2011 articles

Installing Scipy: You're likely to waste your time if you try using ATLAS

Having grown up on a diet of Ubuntu life has always been so easy. Any time I need to install a library Canonical have done their duty and availed a sanitised version that I can snap on with a quick 'sudo apt-get' or 'sudo aptitude'. However, it's not a bed …

Words from the past: Doctor

It struck me some days back that my current pursuits are more suited to my intentions than I earlier thought. See, I'm a teacher at heart. I derive exceeding joy in seeing the lights go on in people's minds. I've been a beneficiary of some of the best teachers on …

Our present opportunity for self-indoctination

We are experiencing something new in the history of Mankind.At no other time has knowledge been available for the asking as it is today. Just twenty years ago the Internet did not exist, mobile phones were in their early forms and the only access to a self-prepared curriculum was …

The Impediment of Terminology

I find statistics hard. Unnecessarily hard. Is it becomes I'm low on neurons? Hardly! It has more to do with the nature of the discipline and how it has evolved.One of the biggest qualms I've had against both probability and statistics disciplines is the fact that they are mostly …

Working with SSH Public Keys

This post is meant to be more of a sign post than anything else...For any fresh installation, a connection via SSH to a remote machine results in the request to store the public key. You have to respond with the letters 'yes' in order to allow the connection to …

The Forbidden Fruit

"And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."- Genesis 2:16,17 (AV) …

Javascript and the DOM

The DOM now makes sense! For the longest time I was completely perplexed as to the rationale behind Javascript. In object-oriented design, the fundamental concept is that of a data structure referred to as a class from which objects ('classes at work') are instantiated. The class is the abstraction - …

Pointers (References) in Programming (especially C/C++)

While learning how to write computer programs in C is quite straightforward for the first few miles, it is not until pointers are conquered that a whole new world opens up. This is not to say that pointers are complicated and hard to learn. Rather, much of the power in …