Codaholic

(This article was originally posted on out-of-office.)

When we begin working on a problem, one of our main tasks is to build a theory about the problem space so that we can capture and communicate our understanding about it to others and to machines.

In the movie “The Martian”, Matt Damon plays astronaut Mark Watney who gets stranded on Mars and makes history by practicing open defecation and growing potatoes using his own shit as manure on Martian soil.

Dr.

ReactJS is gradually moving towards a purely functional style of specifying application views.

When Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini write that Apple is giving design a bad name, you sit up and listen.

Recently, I had to work on an animated view for an iOS app.

Yesterday, I drove an automatic for the first time.

Slides (CC BY-SA 3.0)

These are elaborate notes on a “Tech Tonic” talk given at Pramati Technologies, Chennai, on 23rd July 2015.

The net neutrality debate in India largely lingers on what folks will have to pay for that they’re now getting for free, how much more it is going to cost them to do the same things they’re doing today, what will happen to the small business guys as the l…

Workshop at Brhaddhvani for children this summer on melakarta system.

In A Mental Model for Variables and Closures in Javascript, I described an allocation based model that I’d used with some success to teach and understand the intricacies of closures, as implemented in Javascript engines.

I gave a talk titled “Mathemusicking with children: Doing math and music without telling them apart” at the C.

Some years ago, I had a change of perspective on being vegetarian.

try-catch-finally style error management is common in many programming languages.

I’d written quite some time ago about seriously giving biking in Chennai a shot.

Two common backends seem to be emerging that enable programmers to choose a language and system suitable for their work irrespective of whether they’re developing server side code or client side code.

In computer science literature, “garbage collection” refers to the process by which unused computer memory is reclaimed for use by a program.

Recent writing in the field of ethnomusicology has re-asked the question of “what is music?”.

Was it Gandhiji who said “Be the change you want to see in the world”?

In my previous post, I explored how programming with promises can be made close to programming with values.

Promises are the new old thing in the land of Javascript async abstractions, though they aren’t as good as CSP-style channels for async programming.

In part-2 of How to Practice Carnatic Music with a Metronome, I described some beginning exercises for the vina that combine meditation with practice of basic right hand plucking techniques that need early mastery.

Status: Draft In part-1 and part-2, I covered some very basic techniques for “anchoring time in the body”.

Status: Draft Part 1 presented internalizing “layam” or musical time as the practice goal for working with a metronome.

Internalizing the flow of musical time, known as “layam”, is an essential aspect of the training of a student of Carnatic music.

Here’s something fun done in Tala Keeper - a walk through of Nine Nadais in one big 36 beat cycle.

Tala Keeper version 1.3.0 is the first public release of a visual metronome for practicing music involving complex (or simple) time structures.

The Web Audio API provides graph based API for audio generation and processing primitives with a focus on high performance and low latency.

Here is a demo web app for exploring rāgās and their bhēdams.

Roman text with a few choice diacritics are a common need when writing about Indian classical music.

Google has open sourced the Tuna set of effects used in their Jam with Chrome project.

“eval is evil” has become a maxim repeated in the Javascript community.

Posted a “stream of thought” compiler for a toy language based on the idea of j-expressions as a representation for ASTs.

JSON has become a kind of de-facto standard for sharing data among services on the web.

Scheme and Lisp have for long had powerful meta-programming abilities due to the syntax of their language being the same as the syntax for the main data structure supported by the language - the humble list.

Closures and variables have a strained relationship in Javascript that causes much confusion among newcomers and results in hard to spot bugs even for experienced JS coders.

If you have been programming in Java and C++ for a while and are used to thinking about problems in terms of classes and inheritance, you may find yourself struggling with Javascript since it has only objects.

(This is a “brain-dump” post).

How would Newcomb’s problem look like in the physical world, taking quantum physics into account?

Now that macworld is near, it is time for an iPad wish list.

Decoherence as projection discusses photon polarization as a phenomenon that can only be explained quantum mechanically even at the macroscopic level –

The term “object oriented programming” has degraded to the point where I no longer take self proclaimed OOP enthusiasts seriously.

Recently, a friend of mine pointed out a concurrent implementation of Eratosthenes’ prime sieve expressed in google’s Go programming language.

Recently, Randall Munroe held a guest week where some of his favourite cartoonists drew for him on xkcd.