Month: April 2009

Follow me on Twitter

Interestingly I am more active on Twitter over the last 2-3 weeks than here; I guess that might be because it is easier to dump a quick thought – which I suppose one can do here but kind of “seems out of place” (yeah, weird!).

Another contributing factor is I have been extremely busy – both on work front and also on the personal front (between relatives visiting and my assignments does not leave me any time).

Also, I finally got around to building a new MCE – so whatever little free time I had went in that – life was very interesting the few days we were “in between” MCE’s the old one was disconnected and the new one was not up and running yet (that’s a story for another time).

Lastly, the fact I want to move away from CS 2007 to WordPress has also somewhat been at the back of my mind; the more I post, the more data I will need to move and the more headache.

I should get more active here soon (once I get some time), until then follow the tweets.

Letters

This is a collection of leave letters and applications written by people in various places of India … of course English is not their strong point.

1. Infosys, Bangalore : An employee applied for leave as follows:

Since I have to go to my village to sell my land along with my wife, please sanction me one-week leave.

2. This is from Oracle Bangalore:

From an employee  who was performing the "mundan" ceremony of his 10 year old son: "as I want to shave my son's head, please leave me for two days…"

3. Another gem from CDAC. Leave-letter from an employee who was performing his daughter's wedding:

"as I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week's leave.."

4. From HAL Administration dept:
"As my mother-in-law has expired and I am only one responsible for it, please grant me 10 days leave."

5. Another employee applied for half day leave as follows:
"Since I've to go to the cremation ground at 10 o-clock and I may not return, please grant me half day casual leave"

6. An incident of a leave letter

"I am suffering from fever, please declare one day holiday."  

7. A leave letter to the headmaster:

"As I am studying in this school I am suffering from headache. I request you to leave me today"

8. Another leave letter written to the headmaster:

"As my headache is paining, please grant me leave for the day."

9. Covering note:

"I am enclosed herewith…"

10. Another one:

"Dear Sir: with reference to the above, please refer to my below…"

11. Actual letter written for application of leave:

"My wife is suffering from sickness and as I am her only husband at home I may be granted leave".

12. Letter writing:
"I am in well here and hope you are also in the same well."

13. A candidate's job application:

"This has reference to your advertisement calling for a ' Typist and an Accountant – Male or Female'…As I am both(!! )for the past several years and I can handle both with good experience, I am applying  for the post.

foldl' better than foldl

In Haskell the foldl' function defined in the module Data.List is better than foldl because that does not use a thunk. A thunked expression requires an internal stack. As an expression can grow infinitely large, the runtime imposes a limit on the size of this stack. As the simple example below shows that given a large enough input the stack will overflow.

Prelude> foldr (+) 0 [1..100]
5050
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..100]
5050
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..1000]
500500
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..10000]
50005000
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..100000]
5000050000
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..1000000]
*** Exception: stack overflow

On the other hand, foldl' while similar to foldl does not build up on thunks and in real world programs is probably more useful.

Prelude> :module +Data.List
Prelude Data.List> foldl' (+) 0 [1..1000000]
500000500000
Prelude Data.List> foldl' (+) 0 [1..1000000]
500000500000
Prelude Data.List> foldl' (+) 0 [1..10000000]
50000005000000

Interesting Find #18

  1. Cloud vs. Cloud – guided tour of Amazon, AppNexus, GoGrid and Google. Azure is missing but given its late-alpha/early-beta state not surprising.
  2. SheevaPlug Development Kit – this is a development platform targeted for use as a plug computer, and designed to run network-based software services and has a embedded Marvel Sheeva CPU core; quite interesting.
  3. Office 14 – next version of Office will have “online versions”.
  4. Loopa Bowl – the link has all the details; buy it here (in the US).
  5. KidsMenu – an OS for Kids – seems to be a shell running on Windows.
  6. Boogie – an intermediate verification language.
  7. New windows mobile ads – I do feel like throwing the phone sometimes.
  8. MachineIP.com – name says it all – pretty cool. Of course nothing new but makes it easy in situations where you don’t have access to the tools or the non-techy friends/families you have out there.
  9. Microsoft Web App Gallery – cool, open source tools build on MS stack.
  10. Resetting your Admin pwd in Vista – quite scary actually. (via The Dogmatix).