Blogging from MS Word 2007

Hello World!

good artists copy..

and great artists steal- Pablo Picasso

I found great explanation of this quote by Ged Byrne here,

Copying = Taking something that X else has done and making something that looks like it.  An observer says ‘This is a copy of X.’  X still gets his credit.

Stealing = Taking something that X has done and making it your own.  An observer does not realise that you have taken from X, so X does not get his credit.

Well the context of copying and stealing comes in my course 410, where I am supposed to write a kernel (yeah a fully functional unix like kernel) from scratch. The point is that there are at least thousands of different kernels floating around and there is no way I can write a better kernel in three months time. So the best thing for me to do is to copy / steal ideas from *ix kernels and implement them into mine.

Hopefully I don’t end up just coping the ideas..

power law

unexpectedly, you can’t fail to notice power law

btw, the song Handlebars by Flobots is catchy.. i love Hip-Hop/Rap

update: i think the image is not clear on the page, you might have to click on it view original image.

code.test.debug.test.debug. Sleep once in a while

as title suggests, (code.test.debug…) would be my status for next two weeks. There are three major assignments / projects are due on the same day. Each project would arguably be the most complex piece of code I have written, so its time to give a best shot at it.

Lets see how how my Thread library, File system consistency checker (FSCK) and Android power profiler goes.

‘C’ frame of mind

I am done with project 1 of 410- Operating systems assignment after I guess 7 days of effort.

The Bejeweled game looks like this;

But I am not satisfied with my coding, the code isn’t that organized. Drivers (keyboard, timer and display) are done properly as API was well defined. But as far as the design of the game concerns, I just went on adding functions here and there as required. There are many global variable floating around any one can change data anytime. All symptoms of bad or naive programming. I guess I am still in C frame of mind, where is you write functions as necessary.

What I want to learn, is to organize the data into objects and have well defined methods to work on it. If I don’t learn this quickly, then it would be really difficult to write and manage bigger code.

rat race

Its so easy to get caught into a rat race (race for grades, job, good life etc. etc.); and lose track of a bigger picture the things you ultimately want. Once you realize then things you are running after aren’t that important after all.

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat”. — Lily Tomlin

Image courtesy: http://sketchedout.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/rat-race/

food-bot

Free food on campus is priceless, ask any grad student. People here at Carnegie Mellon are one step ahead, they have applied machine learning algorithm & AI to classify emails containing “free food” or any related terms and posted event on their website http://food-bot.com/

Foodbot is a revolutionary endeavor in the areas of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, working for good of all college students. Using a variety of emails, the program uses text-classification techniques to determine if a particular email contains free food.

If the email contains free food, information about the free food event is parsed using a variety of text-processing techniques and inserted into free food events calendar that you see on this page. Periodically visit this website to get up-to-date news on free food events on or around campus.

great way to put theoretical knowledge to right use!

410

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/

“An experience like no other” – 410 Course

Course 15-410 – Operating Systems Design and Implementation; also widely known on campus as CMU’s one of the toughest and demanding undergraduate course. I would be taking this course this Spring semester, and would like to capture journey throughout the semester. I finished with Project 0, in which we implemented stack crawler which backtraces function calls and displays the current content of stack.

Now started with Project 1, in which we (its not a team project) are supposed to write a Bejeweled game which runs on bare x86 hardware. So in essence we have to write drivers for Display, Keyboard, Clock and then use it for a game. Good part is we don’t have to physically work on hardware as we are using Simics to simulate code; thus it would save us time to debug hardware issues. Nonetheless it would be fun (in real sense) for next 10 days to figure out from scratch and to make sense of specifications.

On China

I was reading Tom Friedman’s latest column and was stunned to read about shear magnitude of infrastructure projects being carried out. Original article is here, excerpts /my notes from it..

1. A new 2 Gigawatt (to put in perspective 147 GW is total power generation in India) solar plant is coming up in China at estimated 3Billion dollar price. Though 2GW isn’t that big figure what’s interesting though is that the overall price of Solar panel is brought down from 59 watts per kilowatt hour to 16. I think the Solar technology is not picked up yet is because of it price (breakeven happens after 10+ years), and if we solve the cost problem then Solar power is feasible and way to go forward.

2. China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15.

3. China has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion. Trains will cover the 700-mile route in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today. By comparison, Amtrak trains require at least 18 hours to travel a similar distance from New York to Chicago.

These are just few things China has been upto, other projects like Three Gorges Dam though controversial are truly great engineering accomplishments. This all boils down to one question, if Communist China with all its setbacks is able to grow this rapidly then does it really matter if it isn’t democratic nation / people doesn’t have voice in decision making? Yes, the way in which Chinese govt tries to control Internet is really scary but its just part and parcel of any type of govt (remember Watergate). Any views?

Avatar

Watched Avatar today and I have to admit its one of the best movies I have seen in theaters since long time (I think last good movie I saw was Die hard 4) . I was reading about how James Cameroon planned making this film after completing with Titanic but at that time “technology needed to catch up” so he couldn’t take up this challenge. After long time back in 2006 he revived the project, invented / developed many innovative techniques for generating realistic characters (they seemed so real). I was completely blown by imagination and creativity behind making of ‘Pandora’ (how much effort they must have spent into this), the minute details with which they filmed flora, fauna, little creatures, the language and customs of Na ‘vi people. Kudos to the director James Cameroon and the whole team for making such a great movie, looking forward to Avatar-II in near future.