For me, the bells toll

Benford's Law

2009-11-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

Benford's law is awesome! Real science, although it is arguable whether statistics is in fact a real science and I know someone who'll be up in arms were such a claim to be made, is far more intriguing than the stuff of novels.

Whoobie

2009-04-03T08:46:00.001-07:00

It bugs me when I'm forced to write bad code in a language as beautiful as Ruby.

Watching...

2009-02-21T13:56:00.000-08:00

It looks like I'm one of a minority who think Slumdog Millionaire is a mediocre derived piece of work. Utterly uninspired, shallow, overtly dramatic and clichéd, it borrows heavily from the traditional Bollywood genre - not that there's anything wrong with it, but we've all seen the rags-to-riches tale with the boy-meets-girl--boy-loses-girl--boy-gets-girl spin enacted in countless creative ways for decades now, that it's just mindless repetitive consumerist crap at this point. Even if Danny Boyle's film has its moments (and how colorful some of his scenes are), ultimately Slumdog Millionaire is drone Bollywood melodrama dressed up to meet its western counterparts. Too bad it's being elevated to undeserving heights of film glory.

Late last night, I watched the pilot of Alan Ball's mindblowing series Six Feet Under. Yes, I know I've arrived long after the train has left the station (the series debuted in 2001), and it's time to board True Blood, but I've just had my mind blown away by the dark despairing humor that is the show's catalyst. I'm now seriously considering spending a hundred bucks and just buying the box set instead of scavenging through the local library.

Sigur Rós

2008-11-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

No form of music till now, with the possible exception of the electronic melancholies of Ulrich Schnauss, captures that pure essence of music for me, that prompts indescribable feelings of bittersweet memories to float vividly in front of my eyes, that sets my heart, my lungs and every part of my body thumping with excitement and anticipation, that combines rhythm and progression into a distinctive form of artistic expression, and that is able to lull me simultaneously into the darkest of corridors and the brightest of gardens.

Watching Sigur Rós perform on stage was undeniably one of the greatest moments of my life. The audience at United Palace Theater, New York, was mostly comprised of people my age, and suffice it to say, at the end of two hours, we were drained of every possible emotion known to man. Testament to the fact that music is universal, I'm pretty sure very few people in the audience actually understand the lyrics of Sigur Rós, partly because the songs are sung in a mixture of icelandic and "hopelandic". But matter it does not, since we all connected and related to the music in ways far more ethereal than just its vocal interpretation.

Beautiful and breathtaking in scale and form, Hoppipola is that one song I screamed at that night. Riding back in the New York subway amidst hundreds of faces, a sight I found to be relatively uncommon even in that densely populated city, I was ecstatic that night. I had finally experienced true beauty.

My new macbook

2008-11-03T15:38:00.000-08:00

I finally got my own macbook! It arrived today morning, but as I was not at home, the Fedex delivery agent had left a notice pasted onto the front door. I couldn't wait until tomorrow, when he would return, so I took a bus to the nearest Fedex location (a 20 minute drive), but in the rush, forgot to check for a return bus. So here I am, sitting in an office operated by one of the bus companies, still an hour to go, waiting for the next bus home. Thankfully, they've Wifi here, and it took me just about 20 minutes to unbox my new laptop and let 'er rip.

The initial cold touch of aluminum felt good, and the laptop feels ridiculously light yet somehow sturdy. I'm grappling with the new trackpad and the absence of the familiar Home and End keys. Other than that, I'm pleasantly surprised with the screen; the glossy finish is not as bad as I'd thought it would be, though a test under normal sunlight would probably fail miserably.

I'm now waiting for my new copy of Photoshop CS4 to arrive in the mail in a couple of days. After that, it's installing Windows XP and try on some real gaming. Yaay.

The Wink

2008-11-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

It is refreshing to watch a tongue-in-cheek ad, expertly made, from the presumptive democratic nominee; and especially one so close to the election. I am partial towards advertisements with no speech - the visual medium is far more convincing than the auditory one in conveying a message, a thought, an idea or simply a suggestion.
And it should be clear that I favour the senator from Illinois. Now there is nothing left to do, but hope.

wiThin

2008-09-16T19:44:00.000-07:00

He said - I took the risk, didn't I? I took the first step, didn't I? We briefly hit it off, didn't we? How then, did I miss your cue?

My favourite quotes of the past few days...

2008-08-31T22:48:00.000-07:00

"Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster." - a cracked article on Dark Matter.

"It's the oldest law of warfare: have your guns in populated areas, and when the enemy responds, show the world your dead women and children." - Thomas Goltz, an academic specializing in the Caucasus, commenting on the recent Russo-Georgian war.

"Every time Barack Obama makes a speech, an angel has an orgasm." - The Daily show with Jon Stewart.

I've also been watching a lot of old episodes from The Simpsons. And this line by Homer is just...such a culturally observant remark, especially considering that it comes from a bovine personality.

"In a world gone mad, only a lunatic is truly insane." - Homer Simpson.

It's not the thought that counts

2008-08-26T23:25:00.000-07:00

It is with mild disdain that I relate to the fact that those moments when the mind is drowsy, such as a just-awoken state or a near-sleepless one, are the most interesting - such as this fleeting, hopeless, reclusive thought that I cooked up today: "Swallowing its pride, the lion swallowed its pride".
Really, how juvenile does a person have to be to think of such phrase-mocking statements as these, even in the most unstable of conditions?

What is probably more disturbing for me is that the thought ferociously stuck even after I was fully awoke. And, well, I had to pretty much swallow my pride in order to post this one.

More than a feeling

2008-08-04T22:25:00.000-07:00

It's humbling: trying to condense my last eight years into a single page, and finding out there's still some space left at the bottom.

Another Oracle takes birth

2008-07-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

If you're a gamer, the next year is going to be one massive joyride, with the gods of computer gaming that are Blizzard, ID, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Maxis, Valve and EA prepping up to give us an orgasmic barrage of titles that can satiate, hell wreak total havoc, on even the most casual and unyielding gamer. Me, I again descend into nostalgia, remembering the time when a friend and I bought six epic games together, and I went breathless for a moment, unable to grasp the gravity of the situation. I guess most of us are urban escapists, one way or the other. The familiarity yet the distance posed by films, music, novels or gaming - showing worlds unbeknown to us - draw us ever closer to them, eventually leaving us hip-deep in chimerical alternate universes. *twitch*

These fits...these...convulsions...
Should I live this world?
Or play it?

Quasi Una fantasia, Op. 27, No. 2

2008-07-08T21:11:00.000-07:00

It was late in the evening and I was walking back home lugging the overweight laptop and lost in thought about nothing in particular. I usually glance back at the clock on top of the tower as I tread on the grass beneath my foot and silently recollect the crunch of snow during winter while also feeling, quite viscerally, the acrid humidity in the air recently. The clock read nine. The sun still hesitated to dip below the dotted horizon, and started flinging harmless, tingling shots of orange and yellow into the far sky in a dying gesture that hinted at ingratitude. To whom was a mystery. Is always a mystery.

The chimes began to ascend into the heavy air. Warmth around, and void inside. I find myself asking the same dreaded question - Will it all just be a chimerical fantasy? Silence. The cadence in the evening sky continued still. Right around the eighth strike, I realized I was subconsciously counting every chime, feeling it like a heartbeat, relinquishing the last while anticipating the next. It was like a roller coaster ride where the sudden turns no longer held any surprise. I knew exactly when the next one would come. Just around the corner. There you go. Nine. Elementary Arithmetic has a strangely comforting feeling.

The moon started to peek shyly through the leaves of the nearest tree. The night had just begun.

And another....

2008-05-14T16:30:00.000-07:00

Yaawn. Staying awake has never been so frustrating. I await the despondence.

Cold Peace

2008-04-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

So I watched Eran Kolirin's brilliant and hilarious Israeli debut The Band's Visit this evening. Beautiful!

One more cup

2008-03-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm slowly yet progressively getting addicted to caffeine.

Willkommen

2008-03-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

I unboxed a Macbook Pro today. Sadly it belonged to a friend. And as I slid my fingers over its keyboard, I came to the realization that I was destined to buy it someday. I'm a sucker for everything that's eye-candy. Afterwards, we watched Frida on the new Macbook. Such a beautiful film; but Julie Taymor looks to be a tad too eager to prove herself, frequently imbuing the film with stylistic touches that were otherwise unnecessary. Somewhat like Joe Wright in Atonement. I just regret not watching her latest, Across the Universe, when I had the chance.

Stuck in a moment that I can't get out of

2008-03-02T13:54:00.000-08:00

So I wake up this morning and there it is. Tijuana! A name that's stuck in my head since morning. Ever had a word stuck in your head for unknown reasons? It's mildly disconcerting, like a distant splinter that the eye can barely see and stubbornly refuses to ignore. So every few minutes now, this word keeps popping into my head while I'm in the middle of something; and all I care to know about it is that it's a Mexican city. And this is not the first time something like this has happened; at least the third. I think the last one was some European politician who hung around mysteriously, stalking me for a couple of days and then disappeared in a puff of smoke (ok, maybe not that last one). So, Tijuana, how long will you be staying?

If only I could turn back time

2008-02-29T15:46:00.000-08:00

This C&H strip appeared the day before yesterday. Perfect timing. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just too blunt/instantaneous/careless/rude/insensitive; can't even seem to count the number of times I metaphorically bit my lip in the last two weeks alone.

[update] Of course in the strip, Calvin does it intentionally. And the title is alludes to a song from the 90's pop band Aqua.

sigh

2008-02-23T00:14:00.000-08:00

It's one of those nights; the heart is restless; the mind is excited; the body is a slump. I'm not able to sleep....

No mon, it wasn't always this easy

2008-02-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

Reading an old paper on MULTICS, I came across this as one of the design goals of the system:

"To permit a degree of programming generality not previously practical. This includes the ability of one procedure to use another procedure knowing only its name, and without knowledge of its requirements for storage, or the additional procedures upon which it may in turn call."

Oh the things we take for granted today.

Combustion of Spontaneity

2008-01-05T22:52:00.000-08:00

To be both mercurial and indecisive is an extreme pain (without pleasure, mind you). I've often taken decisions in less time than it would take a user process to switch to kernel mode (well not really, since those syscall/sysenter instructions came into place). But then I've also stood on cross paths, deciding which way to go, taking a step in one direction, retreating, taking a step in a different direction, retreating again, and so on. Literally. This usually happens when I start thinking about the decision and weigh it against the other choices. No, shouldn't be done. Especially when one is as spontaneous as nitric acid on copper. To reflect when one can still retreat is something that needs to be avoided. Forget the recent past and live in the moment. Sigh, rarely happens, but when it does, it's such a treat for the heart.

Snow

2007-12-04T19:10:00.000-08:00

Have you ever looked down at night, walking along a street, cold and shivering, and seen stars twinkling like diamonds, set in a blanket of whiteness?
It's wonderful.

Mirror

2007-10-31T15:21:00.000-07:00

He stared at the ceiling and the ceiling stared back. Its two drunken eyes, one larger than the other, glowing mildly, contentedly, stalking and preying upon the carpet and everything else that lies below. Their spacial placement on the ceiling stank of nepotism, yet were stunning under the gaze of someone who had just begun to recognize the beauty underneath the banal, sending visceral streams of a realization that patterns of life can sometimes emerge from within the motionless serenity that marks this plastic environment.

camera obscura

2007-09-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

After much deliberation and debate, I finally ended up getting a camera. Over the past two years when I first got interested in photography, I've gradually realized that to shoot something, anything, it's the eye and not the camera that's the deciding factor between a mediocre photograph and an extraordinary one. To develop such a skill is indeed an art. I just hope I've the time and patience for this.
[photograph: Behind The Gare St. Lazare - Henri Cartier Bresson]

The Big Screen

2007-08-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

Over the past two days I've come to realize the only way to sleep less is to sleep uncomfortably; that way, I wake up when I ~~should~~ ought to rather than when I usually do. And I've made it a point to stay away from anything soporific the rest of the day lest it induce me with two hours of what I just scrupulously avoided. I've also been on a tiny cinema marathon watching seven films in two days, the more mainstream of them being Ratatouille. It's been a long time since I saw an animated film on the big screen (I think the last one was Over the hedge) and Ratatouille was just as fantastic and entertaining as 28 weeks later (the sequel to one of my favourite horror films, 28 days later), that I saw last week. Quite a change from the kind of insipid entertainment that usually shows up, and I regret having missed out on The Simpsons Movie. Oh well....

Road Trip

2007-07-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

I remember reading a newspaper article sometime back in which the author (of the article) had traveled to the actual place where the book, some Rushdie book, that he/she was reading, was set. Remembering this article that I would have thought barely even registered then, left me wondering, if I had the luxury to do such a thing, what would I read? Barely seconds had passed before I came up with two choices - Jack Kerouac's On The Road (which I've not yet read) and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries, the former set across North America and the latter across Latin America. Given such a travel opportunity, I wouldn't want to waste it by not reading a road-trip book. Of course, the cheekier mind might just think about getting a travel guide.

Weekend

2007-07-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

Rohmer, Chabrol, Noah Baumbach, Polanski, Gogol, shopping, rains- well, that's my weekend in a nutshell....

goto

2007-07-20T03:21:00.000-07:00

This comic (over at the brilliant xkcd), is what I consider to be an indicator of the presumptuousness of most Computer Science students (including myself). What Dijsktra proposed in his seminal paper "Goto Statement Considered Harmful" is not even deemed as necessary reading for contemporary students of Computer Science. Instead the goto is frowned upon, abolished almost, without caring to understand its history. Now, I use gotos (only recently and very sparingly, of course) because it helps to alleviate unnecessary restructuring sometimes, the most obvious case being function-exit sequences. Thinking about elegant code structures is what takes up most of my time now than the actual coding session. I cringe when I look back at some of the code I've written, how superfluous the statements, how blunt the case-statements, or crude the nested "ifs and elses". I'm not saying it's the fault of the language, rather the prejudice and the inexperience of the programmer, who understands control flows, but not program flows. It is not easy to lift this weight of past-code-disregard off my mind, but to even realize the presence of such a weight is one step in the right direction.
A well-annotated version of Dijkstra's paper can be found here.

Raynor, Kerrigan and Zeratul

2007-06-22T11:06:00.001-07:00

If any serious gamer were asked to prepare a gaming canon, I'm sure most of them wouldn't even think twice about placing Starcraft somewhere near the top. Gamespot calls it "the most loved strategy game of all time" and "The standard by which all real time strategy games are judged". Korea, apparently, has three seperate TV channels dedicated to its gameplay. With three perfectly balanced factions, a riveting story and strategic to the core, Starcraft is a masterpiece. For me, it delivered an unparalleled gaming experience, the equivalent of which could never be met by an Age of Empires before it or a Command and Conquer or even Warcraft III after. It remains in that distant, elusive realm to which games like System Shock 2 have previously ventured, never to resurface. Then again, I eagerly await Bioshock 2, claimed to be the spiritual successor to SS2. But neglecting Starcraft is nearly impossible. Implausible. It doesn't make sense to create a successful universe and then dump it. So I guess, in a way, the announcement of Starcraft 2 seemed inevitable. Crazy fans, a hugely successful universe and Blizzard. There's little that could go wrong, and I suspect, very little will. I think ID's Quake 2, and their engine which then fueled Valve's Half Life redefined gaming as much as Wolfenstein did a long time back. But I don't expect these games to do the same. Half Life 2 didn't do it, Warcraft III didn't and certainly not Doom 3. Each refined their predecessor, but never just took off in a completely new direction. My only remaining flicker of hope is Diablo 3, when and if it happens. Looking back, not far from now, the experience of playing something new for the first time is simply unforgettable. The only problem is it just cannot be relived.

Fragmentation of Scattered Remains

2007-06-08T10:44:00.000-07:00

It was dark. Outside. My legs found their way to the terrace. I stood there. Breathing. Just breathing. A red, like a scribbling across the sky. The Bloody Way. Sad opaque scattered motionless immersive clouds. A distinct familiar shape. Wait. Hold on. This is....my World. My Atlas. Only places. No people. No colors. No overlays. No economics. No politics. No mountains. No deserts. No plateaus. No rivers. No plains. Just plain whiteness all over. Peaceful to indulge in transcendence. I went down. I came up. A camera hangs over my neck. Some point-and-shoot. I am doubtful. I turn back. Forward again. There's now a ledge in front. I climb it. Crouching motionless, like a hunter stalking his prey, I stalk nothingness. Those clouds. Where are they. The sky turns darker, and darker, and darker, till it cannot turn darker anymore. But it still does. I can feel it. Layers and layers of Black. I lift my head. Only slightly. Six stars. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Twinkle. Some more join. Some more twinkle. One strays to the left. A little. Slowly. It breaks away. Another follows. And another. They fall. Slowly. Almost gracefully. Suddenly, an unbearable noise starts. A rumble. Deafens my ears. But I cannot shut it out. All the other stars are angry now. They fume over something. They turn red all over. Wait. They are burning. Fast. They start fuming and burning simultaneously. They start to build energy. Some more. Still more. Until they are nothing more than pure energy itself. Concentrated and diabolical. They can no longer hold it. They have to break free. Unchain themselves. Jump over the wall and start running. Like an orchestrated act, they explode. All at once, and once for all. They come crashing down. A rampage. Hit the ground. Fearsome force. A fire breaks out. Water starts spraying. Water. Sweet naive water. Always fighting a losing battle. I am still on the ledge. Watching. Standing now. Standing still. Still standing.

the moment

2007-05-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

the needle looms forward, its arched poise splitting the vast indistinct space. motionless, it awaits the culmination of its existence - when it bursts forth a spew of light and turns dark the next, never to be relived again and lost in the incomprehensibility that surrounds it. eye burning bright. how yearned and unfulfilling is the light. fleeting and periodic. the soreness of repetition is lost in the inconsequence of the minute moment. but when does one needle stop and the other begin. when did the first one start and when does the last one end. individually detached from memory, collectively forming it, living it and losing it. rows and rows of them. do they already know their fate. if so, why wait then, why not burn at once, rise and fall in a single cadence, together burn and forever be extinguished. does not the last one already realize he is the last, and the one before him that he is the one before the last? does that not signify to them their fate? but unconscious, are they not, for the most part at least. lost to memory and spurned by consciousness, their souless eyes never blink - not before its tryst with time, not in its radiance, not even after the passage of the moment.

The Twist

2007-05-02T04:38:00.000-07:00

Ha aha!, you thought mere html and css could hold me back? I've broken through this senseless syntactical barricade, this....this collection of 'tags'. Bah! What an underestimation of my identity - Yes, I'm talking about my identity of a comment. I've promoted myself, quite self-consciously I must admit, to this superior state of being, this existence of a front-page post. What was meant to be submerged as just thoughts and reflections with only so much as a hyperlink dedicated to it from the main page has become enlightened, liberated even from its own existence. I stand here, extricated from all threads, solitary and autonomous, my head held high, at last living the life I adored. Well anyway, thanks for stopping by!

Oh, and if you're wondering about the post that always hogs this limelight, I've banished him to the "comments" section. Poor fella, he appears perplexed....

Perfume

2007-04-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

Halfway through Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, The story of a murderer (translated from the original German title Das Parfum), I felt the novel contained an almost absurd fetish for morality, with characters that torment or otherwise take advantage of the uniquely skilled Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, abruptly but conveniently amputated from the narrative after serving their purpose in aiding Grenouille’s initially ambiguous quest. By the end, I realized Suskind was not being moral, but understanding and sympathetic of the misanthropic Grenouille, who distanced from the world by both smell and appearance, regains it back by scent. Smell – perhaps the feeblest of the senses, acquires astronomical proportions in Grenouille, who neglects all his other senses in favor of it. Suskind’s writing is easy but effective, even reaching a level of elegiac sarcasm on human perception in one particular scene at the gallows near the ending. But while I still cannot share Suskind’s patriarchal sympathy for Grenouille, a feeling of awe and a faint sense of admiration is nevertheless unavoidable.

Turning Pages

2007-04-17T00:18:00.001-07:00

I think it's been roughly around six years since I came across T.H. White's The Book of Merlyn at a used book-shop, his last volume on King Arthur that was published separately from The Once and Future king. It was a fantastic read and I couldn't wait to get my hands on The Once and Future king, which was unfortunately unavailable everywhere I checked. Having remained at the back of my mind for so long, it suddenly came as a jolt to discover the book innocently staring at me at a book shop. Struck with disbelief, I slowly let the moment sink in and picked it up as carefully as I would handle a bomb. Disappointment hit. Some pages were improper and had been folded around. But the staff said I could get another copy as early as next week. Consoled by this, I left with Erich Maria Remarque's All quiet on the western front, still disappointedly gazing at David Lynch's unfairly high-priced Catching the big fish.

Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor

2007-04-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

Claire Denis’ haunting Beau Travail, which was inspired by Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor was my impetus for reading Melville’s book. The central theme of Billy Budd, Sailor is “Natural Depravity”, where corruption and hate bloom so naturally in some men, their actions though outwardly appear conformant and dialectic, reeks of incomprehensible and detestable psychological character. It is this unavoidable and intrinsic hatred that causes the master-at-arms John Claggart aboard The Indomitable to label as a false mutineer the newly impressed and handsome young titular sailor Billy Budd, affectionately referred to as “Baby Budd” in view of his inexperience at sea. The forethought and genius of Melville is in implicating Billy’s temporal speech impediment as a cause for helplessness at a time when his vocals were in desperate need and as a catalyst to spur his fatal blow against Claggart, causing a judgement of death to be imposed on the cherubic Billy. Melville’s prose, self-conscious and complex in delivery and theme, is more reflective than descriptive. The soul of the book lies in this one impeccably constructed statement:

For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound, such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself?

A couple of passages from the book that delve into the complexity of the antagonist:

But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature is this: though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in his heart he would seem to riot in complete exhaustion from that law, having apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement sagacious and sound.

These men are true madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous but occasional, evoked by some special object; it is probably secretive which is as much to say as it is self-contained, so that when, moreover, most active, it is to the average mind not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason above suggested, that, whatever its aims may be – and the aim is never declared – the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational.

It is the stitch that makes it tough

2007-04-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

I recently learned an important lesson the hard way:
The mask of persuasion is woven from character and only laced with fact and reason.

That hesitation you take

2007-03-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

I love songs that linger on even after they've seemingly ended. It's as if they're reluctant to let go and the music still keeps playing long after the main theme has ended. It's such a calm experience as the song finally sizzles down into just music. I've been repeatedly listening to two such songs all day - "Five Combs" by Fridge and James Figurine's "55566688833". I think this effect is also partly the reason I love GNR's "November Rain". The beautiful lyrics to the ingeniously titled "55566688833":

My phone's got a camera, it's built right in
but it's hard to keep the dirt and grease off the lens
the last time you were happy since so long ago now
I tried to take a picture but it didn't come out

and the messages sent are almost as blurred
my cryptic printstyles dials to songs no one’s heard
if we keep this up, things will never get better
when we disagree we fight in capital letters

I have to type eleven numbers into my cell phone
Just to make it spell ‘love’
So I usually don’t
And it takes up fifteen digits to spell out ‘goodbye’
But if I leave out the ‘good’ I can save us some time
55566688833

my throat’s a little sore after last night’s events
you were somewhere doing something
I was out with my friends
You wrote just to ask if I was having fun
and I guess I didn’t text you back quite fast enough
So when I got home you were awake in the den
There were tears in your eyes, the lights were dimmed
I turned off my phone, you did the same
And we fought face-to-face like it was the 90s again

I have to type eleven numbers into my cell phone
Just to make it spell ‘love’
So I usually don’t
And it takes up fifteen digits to spell out ‘goodbye’
But if I leave out the ‘good’ I can save us some time

The Dance of the Golden Flame

2007-03-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

The oil lamp lies in front of a potted tulsi plant. Enclosed within a wired mesh and set on a wooden pedestal, it is the only source of light in the balcony that also fuels this writing. A round shadow is cast all around the lamp with razor thin sparks emanating from its surface. The hollow wind is also sporadically wild and I watch the round shadow convulsing and expanding in perfect rhythmic harmonies with the wind. It is like watching a heart beat imperfectly; a young unfamiliar heart trying to rapidly find and adjust to the pace of the world around it. The dark shadow is a perfect circle, resembling a sunflower both in appearance and behavior. Its master is the light, be it the mighty sun or the miniscule lamp and it devotedly turns its face towards it and gaily hops around. Born from the light, it moves with the wind. The mosaic expanse that it rapidly covers is discernible both to the eye and through the silky touch of breeze across the cheek. From the golden flame and devoid of color, you transform the senses from touch to sight. I stand before you as I am, stripped of color and appearance and language, the atonal structure of my body in sharp contrast to your austere form and bow down in meek acceptance. You are my master, my guiding principle, my one source of light in the darkness of light. I will always be your disciple.

outlook

2007-03-08T03:55:00.000-08:00

I hate tags. They remind me of dog tags used in the war to identify casualties and inform their families. Presumptuous and Superficial. I hate them. Tags and Presumptions. Bah!!

The Golden Age

2007-02-26T22:03:00.000-08:00

Giuseppe Tornatore, who shot to fame with the melodramatic Italian film Cinema Paradiso has compiled a collage of foreign films and this small piece was shown at the recently concluded Oscars. Fortunately I had my laptop right in front of me while watching it. Except a few that I missed out due to slow typing, a comprehensive list of the films referenced in the montage are:

Shoe Shine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)
The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenabar, 2004)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
Day for Night (Francois Truffaut, 1973)
Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
All about my mother (Pedro Almodovar, 1999)
The official story (Luis Puenzo, 1985)
The Tin Drum (Volker Schlondorff, 1979)
No Man's Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001)
Forbidden Games(Rene Clement, 1952)
The discreet charm of the bourgeois (Luis Bunuel, 1972)
War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1968)
Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
Mephisto (Istvan Szabo, 1981)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2002)
Mediterraneo (Gabriele Salvatores, 1991)
The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963)
Closely Watched Trains (Jiri Menzel, 1966)
Pelle, the conqueror (Bille August, 1987)
Journey of Hope (Xavier Koller, 1990)
Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959)
Walls of Malapaga (Rene Clement, 1949)
Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988)
Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, 2005)
Get out your handkerchief (Bertrand Blier, 1978)
Mon oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)
Antonia's Line (Marleen Gorris, 1995)
Babette’s feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)
Madame Rosa (Moshe Mizrahi, 1977)
Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)
A man and a woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
Kolya (Jan Sverak, 1996)
Burnt by the Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov, 1994)
Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997)
The Shop on Main Street (Jan Kadar & Elmar Klos, 1965)
Indochine (Regis Wargnier, 1992)

Together in Electric Dreams

2007-02-24T23:32:00.000-08:00

When installing straw (an RSS aggregator for Linux) through apt-get, I saw a library named libbonoboui.so scroll across the screen. A few clicks later, it turns out bonobo is a component architecture similar to COM for GNOME, only more advanced and also has bindings for Python (towards which I've grown a recent fascination). Anyway, it also reminded me of the artist Bonobo I've been listening to lately, along with Dntel, James Figurine, Lali Puna, Frou Frou and The Postal Service as a part of my foray into electronic music or more accurately indietronica. Technology used to create music. Now I think that technology is most effective when it is unobtrusive, when we reach that level of transcendence where our interface with it is seamless and subconscious. Frequently, this transparency is achieved through repetition and practice. Take for example a TV remote, cell phone, computer keyboard or a gaming joystick. After some time, our minds connect with these things obliviating their presence. It is then that we see through them into the other world. This other world can be three things - our world itself in which case technology just acts as a bridge for communication (cell phones, IM's), a manifested or generated world (gaming, music), or a hybrid of the previous two (Television). Of course, I'm ignoring the technologies that we don't interact with in daily life, but still co-exist in the background - the communication infrastructure, switches, routers, servers, software et cetera. These innovations are mostly non-interactive towards the consumer and hence do not directly affect us. What does influence us is what we interact with and this is where I think a lot of work needs to be done, both from a technological standpoint and from us. From a layman and purely end-user perspective, I guess I'd call these technological breakthroughs satisfactory when I next step into my room and don't see all the wires crisscrossing each other - the ethernet and telephone cables, wires from my desktop, modem, laptop, 5.1 speakers, headphones, ipod charger, cell-phone charger (ad infinitum). The good thing is we've laid out the foundation. Now, all we need to focus on is in removing the barriers, because I think technology fails when it starts to intrude into our lives. I've found out the basic pattern underlying most of my pet peeves - a loud ringing cell-phone, incessant honking in traffic, the (unbearable) noise from a car backing up, the clickety-clackety sounds from a mouse scroll wheel. All these are examples of either improperly designed technology or frequently just misuses of it. It is when technology intrudes that it disturbs. What needs to be understood is this: These devices are only the means, not an end in themselves (I couldn't help but draw the analogy from Kant). The end-user technology (no pun intended) only becomes useful when it appeals to the instinct and not the intellect. Personally I think my iPod shuffle is halfway there already and not attempting to sound anthropomorphic, this post is dedicated to it for giving me countless hours of pure listening pleasure amidst all the modern-day urban chaos.

Filming Time

2007-01-18T05:25:00.000-08:00

Auteur Theory aggrandizes the relationship between the director and the actor. By using the same actor for different films, the director attempts to form a psychological bridge between these films. A familiarity persists across all of them. But few actors can perform this feat well - carrying a character over completely different worlds without losing any perspective. Over time, I've found one actor who continues to impress me with her choice of directors and might just pull this off, and that's Naomi Watts. I mean any actor who's worked with people like David Lynch (Mullholand Dr), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (21 Grams), John Curran (We don't live here anymore, The Painted Veil) and Marc Forster (Stay) has to be applauded. Her upcoming films with David Cronenberg and Michael Haneke only help to cement her role firmly amongst serious cinema. These two films along with Volver (Pedro Almodovar), Inland Empire (David Lynch) and Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro) probably top my list of hope-to-see-soon films.

The Philosophical Alien

2006-11-23T02:24:00.000-08:00

Usually, my dreams follow a strict Freudian principle, but yesterday's was slightly aberrant. An old king went to meet his pet - a grotesque human-looking alien from outer space who lives in a tunnel underneath the palace. As the king bent down the tunnel and looked underneath, the alien turns his head towards him and says something like, "I always like to know more about the theory of the data than the data in the latest theory". If this sounds gibberish, then let me remind you that this was a dream (inherently meaning that nothing is supposed to make any sense) and was uttered by a philosophical alien who thinks all carbon-based life forms are nothing more than just gas....but I think I kind of understand what the alien meant....

Elevator Love Letter - Stars

2006-10-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

My office glows, all night long,

It's a nuclear show, and the stars are gone,
Elevator, Elevator, Take me home....

An idiosyncratic protocol

2006-09-27T04:40:00.000-07:00

Something happened recently that once again got me thinking quite deeply. I actually tend to like these "little revelations", as I call them. Now I've traditionally thought that a write() or a send() across a connected TCP socket would return an error if the error occured locally (such as permission rights, insufficient buffers etc). A write() would also be expected to report an error for a deceased connection ; isn't that what ECONNRESET and EPIPE are for? Well...yes, but not always. Let's imagine a normal scenario where one end of a TCP connection is always writing (A) and the other end always reading (B). Now suddenly, out of the blue, B freaks out and kills the connection, thereby sending a FIN to A. So far, so good. But A's TCP stack does not handle this FIN and instead forwards it onto the receive queue of A. This poor chap, having never gotten a decent education his entire life, never reads(). Thus the FIN is as good as ignored. This leads us to the interesting part, which is that B is closed and A does not even know of it. The next write call from A therefore happily succeeds and the data is sent over the wire. But B's TCP stack realizes that the connection is already closed on its end and hence sends an RST, indicating the connection no longer exists. Now, A's stack gets the RST and updates its socket error-status to indicate the connection is closed. So, all subsequent writes give us a SIGPIPE/EPIPE. Thus, the first write always goes through succesfully even though the other end is already closed, leading to some frantic nail-biting and hair-pulling....The way to solve this? A select() and a check to see if the connection is already closed before writing to it. But why does the kernel handle only RST (and update the error status) and not a FIN? Because a FIN only means that no writes will happen from that end...but any number of reads might still be done. This is the reason why shutdown(...SHUT_RD) will NOT send a FIN, but shutdown(...SHUT_WR) will issue a FIN. This is also the reason why the kernel does not handle a FIN, since its end might still want to write to it!

Phase Shift

2006-09-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

I just came across this as my system was rebooting:
"Shutting down anachronistic cron - Anacron."
Absolutely Brilliant.

favicon

2006-09-01T03:40:00.000-07:00

My list of favourite applications on kubuntu:

Amarok - Rocks. Period.
Firefox - Need I say more.
apt-get - For installing updates and programs.
Katapult - Breathtaking. A stylish application-launcher.
keyTouch - For my Logitech keyboard's special keys.
VLC Player - Watching movies.
d4x - Download Manager.
k3b - CD/DVD Writer.
gimp - Minimal Image Editing.
kpdf/Adobe Reader - Pdf Viewer.
emacs - For everything else.

Elisp

2006-08-21T01:34:00.000-07:00

The default yes-or-no-p function in Emacs is a total nightmare. However, one can alias it to y-or-n-p in order to enter y for "yes" and n for "no". But, it has its own quirk, which is not to clear the minibuffer after entering y or n. So, I wrote this tiny function to clear the minibuffer after the y/n response is typed. It's a useless & fun function to have.

(defun clear-y-or-n-p (prompt)
(interactive)
(prog1 (y-or-no-p prompt) (message nil)))

Another function, that actually does something is this:

(defun indent-buffer ()
"Indent the current buffer"
(interactive)
(indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil))

This indents the entire buffer (or the rectangle) according to the current indentation. Very handy when editing files which have various levels of "2-spaces/4-spaces per tab" indentation(Ugh!).

19-19

2006-08-09T04:52:00.000-07:00

His fingers were sweaty. Gripping the mouse as hard as real-world physics will allow him, he concentrated hard on the monitor in front of him ; eyes behind hard-rimmed glasses, searching frantically for that elusive rocket-launcher. Tension reaching a culminating point. One wrong move, one misfire, one sneeze even and it was all possibly over. The crosshair focussed intently in the centre of the screen. "The Temple Of Retribution." Retribution for what? he could'nt help but wonder. "All my life, I've been here. Walking through simulated walls, speaking with AI, completing quests. All from a dark corner in the room. Void. There are no dreams anymore. Just nightmares....of a fearsome creature from the depths of Hell." Convulsing in the darkness, looking at the scrolling lines of text in the chat rooms - One frag left. "I don't know the time anymore, or what day it is. The sweet smell of flowers, the cracking dawn of light, the melancholy of a sunset or the exhilaration of rain - Just memories now." He could see the rocket launcher ahead. The opponent was just rounding the corner of the central arena. "The fury of death. And the swiftness of rebirth. It's all just a respawn." The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. "The Red Rose. The last sight for the eyes." Mortality. "It's a scary thought. The thought of not thinking anymore." Silence. "I am". Time hit standstill. He stood rooted to the ground. Nothing mattered.Not the flipping rocket launcher hanging inches off the ground or the opponent lunging for it. Not the sight of a rocket hurtling at breakneck speed towards him, creating a tiny sonic boom behind it. Not the sneer of an invisible face. Microseconds later, the screen went black. The mouse was left dangling. The room was empty. A life was born. A new one. It was tabula rasa all over again.

A FoRtune Cookie

2006-07-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

This brought a smile to my face.
"WoMan _does not_ replace `man', although it does use a number of the facilities implemented in the Emacs `man' library. WoMan and man can happily co-exist, which is very useful for comparison and debugging purposes. The only way in which WoMan affects `man' is that it adds a timer to indicate how long `man' has taken to format a man page."
(From the info page for WoMan - Emacs' manual page browser).

The Pill

2006-07-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

It was raining outside.
I could see it through the curtains.
Thunderstorms bellowed in the distance.
We just sat looking at each other.
I could see he was reading my thoughts.
I was no longer uncomfortable.
I rested my arms against the velvet of the armchair.
I closed my eyes.
I could hear him speak for a long time.
A dark, monotonic voice.
I could feel it.
Something crawling up on my skin.
An experience that could be felt.
He stopped talking.
I opened my eyes.
He looked at me.
He outstretched his arms and opened up his palms.
There were two pills - one red and the other blue.
They were shining against the dim light in the room.
He said, "It does not end here. It begins. The blue pill returns you to the drab life you've been leading till now. The red pill shows you how deep the rabbit-hole really goes. It's your choice."
I looked at him.
I looked at the rain outside.
I chose the yellow pill.

"Long" Live The King

2006-07-03T04:45:00.001-07:00

I was recently involved in a framework that had to provide consistent behavior over both 32 and 64 bit systems ; which was when I came across the wierd standards followed by some compilers, when it comes to data-type sizes, more specifically int, long and a pointer (abbreviated as ILP). Now, both gcc (Linux) and the VC++ compiler(Windows) use ILP32 when compiling for 32-bit systems. This means, that an int, a long and a pointer are all 32-bits in length. To support a 64-bit data type, the type long long has been added, in later compilers. But, on a 64-bit machine, things start to get a little hazy. There exists 3(yes, three!!!) standard conventions :
ILP64 (Int, Long and Pointer are 64-bits)
LP64 (An int is still 32-bits, but a long and pointer are 64-bits)
LLP64 (Both an int and a long are 32-bits, and only pointers are 64-bits).
Faced with these choices, one would think the ILP64 to be a fairly obvious choice. I mean, what's the use of a 64-bit number-crunching machine if one can't do native 64-bit arithmetic on it? But, Linux chose LP64, while Windows embraced the LLP64 standard.
One of the reasons against ILP64 from both these systems was that an int was(and still is) C's most popular data-type and extending it to 64-bits would likely waste more space (4 bytes extra), than it does now. Face it, the average programmer tends to use an int to return even a single bit such as 1 or 0. So, a programmer should be forced(by the compiler) to use 64-bits only when it's absolutely necessary. But, the other argument against ILP64 is an interesting one. Let's consider the types int and long on a 32-bit system. Both are 32-bits in length and are indistinguishable from each other. But why? Because, in the age of 16-bit systems, an int was 16-bits in length, but a long was 32-bits. As we moved onto 32-bit systems, an int became 32-bits, but a long remained the same. This is where we lost it. Should'nt long be 64-bits in length? I don't know why this was done(insufficent hardware support could've been the reason), but it was this mistake that made both int and long equal in size, which made programmers careless and start intermixing them. So, the best thing to fix it, is by making int remain at 32-bits, while extending the long to 64, and this was the approach Linux took. But, Windows faced with a bigger issue, that of "not breaking" existing code, which assumed an int and a long to be the same size. So, they went the way of LLP64, with an int and a long remaining at 32 bits, and the pointer extended to 64-bits. But, there's a subtle loophole here. The size of a long long variable in a 64-bit system, is not, as you would expect it to be, 128-bits, but it remains at 64. So, what happens when moving from a 64-bit to a 128-bit system? The same problems, that we struggled to avoid resurface. The legacy lives on.

Motion Blur

2006-05-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

The sheer diversity and ingenuity of today's programs never cease to amaze me. A new wave of programs that take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops have cropped up, and it just got really wierd and "interesting". MacBook Pros and Thinkpads have motion sensors built in to take care of impact-scenarios. "Nominally, it's there to protect the internal hard drive. The basic idea is if the accelerometer suddenly notices that the gravitational pull of earth is no longer present, the most likely explanation is that the laptop, sensor and all, is currently accelerating at 9.81 m/s² towards the earth. In that case, it will (wisely) try to turn the hard drive off in preparation for impact." So, now we have programs that let us switch between virtual desktops at a tap on the screen, squeal when the laptop is lifted of a table(to protect against thefts) and make light-saber noises as it's hurled across(ala Star Wars). Brace yourself, 'cause the next-gen of programs might just arrive like a fleet of warships hurtling through space. Oh, that reminds me, gotta grab my towel today. "Happy Towel Day" everyone!

Ruubeek's Cube

2006-05-15T02:05:00.000-07:00

I broke my last Rubik's cube some months back. I'd just completed learning to solve it by that time, when the cube came apart in my hands. I tried putting it back together, but one of the center pieces was broken. The assembly of the cube is itself quite interesting. All the parts sit perfectly on top and beside each other, with a minimal scaffolding at the center ; and 'course there's more than one way to assemble it, meaning you can basically create a unsolvable cube (Now, there's a trick to play on someone). Anyway, I got my new cube a few days back, thanks to a friend from the US. It looks very rigid, just like the last one, and initially takes some time to loosen it ; but after that it's smooth sailing all the way, that is of course, if you know how to solve it. There are loads of tutorials on the web to get anyone started on this. But initially, the best way would be to just mess around with it a bit, try getting a particular piece to a particular place and such; get used to moving stuff in three dimensions as opposed to 2-D jigsaw puzzles.
The most basic approach to solve it uses layering. The 3x3 cube is split upto into 3 horizontal layers, and one goes about solving a layer at a time. The first two layers are pretty easy and basic intuitiveness is sufficient to complete them. The last layer is the most difficult of them all, partly because one has very little room to work with without disturbing the completed layers. If you're really good and patient at it, you might figure it out by yourself, or if you're like me, then search for the easiest algorithm, and solve it that-a-way. Either way, after some time, the modus operandi will gradually evolve right into the cuber's hands and a feeling of accomplishment is inevitable. This is a really good tutorial to get started with, and frankly I don't want to get past it. I'm just a casual end-user of the cube, not a geek trying to speed-cube my way into 16 seconds. Of course, if one is really good at it, then the 4x4 Rubik's Revenge is definitely the worthy adversary.

A Scanner Darkly

2006-05-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

My last two novels, having similar dystopian themes, a political regime taking control of a war-waging humanity and the idea of a bleak future ( V For Vendetta and A Brave New World), I had pretty much decided to give myself a break from sci-fi. But, as so often happens with me, nothing ever goes according to plan. I fell, head over feet, for the trailer of A Scanner Darkly, the first film of its kind - purely cel-shaded, and gorgeous. The protagonist is voiced by Keanu Reeves, and there was something in it that just grasped me by the shoulders and shook me violently. I just had to read the book, by Philip K. Dick - a renowned sci-fi writer of his time. Truth be told, it was nothing like I imagined from a sci-fi author. The story weaves through the impact of drugs on our oh-so-impressionable minds, taking control of our brain and reducing us to pulp. I've begun to cherish this kind of writing, where there's not too much of emphasis placed on the technology ; but rather its effect on us and our moral values and principles. The shock with which we realize that every moment of our lives is hopelessly dependent on technology ; and our inability to accept that fact. I just hope the movie turns out to be as good as the book.

So Sayeth, Wanda The Fish

2006-04-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton is one of the movies I kept missing regularly everytime it's shown on TV, along with Donnie Darko and Requiem for a Dream. I finally caught it yesterday on HBO, at a very odd hour of 1:00 AM. The movie was not something I expected, throwing me a bit off-guard ; and definitely not the sterotypical Burton. A fantasy of events woven in flashbacks to a skeptical son, it definitely has fantastic visuals. What is confusing is the fact whether the father is actually telling the truth or not ; because the stories he narrates are bizarre and impossible, in the world we live in ; but yet, there's some element of truth in it, as the son discovers that all characters from the story are not made-up manequins, but they actually exist ; albeit different from the way narrated. People gain immortality, through the stories told about them, sometimes by them, that live after they're long gone. A fine cast of Danny DeVito, Ewan McGregor, Jessica Lange and Albert Finney makes the film a memorable experience. Something that stays on your mind for quite sometime....

Visions Of Paradise

2006-04-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Oblivion seems to have quite created a rage in the gaming industry. An RPG that's raised quite a few eyebrows regarding its success and made gamers and critics alike, all over the world, cry in joy and heap accolades on it certainly doesn't happen quite so often in this world ; this geeky world of pumped up gaming rigs, artistic case mods, liquid cooling, high-end graphics cards, dual-core processors, ergonomic gaming keyboards and mice for the hunched-up gamer drooling over 21'' LCD screens, pumpin' metal into every friggin' marine, or blowing to smithereens every alien scum that dares to show its ugly face, or precariously managing a dwindling economy while warding off another enemy attack on the base, or getting lost in eerie caves and foggy tunnels trying to find a red fire-breathing dragon that's guarding an ancient treasure. If memory serves me right, the last such phenomenon is the now oh-so-popular World Of Warcraft. It might very well be the product that single-handedly boosted this industry the last year, and is still going strong. In fact, after recent reports of addicted gamers,virtual threats and ransoms, and viruses unleashed onto the virtual world killing virtual characters, it's gotten a bit frightening, to say the least. But these are the artificial worlds, entire universes created by games that we tend to lose ourselves in, staying up late trying to ward off that evil spell casted by a level 30 mage. Oblivion does this and more, it seems. I had'nt heard of this game, quite surprisingly (probably because I was not frequenting Gamespot or Gamespy or Kotaku or Pixel Kill or countless other sites out there), until a friend asked me if I'd read the review. I said no, but made a mental note to read it later. Needless to say, I was swept, swept hard by the current, swaying left and right before steadying myself and realising it's never, not even in my wildest dreams gonna run on my system. Still running a paltry processor with a single core and a borrowed withered-by-age graphics card, I solemnly retired to my usual gawking-over-every-new-game-while-
cursing-my-inability-and-staunch-stubborness-to-upgrade routine. I mentally ticked this one off too. Oblivion. Like the lone survivor of a ship-wreck who's lost the complete meaning of time and ticks off every day against the wall with a sharpened twig, I etched the name deep into my heart. One more game to play. My list is all the while getting longer, with each passing month, starting off from Painkiller:Battle out of Hell to Doom III, F.E.A.R, Quake IV, Call Of Duty 2, GTA:San Andreas, Serious Sam 2, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2, Black And White 2, ad infinitum. What's one more to the list, eh? *Sigh*. Getting restless - but just a tad bit at having missed out on all the fun of my first love with computers. And with the release of Apple's Intel-based Mac systems and the beta Boot-Camp that dual-boots with Windows, I have all the more reason to vigorously scratch my head and ponder ; weighing in the positives and negatives of either upgrading my system now(which has complications I don't want to delve in right now), or wait for a sufficiently stable Intel Dual-Core Mac with a reliable Boot-Camp at an affordable price (yeah right!), or just give up on all this and settle for one of my two latest crushes, a DSLR or an electric guitar. Oh, the travails of free will :)

The Musical Harp

2006-04-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

Pandora is a music lover's paradise. An eternity of fresh and eclectic music from authors all around the world, with a penchant for discovery and excitement like I've never experienced before. And I mean this from the humming C Major of my musical veins. Powered by the Music Genome Project and flashing a simple flash-based interface, it grips you right from the moment you step through the humming doors. The concept is ridiculously intuitive, even for a childish Steve Vai ("The Audience is listening"). I'm a long-time self proclaimed addict of Pandora. It made me discover some amazing artists. At the time I started using this service, I was more into a new-age, trance kind of music. I was listening to a lot of Enya, Chicane, Vangelis and Dido then. So, having set up my station to imitate music of this vague genre, I discovered some fabulous artists in Imogen Heap(Frou Frou), Bent, Pentatonik and Adrian Belew. After that, I had some recordings played to the tunes of 80's pop and Country. A few artists like The Decemberists, David Gray and Ph 7 captured my attention. Music, as an art form, uplifts the soul, brings on a sense of detachment from an inconsequentiality and propels the innate desire to be self-satisfied. A feeling of completeness, a full circle - Is that not what Life is all about? The Creation always outlives the creator. The creator is nothing more than an entity, a body form constrained by the physics of the universe. But not the creation. It is limitless. Not bounded by any laws or rules. It touches the heart, in a way nothing else can. That's all that matters in the end, I guess. A feeling of holding hands with Nature. An embrace with the skies. A tryst with the sea.
Every breath we take,
Every move we make,
Every bond we break,
Every step we take.........

If you haven't checked out Pandora, please do. Did I mention it's free?

Detached

2006-03-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

Love, and the Lack of it,
Mind, and the Madness of it,
Truth, and the Tenderness of it,
Pain, and the Purpose of it,
Darkness, and the Depth of it,
Tears, and the Truth of it,
Past, and the Pain of it,
Eyes, and the Emptiness in it,
Time, and the Trap of it,
Idle, and the Intimacy with it,
Fire, and just a Flicker of it,
Gale, and only the Gust of it,
Veil, and the Visions from it,
Death, and the Design of it,
Paradise, and just a Picture of it,
Child, and the Cruelty of it,
Eden, and the Entrapment of it,
God, are you the Garden I am in,
Or I the Dream in You?

Summer of '06

2006-03-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

Winter’s now practically disappeared and it’s summer-time again. I can feel the sweat on my brow, feel it crawling down my neck, I can sense the stickiness of my clothes and that familiar body odor that no deo can mask away. Oh, how I miss Winter, the cold that makes me feel warm inside, grey clouds hovering in the distance, a steaming cup of masala chai, a hint of rain when I take my bike out in the morning, the afternoon sun casting a gentle smile on me before hiding behind the clouds again, the evening rain, watching the rain sipping tea from the balcony and lost in thought, getting drenched from head to toe in the night rain, getting scolded from my mom every single time and just laughing back.
The only obvious advantages of this hot and humid climate is that I can now stop applying Vaseline on my dry skin, travel to coastal areas and frolic on the beaches and have all the ice-cream I crave for. My midnight snack’s now officially chocolate/vanilla ice-cream topped with banana and grapes.
Yum.

Demystifying virtual functions

2006-02-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I got caught up with a problem where a virtual function in a derived class was never getting called. Foolishly, I decided to see how gcc implemented virtual functions and what I was doing wrong, instead of debugging the code from a different angle (vis-a-vis gdb). Anyway, it turned out, the virtual function was indeed getting called, and the problem was in another part of the code. But, the silver lining of all this heinous activity was that I kinda got an idea of how virtual functions are actually implemented by the compiler. Let's start with some basic code.

class BASE_CLASS
{
public:
virtual void PRINT_FUNCTION(void);
};

class DERIVED_CLASS : public BASE_CLASS
{
public:
void PRINT_FUNCTION(void);
};

void BASE_CLASS::PRINT_FUNCTION(void)
{
printf("Base Function\n");
}

void DERIVED_CLASS::PRINT_FUNCTION(void)
{
printf("Derived Function\n");
}

int main()
{
DERIVED_CLASS *dobject=new DERIVED_CLASS;
dobject->PRINT_FUNCTION();
return 0;
}

This has to be self-explanatory. Obviously, the print from the above code, if run, would be "Derived Function". The basic concepts of how virtual functions are implemented using vtables & vptr are explained beautifully here. To surmise, each object has a vptr that points to the correct vtable of the class, where the vtable is a list of pointers to virtual functions defined in that class.

Now, let's put this code under the magnifying glass.

g++ -fdump-tree-gimple -fdump-class-hierarchy -S virtual.cpp

Compiling it with -fdump-tree-gimple gives us the GIMPLE output, which I recently found out from here.
-fdump-class-hierarchy "dumps a representation of each class' hierarchy and virtual function table layout to a file." (quoting the man page of gcc).
-S gives us the assembler output.

Before analyzing the dumps, let me just explain whatever little name-mangling I had to learn for this experiment. The G++ ABI mangles all names with a preceding _Z. After this, certain patterns occur, followed by the mangled name :

TV - Vtables. Pointed to by polymorphic objects and those with virtual bases.
TI - Type information. Returned by the typeid operator, pointed to by the vtable.
TS - Type string. Returned by type_info::name, and used for type comparisons.
In most of the cases, the mangled name consists of two things - a number specifying the length of the string following and the string itself (usually the name of a class or a function).

Okay, let's look at the class hierarchy dump first:


Vtable for BASE_CLASS
BASE_CLASS::_ZTV10BASE_CLASS: 3u entries
0     (int (*)(...))0
4     (int (*)(...))(& _ZTI10BASE_CLASS)
8     BASE_CLASS::PRINT_FUNCTION

Class BASE_CLASS
 size=4 align=4
 base size=4 base align=4
BASE_CLASS (0xb7d1bbc0) 0 nearly-empty
  vptr=((& BASE_CLASS::_ZTV10BASE_CLASS) + 8u)

Vtable for DERIVED_CLASS
DERIVED_CLASS::_ZTV13DERIVED_CLASS: 3u entries
0     (int (*)(...))0
4     (int (*)(...))(& _ZTI13DERIVED_CLASS)
8     DERIVED_CLASS::PRINT_FUNCTION
Class DERIVED_CLASS
 size=4 align=4
 base size=4 base align=4
DERIVED_CLASS (0xb7d1bc80) 0 nearly-empty
  vptr=((& DERIVED_CLASS::_ZTV13DERIVED_CLASS) + 8u)
BASE_CLASS (0xb7d1bcc0) 0 nearly-empty
    primary-for DERIVED_CLASS (0xb7d1bc80)

The first thing we see is that the vtable (if it exists) always consists of two entries, by default. The first one is a NULL pointer and the second one is a pointer to the type-info of the class ( Maybe this is used for RTTI? ). Right, from then on, we have one pointer each for each virtual function in the class. The vptr for the base class is defined to be the value &(Base Class's virtual table) + 8. The 8 bytes skip the first two entries (on a 32-bit machine). Similarly, the vptr for the derived class is &(Derived Class's virtual table) + 8. Now, where is the vptr for each object stored? In the case of gcc, it is always the first word in the object's memory. Well, that's pretty much the vtable structure. So, calling a virtual function is now simply finding the vptr for the object ( in the first word ) & getting the address of the corresponding vtable. Index into the table using the appropriate index (calculated during compile-time), and you get the actual function to be called.

Let's move on to the GIMPLE output (unnecessary output skipped):


;; Function BASE_CLASS::BASE_CLASS() (_ZN10BASE_CLASSC2Ev)
BASE_CLASS::BASE_CLASS() (this)
{
  int (*__vtbl_ptr_type) (void) * D.2250;

  try
    {
      {
        D.2250 = &_ZTV10BASE_CLASS + 8;
        this->_vptr.BASE_CLASS = D.2250;
      }
    }
  catch
    {
      <<>>
        {
          __cxa_call_unexpected (<<>>);
        }
    }
}

;; Function DERIVED_CLASS::DERIVED_CLASS() (_ZN13DERIVED_CLASSC1Ev)

DERIVED_CLASS::DERIVED_CLASS() (this)
{
  struct BASE_CLASS * D.2259;
  int (*__vtbl_ptr_type) (void) * D.2260;

  try
    {
      {
        D.2259 = &this->D.2202;
        __base_ctor  (D.2259);
        D.2260 = &_ZTV13DERIVED_CLASS + 8;
        this->D.2202._vptr.BASE_CLASS = D.2260;
      }
    }
  catch
    {
      <<>>
        {
          __cxa_call_unexpected (<<>>);
        }
    }
}

;; Function int main() (main)

int main() ()
{
  struct DERIVED_CLASS * D.2215;
  void * D.2261;
  int (*__vtbl_ptr_type) (void) * D.2262;
  int (*__vtbl_ptr_type) (void) D.2263;
  int D.2264;

  {
    {
      struct DERIVED_CLASS * dobject;

      D.2261 = operator new (4);
      D.2215 = (struct DERIVED_CLASS *) D.2261;
      try
        {
          __comp_ctor  (D.2215);
        }
      catch
        {
          operator delete (D.2215);
        }
      dobject = D.2215;
      D.2262 = dobject->D.2202._vptr.BASE_CLASS;
      D.2263 = *D.2262;
      OBJ_TYPE_REF(D.2263;dobject->0) (dobject);
     ....

We first see that the constructor for the base class and the derived class are implicitly called with the "this" pointer. This pointer points to the object in memory. Let's look at the base constructor. All we're doing here is getting the vtable for this class and making the vptr point to it. The vptr is depicted here as "this->_vptr.BASE_CLASS". Next comes the derived class's constructor. Since the derived class also has access to the base class's members/functions, it does contain a "pointer" to the base class within itself. In our case, this is the pointer &this->D.2202, which we pass on to the base' constructor. I haven't been able to figure out how the pointer is being obtained. Anyway, after the call to the base constructor, the vptr is now made to point correctly to the derived class's vtable as:
this->D.2202._vptr.BASE_CLASS = D.2260;
Remember, the base and derived classes both share the same vptr, hence it gets overwritten after the call to the base constructor has finished.
Now, let's look at how the virtual function is called from main() :
We first get the vptr of the object as :
vptr->D.2202._vptr.BASE_CLASS and then dereference it directly to get the function. Since the function is at the 0th index, we don't need any indexing here. We then call this deferenced function, which is pointing to the derived PRINT_FUNCTION and voila! There's your rabbit out of the hat!

On a more personal note, I just had an amazing last 3 weeks. Went to Goa (my second visit), the Jethro Tull concert, Bryan Adams concert, started on a couple of B&N free courses and still trying to keep my head above all this. It's now 3:35 AM and I've to leave for Mangalore in half an hour ( I've decided getting even a wink of sleep won't work for me now ). Maybe, I can nap along the way....

A couple of movies I recently saw....

2006-01-23T22:40:00.000-08:00

Rounders is a movie about Poker. It starts off with Mike(Matt Damon) losing miserably in a game against a Frenchman "KGB"(John Malkovich) and thereafter vowing never to play again. But the guy's a genius. He comments he can even defeat a group of judges at Poker blindfolded, after having figured out the exact hands each one was playing. His friend Lester(Edward Norton) , having just gotten out of jail, is shocked to find his old friend has quit. But soon, the two friends start playing together, after Lester insinuatingly persuades Mike to start up again. But, Mike soon finds out Lester is ripping him off and ends up owing $15,000 to KGB. Meanwhile, his girlfriend's left him when she finds out he's started gambling again. This is not an underdog story. You don't feel ecstatic at the end of the movie ; you feel comforted and satisfied, after having seen Mike suffer for something that's not even his fault and finally overcoming it, by playing an unbelievable last game against KGB. You cannot get away from what you are, no matter how hard you try - that seems to be the moral of this movie. And it's stylish ; Matt Damon excels in his scattered monologue and can really deliver that I-don't-give-a-damn-I'm-a-genius character, that he played in Good Will Hunting. The movie had some appealing visuals too and overall, was entertaining. Definitely worth watching.

eXistenZ is a movie about virtual reality(VR) - Reality being simulated in a game. Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a game designer, who's spent the last 5 years developing a 38 million-dollar game. The interface to all such VR games is a bio-port - A hole at the back of the spine into which a cord is attached. The other end of the cord goes to a game-controller ; which is actually an organism, with its own neural system, built from parts of various animals and engineered to simulate reality. Everything goes haywire from the very beginning. An assassination attempt on Allegra leads her and Ted(Jude Law), a PR guy for the company promoting the game, to go into hiding. They soon plug into the game Allegra developed - "eXistenZ", and start playing. Some interesting observations are then realised. The game has a start-point, where a character tells you what you should do next. From there, you're on your own. Your character has it's own motions and instincts, which are displayed as the game progresses. An ingame character goes into a loop, if not confronted with the right dialogue. A loop is similar to a program loop, where the character blindly moves his eyes up and down and stares, dumbfounded at the floor or the ceiling. Soon, Ted cannot distinguish from the game-world and the real-world. They all seem the same ; the same texture and ambience rots through everything he sees. Even after pausing the game and returning to the real world, he still feels it's a game. How do you know where you are, if you can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not? Simple, you cannot. Having looked closely, I realized that eXistenZ can itself simulate another game environment and set up VR games from within itself. Forget VR controllers simulating reality ; this is VR simulating VR. And you can go as deep as you can, you can have a VR game running from within a VR, which is under another VR environment. The movie depicts exactly this, and saying anything more would give away the ending. I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone, even though the visuals are forgettable at best and the acting just so-so.

Ooga Mooga Ga

2006-01-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

GNU's list of funny "C" declarations are hilarious indeed. Some of these are ingenious, actually. Personally, I think code, especially the ones that are a little difficult to understand or even otherwise, should be written in such a way that, people who happen to come across it should find it curious or amusing or even plain funny; 'cause if they do, then they might atleast take the effort to learn and understand it. Of course, writing obfuscated code is taking it a bit too far. I mean, seriously, any programmer worth his hat, should atleast take a glance or even a sideways teensy-weensy peek at any piece of code that appears interesting; even if it is not in his or her area of expertise, it would'nt harm to take a look at it. It's happened to me tons of times. One line, one lousy, stinking, good-for-nothing line that has a wierd statement, or a function declaration, or the name of a variable, that's all it takes to grab my attention. That's partly why reading the Linux source code is quite enjoyable at times. And that's also exactly why you should code a bit differently, or humorously, if possible, 'cause if you think you've written something interesting, then you better grab all the attention you can get to it. After all, there's a gazillion lines of code out there, and not as many programmers. So, put on you thinking cap and start writing code, "code that boldly goes where no code has gone before." May the source be with you.

As a sidenote, this is something I came up with as I was writing this post:
struct on_you; /* You know....the movie???? "Stuck On You"?? Ring a bell????...Oh, come on.... */
void aleehooo; /* would have made a yodeller proud */
float er_ahoy;
[courtesy digg]

Three To Tango

2006-01-16T02:12:00.000-08:00

The 3 movies I saw over the weekend.

Identity

2006-01-12T08:19:00.000-08:00

What would happen if someday, someplace, you met yourself?
A question that is hypothetical at best and better left that way; at least till we find a way to hitchhike in the fourth dimension. But, what would happen if, one day, we somehow came face-to-face with our own self? Now, I don’t mean the physical self, but I’m rather more interested in the mind, or the spirit, or the karma….you get the drift. So, how will you feel if you met someone who thinks and behaves exactly like you do? I mean, this person, except for his or her appearance, likes everything you like, hates all the things you hate, dresses up exactly like you and basically has all the niceties and oddities that you might possess. What’ll be your first impression of this person? Will you be elated at having discovered something; something that feels so personal, like finding a toy you’ve hidden in your childhood?
Well, for me at least, I know it’ll be quite an astronomical shock. As far as I can remember, I’ve never met anyone who share all their passions with mine, who get irritated at all the miniscule and irrelevant things I get irritated at, who laugh at all the things I find funny and also hate the things I positively despise. Suppose I met myself, say at a coffee shop and we start talking. Now, I obviously don’t know the other guy is actually me and neither does he. So, we chat for a while and suddenly discover that we have almost everything in common, overlooking all the facts of life, like parents, schooling and stuff. We both love the same kind of music (mostly new-age, rock and alternative), the same authors (Crichton, Rand, Christie, Austen, Woolf, Tolkein….), the same sit-coms and also the same genre of movies (Surreal, Horror….). We also love technology and have lately taken up an interest in classical music and fine art ( we also quickly realize that neither of us understands what exactly art and music is, but want to find out exactly how it’s worth millions of dollars). Having extinguished this initial high-intensity flame to a cinder, I finally settle down and briefly sip my tea. Now, I always feel like an outcast when I’m in a coffee shop, ‘cause I don’t like coffee at all. I’m a tea guy and always will be. So, having ordered whatever basic tea that this joint had to offer, I immediately realized that the guy in front of me had also ordered tea. “Tea in a coffee shop. I feel like an idiot, but I can’t help it. I hate coffee” – he tells me. “Amazing. I was thinking the same thing” – I say. Wow, this person likes everything I like. Fun!!!! So, for the next few days, I meet up with this guy a lot and discuss everything I’m working on right now, talking about all the crazy stuff that I'm trying to implement. I also discover this guy loves Linux and has a keen interest in the same areas that I just enjoy working on. So, I come up with some good solutions and insights to most of these problems. But, very soon, I discovered that I never felt completely satisfied with the way I’ve solved it. There’s no sense of anticipation or discovery anymore. No sense of excitement or the realization of having done something wrong, or overlooked a minor detail. Everything felt so dull and dreary. It took me a while to realize why. I figured out, I cannot learn anything new from this guy ; I know nothing that I’ve not known before I met him that day. Moreover, hearing the same thoughts, like an echo, both from within my head and from his mouth, was beginning to get boring. It sounded both monotonous and repetitive. The next time we met, he told me that he was feeling the exact same thing. Whatever he was thinking came out of my mouth and he felt it best that we both go our separate ways. I agreed. We shook hands. We left. Opposite Ways. As I was walking home, it started drizzling. I stopped and looked up at the sky. Water ran down my hair and face. Strangely, I felt warm and fuzzy inside. I immediately knew he was feeling the same thing. We wished each other and resolved to meet up in the future.

Look Ma, I'm Lazy!!!!

2005-12-08T03:43:00.001-08:00

Lazy binding on Linux implies that dynamic symbols are not resolved by either the link-editor during link-time or the dynamic linker at run-time, until the first time the symbols are actually referenced. Referencing in the case of variables means accessing them & in the case of functions, it means calling them. Let's prove Linux actually does what it claims by means of a small program.
I'm considering only the ELF format for analysis here. First off, all symbols (static or dynamic) have a symbol-table entry specifying its name ( actually an index into the string table) & an offset (or virtual address). Functions are also symbols, hence they too reside in this symbol table. Furthermore, all programs that are dynamically linked with a shared library also have stub-code within the executable for all functions that are called in the shared-library. This is used at runtime to find its actual address. The stub-code resides in a segment of the memory called PLT ( Procedure Linkage Table ). This is usually ro (read-only) memory. The executable in memory also has a GOT ( Global Offset Table ) that contains the actual address of the symbol at run-time. Whenever a symbol's address has to be resolved at runtime, the dynamic linker queries for the symbol in each of the dependent shared-libraries, finds out the base-address of the library where this symbol is present and populates the symbol's actual run-time address into the GOT. Now, the first instruction of the stub-code in the PLT is always of the form:
jmp *(got-address).
Here, got-address specifies the location in the GOT, where the address of the function resides. Initially, however, got-address points to the next instruction in the PLT itself, which pushes certain identifiers for the dynamic linker and jumps to the linker code itself. Now, the dynamic linker locates the load-address of the function and modifies the GOT entry to contain the actual address. So, the next time a function call is made, the overhead of skipping to the dynamic linker is omitted and the function is called directly.
The program that demonstrates all this is shown below (assuming there's a function called SO_FUNC in a shared-library and this file is linked with that library) :

extern void SO_FUNC(void);
int main(void)
{
  Elf32_Addr *gotAddr, *lazyAddr, *pltAddr;

  pltAddr = (Elf32_Addr*)SO_FUNC;
//Skip the opcode and MOD-REG-R/M....
  gotAddr = (Elf32_Addr*)( (char*)(pltAddr)+0x2 );
  lazyAddr = (Elf32_Addr*)(*gotAddr);
  printf("Address of SO_FUNC before the Call: %x\n", *lazyAddr);
  SO_FUNC();
  printf("Address of SO_FUNC after the Call: %x\n", *lazyAddr);
}
Output:
Address of SO_FUNC before the Call: 804834e 
Address of SO_FUNC after the Call: 40024704

As we see, the address of SO_FUNC before & after the call are different. To further confirm this, we can look at /proc//maps, where pid is the process-id of the above process and see that the address 0x40024704 falls in the memory mapped for that shared library where the function is present.
Of course, this the lazy way of doing this. The correct method would be to locate the address of
the function from the symbol table, its GOT entry from the relocation section ( the rel & rela sections are somehow not present in memory, however ), and then print its contents. But then, to do that, we need to read the ELF header, the Program Header & the Dynamic Segment or use
hashing. Then again, all programmers are born lazy.

The Bitter Sweet Symphony

2005-11-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Tessa - "She's dying."
After a brief pause,
"Won't you ask of what?"
Woodrow - "Of what?"
Tessa - "Of Life."
- The Constant Gardener

Nostalgia

2005-11-06T09:40:00.000-08:00

The word Archipelago stirred my nostalgic senses up a notch, when I stumbled across it somewhere over the Internet yesterday. Archipelago, meaning a group of islands or water-bodies, was one of my favorite words to utter in my school days. I don't know why, but just the way it was pronounced fancied me. Oh, and it also reminds me, I also used to love the word Anorexia-Nervosa, which is an eating sickness (I'd read it in some Biology class). I was reminded of this, when a few days back, a friend commented on how Kate Moss looked so anorexic.
Scary how the human mind works ; I'd completely forgotten 'bout these things ; these words and these thoughts ; somehow they had taken a backplace in my mind, overshadowed by all the other trivial things that occured afterwards. Yet, they never completely disappeared. They were just waiting, lurking deep within myself, waiting for the right moment to make themselves visible again. Nice feeling, this one. This strange sense of........ self-discovery. I somehow have to do this more often..........

Books

2005-10-30T23:27:00.000-08:00

I finally decided to catalog (almost) all of my books and found an excellent website that eased things for me. Although my collection is just meagre, the cataloguing was fun. Here's my catalog.

Caged

2005-10-23T02:09:00.000-07:00

Superbad
Saint Germain
Aloha
Omigosh!!!! If anyone can make an ounce of sense out of these sites, I'll be forever grateful to 'em. This....this is just weird....plain wierd. It's like I've just come out of the cinema hall after a really bad movie with the sounds still bellowing inside my ears and my head starts spinning like a furious top. I mean, what's the purpose of all this piece of crap?? Does it have some hidden secret or puzzle, which I'm unable to figure out? Is it a text adventure? What the bloody is it? I remember this feeling I'm having right now. It's like the one I had when I was watching a movie sometime back - a supposedly horror one - "House of 1000 Corpses". Horrible movie that one. In the words of a character from Friends, "I felt like putting my fingers through my eyes into my brain and twirling it around". (shudder). Oh, by the way, the movie also has a sequel - "The Devil's Rejects". Now, who in the right mind, would trot along and make a sequel to that? Then again, who in the right mind, would have even made the first one?
(links via:digg)

Flocked Ya

2005-10-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

I received an invitation from flock today, requesting me to try out their "developer-edition" release. Nice browser - this one. It's based on the Mozilla browser and hence has a lot of customizable features and extensions (a la Firefox). It was also laden with tiny noticeable bugs during my first 15-20 minutes with it, but that's fine - still an infant, this one. The interesting part is that it's actually a social browser of sorts ; has extensive bookmarking/tagging options and complete integration with del.ic.ious, blogger, wordpress & flickr. Sweet!!!. It also has exciting feature-sets such as "On the Fly Aggregation", that creates an aggregated view of various feeds and displays it on a single page (a wee bit similar to Google IG, start or netvibes), "Blog-This" - The ability to blog any piece of text on any page (kinda similar to the one on digg) and "The Shelf", which can store snippets of interesting content for later blogging. My only regret - like Firefox, this one too hogs close to 90 Megs of memory on my system when left running for a coupla hours. But, other than that, maybe I've finally got a worthy replacement for "The Fox".

iPod, therefore I am

2005-10-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Well, it's 12:30 A.M. now and I've just finished reading the live text-feed from Apple's conference. What's new???
A new blue-tooth remote, sleek 20'' Mac G5's (ooh la la!!) and the ubiquitous iPod, now in a brand new flavor that's thinner, sexier,comes in black and plays videos (mpeg4 and H.264). Holy God, if only I had 300 greenbacks!!!!
(rolls eyes mischeviously and prays that someone gifts him the new iPod).

It's a binary world after all.....

2005-10-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

Just out of curiosity, I decided to find out how many bits were required to uniquely identify every human being alive - turns out to be just a handful. Let's see -
The current world population (14:24 GMT 10/12/05) - 6,472,184,054.
Converted to binary, this is - 110000001110001011011000011110110.
That's 33 bits. But, with 33 bits the maximum number that can be obtained is 8,589,934,591 (around 8.5 Billion). At the current growth rate(of 1.4% p.a.), this'll overflow around 2024. Hmmm, no good.

Let's try adding a bit. Since adding a bit doubles its max value, we can go upto 17,179,869,183 (17 Billion) with 34 bits. Now, the population doubling time with a 1.4% growth rate is around 51 years. Hence, having 34 bits will fail around 2075. So, assuming that we don't nuke ourselves to kingdom come in the next 400 odd years, we just need 37 bits to safely cover the entire human population ( for the next 400 years atleast ).If that does'nt make us seem insignificant, what will? ( The Total Perspective Vortex perhaps????)

The Travail Of Passion

2005-10-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

"When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
 When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
 Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
 Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
 The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
 We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
 That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy witha dew,
 Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream."
                                               -W.B.Yeats

Black Flowers

2005-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

"If I could be any part of you, I’d be your tears. To be conceived in your heart, born in your eyes, live on your cheeks, and die on your lips."

A Lament

2005-10-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Coming home every night, I think to myself that I shall not succumb to you, I shall not give up my resolve, and I shall not let you take over my mind and my body; and every morning, in retrospect, I realize I am, but a hopeless case, when it comes to resisting you. YOU – evil conjurer of the dark, seductress of the night winds, charismatic devil of the underworld, you stalk me all through the day and devour me at night; you devour me like a vampire, seeping your fangs into my fragile neck and weakening my consciousness till it capsizes under your immense power. Devil of the dark, I call you. Hideous creature you. Night after night after night, you unleash your minions upon me; I can feel them moving all over my body, slowly at first, then faster and faster, their speed rising exponential with time. In a matter of minutes, I am all but vanquished. A zombie is what I become; waiting on your every whim till dawn breaks and so does your spell. My mind is your playground. You are but a megalomaniac; your desire to play with my mind is what makes you that. Haughty you. Night after night, I succumb to you, shamelessly, helplessly. All my attempts to overthrow your reign have been futile. An evil King is what you’ve become; tyranny is what you practice on me. Bah!!!! Your stench makes me nauseas, yet I can’t turn away from you. You have me in a stranglehold. I struggle in your grasp every night, writhing painfully, my eyes fixated on you, struggling to free myself from this merciless demon, this --- this vixen. But I fail, I fail every single time, every single night. Your most fearful minion, you unleash upon me. His….his “methods” are very different from yours. You are a silent killer, one who stops at nothing till your goal is reached, your aim fulfilled, your efforts aptly rewarded. And then you rejoice silently, letting your victims realize their defeat at your hands. Not he!!!! I am terrified of him. His modus-operandi is….is….”different”. His visits are sporadic all through the night, his stay much more random. And the visions he shows me are puzzling, dangerous, impossible and sometimes terrifying. Every night, you make sure he visits me. But, of his sojourns, I remember none at morn, except that he visited me. I hear whispers, whispers loud enough for me to hear, whispers loud enough to make sure I hear them, whispers that say you call him “Dreams” - A plural representation of a singular entity. I was puzzled initially, puzzled at this thought. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of this does. When I defeat you, none of this will remain. They’re all useless, meaningless without you. You are the ONE - The one mastermind behind this endless drama unfolding every night, the drama that ends with the first light of dawn. I have hopelessly tried every devious attempt to thwart your actions before – but not this time - this time, I have sided with your arch-nemesis - caffeine - he is now my closest compatriot. Together, we shall overthrow you from the throne you’ve taken over in this kingdom, this kingdom where you’re no longer needed. We shall banish you from this place, this holy land, where nothing was black, before you came. We shall watch you limp in agony to the wastelands, to the lands where there are none as helpless as me to devour, none who shall even endure your companionship. You will regret the day you took over me. Mark my words. You will come to regret it. Till then, I shall call you by the name most fear to utter even in your absence.
“SLEEP”. damned “SLEEP”!!!!!!!

(Inspired by a 3:00 AM dream I had last night).

Eternity

2005-09-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

The following is one of my favourite passages from the book "A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man" by James Joyce.

"-- Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun."

There's an online version of the entire book here.

Memoirs

2005-09-10T07:56:00.000-07:00

I stepped out the elevator into a dimly lit bar. It had been raining outside, raining hard and relentless. The night sky was littered with dark clouds - signs of impending doom. A dim silence swept the town, riding on the crest of fear; the fear of an unknown. The entropy of the future was weighing heavily on everyone’s minds. I waited for my pupils to get attuned to the darkness inside. My mind was a haze. Incidents of the past haunted me, more so in my dreams than when I’m awake. I stepped toward a vacant spot and ordered a martini, stirred not shaken. The waitress served me the drink, wearing a false smile. I returned the favor.
Miles Davis was playing on the radio – "Autumn Leaves" – my favorite song. The music was soothing, yet disturbing. I closed my eyes and took a swig of the martini. A sudden calmness descended upon me, a feeling of detachment, as though I’m not a part of this world; as though I was never meant to be. I felt like a woman in a gay bar. The rain still splattered on the roof. I shook my head violently before the nostalgia crept in, shaking it off. It was then that I realized my uneasiness in this place. An odd sensation – as though a pair of eyes was watching my every move, calculating the results and imposing a judgment on me – “The Last Judgment”. Michelangelo’s stunning accomplishment strained my weak imagination till it collapsed into a frenzy of eclectic seizures. I turned my head sideways, searching the faces around me, not knowing what I was looking for. A blind man in a dark alley told me once, “We see what we want to see, not the facts – but our perception of it. A dimly lit corridor is the same as a brightly lit hall”. I know not why this thought came to me now, just that it did. The faces in the bar were all faintly similar, yet each one different from the next; some distraught, others dull and bored, caught in a time they have no awareness of. The hands of the clock slowly crept toward midnight. The minute and hour hands reminded me of two star-crossed lovers chasing each other through the sands of time, reconciling intermittently and breaking up again. It goes on forever, no limits, and no boundaries.Time. The vastness of it reminds me of the inconsequentiality of what is happening. I wearily ordered another martini, the image of Ford Prefect sitting in another bar across the pages of a book, slipping into my mind.
It was then that I noticed her. A dame – with captivating eyes – pale blue. Her hair ran down the length of her back. As she flipped her weary eyelids and gave a forlorn glance down the hall, I realized she was waiting for someone. I found myself cursing the fool who had stood her up. It was sad, such beauty in such a time. She had a misgiven fortune, but at least she had one. Most of us go through our lives like an automaton, attaching no strings of empathy to anything that happens around us, going through life as if it were just another obstacle in our path, another bridge to cross or another bus to take to the office. Feelings of detachment and loneliness take center-stage in this play – the play of life enacted in the theatre of this benevolent Earth. I pulled myself up before I thought I’d drift away and searched her face for clues, clues to a distant past or a near-impossible future- clues that could give away her presence here in this place. I found none. She had an ash-stricken face, almost as if she just got out of cryopreservation. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for a dame. I felt like I had known her all my life. Out the window, beads of icicles were forming across the edges. Suddenly, she uncrossed her legs and stood up. Her legs were achingly long. A faint smile began to form itself across her lips as she took her first step towards me. She never took a second one.
At that instant, a shrill sound pierced the air. The windows shattered, the glass hitting the floor and me. I staggered, but somehow found my footing and stood up. She was staring at me, those blue eyes like a bottomless pit. Machines with wings flew overhead. The entire town was encompassed with a cacophony of titillating frequencies. The end of time as known to mankind was fast approaching. The wailing siren of a cop car could still be heard in the distance over all the commotion that erupted in the streets below. The ground bellowed from under us, like a monster that showed no mercy, buildings shook and cracked at their edges. No one could have had a premonition of what was happening now. It had seemed an impossibility just a couple of months back; but the reality of it now, a harsh stink – like the stink of dark blood emanating from a badly beaten bum. Craning my neck towards the sky, I could make out faint lights – the lights of warships, encapsulating tonnes of fissile material, enough to blow the Earth ten times over. They all moved in perfect harmony with one another, creating silent music from their movement. I closed my eyes for the last time, and prayed - prayed for a different future, a different time. I prayed for her. I prayed so that I need not look at the inhumanities happening right in front of my eyes, heedless of any words, following a path that only some understand. I finally let the truth sink in.

The War. It had begun.

The Missing

2005-08-18T01:25:00.000-07:00

Just read in today's newspapers that neurologist VS Ramachandran was here in Bangalore yesterday. Apparently, he gave a talk sponsored by the Science and Spirituality research of India. I sure wish I'd heard of this sooner. I would've loved to hear his speech. Reminds me of the time when Peter Molyneux was in town and I missed him, as I only got to know of his visit, right after he'd left. Boy, all this is getting a bit too aggravating. Anyway, I still have "Phantoms in the Brain" on my to-read list. Hope to start on it sometime.

The Addict

2005-08-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

Bang!!! Bang!!! Splash!!!Vroooom!!!!Splash!!!!Bang!!!! Bang!!!!
At last. After what seemed like an eternity of game-lessness, I finally satiated my negligent,tormented soul by fragging the living daylights out of hundreds of mercenaries in a tropical paradise in pursuit of a sexy female CIA operative. Before you begin to judge me as a psychotic or a maniac, let me just say that this is the theme of a game I've gotten addicted to over the weekend - "FarCry". Interestingly, I had earlier given up on even installing this game on my home computer as its requirements are a bit steep. But, as luck would have it (incidentally, me and Lady Luck don't actually see eye to eye) , I got a copy and thought....what have I got to lose??? Anyway, the game came through seamlessly on my paltry 32-bit PCI-E hungry system ( after a little bit of tweaking here and there) and, boy-oh-boy, it's painfully beautiful - water, surf, sand, foliage, birds, mutated primates, mercenaries, scientists, blood.....My eyes are wet, fingers sore, brain splintered, ears deaf, hair upright, thoughts splashed across every pixel on my monitor..........but I just can't stop myself from dragging my numb legs across the floor, faint halfway through, wake up, vomit incessantly, pull up the chair and finish what I've started-The redemption of mankind..........right now, the normal world looks like a far cry.

Wishcasting

2005-07-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

Owning an iPod mini myself, I, like countless other ipodders out there, have a wish-list. These are the things I'd love to see in an iPod:
1. A color iPodMini
2. A video iPod (that atleast plays mpeg1)
3. Integrated FM Transmitter and Receiver
4. Blue-tooth for song transfers
5. A much larger display (something like Sony's new NW series mp3 players, which use "Organic Electroluminescence" display)
6. Different screen-color themes
7. Better battery life
8. Customizable exterior frames
9. Support for reading large e-books.
9. Song visualizations.
11. And,for heaven's sake, please give us a BLACK iPod.

Uncanny Valley

2005-07-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

It certainly made sense to me from the first time I came across it. I mean, "Uncanny Valley" atleast explained why I did'nt like the movies "Final Fantasy","The Polar Express" and partly "Bicentennial Man" and "Shrek 2"; though they were graphically astounding. Incidentally, Pixar too believes that such a theory exists. Speaking of anthropomorphism, I just can't resist myself from raving 'bout this Calvin and Hobbes' strip(one of my all-time favourites)-

Body Doubles

2005-07-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Caught "Freaky Friday" yesterday.Funny "feel good" movie that. Made me wonder ; If I had the oppurtunity to switch bodies with anyone,who will it be?

George Bush - On the eve of 9/11
William Murdoch - On April 14, 1912
Roger Federer - The dawn of a Wimbledon Finals match
Gabe Newell - When Half-life went gold
Paul Hewson (Bono) - When he wrote "One"
Albert Einstein - When he formulated the General TOR
The curator of the MET - When the "Tapestries of Unicorn" were removed from their walls
Neil Armstrong - When he landed on the moon
James Joyce - When he wrote "Finnegans Wake"
David Lynch - When he directed "Mulholland Drive"
The first guy who lays his hands on the "Optimus Keyboard"

Terminal Locker

2005-07-14T04:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally had some free time on my hands and thought it would be fruitful to invest it on some useful coding. I ended up writing this nifty little and outrageously simple "terminal lock" kinda utility for Linux. It doggedly does one thing and one thing alone. LOCK YOUR TERMINAL. Without further ado, here's the code:


#include "pwd.h"
#include "signal.h"
#include "sys/types.h"
#include "fcntl.h"
#include "unistd.h"
#include "ncurses.h"
#include "shadow.h"
#include "errno.h"
#include "stdio.h"

#define MAX_PWD_LEN 512

int main(int argc,char* argv[])
{
  int pwdCorrect=0;
  uid_t thisUserId;
  char *encPwd,plainPwd[MAX_PWD_LEN],*thisUserName;
  struct passwd* pEntry;
  struct spwd* sEntry;
  sigset_t allSIG;

  sigfillset(&allSIG);
  sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK,&allSIG,NULL);

  initscr();
  cbreak();
  noecho();
  clearok(curscr,TRUE);

  thisUserId=getuid();
  pEntry=getpwuid(thisUserId);
  if(!pEntry)  goto bad_exit;
  thisUserName=pEntry->pw_name;
  sEntry=getspnam(thisUserName);
  if(!sEntry)  goto bad_exit;

  while(!pwdCorrect)
  {
    getnstr(plainPwd,MAX_PWD_LEN);
    encPwd=crypt(plainPwd,sEntry->sp_pwdp);
    if(!encPwd) goto bad_exit;
    if(!strcmp(encPwd,sEntry->sp_pwdp))
      pwdCorrect=1;
    move(0,0);
    wrefresh(curscr);
  }
good_exit:
  endwin();
  return 0;
bad_exit:
  endwin();
  perror("");
  return errno;
}

The following steps require you to be root.
Compile it with -lncurses and -lcrypt.
Set the s bit on the executable with "chmod a+s a.out". This is because any other user must also be able to run this application.
Copy it under a suitable directory(which appears in $PATH) as tlock(or any other name that appeals to your whims and fancies ) and you're done.
Just run the program and watch that dumb terminal lock up.

Immortality

2005-07-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

I often find myself asking the question "What's life without death?". Imagine yourself to be immortal, never having to face the end of the road, that ultimatum of Life ; when everything you've held dear in your fragile existence is whisked away from you in an untimely manner. "Light at the end of the tunnel!!!! Or is it darkness?". The "I" in you is lost. The egotistical being that man is, is mocked by nature, by God, by the supreme force that created Adam and Eve. "I" becomes "It", just like when you were born. There is nothing to be seen or heard, felt or spoken,your senses lost, consciousness forgotten, limbs motionless. Life comes full circle. Man or atleast the manifestation of his soul is reduced to pulp. Some believe that this soul of man is not lost even after death. It is somehow preserved, protected, safeguarded all throughout its journey from this Earth to the House Of God, where it awaits His decision. Other doctrines preach that the destiny of the soul is not determined by Him, but Us. We are the ones who choose the Gardens Of Heaven or the Labyrinths Of Hell. God has no part in this; He is just an observer- the lone audience of the Game Of Life. There are no rules, no boundaries. Just a beginning and an end. YOU ride the rollercoaster; you decide the track, but not how it ends. Every turn you take might be the last. It's like falling into a rabbit hole. You never know when the ground rushes up to meet you. But, what happens after we finish the game? Do we get to play again? Did we win? Did we lose? A tie perhaps? What would you ask God if you were given just one question? Man is just an object of a derived class ; a class publicly derived from God, who has one default constructor; one that applies to all of mankind. It is in our constructors that we inscribe how we sustain our object through the sands of time. There are feelings within us, thoughts & actions that are marked private, others public, and some others protected. Object interaction is seamless;integration effortless. We are the perfect object, the pinnacle of God's technology, His achievement. Yet, we somehow find ways to perform nasty operations, make illegal function calls, use NULL pointers and basically keep throwing exceptions for Him to handle. But the sad part of all this is, we do not get to write a destructor; a method to somehow clean up our acts, refurbish that tormented soul within us, to gain salvation,peace,nirvana. Maybe that's what we're trying to do through cryopreservation. Trying to live on borrowed time. But, maybe He had foreseen all this. Maybe, he just does'nt give us our object pointers. He only gives us his pointer, but typecasted to our object. So, when we're destroyed, our destructor never even gets called. His definition of us is succinct. Man will be created and is meant to be destroyed. Why be immortal? What would you achieve? You live to see your loved ones die, their final breath, their anguish and suffering at having to leave you, while you hopelessly hold their hands, making futile attempts to bring them back; back to the mouth of the tunnel. Or would you also go around insulting all the people of the world in alphabetical order, just so you have a mission, an objective, a goal to achieve in life?
No, immortality is more than a blessing, it's a curse.

Build me one, Mr.Calatrava

2005-06-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

One of the very few modern day architects that I know of and really admire their work is a spanish who goes by the name of Santiago Caltrava. His buildings are a work of art and illusion;true masterpieces. I am reminded of Howard Roark(The Fountainhead) every time I see one of Calatrava's buildings. His train station at Zurich and L’Hemisfèric at Valencia just take my breath away. Maybe Mr.Calatrava can leave his indelible mark on Bangalore sometime in the future.
Links:
Official Site
L’Hemisfèric -Valencia

A close encounter with "dc"

2005-06-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

Warning:
"dc" DOES NOT stand for:
David Coulthard (F1 fans can stop reading)
Direct Current (electrical engineers, look no further)
District Council (sorry officer!!!)
da capo (dictionary please????)
Before Christ (You're blind dude!!! Get your eyes checked)

Computer engineers, step forward.
dc is a desktop calculator utility on Linux that uses the reverse-polish notation for its calculations. Honestly, I had not come across it until like a coupla days back, and I would've brushed it aside, were it not for the fact that what I saw critiqued my thinking abilities. Well, I bet it would ruffle up your thinking feathers too if you came across the following line:
echo "16i[q]sa[ln0=aln100%Pln100/snlbx]sbA0D68736142snlbxq" | dc.
The above line actually prints the string "Bash".Well, not to be undeterred by this seemingly haphazard arrangement of characters, I started out on the noble mission of deciphering it. So, let's start from the left and work our way through it. Since we've piped the entire command to dc, it's as if dc read this from the stdin. First the basics of dc(assuming you know the reverse-polish notation):
1. Whatever number dc encounters, it pushes it onto its stack. The radix of the input is set by the command "i". When dc encounters this command, it pops the variable on top of the stack and sets it as the input radix.
2. Whenever it encounters an operator(+,-,*,/,%....) it pops the top 2 elements,performs the operation and pushes the result.
3. A macro is nothing but a collection of commands/numbers/operators within square braces"[]".
4. The command "q" quits from the current macro. If we are at the topmost level, it simply quits dc.
5. dc also has around 256 internal registers. The command "sx" pops the variable on top of the stack and stores it in the register x. Macros can also be stored onto registers or pushed onto the stack.
6. The command "lx" pushes the variable in register x onto the top of the stack. x is unchanged.
7. Command "x" pops the macro at the top of the stack and executes it. Hence, the command "lbx" executes the macro in register b. How? Well, it pushes the contents of b onto the stack and the "x" command pops it off executes it. Cool,nah?
8. "P" pops the variable from the top of stack and prints its ASCII equivalent.
9. The command "=z" pops the top 2 elements from the stack, compares them and if found equal, executes the macro in register "z".
Fine, now comes the interesting part of tearing apart this ubiquitous line:
echo "16i[q]sa[ln0=aln100%Pln100/snlbx]sbA0D68736142snlbxq" | dc.
First the input radix is set to hexa by the command 16i. We then store the command q in register a by "[q]sa". The next macro is a HUGE one. We'll tackle it later. Whatever was in that macro, we store it onto register b. After that, we push the number "A0D68736142" onto the stack, and then store it into register n through the following sequence : "A0D68736142sn". Finally, we execute the contents of register b(lbx) and then quit from the program.
Now, the magic is in the macro that we skipped earlier, which is actually recursive. Lemme print that here just for convenience:
[ln0=aln100%Pln100/snlbx]
First, the register contents of n are pushed onto the stack. If you remember, this is that huge hex number. It is then compared with 0 and if found equal, executes the macro in register a, which contains "q". Hence, this is the terminating condition of the recursion. After this, we again push the contents of reg n(since it was popped during the = operation) and the value 0x100 onto the stack. Now,the stack looks like this:
0x100 <- top
0xA0D68736142
We then find the remainder of "0xA0D68736142/0x100" and print its ASCII value. Finally, we find out the value of 0xA0D68736142/0x100 and store this into the register n. At last, we make the recursive call (tail-recursion) to the same macro through "lbx". But now, the register n contains 0xA0D68736142/0x100 instead of 0xA0D68736142. Thus, we repeat the same procedure until n contains 0, at which point we execute contents of reg a,which quits this macro.
So, how do we get "Bash"? Simple:
1. REG N=0xA0D68736142
0xA0D68736142%0x100=0x42=66=ASCII('B')

2. REG N=0xA0D68736142/0x100=0xA0D687361
0xA0D687361%0x100=0x61=97=ASCII('a')

3. REG N=0xA0D687361/0x100=0xA0D6873
0xA0D6873%0x100=0x73=115=ASCII('s')

4. REG N=0xA0D6873/0x100=0xA0D68
0xA0D68%0x100=0x68=104=ASCII('h')

5. REG N=0xA0D68/0x100=0xA0D
0xA0D%0x100=0xD=13=ASCII(Carriage Return)

6. REG N=0xA0D/0x100=0x10
0x10%0x100=0x10=16=ASCII(DLE) ( I don't know what this is. A flaw in the logic perhaps???)

7. REG N=0x10/0x100=0x0
QUIT.

Life or something like it

2005-06-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

what I'm listening to: Do you feel loved-U2
the ringing in my head: Last thing-Diana Anaid
what I'm reading: The Agony and the Ecstacy-Irving Stone
what I'm not: The Da Vinci Code(don't intend to either)
what I'm writing: Computer code
what I'm not: A love letter
last movie I watched: Star Wars Episode III
last place I ate: Sweet Chariot
what I had: ummm, cheese garlic bread, vanilla cheese cake,
mint tea(if you can call it that!!!!)
what I'm thinking: Goa,Apple's move into x86,Ann Coulter,
Intelligent Design,lip syncing in computer games,
101 philosophical problems,the new Dockers ad,
Nokia N90,ipod,Star Wars....
what I wanted to write at the end of the post: this.

this is me then

2005-06-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

I was recently watching this new sitcom "Stark Raving Mad" on Star World, when I realised one of the characters in it was the protagonist in an old TV show called "Doogie Howser". I used to watch that series every day after school (on either star plus or star world. Don't remember which one). That show really inspired my adolescent thoughts, I must admit. It's 'bout this child genius of 14 or 16 who is an M.D. and works in a hospital after school, treating maladies of all sorts and proportions. The end of each episode always signified the end of a hard day's work for young Doogie, where he sits in front of a computer logging his thoughts onto a "blue screen" ( the edit program in DOS????). Anyway, I always thought at that time that the first thing I was gonna do when I get a computer was to log all my thoughts like he did, which I obviously never even came close to. So, that's one of the lame excuses for starting this blog thingy. Ok, so about me: books; objectivism; nocturnal; bangalore; drizzle; enigma; ipod; google;john carmack; michelangelo; pieta; ps3; aquafina; black currant; subway; tea; isla nublar; david gray; depeche mode; dire straits; 21 grams; amores perros; linux; fight club; tracy chapman; bell labs; friends; bbc; middle earth; galadriel; paradoxes; computer gaming; pizza; leelee sobeiski(GOD, I hope I got that right); nicole kidman; keira knightley.... (yaaaaawn.... the list is endless). Mesa getting sleeeepy. Lemme log off by quoting this pleonasm I came across recently:

"...and so it was deja vu all over again".