::rushabh::

Faster DNS Servers - namebench

2011-06-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

Choosing the right DNS servers can make all the difference between a fast and snappy web browsing experience and a slow and untolerable one. I came across a utility called namebench, published by Google to test out DNS server speeds. It takes about 5 minutes and could result in a faster web experience - I would recommend giving it a shot. In my case, comcast is the fastest DNS server, so no changes needed to be made, but your environment may be different.

Full Disclosure: I work for Google. I do not work on Namebench. Please use it at your own risk.

[books] Surface Detail

2011-04-10T17:28:00.000-07:00

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ian M. Banks's latest Culture novel is, in my opinion, his best work to date. For the uninitiated, Culture novels usually revolve around the Culture, a perfect civilization of sorts, where people live as long as they want, benevolent (and sometimes malevolent) AIs control and provide for everything etc. Except there are tons of races in the galaxy (it is huge, after all) and the Culture deals with those both above and below it on the technological ladder. The most interesting sections of the Culture, Contact (the section dealing with other races) and Special Circumstances (the shady part of Contact) are usually at the center of most of I.M.B.'s Culture novels. No description of any of his works would be complete without mentioning the AIs or Minds as they are called. Generally AIs that control gigantic ships, AIs that are far, far outside the reach of any human, these have their own distinct personalities and play just as important a role in any Culture novel as any human character.

Surface Detail has it all - a new race, an interesting backward civilization, wierd connectons between virtual reality and the Real, crazy (literally insane) AIs with their own quirky personalities. The book is a fast read, I had a really hard time putting it down.

Couple of points of warning:
1. The book has foul language. Lots of it. It is not recommended for children; if it were a movie, it would be NC-17.
2. It is not as depressing as most of Banks's other books (Consider Phlebas for example).

View all my reviews

[books] Containment

2010-12-28T07:01:00.001-08:00

Containment by Christian Cantrell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Good pulp fiction - fast read, interesting idea, though not exactly the most original, and generally well written. There is a bit of a mystery element to it, so I won't go deep into the story, but suffice to say that the synopsis on the book misdirects: I was initially put off by it and left this book lie for a while on my kindle after I bought it. I would recommend ignoring it and just dive in. You'll know within the first quarter or so if this book is for you.

View all my reviews

[books] The Big Short

2010-12-28T06:58:00.001-08:00

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Extremely well written story of the financial crisis, from the insider's point of view. There is a bit of selection bias since all the "insiders" that Lewis interviews actually saw the crash coming and shorted the market. But don't let that detract from the book - its really well done and hard to put down. Lewis explains the various products and terms (CDOs, CDSs, tranches) quite well - most of which are different names for common sensical products anyway - and then goes on to explain how the mess was created, why it was very hard to value and where there was fraud versus bad judgement. He explains the greed factor - and the process of duping the rating agencies (S&P and Moody's).

The book reads like a fiction novel. Its fast, characters (all real people) are the kind you can relate to (like or hate). I loved this book and would strongly recommend it to anyone, regardless of your interest in finance.

View all my reviews

[books] Luka and the Fire of Life

2010-12-14T07:11:00.001-08:00

Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not my favourite Rushdie book, but a pretty good one nonetheless. Think Rushdie crossed with Neil Gaiman and rather bright and written for children. Lots of mythological elements but explores dreams and families and has more fun stuff than usual Rushdie psychedelic strange stuff.

I cannot recommend an appropriate age for this book - certainly not too young since it could get a bit scary at times. All the usual Rushdie staples and extremely well written.

View all my reviews

[books] The Player of Games

2010-12-12T13:45:00.001-08:00

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the best Ian M. Banks Culture novels I have read to date. Perhaps only Matter was possibly better.

Player of Games starts in the perfect Culture universe of parties and general good life - everything is provided for, there is no concept of money because its unnecessary and sentient robots are everywhere. It focuses on the protagonist, the best Culture player at any game ever designed. He has been studying and playing games all his life and is a natural recruit for Special Circumstances (Culture CIA equivalent) to go deal with a new civilization that centers completely around playing one game. This game decides who gets what post in their social and political hierarchies; all the way to the top: the game's ultimate winner is crowned emperor.

Interesting, fast paced, has many of the usual Culture elements of advanced civilizations meeting backward ones (but not willing to take them by force). Humorous sentient drones, interesting personality studies and a good story line make this book a very compelling read. Recommended if you like hard sci-fi, have enjoyed the works of Ian M. Banks, Vernor Vinge or Alastair Reynolds.

View all my reviews

[books] Pushing Ice

2010-12-07T23:16:00.001-08:00

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pushing Ice is my first Alastair Reynolds book. I bought it because it was recommended by the editors at Powell's in Portland (the best bookstore in the western united states, but thats a different story). I'm a big fan of other hard sci-fi authors like Vernor Vinge and Ian M. Banks and this book seemed to have all the right elements of a space opera.

It did not disappoint: it is fast moving, well written, excellent story and it has it all - politics, science, personal drama, aliens. Everytime I thought the book fell into a "usual" mold, the story twisted and accelerated to some other realm. For example: the book starts out with a ship that harvests comets for ice. Saturn's moon Janus, decides to leave orbit and take off on its own - an alien artifact that was masquerading as a moon and nobody realized this. The Rockhopper (aforementioned comet harvesting ship) is ordered to take off after the artifact and figure out what it is. Feels sort of like Rendezvous With Rama doesn't it? Except that it isn't. Its much, much more awesome. Conspiracy in the ship, on earth, who knows where, some bad luck, some bad decisions and the story just keeps accelerating. Starts to feel like Tau Zero. But its not; nor is it fair to give much away beyond this, part of the fun is discovering what happens next.

Its a very fast paced book, really hard to put down. It focuses on a few characters that are developed extremely well - most of the book has a background theme of an ongoing dispute between 2 former best friends. Few things that aren't amazing: while the book is well written, the language itself is not going to win the author awards. This is not to say that its incorrect, just very matter-of-fact. The ending is a bit anti-climactic - but not bad.

Overall: an outstanding work of hard sci-fi. Highly recommended if you like Vernor Vinge and/or Ian M. Banks.

View all my reviews

[books] Dragonflight

2010-07-13T23:26:00.001-07:00

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this book. I discovered this completely by accident while looking for fast reads in sci-fi off amazon. Since it was only 5 bucks, I took a chance and was very pleased at the result.

Dragonflight was first published in 1967. It is set on an earth-like planet that is part of a twin planet system. The basic idea is that when the second planet comes close to Pern, deadly Threads fall on Pern destroying any vegetation that they touch. Pern combats this using indigenous dragons that can teleport. Each dragon has a rider and the man-beast combination is used to destroy the Threads before they cause too much damage.

After reading the description, I will admit that I was not thrilled about the book. It seemed like a stretch; moreover, a story about a battle to save a planet from a recurring natural disaster? Sounds mildly depressing.

The book is anything but: it is very well written; McCaffrey's command over the language is commendable, the story is extremely engaging, fast paced and mind bending. There is an interesting twist to the tale and I would recommend not reading up about the book on wikipedia a priori.

Strongly recommended if you're in the mood for some quick sci-fi.

View all my reviews >>

[books] Starbucked

2010-05-14T08:06:00.001-07:00

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Fast, funny, reasonably balanced read into the workings of the coffee trade and Starbucs. Fascinating parts include the history of coffee consumption in the US - or large, milky, beverage consumption really. Insights into how Starbucks makes money, where the dollars in your $4 latte go, what Fair Trade coffee means and why it exists and finally, the cultural imperialism that Starbucks leads to. Clark tries to be neutral, but achieves that by stepping too far in one direction (anti- or pro- S'bucks) and then overcorrecting, giving the book a distinct "make up your mind" feel.

Not a book to buy, but a good pickup from the library and a fun read.

View all my reviews >>

$4 latte breakdown

2010-05-13T10:05:00.001-07:00

Sad how little of my coffee consumption goes back to the farmer. Breakdown of a $4 latte: http://bit.ly/cpkpJr

[books] Rework

2010-04-07T01:37:00.001-07:00

Rework by Jason Fried

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have great respect for 37signals: they seem to manage to build fantastic, usable product after product like clockwork. Moreover, I strongly agree with their focus on product design and how they generally run things.

Fried and DHH try to distill their philosophy down and put it into a form that is completely readable over a glass of wine and a sandwich. (2 hours, so maybe 2 glasses of wine?)

Key ideas that I love and completely agree with:
* Companies / products are trying to outdo each other in adding features, as if that was the only factor that sold things. Try to underdo the competition - have fewer features than your competition - but really nail the experience. Help people get stuff done.
* Workoholics are bad: they work so hard because they haven't figured out how to get stuff done quickly. Obsessing over minutae is not cool. Working all nights is not cool. Workoholics burn out (eventually). On a personal note: been there, seen that, this is so true, its not even funny.
* Don't plan: any more than you absolutely have to. ie plan for the next day/week but thats about it. Because planning is a joke - all you are doing is making a guess about what you / your team will have done by a certain time. The further out it is, the more variance you introduce and the worse your guess gets. So quit trying. Focus on the next important thing, keep yourself nimble and adjust.
* Be the *not* somebody. As in: UnderArmor is *not* Nike: they are not trying to be Nike. Virgin America is *not* like United and American (I made this one up). By focusing on who you hate and are trying really hard to *not* be, you clearly define who you are.
* Distributed teams work just fine. Make sure you have some time overlap, make sure you all meet up in real life every once in a while (1-2 times / quarter). +1 from personal experience.

This list goes on, this is stuff that I remember (ok I cheated and looked at the back cover and remembered some of the stories).

I think this book is great. It's such a fast read, it's a cheap book, you can get it on various i-devices, read it on your commute or while sitting in boring meetings - just make sure you read it.

View all my reviews >>

pound-o-meter

2010-02-15T01:16:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure: I work for Google. I do not work on the AppEngine product in any capacity.

I wrote a webapp! It is designed to solve one problem: help you keep track of your weight. I had iphones and nexuses in mind, so it should work well on those.

Please check it out: http://poundometer.appspot.com/

Nerd Fanboy Talk:
I love AppEngine. I don't know of other technology that lets you go from something in your head to a production deployed app in a few minutes; where you don't have to worry about creating tables, dealing with databases, all that nasty stuff. And running your own servers too.

OK, I lied. I am aware it is possible to do these things running my own python/django instance or having someone host it or doing something similar with ruby/rails and a myriad of hosting services. Regardless, I stand by my adulation of AppEngine. The ability to write something and deploy it in minutes/hours is simply awesome.

Edit:

Forgot the best bit: Throwing in an easter egg that triggers if user=.

Result (via twitter):

"oh and the bf made me a valentines day app (sort of)! Doesn't get any sweeter than that. ;)"

Nerd Stats:

find . | xargs wc -l
total: 236

python, appengine, Google Chart APIs.

Seashore to do simple image and favicon.

~3 hours, including an inordinately long time dealing with css and figuring out that stupid meta viewport tag to make it look right on a handheld.

[book] Matter

2010-02-12T11:03:00.001-08:00

Matter by Iain M. Banks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My third Ian M. Banks book and perhaps the best so far (Feersum Endjinn and Consider Phlebas being the other two). Matter does not have the distinct writing style of Feersum Endjinn, but is bigger and more interesting in scope. It is a Culture novel and the latest one in the series. Culture novels are distinguished by the fact that they are set in the post-materialistic, intergalactic society/empire called the Culture, but each book is a complete story and environment by itself, so one needn't go in order.

On genre:
Banks writes epic space dramas where the sci-fi and space elements just add that much more spice and deft story turns, but just like the other two books I've read, the space and sci-fi parts of the book are almost incidental. At the end of the day, it is really a political drama set on the edge of a culture clash between highly advanced and underdeveloped societies. The fact that it is set in space, allows Banks to use everything from extremely intelligent AIs to nanotech to really drive home the deification of a super advanced society from the perspective of the backwards. There is this constant, dark overhanging thought of how little the lives of billions of people matter when two highly advanced societies clash. This was present in Consider Phlebas as entire planets and star systems got destroyed in the Culture-Idiran war and is present in Matter as well.

On environment:
I enjoy reading about the environments he creates - Matter is set on a shellworld and it is difficult to explain what exactly that means and why it is interesting without revealing too much. Not only does he create one fantastic world, he throws in 5 distinct species competing for this world (in a way) and their own worlds and backgrounds and such. The Morthanveld water world, the Nariscene war-rock, Culture ships, the Oct and Aultridia and of course, the Sarl that form the center of the novel - each species with its own language, planet/star/cluster etc.

Complaints:
The only complaint about this book, really, is that like the others, it is slow to ramp up, sometimes drags along, and then speeds up and barrels like a speeding meteor to an end that is almost entirely unpredictable (until you get into the final few chapters). It also leaves a bit of a "whaaa???" feeling when its done. I had to go back and read the last chapter again - it made things better, but a bit more closure would have been better. Perhaps.

Overall:
Recommended.

View all my reviews >>

[books] Feersum Endjinn

2010-01-23T14:31:00.001-08:00

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Feersum Endjinn is a work of science fiction set in a time long after the enlightened humans have left the planet and the people living on earth have some technology, not all of which they understand. There is also the kript, or crypt or cryptosphere: an internet of sorts where AIs are free to roam. Moreover, when "real" people die, they can download into the crypt and continue "living" as a sentient being there. People can crypt in at any time and in some cases, crypt forms can take take control of corporeal entities.

This jumble provides for a great story set in the time when the sun's orbit is going to lead the planet into a space cloud, thereby dimming the sun and bringing on a long ice age (the whole thing is referred to as the Encroachment). The first generation of humans anticipated this and left a device to help the rest survive this - this is the titular Feersum Endjinn. The problem is that the current humans have no idea how to activate this and, as if that wasn't enough, have embroiled themselves in internal petty conflict.

Thats a lot to say without giving away the rest of the plot - one last interesting element: the book is written as 4 different alternating narratives. One of these, a character named Bascule, speaks only in phonetics. Thus, there is a good fourth of the book that reads like this:

Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.

Its interesting, albeit on a different plane, how quickly the human brain adopts to this form of written english. Pretty quickly you will find yourself reading phonetics just as well as you do regular English. Fascinating.

All in all, a good book, recommended if you are into science fiction and want something a bit different.

View all my reviews >>

How much money should you donate to Haiti relief efforts

2010-01-18T13:11:00.000-08:00

As much as possible.

This form of ambiguity makes my engineer brain implode. It can't deal with things like "as much as" (possible is a known quantity). So we need to come up with a reasonable model, plug in some numbers and see what it looks like. Here's a proposal:

Match every non-essential dollar you have spent for a week (its been close to a week after the earthquake) with a dollar for relief.

What does non-essential mean?

It depends (hah, ambiguity is back!) but we can take a stab at the definition. For a person reasonably well off (steady job, income that you actually save or invest), it should be everything except food and housing.

Average food cost is $18/day according to Dept. of Labor statistics - so lets double it and say $30/day. For a week, thats $210. Please note: if you are a Googler or a Facebooker or any of the Valley companies that covers your meals, you can't take this deduction.

Housing is 1/4th your monthly rent/mortgage and similarly utilities are 1/4th of your monthlys. Apply corrections as appropriate if you are supporting a family.

Weekly spending estimate:

Favourite form of spending (credit card / cash / atm card) over a month divided by 4. Round up to nearest 50.

Subtract essentials from spending and you are good to go. Mental math if you keep a close track of your expenses, two minutes checking your banking/credit card online if you don't.

In case you need any more motivation:

CNN photos

The Big Picture: Earthquake, 48 hours later and 6 days later

How to donate: Any way you can.

I personally find it easiest to use Google Checkout or Amazon Payments, but thats because I have an established account and its just easy to click away. I work at Google (full disclosure), so if you are uncomfortable about that connection, please use Amazon.

Google Checkout

Amazon Payments (if someone knows the simple URL for this let me know - I cannot unscramble amazon's URL here). You can also just go to Amazon and find the prominent link on their main page.

EDIT: Most companies I know of have donation matching programs; please make sure to look into these to potentially double your gift.

UPDATE: I was reminded of http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/ in case people are trying to find people in Haiti.

[books] Nerds on Wall Street

2009-11-22T20:49:00.001-08:00

Nerds on Wall Street: How Robots, Computers, and Mathematics Have Wired the Markets by David J. Leinweber

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Nerds on Wall Street (NOWS, because nerds must obsessively abbreviate) is a fast, interesting read about the increasing use of computers on the Street. Its a good overview book: Leinweber draws on his vast experience doing stuff at the intersection of computers and finance for a long long time. Its really great if you are a nerd wondering what there is to do in the financial world or frankly how to get a piece of that trillion dollar pie that is the Street. Leinweber talks a bit (and just a bit) about pretty much everything that is computer related - from charting and visualization, data analysis and automated monitoring to algo trading.

There are two reasons for the mediocre rating:
1. Its thin on details: probably because the desire to disseminate information to a larger audience (every equation halves the number of copies that you can sell).
2. There is a lot of repetition. He draws on his experience building several software firms doing various things on or for wall street but repeats the same story several times. Maybe because the book is an agglomeration of various papers he has written (where the mention of his experience would be novel and non-repetitive). Regardless, it does not work for the book.

The good stuff:
1. Good overview. This can't be overstated. The book gets the job done.
2. For a non-fiction book, its a really easy read.

View all my reviews >>

Rolling stones-paint it black

2009-10-24T12:39:00.001-07:00

I'm discovering the Stones thanks to @kristinstecher

Devan

2009-10-21T18:09:00.001-07:00

Devan-112, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Yes, he is *that* cute.

Taking baby pics is probably the funnest thing I have done as a photographer, not to mention perhaps the most rewarding.

[books] Good Omens

2009-09-17T11:36:00.001-07:00

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love Terry Pratchett (though not as much Neil Gaiman, though I'm beginning to change my mind) and this has all the usual humour and fantasy that I would expect from Pratchett. Great book, fast read, just overall fun.

View all my reviews >>

[books] Infidel

2009-09-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
An autobiography that you can't put down - the story of Ayaan Hirsi Magan/Ali from birth in Somalia, childhood in Somalia, Saudi, Ethiopia and Kenya, to adulthood in Holland and an eventual rise to becoming an MP in Holland, to death threats and security crises and eventual move to the US.

Extremely compelling, makes you think of life in the non-western world, especially in Africa and especially Somalia. This is in equal parts a commentary on women's issues in fundamentalist Islam as it is about her life. She does not really offer any solutions to the problem of dragging Islam out of the 5th century into the 21st but does highlight the problems.

A very good read - though not exactly your lightweight beach reading. Strongly recommended.

View all my reviews >>

Has Twitter taken over?

2009-09-09T20:54:00.000-07:00

I feel a bit guilty for not blogging in a long while. It seems that all I do is send pithy tweets about something or another and don't find the time and opportunity to write something (semi-) thoughtful.

This is rather unfortunate :(

[geek] Splitting django views

2009-07-25T18:45:00.001-07:00

Geekiness ahead; you have been warned.

Steve wrote a post about splitting django views. Consider this as another viewpoint / way of doing the same.

The primary problem is to split django's views.py into multiple different modules, ostensibly to make them smaller and more modular (duh).

To begin with, I'm not entirely certain the problem exists - in MVC or MD paradigms, the view is typically very tiny and almost entirely devoid of logic. It is there only to reflect changes made to the model. Consequently, it is unclear that the views.py needs splitting at all. I have not done enough large scale django development (my projects have been of the tiny homebrew variety), so lets assume that views become unmanageable in the long run and need to be split up.

Lets say you have a setup and have the following directory structure:

> ls
__init__.py manage.py* settings.py urls.py urls.py.orig views.py

and views.py looks like this:

> cat views.py
from django.http import HttpResponse

def index(request):
return HttpResponse('index')

def foo(request):
return HttpResponse('foo')

def bar(request):
return HttpResponse('bar')

Now we'd like to break apart views into a directory, so we change it to:
> ls -R
.:
__init__.py manage.py* settings.py urls.py urls.py.orig views/

./views:
bar.py foo.py index.py

where each file in the views directory has its own little function:

> cat views/foo.py
from django.http import HttpResponse

def foo(request):
return HttpResponse('foo')

At this point, note that there is no __init__.py at all.

The original url resolver obviously will not work because it looks like this:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^foo/', 'views.foo'),
(r'^bar/', 'views.bar'),
(r'^$', 'views.index'),

So we change that too:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^foo/', 'views.foo.foo'),
(r'^bar/', 'views.bar.bar'),
(r'^$', 'views.index.index'),

and the site is back up as normal.

I think this approach - explicit directions in urls.py is much cleaner and much more inkeeping with django's spirit of avoiding magic. Note that the other approach which basically imported all functions the minute __init__.py was touched would maintain the urls.py mappings, thus saving a bit of work. However, I think it would confuse the heck out of people, not to mention result in wierd name collisions if any of the individual view files happen to export the same function.

The Sotomayor Hearings

2009-07-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

There was a point when watching the GOP self-destruct brought a bit of joy. The GOP felt like such an alien party - anti-intellectual, anti-everything except God - a party from another planet. Then came the 2008 elections, the Dems won and things were great.

Given their resounding defeat, one would have thought that they would have regrouped and introspected a bit and tried to figure out what went wrong, how they alienated their base and led the most colossal eff-up in the history of the U.S.

But one would be wrong.

Instead they decided to continue on this path of bigotry, racial hatred, and just common thick-headedness. What better proof than the way Jeff Sessions, Ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, manhandled Judge Sotomayor. Quoting the transcript:

"So first, I'd like to know, do you think there's any circumstance in which a judge should allow their prejudices to impact their decision-making?"

"But the statement was, "I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage, but continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate." That's exactly opposite of what you're saying, is it not?"

"...but isn't it true this statement suggests that you accept that there may be sympathies, prejudices and opinions that legitimately can influence a judge's decision?..."

"...I just am very concerned that what you're saying today is quite inconsistent with your statement that you willingly accept that your sympathies, opinions and prejudices may influence your decision-making."

Is Sessions possibly trying to make a point that a person can be completely unbiased? That his or her background cannot affect a judgement? Is it humanly possible? The answer, of course, is no - it is not possible to be unbiased and even if we think we are unbiased, we are not. This is not a statement that I make loosely - the race iat and other literature in psychology would be able to show this easily.

Sotomayor's point was so rational.
"I think the system is strengthened when judges don't assume they're impartial, but when judges test themselves to identify when their emotions are driving a result, or their experience are driving a result and the law is not."

Brilliant.

What is really sad about all this is that the GOP comes out as really bigoted and prejudiced and trying to browbeat a Judge into submission. Not to mention hysterical when a bunch of white guys accuse a latina of being rascist.

This self-destruction of the GOP is very bad for several reasons. For one, I actually agree with a bunch of their ideals - fiscal conservatism, smaller government (never mind that they oversaw some of the biggest increases in government and spending in the past century). But the other, more important reason is that in order for a democracy to function, and to be strong and vibrant, it needs a strong opposition. Having the Dems in absolute power is very, very bad, just as bad is it was when the Repubs were in absolute power: balance is irrevocably lost.

So Dear GOP: Please get a grip on yourselves. Obama checkmated you with Sotomayor - you cannot possibly block her nomination and every minute you pull stupid stunts like the one Sen. Sessions did, you hemorrhage latino votes. Its not a battle you want to fight. And when you do fight, please fight with dignity. Healthy debate is what we want, not mindless Limbaugh-esque repetition of false facts, hearsay and opinion.

[books] Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

2009-06-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Picture this:

The Bennet girls are at a ball. They are upset because Mr. Darcy made some disparaging remark about one of them or their mum. Blah blah blah.

Suddenly, the windows are shattered and the person nearest the window falls victim to the unmentionables, who quickly devour their brains. Because, as everyone knows, there is nothing a zombie likes more than brains.

This book has it all - Jane Austen with her proper romances, haughty bachelors and haughtier spinsters all looking to find the right husband or wife - and Grahame-Smith with his unmentionables (zombies), chinese kung-fu, japanese katanas, ninjas (yes, that's right, ninjas) and other formidable weaponry.

The book is so absurd that it makes you laugh at loud - the section at the end where the author puts in a list of things for classrooms of students to explore is some of the funniest writing I have read.

I want to give this book a higher rating - simply because I admire the author for the courage to write something so patently absurd and the publisher for going along with this. However, at the end of the day, the work is still Jane Austen and no army of ninjas is going to help save the utterly boring romances that Ms. Austen wrote.

This is definitely a library pick.

View all my reviews.

Google Wave

2009-05-28T23:06:00.001-07:00

I'm excited.

[books] Forever Peace

2009-05-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not as good as Forever War, but not bad at all. A vision of utopia where there are means to connect everyone to a global hivemind that basically causes them to lose the will to kill each other. Interesting, some new concepts and some exploration of this idea. A bit heavy on wierd sexual stuff, a bit unnecessarily so, and a bit light on exploring the other side of what pacification of an entire species would do.

View all my reviews.

Photos from the India trip.

2009-05-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Let me know if you cannot follow the links to Kristin's picasa album.

Flaky internet test

2009-04-13T00:31:00.000-07:00

Trying to see if blogger deals with a flaky internet. The internet at home (in Mumbai) where I am right now is rather flaky - pings to google.com range from 300ms to 2s depending on unknown factors. I think its because of the interesting wiring that the "electrician" and the "phone wallah" conspired to put in and convinced my dad that it was fine (because, you know, if you split a phone cable in 2, both lines are just fine, no extra noise from crappy connectors or anything). It also randomly goes OFF. Annoying as hell.

stech and I have a common blog on wordpress (because she likes that more than blogger) at http://bloggingindia.wordpress.com and we have lost two posts already because the stupid wordpress background save *does* *not* *work*. So, so, annoying.

So far, blogger seems to be better - its saving just fine and we'll see with the publish if thats better as well.

Edit: Success! Score +1 for blogger.

New blog for the india trip

2009-04-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

stech made a new blog where we can both post our india experiences.

http://bloggingindia.wordpress.com

[books] Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America

2009-04-07T11:36:00.001-07:00

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace by William Lobdell

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
An excellent book by a journalist about his journey embracing Christ, investigating the Catholic Church and eventual parting of ways with religion in general.

It really is a book in 3 distinct Acts:

Act 1 - From arreligious to an evangelical to (almost) a Catholic:

Its unclear whether Lobdell was an atheist to begin with (I think not), but he clearly was not a practicing Christian. A rough patch in his life led him to turn to God and seek support and solace in the Church. He has nothing but good words for the church that he joined and the people he met. All of them come across as very rational, yet very devout. They support him and help him get on the road to becoming a devout Christian.

Act 2 - Investigating the Catholic Church:

Lobdell was the religion reporter for the LA Times when the Catholic child molestation scandal broke. He investigated various such allegations and returned disgusted as what he saw as a fundamental breach of trust - the priests were supposed to be spiritual shepherds for their congregation and they abused this trust to permanently mess up the very children that they were trying to teach. What made him even angrier was systemic failures in the Catholic Church to expose known child molesters; instead the Church treated it as an internal matter, merely dismissing priests or even worse, moving them to other parishes where the pattern of abuse continued. The Church used its might, money and lawyers to squelch any complaints or protests whatsoever from the children that had been thus abused.

Act 3 - Embracing Atheism:

Investigating the church really seemed to cast a shadow upon Lobdell's faith. This led him to dig deeper and investigate the underbelly of the Christian faith - televangelists, preachers who claim to faith heal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network (largest Christian TV station in the world) and look at the economics of what was going on. Again, what seemed to make him really angry was not the millions that the preachers (or their churches) were making but the straightforward duping of the congregations and complete abuse of their trust. He notes stories of quadriplegics and terminal cancer patients given false hopes that they would walk out of church, healed (they weren't). What's even more heartbreaking is that people would put their faith in God and the faith healers and stop taking drugs thereby making things worse (and in some cases dying).

Lobdell talks about how it was hard for him to let go. He had a difficult time dealing with death - what happens after and if he was going to hell for abandoning God. He talked to friends and preachers about his loss of faith and certain qustions about God that had been bothering him - and didn't get any answers that he considered good enough. Its unclear if this was so because he had already made up his mind and was talking to these preachers almost as "due diligence" or out of a genuine need to resolve things.

On a personal note, the third act of the book really resonated with me. I went through something similar when I left the Jain fold around 2000. Its hard to deal with the fact that there is this life and then that's that - ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But if you come to terms with that, it makes life really nice. The worst that can happen to you is death. Every moment past is never coming back, so enjoy it to the fullest. Doing something you don't like to do is a monumental waste of time. Its also "simple". I don't have internal conflicts about being an engineer doing science by day and talking in an unknown language to beings whose existence is unprovable at night. I don't have to come to terms with reconciling faith and evolution or having to deal with things that I cannot measure (or view someone's measurement of the same).

All in all, a great book. Highly recommended.

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Flip sold for $500M+

2009-03-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

See this post on allthingsd.

I'm happy for the flip guys - I have bought one and the gf has been gifted two (including the one I bought). I think the camera was very innovative and they did a good job making and marketing them.

I also think that Cisco bought the wrong thing at the wrong time. My prediction is that the Flip brand (or whatever Cisco rebrands this as) gets wiped out over the next 3 years. The reasoning here is the following:
Flip at one point was the disruptor in the market - they marketed a device that did not do stills at all, or poorly and was not a competitor to entrenched still camera models like those made by canon or kodak.
Flip was not a very good camcorder either because it did not come with optical zoom, lots and lots of buttons that nobody but the real pros can figure out, and generally looked like it had poorer construction.
It had two things going for it: it did HD and it was cheap.

Classic innovator's dilemma here - a cheap disruptor that is unappealing to any but the lowest segment of the market. Moreover, this is a section of the market that the incumbents are more than happy to get rid of - they most likely are making tons of money selling medium to high end HD cameras and there really isn't a developed market for the Flip.

This is all good stuff for the Flip people. They survived, they did a good job and completely changed the landscape.

However, now we get to a point where the sustaining innovators are catching up - the still cameras which used to take mediocre (at best) video are now starting to do HD. And they're getting cheaper. The Flip may be the cheapest HD camera around, but not by much. This means that its market share will dwindle unless they can continue to disrupt the market - and its hard to see where. Moreover, Nikon and Canon and Kodak are the experts when it comes to making lenses and other things that people start to care about when the price point is the same. The Flip cannot compete with this and Cisco does not employ optics people.

The Flip guys did the right thing by flipping the company over. My prediction is that Cisco writes this off their books in 3 years.

** Of course, I have no data to back up any of the assertions I'm making, but you knew this already :)

[books] Empire

2009-03-08T12:28:00.001-07:00

Empire by Niall Ferguson

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
A history of the British Empire from an unabashed imperialist. A very different perspective on things from what I learned as child from my Indian history books - a complete reversal of good guys and bad guys for one.

Fergusons explores the economic basis of the empire - its start in the Carribean and the West Indies and the rise to power of the Royal Navy. He makes an important note that the Empire did not start out through political means - it was not wars of annexation by a power hungry monarch that drove the British Empire; rather it was the hunger for trade that drove the merchants to various parts of the world. The merchants needed two things -

1. Security of their selves, their markets and their trade routes.

2. Creation of new markets, by force if necessary (and usually).

And thus the creation of the strongest naval force in the world - the Royal Navy had 44 captital ships and the rest of the world combined had 42!

Also tied into this mix is Christian Evangelical zeal, but for the most part, according to Ferguson, this did not form a basis for expansion as much as trade did.

He makes no attempt to euphamise the bloodiness of the formation and maintainence of the Empire - from the Carribean to Africa, to India and the East Asia, the Empire was marked by periods of bloody, violent struggle with the better equiped British typically mowing down scores of ill-equiped natives.

His most interesting theories concern the fall of the empire. He believes it was not so much that the empire crumbled from within, as other big empires (German, Russian, Japanese and later American) came in to conflict with the British and forced it to disintegrate. In the aftermath of the two Great Wars, Britain was completely bankrupt and dependent upon its colonies and the Americans forced them to disintegrate as part of bailing them out. He does make an interesting point that while the rise of Empire spanned many centuries, the fall was surprisingly short - less than Churchill's lifespan. Churchill was a reporter at the Boer War (still an Empire in rising) and presided over the loss of India and much of Africa.

A prescient quote for the Americans (who may not find this book as interesting as those living in the Commonwealth) - "Once Britain had been the world's banker. Now she owed foreign creditors more than $40 billion. The foundations of the Empire had been economic, and those foundations had simply been eaten up by the costs of war."

Highly recommended for peoples (or who's grand peoples) were the subjects of the crown.

View all my reviews.

[books] A Study In Scarlet

2009-02-25T23:33:00.001-08:00

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This remains one of my favourite Sherlock Holmes novelistas - its very obvious why Sir ACD's work became so popular - edge of the seat who-dun-it and the greater story is really the backstory behind the story. Really good stuff; if you have never read any Sherlock Holmes, this is the book to start with (and its free!!!!)

View all my reviews.

[books] The Gods Of Mars

2009-02-25T23:30:00.001-08:00

The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Pulp fiction at its best - beautiful princesses that need to be rescued from monsters or monstrous people, ridiculous amounts of gore, great acts of bravery and a hero (the only earthman on mars) who is far superior to the rest of the martians - this book has it all. Good to read for pure, mind numbing entertainment but don't expect to derive any long enduring benefits or deep thoughts from this one.

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iMovie '09 / Full Switzerland Video

2009-02-18T09:59:00.001-08:00

I finally got my hands on iMovie '09, thanks to Andy and the Lattners. I used it to produce the following video.

Pros:
o I like the cheesy project wide transitions and themes you can apply.
o It seems less buggy than iMovie '08
o The slow motion is pretty cool - once you find it.

Cons:
o Still VERY buggy. I had to retranscode my video several times before iMovie didn't insert periods of black frames or get stuck for several minutes. My theory is that iMovie does not deal well with b-frames in a clip that point to i-frames outside the clip. When this happens, iMovie freaks out and inserts a long period of black or just freezes on the last i-frame. Either way, it blows. My workaround was to "convert" each clip where this was happening - and that seemed to solve the problem.
o Their "large" is too small to qualify for youtube HD - which means that this video is only available in HQ. Annoying when your source material is definitely HD. I think I can get around this; more experimentation to follow.
o No good audio editing. Lots of people on the interwebs have posted about this and they're mostly right.
o Did I mention that it was very buggy?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2009-02-10T14:24:00.000-08:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Interesting, translated, swedish fiction. The subject matter is rather dark and I don't regularly read detective novels anymore, so in some sense this was a welcome change, but it also reminded me of why I gave up on this genre. The writing (or the translation) is interesting - its very to the point, matter-of-fact sort of narration. It gives the book a very wierd feel - almost like you are reading a scientific paper or something but with a murder mystery and lots of sex. Very strange. Its got a bit of computer hackery thrown in - quite funny if you know what he's talking about and what can be actually done and which parts are written with a rather liberal literary license. All in all, a "Borrow" at best, good for quick reading on a plane or something but not worth your valuable dollars (or francs, as the case may be).

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Flumserberg, Switzerland

2009-02-09T07:16:00.001-08:00

[edit] Go to the video at YouTube and hit the play in HD if you want the primo quality stuff.

Going up the lift at Flums. The morning was really nice above the cloud cover; then the clouds came up and spoiled it all :(

Gang Leader For a Day

2009-02-01T10:14:00.000-08:00

[update: s/Gag/Gang/]

Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you were ever a fan of The Wire (and who isn't) - this is a book for you. I picked up this book by accident - Indian dude on the cover, catchy title and I have read Freakonomics and really enjoyed the analysis of how gangs worked; quite enough for me to pick up the book and start reading in the bookstore.

I didn't really buy the book the first time around - just put it on my list of "should read later" books. I was delighted to find it in the library and picked it up on my way to board a long flight. This turned out to be a *great* idea: the book is really hard to put down, the tales of life in the Chicago projects is so gripping - its this unreal world that is only miles away from the really rich parts - and did I mention that it is absolutely unreal?

Venkatesh is (or was at the time of writing) a grad student at the U. of C. and as one of his early projects had to go survey people in the chicago projects. The crazy thing is that he actually did it - he went into the projects to these scary looking black guys and asked them "How does it feel to be poor: a)Very angry b)Somewhat angry c)Neutral d)Not Bad" (The question is mine - I made it up, but the original survey was not that far off). After the scary black dudes with guns stop laughing, they think that Venkatesh is a member of a rival latino gang and want to kill him until the boss steps in and lets Venkatesh in (sort of). What starts here blossoms into this 4+ year friendship between Venkatesh and J.T. that gives him unrivalled access to members of the Black Kings (various names are changed for anonymity, I'm just using the same names used in the book) including several years worth of detailed accounting data about all the gangs activities. This later formed the basis of Venkatesh's collaboration with Stephen Levitt (of Freakonomics fame).

The book is at once a portrayal of life in the american ghetto and an account of Venkatesh's personal story as he comes to grips with what he's doing and what his project has evolved into. The decisions that he has to make - is he a neutral, like a journalist? Should he help the man who just got shot? Should he buy food for the kids who don't have money to eat because the mom spent it on crack? He brings to the surface the real underbelly of America's capitalist machine - the people that society forgot and would rather not be reminded of.

All in all, an excellent book. Fast, easy read (the prose is easy, not the subject matter). Buy / borrow it today.

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Gears Of War 2

2009-01-30T01:09:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I had a dilemma: two sequels to two games that I had loved were about to be released at the same time: Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. In a nod to the general state of the world economy and being a reasonably cheap Gujju, I decided to limit myself to one, not both of these promising games. The dilemma, at this point, is obvious: which one gets bought?

After going back and forth a few times, I settled on Fable 2: I convinced myself that I really had liked Fable more than GoW the first time around, so I was setting myself up for good times.

Big, big mistake. Fable 2 sucked. It was way, way, too easy. There was no penalty for death (other than ugly scars), the money system blew - there were ways to get unlimited wealth right away, the characters got really fat (I am not making this up) unless you ate nothing - in which case you would no recover health in mid battle. The battles were useless - my mage was easily using melee and shooting guns and killing things, all without casting spells. The final thing that killed it off was that it had recurring disc issues which is apparently a well documented phenomenon and reported on various game boards. Great.

Luckily, I managed to sell the game off for $40 or so and got GoW2 instead.

What. An. Awesome. Game.

I cannot believe how much fun this game has been. I just finished playing the normal campaign and it was absolutely great.

Highlights:

Stunning graphics: The worlds look spectacular. The charachters look great too. They have kept the Gears 1 type of overly muscular, chest-bigger-than-a-gorillas sort of look and it just looks great. The monster art is pretty spectacular and the cut scenes make it look like a movie.
Great gameplay: I played single player, split-screen co-op and xbox live co-op. All of them were great. The combat is fun and its not difficult for a newbie to pick up (thinking of certain housemates here). I really enjoy the cover-and-shoot style of play that the Gears series pushes, rather than the run-around-and-dodge style that the Halo series espouses.
Multiplayer Co-op: I got stuck trying to knock out the boss - the AI was being silly (look in lowlights), so I jumped online and found an old friend from Seattle who happened to be playing the game too. Created a multiplayer coop, was is combat with my friend in seconds and a minute later: no more boss. He was cool with playing some more and we essentially finished the game together.

Lowlights:

AI: The AI that controls the friendlies is really bad. It was bad in GoW1 and hasn't seen much improvement in GoW2. Case in point: revival. When you die in combat, you basically get really hurt and start crawling around. At this point, your buddy has a limited time to come revive, or heal you and you can fight again. You would think that this is one thing that the AI would be able to do well: see a fallen buddy: revive. But no. You will be crawling around right next to the friendly bot, and no revival. Seriously: WTF?
Story: The story in both the games has been pretty weak. Marcus (the hero, the protagonist, YOU) runs around above-ground, below-ground, all over the place, without a seeming purpose. Saving something, destroying something else, now destroying the thing you saved and saving the thing that you half destroyed - sometimes it just stops making sense. There is a lot of alluding to some sort of back story concerning Marcus's father but we never really get to what it is. And just when you think its going to all come together, it all falls apart even more.

If you have not played this game yet, I would strongly encourage you to get it. Parents: beware. Very foul language (F-word all over the place) and tons of gore (chainsawing through the locust) make this game not at all kid friendly. My best game of 2008 - I wish I had bought this much sooner.

2009-01-15T16:45:00.000-08:00

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of the best books I have ever read. I cannot wait for the next episode in this saga.

Many people read a previous Amitav Ghosh book such as The Hungry Tide(which I loved) or The Glass Palace(which I could not get through) and were generally put off by his writing style. He likes to take his time, likes to describe everything, setup the scene. He does not hurry through the story; thus making Sea Of Poppies anything but your everyday adventure story.

There is so much about this book I liked: the characters are exceptional, all rather strong, explored in detail, and all *interesting*. There is a lot of imagery - anyone who has read any of Ghosh's previous work will immediately understand what I am talking about. What is very interesting here is that the book is set in a bygone era of indian history when India was ruled by the British East India Company and *not* the British Government. There is so much stuff written about India prior to the British and so much about their rule and a bit about post-independence India. However, this is the first book, fiction or not, that I have read that is set in East India Company times. Most of all, however, is the story line. At the end of the day, Sea of Poppies is an adventure book full of pirates and slave ships, action and adventure. Thoroughly enjoyable read and some of the best English writing I have known.

View all my reviews.

Ski/Snowboard equipment buying guide

2009-01-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

I originally wrote this as a response to a friend who wanted to know if she could/should buy gear online. She got a much bigger response than she expected (ha!) but I think its a reasonable ski or boarding checklist or at least reasonable to post here.

What are you buying? Skis? Boots? Bindings? Poles? Clothes?

In general, the stuff that I'm okay buying online is clothing / apparel and bindings. Everything else, you probably want to see and have a professional fit you out with good things rather than go online.

Skis: Go to REI / Play It Again Sports / Sports Basement and they'll help you out with the size and style of skis that you need depending upon their level. If you have an iphone around, you can cross check the price against Evo and see if its comparable. I've bought a TON of stuff from
Play-It-Again, both in Bellevue and in Seattle and their service has been excellent (replaced broken boots for me no problem) and their staff has been pretty informative and helpful. REI is the same, though they tend to be busier; however the Redmond staff was great.

Bindings: Most skis now come with regular support and thus bindings are interchangeable. However, most ski systems you buy will come with bindings as a package, so most likely you won't have to deal with this.

Boots: This is the one thing that i would *not* buy online. The fit is extremely important and most places will give you a fit guarantee - they'll custom mold your boots if they don't fit perfectly. You really want this because boots change their fit after the first couple of
weeks of wear - for ski boots, the inner layer will mold to your foot, but the outer plastic won't. Almost all ski boot people will tell you to get a shoe that is a bit tight, wear it for a couple of weeks and see if it "opens up". In some cases, they will have to modify the
plastic itself, which they can do as well. So again, strongly recommend bricks-and-mortar (evo has one too) store over online.

Clothes: Definitely stuff to buy online and cheap. I'm sure you guys have gone skiing before, so you have most of the stuff, but just in case, here's the clothes checklist, especially if it is going to be extra cold:

long underwear: silk, performance stuff, REI brand is great, underarmor makes awesome stuff as well. Usually $50 / upper and $50 / lower. Worth every penny.
Ski pants: waterproof outer ski pants, any brand will do, just make sure they're water proof, *esp* if you are learning.
Fleece pants: optional, if you're the kind that gets really cold, really fast. Get a pair of these, they're cheap (~20-30), and last forever.
inner fleece (upper body): you're living in seattle, so you have to have multiple of these lying around.
outer shell: again, water proof is the most important part.
ninja mask: http://www.rei.com/product/725711 I own one of these and its *awesome* when its cold and windy. Worth the $20 bucks.
inner gloves: thin, inner gloves - only if you're the kind that gets very cold.
outer gloves: most likely you already have this, waterproof is the most important part. I've used the REI brand for years and they're great.
wrist guards: *only* if you're snowboarding.
goggles: don't make the mistake of going skiing with sunglasses; it only works in california, if you're lucky.
hat: common mistake people make is to not get a waterproof or water resistant hat and it gets snow on it and wet very fast. Try and see if you can get a waterproof one. Also make sure it has ear protection.

Also remember that both REI and Play-It-Again will rent stuff out.

Dvorak

2009-01-06T18:40:00.000-08:00

This is my first post written using an all Dvorak keyboard layout. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Dvorak is a newer/better keyboard layout compared to good ol' qwerty. I started the switch to Dvorak sometime in late November partly because I had some rsi-type issues because of long hours spent on my laptop keyboard, but mostly because I wanted to learn something new that was not an esoteric programming language.

I cannot elaborate on the reasons to switch to dvorak as well as these guys do If you are remotely interested in switching to dvorak, this is a great (and relatively short) read.

If you do decide to go ahead and take the plunge, this tutorial is awesome. I will strongly recommend doing most, if not all of it to get your fingers used to things.

Finally, one thing I really wanted to do all along is measure how well (or not) I was doing over a period of time. So I used Google Spreadsheets and measured my wpm and error rates using the same measurement tools to track my progress. I used this site (typing the Gettysburg address over and over again) to measure these - its not a good sample for work stuff because its rather thin on the ;s and certainly doesn't include <> and [] or /=. The C language and the Gettysburg address don't have much in common it turns out.

Item Numero Uno:

My great hope, when I started this exercise, was that I would be able to prove that learning dvorak does not imply that I couldn't do qwerty. Something along the same lines as learning French isn't going to make you forget English. Bzzzt. The data isn't very good at this point and I'm pretty close to DISproving my hypothesis - assuming you can count my experiences as "proof".

Item Deux:

The dvorak error rate has been under 10 for quite a while now and what is most interesting is that it got to under 10 within 2 weeks of starting to learn dvorak. I don't know if this is the strength of the dvorak layout or the power of the human brain to learn something completely different so quickly (it certainly isn't me - I am typically not a fast learner with anything involving motor coordination), regardless, I think the low low error rate is astounding. I am interested to see if the error rate stays down as the WPM goes up (I suspect it will).

One more thing for the (extremely) nerdy: I didn't switch any of my emacs keybindings at all and its not been too bad. Definitely had periods "discovering" some key combinations that I "knew" but it doesn't take too long to adjust.

All in all, I can't wholly recommend or disrecommend dvorak at this point. I have definitely had my share of frustrating moments - typing at 20 WPM is slooooooooow - but then again my rsi hasn't kicked in and I've been hitting the laptop pretty hard. I think I'm on the positive side and am definitely past the point of no return in my conversion, so its unlikely that I'm going back, but I feel that the journey has not been easy and you'll want to be sure about it before diving in.

Google's Collaborative Spreadsheet Art

2008-12-29T11:54:00.001-08:00

Pretty cool!

Egypt

2008-12-15T15:50:00.001-08:00

Egypt-140, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

I'm back from a trip to Egypt for about two weeks. Egypt is amazing, magical, old. I loved it - it was like going back to India except with 3000 year old monuments.

Over the next few weeks, as I develop my 1000+ pictures, I hope to start writing some posts about the various places we visited, with pictures, of course. So stay tuned.

Why Do Indians Get Boned For Green Crads

2008-11-09T00:19:00.001-08:00

Dear President Elect Obama,

A few days ago, the latest status report from the INS came out. If a person from India, qualified with *at least* a Masters Degree or equivalent work experience (around 2+ years) applied for a Green Card in June 2003 they are now eligible to get it. This means that they would have been waiting in line, patiently, for almost 6 years, chained to their current employer, fearful of getting fired or doing something wrong and losing their job, because then the wait resets!

In comparison, if you are a European with equivalent experience, you get your Green Card right away. If you are a less qualified European, you would have had to apply in May 2005, almost two years later! Finally, if you are an unskilled European, you are at about the same place as a highly qualified Indian.

And here's the kicker: Most of these Indians with Masters Degrees got them from US Universities. If you kick us out, or force us to leave because bonding ourselves to the same employer for 6 years can get a bit stifling, you will lose US educated and trained talent. From whatever angle you look at this conundrun, it doesn't seem to make sense. The only reason I can think of is that the INS is prioritizing Europeans over Indians and Chinese, and the only reason you can think about for doing this, is because the INS is trying to maintain some sort of racial equity in the makeup of immigrants to the US, an equity in which Europeans are more equal than Indians or Chinese.

As a President, you will, hopefully, have the opportunity to fix this. Please do. Giving us Green Cards can only help the US as we start companies and employ people (usually US citizens) - note that we can't start companies on H1-B visas. It would be nice to be free of the INS bogeyman and feel welcomed into this country.

Even John Doerr seems to agree.

Thank you,
Rushabh Doshi

America 2.0

2008-11-07T00:38:00.000-08:00

Numerous articles have been written about how Obama's victory was a victory of the Internet as a medium for reaching out to people. Elections in this country (and thus slowly around the world) are never going to be the same again. Three things, in decreasing order of impact, but increasing order of coolness:
1. YouTube: Obama's campaign used YouTube very effectively - diligently posting every single video out there for people to watch on YT. They have gotten ridiculous numbers of views on these videos, never mind all the auxilliary videos that other people made about campaign or parts thereof or Change - all basically selling the Obama brand. The numbers on his YouTube page are absolutely astounding. 1.2M views, 2.3M views - absolutely nuts. YouTube's importance as a medium for communication, (mostly) without restriction, and its gobal reach can only make this an even more important medium in the future.
(Full Disclosure: I work at Google on YouTube, but these opinions are mine and do not represent the views of Google or any of its subsidiaries or employees (other than me))
2. Twitter: Obama's twitter updates were good, but not great. They were more propogandaish and less extemporaneous, the way the rest of the world uses twitter. I think by 2012 campaigns will have fully figured out how to make use of twitter and we will see a *lot* more tweeting going on. In case you missed out, some of the best election time comedy was played out on twitter via FakeJohnMcCain and FakeSarahPalin.
3. Flickr: I only found out about Obama's flickr page today, and its fabulous. The pictures on flickr are so "in-the-moment", its unbelievable. If you wanted to show the "human" side of Obama (not that he has any trouble with image-management), that flickr site is all you would need to point people at. I can only imagine that someone like Flickr will grow as a medium for pictures that are not official and are not shot by professionals at Time and other places.

Technology, or rather, the Internet, has forever changed the way elections are run; the way campaigns get the word out to people.; the way money is raised. I truly appreciate how much the Obama campaign "gets it" as far as tech is concerned. Case in point: change.gov is up and its barely two days after election night. This is truly government that moves at Internet speeds. I can't wait for January. I truly hope that Obama makes good on his promise to open up Government and bring the best of the Internet - openness, speed, flexibility, instant communication and response - to Washington. This really is America 2.0.

Sold on pingg

2008-11-05T16:04:00.001-08:00

I used www.pingg.com to host my election night party - send out
invites, manage the lists, you know, the usual sort of thing that one
does while hosting parties.

Pingg is *excellent*. Goodbye evite. I have wanted to kick evite to
the curb for sooo long, I'm ecstatic that I'm finally able to do so.
Pingg provides an unparalelled dashboard to see what the current
status of all the attendees is, manage things like sending reminders
and such. It is very, very usable - about the only quirk was not being
able to easily import my address books from gmail - I used their
import feature, but it could use some work. Other than that, it was
absolutely fabulous.

Party Throwers Unite!!! Ditch stupid evite for pingg.

[books] Brisingr

2008-10-27T10:51:00.001-07:00

Brisingr by Christopher Paolini

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
Brisingr is the third book in what was supposed to be the Inheritance Trilogy. However, a while ago, Paolini made the "Trilogy" a "Cycle" paving the way for a 4th book. So the stories do not conclude in Brisingr, contrary to my prior expectations. Disappointment #1.

Eragon, Eldest and Brisingr are, at the end of the day, children's books. And as such, not meant to be compared to fantasy novels such as Lord of the Rings. Tolkien far outstrips Paolini in terms of his language, both English and the various invented tongues. Paolini's invented languages sound rather like German or some combination of Northern and Eastern European languages, far less "outlandish" than they should be. The dwarfish that he invented is interesting though and not quite like elfish (which is what my former reference was about).

However, if my only points of dissatisfaction where 1) that it didn't end the story and 2) the invented languages were, well, not quite fake enough, it would probably mean that the book was reasonably good and not deserving of a 1/5 rating.

I think this book is arguably the weakest of the 3 so far. Eragon was powerful because he was setting up the stage, exploring the world, but threw in some large fights and chases and introducing magic and such.
Eldest was interesting because it introduced new worlds (elves) and new, powerful charachters (Oromis, Glaedr, Nassuada). It moved the story forward and culminated in a big battle (a bit reminiscent of the Two Towers in LOTR where the second book ends with the Battle of Helms Deep). Still good though.
The third (and current) book, introduces only one new charachter, and mostly meanders the story all over the place. It could have been a lot shorter - I have no problems with long winded descriptions of things, but pages and pages about walking and flying with little consequence (waaay too much like World of Warcraft) just drag the middle part of the book to no end. The final "climax" is rather predictable and expected and just leaves you with "meh".

Overall, not a great book, I will probably read the 4th to just finish off the series, but I'm no longer recommending this to any younger cousins or friends' kids. Its not worth the trudge and the return on investment for going through 1400+ pages (all 3 books) is lower than expected.

View all my reviews.

[books] Anathem

2008-10-19T23:58:00.000-07:00

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Anathem is the latest of Stephenson's books after his mega-massive System-Of-The-World trilogy (I don't know *anyone* who finished all three).

A couple of things make Anathem daunting and mildly annoying (to begin with):

1. 900+ pages. Ouch.

2. It is based on the planet Arbre where people speak Orth. Yes. Its got its own language. And the language is annoying as heck. To begin with.

The first quarter of the book is the hardest. He is setting things up and taking his time to do so. The language is really, really annoying at this point. Its like someone speaking some wierd dialect of English. A lot of the major concepts in science and philosophy are thrown in, but you have to determine what those are - everything from Darwin to String Theory to Occam's Razor exist somewhere in the book, but they're probably called something Saunt Edhaar's Rake. Go figure.

However by mid-book, things are flowing. You get used to the language, even start liking it to some extent. I was always trying to map Arbre's history / philosophy to well known concepts and its sort of fun. He builds almost everything from the ground up, so its a treatise on Philosophy (to the extent that a work of fiction involving, uhm, many concepts can be). I'm trying really hard not to give away the surprise that gets built up - not really a gotcha per se, but more like, "hrm.. what the heck is going on" sort of deal.

The last 75% is impossible to put down. If you've made it so far, then you're completely hooked. Last week was hell, with three nights of reading until 3am, then waking up and going into work with a nasty mood primarily because of lack of sleep (work colleagues are awesome and put up with my grumpiness). Finally, it gets down to blowing off everything, including girlfriend, so you can really just finish the book and see what happens.

Ending is wierd, but hey, its Stephenson, if you expected a normal ending, you're the sort that believes in Unicorns.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to a *particular* set of friends I have. I'm not sure what that particular set is, but I can picture a whole bunch of my friends who would *not* like this book (Yes, K, I'm looking at you). Thankfully that set (the unrecommendeds) are not exactly waiting with baited breath to read this review or the book for that matter. How about the following: If you like cryptonomicon, if you liked *any* of his previous work, if you like science fiction mixed with real science, mixed with philosophical questions about Life, the Universe and Everything, there is a reasonable chance that you'd like this book. Just plough your way through the first 25% and then you're good to go.

View all my reviews.

Mehndi

2008-10-07T17:00:00.001-07:00

Mehndi Party, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

iPhone bugs

2008-10-05T14:41:00.000-07:00

Took a pic, here's the result!

Henna

2008-10-03T00:19:00.001-07:00

Mehendid Hand, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Vistas from the sky

2008-09-27T17:40:00.001-07:00

Skydiving, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

The Awesomeness of Flight

2008-09-27T17:31:00.001-07:00

Skydiving, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Jumping out of airplanes

2008-09-27T17:15:00.001-07:00

Chris and I jumped out of an airplane. It was his birthday present from Tanya and I was along for the ride (and doing my duties as comrade-in-arms-for-insane-stuff).

I thought I would be really scared when I'm sitting on the edge of the airplane looking down about to fall off. I was wrong. There is no time for that. Its two seconds between sitting on the edge and falling off. Before you know it, you're plumeting towards the earth at 100+mph. Whoa!

The instructions-to-peril ratio in tandem skydiving is near 0. Instructions include "hold on to straps" and "put head on my (instructor's) shoulder". Yippee.

The dive was from 13k feet, so not much freefall - about 1 minute or so.

You can't scream while freefalling. Too much wind, nothing comes out. And even if did, there's no one to hear anything.

The earth looks very pretty. Like an extremely high res, large field-of-view Google Earth. Really.

The jerk when your parachute opens up isn't that bad. I felt it for sure, but it wasn't the hard crazy jerk that I'd imagined it would be.

My tandem instructor guy let me play around with the controls a bit. Pull left hand to rotate left, pull right to rotate right, pull both to slow down. It seemed to work quite well.

Its quite common to get nauseated or even throw up after the jump. I was in the former category.

I was really worried about breaking my ankles when I landed. Turns out you can just pull in your legs towards the chest and stick them out (sort of like keeping-ski-tips-up) and land on your butt. I totally made use of this alternate landing technique and was quite happy with the results.

This checks off one of the boxes of "stuff-to-do-before-death", so YAY!!!!!

Spore

2008-09-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

I finally gave in and bought a copy of Spore yesterday. I spent half the night playing it, even though I was dead tired after getting up at 4am for my flight home. Oops.

My reaction to Spore is definitely mixed, bordering on disappointment. I guess I should have figured this, given the online reviews and the Gamespot reviews (all of which I had read before), but still.

Overall impressions:
1. The game is beautiful. Even with all the graphics turned down (so my Mac Pro doesn't choke), its still pretty.
2. The game is *too* easy. I played it on normal. I was in the space stage in about 4 hours. I must have died a total of 5 times, 4 in the protein-soup kind of phase.
3. There is very little depth to the game. If you're into designing your own creatures, great - more about this later - but if you're into *playing* a game, its got very little depth.
4. The way your creature looks does not affect the way it behaves. *How* disappointing is that! There are things you can get on your creature that affect its attributes for sure, but the correlation with how your creature looks is minimal.

My creature around the beginning of Phase 3 (land animal)

At the end of Phase - 4 (small village / tribe)

My tank, to takeover cities and wage general mayhem:

At this point, I got tired of expressing my creativity and just gave up and started using standard Spore constructs to obliterate the rest of the planet (using ICBMs, no less) and take them over.

There is a lot of fun to be had designing your own cute or ugly creatures. There are definitely different strategies that I want to try out (herbivore vs omnivore etc). So there is going to be some replayability here. Also, I have to note that I haven't quite "finished" the game per se. Just getting started with the space phase, so lets see how that works out.

Finally, Spore thinks I'm waaaay too aggressive - the word it used was "Vicious". Apparently, blowing up the entire planet using nukes isn't cool. So yeah, first game was all carnivore, completely mayhem / war on every other tribe and eventual victory. In 4 hours.

Self Perpetuating Web 2.0 Hype

2008-09-05T01:32:00.001-07:00

I've been reading a bunch of things in my Google Reader "Computing Scan" folder. This is my high noise, quick read folder where I expect to find one interesting thing every 20 entries or so. This includes blogs such as Hacker News, TechCrunch, CrunchGear and GigaOm. That's quite enough for 500+ entries / day.

I read a bunch of entries like this one from HN that talks about sharing screenshots on the web and a startup to do the same. So lets talk about this:
The problem: How do I share a screenshot.
Solution: Use floomby.com

Like. Seriously?

Sharing screenshots was such a big market opportunity that you created a startup around it? Oh and btw, it shares music too or videos or whatever files you want.

Again. Seriously?

Like there aren't half a dozen companies that have tried doing this over as many years and have had moderate to no success.

I'm all for startups, all for ideas. I'm not an entrepreneur but hope to be one someday. I do believe in ideas that are worth something. That have some hope of solving *a real problem*. Some hope of making money. This seems rather ridiculous.

Finally, on to the subject of the post itself.

I feel that a bunch of startups today - *especially* the YCombinator kind, solve problems that are largely "Web 2.0" problems. By this I mean, problems that 90% of the web doesn't have because they don't use the tools that have these problems.

I don't mean to trash YC. Clearly, their strategy works. As proven by Xobni and Omnisio and a bunch of others, they have companies that create value. Their approach to finding these companies seems to be to micro fund anyone that is willing to put in the work and create a small feature-like company. But a lot of these companies are solving micro problems that are created because other companies with web-2.0 type sites haven't caught up to them.

Please give me a YC company that is solving a *real* *hard* *problem*.

[books] The Innovator's Solution

2008-08-27T12:28:00.001-07:00

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I finially finished working my way through this excellent book. I think the Solution is actually better than the Problem - but is not a substitute.

It has excellent lessons, with the usual case studies that is standard Christenson fare. I believe these to be important regardless of your particular situation - may you be a worker bee in a big organization, an entrepreneur trying to figure out how to break into a market or a big company exec trying to figure out how to not get eaten by the dozens of downmarket competitors.

I particularly like the framework that is laid out for evaluating the position of a given company in the oscillating cycle of specialization vs commoditization (and back) and how that changes what a company should be focusing on.

View all my reviews.

The complete Hacker News feed

2008-08-23T01:47:00.000-07:00

A friend and I were discussing feeds that we read and feeds that frustrate us. One of our common pet peeves was Hacker News.

The good:
Its fresh. Compared to the news here, Slashdot feels like old and eaten by mothballs.
The opinions are not absolutely stupid (ala Slashdot).
All in all, a worthy read.

The bad:
Each item on HN is a link. And that's it. So you *have* to go to the next site to read it. This is fine on a laptop (sometimes) but it *completely* blows on my iPhone where doing this often causes Google Reader to get swapped out in Safari thereby resetting my state. Yes, yes, I know, its reader and Safari that are to blame not HN, but HN I can fix.

The fix:
Enter Yahoo Pipes
I played with it for about 20 minutes and came up with a way to get the HN feed and fetch all the content for each item and insert it back into description.
The result? A Hacker News Piped Feed that you can subscribe to! Its rough around the edges - a lot of pages have tons of horrible content and this thing snarfs it all up; but it gets the job done.

Enjoy!

Mythbusting

2008-08-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Tried to break a bike lock by freezing it first using inverted canned
air.

Epic fail.

itunes and ampache: fixing a broken relationship

2008-08-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

iTunes does not like m3u files. Or at least not the kind that ampache spits out. For the uninitiated, here's the flow of things to get music streaming to your computer:
1. Find friend with *humungous* music collection.
[check]

2. Get said friend to give you access to his collection.
[check]

3. Friend runs ampache which looks so ugly that you can't wait to get off the webpage and onto the listening. But that's okay, because the music is really good, and there are few other solutions out there that do *exactly* what you want, despite really bad html+css (user xp? what's that?)

4. Get the m3u playlist you want to play.
[check]

5. Watch iTunes add *each* song into its library as if it were a different song.
[scream in frustration]

6. Google search like crazy. Not compromising on:
6a. ampache, or
6b. itunes.

7. Turns out I'm not the first to notice iTunes's brokenness and people with more time than me have created a nifty utility called m3u2itunes which sort of fixes the problem. In the same way that a spare tire solves a flat tire problem. Which is to say, it doesn't solve it at all, but at least makes the experience a little less like a dentist appointment.

8. Be happy again. You can listen to said friend's library *and* not destroy your itunes catalog in the process. Woot.

C++ is still #1

2008-08-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

Love it or hate it, the data does not lie.

Google's CodeJam competition has plenty of stats about the languages used to solve problems; plus they give you the data if you want slice it and dice it differently. The two most interesting charts:
1. http://www.go-hero.net/jam/langbar

C++ is indubitably #1. And this is in a competition where coding speed actually matters - you have two hours to do 4 really hard problems. I would have thought that python / ruby / perl / lisp and other high level languages would have *dominated*, I'm glad I didn't put any money on it.

2. The Olympics of coding (by country)
Lots of Indians were enthusiastic, but we take a beating in Round 2 (the order is a bit messed up; its Qualifying, 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2, 3). The Chinese are *dominating*, and its a toss up between the Russians and the Americans.

Oh and try solving some of the problems: definitely my day of learning humility when it comes to coding.

Dictionary lookups with quicksilver

2008-08-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for the hiatus, etc)

If you're using a Mac, QuickSilver becomes an invaluable add on very, very quickly. If you're not using, it stop reading and install it now.

Really, I'll wait.

Now that you have QS installed, here's a way to do really quick dictionary lookups:
Open QS preferences
Go to plugins
Add the Services Menu Module.
Note: Do *not* add the dictionary module - that will not work in 10.5.
Once this is done, you can open a normal QS window using your hotkey (mine is Apple-Space)
Hit "." to start typing free text.
Hit "Tab" to go the secondary window containing a list of actions.
Start typing "Lookup in Dictionary.app". Usually, I have to type "Loo" before QS figures it out.
Et voila!

Much better than going to dictionary.com or dict.org or even doing "define: foo" in Google.

[books] Lord of Light

2008-06-16T13:36:00.001-07:00

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I just reread Lord of Light and I'm promoting it to my favourite sci-fi/fantasy book of all time. It is extremely well written, its a fast read, and the Buddha kicks some serious butt. What more can one ask for.

View all my reviews.

[books] The Queen's Gambit

2008-05-27T23:14:00.001-07:00

The Queen's Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Bobby Fischer story; except that Bobby is a "she". Really good stuff, fun, fast read. Predictable ending, but if that is the best I can come up with, it must be pretty good.

View all my reviews.

[books] Marooned in Realtime

2008-05-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great fiction from an accomplished writer. It is not a Fire Upon The Deep, but it is still an extremely compelling and rather fast read. Armchair detective novel - except with statis based time travel.

View all my reviews.

Solving the iPhone headphone problem

2008-04-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

Inspired by http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif comparing iPhone headphone adapters, I took a pair of scissors and a knife to my own headphones and fixed the problem. For those that are unaware of the problem here's the short version: iPhone has an almost normal female headphone plug, except that its a tad too deep to accommodate the mic. As a result, almost all "regular" headphones don't work. This has led to a whole industry of adapters, ranging from $5 to $10 that fix this problem. Turns out, a knife does the same. For free (as in beer). Results below:

Those are my JVC headphones, not iphone headphones. That little ring on the side is what I cut out. All you need is about a 1mm cut and that does the trick.
Do *not* blame me if you try this on your $200 Bose headphones and end up cutting the wire instead. I am not liable, YMMV, and all that.

When the problem is really hard...

2008-04-13T01:02:00.000-07:00

... change the problem!

This sounds like a cop-out, but by that measure, most of engineering is a cop-out.

This sort of engineering happens in all fields, but since I am most familiar with CS, I'll go over an example from there.

The problem domain arises from the design of caches. It is also applicable to any general search / query optimization and I'll talk about that briefly at the end. On to caches - I'm talking about the web sort here not the processor sort. So on to the problem itself:
Imagine you're building a large cache of webpages. You have the webpage itself on disk, but ideally you don't want to hit disk to avoid the 8ms hit. You can reference each webpage by some id, which is, say, a hash on the URL. One easy thing to do is to store all the ids in a hashtable using some reasonable hashing function. Even with perfect hashing, your hashtable is going to be size O(n) if you have to store n elements. This is fine if the number of documents you're storing is small , but if you have a large number of documents (1 billion docs * 8 bytes = 8G memory), and realistically you don't have a perfect hashing function, this can become quite cumbersome. So what do we do?

Enter bloom filters. Bloom filters are a type of probabilistic data structures that use some fixed number of bits and provide the guarantee that if an element is not found in the bloom filter, it does not exist in the cache. If an element is found, then it is in the cache, with very high probability. What this realistically means is that your bloom filter can say that you have something, when in reality you don't. In most cases this is okay, because the probability of this happening is sufficiently small.

The simplest kind of bloom filter is conceptually pretty easy to explain too. Lets suppose that you're hashing a set of elements S = {x1, x2, .. xn}. Lets use a bitset of a fixed size - say 1024 bits. Now we hash x1 => k1 where {k1..kn} is a number in 2^1024. Inserting an element x1, we hash it to k1 and flip that bit to 1. Thus your bloom filter looks like this:


x1         x3    x5
|          |     |
v          v     v
10010101010100000001100000
           ^
           |
           x2

x1 => k1
x2, x3 => k12

When we search for x1, the bit is 1, its a hit, we look for it and its there.
Similarly x2 hashes to k12 and the bit is 1, we look for it and its there.
Lets assume x3 is not there in our cache. We search for x3 and it hashes to k12 and the bit is 1 and we try to look for it and its not - its a false positive.
x5 hashes to k17 (or something like that) and the bit is 0, so we know definitively that the element is not in our set.

This is a brilliant optimization that helps out in a surprising number of search problems where the time hit on a false positive is acceptable.

I'm sure I didn't do a good enough job explaining bloom filters, so here's a great talk on the same. The first 10 minutes are really good and then he gets into a lot of very complicated stuff that optimizes various aspects of bloom filters. If you're implementing your own, I'd recommend the whole talk, else just the first 10 minutes or so.

Thus in the end, if you look at the problem definition of hash - "tell me, with certainty, whether a particular element exists in a set or not", its difficult (for space reasons). But if you change the problem definition to "tell me, with certainty, whether a certain element is not in a set, but you can be wrong about it being in the set", suddenly the problem becomes solvable along the space axis.

Snowboarding!

2008-03-31T11:13:00.001-07:00

More snowboarding videos!
This time its Chris shooting the video with me (in yellow) going down the mountain.
The video was edited using iMovie, which is a nifty little program, if you ignore the really obvious bugs.
Enjoy!

Koenig lookup in C++

2008-03-21T00:28:00.000-07:00

This is a nerdcentral post, so non-nerds (all two of you) can stop reading now.

I was dealing with some piece of code at work which looked like this:

// In some header file namespace N { class C { ... }; void DoStuff(const C& c_obj) { ... } } // namespace N // In some .cc file N::C c_obj; ... DoStuff(c); // <-- Look! No need for N::DoStuff

I looked at DoStuff(c) without the N:: prefix and figured that it must be a bug. Someone forgot to put it in. But this code compiles fine - what gives?

I remember reading about this way back when I was really into C++ and thought it was the hottest stuff on the planet. Thankfully those days are behind me, but not everything that I learnt. So I dug into this a bit and finally came across Herb Sutter's article explaining exactly this.

Before you read the article or even read this one furthur, its a good exercise to try and figure out what's going on. What are the possibilities that would make this work? A good guess is someone did a
using namespace N;
somewhere up above. This would indeed make things work and this is why using namespace declarations are a very, very bad idea in header files. They're usually a bad idea in .cc files too, but less so than headers.

However, the above example isn't because of a using namespace somewhere up above. Instead, it is because of a feature of C++ called Koenig lookup. The basic idea is that besides the usual places where a compiler looks to resolve a symbol (local scope, global scope, etc) it must also look in the namespaces containing each of the parameters of the function. As a result, our good ol' compiler looks within namespace N as well, and lo and behold, there's DoStuff defined in N.

Why is this useful?
STL uses this feature quite a bit. Its "normal" to declare things like this:

namespace stl { template class datastructure {...} } } // namespace stl template void operator+(stl::datastructure& s1, const stl::datastructure& s2)

I'm not certain why this is better than declaring operator+ to be a part of datastructure itself (it will have the same effect), but this is C++ arcane voodoo that is beyond me. Anyway, I prefer using better tools these days, but now and then, we have to deal with languages that were really not intended for the ordinary mortal programmer.

Ted's mornings

2008-03-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is my model of what Ted's mornings are like. Much cleaner room, of course, etc, but you get the point.

The Cult of Obama

2008-03-10T10:54:00.000-07:00

It started with this twitter from obama's campaign:
"BarackObama: In Columbus,MS & wondering how somebody who's in second place is offering the vice presidency to the person who's in first place. Vote Tues!"
Hil-a-rious!
All things lead to YouTube and this message was no exception. In the links that followed on the reply twitters, I came across this video:

I'm a die hard obama supporter. I think the guy is awesome in many, many ways.
But that video freaked me out. That video is so singularly cult like that its not even funny. This follows on the heels of a piece I heard on NPR (podcasts) where the Wait, Wait folks make fun of Obama comparing him to Scientologists and got hordes of angry letters from the Obama supporters. Kind of like when they made fun of Scientologists and got hordes of angry letters from the Scientologists.

Edit: Kristin sent me this over IM:

Translation:
To the candidate who is Barack Obama
I sing this corrido with all my soul
He was born humble without pretension
He began in the streets of Chicago
Working to achieve a vision
To protect the working people
And bring us all together in this great nation
Viva Obama! Viva Obama!
Families united and safe and even with a health care plan
Viva Obama! Viva Obama!
A candidate fighting for our nation
It doesn't matter if you're from San Antonio
It doesn't matter if you're from Corpus Christi
From Dallas, from the Valley, from Houston or from El Paso
What matters is that we vote for Obama
Because his struggle is also our struggle, and today we urgently need a change
Let's unite with our great friend
Viva Obama! Viva Obama!
Families united and safe and even with a health care plan
Viva Obama! Viva Obama!
A candidate fighting for our nation

My take: OMG.

Visualizations for a new world

2008-02-27T14:30:00.001-08:00

Data visualization is an intersection of statistics and art - one to
be correct, the other to make sense and engage our attention. Excel
and other spreadsheet programs do well at the "typical" visualizations
- pie charts, lines, bars and whatnot. Where they fail miserably is
trying to show "Vietnam today is similar to the US of 1970 based on
mortality rate and GDP". This is the sort of stuff gapminder excels
at. It makes effective use of availabie dimensions - x, y, size,
color, animation for time. One thing I would be interested in looking
at is using OpenGl or something of the sort to add the z axis and
allow the user to freely rotate and explore and even 'fly over' the
data. A good talk, albeit somewhat long.

Go. Vote.

2008-02-04T14:56:00.000-08:00

For once, I can preach without fear of a "Did you?" backlash. Give me citizenship and I will be first in line to vote. But meanwhile...

Please. Get. Out. There. Tomorrow. And. VOTE.

Links from Google Reader

2008-01-28T19:37:00.001-08:00

Interesting stuff from my Google Reader. Posted by a python script!

The “Secret” To Making Something Great

Getty Images for sale

Venture Fundings Hit $29.4 Billion in 2007: The Year in Charts

Alchemist author cites piracy as a reason for his success

The biggest problem with the Kindle

Snowboarding!

MapReduce II

MapReduce: A major step backwards

MapReducing 20 petabytes per day

Link Blogging

2008-01-27T14:09:00.000-08:00

New experiment: Google Reader has this awesome feature called "Share it". Well, you can only share it with other people using Google Reader, which makes sense in a "promote Google Reader" sort of way. Eh, whatever. Google Reader is an awesome product and I love using it, but if you don't want to use it, that's your prerogative.

The question then becomes "How do I get my shared stuff over to you". The idea was completely Andy's - he's doing something similar, I'll let him explain on his blog when he's ready.

I can't post the script without sanitizing it because it contains my Google Auth token (yeah, its *in* the script - ha!) but if you really want a crossposting script that will take your feed off anywhere and post it to Blogger, let me know and I can clean it up and post it.

And the whole point of the experiment is to find out if link blogging is super-annoying or not. Right now cron's running it once a day - so if you think that's annoying (or not), do let me know.

Links from Google Reader

2008-01-27T14:06:00.001-08:00

Interesting stuff from my Google Reader. Posted by a python script!

The biggest problem with the Kindle

Snowboarding!

MapReduce II

MapReduce: A major step backwards

MapReducing 20 petabytes per day

MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick

China and the U.S. economy: Fallows follows the money

ACM Classic Books Series

Google’s Achilles Heel

A Familiar Quote

Snowboarding!

2008-01-26T16:02:00.001-08:00

My Tahoe snowboarding video, as shot by famous director Stecher. Note that the director is not above taking a few videos of herself, in the third person, *while snowboarding*.

[books] Monstrous Regiment

2008-01-22T02:18:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett lately and been loving it. Pratchett's humour and sense of satire and style are unparalleled in the sci-fi/fantasy world. For the uninitiated: most of Pratchett's books are based in a world known as Discworld: the world is a large disc resting on the backs of 4 elephants which stand on a giant tortoise that travels through space. Asking what the tortoise rests on is considered bad form in Discworld. Pratchett's books have several recurring charachters and almost all of them share the desperately-not-trying-to-be-a-hero trait. Most of the heroes would run away from battle, hit their enemy when they're down and turned away and in general fight as unfair as possible, most of them lie, cheat, steal and do whatever is necessary (or sometimes just for the fun of it), almost like in real life.
I keep going on about Pratchett and I haven't said much about this book. Pratchett was definitely feeling pro-feminist when he wrote this one. If you ignore the message at the end, where there lie huge swaths of feminism that are hard to avoid, the book makes for a pretty good read. Generally light and humorous, standard Pratchett fair, and leaves you with a good feeling at the end.

[books] Nine Princes In Amber

2008-01-22T02:08:00.000-08:00

I started Zelazny with Lord Of Light, suggested by my friend Evan. Read it, loved it.

The Chronicles of Amber are a whole series of fantasy/sci-fi books written by Zelazny decades ago but have maintained their awesomeness unhindered by Kronos. Nine Princes is written as seen through the eyes of a prince of Amber who wakes up on Earth with slight memory loss. It takes you through his recovery as he talks to several key charachters and tries to figure out what Amber is and who he is. Lots of interesting concepts, lots of political intrigue, subterfuge, in fighting among large royal families, and best of all, lots of unanswered questions for book 2. Can't wait.

On Energy Conservation

2008-01-16T13:17:00.000-08:00

I'm an engineer. As an engineer, when you think about optimizing something or fixing something, you think about the 80% case. Its nice to think of the tiny micro-optimizations that will gain you a percent here, a percent there, but for the most part, they're futile academic exercises. Applying the same logic to energy, I think the 80% problem is energy *harvesting* not conservation.

Note: harvesting not production. Why? The sun is the closes source of infinite energy (by todays consumption rates). Various nuclear reactions on the sun are going on and are expending the energy stored there (as a result of the big bang, or God, depending upon your choice in these matters) and blasting this energy out to us. The amount of energy that sun blasts out does not change irrespective of how much you or I use. It is available for harvesting and if you don't harvest it, its gone.

Note again: I lied. Energy coming from the sun is clearly not infinite. Its a finite resource. However, it is more, by several orders of magnitude (unverified, pulled-out-of-thin-air stat here folks!) than the energy that we consume as a planet.

Hence my conclusion: Conservation is not the 80% problem. Better harvesting is the 80% problem and that's what we should be focusing on.

Now this is clearly untrue for known finite energy production resources such as nuclear fuel, coal, natural gas and of course, oil. The known capacity of these resources is within the same order of magnitude as our current energy needs x several decades or centuries. Which is worrying given that as our society evolves, our energy needs will go up and thus the known period of time for which we can survive on these resources will go down.

There is another, non-trivial argument for conservation: Energy costs. *Because* we get energy from increasingly expensive finite resources, the cost of energy keeps going up. Right now, its bordering on the edge of becoming a non-trivial part of living expenses, I think sooner or later, it will become this. Some percentage of our living expenses will be the energy. Cities will be able to attract or repel people based on how much energy they can supply and how much it costs (this already happens for industry which requires a steady supply of clean electricity at relatively low costs). So for purely monetary reasons, I think conservation is fine - even necessary in order to keep our daily costs down.

However, for anything else, we're attacking the wrong problem. Lets focus on harvesting, not on conservation. Go after the 80%.

[books] A Brave New World

2008-01-14T23:28:00.000-08:00

My "classical" education is definitely lacking. Aldous Huxley is required reading for most high school or early college students these days. Well, not mine.
For those that haven't read it, its a vision of the future that, depending on your perspective, describes either utopia or distopia.
Unlike 1984, the people living in Huxley's world aren't miserable - far from it. Free love, perpetual employment at 30-some hour weeks and all the drugs that you want make it a great place to live. What is even more striking is the caste system, unlike any other caste system, is stable. Stable because people within a given caste are made, physically and psychically, to server their purpose. An Epsilon is happy to be an epsilon because he doesn't know any better - he doesn't know what it would be like to be an Alpha and is conditioned to not care. Very, very powerful concepts for societal control.
All in all, a definite Good Read.

Books

2008-01-14T23:11:00.001-08:00

I've been reading a lot lately and I realize that I maintain no record of what I read. I probably don't recollect (after a month or so) what I felt were the best/worst parts of a given book. This amounts to essentially a waste of my time, other than the instantaneous temporal pleasure I derive from the very act of reading itself. Enough. I'm documenting all the books that I read, however pithy from now on. Resolution for a new year.

Javascript, Settlers of Cataan and Randomness

2007-12-17T23:33:00.000-08:00

My roomates and I tend to play a lot of Settlers. One common complaint is that the dice rolled unfairly. Even though all 3 of us are trained computer nerds and realize that dice cannot be completely fair over a very short cycle (average game is 70 rolls), we still like to complain about how we lost because the dice rolled unfairly or at least in inopportune ways.

In order to track what the rolls were, I wrote a dice roller. Its very simple javascript code and users javascript's built in random function to roll "dice". The nice thing is that it keeps track of dice rolls and can plot the aggregate distribution of rolls as well as rolls over time. Check it out here (or even better, use it in your next settlers game!!)

http://keeda.stanford.edu/~radoshi/dice/

This was my first javascript program ever and I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to write something like this in a language that I had never touched. I was even more impressed with MochiKit and PlotKit - the two libraries that allow me to generate the spiffy charts. Another advantage of writing client side javascript: Visit the page once and you have the "application" in your cache - no more server communication required for endless hours of settlers play.

Google Maps Terrain

2007-11-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Total, insane, wowness - terrain maps on google.

View Larger Map

Airport Express

2007-11-18T18:20:00.000-08:00

Andy hooked up his Airport Express to the receiver in the drawing room yesterday. I didn't think much of this, not being a believer in technology and all that (I mean, c'mon, I work in the industry - there is no such thing as *magic*). I have to admit that the little express thingy has made me eat mud - its *awesome*. Go Apple, once again. I have been sitting at the table, all afternoon and evening, coding, futzing around on my computer, all the while streaming music from the laptop to the music system via airport express. Not one glitch, no desyncs, nothing. Its as if my computer was connected to the stereo directly.
Now I really cannot wait for Andy to get the Apple TV.

Waiting for the snow...

2007-10-19T13:25:00.001-07:00

There is a point in time, every year, that I stumble upon youtube snowboarding videos - and at that point, I just *cannot* wait for snow.

Story of my life

2007-10-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Trust me, its 3 minutes, watch it for at least one and half.

The Big Move

2007-09-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

Sitting in front of Andy's TV watching the dudes compete for sub-second times on Mario Kart. Good times.

I'm done with Seattle. For the moment, at least. Now in ... Sunnyvale. Woot. Kinda. But lots of wooting for finally making it back to the Bay Area. Will start working again, after my 3 week hiatus. 3 weeks is definitely not enough vacation.

Mountain goat surprise

2007-09-04T23:25:00.001-07:00

Hello 'dere, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

We saw a bunch of mountain goats on a short hike to Hidden Lake. The goats were interesting - not scared of people at all. All they did was stand and pose for all the tourists clicking away. We walked back to the parking lot at the end of the day to find a whole herd of bighorn sheep hanging out by the cars. People were literally driving upto the sheep and taking pictures in their face. Apparently the sheep didn't care.

Hiking to Grinnell Lake

2007-09-04T23:23:00.001-07:00

Hikers at Grinnel Lake, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Evan, Dianne, me and Allison (in that order) at Grinnell Lake.

Montana

2007-09-04T23:21:00.001-07:00

Fishing, originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Got back from a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. This is the quintessential picture that will always remind me of the trip and the Park. So much of the Park is similar to this - large, nay, huge mountains alongside pretty lakes. Definitely a place worth visiting.

Welcome

2007-09-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

नमस्ते!
Welcome to ::rushabh:: redux. Thanks for following the link from wherever; if you are adding things to your blogreader, please add this and retire the redefine blog.
Why?
I'm tired of Movable Type. Its comment system is something that I have to fight in order to get it functional without spam and I refuse to fight all my battles; I'd rather have someone else fight them for me. In this case blogger. Yay!
Sure - I lose offline writing, but I'm sure there are alternatives for blogger. If not, I can write one over the weekend. Not worried.
Having a blog that works, without headaches or spam? Priceless.
(Not really, but at free, I can't complain!)

First post!

2007-08-28T18:45:00.000-07:00

First post in an upcoming transition to blogger. No longer a huge fan of MT I am.

::rushabh::

Faster DNS Servers - namebench

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