We Programmers are Important too...

For Want of a Nail, A Kingdom was Lost! goes a famous rhyme. Quite often, major events depend on such small and seemingly inconsequential things that they are often overlooked, leading to terrible disasters. When Apple first released its popular iTunes program, thousands of Mac users installed the program, only to find their hard drives wiped out. The reason, apparently was a missing semi-colon (;) in the code caused by an (apparently) sleepy programmer. Thankfully, only drives where the folder names began with a period were affected. Not so lucky was the Mars Polar Lander which crashed on the surface of Mars in 2000.The error was just a single line of code, probably so obvious that (ironically) no one noticed it. More recently, it appears as if software bugs are causing Patriot missles to aim and fire at coalition planes instead of enemy targets.

(Wonder how my Project Manager felt when she ended up with 2500 emails in her mailbox after I forgot to edit out a line of code while testing the email server!)
Related Aside: Winning entry in a competition to devise the worst Windows error message: "WERE you sure?"

On the Wisdom of War

A little sanity in these difficult times. Let me reproduce here, some quotes by people who were truly great statesmen and intellectuals. Their collective wisdom is much more than anything I can ever write, so over to them:

"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
- John F Kennedy

"There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.."
- Thomas Alva Edison (Edison, you overestimated the humanity of humans. We never learnt from the World Wars, nor did the nuclear bomb horrify us enough.)

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."
- Albert Einstein

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?"
- Guy de Maupassant

"A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war. "
- Herbert V. Prochnow

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."
- Bertrand Russell

"Only the dead have seen the end of the war."
- Plato

and finally a thought...

"It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash."
- Fred Woodworth

War, the Oscars and Cricket

While the rest of the world is worried about the war, Indians all over the world have only one thing on their mind - saturday's World Cup final against Australia. It's my theory that as a nation, India is driven by two things - Cricket and Movies.

Which of course brings me to the next best thing happening this month - The Annual Academy Awards Nite. Holly has put up a wonderful article with interesting tidbits about the Oscars and her predictions about the winners. While she's in L.A. watching the ceremony, go through her predictions and post your own.

Spring break 2013: how 'bout outer space?


Travelling to space might not be as far as you think it is. Brad Edwards of Highlift Systems, Seattle proposes to build an elevator to outer space using carbon nanotubes in a decade or so. The nanotubes are cylinders of carbon molecules that are extremely small and unbelievably strong. The molecules could be woven into a fabric to create a ribbon that would be around 3 feet wide and stretch 62,000 miles into space (that's nearly one quarter the way to the moon) and could transport people and spacecraft at a fraction of the cost and danger associated with today's spaceflights.

Unlike the Great Indian Rope Trick, this ribbon doesn't need any magic to stay upright in space. It has a counter weight at the other end which pulls on the ribbon due to the rotation of the earth (Imagine tying a stone to the end of a string and rotating it above your head) and keeps it taut.

The climbers would be powered by free-electron lasers which would be beamed on photocells on the undersides of the climbers and push them up the ribbon. A trip up would probably take a couple of weeks, but what the heck, at $10 a pound of weight, it will probably be worth it.

The scheme for building the ribbon, launching it to space and moving the climbers up the supercarbon elevator reads almost like science fiction, or something out of a hollywood movie, but like most inventions that change the way we think of the future, this one will be considered impossible till someone pulls it off. Wired Magazine has the complete story.

A brief history of Lena

All students of image processing (and I'm sure, many non-techies from the early 70s) are familar with the image of Lena which is one of the standard images used to test and demonstrate the algorithms used to encode and compress pictures. I've often wondered how the image of such an attractive lady got mixed up with the standard test images used by researchers such as fruits and babboons. As a tribute to the "First Lady of the Internet" and the countless researchers who have spent night after night poring over the pixels of her face, here is my brief history of Lena and her transition from Playboy centerspread to a research standard! (Do read the warnings on the page before you click on any link!)
Read the complete story here!

Going Digital!

Movie theatres across India are going digital!One of the major film processing laboratories, Adlabs (which also has the world's largest IMAX theatre in Mumbai) is retrofitting nearly 400 theatres across India with digital movie projectors and film servers by April 2004 so that in the future, movies will be either stored on high capacity disks or transmitted via fibre optic cables to theatres and projected simultaneously from the very first day of release! This is probably the first time that theatres are discarding film and converting to the digital format en masse. Apparently it costs nearly $50,000 to digitize a full length movie, but I'm sure that it's a great move since it will ensure that the movies will be preserved in their original format since most movies (which are stored on film currently) deteriorate over time since few people are interested in preserving a movie once it has outlived it's theatre run.

Check out the Club Rio on Rural. I can't remember the exact location, but it's somewhere between Curry and Palo Verde. It's huge, and if you go between 5 and 7 in the evening, it's happy hour, so you can get in with a cover charge of just $2 and (this is the best part) the food is unlimited and free!!! So go ahead and eat all the chicken wings you want while you sip on $2 mega size beers! Had a great time on friday after work and also got a life size poster from some Paramount studio guys who were promoting the movie "Hunted". Go for it guys!

We take so much technology for granted that it is almost impossible for most of us to imagine a life without the Internet. It is only now that the Internet is making an entry in Afghanistan (not counting the access that news agencies had earlier) and two websites have sprung up - albeit official ones.

Revisiting Deep Junior

Reading David Fogel's Blondie24:Playing at the edge of AI has prompted me to think again about Kasparov's draw with the supercomputer Deep Junior earlier in February. While it has been bemoaned by many as the end of the superiority of humankind over machines, I see it as just the opposite. As far as intelligence goes, Deep Junior is as intelligent as the gecko in your garden, albeit one that is powered by an array of microprocessors that can crunch numbers faster than you can say 'gazillion'. So we have a computer which can process a billion chessboards in a second and go through it's database of previous games and a board evaluation function that's probably tailored to kasparov's style, and it barely manages a draw with a human who probably analyzes three chessboards in a second! Machines still have a long way to go. (And we can happily thumb our noses at the soothsayers of the slavery of mankind to the bots).

A simple guide to HTML

There was a tutorial on HTML that I'd put up on the web a long time ago on a Freeservers account, but they stoppped giving free ftp access long ago, so I stopped updating that tutorial. I'm not sure when they'll pull that site offline, so I've just yanked everything in that tutorial to the ASU server. It's still the same old tutorial, probably mouldy and useless, but for those of you who want to get a quick and painless introduction to writing HTML and creating webpages, go to the toolbar on top and click on "View>Tutorials>HTML" or just click here.