Road Trip

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

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

goto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My office glows, all night long,

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

An idiosyncratic protocol

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!