As its sub-title indicates, “Unix” is a book by Brian Kernighan that tells the story of the evolution of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs and beyond. The author was a part of the small and extremely talented group at the hallowed Bell Labs that used and developed what came to be known as Unix. This perspective of the author and their excellent writing skills that has been repeatedly demonstrated via several great books makes this a must-read book for any student of Computer History.
Archive for 2020
[2020-12-31] “Unix”
[2020-12-30] “The Courtesan, The Mahatma, And The Italian Brahmin”
“The Courtesan, The Mahatma, And The Italian Brahmin” is an anthology of edited essays on Indian history written by Manu Pillai that first appeared as part of a regular column in an Indian newspaper. These essays provide a much-needed perspective on characters and events from Indian history that are often overlooked by history-textbooks in schools and popular books on history. I found most of these essays to be both entertaining and insightful and I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about India’s past.
[2020-08-09] Studio Ghibli
I have been meaning to watch the anime films of the legendary Studio Ghibli for quite a while now, but their works were unfortunately not readily available in India. This changed recently when Netflix made almost the entire collection available in India, that too with an English soundtrack for almost all of them. I came to know of this via this wonderful article in BBC Culture. I have been watching these films each weekend over the last few months. I loved all of them (some more than others). I would highly recommend these films to anyone.
[2020-07-26] “Lucifer” Turned 20 This Year
During ICFPC 2020 last weekend, the keyboard for the desktop PC on which I was coding for the contest stopped working. This made me realize that the desktop PC, which I had named “Lucifer”, turned 20 years old in January this year. That is quite a long life for a PC by any standard. It has served me very well indeed over all these years, though these days I rarely use it for anything other than for recreational programming and for maintaining this web-site. It is the first and the only desktop PC that I have ever owned.
[2020-07-25] ICFPC 2020
I participated in ICFPC 2020 last weekend to continue my tradition of using this programming-contest as a fun way of spending three days trying to program a solution for a really tough problem. This year’s contest was organized by a team from kontur.ru that has itself been performing quite well in recent iterations of this contest. As it turned out, the famous quote by Winston Churchill was quite apt for this year’s contest: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.” Somewhat incredibly, I ended up being both very frustrated with the contest as well as managing to have lot of fun working through it. It is quite weird, to be honest.