My dream of india

I am proud to be an Indian. There are certain questions about India when asked leaves me without answers. Today, I was reading an article in www.rediff.com on how summer monsoon killed 850 people in Maharastra. Few days earlier, on the same web portal there was an article about a farmer in Andhra Pradhesh who committed suicide because of drought and the lack of irrigational resources. Maharastra and Andhrapradhesh are neighbouring states only seperated by a half a thousand miles only. This makes me wonder what do we plan in our five year plans. Why is nationalization of rivers such a big issue. With so much money pouring in through IT sector, why can't the central goverment give a serious thought on this?. This paves way to the question ,Why can't every part of india enjoy the same popularity and attention?. Think about the kashmir issue, two decades to catch veerappan, bihar issue, tehelka case, IIT engineer beign killed, corruption in tamil nadu. Note, everything I mentioned above has political involvement.
I am proud to be an Indian. I am proud to be an Indian.

Anti - Advertisements

Today one of my friends mailed me an interesting forward. I still don't understand how nair kadai shutter had IBM written on it?. Does it stand for Inga baakivaika Mudiyadhu. Oops let me cut short my amphorous creativity.

A Mathematician's Love Letter
De-Morgan's Apartment,
Binomial Avenue,
United States of Matrices.

My Dear Love,
Yesterday, I was passing by your rectangular house in
trigonometric lane. There I saw you with your cute
circular face, conical nose and spherical eyes, standing
in your triangular garden. Before seeing you my heart was
a null set, but when a vector of magnitude (likeness) from
your eyes at a deviation of theta radians made a tangent
to my heart, it differentiated.

My love for you is a quadratic equation with real
roots, which only you can solve by making good binary
relation with me.The cosine of my love for you extends to
infinity. I promise that I should not resolve you into partial
functions but if I do so, you can integrate me by applying the
limits from zero to infinity.You are as essential to me as an
element of a set.

The geometry of my life revolves around your acute
personality. My love, if you do not meet me at parabola
restaurant on date 10 at sunset, when the sun is making
an angle of 160 degrees, my heart would be like a solved polynomial
of degree 10. With love from your higher order derivatives of
maxima and minima, of an unknown function.

Yours ever loving,
Pythagoras

Men are careful liars

One day, while a woodcutter was cutting a branch of a tree above a river,his axe fell into the river.When he cried out, the Lord appeared and asked,"Why are you crying?" The woodcutter replied that his axe has fallen intothe water, and he needed the axe to make his living. The Lord went down intothe water and reappeared with a golden axe. Is this your axe?" the Lord asked.The woodcutter replied, "No." The Lord again went down and came up with asilver axe. "Is this your axe?" the Lord asked. Again, the woodcutter replied, "No."The Lord went down again and came up with an iron axe. "Is this your axe?"the Lord asked. The woodcutter replied, "Yes." The Lord was pleased with the man'shonesty and gave him all three axes to keep, and the woodcutter went home happy. Some time later the woodcutter was walking with his wife along theriverbank, and his wife fell into the river. When he cried out, the Lordagain appeared and asked him, "Why are you crying?" "Oh Lord, my wife hasfallen into the water!" The Lord went down into the water and came up with Jennifer Lopez. Is thisyour wife?" the Lord asked. Yes," cried the woodcutter. The Lord was furious. "You lied! That is an untruth!" The woodcutter replied,"Oh, forgive me, my Lord. It is a misunderstanding. You see, if I had said'no' to Jennifer Lopez, You would have come up with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Then if I also said 'no' to her, You would have come up with my wife. Had I then said'yes,' you would have given all three to me. Lord, I am a poor man, and am not able to take care of all three wives, soTHAT'S why I said yes to Jennifer Lopez."

The moral of this story is:
Whenever a man lies, it is for a good andhonorable reason, and for the benefit of others.

English Fun – 101

Prepositions are locators of time and space. Three commonly used prepositions are in, on, and at. They can be remembered via geometric examples. If we consider a cube, “at” denotes a point in the cube; “in” represents the area or volume and on represents the top face of the cube. Also, here are some example usages . Albeit, they sound simple, they are very important.

at – represents direction and location

The dog jumped at my face. My parents stay at the country. I have to meet him at the railway station.

in – enclosed region

I stay in Bermuda. I am usually in my boxers ;). Two boxers are in the ring. (enclosed by ropes).

on – not enclosed

The soccer players fought on the field. I want your lips on mine but please don’t let your tongue in my mouth.

Some exceptions – on – {bus, train, plane}, in – {car}

Apple Ipod

I got my first apple product..a 30 GB IPod this sunday from the stanford apple store after much deliberation. I also got a pouch for it from walmart. Works great. It has the cool Photo feature which can be used to view uploaded photos. There is ramble going around on how future IPods are going to designed with video support. Interesting...

Don't let your brain freeze this summer

Recently, scientists from Turkey have found that gulping massive chunks of ice cream can cause severe headaches known as brain freeze. In their report they also
said that such h"eadaches can last upto 20 seconds to few minutes". It seems the remedy to this is either to sip hot water after eating a spoonfull of icecream or let the ice cream melt before eating. I personally feel this is kind of little exterme and only hypochondriacs should be concerned.

Atlast, Orkut is under construction. For no reason, flaky orkut shot into limelight. I am sure every orkut user would have seen the message " Bad bad server no donut for you". Lets hope this site is ressurructed and made usable.

Cricket - Lost Glory

Indian cricket teams are pulling up excuses and more excuses to cover their dismal performance in their recent one day series. Asked about their shameful loss to Pakistan, the team's new coach Greg Chapell comments that the "they(team) were distracted". Distracted! On what?. Were they on drugs or alcohol or were the girls in the boundary stand too hot to handle?. Did the dhoodbedawalas lured our Ganguly Dada to make a quick exit to the stands?. What a totally unacceptable excuse. In a country where every 4th grader's desire is to make it to the elite Indian cricket team, where every match costs a millions (or more) bucks to the nation by half the goverment employees not showing up for work, our performance in any sports arena for that matter is pathetic.
Lack of committment to play the game with heart and soul , focussing on one's own personal records rather than focussing on team's performance are the root causes for the team miseries. Based on my aficonado, I feel that there should be strict rules saying that every team player's advertisement goes to the Indian cricket team and the team decides on how much to give to the players depending on their individual performance. All said and nothing done, it is just the crowd who are bunch of idiots.

List of security conferences

Phishing paper - Strech goal - July 31.
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~cis05/

AsiaCCS - September 1 -

http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/asiaccs06/

ISPEC -October 15 2005 -
http://ispec2006.i2r.a-star.edu.sg/

SPC 2006 - October 15 2005 -
Group Trust paper and modify it to mobile domain

IWIA - November - Spin idea

IEEE ETRICS - Jan 6 2006

The random power of picassa. 

Self taken shot sitting inside the car. The cool thing about this snap is that the camera is not visible in this photo. 

(un)Fan-Tas-Tic Four

Yesterday, I went to the Fantastic Four movie. 7/9/05. It was a very boring movie. The fantastic four powers were used just to show off. Instead they could have used it to fight their not so intimidating enemy ..the steel guy a.k.a victor von doom. Here is a nice excerpt that describes my feelings.

" Slow down you crazy child
You're so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you're so smart tell me why
You are still so afraid?
Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day"
- "Vienna" by Billy Joel

Ele Nike...art by Anu

This is one of my very favorite Microsoft paint brush work by Anu. If you observe carefully,
the small elephant has a blue hat with NIKE symbol on it.

C++ ramblings

Using Namespaces

There are four ways you can refer to namespace members:

• Using the full member name, including the namespace it belongs to. For example:

  
   std::cout << "Hello Nasty";
   

  Note: Remember that on Pre-Draft days, cout was not declared in any namespace (they didn't exist yet, anyway), and header files used an .h suffix.
• By taking advantage of Using-Declarations, as in

  
   using std::cout;
   cout << "Hello Nasty";
   

  this declares cout in the current scope as synonym for std::cout.
• By taking advantage of Using-Directives, as in

  
   using namespace std;
   cout << "Hello Nasty";
   

  which specifies that the current scope can refer to names in the std namespace without using full qualifiers. This is mostly used when porting legacy code.
• Using aliases. Say, for example, I have

  
   namespace X
   {
     namespace Y
     {
       class Z { ... };
     }
   }
   

  The full qualifier for Z is X::Y::Z, but we can declare an alias using

  
   namespace w = X::Y;
   

  This declares w as an alias for namespace X::Y, thus we can access Z using w::Z.
  Note: As you can see, namespaces can be nested. One of the design goals of namespaces was to encourage programmers and vendors to wrap their libraries inside them, minimizing name collisions. One particularly useful way of taking advantage of this is when you are designing libraries for, say, your company, which involve several pieces of functionality. For example, I keep some of my reusable system classes and templates in a WRuntime namespace, which contains different namespaces inside it like WThreading and WLogging.

Etymology

Etymology is the study of origin and development of words. Recently, I started developing this as a hobby. Before I blurt further, wouldn't it be unfair if we didn't know the history behind etymology??. The word etymology comes from the greek work etymon (origin of a word) logos (science).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology#English_etymology

is an excellent resource to read the origin of English. In short, English is derived from Anglo-Saxon a dialect of west Germanic. Therefore German and English has strong similarity in the pronounciation of number. For e.g. eight~acht, nine~neun and ten~zehn. Similary most of the pronouns are also the same I~ich thou~Du we~wir she~sie. When Vikings and Normans invaded Britan they brought their Norman language with them. This was responsible for inducing french words in English. For example beef is cognate with the modern french word bœuf, meaning "cow"; veal with veau, meaning "calf"; pork with porc, meaning "pig"; and poultry with poulet, meaning "chicken".

Lessons Learned

Audio cable saves the pride

Superficial knowledge never comes to rescue. I realized this with experience. In the summer of 2005, I was in silicon valley doing internship for one of the top notch IT companies. The company was doing very well and was every programmer's haven. I considered myself extermely lucky to get such a nice oppurtunity. On the other hand a serious handicap was that then I was totally new to C++. Being a C addict, It took me a lot of time to understand the concepts of OOP. There was a friend of mine called Alex, who was a software engineer in the same company .The guy had come straight from undergrad school and was a C++ Guru. He taught me lot of fundamental stuff and one day he asked me "Madhu!, Have you ever done C++ programming before?". I said proudly that "I am a systems guy". He was amazed and since I could grasp ideas fast it made him believe that I was also one of the stallmanian who worked only with operating systems and compilers. Things were going great until one day, when he came to me complaining that his he can't hear sound when he plays CDs from the CDROM. Immediately he came to me for help. I tried configuring alsamixer etc etc...just bullshiting my way thro. I did no nothing each options were and basically fishing around stuff. Two hours later I bite the dust..."A SELF PROCLAIMED LINUX GEEK FAILED TO CONFIGURE SOUND". I went to my cubicle and sat down and vowed to forget this bitter experience. Next day Alex comes and says "Madhu!. Sorry man the CDROM drive's cable failed and it was not able to transmit sound to the sound card". Immediately I felt pouncing on him and saying that "Ofcourse !! because whatever I did was correct". But the correct side of me told me to be a man and accept the fact that superficial knowledge never helps. And people are impreseed by honesty than BSs.

Assert in C

Until recently I was unware of assert in C. It is a very powerful tool used in robust programming. For example to check for certain preconditions on entry to the function, most naiive C programmers use if statement.
for example:

if (c == NULL) {
printf("the pointer c is NULL");
exit(0);
}

But C has inbuilt library function which can do the same stuff in a very nice manner. For example,
#include

assert(c==NULL);

suppose if c==NULL, the program prints out at what line the assert failed and the value. And if you look at the
assert.h it has NDEBUG flag. If UNIX systems the gcc, cc should be compiled with -DNDEBUG option.