This guy is amazing, I understand him better as I grow up.

We aspire to be like you, but Steve Jobs will always be known as “The crazy one” and “The insanely awesome” visionary!

Your job is done, sleep well :)

And……a small gift for you: StayHungryStayFoolish.me

So, today I was donating some money to giveindia.org, started by IIM-A Alum, Venkat Krishnan. This is not like any other NGO aggregation “startup”, but a trust worthy one. They take the pains to filter out NGOs in India which actually do relevant work and do not exist just to mint money.

Anyway, so this is the price of education for a child for 1 year:

Amazed? $47.40 for 1 whole year of education for a child in India?! Think again! Thinking what can you do with $50?

Or you can just donate that money to giveindia.org

PS: I won’t crib about our political system, politicians etc this time. Have a plan B for that ;)

protected int next(int bits)

Implementation of Random.java via Google code:

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    protected int next(int bits) {
        long oldseed, nextseed;
        AtomicLong seed = this.seed;
        do {
            oldseed = seed.get();
            nextseed = (oldseed * multiplier + addend) & mask;
        } while (!seed.compareAndSet(oldseed, nextseed));
        return (int)(nextseed >>> (48 - bits));
    }

The general contract of next is that it returns an int value and if the argument bits is between 1 and 32 (inclusive), then that many low-order bits of the returned value will be (approximately) independently chosen bit values, each of which is (approximately) equally likely to be 0 or 1. The method next is implemented by class Random by atomically updating the seed to

(seed * 0x5DEECE66DL + 0xBL) & ((1L << 48) - 1)

and returning

(int)(seed >>> (48 - bits))

This is a linear congruential pseudorandom number generator, as defined by D. H. Lehmer and described by Donald E. Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Seminumerical Algorithms, section 3.2.1.

Interesting!

EDIT: Something even more interesting: Why this code is giving strange result? So Random?

Link to JavaDocs for Random.

Stuff I am using are:

1. ECB – emacs code browser
2. emacs-for-python which includes all the goodies you need for python development!
3. Solarized dark theme, whose emacs port is here.

My fav feature? It’s M-x artist-mode , see a screencast here

(HOW-TO: Use mouse middle button to get options, COMMAND+click on a mac. Exit using M-x artist-mode-off)

If you are using Aquamacs, I recommend you not to use ~/.emacs but directly edit the file which it loads, its located here: ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el

The ultimate emacs course – An awesome 2hr video lecture for emacs!

Why? Because if you want to customize a desktop at home, there is nothing like buying cheap parts from eBay!

And our app was judged 2nd! The first prize went to an app built with some awesome javascript + eBay API hackery.

Anyway, some highlights:

1. We were using python for the first time. Yes. This was the first time we were using python and django.
2. eBay API were very new to us.
3. We had 14hrs to build a working prototype. It was fun! Photographs of the event on Flickr
4. Something good came out of the hackathon, we are building a python wrapper for eBay API, called python-ebay. It’s an excuse to work more on python and help the eBay at the same time :D

The freebies we got were awesome: Raffles every hour for iPod, Apple TVs, gaming keyboards etc (alas, I had an unlucky number :( ), Snuggies for all of us, 24hr supply of RedBull, eBay developers support through out the Hackathon, more eBay Developer Program swag like T-Shirts and stickers!

Now, coming to the review, how was my experience? Well, it was mixed. eBay API documentation is vast and at times, it’s an information overload.

For example, look at this FindProducts API call reference vs. Google’s custom search API call reference.

I understand, it’s like comparing apples to oranges, but keeping aside the actual functional perspective of the API, it’s not intuitive enough.

An interesting read: What Developers Say About API Documentation

I am sure eBay Developer Program is working really hard to constantly improve it, keeping in mind eBay API is one of the oldest API on the internet. And as of now, we are working on python-ebay which hopefully should be complete by end of this month.

A screenshot of our hack:

“Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life.  Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.”

6. The Meaning of Effort
Fixed Entity Intelligence: In fixed intelligence making a lot of effort or struggling means your dumb. Its only the winners who feel smart, and only if they didn’t have to work to hard to win.

This is sad because students may never come to value effort. Effort gives meaning to life. It means you care about something, that it is important, and you are willing to work for it.

Incremental/Maleable: In Incremental intelligence effort is what turns on peoples intelligence and allows them to use it to their full advantage. + it can foster a more collaborative atmosphere among students because everyone can feel smart by applying their intellectual abilities to the problems they face.

Source: Carol Dwek- Growth Mindsets and Motivation

Where is it?
Yeah right! It’s a secret!

Also, Node.js is one of the new event driven framework, which is freaking fast! A very good guide to understanding what is Node.js and Event driven programming in it self is very well documented here:

1. Node.js, Doctor’s Offices and Fast Food Restaurants – Understanding Event-driven Programming

2. A Programmer’s Tutorial on Event-Driven Programming, Asynchronous Input/Output, and the Bamboo DHT

Anyway, time for some results!!

Update: You can view the most recent results here

1. What text editor do you use?

Others:

Kod BBEdit Sublime Text 2 eclipse Sublime Text sublime text redcar AkelPad BBEdi tNotepad2 EditPlus sublime text nano Redcar Sublime Text TextWrangler Sublime Text Scite Komodo EditPhpED sublimetext Sublime Editor 2 nano

2. What is your Favorite IDE?

3. What programming language(s) do you use?

PS: People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%. Also, I committed a monumental mistake of not including PHP in the list. So, the Google excel sheet I have shared is a formatted one, which also includes PHP in the charting. The original excel sheet can be found here.

XKCD Image credit: carlos.bueno.org