Reflections

Apr. 16th, 2008

10:22 am - Moved to WordPress

This blog has moved to http://gurmeetsingh.wordpress.com

Mar. 11th, 2005

11:10 am - Searchable Encrypted Single-page Address Book

Three design components:
1. A file-format that allows me to remember my list of contacts in plain-text. The format should be as non-restrictive as possible (see Google Maps interface, for example).
2. A transformer that converts the above file into an HTML page. Information about contacts should be encrypted.
3. The HTML page allows the viewer to enter a "key" that decrypts the contact information. It should also provide simple text-search functionality. The HTML page is "read-only". Updates to the list of contacts should require changing the text-file described in component 1.

Has somebody written these pieces?

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Mar. 1st, 2005

09:50 pm - Jared Diamond and Anatoly Fomenko

They have little in common. Recently, they were brought together by Amazon.com, who's advertising Fomenko's book along with Diamond's book, offering a discount if the two are bought together. The duo is an interesting pair of personalities.

Jared Diamond is an American Pulitzer prize winner, who writes commentaries on the human experience of the last 13000 years. Articles by Diamond available online: 1. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (makes very interesting reading), 2. Easter Island's End. Finally, a summary of his book: Guns, Germs and Steel.

Anatoly Fomenko is an eminent Russian mathematician, an artist, and a chronologist whose recent book History: Fiction or Science has attracted some attention. A summary of his book and a list of chapters.

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Feb. 28th, 2005

12:29 am - Tiddly Wiki

Tiddlywiki at http://www.tiddlywiki.com is an interesting idea for composing web-pages in wiki-style. Possible uses: hyperlinked short stories with 10-15 paragraphs, each with 5-10 sentences. Tiddlywiki has a surprisingly large number of features (check them all out).

If we develop a more general widget-like library with show/hide wiki-aware widgets, developers could build a variety of "applications" using them. Identifying a small set of widgets with a manageable set of features seems interesting.

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Feb. 27th, 2005

08:25 pm - CSS Zen and Project Gutenberg

CSS Zen Garden at http://www.csszengarden.com is an amazing site that displays the power of CSS. Now, it would be quite neat if somebody could write a wrapper that inserts div tags into books at http://www.gutenberg.org. Then invite webizens to create CSS files for cool displays.

Stuart Langridge's Kryogenix promotes the concept of "unobtrusive DHTML at http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/ (see unordered lists and sortable tables).

p.s. This is my first blog entry. Himanshu Nautiyal (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nautiyal) inspired me to start blogging.