I was recently working on polynomial approximations of trained artificial neural networks. I shall finish up the project cause I finished the programming 90%, but some editors of prominent ANN journals think it’s utter crap (they didn’t say it in so many words). So it’s officially abandoned for now. I guess you have to learn to live with it. You win some, you lose some. Altough, I am disappointed at having spent a lot of time on this, at least I know one more method of how not to polynomialise neural networks. At least I had lots of fun doing it, which is what really counts in the end.
I am beginning to feel like those stupid evil villians from kids’ superhero TV shows where in each episode they try to take over the world and are defeated daily (God! it must be boring to be both – the supervillian or the superhero). I make a daily attempt at some substantial breakthrough in computer scinece, and end up helping someone in biological sciences or embedded systems or wireless protocol stuff. In the end, my work turns out to be totally worthless in CS. Oh Damn! But finally, having decided to work on BCIs, I’m soon giving up my ambitions and interests on core computational theory and stuff like that. Oh well, one must choose, and attempting to decode brain signals is much funner than decoding machine behaviour – this is more of a personal preference, so please dont take offence if you’re a big computational fanatic. I do love algorithms and all that, but I’m now going to pass out from postgraduation and it’s time I began narrowing down my energy into one area of interest.
Interested mad scientists (my category of people who’re failed scientists and go about proclaiming that we’re mad scientists), should definately visit The Mad Scientist’s Network. It’s a great place to view questions and answer them and ask some of your own. The questions are truly of a mad nature and all my friends are definately going to like them. They are mostly just what my friends are upto in their own labs. You know, something I find is lacking in society, there’s nothing wrong with just putting a few grapes or soap in the microwave and testing what happens. There’s nothing wrong in attempting to connect Van de Graff generators to light bulbs, playing around with a microscope and testing various sub-sonic audio frequencies and trying to break stuff. That’s what science is. If there’s no fun in it, then it’s not science. Regardless of how much money you earn or how reputed you are, science is about excitement. Qualitatively, IMO, scientists have a lot in common with hard-core rock bands compared to anything else. They “just do it! and keep it real!”.
I recently came upon a great recipe for coffee that makes your normal home-coffee appear and taste like authentic espresso. I would love some reviews on this recipe from you. Here goes……
First, you take some coffee powder and mix it with a little bit of sugar and just enough water to wet it so as to form a sticky blob. Then you crush, mix and paste-ise this blob with a spoon or a similar tool for a very long time (around 10-15 minutes) until it begins to appear whitish. It is my belief that this whitish substance is caffine but my friends seem to disagree. So I’m attempting to separate the white stuff this weekend and will send it in for qualitative analysis to some friends. Anyways, back to the topic, you then simply add hot water to the above-mentioned mixture. The taste, texture and appearence is, according to some, almost like Barista’s authentic espresso.
I’ve never tried this myself (I neither have the time nor the inclination to do anything of this sort), but would seriously like your reviews on this.
(NOTE: Name of person who gave me this recipe is confidential since I believe she spends her company’s money inventing such recipes all day long)
I have recently hit upon a great business idea that would allow us all to travel in time for only $10. It’s brilliant and ingenious. Just read it to know. It would also allow us to live in the future instantaneously after implementation.
Follow the link to read the entire article……
When browsing the web and looking up some stuff, I was pleasantly surprised to find, Jedi Linux. I never knew such a thing existed. I promise you, that the day it becomes version 1.0, it will be the ONLY linux that I will use or promote. A Linux distro based on Jedi Philosophy and one that is strong with the source. Of all the things I could have named FCLinux and CSLinux, I did not think of this! Damn! It would have been cool to distribute a project called YODA along with JEDI Linux. May the source be with us all……
I’m going through a programmer’s block this month. I simply cannot seem to be able to program. Life has so much to do that it overwhelms me. I wish I could be reading a million books and yet I dont have time to read even a single one. I have to catch up on a lot of studies. I’ve gotta catch up on Smalltalk just for fun. I forgot a lot about it. I’m actually planning to spend this week catching up on a lot of old stuff I used to do, viz., Smalltalk, Lisp, Prolog and Ada. This week will go fully in documentation. Every piece of program that I write, requires twice the amount of documentation since I’m working on some polynomial approximations of neural networks. It’s quite fun, but also wierd. It has my patented high-risk high-returns touch to it.
So anyone willing to get programming done from me – please not this month. Maybe I can help with problem-solving or code snippets. But to be able to work on some project or to handle a few thousand lines of code is something my brain cannot handle right now. It’s going into a forced reboot. It will take a couple of weeks to boot.
This is the dreaded phase every programmer is frightened of. Nobody knows how long it’ll last and nobody knows how to get out of it. You just have to wait it out. Unfortunately, professors dont understand it, gotta keep working!
I shall be one of 20 top student technolonists in India interning at Microsoft selected through the code4bill competition. The competition was a fun, ruthless and tough struggle for this position, and yet, I know that it was all luck. I’m all excited about the internship right now. Wish me luck! You can read more about this on my BLOG soon. It has been my dream company for the last one-and-a-half year; especially when I found out that C.A.Hoare (the inventor of the Quicksort) works in MS R&D. Microsoft R&D is my ideal place!
Although my internship is at the IDC, I’m hoping the future prospects would be in R&D.
Who would have guessed? I gave the first round during Calyx within 2 hours. I completed the second round (really tough) thinking I’m done for! and I completed the third round again in only 2 hours while preparing for LinuxAsia. I was the only person whose interview questions were somewhat easier than others’. I guess there really is such a thing as Luck. Or if Obi-Wan Kenobi is right, then I have a guardian angel watching my back.
I’m tired of the tech world now. I wish I could go into something very non-technical, low-paying, low-pressure, low-intensity and low-time-demanding like opening up a flower shop or a fruit stall beside the road. I also love cooking. I’m considered to be a gifted cook by many of my friends, relatives and especially my younger sister (which is the biggest qualification one could ask for; close relatives are the harshest critics). I had wanted to work at Pizza Hut as a waiter just for the heck of it during this summer, but dont have the time. If someone has a part-time cooking job, I’d love to try it out for a couple of weeks. I could really use some time off from programming and computers.
I was a student at the Interdisciplinary School of Scientific Computing, University of Pune for one semester (the first semester of my Master’s degree). Initially, it seemed like an idealistic and pure-scientific place. Moreover, I did not want anyone saying I did not go to the University of Pune due to not getting admission. So I joined a course there. After facing serious harassment and complete lack of quality in every sense of the word, I left the ISSC and rejoined Fergusson College to finish the remainder of my M.Sc. in peace. Fergusson is nothing less than a second home to me and I feel a lot safer and much more secure there.
My most recent project called YODA (Yet Onemore Distributed Architecture) was on display at the .ORG MELA of LinuxAsia 2006. Please read about my experiences at LinuxAsia 2006 and also do view the pictures from the trip. LinuxAsia 2006 was a great experience and we got to meet some of the coolest people in open source ever.
You may view the pictures below which I’m adding labels to help you identify some of the coolest people. Some of the most mentionable people are described below. Mark Shuttleworth is the coolest millionaire in the world. He is so humble, sweet, kind and mixes with everyone. He was chatting, talking, experimenting with Indian traditional clothing at LinuxAsia. He is the fellow due to whom we’re all getting free Ubuntu CDs. Klaus Knopper, the creator of Knoppix was also there. He was equally inspiring. However, in terms of inspiration, nobody compared to Danese Cooper. Always the positive and energetic personality inspiring all generations of people to “do what makes them happy”. Of course, Brain Behlendorf was also there, but I didn’t get to interact with him much personally.
As to my own project, it wasn’t really my project. It was developed in one semester by six kids (including me) from the Interdisciplinary School of Scientific Computing. As you will see in some of my future posts, my life at ISSC didn’t go very well and I’m leaving it. Having YODA labelled as the worst project in class didn’t help mend my relations with them. To put things in perspective, YODA was amonst the top 15 projects selected out of 70 projects submitted for display at the event. No other project was from a pure student group with absolutely no support whatsoever compeleted within a single semester of coursework. I personally feel it says a lot about the capability of my group.
