The Rise of AI

 It has been a while since I blogged. And in the meanwhile we have seen a verity of AI tools cropping up especially in the field of entertainment (videos and audio/music). Will slowly get back to blogging... hang in there... 

The legend - SPB - passes away!

SPB succumbed to issues following COVID-19. He was the best singer I have ever heard. He changed the South Indian movie songs (along with Ilayaraja of course). He has sung 40,000+ songs which means in 54  years he must have recorded roughly about 3 songs a day! Wow!

RIP - SPB!

Hated the new movie - Avengers: Infinity War

I was expecting a lot after learning that about $300MM was sunk in producing this.
A few years ago, I had said the Mission Impossible was disappointing but after seeing Infinity War, I would definitely eat my words. MI was quite better indeed!
To me a movie is not just pretty camera work or music - it is story in the center and creative expression all along. I didn't find any of these. In fact it was really boring to sit through.
The screenplay was disappointing - no twists and no punches. The writers should be made to watch Charlie Chaplin's classics first and then cartoons like Wreck it Ralph to understand how to touch the audience! Didn't they know about the hero's journey? What about building anticipation?
Did these directors ever watch the standoff between Clint Eastwood and Lee van Cleef? With so many super heroes lined up there is not even a single scene to cheer the underdogs.
This is poor movie making on the whole. Avengers: Infinity War is one of the worse movies I had ever seen.
Note: I am not affiliated with anyone. these are my views alone.

Notification about European Union Cookies

Today I noticed the following message when I was blogging:

Then I looked around to understand what this means and if my blog-site confirms to this and found this: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/blogger/0HBkufYRymQ;context-place=topicsearchin/blogger/cookies

So I went to GeoPeeker and checked if my site shows up find in EU - and sure it was fine.

The Art of Movie Editing

Here I am after a long break... 

Here is a classic book by Walter Murch that every movie maker should read "In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing"

Here is one important idea from his book:

http://videoandfilmmaker.com/wp/index.php/tutorials/film-editing-walter-murchs-rule-6/

Sorting algorithms

I know it has been a while since I blogged last. I really wanted to post something on movies but I'm going to do something really crazy. This is not a post on movies or movie techniques. It is on sorting algorithms. I have been seeing so many sorting algorithms like bubble sort, quicksort, merge sort, heap sort and so on. And as you probably know the complexities of these algorithms are measured in a certain notation. It is called the big O notation. For example bubble sort is of complexity O(n^2). The complexities of other algorithms are O(n log n). Is it not possible to come up with an algorithm with complexity O(n)? I think I might have just come up with one such  algorithm. Here is it:

This works best if the array to be sorted does not have huge gaps. 

1. Put each element from the array in an hashmap (key set to the value of the array element and value set to the number of times it occurs in the input array). 

2.  While doing the above step remember the smallest value and the biggest value.

3. Once that is done loop through from the smallest value to the biggest value that you remembered and print the loop index if that index is in the hashmap. 

Now tell me, is it not an O(n) implementation? Someone please tell me that i am wrong. 

I am going to call this "Yash sort" 😇 I am super excited ...

Here is a simple implementation [Am not handling duplicate values in this implementation because that would lead you to think that it is O(n2)]:

private static int[] yashSort(int[] ip) {

        HashSet h = new HashSet();

        int min = Integer.MAX_VALUE, max = Integer.MIN_VALUE;

        for (int i = 0; i < ip.length; i++) {

            if (min > ip[i]) min = ip[i];

            if (max < ip[i]) max = ip[i];

            h.add(Integer.valueOf(ip[i]));

        }

        int tmp =0;

        for (int i = min; i <= max; i++) {

            if (h.contains(Integer.valueOf(i))) {

                    ip[tmp++] = i;

            }

        }

        return(ip);

    }

Cheers!

Free tool to help writers!

Have you seen this?
http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/
They say that this is a free tool to write interactive stories. Have you tried it? Do you think it is useful?
Here is a sample: https://writer.inklestudios.com/stories/musgraveritual and here is a tutorial!