The Corner of Mads

While searching for optimal ways to parallelize a transitive closure problem, I came across the following sentence by Donald Knuth:

"Due to the present supply and demand in computer science, I am fortunate enough to be able to pick just about any place I want to go; but there are several good places and it’s quite a dilemma to decide what I should do. I believe the four places that are now uppermost in my mind are Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, and Caltech (in that order). I expect to take about a year before I make up my mind, with Jill’s help"

I wonder how the world of Computer Science would have changed if Knuth (and Floyd) had not gone to Stanford (this is circa 1967). Oh well.

I must say that this Microsoft press release is more ominous from what it does not say rather than the actual withdrawing of the offer. I personally know people both in Redmond and in Sunnyvale who are celebrating.

My thoughts, however, turn to the folks in Mountain View who are celebrating. To mix metaphors, the Dúnedain (the men of the North) could have turned up and helped. The corsairs are gathering, and an assault is imminent.

"But clearly a deal is not to be."

Caveat: this is mostly documentation for future references....

The last weekend was spent in Seattle (albeit, blissfully). Monday morning began at 5am with a dreary drive that was very depressing when I was all alone. On Monday evening, after a really long and tiring day, a good friend and classmate took me out to dinner. I was at dinner when US Airways calls to let me know that part of my redeye travel back to Ithaca was canceled. Note to self, US Airways sucks so bad.... avoid at all costs.

Soon, I was on a flight that left at 11pm from Seattle, went to Washington (7:10am!), then from there to NYC (8:30am) and then to Ithaca(12pm). Given that I had a fairly large project submission due midnight, I was worried about how long I would have to run the work (5 moderately complex Hadoop aggregations on ~ 1.3GB of data using Amazon EC2 and S3). To make my life more miserable, the Ithaca flight was also delayed and I reached home only at 2:30pm in the afternoon.

I had developed most of the Java code and tested it on only local data on a single machine last week. However, I was expecting a crazy nightmare of a day that would not finish until midnight. For some strange reason, it all just worked (TM). I was so uncomfortable with the code working that I tested it more severely for correctness. In fact, given that I had nothing to do when it was running, I ended up cleaning my room and doing all manner of things that I had been putting off (watching Netflix movies for example). I submitted the assignment at 10:30pm. Well, the grades (when they finally come out) will be the final word on how this submission went.

I haven't slept comfortably for 42 intense hours, am mentally exhausted and just bone tired. But, I'm acutely aware of my blessings. Today, my life could have been a lot worse.

When confronted with a bout of homesickness, I turn to trusted weapons to chase away all the melancholy and leave me with a clear nose and happy memories:

• MTR's Mulligatawny soup - A tangy, peppery, lentil-based soup
• Haldiram's Alu Bhujia - Spicy potato noodles with a hint of chaat in them.
• VahChef - this is an Indian chef (Sanjay Thumma) based out of Chicago who puts up recipes on Youtube.

If you are looking for an interesting way to spend time (when full with good food, don't do this when you are hungry), his cooking videos are a lot of fun.

It is nearly exactly a year to the day that I realized how much I love Learning.

Amidst the controversy over dilbert.com going flash, I found this:





Reminds me of the resistance to our standup sit down meetings in the morning (read, 11am!). I still think scrum works, just it is difficult to do with a death march. I would want to code in a scrum environment.

And no, I'm not just saying that scrum works because I was the PHB in question.

I'm writing this post at 3:30 with the prospect of a hurried tiny restless sleep before I head back to more work. Some nights things work out. Some night they go from bad to horrifingly bad. Thankfully, no permanent damage was sustained.

Just that I have no sleep on a really long and tiring day. Onward and upward. One more month to go.

Something that deponti wrote about recently made me think about something that had been bubbling in my mind. Is it just me, or is the New York Times slant on India visible to other folks as well?

The context is that every time there is a front page article on India, it is nearly uniformly negative. So much so, that when I open the paper in the morning, if there's a mention of India, I inevitably avoid reading the article till later at night. Consider the following:

• Push for Education Yields Little for India's Poor

• New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot and Sweaty in India

• World Banker And His Cash Return Home

• Losing an Edge, Japanese Envy India's Schools

• The Ink Fades on a Profession As India Rushes to Modernize

• Careers Give India's Women New Independence

What a time to be in, when a recommendation from a course website is something that I want to blog about. My large scale web information course recommended the article as a "brutal criticism of MapReduce that is an interesting read".

The authors (note: Micheal Stonebraker has made too much money and therefore too many enemies) after getting deluged with comments, respond back to the comments on their first post with a fairly coherent response.

I really agree with their last point. How little knowledge is passed from generation to generation is pretty surprising and scary. Albeit, I've seen reimplementing the wheel several times.

Now, I hope I know better.

Cornell's Bhangra festival, Pao Bhangra was held on Saturday April 7. I walked in expecting to some a few curious folks, but it turned out that nearly 2000+ people showed up. I was shocked to see the percentage of non Indians both in the audience as well as in the various groups who performed. An awesome slideshow of some very good photographs is available via the Cornell Daily Sun website.

As they try very hard to stay traditional, there was little to no fusion or other experimentation. Apart from Absolute Zero, a local breakdance group that came in at the break, all the other teams performed (to me atleast) traditionally.

Some of the folks in this video are good friends of mine, but this cricket video is put together so well that it's just worth it for the production value:





The advantages of a Mac, it makes productions so professional...

Wandering around University of Washington's campus in Seattle with a friend, I came across the most beautiful courtyard of cherry blossoms. Having watched The Last Samurai innumerable number of times with harish, I instantly thought of him. In many ways, harish is the Last Samurai in our little circle of friends...



The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.

Linux taking a memory dump. Indeed.

Approximately 3 years ago, I wrote about a group called Avial who had some nice videos out. They finally have an album out (via MusicYogi) and have released lots more music (tip of the hat to madhav who sent me to their music).

If you want to listen to just one song, try Adupambe. If you have more time, try this playlist of their songs. Good stuff!

Coincidentally, I made avial (the food staple) for a group of friends at school. Needless to say, avial rocks.

Today I went to my first Cornell athletic event - an icehockey game against Dartmouth (we lost, 3-5).

The game was held at Lynah Rink, reputed to be one of the most hostile college arenas, due to the "Lynah Faithful". These are the students who attend regularly and follow the team religiously. Indeed, there were many folks who seemed to know all the chants and the theatrics. The intimidation attempts were pretty impressive to me (new/naive?).

One thing that I now realize is that the absence of such cheering, spirit and sporting events was only at UVCE. Consequently, I have memories of school that are far stronger than undergrad college.

Then again, oldhen is likely to talk to Interact and nearly lost quizzes and leaked answers....