Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

On June 28th 2009, my motorcycle gets towed due to a made-up parking violation while I went for my evening run. Two hours of trying to get my vehicle out of the impound (having left my wallet at the office and no money to get back) later, I manage to recover it. Utterly frustrated, I get back expecting to relax a little and maybe work on my Summer of Code project. I open up my RSS reader and I see this link pop up. It was Richard M Stallman “warning” people about potential issues with a certain project. The first thing I think is “Screw this guy”.

So I fire up vi (yes, almighty VI. I love vi ^_^), and start ranting with a very catchy “Fuck you Richard Stallman” as the title. I was always for avoiding half-baked opinion posts, let alone about some topic people felt so strongly about. The crux of the article was that non-copyleft licenses were good, copy left licenses were evil, and why I felt so. The post flew off into the cloud as quickly as they dropped from my fingers. One thing I regret is making a minor personal insult at Roy Schestowitz, the author of BoycottNovell.com, as I often disagreed with his principles and methods. I removed the offending statements after conversing with Roy personally and understanding that he’s a nice guy just on the different side of a debate I never wished to even know about, let alone participate in.

I also take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Roy for any personal comments I wrote about him.

Soon, the comments and emails started trickling in. What it was about was immaterial right now. Most of them were good natured and it was allright. I thought a little freedom of speech couldn’t ever hurt me back. I was wrong. I’d made an explicit disclaimer in the beginning, which goes something like:
“This has nothing to do with the fact that I’m an intern at Microsoft, and am contributing an Add-in to the MonoDevelop project”

So let’s get this straight:
Day job - Intern at the MS Research lab in Bangalore, India. Works on Multilingual systems
Free time - Contribution to MonoDevelop as a Summer of Code project. works on task-centric programming

Now I wrote this post from home, using a personal computer, using a personal internet connection and personal time. My employer had absolutely ZERO involvement in any activities at that time, and I’d even declared earlier on.

Imagine my surprise when someone points me to this article [screenshot here]:

“Another person, who describes himself as an “intern at Microsoft [who is] writing an extension to the MonoDevelop project,” has just written about this. “Fuck you, Richard Stallman,” screams the headline of his blog post where he complains about Stallman’s stance on Mono. It’s interesting to know that Microsoft is helping MonoDevelop, which helps Windows of course [1, 2, 3]. The foul-mouthed rant also links to libel about me (personal attacks) and about this subject in general. Not bad for proponents of Mono who are also working for Microsoft, eh? At least there is a pattern.”

There are some significant issues I had with this paragraph:

1. It takes my *Disclaimer* out of context, and twists it. It doesn’t even link to the original article to verify authenticity.
2. It makes it look like working on MD is part of my job description. It is not - for future reference.
(for example, if you copied the text “working on MD is part of my job description” and pasted it somewhere, it would be utterly misleading. That’s what happened)
3. Suddenly It’s written that I represent my employer, which I do not, and never wish to.
4. “MonoDevelop helps Windows” because it has a community preview port? Emacs releases a windows port, and so does apache, python, and vi - but they never explicitly help Windows eh?

Does it matter where I work and what I do? You never see anyone saying that I contribute patches to other projects, organize camps at college to help people learn Linux usage and what not. I do many things in my personal time, related to the industry, or otherwise. Judge what I do and what I write by it’s own merits, and don’t bring an employer into it and complicate things.

To my shock, another post pops up, linking to the previous one. [screenshot here]

“Microsoft staff may openly say “Fuck you, Richard Stallman”, but there are rebuttals to this disgraceful behaviour. Stallman was being polite and rational.”

The snippet links to the previous BN article. Suddenly a twist in words turn into an absolute horrible lie. What’s worse, someone inside might think that I’m representing MS and my company thinks I’m to blame. I can take any amount of flames and corrections, but don’t put my career at risk, especially one that hasn’t even begun. This hurts my credibility and potentially my future prospects - no telling how many people pick up these things and mutilate it.

There is an explicit contract which tells me that I’m responsible for what I do on my own time. 5:30 PM onwards, I’m just a 21 year old guy, not “MS Staff”. The offending post was made around 6:30 PM GMT+0530. My employer has nothing to do that post, except that the fine coffee they provide was still in my bladder at time of writing.

So much for freedom of speech eh? I should watch what I say from now on.

Now I write a long email to Roy apologizing and requesting he take away the offending portions. This goes beyond name calling, and can affect my career. I even go on IRC and speak to him, and turns out he’s actually a really nice guy, albeit a little overtly passionate about his field of interest.

In fact, since all their IRC logs are public, you can even see when I joined inside and spoke to him, with the IRC handle “antileet”. The records will be available here. Mirrored over here.

I am only glad I was able to get on Roy’s better side, as very few people with my alliances have. As someone pointed out to me, I’m an “extremely juicy target” for someone in his position. I look forward to the day when I’ll enjoy reading his articles which document the forefront of what the community is upto, and bond the world with positive constructive information.

He understands and adds an Addendum stating that my statements should not be attributed to my Employer. Unfortunately, and understandably, he refuses to remove the original content as a response to the name calling that was involved earlier on. Now I am still concerned that the addendum isn’t prominent and a search for the title phrase leads people to my weblog, often with a false impression. Moreover, the content is untrue and deserves to be taken down.

This gives me an explicit need to clarify my position and situation along with proof, in case someone finds the original article, and leave no room for doubt and misrepresentation.

This post isn’t an opinion or a notice but more of a clarification. I’m done with ranting and I’ve learned my lesson to speak about positive, constructive topics. But it’s also a warning to take everything one reads with a pinch of salt. Tommorow an article on that website will reference my misfortune, and what was originally a misunderstanding becomes a lie, which becomes a proof of something to support an opinion or argument.

I do not want to make any judgements or statements about what I described in this post. I can only hope the community can resolve it’s differences and unite.

Saddened? Losing faith in humanity? Here a youtube video of a girl with a beautiful voice singing and playing Tool’s “Right in Two” that always cheers me up. Now if you’ll excuse me, the semicolon key and the curly braces on my keyboard are feeling neglected because I haven’t written any code in a little while - no more plaintext for me

Post has been removed. Turns out you can’t post your opinion without having everyone who disagrees come down upon you with a thunderous force. I didn’t know anything about what I was speaking about, let alone enough to pass judgement on.

I apologize to anyone who is offended and encourage them to email me - anirudh@anirudhsanjeev.org with good, constructive advice which might help me become a better contributor to the community.

I’m not a big fan of twitter since I closed my account a year ago. I was sick last night and watching the Colbert Report because I couldn’t sleep and Stephen Colbert was interviewing Biz Stone, cribbing about the 140 character limit. I had an idea which seemed great when I thought of it - to apply some on-the-fly compression by exploiting text encoding. Now the idea doesen’t seem so shiny after all.

Abstract:
To send upto 420 characters per twitter message. This will be done by processing the large text to fit into 140 characters. The 140 characters will be the same length and will not appear differently to the server, but will be a jumbled mess of text for any human who reads it. But on running an inflation algorithm on the same text, another user can get back the 420 character message.

Background:
Today, we’ll be exploiting the encoding that Twitter uses for it’s text: UTF-8. UTF-8 is variable length from one to four octets for each character. Since most english messages use ASCII character set, only the first octet is used, and any ascii string is utf-8 compatible by default. It’s a fantastic idea that saves space, and allows the full unicode alphabet because of it’s enormous size in case all four octets are used. Most of the regular english content that you read ever uses more than two or three octets.

Core Idea:
Construct a utf-8 character with 4 bytes. The first byte signals the start of a 4-byte sequence(thus having a value between 240 and 244).
Use each of the three octets to store a different ascii character. This way three ascii characters appear as one utf-8 character, thus only one out of 140 characters is used up. To deflate, read one utf-8 character, and interpret each of the final octets as an ascii character.

Technical complications:

1. The first byte can’t be used :(. It has to be a value between 240-244.
2. The second, third and fourth byte can have only 0×80-0xBF (that is 128-191) as the content. This means the size of the character set that we can compress is 64. Sufficient for Alphanumeric characters and spaces. UTF-8 is not to blame here however. A full four-byte encoded character can have 64*64*64 variations (multiply that by 4 considering that the descriptor byte in the first slot can have four combinations), and you get yourself a fine encoding format.
3. Any non-alphanumeric character would be left alone because it won’t fit in the space that we have for each octet.
4. Any string polluted with non-alphanum characters would compress real poorly. Consider ‘http://is.gd/1f4′ or something like that. ‘htt’ will be one character, ‘p’ will be one, ‘is’ and ‘gd’ and ‘1f4′ would be singular characters. The code will have to make sure that we don’t use 4 octets by default, or fill in the remaining octets with blanks and discard them during inflation.

Implementation:
I’m guessing the implementation is easy enough, though text encoding is one of the hardest things for me to get right. I’m going to try to use the System.Text.UTF8Encoding and Sytem.Text.Encoder classes to read the bytes and re-construct a new string. I’ll dump the code here when I feel like it.

Ideally, there should be implementations in each major language - javascript, python, C++, C#, actionscript - which are used to write twitter apps. Ideally, a greasemonkey script can be run which looks for compressed utf-8 text and decodes them in the twitter page itself.

Disadvantages:

1. All clients should necessarily have an inflation script running.
2. Supports only alphanumeric characters+space
3. Won’t be searchable.(unless you re-encode the search query itself)

Closing words:
Die twitter! die!

Anglicizing Indian names in the US is quite common these days. Let’s face it, some names are hard to pronounce. When I was in the US eight years ago I remember mine getting butchered in as many ways as one can count. A few people who knew they had to stay abroad for a longer time did not want to have to spell out their name or correct pronunciation every time they met someone new.

For example, my friend and mentor, Vikram Dendi, who was in the US from his undergraduate times claimed to have shortened it to “Vik” every once in a while when I met him in Bangalore.

Over the past eight years, somehow, people started calling me “Andy”, and it’s stuck surprisingly well. It’s rare to find anyone call me by my given name in college, not for any cultural significance but rather for the sake of convenience. You can’t beat a one syllable name.

I’ve been talking on mailing lists and on IRC more these days and am starting to wonder if I need to regularly use my anglicized name in my online collaborations. The short answer is yes, and the long answer is too boring to put down here.

So I decided I’ll just use my utterly cool domain name which is lying around stale for email. I will be using andy@ninjagod . com for my purposes. So if you can’t remember my name or email address(why would one even need to?), you’ve got somewhere new to fire it off to.

Just because Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, and Randall Munroe can be funny whenever they want to doesen’t mean you can.

April fools’ is the time of the year, when everyone thinks they’re being funny but they’re just being dicks. And when someone thinks pictures of cats with horribly disfigured grammar is funny, you know it’s going to get really pathetic. I’m talking about you - the Internet.

A lot of people know that I have a short term memory length of nearly three seconds in the morning. I spend about five minutes reading my feeds in the morning and I was pleasantly surprised to see interesting and breaking news just to get fooled, and this happened six times in the morning.

I’m pretty sure a conversation like this has happened several places in the world at this time:
Billy: Hey grampa, <enter tragic news here>
Grampa: (goes into shock)
Billy: April fools’!
Grampa: Oh god, I find it hard to breathe, there’s pain in my left arm.
Billy: Good one grampa, but you’re going to have to try harder than that to get me.
Grampa: I’m not kidding, get me to a hospital.
Billy: Get more creative than that

The worst of all seems to be that of slideshare. I’d signed up for their service, which I actually think is pretty neat.

I got an email saying: “You’re a slideshare rockstar”(IF you didn’t know already, “rockstar” is the word I loathe the most.) Now that I’m a slideshare rockstar and was impatiently looking for ways to find slideshare groupies, I smelled something fishy.

“
We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team“

Every self obsessed half witted moron (a sample set, which, by some freakish coincidence, are all twitter users), decided to blog, twaat, microblog, nanoblog, fermiblog and gloat about their newfound glory. After seeing the pageviews rise and increase hundredfold, they realized that their creative inputs were clearly worth billions. They quit their jobs, brought hundreds of “I’m a slideshare rockstar” Tshirts, maxed out their credit limit knowing that a few minutes on powerpoint would reimburse their investment.

Then they found out that it was a joke with 100x fake page views and everyone got the same email.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people are pissed at slideshare, which is pretty sad because I’m a fan of Rashmi Sinha’s work, which I’ve been following for quite a while now.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, in my opinion:

1. Humour is contextual. A normal person can be clever and insert a few puns into their text, but that’s it. The funniest jokes are internal, the ones that you crack with your buds, and have a lot of context to them.
2. What slideshare did wasn’t “fooling”, it was outright lying. I just hope that it doesen’t get them sued or something.
3. It’s funny to make one or two people laugh. Try it for an entire userbase and you’ll just piss them off.