ThePanda

Amusing how problems change to counter your predictions, this could be in part because of one of the Hitchhiker’s Guides pronouncements, “the moment someone begins to understand the universe, the universe rapidly degenerates into an altogether more complex place”, and well where if not in problems, does the true meaning of the universe lie. It is the day after Thanksgiving, one which has been altogether different from last years, one where I joined something like ten other people for umm an actual (?) Thanksgiving dinner, and listening to amongst other things, Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Heavy Metal Christmas, which despite its name I can thoroughly recommend. This has been a somewhat nice Thanksgiving break, though I have lesser amounts of code written so far than I had hoped for, which probably means I’ll be spending a larger portion of tonight, tomorrow and the day-after coding. No the STL is not a problem, in fact over the years people have done an amazing job of documenting it, no it is Intel’s PNL that is the cause of my current woes, it being well documented in a way that every major function has been ignored, and leading me to rely to an unholy extent on example code, which is perhaps the way hackers usuall hack, but come on, it never hurt anyone to provide good documentation for their libraries. Lulling me into a falks sense of security by providing documentation which is unusable does not bode well for people/me :D.

It snowed Wednsday night, and into early Thursday morning, with the coming of snow I am happy to report we finally have winter. For a while there I was worried about where the winter had dissapeared, it is not exactly natural to have really warm 70 degree weather at the end of November, while still in the northern hemisphere, specifically in parts of the northern hemisphere where such things as snow are to be expected…

I have been spending part of this break (that would be the part where I am not sleeping or eating, sound familiar, well OK there’s also the small amounts of coding, and wadling through code which needs to be better written) reading stuff by Isaac Babel, and while I like most of his writings, he doesn’t quite fit into my view of Russian literary authors. For one he’s both a pre- and post-revolution author, having been killed during the purges ordered by Stalin, however he doesn’t write like any of the other Russian authors I seem to have read. He complains of the Tsarist treatment of Jews, and anti-semitism in pre-revolution Russia, but yet does not seem to either embody as much of the anoyance, or anger some of his contemprories do, he seems to be content in skating along the line of accepted doctrine, and not complaining to an extent where his books would be banned, something which is very different from most of the other Russian authors affected by the purges. Well the book says he was a big follower of Gorky, and I really haven’t read too much Gorky, and most of what I remember about Gorky is the disdain with which Solzenithsyn describes him in the First Circle, and I like Solzenithsyn, and he seems to think of Gorky as this author who toes the official line, who wrote for the party bosses.

I have been watching parts of Firefly, the TV series on which Serenity was based, and while I admit that due to circumstances not entirely controlled by me, I have never actually seen the movie, but the TV show so far seems like fun, it has the requisite Farscapish attitude to life in space, while still not being Farscape (fewer creatures involved, though there are certainly characters who resemble some of the characters from Farscape, there’s definitely the Trillian like character, the inocent, but not naive ship mechanic, there are others out there, sure as hell beats wading through example code for the PNL.

We are going through the entire Secret Santa exercise again this year, ooh what fun, except people almost brought in exclusion lists, there being people they did not want to give out gifts to, there being people they did not want to receive gifts from, amusing what living together does. It seems like every nightmarish scenario we ran over last year as a part of arguing whether the house was a good idea or a bad one has come to bear out on us already, and the first semester’s hardly over. I have never been happier at people leaving, and going their separate ways, and writing towards the end of this break, I am not really happy about imagining people coming back to the house anytime soon, sure it is inevitably true that they will, but I do not wish to have them back this soon…

Hmm I feel like eschewing words of wisdom on coding practices which suck. Do not for the love of God, ever equate ints and pointers in C, or C++ code, I am sure you have a valid reason for getting an address into a numeric data type, but some of us people who work on university computers end up working on 64-bit machines (with certain of the new Pentium-4 class, Prescot machines supporting a 64-bit mode, this is not exactly rare, and umm ClawHammer and SledgeHammer, ehem excuse me, Athlon64s, being out for a while, there is no excuse for you not knowing about 64-bit machines) which have Linux kernels compiled to use 64 bit modes, and it really is quite a pain explaining to your machine why a 64 bit data type (pointers are 64 bit long) is being squeezed into a 32-bit (ints), and when your oh-so-cool library happens to be accessible in 20 languages, and other such things, it isn’t exactly easy going through figuring out such changes and then changing the ints to longs there, because honestly people use casts more often than they should. Casts rock and suck simultaneously.

Oh and what is up with DiskUtilities not allowing FAT16/32 and HFS+ partitions to exist simultaneously, I could swear this was OK with everyone not that long ago. Bah, Mac OSX is in serious need of some new partitioning tools, non-destructive partitioning which actually works, hmm…

So there are more than three people in the house right now, and it still is quite, with no real underlying stress points, I guess what SCE mentioned some weeks ago is true, dealing with people as individuals is so much better than dealing with them as a group. Oh well, I am going to cross my fingers and wait for all of them to come back, wait for the trenches to be reinhabited, and wait for the mines to be laid again, and perhaps familiarity and a break would have made people saner.

Ze Panda

There are many computer languages I have never written anything in (Eiffel anyone, oh there are other too, though I dabbled in some languages in a glorious moment of being bored two years ago, and ended up just seeing what a lot of programming language code looked like, I remember none of what I saw, and the only thing I really remember is going through a weird Prolog tutorial, deciding it was a cool language, and then deciding it was umm weird/hard, I don’t know, I find my C legacy coming back to haunt me too often, C seems to do things a lot of languages seem to be unable to do, and as much as most people complain about it, as a languaage to hack code in, it is amazing. That being said I am not really looking forward to the large amounts of STLed C++ code I am going to be writing over the forthcoming Thanksgiving, like sure there are cool things I am doing over Thanksgiving, and with not too many people around, I plan on getting through some of my readings, write code for my research, turn in early, wake up at a reasonable time, things which this past month of stupidity have made me want to do. However this paragraph is waivering from my original topic, see the one language I have never really written any of, is Pascal, well OK that and COBOL, but not too many people use COBOL anymore, while pascal and the Pascal keyword seem to have much impact on the Windows API and the cult of we write reverse compatible code coders who seem to be controling the Windows API, and it is one of those languages people randomly like to bring up, and I kind of wish I had taken the time to learn more about it back when I was still into the learn new languages thing. So as a part of this CS project I have due soon we were supposed to write a compiler for a language named Blaise, which is simple (thankfully) and has no scoping rules. Now I am ok with not having scoping rules, it really does make the project significantly simpler, and seeing as I have been working on take home midterms through most of this week (I had one mid-term free day in between), I am not going to complain about having a simple project. But anyways, I waiver again, my roomate tells me the entire have declarations on the top of the program file thing is a very Pascallish thing to do, and I will believe him on this, he having written Pascall (and not in Hebrew as opposed to Prolog, of which he has used a Hebrew version), and I having not. Now for those out there who like putting obscure twos together, this would make sense, Blaise is a Pascal like language, and Pascal was named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. Me thinks that is cool, me knows most people don’t think it means much, but it’s cool…

I had my second serious concentration meeting with a concentration advisor this past week, different advisor, different concentration, this concentration thing was supposed to be simpler. I am looking at Math-CS now, and someday soon, perhaps over Thanksgiving I plan on penning my reasons for this shift, I promised at least one half of my parents that I would send out an e-mail explaining my current situation, and I guess this is a part of that current situation deal, but it seems like a hard thing to pen down now. During my meeting I was told that my advisor fears my education at Brown is not nearly as broad as it should be. This is an interesting accusation, it has some truth to it, I am not taking any non-concentration courses this semester, and I really enjoyed some of them, as much as I detest writing papers when I am writing them, I find the experience quite gratifying once I am done with this, and I have always spent time complaining about how living with people who do only Math and CS would be boring for a simple lack of discussions in other fields, and I guess figuring out other fields would be good. But I need to settle on a concentration first, and fill out those forms, I thought this was supposed to be easy enough for me, I though I already knew what I was doing, bah…

For those who don’t know about this, the O’Reilly Factor did a rather humorous piece on “debauchery” at Brown, covering SPG, and followed this up by doing an even worse job of covering it for over thirty minutes on his radio show the next day. Not only did he end up calling most students, Ruth Simons, most members of the Brown administration, and pretty much everyone else around a pinhead, but he managed to get large swaths of his facts wrong. If it wasn’t for the fact that the factual inconsistencies and stupid notions in the radio show make me angry, I think it’d be a fun thing to laugh about, and fortunately the debauchery issue is not doing much at Brown. I am still kind of unsure about what would happen if they had massive news reports about this back home, I have a feeling most people, including a lot of whom I was at school with would not be too happy about this “scandalous” revalation about Brown. Bah, it’s amusing, can’t help it, it is amusing… Also knowing like 3 of the people who were “sent” to the hospital, I am pretty sure no ecstacy was involved with them, or with most of the other people, it’s not cheap, people don’t use E, they were mostly too much alcohol, and while that’s not nice either, it does not inspire nearly as many woohooo looksie rich kids acting dumb comments as other things do.

Last year, a guy from Sun’s Solaris Kernel Group, a former Brown student, and a brother to one of our TAs paid us a visit in my CS class. CS classes are usually uninteresting events, but this was fun, he spoke of DTrace, a tool Sun was building into Solaris to help with debugging, and such things, and he spoke of the halting problem in the context of limited memory systems, and of kernels and operating systems in general. Somewhere in there he mentioned things about the IA-32 architecture which I did not completely agree with. We discussed this, he agreed to some of my changes, and I guess I made mistakes on the others, and then he called me a super-nerd. Now back hom this would have been bad, here it was just funny, and another addition to my stories. Well he’s coming back this year, and he’s interviewing for internships with Sun, and I have an urge to try out for this one, which brings me to my current dilemna. Do I remind him of the fact that this happened last year, sending him a funny e-mail with this incident, or umm should I be staid and umm just not tell him about this. I have a feeling both have their good points, and I don’t actually know which of these would be better…

This weekend has been very plaid, I have an exam to blame for this, but umm I had one last weekend too, I guess the relative difficulty of this class counts for something, that and an apparent inability to work for longer than 20 minutes at a stretch. I might try going to a place where I won’t have easy access to a computer later, try doing this there, fewer distractions. I am going to watch the new Harry Potter movie in an hour or so, I haven’t really watched any of the other ones, so this is like a new experience, though I quite liked the fourth book, so perhaps this would be nice, and fun. It seems funny how my weekends go, and how different the activities I engage in seem to be, I spent some time last night (and thus missed out on sleep) discussing economic policies, and other weird things, I spent some time before then, and sometime thereafter, discussing weird things of life, and umm the problem of being born into “academics”, which is how someone chose to describe mine and SCE’s state, and it was a somewhat weird depressing conversation, one of the many I seem to end up having about this topic, and yet I am going to watch this happy (one would hope) movie today, strange.

I might shift to sub-only status for the Help Desk next semester, I am yet to take a conclusive decission on this, but the more I think about this, it seems like a good thing to do. I am going to try and be a TA in the CS department, and shift to sub only status, so I can concentrate on things I like, and on having a weekend. I don’t know, on some days I really love the help desk, then there are these other days, usually dependent on who I am working with, and other factors, when I can’t wait to get out of there, and while it’s a nice way to earn money, it isn’t nearly what I want to do. TLD is going to head off to the warmer Californian climes next semester, he’ll be working for Google for a while, and this would effectively be the end of my current research project. It’s nice in some ways, none of the associated messiness of ending this anyother way, it however does shift my ship-by deadline up to the very near future, and is partially to blame for my spending Thanksgiving coding, but that is fun anyways. He offered me an Indipendent Study if I wish to engage in one, and I guess that’d be nice, I don’t know, I need to make a decission on this. I think it’d be fun to find other research to do, this was kind of fun… However I am still concerned about a perceived weirdness in the CS department when it comes to dealing with me, it’s like I am not really close to any of the “important” students at the CS department, and it’d be nice to be able to talk to them without being made to feel like an outsider, I know most of them well enough, and while not engaged in as many of the CS departments extracurricular activities as most people are, I know my way around, and I can code as well as most of them, perhaps better than some of them, but then again CS Departments aren’t exactly places for hackers to show off.

I watched the fourth Harry Potter movie, and am probably one of the few people who did not like it. As far as I am concerned, there are massive plot holes in there, things that the book covers, important things, not measley subplots which it was OK to avoid. Also the movie Dumbeldore does not do as many Dumbeldorish things as he should, bleh…

This has gotten much too long, more later…

Ze Panda

It’s a week and a half before Thanksgiving, I detest this semester/wish I had made different choices/wish I hadn’t made too many choices, and am hence looking forward to Thanksgiving. I have had a not so great week, though a lot of things seem to be setting themselves up in strange ways for later, and I hope this later actually materializes, and I haven’t actually done anything too intriguing this weekend. Wait I did have fondue, which was great, I guess, I also met WNS and had a discussion about life, the universe, and courses, something I hadn’t done in a while, was introduced to a condensed matter theoretical physicist, and umm told him that I once wanted to be him, but no longer do, only to realize significantly later that these are perhaps not the best words to mention to someone. I also communicated with the man from the land of the kangaroos, after a significant period of time, realized that in a wonky way, he’s one of my favorite professors of all time, and I wish I had been in more classes with him, or at least had the option of doing so, interviewed with a financial software company, realized I am really unsure about working there ever, went to an info session for a company I once knew about, realized I detest them, and most companies I end up meeting, got through stage 1 of my Apple applications, realized I still want to do a SURF, but need to make other decisions if I want to do so, and need to make them soon, realized that I have issues with altogether too many people, and after trying to be nice to one of them yesterday, realized I don’t really want to resolve too many of them, realized I loved sleeping, missed classes for weird reasons for the first time since school, realized I don’t really want to miss them, decided I am doing to many things, made important decisions about work in future semesters, decided money matters very little, and decided on a few other things that I have since found really hard to implement. I also sort of autonomously decided over the past few weeks, mostly because of recurring incidents with people who surround me, that humans are altogether too weird, and smart people do not necessarily have good short-term memory, and Brown does accept people with dysfunctional/deficient short term memories, and that standing in line sucks, because not everyone wants to act like perfect angelic beings, even though they would, given a chance, guilt trip you into believing not being one is bad. I also realize, that is one hell of a long sentence, shows that I have too much on my mind, and I am not going to discuss too much of that, perhaps none of that in fact.

So I no longer know everyone who reads this blog, I stopped monitoring hits a few weeks ago, and umm perchance if there is someone from Caltech visiting these pages, and umm if you know of any Math, or CS professors, umm OK let’s concentrate on the later half of that list, I’d be really really grateful to find out about them. That being said, I also realize I had this page up on my recruiting profile for a while, so I am not sure about who if anyone is visiting from any of the companies I have submitted links to. I also sort of am divided about too many things, and if there’s anyone who wants to pitch/explain what umm let’s see, mathematicians, computer scientists, and other people do when not earning money to buy their next I don’t know what, because as much as I would like to own a Lamborghini when I am 27, that’s not what I want my life to be about, and while I seem to have an inexplicable love for things which are scarily expensive, I don’t actually know what to do with them, and I want to be an academic/do research/get one of those five jobs at Pixar which Pixar said I couldn’t have.

Also I have decided I am going to get a single next year, and live in there alone, and umm do funky things, and find new things to do, and umm I don’t know, read more books while I am in college, and other such things. This is of course subject to change, and shall be confirmed when lottery time rolls by next semester, but this seems like a very good idea right now, and would perhaps be implemented, I don’t know, I hope so. I saw Guster live in concert yesterday, and this is perhaps the first time I have seen a band I actually like live in concert, and this is a good thing, except a lot of the people there where high schoolers and were acting like dumb wits in there, and crowding me in, and not accepting the fact that they should have gone to the front of the concert space before Guster actually came on, thus making me decide that I really don’t like crowded places, and my feeling that I don’t was not a weird untested feeling so far. I also read some sad stuff about the concert hall I was in, and ugly things about one of the performers who’s going to be performing there soon, and I feel sort of bad about going there, seeing as they shouldn’t really be inviting this performer, but I already had tickets to Guster, and that as far as I know, was the high point of my weekend. Seeing as it is 12:40 AM on Monday, I am pretty sure nothing’s going to make it higher than this.

This is going to come back to haunt me, so as a disclaimer I claim that no one’s really responsible for this, but I had a really crappy birthday this year, which is fine by me, but had me worried about upcoming birthdays in the years following this. Do birthdays actually get worse as time goes by, because I really don’t have interesting 18^th birthday stories, I spent much of it worried about the future, and this is sort of the future, and I love it, on most days I do anyways, and I don’t know, I want interesting birthday stories to share with people, hell I want interesting stories in general to share with people. This is strange, and complaining about too many things I know, but let’s see before I turned 18, I had more interesting things happening in my life, I saw tigers bathing, was charged, and nearly picked up by an elephant, had an elephant tap my head, swam in a river where there were supposed to be crocodiles, tracked two tigers by foot, saw tigers performing pre-mating rituals, had a fishing eagle drop fish on us, and other such things. Post turning 18, I haven’t really seen a tiger, haven’t really seen too many elephants, was thrown out of my favorite jungle, don’t want to go back for fear of being thrown back out, and have generally not done anything too exciting. This needs to change, I know all of my life can’t be interesting, but I miss parts of the old arrogant, haughty, overconfident me, and while many believe I am still arrogant, I want to do more cool stuff. Oh towards me doing exciting things, I have grand (and hence destined to fail) plans for a program I want to write over the winter, hmm which reminds me I should really discuss winter plans with my parents, I want to go back to programming cool things, I coded in assembly for the first time after many years, and awful as writing a gigantic program in assembly was, it made me feel cool, it reminded me of old times, and cool things like that…

Exun 2k5 is supposed to be coming up, and as every year goes by I know fewer judges, I know precisely one this year, most of Exun does not respond to my e-mails about change of information, and for the first time since I graduated from high school I received no pre-public release information about Exun 2k5, something which is completely understandable, and yet sad. I am and always will be an Exun alumni, but I think we have moved on, and while this is something I realized over the small part of the summer I spent in Delhi, no matter what comes next, that part of my life is gone, and it doesn’t sadden me any more, I loved Exun, but too much has changed and we’ve all moved on. The stuff I did in Exun, while exciting is not completely what I want to do next, and someday I will finally be able to go back to Exun and look back at all that being a part of it did for me, but now is not the time. I might go back to school the next time I am in Delhi, but it’s not going to be something I absolutely need to do, and while I am sure there are people in there who would not understand my decision, I will be back someday, someday when I have accepted all the changes that Exun has gone through.

I am done with this entry, it’s not happy, and I still have a story in my head that needs to be posted, and other things that need to be posted, perhaps they will be somedays, perhaps they won’t ever, for now I have a differential geometry midterm I need to complete, so I can concentrate on my analysis midterm.

Ze Panda