So here I am, blogging again. As is usual, I shall preface the main body of the blog with some random remarks about why I haven't blogged for so long. Actually, scratch that - I was planning to explain why, but it's been so long that I can't really remember why I stopped blogging in the first place. So I'll refrain from boring everyone with some made-up excuse, and save myself the bother of having to think one up.
So I'm back home in Mumbai, albeit for a measly three weeks. Winter break is not very long, sadly. My mom desperately wants to fatten me up with home cooking (and of course I have no objection to this :P) but this doesn't give her much time. She has, however, enlisted everyone who sees me in a massive conspiracy that aimed at convincing me that I've lost weight, thus resulting in rather boring "He's become thinner, hasn't he?" lines from every second person I run into. Now what do you say to something like that? Ultimately, I decided to come clean and tell the truth - that this is all part of my sneaky plan to get fed tons of amazing home cooking.
I've come down with something a friend described as "NRI Syndrome". In a nutshell, I've lost my Mumbaikar immunity to the city's polluted air, and ever since we landed, my nose has been switching between running like a waterfall, or blocked so badly that it might as well be a rock stuck to my face. Nose drops are the only way out, sadly. I've never had to use them continuously for a week - two or three days is the outside limit - but this leaves me with no option. And now there's smog all over the place - when did that happen? It's like someone found out I left and gave them the all clear to take air pollution to the next level.
And when did the design of 2 rupee coins change? I saw one a few days ago and almost thought it was fake. It looks rather out of place among all the others, if you ask me.
Moving on, here's a quick semester recap: academically, it rocked once again. I passed the PhD qualifiers - first try, easy pass and all that. They don't tell you just how well you did, so all I know is that I had an 89 in Formal Languages and Automata Theory, and did 'extremely well', in Artificial Intelligence. No idea about Algorithms and Programming Languages, other than the fact that I did well enough to pass with ease. I'm one of 6 people who passed, out of a total of 12, which isn't too bad. Don't know how many of those 6 were on their first try - at least two weren't, as far as I know. In any event, that's one major milestone that's over with.
I've managed to get into the hallowed ranks of two-time ACM ICPC World Finalists again this year (our region is obviously way too easy), which works out very nicely for two reasons. First, because I've done almost as well as can reasonably be expected - two years of competition, two trips to Finals. Second, being a finalist twice renders you ineligible to compete again, which fits nicely into my plans, seeing as how I'll have more energy to devote to research once I find a nice dissertation topic, which I'll be looking into next semester. I've got several ideas buzzing around in my head, but nothing nearly concrete enough to nail down, and I think I need a bit more exposure to the prevailing zeitgeist. That means I'll probably be reading a bunch of papers throughout the next semester, which should be pretty stimulating. Of course I need to balance this with Finals training too, but I figure anyone in a PhD program needs to get as much mental training as possible.
This is also why I picked up a copy of God Created the Integers, which is a humongous collection (1200 pages, in really small print!) of the greatest mathematical works of all time - Euclid, Newton, Laplace, Boole, Gauss, Riemann, Godel, Turing...all the really big names, and edited by Hawking, with commentary. I was inspired by the way literary types often refer to 'the classics' - the works of the really great writers. These are the classics in my line of work - after all, it all boils down to mathematics in the end. It's not all that different from being a writer, I figure - you start by imitating the most amazing pieces of writing you can find, and then absorb whatever you like, eventually evolving it into your own style. This changes a bit for research, of course, you don't want to imitate, except in private for educational purposes, but I think it will be rewarding to try and follow the general reasoning of the really smart people who changed our understanding in fundamental ways.
Anyway, I'm going to go back to reading Euclid and Eudoxus now (old stuff, but still cool). Virtually a religious experience, I tell you...
PS: I'm planning to start blogging in earnest again. Hopefully the plan will survive contact with the next semester. Wish me luck! :)
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
In New York
I'll be in New York until Saturday evening for a little something Google has planned. Looks like going to the World Finals has its perks. 
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Random ramblings...
So I've had one of the most amazing holidays ever - and I squarely blame it for all the difficulty I'm experiencing in getting out of the vacation mood. My parents and sister came over to the US, and we've basically been all over the place. Three days at Disney World, followed by Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Niagara...and loads of shopping, of course. It was one hell of an experience, and certainly a vacation to remember.
Since I'm not taking any classes this summer, I'm busy studying for the PhD qualifiers coming up at the end of Fall, as well as getting some practice done for the next ACM regionals (and World Finals, hopefully). Life is good.
I've recently been playing Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy to pass the time. Now I've always thought the lightsaber really is 'an elegant weapon for a more civilized age', and this game finally gave me the chance to be a Jedi.
You won't believe the fun you can have deflecting blaster bolts back at your assailants and taking down a dozen opponents with a few well placed slashes and spins (or just pushing them off ledges with the Force). Ah, the carnage...very satisfying. 
As anyone reading this might have figured, I have absolutely no issue with violence in video games (and besides, Jedi Academy doesn't even have blood - lightsabers cauterize as they cut, so limbs can get sliced off without any splatter
). Violence and aggression is an inescapable part of our simian ancestry, and modern society rarely has enough outlets for it. I strongly recommend violent video games as a prospective outlet.
There is an amazing sort of beauty to lightsaber combat, even though the games don't make it look that much like the movies. I'm particularly fond of what I term the 'samurai' lightsaber style, in which I basically wait for the enemy to attack, step slightly out of the way and then strike, timing it exactly to go through the opponent's guard. It took some time, but I'm now pretty good at dual saber combat. I've always had a thing for fighting styles that use two swords - Miyamoto Musashi himself did it with his Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū style, and it's just cool. With lightsabers, it gets cooler, because wielders tend to spin their sabers a lot, and it looks cooler when you're spinning two at once and ending with a double slash.
Another thing I do is watch the incredible comedy of Eddie Izzard. It's a very different sort of comedy from what you normally see - it's a sort of Monty Python meets stream-of-consciousness monologuing, with a bit of mime and cool sound effects. This is one of my all-time favorites.
For the last couple of days, I've been watching videos from Beyond Belief 2006. I've only watched about 3 hours total, but these are some of the smartest and most insightful people around, and it's just incredible to listen to what they say, and often, how they say it. I'm slightly fascinated by the art of holding an audience spellbound, and I figure watching some examples of it will help - at least on a subconscious level.
So far, the most interesting talk was by Neil De Grasse Tyson, who made some amazing points. What interested me (aside from the humor) was the novel angle from which he approached things. There was a little section of his talk called 'Naming Rights', and he used that to point out that things are usually named by the people who get there first - and those blokes are the ones who (at that point in time) have a sort of culture of excellence in that particular field.
For instance, a lot of the heavy elements in the periodic table have names associated with the United States - Americium, Californium, Berkelium - and all because they were discovered in the US at a time when there was a great deal of emphasis on that sort of thing among physicists in the US, and they got there first. The constellations have mostly Greek names, because they were the first to stick their myths in the patterns you could see in the sky. Two-thirds of the named stars have Arabic names, because the Arabs catalogued them during the Golden Age of Islam, among a gazillion other achievements. Life was good for them until about the 12th century, when a fellow called Al-Ghazali wrote a scathing critique called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and effectively destroyed the Muslim world's one chance at a philosophical and spiritual Rennaissance.
It's rather sad to note that if the ethos of the time had encouraged skepticism, freethought and unfettered rational inquiry a bit more, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now. It took the other two Abrahamic religions half a millennium before they managed to start looking upon religion with a certain degree of irreverence, which is a very underrated achievement. Religion is fine, as long as it isn't taken too seriously, or interpreted literally.
I've always had issues with the more ridiculous aspects of religion - miracles, revelations, prophets, gods - the usual supernatural garbage that comes with all religions in some form or the other. I guess it's appealing to a basic flaw in human reasoning processes - and one which isn't all that benign. Tyson pointed out one sad effect of it when he showed several religious referents in the work of Ptolemy and Newton and Huygens. And without fail, whenever they would start praising something as the incomprehensible work of some creator(s) or what not, that's where they would stop discovering and creating. And then a century later, someone without 'God on the brain' would come along and take over from where they left off, and then God would vanish from that particular domain as well. Newton was able to figure out the motion of the planets, but he stopped at the question of why it was stable. This is where he invoked God, and that was it. God wasn't anywhere in planetary motion - that was understood. When people understood things, God would vanish from the picture.
It's almost terrifying how religiosity stopped the greatest genius in human history. It wasn't even an insoluble problem - Laplace came along and figured out that problem by inventing perturbation theory - something that should have been child's play for Newton, in view of what he did.
Divine explanations aren't really explanations - they're just a sort of agreement to stop thinking, wrapped up in flowery language, self-congratulation and a sort of righteous humility that is thoroughly misplaced, and rooted in insufferable arrogance.
"Right, we've understood all this, but here's a question that no one can figure out - and no one will ever figure out. Yayyyy, God."
If that isn't arrogance, I don't know what is. And on top of that, it usually accompanies mythologies that imply humans and Earth are somehow central to the universe, in terms of purpose and importance. Yeesh.
Anyway, I'm going to stop ranting now. Richard Dawkins is coming up next.
My parents and sister came over to the US, and we've basically been all over the place. Three days at Disney World, followed by Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Niagara...and loads of shopping, of course. It was one hell of an experience, and certainly a vacation to remember.Since I'm not taking any classes this summer, I'm busy studying for the PhD qualifiers coming up at the end of Fall, as well as getting some practice done for the next ACM regionals (and World Finals, hopefully). Life is good.
I've recently been playing Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy to pass the time. Now I've always thought the lightsaber really is 'an elegant weapon for a more civilized age', and this game finally gave me the chance to be a Jedi.
You won't believe the fun you can have deflecting blaster bolts back at your assailants and taking down a dozen opponents with a few well placed slashes and spins (or just pushing them off ledges with the Force). Ah, the carnage...very satisfying. As anyone reading this might have figured, I have absolutely no issue with violence in video games (and besides, Jedi Academy doesn't even have blood - lightsabers cauterize as they cut, so limbs can get sliced off without any splatter
). Violence and aggression is an inescapable part of our simian ancestry, and modern society rarely has enough outlets for it. I strongly recommend violent video games as a prospective outlet.There is an amazing sort of beauty to lightsaber combat, even though the games don't make it look that much like the movies. I'm particularly fond of what I term the 'samurai' lightsaber style, in which I basically wait for the enemy to attack, step slightly out of the way and then strike, timing it exactly to go through the opponent's guard. It took some time, but I'm now pretty good at dual saber combat. I've always had a thing for fighting styles that use two swords - Miyamoto Musashi himself did it with his Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū style, and it's just cool. With lightsabers, it gets cooler, because wielders tend to spin their sabers a lot, and it looks cooler when you're spinning two at once and ending with a double slash.
Another thing I do is watch the incredible comedy of Eddie Izzard. It's a very different sort of comedy from what you normally see - it's a sort of Monty Python meets stream-of-consciousness monologuing, with a bit of mime and cool sound effects. This is one of my all-time favorites.
For the last couple of days, I've been watching videos from Beyond Belief 2006. I've only watched about 3 hours total, but these are some of the smartest and most insightful people around, and it's just incredible to listen to what they say, and often, how they say it. I'm slightly fascinated by the art of holding an audience spellbound, and I figure watching some examples of it will help - at least on a subconscious level.
So far, the most interesting talk was by Neil De Grasse Tyson, who made some amazing points. What interested me (aside from the humor) was the novel angle from which he approached things. There was a little section of his talk called 'Naming Rights', and he used that to point out that things are usually named by the people who get there first - and those blokes are the ones who (at that point in time) have a sort of culture of excellence in that particular field.
For instance, a lot of the heavy elements in the periodic table have names associated with the United States - Americium, Californium, Berkelium - and all because they were discovered in the US at a time when there was a great deal of emphasis on that sort of thing among physicists in the US, and they got there first. The constellations have mostly Greek names, because they were the first to stick their myths in the patterns you could see in the sky. Two-thirds of the named stars have Arabic names, because the Arabs catalogued them during the Golden Age of Islam, among a gazillion other achievements. Life was good for them until about the 12th century, when a fellow called Al-Ghazali wrote a scathing critique called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and effectively destroyed the Muslim world's one chance at a philosophical and spiritual Rennaissance.
It's rather sad to note that if the ethos of the time had encouraged skepticism, freethought and unfettered rational inquiry a bit more, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now. It took the other two Abrahamic religions half a millennium before they managed to start looking upon religion with a certain degree of irreverence, which is a very underrated achievement. Religion is fine, as long as it isn't taken too seriously, or interpreted literally.
I've always had issues with the more ridiculous aspects of religion - miracles, revelations, prophets, gods - the usual supernatural garbage that comes with all religions in some form or the other. I guess it's appealing to a basic flaw in human reasoning processes - and one which isn't all that benign. Tyson pointed out one sad effect of it when he showed several religious referents in the work of Ptolemy and Newton and Huygens. And without fail, whenever they would start praising something as the incomprehensible work of some creator(s) or what not, that's where they would stop discovering and creating. And then a century later, someone without 'God on the brain' would come along and take over from where they left off, and then God would vanish from that particular domain as well. Newton was able to figure out the motion of the planets, but he stopped at the question of why it was stable. This is where he invoked God, and that was it. God wasn't anywhere in planetary motion - that was understood. When people understood things, God would vanish from the picture.
It's almost terrifying how religiosity stopped the greatest genius in human history. It wasn't even an insoluble problem - Laplace came along and figured out that problem by inventing perturbation theory - something that should have been child's play for Newton, in view of what he did.
Divine explanations aren't really explanations - they're just a sort of agreement to stop thinking, wrapped up in flowery language, self-congratulation and a sort of righteous humility that is thoroughly misplaced, and rooted in insufferable arrogance.
"Right, we've understood all this, but here's a question that no one can figure out - and no one will ever figure out. Yayyyy, God."
If that isn't arrogance, I don't know what is. And on top of that, it usually accompanies mythologies that imply humans and Earth are somehow central to the universe, in terms of purpose and importance. Yeesh.
Anyway, I'm going to stop ranting now. Richard Dawkins is coming up next.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Hilarious Geek Song
This has got to be the coolest geek love song I've ever heard. Not only is it full of crazy jokes from topology and abstract algebra and the generally crazy overloaded terminology of mathematics, they sound pretty good too!
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing, and found myself wondering what it sounds like to a non-geek. Despite all those amazing mathematical double entendres, I have a feeling that it'll make at least some sense to the mathematically ignorant.
So if you know someone who is unlikely to get any of this, have them take a look and leave me a comment to let me know if I'm right, or if it's more like trying to describe color to a blind person. And if you're one of those people, don't worry too much - it takes all types.
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing, and found myself wondering what it sounds like to a non-geek. Despite all those amazing mathematical double entendres, I have a feeling that it'll make at least some sense to the mathematically ignorant.
So if you know someone who is unlikely to get any of this, have them take a look and leave me a comment to let me know if I'm right, or if it's more like trying to describe color to a blind person. And if you're one of those people, don't worry too much - it takes all types.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Phew!
And so, ladies and gentlemen, my second semester of graduate school comes to an end. I'd say it went pretty well, all things considered.
It's been 3 months since I blogged. The amount of catching up stories I need to tell is insane, so I'm going to be shamelessly selective and just pick out anything that seems important.
Though now that I think about it, that isn't very different from what I normally do... So anyway, let's say goodbye to the semester with a little look at what I did.
Formal Languages and Automata Theory - in many ways the most fun course I've ever had, primarily because the professor who teaches it is the most amazing expert on recursive function theory (among other things) I've ever had the privilege of knowing. Not only do I feel twice as smart in some ways, I'll never forget those hilarious jokes that he'd deliver every ten minutes. They certainly compensated for all the brain-addling he dished out.
Actually, I will forget those jokes. What I won't forget is that they were absolutely freaking hilarious. And there is one comic incident that I'll remember to my dying day. That's right, even when I'm creating my own universes and reveling in godlike splendor that amateurs like Yahweh could never imagine, I'll occasionally remember that crazy antic and my laughs will thunder through the cosmos.
Machine Learning was pretty good - as a course I learned an amazing amount from it. The little project we had on constructing a Go AI using Temporal Difference Learning didn't go all that well - but it certainly seemed to be learning, which was all the professor cared about anyway.
I managed to come up with a fairly neat idea for my term paper on Natural Language Processing, though I'm not sure how good it is yet. Still, bad ideas are often the seeds of good ones. I'll shut up for now, because if something good comes out of it, I don't want to get scooped.
I guess the most useful thing that came out of it was the ability to read papers and not die halfway through the second page. When you have to read four of them a week and write reviews for each one, reading just one is a trivial task. And it helps that I can now read them critically too, though sometimes I can't turn on that particular mode of thought until I imagine firing up OpenOffice and starting the review...
Right, so what was the most interesting thing that happened? Without a doubt, it would probably be that amazing trip to Tokyo for the 2007 ACM ICPC World Finals. We didn't do too badly either - we're officially ranked 44th, but then so are all the other teams that solved 3 problems. We're actually second in that lot. In any event, we wound up surpassing UCF teams for the last few years, so our coaches are happy - and we got ranked rather than a mere Honorable Mention, so they're even happier. We even wound up getting interviewed by the student newspaper, and showed up on the university website for a bit.
As an interesting aside, Google has invited the ICPC finalists over to their New York office for a day, around the last week of June. They're going to show off in ways that only us geeks can do without looking like idiots (except to normal people, but then they're merely peasants whose opinions are unworthy of consideration anyway).
Now for the really fun part: in just a few days, my family is going to be flying to the US for a month-long visit. They'll hit Orlando at the beginning of next week, and we'll have a whirlwind tour of Disney World for a couple of days before we head over to my uncle's place in Maryland. And then it'll just be a nice family holiday involving meeting relatives that I may or may not have met before, and all that sort of thing. Of course, as all hungry grad students know, these are merely incidental to the truly important things in life, such as getting to eat good old fashioned home cooking. And when your mom is the best cook in the world...
So any way you look at it, I'm all set.
Except for losing my yellow color on TopCoder.
I guess I'll have to take it back by force in the next SRM. 
It'll be nice to get in some real hard training over summer. I'll be teaching myself loads of cool mathematics (you never know when it might save your life) and preparing for the Ph.D qualifiers next Fall. Putting that all together will mean a serious boost in my abilities. If all goes according to plan, I'll be a lean mean problem-solving machine by the next ACM Regional.
Well, that's it. I'm off to do whatever the hell I feel like, because I'm free as a bird! :D
I think I'll make me some soup at 1 AM. That would just about hit the spot.
It's been 3 months since I blogged. The amount of catching up stories I need to tell is insane, so I'm going to be shamelessly selective and just pick out anything that seems important.
Though now that I think about it, that isn't very different from what I normally do...
So anyway, let's say goodbye to the semester with a little look at what I did.Formal Languages and Automata Theory - in many ways the most fun course I've ever had, primarily because the professor who teaches it is the most amazing expert on recursive function theory (among other things) I've ever had the privilege of knowing. Not only do I feel twice as smart in some ways, I'll never forget those hilarious jokes that he'd deliver every ten minutes. They certainly compensated for all the brain-addling he dished out.
Actually, I will forget those jokes. What I won't forget is that they were absolutely freaking hilarious. And there is one comic incident that I'll remember to my dying day. That's right, even when I'm creating my own universes and reveling in godlike splendor that amateurs like Yahweh could never imagine, I'll occasionally remember that crazy antic and my laughs will thunder through the cosmos.
Machine Learning was pretty good - as a course I learned an amazing amount from it. The little project we had on constructing a Go AI using Temporal Difference Learning didn't go all that well - but it certainly seemed to be learning, which was all the professor cared about anyway.
I managed to come up with a fairly neat idea for my term paper on Natural Language Processing, though I'm not sure how good it is yet. Still, bad ideas are often the seeds of good ones. I'll shut up for now, because if something good comes out of it, I don't want to get scooped.
I guess the most useful thing that came out of it was the ability to read papers and not die halfway through the second page. When you have to read four of them a week and write reviews for each one, reading just one is a trivial task. And it helps that I can now read them critically too, though sometimes I can't turn on that particular mode of thought until I imagine firing up OpenOffice and starting the review...
Right, so what was the most interesting thing that happened? Without a doubt, it would probably be that amazing trip to Tokyo for the 2007 ACM ICPC World Finals. We didn't do too badly either - we're officially ranked 44th, but then so are all the other teams that solved 3 problems. We're actually second in that lot. In any event, we wound up surpassing UCF teams for the last few years, so our coaches are happy - and we got ranked rather than a mere Honorable Mention, so they're even happier. We even wound up getting interviewed by the student newspaper, and showed up on the university website for a bit.
As an interesting aside, Google has invited the ICPC finalists over to their New York office for a day, around the last week of June. They're going to show off in ways that only us geeks can do without looking like idiots (except to normal people, but then they're merely peasants whose opinions are unworthy of consideration anyway
).Now for the really fun part: in just a few days, my family is going to be flying to the US for a month-long visit. They'll hit Orlando at the beginning of next week, and we'll have a whirlwind tour of Disney World for a couple of days before we head over to my uncle's place in Maryland. And then it'll just be a nice family holiday involving meeting relatives that I may or may not have met before, and all that sort of thing. Of course, as all hungry grad students know, these are merely incidental to the truly important things in life, such as getting to eat good old fashioned home cooking. And when your mom is the best cook in the world...
So any way you look at it, I'm all set.
Except for losing my yellow color on TopCoder.
I guess I'll have to take it back by force in the next SRM. It'll be nice to get in some real hard training over summer. I'll be teaching myself loads of cool mathematics (you never know when it might save your life) and preparing for the Ph.D qualifiers next Fall. Putting that all together will mean a serious boost in my abilities. If all goes according to plan, I'll be a lean mean problem-solving machine by the next ACM Regional.
Well, that's it. I'm off to do whatever the hell I feel like, because I'm free as a bird! :D
I think I'll make me some soup at 1 AM. That would just about hit the spot.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Yellow, at long last!
And so, after what seems like ages, I've finally made yellow on TopCoder. At the moment, I'm simultaneously at 1521 and on cloud nine.
I just checked out my TC profile, and it turns out that it's been exactly two years and 3 days since I registered there. Still, I had a bunch of semi-prolonged absences in the middle, so I've only done 51 matches so far. Not too shabby.
I'm off to celebrate - with a pack of Pringles, which were the only celebratory victuals I could find. Bedtime directly after that - can't go around disrupting my schedule too much, you know.
All is well with the world, and so I exit, stage left.
I just checked out my TC profile, and it turns out that it's been exactly two years and 3 days since I registered there. Still, I had a bunch of semi-prolonged absences in the middle, so I've only done 51 matches so far. Not too shabby.
I'm off to celebrate - with a pack of Pringles, which were the only celebratory victuals I could find. Bedtime directly after that - can't go around disrupting my schedule too much, you know.
All is well with the world, and so I exit, stage left.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Shakespearean Insulter
"Away, you bottle-ale rascal, you filthy bung, away!"
From Henry IV, Part 2. Ol' William really knew how to shoot off his mouth in style. Here's to the greatest literary badass ever!
Go here to enjoy Shakespeare's inimitable put-downs, as well as a bunch of automatically generated insults in his style.
From Henry IV, Part 2. Ol' William really knew how to shoot off his mouth in style. Here's to the greatest literary badass ever!
Go here to enjoy Shakespeare's inimitable put-downs, as well as a bunch of automatically generated insults in his style.
At the half century mark!
Today was my 50th TopCoder SRM. The fates were with me (I suppose all those hours of practice also helped a little ) and I hit a new all-time rating high! I'm now at 1483 - just 17 points short of going yellow.
Can't stop practicing now - I'm in more danger than ever of a rating loss after that huge increase. If anything, I need to practice harder to be able to maintain my rating at this level. Still, it's nice to see that practice does pay off, even over the short two week period in this case.
Apparently the trick is to find exactly the right level of problems to practice on. Doing the ones you can crack instantly is a waste of time and a recipe for stagnation. Doing the ones that are so hard you'd never think of the answer is equally useless. Even if you read someone else's solution and look up explanations and what not, you won't gain the ability to make those observations and come up with those approaches on your own. It's like practicing weightlifting by trying to lift what an Olympic champion does, when you can barely manage the groceries.
So the ones you want to do are just a little above your current level. Do enough of those, and you'll have boosted your skills enough to aim a little higher, and so forth.
There's an interesting lesson here - all the practice in the world will bring only minor results if it isn't tightly scoped to your skill level. Perhaps this is one of the major differences between the reds and the rest of us. There's obviously more to it, but I suspect this particular aspect is underrated.
How did I get this idea? At the beginning of my practice sessions, I noticed that I never solved the division 1 medium problems on my own. I always needed the editorial, or perhaps someone else's solution. There was no other way for me to get it.
Since there's been quite a bit of discussion on how the average level of difficulty is rising at TC, I began to wonder if old matches had the kind of problems I could do. So I moved back 130 matches to SRM 200, and tried it out. I was delightfully surprised when I found I could do most medium problems from around then. They took time to think through and figure out, but I could actually do them! If I had my present level of skill back in those days, I would probably have been rated mid-yellow.
This doesn't mean that you should completely neglect the really hard stuff. For the moment, the old mediums are sufficient for me, because once in a while a really devilish problem turns up and leaves me reeling. That's good. Keeps you humble, and teaches you a thing or two.
I only started this a few days ago, and I could almost feel the difference. I started coding and thinking much faster on the ad hoc problems that turn up in division 2 as 250s and 500s.
Okay, it was mostly the 500s. I'm already fast enough at div 2 250s that any speedup there is difficult to distinguish from normal statistical variations. My scores on the 500s have apparently risen about 30 points, though.
Our first Spring practice session for the World Finals is this Saturday. Perhaps we'll see some improvement there. Or not.
The Spring semester starts again on Monday. As predicted, I'm going to need to be really organized if I intend to be productive. I'm taking Formal Languages and Automata Theory, Machine Learning and Natural Language Systems. Topped off with World Finals practice, that's one hell of a workload.
Should be fun.
) and I hit a new all-time rating high! I'm now at 1483 - just 17 points short of going yellow. Can't stop practicing now - I'm in more danger than ever of a rating loss after that huge increase. If anything, I need to practice harder to be able to maintain my rating at this level. Still, it's nice to see that practice does pay off, even over the short two week period in this case.
Apparently the trick is to find exactly the right level of problems to practice on. Doing the ones you can crack instantly is a waste of time and a recipe for stagnation. Doing the ones that are so hard you'd never think of the answer is equally useless. Even if you read someone else's solution and look up explanations and what not, you won't gain the ability to make those observations and come up with those approaches on your own. It's like practicing weightlifting by trying to lift what an Olympic champion does, when you can barely manage the groceries.
So the ones you want to do are just a little above your current level. Do enough of those, and you'll have boosted your skills enough to aim a little higher, and so forth.
There's an interesting lesson here - all the practice in the world will bring only minor results if it isn't tightly scoped to your skill level. Perhaps this is one of the major differences between the reds and the rest of us. There's obviously more to it, but I suspect this particular aspect is underrated.
How did I get this idea? At the beginning of my practice sessions, I noticed that I never solved the division 1 medium problems on my own. I always needed the editorial, or perhaps someone else's solution. There was no other way for me to get it.
Since there's been quite a bit of discussion on how the average level of difficulty is rising at TC, I began to wonder if old matches had the kind of problems I could do. So I moved back 130 matches to SRM 200, and tried it out. I was delightfully surprised when I found I could do most medium problems from around then. They took time to think through and figure out, but I could actually do them! If I had my present level of skill back in those days, I would probably have been rated mid-yellow.
This doesn't mean that you should completely neglect the really hard stuff. For the moment, the old mediums are sufficient for me, because once in a while a really devilish problem turns up and leaves me reeling. That's good. Keeps you humble, and teaches you a thing or two.
I only started this a few days ago, and I could almost feel the difference. I started coding and thinking much faster on the ad hoc problems that turn up in division 2 as 250s and 500s.
Okay, it was mostly the 500s. I'm already fast enough at div 2 250s that any speedup there is difficult to distinguish from normal statistical variations. My scores on the 500s have apparently risen about 30 points, though.
Our first Spring practice session for the World Finals is this Saturday. Perhaps we'll see some improvement there. Or not.
The Spring semester starts again on Monday. As predicted, I'm going to need to be really organized if I intend to be productive. I'm taking Formal Languages and Automata Theory, Machine Learning and Natural Language Systems. Topped off with World Finals practice, that's one hell of a workload.
Should be fun.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
I did it again!
Woohoo - I just successfully cooked some rice, and it's perfect! Mom's recipes really work!
Now I can settle down in front of the TV and watch the South Park marathon.
Now I can settle down in front of the TV and watch the South Park marathon.
Cooking? Me?
My latest exploit is probably the most uncharacteristic yet. I cooked. 
It all started out two nights ago when my roommates declared they were going to Miami for two days with a bunch of other guys. Now I had a pretty good idea of what they were going to get up to out there, and unfortunately, I'm not the kind of guy who enjoys that sort of thing. Sad, but true.
For those who don't know what I'm talking out, I should mention that one of the major qualities of this friend of ours called Avinash(the guy who came up with the idea of the Miami trip) is that he can outdrink the most seasoned Irish drinker. Fill him up with alcohol to the point that you can hear it sloshing around inside, and he'll barely be unsteady on his feet.
Now it's always great fun to watch a bunch of progressively drunker guys make fools of themselves - in fact, a friend of mine claims that this is his only activity on the rare occasions he goes to a club.
Still, it gets boring after a while. I'm not a glutton for boredom, and luckily I wasn't invited. This gave me the idea that I could use this time to force myself to cook, and it worked. Necessity is indeed the mother of not-so-futile dodges.
I created some pretty tasty zeera-aloo - for those of you who don't speak Hindi or Urdu, this is basically a bunch of potatoes the way my mom makes back home. As far as I'm concerned, this is a great culinary achievement. Besides, I'm one of those guys who could live forever on potatoes.
I think I'll try my hand at making some rice tonight. Wish me luck. I'll keep the fire extinguisher ready.
It all started out two nights ago when my roommates declared they were going to Miami for two days with a bunch of other guys. Now I had a pretty good idea of what they were going to get up to out there, and unfortunately, I'm not the kind of guy who enjoys that sort of thing. Sad, but true.
For those who don't know what I'm talking out, I should mention that one of the major qualities of this friend of ours called Avinash(the guy who came up with the idea of the Miami trip) is that he can outdrink the most seasoned Irish drinker. Fill him up with alcohol to the point that you can hear it sloshing around inside, and he'll barely be unsteady on his feet.
Now it's always great fun to watch a bunch of progressively drunker guys make fools of themselves - in fact, a friend of mine claims that this is his only activity on the rare occasions he goes to a club.
Still, it gets boring after a while. I'm not a glutton for boredom, and luckily I wasn't invited. This gave me the idea that I could use this time to force myself to cook, and it worked. Necessity is indeed the mother of not-so-futile dodges.
I created some pretty tasty zeera-aloo - for those of you who don't speak Hindi or Urdu, this is basically a bunch of potatoes the way my mom makes back home. As far as I'm concerned, this is a great culinary achievement. Besides, I'm one of those guys who could live forever on potatoes.
I think I'll try my hand at making some rice tonight. Wish me luck. I'll keep the fire extinguisher ready.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Blogger upgrade and more
Season's greetings, everyone!
Blogger Beta has now gone official, so I just switched my blog over to it a few minutes ago. I've been messing a bit with layout and that sort of thing, and a lot of my old hacks don't work anymore, such as the comment expansion script.
Okay, actually I just can't be bothered to go through with figuring out how to integrate that into things here. I'm not sure how much the template has changed and I'm feeling kinda lazy at the moment. I'll probably look into it sometime soon. One of the things that has always annoyed me about Blogger is the way comments are handled - either a new window pops up, or it opens up in the same window - either way it breaks continuity in a way it shouldn't.
I was going to apologize for not posting for so long, but given that I seem to wind up doing that in every single post, I'm going to be shameless and simply refuse to ever apologize about this again. A man's blog is his castle, after all...
Here's a potted history of what went on between the last post and this one:
My team (UCF Kernel Panic) won the ACM ICPC Southeast Regionals, handily beating the second place team by a margin of nearly 600 penalty points. We'll be going to the World Finals in Tokyo in March.
Well, we were beaten by the pickup team formed by my coaches Ben and Raymond, but thankfully pickup teams don't count anyway. In any event, I'm pretty happy - my first ever ICPC, and I'm already going to the World Finals. Not that I had all that much to do with it - my teammates have been doing this sort of thing for a while now. I did help a fair bit, though.
Right after that, I was hit by midterms, followed by a rather heavy load of work for the courses I was taking. Now, for the first time ever, I wound up slightly concerned that my rather undisciplined approach to getting stuff done wouldn't cut it. It was too late by then for organization to be any help, so I just went with overwhelming force instead.
People who know my somewhat obsessive nature are aware of just how much overwhelming force I can generate. It paid off - I wound up with an A in all my courses but one, and that was only an A-, so I'm mostly satisfied.
Still, I was kept extremely busy all the way through, and that left me slightly annoyed. Having to work like that eats into your time in a somewhat negative way, and I think I'd be happier with a little more control as opposed to my current methods of reacting to things as they come.
Consequently, I've gotten into this self-improvement and discipline thing - presumably the catalyst was reading How to Think like Leonardo Da Vinci and then being strongly influenced by another of Steve Pavlina's posts: Passion Vs Self-Discipline.
Pavlina knows what he's talking about. He does occasionally post on stuff which I consider rather irrational - psychic stuff and what not - but his personal growth stuff is amazing, and well worth the read.
I'd like to point out that I've been inspired enough that I'm actually waking up early these days(so far, that just means before 11 AM, though) and I've been using his 30-day trial approach to train myself to drink 8 glasses of water a day. Works like a charm.
Be advised, drinking more than 8 glasses of water a day means that you'll be visiting the loo on a very regular basis. On the plus side, it does make you feel a lot healthier.
The day after my last exam, I flew off to Maryland to visit my uncle. Armed with my new digital camera - it's a Canon Powershot A630 - I ended up coming back with over 90 pictures. This was another overwhelming force thing - my dad had demanded at least 50, fearing that my lazy approach would result in only a few photos here and there.
Family and close friends - if you guys haven't seen the pics, let me know.
It was a great trip, though it was only a week long. The best part was all the home cooking - mmmm....*Sigh*
Seeing Washington DC was an interesting experience. I briefly contemplated running for President, but then realized that I haven't learned how to fake sincerity well enough to be an effective politician.
It was also nice to meet a lot of family, particularly cousins who I hadn't seen in years, and some who I had either never met, or had no memory of meeting owing to the vagaries of the infant mind...
So I'm finally back home, and rather predictably, I'm solving dozens of problems as practice for the World Finals.
USACO rearranged their training pages, so I suddenly found myself back in section 2.2, after having been in 3.3 a few months ago. In a fit of inspiration, I solved 10 problems in quick succession to get to 3.2. This was mostly done yesterday, and a couple of problems were done the day before that.
I'm aiming to go yellow on TopCoder soon. Hopefully these 2 weeks of vacation will give me the added boost I need. A trend I've noticed among most people who have a high degree of skill at programming contests, is that at some point, they sat back and solved a huge number of problems over a very short period of time, and ratings and skill suddenly jumped. So you can guess what I'm doing now...
I guess that's about it. I've been promising myself that I'd start blogging again, and it wasn't working, so I just did the overwhelming force thing again. It worked.
Cheerio, guys! Enjoy your Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Winter Solstice, Rohatsu - and have a happy New Year!
Blogger Beta has now gone official, so I just switched my blog over to it a few minutes ago. I've been messing a bit with layout and that sort of thing, and a lot of my old hacks don't work anymore, such as the comment expansion script.
Okay, actually I just can't be bothered to go through with figuring out how to integrate that into things here. I'm not sure how much the template has changed and I'm feeling kinda lazy at the moment. I'll probably look into it sometime soon. One of the things that has always annoyed me about Blogger is the way comments are handled - either a new window pops up, or it opens up in the same window - either way it breaks continuity in a way it shouldn't.
I was going to apologize for not posting for so long, but given that I seem to wind up doing that in every single post, I'm going to be shameless and simply refuse to ever apologize about this again. A man's blog is his castle, after all...
Here's a potted history of what went on between the last post and this one:
My team (UCF Kernel Panic) won the ACM ICPC Southeast Regionals, handily beating the second place team by a margin of nearly 600 penalty points. We'll be going to the World Finals in Tokyo in March.
Well, we were beaten by the pickup team formed by my coaches Ben and Raymond, but thankfully pickup teams don't count anyway. In any event, I'm pretty happy - my first ever ICPC, and I'm already going to the World Finals. Not that I had all that much to do with it - my teammates have been doing this sort of thing for a while now. I did help a fair bit, though.
Right after that, I was hit by midterms, followed by a rather heavy load of work for the courses I was taking. Now, for the first time ever, I wound up slightly concerned that my rather undisciplined approach to getting stuff done wouldn't cut it. It was too late by then for organization to be any help, so I just went with overwhelming force instead.
People who know my somewhat obsessive nature are aware of just how much overwhelming force I can generate. It paid off - I wound up with an A in all my courses but one, and that was only an A-, so I'm mostly satisfied.
Still, I was kept extremely busy all the way through, and that left me slightly annoyed. Having to work like that eats into your time in a somewhat negative way, and I think I'd be happier with a little more control as opposed to my current methods of reacting to things as they come.
Consequently, I've gotten into this self-improvement and discipline thing - presumably the catalyst was reading How to Think like Leonardo Da Vinci and then being strongly influenced by another of Steve Pavlina's posts: Passion Vs Self-Discipline.
Pavlina knows what he's talking about. He does occasionally post on stuff which I consider rather irrational - psychic stuff and what not - but his personal growth stuff is amazing, and well worth the read.
I'd like to point out that I've been inspired enough that I'm actually waking up early these days(so far, that just means before 11 AM, though) and I've been using his 30-day trial approach to train myself to drink 8 glasses of water a day. Works like a charm.
Be advised, drinking more than 8 glasses of water a day means that you'll be visiting the loo on a very regular basis. On the plus side, it does make you feel a lot healthier.
The day after my last exam, I flew off to Maryland to visit my uncle. Armed with my new digital camera - it's a Canon Powershot A630 - I ended up coming back with over 90 pictures. This was another overwhelming force thing - my dad had demanded at least 50, fearing that my lazy approach would result in only a few photos here and there.
Family and close friends - if you guys haven't seen the pics, let me know.
It was a great trip, though it was only a week long. The best part was all the home cooking - mmmm....*Sigh*
Seeing Washington DC was an interesting experience. I briefly contemplated running for President, but then realized that I haven't learned how to fake sincerity well enough to be an effective politician.
It was also nice to meet a lot of family, particularly cousins who I hadn't seen in years, and some who I had either never met, or had no memory of meeting owing to the vagaries of the infant mind...
So I'm finally back home, and rather predictably, I'm solving dozens of problems as practice for the World Finals.
USACO rearranged their training pages, so I suddenly found myself back in section 2.2, after having been in 3.3 a few months ago. In a fit of inspiration, I solved 10 problems in quick succession to get to 3.2. This was mostly done yesterday, and a couple of problems were done the day before that.
I'm aiming to go yellow on TopCoder soon. Hopefully these 2 weeks of vacation will give me the added boost I need. A trend I've noticed among most people who have a high degree of skill at programming contests, is that at some point, they sat back and solved a huge number of problems over a very short period of time, and ratings and skill suddenly jumped. So you can guess what I'm doing now...
I guess that's about it. I've been promising myself that I'd start blogging again, and it wasn't working, so I just did the overwhelming force thing again. It worked.
Cheerio, guys! Enjoy your Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Winter Solstice, Rohatsu - and have a happy New Year!
Monday, October 09, 2006
Exams, exercise, Yanni, and public opinion
So I finally had my first real test in the US - the midterm for Advanced AI. As expected, it was a lot more fun than the crappy ones we usually had back home. So I got down to comparing the two styles and noticed a few things about how we did tests back home.
As far back as I seem to remember, my memories of exams have always had a certain kind of boredom and a 'grin and bear it' feeling associated with them. Even the most fun exams would inevitably have some kind of boring question in it - boring because of the tedium of doing it, or because it was something that had turned up several million times before, or something like that. And there was always that little bit of willpower you needed to keep yourself writing more and more crappy stuff at breakneck speed. Especially in engineering, where answer lengths and marks became very highly correlated.
This sort of thing was the hallmark of all exams, except perhaps Maths. Engineering stole even that distinction from that wonderful subject by making it boring as well. There was no...elegance to the mathematics we did in engineering. It didn't take ingenuity, or insight, or anything. Just remember blah blah and use so-and-so and grind away.
That's why the Advanced AI exam was fun. Okay, it was short and easy(who needs 3 hour exams anyway?) but more importantly, it was scoped to exactly the level of difficulty that the subject warranted. This was something completely missing back home. Too much extra crap to consider over and above the subject, which was all that really mattered, frankly. Ah well, at least that's over...
Rather uncharacteristically, I've started getting some exercise. Going to seed in grad school hardly seems like a good idea. Luckily for my lazy nature, my bike is perfect for this sort of thing. I just have to ride to campus and back every alternate day, and the exertion it takes to handle the slopes is all my body needs.
Of course, my killer metabolism(I have no idea where it came from) takes some of the credit too. Some of my roommates have started hitting the gym regularly to keep from putting on weight. I'm lucky enough to remain completely stable even without having to do any of that. Plus my legs have already grown significantly stronger since I began biking last week, and stamina levels are up as well.
Bikes are nice. Best mode of transportation ever invented. :)
Incidentally, I've finally got my nice little review copy of Yanni Live! and I can testify that it's absolutely mind blowing. I'll be sitting down and writing a review as soon as I can. It's going to take some thinking, because there's no way I can do justice to such an amazing performance otherwise. Suffice it to say that it rocked.
Hopefully this little post should be enough to satisfy the demands of public opinion. I've been getting complaints from both friends and relatives about not blogging. Apologies, but I'm a lazy bum, and after all, procrastination is a graduate student's birthright.
Better head for the Engineering II building now - class is in twelve minutes. Cheerio!
As far back as I seem to remember, my memories of exams have always had a certain kind of boredom and a 'grin and bear it' feeling associated with them. Even the most fun exams would inevitably have some kind of boring question in it - boring because of the tedium of doing it, or because it was something that had turned up several million times before, or something like that. And there was always that little bit of willpower you needed to keep yourself writing more and more crappy stuff at breakneck speed. Especially in engineering, where answer lengths and marks became very highly correlated.
This sort of thing was the hallmark of all exams, except perhaps Maths. Engineering stole even that distinction from that wonderful subject by making it boring as well. There was no...elegance to the mathematics we did in engineering. It didn't take ingenuity, or insight, or anything. Just remember blah blah and use so-and-so and grind away.
That's why the Advanced AI exam was fun. Okay, it was short and easy(who needs 3 hour exams anyway?) but more importantly, it was scoped to exactly the level of difficulty that the subject warranted. This was something completely missing back home. Too much extra crap to consider over and above the subject, which was all that really mattered, frankly. Ah well, at least that's over...
Rather uncharacteristically, I've started getting some exercise. Going to seed in grad school hardly seems like a good idea. Luckily for my lazy nature, my bike is perfect for this sort of thing. I just have to ride to campus and back every alternate day, and the exertion it takes to handle the slopes is all my body needs.
Of course, my killer metabolism(I have no idea where it came from) takes some of the credit too. Some of my roommates have started hitting the gym regularly to keep from putting on weight. I'm lucky enough to remain completely stable even without having to do any of that. Plus my legs have already grown significantly stronger since I began biking last week, and stamina levels are up as well.
Bikes are nice. Best mode of transportation ever invented. :)
Incidentally, I've finally got my nice little review copy of Yanni Live! and I can testify that it's absolutely mind blowing. I'll be sitting down and writing a review as soon as I can. It's going to take some thinking, because there's no way I can do justice to such an amazing performance otherwise. Suffice it to say that it rocked.
Hopefully this little post should be enough to satisfy the demands of public opinion. I've been getting complaints from both friends and relatives about not blogging. Apologies, but I'm a lazy bum, and after all, procrastination is a graduate student's birthright.
Better head for the Engineering II building now - class is in twelve minutes. Cheerio!
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Long time no see...
Okay, I've been putting this off for far too long. So now, with profound apologies for the long absence, it's time for me to start blogging again.
Besides, if I didn't, I'd be slaughtered by dozens of angry friends and family members whenever I made my first trip back home. :P
As one might expect, so many fascinating things have happened in this one month that I've been in the US that I'm not sure I'd be able to get it all down in a single blog post. I'll make an attempt to put everything in, and future posts will hopefully cover the things I miss.
First off, this post comes to you courtesy of my new laptop. It's a sexy new Dell Inspiron 6400, with an Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB SATA HDD, and a wonderful 128 MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 HyperMemory graphics card. I'm in love...And now I can actually put my Google Code Jam laptop bag to good use.
I'm in the AI group, and having quite a bit of fun reading papers from all over the field as part of my independent study. Coursewise, I've got Advanced AI and Algorithm Design and Analysis on my plate. Having phenomenal fun in all of them, as people who know me would guess. :P
I should also mention that my status as a grad student gives me a place in one of the Graduate Research Labs - just as soon as the CS Department moves into its swanking new building in a couple of weeks. Then I can misuse the printer, and procrastinate effectively among other grad students.
Yet another wonderful piece of news is that UCF has a pretty good record at the ACM Southeast Regionals, and guess who managed to get onto one of the teams going there next month...
For those who don't happen to be in CS - and for the uninformed ones who are in CS and are still somewhat clueless, the ACM(Association for Computing Machinery) holds a worldwide team programming contest every year. They divide the planet into regions, and there are contests in each region, with several teams from different universities competing. The winners of each region go to the World Finals, which should be held in Japan next year, around April or so. If Japan doesn't work out, the backup destination is Hawaii. :P
In any event, UCF has a phenomenal record at the Southeast US Regionals - they've competed 24 times, and been in the top 3...24 times, with 11 wins. This will be our 25th year, and once again, we're aiming to win the regionals and go to the World Finals. I've had the good fortune to be assigned to the strongest team, since one of my teammates has 5 years of experience, and another has about 3. It's a pretty potent combination.
To illustrate what I mean, I just got back from our first practice session, which culminated in a five hour mock contest. Not only did we solve all 9 problems(the team that came in second only did 5), we did it with an hour and a half to spare, so our coach Raymond came over and gave us another problem to solve.
We submitted that successfully with 20 seconds to spare. :D
In any event, I expect a pretty major improvement in my problem solving ability over the next 7 weeks, given the strong practice regimen they have lined up for us. I think it's time for me to go yellow on TopCoder...And it's always great to meet other people who love doing the same crazy things you do.
So to sum up, life is good. Very good. Amazingly good. The kind of good that you only feel when you're finally doing what you were born to do.
It's lots of fun out here, with my 4 roommates. 5 grad students in the same house is a deadly combination. Especially when 3 of us are in CS, the craziest discipline of all. :P
I think I'll stop for now and go eat one of Vinit's mouth-watering concoctions. I have the ultimate asset - a roommate who actually likes to cook. Dinner time for me, guys. Ciao!
Besides, if I didn't, I'd be slaughtered by dozens of angry friends and family members whenever I made my first trip back home. :P
As one might expect, so many fascinating things have happened in this one month that I've been in the US that I'm not sure I'd be able to get it all down in a single blog post. I'll make an attempt to put everything in, and future posts will hopefully cover the things I miss.
First off, this post comes to you courtesy of my new laptop. It's a sexy new Dell Inspiron 6400, with an Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB SATA HDD, and a wonderful 128 MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 HyperMemory graphics card. I'm in love...And now I can actually put my Google Code Jam laptop bag to good use.
I'm in the AI group, and having quite a bit of fun reading papers from all over the field as part of my independent study. Coursewise, I've got Advanced AI and Algorithm Design and Analysis on my plate. Having phenomenal fun in all of them, as people who know me would guess. :P
I should also mention that my status as a grad student gives me a place in one of the Graduate Research Labs - just as soon as the CS Department moves into its swanking new building in a couple of weeks. Then I can misuse the printer, and procrastinate effectively among other grad students.
Yet another wonderful piece of news is that UCF has a pretty good record at the ACM Southeast Regionals, and guess who managed to get onto one of the teams going there next month...
For those who don't happen to be in CS - and for the uninformed ones who are in CS and are still somewhat clueless, the ACM(Association for Computing Machinery) holds a worldwide team programming contest every year. They divide the planet into regions, and there are contests in each region, with several teams from different universities competing. The winners of each region go to the World Finals, which should be held in Japan next year, around April or so. If Japan doesn't work out, the backup destination is Hawaii. :P
In any event, UCF has a phenomenal record at the Southeast US Regionals - they've competed 24 times, and been in the top 3...24 times, with 11 wins. This will be our 25th year, and once again, we're aiming to win the regionals and go to the World Finals. I've had the good fortune to be assigned to the strongest team, since one of my teammates has 5 years of experience, and another has about 3. It's a pretty potent combination.
To illustrate what I mean, I just got back from our first practice session, which culminated in a five hour mock contest. Not only did we solve all 9 problems(the team that came in second only did 5), we did it with an hour and a half to spare, so our coach Raymond came over and gave us another problem to solve.
We submitted that successfully with 20 seconds to spare. :D
In any event, I expect a pretty major improvement in my problem solving ability over the next 7 weeks, given the strong practice regimen they have lined up for us. I think it's time for me to go yellow on TopCoder...And it's always great to meet other people who love doing the same crazy things you do.
So to sum up, life is good. Very good. Amazingly good. The kind of good that you only feel when you're finally doing what you were born to do.
It's lots of fun out here, with my 4 roommates. 5 grad students in the same house is a deadly combination. Especially when 3 of us are in CS, the craziest discipline of all. :P
I think I'll stop for now and go eat one of Vinit's mouth-watering concoctions. I have the ultimate asset - a roommate who actually likes to cook. Dinner time for me, guys. Ciao!
Monday, August 07, 2006
Farewell, Mumbai!
*Nostalgic music...*
This is going to be my last night sleeping in my nice and comfy old bed. Tomorrow night, I'll be flying off to Orlando. Grad school, here I come. Mumbai - it's been real, old girl. Keep on rocking.
I was originally planning to make this into a long post, touching on all the people and places that have helped shape me into who I am now. Somehow I can't bring myself to do that, though. I think I'll leave that for another day, perhaps as a coping mechanism for homesickness...
And so, Act I of Nadeem's Crazy Life draws to a close. The curtains have begun to descend. We'll have a brief intermezzo as I travel across Europe and the Atlantic to New York, ending with a bit of a flourish as I take another flight from NY to Orlando. And there, ladies and gentlemen, the curtains shall rise again for the second act. It promises to have a completely different flavour, and even the protagonist will not be left untouched by the changes.
Such is life.
Bye guys. It's been nice knowing all of you. I don't know how long it's going to be until I post again. Let's see how things work out. Until then - ciao!
PS: For those who want to call me before the flight, I'll be home until 11 to 11:30 PM at least. I'm not sure what the situation will be like with my cellphone after that. It'll be easier to call me at home, of course - but hey, whatever...
This is going to be my last night sleeping in my nice and comfy old bed. Tomorrow night, I'll be flying off to Orlando. Grad school, here I come. Mumbai - it's been real, old girl. Keep on rocking.
I was originally planning to make this into a long post, touching on all the people and places that have helped shape me into who I am now. Somehow I can't bring myself to do that, though. I think I'll leave that for another day, perhaps as a coping mechanism for homesickness...
And so, Act I of Nadeem's Crazy Life draws to a close. The curtains have begun to descend. We'll have a brief intermezzo as I travel across Europe and the Atlantic to New York, ending with a bit of a flourish as I take another flight from NY to Orlando. And there, ladies and gentlemen, the curtains shall rise again for the second act. It promises to have a completely different flavour, and even the protagonist will not be left untouched by the changes.
Such is life.
Bye guys. It's been nice knowing all of you. I don't know how long it's going to be until I post again. Let's see how things work out. Until then - ciao!
PS: For those who want to call me before the flight, I'll be home until 11 to 11:30 PM at least. I'm not sure what the situation will be like with my cellphone after that. It'll be easier to call me at home, of course - but hey, whatever...
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Censorship!
In the aftermath of the bomb blasts in Mumbai, the government has done what all governments seem to do when terrorists strike. It's gone insane, and decided to brazenly violate the constitutional rights of its own citizens.
Trust some half-witted incompetent government dolt in charge of something to have come up with the bright idea of blocking the Blogspot and Typepad domains, plus quite a few others. Apparently this is because some nuts have been creating blogs with messages of hate and so forth, trying to incite an incident or ten. That's right people, let's block the entire domain so we can get rid of one or two measly hate blogs. Sheesh!
I don't have any patience with people who preach hatred, and I wouldn't mind beating the living daylights out of the blokes responsible for the bomb blasts either - it's my city, after all. But the fact remains - in order to stop people from seeing the hate blogs, they're also stopping them from seeing all the harmless ones. If it weren't so damn unconstitutional, I'd be laughing my ass off at this moronic measure.
Do they actually think that it's possible to stop a reasonably smart and net-savvy person from reading whatever they want on the net? The only way in hell they'll manage that is to shut down internet access completely. Otherwise, we geeks are unstoppable. Since I haven't given the government permission to censor my blog, it should bugger off and look very apologetic about it. And the next time it wants to do something like this, it had better come grovelling on its knees to the Indian Blogosphere, in abject humility and self-abasement. And even then we'll unanimously tell it to shove its lame fascist ideas where the sun don't shine.
Censorship in any form is just plain wrong. The government has no bloody right to tell its citizens what they can read or hear or say. I, for one, will never give them that right, and I spit on any and all of their attempts to do this. And the huge outburst from Indian bloggers all over the country shows that the rest of us won't either.
It will do the government(all democratic governments, actually) good to know one thing - the rights of the people are fundamental and granted by the nature of reality and the human condition. The rights of the government, however, are what the people say they are. The purpose of a government is to serve us, not rule us. It's a dog that should be kept on a very short leash. People in positions of power soon become intoxicated with it. And in India, we have incompetent people in positions of power, which leads to this sort of stupidity. *Sigh*...
As an act of respect to the Indian Constitution, I'm going to provide a bunch of links that show just how to defeat these silly restrictions.
This is a good summary of all the different ways to bypass the ban. Highly recommended.
Here's a list of ISPs that seem to be implementing the ban.
You can use a proxy, such as HideMyAss.
Another way is to go to Google's translation tools and ask it to translate the page you're reading. Unfortunately, Google doesn't have an English to English option :P, so you'll have to muck around with the URL a bit. Something like http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=abstractwhiz.blogspot.com might do the trick. However, this one seems to vary from ISP to ISP - some people can use it, and others can't. I've tried it, but the translation just goes on and on without ever appearing, so I wouldn't recommend it.
The Pakistani government has Blogspot blocked too, but a smart guy came up with an interesting solution - it's a website called pkblogs. You can get to my blog my going to http://www.pkblogs.com/abstractwhiz. There's now an Indian counterpart to it - Inblogs. I'm ashamed that India even needs one of these. So much for democracy, eh?
Let's see how long they can keep this ban up. Pretty soon, no one will even care. And while it's never gonna happen, it's still nice to hope that the government will apologize shamefacedly for making such a dumb mistake and publicly humiliate itself as punishment. :D
Trust some half-witted incompetent government dolt in charge of something to have come up with the bright idea of blocking the Blogspot and Typepad domains, plus quite a few others. Apparently this is because some nuts have been creating blogs with messages of hate and so forth, trying to incite an incident or ten. That's right people, let's block the entire domain so we can get rid of one or two measly hate blogs. Sheesh!
I don't have any patience with people who preach hatred, and I wouldn't mind beating the living daylights out of the blokes responsible for the bomb blasts either - it's my city, after all. But the fact remains - in order to stop people from seeing the hate blogs, they're also stopping them from seeing all the harmless ones. If it weren't so damn unconstitutional, I'd be laughing my ass off at this moronic measure.
Do they actually think that it's possible to stop a reasonably smart and net-savvy person from reading whatever they want on the net? The only way in hell they'll manage that is to shut down internet access completely. Otherwise, we geeks are unstoppable. Since I haven't given the government permission to censor my blog, it should bugger off and look very apologetic about it. And the next time it wants to do something like this, it had better come grovelling on its knees to the Indian Blogosphere, in abject humility and self-abasement. And even then we'll unanimously tell it to shove its lame fascist ideas where the sun don't shine.
Censorship in any form is just plain wrong. The government has no bloody right to tell its citizens what they can read or hear or say. I, for one, will never give them that right, and I spit on any and all of their attempts to do this. And the huge outburst from Indian bloggers all over the country shows that the rest of us won't either.
It will do the government(all democratic governments, actually) good to know one thing - the rights of the people are fundamental and granted by the nature of reality and the human condition. The rights of the government, however, are what the people say they are. The purpose of a government is to serve us, not rule us. It's a dog that should be kept on a very short leash. People in positions of power soon become intoxicated with it. And in India, we have incompetent people in positions of power, which leads to this sort of stupidity. *Sigh*...
As an act of respect to the Indian Constitution, I'm going to provide a bunch of links that show just how to defeat these silly restrictions.
This is a good summary of all the different ways to bypass the ban. Highly recommended.
Here's a list of ISPs that seem to be implementing the ban.
You can use a proxy, such as HideMyAss.
Another way is to go to Google's translation tools and ask it to translate the page you're reading. Unfortunately, Google doesn't have an English to English option :P, so you'll have to muck around with the URL a bit. Something like http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=abstractwhiz.blogspot.com might do the trick. However, this one seems to vary from ISP to ISP - some people can use it, and others can't. I've tried it, but the translation just goes on and on without ever appearing, so I wouldn't recommend it.
The Pakistani government has Blogspot blocked too, but a smart guy came up with an interesting solution - it's a website called pkblogs. You can get to my blog my going to http://www.pkblogs.com/abstractwhiz. There's now an Indian counterpart to it - Inblogs. I'm ashamed that India even needs one of these. So much for democracy, eh?
Let's see how long they can keep this ban up. Pretty soon, no one will even care. And while it's never gonna happen, it's still nice to hope that the government will apologize shamefacedly for making such a dumb mistake and publicly humiliate itself as punishment. :D
Monday, June 19, 2006
Another day, another blog...
It's been just about 2 weeks since the exams ended, and as expected, I've been making several attempts to engage in the ancient and honored art known by the quaint Indian English term 'timepass'.
Unfortunately, attempts to practice this art for a prolonged period are inevitably cut short by various events, mostly due to the upcoming departure for the US. I still have plenty of time, just not enough to waste profitably. ;)
My visa interview was on Saturday. Went through without a hitch - only about one minute long, in fact. The painful part was waiting 2 hours for the bloody 1 minute.
Now busy trying to get other stuff arranged - need to find a place to live in Orlando, find a flight that isn't already booked, buy stuff, and so forth.
Speaking of buying, I was dragged off to Shopper's Stop yesterday to buy a bunch of clothes. To my great amazement, it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be. In fact, the ending was positively fun, when I found me a cool Tantra t-shirt, which read "Hard work pays off later. Laziness pays off now."
That's practically the motto of every CS grad student. B)
Got me a pair of cargos. Man, these things are a lot lighter than jeans. Perfect for this disgustingly humid weather, which I'll be encountering in Florida anyway.
TCO t-shirt just arrived! It looks incredibly awesome, but for some reason, it's one size too large. Which is odd, since my two Google Code Jam shirts fit perfectly.
I've been learning Lisp for the last few days. It's simply the most amazing programming language I have ever seen. Programs written as s-expressions, code and data melding seamlessly, programs writing more programs using the devastatingly powerful macro feature - it's like learning the language of the gods. I strongly recommend Peter Siebel's Practical Common Lisp. Very nicely written, and full of these incredible examples - MP3 database, ID3 parser, Shoutcast server, HTML generator and what not...
Also got back into the TC groove today. I've been neglecting that side of things ever since SRM 302. The last two matches have been tougher than usual, and I'm actually pleased I didn't take part. :D
My 3 MU TopCoder pals are off on internships - Nishant is now enjoying himself at Google, and vociferously advocating that I chuck the US plans and go there post haste. Vishwesh and Arijit are off in Hyderabad at Microsoft's India Development Center. We're all waiting to see how long Arijit waits before installing Ubuntu Linux 6 on a bunch of Microsoft machines.
Or worse - he might use Gentoo. :D
Congratulations are due to Nishant - he's been on a pretty good streak in the past few SRMs. For those who haven't been following along, he's now ranked number 1 in the country. Rock on, dude!
And he even gets to do the next few SRMs from the Google office. Lucky bastard...
Now, on to weightier matters... ;)
First off, it's my sister's birthday! Happy Birthday, sis! It's the last one we'll celebrate together for a while, so let's make this one to remember, eh?
Birthday present - I hereby introduce my sister's blog to the world: People - go here and wish her a happy birthday. Or else.
And let's give it up for Sharon and her new blog! Welcome to the blogosphere, girl! If the first post is anything to go by, this is gonna be pretty interesting. Note to prospective readers - don't make the mistake of praising Hyderabad in your comments...
So now, at one stroke, I've added not one but two females to my blogroll. Score one for gender equality...
And with that we come to the end of another dumb and uninspiring blog post by yours truly. Mostly because I'm not in the mood to write more stuff. Like Popeye once said "That's all I can stands - I can't stands no more!" (*Spinach eating fanfare*)
Btw, I've made a couple of minor changes here and there, and added emoticons. They're still slightly tacky, but I think they add a bit of expressiveness to the large reams of text I tend to spout...
Toodle-oo, people!
Unfortunately, attempts to practice this art for a prolonged period are inevitably cut short by various events, mostly due to the upcoming departure for the US. I still have plenty of time, just not enough to waste profitably. ;)
My visa interview was on Saturday. Went through without a hitch - only about one minute long, in fact. The painful part was waiting 2 hours for the bloody 1 minute.
Now busy trying to get other stuff arranged - need to find a place to live in Orlando, find a flight that isn't already booked, buy stuff, and so forth.
Speaking of buying, I was dragged off to Shopper's Stop yesterday to buy a bunch of clothes. To my great amazement, it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be. In fact, the ending was positively fun, when I found me a cool Tantra t-shirt, which read "Hard work pays off later. Laziness pays off now."
That's practically the motto of every CS grad student. B)
Got me a pair of cargos. Man, these things are a lot lighter than jeans. Perfect for this disgustingly humid weather, which I'll be encountering in Florida anyway.
TCO t-shirt just arrived! It looks incredibly awesome, but for some reason, it's one size too large. Which is odd, since my two Google Code Jam shirts fit perfectly.
I've been learning Lisp for the last few days. It's simply the most amazing programming language I have ever seen. Programs written as s-expressions, code and data melding seamlessly, programs writing more programs using the devastatingly powerful macro feature - it's like learning the language of the gods. I strongly recommend Peter Siebel's Practical Common Lisp. Very nicely written, and full of these incredible examples - MP3 database, ID3 parser, Shoutcast server, HTML generator and what not...
Also got back into the TC groove today. I've been neglecting that side of things ever since SRM 302. The last two matches have been tougher than usual, and I'm actually pleased I didn't take part. :D
My 3 MU TopCoder pals are off on internships - Nishant is now enjoying himself at Google, and vociferously advocating that I chuck the US plans and go there post haste. Vishwesh and Arijit are off in Hyderabad at Microsoft's India Development Center. We're all waiting to see how long Arijit waits before installing Ubuntu Linux 6 on a bunch of Microsoft machines.
Or worse - he might use Gentoo. :D
Congratulations are due to Nishant - he's been on a pretty good streak in the past few SRMs. For those who haven't been following along, he's now ranked number 1 in the country. Rock on, dude!
And he even gets to do the next few SRMs from the Google office. Lucky bastard...
Now, on to weightier matters... ;)
First off, it's my sister's birthday! Happy Birthday, sis! It's the last one we'll celebrate together for a while, so let's make this one to remember, eh?
Birthday present - I hereby introduce my sister's blog to the world: People - go here and wish her a happy birthday. Or else.
And let's give it up for Sharon and her new blog! Welcome to the blogosphere, girl! If the first post is anything to go by, this is gonna be pretty interesting. Note to prospective readers - don't make the mistake of praising Hyderabad in your comments...
So now, at one stroke, I've added not one but two females to my blogroll. Score one for gender equality...
And with that we come to the end of another dumb and uninspiring blog post by yours truly. Mostly because I'm not in the mood to write more stuff. Like Popeye once said "That's all I can stands - I can't stands no more!" (*Spinach eating fanfare*)
Btw, I've made a couple of minor changes here and there, and added emoticons. They're still slightly tacky, but I think they add a bit of expressiveness to the large reams of text I tend to spout...
Toodle-oo, people!
Friday, June 09, 2006
Freedom
It's finally over. Four years of the torture that is engineering have finally ended. And to all those who were expecting a certain cliche, no, it does not feel like just yesterday when I was a mere fresher wondering what the world of engineering had in store for me.
It's still difficult to get used to the freedom this entails. Strange feelings, which are only just beginning to sink in, even though it's been 3 days. Here are some of them:
There's a conspicuous lack of guilt about not studying for some exam, the sheer exhilaration of having no assignments to write, and the knowledge that those kind of exams and those weird assignments will never come again.
Bit of anxiety about what the future holds - visa interview on the 17th, skilling up with all the things I'll need to learn to survive on my own in the US, getting things set up properly. The odd combination of slight fear and confident expectation that comes from knowing that for the first time, you'll be going it completely alone, on the other side of the planet from the people who were always there earlier.
It's also suddenly sinking in that I basically have two more months with my family. After that, I'm not going to be seeing them for a long time.
You know what they say about absence making the heart grow fonder? The expectation of absence does that too.
On the other hand, it's still two whole months. Plenty of time to freak out and revel in the sheer joy of living for a bit.
I think I'll go and do some of that revelling now. :D
PS: GO BRAZIL!
It's still difficult to get used to the freedom this entails. Strange feelings, which are only just beginning to sink in, even though it's been 3 days. Here are some of them:
There's a conspicuous lack of guilt about not studying for some exam, the sheer exhilaration of having no assignments to write, and the knowledge that those kind of exams and those weird assignments will never come again.
Bit of anxiety about what the future holds - visa interview on the 17th, skilling up with all the things I'll need to learn to survive on my own in the US, getting things set up properly. The odd combination of slight fear and confident expectation that comes from knowing that for the first time, you'll be going it completely alone, on the other side of the planet from the people who were always there earlier.
It's also suddenly sinking in that I basically have two more months with my family. After that, I'm not going to be seeing them for a long time.
You know what they say about absence making the heart grow fonder? The expectation of absence does that too.
On the other hand, it's still two whole months. Plenty of time to freak out and revel in the sheer joy of living for a bit.
I think I'll go and do some of that revelling now. :D
PS: GO BRAZIL!
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Yanni is God
I've just got hold of a huge cache of music from my pal Rohan, who handed me his USB drive a couple of days back, so we could exchange cool stuff. And the greatest thing of all is the absolutely fantastic collection of Yanni's compositions, from 1987 to 2000. Probably not exhaustive, but enough to keep me occupied for weeks. There's nothing like Yanni for a nice afternoon of coding and general messing around. Doesn't distract you with words, and subtly improves your mood too. And all those incredible nuances in his music - it's astonishing that someone can even think of them.
Now Playing: If I could tell you, from the album of the same name.
Now Playing: If I could tell you, from the album of the same name.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I'm alive! I'm alive!
Incredible. Once again luck has chosen to favour me. And every other final year computer engineer in MU, of course. Our Multimedia Systems exam was actually easy. Looks like I spent the last four days worrying for no reason. Silly me.
To Satan - the deal's off, I want my soul back...
The next exam is 8 days from now, which is why I'm sitting up this late blogging. Not that I wouldn't be doing it if it was 4 days from now...
Currently listening to Ichibyo No Refrain. It's in Japanese, for all you music lovers. I heard it with the closing credits of Get Backers and thought it sounded good enough to download. Absolutely worth it, even if you don't understand Japanese. Especially all that nice female style Japanese pronunciation. Rather sexy, actually...Music is pretty rocking too.
I'm not really in the mood to produce another mammoth post, so I'll sign off for now. Ciao.
To Satan - the deal's off, I want my soul back...
The next exam is 8 days from now, which is why I'm sitting up this late blogging. Not that I wouldn't be doing it if it was 4 days from now...
Currently listening to Ichibyo No Refrain. It's in Japanese, for all you music lovers. I heard it with the closing credits of Get Backers and thought it sounded good enough to download. Absolutely worth it, even if you don't understand Japanese. Especially all that nice female style Japanese pronunciation. Rather sexy, actually...Music is pretty rocking too.
I'm not really in the mood to produce another mammoth post, so I'll sign off for now. Ciao.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Ladies and gentlemen - the worst textbook ever!
Multimedia Systems Design, by Andleigh and Thakrar, Prentice Hall India.
Disgusting.
Sickening.
Third rate pile of incomprehensible, disjointed, incoherent shitty nonsense.
And that ain't the half of it.
At some point between the 19th and 23rd of May, every single final year computer engineer of Mumbai University will open this terrible tome and be bodily plunged into a pool of miserable melancholia. Most of them are already six feet under and sinking fast. Some have already succumbed and are nothing more than brain dead zombies. Many of those who are not will be before the exam ends. Only the toughest will emerge with their sanity. Not a single one will emerge unscathed.
Yeah, the book is terrible. It's the worst piece of writing we MU engineers have ever seen, and we've seen books so bad they kill people. This crappy book goes off on tangents, wanders aimlessly around the point, repeats the same thing over and over, and then suddenly drowns you in a deluge of useless specifications and technical details. There is not a hint of a unifying principle anywhere.
To the insane idiots in charge of deciding what we budding engineers will learn - take my advice and jump in a dry well. Head first. Preferably with your asses on fire. You're so useless it's almost pathetic. What kind of dream world you inhabit is beyond me, but perhaps you should come down to earth and look at the stuff we're being taught, and just how royally you've screwed it up.
And for god's sake, read the textbooks you prescribe for us. Three times, at least. I don't care how much you suffer. It will save millions of engineering students a lot of pain. Your puny lives are worthless in comparison. Not that they weren't worthless to begin with.
Andleigh and Thakrar - we hate your book. It sucks so bad it's worse than quicksand.
And without further ado, back to work. It's a dirty job, but the bastards in charge don't give you a choice. I shall suffer silently now, keeping in mind the fact that soon, it will be over. I'll be rid of their painful meddling once and for all.
*Gives the finger to aforementioned bastards*
I would say good night, but we know that would just be a lie. Bad night, then. Make the best of it.
PS: I'm not overreacting. It really is that bad.
Disgusting.
Sickening.
Third rate pile of incomprehensible, disjointed, incoherent shitty nonsense.
And that ain't the half of it.
At some point between the 19th and 23rd of May, every single final year computer engineer of Mumbai University will open this terrible tome and be bodily plunged into a pool of miserable melancholia. Most of them are already six feet under and sinking fast. Some have already succumbed and are nothing more than brain dead zombies. Many of those who are not will be before the exam ends. Only the toughest will emerge with their sanity. Not a single one will emerge unscathed.
Yeah, the book is terrible. It's the worst piece of writing we MU engineers have ever seen, and we've seen books so bad they kill people. This crappy book goes off on tangents, wanders aimlessly around the point, repeats the same thing over and over, and then suddenly drowns you in a deluge of useless specifications and technical details. There is not a hint of a unifying principle anywhere.
To the insane idiots in charge of deciding what we budding engineers will learn - take my advice and jump in a dry well. Head first. Preferably with your asses on fire. You're so useless it's almost pathetic. What kind of dream world you inhabit is beyond me, but perhaps you should come down to earth and look at the stuff we're being taught, and just how royally you've screwed it up.
And for god's sake, read the textbooks you prescribe for us. Three times, at least. I don't care how much you suffer. It will save millions of engineering students a lot of pain. Your puny lives are worthless in comparison. Not that they weren't worthless to begin with.
Andleigh and Thakrar - we hate your book. It sucks so bad it's worse than quicksand.
And without further ado, back to work. It's a dirty job, but the bastards in charge don't give you a choice. I shall suffer silently now, keeping in mind the fact that soon, it will be over. I'll be rid of their painful meddling once and for all.
*Gives the finger to aforementioned bastards*
I would say good night, but we know that would just be a lie. Bad night, then. Make the best of it.
PS: I'm not overreacting. It really is that bad.
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