Holly wanted me to suggest a few books she could read during spring break while she's travelling, so I sat down to write a list of books ordered by genre. Pretty soon it became obvious that any such list would be too big for this page, so I've put it up on a separate page of it's own on this site. You can access it by going to the toolbar on top and clicking on "View>Book List" or by simply clicking here.

What's in a Geek?

Merriam Webster's definition of a geek: 1 : a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.

For Liberty We Stand

I was chatting with a friend late one night and she asked me to define "conservative" in my own way. Here's what I told her:

→ Conservative: You are a slave of society. You go by the blind traditions that have always existed in society and act according to the rules of socially acceptable behaviour.
→ Liberal: You are your own master. You use your own intelligence to decide what is right and what is wrong, and do not give a damn about how society views your actions. If faced with a decision, you think of the practical consequences, and not how it will go down with people.

This is probably a weird definition of the word, but I think your actions as a conservative or a liberal finally boil down to these terms.

Froogle it!!!

The guys at Google never cease to amaze me. Like Apple they constantly think on a tangent and come up with things that you never even wanted, but can't stay away from once you have tasted them! I could write a lot about the latest research going on at google, but I suggest that you visit the Google Labs page and check out their latest work. One great idea which you won't find on the lab website, is called Froogle which is a google search engine devoted entirely to shopping! The next time you want to buy an mp3 player , just enter it into the froogle search engine and it gives a list of search results from the web, with an image of the product and the latest price! I know there are sites which do similar things, but none of them have the reach of Google, or the ease of use that one associates with any Google page.


On a different note, Google news has been criticized lately for not being fast enough.. It broke the Columbia disaster news almost an hour after CNN.. I guess that's why they still call it a beta version.

I still have faith in Google.

A contest for writing unreadable code!

There has been a little known contest since 1984 for writing C code which is creative, totally unreadable, and (possibly) funny. The idea is to write a program which should work perfectly, but should not give out any details of the algorithm to a person looking at the code. Believe me, as simple as it may sound, it requires genius of the highest order to write code which is thoroughly obfuscated. The following program which approximates the value of pi should give you an idea of what The Obfuscated C Code Contest is all about:

/*

 * Program to compute an approximation of pi

 * by Brian Westley, 1988

 * (requires pcc macro concatenation; try gcc -traditional-cpp)

 */



#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;

int F=00,OO=00;

main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()

{

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}

The source code for the above program is in the form of a circle and the value of pi is calculated by calculating the actual area and perimeter of the circle in the program!

The most common method( if you haven't noticed it already) is to use the #define statement to redefine the keywords used in C and then write programs with the redefined keywords. The list of programs here has an amazing collection of programs which use methods far more complicated than the one I just said. In particular, check out this flipper program which inverts any block of text across the diagonal. (simple eh?) But if you invert the entire program code, it results in a program which does the exact same thing as the original program!!!

I should probably just let you check out the programs yourselves but I can't resist mentioning another amazing program which solves differential equations. Big deal eh? wait.. the program incorporates a reversing filter which reverses any text. So? just use the reversing filter on the source code and presto! you have another C program which implemetnts a shell sort! Is that all? You bet it isn't.. Use the shell sort on the original source code and it generates a third C program which generates the Fibonacci numbers!!!!! How much more astounding can you get!

Back to India?

"The top talent in India always has one foot in India and the other in Air-India"


IEEE Spectrum carried a news report today about the reverse brain drain - engineers going back to India. Apparently many venture capitalists are setting shop in India in the field of semiconductors and related fields since it is so damn cheap to operate in India. Apparently when Bill Gates visited Infosys, he was surprised by the fact that all the employees at Infy got their lunch at $0.40 - which was the actual cost of preparing the lunch. Even more astounding was the fact that the CEO Narayana Murthy got the same $0.40 lunch every day! I cannot buy even half a sandwich for 40 cents out here!

The maker of the Pentium Chip Vinod Dham has set up 5 venture capital funds in Bangalore, Intel has setup a new $25 million complex near the airport in Bangalore which employs 950 engineers and Sun has another huge complex in downtown bangalore. Almost all major technology firms are now housed in Bangalore (except Microsoft which has its research centre - only one of the two development centres it has outside the US - in Hyderabad) and I think that by the end of this decade Silicon Valley will refer to Bangalore, India.

One major Incentive? According to Spectrum, $7 million of venture capital in the United States is equivalent to $40 million in India. Now that should certainly register with every firm which is looking towards cost cutting. In any case, the employees are going to be the same Indian dudes.. whether they set up shop in San Jose or Bangalore!


Incidentally H1B seems to be a bad word nowadays. Check out the IEEE position on H1B, the H1B hall of shame and Feinstein's Rule!

Ahh... for a job!

Went to the IEEE-Motorola seminar in the afternoon and the cocktail of coke and root beer (I thought I was refilling with coke, but it turned out to be an awful concoction which smelled like medicine) got me thinking: Someone once wisecracked that a person comes closest to his concept of God when he writes his resume. If people could see their own resumes from the eyes of someone else, I'm sure it would impress the crap out of half of them, and make the other half snort in disgust. I wonder if the HRs joke about the resumes they get everyday and boast about who got the most amount of bullshit that day..



And now that Jimmy is a Graduate Assistant and he no longer has to clock-in and clock-out at TBLR (meaning that he can no longer escape after 20 hours a week), here's a cartoon to cheer him up.

What's in a name-Part II

This is what my psychological profile is, according to Kabalarian Philosophy
.
"The first name of Anil creates an intense personal nature. Your feelings and emotional desires are strong and consequently you are an individual, determined, strong-willed person. Your creative nature and ambition drive you to pursue success to the extent that you jeopardize your personal well-being.
There is a tendency for you to dominate others. You are too certain of yourself, and you are not open to the views of others or responsive to their desires or needs. Also, this name does not incorporate qualities that enable you to be diplomatic and to compromise.
In all your work and activities you are inclined to be rather unsystematic and disorderly. These characteristics spoil stability, progress, and accumulation, even though you may put forth intense effort. Tension and frustration exact a heavy toll on your peace of mind and nervous system.
You are often preoccupied with the desires and demands of the moment. Temper and indulgence could become serious problems in your life. Your health could suffer through disorders affecting the nervous system."


The final rejoinder: "While the first name of Anil has some constructive qualities, it has characteristics that undermine your long-term happiness and success in life."

any comments?

Random Discovery : There are two rooms in ERC on the same floor at different ends of a corridor which have the same number 540. Did someone number a room and forget about it?

The easiest way to change the world:

DO YOUR PART.

Saki's on Mill Avenue has an interesting concoction called Saki's Bomber. It comes with a bottle of beer and a jug of Saki wine. Here's the proper way to drink it: Fill a glass with beer. Fill a small thimble with Saki and then drop it into the beer. Glug the bombed beer in one straight swig. The beauty of this concoction? No hangovers and you don't get drunk either. Try it out at Saki's near Harkins Centrepoint.

Another year. Another Valentine's day.


Being in love means loving every cell and mitochondria in her body. Being able to go through the pain and heartbreak and still want to go down the same path if you could start all over again. I hope every person in this world falls in love.

My favourite romantic quotes:

"As long as i'm coming clean, i've loved you for as long as i've known you, with no provisos, limitations, or explanations." [InstantLoser]

"If you have it [Love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have." [Sir James M. Barrie]

"My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me." [Winston Churchill]

"Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important." [Lisa Hoffman ]

"Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation." [Kahlil Gibran]

"We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack." [Marie E. Eschenbach ]

and finally from the book which I personally rate as the most romantic novel of all time.

’’What can you say about a twenty-five year girl who died?

That she was beautiful.

And Brilliant.

That she loved Mozart and Bach.

And the Beatles.

And me. [Love Story by Eric Segal]

This piece of wisdom is from my cousin Manoj:

Bartz's Law of Hokey Horsepuckery:

The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its
success.

The communications gang at ASU

Here's a picture of the gang at the Turkish-American community's Ramadan(ramzan) dinner. Unfortunately, our good friend Ali who invited us to the dinner is not in the picture.

What's in a name!

As an Indian student in the United States, it's been a huge surprise for me to know that there are Americans who actually go to study in India. When I first came across Jennifer Polan's website, I really couldn't believe that someone would make the effort to go to such a faraway land and study there. Bigger surprise for me when Jennifer actually wrote to me after I put up a link to her website in one of my earlier blabs. Guess what she thought Anil meant in hindi? A squirrel !!! Now that's a first for me.. I've been likened to a frog (makri, as my friends back home know me).. and Gireesh's friend Holly calls me Bouncy, but this one is way better.

I always thought that Anil was a simple name to pronounce and write, but that was before I came here. Everytime someone speaks my name with an American accent, they come perilously close to converting my name to something I can't write here (ahem!ahem!) So much so that when I was introduced to a colleague and she asked me how to pronounce my name, I told her that she could say it any way she wanted as long as she didn't call me An*l. So much for my short name!

S*x, Shaves and Statistics

News on the telly is an entertaining affair in the United States. More so since national television news is the visual equivalent of tabloids here. The main headlines are about store robberies, missing toddlers and drunken driving cases. World news? well that would mean news from Washington. I guess it would take would take another Columbus for the news guys to discover that there is a world beyond this continent too.

The best piece of news on ABC channel yesterday night was about a 20 year research somewhere in Wales about (believe it or not) the relation between shaving and s*x. The amazing researchers actually found that those who don't shave regularly do not enjoy s*x too much and are more likely to suffer a stroke. Worse still, the American Journal of Epidemiology actually published the study. Goes to show that if you have enough statistical reports, you can make a connection between almost anything. Have you noticed that the AIDS epidemic has increased with the widening of the Ozone hole? Hmm... now I just have to find someone to fund my research on this subject...

Want really good world news? watch NDTV.

Guys..this is too hilarious to be missed...

A shloka for our times..


sarve bhavantu sukhinaha,
sarve santu niramayaaha,
sarve bhadraani pashyantu,
maa kaschit duhkkha bhaagbhavet!

Translation:
May all be happy..
may all be healthy..
May all people see good..
let no one be unhappy!

And our paths shall cross..

Columbia blasting off towards yet another tryst with nature..

» Get a 1600x1200 high resolution version of this picture to print

Kalpana Chawla

You did India and the United States proud. We grieve for you and all the astronauts who died in this terrible tragedy. The world will be poorer without you.
[Biography]
»A Nation Grieves
»Profiles of astronauts on the shuttle
»The Chawlas Odyssey
»A Slideshow
»A Nation in Shock!
»University of Texas at Arlington
»Google News on Kalpana Chawla
»Google News on the Columbia Tragedy

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