Category — Uncategorized

I have been observing the lifestyle of the 4th grader who is spending a fortnight at our place and positively, I hate it. Poor kid is sort of pushed around everyday. Why? To impart to him the knowledge of English Grammar. He recites the parts of speech (I know them too, just in case you think I have gotten away with that), examples of each part of speech, points them out in a sentence and solves long worksheets on a daily basis. Why? Grammar. I sympathize with him and would like to point out that he’d be better off perfecting his theoretical knowledge of mathematics, such as study what a symmetry is, study what homogeneity is, study what polynomials truly are and so on. He’ll benefit that way. Instead, recite each kind of noun, pronoun, verb, adverb etc. I sometimes wonder what the point of all this is. Sure, if he wants to compete with Natural Language Parsers like montylingua, then it might help.. but he’s got world class search engines to find help too! What is the point of teaching someone non-functional grammar?

I believe that if someone gets grammar right, it has to be the CollegeBoard. Look at the SAT paper. No one asks you what a noun is or what something is. You are forced to learn how to use correct english so that your dialect (there are so many right here that every 200 miles, you may see English being spoken differently) does not hinder your communication with someone in the West or in another part of the world. Focus on that.

Even nature has an example for us. What does a toddler first learn? How to communicate, or the definitions of the parts of speech? So far, I have only used my knowledge of the parts of speech to pass the intermediate examination in English. Instead of teaching kids what the building blocks of English are, teach them how to speak English well.

So, I’ve managed a measly 94 % overall in the Intermediate Public Examinations and life’s good.

Well, I guess that in my life there was math, code and more math. I have realized that I get this excellent feeling when beautifully written Python code ( ever saw Python code in Komodo ? With the indentation, it looks beautiful ) performs primality tests, crunches out the Kaprekar / Collatz depths. By now, I think I think ( and a few people certainly think ) that I might be the best candidate to replace an academic and why not ? Most of the people I idolize are in academia and I want to be there as well.

I was browsing through the archives of Scott Aaronson’s Blog and I happened to read an entry where he ranted on CollegeBoard’s decision to remove the CS AP exam. He mentioned that he ate up everything there was to eat in that computer science course. That is true love for the subject. I had a similar experience with the book, “Post’s Machine” by V. A. Uspensky ( the third time I have mentioned it on my blog ). I just kept reading again and again. Talk about great books and that should be mentioned. I knew from then on that whatever the author was, I wanted to be too. Well, Scott’s got a lot going for him. He went to Cornell for Undergrad, went to Berkeley for Grad and is now teaching quantum computing at MIT.

On the other hand, I am going to a less “glorious” place, will probably never end up as a decent computer scientist as well. Well, I can dream on, can’t I?

I have met a lot of interesting people online. Well, I am shit at doing anything in real life, I can at least act as a tiger online, can’t I?

I’ve got an interesting reading list and I plan to read quite a lot in this week. First, I’ve got to read “Programming Pearls” completely. So far, I’ve been reading pieces of it. Then comes a book called “A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Programming”. It is an excellent book. I would recommend that as well ( but since I have assigned the n00b status to myself, it might not be that good a read for everyone else ). I’ve got a few other *legally free* ebooks and I’m going to finish reading them tomorrow.

Well, I am out of school ( officially ) now and not a lot has changed. People on the IRC server I first wandered to still call me “charlie” owing to the fact that I have managed to make a complete fool of myself a lot of times when I spoke on topics like “British History”, “Politics” and so on.

I am going to solve a few puzzles I have collected ( Math Puzzles in case you were wondering ). Will blog about them soon. Till next time, goodbye

I recently featured in the comments of Ms. Sramana Mitra’s blog. Sramana as you all know is an entrepreneur who did cool stuff after college. She went to Smith College for a B.S. and to MIT ( !!!! ) for an M.S. in EECS ( !!!! ). I will be there in 4 years don’t worry.

If you have noticed, I haven’t posted a lot in the past few days. The reason is that I am brushing up on my Django skills which have rusted in the past few months. After that I plan to creep back into the FOSS world but till I get something done, I won’t put it up here and that is my policy.

Instead, let me talk of some cool memories that revisited me when I was disturbing the one inch thick dust layer in my room by trying to bring about an order. I happened to come across a booklet that I had loved reading a few years back when I was recovering from my accident - The “Post’s Machine” by V. A. Uspensky.

Tears just welled into my eyes when I saw the tiny booklet, a part of the extremely coveted “Little Mathematics Library”. Indeed, this is such an excellent book on such a simple toy - the Post’s Machine. The author mentioned concepts like programming, algorithms etc, all through an instruction set peculiar to the Post’s Machine which I can still remember to be:

This book had approximately 30 problems I think and I had extreme fun solving each one of these. Well, if the field of Computer Science has to pursue some aggressive methods to improve dwindling numbers of searches, this priceless booklet might just be the right tool to use.

I am pretty sure that this was the book that got me interested in Computer Science. For those of you who can grab this booklet, I am sure you will enjoy it.

• Impress a bunch of liberal arts majors.
• Failed to prove to a bunch of liberal arts majors that I along with a million others will save the planet from imminent doom.
• Failed to make a liberal arts guy laugh. I can make most laugh at someone else.
• Failed to get them equal opportunity guys to look at even one link ( Google analytics is a handy tool )
• Failed to make it to a decent college and now the entire society around me will consider my few contribs as “invalid and a perfect joke”. The society I live in is full of paper tigers.
• Failed to get a few PE sums to work in < 8 secs.

And yeah, this is not intended to express views of my employer - Shriphani Palakodety and my benefactor - Shriphani Palakodety.

- by Shriphani Palakodety

P.S.: I am going to kick them liberal arts guys in the ballz.

Let me bustle in with some code, I have had enough of pondering about MIT and lost opportunities and I want to continue doing what I always loved, coding. I am back to solving sums on Project Euler. Well, I am going to get back to web development now. I have stayed away from my loved tools for 5 whole days ! It is time to get back on track.

This was a special year for me in many ways. This year marked my return to full physical fitness and I have decided to move on. I have made up for most of what I missed during grade 11 and 12.

But there is something I love better, programming. So I am going to get back to that. This month was the least productive in this year as I had to draft applications and so on. I have finished all of them and hence I can sit back and allow the “luck” part to take over.

Well let me describe the iLugHyd meeting on the 30th of December.

The ROR session (I am a bit bored by the excessive importance ROR gets and Django doesn’t). The very same cool features of Ruby and the Rails framework (I have to admit, really cool features) were stated all over again. I won’t bother stating them here as a google search lands you at a webpage that does this Django vs. ROR thing quite well.

I am instead compelled to talk about the shortcomings of the rails framework. The CEO of rknowsys told me that rails was bad at handling transactions and J2EE I suppose walks away with this one. Web applications like ebay therefore cannot be created in Rails.

I was also told about the number of users trying to pull data from the database. Seemingly, the more the number of users the uglier it gets with Ruby.

There really needs to be a Django session in Hyderabad.

Oh BTW, TWINCLING Society has a session on Distributed Computing on the 5th of January.

Today I attended ilugHyderabad’s meet. It was once again the under-renovation building at Osmania University that now looks good from the outside. However, after another “brush” with the wall, my favourite jacket was “whitened”. I got to meet the CEO of rknowsys and seemingly rknowsys has a ruby on rails tutorial on its page. I am however not going to try ruby. Not after what I got when I first installed it. I know that most of the problems I faced were due to a very recent version of rails. With Rails2, scaffolding’s gone and so’s a lot more as per what theju says (remember, theju’s dad is an ROR developer)

This has been my least productive month. I have been so busy writing those essays and whatnot and now I am pretty much harried. I need a good break for a week. I have dad’s pdf application to roll out and I’ve got timepass to work on and I have Brown’s essay to submit. But je suis robust dans la tete !

I got to see DP110 after a very long while on IRC. Actually DP110’s beowulf cluster hosted my blog last year. After his server was sold, I lost my blog + kernels I compiled on it.

I have a bad headache now. I’ll write again later.

I broke my new HP headphones (Sniff). I don’t have a spare pair of headphones (Sniff). Well forget it already. I checked my gmail inbox recently and I saw a mail from Mr. Mahesh U. Patil of TWINCLING Society. Mr. Mahesh was trying to make a web interface for his location plotting application. When I last saw him at TWINCLING, he wanted to create a system that would enable him to plot the position of a device without getting the background to change. After this piece of info let us move to the mail. It was about Python magic. He showed me the master’s thesis of someone by the name Albert Huang (MIT as usual).

Well I really am back. I had a pretty hectic week. First I have this crap thing called phase test to attend at my education factory. Dumb ain’t it. Ironically, two days later I have to sit for my toefl exam. Well next, I am going out on the road sometime next week to promote edubuntu in schools across hyderabad. My first stop will most probably be in hps ramanthapur. I have to sit and design a few slides for this and go armed with some ubuntu clothing. I will be posting the slides I have made and so on. I want to ask all fellow hyderabadis to assist me in this. The ubuntu-ap loco team seems too inactive for this kind of work and I feel that if we have to produce a generation of techies and geeks, better start at school level. Assistance will be respected.

Shriphani Palakodety.

Yes folks, I got a cd and that too from one of the least expected places, my neighbour! Amazing ain’t it? I finally get a more up to date os than dapper whose repos are hopelessly outdated. I suppose I can get back to coding now. I am working on a coordinate geometry module that deals with parabolas, ellipses and so on. It is going to include only a parabola at the moment (that is what they are teaching at school, so you know..). I am very worried because I got toefl coming up on the 12th of september, hence the tension is in full spate. By the way twincling is due to meet on the same day as my phase test (at FIIT-JEE). As they say, if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. I am also trying to learn lots of electronics as I can then design my dream LED powered fridge lighting woohoo. I had a lot of fun at mukt and learnt two things:
1. My hardware is crap as opposed to the hardware the general public owns,
2. Never ever trust an individual who gives you a copy of solaris and tells you that it is very fast.

Heh. I am bloody happy and hope that the world stays happy too. good luck and see you later.
Shriphani Palakodety