News and stuff

What follows is a long-winded, idiosyncratically arranged and rather disjointed set of rantings, descriptions, commentary, and the other sort of useless writing that can usually be found on my blog. I'm not exactly sure why I'm blogging about all this stuff, though. Sometimes it just feels good to have prose flow from your mind, through your fingers into RAM/virtual memory, and eventually onto the Web.

Sagar and Thite had the CAT today. For those who don't know, that's one of the world's deadliest entrance exams, used for getting into the IIMs and other fancy management institutes. Even I find it a bit scary, and I actually cleared the IIT-JEE...Anyway, not being a management type(at least not yet), I didn't have to suffer the tension of competing for about 2000 seats with about 175000 applicants. That's right - 175000. After all, India accounts for about a sixth of the world's population. Big numbers like that are inevitable. They also account for the inertia that prevents things from being changed easily in most walks of life. Add to that a self-satisfied entrenched bureaucracy, and there's enough material to rant about for a year or so. This I choose not to do at the moment.

In any event, Thite and Sagar both had a bit of a shock when they were confronted with 90 questions rather than the usual 150. Why is this bad, you ask? For the simple reason that the CAT isn't meant to be finished in the time they give you - they've built it so that completing everything is impossible. The real key is to do as many as possible in the time you have, so you need not just skill at solving, but skill at choosing too. Thus when you have fewer questions, choice is no longer as big a factor, and because solving these things is so terribly difficult, most people are deprived of their chance to score. Presumably this year they're looking for people with more skill than luck.

Next up, sis and Mom are leaving for Bangalore tonight. My cousin's wedding reception is being held there. I would have gone along, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I'm stuck here. Sana, if you're reading this, a gazillion apologies - I really wanted to make it. The universe is just giving me a raw deal. I say we chuck the current administration out of office, since they don't seem to be doing such a great job anyway. Naturally, I am willing to step in graciously to accept the burden of cosmic power. And I've always wanted to stand on the Empire State, with lightning flashing in the background, and thunder modulating itself into the words "I am the Almighty Silicon God! My will be done!"

It also helps that since my view of God is practically deistic(God, the do-nothing king), I can just sit back and leave the universe to run itself for all eternity. Rather boring, of course, but then this measly universe is hardly worth my divine attention...Perhaps I'll make a few more of them, more suited to my tastes. Might also take Sundays off, a tradition the present incumbent established quite clearly in the book of Genesis :) ...Maybe it's a union rule, and if not, it ought to be.

Ran into an interesting MSDN article by James McCaffrey on generating permutations using these weird things called factoradics. This is getting really interesting, so I think I'll go take a closer look at it, and then write my own Java implementation. Maybe even port it to Python after that - after all, I did use Python to generate permutations even before I learnt anything about the traditional backtracking algorithm. That was rather icky code, too.

Hmmm, this looks like the second time this week I've referred to my earlier code as ugly/icky/incompetent. Reminds me of Paul Graham pointing out the difference between the way coders learn to code, and physicists or mathematicians learn to do physics or maths. The physics guys start out by doing good stuff(i.e - solving problem sets) and eventually get original. On the other hand, coders start original(the aforementioned ugly code) and get good. At least that's what I remember of his comment.

So it isn't that surprising that my early attempts at coding stuff were ugly. It's like trying to prove the Theorem of Pythagoras without knowing much geometry. You might just come up with a proof, but odds are it's gonna be anything but elegant.