Now feel the punch :

In the mean time enjoy my google reader links: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ABurad

I loved Google Domestic trends (Though US data only). It was quite interesting to relate them to actual data/market.  You can check out Google Data explore’s  interesting statistics here. Pretty cool and informative.  huh !

You can also have a look at  information aesthetics : (Where form follows data) (great blog if you are fan of interesting charts.) and Flowing Data. Also do share if you know any similar/interesting data/statistics visualization blog.

PS: post after long time, Actually since google reader, Buzz, twitter came into picture I can directly share stuff I like with friends there only. So quite a few things to post here.

“In what appears to be the biggest worldwide device failure in consumer electronics history, tens of thousands of owners of Microsoft’s Zune turned on the music player Wednesday morning only to discover it was the day the music died. By early afternoon, Microsoft released a statement saying the problem, which affected the original 30-gigabyte model of the Zune that first went on sale in September 2006, was solved. The issue: a bug in the way the gadget’s internal clock handles a leap year.”

The problem was in a small part of code in Zune’s clock driver which resulted in Zune looping forever.

Zune Failing :
http://gizmodo.com/5121311/reports-30gb-zunes-failing-everywhere-all-at-once
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_11345379

Cause : (Zune bug explained here )
Bug in code ( Not taking leap year into account properly, seems simple ?)

Part of a function :

————————————————————–

while (days > 365)
{
    if (IsLeapYear(year))
    {
        if (days > 366)
        {
            days -= 366;
            year += 1;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        days -= 365;
        year += 1;
    }
}

————————————————————–

Bugs:

1) It should be days==366 or days>=366
2) No else condition mentioned for nested if. (Should have been there specially when if is inside a while loop )

Now Zune will keep looping forever. Zune bug explained here

Microsoft response : http://www.zune.net/en-us/support/zune30.htm
This is big reputational risk for Microsoft’s Zune, when it trying hard to stand against Apple’s Ipod.

Above is Rangoli, we made at office.

Enjoy !!

Then I saw, they were selling rubik’s cube. It has been a long time since I touched it. So I bought myself a Rubik’s Cube (Original from Rubiks.com, my first one) and It cost me around Rs 225.

Also few must be knowing that around 2 weeks back Rubik’s Cube was celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Check out some cool ads for Rubik cube.

25 years and still going

Today, I also found some creative ads related to Rubik’s cube via Toxel.com

So I have the new cube now, which is much better (smoother) compared to ones i previously had. I hope to improve upon my timing now.

And about the movie, Hancock, it wasn’t worth the hype created. though Will Smith rocked as always.

happy cubing !!

Related Posts:
Solving Rubiks Cube
Adobe AIR: Rubik Timer

Also check: Rubik Cube Timer, My Rubik Page

I’ll agree with it but comic misses the Applied Mathematics, which i think will have application in the whole spectrum of various branches mentioned by comics. On the other side Pure mathematics is purely based on reason, ignoring its usability.

Mathematicians have always had differing opinions regarding the distinction between pure and applied mathematics. One of the most famous (but perhaps misunderstood) modern examples of this debate can be found in G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology.

Applied mathematics sought to express physical truth in a mathematical framework, whereas pure mathematics expressed truths that were independent of the physical world.

Yahoo search gallery provides you many existing search enhancements that you can add after logging to yahoo. [Via labnol.org].Try various enhancement like LinkedIn Profile, IMDB results, StumbleUpon Reviews and other popular ones.

And you can also create your own search enhancement using step by step method using Presentation application (SearchMonkey Guide).

SearchMonkey API unables you to modify how particular links appears in search results. You can add images, related links and other html formatting but it does not unable you change position of a page in search result. I was unable to find feature which will enable us to filter sites which requires you to login or sites like ebay and amazon which may not be relevant to us by making their appearance farther in search results.

But still these enhancements provides you little summary of search results which is very useful like in case of movie reviews, people profile via linkedIn, stock information etc thus sometimes making opening the actual webpage unnecessary.

But what drew my attention again? Yesterday I was watching 21 movie, Its based on real story of six MIT students cashed in millions in Vegas Casinos by counting cards. Here comes the puzzle, In a classroom scene Prof Micky asks one of the student (Jim, our hero)

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

I’m sure you will be left puzzled for a moment, when you hear the solution by Jim, at least I was. Its a tricky one, But you can get through it . So what choice would you have made, I’ll update the post with answer after few days.

Update:

This is famous puzzle known as Monty Hall Problem. Wikipedia has very good explanation for this.

Because there is no way for the player to know which of the two unopened doors is the winning door, most people assume that each door has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter. In fact, in the usual interpretation of the problem the player should switch—doing so doubles the probability of winning the car, from 1/3 to 2/3.

Also Read: Classic Computer Science Puzzles

Related Post:

Orio’s Riddle Completed
Twisty Puzzles

PHP date(output format, epoch); Output format example: ‘r’ = RFC 2822 date
Python import time first, then time.gmtime(epoch)
MySQL from_unixtime(epoch, optional output format)

So the puzzle was supposed to release at
Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:15:00 GMT, for India: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 4:45:00 AM (middle of the night).

Forth Puzzle is available here. Its a bit tricky, but i wrote a c program to calculate the number using brute force method…and it worked.(Share how you did it or is there some shortcut which works without any programming). Problem is to find a prime number which in turn can be expressed as sum of of n consecutive prime numbers. Your answer should satisfy 4 such list of prime numbers of given length.

So its over for now and soon they are going to contest winners and rewards. Hope i could have been one . But I have submitted this puzzle after long delay.(Was sleeping when it was released)

• Puzzle 1 (Robot in a maze) : Find it here
• Puzzle 2 (getting lines from specific files in zip archive) : Find it here
• Puzzle 3 (Network routing table) : Find it here