And with Oden on our side, we are victorious
For my college…erhm… “musical act”, I’m going to be playing the bass on “won’t get fooled again” by The Who. I’ve never really given that much attention to The Who.
But the bass on songs by The Who blew my mind away. I spent the next three days listening only to the who.
I’m filled with an incredible amount of respect of admiration and respect for the Late John “Thunderfingers” Entwistle.
I’ve not written about this, but over the past one week I’ve been working on a tiny, but very interesting and potentially big project. It’s just 1300 lines of code, and I’m adopting the “release early, release often” philosophy.
I have to go to class, but you can read up what you want here:
I’ll cut to the point: Americans, please vote Obama, for the sake of the rest of the world.
Coming from someone who isn’t American, this might not mean much. All foriegn polls favor Obama, and in my personal opinion, his economic policies on grassroots improvement seem to be better.
I personally hate terrorism. Not because it hurts people, because it distracts you from the real issues. Around the world thousands of people die from disease, poverty and violence everday. There has been one major terrorist act in the US, and nearly hundreds in other countries.
I was in the US in 2000, when the Bush-Gore battle took place. I was incredibly naive, and confused at that time (among other colorful terms I’d throw at my past self but not here), and Bush won due to more electoral votes or that’s what I’ve heard.
Nevertheless, if it were the other way around, the same guy who did An Inconvinient Truth would’ve probably done a lot of change.
These are my views, and you’re perfectly entitled to your own opinion. But all I ask is to think about what’s good for the world, rather than who you like better.
Seemingly a hundred and fifty people read this website, and if I can change a single person’s mind, it’ll almost be like a vote from my side.
Again, ladies and gentlemen, everyone I know online and offline seem to feel that Obama’s a better candidate, and so do I.
Thank you.
“I’ve lived in filth, I’ve lived in sin. And I still smell cleaner than the shit you’re in!”
Iron Maiden – “Holy Smoke“
Maybe I have been watching too much CNN lately.
I really don’t read that many books. I own quite a few reference books on various languages and have a very nice collection of printed cheat sheets. This book caught my attention and was exactly what I was looking for.
The book is called “Puzzles for programmers and pros” (or p-cubed), by Dennis E. Sasha, who is a renowned omniheurist, and a professor at NYU.
In the beginning of the book, he claims the book is useful for people who’re preparing for interviews, as well as for people who enjoy sharpening their skills, and also for people who love puzzles.
As I fall under all three categories, I got the book. It costs around $25(though in India, you can pick up a low cost one for about $2.50) and is a rather small book, but not one that you’d read fast enough.
The first four puzzles, which took me upwards of two hours or so to go through, was extremely enjoyable. All puzzles have a “warm up” which solves a simple problem and shows you an approach angle, and then gets into more complex situations.
The puzzles are really nice, and are quite sensible and mathematical. There’s no major “out of the box” thinking, which most puzzle solvers hate. A lot of it is to do with probability, so you better have your basics right.
A very large portion of the book can be read on Google Books, here (TODO: Add link later), and amazon seems to have other books in mind for me, which I shall go into when I’m done with this.
The problems have pretty interesting backstories, and the solutions aren’t the kind you’d kick yourself over. You either get it or you don’t. You can also find a few other ways to reach the solution, and really gives your head a workout. I never thought I’d end up writing differential equations to maximize the amount of cake you’d eat and so on.
A lot of the book so far revolves around gambling, and risk taking. The author even asks you wether you’d take the risk in a game.
I haven’t seen much programming yet, and I really need to brush up my dynamic programming, so hopefully I’ll be through with this before any major interviews.
If you know any good place to find programming based puzzles for my learning and pleasure, please leave a link in the comments section. I make sure to try out a lot of topcoder and spoj.pl puzzles so that’s out. I really should give the ACM archives another look.
So much to do, so little time. As an aquiantaince of mine once said “Life is NP-Hard”
(warning, offensive language, but hey! who cares?)
Is: (wait for it): “Rock Star”
It stands for everything I hate: Lack of individuality, lack of thinking, eager to please, elevating losers who should be gifted
If I hear the word without it being laced with enough sarcasm or cynicism to kill a normal human being, I instantly regard the source as being drop dead incompetent. (also referencens to the holy Rockstar game development studio, which churned out Max Payne, and the Grand Theft Auto franchise, is forgivable)
Here are a few translations for you, from moronspeak to english.
moronspeak: I’m a rockstar english: I’m a fucking moron
moronspeak: You’re a rockstar. english: I’m a fucking moron
moronspeak: I’m such a rockstar! LOL english: no translation available at this time.
moronspeak: Let’s party like rockstars! english: Let’s try to improve our self worth by consuming questionable quantities of alcohol, dance around and make general fools of ourselves, and try to convince ourselves we’re having fun. Also, please take note that I’m a fucking moron.
moronspeak: Dude, you party like a rockstar! english: Firstly, I’m a fucking moron. Second: My friend, your disregard for your liver, self worth, and your life is admirable.
Any usage of the word is either in Moronspeak or for obscure 60s and 70s bands. The origin of the word is probably tracable to the Rock-and-Roll culture of the 60s.
Did anyone notice that “my generation” by The Who refers to “their generation” and they’re like fifty years old now.
If rock is truly dead, bollywood and morons around the world are keeping the damned word alive.
When I finally stopped laughing and acknowledged the fact that I have a considerable number of people subscribing, I decided to send all my erhhmmm… “technology” (more specifically: code, *nix, etc) related material to a new destination. So here we are on the new domain, which I don’t remember purchasing, but paypal sure does:
and no. I’m really not into ninjas, and I’m agnostic. But hey, it’s a pretty sweet domain name.
But hopefully, the flow of pointless unresearched complaining will continue right here!
I saw the fabled “Rock On” movie everyone told me I’d like.
I didn’t like it.
What I did find good was that the folks were spot on accurate. The music was nice, the tones were good, and the actors actually were playing what they were playing the notes. One chap even had a Steve Vai signature guitar, which I’ve heard is fabulous. The songs actually had leads, and was the first Hindi movie since 1997 to probably feature real instruments. To top it off, there were no “item numbers”.
I could barely hear the movie over my little sister writhing in pain over how slow the movie is. In a nutshell, it’s about a bunch of people who used to be real good ten years ago, and how they put aside their differences at the end and play again on stage. It’s largely a sob-fest with characters having to make tough decisions, and strain their relationship to just play six minutes on stage.
What irked me the most, however, was the lack of a Bass guitar (even more that the fact that only the bass players in the world will complain). While a bassline can be clearly heard, the lack of a bassist was purely due to lack of the glamour quotient, and to keep the number to 4. The keyboardist, who’s story is prominent rather lacks the presence in the music itself.
Rest assured, the movie clearly stank in my opinion. There was too much sobbing, confusion and backstory than I would’ve liked. School of Rock, for instance, did a flawless job of keeping the backstory and melding it in with the music.
What would’ve made the movie nice was to educate more people about the music and cut down all the “oh god! playing for ten minutes on stage will change all our lives” philosophy.
In a nutshell: “Rock on” is a soap opera with guitars.
Everybody likes kids. Yes, like them too much and you’ll get a visit from the authorities. Everyone loves their innocence, cuteness and original ideas. And off late, their extreme possibility.
Due to my several months of complete detachment with commercial Indian television, I see some drastic changes in the programming. Almost all the TV shows are just ordinary people singing, and promising them their few minutes of fame. It’s incredibly easy to start a show for the same, requires incredibly small amount of investment, and generates a lot of viewership.
Every channel on saturday night, had almost the same thing on. Kids ranging from the age of seven or eight to eighteen were dressed-to-impress and a panel of “judges” would critcize their performance and give them feedback. an overall seventeen minutes of singing for an hour’s show (I was bored enough to count. this is why I don’t like spending the saturday night indoors).
A few shows, most particularly the “Voice of India” show, even made dramaticized the damn thing. Turning an original innocent singing contest into a singing, dancing, showmanship extravaganza which have the public so glued. With the advent of the tried and tested “elimination” and public voting concept, they’re driving India’s capitalist machine forward, though all the wheels are spinning in a different direction.
Overall, I feel Indians are a little hypocritical. A lot of them criticize the west, and derive great pride in their past and values, but are ready to scarf down a Big Mac in a heart-stopping beat. They take an incredible interest in romance and love, but will look down on any romance in real life. They claim to want creativity and intelligence in what they watch, but are ready to watch dancing bikini-clad vegas rejects, little children whore themselves off for media corporations with absolutely no compensation.
India’s getting the future that she wanted, but it’s a far cry from the future that she expected. While captialist America is sucking the world dry so hard they can suck a bowling ball through a firehose, India is getting there.
But oh! How I love this country.
I'm a senior undergrad at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur majoring in Physics. I'm a self taught programmer.
I love open source, dogs, late-night conversations over coffee, and writing long letters and emails to people I don't know.
You should write to me at anirudh (at) anirudhsanjeev.org!
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