Category: Life

Another long day


As the quarter comes to and end, the effective duration of the days tends to infinity! :-D

For the first time in the quarter I didn’t read a paper properly for Alex’s class. Actually I completely forgot about the paper yesterday and it came to my head just as I tucking into bed late last night. Then today morning I got help up due to various things and reached school at around noon.

Even after that I wasn’t able to concentrate on the paper, because I started playing around with Apache 2 and then ended up wasting a lot of time trying to setup PHP and Perl with it! Sheesh!!!

Anyways, now that thats out of the way, I can atleast focus on the more important things. I’m finally beginning to get a hang of what direction should things take for the project for Alex’s class. Basically we’re trying to validate Modelnet, but at the same time I’m also hoping to develop some tools and scripts which will prove to be useful later on as well.

I’ve to do a lot of work for the bio project as well, but somehow it just isn’t happening. Even Pavel doesn’t know the answer to most of my questions. The algorithm is still unfinished, I have no data sets to test it on, I don’t know how to validate it. Basically, its a gloomy picture. The only good thing is that hopefully I won’t have to make a terribly long presentation on it!

Off to bed for now

The evil of procastrination


I guess without doubt the greatest evil that a grad student is faced with is procastrination. I mean, here I am, with a week to go for the quarter, and struggling with both my courses. Where I should have been comfortably making presentations and reports. Not that I couldn’t have, but just that I haven’t. All due to procastrination. Not that I have anyone else but me to blame, but the temptation to wile away time doing useless things is just irresistible.

I’ve decided that today I will try to finish as much of the bio project as possible, and I will leave it at that. Because I really need to get working on the presentation, as well as finish work for other project. Besides, the bio class is just a breadth course, and so long as Pavel is not complaining, I don’t have much to lose. Anyways, we’ll see how it goes. I also booked my tickets for home today. So thats a good thing. But somehow I’m not feeling so good about is as I should be. I guess its just the end quarter slump effect. Hopefully in two weeks I will be jumping around happily and shopping and preparing for the trip home :)

The best blog?


A recent Slashdot story [[http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm|talked about a comparison]] between the various blogging systems out there. The author has conducted a fairly thorough breakdown in terms of features, licensing, cost etc. Until some time back, [[http://movabletype.org/|MovableType]] used to be the de-facto platform for personal bloggers. However, due to a recent change in their licensing policy, people have stared looking at other options.

Personally, I’m quite happy with my choice of WordPress. Apart from the fact that its open source, matches feature to feature with MovableType, has a flourishing online support community, extensible plugin architecture and active development, atleast for me, the win in favor of WordPress comes from the fact that it comes as a Debian package. Though I consider myself to be a power user, and have no inhibitions with hacking compiling my own stuff, atleast for my server machine I prefer stable prepackaged binaries. Especially if you’re working with Debian, there’s nothing better than an apt-gettable package. Go WordPress!

I’m a linguist (again!)


The last time I was on a language learning spree was back at IIT Kanpur. We had this course in our 3rd year, called Programming Languages, Tools and Techniques. It was like a crash course whirl-wind tour of a myriad of, well, programming languages, tools and techniques — Perl scripting, CGI, shell scripting, decoding ELF files, latex etc etc.

Somehow things worked themselves in such a way that this quarter I got to lay my hands on two entirely new and really funky languages — [[http://python.org|Python]] and [[http://rubycentral.com/|Ruby]]. Though Python is not as funky as Ruby, I really love it. Ruby is darn cool! And I think I will have occasion to visit our old friend Perl. I found some great links on scripting languages:

* [[http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/scripting.html|John Ousterhout on Scripting Languages]]
* [[http://www.ifi.uio.no/in228/lecsplit/|Notes on problem solving using high level scripting languages by Hans Petter Langtangen]]

I feel wasted


As was I chasing random links through the web, I ran across the page(s) of this kid — [[http://www.aaronsw.com/|Aaron Swartz]]. If you think the name is funky, then wait till you find out more. Here’s what his website says:

> Aaron Swartz is a teenage writer, coder, and [[http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#WHAT_IS|hacker]]. He was a finalist for the ArsDigita Prize for excellence in building non-commercial web sites at the age of 13. At 14 he co-authored the [[http://purl.org/rss/1.0/|RSS 1.0 specification]], now used by thousands of sites to notify their readers of updates. He’s a member of the W3C’s [[http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/RDFCore/|RDF Core Working Group]] which is developing the format for the Semantic Web and [[http://www.creativecommons.org/aboutus/people#15|Metadata Advisor]] to the [[http://www.creativecommons.org/|Creative Commons]]. He’s also the author of rss2email, xmltramp, HTML diff, and html2text.

Beat that! I feel so wasted!! I’m 22, and what have I accomplished? Nothing :-O argh!!! Anyways, this is something I keep worrying once every few months. And its good reason to kick back from self derogation and get back to doing some productive work :-)