Algorithms beyond school

I was working on a list of algorithms a new college graduate ought to know to either

• Do well in an interview
• Make quick progress through the learning curve

Here is the list I have so far, I would appreciate comments on what else to add

1. Population Counting
2. Multi-precision Arithmetic
3. Fast Fourier Transform
4. Fast Prime Number Generation
5. Quicksort
6. Union-Find
7. String searching (KMP, Regular Expressions)
8. Polynomial Multiplication
9. Calculation of Pi
10. 8 Queens Problem
11. Instance of a turing machine simulation
12. Tries
13. Radix Tree
14. Red Black Tree
15. Huffman's algorithm
16. Graphs - DFS, BFS
17. Graphs - Bipartite
18. Minimum Spanning Tree
19. Hashing algorithms
20. Linear programming?
21. Classes of problems - P/NP/?
22. Vertex Cover?
23. Synchronization (locks/mutex/spin locks)
24. Lockless algorithms

How does the list look?

Power of programming - online

An article of mine got posted online, check out http://www.linuxforu.com/2012/06/power-programming-bitwise-tips-tricks/

A night that stole more than just my sleep

What a night.. I lost all useful data on my desktop due to (a) lack of sleep (b) eagerness to install Fedora 17 Beta. How this happened is a long story, but here is the sequence of events

1. I saw Fedora 17 Beta (got excited with the new release features)
2. Got excited and upgraded my Fedora 15 (that I had maintained since Fedora 10 and kept doing upgrades) to Fedora 17
3. Neither ATI proprietary nor the open source drivers work
4. I decide to reinstall Fedora - Except that I used my home partition as root partition. I've lost all my scanned documents, my open source repositories (so many of them) :(. My programming, my SDK's, my projects, my articles, my documents, my downloads... I am going to cry. Moral of the story, backup is not for dummies, it is for everyone! Anyway, I am too arrogant to backup, even now :) Leave me alone!
5. On the reinstalled partition, I am back to (c)
6. Today, after extensive debugging I find out all my xorg.conf hacks don't work -- why? Apparently X has gotten smarter and needs additional options to enable specific monitor sections in xorg.conf to a specific output. By default all my configuration was being applied to my HDMI output.
7. I figure it out, fix the display and now I am back to starting off from lot of empty space and this post.
8. Thank god, I use some tools to keep my web data in sync and have backup of some key things (Oh! come on, everyone knows I was lying.. I do maintain backups on USB sticks once in a while, but not enough to stop complaining, yes I still lost all my data). Confused?

There you have it, thanks for reading my rant.. now back to work!

Poem of Physics

Oh! I hope you see my plight
Why does light travel at the speed of light
Which almost seems infinite!
When I think of infinite, I think of god
Does he hide,
Like the infinite?
Hidden in corners, exposed by the equations right
I can see the infinite, but not his might
In a circle so beautiful, like the zero
But, yes sometimes I wish I never know
For its the unknown that makes us go

-- Balbir Singh

Wish list of books - need suggestions

I've got a big list of books that I own. Here is what I intend to purchase in the next set. I am looking for suggestions on what would make useful reading? I am open to all categories of fiction/non-fiction/technical books. It would help if you point me to a review or provide me your own review comments

Enumerative Combinatorics - volume 1 (second edition)

The second edition is out and available at math.mit.edu/~rstan/ec/ec1.pdf


The book is extremely well written, although I've forgotten and probably never read a few of the topics mentioned in chapter 1, like one dimensional complete local ring. From where I stand at the moment, completing chapter 1 and understanding the twelve fold way will be quite an accomplishment :)


Do checkout the book. The first chapter is 221 pages with 203 exercises at the end.