Category Archives: Daily Rant

Anything and everything

Swiftkey Flow Rocks

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One of the coolest innova­tions I have seen in recent times is Swiftkey Flow. This is a keyboard input method that is geared towards touch­screen devices, where the user enters text by sliding a finger across the letters of the word to be input. With a little help from predic­tive technology, this method is simple, accurate, fast and intuitive.

On a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, you can enable this on the “Samsung Keyboard” through the “Settings” menu. If you’ve also setup one-handed opera­tions (the keyboard moves over closer to one side) you could be typing long letters or blog posts with just your thumb and your brain for hours.

Compared to other forms of input such as voice, what makes this so compelling is how easy and seamless it is to handle errors. With dicta­tion, there are bound to be mistakes unless you contin­u­ally keep looking at the screen to see what gets typed (which you wouldn’t want to be doing if you were talking). With the onscreen keyboard, it is completely intuitive to pay atten­tion to the words you have input, and switch back to conven­tional typing temporarily when there are errors. It doesn’t hurt that Swiftkey normally figures out the right words to enter without the user having to try too hard, so errors are much less frequent. (This normally happens when you hesitate while spelling out the word.)

Strange Dream

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A few nights ago, I had a rather strange dream. It had something to do with reser­va­tions. Reser­va­tions for something.

Anyway, reser­va­tions worked on a first-come-first-serve basis, and involved pasta. (It might be more appro­priate to call it a pasta-based organism.) Here’s how it worked: you would take a single piece of pasta and wait until a couple of tenta­cles slid out of one end. (This would happen period­i­cally — two tentacles/feelers would slide out and then slide back in.) When this happened, you would quickly catch hold of the tenta­cles and tie them together in a knot, which would prevent them from sliding back in. And voila! You had a reservation.

System Reboot

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Welcome, year 2013 — the future was here hours ago, and you missed it.…

Life is like a computer; sometimes it just needs a reboot. That is the reason why people welcome the new year with such gusto — it’s time to abandon old beliefs and anxieties, and start afresh with a clean slate. Everyone needs a reboot eventu­ally, so this isn’t something to worry about unless the need becomes too frequent. If you find yourself begin­ning each day with a sense of relief that the previous one is over, then I would gently suggest that you re-install your operating system software instead. Go with Gentoo this time; it’s easier to patch.

Pointerse

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The rest of this post is purely hypothetical.

I am going to invent a new language. Every sentence in this language will be composed of a sequence of numbers, and each number — or word — will be a cultural refer­ence, a refer­ence to a quota­tion, event, activity or just about anything that took place in the history of our world at some point in space and time. Each sentence in this language will carry an immense amount of infor­ma­tion within a few, short, simple words.

Eventu­ally, advances in technology will make knowl­edge ubiqui­tous, thereby condensing sentences into something as simple as a repre­sen­ta­tion of a sequence of vectors in space-time.

I call this language “Pointerse”.

Finally, A Tech Blog

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Finally.

I now have a new blog called technoYak. Does that name sound vaguely familiar…?

For a long time now, I have wanted to maintain a separate blog for all things technical, especially the ideas I work with profes­sion­ally, such as software and system design. This was motivated by a slight unease whenever I wanted to post an inter­esting idea to this blog — but couldn’t because I figured it wouldn’t make sense to the lowest common denom­i­nator of the audience. A new blog with a much more narrow focus seemed to be the right answer. That and a pinch of “seriousness”.

So why haven’t I done this before? To tell you the truth, I’ve been stuck in this vicious circle of inaction. Here’s how the thought-process works:

  1. I just had this great idea! I think I should blog it.
  2. Oooh! You know what, it would be great if I could have a nice serious blog about these ideas that I can talk about with authority, instead of mixing it up with all this random stuff that is unrelated.
  3. Yeah, and it would be even cooler if I could do this on my own blogging platform (the one I’ve been meaning to release version 0.1 of for the last three years). Let’s do that first!
  4. There’s this whole bunch of features I want to put into this code. It would be nice to have some kind of note-taking software to keep track of all of this stuff. Let me check if there’s awesome new software in the Gentoo repos­i­tory for note-taking.
  5. Nope, I guess not. I wish I could use something like OneNote on GNU/Linux…or perhaps I should invest in a really large white­board for my apart­ment? Will I find that online at Amazon.com?
  6. [*] Maybe that’s not what I need. Maybe — just maybe — what I really need is a new laptop to do all this new cool stuff. *drool* Yes, that’s it…if I had a new laptop, all of these annoy­ances would go away.
  7. Sigh. Let’s put this discus­sion on hold while I take care of all this work stuff. *several weeks pass*
  8. I just had this great idea! I think I should blog it.

* If you’re strug­gling to find the logical leap to Step 6, I’m afraid I can’t help you there.

Limits

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Today, I found out that City Market (the general store on Bellevue Avenue in Capitol Hill) closes at two o’clock in the morning and re-opens at six. I also discov­ered that the Starbucks on Summit Ave and E Olive Way actually closes at eleven o’clock in the night — not midnight as suggested by their official website.

I guess I should be thankful for the 24-hour-open Subway store down Denny Mountain.

Hiatus

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When you come to think of it, time doesn’t flow very smoothly — it gushes out in fits and spurts like a leaking pipe that you try to keep under control even as you call the plumber with your free hand. It’s been a while — a long while — since my last post. Heck, it was so annoying to see the same front-page everyday that I stopped visiting my own website beyond a point.

I guess I have excuses. Many things have changed since November last year, and yet, life is the same as before. Most changes in life are like re-arrangements of pieces on a chess board. You move some here, you move some there, but overall things remain in balance except for the occasional loss of a piece. It’s only towards the end of the game that things become exciting, but ironi­cally, that’s the time when you have the least control over the board. Life is God playing chess with you; I suppose He likes to win.

The New Year came and went with a small burst of hope (purely my imagi­na­tion, I am sure) that ebbed quickly and receded into oblivion. But February was a month of many changes, with January franti­cally getting ready for it. I have seldom seen a month packed with so many punches, but the punches were super­fi­cial, almost playful to an extent. There was a wedding to navigate through, a vacation to deal with, castles to look at, a workplace to be moved, an apart­ment to get out of , an apart­ment to move into and impos­sible things to be taken care of at impos­sible schedules.

But the truth is, life isn’t a game of chess — you shouldn’t stop to think after every move, you just power through, no matter what. Never stop, never give up, just keep going. Just keep going, that’s all…

Again

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I feel a sudden irrational urge to design and code a new website again.

The goal is to have a something “new” launched on the 1st of November. Quoting J R R Tolkien, “It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.” So let’s begin.

And thinking about it, there’s a method to motiva­tion and a wee bit of madness to every creation. I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about, but trust me on this one.