Sunday, June 30, 2013

Link: Word document page numbering

Putting page numbers in word document for two different formats: Link

Friday, June 28, 2013

E Book wish list

I like to read. Books are a favorite. They last longer than a normal blog article, usually covers a topic or idea from start to end, and I get a sense of accomplishment after I finish one. Whenever I try to find a book for reading, I start with a search in the library. If I like it, then I buy it. Sometime I do not find the book in library. Then I buy it. Sometimes these are the books which never get completed. Lately, I have started buying eBooks. I am a convert. I never thought I will ever like an electronic version of book over a dead tree version. Some times it is difficult to wait. But main reason, in my case, is size of book. Some of the books which runs into 500+ pages and it is very cumbersome to carry them around. Some books, however, are still not available in electronic format. Here I am maintaining a list I wish to see in electronic format:

  • A Suitable Boy
  • Kinetics of Materials
  • Raag Darbari
  • Mujhe Chand Chahiye

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Link: Web Bookmark

I made my first website when I was at IIT Bombay. It was hosted on institute server. I wrote bare basic html code and it was running in no time. Lately, I bought a domain and web space on Google sites. Now I am trying to learn how to code dynamic websites. After searching through the internet, I recently found a good tutorial website which serves me well. Tizag has tutorials on php, JavaScript, and MySQL. I have completed  tutorial on PHP and am midway into MySQL. While this is not new, I am constantly amazed with ease of finding information on internet. Yes there is lots of noise but its not an issue compared to difficulty in finding relevant information prior to it. I remember one of my Father’s friend asked him to bring for him a computer book from Bhopal because it was not available in Vidisha and when he finished reading it, he said it was useless.   

Monday, June 24, 2013

Quora

I have been on Quora for little less than an year. There are days when I spend more times reading answers on Quora than I spend on Facebook. There are other places on internet where people ask questions and other people answers them. I regularly post questions on Stack Overflow sites, and have posted questions rarely on Quora. Most of the time when I need to find an answer quickly, top links reported by Google are invariably from Yahoo answers. Then where does the utility of Quora lies in ? I think, in the space of web QnA sites, Quora has carved its own niche – Questions. Interesting questions, questions you never thought of and yet when you see them you start to think that knowing this will be good.

If I remember correctly, when I registered on Quora for first time it asked for some topics I would like to follow. I chose few and then I could see latest updates on those topics. It was fine for some days but then signal to noise ratio started to decrease. Or at least my perception of it started to go southward. I also started to notice that by following people, I was able to discover more interesting content than by following the topics. And this is when I decided to stop following all the topics and started to focus on finding people with interesting tastes. These may not be the people who ask lots of questions or write good answers. These are the people who have interest in things I have interest, and they read and up vote indicating me where the better stuff it. And by better stuff, I mean the interesting questions. If you know the question, finding an answer to that is easy on internet. Coming up with the question is difficult.    

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Link: Web Bookmark

US Navy has produced some of the best introductory technical documentation I have ever come across. These documents explain what needed to be done and many times it is what you need. Here is the link for my future reference: http://www.hnsa.org/doc/