ThePanda

Anyone who's spent time on this blog before now, will notice that it has of course changed. Not to worry, this was not a pre-planned change, in fact perhaps the biggest catalyst for this change has been me hoping domain hosting services. This one's faster, offers somethings that the previous one doesn't, and is actually usable for things other than hosting this infrequently read blog. As a part of moving, I decided to not keep my old TextPattern install around, instead going with this swanky new WordPress install, and a bunch of scripts found around the tubes to migrate my TextPattern data over. That being said, more might change...

It has been four or more years since I have maintained this blog, lots has changed, and in some ways we have come a full circle. Back when I started, I was applying to colleges, and while a lot of what I wrote about was (in hindsight), utter crap, it will always be around. Well four years on, I am back to applying to schools, grad schools this time, but not much changes. And that is cool, this summer's finally convinced me that research is more enjoyable than whatever I am doing, and I'd need to go back to school eventually, no matter what I chose to do next, and all else being equal, going to school now seems to be an easier choice.

That being said, some of the changes have led to awareness of some very interesting facts. Since getting into Brown, and coming to Brown, I have rarely written critically about anything, not because I no longer have things I hate about stuff around me, but rather because I am now in a position where anything I criticize involves people who I unfortunately know fairly well, and you aren't really supposed to express negativity about people you know without couching it in positivity, not in public anyways, and this doesn't really work for me.

Significantly worse however, is the realization that I don't really speak about things which interest me, hence the lack of posts on CO, systems stuff, theory, or much of anything. And there are reasons for this, a lot of what I put on this blog comes from what I think other people put on theirs, and while this has been late in coming, most people who write about anything related to computer science (rather than the consumer electronics and software industry), are rather into the entire democratization of knowledge thing. From the past couple of weeks worth of links on programming.reddit what most people seem to write in supposedly famous CS related blogs (LtU being an exception) either talk about particular languages and fairly concrete questions about implementing stuff within them, or write about theory in an over-simplified and often incorrect manner. In my opinion, some things should never be falsified, even if doing so simplifies thing, math and history are high on that list, and repeatedly people have falsified these. Sadly most of these people, A-list bloggers that they are, don't have comments enabled, and invariably the response to e-mails about such factual inaccuracies are met with responses essentially fitting into the template of "Thank you for your e-mail, and telling us about X, however we choose to ignore this information since otherwise it would scare set of people Y, and they wouldn't read our blog", which is somewhat screwed up. While this might appeal to some people, this was essentially my problem with most teachers in India, and is something I refuse to do.

That being said, writing about a large part of what my current interests are, is complicated by the fact that the only way I could express them would make them too hard, and too boring for most people who still read this blog, and would get me no real benefits, since they aren't exactly going to bring in any new readership. So I am at a point where I am not sure what this blog is going to be about, it could be about CO, concurrency, my attempts at reading the original papers which led to a lot of what CS is now, or it could continue to be about me being in California, going back to Brown, and all of that, though more likely than not it is going to be a little of both.

Panda

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 at 8:39 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.