Google v2

Been a long time since I wrote, and as comments to my last post prove that I have a fan following of critics now, waiting for new posts, here it is:

The previous month has been really hectic, as we're working very hard (and at great speed) to complete our project for the finals of Google Product Prodigy '09. BTW, I should first inform you that we guys got selected to the finals of the Google Product Prodigy contest (again, for me) from the entire Asia-Pacific region! People who've read my previous blog (at awardspace.com, which seems to be dead now) would recall the post I made describing the fantastic experience I had at GooglePlex Bangalore last year. We're pretty excited at being able to go through that again!

The other interesting project me and my friends are working on presently are an Adaptive Web Search engine, that adapts to a user's search-usage pattern over a period of time, so that after a while, the search engine starts delivering results tailored to the trends the person has set over weeks.

We're also about less than a month now to the launch of Flare (our Google project), which will be launched as a web service! It will initially be invite-only. :-)

Cheers!
Shashank

LSJ: The Blue Screen of Megadeath

Shudder. For those of you who have used Microsoft Windows XP, be afraid, be very afraid. Because the British Navy has just upgraded its nuclear (powered and deterrent) submarines to the state-of-the-art control technology -- Microsoft Windows XP. A stripped down version of it, if that be any consolation, which it is not.

Check out the Linux Journal article: Blue Screen of Megadeath

"We can't speak for anyone else, but the thought that somewhere floating out there are two hundred nuclear warheads under the control of Windows XP scares the living daylights out of us. If anyone needs us, we'll be building a bunker in the back yard before one of the boom-boom boats throws a blue screen of death and blows us all to kingdom come."

Boo!

~Shashank

Day two: Back2Basics Linux

Having vowed not to spend my 10-day winter vacation doing anything serious, I decided to play a bit with Linux, apart from reading the novel "She" by H. Rider Haggard (of Allan Quartermain fame) and revisiting the Beatles' album collection I got hold of just before setting off from college.

Anyhow, one of the first things I did when I got home was to strip off /everything/ from my ancient Ubuntu installation in the PC at my home, and essentially removed ALL the packages other than the important core and base and essential ones. This brought me down to the beautiful command line at the next reboot, and then I to do a little tweaking with the /etc/init.d/rc to display some messages and request for user login, instead of asking for root login (it was configured to spawn /sbin/sulogin, instead of login) and such. All this led to a cool "Back2Basics" Linux, which still takes around 800 MB because I haven't removed a LOT of unneccesary libraries incase I break something (I've done that once before). So I'll proceed to do the stripping work soon (hehe). I got hold of this O'Reilly book on Building Embedded Linux Systems sometime back and it lists this minimum required directory structure for the root (/) filesystem, and another book on Embedded Linux (whose publisher I cannot recall) which listed the bare essential binaries and the corresponding libraries required. So I'm planning to base the stripping-down on the guidelines in these books, and of course using the ldd command to find the dependencies of the desirable binaries incase I want something extra. I replaced the GNU utils with Busybox yesterday. My target is to just have the Kernel Image, Busybox, Perl, and Java. Lets see what comes of it. ;-)

Also, I'm working on a new categorized layout for this blog, something I'd developed two years back but never implemented. Its going to automatically pick the most popular categories and show posts filed under those in square boxes, and the more popular categories will be higher up in the boxed, 3-column layout.

Cheers
Shashank

Life in other places. What is Life?

The question of whether there is life in other places in the Universe requires a fundamental question to be answered: What is the definition of life?

This is not a spiritual discussion on Life and its meaning, but for those who thought it was, do read on. Fresh viewpoints are always stimulating for spirituality.

People tend to have very varied and often biased views with regards to their definition of Life. Most would think of a grotesque humanoid form with a head, two arms, two legs as an instant reaction to the question, while others might take more colorful forms: octopuses, crabs, giant ants etc. These have been covered extensively by countless science-fiction material, books, movies etc. These view points are flawed at several places:

a) These replies do not even answer the question: "What is the definition of life". These just provide the answer to the specific question: "What would living beings look like in some alien planet". A sea of difference.

b) They all assume that the physical and environmental conditions required for life are similar to that of the Earth. The fact that life could exist at 12,000 degree centigrade is just absurd, in these viewpoints. But living cells have been found on Earth in the most extreme conditions [1].

c) They all assume that "Life" is Carbon-based, and in-fact, material. What I mean is, they assume that the dependence of Living beings on Water, Oxygen and Nitrogen is universal. This "life" that people talked about involved Amino acids and nitrogenous compounds forming the basic genetic material and cell structures that coordinated to form the diverse life-forms that we know of. But this entire set of known life-forms are mostly based on Nitrogenous compounds with dependence on Hydrogen, Oxygen and Carbon. Assuming that life could evolve only from these is a precarious one.

I do not claim to have the correct answer. The purpose of this article is just to try to broaden the scope of thought and opinion of what is living and what is not.

What is Life? The property that makes entities living. Thus if a set of rules determine that the entity in question is "living", then it has "Life". Hence the question narrows down to determining the set of rules that declare an entity living or non-living.

This is where things get fuzzy. I'm afraid there will never be a conclusive, definitive and "correct" answer, but just our viewpoints. Just like our viewpoints of what is "right" or "wrong" determines laws and so-called morality.

I think an expanded and relatively broad-minded checklist for a single "living entity" would be:

a) Should be responsive to external environments and stimuli
b) Should be able to self-sustain for as long as possible in the environment
c) Should be able to change itself and adapt in order to continue existence

Is reproduction a necessity to certifying something "living"? Probably not. Because a single male or female of the human species, or any sexually reproducing species, cannot reproduce without involving two entities. Thus a single man would not be able to reproduce alone, and would hence be declared non-living by following that logic.

Note: Do not read the following lines if you have had enough mind-expansion for the day.

This expanded view brings us to a series of interesting ideas. Could life forms exist in electromagnetic waves? Why make the assumption that life needs to have material composition? Electromagnetic waves are doomed (in a way) to keep propagating ahead in space until their energy is absorbed by any entity they collide with. But what prevents us from calling a man who keeps running non-stop until he vaporizes by running into a blast furnace as living? You'd say he's living even though he's constantly running non-stop because he can change himself, he's interacting with the environment and external stimuli, and because he is... well a man!

But similar is the case of an electromagnetic wave. Its a bundle of energy, like every man or for that matter, "matter". If some quirks of nature in some part of the Universe would cause these bundles of energy to self-sustain on loss of energy, and suit themselves to the surroundings, all while running along at the speed of light constantly, would they be called Living? I believe they would, and should.

Cheers
~Shashank
PS: Image: X-ray of the left hand of a ten year old boy with polydactyly.

The Curse of the Gravel Machine

Trudging through college life, we come across several obnoxious myths, stories and legends belonging to our college. One such legend I came across is that my college is a cursed one. The curse is that the moment it stops constructing something new, building a new annexe block, pulling down a perfectly nice place and building another... the moment it stops constructing... It will cease to exist! Just like that. God's WILL.

Obviously its obnoxious and untrue, or so we'd hope as long as we're here. But the construction bug has bitten my college since before the guards were toddlers (or so they say), and you're bound to collect different proportions of sand, cement and pebbles in your slippers depending on which path you take across the hostel campus.

Oh and I'm on a break from blogging, which is an odd statement to make since I blog in intervals of decades anyway. I'm also on a break from nosy-technical-fun-&-games since there are a couple of exciting new projects I and my friends have embarked upon which is taking up all my time.

Cheers
Shashank

Some sad news

Been busy with exams, and work on the latest project which we're submitting for this year's Google Product Prodigy. But this post is not about that.

This post is about the tragic passing of my friend, Ishan Goel, who passed away a few days back. He was just 20. He was a colleague in the Sun Ambassador programme, i.e. he was my colleague at the Sun Open Source club we were founding here at college, and worked very hard with me in making the Software Freedom Day (September 2008) a success, and also a member of our last year's Google Product Prodigy team (which I covered in great detail in a series of blog posts previously), which we worked for close to 6 months together. A brilliant and immensely creative fellow, and a "Linux Helpline". This is not an obituary, or any formal note of sort. It's just hard to absorb this. My hand still tries to dail his number whenever a problem with my Linux system occurs.

~Shashank

Of the Elusive Breakfast Syndrome

I really have a problem, or rather had one. It is an uninteresting topic for anyone but me, but I haven't managed to have breakfast on any weekend this ENTIRE semester i.e. in the past 4 months. I have never managed to wake up before the closing hours (9 am) of the hostel mess (often I directly wake up for evening snacks on weekends, let alone breakfast and lunch). I have even attempted, several times, to stay awake the entire night, till the golden moment when the clock struck 6:45 am, and each time some odd conspiracy of Nature conspired against me. Once I watched a movie till 6:35 am, and then pondered over how to pass the intermediate 10 minutes, and then continued pondering as I next regained conciousness at 10:30 am. Then once I managed to sleep off on the floor of my room, beside my door, while trying to open it to leave for the mess, again at 6:35 am.

Today, however, I grabbed Fate by the wrist and bent it to my will! I left my room at 6:30 am, as I was sure I wouldn't manage to survive any longer after watching Lord of the Rings III (for the 5th time), and also figured that I probably wouldn't sleep off in the corridor beside the mess, though I'm not sure I'd put that past my capabilities. Anyhow, here I was - unshaven, unkempt, with a haggardly-desperate look, sitting outside the stairs of the mess waiting for it to open. Then I tried walking around the area a bit, and I discovered I didn't like the cold air too much, and again returned to my patient look-out post. And then, the Gates of Destiny opened! And I had wonderful breakfast, and Tea! One of the greatest battles of will and destiny in my life had been fought, and I had emerged the victor - a fed victor at that. :-)

Shashank
PS: I haven't gone loopy. Food breaks the best of men, I'm just a mere, humble mortal.

Upgrade to a dial-up!

Well, here it is finally. Internet in my hostel room. And man, is it fast? I rejoiced when my download speed finally managed to reach 10 KBps at 2 in the morning, and average far worse during regular "earthly" hours. Yet, adaptation is the key to survival. After having paid a substantial amount for this wireless datacard (Reliance NetConnect), I am finally on the internet which is a highly liberating experience, regardless of the speed of connection. Hard to describe in words! :-)

I've been messing around a lot with Rockbox, another OS-type thing for an iPod, and was thrilled to see real video files being played on my ancient iPod Mini 2G (4 GB)'s tiny, monochrome screen. Who said that video was the domain of expensive iPod videos only?! Take an iPod nano or something with a color screen, install Rockbox and BANG! you have excellent videos being played, and with capabilities of extending the codec base. I've been trying to get hold of the various components required for compiling for ARM6-processors, which is rather hard to do without a proper source of unrestricted fast internet. Rockbox allows you to write your own "viewers", which are programs that can process specific types of files, like associating .mpeg files with the mpeg-Viewer, .txt files with the text_editor viewer etc. You can also write plugins to provide new applications. Once my development environment for ARM6 (and Rockbox specifically) gets set I can work on some of the interesting stuff I think can be put in. I would rather like some simple HTML viewers, and a Java virtual machine on it. KVM (released by Sun microsystems) does something of that sort, but hasn't been running all that well for me. Infact it has run at all.

Then I also got this idea of controlling my iPod through my PC, maybe write a simple mouse controller program in Rockbox, which can take inputs from the data-cable connecting it to the PC, and therefore permit me to move my real physical mouse of the PC to control the cursor on the iPod screen. This could later be expanded upon to eliminate the PC by writing mouse-drivers in Rockbox and then using a USB mouse and connecting it directly to the iPod via the iPod data-cable. That would make life tonnes easier for using advanced applications in iPodLinux/Rockbox.

Anyhow, more later. I am too busy sitting idle, waiting for "Google.com" to open. (*rolls* eyes).

Shashank

I had hair...

Don't mistake me. I still have hair, albeit, 8 inches shorter. Farewell my dear long locks. At my prime, I had hair till my shoulder-blades. Now they barely are an inch long. Two and a half years without paying a visit to a barber; feels like I've lost an arm or something. But anyway, why am I boring you with my story of locks lost behind?

I've been studying. No really, I finally have been studying new stuff. Not academic stuff related to what's taught at University (who cares?!) but new interesting stuff. More specifically, I've been enjoying myself by playing around with Mandelbrot sets, Julia sets etc. With the result that I've started manufacturing a sequence of rather spectacular wallpapers by applying various color filters and mapping different parts of the above mentioned sets.

The other things include a compulsary mini-project as a part of our 5th semester curriculum, and we're working on simulation of artificial personality in software bots. You can poke, hit, pat, feed bones etc to an artificial dog and view its responses according to the selected personality, and it will vary over time depending on the past interactions. I'll post on some demos once we have a decent build ready. This time, as it is compulsary and there is a strict deadline, I will finally actually complete something rather than touching it and leaving it to bide time once the interesting parts are done.

Oh, and I finally got iPodLinux installed on my ancient iPod Mini 2G, and it is really great and Awful. Great because it is Linux running on an iPod, and all the cool demos and stuff that can be done with it. Awful because the input method is limited to a dumb touch-wheel, so to input text, I have to circle through a list of alphabets each time. Use it, and you'll know how painful that extra-sensitive touch-wheel is. Another reason it is awful is because it is difficult to program for it as I have to use ARM6-gcc for it. And there is no Java on it. And arm6-gcc is hard to install correctly on my openSUSE machine back at the hostel because I have no internet which effectively makes installing any package with millions and zillions of cross-linking dependencies a nightmare.

Finally, I'm planning to take an internet connection at my hostel room, which will make life "normal" for me again. I have been selected as the Campus Ambassador for Sun Microsystems, which means that I represent Sun in our University, and had to go through a rigorous process of interviews etc. Anyhow, I am supposed to promote Open Source and Sun stuff in our campus, which should be fun I guess. And I get a stipend for it too! :-)

Shashank
PS: The image at the start of the post is from a specific region of a Julia set.

Of Al-Google and the Silicon Valley rantings

I have two thoughts, and am too lazy to write two separate posts so I clubbed them into one.

Al-Google:
Google is funny, really. I was just taking a trip down ego-boosting lane, and did a Google search for myself, and found that searching for "Shashank Shekhar" (which sadly appears to be quite a common name nowadays) returned a reference to Me first on #15, and my current blog at #17 and my old blog at #20. Then, I did a search for just "Shashank", and Hey Presto! I jumped to #7! I thought adding descriptive keywords narrowed searches!
(PS: Yeah yeah, before you SEO geeks start giving me the reasons, the reason is that the #7 position is occupied by my old blog which is called just "Shashank's Blog", with no mention of Shekhar, so..)

My second topic is entitled: "Silicon Valley of India: A Miracle"

Well, I was reading a nice article about the coming together of the original Silicon valley, a paper actually, (here) and I agree with his explantion that the Silicon Valley came together because of a rare co-occurrence of a lot of events that catalysed such an event. The Venture Capitalists were there, the Infrastructure was there, the Research places and great Universities were there, all mostly in the same San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. The setting was just right for something amazing to suddenly come up. The university people came up with great ideas, the area had sufficiently high academic cultured people living around to encourage such innovation and if someone felt that some money could be made out of those ideas, the venture capitalists were there to be sold to the ideas. The spirit of risk-taking was enhanced by some early successes and the smell of money being generated. And people had garages which could be used as offices, and small rooms could be rented for the same purpose too. And employees had places to stay nearby and basic infrastructure like roads and transport pre-existing due to the existence of older residential areas in the neighbourhood. Yes, this is an over-simplification, but these points will come into play in my next paragraph.

Now how Bangalore came to become the Silicon Valley of India is indeed a puzzling thought. Lets see, Bangalore did have residential areas pre-existing, but I think that really was IT (no pun intended). No great Venture Capitalists prowling around, miserably tiny roads and basic small-town transport facilities, and most of all, no Stanford-like great Universities in the neighbourhood to fuel ideas. Therefore how the great start-ups of Bangalore came up, attracted investors, got clients, performed their day-to-day activities with the miserably lacking infrastructure is something that is nothing short of a Miracle. Even today, companies have their own internal power generators as depending on Bangalore City's own rickety power supply would effectively lose them deals worth millions of dollars everyday, they need to find ways to work around the terrible chaos existing in the cramped roads of a city that just grew too fast. Oh and when it rains (which it does for 3 hours every evening), the city halts to a standstill as it is impossible to drive with the pot-holes, broken roads and impossible to work with the power-cuts. I'm still wondering how this Miracle came about. The only possible explanation I see is that
a) The people who started the first start-ups were incredibly clever at attracting investors,
b) The Indians are willing to slave for really long hours with considerably lesser pay (which is true). Hence India is the hot-destination for a cheap-workforce, hence a great deal of investment in off-shore development.

PS: The building in the picture is the Infosys Headquarters.
PPS: If you're interested in reading some interesting stuff related to Silicon Valley, check out some interesting SV blogs I follow as often as I can spare time:

• Silicon Valley Technology & Corporate updates
• Good morning Silicon Valley -- some pretty interesting reads about some really dumb as well as really good stuff happening there. :-)

Crazy World Saving Idea #312

Hand everyone in the world a music instrument, and make it compulsory for them to play some instrument or the other. Playing music helps relax, and would make the world a more peaceful place.

Of course, my first action would be to purchase the finest set of sound-absorbing earphones I can get hold of, to drown out the cacophony of the world. :-)

Shashank

The Creativity-Killer : Office life

Don't get me wrong. Its not because I'm really unhappy at the fact that my vacations are getting ruined as I have to "WORK" in the office 10 hrs a day everyday (read) but truly a realisation that I came about due to this effort.

The "office life" destroys your creativity, forcing you to do continually work piecemeal on mostly dumb projects that you know will never revolutionize anyone's life, but basically does the routine that people need. Yes, this kind of routine work has to be done by someone, but if you're like me, you will not be the one to get stuck in this zombie culture of waking up in the morning, slaving for 10 hours, and then returning towards late evening, too tired to do anything but slouch on a chair drinking tea and writing about how dumb you feel. One simply doesn't have the time or energy to think about ANYTHING else after returning from office. All one seeks to do is to relax and sleep soon. Gotta sleep early.. office in the morning remember? In short, even if you are good, the routine office life will bring you down to its levels of mundaneness and dumbness and make you feel generally really stupid and out of touch.

This is the typical routine every office worker follows, and my statements are meant for those select few who desire to break away from the system and be different. If you are fine with serving people's routine needs, that is perfectly genuine too. Do not mistake me. I am talking about those people who can be intensely creative, know that they can do better things for people, have confidence in themselves that they can create things that will make better and revolutionize the life of others as well as theirs. The first casualty when you get stuck in the drill of conventional life is your sense of Independent thinking.

A matter of bread and butter, some would say. True. You've gotta do what you've gotta do. However, when there is an opportunity, grab it. Risks are meant to be taken, some big and some small. When you have the chance to some radically better stuff, do it. I have been in IEEE Students' Chapter for the past two years, and was the Secretary at last count. But I felt that it was time to move on and do other things, even though I appeared to have a very good chance at the top job. However, it was a risk nevertheless, leaving IEEE to get back the time to do bigger things, develop new ideas that could potentially be the next big things. I feel I can do it. So risk I must. Risk the general "social standing", risk the chance of not having any work to channel one's energies. This is an example of a small risk, almost negligible. But the basic point does not change. If you want to be different, don't get stuck in any kind of routine. One must follow for a while, and move on to other things to remain fresh and dynamic.

9 hr 45 minutes a day. 6 days a week. 33 days.

That's the duration of my summer internship. There goes my vacation, can see it fleeing away while I sit in the office.

Have a confidentiality agreement with them, don't want to talk about them anyway. My poor vacation...

Yet another 'Airport Blues' saga

This time around, hanging around Bangalore's Great Airport, I discovered some harsh truths of life. Life is like the Cafe Coffee Day Espresso that you get at the Bangalore Airport. You do not ever get what you wanted, its hideously expensive, it has no sugar, is black and really awful. Stirring it up makes no difference really, ultimately you end up with the same old stuff and its better to drink it up in one quick gulp than one prolonged struggle and bitter taste. And it always tasted better in the good ol' days.

I can say without doubt that THAT was simply the worst coffee I ever had in my life, and saying that would be a gross understatement. I was waiting to pick up my mom, and due to a series of (un)fortunate events ended up reaching the Airport really quickly, and an hour and half early. Bangalore Airport is seriously not the best place to hang out, and they take great pains to maintain and further that reputation. No chairs or waiting lounges at the Arrivals gate. Just one Cafe Coffee Day outlet with smirking faces serving you bad coffee. So I managed to find a seat in the Departures section, and then was sprayed all over with insecticide. The stupid bugger chose to make his grand entry right at the moment I sat down, and sprayed those fumigated kerosene-like smelling fumes all over me, and the people all around me too. Luckily its meant only for mosquitoes and small insects, not animals.

Oh, and I am alive, kicking and have finally returned back to this blog.
Auf Weidersehen!

PS: I speak German now.

PPS: I simply cannot understand how people manage to drink Black Coffee! My theory is that people find themselves awakened by sipping Black Coffee because each sip is so horrible and bitter that it shocks them awake. That's how I stayed awake for 1.5 hours at the airport, and just managed to finish half of my coffee (which was originally half a cup anyway). Gruesome really.

All I wish is “A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down”…

Ahh.. what a wish, I really wish I could do that for a couple of days more, like I’ve been doing for the past 12 days of my vacation.

I just hit upon this site (nicecupofteaandasitdown.com). I really like their mission statement, really can relate spiritually to them:

Our Mission Statement:

Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely.

What a beautiful concept! This is the reason why the Internet still remains sane today…

Take a look at the site: OPEN SESAME!

Shashank

PS: This might make you hungry.

I love keyboards… I hate people

God bless keyboards, especially at times when the mice decide to go on a hunger strike. I’m sick and tired of wireless mice, and am half inclined to walk right tomorrow and purchase an ordinary optical mouse. The problem is that its far and I’m too lazy to do that as such. :-/

Its been exactly just a week since I replaced the old mouse batteries with brand new ones, and bam! they’re already dead! My mouse has stopped working right in the middle of the night at 12:29 am, when there is no chance that I can go around the house and humbly beg someone to lend me a battery, nor run out of the house and purchase some. And I was just beginning to get cosy with my work.

Damn! Today’s been a miserable day, loads of work planned, and almost none achieved. Overslept as usual.. had planned to wake up at atleast 10am for a change, woke up at 12:30pm. So then I thought, “Such is life”, and started up my system and began designing the new website of my college’s IEEE chapter (I’m its Secretary BTW), and Bang! at 1pm the power fails. With no signs of it returning anytime soon, I grumbled at the interruption of my once-in-a-lifetime, finally-sat-down-to-do-it, just-when-I-was-getting-warmed-into-the-subject initiative of my website, and decided to sit down and paint something instead! Yeah, as in real paint and paintbrush etc, which is something I managed to do atleast for a while, before I dropped off to sleep right there holding the paintbrush.

When I woke up a few hours later, I discovered that the power had returned, and therefore sat down to work again (after removing those wierd paint daubs on my clothes from that paintbrush I took to sleep with), when that stupid UPS repair fellow came. Another 2 hours wasted on that. Clock struck 8pm, and I desperately sat down to do some work atleast, when my sis called up and asked me to help her fix her system via phone and Yahoo chat. Grrr.. it was 9.30 before both of us ran out of patience and went off our own respective ways. Next, dinner and the usual running around the house insanely, before I finally managed to sit peacefully at 11pm (while that UPS fellow, and my sister, and the rest of humanity slept cosily in their respective homes) and worked for an hour or so, before my MOUSE IN A SUPREME BURST OF IRRITATING GAS……. DIED! Bah!

I’m going off to sleep like the rest of the the irritating world.
Good night.

Looking back…

DynamiX Clan (Dec 2006)

There was one time when I was at school you know.. and I met two interesting guys called Roshan Shariff & Rahul Seth (in different ways.. Roshan because of an Intel project we did together, and Rahul ‘coz of one SchoolNet Website competition.. then me and Rahul jointly started and ran an online media portal called Big-Anda.com for a while). And before long we all met up and one thing led to the other and we setup up a Computer & IT Club/Klan called “DynamiX”! We were basically fed up with the lack of anything being done at school for identifying and encouraging talented students in the field of computers. The teachers had this attitude that our school wasn’t any good in computers, and that we didn’t have students here good at computers. We thought differently. My reasoning was that it physically wasn’t possible for them to know each and every student in the school and also know whether they’re any good at computers, or any particular field. So we decided to go deep among the students, of almost all classes and spot people with talent, and people with an aptitude for computers and a desire to grow and do things differently!

We had immense support from our Principal, Mrs. Meera Balachandran, and basically were permitted to do whatever it takes to get it running. We started off with Mr. Umakant Pandey as our chief mentor, who was the faculty in-charge of the Intel Lab, soon re-christened “The DynamiX Labs”. The rest was quite a rush, recruiting students, getting them to work, getting ourselves to work, competiting at the tech fests of many other schools (and winning several of them! ) and holding our own events & fests.

My point is that even though our fests never really played up to our expectations and planning, personally I have grown a lot as an organizer, manager as well as team-player, and the experience I gained due to DynamiX has been invaluable in my college life, ‘coz when we read about managing events, managing people, working in teams, division of labor.. for most of the folks here its just theory, whereas I can actually relate to it from my personal experiences and be better at organizing and working in teams.

Anyway, this post was just a bit of remiscence of my time at school and my “DynamiX Days”, and was sparked by the recently concluded (and very successful) “DynamiX 2007″, one that was almost entirely organized by the young talents (that the school believed didn’t exist before DynamiX started) with help from Rahul & Anshu. Kudos to the new DynamiX team!

Shashank

About suspension threats and selections..

Been a while since my previous post, and for general information, the raiding party of CAM exams are here again.. :-( Start on the coming Tuesday.

As the title suggests, suspension threats are not related to the engineering suspension mechanisms, but basically administrative suspensions, where you're chucked out of the hostel/college etc.. :-) So me and 15 guys got one hostel-suspension threat for an "extended" birthday party which was held at 3 in the morning.. story goes something like this:

A guy had his birthday (obviously), and it started around 8 PM in quite a subdued manner i.e. an SMS message chain through the hostel about getting free ladoos etc to whoever give him birthday bumps at 12 midnight. That was sort of started in my room, with me having a substantial role in its creation and spreading.. :-) That guy could only watch helplessly as message after message poured into his cell regarding confirmations. Heh. Basically we all get a special Airtel Students' Pack with 100 SMSes free *everyday*, so the messages spread really fast. Now at 12 midnight, we all landed at his room, and he got his share of birthday bumps, which for some inexplicable reason ended up with giving him friendly kicks on the butt, while hanging in mid-air him with two guys holding his arms and legs. This wasn't really anything "hooliganistic", and something even the Birthday Boy enjoyed. But since it had rained really heavily that night, and we had given the bday bumps in the badminton court and ensured that he landed perfectly in the slime and puddles, we all later decided that he had to be given a bath. This means that the victim is locked inside the shower cubicles with his clothes on, and water is thrown from the other cubicles in calculated projectile motions. :-) This was where things began to spin out of control, since nearly 15 guys cramped inside a small 12 cubicle bathroom and naturally the din and noise wasn't small. The trouble came with the fact that the shower cubicle-room is right next to the Warden's room, and in the spur of the moment when the warden-room's light came on, in anxiety that bday boy also ran back to his room like the rest of us, the only difference being that he was dripping wet and wet the entire ground floor as he ran. This provided a natural trail to his room, and the warden is no fool. Soon he was being asked to "prove" that it was his birthday (haha), and demands of how his friends came to know of his bday (sheesh!) etc. That was indeed quite a lot of foolish questions on the part of the warden, but anyway, we were all called out and threatened with suspension from the hostel.

Story would have ended, but the fools we are, we resumed his bday party after coming back from classes at 1 PM the next day! Started with a very simple cake-cutting "Happy Birthday to you" chanting ceremony, turned into a cake-smearing fight, and soon another water-fight which started with one guy launching an entire bucket of water on me in front of my room . I retaliated with a bottle of chilled water, and soon World War III was on with the rest joining in. The guard obviously caught us all.. all unrecognizable in our cream-smeared faces and dripping bodies, and threatened to inform the warden. But he was sort of enjoying our party, so he told us to do the water fights only in the bathrooms, and not outside the rooms in the corridors, and we finally decided to end the really memorable "extended" birthday party before we all got kicked out of VIT. :-)

Whew... as for the second thing, I got selected to the IEEE Executive Board.. one of the 7 people who made it through the interview of about 100 odd. The sad part was that I had to quit ISTE to do so, because of clashing domains and difficulty in attention-management.

Now I must scramble back to my, now dry, room and prepare for the CAMs.. this time I'm really screwed. Started preparing just 3 days ago.

States of Matter: A glaring misconception

I was just discussing matter and fundamental particles with a friend when I realised that something has begun to go wrong and the ignorance among people shows it. They know that what I speak of is true, they've always known it. Yet their minds have decided that matter actually exists in three different 'species', believe it or not.

Classification is the basic and fundamental property of abstraction. It makes life easier, and is invaluable. But, some people begin to believe that the artificial *wall-of-division* between each group is quite concrete. In a similar fashion, many people, especially children have lost touch with the fact that Solids, Liquids and Gases are nothing but atoms with different ranges of force of attraction. There is a very elegant graph, a potential energy vs. distance one, which explains the region of solids, liquids and gases very well, which I shall not go into here.

The point is, everything is made up of a fundamental entity. As of today, we are made to understand that atom is the abstraction that is the fundamental entity. It comprises of sub-atomic particles, but essentially, the atom as a whole is what is a repeating unit. Logically quite strange, since atoms vary in sizes, which immediately discards that repeating-unit property. Hence the logical reasoning is that there exists an entity which is elementary. I am not in a position to give you the Truth. In the Age of Reason (circa Aristotle), we were made to believe that whatever cannot be divided any more, say by crushing repeatedly, is the fundamental Truth. In the Age of Science (circa Dalton), we were explained atoms scientifically. And it goes on till today. Now, the terms Solids, Liquids and Gases were created for the sake of abstraction of physical & chemical behaviour since mostly all gases showed nearly similar properties, with just a few variations in quantification of properties. But the essence, that everything is just atoms is true. Hence people who say that Solids 'convert' to liquids and so on, blindly thinking it to be one independent species converting to another are not justified in thinking so.

Of Global Conflicts...

For some wierd reason, I got interested in trying to find the total number of global conflicts (civil wars, proxy wars, disputes etc) and decided to pop around the internet listing out.. and was really shocked to see that I have already filled 3 sides of register sheets and still counting. Wierd.

Useful links:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/disputes.htm
http://www.ppu.org.uk/war/
http://www.ndcf.org/Conflict_List/World2002/2002Conflictlist.htm