To us, here and now, it appears thus

I'm Moving...

2005-11-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

Its always a pain when you need to move, and blogger has been good to me so far. It hurts me to move too.

The want of categorised postings, more attractive templates and in general blogging with the elite has made me effect a change. So, for all ardent readers of my blog I am officially moving to a wordpress blog. However, I will still try to keep content posted here once in a while but please update your bookmarks, feed sources and what not to this url hereafterwards.

NEW WORDPRESS URL : http://vishnuvyas.wordpress.com/

However, All articles there will be posted here too, but that is better for navigation if you do use a web interface (eg: Firefox, IE, etc...)

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

An Indian Startup for the Price of a Small Car.

2005-11-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

I am really interested in developing a web application and it has caught my fascination for a long time. The advantage with web applications is that you really don't have to deploy them in the conventional sense. All you need is a domain name, a hot server and some kick ass internet connection. Being in India, its the third thing would give you more trouble than anything else. So, how much does it really need to get a system running. Though this a lot of armchair entrepruenership and might not be very practicable, but however whats wrong with spending sometime there?

So, for any startup you need an idea, and since ideas come by plenty (note, I am not saying good ideas come by plenty.) we won't really bother about that. If you don't have an idea, there is little point reading this post. You might ask wether do I have an idea yet, the point is yes and no. Yes because I think I have an idea, and no because its practicallity is highly invaluble unless its implemented RIGHT NOW. So thats basically our point 1, You need a good idea. So what now?

Next you need some hardware. But hardware here is cheap, you can get cheapo yet kick ass machines for an investment as small as say buying a small car. Infact, if you have the guts to build your own systems from scratch you can do way better with the amount that you would spend on a car. So lets actually do a small estimate of how much does it really cost. And for the model of a small car we wil take the much loved hyundai santro xing, and in India it costs approximately Rs.2,81,789 (according to the official site of Hyundai). So thats approximately 3 Lakhs we have in our hands and lets see what we can build with that money in terms of servers ready for web applications. Now, before we go ahead we need to look into what a machine for a startup would actually need, or rather the hardware software interdependancy. So lets make things simple here and assume that you're web app would require 3 major software components - a webserver, an application server and a good database (assuming most data is relational). And with that we need 3 types of machines.

The machines running the Webserver and application servers need to give solid live performance in the sense that they need to be scalable. These are the typical types of machines where you would need a processor with a huge cache, clock speed as far as these operations are concerned is basically a moot point. The main bottle neck is actually your cache/ram performance and hence you need to a bit overboard about the RAM requirements of this machine. As far as processors go in terms of availability and performance (going per online reviews) the Intel Xeon HT Dual Core 2.8 Ghz with 2MB L2 cache is the most viable choice and that costs you around Rs.12400, add to that a decent mother board which would set you back by another 5000 rupess and we need as much ram as possible and these boards typically support a maximum of 4 gigs of ram which would costs around Rs.18400. The system would also need some nice hard-disks for disk based caches, a couple of 80 GB in hot-swappable raid should do (yeah, this is only your webserver remember). with a lots of swap space. All other accessories deemed necessary such as an ATX powersupply, a cabinet, the peripherals would cost you approximately another 7500 rupees. Add a couple of network cards to it and it would cost you approximately another 1000 bucks (remember you need 2 network cards for atleast one machine). So lets look at how much our webserver/application server would cost us.

Now that we have a kick ass webserver for approximately 54000 Rupees (actually the price here is kept slightly above bar, it can be made much lesser and it also doubles up as an application server). Now lets look at our second machine, what we need there is lots of hard disk capacity and harddisks are basically cheap there. We can use not so high end processor and we again need lots of RAM but a 1 GIG should do there, a system there can be constructed with approximately 35000 Rs. sans the Harddisks. As far as hard disks go, the fanciest thing you can get here are 300GB SATA harddisks which cost around 7650 Rs each and initially we won't be needing too much space (if we have more users we might turn profitable and can use money from there). So we can set up a bunch of those SATA harddisks (say 4 for RAID level 2) and thats 30600 Rs approximately. So for a sum total of Rs.65600, we can build a really decent database server. we might also need a couple of other small machines for development and testing (these need not be that powerful we can make do with one of the cheap AMD Athlon 2000+ series, which you can get a whole machine for less than Rs.25000) and some power and network infrastructure to manage them all (Switches, gigabit ethernet, UPS etc..) which I estimate would approximately cost another say 75000 rs (another high estimate). So where does it leave our hardware infrastructure investment?

1. Kickass Webserver/Application Server - 53900.00 Rs
2. Database Server with 600G Raid2 - 65600.00 Rs
3. Development/Testing machines(lets say 2) - 50000.00 Rs
4. Network and Power Infrastructure - 75000.00 Rs

Grand Total - 244500.00 Rs.
Price of Hyundai Santro Xing - 281789.00 Rs.
Cash Remaining 37289.00 Rs.

Not bad, hardware for a small start up and some change too. And with a domain name costing approximately 500 Rs a year, its not a bad bargain after all. Now all we have to do is look for the kickass internet connection.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

The irony that is life.

2005-11-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

One whole night's work and you have a brand new template. Featuring smoothing colors, better cross-browser compatibility and a better navigation bar. Yes, for the audience of this blog, (yes, I mean all 3 of you) I present you "Angkor Vat" (thats what this template is called, if you din't know).

Now, why is life an irony? Because one whole night's toil later I get an invite from wordpress.com.
To move or not to move, that is the question!.

Update 1 : If someone is intersted in using this template for their blog, please go ahead and use it, also drop a mail if you do use it.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Experiments with Text Similarity.

2005-11-09T14:36:00.000-08:00

If you do read the intercodes blog then you might have had some vauge hint of me having a 'censored' project, but thats not really that censored.. and I have discussed about that on this blog before. However, seeing some competition right before my eyes, sort-a gave me a rude awakening.(btw, I also registered there to check it out).

And one of the things that is required for that project (apart from a realistic deadline, and and some kick-ass commitment) is a good automated text-similarity algorithm. not the Text::Similarity types (you would know that if you had something to do with perl), but something on a more fundamental level. Approaches which basically match documents on semantic content. So, I basically experimented with some basic algorithms and here are some results. So whatever I've come up with ain't so promising .. but thats just very basic single nights hacking. If anyone else is interested they can of course use the code. its on the MIT Licencse (i.e.. take the code, and don't blame me if loose your hair and your wife runs away.) Since these are just experiments.. we won't care too much about efficiency of code, but rather on getting there.

So each of the textual matter in question is basically stored in flat out text files with no extra formatting around. Just the post content. so we need a quick and dirty function to read stuff from a file and convert it into a list of non-repeating words. Thats easy enough, if we define a small helper function to split a string on space. (for all those who know the Common Lisp Ansi Spec on the top of your heads, is there a better way to do this?)

so here is the splitter function.


(defun split-on-space (input-string)
  "splits the input string on space into a list of strings"

  (let ((old-pos 0) (inspace nil) (ret ()))
    (loop for char across input-string
          for position from 0
          if (or (not (graphic-char-p char)) (char= #\Space char))
          do (unless inspace
               (setq inspace t)
               (if (eql old-pos position) (values)
                   (push (subseq input-string old-pos position) ret)))
          else 
          do (when inspace
               (setq inspace nil)
               (if (eql old-pos position) (values)
                   (setq old-pos position)))
          finally (return
                    (progn (unless inspace
                             (push (subseq input-string old-pos) ret)) 
                           (nreverse ret))))))

well, now that we can successfuly split strings into their component words, assuming they are seperated by spaces. (usually they are not, but this will have to do for now), we can write our function which swallows a file whole and gives us a list of words occuring in the file.


(defun read-from-file (filename &key (remove-small t))
  "reads a text file and splits it into a list of words"

  (with-open-file (file filename :direction :input)
    (do ((line (read-line file nil) (read-line file nil))
         (words ()))
        ((null line) (nreverse words))
      (dolist (word (split-on-space line))
        (if (and remove-small (> (length word) 3))
        (push word words))))))

Since we are assuming its primarily textual data (kadhai in local-speak), its safe to assume the data is line oriented. (note-to-self : a better way would be to read that into a string buffer and then split-on-space the stringbuffer). Also, there is this small key value remove-small which by default is set to t. remove-small is a small flag which decides if words of length lesser than 3 are included or not. the default value of 't' is not such a wise idea, as I learnt later. The reason being most geek-speak and abbreviations are 3 lettered (eg: C++, AST, GC, SCM, DOS, WIN,NIX). So, reading this way would perform badly on textual content with a degree of code in them (like this one).

Since its a really good idea to generate a frequency table and we can easily combine that with the process of removing repeated words. So to get the job done quick and dirty, I am using an a-list here, but for larger sets a hash table would give better peformance.


(defun generate-freqtab (object-list equals-function)
  "generate-freqtab object-list equals-function, uses the equals-function for
   comparison and returns an a-list of objects and their relative frequencies"

  (let ((frequency-table ()))
    (dolist (item object-list frequency-table)
      (if (null (assoc item frequency-table :test equals-function))
          (push (cons item 1) frequency-table)
          (incf (cdr (assoc item frequency-table :test equals-function)))))))

The above function is defined to be a bit more generic than it needs to. One simplification could be made on the equals-function defaulting to #'string=. Now that we have our alist based frequency table.. we can check out a whole bunch of measures, now we will look at two really disappointing ones, but not totally. They gave me some quick insight into the nature of random textual matter as opposed to more sophisticated and rather correct techniques.

So, we will first look at the common word count, but its also usually helpful if we know what are the common words.


(defun n-similarity (ftab1 ftab2 equals-function)
  "counts the number of datum that are present in both the frequency tables
   frequency values are ingored for the moment."

  (let ((n 0) (common-words ()))
    (dolist (word ftab1 (values common-words n))
      (if (assoc (car word) ftab2 :test equals-function)
          (progn
            (incf n)
            (push (car word) common-words))))))

This isn't particularly useful for identifying positives, as it gets in lots of false positives through, and further more the usefullness of this is limited by general english words such as which, where, therefore which occour much more commonly than what would be considered as the words containing actual content. (I would consider these words as semantic indicators, rather than contentful words). So the next obvious experiment is to look at the common words and their frequencies, so if there is some difference that should iron out. (like there is high probability that words like 'which' will be used approximately the same number of times, so taking a difference of frequency should fix that). So, we will write a small function, basically an imporvement over the above one.


(defun nf-similarity (ftab1 ftab2 equals-function)
  "counts the number and frequency of datam that are present in both the tables
   and builds small list of list out of it."

  (let ((nf-list ()))
    (dolist (word ftab1 nf-list)
      (let ((second-word (assoc (car word) ftab2 :test equals-function)))
        (if second-word
            (push (list (car word) (cdr word) (cdr second-word)) nf-list))))))

Hmm.. but the results aren't too suprising.. It seems, even though posts of similar topics do have these words in common, they aren't used similarly enough to actually use 'difference' of frequencies viabily. but all is not lost, atleast there are a couple of important lessons to learn about the whole text similarity thing.

You can't ignore small words because, they might be important after all.

You can't use word occurances blindly because english has more snytactic crap than Java does!!

And, you can't uses frequencies blindly because, english is a very quirky language that allows even semantically similar topics to be written in a weirdly different ways.

This needs a much more fancy research schedule!

And if any one's reading this blog, and have some suggestions or things I can look into (preferably with solid data to back stuff up..) please do mail me.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Guess who's blogging?

2005-11-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

This is a sriramish post, welcoming people into the world of blogging, but guess the blogging wave has caught a lot more people than I initially thought. And the techno-phile geek, cubicle lover dilbert creater scott adams is blogging!.

So, ladies and gentlemen here for your entertainment and enlightenment (not necessarily in that order).....
Scott Adams.

Its just syntax, or is it?

2005-11-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

Holy wars abound in the lore of geekdom. Fans of a particular programming language waiting to castrate their brothers in profession, just because they use a different language. You can call this racisim of sorts, but its based on syntax or rather the programming language in question. The members of the big ones like Java/C++/Perl go to war with each other, while they are more than content with conducting witch-hunts for the patrons of less popular syntaxes. (I would give an exception for lisp - an average lispnik's arrogance usually forms the "force field" to ward off any war that might come their way).

But incindently, many fail to understand that its just syntax. Yes, language is important in the sense that it is the way in which you 'talk' to the computer. The better vocabulary it has, the better it is. But again, its just syntax. And this thought has been ringing in my mind ever since I started out with lisp. I was comfortable doing all my programming in Java without macros. Now, I cannot live without them, every other language is incredibily constraining. So, syntax has more to it that I initially thought. And this was one of the reasons that motivated the common virtual machine which should make it easy for implementation of other languages over it. The virtual machine provides a basic set of primitives that can be used by the compilers to generate code for the virtual machine, which the virtual machine can then execute.

My virtual machine apart, what was the most amazing thing so far was that, most of my thoughts were echoed by Mr.Sridhar Vembu of AdventNet. His Deluge system which is more centered on deployment of web applications, is basically very similar, however, it represents all its items as tables. Everything from the code to the data it manipulates. Though it solves a lot of problems (like R-O mapping, etc..) one of the things that caught my fascination in the system was that, it has this underlying theme of "Its just syntax". So ones who would want to use 'code-writing' code style macros with lots of paranthesis are free to do so, while others who are more than happy with VB style code can go ahead and code. The internal representaion of code is in the form of tables. (Though *I* would feel a tree-structure is more natural, I guess there there is a trade-off there between uniform representation and what feels natural).The whole thing has one common internal representation which can be converted to your favourite synatx and back to the internal representation seamlessly.

Now, that solves the syntax problem, but what bothers me now is the continuim problem (I gave it that name.. so you won't find that anwhere else). So what is this continium problem? Its explaination is a bit more involved, but here is it.

Any programming team, can certainly benifit if it has 'god level' programmers. Usually, those god level programmers are those that don't mind using a weirder language if it can offer the power they want. If one problem can be solved quickly with a certain style natural to the programming languge, they would have no problems doing that. Given, that they have seamless interoperability, it might be very natural to write different parts of a problem in different syntaxes. The harder (and thus more expressive/cryptic syntaxes) are the ones that might end up giving high productivity. So any profitable enterprise needs people with high productivity.

On the other hand, new recruits are part and parcel of business. Its easier if the newbies start out with much more english like and friendlier syntax than say something that looks like 'fingernail clippings in oatmeal', so again it brings down the training costs, or rather spreads it out. Now the problem as I can see it comes from something I guess is part of human nature. Complacency. What happens if the newbie is comfortable with the current language, he might get the job done, with the same quality as what an expert would have done (I am assuming the newbie doesn't skip on basic discipline like error checking, etc.). But what if he had used the same tools/syntax that the expert had used. He could have finished the product faster, and easier.

So the problem is, again in syntax, or in this case a series of syntaxes that can make a newbie's transition smooth to that of the expert domain. A series of syntaxes so that a newbie can learn and slowly grow out of. In the process of learning more powerful (and hence cryptic in some-way), consturcts and concepts, the transition is smooth and as natural as possible. So thats the problem I guess we should be looking at. The problems in programming languages have moved from hardware to mushware (human brains). And we need to find solutions to appease mushware.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Teachers? - Bah Humbug!!.

2005-10-23T11:18:00.000-07:00

"We don’t need no education.
We don’t need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall."

- Pink Floyd.

With the IIPM debate raging all over the blogsphere, what struck me about this issue is not the issue per se, but my stronger reactions to this issue than anything else. This is not the first time this is happening, Free Speech has been a victim of persecution before, in public, in newspapers, in television, and why even in blogsphere with the 'Mediaah!' issue.

But my reactions are different now, I was fuming in indignation then and I am fuming with indignation now. But now its intensity is higher, stronger, and infact feels more personal. And a little reflection reveals that all this intensity is not because Gaurav resigned, No it is not. I appreciate the guy for standing by his principles but just that Its not the reason why this is personal. Nor is it because that Rashmi has got really sexist comments on her blog. I was born into a culture which talks a lot about the greatness of feminity and silently ignores when a random female gets eve-teased on the street. I am innured to its ways, and no the comments on her blog don't affect me on the scale which this issue affected me.

And btw, dict.org doesn't have any meanings for any form of the word 'eve-teased', that brings me to the question of is it so prominent in our culture that we actually need to invent a word to discuss it? But I digress.

The true reason, as introspection reveals , seems to be the fact that I feel that I am a victim of this issue. And how you may ask? How does a student of computer science, studying in an engineering college down south is affected and is the victim of a massive con-operation run somewhere in northern india by dubious academic hooligans? Well the answer is simple - I, as every student out there is part of this devious web spun by power and money, conning people into feeding crap and calling it education.

So far starters, the institution I study is fully accredited and the degrees are bonafide degrees awarded by an institution recognised by AICTE, UGC, and all the other people on these boards who sleep, jerk off and fool around with their secerateries instead of doing their jobs. Yes, in sometime I will be walking out with a degree that would proclaim me to the world as an engineer, who successfuly has faced the rigour of an 'engineering education' and is ready to take on the world. For the more yo! dude types, add a 'Give it to me baby!' here.

So why all this fuss and unnecessary ranting you may ask, well because my degree might look valuble in the eyes of a prospective employer, but my conscience would look upon it disdainfully as some piece of used toilet paper. The reason I took computer science was more personal and the so called IT boom had nothing to do with it. If computer science were in a state where it would get me janatorial positions, I would still have taken it, I took it for the sheer mental orgasms that I recieved every time I got a program working, I took it out of love... or so I thought. How naive of me!!.

The state of education is in atrophy and is getting worse. My heart pains as if a needle is being poked into it, every time I see my favourite subject being raped. Every time I hear English is a CFG. Every time I hear some fuckhead thinking (aloud, may i add) C is all computer science is about. Everytime I hear the same fuckhead talking about astrology, and claiming it to be *proven scientific fact*. Every time I hear the number 2 is neither prime nor composite, and every single time when a reference is quoted to that fact(oid?). Every single fucking time that I hear 0*0 is indeterminate. And it pains me even more to find myself helpless to do anything about it.

In a culture that puts the position of a teacher before god, is this something what we should expect? Fucked up psychotic ignoramuses for that position? As I can see, the job of a teacher is first Inspire, and then Imbibe. Not that I'vent seen good teachers (yes, I have seen one in my life so far, and thats how I can tell the difference), but everyone in the past four years of my undergraduation have been total losers. And not to mention that the fact that the curriculum is not to blame. Infact, I would personally consider the average undergraduation curriculum in computer science is pretty upto the mark. But whats the use when the whole point of 'Computer Science' is missed? When was the last time that any of us had an enthusiastic teacher, when was the last time we actually had a teacher? How many of has have met the likes of a good teacher, say someone like this guy.

Come to think of it, what is the difference between someone like me and someone from IIPM?
We get fed crap about computer science is, and they get fed crap about what management is - simple!.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Making computers think logically, The new and imporved version.

2005-10-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

The previous post about solving CNF using a bit of common lisp was something that transpired out of a conversation with Vivek. The previous program even though was functionaly good, lacked a certain sense of aesthetics that lisp programs should have. So with a little more effort, and some help from Thomas.F.Burdick from c.l.l, here is the new and imporved version.


;; CNF Solver, ver 2.0
;; Same functionality as the previous one
;; but is better in that its easier to work.
;; Thanks to a little help from Thomas.F.Brudrick


(defpackage :cnf
(:use :common-lisp)
(:export resovle))

(in-package :cnf)

(defun seperate-parts (expr)
"seperate the epxression into negated and non negated variables"

(loop for s = (pop expr)
      if (eql s 'or)
       do (values)
      else if (eql s 'not)
       collect (pop expr) into vneg
      else collect s into v
      while expr
      finally return (values v vneg)))


(defun resolve-pair (expr1 expr2)
"resolves a pair of cnf expressions."
(flet
    ; xform is a formatting function which is used to take a list
      ; of symbols and convert them into a list of symbols padded
      ; appropriately with the pre and post symbols.
      ((xform (list pre post)
         (let ((x (car (last list))))
           (loop for item in list
                 if (eql item x) nconc (nconc (when pre (list pre))
                                              (list item))
                 else nconc (nconc (when pre (list pre))
                                   (list item)
                                   (list post))))))

  (multiple-value-bind (list1 nlist1) (seperate-parts expr1)
    (multiple-value-bind (list2 nlist2) (seperate-parts expr2)

      ;rem is the set of variables that cancel out.
        ;allp is the set of all non-negated symbols.
        ;alln is the set of all negated symbols.
        (let* ((rem (union (intersection list1 nlist2)
                         (intersection list2 nlist1)))
             (allp (set-difference (union list1 list2) rem))
             (alln (set-difference (union nlist1 nlist2) rem)))
        (nconc (xform allp '() 'or)
               (when alln
                 (nconc (list 'or)
                        (xform alln 'not 'or)))))))))

(defmacro resolve (exprlist)
"resolves a list of CNF expressions"

`(reduce #'resolve-pair ,exprlist))


;; (end-package :cnf)

Upadte 1: Fixed 2 bugs in code.

Update 2 : Found destructuring more efficient than comparing with the last element.
hence xform can be written as.


    ;; xform is a formatting function which is used to take a list
      ;; of symbols and convert them into a list of symbols padded
      ;; appropriately with the pre and post symbols.
      ((xform (list pre post)
       (loop for (item . morep) on list
                 if morep  nconc (nconc (when pre (list pre))
                                        (list item)
                                        (when post (list post)))
                 else nconc (nconc (when pre (list pre))
                                   (list item)))))

Technorati Tag: lisp

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

Making computers think logically.

2005-10-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

Conjunctive Normal Forms or CNF's as they are called are simply boolean expressions which are stuck together by conjunctions (and's) and by themselves each subexpressions is a bunch of variables (both negated and non-negated) which are strung toghether by or's. So whats the use of CNF's you ask. well for one thing they allow computers to think logically and make decisions.

Here is a small program which does exactly that. Solves CNF's. An explaination of the program is for another post of its own.


;;; Solves CNF forms
;;; the macro resolve-list takes as input a list of the form
;;; ((expr1) (expr2) (expr3) ... )
;;; where each expr is of the the form ( var1 or var2 or ... not varN ...or varK )

(defpackage :cnf

 (:use :common-lisp)
 (:export resolve-list))

(in-package :cnf)

;;; function seperate-parts.
;;; Seperate parts splits the expression into variables that are negated and those that
;;; are not negated.

(defun seperate-parts (expr1)
 "Seperates the negated variables and the non-negated variables"

 (let ((list-v ())
       (list-vneg ())
       (next ()))

   (dolist (iter expr1)
     (cond
       ((eq 'or iter) ())
       ((eq 'not iter) (setf next t))
       (t (if next
              (progn

                (push iter list-vneg)
                (setf next ()))
              (push iter list-v)))))
   (values list-v list-vneg)))

;;; function resolve-pair
;;; uses basic laws of logic to resolve 2 boolean expressions containing only
;;; or's or not's.


(defun resolve-pair (expr1 expr2)
 "Resolves a pair of conjunctive expressions"

 (let ((list1 ())
       (list2 ())
       (nlist1 ())
       (nlist2 ()))

   (multiple-value-bind (lst nlst)
       (seperate-parts expr1)
     (setf list1 lst)
     (setf nlist1 nlst))

   (multiple-value-bind (lst nlst)
       (seperate-parts expr2)
     (setf list2 lst)
     (setf nlist2 nlst))

   ;; rem-list is the list of variables that cancel out due to negation.

    ;; allp-list is the list of variables that are not negated and can occour in the final expression
    ;; alln-list is the list of variables that are negated and can occour in the final expression
    ;; red-list1 is the pretty version of allp-list with the or's in place
    ;; red-list2 is the pretty version of alln-list with the or's and not's in place.

   (let* ((rem-list (union (intersection list1 nlist2)
                           (intersection list2 nlist1)))
          (allp-list (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (if (member x rem-list) t nil))
                                (union list1 list2)))
          (alln-list (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (if (member x rem-list) t nil))
                                (union nlist1 nlist2)))
          (red-list1 ())
          (red-list2 ()))

          (dolist (pitm allp-list)
            (push pitm red-list1)
            (push 'or red-list1))

          (dolist (pitm alln-list)
            (push 'not red-list2)
            (push pitm red-list2)
            (push 'or red-list2))
         
          ;; since there is an extra or/not at the end.. which comes as the first element..

           ;; we can skip it and hence only the cdr of the list is returned.

          (delete 'or (nreverse (concatenate 'list red-list1 red-list2)) :count 1 :from-end t))))


(defmacro resolve-list (exprlist)
 "resolves a list of cnf's"

 `(reduce #'resolve-pair ,exprlist))

;;(end-package :cnf)

Update : The old code had some bugs which din't work in certain cases, so the code now is updated.

Technorati tag : lisp

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Dare to Think? - The IIPM Debacle.

2005-10-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

I've been too much of a lispnik these days and less of the usual rants (maybe proportional to more hacking). But only recently I stumbled upon the IIPM debacle which is happening all over blogsphere (Seems even NDTV did a coverage on this). I have always lamented about the pathetic state of Indian engineering education, but it seems that the world of Management education is infested with a bunch of fradulent institutions and the fact that most of them behave in such an utterly despicable manner makes one wonder wether these megolomaniacal idiots should even be allowed to roam free in a system that seems to value the principles of freedom?

Whats the point in blowing our trumpets hard on being the 'Biggest Democracy in the World', when people can't go on practising the fundamental right to 'Freedom of Expression'. Isn't it guaranteed in the constitution? So why back to the usual rants, because of the IIPM vs Bloggers debacle thats unfolding right here in the blogsphere. Here is a small report for the convinence of the readers.

Gaurav Sabnis , a sales manager at IBM blogged (in his personal site) about the questionable authenticity of the claims made by IIPM in their full page ads carried out by various popular newspapers, linking to an article from a small magazine called JAMMAG edited by Rashmi Bansal. And wah-la!!! for the free country India is, hell bent on honouring the integrity of 'Freedom of Expression' , Gaurav was served a legal notice on counts of defamation and slander. Also, pressure from IIPM evantually made him resign his job, and that too on a matter of principle skyrocketing him to the status of a hero in the blogsphere. Support from the blogsphere was espescially amazing with almost every one who seems to know of this issue raising in unision for the support of the cause. Varun.V.Nair is tracking this issue online. Check that out for more info regarding the whole issue.

My POV :
Shocking! Simply shocking. Being the part of an Indian eductation system, I am not new to the fact that the quality of the education in terms of both the staff and the infrastructure is pitiable. As an example, My school in my opinion had better staff than what my college has. There are certain things that always seem to piss me off with the situation in India.

Firstly education in India is a business, not an institution as most of them claim. With a population of more than 200 million students its a very big market, agreed. But this is the only sector of the business where the whole consumer-producer equillibrium is turned upside down. The fact that these institutions can bully others into taking crap is not only unbelievable, but completely unacceptable.

Fundamental rights of students everywhere are simply stepped upon, and now they have the audacity to send legal notices to some one who is expressing their opinions on a personal blog? Thats undemocratic, anti-libertarian and for heavens sake fucking arrogant.

Now, comming to the IIPM issue, with a byline that goes like 'Dare to dream beyond the IIM's' might be good marketing, but for beating their breasts about for being the 'Best B school' their responses to the supposedly false allegations (accusations?) by serving legal notices that not only seem far below the standards that any self-respecting lawyer would sign his name on, is simply hilarious. The easiest way to put an end to all this controversy is simply by providing hard evidence but IIPM hasn't done it so far, and I guess it can't either.

The only way the 'management gurus' at IIPM decide to fight back seems to be by starting a string of fake blogs with names like 'IIPMStudent9' , 'OracleCoder' (Never knew management graduates had to be writing SQL querries in oracle) and who end up posting rather sexist comments on Rashmi's blog. Really do they even think such comment would get them anywhere if their aim is to clear their names ? What does such allegations achieve - Absolve IIPM of its impotency? Not only are these fake bloggers sullying the names of other IIPM students (making their predicament more unfortunate), but infact making it worse for IIPM itself. Its high time that these people realised that bloggers are smarter than what you think of them to be. But whats most appalling is the fact that the main stream media sans NDTV is almost completely silent. Seems like the fourth estate has stooped so low to become as cheap as say real estate.

But the issue that pisses me off the most here is not the fact that IIPM is a big fraud, or the fact that they are behaving like a bunch of retarded hooligans. But the fact that they have started stepping on the right to free speech. Free speech is the freedom and the right to express what I please, and hear and listen to what I think is appropriate for me. And thats a right that I am at no point of time willing to give up. Blogs provide an ideal medium to express my thoughts and opinions and I would at no point of time see that essential right be allowed to be taken away from me. This holds true for all bloggers, and hence I support the cause of free speech.

So, here is my little contribution for the sake of perserving the Right to Free Speech.

I fully support Gaurav and Rashmi for their courage in standing up for their convictions!

So as bloggers what can we do to support their cause? here is a small list of 3 things you can do.

Blog about this issue
Link to their posts and ask your readers to give the site a quick peep, maybe we can atleast help those who are looking ahead for management careers by making them realise the truth.
Support them and the cause for free speech!

Its high time that we expose such institutions for the big frauds they are.

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas

Tiny Lisp course - Lisp in 10 bullets.

2005-10-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

With my final year project coming up and with my decision to use Common Lisp for the project for both the compiler and the virtual machine, I had to give my friend and project mate venky a simple introduction to get him to the proficiency of reading and understanding lisp code. So I devised this " Lisp in 10 bullets" so that we can get him to start hacking around common lisp.

Since we are using both scheme and common lisp in the project, this 10 bullets had to be general to include both the popular dialects. Also, since he is not a complete newbie to programming (he's a decent javascript/C/C++ programmer), I don't have the need to explain things like what an 'if' does or what a list is. So here is the list.

In Lisp everything thats written is called a s-expression, which are basically of 2 types. Atoms and Forms.
Atoms are stuff like numbers (10, 234.56, etc..), characters , strings, boolean literals like T (true) and NIL (false) and variable names (called symbols in Lisp, which are associated with other values).
Forms, the 2nd type of s-expressions are always enclosed within paranthesis.
Lisp works by evaluating the s-expression and printing the output, which is the value of the s-expression. Each s-expression's value depends on what it is (atom/form) and what type of an atom or a form it is. The process of finding the value of an s-expression is called evaluation.
Literals (atoms like 12, #\a , "Hey", etc.. basically numbers, chars and strings) evaluate to themselves, i.e 10 evaluates to the number 10. Atoms like symbols evaluate to the value that they are associated to.
Forms are of two types - Functional application and Special forms. And they are always enclosed within paranthesis (this is just rule 3 again, but to drive home the point!)
Special forms are written as (special-form-name arg1 arg2 arg3 arg4 ... argN) and special forms dictates how and when (even wether) each of arg1 to argN is evaluated. Functional Application is simpler, even though written in the same manner as (function-name arg1 arg2... argN), it works by evaluating all the values from arg1 to argN first and then passing them to the function 'function-name'.
Functions in lisp are a bit different and there is a 2 step process to work with them. First the action of creating a function which is done using the lambda special form and then process of associating the function with a name. (i.e, its upto you to assign functions a name, you can leave it if you don't need it).
Lisp has a data structure called the list, whose written literal representation is indistinguishable from that of forms. Its enclosed within paranthesis and its elements seperated by whitespaces. So basically you can see any lisp program as a bunch of atoms (which are data anyway) and lists. This means that lisp code and lisp data are indistinguishable.
Since code is indistinguishable from data, you can write programs to change/generate code because its basically working by modifying lists. Since Lisp provides you with an eval function you can evaluate your generated code at runtime, and Lispniks call this feature 'Macros'.

Hmm, thats my simple 10 bullet guide to lisp, hope it was helpful to all those readers who are interested.

Update 1: As far as point 10 goes, thats not what Lispniks call macros, Macros are simply programs which change/generate code, but this happens during compile time. (however the point is still valid, you can evaluate your code at runtime using eval.)

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

The Story of a Virtual Machine and Common Lisp.

2005-10-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

I've been recently proselytized into the wonderful world of common lisp (actually its been 16 months since I started out with cons, car and cdr), And infact ever since I've started out with common lisp, anything else seems incredibily constraining and suddenly I hit the brick wall.

My first peeve with CL was the lack of standard libraries for all my needs but that was just me not doing my homework. Not only does it have good bindings for most of the things I do in the form of CLOCC, but also certain nice implementations of common libraries for regular expressions , Tk bindings, etc. among other thing. My second peeve was that lack of a good IDE, but that was me again not doing my homework again and I had to shut up after seeing SLIME. So with everything that I need for all my development needs most of my hobby hacking if any has been exclusively with CL and to certain extent with scheme. (Dr.Scheme just made me skip all these 'homework' steps anyway).

But 8 years of programming C doesn't leave you that easy. I still love C for what it is - an incredibily flexible low level programming language, put in simple words 'a portable assembler', and no thats actually a compliment. The amount of control over the code you get with C is just an aderanline rush, but of a different kind. I enjoy programing in C and I'm infact so used to C that it is basically a second language to me (more so than english at times!). But I have decided to be pragmatic and realised the move to Common Lisp (when I discovered it ) was impending, but I never did expect it to come this soon.

Well, so what does all this LtU style rant have to do with the title of the post? Well thats because its the quintessential fact of life in Engineering in Tamil nadu, called the 'Final Year Project', In which all students have to develop 'something' . So my choice was a simple virtual machine for dynamically typed languages like Lisp, scheme, python etc.. But with more things like tail call optimisation, continuations, lexical closures, garbage collection - basically the works! And as a long time C programmer, my instincts were to use C for both the VM and the compiler (for a scheme like language, I would call it r4.9rs, because I find (eqv? () #f) very comforting). But since the free ride I get with using Lisp's (read) made me decide to go for the compiler in Common Lisp.

But I was very clear in the start to do the VM in C (or C++), but when I realised that I could have potential gains in using a C/C++ garbage collector for all of my book keeping code I decided to give Lisp a second chance here, but initially I was not convinced. But the interesting and helpful responses I got over at comp.lang.lisp for my post was more than enough to get me convinced that Lisp was infact a very good choice for doing so. But what acutally tipped me over the wall to common lisp was Pascal Costanza's CL implementation of a java virtual machine (big thanks there for making it MIT/BSD style open source licence).

So, what does all this mean? I will have probably have a nice Virtual machine and a compiler (for probably a scheme like language) all written from scratch in Common Lisp (I might use a bit of C here to fill in the gaps, but I guess primarily it will be in Lisp) and have lots of fun doing so. Also, I would like to mention along with this post about my partner in this project 'Venky a.k.a Intercodes', who has started blogging with a bang, some one (or the only person) who would score more than me on the average crankiness scale for normal human beings.

Hmm... Now the real question is not about the project anymore, just about our 'eminent' research scholars!

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

A Whole day of Greenspunning

2005-10-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

Well, with my final year project around the corner and since I might be coding in C ( a lot, a lot more than what I would want to..) I started writing a set of small utility library that I thought might be very helpful for my project (another seperate post on what it is.. maybe even more juicy details). And guess what? I ended up reproducing half the functionality that I get with common lisp.

Yeah, I basically was greenspunning my time instead of making something useful like the actual compiler that I intended to build. Maybe I should chuck the effort and do my compiler whole scale in common-lisp. Since its a p-code compiler and not an actual machine code compiler, it requires a virtual machine which needs to be implemented in C, (because this time I want to do my malloc's and free's and manage by own heap and even garbage collect it... experiment with various gc algorithms etc..). But again, I decided to use the Hans-Boehm conservative garbage collector for C/C++ for all the book-keeping that the VM might be involved in.. which brings me back to the question of can't I simply use common lisp there?

Hmm.. some one with more common lisp experience should elucidate me there..

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Cross Disciplinary Research

2005-10-04T23:09:00.000-07:00

For those who are still new to the wonderful world of SRM, the impenetrable logic (or lack thereof) gaurded within the walls of draconion authority check these out here and here. So, before I begin an obligatory apology for not blogging so often. As I've been carried away with a deluge of work that finding time to blog is very very hard.

This is a season of mixed feelings, for everyone in our college, from the students who are more than happy to leave SRM and yet at the same time are about face the uncertainites of reality. Others (including me), have cleverly postponed that fact by a matter of two years by opting for 'Higher Studies'. This is also the season of the crunch, with most of us scurrying about our final year projects, and one such project is the central object of discussion of this blog post.

Cross Disciplinary Research is an important part of research, without which most of modern science wouldn't have been alive. It is the essence of academic research and here is the example to prove that our dear research scholars, are not the types to shy away from it. Infact they have the mental perspicacity to spot flaws in the mildewed reasoning of unenlightened souls.

[Date : 28/Sep/2005, Time : Unknown... (lost my watch some time back :( )]

Two hapless souls on the dias, under the scrutinious eyes of the globs, ready to start their zeroth review. This is how dismal the situation looked on this particular day. Their project , a cross-disciplinary effort involving Artificial Intelligence, Biometrics and some signal processing. The identification of Fingerprints, or rather validation of people using fingerprints. The two souls, bravely went ahead to explain the intricacies and details of their projects. And all this went across the heads of our research scholars and they took their own time to consider the implications, and the technical soundness of such a project (thier own time being lesser than the least count of a cesium clock). And then pronounced the judgement.

'REJECTED'

The reason being, a powerful cross-disciplinary project such as this had utterly failed to consult with one of the more significant and fundamental of natural sciences, Astrology!. Or in the words of our beloved glob

"Astrologers, have scientifically proved that fingerprints change with the position of the planets and the charecteristics of each and every induvidual. Hence, It would be impossible to uniquely identify the person based on the finger prints alone, as the project does not take into consideration the position of the 4th moon of Saturn on every third sunday of the epi-cyclic lunar calender."

Hmm.. Cross disciplinary reasearch and the keeness to spot flaws, even though they do not form the core area of research of our research scholars, is something that needs to be emulated in every institution of higher research and learning!.

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

The Innovation Tax

2005-09-14T12:52:00.000-07:00

Novelty is hard to achieve, and I guess now the innovation tax is on every one. You think of something and that's been invented 40 years ago at MIT or UCB or worse, even a 100 years ago by a couple of mathematicians corresponding over snail mail.

PDC'05 definitely has sent waves around right from the anouncement of C#3.0 with lambda expressions to the SQL based extension to the .NET languages called LINQ. LINQ basically is an extension of the language to allow SQL like syntaxes in languages such as VB and C#, which are more imperative in nature than declarative and LINQ is what lead me to write this post.

Ok, a quick trip down 9th standard geometry and a bit about circles, chords, and tangents. Circles are round geometric figures (actually its the loci of all points which are at a constant distance from a given point, but who cares about that..) and a tangent is a line that touches a curve at only one point (actually sometimes it might touch it at more than one point, and even though lines that seem to cut the curve and yet touch at only one point are not considered tangents..) and a chord of a circle ( can be extended to curves) is a line which cuts the circle at exactly 2 points.

Now, why all this geometry? Because in 9th standard while doodling on a paper I figured out a nice fact that, for any curve thats not broken in the middle, if I can draw a chord, I can always draw a tangent parallel to it. This was such a nice discovery that I tried my hand at proving it formally (aping the ideas of other proofs I've seen) and managed a hodge-podge version of it and was proud of it. Though, not the fields medal, I was atleast expecting a token of appreciation for that and what did I get? ' You will learn that in 11th when you learn Rolle's theorem'. Damn, Mr.Rolle beat me to it.
(Math Geek Note : My re-discovery is exactly whats called the geometric interpretation of rolle's theorem)

Thats when I dropped any ideas of a career in math (actually I dropped it in my 12th, but what the heck) and switched to computer science. It wasn't like I wasn't a computer geek before, but I was more of a math geek than a computer geek in the begining. Maybe that explains my predeliction for operator-ridden languages such as C to more verbose ones such as VB, preference for closed form solutions rather than pure programming style solutions and love of recursion and functional style of programming.

This phenomena of others having done every single thing you think of can get a little frustrating, when it repeats itself again and again right from small things to quite large things. And guess what? this happens again, with LINQ and VB 9.0. If you had been following my techie blog for sometime (which merged into this blog some time ago), you would probably know that I was working on this language called Runner, and I thought of one must have feature in runner called filters. And filters are basically similar to LINQ but are less verbose (uses 1 operator instead of a huge bunch of keywords), and don't have support of databases or XML. But in essence the idea is the same? and now who beats me to it? Microsoft. I am not saying that I thought of this before guys at Microsoft did, but it must have been in the research labs for some time now. And as if to add salt to the wound I find this 25 line LISP macro which does have pretty much the same functionality (and more too) than my original filters idea.

This is not physics where every great idea was over with Einstein and Neils Bhor, but computer science and its been less than 50 years since it even started out. How smart does one really need to be original here?

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Do No Evil

2005-09-12T16:48:00.000-07:00

As a regular orkut user, I've always been aware of its implications. Being interested in social search has always made me envy Orkut and Google. But there was always this fuzzy feeling of warmth around google that it could 'Do No Evil', but google lately seems to have lost its hackerish charm and has started to ape Microsoft (or any other corporation for that matter).

And for starters, the trend in consolidating google's services seem so much like Microsoft's Passport idea, but much more subtley introduced. Now orkut requires a Google acount. Google Talk requires a google acount, and what next? would I be signing into blogger using a google acount? Hmm.. seems like the passport idea all over again.

I don't in general disagree with the idea of consolidationg, but was this the reason why the server there was being starved of doughnuts on a regular basis? Hmm.. I wonder. The fact that I was perfectly content with using a seperate orkut acount and using my google acount did not in anyway make it an advantage. (I always let all the trivial passwords to the memory of my web browser). So, without adding any significant value to the customer, they had ended up serving us pages about doughnuts. Maybe I am wrong, Orkut will be packed with a whole bunch of killer feautures when I log in next time, but that does not seem to be the case here. What happened to google's stated goal of 'customer first'?

Google's corporateness seems to be a bit rubbing off, with their hiring of a top Microsoft Research employee. I am very much against anti-competitive agreements, and the fact that it is enforced by microsoft. And the slashdot crowd might go ' a kick in the nuts to M$', but imagine this, if they could buy a top engineer from a company like microsoft with shit loads of cash, how long is it before they start poarching for good engineers from smaller firms?

Still I have this feeling, which makes me want to believe that 'Google can do no evil', however irrational it might be. But maybe I've got 'evil' all wrong. Maybe thats what it requires to be profitable in a corporate environment. Maybe the MBA's have taken over google from the people who should be running a technology company, the geeks.

So, should we happy that 'the Empire' is loosing, or be sad that it could be replaced by another 'Empire' very soon?

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

The An'd'rea Framework - Design Notes

2005-09-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

This is the follow up to my previous post on the An'd'rea Framework. These are some random notes and are not particularly as well organised as I would hope them to be, but would probably serve as great reference for posterity.

GSE Notes :

The generic simulation engine is a discrete-event timestep simulation engine.
At any point in time there is only one environment in the GSE.
Each GSE can have as many agents as required (maintained internally by an AgentList)
Each GSE has atmost one state object.
The most fundamental event in the GSE is the Step event, indicating a timestep. All SimObj's respond to the step event (pre, sim, post). The step event is applied to the Environment after it has been applied to all Agents.

SimObj Notes :

This is an abstract base class for all simulatable objects and all simulatable objects respond to the following messages.

Pre
Post
Sim
GetProperty
SetProperty
GetPropertyValue

The GetProperty and SetProperty functions work on a hash table indexed by string keys, and contain closures, which can be evaluated to get the value (GetPropertyValue), or get the closure itself (GetProperty).

The use of closures here is done for 3 main reasons.

It avoids using a circuitious reflection mechanism and hence the Metrics classes can directly querry the hashtable about the nature of the property.
Property values can be calculated dynamically.
Sometimes, Property Values need to be calculated from external C code, and hence closures form thin wrappers around the C code.

Apart from the above given reasons, closures are natural for certain activities that are described below.

Use of Closures :

The entire architecture is based on using closures as an essantial communication mechanism, as it allows the engine to create a dynamical schedule (which is necessary). Since most messages schedule events in the future, the message can send closures to the Engine, which the engine can execute at the specified future time.

Regards to implementing properties as hash-table of closures, that means that the code can install a different closure if required on the fly. And why is this important, Because of this stated goal of the system .

'To quickly develop and test out various swarm algorithms on real problems'

Having installable behaviour in runtime code means that, essentailly more intelligence can be incorporated into the system by having more than one behaviour at hand, and using an appropriate one as the situtation demands. Also, in case of efficiency comparisons, two seperate tests need not be carried out, as the code can install both the behaviours dynamically and compare them at runtime. Also, testing and simulating various algorithms with minor variations is only a matter of modifying some of the behaviours (i.e, installing different closures for common properties).

Take this example of an adaptive system, simulating a group of creatures on an event horizon in the system (Filthy stock borkers, who have come to know of a huge stock market scandal). Now adaptive creatures will have to exhibit radically different behaviour at runtime, so how do you incorporate the fact in the progmatically easiest way possible? Simple - install a new closure for the old behaviour.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

The Season of the Swarm

2005-09-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

My work this month is cut out for me. This is the season of the swarm. No and I am not talking about Micheal Crichton's Prey. What I am talking about is this project that I've been working on for the Center For Aritificial Intelligence and Robotics. Unlike my other self-assigned projects, this one is not just merely code hacking but actually 'software engineering'. I am not saying both are different, just that with mere code hacking, if something is 'fubar' , your ass is not on the line.

So, here is brief prelude to what the system is about. Since I am a big fan of Bottom-up, Iterative, Incremental and Test first Design strategy (BIIT), this is a moving target and an evolving design. entire components might be thrown out, new components might grow (rather than added..) into this design etc.

Also, for those who are software engineers (professional or otherwise), I would certainly like your views on the design, any additions etc.

Basic Design Spec for An'd'rea (nothing to do with my college senior)

An'd'rea is a framework for the simulation, testing and development of swarm intelligence algorithms. It is a system which uses the python as an extension language (the system itself being written essentially in python).

The Andrea system consists of 3 major system components. These components form the core of the system and will comprise the guts of the system.

The Generic Simulation Engine.
The SimObj Classes.
The Metrics Classes.

The Generic Simulation Engine :

This is the core component which handles all the simulation related stuff and performs book-keeping operations. It is a discrete-timestep event simulator, i.e, works using discrete time rather than continuous time. It currently is planned to support only a single time line, but might be extended to multiple timelines with say multiple communicating instances. (A possibility that needs to be figured into the design without making the engine unwieldy).

The SimObj Classes :

These are the basic classes that represent the components of a swarm, the members of the swarm themselves and their environment itself. Though they both derive from the same base class (and hence can be used to build a heirachichal structures), The environment classes are different in the sense that they are usually plugged into a different part of the GSE than the members of the swarm. The members of the swarm plug into GSE's internal simlist, whereas the environment plugs into GSE's state management system (just a big name for a bunch of variables that are accessible to all the members of the simlist).

The Metrics Classes :

These are the basic classes that plug into a different part of the GSE and gather various metrics about the components of the swarm, and the environment themselves. Putting it principles of programming language jargon, 'The form the reflection framework for a Swarm DSL'. That should make it instantaneously clear to anyone I guess. But for the sake of less technical readears who don't write virtual machines during long lunch breaks. These Metric classes are used to querry the status of the environment and members of the swarm present in the simlist.

I've no idea of UML, so this is something that I've invented on the spur of the moment (to avoid learning UML :D) to explain the above system.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

An artifact of great power and great mystery

2005-09-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding extremely doltish, I qoute from the movie 'Dude, Where's my Car'

It's a powerful and mysterious device, its power exceeded only by its mystery, and strangely its mystery exceeded only by its.... er.. insipidity??

Path breaking research never ceases at SRM, and espescially the new paths that are broken everyday are more and more alarming. Not only have they great stalwarts from the department of metaphysical cybernetics have conquered the secrets of the pyramid, mastered Vaastu Shastra, ran over all prevailing common sense and made it an unfortunate roadkill. They are now entering the realm of hacker culture to question the most fundamental assumtion and answer them with such candor, boldness, and a straight face (which wouldn't stay that straight, once the answer is out) that might send Eric.S.Raymond back to writing notes on the back of his dairy on how to please women.

Well, take a bow, Mr.Raymond, before our great researcher who ponders upon the timeless new dimension in the nature of hacker culture, which I've never seen in any of your great published works. Well its time we dusted our 'Catb' printouts, take a whitener, and start adding the corrections. Here is my report on yet annother incident..

[Date: Today.. duh!, Time : Was ROTFLMAOPIMP that I couldn't notice]

A gloomy rainy thursday, with a pretty quiet class, and yet another unfortunate soul at the dias.. This time some arcane aspect of computer security was also at the pulpit, more as a symbol of impending molestation and defenestration of common sense, rather than as the topic of discussion. And as this poor soul as any deeply misguided by the media did use the word 'hacker' in the wrong sense.. (A serious post on this topic later). This led to the revelation of the completely new dimension of a hacker that had wizzbanged past Mr.ESR.

Our dilligent glob.. er.. Research Scholar, catches this poor soul in the act, and pops the question.. No, no.. not that question, but a different one, which has lead to a maelstorm in the world of open-source philosophy and psychology.. and the question is

'Is hacker a hardware or a software?'

To which our poor soul, (wishing he had signed the contract to the devil), elaborates on the fact that 'hacker' often refers to a person in the same way that a carpenter doesn't refer to the chisel or wood. To which the relentless scholar goes on and instructs the person to stop digressing by giving examples and answer the question, to which the poor soul promptly packs its bags and leaves on a one-way ticket to alaska.

Well, thats how this new dimension was discovered.. Enlightenment beckons those who brave SRM..

Reporting Almost live ( I almost died laughing my ass off.. ) for TUHANIAT,
Vishnu Vyas.

The Monty Hall problem and LISP

2005-08-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

I recently stumbled upon the Monty Hall problem at Wikipedia. I've seen this problem before, and have always used good old bayes theorem to solve it. Since, I was hacking at some boring regular expressions and needed to take a break, and also Wikisource site has C/C++/Java and Perl simulations but none in LISP, so I decided to try my hand at it.

Since, I am not some 'uber-lisp-hacker' this is not the most efficient code one can write and if some uber lisp hacker finds this , maybe he can improve it.

Anyway here is the code..

;; Monty Hall.LISP
;; Simulation for the Monty Hall problem as in Wikipedia..

(let ((host 0) (stick-wins 0) (switch-wins 0) (total-trials 3000))
  (dotimes (i total-trials)
    ; chose random postions for car and goat, choices for contestant

    (let* ((car (random 3))
      (goat1 (cond ((= car 0) 1) ((= car 1) 2) ((= car 2) 0)))
      (goat2 (cond ((= goat1 0) 1) ((= goat1 1) 2) ((= goat1 2) 0)))
      (sticker (random 3))
      (switcher sticker))

    ; select the door that the host opens and
    ; the door the switcher switches too..
    (setf host (cond ((= sticker goat1) goat2) (t goat1)))
    (setf switcher (cond ((= host goat2) car)
          (t (cond ((= switcher car) goat2)
             ((= switcher goat2) car)))))
    (if (= sticker car) (incf stick-wins))
    (if (= switcher car) (incf switch-wins))

    (format t "Car:~D, Goat 1:~D, Goat 2:~D, Sticker:~D, Switcher:~D~%"
      car goat1 goat2 sticker switcher)))

   (format t "Total Trials : ~D, Sticker Wins ~D times(~D %),
     Switcher Wins ~D times (~D %)~%"
   total-trials
   stick-wins
   (* (/ stick-wins total-trials) 100.00)
   switch-wins
   (* (/ switch-wins total-trials) 100.00)))

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

Looking at Blogs - part I

2005-08-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

So, what have I been talking about when I say I want to look at blogs? or rather mine them? Well, there are a lot of things to tell, so I shall proceed in no particular order.

One of the most important aspect of blogs (also, a pretty weak aspect) is linking, and thats what we will be looking at in this post. So, what are links, how do they affect the blog-ecosphere and what kind of semantic information they provide? How reliable is the information provided by the links in blogsphere? Can links tell us about what poeple like to read? Can links tell us about what people are writing about? And how about ramifications of links? These are the types of questions I will be trying to answer in the following series.

So what are these links anyway?

For the HTML uninitaiated, links are specific types of tags that starts with an < a > and ends with an < /a > and refer to another HTML page. (for more specific defenition, check out w3c). But in the blogsphere, there is more than a single type of link. Without going into pedantic taxonomy, we can basically classify them as "hyperlinks in posts", and "hyperlinks to other blogs".

Hyperlinks in posts are those that are posted by people inside their posts to link to stuff that they like or refer to within the contents of the posts. Some weblogs, primarily consists of whole lots of interesting links (for an example of that type of weblog look here ). These are pretty important types of links, and often can help us guess better at the type of content in the post, and also if they link to other blogs, then they can be used to analyse the contents of the 'linked' posts.

Hyperlinks to blogs are those that are posted by poeple in their blog side bars etc. These types of hyperlinks provide two entirely different types of information. One, about the people themselves, who they are friends with, etc.. etc.. and secondly, About the content they like to read and most probably write about. But its hard to distinguish which type of hyperlinks provide information of which sort.

How do they affect the blog-ecosphere and what type of semantic information do they provide ?

Links, not only affect the blog-ecosphere, but define the blog-ecosphere. From links and to links tell us who links to who. (the why can be difficult to figure out.. and even if done, might not entirely be accurate.. but we have to work with a certain degree of uncertainity). The linked neighbourhood of a blog, in general can give information about the contents of the blogs. The semantic information is contained in the linked neighbourhood of the blogs, and among the shape of the relationships (shape of the graph) themselves.

But this brings about another question? Well, if immidiete links can give information on the nature of blogs, what about 2nd level or 3rd level links? What about links to links to links? things like that? Well, my contention is that they do, but the amount of relation they hold to the original blog under consideration drops down exponentially.

So, now what kinda of semantic information do they contain? They contain enough information to allow us to categorise blogs in general. Categorising blogs might be a bit more difficult because even a primarily technical blog can be a bit discursive and go into the finesse of germanic languages. The spatial and the topological nature of blogs can provide information about the related content of other blogs.

So what next?

Well, there is more to this than whats in this post, so I will follow up this post with a part 2. Also, there is the temporal aspects of blogs, and why mallika sherawat is a bad data point ;-),

So, till then

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas

Social Search (un)Defined?

2005-08-20T02:55:00.000-07:00

Or, using a C idiom, how about #undef Social_Search

When, I first started contemplating the idea of a social search engine, I only had a very vauge idea what it was, let alone how it goes about doing what it is supposed to. Even as I write this I have only a vauge idea of how I am going to do it, but atleast I am a bit more clear about what I really wanted to do. Infact what I want to do is very far away from what the term 'Social Search' may connote, and henceforth I shall relegiously eschew from using that term, lest someone think I am doing an online dating service of sorts.

So, what is that I want to do with this? Well I want to search blogs. What's new there you ask? Technorati does that, and why even the omnipotent mother of all search engines google does that, so whats new here. Well whats new here is that I simply don't want to stop with searching blogs, but I've realised there is something more that one could do with blogs, that you can't really do with the web as a whole (or its just too darn intractable).

The key here is that blogs are a deluge of semantic information. The previous sentence is so loaded with meaning that I've decided to allocate a seperate post about that. Coming back to what I want to do is that I would like to mine this semantic information, and try to present it in an web-based format. Not only should what I envision be able to do dumb old reverse indexed keyword searches (the quick search), but also must be able to use the abundant semantic information available on blogs to provide more meaningful results.

So, when do I want to this? Not immedietly, may be its a viable final year project, maybe its not. So, lets see how this comes about.

On a totally unrelated note, I tried to gork the details of 'The Java Virtual Machine' (blue-book?), and ended up disillusioned. I was never a big fan of java (atleast not much as ruby/python), but the JVM is clearly one of the least elegant (see, I am not stressing efficiency here, of which I have no idea about) designs I've come across. And from, what I read here, I guess the guys at Microsoft have got it right this time around. So, should I swallow my pride and give them a 'pat on the back' for the good work, or should I just silently ignore that ever happened and play spoil sport? Tough one...

PS : With 'Sriram Currying' in C# and all that, it seems more and more like Greenspunning, doesn't it?

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

Notes on Brawler

2005-08-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

If you are wondering what brawler is its this crawler that I've been writing recently to test out Common LISP and I am having awsome fun in doing so. Also, this has given me something that I've never ever openly accepted in all these years, and that is I am addicted to coding and computers in general. This should be evident from the fact that my GRE is days away and yet I know zilch of the massive wordlists that I need to mug up :(

One of the things that any program for a crawler needs is a nice URL handling library, and strangely even after so much talk about how useful LISP is for web programming, there seems to be no good ones (and something thats open source with a BSD/MIT/LGPL style licence) yet. One thing I like about python is their batteries included approach. Wish LISP grew out of Steele's CLTL2 and developed into more complete and mature distributions. Anyhow returning to the topic of non-existant URL handling libraries, I've decided to write my own, but more specifically oriented to the HTTP protocol. Doing something more general would be an overkill right now, however, I am considering putting in an OO style architecture so that I can probably extend it to say a FTP version of it or something. Also, I am planning to base this URL library on the lines of that in JDK, with something like say an 'open-url-stream' , defaulting to an input stream which must be readily readable with standard lisp I/O functions.

So to get started on that, I needed to experiment with HTTP and I first tried telnet, but only got bored with switching windows and ended up writing this piece of small piece of lisp code.

;; function http-interact, allows interaction with remote http server.
;; uses CLOCC net.lisp for socket interface from PORT collection.

(defun http-interact (website)
    (do ((line (read-line t nil) (read-line t nil))
    (mysock (socket-connect 80 website) (socket-connect 80 website))
    ((string= line "bye") (close mysock))

    ;; read user input and send it to server (request)
    (format mysock "~a" line)
    (terpri mysock)
    (force-output mysock)

    ;; read whatever server throws back at us (response).
    (do ((response (read-line mysock nil) (read-line mysock nil)))
        ((null response) (values))
        (format t "~a~%" response))))

That code is about 10 lines and was written in a matter of 2 minutes, and was debugged at the toplevel in about 5 minutes. I can't even imagine doing the same thing in C anymore (takes around 40+ lines of code) and would definitely not have taken just 5 minutes to do something as trivial as this. (Java is also as good as LISP in this type of code economy I am looking at, but doesn't do better than lisp, unless you really end up cutting corners and sometimes even newline charecters, but what the heck it already has nice URL facility that I was looking for in the first place)

Well, thats it, I am hooked onto lisp (yeah It will never probably replace C for most of the things I do, but might after all replace ruby for most of my throwaway coding..)

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

Discovering Redhat's Source Navigator

2005-08-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

Well, I've always lamented about the lack of good , light and gui-oriented project management tools on linux, and finally I guess I've found out what I was always looking for. I am talking about RedHat's Source Navigator.

Acording to the User's Guide,

Red Hat Source-Navigator^TM is a powerful code analysis and comprehention tool that provides a graphic framework for understanding and reengineering large or complex software projects. .

The project management tool as such is very good and is able to recogonize most projects by simply importing their directory. The tool is also aware of revesion control systems such as CVS and is able to access them. Here is a screenshot of it in action...

Not only does the interface look slick and is highly responsive, It seems to have support for most of the popular languages around (that includes C/C++/Java/Tcl/Ruby/Python). It provides an simple , yet powerful build configuration interface and a easy to use class browser and cross-referencing tool.The inbuilt text editor not only supports full color syntax highlighting, and doubles up as a slick IDE/PFE.

Being the proselytic lisper that I am, One of the first things I tried out was support for balancing parathesis, and its better than what I thought would come by default. Not only does it indicate which paranthesis you are balancing, but also highlights the expression being surrounded.

The only dissapointment with this system is that at its current state totally useless for developing any big LISP projects that I need to do as it neither supports an interface to the interactive top-level, nor does it support LISP syntax hightlighting, So all my lisp coding will be again limited to EMACS and SLIME, however I am looking to do some of my Java/C++/C related coding in this environment.

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Experiences with LISP and Brawler

2005-08-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

If there is someone whose advice I take a bit seriously on programming then its probably sriram and the last time when I started talking about LISP to him he said this 'Try writing a big project in LISP and you will really know if its as great as you think it is', So I thought I would just do that. And I've decided to write an ad-hoc search engine and one of the primary components the Web Crawler is what I will be starting to do.

Now, one might ask what's so great about this search engine.. (and yeah, Google is always there),So I thought I should introduce a twist in the tale and this is what I may term as a Social Search engine. I can't probably define the term more precisely as I only have a vague idea of what I am trying to do. So I will be blogging about here. Lets see how Common Lisp takes up to this challenge

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas

SRM's Research Scholars..

2005-08-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

Research, the occupation of all those super brainy nerds at MIT, UCB and the like. People who sacrifice their own social life and chances of making out with gorgeous super models (It is still an open research question wether they can get any in the first place) in search of truth and betterment of humanity - even if it means SNR analyisis on multiwave carrier communications. Well, its people like these who have been responsible for the atom bomb, particle accelerators, cellular phones, internet search, hamburgers , etc .. and the list goes on.

Well to prove that SRM's intelligentsia (yeah there is one, but I am not part of it anyway) is no way less uglier or stinkier than your average 'glob' at say MIT or UCB, I should go ahead and post a photo but I won't. I shall show you that their intellectual capacity* is well matched if not exceeded to atleast most of the low end coffee machines at MIT. Brace yourself for the latest and greatest path breaking research from SRM in the field of Deciscion Support Systems.

I have chosen that particular instance as a gem of an example of the type of research that goes on at SRM, which is of a completely different nature from what you would find at any other place. Well most of the research is not conducted in dark dingy labs with inhuman hitech machinery all around, but it takes a more socratic approach of open questioning and seamlessly mixes it with the tried and trusted method of spouting gibberish.

Imagine your typical bright sunny day on the 5.5th floor of an insufficiently constructed building (yeah, we have non-integral number of floors, how cool is that?). You have a sufficiently terrified little student standing before a bald headed glob - Oh! did I say glob? no make it 'Research Scholar' , who had managed to unsuccessfuly gork the details of DSS from a 300 page thick book in the past half-hour, stuttering to enlighten us upon the intricacies of a DSS. That's the setting when the most path breaking idea in DSS was discovered. Here is a my report on that incident ..

[Date : Evades my memory , time : when I badly wanted to get home, Day: tuesday]

The sun was shining brightly on the 5.5th floor of a hitech block classroom in SRMEC, when young Mr.Foo (name changed , not on request) climbed on the dias to deliver his keynote lecture on DSS, and started with great momentum and proceeded to explain the various ideas and concepts behind one. He explained a pyramidal type data organisation paradigm for DSS, when he hit his first road block. Thats where our friendly glob, er.. Research Scholar, Interrupted him to ask why it was that the pyramidal organisation was used, for which foo could not give a satisfactory answer. And to enlighten us, our Research Scholar went about explaining this..

' The Pyramid is one of the most ancient shapes and its powers are all well documented. Infact even the ancient egyptians knew about the powers of the pyramid that they invented vassthu shaastra to help them build the pyramids. The pyramids are one of the most important elements of vaashtu shaastra, which tells us how to build big things. Since descicion support systems are basically very complex things, vaasthu shaastra can be used to build DSS, so they used pyramids to build the model for the DSS'.

Hmm you call that enlightenment or what?

Signing off (enlightened)
Vishnu Vyas

* wild exaggeration employed..

The Order of The Lambda Calculus

2005-08-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

Talking about Linux conjures up images of penguins and BSD, images of red demons with pointy tails. These symbols have gained universal acceptance because of their uniqueness and the fact that they represent a community brought together by a common credo.

The lisp community always had its ubiquitious lambda, but somehow a simple lambda doesn't convey the full strength of the community as tux or the deamon (red guy with pointy tail) does. So here is my feeble attempt to make a logo for the lisp community.

Btw, If you notice that there is an inscription saying "The Order of The Lambda Calculus", well its not some weird secret soceity (no 'eyes wide shut' stuff going on). Its just about the fact that anyone who is interested in LISP (and by lisp, I mean all dialects of it too ) or is a LISP user or Just thinks LISP is cool can become a member of it , by simply putting the logo on your homepage / weblog / T-shirts / tatoo's etc..

Also, If you do so, don't hesitate to send me a mail so I can keep an unofficial list. my mail id is vishnuvyas@gmail.com

Signing off with lots of community spirit,
Vishnu Vyas.

Shelved LI24H

2005-08-08T05:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, my long lost conscience made a suprise visit yesterday and politely reminded me that I should be working for those meaningless exams rather than hacking java's reflection framework (which i realised is extremely clumsy), the lisp (or should i say hoplessly modified scheme) in 24 hours thing has been put on suspended till all these irritating exams get over.

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

LISP in 24 hours?

2005-08-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

A talk with a friend of mine yesterday motivated to do this project. I am currently planning to write a functional LISP interpreter, which must be able to atleast do more than a "Hello World" program, in less than 24 hours, and in less than 100KB (compressed obviously!), starting from right now.. (this includes time for sleep, etc.. :D)

I am planning to implement a simple version of scheme based on this standard. Probably once this is over, I will do an IDE too. The language of implementation will be Java, for I got this really crazy idea , in which scheme implementations will be able to access the java code inside.. (probably hacking reflections a bit). So lets see how this guys.. and for all those people out there.. 'Wish me best of luck'

Things I shouldn't be doing with my GRE and TOEFL right around the corner though!..

signing off,
vishnu vyas.

Security by Obscurity Theme Quiz by JK

2005-08-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Quiz Mastero, Jayakanthan a.k.a Shakuni is back again with the second installment of Security By Obscurity theme quiz. I had immense fun solving it but I am still stumped at the connect for that quiz. So for anyone who is interested in quizzing,

DON'T MISS THIS

Boa Constrictor

2005-08-04T23:45:00.000-07:00

All this talk about python (the programming language), and my natural interest in herpetology (thats study of reptiles for all you neonates ;-) ) brought this peom into my memory. And no, this was not written by me but its something that I had in school when I was around 7th standard. I actually digged around my old desk to find out my english text book which had this poem.

Oh, I'm being eaten
By a boa constrictor,
A boa constrictor,
A boa constrictor,
I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor,
And I don't like it--one bit.
Well, what do you know?
It's nibblin' my toe.
Oh, gee,
It's up to my knee.
Oh my,
It's up to my thigh.
Oh, fiddle,
It's up to my middle.
Oh, heck,
It's up to my neck.
Oh, dread,
It's upmmmmmmmmmmffffffffff . . .

-by shell silverstien

Signing off,
Vishnu

Merger of the Blogs

2005-08-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

For those who have been following these pages regularly would know that I started a small techno-blog some time back to put everything that I couldn't put into a blog for general consumption like this one anyway. And the other blog is hosted at Livejournal. But I've grown more and more dissatisfied with livejournal asking me to pay for a lot of features that blogger gives me for free, so I've decided to merge both the blogs into this one. I will post both techie and non-techie articles here.

Come to think of all this obsession with blogs, I was reflecting on why I decided to blog. It brought a series of questions to my mind. but however the posts have proved this so far to me. I would like to reassure that I have a life and not a cooked up dungeon monkey (copyright (c) JK). Thats what the non-techie posts prove. On the other hand computers, programming and in general being geeky is what I am and thats also the main reason I started my techie blog. And by modus ponens that proves that geeks have a life too (extremely fatuous use of modus ponens here).

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas

Don't program in python because you can.

2005-08-04T00:57:00.000-07:00

Removed on request.

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Handcrafted.

2005-08-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

One thing that I always like about blogger was the fact that it is infinitely customizable yet, extremely userfriendly. Though I am pretty familiar with computers and programming I am very much a neophyte to the world of web programming. Infact I guess the web has contributed more acronyms to the dictionary than anyother single field. Blogger, was pertty much an ideal beginers blog-tool with very well made templates and all that, but there are always times when you need that extra punch. Though all the templates were eye catchy and all that they lacked induviduality. Alas, they were not mine.

And none of them could come to be the template that I had always wanted, or so I thought, until I came across raymond chen's blog ( a win32 UI uber-geek ). The color scheme was amazing, the sidebar was filled with extremely useful navigational content (including a LJ style calender, etc.. ) and that was what I wanted my blog to be. So I started the process of mangling my original template and with no idea of what CSS even expanded to I set out. Also the first thing I do when I plan to pay tribute to (shamelessly rip-off) a web page is I look into page source, but unfortunately in this case the blog being hosted on MSN did not have embedded/inline style sheets. So, I couldn't get access to all the juicy formatting content that made this simple blog look like the one I always wanted.. (yeah I know its only 2 lines of python code to retrieve the stylesheet, or one line in the address bar :D ) but something inside me wanted to make this style all my own.. and so I set out to do so..

With one whole day of effort I've got this new completely handcrafted template up and running.. (I wish I could get rid of the dirty blogger bar, but guess I can't ). And I like the result!

Happily signing off,
Vishnu Vyas

Ace Ventura - When Nature plays prank caller

2005-08-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

Note : This post contains a degree of profanity, which is the bare mininum needed to express my exasperation, so readers beware!

Man, a product of ages of evolution ( though no one can still satisfactorily explain 'the missing link') has carved out a marvel of a civilization in which he prides himself. He has been able to satiate his needs to food, shelter and clothing but in this process he often forgets that he is afterall nothing more than a product of Mother Nature, and is always at her mercy.

This is not some impersonal rant about the tsunami or the torrential rains in mumbai (which btw is nature's way of saying 'you silly little twerps!' ) but something more closer and deeply personal. And its about time to clarify the subject of this post, about nature playing prank caller. Many of us are under the fatuous assumption that for dear old Mom Nature to prove that she is still boss she has to show her fury in the form of storms, earthquakes and other such calamities, but what many fail to understand is that she has this very very simple weapon which goes by various denotations such as 'To hit the loo / crapper', but more ubiquitously known as 'The Nature's Call'.

And it was unfortunate for me when she decided to give me a call. Well not just a simple call but a full fledged prank call, here unfolds the story of this poor ace ventura, with whom nature played prank caller

August 1, 2005, 10:10 am, This is the time where this fateful story started as I ventured into our college canteen and ordered a simple samosa. And little did I know at that time that this would be the begining of a very rough ride. To make matters clear and set things on the record, I liked the samosas the day before, crispy with very little oil and for once properly cooked (which is by the way a very rare occurance in my college only paralleling that of halley's comet albeit only totally unpredictable). So, I added samosa's as good as yesterday's, but I guess the lady at the counter grossly misunderstood me and actually presented me with 'yesterday's' samosas.

And this led to what is medically described as food poisioning. Though the word does sound serious enough it somehow simply fails utterly to describe exactly what food poisioning begets. Nothing happened to me till around 3:15pm that day but suddenly I had a spasm of pain in my stomach and I could already feel my bowels screaming with pain. Though I did never have the urge, the pain in the bowel's weren't too pleasurable either. And within this time the churling in my bowels was powerful enough to make me puke its contents. Though the act of puking did provide me with some relief it was only momentary and fleeting. And by the time this was over it was already time for the college buses to leave. The churling in my bowels did not abate.

I did get on the bus, but there were enough vibrations within the bus to shake the embryo out of a pregnant mother, and in my enervated condition I was no match for the powerful transverse and longitudinal waves that lambasted me with insurmountable strength. Very soon I was literally squirming in my seat. I HAD TO GO! I had no other choice! So I stopped the bus in guduvanchery and got down and went straight to the bus stand in search of a toilet. Here is the gist of the conversation I had with a mtc official there

Me : Sir, Bus stand-la toilet yenga irukku ( where is the toilet here )
Him : Ingala athu ethuvum kediayathu sir ( there are no toilets here )
Me : Sir, please sollungu, yenaku konjam urget ... ( sir, please, running a little urgent here )
Him : Inga irukuthu na irukku-nu solla poren, inga illa sir.. ( I would tell you if there was one but there is none here)

Rest assured, I could guess that this conversation was going nowhere, and neither was I. So I did look around a place and did find a pompus and so obviously placed board which proclaimed something to the extent of 'Modern Coin Operated Bathroom' ! I was staring agape at it for moment, with foolishness rushing to my head as to why I did not spot this earlier. But, much to my dismay I really found out that the 'Modern Coin Operated Bathroom' was actually 'Dilapidated Stinking Coin Stealing Room', thats putting it mildly. very mildly.

And I was grudgingly walking out of the bus stand, and I had this sudden storm within my bowels and this made me puke instantaneously, and fortunately I was standing right next to an open drain. So I did puke there twice. (I din't know my stomach could hold so much!). And I went about asking other people where the local toilet was, and no one could exactly pin point the location of a single toilet. And as I was walking down that place I did come across a public health center, or so it was called. And guess what,

THE FUCKED UP PUBLIC HEALTH FUCKING CENTER DID NOT HAVE A PUBLIC BATHROOM. PERIOD.

Well, after asking around the place for a few more minutes I finally found a some one with the source of this much hard to find knowledge, and this what he gave me

Me : Sir, ungaluku inga bathroom yenga poganum-nu theriuma... ( sir, do you know where the bathroom is?)
Him : Inga ellam open-air theatre tha sir.. (we defecate in the open here!)
Me : Illa, ithu chinna vishyam illa, peria vishyam.. (hmm.. this not simple urination, Its something bigger)
Him ; Oh!, appadina, athu inga yengum kediyathu, neenga straight-a pona anga oru maram theriuytha angenrunthu moonavathu left yedutha oru PCO booth varum , anga first right yedunga.. ulla or 10 mins nadantha oru public toilet irukku... (Oh!, if thats the case you've got to go straight beyond those trees, and take the 3rd left from there, where you will find a PCO booth, take the first right there and after 10 mins of walk you should get to a public toilet!)
Me : Aiyo!!!! Ok thank you sir..

And I did hurry to that place to finally find a toilet. Atleast I was happy that it was clean ( maybe because it was in the midst of nowhere so probably I was the only user).

So for all those who plan to put SRM in their college lists 'BEWARE OF SAMOSA', and if you are in guduvancheri and need to find a public toilet, you are doomed..

with this sad tale,

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas.

The world's favourite cacophemism..

2005-07-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

Though I usually don't post links, this is something that I couldn't resist.

This is the most comprehensive analysis of the english-speaking world's most commonly used cacophemism. It even contains equivalents, a small history, grammatical information and even a filmography ;-) . Also check out the links.

Click Here!

Random thoughts on programming languages.

2005-06-10T00:12:00.000-07:00

'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever' - John Keats
No, I am not talking about the close encounters with the 'other' kind (girls) which don't usually happen to dungeon monkeys like me who only get to bang their keyboards. This article is regards to atavism in modern computer programming languages. Well, by modern programming languages I mean those which are worth the hacker's salt, and not those that are designed by behemoth organizations which pander to the needs of profitability and business rather than competent and good design.

It is a very common notion that scientists live in the world of surreal and are not bothered by the non-idealism pervading in reality which are of constant concern to engineers. And thus engineers are considered as those who design skills are to be of any practical use. Usually a scientist's (henceforth called dreamers) obsession with beauty and cleanliness avoids any sense of pragmatism is a much prevailing misconception. However, their obsession with beauty and elegance has the quality to lead and steer than an engineer's (realist's) flirtations with 'ground' reality. If you are still thinking what all these philosophical musings which are often sources of intense debate among the academia, has to do with programming languages then here is what I will be talking about further in this post.

I've always been interested by programming ever since the days of my childhood and I am an active programmer. I currently am proficient in many of the langagues that have come to be the mainstay of modern software engineering such as C/C++, Java etc.. The first language which I ever learnt was called LOGO a simple programing language which launched me into programming, later i accumulated BASIC, Pascal, C, C++ , Java, Perl, Python to my repertoire of programming languages. Inspite of the fact that I've qouted more than half a dozen languages most of my programming is either done in Java or in C. Only lately I've been looking at LISP. Inspite of its alien looking syntax proliferated with paranthesis which can make anyone recoil in disgust, the language hides subtle beauty and immense power which even modern programming languages can't compare. Infact the most amazing fact is that this language is the second oldest programming language to be still in use (McArthy 1965). This is simply a post on my feelings on two of my current favourites in the programming language menagerie - C and LISP.

C - A realist's design : Modelling the machine

The C Programming Language, originally concieved by Dennis Ritchie far back in the 1980's is one of the most popular languages around. This is still one of the most popular language around and much of the bulk of code written is written in C. What served as a low level assembler to bridge the semantic gap has grown into an immensely powerful language. But still it, in its heart is a realistic design. Its imperative style, insistence on the how's rather than the whats has made it close to the machine.. which is in itself a system which concentrates on the how's more than the whats.

Also, one of the most pleasing aspects of C is its bare minimalistic design which belies the power and expressiveness it can unleash which comes from the entire language design being built upon a few but relevant metaphors which form the what you might call the 'C line of thought'. These metaphors are those that model the underlying machine. Infact it was the expedetious choice of such metaphors that make C, a language that was designed on the Dell PDP minicomputers which are long obsolete still relevant to this day.

But, even C has its own shortcommings, The metaphors it models form only a thin layer of abstraction around the actual machine leaving the rest to the ingenuity of the programmer. This freedom, as any other freedom is and has been severly abused by those who don't understand it. Though many modern languages such as C++ and Java were built upon the foundations of C, none of them are as elegant as one would had hoped and are either extremely overcomplicated (C++), or simply too restrictive (Java).

LISP - A dreamer's design : Modelling the math

LISP which stands for LISt Processing was orignally an academic paper by McArthy in the late 50's and early 60's. It was later implemented by Steve Russell on the IBM-704 a machine the size of refrigirator and this was the time when IBM was playing "The Empire" (Now being played by Microsoft and actively competed for by Google - another post on this). It was designed as an alternative model for computation and LISP in itself was just the bare mathematical notation that McArthy incidently developed. As an aside, Steve Russell is incidently the 'father' of computer games which has spanned the multi-billion dollar computer gaming industry

One of the best things about lisp, comes directly from its mathematical roots. Elegance. LISP is elegance defined. Its as simple as that. Being a model of computation and as a system for symbolic processing it wields amazing power in terms of expressiveness. Infact most of the ideas which have become 'de facto' standards in modern programming languages was implemented first in LISP. And strangely all this power of lisp comes from a set of operators as minimal as that of C or even more so.

Being the lingua franca of the AI research community has given LISP the image of being arcane, hard to learn and difficult to understand. But this is exactly the image that has been attributed to math, but many fail to remember that math is the expression of absolute truth. The beauty of math stems not from complicated equations or intricate inferences, but from the fact that every mathematical statement is a statement of truth.
(the sense of the word 'truth' is not entirely in the sense associated gandhiji's teachings, but in the sense that 1+ 1 =2 is undeniable and wholly true).

Again, as in C, LISP has fundamental metaphors, but LISP's metaphors are intrinsically more powerful because of the fact that they model computation itself rather than computers. Also the LISP line of thought focusses primarily on the "whats" and only incidentally on the hows, and one of its fundamental metaphors - 'The Partial Recursive Function' serves to highlight this spirit.

LISP's shortcommings is only the fact that it requires initiation and the fact that it recieves much less media attention these days. Infact most modern languages borrow heavily from LISP. for example Java and the .NET series of languages which talk about garbage collection and 'Managed' code has been in LISP for the past 35 years! but, yet these languages haven't caught up with LISP, and slowly the gap is bridging. And history shall come a full circle. It is also interesting to note that LOGO, the first language I learnt was derived from LISP, life has come a full circle, i guess.

The Language of the future : Modelling what ?

I am not really sure what the future beholds, but what will the next new language be? Looking at the geneaology of programming languages, It started out with modelling computation and led to LISP and all its derivatives, but back then when computers weren't powerful enough people started modelling computers to pump out as much performance as required. As computers have grown more and more powerful modern programming language designs have been trying hard to find the correct middle ground between an effective model of computation and a model of the computer. Infact even I am designing a language which searches for this holy grail.

As machines get more powerful, The languages that will become the mainstay of programming will not be those that model computation or computers, but those that model the mind.

Signing off,
Vishnu

The Fuzzy Logic Show - Pilot.

2005-04-10T01:31:00.000-07:00

Hi guys, This is the comic i was telling you people about in the previous post... So here it is.

Some Old and Crappy Artwork

2005-04-08T23:40:00.000-07:00

Some Old and Crappy Artwork

This is some old psuedo-comic like artwork that I did for the engenious event at shaastra 2k5. Since I am unable to scan copies of my psuedo-comic strip, I am posting this. I will post the comic strip as soon as I can get my hands on a proper scanner.

Btw, the artwork was for a concept wearable water carrier device, which somehow impressed the judges at the event enough to give us a consolation prize!

Anyways
Signing Off,
Vishnu

An algorthimic approach to art

2005-04-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

I am very much aware of the fact that I am neither the next Dali nor Charles.M.Schlutz, But fine art in all it forms has always had a special appeal. Espescially after the scintillating discussion about the time complexity of poetry on vikraman's blog. Well, if you actually went ahead and clicked on the link, you would probably come to the conclusion that I might know only as much as... er... lets say 'Zilch' about art.

Most of my attempts at any form of organised art have been disasters, with minor 'consequences' to the human race. Like my childhood penchant for artistic fireworks , which almost would have sent the entire neighbourhood in flames, if it had not been for my mother's better discretion. Or for that matter the "Hindu Young World" painting competion I attended as a kid. Ok.. now for all those who know me, you are throwing yourself into coughing fits and all.. but for the record 'I did attend such a competion', but just that I had more fun in the face painting category, but strangely the organizers din't take to that too lightly and insisted I use my paints on the charts provided and not on hapless little kids whom I could easily overpower by merely threatening to sit on them! (Any wisecracks about my weight at this juncture will not be tolerated, even if its within the deepest crevices of your mind.. yes Big Brother is watching you..).

Well, my artistic temperament not withstanding, I've been always fascinated by comics. Be it good old indian dose of tinkle and amar chitra katha, or non-desi ones like Archie, Calvin & Hobbes, Tin-Tin, Asterix etc... And I've always dreamed up of having a comic strip. But as most of you would know, my so called 'artistic' talents are extremely in short supply. Drawing stick figures of men and women (how would you distinguish sex in stick figures, without makin.. er.. things obvious?) could in short be termed as 'pushing it'. But that has never deterred me from trying.

After a few hours of digging my old stuff on the pretext of cleaning my room (which by the way I did, after considerable negotiations with my mother on the virtues of chaos and dynamical systems failed.) I managed to find a few comic strips that I had done as a kid. And since, unlike others (you would be suprised to find how many) I do not keep a chronological record of my creations, I was at a loss when I tried to pin down a date on them. Actually the I found it very interesting myself, and I was amused to find that I could actually come with a nice comic strip with very little drawing talent. Wondering how I did that. The answer even today amuses me.

All my charecters on the initial comic strip were balloons! yes, you did read that right, balloons - rubber expandable mebranes which are usually filled with air/helium used by kids as devices for amusement. (Hmm, ain't that the most descriptive definition anyone can give for ballons?). Why balloons you ask. The answer is mind-bogglingly simple. Balloons require just 2 elemnents to draw. A circle and a wiggly line. Actually the comic strip just goes about a group of balloon warriors being at war with other equally nebulous charecters. Though, It might not have made a good comic strip by any standards, I guess its something that I can take pride in!

Apart from puerile incrusions into the world of creating comics, my intrests in comics have been lying latent for quite some time (indicating a period of inadvertent abstinence from tinkle - maturity?? I doubt it!), until quite recently I had the interest to create a comic strip. And after hours of discussion with my friend about the cast and charecters of my comic. The names, etc.. I finally decided to go ahead and make the comic. But only the first time I tried, I really couldn't draw even if it were to save a life! (This again is a rather rummy figure of speech that I seemed to have picked up from my friend mercury!). So for inspiration I did check out few nice webcomics and found some really nice ones, with whose charecters I've immidietly fallen in love with.

So with inspiration from the above mentioned comics, I actually managed to pen down my first story board, with rudimentary panelling and all that. I promise you guys to post a pic of my first comic as soon as i get my hands on a scanner. Guess you would all like to see how it really is. So, till later..

Signing Off,
Vishnu

Gmail's birthday treat

2005-04-02T02:55:00.000-08:00

Yippie!.. 3 cheers for google. With google's mail service GMail clebrating its first birthday today all faithful gmailian's now get double their storage space and even more!!! Yeah guys, gmail's now giving 2 GIGS of storage space!! Infact, if what they say is to be believed.. Its not just going to end with 2 gigs, it might even go higher.. One day they might actually live up to their 'name' and start giving us a googol gigs of space! (pah!!... thats one sentence with a lot of g's!)

And for all those hapless heretics , who said what's the big deal with google, when rediff gives 1gig!.. well, suffer in shame you worthless souls!, as I can mock at your plight with mirthful derision! Ha Ha Ha .. ( add lightening, thunder, a megalomaniacs united logo, and anything else you can imagine!)

Signing off,
Vishnu

Loonatics - A retro look at what cost?

2005-03-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

There are moments in everyone’s life and can be broadly classified into two major categories. The ‘WOW’ moment and the ‘SHIT!’ moment. And here is something that I guess would give all of you a moment of the second type.

What I am referring to is bugs bunny’s total new makeover. They have re-imagined bugs they say. If this is what you call imagination, then animation is not for you dudes! Many might even be surprised at the fact that I have attained heights of joblessness to actually write a post about Bugs and his other loony pals. But this is something that’s close to my heart. Being grown up with an image of bugs with his wit laced one-liners, daffy with his adorable eccentricities and porky with simply the cutest stutter in toon land. Seeing laser eyes and Kung-Fu is not only unbearably insipid but totally unpalatable. Leave the Kung-Fu to the likes of Neo and Morpheus dudes!

The retro look of the looney tunes charecters

Can you imagine when Bugs obliterates Elmer with his laser eyesight, and finishes with a ‘Astala Vista Baby!’. Its gonna suck big time! Bugs Bunny as I knew and loved, or the entire looney tunes gang has been mutilated and transmogrified beyond recognition. And what they don’t seem to realize is that they have simply not only molested their images on the pretext of ‘the new generation’ but they have lost a timeless treasure. Do we want our younger generations growing to images of irrational violence? Has the power and grace of the wit, given away to the glitz and glamour of laser eyesight and martial arts. Though I am not of American origin, I certainly believed that cartoons from Hollywood were a wholly different genre from loads of kung-fu fighting, tsurugi slinging anime. I believed it had a certain element of ‘americanness’ which I loved. They were certainly a welcome reprieve from anime with big breasted females, long haired sword slashers and butt kicking martial arts.

And the costumes of the ‘Lunatics’ as they seem to be called, are so crass and clichéd. Well hasn’t the media learnt anything from the ‘power rangers’? (Well, if you are asking who the F*** they are, then I’ve made my point!). There are even rumors that even Marvin the Martian, is going to get a makeover. Well, getting retro is fine but don't people know the concept of drawing the line? For a culture which seems to be protecting its ‘americanness’ at the cost of everything, isn’t it necessary to protect itself from within? From loosing its traditional heirlooms in the weak pretext of the next ‘generation’ ?.

For all those who jumped at the remote when your parents left the house to switch to cartoon network. For all those who woke up at 7 am on a Sunday just to watch elmer fudd fruitlessly try and hunt bugs. All those who took a well planned break during their boards to see Wile.E.Coyote and Road Runner try outsmart each other. For all those cartoon afficanado’s , who are young at heart, even though they might be reaching senility. For all those who miss the ‘What’s up Doc’s and the ‘Bunny Wabbit’ s. And last but in noway the least, the next generation. Do you want to be fed crap in the name of retro looks and modern imagination. Have you lost any sense of intelligence to not appreciate wit and stoop so low as to be satisfied with martial arts by bunny rabbits. Should we let this outrage continue. Should we let our favourite characters be mutilated in the pretext of the ‘next generation’? Should we let the pens, inks,and graphics tablets of modern day animators (not cartoonists..) run rampant on those characters and all their eccentricities that we cherished as kids.

With these thoughts,
I will sign off with a 'That's All Folks',
Vishnu

What if....

2005-03-27T10:38:00.000-08:00

'What if' a fundamental question that everyone asks.. but something that no one can ever answer ( or atleast give an answer thats not complete wiseassery). And this question has been plauging me ever since .. er... lets say as long as I knew that the two english words what and if put together form such a profound question that has the power to make a lifetime of existence the sucky punchline of a badly timed jest.

And 'what if' is just one of the whole species of questions that evade answers just by their simplicity. An irony I agree but its something thats as real as the earth we live on. Well if you are simply wondering why I am getting philosophical about something that is pretty useless even if answered, Well isin't that what philosophical means. Searching answers to questions that somehow have deep meanings and profound implications but yet are utterly useless, and yet somehow so seductively beautiful. Comming back to the topic of rhetorical questions of life. I really wonder if its just something thats an instinct in us - to fancy the delusional, to reassure ourselves that there were better alternatives, or simply is it wishful thinking. I cannot answer any of those as I don't know the answers. Starting with one rhetorical question and ending up with another. Or is it just the projection of the same question in manifold verbal patterns. Seems I am comming up with more questions than I can count let alone find sufficiently satisfactory answers.

One feeble attempt to answer this question was orchestrated in a couple of episodes of 'Friends' a popular sitcom. Where each one asks the same question and in the end their lives are no different from what it is now. Though, the intention was just to be funny and get some laughs, I think their conclusion is what something that I can totally I can agree with. One's Life might differ in the places one is, the people who share one's life, and the things done. But in general would take on similar patterns irrespective of the choices that were made. Agreed, some choices can change one's life drastically or so it seems but does it? I guess its just a matter of scale you choose to look at.

I will just end this post with this poem which was the reason I even decided to write this post..

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Does it? I wonder...

Signing Off
Vishnu

A trip down the river with tangarine trees and marmalade skies

2005-03-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

A girl with kaleidoscpope eyes and That Four letter word...

Blogging is something that i've known for a long time and never actually got to do till sometime back. I've always been someone who loved to write, but just was lazy enough to not pen down the infinitude of utterly useless things that crossed my mind.. or should i say was in an eternal traffic jam till I actually started blogging. With that akward intro done let me get back to the sole purpose of this post's cybernetic existance. My adventures in blogsphere..

Well when I started this blog, with a single line post I was bursting (with more jumpiness than the many occasions I've had my bladder full.) with enthusiasm to just tell my long time school friend mercury.. And the instant I call her (sometime during the lunch hour in college if my memory serves me right) she declares that she's started blogging too.. hmm does take the wind out of one but that came as no suprise to me at all. Sooner or later it was bound to happen. Curiously enough the url of her blog was something that I always thought as ... er.. lets say 'doped'.. and when I found out it was from the beetles song LSD (no.. not that LSD, its Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds ).. makes you put even more trust in pure instincts.,

And the second thing that originally inspired me to write this post was the second link in the byline.. Well, if you were thinking about That Four Letter Word... No.. No.. pervs!!! The authour means LIFE (now it strikes doesn't it.. 'life' s 4 letters too..) . For some one who's on a shoestring budget.. or even lesser he's pretty determined to finish his movie. Inspite of the many upsets and hurdles one thing that doesn't seem to dampen is his determination. And all this is what I can gather from his blogs. One hell of a movie critic's movie.. should see how things turn up. Well if you haven't visited that link yet or haven't figured out who I am talking about.. its this journalist in The Hindu called sudhish kamath.

Well, through the looking glass and ending up in Blogsphere instead of wonderland was not really a bad thing after all. Comming from a city which has the large community of bloggers this trip down the river with 'tangarine trees and marmalade skies' , was something that is defenitely worth it!

Signing Off
Vishnu

Reflecting On Reflections

2005-03-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Its a long time that I've blogged and in the delerious state that I am in, I wonder wether this post is going to make any sense at all.. The reason for this current state of 'Highness' can be attributed singularly to two people, Vaishnavi and Sunil. Well, its not neccessarily a bad thing, but 8 + poori's (south indian dish, similar to a roti, but has all the oil that was ex-communicated from the roti.) can defenitely hinder your judgement. And now enter Sunil. Or rather, wonderful Madras Meals at Sangeetha restaurant. This assortment of the most common south indian dishes, unhesitantly frowned upon, when made by dotting mothers for their children seems to gain this unworldly charm of being extremely palatable when served on a large plate at Sangeetha. All this food requires tremendous amounts of efforts to be digested, that meagre amounts of engergy is being used up by the brain to construct this post is only whats left after catering to the calls of all the other auxillary systems that keep me alive... (Btw, CC, this is the state that i often find you in when i call you, so i guess you wouldn't have any difficulty in relating to this..)

And now comming back to the point from which i have wandered way off, Reflections '05. An event being organized by S.R.M Images, the in campus photography club in my college.. also the richest of the clubs in our college. The reason for their apparent richness seems to be the fact that they hold total monopoly over photographic / video coverage of any event happening in and around the college. Antitrust legislations are somethings thats unheard of in the club I guess.

The above mentioned event, the club's impotence not withstanding, was defenitely a platform for those budding directors and camera-persons to showcase their talent. More than 15 short films were accepted from various colleges in and around the city for screening during the event. But the real icing on the cake, was that those selected were also screened at Satyam Cineplex this sunday. It was an interesting motley of short films from students of various colleges. Though some were exceptionally boring and well below average.. I should say some did stand out as the stars of the day. And here are some of the films that seemed to have made lasting marks on a silent observer....

The first one, by students of loyola college (if i am right), was this amazing short film. It starts with a hazy view of a young little girl, named jeeva, narrating to us about her family. The girl leads us into her little albeit wonderful and loving world comprising of her mother, father, her little bro and the most favourite member of her family-her elder brother. With the voice over so surreal, it really takes us into her mind. Only later do we realise that, her elder brother, whom jeeva loves unconditionaly is an invalid of some sort. He is ridiculed by everyone around him and on certain occasions by his own father. Unable to bear the shame and humiliation he decides to end his own life by jumping into a well. But instants after he does this, his sister jeeva in a childish and impractical effort, blinded by faternal love follows the suit to save him, only to be snatched away from this earth by the cruel arms of fate. Only here do we actually realise that the original jeeva we see is not real, but dead. Dead men tell no tales or so the saying goes. and this is an valiant effort to prove it wrong. It has defenitely succeded. Hats off to you guys.

The second one, which also caught my eye and imagination was this short film titled 'AMMA', (no relation to our CM). Dealing with issues of adoption is a big task, but doing so in an effective manner in a span of ten minutes or lesser is simply astounding. And thats exactly what this short film has achieved. The extremely cute kid starring in the movie displayed such a wide gamut of emotions which is still well beyond the grasp of most our regular 'stars'. Wether it was the efforts of the director, or facing the harsh realities of being an orphan, or whatever that was which made the kid such a profound and wonderful actor for those fleeting minutes is something that deserves more than a single round of applause. The concept of showcasing the yearinings of an young orphan for a family through a dream was something that is not only a powerful way to say it, but also something that could thaw the iciest heart in the audience. I would not be suprised if there were people who did shed a tear from a corner of their eye at the plight of the kid. If there was a shipwreck event where the director of the film was the captain, then I would probably go ahead and offer the lifeboat to him without further delay. Congrats guys, even though you din't win, you did do something meaningful.

The third movie, which I would like to comment about is this movie about a remote island paradise in the winding meanders of the river Periayar in Ernakulam, Kerala, and how it has been severely affected by large scale environmental pollution. Hmm, I am in no way qualified to comment about this masterpiece (ha! like that has ever stopped me from doing so!). but in one..er two words, the film is 'Visually Breathtaking'. The imagery is not just amazing, but surely professional and is beyond words. It is true that a picture is worth thousand words, but there are sometimes, when even a thousand words do fall short.. and every frame of this film is an example to the above case. The coherence and the clarity with which the film has been presented is not merely professional, but excellent. Kudos to the director. The use of special color filters at just the right places is something that makes this film excellent 'award material' in all aspects. Also the insights of experts and the plight of locals interspersed within those ten or so minutes of amazing footage is not just thoughtful, but extremely thoughtprovoking. For guys who made this film, take my advice... send this to NG/Discovery and you will probably land yourself your own nature documentary show. And if someone from Columbia Univ is reading, guys before you anounce the pulitzers for this year, give this film a good look before you decide.

Well, usually great occasions seldom transpire without great company, and here's where I would like to really thank Kris and Laxmi for the amazing company they kept me. And one more thing, Hats of to Kris and all the other student co-ords for making this happen.

Signing off
Vishnu

My new virtual pet

2005-02-14T12:12:00.000-08:00

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!... After taking sound advice from my friend praveen I have adopted a penguin.
Since describing him would take too long. Also, since a picture is worth a thousand words, I have decided to put him on this blog post.

Too Much Time...

2005-02-11T08:52:00.000-08:00

These are the transcripts, of one of the most interesting conversations that transpired between me, and vivek.

To completely understand, and enjoy the details, and subtleties involved, you should probably need some basics.. and here is a quick guide, into the ideas in the messed head of a poor CS student. Also, you should have read a bit of H2G2, and Assimov.

Sriram : A friend of mine, who has high aspirations, (really high that he is now, the tallest guy in college!). Sriram, being the microsoft student ambassador in my college, is now the M.$ guy..

Penguins : poor little birds, which mostly inhabit in Antarctica and southern Australia. Penguins are also, holy to any linux guy (read me), and any sort of disrespect is sacrilege.

Mac's, and Apples : Apart from being fruits, are also computers. (guess most people know that!)

C/C++/C# : these are popular computer programming languages used

GCC : A free compiler, that was used to compile most of what runs in the name of Free S/W, OpenSource, etc..

LUG : Linux Users Group. (actually ilugc)

Vivek says:

tht link u sent me, sriram told me tht has been doing rounds in the lug forum... is it so?

Fuzzy Logic says:

yeah

Vivek says:

why

Fuzzy Logic says:

i donno.. sriram is an active member of lug da

Vivek says:

oh ok

Fuzzy Logic says:

and strangely he hasn't been involved in starting any major flames .. and

Fuzzy Logic says:

restricted himself from fudding, but whenever he sees me

Fuzzy Logic says:

he just goes on and on about, killing penguins!

Vivek says:

so sad

Vivek says:

pooor things

Fuzzy Logic says:

i guess he is infact obsessed with killing penguins

Vivek says:

report him to the spca

Fuzzy Logic says:

maybe

Fuzzy Logic says:

just put him along with

Fuzzy Logic says:

mutant penguins da...

Fuzzy Logic says:

which understand english

Vivek says:

and are bigger than him?

Fuzzy Logic says:

no.. piranah's are smaller than most creatures that they attack

Fuzzy Logic says:

just lots and lots of mutant penguins..

Fuzzy Logic says:

maybe just for the fun of it, we can give them special powers

Fuzzy Logic says:

i am thinking of something like burly brawl in matrix reloaded

Vivek says:

so lots of pengies with pirhana like teeth that talk?

Fuzzy Logic says:

1 sriram

Fuzzy Logic says:

100's of agent penguins...

Vivek says:

and sriram with a stick?

Fuzzy Logic says:

maybe..

Vivek says:

btw, penguins look like they wear a suit...smith wears a suit...the resemblance is uncanny

Fuzzy Logic says:

yeah..

Fuzzy Logic says:

they are just shorter

Fuzzy Logic says:

a lot shorter, considering his height

Fuzzy Logic says:

and since they are endangered creatures, i donno wether we can find 100's of them da

Vivek says:

simulate them

Vivek says:

are they endangered?

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, thats wat sriram told me..

Vivek says:

i mean, of course i have never seen one, but that is not a criterion

Fuzzy Logic says:

maybe, he was probably taking into a/c the popln after his rampage

Fuzzy Logic says:

or maybe even worse...

Fuzzy Logic says:

he's already a serial penguin killer

Vivek says:

why? does he kill penguins in serials?

Vivek says:

sitcoms or soap operas?

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, sitcoms, are supposed to be funny, and i think murdering penguins wont get high TPR's (i really dontknow, what TPR is )

Fuzzy Logic says:

and soaps?

Fuzzy Logic says:

hmm... yeah wouldnt suit him da...

Vivek says:

TPR -> transport protocol reader?

Fuzzy Logic says:

hmm.. TPR-> Totally Pointless Ratings

Vivek says:

so we have decided... penguins are killed in sitcoms, irrespective of the high or low TPRs that the show may get among the other penguins

Fuzzy Logic says:

not sitcoms. serials da

Fuzzy Logic says:

sriram is a Serial Penguin Killer, not a Sitcom Penguin Killer..

Vivek says:

if he kills penguins by the portside, then will he be a serial port penguin killer

Vivek says:

and it really makes you wonder if there is a parallel port penguin killer

Fuzzy Logic says:

but what if he kills more than one penguin

Fuzzy Logic says:

what if he commits genocide of penguins

Fuzzy Logic says:

then he would be a MPP killer

Fuzzy Logic says:

Massively Parallel Penguin Killer

Vivek says:

then all the penguins will get together and decide to counterstrike

Vivek says:

that will be an unreal tournament

Fuzzy Logic says:

yeah.. Doom to the penguins

Fuzzy Logic says:

if sriram wins

Fuzzy Logic says:

so, lets hope he doesnt...

Vivek says:

Mortal Kombat with a C

Vivek says:

the next version will be Mortal Kombat with a C++

Fuzzy Logic says:

yeah.. then Sriram would probably coax microsoft

Fuzzy Logic says:

and will end up releasing a version

Vivek says:

called c#

Fuzzy Logic says:

of Mortal Kombat with C#

Vivek says:

Mortal C#ombat

Vivek says:

the penguins will release Mortal GCCombat

Fuzzy Logic says:

with which, one penguin, would manage to write a Free and Open Source OS.

Fuzzy Logic says:

but this time, they would choose,

Fuzzy Logic says:

their mascot as Linus Torvalds instead

Vivek says:

where linus is made to wear a Tux

Vivek says:

and a silly bowtie

Fuzzy Logic says:

and all the penguins would have tatooed 'Linus',

Fuzzy Logic says:

on their chests..

Vivek says:

of course, getting tattoos with their flipper like wings is very difficult...they say tattooing is a dying art among the penguins

Fuzzy Logic says:

yeah.. with sriram around, the penguins are dying, no wonder, tatooing is even rarer among them

Vivek says:

i really wonder where they will fight.... will it be a virtual world like matrix or will the penguins have a home advantage by fighting in antarctica

Fuzzy Logic says:

hmm.. atleast, if the virtual world ran on windows, and was written in .NET, then, sometime in the middle, they would get a GPF and crash da

Fuzzy Logic says:

so, its better the virtual world runs on linux..

Vivek says:

Or a neutral Mac

Vivek says:

where neither of them will be able to enter

Fuzzy Logic says:

Mac.. that sounds interesting...

Vivek says:

Macs will lock out both of them

Fuzzy Logic says:

but it is rumoured that the latest mac, has the heart of a penguin da

Vivek says:

Shocking

Fuzzy Logic says:

an apple inside a penguin is werid enuf da, but

Vivek says:

this is a penguin inside an apple?

Vivek says:

what kind of a winter thing is that

Fuzzy Logic says:

yeah.. a penguin inside an apple

Fuzzy Logic says:

hmm.. i guess, these are easter apples (not winter), just like easter eggs, have something else inside em

Vivek says:

with big polka dots painted on them...come on, apple has better taste than that

Vivek says:

apples are sweet

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, you never know, when it has a penguin inside da..

Fuzzy Logic says:

since you have never seen one, i can safely assume you have

Fuzzy Logic says:

not tasted one either.. so..

Vivek says:

i dont really know... what does it taste like

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, must ask sriram i guess..

Fuzzy Logic says:

maybe he is just harmless, and kills penguins only for entertainment, and snacks

Vivek says:

sriram doesnt eat them... he just kills them

Fuzzy Logic says:

you never know da

Vivek says:

what kind of snacks would one makje with a penguin.... frozen penguins?

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, i guess they would have penguin flippers (like chicken wings)

Fuzzy Logic says:

and,, for frozen penguins, what do you freeze it with da?

Fuzzy Logic says:

liquid nitrogen?

Vivek says:

i was going for liquid air, but

Vivek says:

yeah liquid n2 seems fine

Vivek says:

just open their beaks and pour it in

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, maybe we shouldn't give sriram ideas da.. whose side are we on?

Vivek says:

i am on all sides... i just watch the fun, clap and but popcorn

Vivek says:

that was buy popcorn

Fuzzy Logic says:

oh..

Fuzzy Logic says:

and probably put a blog post about the greatest fight involving

Fuzzy Logic says:

penguins, and sriram

Vivek says:

and apples with penguins and penguins with apples

Fuzzy Logic says:

easter apples.. easter penguins..

Vivek says:

speaking of easter apples and easter penguins, will easter penguins carry easter apples in a basket

Fuzzy Logic says:

maybe, the will just host the apples on appleforge

Fuzzy Logic says:

or freshfruits

Fuzzy Logic says:

etc.. da

Vivek says:

or pazhakadai?

Fuzzy Logic says:

well, you cant download apples for free from pazhakadai da.. you got to pay

Vivek says:

99cents per apple

Vivek says:

and mind u, it is called iFruit

Fuzzy Logic says:

iFruit,

Fuzzy Logic says:

thats nice, does, iRobot, use iFruits, if its hungry?

Vivek says:

and the strange thing is, what does uRobot use? uFruits?

Fuzzy Logic says:

thats one of the mysteries, i guess.

Fuzzy Logic says:

and the only answer i can give to it , for now is 42, but i really cant explain it

Vivek says:

if 42 were the answer to this question, then this would tbe the question of life universe,etc

Fuzzy Logic says:

hmm.. interesting.. but, isint the question about the life, universe and everything else

Fuzzy Logic says:

supposed to include iRobots, uRobots, and their respective food items?

Hmm.. I've got too much time on my hands ...

Till later

Signing Off,
Vishnu

Rants of a fledgling manager

2005-02-06T19:06:00.000-08:00

Now, I know why Jesus was a shepherd!

Being a student of engineering, you are supposed to innovate, create, and in general, drown people in awe with your magnificient creations. But sometimes, as fate would have it, however vile and unthinkable it may be, you are thrusted into positions which...er.. hmm.. lemme say, are not very comfortable. And one of them is when you are incharge of organizing or managing something. Before we go into the actual happenings that unfolded the three days I was incharge, allow me to present before you, my case, on how I got suckered into this redoubtable vortex of responsibility.

Well, with most of my classmates, nose-diving deep into books on quant's and logic, and others from similar genere, getting themselves armed to the teeth for the CAT/ZAT/MAT/RAT/FAT and all the other exams. Hoping for a management carreer, which beckons large paychecks to fructify right before their eyes. I thought I should give this idea of 'Managing' a try. This was not the only lure, as there was this silently lurking reason, of close encounters with a certain someone. With as compelling reasons as the above, I had to jump right in, and get the biggest bite out of the management cake. And I did, within minutes, your meek old friend had magically metamorphosised into a haggardly, loud-mouthed, power-hungry demagouge. It is really frightening to see what a mere illusion of power can do to you. I wonder, what real power tastes like....

Day 1 :

Hmm, day 1 was not as bad as you might think. because, there wasn't much work to be done, and I had a deadline the same day. Beats 2k5 at stella marris. who would want to miss that, espescially when it was being organized by my buddies there :) (I guess they would have a similar tale too ). But the morning session was primarily brain-storming. Me, a couple of my friends and the staff incharge, were all that were needed to 'brain-storm'. I really wonder who came up with such a quirky word. Brain-Storming, A neophyte in etymology would have mistaken it to be some sort of cannibalistic ritual. I once imagined cannibal-cook shows, with titles as 'Today's Delicacy - "BrainStorm'' -Hubba Hubba!" and the like. Such, a negative and destructive name for a mild, and rarely constructive process. The better word for it should be on the lines of 'War of the words', or 'Me vs The Entire Fucking Desk, Come'on Baby'... or 'Talk First, Think later'. Hmm, well as it goes, there is always a calm, after a storm, and it was very true. I left for Beats 2k5, and this prodigal calm resulted in tightening our time by approximately 4 1/2 hours.

Day 2:

The second day, was much better, atleast in the beginning. The reason, was that, there weren't too many to manage. Just myself and a couple of juniours, but that was quite a handful. And in the afternoon, after we had finalized all the work that needed to be done, we needed people to do work. And here is where my tale of woe starts. I immidietly started recruiting students of my class, to do some chart work, and presentations. I had recuruited with such fervour, that I had ended up emptying my entire class. The staff in my 'home' dept, if i can call it that, were obviously cross with me. I wonder why, because, they really dont teach anything in class, just puke the crap that they have ingested from low quality books, that you find on platforms, and all that. What I din't realise was that, there was seething unrest brewing within my home department. And I was already being framed as an infidel and a traitor. Why you may ask?, all my efforts, and energies were being spent for the Maths Dept, and not for the C.S.E Dept. Well, if you thought you were immature, and childish, then think again. The higher echelons of my department are more childish, and immature than you can possibily imagine. I wouldn't have been spared if the case against me were stolen lollipops either.

If you remember I had annother reason, for getting into this mess in the first place, Close Encounters?, yeah.. that wasn't too successful either, because the certain someone, was so good in her work, that I really din't want to disturb her. The problem with conscience is it doesn't stop you from doing wrong things, It justs prevents you from enjoying it!. Sigh! With, one of my prime motivators, flopping, and already knee deep in work, and the level steadily rising. I had no choice but to stick on here and finish the work. The second day was just the beginning of the nightmare, as I was blissfuly unaware of the miasma blowing within my department, I thought my headaches were limited to the completion of the tasks assigned. With fifty percent of the charts completed, presentations transforming into presentable form, and in general work getting done. I was happy. Mathematically speaking the second day's headache curve sort of mimicked the 'bell curve'.

Day 3:

After waking up early in the morning after a weary night with interrupted sleep and recurring nightmares of missing deadlines, and being persecuted for crimes, unknown to me.. I was a bit jittery. I had to bathe this off my system. A step I usually resort to only in the case of direst of circumstances. With sleep filling my eyes, I dragged myself to the dept corridor. My first job was to find a class to accomodate all those who were willing to spend their talents for the dept. I ended up running around the campus, climbing up and down the blocks, all in vain. My search for an accomodating classroom, ended fruitlessly. But my friends, as I later realised, were more than happy to work under the cool shade of the coconut trees, and in the grass. With, the cadets ligning up for 'taking care of some charts', It was upto me to fill-em up with ordnance. Once, ready to go there was no stopping them. And with the presentations completed, I was feeling happier. But unfortunately, the feeling of happiness, was fleeting and evanescent. The OD's (that's on-duty for the uninitiated, wherein you get attendance, for not attending classes) were being refused for all my dilligent cadets. And the root cause, being centered to one, narrow-minded, childish, imbicile, whose name I in a gentlemanly way refuse to mention.

This issue, was priority number one, as my cadets, deserved atleast this for all their hardwork. I had to hunt down, certain people and ask them to sort out this issue with the higher echelons of my department. And finally after a few rounds of negotiations, this issue was amicabily resolved. The only casuality being my attendance. Yeah, atleast my cadets were better off. The work was getting done, but my troubles were building up. It seems, that people in my department thought I had to get some comeuppance. Along with this, I had to face the wrath of my H.O.D and all his minions, espescially those who are bald on both the sides of their head. By afternoon, all the charts, models, and presentations were complete. Only thing was putting those in place, which was no bigdeal at all, with the help of a couple of my friends, namely C.A, and atul, etc.. this was as easy as 1 , 2, 3...

It was already 4 p.m, the presentations installed, the charts affixed, the models placed, volunteers recruited. I was feeling happy and relieved. But only to be met right in the eye with my nemisis for the moment. He was fuming with rage and a bit of jelousy too. I was like a whimpering cat. The great millitary general inside me had vanished abondoning me in the hands of this vile creature. I felt like a small helpless kid, uneasy under the greedy and lecherous eyes of a sick paedophile. The ageless dilemma which had cropped up in the head of every hero history had ever witnessed, did not spare me too. Flight, or Fight. I had to decdide quickly. Without wasting an instant, I decided on flight, and quickly evaded his eye. Raced to my bus and hid under the seats.

Three days of managing, some sort of a menagerie, getting work done, being persecuted by childish and immature freaks, and surviving all this with sanity. I had wondered how, others, in my college take up work of organizing , take it so lightly. And after intensive thought, and introspection, I had come to a conclusion ...

'It hurts only if you care'

This was one enjoyable experience over all, even though most of my motives failing, getting into trouble, and the like, I have decided to stick on to engineering creations, that marvel people and drown them with awe. Management, Is more like herding sheep, but only more difficult. I guess I am not built for that. Sigh!.

This post is trailing already, and I guess, I had written more than what you would like to read. so, till later,

Signing off,
Vishnu.

Bangalore - Where 'Early to Bed, and Early to rise' is passe!

2005-01-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

Well, with memories of food from woodlands fixiated in my mind, I was woken up with the sound of a caterwauling ambulance, at my hostel room that I had moved into yesterday. Yeah, It was my mom on the phone, and thats the ring tone that I use to remind myself of the one soul I owe my existence to. What better tone, than the shrieking siren of an ambulance to remind you of impending danger. For all those who haven't got this post yet , check out the first part

The hostel room, was a small cosy room, with an ominous number of 113, (well, if 13 was not enough, it had to be 113). And guess what, it did have a small yet, comfortably spacious balcony. And, with my mom swathing me in dreadful ennui for close to 19 mins and 27 seconds, going meticulously and mercilessly into the details starting from importance of brushing your teeth, to emergency measures that need to be taken, in case of a sudden outbreak of anthrax. I had had enough of maternal love and wisdom for one day, and that too at 5 in the morning. My mom is from 'Early to bed, Early to rise' school of thought, which honestly to me is something people had to make up because blogging wasn't invented yet. Still with my eyes laden with sleep, my eyelids so heavy, like jackfruits hanging from trees, bending the branches under their own weight. I dragged myself sloppily to the balcony, and opened it with hopes of inhaling the fresh morining air of this lovely city. Ah!, what a lovely day it was, the 20th of December, 2004.

This city has the uncanny knack of constantly and yet ingeniously throwing suprises at me. This one was a pleasent surprise though. The citizens of banglore somehow, are immune to the mindless preachings of people who share their views with my mother. Yes, and I am ecstatic, and overjoyed to know that this is a city of late risers. Even the sun rises late here, at approximately 10:30 to be precise (why the contradiction you ask, well, there is nothing wrong in being approximately precise, or precisely approximate, is there?).

I bravely stepped into the balcony, with bare foot, and skimpy clothing. I was quick to realise my fault, as icicles started forming all over my body, and I looked as if I had been attacked by sub-zero of the mortal kombat fame. I rushed into the warm confines of my room, and hid under a warm blanket. Hmm..., cool is good, but bone freezing cold is not that enjoyable. As I was revelling under the warmth of my blanket, I was rudely interrupted by racous knocking on the door. Breaking the silence of this fine december day, I was accosted by my friend bharat, with a blocked nose, unable to breathe, and rage all over his face. He was perfectly fair in being angry, for he had tried to wake me up from 4:30 in the morning, as he later told me. Well, convalescensing from a major attack of typhoid, the cold weather had taken a toll on him. poor Bharat!.

Enswathed, in mist, and freezing cold, with visibilty very very poor. (happens when you are wearing fogged glasses). Bharat and I ventured out, with the same adventerous spirit, that led one Mr.Chris Columbous to discover America (or was it simply the case of mistaken identity!). This time, the search was for a medical facility rather than an alternate route to India. Early morning walks, inspite of their rather tardy nature, seem to grow on you. We walked all the way from our cold hostel, to the sprawling multi-hectare IISC campus. Hindi, being the lingua-franca at the moment, and Bharat being rather proficient at it handled all our communication needs. The place took on a deserted and sombre look, as it was practically devoid of all life, barring the abundant flora, and the buzzing bees. We treaded every mile possible of this huge campus, and it was of no avail, even after we found the local medical facility. It was deserted, with emptiness permiating all around, like smoke from unburnt cigarettes in an ashtray. Yes, this is a city of late risers. Sigh ...!

Signing off,
Vishnu

A Slice of School Life

2005-01-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

'Verbosity is a virtue', and thats my credo, if I am at my keyboard. But sometimes I am in compelling situations, where there is always this impetus to meander, and this is one. A great piece of work which jolts me back to my school years, by one of the best raconteurs known to me.

Signing off,
Vishnu

The 7 people lemma and my experiments with Orkut

2005-01-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

Its a small world after all!

Listening to japanese music, always makes me quirky. And as it happened one day, I was listening to the sound track of some of my favorite anime and not understanding a single word of the songs, but nevertheless thoroughly enjoying it. And with the vigour of japanese rock, a thought , an idea if you will, slowly started to take form. (insert evil laugh with lightening here!). Yes , It was from a very simple statistical conjuncture, often misleading and errenoulsy called the '7 people Lemma'. The lemma states that,

'On an average every person in this world knows every other person through atmost 7 people excluding himself'

This was what made me spend a whole sleepless night with this website called orkut. Now "orkut.com is a new social networking service named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.)". Self explainatory isin't it. But thats not the point of this post anyway. Orkut, has an invite system, pretty much like google's gmail . And, to get an acount you need to know someone already there. So, now you may ask what does all this have to do with the first few lines of this post.

Well, for starters, orkut is the perfect place to test the 7 person lemma. and orkut makes it even more comfortable to check it out, as it gives the shortest path to the person(yo! dijkstra!). So, now adapting the lemma for our cyberworld needs, I had to give the original conjuncture a bit more room. So, instead of 7 people, I had to increase the number to a comfortable 11(also because, I am the perfect asocialite possible!). And started experimenting.

And to say, the results were nothing short of astounding!. As I moved across communities, ethinicities, and sometimes even nationalities, the maximum length of path was mostly around 6 or 7. And the longest path I ever encountered on one whole day of ambling around in the orkut world, was around 10. And also, its always suprising when some person who you would never ever know, and possibly never meet in real life, is just 3 hops away. On the other hand, its also interesting to think about the fact that, when someone you reached through one friend, is even more easily by some other friend. Well, doesn't this line of reasoning have a lot of interesting ramifications. So, what do you expect, Its a small world after all!!.

Signing off,
Vishnu.

PS : any one, who wants an orkut invitation just mail me.(vishnuvyas@gmail.com)

Bangalore, Brigade Road, and an International Conference inbetween

2004-12-27T06:15:00.000-08:00

Hi,

For all those avid and non-existent readers, a big apology for not being faithful to my blog. Its not that i've not written perfectly meaningless posts with no information. (even from shanon's viewpoint, the stuff I write, no matter how unexpected, can still contain absolutely no information!). Its just that i really din't feel like writing in quite a while, and also, yeah i really did not have anything to write about anyway. So don't blame me for derilection - yet. Without much ado, lets get to the reason this posts exists. My trip to bangalore.

Disclaimer : Its a long time since i've been writing. So my skills as a writer (hmm, where there any in the first place?) have taken a nosedive. So for people who are looking for eloquence, here's what I've to say - "Sorry buddy".

Yeah, I was really excited when i first came to know that i was going to bangalore. yeah, many might wonder why such a childish excitement for that place. The truth of that matter is that I've never really seen that place, and unfortunately missed the college trip the year they had it. Well thats only half the reason for the excitement. the other half is that my paper on image compression was selected for presentation. (let me spare you eternal boredom and get to the fun part of it.).

Bangalore is such a fine city. the weather, the roads, the greenery, I can go on. but most of you already know that hmm. Having a demographic below 35 years of age, is one indicator to say that the city is youthful, but the true test comes really in the crowded arteries of the city. My intro to bangalore started, with me arriving in an early morining train, and stepping outside just froze me to the bone. Coming from everlasting humidity and a place where seasons are defined as warm, warmer, and oh yeah, hell would be a lot cooler right now - Chennai. This was the first surprise this city threw at me. This was 19th Sunday. The rest of the day was uneventful mostly because I was sleeping the whole day. and promptly got up at 5 pm.

As it seems, the Times of India seemed to be the most popular paper around. This was the second surpirse that the city threw at me. Whats so surprising you ask, for starters the paper had more newsprint devoted to frivolous supplements than the news. It did have a good collection of comics though. And most of the supplements were magnanimously infested with BYT's (beautiful young things) with the perfect waist line that most of us can only dream of.. Well, probably guys at The Hindu should take a cue, and get a bit more 'exposure' for their supplements too.

Well, perusal of the newspaper which was lingering on the borders of pronography was just one idling, i spent my time on at bangalore, the other was basically roaming about the major roads of the cities, as if i had lost a family heriloom somewhere there. And the first day saw me going to the most commercial street in bangalore, so aptly named 'commercial street'. This place (for all you chennaites), is spencer's plaza, unfolded into a single long street. How, would probably tax the mind of the most talented topologist, so just take what I say for granted. This is one place where you can shop for anything from trekking boots to lingerie, without breaking a sweat. This street is overwhelming and breathtaking, both in its sheer magnitude, and also the unearthly prices qouted. So, inspite of all the unimaginable lure, you end up window shopping (and drooling a lot nevertheless), and buying nothing at all. And, my rather eventful first day at bangalore ended with a hearty meal at Woodlands, courtesy Bharat's uncle . Well, not a bad way to start a trip hmm. Maybe I will write more about this when I find time to do so, but for now, this post has already got longer than what most people would read, so signing off

Vishnu.

The Root of All Evil.

2004-11-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

Well, there has been furious off topic posting, at the ILUGC, and I've come across something very interesting. For people who know me well, would agree that I crib away a large portion of my time, about how bad the education system in India actually is. Well, I've always had an inkling that I was in midst of a conspiracy, but now that's been proven beyond doubt. And for all those loyal souls who read my blog, here is the extract I've been talking about....

February 1835, Lord Macaulay's Speech in the Biritish Parliament, also known as the Minutes.

I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

I am not very sure of India's ancient and traditional system, but I am sure, that the current one is certainly up to no good. It is a pity, that even after more than half a century of Independence, we are no where near, any thing mentionable. If India had a resume, it would suck. Its moments of triumphs, and glories, dwarfed, and rendered impertinent by the sheer monstrocity of its failures.

It is not to say that there are no good engineers, or doctors, or citizens for that matter, but the truth is any student, who achieves, has done it inspite of the system, and not in one case, because of it. This in itself is a rather painful thought. And for all those, who paint a rosy picture of a resplendent Indian dream of glory, and prosperity. well, think again. It is further disheartening to consider the fact that engineering education takes after this old, and utterly useless relic of an education system. A system aimed to cripple all induviduality, and any threads of originality in a student, lies at the heart of our current engineering education. A morbid, and disconsolate state of affairs, where students mindlessly mull over tomes of useless information, with their only aim being reproducing the contents verbatim, with no thought given even to remotely understanding any of the subjects. A system solely built to produce clerks, and secerateries, who can manage ledgers, and recite arcane rules, simply cannot produce quality engineers Period.

And the woes, do not end there, but persist, because of the fact that, the system, which in itself is utterly meaningless, is manned by equally imbecilic staff, who have hold of the most important resource of any nation. Well, about the rosy picture of the current status of education, well here it is, and I doubt if it is anything but rosy. A nation, in shackles, constantly constricted by the imbecility, uselessness, and absolute meaninglessness, of an archaic educational system, slowly but completely, wiping it of every breath of originality, innovation, and creativity.

With utter disgust and trepidation, I fear, that Lord Macaulay's dream, has finally come true. We have become exactly what he wanted, 'a truly dominated nation'.

The Muses of an Incorrigible Romantic

2004-10-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

The Muses of an Incorrigible Romantic

A Romantic!!!!, many of my respected friends would agree to the incorrigible part, but never, in a million years,to the romantic. They would probably, be considering something along the lines of all forty of Ali Baba's thieves on a pair of legs. But, yet, as unkind of fate as it may be,I am fundamentally a romantic. and, the following post beholds, the idle muses of one.

Narcisim, apart, there are a few other things, I am passionate about, (one dama justa de una provincia lejano, for instance), and of the many romantic pursuits, I have recently been reading (and that has got nothing to do with college). Many books, too numerous to mention, are piling up on the list of 'Must Reads', and among the few, that I have finished, one that caught, my attention, was this great one by Dan Brown - The DaVinci Code. A fast paced book, with bold, and colorful renditon of an alternative premise for Christianity. This book is a must read, for anyone who happens to have passed std 5, and is able to read English (That means, all of you, who are reading this post). Well, not exactly comparable to the Magnum Opus, of one great writer, 'The Attack of the Mutant Homicidal And Yet Extremely Seductive Lesbian Vixens' ( haven't you heard of Comique Erotika ). In fact, I was so riveted to the book (Dan Brown, not Comique Erotika) inspite of the prodigal failure by the Electricity Board, and an incessently flickering emergency lamp, which gave away finally. Infact, I read more than 200 pages of the book, with the help, of the light from my trusty cellphone, which has been automatically programmed to switch off every minute or so!.

Also, another one of my rather sardonic passtimes, includes, making jibes at the male libido, or female irrationality, or sometimes both. Eventhough, I realise the fact, that I am an evantuality of both, that I take, immense pleasure in criticising those aspects, which I am a victim of (male libidos, not feminine irrationality you sillies). Take this hypothetical conversation for example.....

The teacher, in an attempt to stimulate their minds,asked the class the

Teacher : " What is bright red and shiny?"

Little Johnny (jumping up and loudly) : " A fire engine !!!!???"

Teacher : "No! No! But I like the way you think. Anyone else?"

Little Susan : An Apple

But, Li'L Jhonny, was not very happy, and so proceeded ......

Little Johnny asked the teacher if he can ask a question to which she nodded OK.

Little Jhonny : " What is long, hard, rounded and has hair at one end?"

Teacher : "JOHNNY!!! WE'LL HAVE NONE OFTHAT TALK HERE..."

Little Jhonny : " No, it's a toothbrush, but I Iike the way you think".

(Shamelessly copied, from an unknown internet source!)

PS : for all those, with a bit of brain, who figured out the devious, allusion, to the 'dama justa de una provincia lejano', please keep, this hard earned wisdom to yourself, and not use the name of the aforementioned aphrodite, in any of your comments. (With this much of high sounding legaleese, I should be writing script for Alley McBeal, or even better, become a lawyer myself!).

Signing off,
Vishnu

Tell tale symptoms of an Internet Vegetable

2004-10-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Before I proceed listing the classic symptoms, of an Internet Vegetable, I in all respects should define what or who an Internet Vegetable (hence forth abbreviated to I.V) is, though that should be rather self-evident from the end of this post.

Internet Vegetable : (n) /~In'tehnet Veg'itebl ~/,
defn 1. Any living form, mostly human, capable of manipulating computers and with connection to the Internet, and spending excessive amounts of time online, engaged in activities whose productivity, is matched only by those of ineffectual organizations run by the Indian government.

(Ah!, that should make one Mr.Webster proud. .. Sob..Sob )

So, getting back to the subject at hand, here are a list of classic symptoms of an Internet Vegetable. Though not all of them are necessary to identify, and ascertain a I.V, most of them occur, together.

Symptoms

Owning, or writing blogs regularly, and rather obsessively with excessively long posts.
Compulsive tendency to scribe the even most miniscule incident into a elaborate blog post(like this one for example) .
Visiting, Creating, Owning, or having knowledge of arcane websites with content only as much as ..., say.... Zilch.
Posting on the same blog(s), multiple times, within 24 hours, inspite of an exam the next day.
Ability to recite, url's with more than 200 characters from memory.
Celebrating September 6, with a pagan ceremony, just to commemorate Google's birthday.
Also accompanied by insomnia, somnabulism, sleep-talking, sleep-typing.
Carving out a personal insignias of penguins, lizards, etc... from candy bars.
Thinking, all problems in life would have simple answers like Yes, No, and Cancel.
Always looking to type Ctrl-Z, when it dawns, you have messed up something bigtime!

Well, if you are a victim of any of the above symptoms, or have hallucinations, nightmares, or even dreams (including the not very dry variety) about being offline, then you may potentially be what most, cyberpsychologists call an Internet Vegetable. Now, that you know you are one, don't wander around any vegetarians. They may be hazardous to your health.

PS: if you have all the above symptoms, and are proud of them, then you are .. Oh.... Worse......, an Internet MOLE.

Signing off,
Vishnu

I don't think, therefore I am not

2004-10-18T11:02:00.000-07:00

Rene Descartes, once said 'I think, therefore I am'.

I believe that was one of the many inadvertent comments, people seem to get away with. Simply, things that work for some,never works for us! Like the way, your friend seems to go through cycles of girlfriends, and you get treated as if you are a vegetable by the (un)fairer sex?..., or when was the last time your teacher actually asked you to prove some theorem, and you got away with saying 'I have a great proof, but the margin is too small!'. Fermat did!!!

Excuses, the most abundant commodity available, only next to unsolicited advice. My sister, for example, just got away with saying ' Its more fun, if the colors are all mixed up!', yes ..., it might be more fun that way, but it took me more than 8 hrs, to get the ---- (expletive deleted) rubik's cube right!!!! And, as a famous French man once said (whose name, invariably fails my memory) 'On ne pouvait plus que crier', There was nothing left but to scream!. If there was a record for unsuccessful and lame excuses, then I am the rightful holder of the record. Take this excuse for a post, as an example. A rather lame one even if I say so myself.

Something that always pissed me off during school was History, a subject whose lack in practical utility was matched only by its ability to effect unspeakable ennui on impressionable young minds (namely me). I was one of the unfortunate few, who always got all the dates right, just the people and incidents mixed up. And you know what, after braving years of merciless criticism from my teachers, I was right all along! (The BJP-RSS version of the history books say so!)

Hey maybe I was right about black holes all along too.... mmm ....., should check up on Hawking's new theory.

Talking about people who get away with a lot of crap...., well most of the staff in my college would naturally come under this category. They take to teaching, as naturally as blue whales take to mountaineering. And the things that say, under the beguiling pretext of teaching! All that for another post, some other time, by the way, wondering what happened to the Descartes bloke? Here is a small story .....

Descartes, tired after inventing the co-ordinate system (or unsuccessfully instructing his wife to find the lost bottles of rum!) headed of to a bar, and ......

Bartender (in tweed suit) : Hey, Mr.Descartes, how you feeling!

Rene : Yeah, a bit tired, can I have a drink?

Bartender : The usual, Scotch on Rocks, Mr.Descartes?

Rene : I think not!

poof!!! And he promptly disappeared!

till later ........
Signing off,
Vishnu
Stardate -319801.13

PS : wondering were I got the stardate from, check out this site!

The Rip Off

2004-10-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

The story so far .... Hey just scroll down for that.

Anyway, I realised that it was high time that I did something about the printouts,
so I frantically called up a dozen people that I knew (including Madonna,
kirsten dunst, and all the other celebrities that you can never really check
up with :-)) to help, and it was of no avail. There I was, as it slowly dawned on
me that I had no choice. It was me and the keyboard, nothing else. So, that's exactly
what I did, a couple of hours of relentless typing (and spilling countless eatables
on my keyboard). I had the documents ready. Relief. Finally!.

Well, and I switch on my printer, which started up with a lazy, and rather unpleasant moan.
It must have been easy from here, put in the paper and click print right! That would have
been true for anyone else, but my printer has been affected by the BHRH (Black Hole, Right Here)
syndrome, where the paper in the tray goes in, but mysteriously never comes back. Shucks! (The guy
in the other dimension must have been getting all my precious printouts). Hours of cajoling,
dint seem to help. And with no other alternative in sight, I had to go to a nearby DTP center,
and for the uninitiated, a DTP center is place where they take your data and charge obscene
amounts money for getting it printed, no wonder they are named DTP (Drives you To Poverty).

After navigating an abysmal sea of traffic, I finally managed to reach a DTP center,
so aptly named **** (Hey, I am not giving out the name here, if you are that smart,
just figure out the allusion!). The place was deserted, with a lone attendant in
front of a billing machine, and at the other end, a solo computer operator. The perfect
place where people get murdered in Tamil movies(apart from the hero obviously!). I
approached the computer operator,and reluctantly handed over the floppy disk. He
was quick with using it and loaded up the documents, and let me check them.
Well, all I did was give a nod of approval, to which the operator instantaneously
clicked print. The printouts were supposed to be on special sheets embellished with logo's of
my institution. But, with the sheets safely stowed away in my bag, what was it printing on??

The answer came to me in the form of a printed bill. Rs 80, for printouts that I dint need, and
more to go for the printouts that I actually needed!. I gave him my assignment sheets, and asked
him to take a printout, hoping, he would realize his mistake and waiver of the original prints!
He promptly took my sheet, and went inside and .. SKreech! Crash! Bang!... Paper JAM!!!.

Twenty minutes and after a long senseless argument, I was offered the ultimatum,
'Pay for the Printouts, and Forget your assignment sheets', What a rip off!!, I handed over
the money, and walked out of the place, vowing never to set foot, at that place ever again.
Oh..., I just forgot I left my bag there, shit, I hate breaking my own vows. I still had a record
to go, and the time was already 7pm, 5 hrs, to go to the end of the deadline.

After searching for other DTP centers, everywhere including the telephone directory, yellow
pages, pages of FreeAds, the Holy Bible, The Torah, etc..., I finally found another place
which just suit my requirements just right, only that it was 12 km's from my place. Hoping
that my petrol was sufficient in my scooterette, I raced to that place, and finally managed
to get my printouts, and also get it spiral bound there. The time 11:30 pm, Mission Complete!

Well, this post is dragging a bit, and I am really exhausted! So, until later.......

A couple of records in record time

2004-10-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

Records, the common grievance of being a student of engineering in India. And to some the word record, brings images of long hours of drudgery, a slow incompetent dotmatrix spewing out mercilessly college assignment sheets which are more often than not in short supply. And every one, I believe has a dreadful story to tell, so here is mine.

A single day deadline ( price of lazing over an entire semester! ), and two records to go. From scratch, and that's exactly how the ground situation looked like when I woke up today morning...Err..., ok afternoon. Well not all hope was lost, as I still had the solution to all (most) of my record problems, the Holy Grail, the floppy disk containing all the programs that need to go into the record.

So, a quick bath, hefty lunch, and a few hours later, I switched on my computer, spent a few minutes selecting my playlist and I put the floppy in the drive. And that's when tragedy struck!!!! Well with Murphy's law ringing in my ears, I was distraught on realizing the fact that, the only file on the floppy that I really needed was ....gone .... ( tears, painful violin music here..).

So, without further ado, I immediately sat down to finish the written portion of my record, which until now, I was blissfully unaware that it involved mundane, and really boring work. But with no other choice, (or first years to bully, err... I mean convince (being politically correct you know ( LISP MANIA!!!! No oooo))) I had to sit and painfully write my record. (well for all those who empathise with me , you are blessed, and for all others, watchout, your underwear may just turn carnivorous!)

After, spending considerable time, writing the record, it was time to do something abt the printouts, and other stuff. well, all that in a later post, more appropriately titled, 'How I finished my record, or got terribly ripped off in the process!'

Out of my mind

2004-10-03T02:25:00.000-07:00

Since, being the ultimate couch potato, that i am, blogging should be as good as any of the millions of other ways to idle your time. so here is it.