Thank you Team In Training

This has been one of the most productive year for me so far.. working on an awesome project in Cisco, got few paid gigs as a photographer, and ran a marathon.. that's right ran a friggin marathon!.. Everything else I did this year pales in comparison. I still choke up when I think of crossing that finish line, no matter how abysmal my finishing time was..

It all started in May. I was pissed off at someone (and lets just leave it at that), was driving back home and stuck in traffic, there was a radio ad for Team In Training, a team that trains people for marathons, triathlons, crazy hikes, century bike rides etc to raise money for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.. I thought..fuck it.. I'm going to run a Marathon. It was just a whim, I had no desire to be an athlete, nor had any relation to the cause.. it was a Forrest Gump moment for me where I just wanted to run.. for no apparent reason..

Now you guys have to remember that I used to bunk PE/games classes back in school and spend my time in the lab/library.. the last 5K I did was about a year ago, when I just woke up one morning, wore a sketcher shoe, and ran a 5k organized locally.. no practice etc.. i.e. I was in as good a shape as an average engineer is. Every rampup weekend run, which started at a measly 4 miles, was followed with me lying on the bed for 2 days, limping, and bitching and moaning for the rest of the week.

I don't really think my words can do justice to what the staff of TnT (Team in Training) has brought into my life. I know it is a cliché but they really did change my life. I'm normally a pretty distant guy with an EQ of a dead cat, so I thought that I'd be pretty thick skinned to whatever they had to say.. I just thought that I was there for the run. Coming in contact with all the honorees, cancer survivors & people still suffering from cancer has given me a different perspective of life. When you see a grown man cry after he exclaims that he was told that he'd be cancer free after 15 years, or when you realize that the person running & motivating you for the past 10 miles had cancer and was going through chemo just few months ago.. or when you find that a bubbly, high spirited lady decided to run 3 marathons, one for each kid she had, after she was told that she was in remission.. it puts things into perspective. Life is fragile and we take so many things for granted.. we tend to be lazy and jaded & stop aspiring for greatness and just settle for mediocrity. That finisher's medal hanging in my room, doesn't remind me of my accomplishment, but my time & experience with the team, which I'm going to cherish for ever, and if life permits, return next year.

The training was kind of harder than I expected, more so because of the time commitment it needed. I was running on Tuesdays, Thursdays & Saturdays and was supposed to cross train on Monday & Wednesday.. this meant that I couldn't go out with my friends on friday because I had early morning runs the next day..or Sunday because I was sore from Saturday. I think most people at my work don't remember me walking straight :P now. It was also a revelation to me that it was much easier to build stamina than the musculoskeletal system. What that means is that for longer runs, I used to hurt my legs  faster than I used to get tired. It is no secret that I have a huge ego, so on any given run, I had a choice of either hurting my ego or hurting my leg.. I obviously went with ego.. against all the warnings from my coaches.

I've hurt my IT band, hamstring, medial shin, lower shin, ACL & Achilles tendon running.. (of course few months ago, I'd have said that I hurt my leg.. but you pick up stuff when you are on the first name basis with your massage therapist). I've bled from my nipples, and yes it is funny until it happens to you.. guys wear something called nipguards, which actually make you look like the models on paid only porn sites which put a star on the unmentionables (come on.. every teenager with access to a computer has been to those sites).. I don't remember any body part below my neck that hasn't been hurt at one point or the other. The remedies to these ailments are as weird as the ailment itself.. the best being icebaths.. it is exactly what it sounds like. You fill the bathtub with as much ice as you can manage, and dip yourself in it for 15 minutes.. you might yell obscenities for the first few minutes, but your legs will thank you later. But nothing hurts more than random advice from people who have never run in their entire life..

The way training works is that you ramp up your distance every 2 weeks, but run half the distance of your longest run during week in the middle to rest, so when I was up to a 20 miler, I was supposed to run 10 miles.. just to rest. A masochistic moron that I am, decided to replace it with hike, it was a 11.3 mile hike with 2.5K feet elevation! Even if you feel ok, your body would still be in recovery mode.. so when I ran 20 miles the next weekend, I pulled something.. and was kicked out of track the next tuesday. I couldn't really walk and although the possibility of stress fracture was dismissed by a quick visit to the doctor, running was out of the question.. I just had 3 weeks to go for the race. With a lot of ice cupping, compression wrap, ice bath, foam rolling, massages and intense cardio at more than 1hr/day, I tried to make up for the lost training runs. I was still limping a bit, but atleast it didn't hurt, which was a good sign.. It would have been a wise decision to just back out and live to run another day, but as I said, my ego hurts more than my leg, so I pushed on and made it to the marathon.

I was following the Jeff Galloway's method of running and was doing a 4:1 interval ( 4 minute run and 1 minute brisk walk) & based on my training, I was expected to finish in 5hr50min...well that didn't happen. At mile 18 I started falling apart, my limp became more pronounced and I could feel my legs locking up.. still kept on going till mile 21, but couldn't keep up my rhythm. They say that you run a marathon in 3 parts, first with your mind, second with your body, and third with your heart. I was at the last leg and lost my heart! I became deaf to all the cheers, all the bands playing, all I could think was to just jump of the bridge and end the misery (and Emily Dickinson's "Success is counted sweetest" playing in my head meant that I sure as hell wasn't going to quit the race and live). Suddenly like an angel, one of my coaches came and started running with me, she told me to run only if I could run faster than I could walk.. so I ended up just walking the remaining distance.. she stayed with me till the finish line.. I zoned out everything else and just zeroed in on her continuous chants of "Lift your legs, tighten your gluts".. After which I just became more or less an automaton and finished the race. I don't think humans have the capacity to assimilate greatness without going overboard.. but I'd say this.. I cried like a baby for 30 minutes after I finished the race.. It was not because I considered finishing a marathon an overwhelming accomplishment, but because I was overcome by the gesture of my coach.. Thank god for those Oakleys, I didn't look too different to the onlooker than any other marathoner in pain. It was not even a cool guy cry.. well it was at first.. but then I started tearing up so hard that I had to gasp! They say that starvation during any extreme sport does weird things to your mind.. but I don't care.. I don't care if I was out of my senses.. but I don't think that I can thank my coaches enough for what they did.. Coach Meghan.. if you are reading this, you ROCK!!

The other important aspect of the race was fund raising. I was supposed to raise $2900 in donations. I was able to raise $2400 just by shooting two events!.. the rest came from my facebook friends.. not only did it make me more confident as photographer, but it also reaffirmed my faith in my friends (those who paid anyways :))

It has been 2 weeks after the race, I'm still limping, but I can't wait to get back track and experience it all over again... GO TEAM!!

So.. what's next??

Unless you live under a rock.. you know about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Here are the events that happened prior to that:

• November 26: Mumbai terrorist attacks kill over 100, 287 injured
• October 30: Explosions kill at least 64 in north-eastern Assam
• September 30: Blasts in western India kill at least seven
• September 27: Bomb blasts kill one in Delhi
• September 13: Five bomb blasts kill 18 in Delhi
• July 26: At least 22 small bombs kill 49 in Ahmedabad
• July 25: Seven bombs go off in Bangalore killing two people
• May 13: Seven bomb hit markets and crowded streets in Jaipur killing 63

(Source: http://www.andhranews.net/India/2008/November/27-India-eight-bomb-attacks-76148.asp)

Do you see a pattern? Apart from destabilizing Kashmir, terrorists have attacked the other three corners of India (North:Kashmir, East: Assam, South:Bangalore, West:Mumbai and Center:Delhi). What the hell is the Indian Intelligence Service up to? But I won't rant on the state of Indian Union and the politicians, or the eminent lack of crisis management. I want to ask why.. why on earth did the terrorists do it? Was there something they needed? When they held hostages at Taj in Mumbai, they didn't ask for money.. they didn't mention Kashmir, they didn't mention religion.. then what might they possibly want??

Now, am not an intelligence expert or a conspiracy theorists, but I do have a brain which constantly needs to connect the dots. Can't anyone see that these are not terrorist "attacks".. this is an act of war. No.. not between nations, but between India and the "terrorist" (if that's what they choose to call themselves). These are well known guerrilla tacts to overcome a bigger, more sophisticated army. The kind of war which we never have seen before. Of course.. they won't challenge us in a "real" battle. The art of war is to play according to your strengths, not weakness, which is exactly what they are doing.

Let me take off my Indian hat, and look at the situation from a perspective of a third person. (you get good at it if you play AOE/Caesar et al.). Lets call the terrorists X. Now we have to work the facts and have a strategy to understand what they do and why they do it.

Lets have some facts:

• America is to increase its military presence in Afganistan.
• India doesn't hate anyone. It has a neutral attitude, ergo it doesn't hate the west, so it is not on the good books of the terrorists.. I mean X.
• India and Pakistan have a very sensitive border.
• India and Pakistan are densely populated and diverse, plus being from the same chunk of the continent, its hard to differentiate Indians, Pakistanis and Xs from each another.
• X is loosing its stronghold in mid-east and Afganistan and is being forced into the Indian subcontinent.
• India is doing absolutely nothing to resist this.. and seems unaware of this incursion.
• Pakistan appears to be doing something, but is overwhelmed by religious extremism.. for every forward step it takes, it seems to go back two steps.
• The whole world is suffering an economic depression and doesn't want to be bothered.
• High profile outfits remain untouched while their human-bombs, the pawns, continue to wreak havoc on the whole world, continue to get caught, continue to die. Just imagine a chess game in which you have unlimited pawns to gambit..
  
• India, Pakistan and US are the most visible players in this game, and they should each verify the authenticity and innocence of the other two countries and ascertain if they are being double crossed.

Feasible actions that can be taken (if and only if none of the major players are helping X out):

• Put India and Pakistan on a state of war with X and declare emergency in both the countries. Dispense any logistical bureaucratic crap, that has so often hampered progress in both the countries, till the issue is resolved.
• Let India and Pakistan co-ordinate attacks with USA. Let USA push the X overlords from the west periphery while India and Pakistan do it from the east end.
• Put the whole world on vigil in case one of the X overlords try to hole up in one of the other countries. (I wish it would be as easy as sending a text message to get some action taken)

Well.. it's all easier said than done. I hope that atleast a common enemy brings India and Pakistan closer to resolve their personal conflicts.

Changing times...

1998:
me: Hey am getting a new computer.. 8.1 G hard disk, 64 MB ram for about $1000
friend: What!! are you gonna live inside it?? Why would you need that much storage??

2002:
me: Hey am getting a new computer.. P4, 40 G hard disk, 512 MB RAM for about $1000
friend: neat man.. NFS will rock on that.

2005:
me: Hey dude... I got a new laptop.. P4, 80 G HDD, 1 GB RAM for $1000
friend: I guess that should be enough for a student.

2008:
me: Hey I got a laptop for my uncle: Dual core Pentium centrino 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB 7200 RPM with collision sensors for about $1000
friend: Good deal... will that be enough though?

Based on above conversations, my corollary to moore's law: Human expectation and dependence on technology is directly proportional to the rate of growth of technology.

And on a totally unrelated note.. I have already decided on my next desktop that I will be purchasing next year: a dual quad core Intel Xeon with atleast 4G of RAM. This is the sweetest machine at my workplace and should be inexpensive this time next year... but based on my proposed corollary above, my friend might declare me a retard.

Email scam!

Many of you guys would have recieved spam mails by some rich guy in Nigeria (or some such place) wanting to offload money and asking your help in doing so. I was not sure of the consequences if I had gone with the scheme. What could the money transfer do to me anyway? I learnt it the hard way.. well I did not goof up.. instead it was my roommate who did it few months ago.

Few months ago, before moving out(after graduation), we decided to sublease our house. My room mate, lets call him XYZ, took the initiative of finding someone. He posted ads on craigslist, various user groups, mailing lists and what not. Finally one day he victoriously declared that he had found a hot blonde from London who wanted to move in a month early and was ready to pay $4000 (our rent was $810.. I smelled rat but who was I to dampen his spirit). Quite surprisingly, within a week or so he got a check for $4000. Since that was gonna be shared amongst us, I kept my suspicion under covers and joined the celebration.

(This part of the story was revealed to me after it happened).
A week later XYZ was contacted by the girl saying that the rent was not fair and that she had checked out various websites and wanted a fair deal. Being the "decent guy" XYZ is.. he agreed to pay $3000 back and since, supposedly the English blonde was low on cash, XYZ money ordered it to her. And then the inevitable happened.. the cheque bounced. XYZ got conned of $3000 which ended up eating up all his savings and cancellation of his credit cards connected with that account. The bank did not want to help in the case of an international fraud.. neither did the police. The school lawyer could only help so far as filing a report with the police and putting up a public notice letting students know that email scam threat is very real.

As sorry I was for XYZ, I was amused and curious as hell. I asked him to forward me few of the emails. Email scammers are not as high tech as spammers so analyzing the emails was quite easy. All I had to do was to do a geo lookup of the MTA ip address. The IP addresses pointed to some location in Mexico.. not London.

Generally these cases go unnoticed because people dont want others to know. I called XYZ yesterday and he told me that he saved 5 other friends from similar scams. These scams are not as uncommon as you think... so beware of trolls on various public lists.

Occupational hazards

If someone walks into your house with a gun how would you possibly react?
First reaction would be ,of course, panic (well.. in most of the cases). Hardly any of us would try to analyze the intention of the guy before panicking.. thats human nature. Why am I talking about this?

A week ago I asked my landlord to forward a port to my machine. He seemed hesitant. I thought he was tired and would sooner or later do it.. I asked him again this week and he seemed hesitant again. I looked at him inquiringly and he asked: "How would you react if a guy fresh out of college with a Masters degree in computer science, specializing in security, working as an anti-spam engineer, with a lock picking tutorial on his blog asks you to open a port on your network?". I had nothing to say to him.

The Bitter truth

Anyone who knows me, knows that I used to loathe MBAs/Marketing guys (well Marketing ppl I didn't know). Yes.. I was prejudiced, sort of envious of their life and had a feeling of being hoodwinked everytime I dealt with them. I think it's time for me adapt to nature of the world rather than question it. So here's my open apology to all you MBAs out there..

I never was and probably never will be a glib, suave, sophisticated salesman. What one wants to be in life depends on his priorities..its a binary choice; either one aims to be highly creative or one aims to be extremely rich. There is no middle ground. Although your priorities can change over time. You cant be rich and creative.. and mind you the rich will mostly take the credit for the work done by the creatives.

I'll restrict my domain to engineering as a creative work as I can relate well to it. An engineer creates great product, a salesman sells "not so good" products but it sells better than the "great" product. You could call the salesman evil for selling a "not so good" product or you could call an engineer incompetent for not being able to sell his product. The truth is that it does not matter and is not going to change anytime in the future. The salesman will always be on the deck of the cruise sipping a martini while the engineer would be in the engine room doing a performance study of the isothermal combustion inside the turbine... you get my drift. And at the end of the day, when the engineer comes up with a new design for an efficient engine, the salesman takes most of the credit just by doing a presentation (and mind you.. does better than the engineer).

Lemme support my verbiage above with some examples:

• We all know Shah Jahan built Taj Mahal... who was the architect?
• Windows was built by Microsoft(most people assume its Bill Gates :P )... who designed it?
• Did you know who Ted Hoff is? (inventor of Microprocessors)
• Did you know who Per Brinch Hansen was? (Inventor of OS)

Unless you are a "fact geek".. you might not know the answer to any one of them... and you know what, these guys didn't care. They are necessary for the well being of human race. We should be thankful to each one of them.. from the one who made fire to the ones who are making laser propelled space crafts. We should also be thankful to the salesmen.. they are the ones who are bringing these products to the masses. How would the world now be if we didn't have a Bill Gates mass producing and selling PC softwares? Each product defines a milestone in technological evolution and there is no looking back (Think iPhone, iPODs etc).

In conclusion when a large corporation speaks to you (urges you to buy its product), the voice behind the loudspeaker is that of an engineer.. the loudspeaker itself is the salesperson. You need both of them to convey a message to 10+ billion people in the world.

So all the MBAs out there.. if I have ever judged you by your good looks, smooth talk, a balanced life and money, I realize that it was not your fault.. it was and is my choice. Accept my humble apologies...

The end of the beginning..

My academic life has now supposedly ended.. you know with me graduating and all... I have moved to Santa Clara and would be working for Mailshell. Hopefully I will not succumb to the complacency or frustration that I have seen so many people succumb to after stepping into the real world. Anyway.. This entry is dedicated to people who influenced my life in Syracuse and have a big hand in what I am and who I am:

Dr Marc Howard: There are really few people on earth who don't judge a person by their past(I mean work experience.. not parole history :P) but what they are. He is one such guy. People want experience, they want something on paper.. something that speaks of your achievement. When I met him I had none.. During the initial interview.. my answers to almost all his questions were: "I dont know".. I was hired.. probably because our shared hatred for microsoft, because I loved Linux, because I was a vegetarian, because I was a coder stuck in a food court job.. I dont know the reason. Frankly I thought that I did not fit in well.. I had no knack for cognitive mathematical research(although was interested in it), but somehow he always found me something that I was interested in doing and something I was good at doing. I worked with him for an year and met some most amazing people; Vinayak, Vijay, Jennifer, Donna.. they were all gurus in their field and kept Memlab machinery running smoothly.. Dr Howard if you are reading this: Thank you for being there...

Dr Wenliang(Kevin) Du: I worked as a research assistant under him for an year and it was a rocking year. One after another, the super kewl projects kept my adrenaline levels insane. Remember when you were a kid and you so badly wanted that bike or that GI Joe set or that comics.. remember how you felt when you got them; I felt the same about the projects I did(that I wanted to do). Dr Du gave me direction.. I always wanted to do the projects I did for him, but when he sponsored my 2 semesters in Syracuse University, paid me stipend, I didn't have to worry about anything else.. I just did what I loved to do. My lab became my haven, a utopian land where nothing went wrong.. life was too good. Thanks alot Dr Du for letting me play with what I loved to do and building my resume on the way.

Dr Per Brinch Hansen: Now I have already written loads on him so wont overdo it. He reminded me of two professors, Mr ATC and Mr Sridhar M, of my undergraduate college. You know what the common thing amongst all three is: Every one suggests not to take their courses, most of the people who take their courses have their ego hurt and hate them(some open hate groups), all three are considered difficult... but I liked all three of them, they were excellent teachers, and somehow I didn't find them that strict and found their courses extremely easy contrary to the popular belief, all three of them helped me alot in my career. It was an honor being his student and that too in the last compiler design class he taught.


Dr Jim Fawcett: Most people in Syracuse University would brand me as a hypocrite if I say that I am a "Fawcett Fan".. The word "Fawcett" has become an adjective in Syracuse University. There are Fawcett courses, Fawcett Fan club, Fawcett quotes.. etc etc. I know people who take all the courses he offers (8 I think).. I took two of them and really loved the Object oriented Design course. IMHO It should be made a core course. The mere fact that I just took only two of his courses and I work on Linux, causes many guys to think that I am not a "Fawcett fan".. but I am. I have never in my life seen such an energetic person with so much industrial and academic experience. What is more interesting is that he is really affable and can teach the a dimwit to write the most elegant C++ code. Dr Fawcett.. I salute you .. and I am a "Fawcett Fan" for life :)


Syracuse University: Lastly I would like to thank my alma mater. After all I met the afore mentioned people here. The infrastructure here is aeons of geological time ahead of any place I have been. It gives your own niche. You can find people to "Party" and you can find people to "geek out" with you. Almost any legal activity you can think of, you can do it in SU.. for free. Man.. I love that place.



PS: Click on the first and the last photos to view pictures in the related sets.

Phi Beta Delta

I got nominated for membership in Phi Beta Delta. You ask why? Not to sound boastful(or to reaffirm the fact that modesty died the day I was born), I'll attach the verbatim copy of the nomination letter:

March 8, 2007


It is our pleasure to inform you that you have been nominated for membership in Phi Beta Delta by Dr. Patricia Burak, with the concurrence of the Membership Committee of the Syracuse University Alpha Sigma chapter. Phi Beta Delta is the nation's first honor society dedicated to recognizing individuals who have demonstrated scholarly achievement and performed outstanding service in the areas of international education and exchange.

There are three basic categories of members: first, distinguished international and domestic faculty and staff; second, international students and scholars who have demonstrated high scholastic achievement at Syracuse University and have demonstrated interests and/or involvement in international activities; and third, domestic students who have demonstrated high scholastic achievement and/or comparable experience.
...
...

The ceremony was on April 9'07. Here are the pictures and a brief video of the speaker explaining the meaning of Phi Beta Delta.

Now... I just NEED a job :(

Compiler Design....

Before I dive into the meat of the topic, I would like to mention that I am a HUGE fan of Per Brinch Hansen... so whatever viewpoints I express in this post, will totally be partial to him.Per Brinch Hansen is teaching me Compiler Design this year and I need to implement 6 phases of a compiler, for a minimalistic language(PL), incrementally for the course completion. I am already done with the scanner and parser.Programming should be a thoughtless process. It should be as obvious as Maths.

Most of you guys(that is, if you are in Computer Science) would have taken design courses(OO etc ). How many times did you have trouble implementing a properly designed code? If your design is good, you should have none, but the idiosyncrasies of the programming language sometime do corner you at some nasty implementation issue. Everyone has seen a nasty memory leak or a typo ruining the whole logic of your implementation. According to Prof Hansen:

Programming should be a thoughtless process. It should be as obvious as Maths. If you are asked the value of 5+2, you would say 7. Have you ever stopped and tried to derive that. Programming should be like that.

Yesterday I was writing the parser, which mainly involved sifting through the PL code and producing a JAVA implementation for the PL's BNF. PL's grammar had some 50 rules which needed to be implemented in the form of around 50 functions. Following the design rules and restrictions imposed by him, I was able to code the parser in just four straight hours!! The code compiled with no syntax errors!! I spent around a day testing it rigorously..and nothing failed!! In fact at one point of time, programming seemed more like documentation. I even wrote vi macros to construct the function skeleton from the grammar rule in the comment (I hate typing:P ). Cant wait to finish rest of phases...

PS: BTW the EFS project ,I was talking about in the earlier post, is implemented and all the issues are resolved. Too bad its proprietary :(

PPS: A colleague forwarded me this link. Turn out that Per Brinch Hansen was the one who came up with the idea of an OS kernel!!

Am I an engineer?

The most appropriate heading would be "Are software engineers really engineers??". I'll get to that in a minute. According to Wikipedia:

Engineers apply established principles drawn from mathematics and science in order to develop economical solutions to technical problems. The work of engineers is the link between perceived social needs and commercial applications. Engineers consider many factors when developing a new product.

There in another word, CRAFT... according to the Wikipedia again:

A craft is a skill, especially involving practical arts. It may refer to a trade or particular art.Crafts practiced by independent artists working alone or in small groups are often referred to as studio craft.

The only thing that distinguishes craft from engineering is objective logic and intuition. There is no place in engineering for the "feel good" factor. It just a simple cold manifestation of science in a practical form, which in turn is just simplified mathematics represented in language understandable by humans.

So why is software development a feat of engineering? and not a craft?
Now there is nothing wrong with it being a craft. New craftsmen are trained by a master craftsman (something like internship/co-op).. they mimic everything the master does to achieve the end result. This works for general arts and used to work for medical science too few decades ago. So if you were to learn software development as a craft from the "experienced" developers, you would mimic everything they do... even if it involved throwing a dead frog after declaring each variable in a file, and it will not lead to a catastrophe until you are copying everything that the master developer does.

Advancement in technology has given so much slack to us "Computer scientists/engineers" that we do not evaluate the consequences of our action. We do not look at a problem as an engineer in other field would. Take an electronic or mechanical engineer for an instance. How many time have you known that they designed a system that failed or had a bug? Bugs are a commonplace in software engineering. Infact it is widely acknowledged that a shipped software will have bugs.. then there will be an upgrade or a patch released to fix that bug.. and then another..and another ...and so on. This is mostly due to the fact that most software rarely effect human life... but when a "crafty" software developer does write a such a software, we are in for some serious trouble.

Not all the software development fraternity works this way. There are certain organization that are required to develop 99.9% bug free software or risk loosing a million dollars or a million lives. NASA is one such company, a bug in code would mean loss of over a billion dollars.. and guess what! they don't do version upgrades on space vehicles. It does what it is supposed to do. No one is perfect though, the MARS land rover running Linux had a small race condition and that had jeopardized the whole multi billion dollar project... and imagine the mental state of the computer programmers who had the whole world looking over their shoulders, ready to point fingers should anything go wrong. Fortunately they recovered with minor losses. Boeing is another one, from auto pilot to auto land, everything depends on the software... a small bug would not only cause the death of many lives aboard the plane, but would also lead to the destruction of the multi million dollar equipment. Forget the biggies, the real time and embedded software developers are also better engineers because their software control the expensive machineries. Then we have the financial developers like Bloomberg... the whole money making fraternity depends on them, from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan. A simple miscalculation can lead to a loss of billions of dollars.

I am an engineer/scientist by education, but its my profession that will decide what I really am;an engineer, a scientist, a blue collared programmer or a craftsman. After all as Batman said..

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.

Practice what you preach...

Today morning I received a mail (via listserv) from Dr Du. He wanted to fix the time slot for a make up class as he was going to attend a conference during the regular class hours. Here is the mail he sent us:

I have proposed the following 3 time slots. Unfortunately, so far, there
is an exactly one conflict for each of them. Since there is a 3-way tie, I
need to pick one randomly.

(1) 11:00 - 12:20
(2) 13:00 - 14:20
(3) 14:00 - 15:20

What makes this thing interesting is that I also have my own preference.
How can I pick one while convincing you that this is picked randomly, not
based on my preference?

To demonstrate an important application of one-way hash function, I would
like to propose a protocol to generate a number S (S will be 1, 2, or 3).
The S-th time slot described above will be picked. There is an important
requirement: S must be random; neither I nor you can control the value of
S. Let's conduct this protocol through emails.

(1) You pick a string M: Whoever reads this email first, please send me
any string you like (please send to this mailing list, so we all know the
string). Let's call this string M.

(2) I also pick a string K: I cannot tell you my string at this moment
(think about why). However, I need to tell you something, so I cannot
change my string after seeing your string M (think about why I want to
change my string). Therefore, I am sending you the md5 hash value of my
string. Here it is: 1c4bfe13bf159f26ddd23926b7376b14

(3) After receiving your string M, I will generate an HMAC_MD5 value on M,
using my K as the key. We will get a 16-byte number.

(4) Let D represent the last byte (the least significant byte) of the
HMAC_MD5 value. I will compute S = (D % 3) + 1. This result S will be our
final decision.

Question: is this protocol fair? Can anybody (you or me) control the
outcome? Please think about this, and we will talk about it in our class.

Now, I am waiting for your string. If you are the first one to read this
email, please send us a string of any length. I assume there is at least
one hard-working student in this class. If nobody sends a string by 8:00am
tomorrow. I will use M = "AAABBBCCCDDD", and generate a decision.


- Kevin

(published with permission)

Is there a better was to teach Internet security?? ... practice what you preach

A blog that inspires...

I have been reading/writing blogs for quite sometime now. Never has any blog awed and inspired me like Anoushes Ansari's blog...
All the paleolithic(stone age) people, who have never heard her name before, should definitely read her wikipedia page before reading her blog. For the lazy souls, she wanted to be an astronaut but couldn't get into NASA. She ended up starting her own firm, a bit of this a bit of that, saved around $20 million and went to international space station. She will be returning to earth soon.

Visit from a Knight

Got to meet Dr Ralph Miller today at work. He is a well known Computational Neuroscientist working at University of Binghamton. I wont bore you with what he does but will surely tell you something about him that excited my very core. Each molecule of my body was vibrating in a strange tune in his presence.

The talk started between my cabin mates and him. We thought that he would be surprised to know that we all were from different fields of studies , me being from computer science and other two being from electrical engineering and bio-medical respectively.As a matter of fact, he wasnt!! He lapsed into a flashback and gave us a brief insight about his background. He got a BS and MA in physics from MIT!!! Was working under a team, three of whom got a nobel prize!! He got 2 more masters and a Phd from Rutgers university. He told me about a startup company called DEC!! (he told as if he never knew that DEC was a big company now) and about PDP-1 he programmed in using punched cards. You would have heard alot about the inception of word "BUG" in computer jargon but it is really amazing when someone present there at the time tells you about his own accounts. Its really amazing. Its like being in the world of Mythology... and meeting with the titans. He gleefully exclaimed that made vaccum tubes for his project. I have not even seen one in reality.

The icing on the cake was when I googled for Ralph R Miller and checked out his Curriculum vita. Its a whooping 44 page resume, by far the largest I have seen. I hope to be just like him (I would love to have the Nobel Prize though) when I grow up :) and have the money of Bill Gates :P