Thermal Noise

“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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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

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

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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Its 3 A.M. in the morning. I usually sit on the front stairs of my house and read something or listen to music around now. But there is an old woman today sleeping on the 6 inches of breadth that the staircase spawns. She was there when I come home from office and says she has no family and the people at the place she stayed (what is a “hesaru” in Kannada ?), told her to boot off. I have no frigging clue what to do. In ignorance and desperation, I turn to Google. The first two NGOs I could find gave the same answer - Its too late in the night and they don’t take in random people on the street. They are supposedly “old-age homes” that need books to be filed in before they take in someone.

I am terribly uncomfortable because a lonely tear drop keeps falling off her eye every now and then. And I think, she thinks that we think that she is scum. I don’t connect much to the human race and I can’t just like that comfort her either with words or gestures. And she keeps reminding me of my grandma whom I haven’t called up since ages. What in the name of heaven or hell am I supposed to do ? Goto sleep and hope she is not there in the morning to make me feel guilty ? What if she turns up tomorrow night ?

Can someone world-wise advise ? Is there a place in Bangalore known to someone that can take in such people ?

It is impossible to be dispassionate about cricket if you are an Indian. The Indian Cricket Team’s stunning (?) loss to Bangladesh in the ongoing World Cup has given everybody something to talk about.

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Most of the books referenced from here are excellent.

http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html

Everytime once in a while, I wonder: [1] How would life be without the World Wide Web? [2] What would have Euclid done if he were here today ?

I was at my alma mater last week to give a presentation on Debugging Tools and Techniques. It was a part of a week long seminar on FOSS Technologies. You can find the presentation here. The talk wasn’t half as scary as the presentation, which looks completely crazy with useless command line options. The “uninitiated” second year students of TCE were the main audience along with a few third year students. It was great to find a lot of wannabe Unix programmers out there.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the spring of hope, It was the winter of despair ….

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It might well go down in history as the month that changed the World. Or atleast the part of the world that me and my fellow humans who get paid for creating strings of ones and zeroes are primarily concerned with.

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A sovereign shame so elbows him: his own unkindness,
That stripp’d her from his benediction, turn’d her
To foreign casualties, gave her dear rights
To his dog-hearted daughters, these things sting
His mind so venomously, that burning shame
Detains him from Cordelia.

So reads a passage from King Lear by Shakespeare.

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September had been a highly productive month. I ticked off 12 movies from my “Must Watch” list and completed five books. I tried finishing the Sixth - “A New Kind of Science” (NKS) by Stephen Wolfram but ran out of patience.

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About a month old news, but quite an inspiring one. Story of an IIM Graduate who is an entrepreneur running a catering service now. Read it here.

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E-Mail forwards stupid as they are, sometimes do make you wonder. I just calculated that I had lived for approximately 2,04,507 hours. That somehow sounds like a shockingly large number. It instantaneously raises obvious questions like - What have I done in all these hours ? How much of it can I recollect ? What percentage of it was spent meaningfully ?

More than these questions what bothers me is - “Why” those questions and Why “why those questions” and the resulting non-converging infinite series of meta questions !

I am not particularly a fan of biology but Memory, the way it works and the its effects on perception is something that is fascinating to study. J Krishnamurthy is a proponent of the theory that memory prevents us from experiencing truth and that our perceptions are stunted by a memory, that compares and contrasts and works based on repetition all the time. Edward De Bono has parallel ideas when says that memory is a limiting factor to your creativity.

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Its not rare for me to face the question “So, How do you make money ?” when I say that my company gives away its operating system for free. Yeah, Sun did “sell” Solaris a few years back but how many people do you think would have bought the OS alone without buying the Hardware ? That just let me wonder as to why people think you need to sell software at a price to make money.

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I have been hopelessly out of touch with Java, Perl and Python these days that I decided to take a look at it this weekend. My “Java - The Complete Reference” based on JDK1.2 is so backward in time that I was wondering left how quickly you need to keep learning things to stay on top. I learnt Java, J2EE and Web Programming around 4 years back in 2002. If I write code the same way I wrote it 4 years ago, I would almost certainly be out of employment (Unless someone wants me for some offshored maintenance work)

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I am tired of seeing endless biased stories on Slashdot, Google Sci/Tech and Wired which claim to be "Tech News" feeds and stuff that "nerds" care about. Slashdot in particular has badly detoriated with time and become a Glitz and Glamour - populist news feed. Whenever Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds sneezes, it makes the headlines on all news feeds and if Scott McNealy or Theo de Raadt die, they might be lucky to gain some attention. Today for example we had headlines saying "Apple wants to port ZFS to OSX". I don't remember any previous instance where they ever had some headline that said anything about ZFS. If Google suing Microsoft for making MSN the default search engine on IE7, demands to be the top headline, then something as revolutionary as ZFS should be a screaming bold, center, h1,#FF0000 formatted tag on every news site that claims to provide "tech" news.

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The world has suddenly became a more knowledable place after the advent of the Internet. The average intelligence of humankind seems to have risen multifold. Oops ! Did I say Intelligence ? I meant "Knowledge". Well, "Information" to be precise. This sudden mania for Information Overload stems from the fantasy of John Doe finding his way to nuggets of information on the net that constitue no broadbased knowledge but just a few facts from here and there. That ain't something bad ! Wouldn't you say ? Well, I will agree for the most part except that I cannot stand the side-effects of the Information Overload era.

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