran’, but thankfully, the majority of the US electorate saw that as completely unnecessary. Conservatives kept talking of Regime Change in Iran by hook or by crook, though, so now that Iran is showing signs of the same ‘by hook’, the US audience in particular and the international community in general, is understandably excited. Read the rest of this entry »