Save my soul

A reporter for mathematics, is what you can call me. I write about anything and everything that has been happening in the mathematical community. A famous anomaly is getting a lot of attention in the community. I am writing about the different approaches that are being proposed.
The first three are quite conventional. No surprises there. The fourth one is trying to explain it by the means of a constant. " A rather lazy approach, must say, the guy is try to explain every step by not moving at all", I smile to myself.
Just then i hear a music filling the air:

I've been living with a shadow over head
I've been sleeping with a cloud above my bed
I've been lonely for so long
Trapped in the past, I just can't seem to move on

I've been hiding all my hopes and dreams away
Just incase I ever need them again someday
I've been setting aside time,to clear a little space in the corners of my mind

I am about to drift into a thought when i got reminded of the fifth approach. Its my favorite and I am looking forward to write about it. I thank something up in the skies that i have something to save my soul.
Interesting phrase - "Save my soul". I will definitely use it somewhere in writeup. There i am back on my desk writing with fervor again.


Sometimes we are grateful for our dreams, arent we ?

A programmerś utopia

In the good old days, when visiting the kernel source code wasn´t this daunting a task as it now, I had this first hand experience of discovering that linux source code is interspersed with interesting/witty/funny comments and shocking amounts of profanity.
Could never motivate myself to congregate them all and send them to others interested ( read jobless) souls like me.
Luckily found a list of them on the internet :D, courtesy here and here.
Would be adding to the list, as i come by more :).


Some of my favourites are :

==> *!-- I didn't write an indexed search because I have no motivation right now. Please continue wasting your time. --*


==> *!-- User is a moron. Make it known. --*



==> /* DRUNK. FIX LATER */




==>   from buffer.c:

/* NOTE!! While we possibly slept in sync_dev(), somebody else might have
 * added "this" block already, so check for that. Thank God for goto's.
 */




==>   from main.c:

 /*
 * Yeah, yeah, it's ugly, but I cannot find how to do this correctly
 * and this seems to work. I anybody has more info on the real-time
 * clock I'd be interested. Most of this was trial and error, and some
 * bios-listing reading. Urghh.



==>  from vsprintf.c:

 /* vsprintf.c -- Lars Wirzenius & Linus Torvalds. */
/*
 * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up :-)



==> from tty_io.c:

/*
 * Jeh, sometimes I really like the 386.
 * This routine is called from an interrupt,
 * and there should be absolutely no problem
 * with sleeping even in an interrupt (I hope).
 * Of course, if somebody proves me wrong, I'll
 * hate intel for all time :-). We'll have to
 * be careful and see to reinstating the interrupt
 * chips before calling this, though.
 */


P.S: Some of the above more ¨serious" comments, make more sense when you 
are trying to understand the rest of code.

P.S : GoodJob has taken the trouble of plotting the ¨frequencies¨ of 
profanities for records :D

P.S : I vaguely remember that there is a an xkcd strip about the same. 
But dont seem to be able to find it :(.

Down the memory lane

After endless bickering by Ma, about how books are dangerously encroaching the whole of our modestly sized house, she said it was time to discard them , /pause/, she corrects herself "we have to discard at least some of them". So stood ahead a daunting task of sorting the old books and catergorising them into "Have to keep", "Find rightful heirs" and "Discard".
I love my book room. It has this huge shelf with glass sliding panels and books arranged behind them in neat rows.

So first came the old text books, from 10th grade onwards. The english text books, which were read the day they were bought. The "Merchant of Venice" in old english. I only realised the importance of ICSE english syllabus, when i shifted to CBSE for my 11th and 12th. The former having a distinguished class ( spoken like a true ICSE snob ! ). I missed "Selected short stories" and "Pagent of poems" after i left them behind.

Among the books, i saw a familiar red- black book cover and out came the "Resnick and Halliday". Eagerly opened it and started reading the first chapter. Aaah, how i love those tiny fonts and those diagrams. And all the "Prove that .." questions at the end of each chapter. Then there was Looney with all the Trignometry gyan. I suspect my other text books except english have already been "given". Then there a few books on physics from my dad's time. Indian authors, big fonts, i remember reading them on and off.

Some odd 30 novels. The ones i started buying like mad when i started earning. I even have a james hadley chase for that matter. :P

Then there were the engineering books. Out went the ones which said "Object Oriented Programming" or "Html" or "Java" or "VC++". I somehow absolutely hated "learning" languages. Then there was "Theory of automata and finite languages" by John Martin. Definitely a keeper. I learned the concept of FSM's here. I am still fascinated by them. Then a "Introduction to Prolog", what a teaser that was , i remember ! Until you think in terms of recursions, you can never write a program. But when you do, it was a 3-5 lines of code , brevity and elegance personified. A keeper again. The "Operating systems" by Silberschatz got eaten by termites. Felt bad, but was secretly relieved that it wasnt "Resnick and Halliday". Then was "Compiler design", a keeper. Was torn whether to keep the "Network analysis", but would have to keep "Microprocessors" too, for the sake of fairness, you know. And "Have to keep" pile was growing making it an extremely difficult optimisation problem.

There were a huge pile of brilliant tutorials mock test papers and YG files. Was tempted to keep one of the papers and try to solve the math section. Debated between getting excited and feel good about myself or getting completely humiliated. Whisked it into the "Have to keep" pile.

Found an old notebook, with neatly written notes sbout calculating the final velocity of a projectile under the force of gravity.

I am so glad that some things never change...

Refuge

Lots of last minute packing to do and I am writing this post. The age old habit of giving importance to useless trivial stuff, when there are more pressing matters to attend.
A roller-coaster ride has it been. Words somehow dont seem to give way to whole turmoil down there. Lower the defences, one always has the option. Only one doesnt realizes, that one does. The intense desire to be loved is fatal. Wake up and realise its all epheremal. Bittersweet memories swirl around into an oblivion , like one is hurled into the air from a play cart. Momentary glide and then a free fall. Gravity defies none. And what does one think on all the way down ? How did it come to this ....

Epiphany

It happened to me when I was in iitm for a week. Now, thats what i call a huge campus, which is as beautiful as it is massive. And my navigational skills suck ! ( This is one of the rare things i actually admit , I am bad at , so it can deciphered how bad I must be ).
So I wanted to take a walk to this place called Gurunath stores. I remembered someone had told me to go in the direction opposite to what I take when i go to Computer science block ( Or was it the sharavati hostel ? ) and walk until i see a small ICICI placard, and walk left from that. So I start walking left from Building Science block and kept walking for a long distance, waiting to spot that ICICI placard. It was a long time before i realised that the turns didnt seem familiar, hence i should ask someone for directions. A gentleman gave me a very warm ( sympathetic) smile and told me wait at a spot for the bus which would take me there. I bravely assured him that i wanted to walk and hence be kind enough to give the directions. So I walk beside the hockey-football grounds, electrical engineering dept, and take a right, when i suddenly spot that damn ICICI placard !
I "globally localized " and shifted the whole map in my mind according to my new position. And i did it as an impulse. That is when it struck me ! So this was what MK ( my robotics prof ) kept drawling on in the Mobile Robotics classes !
I have drawn analogies before, but it was never this striking. And the fact that i did it almost as an impulse, made me started thinking how someone would have bumped across the concept of "localization" and decided to use it for robotics !
After learning robotics for 2 years, "localization" is definitely a concept/term would take a permanent place in my dictionary/vocabulary.
With my perfect knowledge about the world, I proudly made my way back towards the sharavati hostel.

The two pillars.

This post is an ode to those two people who literally shaped my professional career, sometimes knowingly and mostly unknowingly.

Yoda: I call him 'sir', but found an apt name after I watched star wars. He is probably the only person I have met till now, whose rationality actively strives to equal his brilliance. Inspite of being 50-something, He still has a well-nested child-like curosity in him, which makes him so approachable and an extremely interesting person to have around. He is a self-made genius, who didnt even start as a CompSci engineer, but today sustains single handedly various projects in my ex-workplace. On why and how did he shape my career, i woudl exactly quote a mail i wrote to him long time ago. -
"Now when i look back to those 2 years in eI, i can only think how lucky i was. When students enter industry, they witness petty politics and manipulation, but i got a chance to work with u and what i witnessed was sheer techincal excellence, humility and fairness, which helped me to be myself."
I regret I couldnt get to know him better, one because I felt shy, and second because he was a bigshot in the workplace and I felt a little hesistant in doing so, though I am sure he would have never minded.

A.G - This guy, fortunately was a close friend, and at a time, i was having serious exsistential crisis. A child prodigy, who has impressive academic records is also a self-made genius. There is nothing that this guy hasnt tried his hands on, electronics, mechanics, every damn field of computer science etc etc. In that way, AG and Yoda draw many parallels. They both are brilliant, humble, curious and fair, I used to always wonder what is that they are talking about in the office parking lot . There have been million times I felt like dropping by, craving to just listen to those intelligent exchanges, and maybe express an opinion or two. Well, there was no else i could talk about stuff like Computing and Intelligence, Science fiction, philosophy and metaphysics. But just knowing that they were there, who were interested in something more than APR's , QPR's and office politics was a consolation enough, that I would survive too. Inspite of all insanity around, these people stood as my pillars , mostly unknowingly, that there is still a lot of good and fairness in the world.

P.S : I wish i could write well, I feel i havent done justice to the ode.

7 things that research taught me.

1) Happiness is rare, cherish it while you can.
- Sounds dramatic ? Try living through the ups and downs ( usually downs) of missing deadlines, paper rejections, getting your ego crushed, watch your peers pass out etc etc.

2) 'Guide'liness is next to Godliness.
- For those of us who are atheists, as if the world fights back in revealing a new power in the form of a middle aged man/woman, who has the power to affect your life on everyday basis. For others who already believe in almighty find themselves showing intense partiality in devotion to this new source of power.

3) Money is rare too, cherish it, while it lasts.
- Living on meagre Research Assistantships ( as if calling it an RA is supposed to make it sound honourable ), rarely lasts when the month is coming to an end. Hence the sheer desperation of living within the means turns out to be a pattern in extravagances in the former days of the month and penurious in later half.

4) All thesis topics are either too aimbitious or taken.

5) You are an insignificant drop in the ocean.
- And you thought, you didnt want to be just one among the thousands of IT engineers, clunking away the keyboards in their cubicles ? Well here you find, there is another kind of ocean, reseachers in almost completely saturated domains, where you still end up being an insignificant researcher , with the exception of course, some of the brightest or luckiest kinds.

6) Almost all research end up at the blind alleys of open problems.
- From wherever you start, you have to given in to an outstanding open problem in that domain. It would be either intractable or NP-hard. Hence you end up using patchy solutions that have been already in use, indicating to the fact, that till these open problems are tackled, there is not much one can do.

7) I cannot be an island.
- One never really realises the importance of friends (in some rare cases, family), when one is facing the frustuation of research. I remember one faculty say once - " Research is a very lonely experience", and i cant agree more.

P.S : Usually i am not this pessimistic, and i hate this side of me. I still like research.