Extreme science? Extreme stupidity?...

This story made it to front page on digg.

The post explains ways of ingesting Methylene Blue in order to turn the color of your urine to blue. Apparently would also changes the color of your feces to green.

I know that imagination and human mind go hand in hand, but paying attention to the color of your wastes and consciously doing something to change it, is weirdest waste of time. Since the story received 850+ diggs, I assume that either I am living under the log for too long and changing the color is the new fad or mankind has entered some sort of reverse evolution cycle and are slowly transforming back to monkeys.

Rise and Fall...

If you have been in an airplane.. did you ever feel its speed? Well for those who haven't, the answer is no. Why? Because at that height, there is no frame/object of reference with which you can compare your speed. You can feel/estimate the speed of a train/automobile you are on by looking at the speed of the trees going by in the opposite direction and believe me you will be more thrilled driving a bike at 200 miles/hour than being in an airplane cruising at 700+ miles/hour. The increase in your speed does not thrill you after a certain point....

Our life follows the same rules. Here is how I relate to it..

• When I was a kid, I didn't study because I wanted to; but because my family wanted me to (come on, none of the kids want to go to school right!!). Although I had developed interest in science and computers at a very young age, yet it was not in competitive sense. I learnt what I loved and crammed what I was told to... life was a lot simpler. I simply judged my performance based on how happy my family was.
• Then came 11th and 12th standards and the mad race to join IIT, the temple of science and technology. It is considered the only goal in life by some 100,000 Indian students, only 4000 of whom make into the institution. I took part in this race too... Performance here was gauged purely by my relative performance amongst my peers. I was not very good at this game and lost it :( ... nevertheless I got into some college.
• Undergrad engg was a totally different experience. Since I was away from my family, there was no one to really feel happy for my achievements and feel sad for my failures, I had to do it myself. After a while, when you have your own fair share of successes and failures, you don't feel that adrenaline gush. You don't feel happy when you succeed and sad when you fail... you just feel kindda humble ( I am anything but humble :P) , enlightened and very very numb. I have seen a lot of people in this situation, they all react in strange ways... few of them gauge their performance by their relative success amongst their peers... this is healthy in the beginning until they start believing that the failure of their peers is their success. Most idiots you see in the corporate world believe in this philosophy. Others are not able to handle this and start smoking, taking drugs etc etc. Still others like me, continue working endlessly in search of excitement.
• Finally came the grad school. Although we all have a moderately socially active life, professionally we all are still loners. Everybody has his own battle to fight. This is where life gets really weird. Not only you can't use any methods that were used in undergrads(sadistic or otherwise) but also you cant make anyone to relate to your problems. Imagine being hurled into space with no heavenly bodies, just you and your peers, all going in different directions, thinking their's is the right one. Nobody really understands the trajectory of other's path (although there is a general idea amongst people going in the same direction)... And then when you are thus enlightened you realize that there is a race that can give you excitement. The race with yourself... and I think that is what keeps me going.

So in retrospect, how can I always succeed if I have race myself. Of course, I cant outdo myself everytime... I am not a superhuman, the key is to occasionally lower your standards so that you can defeat yourself and raise it when the decrease in performance goes down below the limit. The bottom line: sinusoidally change your standards to win everytime. This way life becomes more bearable, your brain is not rusted and you feel less frustrated at your failures. It is really important that you don't find an absolute goal but a relative one on the horizon, something you might never reach, or else your life will lose its meaning after reaching that goal.

Interestingly my finding is similar to that found in religious scriptures.

Ubuntu Edgy Eft and Firefox2

The developer community seem to be on drugs. Last week Ubuntu Edgy Eft, Firefox 2 and Fedora 6 were released. Apple have also given hints of Touch screen iPod and iPhone. Last but not the least Microsoft have released IE7 after 5 years.
Am not an apple user so might not use those products. I am not going to even try getting IE7... i cant browse on anything except firefox. Fedora 6...ummm .. only if I am forced too, not interested, life is too bland without apt-get.

However I did upgrade to Ubuntu Edgy Eft. The user experience in Ubuntu never stops to amaze me. I find it so much easier to use than Windows. If you have ever upgraded Windows, you know the process...

• Pop in the CD..
• Navigate through ugly menus, expect the user using Windows to play solitaire to know how to partition, which partition to load on...
• Take 30-50 minutes to install.
• Take another 1 hour to install the drivers.
• Take another few days to get all the applications running.

I was running Ubuntu Dapper before... i just did gksu "update-manager -c" .. This took care of everything. It downloaded all the upgrades, installed it... thats the level of abstraction that creates a cult user following. As an added surprise it upgraded my Firefox (although I was running firefox2 on dapper). The only hitch was the some unwanted services that were running at startup. I killed them using sysv-rc-conf (Fedora users think chkconfig)... I think I am in love with Ubuntu :P

Firefox2 deserves a mention too. It has integrated several function provided earlier by extensions. One of the feature is the snap back tab feature earlier provided by SessionSaver. Just press Ctrl+Shift+T to get back a tab you closed by mistake. I am also a sucker for its inbuilt spell checker. Blogging and writing mails is so much fun now that I don't have to use the bloated spell checking web app.
I know that I am addicted to computers, Linux and internet... but am too smug to care.

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

Another year gone by...

Another year passed by... Am 24 odd years old now. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how I spent my birthday. I had to reply to 150+ emails and orkut scraps who had wished me. All efforts to work today went in vain. So here I am at home.. still checking my mail every ten seconds and pathetically blogging about my birthday. Did not have a party as people had their midterms... generally I gift myself stuffs on such occasions but after searching the web, I couldn't find anything that fits my budget :(

The past year was great... although it could have been better. Since I am expected to be a bit more mature (hehe...lolz), let me plan the next year or set the goals I need to achieve before I turn 25. This is just for me...

1. Get a Job: I need one... am graduating in May'07
   
2. Retain/Increase the level of weirdity in action : I hate mob mentality but I am not a non-conformist. Since my actions are so much different from my peers, some people call me weird... (something like .."He blogged instead of getting wasted" weird).
3. Shed the movie geek title: I know people who download movies like crazy and I watch movies like crazy. There have been times, when I had seen the same movie thrice... back to back. I know their IMDB rating, RottenTomatoes rating, the wikipedia entry and filmography of the actors. Its an addiction I need to get rid of. I have read less than five novels since I came to the US.
4. Definitely read more.
5. Code more.
6. Maintain my sourceforge projects.
7. Eat healthy so as to exercise less :P
8. Get a girlfriend... the possibility is meek, given that I spend 18/24 hours in front of the computer.
9. Get more gadgets... you can never have enough of those.
10. Lie without feeling a pang of anger or guilt.

On a totally unrelated note I came third in TopCoder's Collegiate challenge. I got a $50 gift certificate from Best Buy. Unfortunately I did not find anything there that I need for myself or for gifting anyone in India..