celpec

Are we dead yet?

2005-06-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Ok, so is this dead?

Car Makers explore car-to-car warning

2004-12-17T20:45:00.000-08:00

Now this is a pretty imaginative idea - but imagine how much havoc someone could wreck by spoofing these alerts from one car to another, causing some of them to suddenly change course or brake and thereby cause traffic disruptions and pile-ups.....

FT.com / World / International economy - Makers explore car-to-car warning

Chagrin

2004-08-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

Chagrin probably is the word for this.

It happened while I was trying to negotiate a package for campus recruitment in PEC this year by my company, Evalueserve (http://www.evalueserve.com)

At IITs we offer an amount, say x. At BITS-Pilani, ditto, at IT-BHU ditto again. But at PEC, it has been decided for 0.82x. Though this isn't less, per se, but my point was to negotiate the disparity away. But I failed.

And among the reasons which I could gather is the severe lacking of brand. I mean look at the website, Late Ms Chawla going to space is the bleeding news at http://www.pec.ac.in

The discussion (or debate, if you may) then was directed to, "I beg, you please, at least keep a parity between BITS-Pilani ("a non-IIT", just as PEC) and PEC. But they disagree, rightly so, I now realize.

Came back to my seat and with a bruised spirit started looking at BITS-Pilani and IT-BHU presence on the web vis-à-vis PEC and man, I feel like a fool at even having the thought of going for that discussion.

Who or what is PEC, one can't know. Probably, it is Pondicherry Engineering College, for all they know. Just search for BITS and you come across pages talking of the "highest paid guy in the Indian Corporate" -- Vivek Paul - a BITSian, proudly says the website.

Man, I thought we had achievers too. I thought, Vivek Mehra who sold Cobalt Networks to Sun for $ 2 billion was from PEC. His wife, Sonia Bhanot, alumni of PEC, is a CEO of Verano, some Mr Paul Singh, PEC again, is a multi-billionaire. These achievers and many more, but these achievements don’t get fed back into the PEC brand.

But then why the heck isn't any brand there? I don't know. For now, I'm sitting here, chagrined.

MBAs - Life, liberty & pursuit of yuppieness

2004-07-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

Jivha - the Tongue: MBAs - Life, liberty & pursuit of yuppieness: "In 1944, C.S. Lewis delivered a speech titled 'The Inner Ring' to the graduating class of Kings College at the University of London. He asserted that the strongest of all drives is the desire to belong to an 'inner ring' - an imaginary circle of the important. But, he warned, status is like an onion comprising endless layers. No sooner do you crack one ring than you become obsessed with getting to the even-more-exclusive ring inside that one."

The new new thing via Nilesh

2004-07-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

Since Nilesh still maintains email is the best/easy way to convey ideas to a group of people. Here is one of his blurbs with his permission (Hyperlink is mine :D)

I had heard good reviews of Liar's poker... so I went out to buy it. As it turned out, the shop I went to didn't have the book, but they did have The New New thing - by the same author, Michael Lewis.
Being the shrewd salesman that he was, the guy showed me the New new thing although i didnt ask for it. Being the bibliophile that I am, I spent over 600 bucks and bought it.
Fortunately, ti turned out to be a good book,

The New New thing was written in the pre-April 2001 era and chronicles the story of Jim Clark.
All the geeks in this world can be neatly divided into 2 categories: those who know who Jim Clark is and the rest. (the rest should seriously re-consider their own aspirations and claims to geekdom and take approrpiate corrective action).

As with all big events in history, it all began with something so trivial, it was almost impossible that the event could have triggered a global economic frenzy unlike any seen ever before.
It all began with a boat.
It was a pretty boat and a really big boat - the world's largest single sail yatch. It was also designed to be completely controlled and run by computer. If you wanted to switch off a bulb, you'd punch in some commands and the computer(s) would switch off the light for you. Navigation, control, the engine - all were controlled by the computer. Needless to say, it was also quite expensive - which is how the story began.

Actually, the story began a long time ago - in the early 1980's. At the time, Jim Clark created a new chip - a geometry chip. It was the first chip to allow people to create elementary 3-d images on computer. The quality of the graphics were such as to leave even toddler's from today un-impressed, but back then entire armies of grown up engineers were drawn to it as were venture capitalists. The idea came together as a company - Silicon Graphics. The story from then on was quite simple - man invents the new thing, VC finances the firm, VC gains financial control of firm, VC fills up the firm with his CEO and his "managers", man slowly gets edged out.
This was about the time when Jim Clark discovered two separate things - his computer controlled boat and Mosaic.
(If you don't know what Mosaic was - DO NOT EVER CALL YOURSELF A GEEK!) Mosaic was the world's first web browser.
Jim founded a company with the guys who had written Mosaic and called it Netscape.

Because Jim needed money to buy his boat, he convinced his VC's and others to take the company public, even though it was bleeding money and that is how the Netscape IPO happened. The rest, as they say, is history. Netscape's IPO launched the dot-com boom. And it all happened because one silly rich man wanted to buy a boat !

The New New thing is a lively (and often funny) book that makes for entertaining reading.

H(p) = -plogp - (1-p)log(1-p)

2004-07-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

H(p) = -plogp - (1-p)log(1-p)
by Scott Aaronson

I was reading an obituary of Shannon,
asking myself:
why did it take till 1948?
That the semantics of a message
are irrelevant to how to transmit it,
that the distribution from which the message was
chosen is all that matters,
is obvious.
Should've been obvious to the Babylonians,
Greeks, Egyptians.

Why, among the thousands of ideas put forward
by Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides,
Kant, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche,
Mary Baker Eddy,
was there nowhere the almost trivial observation
that to encrypt perfectly you need a key
the size of the message itself?
or that almost all functions
have exponential circuit complexity?

I wandered out of the library
and saw a girl sketching the landscape,
breasts straining against the V of her sweater,
surrounded by laughing guys
who'd probably never even seen the entropy formula,
and then I knew.

The value (controversy) of Geo-Spatial Databases

2004-06-22T16:40:00.000-07:00

This article in Newsweek is a good article on the topic.

An interesting website is listed in it.
Fundrace This uses the FEC's rule of logging campagin contributions to a map, allowing you to see who is contributing to whom and how much. I can now see what many of my neighbors do, get some idea on their financial background etc.

I know it goes against free speech and the principles of technology, but have we reached a stage where we need regulation (or atleast think about ) how & how much information can be interlinked?

-Ashish

HUMOR: What is the value of an admissions essay?

2004-06-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Found this here

Secure & Easy WiFi Setup & Usage - HowTo

2004-06-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

I want to setup WiFi connection in a new lab (a 30' x 20' lab). The connection needs to be:
1. Secure
2. Be a Closed Network
3. Need little configuration to connect to (from Win XP, Linux, OS X)

Req 1 & 2 are easy to fulfil & Apple's Airport does a great job & is easy to use & administer.
#3 is harder.

What I would like to do is identify 3 classes of users
One set of people whose MAC address I know in advance, so this guys whould be able to come in to this lab, open their laptops & get connected.
The second set of people could come to the lab, open a browser --> enter a user name & password (given in the lab) --> be connected (something like a WiFi hotspot, though with encryption; i don't think WiFi hotspot connections are usually encrypted).
A third set of users are those who cannot access the web but still access the internal networked resources of the lab. For them, there is a common user name & password.

SInce this connection could irk my school's computing admins, I will need to address their concern that outsiders could not just sit outside my lab and start using this connection. A connection which is secure, restricts access to those who are not inside the lab (the lab is controlled access), will probably address their concern.

Any ideas on how we setup such a secure & easy to use WiFi connection?

Ashish

Another test to check the html tags

2004-06-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Now that basic email posting is working. Let us try some tags
This is strong text

Now the most important tag blockquotes. Now the most important tag
blockquotes. Now the most important tag blockquotes. Now the most
important tag blockquotes. Now the most important tag blockquotes.

That is the end of test.

Test Post via Email

2004-06-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is a test by Pankaj to test posting to celpec blog via email.

Pankaj

The Matrix is Here

2004-06-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

The latest Harrow tech report talks of new advances in CyberKinetics (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20040607/20040607.htm)- an ability to plug the brain into a computer which recognises thought and coordinates motor functions.
I took the concept just one step ahead - the ability to plug a brain onto a computer network. Here's a list of applications that I came up with (I sent these to Jeff Harrow as well).
****
The more I think about the applications, I am convinced something quite like "The Matrix" would be possible. Imagine the possibilities, some of them frivolous, some extremely dangerous:
1. We wouldn't need to have meetings because we can simply "connect to" other people.
2. It would be possible to project what my eyes see to my family when I am out on a vacation without them. So 4 people get to "see" Paris for the price of one air ticket :)
3. Imagine malicious worms/ viruses - which can now enter people's brains and corrupt/ control/ read up their thoughts (shudder!).
4. And no, you wouldn't really always need to wire yourself up to the network - there'd be wireless cards for those on the go or those who seek competitive advantage 24X7.
As a corollary, if I walk into a superstore and have a wireless brain card - the superstore could transmit advertisements to my brain urging me to buy things.
5. Although we can digitize brain signals, our thoughts have an analog element outside of the thought pattern - intensity. The intensity of the motor reflex with which a fighter plot pulls away from an oncoming missile is very different from that of a disabled person who reaches out for a glass of water. This difference in intensity would have to be accounted for by the computer interfacing with our brain.
Now imagine a case where two people with different intensities of thoughts come in contact with each other - would one of them be able to dwarf the other's thoughts and push through his own ideas on the other? Will one of them be able to force the other's response?
We come across this all the time in our lives - if we have an argument, one side yells louder than the other and sometimes wins the argument. Would moving our argument from one medium (speech) to another (thoughts) further exacerbate this phenomenon?

I am convinced these advances can happen within my lifetime - it would be very interesting to see how humankind survives and adapts to these challenges. Many of these advances shall end up creating superhumans, but the architecting and developing of reliable systems would also need superhuman effort. Software always has bugs in it - it is inevitable. Just how comfortable would we be in installing buggy software directly into our brains? How would this industry be regulated? How do I setup spam filters on my brain? I can imagine many dilemma's and legal issues that can arise and would need answers that would have challenged the wisdom of Solomon.
****

Nilesh

Toys-for-Men etc

2004-06-05T02:15:00.000-07:00

Sometime back, while visiting toys-r-us (I have a soft spot for legos - call me a geek, I could care less), I was wondering the viability of a toys-r-men store. This would be a store that targets men and only stocks gadgets, electronics etc. Not quite the run-of-mill compusa or circuit city, instead a store that focuses on gadgets and the kind of electronic toys that make most men (not just geeks) drool. These could be computer toys, car accessories, sport gadgets whatever.

Anyway, I am sure most of you do read David Pouge's coloumn in NYT - "Circuits." While a good article on tech, it does not do gadgets quite like wired does. Now I came across a section of wired magzine that only does gadgets. Check this out.

I esp like the idea of a USB powered cell phone charger See here . For $20 that is a lot of saved cables & is ideal when travelling. Planning to get one.

Joys of Indian Match making

2004-06-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

After a visit from two of his yet single friends Naru muses over Indian Matrimony scene over at
Not Really Indian:

"According to a MIT literate friend they shud have reverse kundli facility also like if one is born on so and so date at so and so city, where and what period born spouse would be the best. Any body listening"

Ultra High Resolution Photography

2004-06-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

This guy does not like of-the-shelf cameras so he builds one that does what he wants - take a digitally processed picture that is a whopping 2.6GB in size and captures details that make your jaw drop.

Check out this picture
and this picture

Also see the cnn story on this

-Ashish

What is Niks doing on Rediff

2004-05-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

Rediff Guide to the Net: Features: It's A Snap!:
"Nikhil Goel, an amateur photo enthusiast and software programmer at Smart Bridges, says that he puts pictures online primarily to let his pals know that he's got a better camera and has managed better shots than them! Goel has a digital camera and hence finds emailing friends quite simple. However, he admits, 'I would recommend people to use online photo album services as email space is premium these days!'"

Paralysis by analysis, Rajesh Jain at his best

2004-05-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

E M E R G I C . o r g:

"When one is in a difficult situation, it is very hard to think straight. One encounters, what I call, paralysis by analysis. Because one is smart (too smart for ones own good), there is a tendency to keep analysing the situation replaying events and getting lost in an infinite maze of what-if scenarios. The need of the hour is for tough decisions and surgical actions, but thats the last thing one makes, because of the belief that there has to be a logical way to remove the bugs one-by-one from the system. This inaction compounds the problem. I went through such a phase for many months. Outwardly, I had to act normal and optimistic because of the other people who looked up at me for direction and guidance. Inwardly, I was coming apart. "

Disruptive technologies, and the little engine

2004-05-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

Well, Cringeley does it again. He's got a piece over here on Linksys Router and how its disruptive technology nature would send ripples across different networking and internet companies. Via Lockergnome

One of the cheapest Linux computers you can buy brand new (not at a garage sale) is the Linksys WRT54G, an 802.11g wireless access point and router that includes a four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch and can be bought for as little as $69.99 according to Froogle. That's a heck of a deal for a little box that performs all those functions, but a look inside is even more amazing. There you'll find a 200 MHz Intel processor and either 16 or 32 megs of DRAM and four or eight megs of flash RAM -- more computing power than I needed 10 years ago to run a local Internet Service Provider with several hundred customers. But since the operating system is Linux and since Linksys has respected the Linux GPL by publishing all the source code for anyone to download for free, the WRT54G is a lot more than just a wireless router. It is a disruptive technology.

Get Married early - stick to one partner and live longer life

2004-05-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

According to this article at Forbes.com:: Being young and male puts you in a lower mortality group, who knew about this. My only concern is we have a higher percentage of people in CELPEC who are affected by this. So guys do something ;-)

One reason for the difference is as old as time, Kruger said. Men --indeed, males of all species -- 'compete for status and resources to attract attention and partnership of women,' he said. 'The higher degree of mating competition among males is the evolutionary reason why females live longer on average in most animal species.'
'Not all men successfully get a partner,' Kruger added. 'Because of this, men are willing to take a higher degree of risk. Women's behavior is shaped by the needs of child care, so they have a decreased tendency for risk-taking.'

What a blog is.. why and how it is better than a mailing list

2004-05-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

Nilesh asked me about this and I wrote a reply to him which I am publishing here

Here is link to good introduction to weblogs, don’t forget to also read part 2

http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002399.html

There are links to very good articles on blogging just in the beginning of part 1.

I will also try to explain it in the context of CELPEC.

What do we do on CELPEC:

Talk about any thing and every thing, more on technology and related stuff. Idea is to have some form of conversation where one starts by saying “Hey dude did you hear about this, or you know what happened” But this thing happens in the virtual world.

With weblogs in picture, idea will still remain the same. But we are opening our conversation to the whole wide web. So be sure that you don’t want to put some thing like my company sucks. As it would be viewable to everyone, would be indexed by google, tracked and pinged by you don’t know whom. But consider putting something like hey I have this neat theory about how India’s population can be reduced ;-) Or I read this book. You get the idea.

How do we do it:
With the CELPEC mailing list, it is a real simple interface, you send an email to a particular address, mailing list host accepts this email from certain predefined addresses, which were put there when we subscribed to it.

With CELPEC weblog, the most simple interface would be to visit the site http://blogger.com or whatever. Login to make a new entry and post to your heart’s desire. This is the basic one.
Now onto more exotic ones, almost all blogging systems provide something like “Blog This”. Idea is to have a link to your browser toolbar. You would see this orange symbol on google toolbar. This is really neat. You might be reading a website and you feel the urge to blog. You select some text of your interest on the webpage and click the “Blog This” link on your tool bar. This would popup a window with the selected test and the link to it. Now you can enter your comments on this and publish this. It would be posted to your weblog.
Third and most widely used by regular writers is to have clients like w:blogger (http://wbloggar.com) etc. These are your regular applications you give your server address and your credentials in the beginning. Then write stuff inside this client and once done press publish. Just like the above “Blog This” interface your post is published and ready to pleasure world’s eyes.

Interaction:
On the mailing list we simply reply if someone feels like and everybody gets the reply. Idea is limited to our selected group. But with weblogs your post is opened to the whole world and anybody can comment on it. Another nice and powerful feature is trackback. Let us say you read a post somewhere and you want to write about it, or you mentioned it in your blog. By using the trackback feature you can let the author of that post know that you have published an entry that references his post.

How do we get it or syndication:
With mailing list we get in our inbox. With blog, you can goto the site regularly to check if there is something new. But there is no fun in it. For this almost every weblog publishes a feed. For example celpec feed is at http://celpec.blogspot.com/atom.xml So there are weblog feed aggregators like SharpReader(http://sharpreader.net) where you can specify which weblogs you are interested in reading and just like your email client check this regularly to see if anyone has something new to say. There are online aggregators like http://www.bloglines.com/ also.

Hope this helps. I am posting this on my blog at http://pnarula.com/blog as well as celpec blog.

Good blurb on Stress Management

2004-05-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

A lecturer was giving a lecture to his students on stress management. He raised a glass of water and asked the audience, "How heavy do you think this glass of water is?"

The students' answers ranged from 20g to 500gm. "It does not matter on the absolute weight. It depends on how long you hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it is OK. If I hold it for an hour, I will have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you will have to call an ambulance. It is the exact same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes." "If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, we will not be able to carry on, the burden becoming increasingly heavier."

" If you HAVE to hold the glass of water, but should not feel the pain from that, what you have to do is to put the glass down, rest for a while before holding it up again." We have to put down the burden periodically, so that we can be refreshed and are able to carry on.

So before we return home from work tonight, put the burden of work down. Don't carry it back home. We can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens we have now on our shoulders, let it down for a moment if we can. Pick it up again later when we have rested... And attend to it Successfully! Rest and relax. Be happy and make others happy!!

Math Joke

2004-05-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

Joi Ito's Web: Math Joke: "Math Joke
"

EDN - From the ashes: The next stage of EDA

2004-05-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Came across this article via FutureSalon. This is about the ongoing new things happening in EDA. Haven't gone thru all of it but I know some of you will be delighted to read this. Especially people on islands :D

EDN - From the ashes: The next stage of EDA: "From the ashes: The next stage of EDA
Moore's Law is not dead, and the EDA industry is challenged with keeping it profitable. This task requires a change in focus from designing silicon structures to producing systems"

And here is Mark's ,founder of Future Salon, take on it

...it gives a good overview of "Where we are now" -- where we are in the ongoing Moore's Law saga, the current problems facing the semiconductor industry, and the surprising ways people are changing what they are doing in response. (The figures are in annoying PDF files, but still worth checking out.)

For example, we keep hearing about how all the hardware design jobs are going to India. But this article talks about the increasing difficulty of digital design, and if this article is to be believed, those jobs going to India are the "dumb" digital design jobs -- jobs done by some guy who went to college and learned Verilog or VHDL, and who understands very little of the underlying semiconductor physics.

Girls = Evil

2004-05-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

Very funny. Check the link
Link

Maasputer - another idea making rounds in blogsphere

2004-05-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

Niks check this out, remember we used to talk about this, paln was for you check dirt cheap manufacturers in Singapore area and at that time our price barrier was Rs 10,000.

Om Malik on Broadband: "At $300 a machine, the market is going to split wide open. In India alone nearly 55 million such machines could be sold to schools, colleges, government, and small businesses, estimates Netcore Solutions, a Mumbai, India-based company. Multiply this many times, and you see the numbers add up. The total market opportunity for the lower priced machines is upwards of $16 billion. (This is a concept championed by Rajesh Jain.) "