Archives for March 2007

The Web 2.0 Family

6 March 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 9 Comments

The Web 2.0 revolution is on. Blogs are everywhere.

I am happy to tell you that all members of the Meetoo family now have their own blog:

You will notice that the kids have their weblog on wordpress.com. ~~In fact, in some days, Christina will move her own blog there.~~ (Done!) Perhaps, I’ll do the same thing in the coming months

Incidentally, I suppose you know my profile is on LinkedIn, my photos are on Flickr, my books are on LibraryThing, my bookmarks are on del.icio.us, my music compositions are on Last.fm as well as the music I listen to…

The world is changing fast. Either you adapt or you disappear!

My books on LibraryThing

6 March 2007 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

In addition to the quality information found on the Internet, I also have a lot of books. Not all of them are reference quality material but they are all mine…

Yesterday, I have started using LibraryThing, a Web 2.0 application to manage my bookshelf.

LibraryThing will allow me to buy better and better books. I’m thrilled!

I have books on:

Computer Programming

Software Architecture

Hardware, Networking and Parallel Processing

Database and Artificial Intelligence

Operating Systems (Mac OS X, Linux, etc.)

The Web, HCI, Graphics and Multimedia

Various other things I like

By the way, I hope (?) that you have all recognised the cover of Kitab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala written by al-Khwarizmi (AD 780-850). This book is the first book on the systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations and consequently Al-Khwarizmi is considered to be the father of algebra (al-Jabr). The word algorithm stems from the Latin version of al-Khwarizmi’s name.

In other words, Al-Khwarizmi is the grandfather of all computer scientists…

Programming Quiz #1

1 March 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 14 Comments

Tomorrow I am asking my Computer Science & Engineering students to solve this small programming problem:

Write a function in C which returns a random integer between 1 and 20. One extremely important caracteristic of the function is that it must return a different integer each time it is called. This, obviously, implies that it can only be called twenty times.

There is a second part (and in my opinion it is the coolest part):

Write the same function using a more modern programming language (e.g. Ruby).

Care to give this a go?

(Image courtesy of Sega Japan)