Floating Sun » gradlife

Blue balls

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:36:31 +0000

Most Americans I talk to feel that I was raised here, because I don’t have the “Indian accent”. I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that cultural differences can show up in the least unexpected places. I’m reminded of an incident that happened in my second year in grad school.

We were working on a paper, and my advisor asked me write a section giving an overview of our implementation. In particular, he wanted me to come up with some good visuals to depict what was going on. So I fired up Inkscape and drew a figure. My figure had a few big prominent markers. Now I’m not too creative when it comes to color schemes. In other words, when I think of “color”, I start from Red, Blue and Green (RGB). Not surprisingly then, I drew my markers in red and blue. Prominent and easily distinguishable.

Now, it so happened that my markers were circular in shape. This was primarily because circles are really easy to draw in Inkscape, and one of the first shapes you see on the toolbar, and also because I didn’t pay too much attention to the shape of the markers. Naturally then, in the corresponding text describing the figure, I had the phrases “red balls” and “blue balls” sprinked all over the place.

I happily sent out the first draft to the faculty on the paper. In our next meeting, everyone came in looking very funny and laughing over something and I had no idea what they were laughing about. I felt so left out, like there was some secret joke that I had missed out on. Well, it turns out that “blue balls” has an entirely different connotation that I had never heard of back in India. Now, imagine a formal academic paper on virtualization talking in terms of red and blue balls. No wonder everyone found it so funny.

Lesson of the story: choose your colors, and your shapes, very very carefully :)

History of Computing

Diwaker Gupta — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:07:00 +0000

This quarter I’m taking a class on the [[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590a/06au/|History of Computing]]. This is a distributed course, held simultaneously at [[http://www.ucsd.edu|UCSD]], [[http://www.cs.washington.edu|UWash]], [[http://research.microsoft.com|MSR]] and [[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu|Berkeley]]. Earlier in a similar setup I have done classes on [[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/04au/|IT and Public Policy]] and [[http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/05au/|Homeland Security]].

My experience in the past two classes has been good. In particular I really enjoyed the IT and Public Policy class. For this history of computing class we have an impressive ensemble of speakers, including Steve Wozniak, Butler Lampson and Ray Ozzie. To make the class fun (and to make sure I pay attention), I’ve decided to live blog the lectures that I attend. Tonight is the first class, so be sure to check back!

So much for academic integrity

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:17:00 +0000

This is pretty depressing actually, though I don’t yet know the full details of the “survey”: And the grad students most likely to cheat are… | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

Back

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:16:30 +0000

Wow. Its been only 10 days, but it seems like forever since I last wrote anything here. Infact, for the past week I’ve been so cut off from the outside world, missing my lunches, not following the news (no, not even Slashdot). But its all finally over, and hopefully I will catch up with my life in the next couple of days.

In unrelated ramblings, I was really shocked by the Pramod Mahajan shooting incident. Some brother he’s got. Why is there so much violence in this world?

The Power of Procrastrination

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 02:26:46 +0000

I just got back from the [[http://www.phdcomics.com/speaking.htm|Power of Procrastrination]] talk by [[http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~jgcham/|Jorge Cham]] of [[http://www.phdcomics.com/|PHD Comics]]. The talk was superb! Jorge managed to keep a packed audience entertained for a full hour with jokes on almost every slide and some “real” messages thrown in for good measure.

Apart from all the obviously //should-not-be-taken-seriously// material, Jorge’s main point was that if you’re feeling stressed out, anxious, depressed, lonely at some point in your graduate career, don’t take it to heart. Its not unusual, and you’re one of thousands of graduate students who go through the same thing. So **just relax**, and when the time is right, you will graduate :-)

I haven’t been reading PhD comics for a while now — I figured I’ll just buy the third book when it comes out (I already have the first two). If you’re a graduate student and you haven’t heard of PhD comics yet, its time to take some action! Go [[http://www.phdcomics.com/comics|read it now]]! You’ll love it, its just fabulous. Though to really appreciate the strip fully you need to have experience grad school yourself, it might still be enjoyable for a wider audience, so give it a shot.

Oh, and his slides were //superb// — god job Jorge!

UCSD Graduate Student FAQ

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:07:29 +0000

I have moved the [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/articles/ucsd-graduate-student-faq/|UCSD Graduate Student FAQ]] to the blog — please update your bookmarks.

NSDI

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 20:11:23 +0000

I got the official confirmation yesterday — my paper on the time dilation stuff has been accepted for NSDI ’06! I’m happy, because its my first, first-authored paper in a respected systems conference :-) Sadly though the conference is in San Jose (unlike the last two conferences I attended, which were in Europe!).

I Passed!

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:41:16 +0000

Phew. //So// relieved. My advisor told me:

> It was a great talk. But the worst you ever gave.

Nice. But what the hell, I passed! And given the last minute preparation I did, I’m not complaining :-)

Wish me luck

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 23:30:44 +0000

I’m taking my [[http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/gradedu/advising/exams/researchexamination.html|research exam]] on Monday morning. Its titled “Resource Isolation in Virtual Machines”.

Last few days have been busy preparing the report and working on the slides. Everytime I think I’m in good shape something happens and shakes me up! Arghh! Can’t wait to get it over with. Then I can start shopping for my India trip :-)

How to attend a conference?

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:57:43 +0000

I was recently in [[Google>Brighton]] for [[Google>SOSP]]. For those of you who don’t know about SOSP, its the premiere conference in systems and networking (more systems, less networking). Its very competitive (20 papers selected out of 150 odd submission or so) and the who-s-who of the community are there to attend. Naturally its a great opportunity to be there and see all these people in action.

This was my first SOSP and I think the biggest lesson I took away from this conference was that you should never attend a good conference unprepared. Some things to keep in mind:

* true, you might be on a paid vacation, but you can always go back to Hawaii or Cancun or whatever. But good conferences (SOSP happens every 2 years) are hard to come by, and you’ll attend only so many of those before its time for you to market yourself for a job when you’re about to graduate. So you do want to make the best of it.
* Never, //ever// sleep in a talk. You might be jetlagged, tired, hung over from last night’s booze — whatever the cause, don’t sleep there in front of everyone. If you are sleepy, go to your room and sleep there.
* Try to attend all talks. Its hard, but not impossible. While you’re at it, try to //listen// in all talks. SOSP turned off wireless during the sessions, and I think it worked out pretty well. When you don’t have a laptop in front of you, there’s not much choice but to listen.
* Prepare, prepare, prepare: I can’t emphasize this more. Its critical to be prepared. You don’t want to sound like jack-ass in front of all the big shots there, do you? Try to read the papers. Or the abstracts at least. Definitely read the papers that are relevant to your research. Do some background work on the authors — what have they worked on before, what are they working on now, who are they working with, where are they from etc. Knowing a little bit about the people you might/want to meet will definitely pay off.
* //Do not// go and blabber garbage with someone famous, just to get them to talk to you. As Stefan says, its not important how many people you know. Its important how many people know //you//. While some may disagree with this, but personally I don’t like going up and talking to someone unless I really have something meaningful to say. Maybe about their talk. Or about their paper. Or about their student. Or about their birthplace. //Something//.
* Network, network, network: This is easier than it sounds. Some people are born naturals. Others have to work at it (I’m latter). But hopefully you won’t have to do too much. Two rules of thumb help: avoid sticking together with your own flock; and when in company of strangers, at least introduce yourself and try to get to know them. Hopefully over a few dinners and social events, you would have built enough critical mass so that conversations will flow naturally.

Just some things I realized I should keep in mind for my next conference, and approach it in a more systematic way than I did this time. The 3 days at SOSP were quite useful — I met a lot of people, I got to talk about my work a little, and I got the first “taste” of the systems community. I came back from SOSP a little more inspired and a little more motivated :-)