विदाई लेने का समय फिरसे आ गया है। आज की तारीख़ हुई मई 27, तो अब जून 11 के आने में कुच्छ ही दिन और हैं। गर्मियाँ शुरू होते ही हमारे hostel के लगभग 200 लोग अलग अलग जगह जाकर काम पर लग जाएंगे और सितम्बर में जब लौट के आएँगे तो सब अपनी नई नई जगहों में होंगे। हर साल की तरह ये साल भी बहुत ही जल्दी बित गया, और हर साल की तरह इस साल भी कुछ पुराने दोस्तों से दोस्ती छूटी और बहुत सारे नए लोगों से दोस्ती बनी। पर it's not really because I actively willed it or something. This is just something that seems to happen because I feel I only have a finite दोस्त capacity and having a small number of really good ones is what satisfies me most. इस साल जो दोस्त बनें हैं वे मेरे खयाल से exceptionally अच्छें हैं, और क्योंकि उनमें से बहुत सारे अगले साल campus के दूसरे कोने में होंगे, unfortunately, लगता है कि अगले साल मेरा entertainment थोड़ा low रहेगा।

खैर उदासी जो उदासी साल के खतम होने से कुच्छ अच्छी बातें भी होतीं हैं, namely, बस कुछ ही exams और homeworks की छोटी सी नदी पार करने के लिए बची है, जिसके बाद 9 जून से WWDC और 16 जून से internship शुरू हो जाएगी। WWDC attend करने के लिये भी मुझे बहुत खून पसीना बहाना पड़ा है क्योंकि वो और हमारे exams एक साथ शुरू होतें हैं और Steve Jobs के keynote को personally देखने के लिए (शायद! ये भी पक्का नहीं है क्योंकि मुझे नहीं पता कि student scholarship वाले लोगों को पैसे देने वाले लोगों के मुक़ाबले equal treatment मिलता है कि नहीं) बहुत खून और पसीना बहाया है। मेरे सारे exam ज़्यादातर लोगों के exam शुरू होने से पहले ही खतम हो जाएँगे क्योंकि एक तो इसी गुरुवार को है, एक अगले शुक्रवार को और एक अगले रविवार को है। Hopefully, it will live up to all its hype. It is apparently "sold out" this year which is a first, and I'm sure iPhone developers will also be there by the bucketload. Basically, I hope all this rescheduling effort is worth the pain and possibly worse grades due to early exams. 16 more glorious days before "the summer".

Labels: Hindi

I am doing a lot of low level programming this quarter... a lot. Firstly, for a networking class in which the coding component is completely in C and although it's a complete pain to be coding in C and constantly trying to do things that C doesn't permit, it gives me a very wonderful feeling of savage success when I get something cool working in C. C code is the lonely-hiker-in-the-mountains equivalent of the computer world – lacking all the "bare" necessities (like, classes or a sense of responsibility) and extremely unclean. Pretty much everything in C is like using twigs together to make fire. Possibly one of the better examples of this is the standard C library that ships with some BSD systems such as Mac OS X. Do a man queue in the Terminal on Mac OS X to get exactly what I mean. The freaking thing is simply a shitload of #defines 而已.

Also, if I haven't mentioned at some point before, I am the biggest fan of my computer security class and its professors. "Computer Security" basically involves finding out how systems are broken and how to fix them, so it involves learning both aspects (just like the dark side of the force, or alchemy). Our first assignment basically involved seven programs that had vulnerabilities in them due to stupid or careless programming and we had to identify said vulnerabilities and exploit them so as to gain root access on the machine. It was extremely painful work but I came out of it having achieved: (a) extreme at-home-ness with using gdb in the command line, (b) the ability to work with hex numbers directly (and a great deal of respect for the Programmer mode in the Mac OS X Calculator) and (c) more actual experience in writing and exploiting assembly code than I actually got in my compilers class. This class is basically the equivalent of getting mentally laid – I feel that this class elevates me from being a CS major on paper to a person who actually feels that he is a real CS major.

Also, in more developer-related news, I found out yesterday that I've been awarded the WWDC student scholarship that I applied for a few week ago for. Excitement more profound than I can express using my limited vocabulary. I've always wanted to go to WWDC because it's the more serious of the two Apple conferences and being so freaking technical in nature, it weeds out all the Apple fanboys and leaves only those people who either have a lot of money (because it takes upwards of $1300 to attend the event), or those who are responsible for the existence of the Mac universe in the first place, i.e., the hardcore developers. I don't know how many or how few people Apple grants the student scholarship to or whether my hoping for a seat in the keynote presentation is just wishful thinking, but I can't wait for June! Unfortunately, June also brings final exams, and WWDC is incidentally smack in the middle of them. I don't have a plan at this point as to what I will do if there is an exam scheduled during the keynote speech (beg the professor?), but something will get figured out I'm sure.

Labels: English