Age of Reason

Random musing of books and stuff I am reading.

2004/12/14

Books I am reading - King John ..

I never seem to get down to write about books I am reading.

King John by Shakespeare. I was following the Cambridge Shakespeare by John Dover Wilson. Yesterday I switched to the Folgers edition, since I like the notes on the side and the smaller size.

The play is never mentioned in recent times,
because it religiously deals with power and
politics, and maybe too close to reality.
The Protagonist Bastid saves the
day for England while John wavers.
It has other strange characters like
the Prophet of Pomfret and Lord Bigot.

See http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/kingjohn
and http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/history/kingjohn.html

Also reading Dan Gusfield's classic. Aho Corasick's algorithm is cute, and now I can see why agrep is blindingly fast. Bit-Shift-Anding is kind of multiplication, and that leads to FFTing the bits in m.log(m) time, interesting. So far, so good. Gusfield is great writer, his book could be taught to Btechs, though the price is steep at ~$50.

The third book I am reading is R.K.Narayan's "World of Nagaraj", not much happening, but that is the way I like my novels to be. I finished "Waiting for Mahatama" last month, very touching. The book gives a personal view of South India in 1940s thru the eyes of Sriram, that no history book can match.

I am once again reading Hardi's book, stiring a healthy mix verilog and vhdl for the hardware debugger's compiler.

Agrep got me thinking, that vim needs a dynamic spell check against a dictionary or words in current buffer. String searching can be very fast, especially the bit-shift-and algorithms of agrep. The other option is dynamically lookup esoteric words in google as I type. For example, what is the Latin name of pipal tree in Mumbai.

I try to cross check proper names when I am photo blogging.

Usually I search in a tabbed window of Opera in text mode. Today I tried wget google and got back over-htmlized unreadable text. That's when I found google apis - not fast enough to complete as I type, but certainly plug-able into emacs and gvim to do lazy-lookups in a secondary buffer, while I type ahead. The CPU and network capacity and already there.

- M.

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