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ScribeFire

Yep, I am lazy !!! Sometimes it seems quite some task to open a tab, point to my blog, sign in, and then post something.

But ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that makes life really easy for me. Simply install ScribeFire onto your Firefox browser, tell ScribeFire about your blog, and use ScribeFire's editor to post to your blog. The editor is really similar to what your blog provides. The best part is you can manage multiple blogs (of different blogging services) very easily.

And yes, I've put in this post using ScribeFire. :)


PS : I am posting this note from Blogger, after publishing the post using ScribeFire. The post looks good. One minor point though. By default, ScribeFire adds a "Powered by ScribeFire" line at the end of the post. However, it can be disabled in the Settings tab of ScribeFire panel.

Oriya music

I was born and brought up in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa. Orissa is a beautiful state along the eastern coast of India facing the Bay of Bengal, and has a rich culture and heritage, replete with stories of devotion and sacrifice, grandeur and resplendence.

Orissa has had a film industry for more than half a century now, and songs have been a major part of the movies always. Oriya movies of the 1960-90s boasted of brilliant songs, soothing to the ears and really refreshing for the mind. Of course, the Oriya movies of late have been, IMHO, a shade pathetic when it comes to music.

Anyway, it is always an experience to be audience to the "old" Oriya songs. Recently I found some online music repositories that provide access to listen to these really beautiful classics online.

www.oriyamusic.com
www.musicindiaonline.com/music/oriya
www.purionline.com/entertainment

So tune in and escape into the serene world of the yesteryears.

Happy Pi Day

Yes, "Pi" is the same number you read about in your math textbooks at school. For those who can't remember what on earth it was, let me refresh their memories. Ahem Ahem... The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is constant for all circles, and the constant is called Pi which approximates to 3.14, if we consider two decimal places.

Pi Day is a fun and unofficial holiday celebrated on March 14 by math lovers around the world. Why March 14? March corresponds to 3 (third month) of course, and so 14th March can be thought of as 3.14. Well actually, the story goes further than this. People usually convey their wishes at 1:59 pm on 14th March, as the decimal representation of Pi is like 3.14159...

Math lovers (mostly in universities) celebrate this day by getting together and discussing about the history of the "loved" number, having contests to see how many digits of Pi one has memorized, and eating pies, of course.

Now shifting to a serious mathematical note, the number "Pi" has been shown to have multiple interesting properties. Two of those are as follows :

• It is an irrational number, which means it cannot be written as a ratio of two integers (a close approximation is 22/7).

• It is a transcendental number too, which means there does not exist a non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients that has Pi as a root.

A widely believed conjecture related to Pi is that it is a normal number. A normal number is a real number whose representation in any base has digits (or whatever they are called in some base) in a uniform distribution. In other words, any substring of digits is equally likely to occur in the representation of Pi. If you think more about this, then you can surely arrive at this hilarious conclusion.

So folks, here's to you wishing a Happy Pi Day !!!

PS :
(1) July 22 is celebrated as Pi Approximation Day (Think 22/7).
(2) Not sure if its a coincidence :), but March 14 is Einstein's birthday.

Cool navigation feature in Konqueror

Why does one use mouse while browsing? Primarily to click on hyperlinks, of course. Recently, I came across this cool feature in Konqueror which allows you to browse around using keyboard only.

Try this. Go to some web page using Konqueror, and press the Control key on your keyboard.
Konqueror would provide you with tooltips on the webpage, that associate a key with each link on the webpage. Pressing the correct key would take you to the associated link, in the same manner as would have happened if you had clicked on the link with the mouse. This feature is probably called Access Keys Control.

The screenshot shown here is what it looks like. Notice that the "A" key is assigned to two links in the screenshot. This is because both the hyperlinks point to the same location. Hmm, smart, real smart... :)

FYI, the version of Konqueror on my system shows "Konqueror 3.5.5 (using KDE 3.5.5)". I ain't sure if the older versions have this feature.

However I think there is a problem here. As far as I know, Konqueror uses the alphanumeric keys (A-Z,0-9) for labelling links on a web page. Now what happens once the number of links on the web page exceeds the total number of alphanumeric characters (which is 26+10=36)? I found out that only the first 36 links are alloted keys for navigation, while the rest of the links are not. This looks like a shortcoming to me, unless there is some other way to label all the links on a webpage, however many there are. A better solution would be, IMHO, to label only the links on the webpage that are visible at a time in the browser window. In this manner, once the user scrolls down the webpage and finds more links, the keys can be reassigned. In other words, the assignment should be dynamic. Although one could argue that this method would fail if the number of links visible at a time exceeds the total number of alphanumeric characters, the proposed method is still better than statically assigning keys only to the first 36 links.

Anti-matter therapy for cancer

Well who could have thought of this!!! Anti-matter, that has been at the core of volumes of recent research in physics, has found its way into medical science and therapy. Recent announcements by CERN lab in Geneva have hinted at the idea of using anti-matter to target cancer cells resulting in intense biological damage of the cancerous cells leading to their death.

In fact, particle physics is already playing a role in cancer treatment today. Radiotherapy for cancer results in exposure of some non-cancerous parts of the body to harmful radiation. Applications from particle physics help reduce this collateral radiation by a significant amount.