Yantrakaal

The Google App Suite ( or G-Suite) of products is a powerful and free alternative to the traditional Office Suite and includes among others Docs, Sheets and Slides. Google Sheets offers full spreadsheet functionality and in this post and sample, we show how data stored in Google Sheets spreadsheets can be accessed with SQL. This post assumes that the reader is familar with standard spreadsheet terms like sheet, range and functions. Google Script The primary programming language used here is Google App Script, a javascript look alike that can be used to enhance and extend G-Suite products. Google script can also be interleaved with traditional HTML / CSS / JavaScript to create an elegant user interface as is shown in this example. A Google Script project sits in the Google Drive just like any other Sheet, Doc or Slides and consists of code in a code.gs file along with html files for the interface. Google Script functionality can be built into other Google products but in this exam...

My presentation on Quantum Computers at the Cypher 2017 conference in Bangalore on 21 September 2017 more information about Quantum Computers is available in an earlier blog post .

The weekend of 8th - 10th July 2017 was a little different from most other weekends. First, late on Friday night, the Airtel network in the NCR region went down because of a data corruption in one of their critical computers. Then, and the exact time is not known, someone hacked, or illegally accessed, the Jio customer database, retrieved confidential identity data about customers, including phone and Aadhaar numbers, and published the same on a public website. Finally, and again the exact time is not known, something unpleasant happened to the National Stock Exchange computers so that when the market opened on Monday morning, nobody could trade for almost the entire day. It is possible that these three events were independent, random events but as Goldfinger says, in Ian Fleming’s eponymous novel, “ Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action. " So let us not have any delusions about incompetence or equipment malfunction. This was a cyber...

Rapid advances in machine learning and the spectacular success of artificial intelligence software in, say, self-driving cars, voice recognition and chatbots for customer service, is sending shivers of anxiety through IT employees. The havoc that robots and automation technology has played with the jobs of blue collared workers on the shop floor, is now travelling upward into white collar offices and not a day passes without a new report about automation eliminating jobs. In India, the IT sector -- that includes actual software developers, application maintenance staff, tech-support personnel and BPO call centre operators -- seems to be particularly vulnerable and it is no secret that a sense of doom and gloom hangs over the cubicles and around coffee machines in large and small IT companies. To make matters worse, some companies have started to shed mid-level people managers, who have stopped writing code for years,  and even senior managers who give poor returns of billability ...

Facebook is the mythical 800-lb gorilla in the media world that, as the original joke goes, “sits down wherever it wants to”. With 1.2 billion pairs of eyeballs eyeing it every day, it has an audience greater than any American, European or Asian TV news network, newspaper or online news portal. This immense reach also makes it the most effective medium of entertainment. In societies where it has crossed a critical threshold of penetration, it has become the most potent mobilising force in politics and all this eventually translates into Facebook being one of the  most valuable companies in the world. image borrowed from https://mymuddledmind.blog / We know that information is power. We also know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Should we be wary of Facebook? Consider the following ... In the Foundation series of iconic science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, we have  the villain, a mutant psychopath called the Mule, using popular musical co...

As an erstwhile DBA, a long time user and a great admirer of the SQL language -- that has stood the test of time for the last 30 years -- I have always sought to use SQL in many useful ways. In an earlier post , I had shown how SQL can be used to solve a classic data science problem, namely Clustering, using the K-Means algorithm and today, I demonstrate how SQL can be used to process OLAP data cubes and generate the popular cross-tabs table. Data cubes, or OLAP cubes, are a way to store historic data using the dimensional model, as opposed to the relational or 3rd normal form model. These data cubes can be "sliced" and "diced" to reveal data relevant to particular dimensions. Because of the immense popularity and ubiquity of relational databases, like Oracle and MySQL, data in the dimensional model is routinely stored in relational tables and retrieved -- by slicing and dicing the cube -- using standard SQL constructs like the WHERE clause. This is called Relat...

Quantum mechanics is a subject that has the strange property of simultaneously being logically rigorous and yet completely counterintuitive. So much so, that even a towering intellect like Einstein could never bring himself to accept its principles even though products based on the same exist all around us. The earliest oddity, identified by Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics is about a hypothetical cat that is neither dead nor alive until someone actually observes it. A similar oddity is that of quantum entanglement, where the behaviour of one particle is instantly affected by the behaviour of another particle, however distant it may be -- an example of “spooky” action-at-a-distance. Explaining these phenomena is beyond the scope and temerity of this article and so the reader would have to accept them here in good, almost religious, faith and carry on with the belief that such phenomenon has been observed and explained by scientists under the most rigorous experime...