Tech insights

  Plan 9 is an Operating System (OS) from Bell Labs which is a successor to UNIX. It builds on the learnings from the previous Operating systems. Network computing and graphics is an integral part of the OS rather than an afterthought. It is modular and portable - it comes with a cross compiler . It is available, under MIT License , which anybody can use, learn and tweak. Features Everything is a file. Small Kernel:  Around 5MB size which can be built in under 2 minutes.  Singular Grid: All the computers running Plan 9 OS and connected together act like a singular grid. So there's no need for remote access solutions like VNC or RDP. This cool video shows a small glimpse of the possibilities. Process Isolation: Processes run within their own namespaces and are isolated from each other. So you can run rio (the window manager) within rio. Applications like Browsers don't need complicated sandboxing. And a crashing program is unlikely to bring down the OS. No DLL Hell : ...

Traditionally, Operating Systems (OS) have had folders as an organization entity for collection of files. Documents, Videos, Photos and Downloads folders cover most of the use-cases. However, if you have used it for some length of time, you'll realize it is not enough. For instance, this blog post is a collection of text, images, videos and web URLs. And while working on this idea, I need all of these at my disposal. Or atleast an easy way to access all these related resources. That's when it clicked to me why some people are gung-ho about org-mode ! Often, it's better to organize files around ideas rather than file types. For a beginner, org-mode might seem daunting. I myself ignored it completely till few days back. Don't worry about learning the syntax in depth. Even if you are not using the advanced features, there's lot to be gained. Here's complete list of types of links you can store in a text file and access it using (org-open-at-point) . ( No...

  Exploring some alternative ideas in GNU Emacs. Stock Heatmap Index (left) and Sector (right) performance heatmap   The circle radius is proportional to the weight of the stock in the index. The color is a range between green, white and red based on the price movement. This uses circle packing . ;; For drawing tooltip, additional point attributes are required. Properties old-x and old-y are used internally. ;; fill    - Circle color ;; title  - Circle label (Use \n for new line) ;; href - Link ;; text  - Tooltip text (Use \n for new line) (defstruct point x y r old-x old-y fill title href text)   ;; Image is an SVG image. (graph-draw-tree root image)