Wordlist for GRE

Hello people, I have made a simplistic wordlist tool for GRE preparation. I've been asked by a well-wisher to post it here, so here it is: http://wordlist.dhruvbird.com/.

Recipe cheat-sheet

Just a ready reckoner for me to look up to figure out how vegetables and lentils are made at my home.

Recipe	Fat	Rai (mustard seeds)	Jeera	Methi seeds	Hing (asafoetida)	Green chilli (whole)	Kadi patta	Haldi	Salt	Ginger paste	Dhania and jeera powder to season
Dudhi (bottle gourd)	Ghee	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Tendli	Ghee/Oil	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Karela (bitter gourd)[1]	Ghee	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Dudhi + Dal (chana or tur daal)[2]	Ghee	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Cauliflower (fool gobi)	Oil	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Cabbage (patta gobi)[3]	Oil	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Tur Daal[4]	Ghee	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

[1]: Also put jaggery(gud), kaju(cashew) and kishmish(sultanas).
[2]: Also put jaggery(gud), kokam and corriander leaves to season.
[3]: You may optionally add tomatoes halfway through cooking the cabbage, and also add jaggery(gud) if you add tomatoes.
[4]: You can also add jaggery(gud) and kokam. It gives a very good taste to the daal. If you don't want to add gud and kokam, you can add lasun(garlic) to give it a nice taste and aroma. A 3^rd option is to add tomatoes. If adding tomatoes, leave out the kokam, but you should add jaggery and may optionally add garlic.

Online hindi dictionary

I've been trying to find an online hindi dictionary where I can enter the text in english, and the system transcribes it and searches for the meaning. However, the best results I have got are by using google's transliteration tool(http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic) followed by a google search for the resulting word.
That apart, this site: http://www.websters-dictionary-online.org/ seems to have a lot of words. Make sure you choose the "non-english" option when you search.

Lip-smacking Rasgulla recipe

I have tried for long to make rasgullas that taste like the ones I had a Ganguram's in Kolkata. I tried buying rasgullas from many shops, and tried making on my own in the hope of being able to reproduce that taste and texture that had lulled me into have a lot many Rasgullas that rainy day in Kolkata, but to no avail. None came even a close second.... Then, I read somewhere the milk that is curdled should be curdled slowly, taking care not to shock it, so I decided to try it out.... The rest is history....

The secret of making good, no GREAT tasting rasgullas is in what milk you use and how you go about curdling it and then processing it. Every step is very important, but I wasn't able to get the 2^nd one right for quite a while. I finally tasted success (and moth-watering rasgullas) after a long time yesterday. I'll mention how you can go about reproducing them at home....

1. Buy cow's milk for making rasgullas. 3.5% to 6.0% fat content is alright. Do not get low fat milk


2. Boil it till about 10% of it boils off, taking care to not let it stick to the vessel. To ensure that, keep stirring as you boil it


3. For 1 litre of milk, you will need about 2-3 tsp of vinegar or about ³/₄^th of a lime's juice. IMPORTANT: Dilute this juice in about 1 cup(240ml) of water


4. Now, slowly keep adding this juice to the boiling milk, making sure to stir all the time. You can add about ¹/₄^th every time, and stir for a minute. Do this about 4 times, and keep stirring and heating the milk on a low-medium flame. The milk should continuously keep curdling


5. The milk is completely curdled when it separates into while solid and a greenish liquid


6. Make sure that you do this curdling VERY VERY slowly, otherwise the paneer will result in rubbery rasgullas


7. Now, separate the solid part(paneer) using a muslin cloth and squeeze out as much water as your possibly can. You can wash the paneer to remove the acidic part and squeeze out again, as much water content as you can


8. Let this paneer dry up for about 30-45mins


9. Now, you can follow any standard rasgulla recipe that tells you to knead the dough, form balls and cook them in boiling sugar syrup. However, I would like to clarify a few things


10. The ratio of sugar:water in the boiling syrup should be 1:6 or lesser. I have heard some people boil the paneer balls in just water


11. Make sure you roll the paneer balls tight and their surface is smooth. You can smear a bit of ghee(clarified butter) on your hands while rolling to ensure that they don't stick to your palm, and result in smooth balls

Use these rasgullas as rasgullas by dipping them in 1:2(sugar:water) syrup or by squeezing out the water(on cooling) and dipping them in rabri(to make yummy rasmalai!!!!)

Some lessons learnt

I have been working closely with this person called "Ramki", and have learnt a lot of interesting things from him that I wish to share. I don't know if I'll keep appending them to this post or create a new one each time. I guess it depends on my mood and the context and other such stuff....

1. Never use filenames or variable names in an application that have the name of the product in it. If you ever decide to change the name of the application, you'll have to change all those file and variable names too. This can be a nightmare.


2. When creating database tables which hold the email address of the user, also use a unique user ID. This allows users to change their email IDs when they please. If you use the email ID as the primary key(like how I was going to), it would not allow a change of email address in a cheap fashion. You would probably have to do an ON UPDATE CASCADE, etc.... and it would be quite an expensive operation.

Sita Sings The Blues

I have to start off by saying that "Sita Sings The Blues" has to be one of the most influential movie I have ever seen. In the sense that it has prompted me to notice and think about a lot of things, and I think especially since I am from India.

There are many aspects of the movie I really like and I'll try talking about each one in as much detail as I feel necessary.

• Lots of things have been left to the imagination of the audience even though a lot many have been explained by way of the random conversations that happen between the 3 narrators in the movie. I think it was very natural to make them say the things that they did, and the way that they casually argue with each other. Also, the conversations weren't casual enough to call them loose.


• The music given is quite apt and makes you want to listen to it more often. The title track "Sita in Space" is trance-like in nature and makes use of instruments that sound Indian as well. I felt that the way Lord Rama is first shown being waited upon by Sita and the last scene which has the same scene with the roles reversed is quite an outstanding and representative of a lot of things.


• The way that all the characters and their relationships to each other are shown upfront is something really neat. There have been times when I've seen movies and only towards the end have I fully understood how each of the characters are related to each other(when the story depended upon the viewer knowing these relationships up front).


• I found the scene is which Kaikayee is shown to be a nurse taking care of Raja Dashrath quite hilarious.


• There is another scene in which Nina is shown almost completely undressed, sleeping by her husband's side and her husband wants nothing to do with her when we hear a dog barking in the background. This was a scene that I was most impressed by because it felt so real, since that is exactly what I hear at many places(a dog barking in the night time). The level of attention to detail at places in the movie is really commendable!

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This is a post in progress, and I shall keep updating it regularly.... Till then, you can watch the movie for free here. The song "Sita In Space" is really nice....

Garlic and Herb Chapati

As always, I'm a bit lazy and don't want to spend time baking bread(it is a very long and drawn out process). However I felt like having focaccia(yes the yummy bread with herbs, garlic and loooots of olive oil), so I decided to make a similarly flavoured chapati and see how it turns out.

Ingredients:

Whole Wheat Flour:	2 cups + more for dusting
Water:	Enough to make a really hard dough(we'll soften it up using lots of Olive Oil!!)
Softened Salted Butter:	5 Tbsp
The Best Extra Virgin Olive Oil that you can get your hands on and afford:	5 Tbsp
Mixed Dried Herbs(Parsley, Basil, Oregano, Rosemary, Thyme):	1-2 Tbsp
Salt:	1/4 tsp or to taste
Fresh Garlic Paste(it needs to be FRESH!!):	of about 10 cloves
An appetite:	as much as you can squeeze in!!

Procedure:

1. Make a very hard dough from the whole wheat flour, water, herbs and garlic paste(take a really deep sniff, close your eyes, and savour the smell for a while).



2. Use all the Olive Oil and mix it with the dough to make it hard(very hard to hard).



3. Use this dough to make about 8-10 portions for rolling out.



4. Keep tava(pan) for heating up on a slow flame. This will ensure that your tava is heated up evenly and your chapati won't get burnt or cooked unevenly.



5. Roll out the chapati apply dusting flour regularly to prevent it from sticking. Roll out slightly thicker than standard chapatis because we have garlic and herbs in the dough. They may cause the chapati to puncture if we roll it out too thin. If the chapati gets punctured, then it won't balloon like we want it to.



6. Cook the first size on a slow flame on the tava just until small boils begin to appear on the top surface.



7. Turn the chapati over and cook on medium flame, turning the chapati so that the sides are cooked well. Always keep the sides in the center of the flame. The center of the chapati will get cooked well automatically. Now, larger boils will appear on the surface, and the under-surface will have brown spots on it.



8. Make the flame high, remove the chapati from the tava quickly, remove the tava from the stove and turn the chapati up-side-down on the direct flame. Watch it balloon!!!! (if you've done everything well till now. It took me a month and lots of flat chapatis to get to this stage).



9. Turn it around for just 1 second(or for symmetry as Appu would put it).



10. Take it off the flame and apply a little of the melted butter while it is still steaming hot.... Smell it again and again till you think you've attained nirvana....



11. Eat it!!!!

YAVFS

Yet Another Versioning File System....

I've been reading about Versioning and Snapshoting File Systems and here is a mini-dump of what I think so far. Please correct me if I'm mistaken....

I saw a few file systems with slightly more than a cursory glance, and here are my comments:

1. ext3cow: This is very close to what I have in mind for a versioning and continuous snapshoting file system. However, it does not agree with some of my "requirements of a versioning and continuous snapshoting file system"(below).


2. Elephant File System: This is probably one of the earlier snapshoting/versioning file systems and has been implemented on BSD. It is modeled on BSD's FFS. It does a great job of doing what it says it does. I like everything about it except that I can't use it on Linux.


3. NetApp's WAFL: This again is mainly solving a different problem, that of providing very fast and safe storage on a storage appliance. To the best of my knowledge, you need to trigger a snapshot(though the process itself does not take more than a few seconds), and the number of snapshots are restricted to a fixed number(32 or 256). This may be done using hourly cron jobs, etc.... The interface of getting previous versions of files is a little clumsy though.

Requirements of a Versioning and Continuous Snapshoting file system:

1. It should be able to store a large number of versions of files and directories alike


2. It should be able to do so very fast and without any user intervention. ie. Snapshoting should not be user-triggered, but should be done automatically on every close()


3. You should not need to re-compile the kernel to get this functionality


4. You should be able to apply this to a specific directory root. This means that you should be able to snapshot parts of your directory tree. You should not incur a performance penalty for accessing file out of this region of interest


5. You should have policies for controlling which file to snapshot and version files based on file attributes such as size, name, MIME type, etc....


6. The interface for accessing continuous-in-time file versions should be very clean and fairly intuitive, and it should be fairly easy to write tools around it so that GUI/web-based access can be enabled


7. You should be able to enable this functionality on any file system(and not require to re-format the partition on which you wish to enable it)


8. You should be able to disable this operation at any point in time and get back to accessing the most recent versions of the versioned files using the earlier access methods without any performance penalty. ie. Users should be able to turn on and off this functionality at will and it should allow users to proof this on real workloads without them having to make any drastic changes in their environments


9. The operations performed should be safe, and should not result in data corruption


10. The system should be easy to install and set up

I have in mind something that satisfies the requirements mentioned above....