Skip to main content

Mom and Sudoku

My mom has a thing for sudoku, she is always solving a few each day and is very fast at it too. I can't ever match her speed, and she is 60! Recently, she has moved on to "Extreme Sudoku" with difficulty rating of 5 and above, and I still take 5 to 10 minutes for the easy ones. I am so proud of her, but (sigh!), I better catch up!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When two choices are enough

I came across the  power of two choices   theorem recently, it was referenced in a tech talk about schedulers. The central premise of the power of two choices is simple. Yet it is striking in its effectiveness in making decisions about routing requests. The following is my restatement of the premise: You have n options, and a score or rank associated with each of them. You also have an incoming queue of decisions to make about which option to pick. At each decision point, if you pick two options from the n at random, and then use the score to pick the best among those two, you will get exponentially better results (in terms of distributing load), than choosing a random option.  Going from best of two, to best of 3 or 4 or more, only improves the results by a constant factor.  Using power of two choices really starts to pay off when n is very large and examining all n options becomes prohibitively expensive.  The paper applies this to load balancing, whe...
Post a Comment
Read more

What are your future plans? Why are you *still* a developer?

If I had a nickel for every time someone has asked me that question I'd have enough change for a year? Inspired by my friend's post here , I thought I'd write about how I ended up doing what I do now. Then I thought about it some more and decided to write about something else. Is it important to know where you are going in life? If you aren't moving forward in your career does it mean that you are doing something wrong? What does "moving up the ladder" even mean? I am going to attempt to answer these questions for myself. Its almost 5 years since I began my professional career. It has been great so far, lots of ups some downs as well. However, once in a while when I get the title question it still throws me off. It is usually my parents or well meaning relatives, sometimes friends that ask this. I have nothing much to say to them except "I enjoy what I am doing right now, haven't really thought about the future". But the truth is - I have thou...
4 comments
Read more

My perspective of women in CS

For almost all of my professional life I have been very passionate about this topic. I am on the Anita Borg Institute  mailing list. I read various posts addressing this where they talk about why girls need more encouragement to get involved in CS from an early age and how gender stereotyping in schools is hurting their chances. Programs like  http://www.girlstart.org/  conduct camps and special events to encourage girls in STEM subjects, that I enthusiastically support. I got extremely worked up over this post ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/women-in-tech-stop-blaming-me/ ). Two years later it still makes me angry. There's no disputing the fact is that there are relatively very few women in this field, both entrepreneurs and working in the industry. There's also no disputing a facts like the last ten years of ACM programming champion teams are all men. Sure, there are stellar examples like Marissa Mayer, but what about all these women here who want to bre...
Post a Comment
Read more