* Sigh *

I was in the process of getting transcripts issued for a senior of mine, so after getting all the necessary photocopies made, I made my way into the Dean of Student Affairs’ Office, which MNITians lovingly (not!) refer to as ‘dosa’. The folks in that office are well known for playing ball with you. While that would be fun under normal circumstances, it isn’t quite that way when ‘you’ are the ball as is the case here. No one there really has a clue of what he/she has to be doing, so if you ask one person, “Sir, I want <insert requirement here>”, he’ll calmly point towards some chair behind some other desk. I say chair here because that’s what you see; there’s usually no one occupying it. I have a feeling that that’s part of their plan. Leave an empty chair behind a desk and when you don’t know what the student’s asking you or you’re not interested or simply because the sky’s blue, just point towards the empty chair. That’s like the ‘default’ case in a select-case block. Only thing is, the actual cases are useless code, written poorly and no input will ever reach those branches of code. The game ends when the ball leaves the office in a spite of frustration, after visiting all the desks.

Anyhow, I got rather lucky that day and my request got a HIT in the first try. Since I was getting eight sets of transcripts, each with nine sheets, the guy proceeds to write the following calculation for the amount I was to pay on the request letter:

9 x 100           = 900

8 x 9 = 63 * 2 = 126

Total = 1026

Guess I don’t even need to explain this.

Gyan! A FOSS Workshop @ MNIT

Neuron ‘09, a technical fest, was held between 23rd and 24th of October, 2009 in my institute and I must say, those guys managed to pull it off pretty well! A once in a blue moon situation, most of the events violated the ‘Indian Standard Time’ rule by actually beginning and ending on time! When’s the last time you saw that happen here? Anyways, as always, we from the MNIT Open Source User Mesh (MOSUM) decided to conduct a little FOSS workshop during the three day programme. The 24th of October was the auspicious date as per the alignment of the planets (yeah right). So just like we did with all our other workshops that happened during our tech fests, we decided to bring in speakers from outside. Steven Fernandez (who works for Druvaa, and is also a former Red Hat employee) talked about the FOSS ecosystem, how it works and how one can be a part of it. Jai Pandya (JECRC, Jaipur) followed with a beginner oriented talk on WordPress and how to use it setup a website in under 5 minutes. Finally, I took over with a not-so-beginner-oriented talk on parallel programming using OpenMP (#pragma anyone?). Furthermore, the turnout of 120 was far more than any of us expected! Wonder if the city of Jaipur is really awakening. Let’s just hope that we see new faces turning up for our LUG-Jaipur meets from here on.

In a daze

The past one week has been quite interesting. Things that never crossed my mind, seem to have happened, and no amount of pinching myself seems to change things, which certainly proves that all this is real. In one part of the world, Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace prize. While this seems to have generated quite a furore, the media looks like they’re enjoying every bit of it. Check out these cartoons to get an idea of why people think he shouldn’t have won the award. Mahatma Gandhi was nominated five times for the same award without winning it, yet, people like Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Yasser Arafa found a way through. Sigh. Anyways, to all those of you who think he didn’t deserve this, at least be happy that it wasn’t given off to his predecessor. That thought kind of works for me.

Diametrically across the planet, in a hostel room numbered 4/24, of a university named MNIT-Jaipur, something strange has happened as well. In what seems like a bizarre case of insanity, I am actually _slogging_ for a change. No, this is not another one of those mid term exams (which should be aptly renamed to something like take-a-break-from-whatever-you’re-doing exams; makes more sense that way), nor does it have anything to do with assignment submissions either. Neither of those take up much of my time anyway (final year stereotype I’d say). What seems to have got me bogged down, is an exam, which I’m bound to write if I wish to fulfill a destiny I’ve chosen for myself. I’m talking about the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). By the way, this is supposed to be gee-ar-ee and not gree (which rhymes with glee). There’s a reason why I’ve mentioned this here, because there are people in this institute who’re known to say stuff like, “I’m going to write gree, toofil and iltus” (referring to GRE, TOEFL and IELTS), and they are _not_ trying to be funny. So if one of you guys stumble upon this, please do get it right from here on. Anyways, so here I am going through word list after word list, passage after passage and silly math problems that make you so over confident, you end up getting them wrong. Man I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy, or wait, maybe I would.

The best part about the whole idea behind the GRE is that it isn’t the sole factor that determines your admission to a foreign university. Your academic profiles and recommendations matter the most so yes, if you’re one of those guys who people look at and say OMG-I-WISH-I-HAD-A-PROFILE-LIKE-HIS, then relax, an average GRE score will do as well.

I’ve gotten into a good deal with my conscience, and we’ve both decided to give the where’ll-I-be-after-I-graduate thoughts a one way ticket to /dev/null. To all you non techies, you can say those thoughts were sent to hell.   The amount of attributes that affect the answer to that question is overwhelming, all the way from the N masters programmes you could apply to, to the companies you could work for and finally to the roadside shops you could open. It’s options galore!  For me, the question still remains unanswered but yes, there seem to be little sprouts of options coming up, although, they’re far from bearing fruit. The day it _does_, I’m treating myself to a drink, maybe more.

I’ll be glad after this phase is over, until then, I’m getting back to my word lists... duress, dutiful, dwindle, dynamic, dyspeptic…

Wow, I’m excited already.

Software Freedom Week @ MNIT-Jaipur

This is yet another one of those long-time-no-post-buster posts. I’ve been quite bogged down by work as always, with exams not exactly helping either. The past one week flew by with the Software Freedom Week celebrations we had here in MNIT. While I still wish we’d done something like last year, where we had 5 seminars, 2 labs and a trip to BITS-Pilani to top it off, this year, SFW was held on a slightly duller note but the intention remained the same: get the juniors involved in the world of FOSS!

Unlike last year, where everyone had to put up with me through 4 out of the 5 talks, I took a backseat this year as I let my juniors showcase their work and areas of interests. On day 1, the 15th of the month, Harsh and Nitin from 3rd year kicked off with a very good presentation on developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) using JavaFX. I took over day 2, with a talk I’ve always wanted to give, titled “Virtualisation: The why, the what and the how”. The toughest part as far as the topic was concerned was to strip it down well enough and keep it light enough for a crowd of 2nd and 1st years who didn’t have a solid computer science background. So my talk was pretty much confined to the different kinds of Server Virtualisation and a little bit of Storage Virtualisation all of which was depicted in a newbie friendly way using pictures alone. Day 3 was launched with an introduction to SunSPOTs by Ankit and Sarguru, who gave the juniors a very good overview about the capabilities of one of the coolest gadgets ever! The demos that followed also took the students by surprise (mainly the sample demos that are freely available). Day 4 was again a talk by Harsh on PHP and other aspects of web development, especially the usage of Content Management Systems. Finally, Day 5, that is today, was the finale with me giving a talk on Parallel Programming concepts. While I had a feeling that this would go over their heads, I was quite surprised to see almost everyone scoring well on the quiz that followed the talk! I talked about the switch to the multi-core era, about the free lunch being over, what threads are, multi-threading, the devil in the form of race conditions and how to go about parallel programming with OpenMP.

Perk bars were handed out freely to students who were active during the presentations and headphones were given away as prizes to the quiz winners.

Being my last SFW session here in MNIT, I just can’t help but wonder how it’ll be like in my absense, next year on. Maybe the flame’s been instilled into my juniors, maybe it’s not. Bah… who cares!

A little harmless theory

Finally, the guest lecturers in our department have started to arrive and all our subjects are finally ‘happening’. So here I was, in our first Artificial Intelligence lecture, being taught by a guest lecturer of course, who was pretty much an under-graduate fresher with an year of teaching experience. Sigh. Being an area that I’d already worked on for a while, I really wasn’t interested in her talk on what AI was all about, especially the part where she was trying to tell us about ‘The Matrix’ and ‘The Terminator’. So I came up with a little theory which I’ll share with you. Note that I’m not sure if this has already been discussed before, but anyways, here you go. But first a, little introduction.

So just like almost every other class I was in (note the stress on almost), I was bored and I was lost in my own chain of thought. And well, it had something to do with artificial intelligence itself (surprise, surprise!). The thought that particularly intrigued me was one of the biggest differences between a human (or any other entity considered ‘intelligent’) versus a machine (which could possibly be artificially intelligent), which I’d once read about, and that is the presence of the mind. According to the article, the brain is just a complicated computer which, by theory, can be replicated in the form of a machine (neural networks were inspired by neurons themselves). But one of the things that make us different from a machine is merely the mind, in the form of thoughts, dreams, common sense and much much more. To all those of you who’ve played Starsiege, Prometheus was a machine who had a mind, and that made him turn against his creator (by creating the Cybrids, or rather, his army of machines). But he was unique, and when you actually beat him in the human campaign, he says, “Three times have we fought, and three times have I lost, only because of your will to survive. The will I could not program into my children.”

Now that I’ve told you about the mind-brain separation, I’ll get to my theory. There will be seven assumptions I’m making. Here are the first six:

• Assume, we are able to create a species (which I’ll arbitrarily name Ems) which by size, is very negligible to that of a human. The order of the difference in size I’m talking about is that between maybe the combined size of a billion T-Rexes and that of a billionth of the AIDS virus perhaps. Maybe more. But anyways, get your imagination going.

• Assume, that we’re able to develop a container, which is unimaginably large in comparison to the said species (Ems), but smaller than a human, possibly the size of your everyday aquarium.

• Assume, that we are able to monitor anything inside this container, but nothing inside it will know of the world beyond.

• Assume, that the conditions inside the container are favourable for life to grow, and is fully self sustainable.

• Assume, that we’ve laid the seeds for life in this said container, and as a result of which, the Ems (you can throw in others too if you want), are born.

• And lastly, assume that the Ems are intelligent.

I’m quite sure some of you might have guessed where I’m heading, but here comes the main part. The Ems would begin their life and would survive in a complete world. They would go about whatever they do to get food, to find fellow Ems, to form communities and so on. They would discover other species, hunt them, be hunted themselves, but they’d have the will to survive. They would protect their enclaves from others and they would discover ways to defend themselves. Thoughts and ideas will emerge, and will give birth to cultures in their universe. They’d probably discover the equivalent of fire, and would take the baby steps into invention, like humans did with the wheel. They’ll move on to build shelters, villages, towns and empires and they’d fight amongst themselves. But their curiosity thrusts them slowly into the wonders of the sciences that govern their universe, and as time progresses, they discover more and more of the wonders around them, but all the while, they have no clue of just how tiny a dot they are in their universe. Now assume that enough time has passed such that they are in an era equivalent to the 21^st century for us, humans. Note that I’m talking about equivalence of knowledge here. Now here comes the last assumption:

• Assume, that they’ve developed machines that are artificially intelligent.

The Ems, have begun to make machines that they hope, would someday be equivalent to them, that is, would have a mind and a brain. While they’re intrigued by their own complexity and intelligence, they are totally unaware of the fact that we are out there watching them, and that it is we, who created them, that it is possible to achieve natural intelligence, and they are the fruits of that achievement.

Now here’s my question. If that is the case with the Ems, is it possible that we, ourselves, could be in one big such shoe box? That we were the result of an achievement to design an entity that could be naturally intelligent? That we’re some sort of alien experiment? Creepy little thought eh? I guess I’ll stop here and leave this question untouched. And please do note, I’m not hinting at the existence of any God here. I’m not hinting at anything as a matter of fact.

Damn, I do get carried away with my thoughts at times.