The Corner of Mads

What day is it?

2008-07-11T07:04:22Z

So after working out for two hours on what felt like an empty stomach, I came home this evening ravenously hungry. Some food later, I was supposedly watching the latest hill stage on the Tour De France 2008 when I fell blissfully asleep. This is not a indictment of this year's race (nope, not talking about any favourites, don't want them to have doping allegations ;) ), but of how tired I was.

When I woke up (at about 8 actually) it was a very strange feeling. I had no idea what time it was, neither did I know what day of the week it was or what was going on. Day, night, day of week, time of year, it's all blurring. Strange.

Security Theatre

2008-07-10T01:22:41Z

Sometime ago, it was possible to go to a credit union branch and transfer funds to another credit union. They were all on the "same system". Their USP was of course that since they were all small credit unions, they ganged up to compete against the big chains. And all was well.

Now, I tried to transfer some money and all manner of strange excuses are being brought forward. Atleast two employees have tried to suggest to me that I'm losing my mind. Huh? Nice customer service, keep it going. In desperation, I got a cashier's cheque (equivalent to a bank draft in India). Now, the second credit union refuses to honour a cashier's cheque (holding it for two days) insisting that they are being forged. WTF? What's the point of a cashier's cheque versus a personal cheque then? Bah. Security theatre of the worst kind.

Inspite of all this, I'd still recommend (atleast one of these) credit unions.

Talking of real security, this is something that happened to me: I was recently talking to a cloud company (nameless,again) which did financial processing for companies in the cloud. Given that this is something that is of interest to me, I asked what they were doing about SOX. Appearing puzzled, the techie replied that they supported https (he believed I was talking about SOCKS). Trying hard to keep a straight face, I moved on. Now that's a company I'm not going to recommend soon.

The sky is falling

2008-07-09T04:01:37Z

Err, hopefully everything works out, but this new DNS vulnerability is really scary. There are few times when I'm worried - this really could be a big deal. Please do the right thing, check DNS servers you own. You can check your DNS server via Dan Kaminsky's tool.

If we are all lucky, it will all appear like Y2K or the recent DST - the kind of system update that seems like no trouble at all.

Structure '08

2008-06-29T19:58:56Z

On Wednesday, I attended Structure '08 organized by GigaOm at San Francisco. Thanks to the course at Cornell, I'm actually rather interested in cloud computing and virtualization. In addition to having a bunch of interesting people and discussions, the clear impression I got that this is really the Wild West frontier. Not many people know how it's going to turn out and are still feeling their way around.

And yes, if you are interested in this area, I would strongly recommend Nicholas Carr's book The Big Switch. A though provoking read, even if uneven in patches.

Now no longer a Bachelor

2008-06-29T19:48:00Z

I have graduated. The journey that began almost a year ago completed with graduation. The journey was recounted in some spotty way via entries, but overall, it was a great experience. I really enjoyed my time at Ithaca. Even with all the snow and the cold, staying away from home and family, it all passed so quickly.

There was a little ceremony by the CS department for graduation on May 24th. This photograph is from there:

That was the most personal moment of the graduation. The college ceremony was a lot more impressive than I imagined. But, as expected with so many graduates, it was a stand up, be granted degree and sit down.

Thankfully, at least I had the sense to get the lady of learning to visit. She managed to take a bunch of photographs, but sadly enough, none of them have the both of us together.

Last exam at Cornell

2008-06-25T23:44:20Z

The last exam that I had was for MBA course Electronic Commerce. Studying for it was weird as the course covered so much, that going through all the materials was all that I could do. As would be expected with such a course, you wrote the exam as a word doc on your laptop and emailed it for grading. Interesting new ways of learning and teaching.

When I finished the exam, it felt really weird. There was still a lot of work to do, so there was no sense of freedom or release, but still a strange feeling of sadness. Something that I realized was that having friends who did the same courses and took the same exams really gave you a feeling of a class. Thanks to electives, course requirements, individual interest there were people who I spent time with who had very different schedules. I think this hurt the feeling of class more than I anticipated.

Missing Slope day

2008-06-25T23:43:10Z

Slope day is a fairly big deal at Cornell. Admittedly mostly for the undergrads, but enough grads woke up early to indulge. Sadly enough (Murphy!), that day turned out to be the one that a critical system I worked to die. Since this was a fairly big deal, I ended up spending the entire day doing investigation and debugging. It appears that I missed quite a bit.

The actual problem turned out to be that the partition that MySQL was on was full. Turns out that the error reporting (JDBC via tomcat) isn't as polished as I'd like to be. I would have expected requests to fail, not HANG in there waiting for disk space to show up. Sigh.

Last day at Cornell

2008-06-25T22:13:40Z

While this may seem strange, I have a bunch of posts over a long period of time that I just wrote and did not post. Why? Coming soon. First, rewind back to 2 months ago:

Going into the last day at college was hard.

I woke up late and nearly missed the Large scale web information class. Calling a cab, I was reflecting on how even after selecting a class that was late, I still manage to oversleep. Headed into class to discover that the grades for the horrible exam were still not out. It was amusing to see that the professor left in a hurry ( I was expecting something about it being the last class). He did indicate that he had to correct the midterms (side note: I eventually topped the class in the midterm; Wonders will never cease).

One of the classes I was most worried about was the introductory swimming course I'd taken. This being the last day, it also had to be the day that I had to take the swim test. I'd already failed it once before. I was oh so close to failing it again. I had a great instructor; (you rock Robin Dyer!) who egged, screamed and dragged (or so it felt) me through the test. The handshake at the end of the test made it all worth the while. Officially, I can swim. In reality, I think I still have a ways to go. Back stroke though, is so easy that it rocks.

Finally, the last Electronic commerce course was also a good way to end. I hadn't expected much from the course, but I was surprised at how wrong I turned out to be. The assignments and work werent very hard for CS folks but the business implications in the class were great.

Knuth at Cornell

2008-05-05T21:43:35Z

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.

By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value...

2008-05-04T02:14:07Z

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."

Some days, you wonder how you survive

2008-04-30T02:52:40Z

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.

Homesickness Solution #1

2008-04-25T03:52:38Z

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.

How quickly time flies

2008-04-22T03:29:04Z

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

Dilbert goes flash and Scrum meetings

2008-04-19T23:50:41Z

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.

Bah, life sucks

2008-04-16T07:38:12Z

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.

NYTimes and an slant on India

2008-04-12T22:46:05Z

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:

Looking good so far

2008-04-11T00:55:03Z

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.

Pao Bhangra 2008

2008-04-10T01:03:32Z

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.

Cricket at Cornell

2008-04-03T22:57:45Z

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...

Perfect, they are all ... perfect

2008-03-30T22:57:20Z

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.

Mac v/s PC v/s Linux ( Southpark style)

2008-03-12T22:25:32Z

Linux taking a memory dump. Indeed.

Avial : Malayalam rock is back!

2008-03-11T00:37:49Z

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.

Ice hockey game

2008-03-09T03:06:54Z

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....

Subtitute teachers

2008-03-07T04:31:57Z

Today, I had one of those nightmare experiences that I'd forgotten how it could feel like. A teacher was sick, so I had someone else come in to a class today. With the inevitable results that could be expected. Different ideas, different pace, different style. This new teacher was pushing us a lot harder than the other one did. The analytic half of my brain kept telling me that this is good for me, but the other half was just plain mad.

I remember a teacher in high school who taught us programming. To the students who liked/loved it already; he was pushing us a lot harder than some teachers in undergrad courses, but he ended up making atleast some portions of the class hate programming for life. It's a fine balance. To the people in class who were doing well, they were beaming at the end of the class. Usually, I'm not the worst, so I get some breathing space. Today, for my luck, all of them who were lower than me on the totem pole decided to skip class.

Being the weakest link is hard. I don't have an issue with the attention per say (too old to be bothered) but you barely get time to breathe after one exercise and the next drill begins. Sigh. This too, shall pass.

Haydos, some weed can ease the pain?

2008-03-05T22:11:55Z

Heh, ever since the Indian victory against the Australians, I've been thinking that this would be a good poster for someone to show up with at a cricket match where Matthew Hayden is playing:

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson