Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " The ability to handle rejection is an important quality to have " [I started reading this fantastic book called " Design Of Everyday Things " by Donald A. Norman. The book is highly recommended by the way. This post is inspired by the book. Let me start off by saying I am no expert - these are my opinions only] Systems and Designs seem to be very technical words. But, to me, they are more like common sense. These days, that is... Actually, from yesterday, because I started reading this book and now I have suddenly become an expert in the area. Driving in Bangalore is a pain, which most of you are aware of. But driving a car can get a little more annoying because of all the motorcycles that swarm around you. Motorcycles are inherently unstable and tend to move in unpredictable paths in excessive traffic. So a driver of a car has to be extra careful when he drives because he has to concentrate on a number of haphazardly moving vehi...

Baba Gyani Triviani said: " If you believe in fate and destiny, then the randomness in this world is pseudo-randomness " Random Number Seed I am sure most of you would have used a Random number generating piece of code in your program at some point of  time or another. And when you were looking up code, you would have noticed the word 'seed' but would have ignored it. Some of you would have even noticed a word called pseudo-random number generator. Well, I did. And I didn't know what this seed was until a few days back. Let's try out an experiment. I will use Python in this post, but you can use any other language - Java, Ruby and they will all behave in the exact same way. >>> import random >>> random.random() 0.23108685984562283 >>> random.random() 0.017276293409835386 If you try this piece of code on your machine, your results will be different from mine. Isn't that obvious? It IS a random number generator af...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " When in a game, play... " I have won several lotteries organised by Shell, Coca Cola and other companies. Each prize was no less than 500,000 GBP. And I have also been fortunate to share my surname with super rich heirless millionaires, facilitating unscrupulous lawyers to wire their enormous funds into my account so that I can send them their share for making it happen. Considering the number of lotteries I have won and number of inheritances in my name, I am richer than Bill Gates ten times over. But alas, we are aware of how scams work. Some of us, at least. So I continue to be penniless as before. Recently, I got an email - The brevity of which prompted me to reply, and then began an interesting conversation. from: Robert Adair to: r-adair@hotmail.co.uk date: 17 October 2013 21:29 subject: Your revert awaited having a proposal to discuss with you To which I replied, with equal conciseness... Regarding what And I got ...