The Corner of Mads

Knuth at Cornell

Mon, 05 May 2008 21:43:35 GMT

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...

Sun, 04 May 2008 02:14:07 GMT

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

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:52:40 GMT

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

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:52:38 GMT

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

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:29:04 GMT

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

Dilbert goes flash and Scrum meetings

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:50:41 GMT

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

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:38:12 GMT

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

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:46:05 GMT

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

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:55:03 GMT

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

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:03:32 GMT

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

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:57:45 GMT

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

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:57:20 GMT

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)

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:25:32 GMT

Linux taking a memory dump. Indeed.

Avial : Malayalam rock is back!

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:37:49 GMT

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

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:06:54 GMT

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

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:31:57 GMT

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?

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:11:55 GMT

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

2007 Index of Silicon Valley

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 04:39:28 GMT

If you live or are interested in the Bay Area, then this 2007 Index of Silicon Valley report is a must read. It's still a bit fuzzy who the organization that put this together are. But the report was released with Al Gore et all in attendance, so the connections of the valley (re: Google-> Al Gore) were clearly used. Some interesting data points I found:

Spikes in a flat world: looking at patents, VC funding and IT spending, Bangalore is woefully behind
46% of all California patents, 11% of all US.
55% of the Science and Engineering talent in the Bay Area is not born in the US (14% Indian)
Of that 14%, only 3% spoke an Indian language at home
Immunizations rates are 80% (!)
Average rent is back up, ~ $1450.
Only 26% of first time home buyers can actually buy a place.
49% of households are spending 30% or more on a mortgage.

Usha Uthup v/s CPI(M) currently at 1:0

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:37:49 GMT

Tip of the hat to Amit Varma who found this IndiaToday link:

'No sooner had [VS] Achuthanandan ended his speech, the newly re-elected state Secretary Pinarayi Vijayan rushed to the stage, seething with rage. “Is this a communist rally or an Usha Uthup rock show that you dance and revel like this?” said Vijayan and told the volunteers to rein in the bad hats. Uthup later took exception to the remark forcing Vijayan to clarify that he meant no offence.'

He goes on to try to 'find a YouTube clip of Achuthanandan singing “Dum Maro Dum” in a saree'. Just picture that.

Usha Uthup (sing in 14 Indian languages, VS?) rocks (didya hear VS sing Ende Keralam anytime?).

Amazon Web Services

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:38:23 GMT

Last semester, in a course where we had to plan for a startup, I suggested the fairly (!) radical idea of not having/owning any hardware of our own, but just completely depending on Amazon's EC2 (compute) and S3 (storage) services. The professor in charge of the MBA school course (note!) at the evaluation immediately got what I was talking about and suggested that it was a clever idea.

This semester I'm actually implementing a fault tolerant system using Amazon web services. Tip of the hat to Amazon for giving this to the class to experiment. So far I'm really impressed. It's a whole lot cooler than I imagined.

botsie's view of the Botswana series

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:27:47 GMT

Of the two people I could ping, it turned out thaths had not read the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, so I had to hope and pinged botsie. I was trying to get a sense of both how accurate it was and what he thought about it. His comments:

"a. The atmosphere is just right for late-80s, early-90s Gaborone.

b. I don't think I ever met anyone as daft as the main characters.
Most of the Batswana I knew were pretty sharp, fairly hard-nosed and
not given to abstract philosophizing.

I have read only the first book. I didn't like it very much."

Sigh.

Another good recommendation from oldhen

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 01:02:57 GMT

Another book that I stole from oldhen that turned out to be beautiful, Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series. Beautiful lyrical writing, with (for me) clear overtones of both R K Narayan (Malgudi) and Ruskin Bond (Mussorie). The same (almost lazy ) humor, the same (apparently) simple stories, the same superb evocative landscapes. Set in Gaborone, Botswana, the stories are not really short stories and not really a complicated novel, but something delightfully in between.

This extract is from Tears of the Giraffe, from when a character is meditating on the nature of being a mechanic:

"Did not the Lord himself learn to be a carpenter in his father's workshop? Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought. If the Lord came back today, he would probably be a mechanic, he reflected. That would be a great honour for mechanics everywhere. And there is no doubt but that he would choose Africa: Israel was far too dangerous these days. In fact, the more one thought about it, the more likely it was that he would choose Botswana, and Gaborone in particular. Now that would be a wonderful honour for the people of Botswana; but it would not happen, and there was no point in thinking about it any further. The Lord was not going to come back; we had our chance and we had not made much of it, unfortunately."

Excellently written, much happiness has been derived. I've only got two left to go in the series. Note to gentle readers, a movie is scheduled, so please read before it comes out....

Phlebotomy

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:18:45 GMT

Hurts like hell.

Hope folks are safe; why is never necessarily clear at the actual location of implementation.

Youtube for music

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:21:11 GMT

One of the things that oldhen managed to show to me was how he got Youtube to act as a source of music. I'd heard of a startup (Songza) that did something similar, but far more cleverly, but I didn't think it was a particularly good idea.

Until I stumbled upon Indian music Now, I do understand that raaga.com and equivalents will do the same, except that I've never liked their popups and their horrible interfaces. Additionally, watching the videos was also a component of the enjoyment. I spent the evening enjoying songs from His Highness Abdullah, a relatively old movie with superb carnatic performances from Yesudas.

The movie has a faux duel between two exponents with Gautami (she of the large expressive eyes) watching on. A few clicks later, I was at Raghu Vamshapathe from Bharatham. And then onto Rama Katha.

Sometimes, I miss sleepy Sunday afternoons. At home. Mostly, I think I miss home.

The founders rock

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:49:45 GMT

In the midst of all the craziness and the n billionth article discussing the purchase, I have the following few bits to contribute:

- Strangely enough, it doesn't bother me at all. Perhaps it has to do with distance, perhaps school, perhaps mellowing down...

- I remember thinking to myself when messenger interoperated that if it had been in the good old days of Bangalore Unix IM hacking, I'd have steam coming out of my ears

- I really (really really) respect the founders. Jerry I've spoken to less (Re: Management, Sue is also a pretty smart woman, I like her) but I've spoken a lot to Filo. I mean you just have to respect the man, his work ethic and his passion. So when you get all riled up about reading bad news after working there (ok, 64% of the time it existed is a lot!), but imagine how he must feel. But he still puts in a mean work day. The tiny things that he does, just too honest and down to earth to imagine.

- I think that they can do many many things, but they will think hard and do the best thing as much as they can see it. Rather than faceless nameless droids making decisions, the founders, I feel comfortable in. More power to them.