the brook

That’s me, in case you didn’t already know. While a lifetime of evidence exists, in the interests of brevity, I will only present its latest manifestation. Warning: this is a work-related (read: geeky) rant.

if ( A or B ) // A and B are some valid conditions
{
if ( A ) return x; // x is some valid return value
if ( B ) return y; // y is some valid return value
throw error; // should never reach here, right?
}

There should be absolutely no reason I’d get the error. Yet, I was. And once I got the error, I praised myself for having kept an “open mind” and actually anticipating that the impossible could happen. I enchanted myself with the discovery I was about to make which allowed this execution flow and rewarded myself with a subway cookie.

A while later, after banging my head around trying the complex conditions A and B by hand, I realized that it was impossible for this impossible thing to happen – as any first year undergrad could tell you. I’m doing a PhD and have to keep an open mind and let my brains leak out. That’s my excuse.

What happened was pretty simple. Master Yoda would put it this way: “Putting way too many error messages leads to lost time. Lost time leads to hurrying up your code. Hurrying up your code leads to copying and pasting aforementioned error messages. That leads to confusion about which error message you’re seeing. Confusion leads to suffering. Mmmm?” I sure found that out, after trying for an hour to debug code that was completely and obviously correct.

After this episode, which was actually the least of my worries (ever heard of segmentation faults?), I was wondering why it felt like I’d gone around in a circle a hundred or so times. And that’s when the universe, in a cruel stroke of brilliance, responded through subversion:

$ svn commit
Committed revision 314.

Just one of those days.

If I had known that what I’m doing would one day be labeled by one of the world’s biggest companies as “Tafiti”, I can assure you I would have reconsidered a foray into research.

So Microsoft has debuted a beta of Tafiti (which means “do research” in Swahili). I can’t run it yet – of course it doesn’t work on Linux – but from what I’ve read, it can be summed up as “Copy and Paste from the Web”. Couldn’t they find an African word for that? Oh, wait… they did.

I have a theory behind African naming. Quick question: What’s as rare as in the Internet in Africa, other than matter in the universe? Answer: Good domain names in normal languages, of course. In a world where even http://www.wednesdaynightcheese.com/ and http://www.ifoldspacewithmymind.com/ are taken up, it’s not too hard to understand why someone rushed out and bought http://www.thegoodnamesweretaken.com/. And of course, this is true for almost every language in the world which is spoken by Internet accessing folks. We now have no choice but to turn to Africa; our last remaining resource of domain names until someone starts giving them cheap Internet access.

This grows into a rather neat startup idea. Start up a firm and buy domain names and transferable trademarks of words in any and all African languages, even those spoken by now-extinct gorillas in the disappearing forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then start charging exorbitant fees for “brand consulting in the next century”. Your contribution will be to analyze market trends and shifting paradigms to maximize perceived identification with customers for a more human-centric branding strategy.

For example, if MSN and Yahoo join hands in search, the resulting engine could be called “Jomaiglooeghatahata”, an Angolan word for “We tried to beat Google but couldn’t”. The newest iPhone accessory range could be branded “Yootodomiyooto”, a poetic Gabonese word which elegantly translates as “We fleece you some, then we fleece you some more”. The phrase “Inev Idiv Iciv Ucho”, hailing from Burkina Faso, would serve as the perfect momentum-giving tool to Operation Iraqi Freedom, conveying unequivocally “We came, we found nothing, we keep getting hit and now we’re stuck”. And… well, you get the picture.

The business, of course, could use a professional sounding catch phrase like “Roonimoondonakagutu”, which in an ancient Namibian dialect that means “We know it sounds ridiculous, but trust us it works.”

There. I was planning to do all this myself but I decided to give it away. I feel generous today. No not lazy, generous. Go and make your billions. Drop me a penny or two after.

This book is a novel about a doctor who delivers his wife’s twins himself, but decides to give away the girl because she has Down’s syndrome. The doctor’s nurse takes the girl away and raises her on her own.

The writing is excellent, I enjoyed that independently of the plot. My tastes have changed slightly in that regard – I can now enjoy writing for it’s own sake, which I just couldn’t in school or even a few years ago.

The plot revolves around the lives of the people affected by this one decision – the doctor, his wife and the healthy son in one thread; and the nurse and the retarded daughter in the other. While I wasn’t exactly holding my breath, there were a few things to think about. Personally, the book was a reminder that humans tend to spend much emotional energy without necessity. I’ll stop here before I give away the book :)

As usual, I trooped down to the Indian High Commission and had a good time. Here’s a nice article on how India has done in 60 years. As usual, clicked a few snaps at the High Comm.

The flag hoisting.

Mini Rang De Basanti being acted out :)

The President’s address delivered by the High Commissioner. I’d say the speech lacked a certain something that was always there in Dr. Kalam’s addresses on Independence Day. Can’t help wishing he was back for a second term.

More photos here. Happy Independence Day!

This just in:

Earlier in the day, Apple released a 32MB Keyboard Software Update v1.1.

In a brief set of release notes, the company said the software allows its new aluminum keyboard to take advantage of the special features.

I once had a computer with a 40 MB hard drive. And now keyboard firmware updates take up 32 MB. God help us all.

A very interesting book about people who tend to prefer their own company over others. When I first saw this book, I was surprised to see the subtitle – why do loners need a manifesto anyway? – but my doubts were answered soon after. Even before I’d read the first page. The first three people I knew who saw me carrying the book had roughly the same reaction – “Don’t worry! You’re not a loner!“.

So, it turns out that loners (distinct from lonely people) do have a negative reputation and some bad press. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the author describes how serial killers and the like are often labeled as “loner types”.

Most of the book though, is about a loner’s perspective (the author states that she is one), how they tend to be different from people around them. Also discussed are the lives and traits of many loners who were very well known – from Einstein to Emily Dickinson.

As someone who definitely needs some alone time and private space, I appreciated most of the book very much. The issues discussed are wide-ranging and the writing is wonderfully light and personal. This, however, is not a book for people who’re extremely social and unconditionally love human company – I’ve had many discussions with such people and they probably won’t be able to appreciate the thoughts very much. It is, after all, a loner’s manifesto.

Rating: 4 / 5

Yum just updated pidgin to version 2.1, but I got the following error.

$ pidgin
libnm_glib_nm_state_cb: dbus returned an error.
(org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files
pidgin: symbol lookup error: pidgin: undefined symbol: purple_core_ensure_single_instance

Turns out pidgin 2.1 has a dependency on libpurple 2.1 which somehow got past the package managers. Works fine after doing “yum update libpurple”.

(via)

In terms of chronology, this is the oldest authorized Star Wars fiction novel. Written by the writer of the KOTOR games, it describes a period even before the Old Republic when the Sith and the Jedi were numerous and warring against each other – and the story is about how the well known Sith principles of only two Sith Lords arose.

The main character starts from humble beginnings in a cortosis ore mine and ends up training on a Sith academy by accident – and later goes on to become the most powerful of them all.

The book deals mostly with dark side, of course. We’re shown the motivations and thought processes of the Sith, which is the really interesting part – most Star Wars books actually involve the Sith only as the enemies but this is a book written entirely from their perspective. So the “enemy” are the Jedi, and the “good” qualities are betrayal and treachery and the “weakness” is compassion.

The writing is decent, but it isn’t as good as say Matthew Stover or Timothy Zahn. But it’s definitely a page-turner for any Star Wars fan.

Rating: 4 / 5

I thought Guns, Germs and Steel was a brilliant book; and this work from Jared Diamond far surpasses it.

We hear many important messages all the time, but there’s nothing like a good story to add impact. Except, maybe, a true story. Or maybe a dozen true stories. If you pick up this book in a bookstore and read the jacket and the cover, you’ll know that this is a book describes societies in the past and the present that have faced challenges to their survival, mainly due to exhausted or severely depleted resources that they were dependent on. Each story is wonderfully told, as gripping as a fantasy epic. Yet through his writing, the author manages to convey that these were humans, just like us and lived through choices just as we do. Jared Diamond critically analyzes all known aspects of a society and condenses to a few major points the salient reasons why a society collapsed, or why it survived. That in itself is a great read, always thought-provoking and often mind-blowing.

Then we come to the smaller, but far more impactful part of the book; where we’re shown the resource management problems of today’s world – growing population, reducing soil fertility, loss of biodiversity, air pollution, forest cover reduction among others. We’re told how each one of them are created, how people, nations and business are trying (or not) to solve them, and how significant the potential impact on our lifestyles can be. In his words,

Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years.

…because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.

And well, at the end of the day, all I can say is – he proves his point. This is not environmentalism for it’s own sake; the arguments made are scientific and rock-solid. Just reading about the collapses made me think of how little attention we pay to how our resources are consumed. Coupled with the analysis at the end of the book, the overall effect is extremely sobering.

I feel there isn’t a single person who will not benefit by reading this book – it’s message is too important to ignore, and too well-conveyed to resist.

Rating: 5 / 5

I came across Swivel today, and it’s a fascinating place. It’s a repository of publicly-uploaded data (and corresponding auto-generated graphs, it seems like) on anything under the sun. Today’s front page shows me interesting graphs on the falling US contribution to physics, top reasons why books get banned, and airline accidents and fatalities over the years.

The graphs are all Javascript (mouseover actions over a bar show the actual value), and there seem to be some basic manipulations you can do because of this. It’s still not very clear to me how they intend to ensure the reliability of data as service use increases, though. And I’d like for the graphs to be embeddable in web-pages as well as exportable in various (Swivel claims all data is Creative Commons).