Praveen's Blog

An Eternal Quest for Incremental Improvement

One of the most common interview questions for software professionals is "How do you find a loop in a singly linked list?". Most of the people tend to think in the recursive way to solve this problem. The truth is that the most optimal solution for this problem lies out ...


Finally, the long time pending task of getting a more visually pleasing theme for the journal is over. I have taken up one of an existing Wordpress theme and modified it to suit my needs. This theme looks neat for me in my Mozilla Firefox 1.5 on Linux. I ...


I might move this site to another host soon. You may see some flakieness.


A few months back we were introduced to the a subset of eXtreme Programming practices like Pair Programming and Test Driven Development. At the beginning I was in the impression that Pair Programming will not work out well for my style of programming. But slowly, I am leaning more towards ...


One of the recent jokes that I have come across on abscent mindedness is quite interesting.

An elderly couple had dinner at another couple''s house and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.

The two elderly gentlemen were talking, and one said, "Last night ...


I have bought a new virtual server from VPSLink a couple of days back. It runs OpenVZ for virtualization. It provides me with 20GB of hard disk space, 512MB of RAM running on a Intel Xeon processor. Looks like a bit less for an extensive server. I have associated the ...


For all those who are not able to get up from thier morning sleep where alarms are no use for them, there is a new product called Pattern clock. This clock won't turn off the alarm unless you repeat a Simon-like pattern of lights by pressing a series of ...


When you are behind a HTTP proxy and you want to SSH to a server on the Internet, the best choice is to use corkscrew. After installing corkscrew in your PATH, the SSH command goes like this.

# ssh -o "ProxyCommand corkscrew <Proxy server> <Proxy port> %h %p" <SSH server>

In C, sometimes you want to write a C pre-processor macro that takes variable length arguments. Let me give you a practical requirement example. The requirement is that a debug log function needs to be written that takes format string and the variables as arguments and produce a debug log ...


Gnome is my all-time favourite desktop. I use Gnome 2.14 on my Debian SID. Yesterday night I did an upgrade and I think due to some of the packages that were pulled in yesterday, my Gnome won't start today morning. When I logged in from the GDM console ...