Another Swwwwwaaatchhhh!

Oh! yeah, I got another swatch to add to my portfolio of watches during my recent NewYork trip. This makes it seven watches on my collection and looks like a cruise towards two digits. Click here to see my newest addition.

The Undulating Mind

As I travel on a united airline flight from chicago to austin, I cant help but think of my inability to do any work unless under duress. It took me fifteen minutes to debate whether I should get up from my seat, get the laptop in the bag from the overhead bin, and then, the most difficult part of all: switching it on! Now that I have crossed all the barriers and started typing incomprehensible sentences, my mind wanders off in a direction that is totally undulating, I am thinking of my presentation day after tomorrow, and now, I am worried about buying a car. Then again, I havent really prepared myself for the presentation, and now, Should I buy the car in boston or in salt lake city? Oh, I dont seem to be nervous about my presentation, and now, I wish I had a full time job that would get me a BMW 3 series or a Merc C Class. It is a pity that the mind can process unrelated thoughts at such high speed (Hyper-Hyperthreading!), that I wonder: Will a machine ever replace the most mysterious living thing in this world: The human mind!

Hall of 'Shame': Times Of India, An Indian Newspaper

I wake up in the morning and get online to read some of India's newspapers and by far, the Times of India seems to top the list of the worst papers ever published! If I am talking crap, why does the front page of an Indian newspaper have a quarter page article on Brad Pitt's travel to the Rishikesh to get high (today's issue)? There is definitely "more" critical issues that Indians need to know about. Yeah! Brad pitt's tour needs a mention, but not in the front page!

I just hope that the journalists/editors are more responsible and professional about front page content in the future.

AT&T : vying to be the top telephone backbone

If you have heard of UNIX and C, then you probably know "AT&T"; It has agreed to buy SBC (Cingular wireless)
and the deal would make it the largest telephone company in the US. That is, if the deal goes through! The consumer federation of America is afraid of market monopoly and has urged the antitrust authorities to block the deal. As a long time C programmer, I would love to see the then famous "Ma Bell" research labs merge with the baby bell labs. After all, hasnt the C programming language been useful to us?

Search: car, phone and cray

Back to blogging after a self-imposed exile, I am now actively looking for a bunch of things that light up my otherwise quotidian lifestyle. Why am I looking for CRAY Inc, the yesteryear darling supercomputer company that is a minnow today? Well, the minnow is trying hard to turn the corner and its stock has almost doubled over the last two months. At 2.10$ a share, it might be a worthwhile investment for a short while. Until today, I havent put a penny into the stock market and it looks like an exciting avenue to get into, specially for the thrill of seeing the minnows bounce back!

My samsung e-105 is at the deathbed and am desperately looking for a new cell phone! And, to add to that, I am also looking to buy a used car (oh! grammar check: an used?) and have put in some research into the area. It increasingly looks like people have lost interest in the BIG THREE ( Ford, GM, Chrysler ) with their cars struggling to hold any resale value! The japanese carmakers have stamped their superior reliability in the market, but hey, that means I have shell out more money for them!

"I Bid Adieu" My Uncle!

I had recently been on a visit to India in December to meet all my folks after a year and a half. It was one of the most enjoyable and yet, one of the most sad tours I have had. Just three hours before my trip was over, I heard that my uncle passed away in a road accident! While it left the whole family in tears, I felt sad and shocked by the transience of life! I had met him the previous day and we had completed some shopping and then I came home to wave another bye to him on the phone. To learn that the very same person is no longer alive was a bit difficult to comprehend and it has been the same until today! As much as I would like to accept the fact and move on in life, this incident seems to have left a profound effect on my life!

I bid adieu, my uncle for we have spent a lot of the good times together and it is only sad that you had to leave us at an inappropriate juncture!

India thrash Sri Lanka in Cricket ODI series

Yay! After a very long time, the theoretically strong India applied things into practise and thrashed Sri lanka 6-1 in the recent one day international series. As an Indian cricket fan, It was heart warming to see our guys perform well as a team. All the newcomers stood up to be counted when needed. Every Indian fan has been envisaging this crushing win for a long time. Ganguly was finally off the team for his low scores over the last three years and it rather looks like a bleak future for the former cricket captain. To all Ganguly fans out there, I hope you understand that he has not performed against the likes of good teams ( and this doesnt include kenya, bangladesh and zimbabwe) for a long time now and he does not merit a place in the team :). Please do not waste pages and pages talking about past glories (things that happened a long time ago, like 5 years) for cricket is a professional game and there is no place for non-performers. Ganguly, probably, extended his stay over the last year or so :).

Malaria vs Cancer: Which disease gets more research

Malaria kills around 2000 (A huge number!) african children every day and accounts for three percent of all the productive years of life lost to diseases. It is a pity that it only gets one-third of one percent of the total amount of money spent on medical research. One big reason is because if africa is an under-developed country and most people dont care! More money is spent on researching diseases that attack the so-called rich people in the world because they provide the money!

It makes me wonder if mankind is evolving at all? Are we really looking for the welfare of human beings in the world or are we after our selfish goals?

One good news is that atleast one technocrat, namely, Bill Gates recently donated 258 Million dollars for Malaria research through his foundation (link) . Well, I am happy to hear that there a few sane rich people around in the world too! :)

Jorge Cham's talk: The power of procrastination

Jorge Cham is the author of the grad student "phdcomics" topics. He recently gave a talk at our university, and needless to say, the audience were enthralled. He recently received his Ph.D. from stanford, but is known for the cartoons he writes during his past time as a researcher. I would recommend all graduate students that have not heard of him to click and have fun at the link: http://www.phdcomics.com.

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made

Andy Herltzfeld, a mac enthusiast joined Apple as a systems programmer in the year 1979. The book he wrote was released in 2004 (title shown above) and it talks about the history of the team that invented the mac. I am looking forward to reading this book sometime in the future . A absolute piece of technological history!

Massive Earthquake in Pakistan and India

I woke up today at around 10:00 AM (early morning for engineers :)) and got into my routine of reading BBC, a desire within me to me abreast of happenings around the world early. While fear of the bird flu is gripping the world, I awoke miles away from an earthquake that probably had killed around a thousand people. How many more natural disasters are going to come our way? Man has been attempting to understand science for a very long time now and it has come a long way. I, for one believe strongly that if research in science does not help the ordinary man, then perhaps, we are not doing great justice to ourselves. I understand that there is a value to understanding things but science and technology should help the ordinary man fulfill the basic needs. While our ability to predict hurricanes helped people save their lives, this ability is available only to the rich countries in the world. Millions of people in the poor countries die without the money to employ science to save their lives.

I do not know the answer to the question, but perhaps it is time people thought about the true value of research in addition to the financial implications of success :(. My urge to pen down this thought while my mind is in a cloud requires that I edit this article when my thoughts will be clearer and precise in their opinion sometime in the future.

Men of Mathematics: Eric T Bell

I read this book a few months back and wanted to recommend other people to read this book too. It was suggested by a good friend of mine and does not have any technical details. Instead, the book delves into the life of mathematicians in a chronogical order starting from the great Archimedes until the mathematicians of the nineteenth century, famously called the golden era of mathematics.

The author explains he believes that Archimedes, Gauss and Newton were the greatest mathematicians ever. He talks about the extent to which Archimedes hated practical mathematics but still had to apply math to devise those giant pulleys and spherical mirrors to defend his homeland against the romans.

This non-technical allows us to visualize a leaf from some of the mathematicians and would believe it as a must read for everyone!

Salt Lake City cooling down

After a rather "hot" summer, it has been a very pleasant fall untill now. It get a bit cold at dusk, but it is not too bad. I am looking forward to the winter season and hope to go skiing more often :).

Are spirits waning at Man-Utd

I have been a fan/follower of ManU ever since I started watching football. One of the main reasons why they were/are my favorite was/is the fighting spirit and oneness in the team. We have had a bad last few years without any silverware; partly because of the amount of inexperience and partly because ofthe waning spirits towards the last fifteen minutes in the game. It would always be exciting to watch ManU play towards the end of the game. Sadly though, I should say that spirit seems to be waning and Chelsea just seems to run away with the cup!

Go ManU!

Indian cricketers: professionals or lazy bones

Here is what some of the Indian cricket players purportedly had to say about the new coach Greg Chappell's ways:

"He's a bit too rough in his approach. He's just come to the job and he's being ruthless. We all know that we have to work hard on fitness and all that, but you can't just push people away the first time they struggle with a fitness regimen"

Oh! please wake up you cricketers! It just means that you guys have been goofing off the last few years and have basically been unfit to win matches! The coach has been with you for three months now and you will be fifty years old by the time you slowly warm up to the fitness drills!

I am not here to support any side here but things apart, I find it difficult to understand that a bunch of professionals (no.. lazy bones) complain about the coach asking them to do fitness regimes. You guys are paid millions on contracts and advertisements to represent the country and you cant even carry out fitness regimen! Fitness is a critical part in modern day sporting regimes and now, we know that our cricketers have not been upto par in the last few years and that has basically shown in bad results. we can only beat Australia or England if we are professional and disciplined! just whining about do working is very sad to hear!

I just hope that we will have a set of professional (fit) players representing team India!

AT&T Bell labs: The legacy of Unix to today's struggle

It is a well known fact that Unix was an offspring from AT&T Bell labs, the then research giant that gave some of the most important inventions to the world ( think transistors that runs virtually every computer on the planet). I did not know until today that they invented the laser too (optical systems could be a part of tomorrow's computer: we do not know about the future though). But what were the issues that led to the fall of monolithic yesteryear research giants like AT&T and the XEROX Palo Alto research centers.
Is it because the researchers at those labs were crazy enough to work on their interests rather than the future of the company?
Is it a byproduct of the greatly decreased time to market for a research product (it used to be a time gap of 8 years between when a product was in research and was released commercially)?
Is it that mankind is being aggressive enough to virtually see a new product every three/six months(think cell phones; you have a new architecture/model every 6 months or even under that i guess)?

There might be more questions to ask and a greater number of answers to the above questions but it looks like "change" is the only eternal thing in the world. I believe that people normally change for the good more often than not and am hoping that technology too is changing for the good!

The wrath of Rita

We are still miles away from the eye of the hurricane and already, there have been three significant breaches through the levy in New Orleans. Galveston is already flooded and with Rita expected to fall on land around saturday morning we are already looking at lots of damage. Natural disasters are always very sad irrespective of where it happens in the world. I just hope it affects people very little!

Static Analysis in Compilers

Compilers have advanced tremendously over the last few decades and combines the right ingredients of computer science theory and algorithms to produce practical programs that run on machines. This article is basically an afterthought of a discussion we had in the last program analysis seminar.

Consider the following piece of pseudo-code for any number 'n':

while ( n!=1)
{
if (n is even)
{
n=n divided by 2
}
else
{
n= 3*n+1
}
}

Watching through the piece of code and employing some static analysis of the inner if loop shows that it 'n' is odd, then the execution path is along the else loop. In the else loop, 'n' (which is odd) is muliplied by 3 and that yields an odd number. Adding one to it always yields an even number. During the next run of the loop, 'n' will be found to be even and will run through the if loop. Careful observation will tell us that we are wasting a set of instructions by running through the compare ( if). Instead the code could be unrolled as,

while (n!=1)
{
if(n is odd)
{
n = 3*n+1
}

n = n divided by 2;
}

we have now saved one compare set of instructions whenever 'n' is odd. Though the analysis looks pretty simple it cannot be exploited in today's compilers. The reason is that during manual analysis, we looked at the algorithm using the assumption that 'n' was odd. Compilers always assume all possible set of values as inputs to the program and cannot exploit the above optimizations. Though compiler optimizations are advancing at a fair rate, I hope to see more sophisticated compilers in the future!

A triumph of Hope over Despair

This post is dedicated to one of my roommates and friend narsi, who recently( 4 hours apprx.) got a job in Provo, Utah after a seemingly long time. In short, we hope to preserve the moment we savor for him getting the job. After a bad couple of months where he almost landed at a few jobs, hope started turning to despair when none of his offers consummated.
He attended an interview yesterday (to be exact) and was offered a job today ( a pretty small trun around time) and is practically going bananas over the offer! Well, if you wait the "wait" and hold your hopes, it always is the triumph of hope over despair!

So long.

A Season McLaren blew !

I have been following McLaren-Mercedes ever since the days of Mika (Hakkinen) and have been an ardent fan of the technological advances in the sport of Formula-One racing. Right from the aerodynamics employed in the cars to the on-board processors used for electronic control, F1 has always represented the pinnacle of engineering. In this article though, I will try to enumerate why McLaren should have already had the championship in the bag and how both the drivers and the reliability issues blew away the perfect season.

McLaren started the season as one of the favorites to win the championship along with Renault. After the initial set of races, it was pretty clear that McLaren was the fastest car in the field though it came at the cost of reliability concerns. Alonso started off the season in consistent fashion and has kept up to his name by gathering points whenever McLaren failed! Montoya has always been reckless ever since his start on the Williams a couple of years ago and blew away too many team points because of his stupid mistakes; Raikkonen, on the other hand could be considered unlucky to an extent even though he committed a couple of mistakes.

With three races to go and Alonso walking away with the championship mostly, I just hope the McLaren drivers hold their heads to get the constructor's title!