Tagged: gradlife

2 more days…


The days are long and the nights longer. The NSDI deadline is monday and I just can’t wait for it to get over. The frustrating part is that I’m neither writing new code nor testing my own. Instead I’ve spent most of the last week just trying to get some other system to perform “normally” so that I have a good baseline. Only //then// do I get to the part where I can actually run my own code.

I really don’t like this part of research work. Debugging is fine. Performance evaluation is good, so long as I know what I’m evaluating. But running someone else’s code and trying to figure out where the bottlenecks are can get a bit frustrating. To be fair, I’m getting all the help I can from the guys who wrote this other piece of code, but I just don’t like this feeling.

Anyways, 2 more days to go and then I’ll be taking it easy for almost 2 weeks.

…. must…. keep…..trying….

Modern Cryptography


I’m taking a class on [[http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/cse207/index.html|Modern Cryptography]] this quarter, and it is //so// cool. Its not easy, mind you. I have problems doing almost all homeworks, but nonetheless its fun. For one, it gives me a chance to excercise the grey cells a bit, otherwise I feel I’m just rusting out, you know. Secondly, I’ve been meaning to learn some cryptography for quite a while now and this seemed like a good starting point.

Besides, [[http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/|Mihir]] is an excellent teacher. He’s a bit particular about the writing though — it has to be formal, concise, with all notation and formalisms — which is nice, actually. Just today Kashi and I were discussing how such formal writing is useful in writing up systems material as well.

Ok, back to work now. 6 days to go.

Going going…


I had thought that this whole month I would try to maintain atleast one blog entry a day. As you can see, it hasn’t quite worked out as planned. But then, what does?

Anyways, last few days have been not uneventful, but nothing very exciting either. For one thing, now I have an excuse for not doing any more “academic” work, since I’m quite “busy” in preparing for my upcoming India trip :D I had my last (well, almost) meeting with Amin on Wednesday. Its really a shame that he’s been really busy last 2 weeks, otherwise I would have definitely gotten more work done. I mean its not that I have been completely wiling away my time, but you know, having the advisor around always help.

I believe productivity is often directly proportional to accountability; unless of course the individual in question is self motivated, in which case it doesn’t matter anyways. Other than that I’ve been doing a bit of shopping. Got a whole bunch of chocholates for my kiddie cousins, an MP3 player, and spruced up my “computing environment” at home a bit.

First I bought a nice set of speakers — the Altec Lansing 221 from Buy.com. Then I’d been wanting to buy a nice big external HDD to solve the storage problem and also to make backups of my laptop before I leave for India — so I bought a Western Digital 160 GB 7200 RPM external HDD with USB and Firewire support. A bit pricey at 180 bucks I thought, but its a one time investment (I hope!)

Other than, nothing much really. Saw “Kyun! Ho Gaya Na?” — not worth writing a review about, and that should say it all. Also saw “The Village” — thought Shyamalan is afraid to try anything new and just wants to stick to “oh-the-big-suspense-ending-you-never-expected”; but now most people go into his movies spending each second of the movie thinking about all the weird kinds of things that could be the final surprise; and I’m afraid in this one it was all too easy to figure out. But a nice watch, nonetheless.

Have to get done with some paper work, and put a lot of stuff in order before I leave. So will be spending the weekend doing that. And some more movies, not to mention! :)

Birthday bash


Yesterday was yet another birthday bash. Ragesh this time. Poor guy got GPLed not once, not twice, but **thrice** in a night! After much digging we managed to get a plain, vanilla cake for him with no chocolate at all. The cake looked really beautiful, but sadly it didn’t taste as good. Well, as long as Ragsy can finish it off, I don’t really care.

We are having the real party tonight — everyone figured friday night much batter than thursday night for a party. We also have the AIGS movie show tonight — they’re showing Angoor. I’m not sure if I’m gonna go, I’ve already seen Angoor many times, and they’re charging 10 bucks for it! :-O

This whole week has been more or less non-productive. Well of course the paper got accepted, and I’ve been spending most of my time last few days getting the camera ready version ready. However, I could have got some more work done had our NFS server not crashed. Well the problem was much worse, and the timing could not have been better.

See this week we had three deadlines — MASCOTS, WORLDS, and HotNets. Now the service contract for the RAID array of our NFS server expired on July 31st. On August 3rd, the RAID controller of our server crashed, and since the service contract had expired, the company said that they won’t be able to provide 24/7 support or even an instant replacement. So there we were, paper deadlines looking, with nothing better to do than to wait.

The CSEHelp team along with the sysadmin’s really pulled off an amazing feat in the next few days. They started off by restoring the web pages and the project CVSes. Next in line were the critical home directories (and mine was one of the first to be restored B-) :D ). Its only when something like this happens that you realize the importance of all those big sounding words like reliability and availibility and fault tolerance and resilience to failures.