Monday, February 28, 2005

Interesting puzzles - 4

This was one of the first question they asked during ragging at college :)

A person is on a round the world trip on a hot air balloon and at 3 random points of his journey he drops a ball. What is the probablity that all the 3 balls are on the same hemisphere?

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

p2p Ramblings...

P2P software has caught my interest these days (the techy aspects, not file sharing). The primary reason being skype, that I have started using recently to talk to my brother in US. The quality of voice is *much much* better than an ordinary phone. I can even hear the other party typing :) and whats more - computer to computer is free ! With 70+ million downloads, I wonder why it has not being bought over by the biggies yet :)

Been browsing around reading up on related stuff and found these with really nice ideas:

How ants find their food
P2P communication over NATs/firewalls

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Interesting puzzles - 3

1000 people are standing in a circle. The thought police starts killing them alternately till just one is left. Who will be the remaining one? Solve it for a general N.

Elegant solutions get more marks :) [No induction please :)]

eg. if N = 5, ppl get killed in the following order 2 (skip 3),4 (skip 5),1 (skip 3 since 2 is longer there), 5. The survivor is 3.

Monday, February 07, 2005

BSNL Broadband 2

Turns out my previous blog on BSNL was overly pessimistic :). I have bsnl broadband up and running on my home machine now. Here's what needed to be done to get it working:

1. Go to a local office and apply for a connection (forget online)
2. They will call you in a couple of weeks informing that if you pay up, u will get a connection. Pay up
3. They will come and install the connection in a week or so. Stay around in case they have technical difficulties with your particular machine (actually just plugging a couple of cables and getting ur userid ...)

It is up almost always and I am pretty happy with the connection so far (256kbps).