Shriphani’s Weblog

I recently featured in the comments of Ms. Sramana Mitra’s blog. Sramana as you all know is an entrepreneur who did cool stuff after college. She went to Smith College for a B.S. and to MIT ( !!!! ) for an M.S. in EECS ( !!!! ). I will be there in 4 years don’t worry.

If you have noticed, I haven’t posted a lot in the past few days. The reason is that I am brushing up on my Django skills which have rusted in the past few months. After that I plan to creep back into the FOSS world but till I get something done, I won’t put it up here and that is my policy.

Instead, let me talk of some cool memories that revisited me when I was disturbing the one inch thick dust layer in my room by trying to bring about an order. I happened to come across a booklet that I had loved reading a few years back when I was recovering from my accident - The “Post’s Machine” by V. A. Uspensky.

Tears just welled into my eyes when I saw the tiny booklet, a part of the extremely coveted “Little Mathematics Library”. Indeed, this is such an excellent book on such a simple toy - the Post’s Machine. The author mentioned concepts like programming, algorithms etc, all through an instruction set peculiar to the Post’s Machine which I can still remember to be:

This book had approximately 30 problems I think and I had extreme fun solving each one of these. Well, if the field of Computer Science has to pursue some aggressive methods to improve dwindling numbers of searches, this priceless booklet might just be the right tool to use.

I am pretty sure that this was the book that got me interested in Computer Science. For those of you who can grab this booklet, I am sure you will enjoy it.