It's not the spoon that bends, it's your mind.

As a child I had taken a test, where I was asked to decide the direction of rotation a certain fast moving teddy bear. Turns out it was visual illusion, teddy was never turning, but the mirrors around it were doing a lot. It acts as a good test for verifying the initial line of attack of an underdeveloped brain (like that of a child) towards a decision problem. Some kids see it turning clockwise, some anti-clockwise.

As a high-school-er, I came across the ideas of rotational mechanics where the initial choice of positive direction, finally decided the sign of the final torque. Though insignificant from the result perspective, it could lead to funny physical interpretations; the bridge rotates negatively with respect to train etc.

In computer science, recursion versus dynamic programming holds the exact same clockwise/anti-clockwise relationship in a vector space.

In the whole of engineering, algorithmic problem solving versus optimization based problem solving are another equivalent analog.

In statistics, it is precision versus recall.

In information theory, it is bias versus variance.

Overall, it is a battle we all experience every day in our minds, the kids who choose anti-clockwise are biased learners who make quick decisions but deal badly with noise when subsumed with holistic picture, are more precise, top down strategy makers(recursion), choose the impersonal frame of reference as true. The kids who choose clockwise are holistic learners, slow decision makers, understand the details too well but miss the big picture some times, are more creative and have higher recall, hence have like 5 different ways of solving a problem and choose the personal frame of reference as true.

It’s obvious every kid in today's world, learns stuff which is anti to his nature many times just to survive. It is obvious; going to school is painful, surviving in exams hard. It is also obvious the experience and suffering of going to school puts pressure on you and makes you better.

I see one kind of thinkers becoming extremely good at the other kind over time. I see the insightful ones are the ones who have suffered a bit more. I see putting pressure on yourself by challenging your dominant tendencies to be the path to self-development, happiness and liberation. I feel it’s the only way.

PS: Thoughts over a quite weekend near the beach.

Rockstar

During the not so dynamic life of a research scholar some common worries which haunt your peers sometimes are as follows:
1) Well all my friends are living it up while am freezing my arse off.
2) I work in an all encompassing area to make some miniscule progress in a period of five years, which probably no one cares about.
3) These are best years of my life !
But then mostly the pleasure of creativity keeps you ticking and you ignore the larger picture bogus questions and focus on enjoying the silent battle with yourself.
 Few weeks back, some time around thanksgiving, I happened to watch a movie called Rockstar, pathetic in every other sense except for the music, the movie had one touching moment. The protagonist is kicked out of his house and spends three homeless months in a dargah ahhh, where out of nothingness he sings and sings and sings and sings and sings some more..........

Beatles spent a lot of time playing for no-one in a club in germany.
Einstein spent years as a clerk in the patent office in a mind numbing job.
Nirad C Chaudry spent years of oblivion before being labelled as the Indian with best hold on English language.
So on and so forth.............

If you can't connect the dots then maybe you don't need to, stop thinking and let it go.........
 this is ur rockstar period....work for urself.....play for urself, write for urself, think for urself........live for urself.

Hmm..

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than
meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would
like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old
sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous
multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t
expect to arrive.

- Jorge Luis Borge

Feel for yourself

I have always been made to grow up with the feeling of loving your work and giving it all, I didn't know the importance of heart all along, when you do a lot of thinking and no feeling you are just an agent, the human touch that takes us ahead of agents goes missing, so ideally you should hate your work, love your work, get attracted to it, demand from it,make compromises and don't leave an inch, treat it like a person who you live with 50 years of your life, and once you figure out what you like, treat your work just exactly how you would treat the most adorable person in your life. Because if your heart is empty, your mind doesn't matter.Maybe that's why all the greatest scientists of this world were either angry young men or settled and happy old men, still have to find a middle aged success

I just wanna be supportive...

He was toiling hard all day to create a sculpture, its wasn't coming along just how he had imagined it, no matter how much he tried. He toiled and toiled and toiled some more, he had given it his everything, all his skills, his courage, his blood and sweat, it still wasn't how he had imagined it all in his mind.What was he trying to do.......maybe he doesn't even remember now.He was sitting down like a tired athlete who came fourth in an Olympics race.

After a while , just when he had mustered enough courage to get up on his feet to walk away probably move on...........he saw an angel, who smiled at him with a touch of honesty and innocence that touched him , moved him,held him captive....... like someone had just wiped his forehead after a long time. He got up, finished his work and looked at it one last time which suddenly looked at ease and complete.He had just realized that the secret to doing amazing work is believing that your work is amazing.What made him realize that, the innocent,honest smile of an angel? He didn't know why, he didn't wanna know why. Some things are better left unexplained.

The sculptor was sitting near the lake, under the house he had built for himself. He was proud of the boat he had carved out of rosewood, proud of the magic he could do with do with wood and rocks, proud of how every piece of stone was an invitation to his imagination and most of all proud of being with the lady who he had always adored, he didn't know why, he didn't wanna know why..................

She came up to him, told him it's late and he should get up to go to work. Little did she know that she had still retained that innocence in her smile........the smile that had inspired this creator's heart years ago.He was happy and content and ......he didn't know why, he didn't wanna know why?

As he got up the lady said...........all these years that have been with you, wish I had understood your art a little more, wish I could understand what you murmur when you are immersed, wish i could be a little more supportive............the sculptor was suddenly staring at his energy source asking him if it could do more for him........he was smiling at himself.........he didn't know why, he didn't wanna know why :)

Wake Up Thought (Life and its heartening instances)

Continuation of a post written about 3 years back called thought block....which said,

It's like having everything you ever wanted right there in front of you,and like you are not prepared for it.

It's as if every moment from then on is another chance to make it up to it.

But it's just a dream , not like it's ever gonna come true.

You are used to being a smart-ass. You grew up a responsible student, reliable professional.These things in turn taught you the values of holding your own and behaving yourself under all circumstances.Your feelings were just musings your thoughts were unattended secrets and your heart a gentleman's lounge.

One day you drop your guard, respond to attraction which was in first place silly, which went on to become a passing fad, but it stayed and grew stronger like an un-diminishing flame which made u smile at your musings and yourself but it satisfied the basic condition for condition for staying glued to something , unexplained pleasure.(also referred as love by many).

You grow up in an imperfect world where that one thing which was supposed to be the purpose of your life turns out to be a mirage. But some day that un diminished flame comes back at a moment when you least expect it to light a sea of joy in a mind which had learnt to accept itself as rough and tough. Thank you for letting me be frank, letting me drop my guard, letting me show the person inside to someone.........it feels great to be vulnerable.

Really fulfilling your childhood dreams?

Let's not get as far as fulfilling, let's just ask, what was my childhood dream?

I want to be able to create agent smith(the villain in matrix)..............after spending years in AI i still wonder how, but that's the childhood dream.(Will post more on this later)

Prayer

Green leaves

That dawn after dawn

Grow yellow;

Red cheeks

That fade

With the passing days----

If our world

Is made up

Of such changes

As these,

Is it strange

That my heart

Is so sad?

------------HSIAO KANG

Mission Statement

Things you write when you are on top of a wave,that might go anyway.Things you write when your mid-life crises makes sense.Things you write when you finally try to answer the never answered questions hidden in your mind.

I am perfectly suited for a desk job, engineer's job, on field problem solving job.Why did I come to grad school, why did i decide to go into research, why did i choose to take a sabbatical from this typical job that am hand-made for.Simple, I didn't know what i wanted to do, i wanted a job that fills me with joy everyday, gives me complete creative satisfaction, not leave me hollow after the end of every project.I needed to self-explore, i needed to find my love and make love to it.I wanted complete intellectual gratification at the cost of anything.

Turns out that thing doesn't exist, it's a myth, anyway,but today I can clearly say I have found what will keep me engaged for the next 30 years of my life, keep the scientist inside me amused and the engineer inside me busy. Here in the world of research, where creators create wonderful things to help the world, only about 5% or less make it to any customer.Companies hire smart engineers , then why the gap.Simple, as long as things work, nobody cares. Hence, state of the art in the industry , and in the academia have glaring gaps, in terms of acceptance, exchange everything.

I plan to bridge that gap, being a computer science person,whichever system i work for, i will fill that gap between what exists and could, not only when it is required also because we have too many options and we never use them. I will bridge that , with knowledge gathering, hunting, distributing and if required developing.

Enter:HunterGatherer

Always connected to this!

Boast of Quietness

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than
meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would
like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old
sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous
multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t
expect to arrive.

- Jorge Luis Borge

The pedestrian

It was a beautiful evening but Romy had to walk, he had to cross the bridge and hillock, long way to go, his shoes were wearing off, his body aching like hell, his mind numbed by the scars of past and his eyes filled with regret, guilt and self pity. He had been a looser, in each and everything he had laid his hands on, but as always he kept walking, he had lost and lost again and again but that thin line between defeat and the acceptance of defeat was still uncrossed ,so he walked and walked trying to move away from the clutch of circumstance away from the cobwebs of past, which never stopped haunting him.

He thought of Jess, and some beautiful summers they had spent together in the willows.He remembered how every beautiful spark he had ever had in his life left always was a sweet pain to begin with and a deep scar to finish up.Maybe he was always focusing on the ends not the means, maybe his means was series of ends, maybe he was always trying to have a rebound.

But this was it, he had to walk, get to the top, he was three shots down, both bullets and whiskey, he needed to sleep, he was gonna be gone forever, this was gonna end, then nothing was gonna matter, but he still needed to make the last few steps, deliver his last job, was it this compulsive need, which had been the problem or was it "i have to do this but i dunno why"..............he fell down,he rolled he died.

Not all stories have a happy ending.

He wakes up somewhere in heaven, free, easy, no hurry to do something , no worries of getting somewhere, his life had just begun.

Quitter or winner.

They were both alone having a drink at the remote corners of open-air beach pub.A wild card samba dance contest happened, and as destiny would have it,their seats were picked and their eyes met.He was at his wittiest best, she was at her sultry best.They danced under the moonlight for hours and a lot of wine and shag tobacco happened in the meanwhile. They kissed, stroked each other for hours and went back to her place.

She woke up in the morning and wiped a particular photo frame with the silk she was wearing last night.

Him: Who is he?

Her:My husband.

Him:(Dressing up about to leave)Where is he?

Her:He's been in a vegetable state for a while now, but once he had more wits than you do now.I need to to go see him.The visiting hours begin at 7:00AM(almost about to leave).

Him:Then why did you sleep with me?

Her:Because I love him.

Carl and Ellie

Most romantic video ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GroDErHIM_0&feature=related

Dhobi Ghat: A Review

I have never posted a movie review on this blog, but this is a special movie which deserves a special mention.

It is not a thriller, not a romantic movie, not a comedy, doesn't have a protagonist or antagonist, doesn't really begin or have a clear ending.It is what you can label as a good editorial column expressing the insights of the bored and the helpless but the aware mind, the musings of an artist on canvas when he paints without trying to convey his feelings but to soak in them himself, a research project which is not done to justify some funding but because true knowledge is about dispassionately observing something and getting to realize that knowing that you don't know is much more liberating than knowing that you know.I personally call it a window movie, which shows a small portion of the characters' life where they happen to touch each other in explicit/implicit ways.

As a first thought it reminded me of some of the best Chinese movies that I have seen till date like crouching tiger hidden dragon. Very east, very subjective , very cyclical.

Anyway the movie was basically about unspoken moments and forgotten ghosts and how they mean the smallest speck and yet our entire emotional constitution.When Shai looks around, she sees people treating Munna like a menial worker, someone who is served chai in a tumbler rather than a cup, someone who has to lie about his profession when he goes on dates, so much that even the narrator himself hides one of his main jobs which is rat killing during nights so that viewers don't judge him instantly. She treats him as an equal and lives in the acknowledgement of his crush on her and understands that it's a delicate friendship hanging between unrequited feelings and momentary friendly warmth. One of my favorite scenes was when Munna sees Shai and Arun together and walks out without uttering a word, Shai runs down immediately to say hello."People who care for you are more important than people you care for."She looks at mumbai like an observer hence treats munna as her eyes, to reach to the soul of the city, but sadly doesn't realize that this benevolent treatment towards him is what is hurting him the most. He is confused between her being nice or just being plainly kind towards him(which men hate).When she discovers her real profession by chance , he runs away, like an unspoken storm had just passed by, like saying, " it's over bbye......when even i don't like this side of me, how could i let you see me like this. And i don't need your pity for chrissake." But he grows up to realize that it feels great to make people you care for happy, no matter how, no matter why.He runs back to give arun's address to her in one of the final scenes.Munna without donning the garb of the stereotypical modern indian male was a wonderful representation of one.Fighting, ugly, confident, sensitive, hypocrite but most importantly "accepting".

Shai the hot shot alpha female. Banker, researcher, pretty, sultry, photographer , confused and caught up in the mess of being independent or accepting her femininity, she has got it all. Heavily attracted to a guy who is completely into her(feminine), but not being able to call a one night stand what it stood for(confused) and unable to understand the rejection from a seemingly wonderful person after a wonderful few hours of passion she chases him like a blood hound to unearth the man behind him, a combination of the typical female instinct of solving mysteries and a typical male egoistic thought block of "how could he??".........today's woman.

Yasmin belongs to the times gone by, to a set of people who are accidentally born in today's age.The quintessential girl next door, who is happy with the flavor of "being" and kills herself because the sense of being has no synonyms without the concept of a happy home.My heart went out for her.

Arun on the other hand makes the fifth character "the city of mumbai" come alive from an interactive perspective. He moves from place to place, corner to corner, forgetting the regrets, untying the cobwebs, running away from the past, seeking pleasure in momentary escapism but forever living with the weight of a heavy conscience which proclaims that he is innocent but that itself is the hardest thing to accept.
He moves from place to place seeking peace, loneliness, but only from the surroundings, not from the people who make him feel alive, like his dhobi or his manager.He doesn't dig today's alpha female but a virtual person on the TV whom he can turn off at will, basically someone he doesn't have to demand his space from.But even this true loner, who doesn't want the burden of having close relationships, gets deeply deeply hurt from the knowledge of what happened to yasmin and moves away from that house eventually.

We work hard, we move places, we hope, we forget it all to rejoice and move on but the stark reality(represented in the form of a city) refuses to go away. This movie is a true dedication to all your shattered dreams, unfulfilled hopes, peace that is never found, mysteries that are never solved, crushes that live on to hurt, memories that live on to haunt and all of these interspersed with a few moments of "human goodness".And all that survives are a few photographs, a video cassette, memories of a wonderful night or a painting that you love to hate.

My first reaction after I finished watching the movie was, "Finally, here is a movie which will forever be loved by bibliophiles and people who care for the unspoken words."

Quitting

I love to voice my opinions about things, talking about events, reflecting upon people and perspectives.But lately i feel i have hit some kind of a creative roadblock. Bella's lullaby seems soothing, and star trek unattractive.Prolly it is another personality metamorphois that am going through.Human mind is a complex adaptive system too just like the market, there are losses and profits but at the end of the day ,market takes its own control , and when sometimes there is a huge recession or upheaval the system kills itself and creates a new avatar which is just the same but with different learnings.

I shall be back , once my mind finds its creative inspiration back again.

Freedom

For some it is the state of mind..........(I feel free, am different, i enjoy my work, am so special, i stand out,i achieved, i proved myself blahblah).

For some it is the state of grind...........(All the above is a self help books generated lie, i live for good health, good company and life is not about winning or losing, it is about making people happy)

For some it is a point somewhere between this hypothetical bimodal curve.

The desire for freedom, which includes freedom from peer pressure, societal norms, the beaten paths, stuff like making a difference, changing the world; in short all the stuff protagonists in academy award winning movies are made of, is just another cage.

The desire to eliminate your desires is just another desire, the proclamation of freedom just another cage and so is the realization of am sooooo special just another way of saying "all in all am just another brick in a different kind of wall".

So what did great people say to this.....Buddha suggested the "middle path", yoga suggests restrained indulgence so on and so forth.

I suggest just remember the second law of thermodynamics......"the amount of disorder keeps increasing(entropy is always positive)".

Every piece of automation generates the desire for more comfort, every patent ends with a section for future research.

All in all, you are not finding the answers , ur just generating more questions.

"Freedom is opening your mind", beyond all judgements........judgements is where freedom ends............don't judge ,be free.

Defense

Have met two kinds of intellectuals:
1)Down to earth.
2) Nasty and arrogant.

It is almost a bimodal distribution, is what i used to think, now i feel otherwise,the more nasty one is, the more insecure he is, and the more he uses his intellect as a defense mechanism.

You have just one life!! really?

Well,after you are done reading let me know if the whole idea sounds crazy and stupid to you.
So, what exactly was multimedia built for:entertainment. How exactly do we get entertained: escapism. Whether it's the picture of a perfect lover as edward in twilight which women all over adore, whether it's the picture of success after years of struggle in all the oscar winning ones and tonnes of power in every punch kinda ceremony which every man loves, whether it's the arabian nights, avataar or harry potter kinda, "give the user a blood rush" sorta fantasy world's ride, whether itz a virtual meritocratic world,like the role playing games or the books of ayn rand, or some melody engineered for ur eardrums............blah blah ........it takes u away from reality for a while, makin u think that you are thinking, making you feel that you are feeling and for once making you look at a reflection of who you think "you are, you can be".

What could be the greatest form of escapism? Escape the cycle of life birth and death and worldly possesions, and all that surrounds it, Buddha called it nirvana, vivekananda is reported to have gone into days of samadhi(meditation in one difficult position), sexual orgasms make you feel that for a few seconds,so on and so forth. So escapism or pure pleasure is when your mind reaches zero,or the feeling that it can't think or the feeling that it's feeling exactly what it wants to feel. So make his mind numb or put his mind under trance........he's entertained.

Now,the next point. You are born in a certain family, you go to a certain school, go work in a certain place,have a few friends and spouses,so on so forth. Your life is your set of decisions and sadly life has no undo button, no redo task,so we have regrets, intimacy hungers, recognition hungers, structure hungers etc. Your decisions shape you and you end up creating your own universe and live "there", The famous hindi song by raj kapoor "jeena yahaan , marna yahaan, iske siwa jaana kahaan" , which means , am a clown in a circus, this is my life , i shall live here , die here , be here.

BAAM, achilles the soldier, alexander the emperor, ramanujan the math guy, einstein the physics guy...........sounds boring and dull, the messge is better captured by rockstars proclaiming their existence in form of "itz my life , i want no peer pressure, i care not for the world etc.

So whoever you are, you will have a job and some hobbies and your definition of fun and adventure and hence your choice of esacapism varying from slapstick comedy to mind boggling books.What if you could escape your universe, what if someone could tell you the boundaries of your universe, what if tomorrow you could create a new one,what if you could live in it,what if tomorrow i can go live in a lionel messi's(argentina football star) universe and be back without that affecting my life at all. What if i can live multiple lives, what if i can go do the job i wanted to do when i was 3,marry the woman i fancied but who is not compatible with me, what if i can juggle between these universes, what if i always knew what grass is like on the other side, what if " jeena yahhan" song as quoted earlier is proved to be bullshit, many famous people have done that, "super politician quits career to become dog trainer", u think they were full of conviction,maybe, i think they were too pleasure seeking...........

So if i can find out the limits of my universe, dodge it and live in multiple universes in one life, would i need multimedia, or will that be the greatest form of multimedia ever, shutting down hollywood and gaming companies.Now how can this be done, i don't know.It is just a thought an idea, which sounds good in my head. Good Night all, enough blabber.

Totem

Two days, after watching the movie am still thinking about it subconsciously.I need to move on, hence jotting down my final thoughts about the movie "Inception".

If u haven't seen the movie yet, please don't read further.

So, this is a movie which drops sufficient clues to the audience and leaves the climax to them. The typical high school " Lady and the tiger story" where u can't tell which door was opened, lady or the tiger.

According to me,these are the possibilities.We don't know whether the totem toppled or not.

So assuming equally probable independent events this is what might have happened.:

1) Cobb and Saito wake up in the real world and Cobb goes home to his kids.

2) Cobb was inside a dream. He was wrong all the time and his wife was right. When she killed herself , she went back to the real world and he was still stuck in the limbo.

3) The third one to me is the most likely possibility, the entire movie was real, except the climax which was a dream, they never show Cobb and Saito getting the kick, they just get up in their seats after Cobb's realization and after all this time his kids are still wearing the same clothes.

The biggest problem with the script(deliberate problem) is the concept of the goddamn TOTEM, it can only tell you that you are not in someone else's dream. But what if you were in your dream, all this time?

But as a story teller the message Nolan was trying to send us was that, once Cobb leaves the totem to spin, he doesn't turn back to check itz state,he has reached his reality, he has gone back home to his kids, awake or asleep doesn't matter.

Hats off, if u can think of better explanations, please post.

Creep

While watching inception, i happened to watch the first theatrical trailer of "The Social Network" ,the movie about the story of Facebook.The thing that struck me about the trailer is that, the background song in it was a mashed up version of Radio-head's "Creep". A timeless, ageless masterpiece. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk

The mashed up version had these few lines reverberating over and over again in it.

I don't care if it hurts,
I wanna have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice
when I'm not around
You're so fuckin' special
I wish I was special

But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doin' here?

I don't belong here, ohhhh, ohhhh

Huh, so many researchers , mathematicians,computer scientists are trying to mathematically model the human behaviour in the virtual world and radio-head had all that figured out, since yore.

The vicarious me , the voyeuristic me, the meforming me,the informing me, the connected me, the " am so fuckin " special me, the facebook profile me.

Hats off, radiohead!!

Binary Search

This is how binary search works, and this how you will find it written in most popular books.This one is straight out of Wikipedia.

low = 0

high = N

while (low <>

mid = (low + high) / 2

if (A[mid] <>

low = mid + 1;

else

//can't be high = mid-1: here A[mid] >= value,

//so high can't be <>

high = mid;

}

// high == low, using high or low depends on taste

if ((low <>

return low // found

else

return -1 // not found

It feels perfect, looks perfect even the Prof in your class must have written the same, then why am I talking about it. Well ,it has a major bug which had stayed undetected like for ever and detected sometime very recently. (Google for more details and timeline)

Problem: Well line 4 says, mid=(high+low)/2.Say if "high" is the highest integer your compiler can access and if low is any number greater than zero then mid goes out of range and causes overflow problems. :O :O

Solution: Do (high/2 +low/2) or low+(high-low)/2

Come to think of it: While implementing many other array based divide and conquer algorithms like merge sort etc, we do the same to get to the center of the array.

Caution :Don't take the average.

Romeo and Juliet

There is a system which consumes every brain once the person dies,downloads its intelligence and keeps it alive.That system is now the brain or "God" of this world.

Romeo:If the world was to end today and we were the last two people to be consumed into a sea of artificial intelligence, would you still want me?
Juliet:Objectively??
Romeo:Yes , because love, care,longing is just a chemical imbalance,causing a dispersal of electrical signals in our neurons giving us lag periods which provide moods like "i wanna work", "i wanna relax" creating statistical processes which give name to our outcomes like success and failure at the end of the day,you wanting me is you moving towards a greater state of imbalance.

Juliet:I still do, cause that's the only thing that keeps the process random, the fact,that am capable of loving,its what answers the age old question of indeterminacy the debate between free-will and destiny.
Love separates free-will from destiny.Love towards your work ,family,friends or for those few minutes of life left with us.
I don't want a predictable life, I want to love.

Sufified

I am shunning all western music for the next two months.

I never knew the power of sufi music before today, which I have been thankfully introduced to by my Pakistani lab mate.

Try this as a sample:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clt1SPTymwc

The "FRIENDS" Conundrum

Part1: (Amogh at NITR) Amogh the teenager hears huge praises about the series "Friends" of which he had only seen a few episodes here and there on Star World, he thought it was funny , he never knew it was GOD like, like others he sits down and watches all the 10 seasons loves them and sometimes just to be with friends he watches the same episodes over and again and again and again and again.

Part2:Amogh's friends in social networking sites like "Facecopy" and "Chirkut":

Jackass just joined the community "I will never get bored of watching friends".

Iamthedude joins the group "Friends will live forever"

"How u doing"?

BLAHBLAHBLAH.....................I get it dude, FRIENDS rocks.

Part 3:Amogh joins joins a varsity in USA,where some his friends lab mates etc are americans.

Their reaction:Older ones:"Friends" yeah that was good, it was kinda huge.

Middle aged ones:Friends oh yeeah it was kinda nice.

Undergrads:"Friends" wattt???

Epilogue: Mahabharatha and Ramayana were the biggest hits Indian television ever witnessed which started a trend of religious serials on Indian TV, still get telecasted on some channels, toh rooz dekhoge kya?????

PS:Teenagers living in a conservative environment like india have their EQ sharpened only by such sitcoms, for ameraicans, yeeah that was big, so wat, we have dozen others on air now, can u watch mahabharatha everyday??

My favorite poem, truly inspirational.

Ulysses
Alfred Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Dreams development lifecycle!

Naa am not gonna talk about software or it's development life cycle in any possible way if that's what the title suggests.

Back in Hyderabad, i met a guy named Smruti Parida, we got talking as we were from the same Junior college in Bhubaneswar (BJB); him being a couple of years senior to me; we became friends travelling in the same company bus from banjara hills to gachibowli, discussing crazy tech ideas over coffee and getting drunk at Club 8 over the weekend, guess i had a great time with him and i respected the person inside him as his soul was that of a true techie, a person with shrewd insights and someone who was great fun talking to.In one of our drinking sesssions in club-8 when deccan chargers was being taken to the cleaners we started discussing about innovation heads up.I said that "Germany had built the rourkela steel plant in 1950s and after 50 years of india producing 50 batches of metallurgical engineers from IITs,NITs and other prestigious colleges, they had to come back in to remodel it, shameful ,but that is just a trailer,we have engineers in every field but our in house expertise in none. Our engineers do most of the innovative work in most of the MNC's but still except a few silver lines like Tata motors etc we summarily don't build anything, we have all this hype as a booming economy because we are like the office of this world, a billion people who would take up any job and work as anything, almost every engineer ends being a coder and every manager ends being a consultant,so how do u expect us to be able to make active contributions in creative fields like manufacturing, research papers,patents, etc when we pick up any job that comes our way, coz if we don't someone else will. He said" It is not the population which is a problem, india has lot of people way too smart way too secure to take their set of risks, in the last 6 years some of the big companies of the tech world could be youtube,facebook, twitter,netvibes,37signals etc.These companies were started by 25 something old americans and then turned into multibillion projects,what have we done as the most educated 20 year olds in this country,maybe our creativity has been killed by 200 years of subordination or maybe it is a little too early , and we are expecting too much." I didn't agree to the last line that he said, come on!! what does creativity have to do with subordination.

Deccan lost to bangalore we were drunk like hell and had a great time, but this point kept distubing me,is creativity connected to ego. This is his blog about that:link

Few months later ,I happened to see Larry Page's commencement address in the University of Michigan .(link)Please watch it if you haven't, it is heart rending and makes u bow down to the the greatness which created google. In a section of the speech he says, My grandfather who was a assembly line worker used to drive my dad around this place and tell him "son this is where you will come down to study, that was the american dream and my father happened to come here and went on to become a professor here". In the next generation Larry happened to go to join Michigan and ended up being a PHD drop out to create google. Hmm , the story of strength and honour, the tale where characters believe in the pursuit rather than the sit and wait of happiness.It is this restlessness to go after one's happiness is what created america,it is this restlessness which is like a trademark of modern india, as some one put it, the life of a modern indian who disagrees to be in a sarkari naukri, who doesnt settle for a "contentment is happiness" formula, who doesn't settle down with best MNC's (if you knew the attrition rate at Microsoft and Google India , you would agree with me), who is a hypocrite as he is caught between his logical mind and a conservative upbringing(watch DEV D, u will get wat am saying) is underlined with just one characteristic: "restlessness", no hopes no dreams but an infinite possibilities.

Thatz modern india.

So yes,subordination affects creativity as it directly affects your ego, it hampers the confidence of those before you those smarter than you and hence yours too.(Vivekananda and Gandhiji were just exceptions). So yes 60 years hence this is the Indian dream , which university i will join, which scholarship i will win, which job i will get, which hottie i will land up, which place i will get to.I am sure there must be so many gradutes who must be looking at an IIM/IIISC/TIFR and telling themselves this is where i want to come and study, like Page's father years ago, there must be so many who would have promised themselves that one day they will end up working for apple.That is the Indian dream, the then american dream.

But there are exceptions to this rule, a 60 year old built the first Electronis voting machine and india had the first e-elections, it is called india's pride world's envy, a bunch of grad students at IIT Chennai built the cheapest ATM machine a bunch of 24 year old IITians came up with Adam the I-pad killer, nothing world shaking but we are getting there, from being third world to dreaming of a good life, to actually getting there, from chasing mirages to becoming a generation of go getters some time in the future.

Thatz the development life cycle of dreams.

Hmm

Done with first term in uncle sam's land!

Adios another year!

Another birthday passed by,another year slipped away, they say times are good when they are fast.I dunno how to react to this. I freaked out a bit,am i where i wanted to be now, am I on the right track, so do i have a plan blah blah, in the end, oh who the fuck cares, if am no more than another one on the street at least am livin it up!

In the name of the best within us

These are my, most favorite lines from one of my all time favorite books "Atlas Shrugged".

"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

Thought block

It's like having everything you ever wanted right there in front of you,and like you are not prepared for it.

It's as if every moment from then on is another chance to make it up to it.

But it's just a dream , not like it's ever gonna come true.

Halloween

Theaters showing horror movies, heavily colorful atmosphere, buses carrying drunken people, guyz dressed like dorks and gals dressed at their provocative best, what's the matter, Oh it's halloween. I had way too many submissions the day before Halloween, couldn't care less for a costume, but it was gud fun to go out and feel Halloween anyway. Roamed around downtown, had Indian food at probably the only mentionable Indian restaurant in Minneapolis "dancing ganesha" and then jumped around for a while with a bunch of drunken people.

PS: (In the pic)Mikhil dressed as a FBI agent, me,well dressed as an eskimo and sid behind us click on pic to get a better view dressed as a Ninja,prolly devastated after Win7 release.

Invictus

In the not so dynamic life of a researcher where the greatest challenge is to keep your convictions up and alive, i today resolve that I shall play the game with no fear or hatred with nothing holding me back from living out this "one life". I shall try not to win , but see if i can fail any further, if things could be at their harshest best and I could still move on,i shall move and move not coz i have to get somewhere, or to something , but fearless, emotionless coz thatz the only the only way i know how to live.

I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.

My current research pursuits

Computing DNA copy number variations of cancer cells by using edge detectors

Purpose: Aberrations in DNA copy number is found to be the reason behind many types

of cancers, autism and other genetic disorders.DNA copy number variations have been

measured by many techniques. The popular ones are : 1) Local fluorescence in situ

hybridization based techniques. 2) Classical CGH 3) Microarray based CGH etc.

The common problem faced by all the techniques is that the signal is usually

corrupted by noise. As a result, sometimes true edges are missed and false edges

are amplified which affects the overall result. Hence, in this project I plan to

carry out the de-noising and smoothing of the DNA signals by using edge detectors,

which are commonly used in image processing as a pre-processing step.

Review: An edge can be defined as a sudden/abrupt change in the state of a signal.

A good edge detector is supposed to have the following two most important

qualities:

1)It should be robust against the background noise. It should not falsely detect

edges caused by noise, nor should it miss weak actual edges.

2)It should localize the edges accurately.

But, both these qualities are difficult to achieve at a time due to the nature of

the smoothing filter and are related by an uncertainty principle.

An edge is usually modeled as a step function. Edge detection is usually a four

step process: 1) Smoothing (to remove the noise) 2) Find the derivative (to pick up

the edges) 3) Find the maxima and decide on the confidence intervals. 4) Threshold

(optional).

Choice of a derivative: The first and second order differentials are usually used

to ascertain the existence of an edge. The first derivative gives a much smoother

edge, it gives a maxima centered on the location of the edge. The second derivative

gives a more accurate location of the edge i.e. the edge occurs where the

derivative crosses the zero axes. Hybrid detectors use both the derivatives using a

logic circuit to obtain a smoother signal with lesser probability of error.

Choice of Filter: Differentiation process which is used to detect an edge cannot

distinguish between an edge and a noise. Hence, the overall SNR of the signal is

reduced, so to avoid this problem the signal is first passed through a filter so

that it gets regularized. This is achieved by convolving the input signal with a

filter, f(z), whose Fourier transform, F(w), satisfies the following conditions,

known as Tikhonov’s Conditions, which are:

1)F(w) must be bounded 2) F(w) is an even function in frequency 3)F(w) and jwF(w)

must be finite energy functions 4) F(w,sigma) = 0 for sigma > 0 and w tends to

infinity 5 ) F(w,sigma)= 1, for sigma=0 where w = radian frequency. Band-limited

filters satisfy Tikhonov’s regularizing conditions, but have infinite support and

are therefore computationally inefficient. Support limited filters are seen to be

computationally efficient but unsatisfactory in the view of Tikhonov’s criteria.

This compromise is met by filters with minimal uncertainty, uncertainty is defined

as the measure of spread of a filter in time and frequency. The known functions

which satisfy the minimal uncertainty condition are the Gaussian, Gabor and Hermite

functions.

Gaussian is more popularly used because of the following benefits, 1) It is smooth

and infinitely differentiable 2) Decays to zero rapidly(compared to sinc functions)

3)Separable in multi dimensions. The choice of sigma of the Gaussian filter,

greatly affects the quality of the output. A large value sigma causes too much

smoothing and removes some actual edges, while a small value of sigma causes a

higher amount of noise to be detected.

Threshold: Once the signal has been smoothed by the filter and if the filter is

using a first order derivative, a threshold value is applied at this stage is to

limit the noise induced edges. If the derivative is greater than the pre-selected

threshold, then an edge is selected.

The most efficient edge detectors are usually hybrid structures of the above

mentioned choices of derivatives and filters.

Some other techniques: Some authors used the technique of histogram equalization

prior to the edge detection to improve the signal quality. This technique is based

on the fact that histogram of a given signal should be as flat as possible.

Other than the zero cross edge detection and the Laplacian edge detection mentioned

earlier two other popular edge detection techniques are :

1) Sobel edge detection: It look for edges in both the horizontal and vertical

directions and then combine this information into a single metric. It uses the

gradient operators along the x and y direction to compute the gradient magnitude.

It can be used in I-D cases as well.

2) Prewitt edge detection: It work in a similar way as the Sobel edge detector

but with a different set of pre-defined weights. It can also work in 1-D.

In case of extremely noisy signals, neural networks(FANN architecture) have also

been used to compute the edge.

Conclusion: I hope to choose one of the above mentioned techniques to denoise and

smoothen the DNA signals.

Intution

What exactly works for a product in the tech market.The quality of the product, durability,efficiency performance,security and the most important quality of all usability,of course it all starts with the UI,interface etc., I call it the "presentation layer".So a customer actually takes a deeper look at your product if the presenatation layer is attractive enough.Just like, if some girl is pretty there is every chance she would get the initial attention from men.As Barney in HIMYM says" the similiarity between women and fishes is that they are both attracted towards shiny objects."(Well it applies for both men and women.)

Letz see what exactly works on the presentation layer.

A web page with a text box and two simple buttons make up the UI of the most cutting edge search engine the world has ever seen.(Google)

A simple white board marker like surface with huge buttons and bold engraved letters, gives you world's most popular mail, yahoomail.(People find gmail tuffer to use,as it bundles a email thread opens up the reply window below and doesn't outline all the options clearly.)

The first touch phone sells like hotcakes"iphone" inspite of the fact that it had a crippled bluetooth, bad keyboard, no select all option(how did they miss that),etc.

The main reason why Zune bombed so badly was the first version looked ugly(dull black),not coz it frooze on the new year day.My personal take, first Zune had sharp edges which hurt real bad.(whhy??)

So what can we derive,what exactly works, intution.

If a product is intutive it becomes a customer's friend immediately.

A text box and button saying search, intutive.UI

World's most easy mailing interface, yahoomail,intutive enough,even for complete laymen.

But thatz the hardest thing to find out, what is intutive??

It actually takes a lot of study and nice pieces of observations compiled together in making a product intutive.

Like how, this is how:

I got a Samsung Eternity a few days back, Samsung's take on the Iphone.(Looks and feeels very similiar)

It has two features worth talking about.

1)The iphone has one black buttton below, which takes u back to home from which ever directory that u are.But if are inside the fouth level of directory say Camera\MyPics\Ooty\Falls and you wanna go one folder up,that is to Camera\MyPics\Ooty then you almost have no go.Well samsung eternity's button below,acts like the up arrow in windows explorer and takes u one step behind. Nice!Good obseravtion.

2)There is a small button on top right rear side.Acts as the lock-unlock button,oh thatz such a hassle with Iphone. Nice again!

So my final take,intutive features are direct result of simplicity and good people centric observations.

Self Obsessed

Another reflective piece of self criticism.

After I opened a bank account at the TCF bank in the campus branch of UMN, I received a purple coloured sweat-shirt on depositing my first 50 dollars.

Boldly saying"Golden Gophers".

I chuckled to myself as i knew it is going straight to my closet unless someone asks for it .

Whhoh, why??

Four years at NITR;T-shirts sold every year, never bought one.

2 years at Microsoft; T-shirts,jackets and bags distributed all the time, never used one.

The trend shall continue at Gopherland.

Never had an email signature, saying am blahblah.

Never had a business card saying howdy here's the so called me.

If,I was so proud to be wherever I was,why did I never wear my pride on my sleeve.

Was I playing the humble kitten.No, something a blunt person like me just can't.

Was I intimidated by something, heh, thatz just ridiculous.

The reason is that,I was always way too proud to be myself,nothing,no university, no company, no country or watever else u have, captures the true light of my indomitable spirit.Am proud to be all that, but I only wear the greatest pride on me,the pride of my individuality.

So i don't wear nothing, coz no identity is bigger than me.

It is the source from where,I derive the strength of all my convictions from.

This is both a gud and bad way of thinking, think u can guess why, whatever, at least my premise has no contradictions.

Guilty.

My grandmom, my dad's mom expired today.

I feel a little bad and heavily guilty tonight.

Am suddenly a little nostalgic, all her stories,endless chats, descriptions of quit india movment when she was a 10 year old,all the those little stories from puranas and other indian mythological books,all her experiences as a police officer's wife,some of her patentable recipes and those loving eyes of a person who well and truly believes in you. Miss u Maa..

Before coming from India, i could have gone and visited her(one last time)but because i was so busy in travelling and "exploring myself" that I could never find the time.

Am sorry Maa, I really am.

I don't really like myself today.

If you are reading this,please go out there and give a hug to every person who cares for you.

Travelogue:NYC

So it starts like this.

Mom and Dad dropping me off at the Dum..Dum.

Mom giving me a good emotional speech about staying careful,aware and holding myself in all possible situations.Dad, very quiet,like he's gonna miss his buddy.Sister,the usual chatterbox, and also my biggest die-hard fan who already believes my thesis will win me the nobel prize someday,Lolz,who kept telling me about how I shouldn't worry about anything back home and it's all gonna be ok.

Well,thatz my family,God's most precious gift to me.

I never missed them more than i did in that 22 hrs weird flight. Weird coz i got up in calcutta in a direct flight with a stop at delhi,here comes the weird part, they make u get down at delhi airport(phish market is a better description) and u change planes, itz like a completely new check in minus lugggage.I had heard about delhi's internationtional terminals being unduly overcrowded but howrah bridge won't look all that busy to you, once u spend some time there.

I was just talking to a co-passenger at delhi, Katie, who happened to be a professor of biology at the NYU, when something really funny happened. Some guy, bengali by appearnce,very innocent looking like he won't hurt a fly, came upto me and said hey i just overheard your conversation,am a graduate from UMN too, am from calcutta, i used work here in tata motors, i did my undegrad in IITG, UMN is a great place blahblahblah.........and suddenly he sneezed very heavily like his brains would burst out, before i could talk or react, the woman next to me walked away and u know what ,so did I, and so did the next person, and soon so did all of us, ( they should call it fear flu not swine flu), he was left all alone just because he had a bad sneeze,immdiately I took a napkin and wiped my hands and stopped talking for a while, looking back at it,i feel that was very insensitive of all of us, but thanks to media, common man is a lot more scared these days.

Me getting down at JFK 60'clock Tue 11th August , Ron picking me up at the airport,us finding our way past that stupid airport railcar, and here I am at NYC, Harlem, the place where my buddy stays, the block that i had last seen in Die Hard 3,and am heavily jetlagged. I have to admit that fear makes us take stupid decisions, the easiest way of getting past a jet lag is that,just keep doing everything at regular hours, sleep when itz nite and eat even when you are not hungry and stay normal, but because i had seen too much television before leaving india, i was thinking like this, i should just oversleep, thatz the best way of avoiding any possible infections/flu , looking back at it, i can only smile at myself. HUH.

So I,slept two and half days straight and Ron had an exam to study for.

Other than our short little trips to a some nearby italian and mexican resturants, thhe first 2 days were pretty uneventful.(A vegetarian's perspective)I feel italian food just overflows with cheese and mexican food reminds you of Indian food quite a lot. Funnily, I never noticed this about mexican food when i had it back in india.

So we went along to our first place of visit in NYC, Rockefeller centre.When you are in Manhattan it feels like you are in a very chilled out place, like the humdrum of a busy metropolitan is missing, but once you are downtown you see the real NYC,the skyscrapers lined up for miles, and yeeah not just buildings, architectural marvels, you might have read about those in many books,i will not try to capture the spectacle in my words,go feel it yourself.

So we went on top of the second highest building in NYC now(probably),and enjoyed an aerial view of the entire city, quite a sight that.I had thought, initially that I would probably be the only visitor,(who on earth would wanna go on top of a building paying 15 dollars), but to my surprise,there quite a lot of people there.

Next we reached,Times square, there are so many places in this world which are worth watching over a hundred times over, like Taj Mahal, this one is worth watching just once , but you will be spell-bound the first time you watch it, next time onwards you won't even know u are there.I think thatz what explains the hundreds of visitors and tourists standing there for hours together and admiring the amazing play of lights(like a daybreak). I was no different, but yeeah you wont feel the same the next time you go there,which we did, 2 days later to watch a movie.

Third act,a typical american bar on the times square,few drinks, we call it a day with lots of pictures as a testimony.

Next day, we start late, do some shopping, have some junk food and reach "ground zero", the place where the twin towers stood once, apparently that has now become a construction site for the new set of towers,now coming up,called freedom towers.Looking at that site, i wondered how much world politics has changed since that day, for gud or for bad, only time will tell.I couldn't take a picture, thought it might haunt me(Silly me !).

Next we,reached the site of another architectural wonder, built in 1875 and absolutely flooded by tourists,the brooklyn bridge.The manhattan bridge happpens to be right in front of it.I wonder how Shah Rukh sat singing on this bridge all alone, Kal ho na ho, it should take at least 3-5 hours to completely evacuate the bridge.Nevermind, he's our superman, absoultely capable of anything.So we went around the parks, waterfronts and viewpoints all around the twin bridges.

And thatz when you see another side of this sublime city,the calm one, the coming out for a walk one, the breeze is so amazing one, the gentle one.They say sunrise and sunset at this location is quite scenic and it truly was.We were accompanied by Ron's roommate,Vinay who kept providing me with his tid bits NYC gyaan once in a while, and it was nice to know too.

I always believed that all those websites which rank resturants and theatres on a weekly basis,never reinvent the wheel, their sample surveys provide us with a very tunnel vision about things,but here i was,about to to be contradicted. Ron took us to a place which he said is a great place coz it got voted by Zagat as the best pizza place in NYC,i thought yeeah letz see,but even a fusssy foodie like me was completely floored, I have never had better pizza in my entire life than in that italian pizza joint that day(SLUURp!). I shall follow zagat from now on.

Little down the street was where i saw quite a scene.

A street full of italian resturants(around 3/4th mile long) called "little italy", resturants all over the place, and all those little shops selling junk jewellery and other trivial stuff, with lotz of small flashing lights,all over the place. In short , typical jatra party style rapchik masala, so Indian mela like, the decoration so indian wedding like,and all this is italian, well aryans must have definitely come from europe.

The next day was completely dedicated by us in visiting the Liberty island,statue of liberty and the ellis island.One more incident worth talking about, we are standing in an infinite queue of tourists to get into the water ferry which would take us to the the islands, lots of bums kept asking for money by playing instruments and singing etc. So here we are, and we see a set of bearded gentlemen and a few women in black burqa like clothes talking in hindi,we are guessing Indian/Pakistani, suddenly the bum next to us starts playing,some tune,Ron says(dunno how he knows) dude itz Pakistan's national anthem, and then a little gal from that group goes out and gives some money to him.Hmmm, Purpose solved for him, we were still guessing, he just knew what to do,awesome maan u rock.

The statue of liberty is a worth watch, not just for it's majesty and beauty but also for the amount of history surrounding it.USA the nation built by immigrants, this is first thing the immigrants used to see when they entered the states.The statue of a lady with a torch in one hand and the declaration of independence in another.Then the immigrants were taken to the Ellis island, which was like the immigration centre of US back then, they now have a software which can track back the name of the ancestors of the americans, after they furnish a few details.Hmm, must be emotional.In fact they have a small museum of sorts at the Elllis island commemorating many special days and occassions.Like when 11000 immigrants had entered the US in a single day,like how much diversity used to be on display in the ellis island, my favorite one,the jew man used to kiss his wife like he wants to exhaust all his kisses, the italian just holding his daughter and not displaying any affection towards his wife in public, thatz diversity,thatz US.

We saw a short movie about what was it like to be an immigrant back then, what went through there minds, what happened at the island, how the immigration process was joy for many and going back to bondage for a few.Quite Moving, I would say.

So we called it a day again

Our next destination was the famous walls street on a saturday.All empty, except for the tourists.I must admit hat the statue of George Washingtom near the NY Stock exchange is quite a piece of art and then there was the legendary bull, from where the stock market "Bull" finds it 's name. Legend goes,it was to motivate the traders and provide them with a pinch of aggression as they walk in everyday.Watever.Traders might consider creating a bear, just to keep themselves in check sometimes.

My last day consisted of shopping and movie watching(Hangover,Kaminey) and just chilling in NYC.

Hope to go back once more, I still haven't been to Niagra.

But overall, a trip to remember!

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away-I

Well it's gud to be back after a very long time.

All that and a update on the last few episodic months is coming soon on this way.

But before that lemme announce new liitle feature that gets added up on this blog today.

Here it goes, everytime the subject line reads "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away-Number"

it must be some experience which was worth penning down and definitely worth reading years later.

Lemme see how many I can collect from here on.

So am at grad school in Minneapolis after having an awesome vacation back home, preceded by a honeymoon period

in the office after my resignation and a week to remember in NY with one of my best buddies Shrinivas(Thanks

Ronnie,you indeed are one of the best things that has happened to me) and I come to this cold lonely windy place

where summer temerature is at 12C and and am unable to find a single one I know or can connect to.

So it's the first 3 days going through the usual routine of orientations,cards, passes,bank accounts and blah blah and

plus I get heavily stared at if am wearing a sweater(woof people's eyes almost screeching aloud, hey itz summer dude)

.Deep inside am feeling very alone, very home sick and and my mind keeps going back to mom's emotional speech at the

airport.

So there I am all drenched in a sudden downpour.,lost in this huge campus where I can't figure out where to go for the

last couple of hours or so and missing everything awesome about my life.I ask some one passing by "Hey Could

temme how the gopher goes to the Coffman hall."(The entire university is connected by a subway which people probably

use when it snows or rains, and Gopher thatz what anyone connected to the University of Minnesota is called(students

profs etc.)even the roads). He says "hey you, oh no nevermind" then when he says with a litttle shaky confidence "think I have

seen you somewhere,thatz when i almost spontaneously say "think I have heard you somewhere",ayaskanta ...amogh

woohoooooo.

That was one of my buddies from back in 12th, someone I had a great time with back in those agonizing lab sessions.

We, finished our twelth together, I went to NITR he went to IITR(Roorkee) and somehow we had lost touch though

surprisingly he was well informed about me that I was in tronics and had joined MS and other stuff,and guess what, he has

been here for the last two years pursuing a PHD in chemical engineering and we both were completely unaware of this, his mom

happened to be our teacher in BJB junior college, and whoa what a way to meet.

Rest, well we had a great time that evevning.

Suddenly I was talking to someone in oriya and cursing someone naturally with a smile.

Suddenly I was feeling all better and cozy and little more confident.

It wouldn't have been have half as much fun had we had a regular meeting.

It's a small world and a beautiful life.

A new life begins, am a Gopher now!

Could not find installable ISAM.

A colleague of mine was trying to do something really simple,read an excel file programatically:
There are 3 ways to do this using C#:
1)Add a reference to the Excel Object library and use the Accessor class.
2)Use the data binding mechanism already provided in Visual Studio.
3)Use the OLEDB class to run SQL queries on it.

If you are a lazy programmer who hates writing too many lines of junk code and who would rather spend a bit more time in figuring out an easy way of doing things then the first method strikes out, itz a lot of functions and a lot of properties.
The second one is the easiest to implement and use but gives you almost no flexibility.So that one is crossed out too.

I personally liked and implemented the third approach why?? simple easy instinctive.
An excel sheet is a like a database,every sheet inside it is like a table and the name of the header is like the name of column.
So if I have a an excel sheet called Jobs.xlsx where first sheet is called Emps and i would wanna have the employeed ids which is the 5th column and has a header called ids, I just have to say:
[Select ids from Emps$]
Here is the sample code:

string conn = @"Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=" + @"D:\s.xlsx" + @";Extended Properties=""Excel 12.0 Xml;HDR=YES;""";
OleDbConnection connection = new OleDbConnection(conn);
connection.Open();
OleDbDataAdapter dataadapter1 = new OleDbDataAdapter();
OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand("Select * from [Sheet1$]", connection);
dataadapter1.SelectCommand = cmd;
DataTable tbls = new DataTable("aa");
dataadapter1.Fill(tbls);
DataRow dr = tbls.Rows[1];
object[] obj = dr.ItemArray;

So because I had done this earlier, so I just sent over my code to my colleague.
The code crashed in the 3rd line:
connection.open();
>.NET exception:Couldn't find installable ISAM.
Whoa itz running on my machine then why not his and wat the hell is ISAM, huh.
The first thing that we do when something puzzles us is search:
But guyz here don't look at the results returned by the search, it will talk about unchecking just my code in System properties,it will talk about two Jet OleDb providers present in your machine blahblahblah.

The remedy is just check your Connection String.
If you have problems with connection strings which probably every developer has u can visit,http://www.connectionstrings.com/
The connection string is consumed first but validated later by the compiler, and when it does it doesn't know what to do as it doesn't have a base value to validate with probably.So what does it do, pops out the last message from the error queue. HUH.

It's funny even today in the age of super duper compilers and debuggers we still have errors and exceptions which are handled so badly.

Saapnon se bhaare naina, toh neend hai na chaina

I guess am changing my fan club.
For a very long time since "Sarfarosh", I was a die hard Aamir khan fan and admired him for the fact that he probably was the only honest story-teller in bollywood.He still is, but i guess i have fallen for someone else's charm.

Just heard the songs of "Luck by chance".
Pure Nirvana.Period
Anyone else joining the Farhan Akhtar fan club.???

Who the hell is invisible?

Maybe coz I've been using gtalk and gmail for more than a couple of years now,hence am getting too critical about many of their finer aspects. But by this,I do not intend to hurl any insult at these cutting edge,instinctive products.

Disclaimer. Period.

Back to bashing.

Do u sometimes wonder as to who among your friends are currently invisible on their Gtalk account. For beginners, the invisible option doesn't show up on your gtalk chatting client, it only shows up when you login through ur gmail account and use the cloud gtalk.

Well,now am gonna tell u a simple trick.

1) Login to gtalk.
2)Go to settings
3)Go to the Notifications tab.
4)Check the box, show friend when online.

From now on whenever anyone logs in u get a irritating message saying "Jackass is online."

Sometimes or rather many times it also shows people who are invisible .

I have checked it with multiple accounts and with some other friends of mine.
Well am not the one who found it first, lotza other people have noticed this too.

I strictly cannot predict how to reproduce this bug,coz it doesn't work many times.But yeeah, i do know most of the times, the names of some those who are invisible.

Just a piece of code which might be hitting a global variable by chance. That's my take.

Wanna be invisible still??