Blogs

I’ve recently watched Randy Pauch’s last lecture (I know, I’m behind the times). It was amazingly inspirational, and couldn’t have been delivered better. It also got me thinking about my own childhood dreams and I realised that if I don’t pen them down somewhere, I’ll forget them or manipulate them. So here’s a list of my childhood dreams (as best as I remember them) in no particular order: Be an archaeologist and dig up some dinosaur bones (I was a huge dinosaur fan…). Get into MIT (this was a semi-promise I made to Mr. Derek Mosser, my 4th standard teacher, before I actually knew what that entailed). Compose and play live a blues piece similar to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Vinnie Moore. Do Jackie Chan-level stunts (if I recall correctly, this was back when I was horribly fat but not willing to acknowledge the fact). Be a Jedi Knight. Write a novel. The list isn’t as long as I had thought, but good god, I have no idea how to achieve any of them. This is an extremely meme-able topic, so I’d love to see anyone else’s list. Finally, I’d request you all to please comment, my blog is getting lonely :-P. ...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything - prime culprit being work. For about two months now, I’ve been hacking on Windows (gasp), and I’d like to share my experiences. Since I am under a NDA (pfft), I can’t give more details than I was working with the Windows Filtering Platform and had to write a “driver” to do some packet inspection in kernel space. For those who know me at all, I’m a Linux-boy through and through (signed, sealed and delivered ;-)), but I took this as a great opportunity to actually find out how good/bad Windows was. I’m trying to be unbiased, but like heck I will be. ...

Introduction For quite a while I’ve wanted to share my trials, tribulations, and final wonder for programming, and how it’s opened a plethora of insights into how I perceive the world to work. You might question the utter T-ness of such a discussion, and indeed I’ve been known to overdo many a topic. I’m probably doing the same for this one, but I can’t really help my romantic view of the world. I apologise before hand for the length and absolute abstract-ness of much of this discussion. I hope to have made it easier to digest by creating subsections, so you can skim through more easily. ...

This weekend I took a mildly irrational trip all the way from San Diego to Hanover (near Boston) to meet a old friend of mine, Tarang Agarwal. We met each other at Canadian Academy, in Kobe, Japan in 1999 I think. We were really close friends, but in 2000 I moved to India, (and shortly thereafter, he moved to Cincinnati I think). And this was the first time in the 9 years hence we met. ...

Technically, it’s 3 weekends into summer, but I consider this my “first”, since it’s the only one where I’ve had time for myself. A brief summary ensues. San Diego Beach This Saturday, we managed to get ourselves down to the beach (just barely mind you). Before I jump ahead, “ourselves” is Nachiketas (from IIT KGP), Gauri Joshi (from IIT Bombay), Kishore Jaganathan (from IIT Madras) and myself. It began on a pretty bad note with an unprecedented lack of coordination (read 2 hour synchronisation mis-match). The beaches were nice. Not being a “beach” person, I really don’t know what more to say. Having a soft spot of water bodies, I found the ocean simply breathtaking, and had a ear-to-ear smile for most of that part of the trip. Few random strew of words to describe the rest of the trip: creepy bulbous green sea plants, Burger King, long bus rides, arbit pointless trolley ride (we went around in a circle just for the heck of it), cooking rice. ...

Gee whiz, it’s been 2 weeks since the end semester exams finished. And perhaps a half a week since the semester actually ended (thanks to the current CSE setup at IIT Madras). And so much to update on. The Semester Firstly, the end semester exams went off without too much of a hitch. They were definitely the most “peaced-out” end semesters I’ve written, though I ended up staying up till 3-4 a.m. for almost all the exams (including HS!). All in all I am happy with what I’ve taken away from the semester in all but the maths course (Probability and Random Processes) which was a farce to begin with. For those not in the loop, there were 205 students in 1 class, being taught by a cynical professor who didn’t care the least bit about the student’s comprehension. It was definitely the most enjoyable semester we’ve had yet (with the exception of the maths course that is). ...

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. While the litany, (devised by Frank Herbert, I take no credit), was intended to tide one through fear, I find that it works pretty well for everything; love, hate, anger, disappointment, envy (I’d go with all the rest of seven sins, but I don’t think it’d work with Sloth). Perhaps it appeals to my narcissist tendencies. It does not seem to be working on this growing realization that there are only 2 days left to this “vacation”. ...

So prime numbers are useful. I found that I needed to generate a prime number for a hash table (details of which should be posted soon. If all goes well that is…). And I decided to come up with an algorithm to generate that prime number. Clearly stating the problem: “Find the smallest prime greater than n” The simplest way of generating primes is of course using Eurothenes' sieve1. However, this naive method runs in order of $\frac{n}{2} + \frac{n}{3} + \frac{n}{5} \ldots + \frac{n}{p}$ time, which MathWorld tells me is about $T(n) = \omega(n \ln(\ln(n)))$, and uses $\Theta(n)$ memory. This sucks for big numbers (or atleast I think I can do better). Further more, this step has to be repeated (or intelligently modified) till a prime number has been found. (I will show later that the best this can go would be $T(\lceil(\sqrt{n})+1^2\rceil)$), which is of the same order, $\omega(n \ln(\ln(n+1)))$ (mind you this is a lower bound). The algorithm I came up with, which I thought might be better is: generate all primes till $\sqrt{n}$, and check if any of them divide the number in question. If they don’t well, we have a prime, ladies and gentlemen. If they do, then we’ll just have to move along won’t we… ...

As always, I’m a week late on this post. Shaastra, our annual techfest wrapped up on the 5th of October. This last week has been terribly hectic with all of our teachers catching up on lost time. We handled three distinct “events”, namely a mini-FOSS conference, a HackFest, and of course the VC with Guido van Rossum. Looking back, we probably could have handled things better, but as a first attempt, I think we fared rather well. This is a retrospection of the event, in the hope that it will help others find out something that helped and a lot of things that didn’t. ...

Sure, it isn’t the most awe-inspiring of events, but then again you don’t get to talk to the Guido everyday. Besides which, a considerable amount of effort and FOSS pimpage went into this. The Guido, i.e. Guido van Rossum, will be doing a video conference (VC) at our annual techfest (Shaastra) this year. Because of certain scheduling issues, Guido will be doing the talk from home, using his Mac’s webcam. Our “VC” team has never ever held talks with anyone not using one of those super expensive VC equipments that all colleges and big companies own, so it was upto us to figure out how the heck to get it to work. ...