ThePanda

You have to admire people who tell you that it wasn’t all the work that had them tired, but the drinking. Umm OK I have not been told this by someone yet, I however did overhear people at the post office, where I was helping a friend parcel over big boxes of stuff back home, talking about something similar, and am hence in awe. Now before people go on to comment about the futility, or the lack thereof of such activities, it should be noted that this is senior week, and you have one senior week per education level (umm I probably am exaggerating, it probably is no more than one a lifetime), and hence such displays of joviality should be treated neither with disbelief nor with a sense of disgust, for these after all as pointed out in the Alma Mater these are the “The happiest moments of youth’s fleeting hours” for them.

The weather’s gross out there, which is sad in more ways than one, like it’s been raining, and the mercury dropped a lot over the past two days, so that is a good thing back home, especially around now, but no it’s a bad thing here. To make matters worse, the wind is roaring, and as it goes through the thick sheets covering the scaffolding for the future biomed center, it sounds like a million firecrackers going off, in tandem, continuously. I hope it’s not week or anything, those plastic sheets seem pretty big, and heavy, and I really wouldn’t want to see one of them fly off, oh well, just goes to show, this weather wasn’t expected…

For all those who visit this blog, after reading Slashdot, what I am about to say in the next paragraph or so should be old news. Hence I would suggest, buggering off, finding something more interesting to do for the next paragraph or so, and then coming back to reading the rest of this entry, or you could simply close this window/tab/whatever the hell you are viewing it on. Recently (it’s yesterday by my current watch), the New York Times (hmm I can’t even write that out without remembering about Epic2020 and the entire Fourth Estate), published a report about the Windows-Macintosh war essentially establishing ground rules for the same. Having gone through iterations of both operating systems, and having in turn liked both at various points in time (though I admit, currently I love Macs), I think some of those rules are excellent, and need to be adhered to on both sides. I know at times I have been extremely umm protective, about what I feel Macs can do, and I know I have had debates with people who have been extremely fond of their Windows machines, something which is inevitable, seeing as a big part of my life was spent in a country where Mac-penetration is extremely low, mostly because of Apple’s own mistakes (I don’t have the inclination to go through the archives of Karan’s blog, but I believe he had a post about this a long time ago), and generally the debates leave me feeling unaccomplished because I really haven’t managed to change people’s views, and my views remain pretty much the same, and hence are not really beneficial to either side. Seeing as nearly everyone who’s a Macophile has access to Win XP from some source or the other, and most people who are vehemently against Macs, have some reasons to be that way, and should hence have access to those (umm quite frankly, the “I don’t like Macs because they are dumb” argument doesn’t quite cut it), I think adopting that set of ground rules would do both sides some good, and it might actually help get things done. Now I would point out that adopting similar rules for most software/hardware debates, might do us some good, but umm some paragraphs down I might actually be bashing somethings I don’t like about the Matlab language, and about the ultra-restrective Matlab license I am working under (umm using Matlab is kind of important to me this summer, more about that later), and I could be wrong about a lot of things, mostly because I am not really an expert on Matlab, hell I am not even a novice, more of a rookie I guess, and umm ya I reserve the right to make those comments, though I’d obviously be pleased to receive comments proving things on the contrary, since that might actually allow me to learn something, and umm might help me. Obviously all of this requires that the thin stream of people (ya, there are about 30 of you who visit any given day) who visit this blog, leave comments, or mail me, but meh whatever, a lot of this is also about organizing my own brain.

I am amused to learn that school (umm DPS, not Brown) has something called the “academic council”, I am not quite sure where that stands or what that is, but it’s sort of intriguing. Hmm also all of Providence seems overrun by alumni, and if their cars are an indication of anything, I must say Brown alumni do fairly well, they drive good cars :).

I had my meeting with TLD today, somewhat amusing, every time I meet him, I end up getting more pieces of paper on bayesian nets, and how they could possibly relate to the visual cortex, and go back to figuring something or the other out. Right now it’s this Matlab package I am supposed to decipher and then see whether it is actually supposed to work for everything, or whether there is this one kind of data it would work for, sort of fun, except umm I am not really that good at Matlab, and it’s a weird language. It seems to borrow from every language I have seen, and yet seems to be developmentally primitive, its idea of functions is having files with different names, things are returned by naming variables (anyone remember Visual Basic subs, and I think something similar worked in QBasic too), and global variables must be imported in by a global declaration (C extern keyword anyone). Now don’t get me wrong, there are somethings I absolutely love Matlab for, the fact that everything is a matrix, and works on a matrix (hmm imagine taking an array of 5 elements, say A, and going A=(A<=0.75) to get arrays with 1 for everything less than or equal to 0.75, and 0 otherwise, imagine being told this is wayyyy faster than iteration, and while I won’t claim this for a lack of better knowledge, most Matlab programmers out there seem to use this like an O(1) operation, but then on the other hand as someone mentioned on a forum not so long ago, no one really cares about performance that much, and you use an O(n) thing when you have to use an O(n) thing), but umm well they seem to charging a helluva lot of money for it, and they seem to have restrictive licensing agreements, and I am led to believe they are rich, and have big research team, and well they could probably mess with the language a little, get it a little up to date or something. I am not really looking for full OOP capabilities yet (though having that for somethings, without being forced to constantly use it might actually help), but you know something a little better. I however will attest that until this point of time, I have not yet seen a goto in any Matlab code, which makes me happy, since I am burdened with the knowledge that an intro C course in the CS department (admittedly for non-concentrators) does spend time introducing gotos in C, and umm me and a friend tried counting non-evil uses for goto, and I think we came up with one iffy, non-evil use, though I could be wrong about this, but ya, most C programmers seem to consider Goto evil :D. But either ways getting back to Matlab, seeing as my computer hasn’t gone down for a few days, and by days I mean weeks (my mistake, I know), the fact that Matlab uses X and is more Unixy than Aquaish to look at (though the shortcuts are Mac shortcuts, something which always confuses me, since I have been running stuff on an X forwarded SSH connection from the CS department, and everything there seems to use Linux/Windows shortcuts), and takes time to get back to taking input from me (I keep moving around, multitasking is a big thing for me), opening new files for everything I need to do is not something I am very happy about. Hmm so much for complaining about Matlab (please keep suggestions such as use Mathematica, or umm use Maple to yourselves, because I also use the other two, it’s just that I find them useful for different purposes, and am not really good at any of them)...

I am going to cut this entry now, I am going to Waterfire later tonight, and I might have human company when I go to Waterfire, which would be kind of nice, considering a large feature of my nights over the past few days has been watching movies, hmm the fact that I have watched the same three times round, in a period of four days doesn’t help much, but whatever, such be summer ;).

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 6:02 pm and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.