Thermal Noise

By the rules of propositional calculus, the following compound statement is always true:

( (Man is God’s greatest mistake)

(or)

(God is Man’s greatest mistake) )

Paper by Rivest et al:

http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~morin/teaching/5408/refs/gr93.pdf

And the mandatory sucky applet:

http://people.ksp.sk/~kuko/bak/index.html

Found this out while lifelessly grokking around boost:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/doc/html/intrusive/sg_set_multiset.html

Balanced Trees are better than unbalanced because of bounded worst-case O(log n) search time. And AVL is the simplest balanced tree. Red-Black is better than AVL because worst-case O(1) rebalancing during (Updated) insertions are guaranteed. But Scapegoats are even better because they gaurantee O(1) rebalancing AND don’t need the extra field for storing the color of the node. Strange that I have not even heard of a 1993 data structure that sounds practical enough.

BeleniX 0.7 has been released just a few seconds ago.

http://www.belenix.org/

This is the most kick-ass version of BeleniX ever. Among the most important features is the ability to install it to the hard disk and use it as a regular desktop OS. Release Notes details the other changes:

http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=ReleaseNotes_0.7

I am just waiting for one more feature - An IPS repository of BeleniX packages and then I will make BeleniX my primary Desktop Operating System

Here are the said notes from Knuth’s lecture on Valentine’s Day 2008. There was no specific topic that the Don spoke on. It was more of a Q/A session than a lecture. However there were few short questions and long insightful answers

(A day after the lecture, I did a full transcript which I seem to have misplaced. What follows is a reconstruction from the short-hand notes that I took during the Don’s talk. Due to the peculiar way in which Long-Term memory is reinforced in the human brain, we are capable of making grossly false recollections and delude ourselves into beliving it to be the gospel truth. I have tried best to stick to the words that I took down with no superfluous explanation. But be warned about the limitations of the cerebral cortex. The gist of the ideas and most of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were mostly by the original speaker. But the correctness of pronouns, infinitives, sentence ordering and in general a guarantee of authentic tone are in no way implied.)

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I have always relied on sky charts to guide me through the heavens. Printed charts suck because they usually calibrate the sky for 40 degree North (or south). So I end up using KStars.

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Wrath and fury unleashed upon the sin city as I clicked away:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ananth.shrinivas/HellHathNoFury

Please excuse the ineptitude and lacking taste, for this is the first time I handle a silicon based device capable of capturing electromagnetic waves in the visible spectrum.

“It is the greatest houses and the tallest trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder for the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest” (source)

“Beauty is truth and truth beauty
That is all ye know on earth
And all ye need to know”

John Keats was 24 when he wrote those perspicacious lines. I cannot but wonder at what wisdom nature bestowed upon the child she claimed as her own, barely a year later.
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Its 4 a.m in the morning. I haven’t slept in 24 hours. I am still wondering if this is a dream or a dream within a dream.Without much ado, I have just listened to for more than an hour and spoke a word to Donald Ervine Knuth himself, albeit over the telephone on the wrong side of the Atlantic. It was the Don’s Lecture at Sun’s Menlo Park campus on Valentine’s Day and I sneaked in with a friend.

Euphoria is very hard to describe … I will stop !

P.S: I am on a scheduled break from blogging. But this was far too tempting to resist. The transcript of his talk and more details may appear at a later date

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Warning: Small doses of Martini can induce great amounts of Asinine Vanity

In 2007: Thrice on the WordPress Dashboard. Twice amongst the top on Reddit, Twice amongst the top on DZone. Fastest growing wodpress blog on the last day of 2007. Nice eh ? As I was saying about the Martini …

Happy New Year Earthlings

For the past month or so, I’ve been trying to understand what appears to be a black art mostly because of lacking documentation - Python bytecode generation and peephole optimization. Some notes from the study for the benefit of IRC-mate ‘jstatm’ and anyone else living on similar planes of insanity.
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Bangalore Sucks ! I would gladly leave the city given the slightest chance. While its hard surviving as a pedestrian on the dangerous roads where vehicles Speed Up instead of Slowing Down if they see a human form trying to cross the road, its even harder to survive as an amateur backyard sky-gazer.

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What is the point ?

Do we solve problems to understand techniques better ?
or
Do we understand techniques to solve problems better ?

Why should Epiphanies always result in cyclic, stoical and pointless rumination ?

Update: You really don’t want to miss clicking on the second link

Netbeans users on Solaris and Linux, who hate, detest and despise the horrible looking default Java UI, ought to add this line to ~/.bash_profile

alias netbeans=’/opt/netbeans/bin/netbeans -laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel’

Update: Netbeans 6.0 users should type “–laf” instead “-laf” (Two hyphens before ‘laf’ instead of one)

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From D.E. Knuth’s famous letter to the United States Patent and Trademark Office:

“
I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.

Nor is it possible to distinguish between “numerical” and “nonnumerical” algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data. Mathematicians work much more with symbolic entities than with numbers.

Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It’s like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.
“

In those words of eloquent truth,
Beat Frost he did, Master Knuth.

Here is an example of how incredibly powerful DTrace can be. I had to solve a problem where a nice high-level overview of the code flow in a single threaded userland application would save me some pain the backside. Lo and Behold, Dtrace - The Universal Hammer for every nail.

Here is a simple visual call graph generator using 5 lines of DTrace combined with the outstanding Graphviz graphics library.

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India appears in the Top 10 of the Top500 supercomputers list for the first time: http://top500.org/site/systems/2838

EKA, is a Linux cluster of Clovertown based Intel Xeon systems connected via Infiniband. Congratulations to Tata Sons and HP !

Quite shamefully, Solaris runs on only two of the Top500 supercomputers. Blame it on the pathetic HPC userspace and community when compared to Linux !

This is a totally absorbing book by Stephen Levy- “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” (There is an online copy whose legality is unclear)

You should definitely read the book if you find these kinds of stories fasinating

void foo() {
switch(0) {
case 0:     do{
case 1:         printf("Hello World\n");
}while(0);
}
}
int main()
{
foo();
return 0;
}

Surprise. Surprise. This program compiles and works due the fall-through definition of C ! Tom Duff discovered this accidentally (about 25 years ago) and said: “It amazes me that after 10 years of writing C there are still little corners that I haven’t explored fully.”Wow, Some discovery ! In a discrete system with finite states whose permutations can never be fully explored in a entire lifetime, it is a question of whether you hit a permutation that happens to be interesting

Kimi won the world championship. w00t !

For the last two weeks, I’ve spent every ounce of my spare time trying to finish “Beautiful Code”. There will be two kinds of people: Those who think its a pointless piece of non-sense and Those who find the book a religious experience . Sharing as they did, some of their most intense experiences of programming and profound insights into the art, were legendary modern day programmers who stand tall to inspire us all: Brian Kerninghan, Karl Fogel, John Bentley, Charles Petzold, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Simon Peyton Jones and Bryan Cantrill.

The two best chapters in the book were: Beautiful Debugging & A Spoonful of Sewage.

I am ordering a hard copy so that I can pray to the book everyday

The world is going BeleniX crazy ! I setup links to the isoHunt torrents on the BeleniX download page a few weeks back and the isoHunt folks responded most kindly by setting up a special box for seeding (Have you ever heard of that ?) and ran a front page article on BeleniX as a model project to use BitTorrent constructively.

As of today, the BeleniX DVD has more than 18000 (Yes Eighteen Thousand) seeds ! How many other torrents can claim as many seeds ? aXXo’s latest torrents have no more than 5000 seeds.

Is that frigging cool or what

P.S: For those who don’t know, isoHunt is the world’s most comprehensive BitTorrent search engine !

Juergen Brendel who commented on my post, about the Global Interpreter Lock, wrote a open letter pleading Guido to consider removing the GIL. Guido gave a seasoned response on his blog today - Anyone willing to do the hard work is free to submit a patch for Py3K AND prove that it does not affect single threaded performance. A fair call on Guido’s part and very generous of him to respond to yet-another-rant-about-the-GIL.

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I am not the biggest Java fan inside or outside of my company. But I detest being on the receiving end of a conversation that involves Sun (I am madly passionate about Sun). So when I met up with a few friends of my friends and heard the standard “Java is dog slow” complaint, I had to invent a (truthful) counterexample.

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The Bureau of Indian Standards has given the finger to OOXML. Despite the BRIC votes being regarded as influential, I doubt if the voting process makes any difference because ESR has expressed concerns that Microsoft has resorted to corruption and bribery inside the ISO.

M$, where do you want to go today ? Judge Thomas Jackson’s Courtroom ? Man, I get vague memories of Enron for some reason ….

Further Reading:

• Why is OOXML defective by design ?
• Say No to OOXML

Update: The WashingtonPost reports on Microsoft’s dirty tactics.