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This is not about the iPad
When I started using the iPhone, both as a user and a developer, I finally saw freedom. Freedom from the ridiculous way in which software - Mac or PC - is made today. Here was an entirely new UI paradigm that finally - finally! - did not have the horrible and messy baggage of desktop operating systems. The very same menus, windows, pop up buttons, etc. that, in the 1980s, were the saviors of computer users everywhere, rescuing them from the abyss of the command line interface, are now the devil. We all know this because we know how incredibly hard it is for people like our parents and less "tech-savvy" friends to even become close to proficient at using them.

The iPhone came and showed us that we don't need all that! Hell, it didn't even have Cut, Copy and Paste for more than a year, and I almost never felt it missing. And yet, when they finally added it, the way they did it just blew me away with how clever and minimalist it was. (In contrast, look at how Windows Mobile or Palm Pre tackled the same problem, and you'll see how they're still burdened with the baggage of desktop OSs - it's just all too easy to give in to following the tried-and-true way, right?)

This is big. Forget about the iPad itself, but look at what it is saying. It is saying that we can have a fully usable desktop operating system (for that is what the iPad has, believe it or not), while simultaneously throwing away most of the crud that makes a desktop operating system what it is today. Many will complain that there is no Finder. But I don't want a fucking Finder! I've had it with manually managing a ridiculous file hierarchy on my computer. I've also had it with hunting for commands in menu bars, toolbars, contextual menus, and pop up buttons! I absolutely love the UI innovativeness that both iPhone and iPad are brimming with; this is the kind of fresh slate that was previously thought of as impossible to attain, and the kind of fresh slate that any other company would give an arm and a leg for.

And I have to give Apple kudos for playing it off as well as they have done. If this had been directly pitched as a successor to the Mac OS, there would have been massive booing, since it didn't run any Mac software, couldn't work with any of the existing peripherals, and so on. What they've done instead is to let their brand new OS with its brand new UI paradigm mature alongside the Mac OS, letting this new OS build its own base of both users and developers (140,000 apps!), so that when they ship the successor to the MacBook in a couple of years and it runs what we know today as the iPhone OS, no one will raise an eyebrow, because it will be the most natural thing in the world. I look forward to that day.

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2 comments
  • Oh Skar, you are still a Mac lover after all! I agree with you completely. From an HCI standpoint Apple is re-inventing how we interact with these devices in an easy, sexy and intuitive way. The next task? Figure out how to make development for these devices as easy as using them!
    By Blogger Jorge, at January 28, 2010 5:36 PM   
  • I agree with you. I have subscribed your feed. If a saw your post early I will quote some of them in my post:)
    By Blogger Shawn Lee, at January 28, 2010 6:06 PM   

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And Another Thing...
One good sign of a very bad fan is when he finds out about the latest book in a "trilogy-ish" written by one of his favourite authors only by strolling into a bookstore and being told about it by the pleasant, hippie-like shopkeeper. But then again, I wouldn't go to great lengths to blame this faithful reader given the fact that said author is dead, and would it really be too presumptuous to think that people ought to stop having books published once they're six feet under? Apparently so.

Out comes "And Another Thing...", the sixth instalment in the H2G2 hexology (formerly pentology, originally trilogy), written by Douglas Adams' ghost Eoin Colfer, who was the anointed writer for the book. Douglas Adams had supposedly cherished this wish to write a sixth book to sort of wrap things up, tie loose ends together and what-not, and since he couldn't be bothered to live long enough to write it himself, he let somebody else finish the job. Of course, the fact that the H2G2 franchise is worth more than some small countries might also have had something to do with it.

So, I bought it last night and just finished reading it. It's surprisingly short. Maybe I'm just too used to those Harry Potter books, so that any book with less than 700 pages looks like a pamphlet to me. Anyway, I won't go on about the story too much, but the writing is something of a curiosity, given that it clearly endevours to replicate Adams' style. Yes, it's funny, um, in parts. Unfortunately, a fair bit of it is a just a tad overdone. A lot of H2G2 is about made up names of made up planets, solar systems, species and the like, but there's just too much of that in this book. It's pretty much impossible to read a single paragraph that does not contain at least one made-up word. It goes from entertaining to tiresome really quickly. Finally, there's no Marvin, which leaves the reader with a there's-something-missing-but-I-just-can't-put-my-finger-on-it sort of feeling.

Go get it while it's priced, uh, okayishly.

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1 comments
  • I really like "part six of three" though.
    By Blogger Kimberly, at January 2, 2010 10:14 AM   

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Google Latitude
Of the newly introduced Google Latitude for iPhone, which is a web application:
We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.
This is one of the major issues with developing apps for iPhone. Apple tells you they won't accept it after you have done all your hard work, and this ought not to be underestimated. The only thing that is a bit surprising is that Apple has the balls to give the same crap to Google.

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Modal Particles in Hindi
I think one of the best things that has happened for me as a result of having studied Chinese is a much better understanding of Hindi. Chinese and Hindi have more differences than similarities but the similarities they do share are quite fascinating.

Both languages have this really interesting concept of a "modal particle". A modal particle is a term that linguists use, which approximately means a small word which doesn't mean anything on its own in a sentence, but which has an influence on the overall meaning of the sentence. The examples below should clarify what I'm talking about:

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"Yah bahut zyādā hai, mujhse aur nahiⁿ khāyā jāyegā, tum khālo nā."
"This is too much, I can't eat any more of it, won't you eat it (please)."

"तुम खेलने क्यों नहीं आये?" "अरे भाई, मैं कल के टेस्ट के लिए पढ़ाई कर रहा था ना!"
"Tum khelne kyoⁿ nahiⁿ āye?" "Are bhāi, maiⁿ kal ke test ke liye padhāi kar rahā thā nā!"
"Why didn't you come to play yesterday?" "I was studying for tomorrow's test!"

"तुमने ठंडे दिमाग़ से सोच लिया है ना?"
"Tumne thaⁿdey dimaagh se soch liyā hai nā?"
"You've thought it out carefully, right?"

"हैं! तुम पागल हो गए हो क्या?"
"Hāiⁿ! Tum pāgal ho gay ho kyā?"
"What! Have you gone crazy?"

"आज तो मेरे पास टाईम नहीं है, मैं कल आता हूँ हाँ."
"Āj to mere pās time nahīⁿ hai, maiⁿ kal ātā hūⁿ hāⁿ."
"I don't really have time today, why don't I come tomorrow instead."

"हे भगवान्, तूने यह क्या कर डाला रे..."
"He Bhagvān, tūne yah kyā kar dālā re..."
"Oh my God, what have you done..."

"क्या है भाई?"
"Kyā hai bhāi?"
"What is it (with you)?"

In these examples, the words in bold are the "modal particles" (at least, in my opinion, they ought to be considered modal particles in Hindi). These words work to add emotion to the language. These kinds of words are not used much in English, which is why I feel that when I get angry, I can convey my opinion to the other person much better in Hindi. These words solely exist to add emotion to a sentence, which is proven by the fact that removing any of them from the above Hindi sentences will not change the essential meaning of the sentence.

Both Chinese and Japanese are also full of words like these. In Chinese, they are called "语气词" (yǔqìcí) which translates to "language tone words". In Japanese, they are called "叙法の助詞" (johō no joshi) or "modal helping words". To find out more about these, you can read Wikipedia's articles on linguistics, although Wikipedia also only has limited information about them.

This article (the Hindi version) was edited using Rungta's Hindi Transliteration tool.

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More Rejection
This time it's not my story but this guy's. Basically, they're rejecting his iPhone app because it requires a companion Mac application. This is beyond fucked up. This is just kicking the man in the groin. I mean, not only has Apple provided precedent for this kind of application (the Remote app, which needs iTunes as a companion), but that it makes no sense at all! Rejecting based on objectionable content is one thing, but this is just ludicrous. Might I remind you that making these applications takes months of hard work and if it's rejected, that's it, the work all goes to waste. End of story. Not to mention, Apple is never willing to talk to you nicely - emails are ignored and those annoying "can't comment" responses honestly make me want to take up a career in violence.

In other news, I've resubmitted Qingwen to the App Store with even more new features and bug fixes, and now I await even more of Apple's senseless displeasure. Maybe they'll want me to take Mao Zedong's entry out or something because they find it offensive. Seriously, I don't know what's going on with this whole App Store approval situation. I just hope that either Apple gets its act together or other competing platforms like the Palm Pre come up to speed quickly and offer a friendlier solution.

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With Hands Tied Behind My Back
I started reading Garrett Murray's post about his annoyances with the way the iTunes App Store works, and I have to say, it's made me way more pissed off at Apple and the way they handle App Store submissions than I ever imagined.

Yes, in writing this post, I realize what a marvelous piece of work the iPhone platform is and how the runaway success of the App Store means that it's definitely doing a lot of things right. The thing is, most of that is from the customer's point of view. From the developer's standpoint, regardless of how many times Apple tells me that the App Store takes away all the pain of marketing and distributing my app, I have to say that this is not the way I want to be doing it.

What stirred all this poison? An email I got from Apple yesterday telling me that version 2.0 of Qingwen has been rejected because of two reasons: one is a minor bug that I've fixed and that the email did not even have accurate reproduction steps for, but the second is the one I'm pissed off about. Apparently, they've "reviewed Qingwen Chinese Dictionary and determined that [they] cannot post this version of [my] iPhone application to the App Store because it contains objectionable content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states 'Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.' Please refer to the attached screenshots." Here are the screenshots they sent me:

  

I hope you're looking at the screenshots and thinking something along the lines of "you've got to be kidding me". I'm sorry, did I mention it's a dictionary? Dictionaries have words, all sorts of words, including, yes, swear words like "fuck" and also words like "penis", which of course is such a lewd word that I should be smited (well, technically, smitten) for having included it in Qingwen? And all of this somehow falls under their so-called "reasonable judgment".

It's hard for me to imagine precisely who Apple is trying to "protect" by keeping these words off the iPhone. But that's not even the right question to ask. My question is, can they keep these words off the iPhone? Of course not! As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn't bombard you with words like "cock" and "penis" the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you're reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don't want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you "objectionable material", then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more "objectionable material"?

But that's not all. First of all, Qingwen 1.0 contained most of the words they've pointed out in those screenshots as objectionable and it's on the App Store right now! In fact, it's been downloaded more than 20,000 times since it came out earlier this year. Not only that, but every competing app I know of contains all these same words and these apps are all out on the store gathering downloads. Meanwhile, Qingwen is stuck on what is now a completely outdated version 1.0, not because of some hairy bug that I haven't fixed, but because of some bullshit company policy.

Here I am sitting with this idiotic email from Apple, while users are going on the App Store, giving Qingwen bad ratings and writing it bad reviews, and I have this new version of the app that addresses nearly all of their issues and more just sitting on its ass. And this is another chord that Murray's post struck with me. Loads of "customers" on the App Store are just complete asses. They download your app, don't even bother playing around with it for five minutes or contacting the developer, but instead go and post a negative review on the App Store, talking about missing features that are not even in the list of new features in version 2.0 because they're there already in version 1.0! And it's for this reason that I am no longer going to be distributing Qingwen for free. It was an app that I made for my own use and thought it'd be nice if other people also got to use it, but you know what, I'm done dealing with all the freeloading jerks whose only job is to make my day worse. From now on, if they want to bitch about it, they at least have to pay me first. And for those who feel it's an app they like and is worth having, well maybe it wouldn't hurt for them to dish out about the same amount of money as it takes to buy a Crunch bar.

Anyway, that's enough raging for today. I want to end the post on a lighter note because, really, overall Qingwen has been a great thing for me. Not only is it my first real-world app, but it's also been way more successful than I ever imagined. As I mentioned, it's had over 20,000 downloads last I checked, and that's way, way more than I ever expected to have in its entire lifetime. Also, if you visit Qingwen on the App Store, you'll see that most people have written extremely gracious reviews and it's a great feeling to see other people appreciating what you've made even more than you yourself do. Reading these reviews and watching the downloads counter is a bit like an addiction–I want more and more happy users–and for Qingwen 2.0 I've added at least a couple of significant features that I don't really use myself but which others have requested. And that is something that I wasn't expecting to do at all when I starting developing it, because I kept telling myself it's an app made only to suit my needs and mine alone. This is all the more reason as to why I wanted Qingwen 2.0 to make it to the App Store as soon as possible, because this is really the first release that I've actually developed more for my users than for myself. So, I do hope Apple gets a little smarter about this whole process, and soon.

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5 comments
  • This whole App Store relation with the developers comes across as, like you said, "you've got to be kidding me".

    All those words they find offensive, they're there in the shipping Dictionary.app in Mac OS 10.5, and for good reason too. It's a dictionary for crying out loud! Maybe the reviewer should've checked the meaning of a dictionary before reviewing you app.

    Congrats on finishing and shipping (on your part) 2.0!
    By Blogger Prateek, at April 22, 2009 2:15 AM   
  • I'm not sure why they've changed their behaviour since iPhone OS 2.0. I remember 'f**k' was a word that the iPhone's auto-correction dictionary supported before 2.0. If I reset the dictionary on my 2.x device, I immediately see the auto-correction suggestion 'duck' for the word.

    Dictionary.com's app requires network access if users want to access everything they would find on a real dictionary. The other $3.99 'Dictionary' app that uses only a built-in word database doesn't have the word.

    If this censorship is for the benefit of kids then they should allow apps to use the Restrictions feature on the OS(is this allowed already?).

    This is just the beginning. I wonder how long this manual approval process is going to continue. I think there will be a saturation point where they will have to open up the App Store.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at April 22, 2009 12:05 PM   
  • As I sit here waiting on my own v2.0 release (the longest wait I've had since August 2008), the only words that come to mind reading your post are expletives. How many of us have dictionaries based on CC-CEDICT in the AppStore with all of those same entries? That's not to mention all of the other dictionaries based on whatever source that likely have the same entries.

    What's your plan? Are you going to censor the entries or resubmit and hope you get a sane reviewer?
    By Blogger Jason, at April 24, 2009 6:37 AM   
  • Well all I have to say is that you have done some fine work with your app and I am sad that apple doesn't see that. I bout a palm a year ago for $150 and student edition Pleco dict for like $90, just so I can have the functionality you have in your app. I could have bought a touch AND your software for way less. Keep up the good work and don't let the app store keep you down!
    By Blogger The Cat Family, at April 29, 2009 10:00 PM   
  • I was wondering why this wasn't free anymore and now I know. But I am going to buy it anyway because it sounds to be the best and looks like you put lots of work into it!
    By Blogger John, at May 25, 2009 7:50 PM   

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VoiceOver in the iPod shuffle
The new iPod shuffle released today has VoiceOver which can read out songs, artists, albums and playlists to you and it supports a ton of languages. Apple has a little section at the bottom of this page which demos all the languages they have and all this makes me think is, "Hey, where are all these languages in Mac OS X?" For example, Mandarin Chinese is definitely not available in Mac OS X, but it is available on the new iPod shuffle. And the fact that Apple claims you'll hear different voices depending on whether you're synching from a Mac or a PC, makes me wonder... Are these voices stored somewhere on my Mac? Can I use them? Please?

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The Inexplicable Safari 4
Yesterday, Apple released Safari 4 (Beta) out into the world. Although I can't say I can feel the speed boost Apple claims with Safari 4, I believe all the benchmarks conducted by a bunch of tech blogs and they all say it kicks every other browser into the netherworld with varying margins (Internet Explorer 7 receiving the worst kick) in terms of its JavaScript execution engine. I also love the fact that my URLs are now much better auto-completed as I type them (à la Firefox 3) and that the History is now more extensive. The new developer tools are also pretty amazing and I look forwarding to using them, especially if it eliminates the need to use FireBug for testing websites. Also, I really like the fact that someone finally came to their senses and made the Windows version use Windows UI widgets and not look completely disgusting.

However, I am saddened - yes, saddened - to see how much time has been wasted on what I feel are completely useless feature additions to Safari. I absolutely do not understand why Apple is trying to make Safari be Google Chrome. Has Chrome picked up a particularly good slice of the browser market? No. Have people really expressed the opinion that the Chrome's "tabs-on-top" UI is vastly superior to the regular tabs in other browsers? No. In fact, most people I know played out with Chrome for a few days and then relegated it to their pile of unused software. As with Safari 4, the only thing I liked about Chrome was under the hood, that is, the fact that every tab ran in its own process. As for all the "UI innovativeness" that Chrome brought to the market, I don't have much to say. I certainly fail to see its merits.

And that is why I feel that Apple has wasted a lot of precious effort for nothing. Not only do the tabs on top look ghastly to my eyes, but they also don't make my tabbed browsing experience even an iota more pleasant. The "Top Sites" feature, which is also a direct rip-off from Chrome, is again something that I initially thought I'd find useful; but it never ended up falling into my workflow, and, believe me, adding a cool 3D effect to it is not going to change that. It was also the first thing I turned off in Safari 4.

Then there's CoverFlow, which was the second thing I turned off. I honestly don't know if there was any significant thought behind this at all. CoverFlow in Finder already gave off the vibe of "eh... this is kind of superfluous" and in Safari it seems to be shouting "we made this cool thing called CoverFlow and we're going to shoehorn it into every new app we make." Even in iTunes, where CoverFlow originated, I only used it for the first couple of weeks and can easily count on one hand the number of times I've used it in Finder.

And most painful of all, why the hell did they take out the progress-in-address-bar? Not only is the progress bar an essential feedback element, but Safari's was also most ingeniously implemented.

Thankfully, there seems to be some hidden preferences that can bring back some of Safari 3's goodness. However, I feel that Safari 3 definitely trumps Safari 4 as far as usability and sheer UI elegance is concerned and the Safari team should think twice about making Safari 4's the standard UI. At the least, these hidden preferences should be exposed in Safari's Preferences.

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3 comments
  • One reason the new tabs might look so strange is that they’re set in Helvetica, rather than Lucida Grande. Someone deserves a chance encounter with the cluebat for this.

    Interestingly, Apple claims that Safari was the first browser to have a combination URL/progress bar. As far as I know, Opera (surprise) was first with that feature: I noticed it way back in Opera 2, but it just wasn’t shiny like Safari’s. Safari more clearly copied MSN Explorer, which used an identical design, featured in a series of “MSN butterfly” commercials aired nationwide.

    Too bad the actual progress bar was removed. Safari’s progress bar was much more accurate than the ones in Firefox and IE.

    I’m not surprised at the superfluous eye candy. Apple likes these things (cf. glassy Dock).
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at February 25, 2009 7:25 AM   
  • i actually like the tabs on top because i get slightly more vertical space to display actual page content. i just wish they disabled click-through for those tabs because you can accidentally close them when switching from another window.
    By Blogger James, at February 28, 2009 12:26 AM   
  • spot on with the review of Safari 4.0
    Even i had to revert back to the old progress bar in address bar thingy.
    N even the tabs don't come out so easily.. U have to click on the top right ( diagonal Lines ) to take a tab out..
    N in Safari 4, i dont think there's any way to stop a page while its loading. Even +. doesnt stop anything..
    is any way out ?

    I might be heading to back to safari 3 soon.. Damn
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at April 20, 2009 12:08 AM   

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Qǐngwèn
The product of about three weeks of on and off work is finally complete and uploaded on the App Store for everyone to download for free. Given the choice, what do I end up making for the final project of my iPhone class? A Chinese dictionary, of course! It's called Qǐngwèn (请问/請問) and has the following icon:


I know it screams "Japanese!" and well, for people who don't like that, I can't help it. It's the first thing I came up with in Photoshop after spending a couple of minutes fiddling around with colors and I couldn't make anything else that looked better. The unfortunate part about making apps is that the icon is the last thing you do and the thing you spend the least effort on, but the most important aspect in the initial attraction prospective users feel towards your app and a bad icon can dramatically reduce the number of people who try out your app. And since most of us small developers can't afford professional designers, we're left with whatever we can come up with in Photoshop in a few minutes before submitting the app to the App Store.

Anyway, a decent icon will make the user tap your application's name in the search results, but then you have to keep the experience going with some screenshots, which are the next thing a user bases their decision of whether or not to download your app on. So, here's one of those:


Of course, there are additional screenshots and also much better presented on the website I've made specifically for Qǐngwèn, which is karanmisra.com/qingwen. Which brings me to the other thing you do in a hurry once you're done making the app: the website. In my case, I needed something that looked decent but definitely did not have the time to sit and do hand coded CSS (not that I'm good at that sort of stuff anyway), so I ended up making it in iWeb which is absolutely superb in the way that it lets you take your ideas and directly convert them to a website as long as you don't care about the fact that all the CSS is inlined. So, don't go look at the source of that website.

Of course, as far as the app itself is concerned, there are two main features: search and word lists. And all I did was to try to make those two features as smooth and simple to use as possible, trying to eke out as much performance as I could out of the iPhone's little CPU. Apart from that, two major components in the app are actually not done by me. The dictionary comes from the free (and slowly growing towards excellence) CC-CEDICT and the handwriting-based input method, which by the way is abso-fucking-lutely incredible, comes from Apple itself, and I need to write an accolade to it at some point (for instance, look at this screenshot in which I wrote that character by hand and its first guess was exactly what I was going for.)

And that's Qǐngwèn, the Chinese dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch, that I made mostly over winter break. Of course, I've already started work on version 2.0 and there's loads of stuff I have to both fix and improve upon.

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20 comments
  • Congrats on your first iPhone app! I really like the brown shades you went with for the app.
    By Blogger Prateek, at January 17, 2009 10:10 PM   
  • Thanks! I really thought the brown shading would be appropriate for a dictionary, since it reminded me somewhat of books.
    By Blogger Karan, at January 17, 2009 10:11 PM   
  • Congratulations on releasing the app -- this looks like it'll be a really nice addition to the iPhone.

    Feature/pony request time: One killer feature would be if it supported custom dictionaries. WeDict Pro supports StarDict-format dictionaries (which brings all kinds of Chinese-Chinese dictionary goodness -- I use Chinese-Chinese dictionaries a lot more than Chinese-English dictionaries), but the implementation is lousy and the app frequently refuses to download dictionaries. Any chance of seeing this happen in 2.0?
    By Blogger bokane, at January 22, 2009 4:59 AM   
  • Nice work. You've raised the bar for the rest of us.
    By Blogger Jason, at January 28, 2009 12:41 PM   
  • Beautifully designed app. I can't decide whether the aesthetics or function is better.

    Request: export word lists
    By Blogger Richard, at February 2, 2009 4:24 AM   
  • The link to the screenshot you've linked is broken.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at February 7, 2009 8:40 AM   
  • Hi, it's perfect app! Just a small bugreport: even after switching the traditional character set, the logic remains simplified (as well as button captions): i.e. the screen for character 颱 offers a search for words containing 台 or a search for 只 returns also results like 隻 etc.
    By Blogger Hans, at February 7, 2009 11:22 AM   
  • @Everyone: Thank you!

    @Abhishek: Fixed the broken link.

    @Hans: I'm aware of that bug. It should be fixed in the next release.
    By Blogger Karan, at February 7, 2009 11:24 AM   
  • I can't find a way to draw a character. Do i have to install something else?
    By Blogger Pieter, at February 9, 2009 3:26 AM   
  • I also can't find a way to access the handwriting input screen. All I can get is a keyboard. Advice?
    By Blogger Verre, at March 5, 2009 12:20 AM   
  • You need to activate the Pinyin and/or Handwriting keyboards from Settings > International > Keyboards using the iPhone's Settings app.
    By Blogger Karan, at March 5, 2009 12:22 AM   
  • That worked, thanks! I think a lot of us iPhone noobs aren't aware that this functionality has to be enabled through the phone's general settings.
    By Blogger Verre, at March 5, 2009 4:18 AM   
  • you should contact the developer of ktdict and perhaps hybridize your two apps. His/her app has instant lookup, whereas yours has wordlists and traditional/simplified, which is really cool... some kind of combo of the two apps would be the best chinese dictionary out there and you could sell it for $5 or something
    By Blogger Skateboard P, at March 15, 2009 3:23 AM   
  • Very nice dictionary, good ergonomy (the best free Chinese dictionary at the moment in my opinion).

    Ideas for improvements in next versions :
    - quality and number of entries (some usefull words are not in the dictionary, but maybe this "lightness" is the reason your dictionary is faster than Dianhua)
    - management of wordlists (last word in at the top of the list instead of the bottom, import and export options, options to hide translation and/or pinyin in "study mode")

    Thanks again !
    By Blogger Adi et Noé, at March 17, 2009 9:55 AM   
  • Also a bug report : sometimes (I can't really say when it happens) some wordlist entries get lost, more precisely if my list looks like this:

    word1
    word2
    word3
    word4

    It might become like this:

    word1
    word1
    word1
    word4

    so one word entry replaces other entries
    By Blogger Adi et Noé, at March 17, 2009 10:04 AM   
  • when I make multiple word lists, the program abruptly quits when I scroll down to add new words to the newer lists. Very annoying for a program that is otherwise excellent.
    By Blogger Ervin Massinga, at March 17, 2009 6:11 PM   
  • Hi, please contact me by email, thanks!
    By Blogger MDBG, at March 20, 2009 1:12 PM   
  • Hi. I loved the app; used it during my vacation in China to write new words down. Then I restored my iPhone from Scratch, forgetting I had QingWen :( , hence losing all my precious vocabulary list. What a shame. My suggestion would then be to have an "online backup" system (by email adress); or at least an Export feature; as someone suggested. But definetely, the online backup (such as the one implemented in the app "Weightbot" by Tapbots) seems the best.

    Regards,
    By Blogger Gilles Lemagnen, at April 12, 2009 10:08 AM   
  • Hi, the bug I mentioned above (word entries get overwritten by a single one repeating itself) happens when I use the delete function for some words in my list.
    By Blogger Adi et Noé, at April 14, 2009 7:07 PM   
  • Thanks for reporting the bug! I will definitely look into it very soon.
    By Blogger Karan, at April 15, 2009 10:18 AM   

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Dostana
This movie was hyped up a bit for me by some of my friends and since my mother brought home a DVD, I thought "Why not, let's give this movie a try." So, we popped it into the DVD player and off it didn't go, because the DVD player is now officially a piece of crap and claimed there was "No Disc" after "Disc Reading" for a few minutes. So, we hooked up a laptop to the TV and off it went.

As I said, I was excited for this movie because the idea of a fake Indian gay couple being found out by a theth Punjabi mother was fairly amusing. And you know, that part did end up being very amusing. Unfortunately, that bit only lasted about ten minutes. There were then another 130 minutes or so of putting up with the storyless piece of crap produced by Karan Johar and enterprise. Spoiler alert here (a bit too late anyway), but there's only so long you can stretch a movie about two straight guys who pretend to be gay guys to live in a particularly nice apartment (the premise, although, is a bit over-stretched from the beginning, not to mention the fact that it's ripped off, badly mind you, from this recent American movie.)

Also, amongst other things I would like to make clear to the rest of this world is that Abhishek Bachchan, to me as a straight male, comes off as not anywhere nearly good-looking enough to be working in movies, and particularly not this one in which the entire fucking premise of the movie is supposed to be two extremely attractive straight guys who pretend to be a gay couple. And no, he's not one of those actors whose acting is so par excellence that it can compensate for his average or below-average looks. Also, can't the fellow shave? Ever? Looks completely dreadful, especially because he's always in stark contrast to J. Abraham who, I'm sure even most straight males can agree, is an extremely attractive man. Thankfully, the director at least succumbed to this truth that even though he picked Bachchan for this role, he could never make the bloody fellow take his shirt off, and I honestly would have thrown up right then if he had.

So, in short, what is worthwhile is really to find a YouTube clip with the one scene from the movie that is priceless which is when Bachchan's mother comes to terms with her son's gayness and does a grih pravesh for her new son-in-law. What is unfortunate is that movies like these make me even less likely to watch the new Bollywood production to hit the silver screen.

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3 comments
  • Yeah, well the only reason I think they chose Abhishek was cuz he acts ... gay. As does Bobby Deol. Blearrgh.
    And no, I disagree, that fictitious love story was really funny as well.
    By Blogger Espèra, at January 3, 2009 6:10 AM   
  • haha.. actually true.. thank god K. Johar didn't make banchan take of his shirt seriously..abhishek shud have morally rejected this role opposite ( supposedly ) abhrahim. Where John cudnt wear nething more than undies but our handsome ( god knows how ) bachan was all the time wrapped in chunnis
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at January 8, 2009 5:51 AM   
  • Heh.. So glad I didn't waste time watching it. And Abhishek Bachhan taking his shirt off??!! That'll be one shocking sight!

    Anyway nice to find your blog. Keep posting!

    --
    Rasagy (Exun.. Remember?)
    By Blogger RaSh, at January 19, 2009 1:03 PM   

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Hating on English
I'm now about four or five weeks into the first term of what can possibly be my last year at Stanford, but the eventfulness or uneventfulness of this one of the last few terms of my undergraduate career shall be reserved for a more opportune moment. For now, I want to talk a little bit about a foreigner's observations about English. Before I start though, I want to clarify that I love English a lot and let's face it, English is probably going to remain the language I'm most expressive in for the rest of my life as well.

My obsession with Sinitic languages continues and so, this term I am taking a class on the structure of Modern Chinese. As expected, the professor is Chinese, and so has learnt English as a foreign language, and since we talk about language so much in the class, it is inevitable that comparisons frequently get drawn between English and Chinese (Mandarin Chinese, for the purposes of this entry.) And sometimes I feel that the class name should be altered slightly from "The Structure of Modern Chinese" to "How Modern Chinese totally kicks Modern English's Ass, 'cause Modern Chinese is Fantastic" because the professor can occasionally go on endlessly about how certain things in English just don't make sense (His latest one is "How do 'put', 'up' and 'with' have anything to do with 'put up with' which means 'to tolerate'?") Truly, even though I feel his comments are always a little off topic, they do have some reasoning to them, and even if they don't really teach me anything too useful, they are interesting factoids about a language whose lexicon, grammar and idiosyncrasies I have rarely given much thought to.

The Chinese people have had a history of using ridiculously terse language, with Classical Chinese's syllables-to-meaning ratio unparalleled by any language I know of, and Modern Chinese comes in at a close second on my list. Whenever you want to introduce someone to Chinese grammar, you first have to introduce that person to what all Chinese grammar does not have, and this list includes: conjugational inflections, adjectival/adverbial agreement, plurals, gender and tense. Or, at least, that's all I could think of off the top of my head. So, this professor of mine argues as to why English also can't be the same way. If Chinese people manage to get along perfectly well without all those language features and still communicate just as well as any other people, why are other languages so complicated in this respect?

For example, if you have grown up speaking Chinese, you will wonder why English has this almost fanatical obsession with having a subject for every sentence. For example, take a sentence like "I should go to sleep", which is not only a perfectly good sentence but also a very natural one. The same sentence translated in the most natural way into Chinese would be "gāi shuìjiào le", which translates word-by-word to "Should sleep le", where "le" is a marker that conveys any of change in situation, when it is placed at the end of a sentence. English, as you saw, had the subject "I" in the sentence, while the Chinese didn't require it. Sure, English was more wordy in other senses but the sentence can be shortened down to "I should sleep" if one wishes. The "I", however, is fundamentally necessary. If someone said "Should sleep" out of the blue to me, I'd think the sentence sounded a bit incomplete.

Another example of English's determination to have a subject is sentences like "It is raining" and "There is a car outside". First of all, what baffles most foreign learners is "it". Most of them, after having learned English for years, still can't get over the "it" and wonder what the hell it refers to. I, certainly, don't think of anything in particular as being the "it" when I say "It's raining" or "It's hot outside". I just say it. It's part of the construction. In the end, I feel it stems from English's obsession with having a concrete subject at the beginning of every sentence. The Chinese would say "Xià yǔ" ("Falls rain") instead of "It's raining", "Tiānqì hěn rè" ("Weather very hot") instead of "It's hot" and "Wàimiàn yǒu chē" ("Outside has car") instead of "There is a car outside". Many English speakers these days also tend to mess up and say "There's five cars" instead of "There're five cars", and both forms are accepted in colloquial speech. This points to the fact that "There is/are" has become such a set phrase that 'there' is no longer looked upon as the 'subject' of the sentence.

And that's just the beginning. You don't have plurals in Chinese, so "shū" could mean both "book" and "books". So, it baffles my professor why one needs to add the 's' at the end of 'book' when "five book" leaves no ambiguity in the fact that there are five books. And if you say a sentence like "Book are expensive these days", you'll note that 'book' doesn't agree with 'are', so it sounds awkward. But, if it's a matter of pure communication, there are no two meanings you can interpret from this. It is clear that the sentence is simply "Books are expensive these days".

Then you can take it to the next step and question why the verb 'to be' needs to be conjugated. This concept of conjugation is completely alien to a Chinese person. For them, the most natural sentence would be "Book be expensive these days". Since no particular book was pointed out, it's obvious that books in general are expensive.

Then there's also the thing about "pointing things out" which leads me to the topic of articles, such as 'a', 'an' and 'the'. Let's not even talk about the fact that there are two articles 'a' and 'an' simply because it's unfashionable to say "a umbrella", why in the world would you need 'the'? I know that some people reading this might know Hindi, and so you can relate to the fact that Hindi doesn't need 'a' or 'the' either. The context makes it pretty darned clear whether you're talking about a particular thing or a thing in general. And you'll see that if you want to draw attention to a particular thing, you can use the word for 'that' in English, Hindi and Chinese. "The car is parked" would go into Hindi and Chinese as "That car is parked" and "A car is parked" would go as "One car is parked". So, the reason as to why English and many other European languages need articles is a mystery to many foreign learners. Unsurprisingly, they mess it up quite often as well.

Then there's pronouns and their myriad complex uses. For example "I drive a car", "That is my car", "The car is mine" and "Give the car to me" all involve the person 'I' and yet they all have a different form of the pronoun. In Chinese, they'd go "Wǒ kāi chē", "Nà ge chē shì wǒ de", "Chē shì wǒ de" and "Gěi wǒ nà ge chē". In Chinese, all the four sentences have the same form for 'I', i.e., 'Wǒ'. The same thing goes for 'you', 'he', 'she' and 'they'. I have to note that even many native English speakers get confused about the conjugation of certain sentences, such as "It's me" or "It's I"? "My friends and me went to dinner" or "My friends and I went to dinner"? Unsurprisingly, both are accepted forms, the former more accepted in colloquial speech and the latter in formal speech.

Another thing with pronouns, besides conjugation is why English differentiates between the pronouns for humans and non-humans. For example, "It is ugly" can never refer to a person (unless derogatory), while Hindi and Chinese both use the same pronouns for 'It' and 'He/She' ('Vo' in Hindi and 'Tā' in Chinese.) Interestingly, in spoken Chinese, there is also no differentiation at all between 'He', 'She' and 'It', just as there isn't in Hindi. Context makes it all so clear that native speakers might not even notice this.

Then of course there's also tense. I don't think there's any native English speaker that hasn't written a story or an essay in which he discovered half way through that the tense he had chosen for the starting line somehow shifted from the past tense to the present tense or past perfect tense by the end of the paragraph. Then the author invariably has to pick one or the other and go back to change the entire paragraph such that it has the same tense and everything matches up. In Chinese, there is no tense! How do they tell when something happened, is happening or will happen? Let's take the example "She went to the market yesterday". If you change it to "She go to the market yesterday", does that change the meaning at all? No. And that's how you would say it in Chinese. In fact, there exists a particle in Chinese which can be added after a verb to show that the action has completed, but in sentences in which a time word has been mentioned, that particle is optional. So, for example, one could say "Zuótiān, tā qù le shāngchǎng" or "Zuótiān, tā qù shāngchǎng" and they would both mean the same. The 'le' is the "completion marker". However, this 'le' is not a "tense marker" because it means the action has been completed; however, it could have completed in the past, present or future. For example, "Míngtiān, tā xià le kè, jiù qù kàn yīshēng", which is "Tomorrow, as soon as she is done with class, she will go to see the doctor". Here 'le' is used in the future 'tense'. So, there are no 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was' and 'were'. It's all one word. And no 'go', 'goes' and 'went' either.

In short, even though English is nowhere near losing all of its various grammatical idiosyncrasies (and I don't think I even scratched the surface), the take-home lesson for now is that Chinese is a ridiculously easy language to learn for a foreign learner, while English is the exact opposite.

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7 comments
  • Criticism of English is something up with which I will not put.
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at October 20, 2008 9:50 AM   
  • Also, while Chinese might be incredibly easy to learn grammatically – since, well, what grammar does it have? – that doesn’t help Westerners trying to learn the ideographic writing system or the very concept of tones.

    So your arguments boil down to the fact that, yes, Chinglish is very easy. ;^)
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at October 20, 2008 9:55 AM   
  • I share your sentiment about the Chinese writing system, in that it is extremely difficult to learn, and is viewed by many to be quite impractical and a hindrance to both native and foreign learners of the language. However, do note that I have written perfectly acceptable Chinese sentences in this post without a single one of these "ideographic" characters and without any ambiguity in meaning.

    As to your comment about tones, they are a language feature unique to some of these East Asian languages and yes, they do take getting used to. But then again, if you learn Hindi, you suddenly have to distinguish four T sounds that you never knew existed or four D sounds, along with long and short vowels. All this is just the phonology of the given language and, in learning most foreign languages, the phonology is the initial and most difficult step. However, the structure of the language is a completely different topic and it was the structure that was my primary focus in this post.
    By Blogger Karan, at October 20, 2008 10:57 AM   
  • This post has been removed by the author.
    By Blogger sid, at October 20, 2008 12:05 PM   
  • Great entry! This entry made me think about how we love words in the English language compared to Chinese where structure often relies on directness and simplicity. Our highest income earners and socialites include lawyers, consultants, and politicians, whose eloquence over words is probably the most important piece of their economic success. These members of our society embrace the fact that communicating in English is a complex exercise full of nuances. As Americans, we think of math and reading, analytic thought and it's expression, as roughly equal priorities when we talk about educating our children. Could this explain why we prioritize different sorts of knowledge differently in societies as different as China and the West? I agree that a shorter solution is often elegant, but is it truer for geometry than for the spoken word? Perhaps, being verbose makes it possible to achieve in English what can't be achieved in a terse language such as Chinese. Right now, I'm not convinced either way. How do you think the terse structure of Chinese affects being tactful or being able to weigh one's words carefully to convey the right tone and meaning especially when conveying a reality that's difficult to absorb or react positively to for the listener?
    By Blogger sid, at October 20, 2008 12:09 PM   
  • I thought you were busy with CS140?
    By Blogger Alan You, at October 20, 2008 2:58 PM   
  • I think the difficulty is more that you have to learn language features so different than those of your native language. For those of us who grew up knowing (to some extent) a tonal language, things like tones don’t really trip us up. Similarly, you wouldn’t find it hard to pick up another language’s retroflex consonants, since Hindi is so abundant in them, but most others would.

    So I don’t think the issue is that English or Chinese is difficult in an absolute sense. Whenever someone learns their second language, they have to learn certain skills, like circumlocution and metacognition, that likely haven’t come up since early childhood. If it’s an English speaker learning a Romance language, they have to relearn conjugation. A polyglot who dabbles in a diverse array of languages probably wouldn’t find learning English, Chinese, or Latin to be more difficult than the others.

    I often sell people on learning Vietnamese by telling them there’s no conjugation (tense, person) and no declension (case, number, gender), and any word can be any part of speech as-is. What I don’t tell them is that pronouns in Vietnamese are diverse beyond disbelief, and that the /ng/ sound is notorious for Westerners. Every language has its rough spots.

    There are quite a few Vietnamese words and expressions for which I don’t know the English equivalent, and English is my native tongue. That’s why I feel sorry for someone who knows only one language: they’re missing out.
    By Blogger Minh Nguyễn, at October 20, 2008 9:47 PM   

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NSWindow and Animation
NSWindow, it seems, was never designed with the aim of supporting animation, which becomes slightly problematic when that's precisely what you're trying to do. This is the result of all the research I've done on NSWindow in the past few days because I was trying to do some animations with it, which proved to be a nigh impossible task.

So, what can you do in terms of animation with NSWindow? NSWindow supports a few basic animations - opacity, frame size, frame origin and frame rotation. If you want to change any of those and have the window animate the action, it will gladly do so. You can do those either using NSViewAnimation, through the setFrame:display:animate: method and perhaps even through the animator proxy. Try this Quickie to help you get started with simple window animations.

Beyond that short list, the next best thing you can do is to create the impression that you are animating the window. This allows your animations to be more flexible but not as smooth and well-blended as they would be were they being performed on the window itself. One way to animate things is using the Core Animation API that was introduced with Leopard. What you need to do to get things started though is a bunch of CALayers which Core Animation can animate. Now, these layers need to be inside something and, generally speaking, anything that you want to show on the screen needs to be inside a window. So, the solution is to create a transparent window the size of the entire screen and use that as your canvas, set that window's contentView to have a backing Core Animation layer and then add images of your windows (but not the windows themselves of course) as CALayers to this big transparent layer as sublayers. Here's some code that demonstrates that:

- (void)awakeFromNib {
    /* screenWindow is an IBOutlet hooked up to a borderless
       NSWindow window and this stuff should ideally be done
       by subclassing NSWindow and making a TransparentWindow
       subclass and putting this code in its -awakeFromNib */
    [screenWindow setBackgroundColor:[NSColor clearColor]];
    [screenWindow setHasShadow:NO];
    [screenWindow setOpaque:NO];
    [screenWindow setFrame:[[NSScreen mainScreen] frame] display:YES];
    [[screenWindow contentView] setWantsLayer:YES];

    /* Get the layer from this empty window */
    NSView *rootView = [screenWindow contentView];
    CALayer *rootLayer = [rootView layer];
    
    /* Create the layer that will animate */
    CALayer *fakeWindowLayer = [CALayer layer];    

    /* Get the window's (another IBOutlet) contents */
    NSBitmapImageRep *imageRep;
    [rootView lockFocus];
    imageRep = [[NSBitmapImageRep alloc] initWithFocusedViewRect:[rootView frame]];
    [rootView unlockFocus];

    /* Now set the layer's contents and add it to the layer tree */
    fakeWindowLayer.contents = (id)[imageRep CGImage];
    [rootLayer addSublayer:fakeWindowLayer];

    /* ... Now do some animation with this layer ... */
}

I don't know whether you picked up on it or not but I never autoreleased or released the NSBitmapImageRep, which was for a reason. The reason is that the CGImageRef we get back from the NSBitmapImageRep is actually half-hearted and is directly dependent on the NSBitmapImageRep, so much so that if the NSBitmapImageRep goes away and you try to access the data in the CGImageRef, your program crashes or you get junk on your screen. I'm currently working on it and trying to find a solution to this, but, for the time being, a memory leak it shall remain!

Anyway, at the end of that code segment, you have a CALayer that looks exactly like the NSWindow (minus the shadow) and can be animated at will. All you have to do now is to hide the actual NSWindow, animate your fake window, and, at the end of the animation, unhide the actual window and make sure it's where the fake window was last seen. Complicated, but so far the only way I've found to "animate" NSWindows.

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1 comments
  • Yeah, it's a shame it can't be easier to do nice NSWindow animations. Thanks for the nice tips in this post, I found them very useful.
    By Blogger Ted, at April 15, 2009 8:22 AM   

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Dealing with NSArray "out of bounds"
NSArray being one of the most frequently used Cocoa classes and being out of bounds being one of the most common errors one would get with an array, I'd have thought that the NSRangeException which NSArray promises to throw if an out of bounds error occurs would trigger the debugger (or, alternatively, the application to crash in non-debugging mode). However, it does not do so. All that happens is that you get this in your Run Log and your stack unwinds:
*** -[NSCFArray objectAtIndex:]: index (2) beyond bounds (2)
The fact that such a basic but critical error (who knows in how many devious ways an application could mess with your data once it has a bad state that made it go out of bounds?!) defaults to being silently acknowledged and subsequently ignored unnerves me, and frankly, it annoys me, because, just like any other developer trying to make a half decent program, what you want to do at that point is to jump to the stack trace and see what went wrong. Now, since we're very unlikely to convince Apple to change basic functionality it hasn't touched in about eight years, it's time for workarounds.

The first question that should come to mind is, "What the hell is actually going on? Is the promised NSRangeException being raised at all or is the documentation just lying? Giving the documentation the benefit of the doubt and assuming that it is being raised, what in the world is happening to it before it reaches us?" This kind of reasoning led me to search for ways to catch exceptions in the debugger. Some Google searching revealed that setting a symbolic breakpoint at -[NSException raise] might do the trick. So, I did. And it didn't. Cleanly flew by that breakpoint as if it was a man raising his kilt to hitch a ride.

What next? Look for an even more basic call to catch exceptions. Going by the fact that most fundamental Objective-C runtime methods eventually go into C functions and going by the example of objc_msg_send, I discovered objc_exception_throw and set a breakpoint on it. Worked like a charm! And now I have that breakpoint always set because I, like any sane developer, wants to catch his exceptions before they reach the end-user.

Incidentally, why the exception was not being caught by setting a breakpoint at -[NSException raise] now came to me with breathtaking obviosity ("obviousness" just isn't cool enough). I looked into the documentation for NSException once more and looked at the stack trace once more (the stack trace that now appeared thanks to my breakpoint). NSException, as it turns out, has three methods which can be called to raise exceptions, and, apparently the other two (+raise:format: and +raise:format:arguments:) do not all eventually call into -raise. Now here's the most ludicrous thing about this affair; read this bit from the documentation for -raise:
All other methods that raise an exception invoke this method, so set a breakpoint here if you are debugging exceptions.
Wow, just outright lying. Very spiffy, Apple, very spiffy indeed. Undocumented exceptions about exceptions. Is this supposed to be some sort of geek humor? हे भगवान!

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1 comments
  • WOW. Just wow. You, sir, are a savior to all programmers having to deal with NSArrays. I would go apeshit every single time I had an out of bounds error. I can now rest easy with this new weapon you have shared with the world.
    By Blogger J.C. Subida, at July 27, 2009 5:04 PM   

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Reminiscences
For the two hundredth post on this new journal, I bring old memories and a new address. The new address comes as part of a shift I want to make to consolidate all my web logging experiences in one place and a want to redesign, not the journal itself (since I still like this simplistic self-designed template very much) but the rest of my website to match the journal. So, that will be coming in a few days. Until then, let me look back at the past year and dig out some of my most cherished memories.

Although it might not be the first chronologically, the first really grand thing that jumps to my mind about last summer - almost exactly a year ago - was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What a delight to read that wonderful book was, and still was yet again this summer and I just finished re-listening to it on audio only to move on to Book Six. Perhaps, I can go through them in reverse order this summer. I really enjoyed reading the aforelinked entry because it's just brimming with my excitement and enthusiasm about Harry Potter - a sentiment hard to mask even behind the stillness of written text.

Possibly because my internship was so boring did I get so much work towards personal projects done last year. This year, since my internship keeps me glued so, I barely get that kind of time, not to mention that last year I was friendless in an alien suburb, which gave me more free time than I'd ever imagined having. It got a bit boring, but I feel I made the best of it. And here's something I spent the beginning of last summer working on - the then redesigned Journal, which, as of this writing, is the current design.

Ah, yes and my Chinese adventures continued in full force last year after having studied it for a year at Stanford and having found it to be a supremely interesting language to study, which, if it were not for the characters, would also be counted as one of the easiest to learn languages of the world. And along those lines, I published what I believe is my first post completely in Chinese. And now that I come to read it after a year, I have to really restrain myself from clicking on the little pencil icon and fixing all the numerous errors I'd made back then, which sound disturbingly wrong to my ears now, after another year of having studied the venerable subject.

Toyon, of course! Wow, looking back at the memorable year this has been, living with about ten score sophomores. And these two posts recount the beginning of that adventure, one that would be filled to the brim with endless fun, friends and anime. It was an amazing experience being staff on a dorm and I recommend it to anyone who's considering it. I found out after having staffing that the key point which makes it so much more fun staffing than being a regular person in the dorm is that when you are a staff member, people feel less guilty in bothering you, which gets you, assuming you're someone who likes company, more people to talk to and become friends with than you ever imagined. And afterwards I reminisce over it in Hinglish.

When I discovered Simpu Singh and Indians speaking Cantonese.

When I met Chinese people in New Delhi over winter break. (Hindi)

When I had my best academic quarter ever! God, that made me happy.

When I wrote the first piece of software that made me feel a sense of accomplishment. (Liànxí)

When I finally got a free ticket to WWDC.

And found an internship I really liked.

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2 comments
  • Of course you had a great year at Toyon! You were living next door to me; how could it have been a bad year?
    By Blogger Alan You, at August 3, 2008 4:24 PM   
  • Good use of the semicolon.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 5, 2008 12:48 AM   

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Trailer
The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out and it's really nice. This Dumbledore is finally beginning to grow on me even though his tone of voice is almost always off from what I feel the real Dumbledore should be (I feel that Jim Dale captures it brilliantly in the audiobooks). I will reserve judgment on "young Dumbledore" and "young Voldemort" because, honestly, they're only there for one scene and it doesn't matter much to me. I really do look forward to the lake scene though and all their trips through the Pensieve. In other words, I can't wait to see the movie - the crowds are going to be unbelievable, but it'll all be worth it.



Also, a couple of days ago, trusting that future versions of iPhone software will continue to improve (or at least support) Hindi font rendering, I converted all my five hundred something Hindi songs to हिन्दी songs, meaning that my library now looks like this:



This result is achieved by painstakingly filling in "Sorting" information which was introduced as part of one of the iTunes 7.x releases. (Well, technically, you don't need the sorting information per se, but all your Hindi songs will find themselves at the end of the list in a randomly sorted manner if you don't have it.) Unfortunately, not all parts of iTunes have evolved to support all these new features and one of the glaring omissions is the lack of a way to set the Sort fields on multiple tracks at the same time. This is in some part relieved by this iTunes AppleScript, which, although not perfect, gets the job done.

This music library conversion, besides being immensely satisfying in a very OCD way, also revealed lots of errors to me both in the Latin transliteration as well as the Devnagari transliteration. For example, Ishq needs to be spelt इश्क़ but was इश्क in many places, द्र was दर, कुछ was कुच्छ (a rather overindulgent use of the क्ख/च्छ/द्ध kind of consonant cluster) and the odd ि was an ी (an easy mistake) as well as the other way around.



In continuing happiness, I will soon have another great load off my head as I will soon be finally finishing this project for my part-time job (during the school year) that I was supposed to finish in... March. It has bothered me almost every day since then but I simply did not have the time while the school year was going on, and now I'll have finally finished it! What a relief. Also, I think I seem to have done a rather better job of it than most people (who, although they submitted the thing on time, mostly did a shoddy job of it).



Finally, I've been trying out last.fm for the past few days. What it does is that it tracks the songs you listen to and then can play (in a Pandora-like fashion) songs it thinks you'll like. You can also make friends on last.fm and see how "compatible" you are with them. Since I use CoverSutra, which has a builtin last.fm mechanism to send song updates to their server, it's zero disruption to my existing workflow. So, although I doubt it has many uses for me, it does seem like an interesting little thing to play around with.

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2 comments
  • Why don't you give me credit for making you use last.fm?
    By Blogger Alan You, at August 3, 2008 11:23 AM   
  • Why bother, you've claimed it yourself.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 3, 2008 11:25 AM   

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The Five-Day Picnic
Wow it's been quite a weekend this one. I've been away from work for so long (five days) that it feels a bit odd. So, let's see how I spent this massive weekend of fun and frolic. On Friday morning, five of us interns from the Silicon Valley Microsoft office left for a leisurely 11 o'clock flight to Seattle where a car was convenietly waiting to pick us up. Once at our hotel, we waited for a little bit and went to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue Square (because, of course, all our meals were being paid for by the Company - otherwise it'd have been a taqueria).

Having satisfactorily gorged ourselves on burgers, chocolate mousse and the like, we went to the main campus in Redmond where tens of buses had lined up to take the nearly 1400 interns to Woodland Park Zoo. Now, the bus ride that followed was probably the most entertaining event that evening. When the bus was just about to start, our driver - a sweet old lady in her forties - told us that we had a police escort going with us. And sure enough, when we looked out of the window on our left, we saw about ten or twelve policemen on those gigantic police bikes gearing up to leave. Of course the real entertainment started when we got on the highway. You see, the trip from Redmond to the zoo is about sixteen and a half miles and goes over two major highways - the 520 and the I-5. So, we were quite amazed when we got on to the highway and saw that just in order to let us pass, the entire freaking highway had been corked like a bottle by the policemen who were blocking all vehicles from entering the highway and blocking all cars already on the highway, except the Microsoft buses, which were carrying interns... to a zoo... for a concert. I still can't get over the sheer ludicrousness of the fact that about sixteen miles of highway - interstate highway - was blocked (at a peak hour no less!) simply to allow for the merrymaking of a thousand something interns... at a zoo... for a concert. Hell, I don't even know if it was necessary. Talk about corporate clout! Pretty amazing though. And here's a picture of the blockade:


At the end of the zoo event, in which we were provided with food, drink and music (though ironically not a single glimpse at any kind of animal), we received a free Zune 2.0 each and were ferried back home. I honestly don't know with all these Zunes I keep getting (okay, my second free Zune); they don't work with Macs and are thus practically worthless to me.

On the second day, we went to the Company Picnic which took places at Mountain Meadows Park, which is about 25 miles from the Redmond office. We drove there instead of riding on the armada of Microsoft buses because we wanted to be able to leave at any time we wanted. The field was huge and the weather was really nice. The food was terrible (although all free). The activities weren't as bad. It's organized for Microsoft employees and their families, so there were loads of kiddie events and some daredevil performances by motorcyclists as well. I didn't take part in much except for mountain bike riding for 10-15 minutes which was fun, then went home after meeting a few friends and spending a few hours there eating and drinking. In the evening, we went and drove to Seattle hoping to get IMAX tickets for The Dark Knight but they were all sold out. So, we instead went to a Japanese bookstore in the downtown area, I bought a couple of books, and then we went back to our hotel and had dinner at this really posh Italian restaurant called Palomino. The Chocolate Tiramisu deserves a special mention in the "beyond delicious" category.

On the third day, we woke up egregiously early and drove to Mt. Rainier National Park (about 85 miles from our hotel), which took about three hours with some wrong turns and all, and hiked up the mountain which was completely covered with snow. I have to concede that this was probably my oddest snow experience. The sun was blazing and it was maybe between 15ºC and 18ºC outside. The snow somehow persevered. Our hike was about 5-6 miles all over and throughout the entire thing, our feet were in snow and our foreheads were covered with sweat from the hot sun, appreciative of the intermittent cool breeze. It took us two or three hours to climb 2000 something feet after which we took a break, made a snowman and came back down. This was also possibly the most comfortable climb down from a hike that I've ever had. Usually your legs and feet start killing you pretty quickly because climbing down has a tendency to do that (the faster the worse). However, since we were climbing down in snow, any impact from the ground was completely buffered by the snow and it was the best time during the entire hike. We also weren't afraid of slipping and falling down, because if we did, the hardest thing we were likely to hit was snow. July is definitely a great time to hike on Mt. Rainier. By the time we came back though, I was dreadfully tired, went to eat a great dinner at IHOP consisting of pancakes and omelets and then fell asleep almost as soon as I could.

The fourth day (Monday) was the only relatively free day because we decided not to go to one boring ol' event and instead decided to sleep in. In the afternoon, we went to visit some of our intern counterparts up in the Redmond offices, chatted with them for a while and then went and shopped at the company store. The evening was me meeting up with a couple of Stanford friends, eating burritos and watching the third Pirates movie again, which was entertaining.

The last and final day consisted of getting up lazy-ishly at around 10 o' clock, getting lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Seattle (Todai), which turned out to be horrible for me (because I'm a vegetarian), then taking the ferry to Bainbridge, taking the ferry back and heading to the airport to come back here. And now that I've finished writing this story out, it's time for shower and bed.

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1 comments
  • Those nice n cheesy lines u write between the lines ;-) smart move aye.. i hope u understood which lines am talking abt. !!
    By Blogger Arjun Goel, at July 28, 2008 1:00 PM   

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NSAssert(work == fun, @"WTF?");
It's such a weird feeling. I'm actually enjoying my job? Like, the thing I get paid for? It's true, and sometimes it makes me feel embarrassed when my fellow office mates don't share the same enthusiasm. Today, overestimating how sluggishly I would do the whole waking up ritual, I got to work 45 minutes earlier than expected, at around 9.15am. Now, I'm really not hardworking in the normal sense, but man, I just couldn't leave without implementing that one feature I'd planned for today and crushing that nasty bug in which the windows forgot their positions! So, I ended up staying until 8.15pm... yeah. 吾嫌蟲也。

Also... especially useful for those who aren't super-thrilled about what they're doing (an added bonus for me), there are loads of intern events at Microsoft to keep them busy and excited. For example, just last Thursday, we went on a sailboat to tour the San Francisco Bay and it was amazing! I'd never been on a sailboat before and really loved it. Also, on Friday morning, all of us interns are flying up to Redmond and won't be at work again until Wednesday the next. So, a five-day long weekend, which, as far as I know, includes a trip to a zoo, a hiking trip to Mt. Rainier, and a company picnic. Plus, I really like all the interns who are in my building and it looks like it's going to be really fun hanging out with them for one mega-weekend... in, by the way, a Hilton. Did I mention that this is not only free but that we're also getting paid for the days we're off from work? Wow. They definitely do not treat full-time employees this nicely.

Other stuff that's been keeping me excited is the release of Apple's iPhone 2.0 software which has all but breathed (I don't like the past tense form of breathe, I would like it to sound more like "breatht" perhaps...) new life into my one year old iPhone. I absolutely love the new Maps with its continuous location tracking feature, I am a huge fan of my iPhone's newfound ability to display song information in Hindi, I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that playlists containing videos now behave as I expect them to, I am constantly amazed by the new Chinese handwriting recognition system and am a huge fan of the App Store and many of the apps that have come out of it such as the Remote app.

Also, I've begun re-listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the nth time (summertime always rekindles old interests). So, it's time now to go listen to another chapter.

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3 comments
  • You've achieved Nirvana my friend! :P

    I was under the impression that you were interning at Apple this summer, but clearly that's not the case. Oh and I just finished a Deathly Hallows re-read myself, just to celebrate the book's one year anniversary. :)
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 15, 2008 5:43 AM   
  • Well, since I'm doing Cocoa programming either way, it doesn't make much difference to me where I happen to be. (And I get the feeling that MS probably pays better.)
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 15, 2008 8:44 AM   
  • oh I want an iPhone too. Hindi, or not.
    And glad to see you still read Potter books. Heh. Harry rocks.
    By Blogger The Keeper of the Keys, at July 17, 2008 4:40 AM   

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Eight Hours
It's the summer and I can finally get eight hours of sleep if I want to by going to bed before midnight. So, I can either do that and get a comfortable amount of sleep every night or work on personal projects that I've been dreaming of doing over the summer since forever. I can't decide on which. For tonight though, it's eight hours. So, I'm off.

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WWDC08
WWDC08 ended a good week and something ago, but I finally have some motivation to write about it, since I was busy with moving out of my dorm and moving in to my summer apartment as well as starting my summer internship for the past few days. So, first of all, I know that it's in Apple's interest to provide the WWDC Scholarship and attract student developers because they are younger, more impressionable and more likely to adapt their programming lifestyle to the Mac kind, as well as suitable candidates for employment once they're done with college. That said, it's still more awesome from the student's point of view because the thing I am really glad about (emoticon with tongue sticking out goes here) is that I didn't have to pay a dime for it except for the Caltrain tickets.

Unfortunately, there was the slight snag that WWDC happened to fall right in the middle of the week when I was having final exams, had to move out of my dormitory and my entire family was arriving that same Wednesday. So, even though I had preponed all my exams such that they didn't interfere with anything, it still ended up being one hectic week. And because of that, I did end up missing a lot of really cool sessions, which I hope I will be able to catch up on when Apple uploads the videos for the WWDC sessions, which will hopefully be free for attendees.

Keynote
As for the event itself, it took place in the extremely large Moscone Center in San Francisco. On Monday, the day of The Keynote, to get there by public transportation (i.e., Caltrain), I had to wake up at 6am and make my way to the station. Then, finally, at around 8 o' clock, I reached the convention center. The registration process was pretty much nonexistent in that I just went and showed them my ID and they gave me a badge and that was it. Then, I got in line for the keynote. The line was long. It was a 30-foot wide throng of people crawling up through to the top floor of the convention center. It was so long that they had to lead this throng of people through some extremely lengthy corridors to make sure that the "line" remained within the convention center, such that when I actually entered the hall in which the keynote was taking place, I wound up, after having waited in line for more than an hour and a half and having been around what seemed like the whole convention center, at the same point at which I'd joined the line. Since I joined the line at a bit past 8 o' clock, I was able to easily get a decent seat and could see the stage from where I was sitting. However, to ease viewing for people sitting in the back rows, the hall had giant (approximately 40' by 30') screens mounted at strategic locations which meant that you never got to miss out on the action. Finally, at a few minutes past ten, the action began. Of course, everyone's seen the keynote on QuickTime by now, but it was very exciting to be there, in that room, hearing the details live and first hand, and hastily text messaging details to anxiously waiting friends. A long time ago (2002 to be sure), Apple used to telecast these events live all over the world using QuickTime but has stopped doing that for quite a while now – I suppose the costs must be a bit much. For a while now, I've been harboring negative sentiments towards rumor sites (which now basically means the mainstream press because even the New York Times doesn't want to miss out on a juicy tidbit about the next iPhone), so I just wanted the rumor sites to be wrong about MobileMe, the 3G iPhone and Snow Leopard just to prove my point. So, the only disappointment I felt in the keynote was that all the announcements were precisely as the rumor sites said they would be. Also, the only point where it got a bit boring was the seemingly unceasing demos of iPhone apps, which I feel could have been fewer and more select.

Food
Sucked. I heard there was pizza last year. I would have been more than happy with pizza, but there was the shittiest food imaginable there. It was all cold food. Sandwiches and the like. And forget about any good choices for vegetarians. Pathetic. I don't want to complain much because I didn't actually pay for the thing, but I would have been really pissed if I'd paid $1600 and then had been asked to eat that for lunch. I feel that, as a general human being, food is very important to me and having good food really livens up the atmosphere. Sucky food, of course, does the opposite.

Sessions
I was mostly constrained by time, otherwise I'd have gone to more, but I was able to go to a fair number of them, including "What's new in Objective-C?", "Font Management and Core Text", "Using Leopard Features Effectively", "Leveraging Cocoa's Layer-Backed Views", "Using Garbage Collection" and "Mastering Advanced Objective-C Features". Most of them were really interesting and those that weren't were only because most of the stuff required more background knowledge than I have about Mac programming and so a lot of the stuff went straight over my head. There were seemingly people attending from everywhere at WWDC and I heard a lot of Chinese and, for some reason, a lot of French. I was also really amused when this Chinese man, just before he was about to ask a question at the end of the session, started with a very audible "nèige" (那个), which, if you've seen a certain Russell Peters video, you'll know is the standard filler word in Mandarin, and which, for better or worse, bears a very strong resemblance to a word in English.

Labs
I didn't... really... have anything to do in the labs because I really wasn't having any problems in my Mac application that I needed an expert to take a look at but I went to one of the labs - the Core Data lab - to check it out anyway. I feel like I ended up just wasting my time (and the time of the person who was helping me) because I didn't have anything very worthwhile to ask him. But meanwhile I saw some other people being helped and I realized that this was basically what many developers came to WWDC for and was, in effect, upwards of a $1000 to attend a very grandiose "TA help session" for a week. I felt like the guy who hadn't started the homework yet and had come to pick up feelers to see how difficult it was going to be.

And that, I think, was WWDC08 – my very first – in a nutshell.

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4 comments
  • "preponed." wow, that's the first time i've heard that word.
    By Blogger James, at June 22, 2008 1:41 AM   
  • Are you making your app public anytime soon?
    @james: I think it's become part of South-Asian English.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at June 22, 2008 10:59 AM   
  • @James: As Abhishek said, it's been part of the Indian English vocabulary for a while, but another of my friends challenged me on it, so we checked and it did exist on dictionary.com at least. :-)

    @Abhishek: It's still very immature. It doesn't crash or anything, it's stable, but it has very few features. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/6lazsp.
    By Blogger Skaran, at June 22, 2008 12:45 PM   
  • I feel this one was one of the worst apple keynotes. it was boring for most of the duration because of the app demos. A little less on that and a little more on snow leopard would have been better.

    And i agree... bad food is a real "turn-off".
    By Blogger Souvik, at June 25, 2008 1:30 PM   

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地獄
It's 8.30am and I'm about to take a "nap" after having worked all night on a programming project and then having quickly skimmed through the handouts and the textbook for this exam which is at 12.15pm, in less than 4 hours. Then an exam tomorrow and another on Sunday. Then a paper to write, and if I am alive on Monday morning, WWDC. I also have a spare $200 to spend thanks to the Kung-Yi Kao Prize.

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  • Congrats on the Kung-Yi Kao Prize, Karan! Cuppa noodles beckons. And thanks to impulsive highlighting, i can see things :)
    By Blogger Manas, at June 9, 2008 8:48 AM   

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#define DEBUG
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.

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3 comments
  • Congrats on the WWDC scholarship! I'm both jealous and happy for you :P

    Computer Security sounds extremely painful yet fun.
    By Blogger Prateek, at May 1, 2008 11:42 AM   
  • the equivalent of getting mentally laid, huh? wow, looks like i'm going to have to take that class...
    By Blogger James, at May 1, 2008 10:30 PM   
  • Heh, at least you see why I wanted that concentration in systems ...
    By Blogger Nisheeth, at July 14, 2008 10:47 PM   

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Pac Man at the Library
The funniest YouTube video I've seen in quite a while.

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1 comments
  • Huray! for the UofM Patriots. I go to a wonderful school!
    By Blogger asdfghjkl;, at July 30, 2008 6:29 PM   

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Apple Demo Day
Last quarter I wrote a character-learning software for my Mac programming class and since it was a project that I really wanted to work on – in fact, probably the first project I've done for a class that I actually wanted to work on as opposed to being forced to work on it for a grade – I continued working on it all throughout the one week spring break and up until now. Our professors for that class had told us that they would organize a Demo Day at Apple Campus where we could show our projects to Apple engineers and get feedback from them, and that Day happened to be today. Basically, we went to Apple, hooked up our computers and loads, loads and loads of Apple engineers came by and asked for a demonstration. I have to say that it was really fun and encouraging. First of all, I had this bug in a class called NSLayoutManager and what ho, here's the guy who works on it who wants to see my project; after I demo it to him, I tell him about the bug and it's solved within seconds. Awesome! Secondly, hey, it feels good to be appreciated and I liked how people were impressed by (a) the software itself, and (b) how short a while it took to take the thing from scratch to where it is now. There was an engineer who asked me, "How many months did it take you to make it?" "Two and a half weeks," I said.

Here are some screenshots of the software itself, which is called Liànxí (means "practice" in Chinese):








Also, it's finally been decided that I'm taking three Computer Science courses towards my CS major this quarter – networking, introduction to artificial intelligence and computer security. I'm also continuing my Chinese, although I've shifted to the bilingual class which meets only thrice a week instead of all five days and, as the name implies, mostly consists of native speakers of the language. Finally, I have to make a decision about a class to take towards my Chinese major – there's the History class about the Qín dynasty, towards which my interest is very questionable because I really, really don't care about Chinese history and their twenty gazillion empires; anyway, the more interesting class that I'm possibly taking is a Chinese Literature class which as I found out today is taught completely in Chinese! It was a fun experiment – I discovered that, at least at this level, I was able to understand most of what the professor was saying (as long as I'm paying attention), but there were a lot of characters in the reading exercise I didn't know. So, I have to decide in the coming few days whether taking this class would be an act of boldness or foolishness, and whether I should stick to classes taught in English for now instead of reading novellas written by twentieth century Chinese authors.

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2 comments
  • Happy Birthday!
    By Blogger Maanick, at April 7, 2008 9:25 AM   
  • hey...belated Happy Birthday!
    and by the way, that software looks really neat :)
    By Blogger » sahil, at April 16, 2008 8:02 AM   

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Winter Break
You know what I always think? People try to do too much on breaks. And, I've got no qualms with it if they do it, it's just that I hate being dragged along with them on these unfortunate excursions. What do I want to do when I'm on a two-and-a-half week break from the murderous college lifestyle? Sleep, eat and futz around on the Internet. Perhaps meet up with some old friends, visit the good ol' school, read a book or two, learn some new characters; you know, fun stuff.

Still, there's always the minimum number of window shopping I must go do and get dreadfully bored doing it, attend a certain number of parties and marriages and get dreadfully bored doing it, listen to a lot of people who meet me every time I come back home after a stretch and who always ask the same old questions and repeat the same old things and, without question, get dreadfully bored doing it.

Still, somewhere between dreadful boredom and the intense bliss of sleep, there are some rather good "things" I've come across recently. One of them is PotterCast, which is this podcast about, as can be easily guessed, Harry Potter and they recently had J.K. Rowling on the show for two entire episodes of considerable length. Now, normally, I tend to stay away from Potter-ness on the Internet in general. It's not that I don't like the topic - I love it immensely - but that, just like being able to speak, say English, fluently doesn't get you much in terms of credit in this world anymore, being a person who knows about Harry Potter wouldn't give me the same pleasure as knowing about something rarer would, something about which I would be one of the few people to know about. And, as much as I love Harry Potter, I know that thousands others love it and know it with the same intensity as I do, and so, the market is, as the economists say, saturated. Still, if you like to talk about Harry Potter with friends of yours for hours on end, this PotterCast thing is indeed for you.

As far as entertainment material goes, I have also recently been able to watch some episodes of "Jeeves and Wooster", a TV series of whose existence, I was hitherto unaware. Adaption of some of the stories written by P.G. Wodehouse, quite amusing and everything. Jeeves is played by Stephen Fry and Bertie Wooster by Hugh Laurie (who is now most popular for his role as Dr. House in the TV show "House"). Worth a look into if you're a Wodehouse fan.

And lastly, another neat thing I've recently stumbled upon is this website with Sino-Platonic papers on it, a bunch of which are available for download for free and some of them are a delightful read, although I would be remiss if I did not mention that it is only interesting if you are at least a little interested in Sinology in the first place, as the writers generally tend to assume that you are, er, in their fold. If you have tried to learn Chinese in the past and have banged your head against it, I highly recommend "Why Chinese is so damn hard"; the cathartic effects are unmistakably remarkable.

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1 comments
  • Aah. Well. The weddings and parties. And all those mouldy aunts and uncles who are always pretty shocked to see that you've grown .

    And with Harry Potter, well, ever since JKR shut down the series, it's been, shall we say, a little bit old? I mean, every conspiracy and every plot has been laid bare so there's hardly much to discuss. Except, maybe what Harry and Ginny do as married couples.

    Which, shall we say, is not worth lengthy debates.
    By Blogger Espèra, at December 30, 2007 7:31 AM   

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Home...
Food. Finally, something I can call proper food has reached my craving mouth after an entire year. My craving for proper home-cooked food pretty much describes all of last week which I spent wishing for some awesomely cooked Arhar ki Daal, Bhindi ki Sabzi, Dahi and Karari Roti. Oh man, this place is brilliant.

On the other hand though, the air pollution situation in Delhi is getting seriously out of hand. If you step out of the house and breathe in the air, in pretty much any place with half-decent air, you'd begin to wonder if your house was on fire. I am not kidding. Delhi pollution is bad year-round but it's worst of all in the winter when the dust and smoke settles down and causes devastating smog and constant smell of burning substances. I suppose if you live in Delhi long enough, don't leave for a year and come back, this might feel normal. But, it totally is not.

On the bright side though, more food tomorrow, meeting up with some old folk and going to school!

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3 comments
  • you came to school today?
    By Blogger » sahil, at December 17, 2007 6:37 AM   
  • I just landed in Kolkata today and now I know exactly what you were talking about. Air pollution levels are way out of normal.
    By Blogger Prateek, at December 24, 2007 10:35 AM   
  • Yay air pollution!! Maybe I'll work in India one day
    By Blogger Secret Embrace, at January 19, 2008 9:30 PM   

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Earthquake
We just had one. The first one I've really felt in all my life.

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5 comments
  • Why, where were you on Jan 26, 2001? I was in Delhi, and I felt the Bhuj effect.
    By Blogger Geetali, at November 1, 2007 5:41 AM   
  • I was there, my father felt it and pointed it out to me. Then I saw the fan shaking. But I didn't really feel it myself.
    By Blogger Skaran, at November 1, 2007 6:04 AM   
  • Ohh, I have actually exp. quite a few. :-) Worst one was when I was in Toilet.. Felt so helpless :( lolz..
    By Blogger Arjun, at November 5, 2007 5:35 AM   
  • Fascinating, Arjun. How's it going Karan? Long time no see.
    By Blogger Manas, at November 8, 2007 11:06 PM   
  • Wow. Man.
    We just had a major one right now. Like, half an hour ago.
    By Blogger Espèra, at November 25, 2007 3:47 PM   

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Indians speaking Cantonese
This blows my mind.

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Training
Surprisingly, I've really enjoyed all our RCC (Residential Computer Consultant) training and the sessions have mostly been very informative – many of them surprisingly so. A bunch of them have also been really funny. I liked those. They also have this policy of passing around sticks of gum to everyone in the room to keep them from falling asleep and I think that's the most brilliant idea. So, we learnt all kinds of stuff about networking, how to allow and disallow people from accessing the network (and thus the Interwebs), how the computer clusters work, why sexual harassment is not as cool as it initially seems, how we should all come to terms with Windows Vista's general shittiness, etc. There were also some rather memorable quotes from today's session such as one from our Residence Dean - "She calls him a bitch, he calls her a ho" – and one from our Senior Network Administrator – "The University shouldn't care if I'm freaking watching monkey porn on my computer." And such. Tomorrow is the last day of training and there is only one session of one hour, where we get to hear stories from past years' RCCs. Oh yes, and here's another memorable quote from our Senior Network Administrator – "Anyone got any good sexual harassment stories to share?"

Apart from that, my room is finally well organized, and if I may, shiny. There are loads of errands that I'd been wanting to run for a few months now and they're finally getting done. One of them was getting my blankets (which were used on the futon in our triple all last year) dry cleaned. Now I know how expensive that is – namely, enough to buy a new blanket. Another errand was getting framed the pieces of calligraphy that my calligraphy professor had written for me. Getting them properly framed would have cost about $60 and I wouldn't have wanted that anyway because it would have made them a pain to store. Instead, for $15, I bought some supplies (thick piece of cardboard and some 0.005mm thick transparent sheets) and framed them myself. I'm really pleased with how it's worked out. Perhaps I'll post a picture when the room is completed. Also, today I finally got my Microsoft bike after it'd been assembled by the bike shop and man, it is so superb. I went into Palo Alto for the first time on bike this (academic) year and I was simply stunned by how quickly I got there. I'm looking forward to some serious biking this year.

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2 comments
  • This post has been removed by the author.
    By Blogger Michelle, at September 15, 2007 1:50 PM   
  • no anonymous comments? I'm confused.
    also, sometimes michelle logs into blogger and doesn't tell me.
    this is kimberly.
    and I really want to see your room! (I mean. and you.)
    and I have your chinese name for you.
    sooo wednesday? thursday?
    By Blogger Kimberly, at September 15, 2007 1:53 PM   

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Toyon
Campus just has this property of being busy and involves having to look a lot more at the clock than should be legally permissible. Which is why, although I have been back since last Wednesday and have had tons to talk about, I've never had more than fifteen minutes to spare which greatly inhibits journal-writing and sleep usually takes precedence. In fact, come to think of it, almost anything takes precedence over journal-writing. Food, for one.

Anyway, amongst the bigger things, I have made some recent technological acquires. One of those is a brand new MacBook in the colour black, which I picked finally after realizing that buying the white one would be the equivalent of ensuring lasting brain damage which would occur once I saw how easy it was to stain the laptop. It, of course, has a couple of gigabytes of memory while the rest of the specifications are standard. Incidentally, the memory was purchased two weeks before the notebook itself. In a more, erm, unexpected and exciting turn of events, I bought an iPhone last Thursday after they announced the price cuts on Wednesday. It's an extremely sweet device and I love it.

I spent the entire weekend with my dorm staff for this year (the Toyon staff) at beautiful Half Moon Bay. There was a lot of discussion which almost invariably tended to put me to sleep because a lot of the discussion about "dorm issues" like alcohol, etc. was very circular. Still, the beach house we had for the weekend was this fabulous place with really beautiful architecture and a living room with a fantastic dome-shaped ceiling with a mural on it. A mural that involved Sponge Bob. There was also a fair bit of beach and frisbee, some sun and something that looked like an Orc-house. Fun times.

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1 comments
  • A review of the Macbook and iPhone on ImHi?
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at September 11, 2007 2:39 AM   

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Three - Two - One
Right, day one of four is over. Gosh, I am so stricken1 with being in between looking forward to finishing this internship, but also with worrying about what little time I have to accomplish all my goals. I want to do well. I want to write good, clean, lean, mean code that works fabulously and gains me the respect of my colleagues, but I also hate the programming environment I'm working in. I love the place, the people, the work environment, the food, everything. I just don't like the work I'm doing. Just plain don't. So, I'm looking forward to being rid of that computer that I'm using, that build system, that desk and that keyboard but I'm sad about leaving all the interesting friends I've made and all the delightful conversations we've had. Sigh. I like the wireless mouse though.

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Hālì Bōtè
I mentioned this in my last entry, but, since hardly anyone who reads this Journal reads Chinese (Chinese is one of the languages in which speakers cannot be necessarily expected to be able to read and write, unless they were raised in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan), I'll reiterate some of the facts. One thing I mentioned was that, yesterday, I visited Seattle's China Town and found it to be really beautiful. There was Chinese everywhere - characters I could actually read and understand – and I was biking slowly down the streets staring up and pronouncing the characters under my breath, probably looking like an ass. My main aim in going there was to visit this bookshop called Kinokuniya, which, internationalists would realize, is a Japanese name. I had feared that it would be a rundown little Asian store with mostly Japanese books and a tiny Chinese section, in which I would find nothing useful. But I was very pleasantly surprised and happy, for once, to have been mistaken. Kinokuniya is a huge bookshop with loads and loads of both Chinese and Japanese books. On their second floor, I found the entire collection of Harry Potter books in Traditional Chinese script. Really amazing stuff.

When I came home, I found a note in my mailbox telling me that there was a package waiting for me. When I went to pick up said package and inquire what it actually was, I was, for the second time in one day, pleasantly surprised. So, in a move to combine two of my favourite interests, Harry Potter and Chinese, I have started reading Harry Potter in Chinese. Yes, very clever indeed. These books (I ordered Book One, because it's the simplest, and Book Six, because it's my favourite) are in Simplified script, and are thus easier for me to read. I have great reverence for the Traditional script but I have reasons to think it is occasionally less practical, and even, gasp, occasionally less beautiful (I could get stoned for saying this in certain parts). That is what deterred me in buying any of the HP books at that bookstore for myself - reading in Chinese in any case is very demanding for me, and doing it in Traditional would be even more so.

Reading Book One has been slow work. I decided to read what the inside cover said before I moved onto the actual content, and that proved to be a wise move because it foreshadowed clearly what an uphill task reading the book was going to be. This book, whose English version I can read in the time between a fairly late breakfast and a fairly early lunch, is one whose inside front cover took me one hour and a half to fully decipher. Of course, I could have read the thing in five minutes and gotten the gist of it, but my aim in reading this book is to document all the words I don't know. So, for every character and every word I don't know, I stop and look up in my dictionary, and looking up characters, you ought to know, is an absolute pain. I wish, I really wish they would switch to a phonetic script for Chinese! Today, I spent about two and a half hours in reading approximately one and a half pages of text, and most of the time was spent in looking up characters in the dictionary. By the middle of page 2, and including the inside front cover, I have learned 180 new words already.

Of course, as far as using a phonetic script goes, this is viewing the situation from my point-of-view, being a foreigner learning Chinese and one who is simply daunted by the thousands of characters I would need to learn in order to be able to read anything interesting, and I acknowledge that, in essence, I am putting forward the view that the language be simplified to make it easier for the learner to learn. I do know it is very much arguable whether this is a practice that should be encouraged at all. After all, the government of mainland China did try to do exactly this (in principle, not in practice) in the 1950s. Although Máo Zédōng's original intention was to abolish characters altogether and just used a romanized script like the Vietnamese do, in the end, what they actually ended up doing was just simplifying the most common characters such that they needed fewer strokes to write. For example, 歡 is written 欢 amongst Simplified characters and 儀 as 仪. Most of the Simplified characters are easier to read than the Traditional ones, especially at small font sizes, but the debate lies not in that but in their beauty as characters. In their proportion and balance. For example, 氣 looks like 气 in Simplified and you can see that it looks like something is missing in the latter. In fact, that's what I thought when I first saw it, and went and asked my Chinese teacher about its weirdness. She wrote the Traditional character for me and I saw, and understood. The Japanese have gone a third route in simplification by turning the same character into this 気. In this way, they've maintained the proportion and balance that Chinese calligraphers cherish, while still making the character easier to write. However, the Simplified script, in favour of making itself easier to learn, has forgone aesthetic principles in many cases and has given us ridiculous characters like 广, 产, 气, 国 and 飞. This is why, in my previous entry, I have chosen to use the Simplified or Traditional form for each character depending on which one I prefer and have not stuck to any standard.

And this is why I feel that the simplification of Chinese characters was a huge disaster. Not in that it wasn't a good idea, but in how the idea was implemented. It would have been terrible (aesthetically and practically) if the Chinese had abandoned characters for a Pinyin-based system, but I think it was worse that they chose to artificially concoct a new script. If nothing else, it created two competing standards of Chinese, and now there are even more characters for anyone to learn if he wishes to become accomplished at Chinese, because, in the end, you simply have to learn both Simplified and Traditional.

The Japanese, I feel, have struck a decent balance between giving up characters entirely (which the Koreans and others have boldly done) and between using characters for everything. What the Japanese do is that they take the key meaning-giving words in the sentence and write them out as characters, while writing out all the grammatical particles (prepositions, tenses, etc.) in their phonetic script (Hiragana). This greatly reduces the number of characters you need to know to be literate in Japanese (around 1200) as compared to Chinese (2000). This kind of a hybrid system would greatly benefit Chinese because a lot of the words are disyllabic and thus use two characters to write, such as 美丽 (měilì; beautiful) and 事情 (shìqing; affair, matter, thing), but their meaning can be deciphered from just one character alone. So, 美 alone means beautiful and 事 alone means "thing (to do)". But, in order to use their disyllabic forms (which, I guess, are often used because they give a better rhythm to the sentence and are also used to disambiguate), I'd have to learn two more characters, which doesn't really give me any more meaningful information about the word but adds to the number of characters I have to learn. And having a phonetic script also means the language is a bit more forgiving. For example, you can write out words you don't know the characters for. In Chinese, unless you're on a computer, you're just stuck and have to resort to Pinyin which simply looks ugly when placed side-by-side with proper characters.

Anyway, it is unlikely that the Chinese are going to do this any time soon because they just love their characters too much.

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2 comments
  • Interesting analysis, but I think it would be really sad if Chinese became like Japanese. I prefer that the East Asian languages retain their diversity.

    Japanese can be more confusing though, considering that many more possible readings exist for each character than they do in Chinese. Especially when it comes to people's names.
    By Blogger Jean, at August 27, 2007 8:56 PM   
  • Well, I should just clarify that I don't want Chinese to become exactly like Japanese. If you want implementation detail, here's the way I think it should be implemented.

    First of all, I don't think a Korean-like system or, in fact, even a Japanese-like system would fit well with Chinese. Those characters would look too alien or too sparse to the Chinese eye. No, my suggestion would be to take popularly known phonetic characters such as 马 for 'ma' and and 青 for 'qing', choose radicals to represent each of the four tones (the neutral tone can just be represented by the plain character, without any additional radical), and then construct characters.

    So, měilì can become 美㔹, with 㔹 as lì (I randomly picked one out), and shìqing can become 事青. And similar words in which the meaning is already well-specified by the first character would use these 'designated phonetic' characters. Now, basically, people don't have to learn all the secondary characters which only go with certain words and only in certain combinations, but just the main ones. So, in 葡萄, the first character already means 'grape', so the second can be in 'designated phonetics'.

    This will also be a great boon for transliterating foreign names into Chinese because there would be standard characters for use for transliteration.

    And, in fact, it will even benefit reading in many cases such as words like 暖和 in which the reading of 和 is not 'hé' but 'huo'.

    And regarding the ambiguities in Japanese, they are of their own making and do not, in my opinion, come about because of Hiragana. In any case, ambiguities will be much fewer in Chinese because it has tones to distinguish between various words, and, phonetics will only be used when there is a single word that fits that combination. For example, if you type měilì or pútáo into an electronic Chinese dictionary 美丽 and 葡萄 are the only words with those sounds and tones. But, since there are at least five separate words with the sound chūshì, characters will be used in full for all those words. So, ambiguities are not a necessarily evil that comes with a hybrid system.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 27, 2007 10:27 PM   

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By Component
They break the characters by component! And man, I love this video. Gosh, I must be a complete geek because this video just fills me up with "happy", just like the scene with Patronuses in the Order of the Phoenix.

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Buying
I've advised a ton of people on buying computers, but, when it's come to getting one for myself, I find the decisions are harder to make. There's always the eternal struggle - between what I want and how much I'm willing to pay for it. And this question comes up most often when people want to buy MacBooks because of the whole "black tax" thing. I think Apple is being a huge git by charging $125 more for the colour Black when compared to an identically configured White model. I can't believe there is no consumer protection law or something against this sort of disgusting behaviour. I see the Black model and it looks so sleek that I want to buy it right now; then I see the White model and look at how much lower its price is in comparison, which just gets me utterly confused and I close the browser window.

And so, I've basically been going back and forth between the two - having placed and canceled six orders in the last two weeks. Now, I've decided that I'm going to wait for another couple of weeks before buying due to the promise of somewhat lower prices, though I doubt that's going to help any in the making up of my mind. Sometimes, it's good to have an advisor who knows exactly what is to be done, but alas, no advisor can help me here because - although I don't mean to boast and this is going to sound really bad - I don't know anyone who knows more about buying Apple computers than I do. Eventually, the one - black or white - that finally arrives in my lap is going to be the one that stays.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.

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1 comments
  • Attitude aye.. Cool. N Ya when u on the top, U tend to be alone !! ;)
    By Blogger Arjun, at August 24, 2007 1:13 AM   

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All that Skyping
Last Sunday, I was talking with the reverent Rungta about how Impulsive Highlighters didn't scale well to maximized windows at high resolutions, with the ulterior motive to bring up the topic of a redesign for the happy blog. To my delight, the idea immediately caught on with him and we ended up having a four-hour Skype conversation with so many entertaining digressions that we spent perhaps twenty minutes actually discussing the redesign. Still, we came up with a bunch of cool ideas, and, by the following day, I'd made a mock-up for the new design, and we ended up having another long chat doing some actual work and planning out.

Of course, all these long conversations started at around 2am in my timezone and lasted until the not-so-wee hours of the morning. For the entire past week, I ended up going to bed at very inadvisable hours between four and seven in the morning. This is what happens when you collaborate with a fellow in Australia, who's not even experiencing the right season, let alone having the right time of day. But, it was all totally worth it when I now look at what we've achieved in the short manner of a week. Not only that, but we had to give up none of the ideas we came up.

After having written some JavaScript for this Journal's redesign, I really got into the whole thing; JavaScript is, and don't kill me for saying this, simply entertaining to write and even more entertaining to watch it do things. There are no compilers, no linkers, no memory management, no type resolution and basically none of the sorrow that comes with conventional programming. Of course, it comes at the cost of having your code run within the confines of a browser but at least I am not shedding any tears on that account.

The only major sorrow of making websites, I think, is Internet Explorer and how its non-standard implementation of everything imaginable makes simple people like me want to tear my hair out. In fact, one of our coolest features, the news items flying into their correct positions, is, as of this writing, turned off for Internet Explorer because it doesn't work properly. Of course, if you're using Internet Explorer, all the websites always seem to work fine because they've all been thoroughly tested for it and have added tomatoes of code to make sure everything looks fine. If everyone wrote code that strictly stuck to the standards, Internet Explorer would show you piles of junk. Even if you look through the source code of my very simple Journal, you'll find loads of places where I've had to add code to account for the Internet Explorer's impotence.

Rungta and I were discussing this, and, we reckoned that, when god was done making the tree of life and sat down to make the DOM tree - you know, the whole CSS and JavaScript thing - he thought to himself, "Wow, this stuff is really neat. I mean, super hot. Man's going to have an awesome time writing cool scripts that seamlessly work across different operating systems and browsers." Five minutes later, as deities are usually bound to discover their errors, he realized, "Oh crap, now I've gone and freaking distorted the balance of Good and Evil!" Shortly thereafter, he cooked up Internet Explorer to restore order. Other examples of this kind of realization that he was about to make humankind a little too happy were when he introduced uncertainty in sub-atomic particles so that we'd never be able to resolve anything to our satisfaction, the speed of light so that we'd never be able to comfortably get off our own planet while living long enough to see anything else worthwhile, myopia so that people who liked computers too much would pay with their looks by having to wear glasses or stick little lenses into their eyes, obesity so that we'd never enjoy eating as much as we might have, and exhaustion so that we wouldn't be able to easily to burn off all that fat we gained from eating to satisfaction.

Still, even with Internet Explorer's annoying existence, the more JavaScript I write, the more I like it and want to write more of it. And it's also not so terribly hard to debug.

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6 comments
  • Yes the new template is nice and I really liked your paragraph on Internet Explorer. I was a little surprised because I thought you were an atheist.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at August 21, 2007 2:37 AM   
  • For some reason your javascript is not working on my Safari3Beta!! I had to check it out on Firefox. Otherwise a fine makeover.
    By Blogger Souvik, at August 21, 2007 4:08 AM   
  • nice post ... well written and i like this kind of non-laugh-out-loud-witty humour ...

    and excellent redesign too, btw
    the seggregated news bits was something i've wanted on my blog for a long time (since blogger doesnt inherently have that feature)

    and yeah, me likes JS too!
    By Blogger » sahil, at August 21, 2007 9:27 AM   
  • @Abhishek: I'll just ask you whether a true and faithful believer in god would (a) write his name with a small 'g' and (b) make fun of him like that.

    @Souvik: That flying bit is a very complex piece of JavaScript and we have been fighting with it for a while now. However, if you check now, it should be working on Safari 2, Safari 3, the latest WebKit from webkit.org, Firefox 1.0.7 and Firefox 2. The animation is currently disabled in IE because it is not yet well-adjusted to its life on earth, and if you're on a Mac, I would recommend using Safari because, although Camino and Firefox work, the animation is hellishly slow in them for some reason. We're trying to find out why.

    @Sahil: Thanks. :-)
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 21, 2007 9:48 AM   
  • Oh, so god is male :)
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at August 27, 2007 12:35 PM   
  • I could have gone with "it", but my, that would really have angered some people.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 27, 2007 12:37 PM   

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Ratatouille
I had been looking forward to seeing it ever since I saw the trailer. If you're anything like me (that is, if you're human), you'll love this movie. The thing about Pixar movies is that they usually create worlds that are kind-of, sort-of, but not quite, linked with the real world. Think about Toy Story and Finding Nemo and you'll know what I'm talking about. They're also the kind of movies that both kids and adults like. I really like the humour that's not always 'in-your-face'. In fact, I think in-your-face humour is probably the worst sort ever created and needs to be taken behind a nearby chemicals facility and shot. There's also the story that's again, almost, but not entirely, predictable. To cut my blabber short, it is an awesome movie. Go see it.

Also, almost invariably, when I go to see a movie, I find at least one spot on the ground where someone managed to spill a huge quantity of popcorn, and, I almost invariably ask myself just how big of an idiot one would have to be to do that. That question got answered today when I put my bag of popcorn on the ground, and subsequently, kicked it, thus discovering precisely how big. But hey, at least I cleared up the mess.

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4 comments
  • Hahahaha!
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 13, 2007 1:40 AM   
  • oh man, I so badly want to see this movie.
    drat the insufficiency of time!

    --
    Sumedh
    By Blogger V, at August 13, 2007 9:36 AM   
  • You need some color on this Journal. Please switch the photos back to how they were.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at August 14, 2007 10:31 AM   
  • Yes, I was going for a look with the black-and-white photos which I unfortunately wasn't able to achieve. They'll be back in their full colour glory soon, don't worry.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 14, 2007 11:15 AM   

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"Get the fuck out. Now."
A rather more amusing than insightful article about scientists in India who want to get the hell out of the place.
"We simply could not find an answer to our original research question: 'Now, why exactly are we here again?'" said Dr. Prashant Goswami of the Centre for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation. "After months of studying the subsistence-level existence of the average Indian, who lacks modern amenities like electricity and running water and is ever threatened by drought, flood, famine, and disease, we were at a dead end."
(Thanks, Aurojit!)

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The whole sort of general mish-mash
I never thought I'd ever say that I hated programming, but, occasionally, the sort of things programming involves drives me up the wall. Of Taipei 101. For a person who's majoring in computer science, hatred of programming is probably not a decidedly good thing, which is why I'm glad that I only hate certain kinds of programming. That is, the kind of stuff I'm doing right now for my internship, which involves reading 1500 lines of code, taking two weeks to get so deeply acquainted with it that I could compile it inside my head, and then adding four lines of my own. If this is job satisfaction, then the hunchbacked dude from 300 has sex appeal.

Still, the cafeteria has Indian food. Palak Paneer and Chholey Chawal - I'm not an unreasonable man.

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1 comments
  • "Damn you Palak Paneer and Chholey Chawal" eh?
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 10, 2007 5:31 AM   

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欢迎
The reasons for this I will not make clear. That would be rather tedious and boring. And this is not the appropriate time for me to experiencing either tedium or boredom. That is reserved for tomorrow (by which, I really do mean, in five hours) when I go to the office and try to make some sense of ten-year-old MFC code that might as well have been obfuscated. Of course, that is assuming I get past the makefiles first.

There have been some Apple announcements of note.

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The Blue Angels
While I was making my way to Seattle once more, on that 18-mile trip to the IMAX theatre, my journey was suddenly impeded by the sudden appearance of about a thousand people who were standing in my way and blocking the bridge that I was trying to cross. Then I saw the US Navy fighter jets - flying really dangerously low, criss-crossing with each other with not very much distance between them, flying in precise formations and doing things that would make a normal airplane want to stall and cry for its mother - basically, everything you'd need to do to get the female of the species to get to have sex with you. Anyway, it was impressive and loud. There are some pictures here.

I did also watch the Order of the Phoenix in all its three-dimensional IMAX glory. The Dumbledore-Voldemort duel which I had previously found unimpressive looked really impressive in 3D and I loved every moment of it. Also, I really must give credit to this director because the DA scene with the Patronuses is just incredibly superbly done and it really did fill me with unexplicable cheeriness. I've decided that it's my favourite scene in the entire movie. Also, on the whole, I assumed that, when I saw the movie for the second time and so on, I would like it less, but I turned out to be quite wrong because I enjoyed even more than I did the first time. However, seeing the movie on such a ginormous screen also has its disadvantages; for instance, I noticed how much lipstick Voldemort had on and that was a bit disconcerting. Still, the experience was definitely worth the three dollars.

Oh, and one minor announcement: you may notice that when you click on the comments link, the comments now roll out instead of just appearing. For this, I must give full credit to none other than the greatest photographer and web developer I know - Rungta - whom I thank for his incredibly superb and easy-t0-use Animation Library.

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5 comments
  • pshh... F-18's are nothing. There are jets that don't stall at much higher angles of attack than the F-18 can achieve, like the X-29 for example.
    By Blogger James, at August 7, 2007 4:41 PM   
  • oh lovely
    i was going to ask him (prateek) how exactly he did that...
    By Blogger » sahil, at August 8, 2007 2:33 AM   
  • Btw, is that script "free-for-all"?
    And one more thing, are you using the classic Blogger template markup or the new, XML one?
    By Blogger » sahil, at August 8, 2007 2:41 AM   
  • I'm using the classic Blogger template markup. I find it much simpler to use than the new one and the new one doesn't give me anything I really want.

    As for the scripts, Rungta would be the person to ask.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 8, 2007 4:59 AM   
  • I love these air shows.

    Sahil, the script isn't "free-for-all" but like Karan said, you're free to contact the author. :)
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 10, 2007 5:37 AM   

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Answers
These are my favourite questions and answers from the webchat with J.K. Rowling on July 30.

Q: Why is it that Albus Dumbledore can see Harry under his invisibility cloak at certain moments?
A: Dumbledore, who could perform magic without needing to say the incantation aloud, was using ‘homenum revelio’ the human-presence-revealing spell Hermione makes use of in Deathly Hallows.

Q: What does "in essence divided" mean?
A: Dumbledore suspected that the snake’s essence was divided — that it contained part of Voldemort’s soul, and that was why it was so very adept at doing his bidding. This also explained why Harry, the last and unintended Horcrux, could see so clearly through the snake’s eyes, just as he regularly sees through Voldemort’s. Dumbledore is thinking aloud here, edging towards the truth with the help of the Pensieve. (Another question that had not been answered definitively in the books)

Q: What was Dudley's worst memory?
A: I think that when Dudley was attacked by the Dementors he saw himself, for the first time, as he really was. This was an extremely painful, but ultimately salutory lesson, and began the transformation in him. (I had been extremely curious about this ever since I read Book Five)

Q: On behalf of all Harry Potter fans who consider themselves to be Hufflepuffs could you please describe the Hufflepuff common room as it is the only common room Harry hasn’t visited.
A: The Hufflepuff common room is accessed through a portrait near the kitchens, as I am sure you have deduced. Sorry — I should say ‘painting’ rather than portrait, because it is a still-life. It is a very cosy and welcoming place, as dissimilar as possible from Snape’s dungeon. Lots of yellow hangings, and fat armchairs, and little underground tunnels leading to the dormitories, all of which have perfectly round doors, like barrel tops. (This answer really made me chuckle because it reminded me of Hobbit holes)

Q: What did Dumbledore truly see in the Mirror of Erised?
A: He saw his family alive, whole and happy — Ariana, Percival and Kendra all returned to him, and Aberforth reconciled to him. (Predictable but good to know for sure)

Q: Whose murders did Voldemort use to create each of the Horcruxes?
A: The diary — Moaning Myrtle. The cup — Hepzibah Smith, the previous owner. The locket — a Muggle tramp. Nagini — Bertha Jorkins (Voldemort could use a wand once he regained a rudimentary body, as long as the victim was subdued). The diadem — an Albanian peasant. The ring — Tom Riddle Sr. (Trivialities, but interesting)

Q: What do you think is the funniest moment you have written in the series?
A: It sounds very vain to answer this! My favourite in this book is probably that line of Ron’s ‘really captures the scope and tragedy of the thing, doesn’t it?’ (Sadly, I didn't recall this line when I made a list of funniest moments in the book)

Q: What ever happened to Aberforth?
A: He is still there, at the Hog’s Head, playing with his goats.

Q: Did Hermione really put a memory charm on her parents she says she did but then about 50 pages later tells Ron shes never done a memory charm?
A: They are two different charms. She has not wiped her parents’ memories (as she later does to Dolohov and Rowle); she has bewitched them to make them believe that they are different people. (I thought this had been a mistake on Rowling's part, and, well, it might've been)

Q: How did Snape get into Grimmauld place to get the second half of the letter, if there were protection spells on the house stopping Snape getting in?
A: Snape entered the house immediately after Dumbledore’s death, before Moody put up the spells against him. (The answer to why the Death Eaters couldn't get in if Snape was a Secret Keeper)

Q: Since Voldemort was afraid of death, did he choose to be a ghost if so where does he haunt or is this not possible due to his horcruxes?
A: No, he is not a ghost. He is forced to exist in the stunted form we witnessed in King’s Cross. (Definitive proof of what was previously speculation in my mind)

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2 comments
  • The description of the Hufflepuff dormitories reminded me of Hobbit holes too!

    Another question and answer that made me chukle was:
    Q: How does dumbledore understand parseltongue?
    A: Dumbledore understood Mermish, Gobbledegook and Parseltongue. The man was brilliant.
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 6, 2007 2:38 AM   
  • I have been racking my brains ever since I read the interview on Mugglenet, but I still did not understand the last answer. As in he was not in his stunted form when Harry got up.

    If anyone could elaborate please.
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at August 6, 2007 5:23 AM   

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Something about a lion, a witch, and yes, I believe a wardrobe was involved
I've become weird weirder. It's harder for me to get bored now and it's mostly thanks to the Internet, Netflix and the profound enormity of the amount of sheer stuff that can be found there. It's almost like a magic wand. I say, "Get me the entire works of Douglas Adams. Oh yes, and I want them on audio", and then I go to sleep. The next morning, they're all there in iPod-ready goodness. Unfortunately, the ID3 tagging on the files is never up to mark - I think it's a sort of flick that I can never get right; and, the summoning also has to follow the exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration, which means that I can only ask for things that can be reproduced in digital format.

Incidentally, the Harry Potter community is totally abuzz with discussions of what exactly the five exceptions are. I'm rather curious myself, although I'm guessing that food, money (because wizards can be poor), sentient beings, clothing (because they apparently need to buy clothes), and any kind of magical substance (they have apothecaries, don't they?) might make the list. Rowling knows for sure, of course, or, well, at the least, when she makes it up, her tosh is going to have more value than my tosh.

So, anyway, today was a day for biking. My rather modest aim was that of acquiring a ticket for a movie, which I'm going to be watching on IMAX (as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago) and I had to bike a total of 36.2 miles to get there and back. Of course, I'm a complete outsider amongst 'bikers' - those people who look like they belong on the bike tracks. You know the sort - wearing tights and a bike helmet and looking so dreadfully good in them that you'd believe they were god's gift to humankind, and riding those classy thin wheeled REBs (really expensive bikes) that seem faster than yours even when you're overtaking them. Bastards, the lot of them. And there I am, in their midst, riding along, as if solely for the sake of contrast, on my regular bike, wearing a t-shirt that made the guy at Quizno's ask me whether I worked at the Apple Store, my favourite pair of corduroy pants because they're just so comfortable, and squinting because I never remember to bring my sunglasses on these trips. I have a hunch I'm going to forget again tomorrow, when, ticket in hand ("ticket in wallet, which is in pocket" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as smoothly), tomorrow is going to be another day for biking. Last thirty minutes in 3 freaking D? I'm excited.

I did manage to take some pictures along the way, and there's one up there, but I wasn't impressed with most of them. Unless you're a skilled photographer, it's really hard to capture what you actually see on the camera. And I really did want to capture exactly what I saw because Seattle is just breathtakingly beautiful. It's high time they invented something that could do that - just capture the image directly from the visual thingy in the brain and store it on an MMC. It would make the whole 'photography' part of the process a hell of a lot easier, though I suppose it would put some people out of commission.

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年月日点分秒
If there's one thing that has impressed me the most about Chinese people, it's how systematic some of the things in their life are. There are a rather lot of things they just didn't bother to muck about too much with, but instead, accepted them in the same way that they don't accept democracy.

One of the things they do rather well is dates. You look at our dd.mm.yyyy format of arranging dates, compare it to the seemingly completely arbitrary way in which Americans do it by putting the month first (whatever they were thinking when they decided on that, they simply weren't doing enough of it), and you think that your method is so vastly superior and better done and so on and so forth. And then, along come the Chinese (well, actually, they've been doing this for a while now, but I've only taken notice since last September) and show you the simplest and most obvious way to do it. In fact, way back when some rather intelligent people originally made computers, they made it such that the machines, by default, displayed the dates in this selfsame fashion because it was just the obvious thing to do. (The way computers stored dates, however, is a completely different matter and not at all obvious - most of them count the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since an arbitrary point in time, say, 12am on January 1, 1970, and then converted it to something more digestible than 1185944654360 whenever you ask for it.)

Anyway, that most obvious – and the most Chinese – way of doing dates, as you probably know, is yyyy.mm.dd. Not only that, but the Chinese also figured out that the best way to name months was not to do so. Instead, January, in Chinese, is simply 一月. The first character means 'one' and the second character means 'month'. August, therefore, as you can predict, is simply 八月, or, the eighth month. If I wanted to tell the complete date and time in English right now, I would say something along the lines of "Five twenty-five A.M. on the first of August, two thousand and seven". If I had to say the same thing in Chinese I would say "现在是二00七年八月一日五点二十五分". Go on, admire it. I would have done it in pretty colours, but, instead, I made all the numbers bold, because I am not a thirteen-year old girl. In fact, it has been rather a long while since I've been a thirteen-year old anything, although I doubt I would've done it in pretty colours even if I were a thirteen-year old something. The first two characters in what might seem to you gibberish mean "right now"; the third is the verb "to be" and the non-bold characters after that stand for "year", "month", "day", "hour" and "minute" respectively. The system is, in fact, so systematic (for lack of a better word), that, you could have figured out the dates on this Journal even without being aware of these pieces of information, because, just as I have done with my dates, most of the time, the Chinese use the Hindu-Arabic numerals instead of characters for numbers anyway (although it would not be a very good compliment to your intelligence if you weren't able to recognize the characters for 一, 二 and 三).

Now, I was already impressed enough knowing the way they did their dates. But the fun doesn't stop there. Guess the way they write addresses. Actually, I'll leave that one to your imagination. Writing out formats has become a bit tiresome for me now. Now that we've decided how brilliant the Chinese are, communist though they may be, can you guess the way in which they do names? I'll leave you to figure out most of it on your own, and, unlike those physics problems at the end of chapters, you might actually be able to correctly guess this one on your own. Let me just say that Chow Yun-Fat, the distinguished Hong Kong (o magic wand, turn this into an adjective) actor, would not appreciate it very much if you called him Mr. Fat. No, I rather suspect he prefers the relatively more solemn Mr. Chow.

Now, think of all the exceptions you have for numbers in English, such as the missing 'u' in forty and how eleven to nineteen and most multiples of ten have a special way of wanting to be called. Now, think about all the rules you have for correctly saying numbers in Hindi, in which all the above rules for English apply (except the lack-of-'u'-in-forty thing) with the addition of oddities such as every multiple of ten minus one except nine (19, 29, 39, 49...) has to rhyme with its successor instead of being constructed like the rest of the numbers in its series, how the nasal inflection that you have to do to change the number from being cardinal to ordinal never sounds quite right, how you not only have to learn the names of all of the multiples of ten less than a hundred, like you do in English, but also have to learn what each multiple of ten changes to when you start adding numbers to it (like how, 50, pachaas पचास changes to 51 ikyaavan इक्यावन). Now, since you obviously haven't had enough of horrible number-naming schemes, think about the rules for numbers in Arabic, in which, like Hindi, German and countless other languages, each word has a gender; but, that's not enough, because each number also has a gender, which, did you know, has to disagree with the gender of the noun it's placed before?! Oh, but it disagrees only for numbers until 11, after which it starts agreeing with it. And you think your relationship has problems. Anyway, now take all these rules and simply forget about them.

Any unbiased observer would observer that, unlike Japanese, each character in Chinese is no more and no less than exactly one syllable when pronounced. And there's one character for each single-digit number, from 0 to 9. These are: 零 (or 0) 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九. They also have a character for ten (十), hundred (百), thousand (千), and ten thousand (万). (They have some others like 亿 for 100 million). The construction of numbers greater than 9 is very simple. 10 is just 十, 11 is 十一, 17 is 十七, 21 is 二十一 and 18729 is 一万八千七百二十九.

And you know the really cool thing? No, of course you don't. The cool thing is that I can write out the entire scheme for constructing Chinese numbers as a context-free grammar (CFG):
The set of terminals is {0, 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九, 十, 百, 千, 万, ∂}
The set of productions is {S, A, B, C, D, E, F, G}
The starting thingy is {S}

S -> 0 | A | B | AB | ABA | B万 | C | CA | C0A
A -> 一 | 二 | 三 | 四 | 五 | 六 | 七 | 八 | 九
B -> 十 | 百 | 千 | 万 | 亿
C -> DEFG
D -> A万 | ∂
E -> A千 | ∂
F -> A百 | ∂
G -> A十 | ∂
[UPDATE: As it turns out, being right makes me happy; so, I've modified the previously simple CFG into one that is a little more complicated but hopefully correct. Anyone who cares to double-check is welcome to do so. Yeah, and it's not in Chomsky Normal Form, but, believe me, you like it the way it is. Also, this makes the remainder of this paragraph mostly a bunch of lies] The only significant exceptions to the CFG above are that the smaller units in B generally go before the bigger units (they prefer to say a thousand millions than a million thousands, as to most sensible people with a right state of mind) and, sometimes they add a zero (just like we call the year 1901 "nineteen o' one" instead of "nineteen one") although that too has rigidly governed rules (which help bring the rules for numbers in American English into perspective and rightly make them look more like the warnings before entering an adult website). Now, this is not to say that, with those additions, Chinese numbers can no longer be constructed by a CFG, because they can. It's just that I've simplified my CFG for simplicity's sake. And I'd personally rather be happy than right any day.

Yes, the Chinese got the dates, time, numbers, and names right, but then, they also happened to decide that using a different character for every word was a really cool idea. Just goes to show that the world has its way of balancing out a lot of things.

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2 comments
  • wait, how would "BB" work? i don't think that forms a valid number...

    mmm, also, i've been meaning to say this for the last several entries- i really like your writing. what are you doing wasting your time in CS? haha, go be a writer or something.
    By Blogger James, at August 1, 2007 6:49 PM   
  • I know. BB is a bit iffy. Some of it works, but not all of it. I suppose I'll have to modify the CFG a bit more. I'm going to change it to B万 because 万 apparently seems happy to take any kind of B prefix but none of the rest do. Sigh...

    And thanks.
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 1, 2007 7:04 PM   

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Krikkit
I thought the best thing to do to relieve myself of this Harry Potter fever would be to go read (or, as I prefer, listen to) some other gluing book. I knew I had the audiobook for The Fountainhead lying around on my computer. Tried it, got threw a few hours, found it to be not gluing enough and settled on the Hitchhiker's Guide series of novels, one of the important advantages of which is that it is a series, and, I thought, by the end of it, I would perhaps be more free of the Harry Potter mania.

Unfortunately, the Hitchhiker's series has ludicrously tiny books (at least compared to the longer ones that I've become accustomed to listening to) and I'm already done listening to three out of five of the series, averaging about one book a day. The impractical downshot of reading these books has been that this morning I awoke rather frustrated, having spent a good six hours of the night in a very disturbed sleep having been chased around senseless (and wandless) by a bunch of extremely scary, white Krikkit robots (that rather resembled stormtroopers) who, I can only assume, were attempting to murder. As the dream would have it, I was Harry, Ron and Hermoine - all at once. And our wands had apparently been left on board our spaceship, which we were trying to get away to. As anyone who's dreamt ought to know, the good part is always calculated to happen precisely half a minute before you wake up, which is the sort of dastardly n-1 thing that makes waking up so ruddy difficult, as if there's some infernal 'greater plan' to infuriate the hell out of you. So, after six hours of being chased around - senseless and wandless - we (that is, I) reached our (that is, my) spaceship, found wands and... woke up.

And all I've got to listen to now is The Fountainhead because I only synced Life, the Universe and Everything when I left for work.

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3 comments
  • Really liked your writing style in recent posts.
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 31, 2007 1:38 PM   
  • Haha. You're lucky to be able to recall your dreams. In my case, when the 'greater plan' infuriates the hell out of me and I wake up, the dream starts slipping out of my mind like water. Then the 'even greater plan' infuriates whatever was left inside because I end up getting angry that I don't remember what I was angry for in the first place!
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 31, 2007 8:12 PM   
  • @Aditya: Thanks. :-)

    @Rungta: Well, I usually don't remember them (and try not too) but, in this dream's case, I guess it was just so adrenaline-filled, and I had been just so afraid for my life just before it ended, that it was easier to recall than most.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 31, 2007 8:18 PM   

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Zune
Last Thursday, Microsoft had its once-in-a-while Product Fairs which are exciting events and opportunities to get lots of utterly useless free goodies and participate in raffles in which you have no chance of winning so much as a handkerchief. Of course, it's also an opportunity to get to hear and see Steve Ballmer give a public, erm, performance. Yes, let's use the word 'performance'. I had heard that he, uh, liked developers. Now I know it's true.

Moving on, if you haven't seen these brilliant and impressive videos of the Microsoft Surface Computing initiative, I suggest you go and watch some of them before continuing to read. Come now, go and watch the videos first. No point in me blabbering on about them if you haven't the foggiest what I'm talking about. The point I'm trying to make here is that you're about to be very, very jealous of me. Take a guess. No? Why you're an uncooperative little git today. (Notice the genius of how this unilateral style of writing lets me assume your responses.) So, anyway, the point, indeed, or the lack thereof, is that I got to use one of those computers. In fact, I didn't stop using it – ignoring the crowds swarming behind me trying to do the same – for a good ten minutes, and eventually had to be dragged off by a couple of beefy security guards (I just had the impulse to write 'security trolls' instead. I'm obsessed.) Also, the last bit about security trolls guards might or might not be true. Now, in order that my inclusion of this Product Fair narrative in this entry make sense, I'm going to lie and say that I got a free Zune at this event.

In truth, it was a completely different event that I got a free Zune at. But, that's not important. Not much is, really, when you come to think about it. Except, perhaps, Harry Potter. And Maggi Masala noodles. I would say Douglas Adams was important too, but, sadly, he is dead. The great thing about dead people is that they can't sue you for libel, or slander, or, in fact, anything at all. It seems I'm having a difficult time sticking to topics today. I'm living a very unreal life these days. It is happy. It has Quiznos' delicious sandwiches, Maggi Masala noodles, lots of audiobooks, the middle of my internship and my finally being satisfied with the kind of code I'm writing.

Zune
I'm hoping that that subheading will make me better concentrate on the topic. All right, so, in brief, had I paid my own money for it, I would be a really annoyed person missing a very real 250 dollars (plus tax). Thankfully, I didn't pay for it, so I am merely miffed.

The long story now commences.

The box was actually better done than most non-Apple products I've opened and was stylish in its own right. The Zune department seems to have this fixation with "Welcome to the social", which I have never understoof (sic) and so I mostly ignore it spare my brain the bother. When I first set my eyes upon the Zune, my immediate reaction was that pictures didn't do it justice. No, in fact, most of the pictures of the Zune look rather better than the device itself. "First words" are important when it comes to getting the general impression of something new. The first word that jumped to my mind upon seeing the Zune was "brick". If you've ever noticed, for most of the things you buy that are 'fancy', like digital cameras and cell phones, you regard them as extremely delicate and valuable objects and take really good care of them for about a month. After that, they start to become a regular part of your life and seem less striking than they were originally. With the Zune, it seems to be more of the opposite. On Day Four of ownership, I suddenly looked at it and realized that it had a sleekness that I had never noticed before and that I couldn't satisfactorily put my finger at. Odd, I thought, and continued munching my delicious Italian Caprese.

As far as installation goes, I followed the instructions as precisely as possible. I didn't want to be blamed for badly written code if it wasn't my badly written code. And badly written code is almost precisely what comes with the CD inside the box that also contains a Zune. The first computer I tried to get my Zune cooperating with was my work computer. This is a reasonably fast machine with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.66GHz and has 4GB of memory to boot (I've never been able to use more than 63% of it). It was all going rather smoothly while I was repeatedly clicking Next and going on with the initial "Express" setup (don't show me "Custom"). Then, it dumped me into the actual software that interacts with the Zune, which is also creatively named "Zune". This leads to a lot of ugly dialog boxes because any time that it has to refer to the device itself, it has to disambiguate and called it "Zune device" and where the developers have forgotten this clever addition, they have made a rather lot of people very unhappy. Still, I thought the software looked rather pretty, and it had started copying my music, videos and pictures to the Zune. The trouble arose when I tried to use the software. I clicked on the "all music" button thingy in the sidebar and it froze up. To cut two hours and six crashes of frustration into one sentence, I was annoyed. Apparently, the Zune (software), like iTunes, is not yet very friendly with Vista. And not at all friendly with 64-bit processors. When I repeated this experiment on my home machine which ran Windows XP on a 32-bit processor, everything seemed fine and the software has only crashed twice.

Regarding the Zune itself, I like it. Sure, it's a brick, and feels like one when I hold it in my hand (especially because what I'm used to is an iPod nano), but it does play videos (I have tested this but not used it a lot). As soon as I stumbled upon the option to change the wallpaper, I choose Rungta's Rangoli instead of the default and I must say it looks rather elegant now. The best things about the Zune are its large and crisp screen, its very logical and friendly menus, its devotion of the best part of the screen to Album Art when you're playing a song (looks rather spiffy), its ability to play videos, and how it neatly lets you change the Shuffle and Repeat settings without having to navigate all the way to the Settings menu in the same way that an iPod does not.

The worst part about it is that it is a brick that no one's put much heart into. It is also a version 1.0 product that was merely meant to feel out the market and not to actually make a dent in it. So, here's what you're missing out on: audiobook support, any kind of non-English language support, terrible client-side software, horrible syncing (due to the software I suppose), any kind of Wireless support that is not painfully crippled, ability to play the same video formats as the iPod, Mac support, and the lack of a general feeling of unease which makes one feel that no one really wanted to make this thing, but that some people were rather forced to. I'm hoping that Zune 2.0 remedies all or most of these complaints and that they offer a free software update for all the unfortunate Zune 1.0's so that they might be put to some better use than paper weights.

I hope I wasn't too negative about the Zune. It's really not all that bad, you know. I personally feel that the logo is really fetching.

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5 comments
  • hahahaha, Steve Ballmer. did you see him throwing chairs?
    By Blogger James, at July 31, 2007 8:30 AM   
  • Rate the iPod's and Zune's interface out of 5. Which wins?

    The Zune software which is available for download even for those who don't own the Zune player is so bad, it crashes more often than Safari 3 Beta for Windows does.

    Microsoft is doing a big mistake by not promoting the Zune in places where the iPod is not dominating the portable audio segment.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 31, 2007 9:23 AM   
  • *Which one wins?
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 31, 2007 10:51 AM   
  • Presently, it's quite obvious that the iPod wins. I can tell because it's the one I'm using.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 31, 2007 11:25 AM   
  • I had forgotten to mention one of the things I really liked about the Zune, so I've added it to the end of the list of things I like about it: "...how it neatly lets you change the Shuffle and Repeat settings without having to navigate all the way to the Settings menu in the same way that an iPod does not."
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 31, 2007 12:15 PM   

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The Deathly Hallows
Wow, what a book! I've enjoyed spending time with this book so much that I'm seriously considering proposing to it. Both times that I've finished it and have had to "let it go", I've felt a sad emptiness, not quite unlike that which you get when you do generic programming using void*.

The Deathly Hallows was everything I expected from the grand finale of the Harry Potter series, and then, it was much more. For instance, I would have guessed that most of the book would have been consumed in finishing up all the little threads that had been spawned in books one through six. I would never have expected anywhere near as much new material as this book provided. The book was also gratifying in how quite a few of my predictions came out to be true. Yes, I know McGonagall ended up not being a Death Eater, but still, Snape was revealed as a good guy (you'd be surprised at how many people - my suitemate included - didn't have any idea this was coming) and Harry was a Horcrux. I was also surprised to find out that a lot of facts that I had already taken for granted since Book Five (such as the Hog's Head's barkeep being Aberforth) had never been explicitly mentioned and came as new information to some.

After the extremely heart-wrenching endings of the last two books, I had come to look upon Rowling as this evil, sadistic woman who wanted to harness the power of children's tears as a fuel for some sort of weapon she was making to take over the world. That was the part of me that loved Dumbledore so dearly that I didn't want to believe that I would never hear (all right, read) his voice in Book Seven. And so wrong was I.

The bloodbath that wasn't
Yes, Hedwig was a low blow. But, Fred's departure wasn't really a huge surprise, was it? I'm not saying it wasn't sad, but, by the law of probability, if all of the Weasleys had survived the book, it would been remarkable indeed. Mad-Eye? Well, I never really got attached to him, so his death was not a big deal for me. Tonks and Lupin died together and their son would be raised by his grandmother – so that didn't really strike me as too sad either (if only one of them had died though, it would have been a lot more sad). Dobby's death, I must say, was the most painful.

The Dursleys Departing
All in all, I think Rowling was really kind in writing this book. It was a very pleasant parting between Harry and his reluctant relatives. I was very touched that Dudley realized, after seventeen years, that Harry, was, in fact, not a waste of space. When I first read the chapter, I was sad that we didn't get to find out more about Petunia, but that was remedied before long. I like how Book Seven, as it is wont to be, being the final in a heptology, links back to so much stuff in the previous books. For example, the "we have corresponded" line in Book Six, when Dumbledore comes to take Harry from the Dursleys, and its reference, not to the Howler as one might have assumed back then, but to the letters exchanged by Petunia and Dumbledore when she wrote to him requesting to be admitted to Hogwarts.

Hallows and Horcruxes
I find it hard to believe that Rowling had this whole thing about Hallows and Horcruxes worked out ever since she started writing Book One. I mean, if she did, she must really be brilliant because that's a lot of information to keep in mind while writing those end-of-book Dumbledore narratives throughout the series (except Book Six). I was really impressed by how the Hallows came into the story and how they linked together with Horcruxes and even Harry's Invisibility Cloak. Still, it was left to the reader's imagination as to whether anything special would happen when these three objects were brought together. Also, honestly, I think that the Invisibility Cloak was rather a lame Hallow. The cloak itself is immune to magic, sure, but wearing it doesn't make you immune. Now that would be dead useful.

Wandlore
I thought we'd found out everything that we'd ever find out about wands back in Book Four with Priori Incantatum and all that. Again Book Seven surprised by presenting a great deal of new and wildly interesting information about wands and their ownership. Arguably, it was one of the most interesting parts of the entire book, right up there with information about the Hallows and Horcruxes.

Severus Snape
There is no doubt in my mind that "The Prince's Tale" was, by far, the most absorbing chapter in the entire book. And, in my opinion, it took a surprisingly short time to explain all of it (an almost disappointingly short time). Nothing demonstrates Rowling's genius better than her picking of the perfect set of memories from Snape's mind that, in short, explained everything. Somehow, I had never envisaged a scenario in which I would be able to forgive six books' worth of Snape's complete gittiness.

Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure
You've just got to love the little tidbits of magical knowledge that are sprinkled throughout the book. I drank it all down – Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration, the power of House-Elf apparition, Taboos, the entrance question for Ravenclaw tower – and relished it.

Dumbledore
If there was one thing I could have been sure of before having read the book, it would have been that Dumbledore was to have little to no part to play in it. I was, yet again, woefully mistaken. And pleasantly surprised, might I add. There was nary a chapter that was not chock full of Dumbledore. Personally, I was most interested in what part his portrait hanging in Snape's office would have to play. And yet again I was surprised to find out that it was a most significant role indeed. Paintings in the world of Harry Potter have always intrigued me because of how much power they have. I mean, did it really matter if Dumbledore died if he was there, talking, thinking, plotting, generating new ideas and ordering Snape around? As far as I can tell, the only significant thing the portrait-Dumbledore couldn't do was to cast spells. Also, it seems that Rowling is just as big a fan of end-of-the-book talks with Dumbledore as I am, because she managed to put that in the book regardless of the fact that, well, Dumbledore was a tad dead. I'm not complaining though. It was like having Dumbledore alive again – my favourite person in the entire series. What was the significance of the ugly, moaning baby at King's Cross? I'm afraid I don't know even after having read the book twice. My first instinct was to think it was Snape but it just didn't make any sense.

Aberforth
That little conversation with Aberforth was really important. It introduced Dumbledore not from Harry's limited perspective, not from Elphias Doge's sidekick perspective, not from Rita Skeeter's malicious perspective, but from a truer and purer perspective by far – that of his own brother. It was very illuminating to say in the least.

Oh well, that's all I could think of. Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book (page numbers are from the American edition, spellings from the British):
  • "I don't think you're a waste of space." - Dudley, p. 40
  • "Pathetic! With the whole wide world of ear-related humour before you, you go for holey?" - Fred, p. 75
  • "Perhaps just one more, Master Harry, for luck?" - Kreacher, p. 221
  • "Rack your brains, Ron, that should only take a couple of seconds–" - Hermoine, p. 381
  • "So he can sneak up on people. Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking..." - Ron, p. 408, regarding Death's possession of an Invisibility Cloak
  • "But the fact remains he can move faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo when he wants to" - Fred, or George, p. 444
  • "We teachers are rather good at magic, you know" - McGonagall, p. 595
  • "Oh, don't mind me... I'll just lie here and crumble...." - Gargoyle, p. 620
  • "Of course it is happening in your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Dumbledore, p. 723
Gosh, I already want to read it again.

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12 comments
  • An excellent review of an excellent book. The scale of Dumbledore's role was indeed a wonderful surprise. I'm really really glad that we had the end-of-the-book talk with Dumbledore because I for one was almost sure we would be missing it in the final book.

    By the way, I think wearing Harry's invisibility cloak does make you immune.
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 28, 2007 7:46 AM   
  • Prateek, I am pretty sure it does not make you immune. Remember the freezing charm Dumbledore put on Harry when he had the cloak on, at the end of book six?

    The way Harry and co. somehow managed to find and destroy all the horcruxes was something special I think.

    Karan, nice collection of those quotes. Oh the review was ofcourse brilliant. Though I disagree with the cloak being 'lame', in fact IMHO the ring was 'lamer'
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 28, 2007 8:27 AM   
  • Aditya, the cloak's supposed to make you immune from death, not all magic.
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 29, 2007 12:13 AM   
  • Yup! nice review!
    I still have to read the book for the second time - there were some things I didn't quite get - but I still loved it.
    In the fourth book, voldemort had taken the body of an ugly baby-thing before he got his proper (that is to say, the one he had before he tried to kill Harry) body back - could there be some relation between that and the baby at King's Cross?

    Oh, and what made you think that the Hog's Head barman was Aberforth? [I certainly didn't expect it]

    And yeah, I was surprised that there were people who didn't think Snape was a good guy ... actually that might have made those revelations (in book 7) a lot more interesting :)
    By Blogger » sahil, at July 29, 2007 3:09 AM   
  • I hate it when I write long comments and blogger screws it up.

    The Invisibility Cloak was rather a lame Hallow. The cloak itself is immune to magic, sure, but wearing it doesn't make you immune.

    @ Prateek: Oh drat, I thought Karan meant that by immunity he meant 'magical immunity' to the wearer as he was talking about the cloak being immune to magic.

    I don't even think that he Cloak made you immune from death. That would be like crazy. Dumbledore for one would have known about it. He would have told Harry and James about it too.

    The cloak was supposed to be of help in the quest for immunity from Death, not make you immune per se. It simple 'Point and shoot' funda, you don't know where to shoot if you can't point at it innit?
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 29, 2007 3:11 AM   
  • Aditya, after reading your 'point and shoot' funda, I think you're right.
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 29, 2007 8:34 AM   
  • Damn those grammar mistakes :p
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 29, 2007 11:20 AM   
  • Yup i completely agree wid Aditya's 'point and shoot' funda. I was thinking the same thing when i was reading Karan saying about the lameness of the cloak. I mean being invisible is quite an advantage.

    What was the significance of the ugly, moaning baby at King's Cross?

    i have read the book only once so may be i'm wrong. But when Voldemort and Harry was having dat little pre-combat convo, Harry says something like "I've seen what has become of you". Does that link to the baby??
    By Blogger Rohit Nag, at July 29, 2007 10:19 PM   
  • You might be right, Rohit, it could be Voldemort-related.

    p. 706
    "He recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises... form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath."

    p. 741
    "It's your one last chance, it's all you've got left... I've seen what you'll be otherwise... Be a man... try... Try for some remorse."
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 30, 2007 5:21 AM   
  • @sahil, regarding Aberforth:

    From Book Five, regarding the pub and its owner:

    "It was not at all like the Three Broomsticks... the Hog's Head bar... that smelled strongly of something that smelled that might have been goats."

    "...great deal of long grey hair and beard. He was tall and thin and looked vaguely familiar to Harry."

    And, in Book Four, Dumbledore says: "My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms on a goat."
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 30, 2007 8:52 AM   
  • oh yes, i remembered the goat charms part, but i didn't notice that goat-smell :)
    By Blogger » sahil, at July 30, 2007 9:34 AM   
  • Definitive answer from Rowling herself concerning Voldemort:
    "No, he is not a ghost. He is forced to exist in the stunted form we witnessed in King’s Cross."
    By Blogger Skaran, at August 1, 2007 1:58 AM   

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Sold
I've been shedding computers for the last two months. When I left for this internship, I gave back the PowerBook G4 that I had taken from Residential Computing and which I had hardly ever used except for playing multiplayer Tetris. Then, I got my 12" PowerBook back from my dad whom I returned his MacBook Pro. And now, that 12" PowerBook is also gone. Sold, in fact. So, finally, I'm down to one computer. After years of synchronizing data and music libraries, etc., it's kind-of a relief to be back to a single-computer setup. No more worrying about where what is and all that.

Meanwhile, tech news is bugging me a lot these days. All the previously-Mac blogs have now become iPhone blogs. I am completely fed up of it. It's ridiculous that more than half of the stories on tuaw.com, macuser.com, etc. are now about the iPhone. They need to spin-off their own iPhone counterparts because it's driving me up a wall.

Also, having acquired the audiobook for The Deathly Hallows, I am now a good way into my second run-through of the book and am now noticing all the finer points that I had missed in my first read. There are points in the book where I get lost in the words and can't tell who's saying a particular line and that's really confusing, not to mention annoying. And I remember at least one line in the book that was so obfuscated that I had to read it five times before I could figure out what exactly it was trying to say. However, listening to the extremely well-performed Jim Dale version of the audiobook is a real treat. His voice acting is superb and there's never any confusion about who's saying what because he has distinctive voices for each of the characters. Only once I'm done listening to it will I write up a definitive (well, I'll try) analysis of the book. Anything less won't do it justice.

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4 comments
  • I wish I had the audiobook too. Hearing the book with the expressions is a difference experience in itself and Jim Dale does an excellent job with it!

    Which computer are you using then?
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 24, 2007 5:38 AM   
  • It's really sickening. Apple's website hasn't been updated since the release.

    Even the four thumbnail links are all iPhone related. I guess Apple is trying to show the difference in it's name(Apple Inc.) by doing all this.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 24, 2007 8:22 AM   
  • Did I tell you about the Gateway machine my brother sent me last year because he wasn't using it? I'm using that.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 24, 2007 11:10 AM   
  • You might've mentioned it.
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 1, 2007 3:34 AM   

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राष्ट्रपति?
Cheers!
Pratibha Patil is to become India's first woman president after winning a comprehensive election victory, Indian officials say. Mrs Patil, 72, won nearly two-thirds of votes cast in state assemblies and in India's parliament, they said. (BBC News)
Pratibha trounces Shekhawat, becomes first woman President (The Times of India)
Patil to be Rashtrapati or Rashtrapramukh? (The Hindustan Times)

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Banned?
This devilry is precisely the sort of thing that Harry Potter books most rail against. What utter non-sense.
This Sunday, though, the nation's No. 1 best-seller won't be at the top of the nation's No. 1 best-seller list. Neither will the second, third and fourth. Americans young, and not so young, may be in the grip of Potterphilia, but "Goblet of Fire" and the others will not be in their rightful slots. In the first revamping of its lists in 16 years -- a change that casts a cool light on the hot war of competing best-seller estimates, both in print and online -- the Book Review has created a new children's list and consigned the Harry books to it. Instead, this week's list has a truly mature book at the top: "The House on Hope Street," the latest potboiler by Danielle Steel.

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free()
I am not a person who has the gift of dreamless sleep. In fact, it's most remarkable for me if I wake up from a night's rest fresh and without any lingering thoughts. However, that is, unfortunately, not how I awoke today (or, technically, yesterday). I heard the sounds of faint knocking at my door – my brain informs me that there were eight knocks on the door although I don't have any recollection of this exact number. When I heard the knocks, I had no idea whether they were in my dream (which, to my annoyance, politely modified its storyline such that the inclusion of eight knocks seemed entirely natural) or whether they were real.

However, having gone to sleep with the thought of waking up to a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I thought it was worth getting up from bed to verify whether the knocks had been real or not, because, if they had, the reward would be well worth it. So, I get up from bed, snatch my glasses, sink my feet into an extremely comfortable pair of slippers (a birthday present, in fact) and walk as fast as I can towards the main door. When, I see no one standing in front of me with a copy of the book I so dearly desired to read (devour might be a better word), I thought the mailman might be walking back to his truck, so I rushed out of the house hoping to spot a retreating back dressed in USPS uniform, but there was nothing. At this point, I also realized that the slippers I was wearing were not supposed to be worn outside the house. So, disappointed, I started walking back towards the door thinking what a waste it had all been – waking up and blasphemizing my most comfortable pair of slippers. However – and I'm sure you've been expecting this – just as I was about to walk back inside my apartment, my still-bleary eyes noticed a white-and-red box next to the door. A slightly closer inspection determined the following words printed upon its immediately visible side, "Attention Muggles: Do not deliver or open before July 21". (It was in all capital letters but I'll spare that eye-sore here. It would look dreadful in Georgia.)

Anyway, at 10.10am (the 'right' time, so to speak), I began reading. Of course, I am not a very gifted reader and it was a little before 5.30pm when I finished the first 389 pages. I was waiting for the situation in the story to stabilize a bit before I could 'safely' leave the trio and go grab some food because I was hungry beyond words. I finally finished reading the book at 1.33am.

Yes, it is a most astoundingly good piece of literature and if it is really only just a children's book, then I'm proud to be a child who is in love with it. It added a brilliantly woven storyline to the series, answered every question I could throw at it in the most cunning fashion, and had a happy ending to boot. In fact, this happy of an ending, I confess, I wasn't expecting. The geek in me will generously reveal itself now when I say that it feels like the end of a very long C program with a lot of memory being freed at last. Above all, after reading this book, I am satisfied and relieved, and that is not something I can say about most of the books I've read. In essence, what I'm trying to say is that is not a book that you can shake a stick at.

Of course I'll re-read it. I reckon I'll be listening to it since I already have it on audio, but there is simply nothing that compares to a first-read.

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1 comments
  • Oh yes!! The first read, is nothing compared to the second, the third or the subsequent ones. The first read is hurried, there is tension in the air, a kind of uncertainty as to what happens. The other times, you know the story, you're simply reading to analyse it, or refresh your memory about the minute details.
    By Blogger Espèra, at July 24, 2007 2:05 AM   

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好不
No one knows better than I how much I love browsing through my Chinese dictionary – Wenlin – in search of new words and characters. This is one of the quirkier words I found, and, I hope you can appreciate precisely why.


Now, you would think that only the Chinese would be weird enough to stuff two completely contradictory meanings into one relatively tiny two-syllable word. Even if it were possible to distinguish the meanings in context, you'd question whether all the effort was really worth it at all.

"Oh, those chinks", you'd say in a deeply satisfied manner, reminding everyone in your presence how you always thought they were a bunch of no-good communists, who, at one time wanted to take over India (probably still do, come to think of it). After a couple of minutes of your reveling in this superiority complex, someone would tap you on the shoulder and remind you that the word कल (kal) in Hindi meant both 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow', and, subsequently, your ego would proceed to deflate quite like a balloon does when it comes a tad too close to a sharp, not-quite-blunt object.

Not to let anyone feel left out, English is, of course, no exception. The word 'run' has so many different meanings in so many different contexts that, at font size 12, it takes ten sheets of (Letter-sized) paper to print out its definition from the Oxford English Dictionary. I know this from personal experience because an inadvertent mistake has recently caused my pile of scratch paper to grow by ten innocent sheets of paper which didn't know what was coming for them.

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7 comments
  • hmmm, interesting, i don't think i've ever encountered it with the 2nd definition before.

    how's hp7? =)
    By Blogger James, at July 21, 2007 10:36 AM   
  • How do you show the "new entries since last visit" message?
    By Blogger Arjun Attam, at July 21, 2007 10:40 AM   
  • Using cookies, of course!
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 21, 2007 11:28 PM   
  • Abhishek is right. It's a bit of JavaScript I added a couple of days ago. It took a lot more work than I expected, to tell the truth, because of an unfortunate invention of mankind known as "time zones" and an even more dreadful invention known as "daylight saving time".
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 22, 2007 2:23 AM   
  • Hehe, have you try this Chinese dictionary with examples and calligraphy?
    By Blogger Bob, at July 22, 2007 5:59 AM   
  • Hahaha
    Nice work it is.
    By Blogger Arjun Attam, at July 22, 2007 9:18 AM   
  • No, I hadn't seen that one before, Bob. Is there anything special about it?
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 30, 2007 1:20 AM   

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Disconnecting
All right, with the first spoilers beginning to show up in status messages, it's time for me to disconnect from the Internet and not come back until I'm done reading the book. Spoilers in status messages are just the height of mean-spirited dickery.

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Heptology
My favourite spoiler from Book Seven:
"Harry is decapitated by Ron who turns out to be Voldemort's robot son." - John Oliver

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Resistance
Oh, I thought I was showing tremendous moral fibre yesterday when I boldly decided not to read the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that was lying on my computer as seven hundred and ninety-four badly taken photographs. However, only now am I truly tempted because of a complete transcription of the book which has showed up thanks to due to the efforts of some very dedicated Potter fans fanatics who would stop at nothing less.

Anyway, I am still resisting. However, I am also not deleting the file from my computer. Keeping it not to be used in any but the darkest of hours, the greatest of needs – basically, if my copy of the Deathly Hallows doesn't show its pretty face by Saturday evening.

Rowling seems a bit upset by the leaks though, and, of course, urges people not to ruin "Harry's story" for its readers.

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2 comments
  • wow, you're updating a whole lot these days. haha, moral fibre... you know what I think you should do? I think you should stop resisting.
    By Blogger James, at July 20, 2007 12:26 AM   
  • Never!


    ...or, well... not yet at least.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 20, 2007 12:29 AM   

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Floods
The Internet is such an echo chamber. With the number of torrents carrying PDFs of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows floating around, it would seem that there has been some sort of massive leak. However, the fact of the matter is that it is the same data that has been passing around from person to person and website to website being processed and reprocessed. It started a couple of days ago when some raving lunatic posted badly taken, low-quality photographs (although legible) of the entire Book and posted them online. And now, the same content has been posted and reposted several times as different torrents all over the place, and one person has even read aloud the first ten chapters and recorded them which some people have mistakenly thought to be the Stephen Fry version of the audiobook.

In these times, a restrained person avoids giving into temptation and downloading any of these files. However, I am not such a person. I took the liberty of downloading a couple of these torrents and verifying whether they were real or not. There are so many people downloading these that they came down at a whopping 1 MB/s. Well, ladies and gentlemen, they are real. Am I going to read any of them? No. I read the first page and I'm very excited about the whole thing but I have a couple of reasons for not doing this. First of all, I want to be able to comfortably sit in my bed and enjoy hours and hours of reading without any interruptions and without having to squint at low-resolution images to figure out what a word is... every two seconds. I want to experience the feel of book-in-hand again. Secondly, I have two more workdays left and there are certain goals I need to achieve regarding programming and it will be a magnificent error on my part if I get all into Harry Potter now and don't feel like writing a single line of code tomorrow because that is what will happen if I start reading now. I won't be able to concentrate on anything else for the next two days! This is probably why the publishers have wisely chosen a Saturday for the unveiling in the first place. It makes for a good first-read experience.

So, go download it if you are eager... or jobless... or both... but I would recommend against it. Don't spoil it for yourself.

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5 comments
  • Can I post spoilers as comments? Please? Pretty please?

    She damn right kills everybody. Damn. I feel uber pissed off.
    By Blogger Manas, at July 19, 2007 4:34 AM   
  • It's really surprising they had to kill so many people. It's really a bloodbath.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 19, 2007 9:28 AM   
  • Now now people, please no spoilers. Let's not ruin the fun for everybody.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 19, 2007 10:02 AM   
  • *in a creepy, seductive voice*: give in to your desires skar....you know you want it... =)
    By Blogger James, at July 19, 2007 10:20 AM   
  • The only way I'm going to read those crappy versions from the Internet is if I don't receive my hard-cover copy by 7pm on Saturday.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 19, 2007 5:50 PM   

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Chapter Titles
This is splitting my head like a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster right now. Oh how I wish I hadn't been shown this. Arrrrrgh!

UPDATE: The list got removed from HPANA but it is available on Wikipedia now, on their Deathly Hallows page.

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1 comments
  • whoa! I didn't know that! thanks!
    By Blogger Kimberly, at July 19, 2007 9:19 PM   

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Funny Place
This internship is turning out to be quite interesting. Microsoft, I've come to conclude, is a funny place. A funny place with a lot of dual-monitors. And KVM switches. One fine day, I told my manager that the CRT that was my secondary monitor wasn't floating my boat. The next day an LCD monitor walks into my room. And now I've got one of those dual-monitor setups too.

I'm in the middle of the fifth week of this internship and I've barely written a hundred lines of code. All I've been doing is taking existing stuff and refactoring it into new pretty little bundles that do interesting things, and apparently everyone's impressed that I can just manage that. Every time I've started doing a new project here, I've thought to myself, "Ah, finally, this must be the real stuff". But I'm still waiting. I'm always waiting. Waiting and eating Maggi noodles.

Also, it looks like I'll be going to watch a lot of IMAX movies because today they handed me what they call a Microsoft Premium card and it lets me watch IMAX movies for $3 instead of $15, which is a lot cheaper than even standard cinema. So no reason not to indulge.

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The Waiting
I was just reading this article about Jim Dale and his having finished recording Book Seven a couple of months ago, and, it made me realize that, this is the End. The proverbial 'it', if I may. The last chance for us Harry Potter fans to experience the excitement of not knowing how "it ends", of waiting outside a bookstore at 12.01am to buy the new book and then to not put it down for the next 24 hours, reading it quickly once and then rereading it again slowly to absorb the genius of Rowling's writing.

Sigh... well, at least, according to Jim Dale, "It’s a surprise ending". Gee, thanks.

On a lighter note, the Links are finally the way they were supposed to be - sorted by how recently the blog has been updated and... <drumroll> live! All thanks to Rungta's ingenious LinkedList JavaScript recipe.

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White Space
I do hope you noticed the slight change in the Journal's template (that's the new one on the left). I took out a bit of the blue that had been there for about three years and had been bothering me for quite a while; in its place, I added some more white, which, in my opinion, is, in itself, a very pleasing blend of colours. In all, designing the new template from scratch (this is the first time in my life that I've done so) took only five hours mainly because it's not a very complicated piece of web design. Refining and bug fixing took another couple of hours (thank you very much, Internet Explorer), and porting the last hundred or so entries over to it (sans comments – somehow, comments always get left out in major transitions) took another five hours.

Kòngbái (空白) is what the Chinese call White Space or Empty Space and I've always been a huge proponent. It might not look as good on news websites or the websites of big corporations, but I've always found it to have added a bit of class to personal websites. One of the main reasons I chose this design was that the old one looked fairly cluttered. I'd also become tired of seeing Trebuchet MS everyday. Also, I really wanted that bird in the sidebar to snuff it (reminds me of JLS). The new design centres on the most important substance in this Journal – the text. Archives and Links aren't crucial, and so, they need not be visible as soon as the site opens. However, I realize that clicking on them and waiting for another page to load is also quite a pain; so, they're just 'hidden' using CSS and are unhidden when you click Archives or Links using a tiny bit of JavaScript.

As for the older posts, I have copied over all the posts since last July into this new Journal, and, at the least, I expect to go back and copy over the remaining posts from 2006. However, it was also one of my aims with this new design to get rid of some of the old that has been bothering me for some while. There is a lot of blogging I did back when I was in high school that, quite frankly, embarrasses me. It was a different person who wrote on the Journal back then and it would be unfair of me to modify his entries. But, I also no longer associate myself with that person; which is why I'm just going to rope off those old posts and leave them intact along with the old template. This way, I can go back and experience pure nostalgia whenever I go back and read them without also having to experience a pang of discomfort about the fact that anyone else could also do the same.

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7 comments
  • I love the new design. Looks brilliant!
    By Blogger Prateek, at July 16, 2007 5:05 AM   
  • Beauty.
    By Blogger Arjun Attam, at July 16, 2007 5:42 AM   
  • The white looks great. Noticed the change as soon as I saw the Skaran missing in ().

    Ajax Search is all that's left.
    By Blogger Abhishek Nandakumar, at July 16, 2007 6:20 AM   
  • whoa whoa whoa, new design. i like it- minimalistic with nice fonts. my only complaint is that because my screen resolution is so unbelievably high, the body appears as a rather skinny line of text flanked by two huge areas of white. not only is this slightly aesthetically unpleasing, it also forces me to scroll a lot more. can't you make the width of the body a percentage of the browser window instead of having it be fixed?
    By Blogger James, at July 16, 2007 6:53 PM   
  • Yeah, you often feel ashamed when you read how much of an idiot you were in the past entries.
    But you wouldn't want to alter it. It was you, after all.
    EVen I have contemplated deleting my entires of the initial 2 years, but it'll be like wiping out a part of myself from the blog.
    By Blogger Espèra, at July 17, 2007 5:07 AM   
  • The new design looks brilliant, no doubt. Though I really loved the original design, which I think was exceptional.
    By Blogger Aditya Anand, at July 17, 2007 5:34 AM   
  • It wasn't so much that the original design was terribly bad, but that it had been around for a very long time. Change is good. And I really wanted to make it look cleaner.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 17, 2007 10:14 AM   

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The Order of the Phoenix
Unfortunately, the IMAX theatre was completely sold out for what seemed to be the foreseeable future, and the earliest tickets I could've gotten were for next weekend because I can't go to see the film on a weekday. But I couldn't have seen it next weekend either because that's Deathly Hallows weekend and nothing in the world is going to be able to distract me from that - not even another Harry Potter related thing. Yes, compared to Book Seven, Movie Five just barely qualifies as a "Harry Potter related thing". Anyway, it had to be today. Plus I had to bike down 12 miles to attend a LAN party anyway, so I found a theatre on my way.

And you know what, the movie wasn't bad. Not bad at all. Compared to most of the Harry Potter movies, this is actually paying it quite a complement. As usual, it's very hard to compress a book as large as the Order of the Phoenix into a 150-minute movie, but they did it alright. They got help in the form of the first one-third of the book being completely devoid of story and thus being, for the most part, completely ignored in the movie.

So, here's what I liked about the movie:
  • Umbridge: They changed her character slightly in the movie but this was a necessary measure I believe, because, you know what, they didn't have five hundred freaking pages to build up her character. Her relationship with McGonagall and Dumbledore was a lot sharper and obvious but I liked it because subtlety here would have made the movie seem bland. As for her nastiness, it was really really well-done and highly entertaining.
  • Dumbledore's Army: I truly enjoyed the DA lessons in the movie. In my opinion, the Room of Requirement was well-adapted to film and I immensely enjoyed the Patronus Charm lesson. After two years, they've finally got the hang of what a Patronus is supposed to look like, and I'm glad because they were absolutely fantastic. A really good bit of animation there.
  • Ginny: She didn't have a huge part in this movie but they did slip in a couple of hints for Movie Six. Ginny looked back at Harry proceeding towards Cho while leaving the pre-Christmas DA lesson and it was done with admirable subtlety, so I congratulate the Director on that. Also, all her spell work was shown to be amazingly powerful which of course becomes a characteristic of Ginny's starting in Book Five and continuing in Book Six. I do hope she gets a bigger role in Book Seven because I love her spells.
  • Luna Lovegood: Charmed. Just absolutely charmed. I loved her character in the Book and in the Movie. It's probably harsh of me to say that they probably made Luna prettier than she ought to have been. In the scene towards the end when Harry tries to offer to help Luna find her lost things, I almost got the impression that he was hitting on her.
  • Cho Chang: Well acted. I believe making her the sneak instead of her friend Marietta (whom we weren't introduced to) was a brilliant idea because it simplified the story considerably and cleanly avoided the whole Hermoine-jealousy topic giving Harry an iron-clad reason to dump her in the movie. One of my clever friends pointed out that it was mentioned in the movie that Veritaserum had been used on Cho, which basically makes Harry a jackass for dumping her. Now, if only they'd picked an actress who was as pretty as she's supposed to be in the books. Sigh. But, that has been a complaint of mine since I saw Movie Four.
  • The Ministry of Magic: I loved it both when they showed it in the beginning for the Trial and in the end when they went into the Hall of Prophecies. In fact, I think that, barring the fact that Bellatrix Lestrange fell down and cowered in front of Harry all because of his feeble Cruciatus curse, the entire sequence was very well executed, and no, I'm not going to pluck any crows about the fact that Death Eaters moved in black blurs and Order of the Phoenix members moved in white blurs because I rather enjoyed those special effects.
  • Floo Powder: The whole head-in-the-grate thing was done dreadfully in Movie Four and it has been dramatically improved in Movie Five although I still don't see it as I imagined it in my head.
  • Occlumency: It's good that they kept those lessons short and sweet; and, instead of making Harry take a trip inside the Pensieve again (which takes up way too much time), they simplified matters by having Harry find out what a git his dad was when he repelled Snape's Legilimens with his Protego.
Things they got disastrously wrong:
  • Dumbledore: Maybe I'm just in love with Dumbledore but ever since Movie Three, when they changed the actor, he's been going doing hill. He was barely bearable in Movie Three, atrocious in Movie Four and I just have no words for what he is in Movie Five. There's no help for it. He has no subtlety; they've completely ruined his character. And half the time in the movie (okay, so on two incidences), Harry kept shouting after him and he didn't turn back to look at Harry. No subtlety at all.
  • Snape: I don't see the nearly the amount of hatred in the movie as I just saw in the book which I finished reading a couple of days ago. He's simply not being the big git he's supposed to be. I mean, it makes the movie a lot more 'pleasant' but it's not an accurate portrayal of character.
  • Bellatrix Lestrange: Unimpressed.
  • Voldemort-Dumbledore Duel: Unimpressed.
  • Malfoy: He was completely MIA during the movie; I guess, like Quidditch, they just couldn't devote screen time to him any more. Oh yeah, there was no Quidditch, but that's not something that they did wrong. It was for the best. I don't think I could have tolerated the whole "Weasley is our king" thing.
For every Harry Potter movie I've seen, I've wished that I'd made it instead because there are just a lot of 'small' things in these movies that are so obviously wrong and completely unfaithful to the books that it makes me mad. I mean, the Firebolt looks like shit for example. They just don't understand! Still, that was a good 150 minutes of my life, except for when I really had to go to the bathroom towards the end and had to miss a couple of minutes of the movie. I broke my usual policy of not buying a soft drink and I've been swiftly reminded of why I made the policy in the first place. Never happening again.

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3 comments
  • Ah, well, I think they ruined it in this one.
    The direction was HORRIBLE. Certain characters were well chosen (Umbridge, Tonks and Luna, for example), but continuity-wise, the movie was as jerky as a K-soap.
    By Blogger Espèra, at July 17, 2007 5:04 AM   
  • Movies Four and Five will unfortunately make sense only to those who have read the books beforehand.
    By Blogger Skaran, at July 17, 2007 10:54 AM   
  • Well I finally went and saw the movie at IMAX today and I must agree with you, it was not bad. Not bad at all. I especially liked that they didn't rush the movie like the fourth one. As for Dumbledore, I've given up hope. The original actor - Richard Harris WAS Dumbledore. The new one just doesn't "get it". All in all, I'm happy that David Yates is returning to direct the sixth movie.
    By Blogger Prateek, at August 18, 2007 2:22 AM   

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Addict
My friends, who've seen me buy and sell more hardware in six months than they've ever owned in their entire lives will attest to the fact that I'm quite addicted to technology and gadgets. An addict, but not a hoarder. I love selling them too (and for a profit whenever I can). They say it's surprising that I don't get "attached" to my computers and things but I don't. In fact, I thought I was attached to the OS (Mac OS), but that, I see now, was also an inaccurate observation on my part, because after having worked at that "other company" for the last four weeks, I've discovered that I can get accustomed to Windows very easily (although after having used it for a month now, I still can't see myself purchasing a non-Apple computer in the near future because I don't think I can let go just yet).

Amongst my latest acquires are a new pair of headphones and a new monitor (which I'm currently staring at and believe to be dreadfully gorgeous). The first time I booted up my computer hooked up to it, I thought to myself, "Have icons always looked this good?" and I concluded that the answer was, "No, they haven't, because you, uh, didn't have your glasses on. But also, with the kinds of monitors you've been using for the past year, even a digital watch's display begins to feel spacious." Either way, I'm now the proud owner of a gorgeous 22" Samsung monitor which doubles as a TV (part of my aim, which I mentioned a few entries ago). I'm glad that I bought it now while I'm in Seattle because MacMall doesn't charge tax in Washington state and the prices for 22"-ers have dipped below the $400 mark and have thusly become affordable, now costing approximately the same as an "iPod with video", which, by the way, has a very poor screen size-to-price ratio now that I compare it to my new monitor. Hush, don't tell me my comparison wasn't a fair one. I'm not going to listen to a word of it... Nope, still not listening.

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Whacked
Googlewhacking is the pass-time of finding a query that returns one and only one search result on Google. As of July 11, 2007, if you search for 閔士睿, you get a single result on Google which is this Journal. Guess no one else has that Chinese name.

And to think, there are more people with a single surname in China than all the people in America. So much so that, in China, distinguishing people is becoming a hassle for the government because there are hundreds of thousands of people with the exact first name and last name. So, they are going to make dual surnames legal; that is, if your name is Wang and your wife's name is Tang, then you can name your son Wang-Tang.

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Amazon's Promise
That email makes me even more impatient.

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29
Quizno's is awesome. For dinner tonight, I just had a sandwich there and even though they have only one choice of vegetarian sub, it was amazingly delicious. The only sad part was that I got the medium-sized one and immensely regretted not getting the large one. So, I guess I'll make it up when I go there next time.

But, in grander news, this happens to be the five hundred and twelfth entry on this Journal and that of course marks a very important milestone. Only yesterday did I go back to the very first entry I wrote a little less than four years ago and of course ended up finding some major grammatical blunders which made me blanch. After that, I read the next four months' worth of entries and got all nostalgic thinking about my life at school. Reading the old entries did make me think about what a prat I was for writing in such an immature and careless manner back then, and so I was instantly gripped with an urge to alter the entries left, right and centre. That of course prompted the question of whether I ought to make any changes to the old entries at all, because, they were, after all, records of my own history and altering them would mean that they would no longer be genuine. Then I thought about what genuine pain I would inflict upon anyone who would come to read them because, if the reader were anything like me, he would probably wish he were disemboweled by a misbehaving swimming pool rather than read entries that would give Vogon poetry a serious run for its money. So, I fixed any grammatical or seriously diction errors that I could find – I didn't know the difference between the words cheeky and cheesy back then, for example – and the couple of entries that were simply too embarrassing to be allowed, even by my standards, I regretfully marked as drafts. This allows me to go back and embarrass myself by reading them if I want to but prevents others (namely, you) from doing the same. I think I'm going to go on a campaign to fix all the broken links in those entries though as the websites I linked to back then have been moved and removed several times since 2003 (especially blogs), and I have a Monk-like reaction when I see a broken link and have to seriously restrain myself from not doing something to it. Hanging sounds like an idea...

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lol
It hurt me a great deal to put those three letters in that order up as the title of this post. I have seen far too many people fall into this disease of suffixing 'lol' to their online sentiments. It usually happens when I'm happily reading along a line of text, and, the moment I reach the end, this 'lol' jumps out at me, and in a nanosecond, completely undos the work of every single word that came before it. Once I read that 'lol', I get this urge to click the little X button and just get away from the nastiness. I just can't take anything seriously if it's followed by an 'lol', I just can't. It's like those people riding all over the place on Segways. I've seen policemen on those and if they ever stopped to tell me off for something, I just don't think I could take them seriously - I'd probably just laugh at them and subsequently get arrested. It's like,
Confucius said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." lol
See what that did? Those three characters appended to the end of that line just completely negated the effect of everything in it. It's like a line-deleter. And it makes me want to pierce my right ventricle with a sharp object to boot. The only bright side is that, when the universe finally collapses on itself, at least all the 'lol's will go with it.

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泰
First of all, I would start off by saying that, in the past two weeks, I have become sick, absolutely sick of hearing about you-know-what; reading every new story about it drives me up a virtual wall and unfortunately the stories are not going to stop coming. Everyone seems to be mega-impressed with the damn thing. Hell, even I biked up to a nearby you-know-where to check it out but honestly, although I can see what some of the fuss is about, I really can't see any justification for this much of it.

Anyway, having fumbled around with Windows Vista, Visual Studio and having drunk a laut of coffee, I've almost reached the end of three weeks in my eleven-week internship at you-know-where. The first two weeks were relatively easy; I was doing networking stuff and Winsock (the networking thingamajig which pretty much every Internet-using thing on Windows relies upon) is very decently documented. However, now I am heading into uncharted territories - APIs for which no one has ever written a client, and, unlike the stable, tried and tested Winsock API (which is more or less unchanged since Windows 95), when I encounter a bug from now on, I will never be a cent percent sure that it's a bug in my code, which, to put it shortly, will be a nightmare. Every day this week (save the fourth), files have been dumped on me to read – files whose documentation is still a work-in-progress might I add – I open them to find a thousand lines of code – just in the header file, mind – and the grinning co-worker who gave them to me says, "It's a bit long." I nervously grin back, muttering an indistinct "Yeah, a bit" while I sit to ponder how much deep the shit is in which I am now in.

But but, there are also funner things happening though. Apparently, there is this Thai place without having been to which an MS employee's experience remains incomplete. So, my boss's boss who's also kind-of my boss took us all out to lunch today in honor of my joining the team (yay!). I was very apprehensive that I'd yet again hate the food since I've had Thai twice and I've disliked it immensely mostly because they make the main course sweet. I ordered a Vegetable Curry with a Spice Rating of four stars out of five, which, I was told, was high with regard to the average American as they tend to stick to two or three. Of course, I am quite aware that, even though I am one of the least spice-loving Indians, the spiciest food I've had here has been just normal or slightly below. So, I would have ordered five but was deterred by the description "HOT!!! HOT!!! HOT!!!" and also I didn't want to foolishly order something that I subsequently couldn't eat. However, I was very pleasantly surprised when I ate the stuff because it was simply delicious. As far as I knew, this came out of nowhere - Thai food was supposed to be sweet and disgusting and I was supposed to hate it. Still, I'm not going to complain about a good thing. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I might just consider paying them another visit before I'm done here.

Other than that, biking around the area is immensely enjoyable. I still haven't been to main Seattle but I will most certainly do so this weekend. It will be a long bike ride (or, if I'm more pragmatic, a bus ride) and probably be the whole day's affair but I do have to visit the 中国城 (Chinatown) in Seattle and replenish my supplies of 纸 (calligraphy paper) and 墨 (ink) because I ran out a month ago and wasn't able to buy any before I left for here. I need to practice!

Apart from all that, I am, of course, terribly anxiously awaiting July the twenty-first when The Deathly Hallows is released. Like any sensible person I've pre-ordered a copy and Amazon.com says that if it doesn't reach me by 7pm on the very day, I will get the book for free. Isn't that generous of them? Thank the stars it's coming out on a Saturday, because otherwise I would have to skive off work. Also, The Order of the Phoenix comes out in a few days and I'm going to try to watch it on IMAX. I watched The Prisoner of Azkaban on IMAX and it was absolutely amazing. The screen is just so... big.

Oh, and I got a haircut

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Microsoft
The internship has begun. Actually, one of the eleven weeks I have here is almost over. I'm also under an NDA (a non-disclosure agreement), so I couldn't tell you what secret project I was working on. Unfortunately, so far, I have seen nothing here that's so revolutionary (or even borderline interesting) that would make me want to break the NDA. This ain't Apple.

However, it would be wrong of me to say that I am not enjoying my internship here. Microsoft really takes care of interns. There's the pay. There're the perks. But then, the actual place is really nice. They give you a boss and a coach/mentor. The awesome thing is that I'm not playing around in a sandbox. The project I 'm doing for Microsoft is something that you will probably see in the next version of Windows. So, I basically get the same privileges as normal employees but also the same responsibilities, which is awesome because getting the feel of working in a big company is a good thing.

Also, Microsoft is big. Very big. In this campus alone, they have 75000 employees and gosh, every third person here is Indian. Like, no kidding. I haven't even seen these many Indians in India. They're freaking everywhere! But, another good thing is that there are a ton of Chinese people here,. I've found that, compared to the Chinese, the Chinese Americans generally tend to show a great deal of reluctance in speaking Chinese. And that's sad 'cause I like speaking Chinese (at least the little I know).

A lot of bash on Microsoft saying that, even though it has so much money and so many people, it still can't make good software and they talk about Apple which is such a small company but makes such good software. I've always said this and I'll say it again now. It's not as if the people who work at Microsoft are stupid or incompetent - far from it. No, the fact is that Microsoft carries a lot of baggage. Do you remember old games like Monkey Island 1 or Grim Fandango? They run on Windows Vista. How much software from the mid-90's can you run on a present day Mac running Mac OS X without using a virtual machine? Thanks to all the processor and OS transitions at Apple, zero. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'll refrain from judging that at the moment. However, one of the things that really restricts programming efforts here at Microsoft is that they try to make sure that, by introducing something new, they don't break all the old stuff. I know this because I'm currently using a book about Windows 95 Programming to get introduced to Windows programming. Every piece of code in that book is not only relevant to Vista programming but it also compiles and runs flawlessly. You can't say that about Mac OS X. But, it also makes programming for Microsoft not easy, and even I am going to run into those hurdles pretty soon.

And the fact that Microsoft actually has very competent engineers working for them is easily verified when you see what they make when they don't have a ton of baggage to carry around. Look at the Xbox, Windows Mobile, Office 2007 and you'll see that Microsoft is certainly capable of making good stuff. I personally believe that they should drop the baggage that is Windows and rewrite it from scratch (not the whole thing of course - that would take a decade). Sigh... more updates after I have Internet at home.

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Year Two Ends
Wow, another extremely short year passes by. The years at college just seem to go at like four times the speed of the school years. It's very odd, mostly frightening and borderline interesting. Basically, it makes me feel really bad about all the time I've wasted (like all last summer).

End of term exams didn't go terribly badly from my point of view, although I'm sure they did from a grade point of view. Will be lucky to get a handful of B's. Sigh... anyway, at least it's over. And I've now taken my last physics class for the entire college career. So, now, strike out maths and physics from the list of subjects I need to do. From now on, it's just CS and Chaa-neez. Cool.

Joota Polish Days...

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很高兴
All right, so I won't be able to give an accurate description now because I really should have written this out on Thursday when the elation was actually flowing. But... basically, it turned out to be a very interesting day.

I always get the feeling that my Chinese teacher hates me a lot or is genuinely annoyed by me but I went to her office hours today and really good conversation which completely dispelled those beliefs of mine and I saw myself in her eyes in a completely different light. And even though she gave me some bad news about grading policies, I walked out of the room happy.

Then, in calligraphy class, I think I got another very interesting and insightful peek into this eccentric professor of mine. For the better part of the past three months, in these calligraphy classes, I have been trying to figure this man out because I really want to know what are the thoughts behind his actions. Anyway, regarding the class itself, it is one of the very challenging ones I'm taking this quarter actually because I'm really interested in succeeding in it and getting it right (more so than most of my other classes) and so sucking in this class is really not an option for me. However, I have not been particularly good with the brush and ink up until now. I've been of the opinion that my characters look pretty ugly and I think the teacher agreed because on his rounds (while we wrote), occasionally he didn't even bother to stop by and suggest improvements.

However, today, just a few minutes into the class and my having finished my first character, 心 (xin, heart), he comes by, looks at it and says that it is a very well-balanced character and I'm like, wow, I guess that's actually a compliment, because the best I've got from him before is a 不错 (not bad) or a 很不错 (very not bad). Anyway, it gets really happy when I was writing the last stroke of another character 金 (jin, gold) and he looks down at it excitedly and says "Please-a... finish-yit". I get really anxious when he's watching me draw strokes because (a) I think I'll make a mistake, (b) I think my strokes are ugly and (c) I tend to "correct" my strokes because I don't get them perfectly right on the first sweep and that is a total no-no according to him. Anyway, I finish the character and he says "well, for this a-character, I will giwe you three circles." Then, he of course proceeds to draw three circles near my character, and says "yin Chinese, this means an A. Yeach yindividual stroke is perfect and the balance and proportion is perfect. You can-a cut it out and put it up on your wall." And yes, vain as it may sound, but this gave me immense amounts of happiness, because it was such a culmination of eight weeks of trying to get it reasonably right and a lot of frustration. Anyway, I will reproduce the character that I drew/wrote here below and a yardstick computerized semi-calligraphy font as a yardstick:


So sure the computer one looks a lot more impressive and I could make excuses, but instead I'll just ask you to cut me some slack 'cause this is an enormous improvement from yesterweeks.

The rest of the day was less eventful, because 5pm to 1am nearly continuously (break for food) were dedicated to a CS problem set.

I feel I should find time to write about the other goings-on but there just is no time! Even now, I cut into my precious weekend sleep. So, I should go. 拜拜!

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To EWR
I think I might become a fan of Continental Airlines if all their flights are like the one I'm on right now. Of course it's coincidence that the first row seats were miraculously empty and so I was able to remove myself to one of them and get an extravagant amount of leg space. The second thing was the fact that they served food which is a kindness I have experienced for the first time on a US Domestic flight. I understand that I probably paid for the food somewhere in the price of the ticket, but then it was also a risk on Continental's part because if I go to kayak.com or something and look for flights, Continental has had to take the risk that some other airline's flight might be cheaper because they don't serve meals. Or, well, something like that at any rate.

All right, this is happening way too much. I'm on my way to New York yet again! Well, it didn't come as a surprise; I knew when I went in March that I'd be coming back in May for a couple of days for my brother's graduation. It should hopefully be a fun-filled family reunion as my parents shall also be in NYC for the big event.

Amongst (sounds so much better than 'among') other things, I will be switching computers yet again when I go to New York and I will have my beloved dual-battery PowerBook G4 back which was previously in the care of my beloved papa. He will, in turn, get his MacBook Pro back, with which I have spent the last five-ish months. He will also be getting his new digital camera as his old one broke and Canon allowed me to upgrade to this really cool seven-megapixel thing for about $200.

Oh and the pilot just announced that we're going to be landing in 30 minutes, which is sad because I was just starting to enjoy this flight. Such nice air hostesses (no stewards on this flight for some reason) there are here, who've been asking on the hour every hour whether we want any drinks or anything. I think I lost track of the time due to the time difference, and so this flight was actually only five hours long even though I was actually prepared for something like eight hours. Silly me.

Meanwhile, I think there are plans of going to Yosemite National Park next weekend, which, if I go by the time I had last year, should be extraordinary amounts of fun. I think last year I trekked about ten or eleven miles, but this year I'm going to go with this more hardcore group, so it'll be more like eighteen miles. Don't know whether we're going to go to Half-Dome or Clouds' Rest, but I think those are the two options on the board.

I will also be done with midterm exams once I take the second physics midterm on Thursday (later than everyone else who's taking it on Monday). That will be a relief. Of course, short-lived relief because finals will be in the second week of June. Also, I have to start making this website for my "Program in Writing and Rhetoric" class. I think I might do that now in the remaining twenty or so minutes of this flight. iWeb sounds like the software I need because I can't afford to spend too much time on this website.

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Dream Home
Can I live here? Please?

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Two Times Ten
Twenty years old, that's what I am now. Had a nice little birthday celebration on Saturday. And speaking of celebrations, you know, I like one more thing about this place - on your birthday, you get treated out to dinner instead of you treating everyone. It's more economical this way. We had Indian food at a nearby restaurant. It was good. Afterwards, we played two really entertaining games - True Colours and Pit. I highly recommend them both, although they really need at least four people to be fun. My Facebook wall also exploded and ended up with more messages than I've ever seen on it before. And, as a birthday gift, I just bought an electric pencil sharpener. Can't wait for it to arrive. Trust me, the sharpener I use right now is pretty shitty and I do seem to go through pencils like anything. At least, now I have the promise of a sharpener that knows when the nib is about to break and automatically stops.

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Five Hundred?
Yay, this is my five hundredth post, and I guess I might not be shutting the ol' journal down so soon after all. Part of my motivation is that I want to make a new template for it - a good-looking one. I need to learn me some CSS. Anyway, that's going to happen after I finish this programming project I've taken up for Student Initiated Courses, which is going well and should be completed some time next week. It's been a good learning experience and I've become reacquainted with PHP and CSS and it's an opportunity to earn some money, though I don't know yet how much exactly they're going to pay me.

OK, first day of classes was today! Chinese, which was very amusing as usual, went well and it looks like we're in for a good deal of work this quarter as usual. Thanks to the goodness of the teacher, I did get an A+ for last quarter which made me really, really happy. However, I did more poorly in two other courses than I really was expecting and that was disappointing. But I guess a B+ over a B is not nearly as happy as an A+ over an A, so I take my result with happiness and joy! Next class was our Arabic class. I've switched sections now so that I have three Arabic classes a week instead of five although two of them are twice as long, but I think it'll work out better as, as a result, no Arabic tomorrow! Arabic is an extremely interesting language, possibly moreso than Chinese, but the way it's taught leaves something to be desired and I do truly wish their course planning was better, but what can I do... although, when I was watching a little bit of Al-Jazeera TV in Arabic I actually understood a couple of phrases, which caught me by surprise because in all the listening material we have for Arabic, everyone's speaking so fast (or so colloquially) that we cannot understand a word they're saying and I never expected to be able to understand anything on TV at this stage.

Next was the Chinese Calligraphy class that I thought might be interesting, and interesting it was. Taught by this eccentric old Chinese man whose English is actually quite bad, we had quite an interesting class today. It was almost as if it was out of a movie. I can't exactly relate the experience here, but it was extremely fun and amusing. Perhaps, imagine the kind of dialogue that Snape gave in the Philosopher's Stone in their first Potions lesson.

But the guy's a bit weird. He can't take more than 15 people in his class and there were 18 there, so he said he'd pick the 15 he'd keep by going down alphabetically by last name and picking the first 15. Aside from being quite rude (as, to the left-out three, he just said, "You can leave now"), this is wholly unfair and is just as bad as discriminating on any other factors (I'll take all the Asian kids first, then the White kids...) and there's definitely a better way of doing this. Since there are two sections, back to back, he should have at least asked if any of the people could transfer to the other section to balance the sections out or at least have waited until next class to see if anyone left, but no, he just told three people to get out of the class based on their last names. This is not done. Sigh...

The last class of the day was a class on Cocoa Programming which I am very glad to be auditing (because I just don't have any more units - I'm already taking 24 units for 20). It looks interesting. We've got our first (and very simple) programming assignment and I can't wait to get started.

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First Times
So, I guess I'm trying all kinds of new things because of my hyper-active and hyper-energetic brother. I had my first sip of an alcoholic drink (not tasty) and went to a traditional college party (apparently, so long as I was "vouched for" they didn't need to check whether I was twenty-one or not). Anyway, I think one of the more fun things I did today was to (a) discover that the jackets for the seventh Harry Potter were released by Bloomsbury for the British edition of the book (due July the Twenty-first) and (b) visit the American Museum of Natural History while listening to Book 2. I liked the museum. Might go there again some day (although the entrance fee isn't cheap). I watched one of their IMAX movies - something about Mars - and it was really good. IMAX is amazing. Tomorrow? Maybe I'll go check out coffee shops in Times Square and perhaps pay my homage to the giant glass cube on Fifth Avenue.

Meanwhile, here's an amusing picture. Do look carefully at the part I've blatantly marked out in red.

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Again, you say?
Yes, I am fated forever to return to New York every now and then and recite... tales... thereof. But this trip's been going better than most. First of all, New York is warm. About five degrees celsius warmer than Northern California in the day time right now. That's nice, because sucky weather sucks and New York gets a lot of that. I'm glad that the city's weather's decided to cheer up a bit. Secondly, I've been having dinner out in a new place every night and that's been kinda fun and delicious. Sunday was Spanish, which was, in my opinion, passable food, Monday was Indian Chinese which was tasty but really oily, Tuesday was really good North Indian (mmm, delicious, I shouldn't have reminded myself of it right now), and yesterday was some really nice Mexican. The best thing about Mexican places is that they have piña colada and boy do I love piña colada!

Also, went to see this movie called 300 yesterday... on IMAX! So big, it was kinda amazing - the theatre, that is. As for the movie, I liked it. Of course, if I didn't, I'd have to turn in my penis - a devastating thought for any man. In any case, the movie was completely pointless but also amazingly entertaining at the same time. So much so that my brother saw it the second time with me - of course, in IMAX, it's completely different. Blood and gore, the fun stuff. And all those people whose IM statuses were "This is Sparta" for the last two months or so finally make sense to me. They apparently also decided to show the king having sex with the queen in all the different positions. Was this really necessary? I guess it must be that character-building thing.

Also, New York == rude. Have I mentioned this before? The taxi drivers have less courtesy than auto drivers in Delhi and that's saying something. Everyone's so immensely irritable all the time that it's actually somewhat amusing to watch. The waiter at the restaurant shows this forced restraint as if the best thing he'd like to do would be to smash your head open with his heavy tray but he'll suffice with just rigidly smiling and pretending that he likes you. And he's only making this effort because his tip depends on it. If a tip isn't involved, New Yorkers don't mind using the word 'fuck' for basically any kind of grammatical particle you can think of - as an adjective, adverb, gerund, pronoun, measure word, and also as a replacement for fillers such as "uh" or "er".

Ah well, that's New York.

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It is over
Wow, I'm done with final exams two days into finals' week. So cool! I would've had another exam today (at 8.30am too - I don't think I've woken up that early on even a single day this quarter - stayed up though) but I took it yesterday instead.

Chinese went well. I don't think I'll be getting an A+ like last quarter because I messed up on both the oral exams and that's like almost one entire percentage point off my grade, then I haven't been getting full scores on my quizzes like I was getting last quarter, but the midterm was nice. And as for the final, I don't know, it was very tricky and I feel I must have made at least a couple of blunders. So, it really depends on how many blunders I made on the final and where their cut-off is - 98% or 99%. In anyway, I'm guaranteed an A in Chinese, which is good enough. And Arabic's already given me an A, which was expected, because there isn't really much to mess up on those Arabic tests (I mean, there is, but it's not easy to mess up).

Physics? I should really pay more attention to this subject. I'd not been to a single TA section this quarter and I went to only about, I don't know, four of the lectures? This would be okay if I was actually good at physics but it doesn't work out for me because I actually suck at it. Still, the midterm was dead easy and almost everyone, including me, got a full score or somewhere in the 95-100 range. The final was comparatively ten times harder. In the last two lectures, they did some funny stuff involving differential equations that we hadn't touched throughout the rest of the course and that was irritating, so I messed up on the questions involving damped oscillations, and by messed up, what I really mean is I didn't do them. So screw it, I thought. I'm expecting a B+.

Same for CME - probability, that is. Towards the second half of the quarter, I discovered that the key to success in the CME course was simply going to the office hours one night before the homework was due and sitting there with other CME peeps and just doing the entire problem set for a six or seven hour stretch. It's awesome because you can check your answers with the TAs and they're okay about letting you know if your answer is right or not. For example: "Hey, I got 20.34 for this one. Is it right?" "Nah, the answer's 10.89, did you check if np was ≥5?" So, the midterm was good, and I scored above the mean (huge surprise - no, really, it was, considering the fact that I thought I was going to fail the class) and on my last homework, I finally managed to get a perfect score. Of course, there is the homework that I didn't submit at all (that was my breakdown point during this class) and so that's a good one-seventh of one-third of my grade. We'll see. Maybe the extra credit problems will make up for the missing homework. They're awesome. You type in like two commands into MATLAB and print it out, and you get one entire percentage point on your final grade. I bet they're going to get rid of this next quarter.

What else is left? Ah, yes, CS. I have no idea what I'm going to get for this class. The final project came out nicely I believe, although it is quite a CPU hog even on my dual-core machine. However, I really screwed up the last homework. Apart from that, it was normal. So I don't know what I'm looking at. I assume it's a high B of some sort because the final project is like 50% of the grade and there were no exams for this class! Let's see, there is a grading session for the final project today, so we'll get to find out what the professor and TAs think about it.

Next quarter? Nothing too exciting. Going to have the second quarter of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (known as PWR or "Power") and I don't like writing for grades because I'm pathetic at it. So we'll see how that goes, though I'm not keeping my expectations high. There's Chinese again, my saviour and morale-booster. There's Arabic, which is a very interesting language but I don't like their style of teaching (though I'm switching to a different teacher, so we'll see), there's Physics again, which I'll really need to work harder for because it's going to have more difficult concepts next quarter and I really should find out if my TA is male or female and not simply whether s/he is Korean or not. Seunghwa? That sound like a guy to you? Does to me. What else? Ah, CS 154. Yes, that ought to be… interesting. It's another one of those maths courses and it's about Finite Automata and Complexity Theory. Hoping I won't suck completely. It's like CS 103B on steroids and 103B was hard-ish. More office hours for me!

Let's see, on the geek side of things, I actually purchased a copy of Vista Home Premium Upgrade for $89 (plus tax!) and it runs really well on my MacBook Pro. I like it and I think OS X could use a couple of features that it has. Of course, the Flip 3D is completely useless and I simply use the Alt+Tab which also has live previews now. I really like the Sound Manager which allows you to turn down the volume for individual programs instead of the entire system, so you can mute your IM client if you're watching a movie or playing a game. The network stack has been remade of course but it introduces a problem that Vista doesn't acquire IPs from DHCP as well as XP used to because what it does is that, when it wants an IP, it shouts it out to everyone on the router, i.e., sends the message to the broadcast address. That's okay, because all computers do that. However, what it expects is that the router will shout its IP address back to it, which doesn't happen in the routers in my dorm. The routers in my dorm actually whisper the IP back to the computer and Vista doesn't recognize that. Hence, I have to manually configure my IP settings to get Internet until either Microsoft or the IT staff come out with a fix. But, in general, I think it's a solid OS and, as long as it doesn't catch any viruses or spyware, I'll leave it on my MBP for fun and games. Incidentally, I did manage to find a driver for Mac OS X called NTFS-3G which lets the Mac write to the NTFS Windows Vista partition which is extremely useful, and it seems to be stable for now. Hasn't crashed or anything.

So, well, that's the update for now. Looking forward to Harry Potter and the... Deathly Hallows? Yes, in July. So exciting, I'm re-listening to all the books.

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Spiderman in Punjabi
Granted that you have to know either Hindi or Punjabi, but if you do know either, you will die laughing. It's a series, by the way, on YouTube, and goes up until number nine. I definitely recommend watching at least this first one and the last one.

Thanks to Srajan (from Exun) for the link!

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ex
The derivative of ex is just ex again. That's kind of like giving birth to yourself, a very difficult event to achieve, and one that would get you major tabloid coverage.
I'm a bit stupid. Every now and then (by which I mean a total of two times), I take a class and I just don't get it. I'm just sitting there in class not understanding anything and it's so unnerving. I think it's just some sort of denial-based mental barrier that I develop occasionally. Thankfully, in both cases, I've managed to figure things out just in time to avoid disaster. It was worst with a Math class last year in which I actually failed a midterm, but this time my luck's been better. I managed to get my act together for this probability class and now it doesn't feel like a two hundred ton deadweight hanging over my head. I even managed to score respectably over the mean on the midterm and would've done even better if I actually knew how to do differentiation :-þ.

Anyway, this week has probably been one of the smoother, less busy ones. There's no homework due tomorrow as usual, so I'm relaxing a bit, but there is the huge - and I mean, positively gargantuan - CS project that I have to do along with three other people. Yes, it's big enough to need a team of four people, working in a very object-oriented manner with fancy shmancy stuff like CVS repositories and everything. I have to make a basic language parser and execution system by Friday night. Unfortunately, I've taken on some other stuff also - programming stuff - one for my regular job and one for a Student Initiated Courses group, and they need to be finished too. But they should all be good, practical learning experiences. Ah, programming… how I both love and hate you.

Anyway, this is a cool video to checkout, especially if you're Indian (it's not comedy or anything, more patriotic stuff):


Happy March! Oh, and also Happy Chinese New Year! 新年快乐！进步学业！

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Elephant in the way
The elephant is so good!

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The Other Blog
To anyone who visits this place regularly, appearances might suggest that indeed, I have stopped blogging. And it would be a fair judgment. Unfortunately, it's not true. I have started that blog that I thought of starting a little while ago - the one that was anonymous and unknown to all the people I know in this world. And I have been writing detailed entries on it with the highest regularity. I'd say seven massive entries in about nine days, totaling about four thousand written words (most in English). I can tell this anonymous blog anything I like and be sure that it will not judge because, it is, after all, just a fraking blog. It's like the friend I never had. Of course, unlike a friend, it doesn't think and talk and so offers little reassurance or company, but writing out precisely what's on my mind does bring some sort of relief. It's like a pensieve - let's just put it that way. And to boot, I don't bother re-reading to fix errors because, heck, no one's reading. It's convenient.

In other news, well, there is no other news. Except that the goal towards five hundred posts might be approached with extreme slowness due to the fact that I will only be writing one of perhaps ten or twenty entries here instead of there.

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Hail, Stanford, Hail?
I apologize for the horrible pun but that's what's going on outside right now. I wish I had my camera with me so that I could take a very low-timing (maybe 1/2000th of a second) photograph of this. It's amazing...

Also, it took me a while to remember what it was called in English. All I could think of was "Oley pad rahein hain!"

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Time Fries!
First of all, Happy Republic Day! I hope you all watched the parade on TV even if you couldn't make it to India Gate and I hope you enjoyed seeing the Agni II missile. And I hope you stood up at attention when they played the Jan Gan Man. Oh, fun times.

Anyway, this weekend is going to be "hella" busy. It's not even worth the bother to describe what outrageous amounts of work I have. Just trust me on the fact that there is too much of it.

In the meanwhile, I highly recommend visiting the January 26 Crazy Apple Help Desk, which is really hilarious. And while we're on the subject of hilarity, you really have to watch this YouTube video also.

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Bike Tales
So, over the last week and a half, I had even more adventures with my bike. Apparently, the rear tyre had completely broken down. Since it was too expensive to get it repaired, I decided to walk to and between all of my classes, which was actually kind-of fun, although it came at the cost of much annoyance to my roommates who, being honourable gentlemen, couldn't bike away while leaving me following behind when we were going somewhere together, and so had to either walk themselves or ride very slowly. Anyway, that has since been remedied as I bit the bullet and got the tyre replaced yesterday for some unearthly amount that is too painful to mention.

Anyway, things are going well with academic-minded me. As of now, I have only skipped one lecture, with almost a fifth of the term over, and all my homework assignments have been handed in and on time. Also, since I have declared my CS major, I've gotten my very own @cs email address (as mentioned earlier) and also have got access to a lot of stuff in the CS building (like computer labs). And, after a lot of chakkar-lagaoing around my CS advisors (both former and current), I have managed to file petitions for exemption from some basic mathematics and computer science courses whose equivalents I had already completed in school. Hopefully, those will be (a) granted and (b) granted by the end of this week.

In other awesome, email-address-related news, I also have an @rescomp email address now, thanks to my new job at Residential Computing, which is also, by the way, pretty awesome. Of course, being a part of Residential Computing also allows me to do all kinds of neat stuff, but I'll refrain from going on another power trip just now. But yeah, it pays better than the other desk job, although I have other attachments there :-).

Also, yesterday I worked out most of the kinks in my four-year plan at Stanford and I should be able to graduate with B.Sc. The good news is that if I remain on track, I should be able to finish 98% of my B.Sc. by the end of next year, and thus have space for another small major of some sort. Which is why I'm seriously thinking of getting a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese, which, at 43 units, is incidentally the smallest major here.

That, and two things are going away. The first is my iPod Shuffle. After a month and some of ownership, I've figured that I hardly ever use it and prefer my Nano over it in almost every way. So, at approximately 6.30pm tonight, I will have a little more cash than iPod. The second thing that's going away is this journal. Incidentally, it will not be going away at 6.30pm tonight leaving me more cash than journal, but rather once I reach the five-hundredth post (I think I mentioned a while (a while being a couple of years) ago that powers of ten are rather important to humans). And when the five-hundredth post arrives, which should be soon enough, though not in the next couple of days, I will probably aptly entitle it something like "Five Hundred".

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@cs
So, I popped my head into one of my previous class' lecturer's office and said, "Hi, I'm declaring my major; do you think you could be my advisor?", then proceeded to the Advising office, filled out a form with barely four fields and now I'm an officially declared CS major with my very own @cs email address. Sweetness.

Of course, I'm currently dying under a load of homework. By this same time tomorrow, I have to somehow have finished my huge CME problem set, three of whose questions require MATLAB which I have very little experience with.

I'm thinking about applying for some scholarship-type thing that might pay for a summer education in second-year Chinese (in China!). If that works out, it'll be totally awesome. Also, I'm hoping to start my new job soon - Mac OS X Developer, though still not at Apple :-p

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CME
For our probability class, it looks like the professor's going to include something funny and probability-themed at the beginning of every problem set. Here's the first one:
A man who travels a lot was concerned about the possibility of a bomb on board his plane. He determined the probability of this, found it to be low but not low enough. Now he always travels with a bomb in his suitcase. He reasons that the probability of two bombs being on board would be miniscule.
And yes, it's only funny, not true - as in, it doesn't work that way.

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Fifteen Miles
So, I've switched to the new Blogger now, which basically means that all the comments which were posted by people who weren't Blogger members have all become "Anonymous", which is, indeed, a loss. There is also now an ugly blue bar on top that Blogger had thus far refrained to attach to my blog. Sigh… But it also means that I won't have to hit the Republish Blog button - it just happens! (or so they say)

And, in more… relevant… news, I've only now begun to see the consequences of my taking 22 units this quarter (an all-time high, but beating only last Winter, which was 21). I guess this is to make up for last Spring when I totally took it easy at 15 units - wow, those were fun times. Anyway, yes, consequences - well, basically, I'm really glad that this is a three day weekend and there're no classes tomorrow, because I don't see how else it would have been possible for me to finish even a tiny bit of this homework (and, right now, at the beginning of the quarter, it's simple mind you). I have five subjects and they've all assigned homework that's either due on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. It's a lot of work. I've finished two out of the five and those were the small ones. I'm about to start a medium-sized one (physics) now and hopefully find out how the hell I'm supposed to do CME (probability) and CS (Eclipse) which I haven't even looked at. Note to self: this is not going to get easier as the quarter progresses.

Anyway, I have also been pondering the Bing Overseas Program and my desire to study for a quarter in Běijīng. I'm definitely going to apply, although I'm not sure which quarter to apply for because I do also want to be able to graduate… so much planning. But first thing on Tuesday: beg the School of Engineering to give me credit for Mathematics 41 and 42 (Single-Variable Differentiation and Integration) which I am certainly able of doing, because I've done the Math 50s series (the multi-variable dealio) and passed with good grades. But, I'm afraid they're going to be unreasonable and ask me to take an extra 8 units of mathematics somewhere, which would be hideous because I absolutely hate taking classes in the subject.

Oh, and yes, the title of the post. I almost forgot. So, whenever I go back to Delhi, I resume my gymming activity (or so the past two visits to Delhi would prove). This time on, unlike last time, I decided with an extra-strong swig of will that I would continue to exercise once I got back to college, and thus far I have kept my promise. I have been running at the fitness centre every other day for the past week and have run 5 miles each day. Which means that my calves are really aching right now (I'm lying, they were aching but are definitely okay now) but it's a satisfied sort of ache.

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Seoul
This time I flew by Asiana Airlines, Korea-based you know. Which meant that I stopped over at Seoul, in winter-time, which also meant that Seoul was beautiful! Absolutely gorgeous, snow-clad and totally Korean. The snow-clad beauty also meant that it was freezing cold, –7ºC cold (highest 1 and lowest –14). Which is why when I walked out of the comfortably warm airport completely not expecting it, I was like "Oh, aaah…" and then ran coughing towards the hotel shuttle which was again comfortably warm inside.

Yep, they gave me a hotel… in downtown Seoul. The "Seoul Royal" was amazing. My room even had a toilet with one of those electronically controlled toilet seats which are pre-warmed at a specified temperature (low, medium, or high) and they have a built-in bidet which is really awesome. Also, free very high speed internet in the room, both wired and wireless. Korea is awesome high-tech! And the lifts run so fast that they announce that they've arrived on your floor (the ding sound) when they're still displaying the previous floor on the LCD - yep, that fast.

Since I just happened to be in downtown Seoul, I just thought I'd roam about for a bit instead of taking a very highly desired nap. Not a bad decision, though since I was not dressed appropriately for negative seven degrees celsius, I came back after about ten or fifteen minutes having lost feeling in most of my extremities. I did take some cellphone pictures though. Three, in fact, and here they are:



I really wish I had my real camera though. Seoul is an amazingly beautiful city and these silly cellphone pictures do it no justice.

Anyway, Macworld tomorrow!

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Trips to places
Ow. A headache is not the best thing to have when writing an entry but I've taken my dosage of Ibuprofen and there's nothing more I can do about it. But on an exciting note I’m actually writing this entry instead of typing it (a first, I note) because I am using my mother's new tablet PC. On another downward note my brother’s being an ass right now and I can say that, in almost all situations, that is not too much fun (thankfully, his being-assy periods are usually only 16-20 hours long). So let’s see what this extremely discomforted head of mine can spew out as regards the experiences of the past week. On the twenty-sixth, we made our merry way to the domestic airport to catch a flight to Kochi. The flight was long but very bearable since I had with me my laptop - a trusty PowerBook G4 - and a spare battery for it, along with the first two seasons of the rather well-conceived television series “House”. The spare battery meant that, for all practical purposes, the playtime on that computer was ad infinitum. This ample viewing time meant that I’m now fairly addicted to this TV series, although, since there exist barely three seasons of it, and I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait a week between episodes, I don’t think I can properly feed my newfound addiction. Anyway, the flight was pleasant except for when we landed and found out that my Mama (my mother's brother) had had a myocardial infarction while we were airborne (an "MI" to us doctor kids but a "heart attack" to nearly everyone else). That was a quite distressing and we shortened our trip by a few days so that we could get to see him as soon as possible.

The General Impression
When people talk about Kerala, they usually just heap a very liberal amount of praise on top of it, and so I was expecting a bit too much out of the place - like, God's own country or something. To be fair, the weather there is clement throughout the year and the people are really nice. The autowala wanted fifty rupees for a trip to some nearby place and back and we told him it was too much; but, we didn't actually haggle because we were short on time and so we sort-of just accepted his price. At the end of the ride, I handed him a fifty and he gave me a ten back; these people actually have consciences! That, and the food was really good. The place (once you get out of any major city) is incredibly green and beautiful. Going by road is the best way to commute, not because the traffic is good (more on that later), but because the scenery (especially when you cross bridges) is simply breathtaking.

The Driving
Now, here's the problem with traveling in Kerala - their roads are too good. At least for Indians. Like, they're all nicely mettled and everything, which basically means that everyone goes at a minimum 80kmph. Now add a minimum speed of 80kmph (everywhere!) to driving even worse than Delhi's (and that's saying something). What do you get? Something like the movie Speed. Whenever we were traveling, I just tried to either fall asleep or concentrate on an episode of House because watching the road basically doubled my heart rate (did I mention that almost all the roads there are two-way?); and this is when I'm totally okay with Delhi driving. Those were some horrible road trips in which I simply didn't know whether it would be reasonable to assume that I was going to make it to the other end.

The Backwaters
Ah, the much-hyped backwaters of Kerala, which, mind you, if I hadn't visited, I would've been pounded on by a thousand annoying people-who've-been-to-Kerala as to how I missed this not-hidden treasure. Let me tell you the truth - it's shit. And all these people tell you it's good because they're sadistic morons who want you to suffer like they did. We were driven (in the Kerala way) for an hour to get to the village where they dump us into little canoe shaped boats for the ride through the backwaters. By the time I got into the boat, I already had a mild headache from the bus ride. Then, for the next hour, I enjoyed one of the most boring experiences in recent memory. We were in a boat, which was in a river-shaped water body approximately five metres in width, and they simply rowed and rowed and rowed in the most soporific manner ever for sixty excruciating minutes. No commentary, no nothing. The worst part? I couldn't fall asleep! The only thing on my mind was, "Wait, we have to go all this way back to the starting point, right? Because this backwater is not going to be conveniently circular in shape and deliver us back to where we began… although it'd be cool if it would… please…" After what seemed like a good approximation of forever, we reached the end, which was another little village; we saw some women make ropes out of coconut fibre, saw some people make mats out of dried wild pineapple leaves, bought some mats, and then sat again in that dreadful boat. Argh… another hour later we disembarked from that horrible little boat and another hour after that, with my head throbbing painfully, we were back at the hotel. Wow, did that suck or what. Thankfully, ours was the half-day trip that was only about five hours in total. There's apparently also a full-day ten-hour trip, and I honestly fear for the sanity of those who go on it.

Kochi
We went to a place called Mattancherry (pronounced as Mutton + Cherry) which is, as you might agree, an odd enough place name to begin with. It gets funnier though. It's apparently got the oldest synagogue in India or something, built in the 17th century. Know the name of the place where the synagogue is located? Jewtown. Yeah, Jewtown. We went to the synagogue. We found there the only Jewish person we saw in Jewtown and he was… uh, counting money. So amazing!


The entrance for the synagogue was Rs. 2 which was okay (if a bit too meager), but they made us take off our shoes before going inside, which was irritating. They even wanted our shoes off inside the church in Fort Kochi, by which time I was fed up of taking shoes off and simply didn't go inside the church. Screw the fact that Vasco De Gama was buried inside - I don't like grave-viewing too much anyway. Oh but here's something you should definitely visit when you're in Kochi - the Chinese Fishing Nets. They are amazing. You can Google for pictures I'm sure but they're worth seeing in real life, and according to the pamphlet, they've been there for a long-ish while, having been put there with the help of people from the court of Kublai Khan.

We also went to some mountains the next day but it was pathetic and not worth elucidating on. On the 29th, we flew back home and on the 30th, drove to Chandigarh to visit Mama. Mama is thankfully doing well. Now would be a really brilliant time for him to quit smoking. There is such a strong correlation between smoking and heart disease and being Indian and heart disease that smoking and being Indian at the same time gives you basically the same odds of having a natural death as a random person on the Titanic did. Don't smoke? Yeah, good idea.

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Happy Christmas!
I don't believe in the mythology behind it (redundant, I know) but I've heard it's a polite thing to say in the days before and just after the twenty-fifth of December. An atheist also needs to make friends and not wishing people a Merry Christmas or a Happy Diwali is probably not the best way to go about it. Mark you, I've got nothing against the festivals themselves, only what they're based on. Seemingly, humans can't celebrate a decent day like winter solstice (albeit, a bit inaccurately) without a set of cock and bull stories about god's son, and, if I am to humour the right people, I would even be asked to believe that the stories were sent to the Earth by facsimile from heaven. How elaborate.

And this is what irritates me the most. Now, if I were born into a world in which everyone followed exactly the same religion, believed in the same one, true god, etc., I would be a lot more inclined to believe in that one, true god. However, I was born, more fortunately I think, in a world with many different religions, some of which developed independently. This helps me to take the more skeptical stance of, "Well, I'm not that much different from you when it comes to religion except that I believe in one less god than you do." Something convinced you that your religion was the one, true religion and ditto for your god or array of gods, and that convinced me that I had no reason to believe that any of you were referring to any kind of god (true or not) or that "god" even needs to exist.

Christmas is not celebrated today because it's the day Jesus was born. It's just an excuse to celebrate. It's a time to be with family, wear silly hats, give each other gifts and be happy. It's sad that we would need an excuse to do this. I'd much rather celebrate New Year's instead of Christmas just because of this. Also, don't you think it just sounds morally better that you do something good, say donate some money to charity, simply because you feel sympathetic towards the needy and want to help out and not because god is watching you and will reward you if you do good and punish you if you don't? Which one of those sounds better? I don't think about punishment and reward when I buy gifts for people or do something kind and I'm sure you don't either. But perhaps you want to have god as this imaginary friend whom you can always talk to if there's no one else around and feel the divine presence ("oh, I felt Him, I really did!") Maybe god is the imaginary friend which even adults can keep without being embarrassed about it.

God was an invention - a clever one that fulfilled the needs of the day. Those being that anything that could not be satisfactorily explained with logic could be attributed to god. What a great way to go. It's like a perpetual motion machine or the 100%-efficient heat engine; conveniently does a lot of work with little or no effort and, secondly, nonexistent. I would say that god is an invention that ought to have been outdated by now. After all, we've arrived at so many answers to questions with thinking and observation that were previously just left at "that's just how god's world is". To me, it's most insulting to the human race that most of us still need this "god" thing to gobble up those questions that can't yet be answered and to be this being that is listening to your pleas. Pathetic.

We should be able to deal with life for what it is, not planning for some afterlife that's not going to happen. I like churches and festivals and happy times, but I just wish we didn't have some ridiculous pretense to back it up all the time. I don't wish to be condescending but a lot of people do need to grow up.

Merry Christmas! Oh, and Happy Boxing Day too while we're at it!

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回家了
I've just had two exemplary meals and some fresh homemade carrot juice. It's good to be home. Plus, I have big plans for this break. I'm going to go over my French and take the placement test in January, I'm going to learn all the characters from my Chinese textbook (yes, those pesky traditional ones too), I'm going to do something about learning Objective-C and Cocoa (finally?) from the many books I've downloaded. Okay, maybe not all of that because a very sizable week of the already-tiny winter break is going to be spent in the southern reaches of the country. But definitely the French and the characters. I need to do those. The good news is that I have now acquired a whiteboard and some dry-erase markers using which I can practice writing characters endlessly without wasting a single sheet of paper.

The grades situation is looking wonky. Now that I have all my grades for the quarter, it's the fuzzy grades that have significantly outpaced the techie ones and that's not a good sign. I did get the Chinese grade I wanted (yay!) but to keep everything balanced, my CS grade took a dip and has now landed at its first non-A. Sad. I really need to study more. Sigh… why do I hate working so much?! If only I hadn't started so many projects the day before they were due, I might have scraped some sort of an A in CS. Depressingly enough, I think the thing that really makes me happy is good grades and unfortunately, they don't just drop out of the sky. Wish they would…

Still, there's much to look forward to. Like another night's sleep that's not going to end in an alarm clock going off. Gosh, sleeping might be my favourite thing in the world… I'm screwed up.

Also, isn't it awesome how the character for "family" is basically a pig under a roof?

家 (jiā)

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香港国际机场
That reads "Hong Kong International Airport" - so don't bother translating. I have a 15 hours' stop-over here and they wouldn't give me a hotel because my "Special Fare" ticket won't qualify. I don't care - there's free official Internet (with signs all over the place proclaiming so), there's a place that sells an edible veggie burger and loads of Chinese characters that I'm trying to read. The fact that they use traditional characters here doesn't help too much because I'm learning the simplified form. Here's an example with the n-phrase "international airport" in both simplified and traditional (the more complicated one):

国际机场 (Guójì Jīchǎng)

國際機場 (Guójì Jīchǎng)

Some characters are recognizable, some are horrendously different. Anyway, the 14-hour flight to HKIA was pretty good, with like only 2 or 3 hours that I was actually awake. They also honoured my request for an Indian vegetarian meal and I had some tasty stuff, some of which I can't actually put a name to and some that looked suspiciously like idlis. It's really nice how now almost all major carriers honour the request not only for a vegetarian meal, not only for an asian vegetarian meal, but an Indian vegetarian meal. Either people have realized that India exists thanks to all that outsourcing or perhaps our numbers have now become too large to reasonably ignore.

Oh, and I might have sold two iPod Shuffles on my way because both the security officials in both San Francisco and Hong Kong were like, "MP3 Player?" And I was like, "Yes". And then they asked "the new iPod?" I agreed. The SFO guy couldn't believe the thing stored 1GB of songs instead of the 75MB he thought it did (and I actually had to say "one thousand and twenty four megabytes" because apparently "gigabyte" was not in his dictionary); the HKG guy took it better.

Going further back in time, the CS final took place on Friday and it was damn hard. Not harder than expected because I did the practice final they gave out and that was damn hard too. I hope I manage to scrape something respectable, though, in this class, for the first time, I actually doubt it. I don't think I've ever gotten a non-A grade in CS, but with this class, the times are probably a-changing. In another nine and a half hours, the nice peeps at the registrar's office will presumably put up the grades on the Internet for our viewing pleasure, if, that is, you filled out and submitted all the teacher evaluations. If you haven't done so, you'll have to wait another couple of weeks before they show you your grades. Sometimes they achieve their goals by rewards, sometimes by punishment. History has shown that punishment works better. It's also more affordable. In fear of being parted from my grades for what would be an interminable period of time disguised as two weeks, I chose to fill out all the evaluations approximately five minutes after I got the email with the link in it. I don't pray, but those of you who do bother with the procedure, do append a little note at the end of your prayers for my grades, won't you? Thanks.

Also, finals' week was apparently when the time was ripe for watching musicals and plans were made and executed for watching two of them - The Sound of Music and The King and I. The first one I liked, the second one not as much. Western musicals are basically what regular Bollywood movies are, and regular Western movies are "art films" in Bollywood. I'm sure you knew that already, but there's no harm in reiterating. So, basically, there are songs in these movies every three to five minutes that have raison d'être ranging from 0 to negative infinity. That's okay when you have good songs because you like listening to them. On that note, The Sound of Music is where a lot of the "classic" English songs come from (the ones even Indians have heard some time during their lives). Unfortunately, the movie had no appreciable plot. The plot thing is true for The King and I as well except for the fact that I thought most of the songs completely sucked and some of them were rather unbearable. One of my roommates (the one who does not, in fact, read this journal) would call me a hater if I told him my actual thoughts on the matter because he considers the movie a "classic". Anyway, I've acquired the music from The Sound of Music and some of it's going to make its way into my ever-growing My Top Rated playlist. In fact, I think I shall do something about the "ever-growing" part and trim it a tad bit because I no longer enjoy of the tunes in it. That should hopefully eat up some of my time. Also, thank you for participating in my effort of killing time by reading this entry.

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Wish me luck
I'd like to write about how scared I am of the physics final exam tomorrow but I don't have time to flesh out my thoughts any better at the moment, so just wish me luck!

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Four-Year Plan
For a number of days, I had been telling myself that I needed to plan out the remainder of my college days a little better. Knowing what's coming in the future is always a good thing. So, tonight I sat down and finally made my four-year plan (that too in Excel). Before leaving for college, the only other person I talked to about study plans was a Chinese girl who had already planned out, quite intricately, exactly what she was going to be doing for each of the four years in college; I, on the other hand, didn't even know which courses I was going to take for the first term until two weeks before it started! So, making a four-year plan actually made me feel a good deal happier and it looks like I don't have all that many courses to take to survive complete the computer science major. Either way, I do hope to be able to complete some sort of non-technical minor while I'm here and my guess is that it'll be in some language or another. I did take French in school and I'm going to give take the placement test here to find out if it might be worth it to continue it and get some level of proficiency in it ("it" overload!). Even with my sort-of "fetish" for languages though, I don't think Japanese is going to happen simply because I don't have time for it… 我没有时间… I'll just have to content myself with knowing a little bit of Chinese. Oh yes, and speaking of Chinese - I had my Chinese oral exam yesterday and it totally rocked! 10/10 and everything. Now, if only I can get 99% or higher on my final exam, I'll have my first-ever A+. Sigh, that… might not… be happening.

In exciting events - I saw my first Chinese (okay, Mandarin) movie ever, "Hero" and really, really enjoyed it. I'll bring it with me to Delhi over Winter break; it's really good. I also saw Pretty Woman yesterday, which, incidentally, I hadn't seen before. It was a really good movie but I don't see why it's considered such a classic. It's good, but not that good. Did have some really funny moments though; I enjoyed it. Also, Kimberly (of "hating monosyllabic names" fame) bought a Gingerbread House Kit and so, the better part of today's 6-8pm was spent constructing an edible house which used icing as glue to hold it together and included: (a) a chimney that kept falling off until someone mercifully ate it, (b) a little gingerbread man made to look like Santa leaning against the back door, but who was actually a child rapist, (c) a swimming pool full of viscous yellow liquid that was actually butterscotch, and (d) a patrol robot made out of something chewy. That was fun.

Oh, and in other happy news, an Age of Empires II revival is happening here, and starting next term, a bunch of us are going to start playing multiplayer! AoE2 is a totally amazing game which I've been missing out on and this makes me very, very excited. I can't wait 'til our first game.

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Towels
Now, this is not going to be a treatise on towels. And it's definitely not going to be something along the lines of h2g2 because I won't be teaching you how to perform martial arts with your towel or carry emergency vitamins on it. I simply wish to describe what I expect from my towels.

So what makes a perfect towel? Well, first and foremost, it must be very good at absorbing water. That seems to be the raison d'être of the thing anyway. In addition, it must be good at absorbing a lot of it. You know those towels that, as soon as you start drying yourself off, feel like they've absorbed all the water they can and you keep wiping but it feels like nothing's happening? I hate those. A towel must not give the feeling that it's not absorbing water; it makes for a most miserable after-shower experience. Secondly, and this is very important, a towel must have, on either side, a different and distinctly recognizable pattern. One of my towels, for example, is plain on one side and has a pattern on the other. This allows me to maintain the two sides of the towel for different purposes and any reasonable person can see the advantages of that. Thirdly, the towel should not be too soft. In most cases, I've found that towels that are too soft are usually the perpetrators of the first immoral act I mentioned - it doesn't feel like they're absorbing any water. Lastly, you must also get a towel of the right size. Too long and it'll be touching the floor while you're drying yourself off (the very thought makes me shudder); too short and you won't be able to comfortably wrap it around your waist, which will be awkward let me assure you.

Good towels make us happy are an essential part of life and I think it's important to recognize that. This entry celebrates those towels.

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Dead Week
It's that time again. The deep breath before the plunge, the intense apprehension just before gulping down some really bitter medicine, the time spent in an airplane waiting for it to take off… it's Dead Week. Exams begin on Tuesday for me. "Three hundred lives of men I have walked this Earth and now I have no time." It's always like that, isn't it? (And boy do I love that quote!) I hope you caught the reference.

Anyway, tracking back a few weeks, for Thanksgiving break, James and I went to Cincinnati (in the state of Ohio) to spend four very enjoyable days with Kimberly and her family.

Traditional things to eat for Thanksgiving are pies and turkey. Since I couldn't eat turkey, I invested as much effort as possible in the pie department. The day before Thanksgiving, everyone in the house got together and we made three delicious pies - apple, cherry and pumpkin (I've never had pumpkin, and to me, it looks about as appetizing as a three weeks' dead frog that got run over by a car). My part in baking the pies was basically peeling the apples and stirring the sauce, both of which I think I did with aplomb if I may say so myself.

Now usually I'm not a great fan of board-ish games, but this one week I really felt like playing all kinds of the stuff like Catchphrase, Scrabble, Taboo, Telephone Pictionary and The Naked Game™ (sigh, no article on Wikipedia I can link to)… and I had loads of fun playing 'em. Telephone Pictionary is possibly one of the most entertaining and least demanding games I've played and The Naked Game™, with a sum total of ten people including four parents, two of which are Finnish, is simply hilarious.

One of the most satisfying things I did over the course of staying with Kimberly was fixing all the computer problems her dad could throw at me. The best part was that none of them required something weird like tweaking the registry or something that's actually not possible to do without rewriting the OS, but simply things that normal people don't know about and features that are cleverly hidden in Windows. Of course, the fact that they're cleverly hidden might shed some light on the mental stability of Microsoft engineers, or maybe you can just call me a hater. Nonetheless, fixing stuff makes me happy.

Pictures from the trip should be up on Facebook, depicting our adventures in and around Cincinnati… James watching ducks, my glasses fogging up because of the 50º temperature difference between the greenhouse and world outside (Fahrenheit of course; damn these Americans!). Oh yeah, it was pretty cold there… the mercury is basically in love with the freezing point of water in Cincinnati.

Moving a few thousand miles westward, I should probably declare my major as Computer Science at the beginning of next quarter. I'm finally enjoying my CS programming class; unfortunately, it's at the end of the quarter. I just wish I'd gone to office hours for this class in throughout the quarter like I did for my previous CS class because it really does help and makes sure my programs are bug-free and high-scoring. Sigh… those grades are never going to come back. But, moving forward, I'll probably doing Compilers next quarter, which is taught by my very own Academic Advisor and it's rumoured that he half-wrote compiler-theory himself. Oh, there are just too many brilliant people here… way too many. Also, I think I'll continue with both Arabic and Chinese, schedule-permitting, and hopefully do some kind of minor with both of them. Probability Theory? It's this required class I have to take for CS. It's like getting an injection except for the fact that it's going to be like getting an injection every other day for three whole months and a bad grade to top it all off. Winter's not looking too hot for me. Nyeh, heh.

But, sigh, I'll just have to suck it up… for now, let me get to my first "take-home exam" ever… I'm excited.

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Eternal
Since Monday, I had been dreading the Thursday-Friday period. All week, I'd been trying to get all my work done so that I could study for the physics exam (which shall henceforth be referred to as the "paper") since it covered a wide variety of topics and would probably be very difficult. Surprisingly, I did succeed to some degree in that I managed to finish my computer science assignment a shocking twenty-four hours before the deadline, and I'd finished an assignment this early only once before. However, the rest of the plan did not work out as fantastically. By dinner time on Thursday, physics had still not begun to teach itself to me. Of course, this wasn't all. The next day, I had four classes to attend. Three of those four would either include or consist entirely of, a paper, a quiz or a test. On top of this, there was also the longest physics problem set in living memory to begin and end. I knew I was in trouble. To cut the story rather short, I was up until seven-twenty "Thursday night" studying for that dastardly paper along with that blasted quiz and that despicable test not to mention finishing that devil-concocted problem set. Fifty minutes of sleep later I was on my way to give that paper*.

That physics paper went so badly that there is just one other exam I can compare it to, which was a mathematics one I gave last winter, on which I received a whopping nine out of a hundred, and shortly after (a week later), proceeded to give the final exam on which I received a ninety-two. I have no idea what my grader must have thought about the graph of my marks in that class (on the y) versus time (on the x) because it would have been a sharper V than any I have seen. But that was due to lack of skill and much less frustrating than this one which was simply due to lack of time. I believe I had the ability to do all the questions, but for the fact that this paper, which consisted of four very long sets of questions, was to be completed in fifty minutes instead of the one-hundred and fifty that would have better befitted a paper of such magnitude and complexity. Severely trying it was and little happiness did it add to my day.

The remainder of the day was fairly clement however. The test and the quiz both went remarkably well, though none more remarkable than I expected I might add. I had finished the problem set much earlier (if six in the morning can be appreciably considered as "much") and there was only one hour of work at the library which was actually quite productive as I managed to reset a password which my benevolent (and usually flawless) employer had forgotten.

However, the highlight of the day was the Chamber Chorale Concert I attended that evening. One of the sopranos in the choir was none other than the selfsame Kimberly whose name appears under The House of Lords and is usually near the top of the list. The beginning or introduction, call it what you may, was quite marvelous. So magical, in fact, that it had rather a numinous grandeur to it. I won't bother describing the actualities because I am nowhere near as gifted an author as would be required to give it even a fair correspondence in words. But the introduction was not even nearly all of it of course; as the word suggests, it was but the beginning. The rest of the concert was also unsurpassed in splendour. The singing was so pleasing to the senses that I might have spent an eternity just sitting there listening. And if this is what I think at the end of a day with a sum total of fifty minutes of sleep and one really bad paper, I should like it very much to go to another of these charming events with my mind more at rest and my body less in want of slumber. Thankfully, the choir actually sings a rather lot and I might not have to wait too long for the opportunity to do so. If you read Kimberly's journal, you'll notice that she talks an awful lot about her choir; after Friday night's performance, I don't see how anyone wouldn't.

A note on the use of the words "give" and "take" with respect to exams in the American context
They take their verbs seriously here. My casual construction of the sentence including the phrase "give that paper" would actually make the educated Westerner look twice and realize that the word in question should actually be "take"; and, if I too gave it more careful thought, I'd agree. Giving the paper would actually imply making it or handing it out; back home, however, I would have used the expression "making the paper" and "invigilation" to describe these two tasks, and as one doesn't often find himself assigned the task of making a paper as a student, the confusion usually never arises in addition to the fact that teachers never used the phrase "giving an exam". Thus have I been accustomed to pay little heed to whether I am using "give" or "take" in this context and use whichever occurs to me more naturally. Give. Return

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It's Friday again!
I think these four years of my college life (of which one-fourth I've already spent) are going to just whoosh past me just like deadlines for Douglas Adams. It just makes me sad because I really like college and I wish I could spent more time here. I think it was somewhat the reverse for school until I reached Class XII. The speed at which the weeks just flash by is simply ludicrous. It's just class… homework… test… sleep… quiz… midterm… final… project… and perhaps a little bit of fun-and-games somewhere in the middle. Lo and behold, ten ridiculously short weeks later, it's the end of a quarter… one of three. Three of those and a whole year is done. Three more of those and I'll have graduated. And doing what? Lord knows what.

Also, for all I know, I might be on my way to becoming a fuzzy (non-engineering). I'm taking precisely four classes this year. One physics, one computer science, and two languages. The physics class has a boring professor and I haven't attended the last, I don't know, twelve lectures?! Wow. That boring, huh? Uh huh. The CS class? Interesting stuff. But… since this is the beginning of those CS classes which now definitely lead towards the CS major, the marking is horrible and I'm getting really bad grades in it. So very depressing. The one thing I was good at… and now I'm going to suck at it. The two language classes? Going beyond brilliant. I enjoy them thoroughly. I can always get myself to do homework for those classes but I never feel like doing physics or CS homework. CS usually gets done a day before. And physics? Two hours before the deadline. I know I'm going to be a CS major - hell, I'll force myself to become one and tackle that Algorithms class sometime next year, but if I honestly enjoy these fuzzy language classes more than techie ones, am I cheating myself? Wish I knew.

Hell, Exun's this weekend and I was supposed to submit questions for quiz and crossword but thanks to three tests this week and a pile of homework? Nothing. Way… too… fast. I feel bad.

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閔士睿
Wow, it's been a while. Two weeks of midterms and projects, quizzes and "tests".
It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.

And thank you WikiQuote. Ah, I'm going to miss Dumbledore in the next and last book; all those quotes I could have memorized. And here's a theory that says Dumbledore never actually appeared in Book Six.

After the Chinese midterm, I was really excited that I'd guessed one of the answers and I really wanted to write about it and talk about how genius and elegant the Chinese system of writing is. But since I didn't get time to do that, I guess I'll do it now. So, as you might or might not know, Chinese words are written in Chinese characters. Each character represents precisely one syllable in the language (since a lot of the simple words are only one syllable long, a lot of words are just a single character). We are supposed to memorize the writing of most of the characters in our Chinese textbook; however, there are about five or six in each lesson that are meant for "recognition only". So, while studying for the midterm, I practised the writing of most of the Chinese characters but forgot to look into the "recognition only" ones. And Chinese words are not like English words that you can memorize at a glance; it takes a little while. Which is why I was at a total loss when I saw the following word on the exam that I was supposed to translate to English:

记者 (Jìzhě)

The first thing that came to my mind was that I'd never seen these characters and that maybe the teacher had made a mistake and I should go ask her if this wasn't an error. But then, I knew my teacher and knew that I could hardly expect her to make a gross error like this. And going to ask her would prove that I didn't know the character while at least now I had the chance of guessing, though admittedly it was a faint one. So, I tried to think of characters I knew that looked similar and what they sounded like. That's because a huge majority of Chinese characters are actually not simple pictograms but "pictophonetic compounds" which means that one part of the character gives the character its meaning and the other part gives it its sound. The second character, this respect was problematic because I'd only seen it as a part in another character 都 (dōu) and never on its own. So, my best bet was now the first character. The second part of the first character reminded me of the last character in the Chinese word for "I'm sorry" - 起 (qǐ). I also knew that the first part of 记 (jì) was the "speech" radical and thus was probably the meaning part. So, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to assume that the second half of both characters denoted the sound. If so, the sound would be qǐ (chhee or छी in Hindi). Now, this is where a limited vocabulary helps, because I just had to think of a word that I knew that began with a qi sound. The closest I got was jìzhě (reporter). I knew it wasn't too far-fetched because the sound parts in Chinese characters are not very strictly adherent and that the qi I was looking for could actually be qi, ji or xi as they are part of the same family of sounds just like क ख ग घ (xi is pronounced as shee or शी). So, I put down "reporter" and moved on. When I finally got back to my computer, I fired up TextEdit and typed in jìzhě to see what character came up and bingo! That was pretty freaking sweet.

Ah, that was the high point of my midterms. The CS midterm just took place on Thursday and I'm somewhat anxious to find out whether I totally messed up or did decently. The CS class I'm taking now is the one in which potential majors get separated out from the hobbyists. It's a centrifuge of sorts for the CS department. After this class, you know whether you're a CS major or not. I like this class.

I watched my first Indiana Jones movie on Friday (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and it was quite decent. We also watched the original Star Wars trilogy last night and that was pretty awesome too. मुझे अपने दो रूममेट्स के साथ फ़िल्में देखने में बस एक कष्ट है और वह यह है कि यह लोग फ़िल्म देखते वक्त ना खुद एक शब्द बोलते हैं ना किसी और को बोलने देना चाहते हैं। कुछ भी कौमेंट मारो तो इनसे झेला नहीं जाता। ऐसी भी बात नहीं है कि फ़िल्म चल रही है और तुम अपनी लाईफ़ स्टोरी सुना रहे हो। इनसे तो फ़िल्म के बारे में भी बात नहीं कर सकते। और यह भी नहीं कि हम Red Violin या Black जैसी कोई बहुत emotional फ़िल्म देख रहें हों। इन्हें तो Star Wars और Indiana Jones में भी बिलकुल शांति से बैठ कर Lucas की कहानी देखनी है। कुछ ज़्यादा ही serious बन्दे हैं। हे भगवन।

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॥शुभ दीपावली॥
OK, so the most depressing thing (well, not really, but let's imagine so) happened today. I got a ticket for jumping a Stop sign on my way to work… but wait, I was on a freaking bicycle! Yeah, that kind-of ticked me off, but hey, at least now you'll see me slowing down slash actually stopping at Stop signs. The world's a safer place I'm sure. I do have to answer a summons from the court though. Eech.

Meanwhile, I've started playing Escape Velocity Nova (or EV Nova) again and it's really this simple-yet-fascinating, addictive-yet-not-exactly-glueing game that's real fun to play. I suggest you give it a try. It used to be Mac-only but's now been ported to Windows as well. The developers have put in a tonne of work into this game and it is very, very, very detailed. I just love it for all the detailed descriptions and pictures of all the planets and systems. According to the developers, a total of 75000-manhours (8.5-manyears) were spent in making the game. That's a lot and it's easy to see where all the work went. This kind of stuff requires time, yes, but also creativity. There are also a whole bunch of references to a whole bunch of things in the game. One lot that I obviously notice are the Lord of the Rings ones. Every once in a while, a ship named Galadriel will send you a Hello message and there's a star system with two planets, Thror and Thraine. There're also references to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; for example, every now and then, you'll see a ship that's intriguing and blue in colour; it's name is ShadeOfBlue and it's Hyperactive. Ah, ye gots to tries it… (oh, and also, these people haven't ceased development; the latest version (1.0.10) introduces Intel support!)

Oh yes, and Happy Diwali. दीपावली के शुभ अवसर पर hope you had fun and all that. Apparently, it's a national holiday in Singapore. Ain't that sweet? I did go out for dinner at an Indian restaurant with some family friends here and it was good. I also spent six hours at work today because I didn't have anything to do and probably made and received a billion phone calls along the lines of "Happy Diwali". Sigh, no firecrackers here, no fireworks, but what I miss the most are the hundreds of दिये (diyas) and candles I used to light and line up in a row. And I used to do that with my brother and we had loads of fun but… I haven't done that since 2002 (since he went away to college). The last Diwali I celebrated in Delhi:


Yeah, I made my very own स्वास्तिक (Swastik), yet that Diwali was still kind-of sad too because (a) we moved to a ground floor house and thus no lighting-candles-on-the-rooftop and (b) lack of brother.

Oh yes, and to standardize speech terminology as well as to give myself a morale boost every now and then, I've now decided to define all kinds of sleep as naps. This means that I'm always taking a nap when I'm asleep and there's no distinction between the afternoon sleep and the aftermidnight sleep. They're both just "naps". Plus, these days, they both last almost the same duration of time anyway, so… It feels so much better when you're going to bed at five-thirty and have to get up at eight if you tell yourself that, in nap-terms, two-and-a-half hours is huge! Then you go and take more four continuous hours of classes, including one midterm and go on to work for another couple of hours before coming home and taking another nap. Sleeping is probably one of the most fun things I do and that's probably why my weekends go away so quickly. :-D

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The Final Countdown
Unrelated story first: this would be the ninth of september. We were driving to see प्यार के साईड इफ़ेक्ट्स (Pyar Ke Side Effects), and on the way, this song ना तुम जानो ना हम (Na Tum Jano Na Hum) was playing on the radio and with all the god-given brain power I possessed, I was trying to remember which film the song was from, and I just couldn't… and I knew I knew it; so that was really frustrating. But then, my mother, who was driving, asked me "यह किस फ़िल्म का गाना है?" ("Which film is this song from?") and I instantly replied "कहो ना प्यार है" ("Kaho Naa Pyar Hai"). I quite literally gave myself the tiniest of shocks. I knew the film but I couldn't coax it out of myself. It took an external impetus to get me to say the name. That was just weird; I mean, I happen to be the person in possession of this information and it is actually accessible to everyone but me. Perfectly ludicrous.

Anyway, I was sitting at work today and it was nearing midnight and I said to myself, "Y'know this algorithms class… admit it, you're really not up to it and believe me, you're going to end up failing every exam in it" and I replied, "Damn right I'm failing it." Which is when I logged in to Axess and dropped the class. I also added a class 11 minutes before the Add Deadline but I'm not saying what it is. بسم الله الرحمن يلرحيم

Also, dropping this algorithms class will probably prevent my begetting of a brain tumour; this class was seriously way over my head. I mean, I've been in classes in which I've scored badly on the exams and the homework assignments have been extremely challenging, but I've always been able to keep up with what the guy's saying in lecture. But here, the lecturer's saying to the class, "Please answer; this is not a trick question; it's actually very simple." and I'm like "I have no clue what you're on about." Probably a bad sign. It's a junior-level class and I'll take it next year when I'm more comfortable with books that weigh three kilos.

Also, I finally have batteries (yes, plural, I have two) for my PowerBook G4 that are actually guaranteed not to explode. For the past two weeks, I have been using one that could have exploded just about any time and killed me. Sure, I would've gone out with a bang (that too in physics lecture or something) but it would've been sad and unfortunate. Besides, I prefer a death in which I get impaled by three black arrows like Boromir did and having some fancy dialogue with the King of Gondor before making an exit stage up… or something… along those lines. Also, now that I have two batteries, I can use my laptop continuously for about eight hours. Cool or what?

Oh, and also, my handwriting is actually being admired here. Can you believe that? Ce n'est pas possible. It amuses me no end because back in UAE, my handwriting was considered shit. Back in Delhi though, yeah, the handwriting scene was pretty bad (our school didn't exactly emphasize…) and I considered mine to be "neat" if nothing better (at least amongst the male population). Here, for the first time, I've heard my F's and I's being called "hot". Yeah, it made me happy. Also, my Chinese teacher likes my handwriting in Chinese. She wrote 你的汉字很好 (Your Chinese characters are very good) on one of my homework assignments and it made me glad beyond words. Gosh, I wish I didn't need praise to make me this happy. Oh for cathartic releases through blogging! I'm just not good at too many things.

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Weekend
Wow, it's been a really busy week. And even though I can complain that it was because we had two quizzes and two homework assignments for Chinese this week, I would mostly be lying because Chinese really isn't a lot of work at all. But, I don't want to ask anyone else in the class whether they share my opinion because I might come off looking like a jerk. Both homework and quizzes make me memorize the Chinese characters which is awesome because it's fun to read and write them. Anyway, yes, straying back to the original topic, thankfully there was no Algorithms homework this week because it would've been the death of me. I did have a Paradigms assignment which was thankfully small enough to get completed within five hours in the wee hours of Thursday morning (sans code commenting of course). And then there was the Physics problem set which caused the most nuisance this week and made me stay up till five yesterday and didn't even let me have the satisfaction of finishing it. No, I had to skip the CS lecture, not for sleep or pleasure, but to finish the Physics problem set so that I could submit it and get to work by… <oops, got distracted by a game of Tetris in which I just beat my own long-standing high score>… 1pm. Yeah, that was a race against time; I finished the PS at 12:47, left the dorm at 12:49, went to Hewlett to drop the assignment and reached work at precisely 1:00pm… which was good because there's this bonus you get at the end of the quarter if you made all your shifts on time and 1:01pm would've been bad news in that respect.

Four hours of work and I was completely exhausted, had dinner, started watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (with Wizard People commentary) with a couple of friends but was so sleepy that I couldn't finish watching that and went to take a nap instead. Got up from the nap about five hours ago and the room was empty; my curiosity did not compel me to call someone and ask where everyone was because my chain of thought was interrupted by an invitation to play DotA, which I gladly accepted. And now that I've made another high score in Tetris, it looks like this week's purpose has been fulfilled.

Oh yeah, and I went to this career fair on Tuesday. It made me realize how similar career fairs, glasses of milk and friction are - all quite necessarily but most undesirable. But, cool thing was that, at the Apple booth-stall-thing, instead of giving business cards, they gave away "One free song" iTunes Store cards (which actually haven't been updated and are still living in the "iTunes Music Store" era) and so today I ended up downloading Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a really beautifully sung song by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (good thing I don't have pronounce stuff while typing).

And yeah, those red iPod nanos? So not interesting.

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