We all heard and been talking a lot about Google's recent acquisition of buying Motorola. Google entering into hardware? Unbelievable but at the same time it makes a lot sense when we think about it this way: Google already having a killer mobile OS(Well, you might have had heard about Android) and owning the hardware will not only add a lot of revenue to Google but will also give them full control in Mobile computing and smartphone space.

Larry Page, the Google co-founder and CEO has clearly stated in a blog post that Google has acquired Motorola not only because of its strength in Android smartphones and devices, but also for being a “market leader in the home devices and video solutions business.”

Courtesy: Wikipedia

I googled and looked at the percentage of people using Andriod, it raised my eyebrows and made me curious to understand and dig more deeper to find what sort of world it would be after 5 years? Well, i didn't exactly get the answer to this one. But one thing Google has done all these years is: they managed to build trust within the consumers and i personally trust google. Having said that i feel that the world will be much better with this acquisition(DISCLAIMER: It's just my personal opinion about a company!).

Effects on Android partners:

I was a bit worried for the current Android partners like HTC, Samsung et al. Will this affect them? But felt relieved when i heard Peter Chou, HTC CEO saying this and hope rest of the partners have similar things to say.

What i take out from this acquisition:

• Google will now have the ability to control the Android experience.

• Larry Page has proved it again that he is a great CEO of our times.

• It will save Android from patent claims from Apple, Microsoft.

• Google has opted for a great challenge to prove itself as they don't have any history of success in selling hardware.

I am pretty sure even you must have concluded something from this acquisition? Please comment!

Conway's game of Life is used as an icon for hackers

If you are an Emacs user then you will definitely understand the importance of control key. So, emacs user usually shift their ctrl to some different key for the sake of saving their little finger. In my case i swapped my ctrl and caps keys. Open the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and add the following line in the Section "InputDevice" Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps" Now your caps is ctrl and ctrl is caps.

W00t! It's a Programmer's day today. I wish all the programmer's worldwide. The day is unofficially celebrated on the 256th (reason: 256 = 2 to the power of 8 = the number of values representable in a byte of data) day of the Gregorian calender year. Therefore, it usually falls on September 13, and on a leap year it is on September 12.

A tourist walks into a pet shop in silicon valley, and is browsing around the cages on display . While he’s there, another customer walks in and says to the shopkeeper, “I’ll have a C monkey, please”.

The shopkeeper nods, goes over to the cage at the side of the shop and takes out a monkey. He fits a collar and leash and hands it to the customer, saying “That’ll be $5,000″. The customer pays and walks out with his monkey.

Startled, the tourist goes over to the shopkeeper and says, “That was a very expensive monkey, most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so much?”

“Oh”, says the shopkeeper, “that monkey can program in C with very fast and tight code, no bugs, well worth the monkey.”

The tourist starts to look at the monkeys in the cage. He says to the shopkeeper, “That one’s even more expensive, $10,000! What does it do?”

“Oh”, says the shopkeeper. “that one’s a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java, all the really useful stuff.”

The Tourist looks around for a little longer and sees a third monkey in a cage on its own with no price tag round his neck.

He gasps to the shopkeeper, “Why is that so! What on earth does it do?”

“Well”, says the shopkeeper, “I don’t know if it actually does anything, but says its a LISPER and of course priceless” 

GREP:: Prints line matching a pattern. While digging out for pattern matching stuffs, i came across a brilliant search utility that works fine on Gnu/Linux. Actually all my mobile numbers were scattered in different files and each file containing huge amount of text including mobile numbers!! And i only wanted those numbers.<br />

atif@ct:~$ grep [0-9] home/atif/foo home/atif/bar
home/atif/foo:+91 9930001234
home/atif/foo:+91 9833730782
home/atif/foo:+91 9890422344
home/atif/bar:+91 9878565545
home/atif/bar:+91 9890786567

When i was in college, i had a topic Regular Expression under the subject Formal system automata! At that time i was so confused with "What exactly this pattern matching is" never understood the concept just mugged up and passed!! After getting into the real world and for writing real application i have been forced to get back to REGEXP again!! Now, after writing few stuffs, i understood the basic concepts!! How powerful this pattern matching thing is!! I am giving an small example "To replace all hyphens with underscores". I have used CL-PPCRE library for this.

cl-user> (cl-ppcre:regex-replace-all "-" "foo-bar-bazz" "_") => "foo_bar_bazz"

w00t! this is really exciting!! one can do wonders by using regexp to get rid of major problems such as one of the problem we face is To split date "14/08/2008" as ("14" "08" "2008").

cl-user> (cl-ppcre:split "/" "14/08/2008") => ("28" "09" "2008")

These are few examples of REGEXP. I will add more of it soon :-)

Two months back i started hacking Lisp! Though i have been quite familiar with few programming languages such as C, C++, Python, Java. Over months i discovered that Lisp is extremely powerful functional programming language where you can treat function as data uniformly (one of the cool feature) and i am sure many more exciting stuffs i will come across during the process of learning! :-)