Devadutt

12:41 pm - N78

I've finally bought a new phone. Its the Nokia N78.


(image source: gizmodo.com)

I'm having fun playing around with it :)

11:56 pm - The Last Lecture

kiran_c recommended this video of the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Randy was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and passed away due to pancreatic cancer. This is his last lecture at CMU. Its one of those rare talks which is both humorous and insightful. I would definitely recommend watching it.

A log of Randy's experience with his illness can be read here. Though, you would expect this to be depressing, its far from it. His spirit is truly inspiring.

09:18 am - Steve Pavlina

I came across this article, "Do it now" by Steve Pavlina. From his website, he seems to be a personality development guru. Personally, I don't really take to his style of writing, as it has a preaching feel to it. However, I find his focus (or should I say ruthlessness) to optimize and his clarity of thought to be interesting.

03:15 pm

Came across the following statement in the  Art of Living site:

In science you have knowledge first, and then faith follows. In spirituality, faith comes first, and then Knowledge follows.

05:00 pm - Cracked

Here's a really interesting story by an UNIX system administrator about having his machines Cracked !

10:03 am - XGL

Here's a video of the upcoming Linux graphics. XGL as it is known, has been around for a while now.
I believe it requires 3D acceleration for it to function smoothly...
Will surely give it a try, once 3D acceleration enhancements have been made to the Intel i915 driver.

05:21 pm - Writely

The obvious is happening. Google has bought Upstartle, which makes Writely (web based word processing software). As expected, it supports MS Word, Opendocument, PDF etc.
Along with Spreadsheet, Google's office suite seems to be coming together.

To me, the big question is privacy.
I don't think, these tools can be used for any proprietary documentation (I use vim for personal documentation anyway).
If this is correct, then are people going to use these tools only for unofficial documentation ?

03:39 am - Programming Pearl

A very interesting post in the Google Research blog talks about how most implementations of a simple algorithm such as binary search are broken, even after so many years !

Surely plan to get Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley sometime soon...

03:20 pm - Youth For Equality

Youth For Equality

05:04 am - Reservation in Institutes of Higher Education

There has been a huge amount of debate/protests by the student community against the proposed 27% reservation for OBC (Other Backward Classes) in institutes of higher education (such as IITs, IIMs etc).

Quite a few of the articles/editorials published on this topic are very good, however, HRD minister Arjun Singh's interview by Karan Thapar takes the cake.
Surely worth a read. It clearly makes a case for the protesters.

04:45 am - Template Metaprogramming

Is it possible to perform a computation during compilation itself and improve the run-time performance of a program?
Apparently, it is possible in certain cases using C++ Template Metaprogramming.

01:09 am - Openhouse

IIT Delhi's Openhouse was held on 22nd April. One of the projects on display in my department was the the "Smart Cane". This has been developed by a few 3rd year B.Tech students and has got a lot of publicity of late.

• Coverage in major national media  (article in HT)
  
• One of the top hits in the Sci/Tech section on Google News India
• Even a chinese online paper has coverage on it !

10:29 pm - Pune's wireless plans

Pune plans to be the first Indian city to go wireless, according to this report. The interesting bit is that the plan being mooted by Pune's municipal corporation and not by a private player. That's one government body acting ahead of the times !

03:08 am - PM Manmohan Singh's visit

Prime minister Manmohan Singh was on campus on the 20th March to inaugurate Bharti school's new building, which also houses my (Computer Science) department. Bharti's CEO Sunil Mittal was also present and spoke quite well.

The PM's speech can be found here for the interested.

03:00 am - Blogomania

This is to announce Pavan's entry to the world of blogging :-)
Check out http://qcoe.blogspot.com

06:05 pm - Too little, too late ?

A news article in the Deccan Herald http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/feb122006/index2032412006211.asp
Wonder why they are always reactive and not proactive? Hope there is action following the words this time...

02:01 am - Tryst 2006

Tryst 2006, the Institute's technical fest was held on 3rd - 5th February. The event was much larger than previous year and the organizers seem to be better organized :)

Interesting events:

• Judged the preliminary round of Creativity++. That was completely unexpected !
  
• Participated (with Pankaj) in Algorythm and Runtime. Got through the prelims of Runtime, however, the finals didn't go well.
• Free Go-Karting ! The circuit was very small... it was still good fun. Pankaj's crashing into Ashu resulted in Ashu retiring even before he got into the kart :)
• Visited the Main building roof top. Its a cool place. Must go again.
• Hypnotica - The hypnosis show.
  
• kanthi's marathon sessions (as a judge) at the Technical Paper Presentation prelims.
• The website and the posters. Really slick. One of the best, I've seen oflate.
• SAP being the primary sponsor, was giving away Apple ipods everyday. Should have tried my luck ;)
  

10:40 pm - Ubuntu - "Breezy Badger"

Installed Ubuntu 5.10. The distribution replaced was FC4.

Linux has really become easy to install. Put in the install CD and that's more or less what needs to be done. Ofcourse, you need to install the packages specific to your requirements, but there's apt for handling that.

04:05 am - Visit by Hopcroft

The man himself, Turing awardee Professor John Hopcroft was in our department today. He spoke about Computer Science Theory for the future.

06:26 pm - Beginning

Finally after a lot of procrastination, I have decided to blog. More to follow