About Me

Hi! I am Susam Pal. Welcome to my website. This page provides a brief introduction about me and this website.

I am a software engineer by profession. I have a keen interest in free and open source software. My first non-trivial contribution to open source was NUTCH-559 in 2007. That contribution added support for various authentication schemes to Apache Nutch, an open source web crawler. I have remained active in the open source communities since then. I also develop and maintain a few open source projects of my own at github.com/susam. For a list of my projects, see my open source work details.

When not involved with technology, I like reading books, playing the piano, and travelling.

IRC

I am usually online as my IRC nick susam on Libera IRC. I hang out at various channels like #algorithms, #commonlisp, #emacs, #python, etc.

The #algorithms channel was founded by me first on Freenode in 2007 when there was no such channel dedicated to the subject of algorithms. It started as a tiny community of about 10 members from the ##math channel and then gradually grew to have over 200 members within a few years. The channel was then migrated to Libera in 2021.

Website

This website is generated using a Common Lisp program. Most of this website is static in nature. The comment form on this website is served dynamically using a tiny web server program written in Common Lisp. See github.com/susam/susam.net for the source code of this website.

Every line of HTML and CSS that makes this website is handcrafted. The primary copy of this website is hosted at susam.net. A mirror of the website is hosted at susam.github.io.

This website began its life as an intranet portal running on an intranet server out of my dorm room during my university days back in 2001-2005. That intranet server was named maze. I used to run that server for my fellow students in our university's computer network. The server used to host an FTP server and an HTTP portal for mathematical puzzles, technical articles, free software downloads, and audio/video streaming. While that intranet portal and its source code written in Classic ASP are now long gone, some of its content still survives on this website.

Browse

The home page of this website presents my primary blog. I write about technology, mathematics, and other miscellaneous topics on this blog. The posts on my primary blog often tend to be long-form, involved, and detailed. They sometimes take considerable time to write and publish. As a result, the interval between two posts on this blog can range from several weeks to months.

I also archive notes, code, and various miscellaneous files on other sections of this website that I update more frequently than my primary blog. Visit links.html to find quick links to my primary blog as well as other sections of this website.

Colours

This website supports both light and dark colour schemes. The information box below shows the colour scheme selected right now.

The light colour scheme is active currently.

The dark colour scheme is active currently.

If you would like to browse this website using the opposite colour scheme, please check if your operating system or web browser supports changing the preferred colour scheme. Most modern operating systems do support it.

Name

I have been told many times that my name, "Susam", is a little unusual which makes it difficult for others to figure how to pronounce it. It is pronounced almost like the English words "sue sum" (/suːsʌm/). However you may call my name however you find most natural, convenient, or intuitive. I do not mind mispronunciations of my name at all whatsoever.