Dr. D. Veeraraghavan passed away day before yesterday. Dilip is the only person I know of who could be unquestionably rational while being tolerant, forgiving and understanding simultaneously. Forever patient and sympathetic and willing to talk to students as a friend, he wore the virtues of honesty, sincerity, tolerance and selflessness as no one else did. Practising these virtues, it seemed to me, was very natural to Dilip - he never tried to tell the truth or try to be nice to people, he just did. Through hours of conversation, debate and discussion, Dilip shaped my views, thoughts and in fact my life (and I am sure that of lots of other students too) as few others have. May he rest in peace.
[Update - 3/1/2009] - A Wiki page with links to blog posts/news articles about Dilip and a collection of photographs is here.
R.I.P. Dilip
CCE, IIT Madras's Website Hacked
Update(12/31/08) : It's been more than three days and this still hasn't been fixed.
The website of the Centre for Continuing Education, IIT Madras was compromised, some time today I presume. The index page redirects to a page on the domain of ztomy.com. For those of you who are reading this post after the problem is fixed, here is a video of the redirect in action.
Time to get good at Functional Programming?
Slashdot has a *very* interesting discussion on the necessity for programmers to start learning functional programming in order to get their algorithms running well on multicore platforms of the future. The discussion was motivated by an article at Dr. Dobb's which says much the same thing and then goes on to give brief overviews of Scala, F#, Erlang, and Haskell and - hold your breath - functional programming in Mathematica!
I found the discussion very interesting partly because it revealed to me a lot of my ignorance of the paradigm of FP but also because of the way it illustrated how discussions at Slashdot go. Here are a few (randomly picked) observations :
- A month or two ago, I wrote a program for a class project in Lisp and I had setf's strewn all over the place. I "knew" I was doing something wrong with that as I was with all my for loop-ish structures but I couldn't lay a finger on it nor could I see an "easy" way of not using such non-FP-ish structures. One post in the Slashdot discussion describes it very succinctly : "To be functional means to be stateless . . . Church invented lambda calculus, and Turing invented Turing machines . . . Turing machines have state . . . Lambda calculus, is well, a calculus. It is functional in nature and has no state."
- " . . . it's impossible to do a quick sort in a functional language, although other less efficient sorts may be done . . ."
- It's interesting to see how, as a discussion on Slashdot gets more technical, the number of contributors falls rapidly. :-) In spite of moderation, a lot of threads on "popular" topics attract all sorts of arbitrary posts. The more technical posts, like the one above, sometimes have no replies :-)
- The discussion also refers to a previous one titled "Twenty Years of Dijkstra's Cruelty" . This references an article by Dijkstra written (obviously) twenty years ago discussing the then-current state of Computer Science education. Dijkstra's article presents a very mathematical view of a program (which is true, in some respects) and dismisses the notion of software engineering as being analogous to (and as silly as) "formula engineering" or "algebra engineering" in mathematics.
- And of course, there was a reference to Godwin's law :-)
Tomato Rice
Inspired by Bhaand's culinary experiments, here's my look-what-I-managed-to-make-without-burning-anything-and-oh-it-tastes-so-wonderful post.
A week or two ago, at some random point of time during the day, I was quite hungry but in no mood to go through the convoluted ritual of making a curry/sambar/rasam. Faced with the additional challenge of having to dispose of the previous day's rice, I Googled a bit for rice-based dishes which are quick and easy to make and hit upon tomato rice (coconut rice and jeera rice were rejected for lack of raw materials). There are enough recipes out there so I am not going to list mine here. Suffice to say that my implementation did satisfy the authors' claims of quick-and-easy-to-make, decently tasty and a good way of converting cold rice into something edible. :-)
Moon Gazing
I stepped into the balcony of my apartment a few minutes back and looked up to find the moon. A few minutes of moon gazing later, I realized that this was the first time I had actually seen the moon in more than two months.
How long has it been since you saw the moon?
Journey to Atlanta
What follows is a description of my mostly event less but nevertheless personally significant flight to Atlanta. Enjoy and yes comments are welcome! For those hapless chaps who have to make this journey in the near future, pieces of information and gen gyan are in parantheses with an INFO: tag. Please note that you should do #include <standard_disclaimer.h> (I am not going to be friends with anyone who doesn't understand this) when taking these bits of advice. These are totally personal observations with no statistical evidence at all.
It started off with an (unnecessarily) early_max check-in (2.5 hours before scheduled departure of flight) at Hyderabad airport where I guess I was like the third guy among 300 or so to get my boarding pass. (INFO : Lufthansa lets students carry 3 check-in bags weighing 23 kg. This is not known even to the guys at Lufthansa's customer helpline! So do remember this if you are traveling from Hyderabad. Also, you needn't subscribe to the weight limit very strictly. My supposed-to-be-23-kg bags were 23.8 and 24.5, I think. What's more is that the cabin baggage is not weighed at all so you can very peacefully exceed the limit as long as it looks small enough to take on board. Also, you can take two pieces - one is called cabin baggage and another your "personal item". And there's like no difference between the two. I took a trolley (10 kg) and a standard shoulder bag with my papers and a change of clothes.) Following that, Indian customs was happy to let me go with only a cursory examination of my passport and I-20. (INFO : Please keep your passport and I-20 in an easily accessible location. You're asked for your I-20 almost every place that you are asked for your passport.) I could be smuggling out a sculpture from Mahabalipuram or Ajanta&Ellora and they wouldn't really know. After that began the long_max wait at the gate. To add to the pain, the flight was delayed by 40 mins because the incoming flight (from God knows where) was running late. The painful part is that you cannot really eat anything here because the prices are too high (Obviously, I mean in rupees. The dollar equivalent is pretty reasonable). A good 2 hours later, boarding started and I got in. (INFO : I don't know if this is a standard problem but at least on this flight, the guys who got in towards the end didn't have room in the lockers for their cabin baggage because almost everyone had two pieces. They had to keep theirs in business class which is a pain because you cannot take it out during the flight. So don't wait till the end to board.)
Once in, the take-off was pretty peaceful and it took like an hour for those guys to get to cruising altitude. Meanwhile we were told that Lufthansa's workers were on strike and hence the in-flight services would be limited. This didn't seem significant until later when it turned out to be a HUGE pain. I was eagerly waiting for what followed - grub time! - because I was pretty hungry by then. Grub was decent - fried rice with curry and pappu/paruppu and a roll of bread with butter etc.- but limited. There are drinks on board and first time fliers are advised to stick to safe ones like apple/orange juice. This is not the time to booze! Grub done, lights were off and most junta crashed. There was a movie going on too ("21" - another of those "popular math" movies in which being able to add 6 and 7 and come up with 13 faster than the rest of the guys in a graduate class is considered a mark of mathematical genius) so I sort of half slept and half watched the movie. (INFO : The flights from Chennai and Delhi have personal entertainment screens and on-demand movies. Sadly, Hyd gets a kuttier flight which has like 4 to 5 common screens. There's personal radio though.) This was followed by a vetti_max Hindi movie called Race. And then breakfast, which was upma and idly with sambar. Makes sense considering that 90% of the junta were Indian. An hour or so later, flight lands in Frankfurt and I manage to navigate to the gate to my next flight. With nothing to do for 4-5 hours, I roam around for some time but there's nothing very interesting and sadly, nothing which is free. :-) Quite naturally, I ran into a chatty, kind uncle from gultland. Vetti timepass for some time. The biggest highlight of this stopover was that I managed to con an American into lending his laptop for me to mail my parents back home. I consider this an achievement and will be adding it to my CV soon.
Boarding started around an hour before departure (this flight was on time!) and I got in to find a non-chatty, kind old American uncle beside me this time. We were again told that Lufthansa staff was on strike. This time, it mattered. First round of grub was yucky_max. I think we ate pasta or lasagna as the main course but whatever it was simply horrible. So were the side dishes. Movies this time were "Fool's Gold" and "Definitely, Maybe". Boring. This leg got pretty painful because it was day-time and so I couldn't crash. (INFO : It's actually a good idea not to crash in this leg because it's also day time in your final destination and hence you'll be better adjusted to the time difference when you get there) Generally vettily time passed. Somewhere in the second half, there was the realization that we would NOT be served another meal. A 10 hour flight with ONE meal in the beginning and nothing else is a pretty easy way to kill people (I wonder why they bother with the guns and the knives in Bollywood. Just put this guy on a Lufthansa flight and make sure the catering staff is on strike.) We were served juice instead. Freaking, crappy orange and apple juice. I probably downed 5/6 glasses in the space of 3 hours but that didn't really help the hunger pangs. Flight somehow got to an end. Somewhere in the beginning of the flight, we were given US Customs forms and I had some nice time trying to figure out which questions to lie about and which ones to risk answering honestly. This landed me in some pain later. At some vague point of time, (I had stopped counting minutes by then) the flight landed and I made my way to immigration control or some such thing. Long_max queue here but peaceful "interview" at the end of it. Passport, I-20, one stamp and you are done. Pick up check-in luggage from luggage carousel and then proceed to customs. The female there is waving junta through generally so I peacefully walk up to be told "Please take this form and go into this inner room". Heart skips several beats and little Sameer has brief visions of CIA detention camps and quickly runs through his rights under the Geneva convention. After a random period of time spent in trying to devoid my fingers of all their nails, my name is called and I am asked a few questions about what I am carrying. I tell them about jeera, chilli powder and garam masala but what they want to see is the rice! Some vague funda about insects etc. Anyway, I am let off petty soon with a "Study hard, son" and find my seniors waiting to pick me up. Deliverance!
After a lot of lugging luggage from airport to train station to apartment to half way across city, we land up in the seniors' apartment to find water, food and heaven. End of journey!
Kamal and Dasavatharam
With about 20 hours to go for my visa interview and not wishing to spend that time agonizing over the details of my woefully inadequate financial support documentation, I chanced across a fairly viewable copy of Kamal Haasan's Dasavatharam on the borrowed machine I was using. Much hyped before release and strongly criticized by the reviewers later, Dasavatharam's been on my list of to-watch movies since I first heard of it in April (of this year, yes) or so. So I double-clicked away in muffled excitement and leaned back.
A couple of hours later, I emerged from the room dazed and clueless. This is not going to be yet another piece on why Dasavatharam is a huge letdown or why Kamal's much touted ten-role performance is a disaster. What puzzles me most is the question of why and how an actor and a writer as intelligent as Kamal could have made a Dasavatharam. Since Hey Ram of course, he's been on some sort of a decline but one could still see the genius of the old Kamal in Anbe Sivam (minus the deviating monologues on MNCs, globalization and Communism). BTW, this Dec. 2003 article written soon after Anbe Sivam is an interesting read on Kamal's future. I wonder what the author would have to say after watching Dasavatharam.
This brings me back to the point that the extreme irrationality and contorted storyline of Dasavatharam would have been more standard Tamil movie fare rather than something you would expect from a script written by Kamal. Or a dialogue like "Nee enna terrific scientista ille scientific terrorista?" for that matter. One should admit that if you were to view some of the characters in isolation - the strongly typecast Balram Naidu or the brief but significant appearance of Rangaraj Nambi, you would perhaps see glimpses of Kamal's amazing ability to get under the skin of a character and play it to the T. Almost always, you can see the Surya in the Anbuchelvan, the SRK in the Raj/Rahul and obviously the Rajni in the Bhasha but Kamal is one of those few actors (rivalled perhaps by Amitabh Bacchan?) who does not let his personal traits show through in his roles.
Unfortunately for him though, what do show through of late are his whimsical trends and his fancies. There's this thin line between genius and eccentricity and Kamal seems to have gone gone from one side to another with Dasavatharam.
Edit : Here is a much more comprehensive dissection of why Kamal's latest disaster is one. I significantly echo the author's feelings.
