Rambling

Rambling: A long meandering talk with no specific topic or direction.

If I write a blog entry everytime I think about writing one, I would average about 30 per month. Right now it's less than 1 per month.

I am making good progress on my research. All I need now is magic.

There is a tiny wild flower in front of my house. Its the harbinger of spring, grows at the same place at about the same time every year ( or at least the two years I have seen it there)

Euphoria's The Road is awesome.

Euphoria's Kaise bhoolegi mera naam is awesomer. At one point of time, the song constantly kept playing in my mind for 4 days non stop. Even while I was sleeping.

Indian bowling is not as weak as it is made out to be. Still very capable of loosing the world cup.

My randomness is very carefully planned.

Interference must die.

The one with the new year

Bye Bye twentyten. Not a very nice end to an otherwise fine year and a poor start to the New Year. Reason ... I am lazy and forgetful to an extent not forgivable and I am no Sachin Tendulkar to start the new year with a ton.. This year though is promising and I already have my list up, a relatively short list. I hope this year gets better as it progresses and that I fulfill the promises. Cheers!

Andaaz aaj shayarana hai

December ki is sardi mein, 

jab thandi thandi hawa chali.

Hawa chali to ek kitab khuli.

Yaadon ki kitab, khwabon ki kitab,

thodi anban, thode jhagde,thode pyar ki kitab.

Kitab ke panno mein chhupakar, 

rakha tha ek gulab.

Gulab ki pankhudiyon ke niche tera naam nikla.

Tere naam ko dekha, 

to aankhon ke samne se,

apne ek ek pal ka karwaan nikla.

In palo ki kadiyo se, 

ulajhti sulajhti chali gai do kahaniyan.

Hawa ki sihran ne bataya,

kaise in kahinyo se apni kahani bani .

December ki is sardi mein, 

jab thandi thandi hawa chali.

Update

Finally an update :). Have been seriously busy all this time and if you're following me you would notice every time the adjective before the term "busy" gets more and more elaborate. This time I have been seriously busy and I am loving it. I have a direction and I know I am making progress. Personally a few things are shaping up and fingers crossed hopefully they will culminate into something really nice. Its always a good feeling when you have a goal and you know what you are working for rather than just languidly following a shiny object.

                A few things happened over the last few days. I finally took my first step towards learning LaTex. I wrote whole of one my homeworks in it and it was fun and am also trying to learn Beamer. :) . Before that I wrote a report on spyware for one my classes. I really enjoyed working on it and also learnt quite a few things. I have posted some interesting excerpts from that report on my other blog here. Hopefully it will be useful to people .In between all this I also gave a talk on Mahatma Gandhi at Dylan's church. While preparing for the talk I found a very interesting fact about Mahatma Gandhi. He wasn't a particularly good public speaker and this gave me a lot of heart :P .Thomas Jefferson again wasn't a very great public speaker but both of them went on to become leading public figures of their time. So people like me who fret at the very idea of speaking in front of an audience have history to look upon.

As I have said before and I reiterate I am really bad at concluding things so I'll just finish this one abruptly too. Adios!

Code Decay

Ever wrote code which was working perfectly for a while and then just magically stopped working? Well we did. One part of the implementation of our code on the mica2 motes was over by the end of the summer and that was when both I and Josh took a break. When we came back and started getting the implementation ready for a demo it refused to work. It just refused to work. We don't know what the heck happened to it. When we left it there it was working and now it doesn't. We know nobody touched it or messed with it, so what happened to it. There seems to be no reasonable explanation unless we assume that our code was radioactive and it just disintegrated by itself. Josh named it code decay; while we were away our code was rotting.

So there we were, just one hour away from a live demo with a bunch of motes and non functional code on them. We tried everything even hard coding the data "just for the demo" but all we could get was random behavior. In the end we decided to go in with the original code with the hope that it will work. Fortune favors the brave as they say, the code kind of worked, and the presentation was so good (Thanks to my advisor) that nobody noticed the demo. Well it has been crazy last 3 days and I am glad the demo is finally done with. Looking to relax on the weekend and recharge my batteries, hopefully will get the implementation up and running and perfectly fit by next week.

Failed Predictions

I was listening to a talk in the department today and the speaker started with some failed predictions in computer sciences. Man has always been making predictions about future and sometimes he fails miserably. I googled some of the predictions which went seriously wrong, not just in computer sciences but in other disciplines as well. Here’s my top 10 list.


10. Nuclear Energy is not possible says Einstein

“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” — Albert Einstein, 1932

9. H.M Warner supporting music instead of dialogues in movies said nobody would want to listen to actors talking on screen,

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" — H. M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, 1927.

8. Germs don’t cause diseases.

“Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." — Pierre Pachet, British surgeon and Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

7. Who needs Xerox machines.

" The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most." IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 1959.

6. Inflation is over.

"In all likelihood world inflation is over." -- International Monetary Fund Ceo, 1959.

5. Nobody will ever need a 32 bits operating system.

“We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” — Bill Gates

4. Rail travel is hazardous

“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” — Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859), professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College London.

3. Does your PC has 4 GB of RAM?

“No one will need more than 637 kilobytes of memory for a personal computer.” — Bill Gates

2. Everything which needs to be discovered has already been discovered.

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1900.

And the biggest fail of them all,

1. Who needs a personal computer?

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC).

Chain mail

When was the last time you received a chain mail? May be today. I received one today which prompted me to write this post, this probably is going to be the most informative thing ever on this blog.

I have been using email for over 10 years and I can say chain mail or email is one of the most annoying things on internet and specifically what gets to me is how easily people are fooled by these scammers. Chain mail is the prime example of social engineering where these scammers take advantage of people's emotions. Below I list some of the very popular forms of these emails.

1. Earn money by forwarding this email.
2. Send this email to 10 people or bad luck will befall you.
3. If you love your mother send this email to everyone on your list.
4. Sick Girl(Little Kimberly Anne is dying of a horrible tropical disease)
5. Forward this mail to everyone and Bill Gates will give you $1000.
6. E-Petitions.

Beware! The chain mails are fooling you. I will tell you why any of the above claims won't work.

Some of them are insanely stupid like the bad luck ones. Read on for the others which involve money and the e-petition ones. In the absence of information such as physical address and phone number an email cannot be binded to a person, so any name on the list can be fake and still unverifiable. Anyone can easily put a number of non existing email addresses in the list without letting anyone know. It is not entirely impossible to receive the same email multiple times, so there will be enormous amount of repetition in a list. If you ever tried to email the person who originated the chain mail, you would find that it's a fake email address. Even if it was real, the ISP instead of giving money for forwarding the chain mail will delete the account for generating so much of bad traffic.
Chain mails are unethical. Chain mailers put pictures of people in distress and play with your emotions which compel you to forward these emails. Don't do that, not only is it unethical it is also illegal. Chain mails by US mail are illegal and although chain email is not illegal, it is against the terms and conditions of any ISP. If your service provider knew you were forwarding chain emails it could delete your account at its own will.

If you want to read further please see these links.

http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/chainletterhoaxes.php
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/chain-letters.html
http://www.theburleys.net/chain.html
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/10.11.97.html

Happy E-mailing!