Technology, books, travel, and linguistics
Lecture 3: Bitcoin overview There are three Bitcoin protocols Consensus Protocol – decides what the ledger is Transaction Protocol – assigns meaning to the ledger Network Protocol – the P2P protocol which decides what new should be added to the […]
Lecture 2: Creating a digital currency Desirable properties of a good digital ledger No deletion Temporal ordering Global consensus Semantic correctness Live – writable, no DOS, no censorship Attempts to create a digital currency in the increasing order of sophistication. […]
Lecture 1: Introduction Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency with distributed trust. The blockchain is a public append-only ledger. The append-only property is sufficient for having a currency. Hash functions: H: M -> T where |M| >> |T| that is space of […]
Maui is a small but beautiful island of Hawai’i. Here is a recommended 4-day itinerary for Maui. This itinerary is a slightly modified version of what I was able to do. The public transport on the island is poor. For solo travel […]
Earlier, the Software world was rigidly divided between closed and open-source software. Microsoft Windows is closed-source, GNU/Linux is open-source. Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes are closed-source, LibreOffice is open-source. Turbo C++ is closed-source, and GCC is open-source. But now, a […]
Don’t use platform fragments (android.app.Fragment), they have been deprecated and can trigger version-specific bugs. Use the support library fragments (android.support.v4.app.Fragment) instead. A Fragment is created explicitly via your code or recreated implicitly by the FragmentManager. The FragmentManager can only recreate […]
We sailed on the Windstar cruise in French Polynesia. On a 7-day cruise, we stopped on six different islands, including two days in Bora Bora. The cruise ship has a crew of 99 and 74 staterooms for~150 passengers. This ratio […]
Getting to French Polynesia Getting from the US to French Polynesia used to be hard and expensive, with Air Tahiti Nui being the only option from the Los Angeles airport (LAX). In 2018, French Bee and United Airlines started direct […]
A JPEG file can have Exif metadata which can provide the rotation/translation field information for a raw JPEG image. So, a landscape raw JPEG image could actually be a portrait because it’s EXIF orientation could be set to ORIENTATION_ROTATE_90, the best way to […]
Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah is a National Park consisting of three natural bridges. One can spend ~1-3 hours hiking nearby each of the bridges. The hikes are short and require ascent/descent. Even without the hike, one can drive around […]