To us, here and now, it appears thus

Warning - Hysterical Rant coming up.

I am very much human and being human, I am not immune from common afflictions of human beings. One of them, being hate. I hate many types of people. I hate a lot of people for their crazy views. I hate some people for what they openly profess. I hate others because they hate me, the feeling is mutual. Then I hate some people simply because I find their stupidity irritating. But I always value reason above my hate. I usually let reason win. But sometimes I simply can’t, because there is one more type.

The types of whom I hate so intensely, that my fingers tremble as I type about them. They disgust me utterly. They are total morons. Fucked up lazy bastards who sole purpose in existence is fucking up lives, theirs and in the process others. These are the morons who are the enthusiastic bozos who make promises, take up ideas and sometimes lots of energy and time of the others. And in return they come up empty handed. Once, twice, why even thrice can be excused citing circumstances beyond control. But every-time? That’s simply inexcusable.

People who take up responsibility upon themselves in all enthusiasm and refuse, in-spite of knowing fully well what might occur, to go the whole fucking nine yards. Their half baked attempts at every fucking thing, wasting the efforts and time of others. Their enthusiasm, true or falsely professed does not matter. Their promises empty. The people who give up when if you could just wait a bit more, if you could have spent a little more, if you could have fucking understood what you got into in the first place. These are the bastards that I hate - intensely, those who don’t fucking understand what they are getting into and end up hurting others and in certain cases, costing a life. The worst kind.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Since the last time I posted here about getting a cichlid, I’ve had a fast track lesson in chemistry, biology and even some good old physics. First, I realised that my skills at identification of a species are hopeless and I would have never been a good biologists.

It turns that I got my family (genus) right (from the general charecteristics) but got my species wrong. I have a flowerhorn cichlid, which is in some sense a disapointment because its a man-made species. Though, I don’t believe in god, I am pretty certain that making new species is not for the better of the environment. Speciation occurs because of the presence of an ecological niche. Lacking one, artificial speciation could be dangerous.

On the other hand, ecological ruminations aside, I have come to like this fiesty little bugger and I would like to give him as good a home as possible. As this cichlid is a hardy species and can tolerate a wide vareity of conditions It needs little attention, yet I’m learning a lot of new things by observing his behaviour. As time comes, maybe I could probably qualify to a full fledged aquarist. I have decided to blog about my learning experiences here, and since I pride myself in being a bit more inquisitive than many, I will be putting a good discussion of the science involved in keeping fish.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

I am now officially the owner of a member of the family cichlidae. Just that I’m still not very sure of the species yet. Its either a frontosa (as reported by me dealer) or its a more fiesty bugger, the Aulonocara Jacobfreibergi, which it is more likely to be based on its markings and morphology. Its a juvenile and hence difficult to tell what it exactly is.

I’ve got a small twelve gallon tank (20″x10″x15″) with this fish about 4.5″ in length and already showing signs of colorations (and probably sexing too). I’m looking for a bigger tank and some tank mates to keep him company. Any and all suggestions welcome..

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Imagine, you are a scrawny 18 year old who is planning to take up programming and with the mess thats out there, you really don’t know what to do or how to start with programming and all that. So what do you do?

If you answered fire up gmail and email some of the really really famous people in the computing industry, whose time is almost invaluble compared to yours. Then you would call me crazy. right? Well actually one smart polish teenager did just that and guess what - They replied. His list included computing giants like Linus Torvalds (father of the linux kernel), Dave Thomas (author of the pragmatic programmer), Peter Norovig, David Hansson, James Gosling, Guido Van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup, Tim Bary and Steve Yegge.

This is one of the times I wish that the thought had occured to me instead. You know, now I feel like banging my head on the keyboard and probably feel like eating my own shoes too..

Check out the replies they have given (here) and go bang your heads on your keyboard for not thinking of this earlier.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Its long time since I wrote anything remotely techy. Though I’ve taken a small break from the outside world for personal reasons I’ve still been hacking around, the usual fun stuff you see. Now since Python 2.5 is out with a whole lot of new features I thought I should check it out . And well I’m impressed at a lot of work the guys have done and still I have a few peeves with it to. This is just a cursory glance and probably my opinions could change. So here is what I’ve gleaned so far from less than two days of hacking around. I will discuss the features that I found the most interesting.

Speed : This is one are where they have done lots of improvement. There is a perceptible difference in speed between the previous release and this release. I have moved a lot of maintenance scripts that I use to clean up my database and I managed to port them to python 2.5 without any problems. So a tip of the hat for the guys who’ve done the good work in improvements for speed. I have’nt checked out for compatibility so far, but if it doesn’t create new dependencies, I guess a lot of my mainstream projects would definitely get a power boost because they are basically frameworks other people use.

Co-Routines : Well, generators just got better with this version of python. They have been morphed into full blooded co-routines which already makes me think of the possibilites. For those who are new to these things, Co-Routines are functions on steriods. Normal functions have single point of entry and a single point of return (which may be dynamically decided of course). Co-Routines are cousins of functions which have can be entered at more than one point and can be left at multiple point and hence, they can be resumed. Though this looks like some form of primitive co-operative multitasking (which they are), They are also amazingly powerful programming constructs.

There are lots of situations where you could put this to use. Basically sometimes its easier to imagine your programs as moving from one state to another (exhaustive searches on graphs) or even better there are lots of occasions where you can actually consider the whole program to be a graph and the flow of control as traversing a graph in a particular order. Say a small MUD for example. Its a classic situation where co-routines can be put to good use. Another great place where you could use these is in finding patterns. In conjunction with partials (which I will discuss below) you can probably write pretty fast regular expression matchers. A boon for all those bioinformatics guys.

Partials : If you have any experience in functional programming, this shouldn’t be new to you at all. Partial Functions are functions which are built out of other functions with some arguments filled in with particular values. Kinda like C++’s default arguments, but a partial function always has a lesser number of arguments from the original function it has been constructed from. Let’s take an example so we can see them a bit more clearly.

consider the function add which takes in 2 arguments a and b so you define it as

add a b -> a + b

Now, consider another function inc, which is a partial function built from the original function..

inc = add 1 a

Of course this inc a is a partial application of the add function. There only one of the arguments of is defined and the other is passed down from the inc function. Now if the function could store a state (or is a co routine) and is partially applied in another function, then that gives us a powerful control structure. Imagine the possibilities…

Now that you have drooled over all that, I will give you the bad news. The syntax is absolutely clumsy. The syntax I used above is not the actual syntax, because the actual one is too verbose. This could probably be my Lisp/Haskell biases talking here, but in general I consider the syntax clumsy and not well thought out.  So thats a big dissapointment there.

Overall, at first glance, python 2.5 seems a good improvement with few dissapointments. Since I’m all itching to get something working with 2.5 time to get coding now..

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas (your favourite dungeon monkey)

Lord Muruga after being hounded by feminists groups for openly practicing bigamy, has now taken refuge in the city of Amsterdam after the Priyanka Rahul Gandhi brigade had burnt his effigy and promised violence for ‘misusing the national bird’ by trying to mount it.

In a controversial interview to AP, he criticized the Pope for being partial and lashed out at him for not giving all religions equal footing and totally forgetting to mention him in his speech, in spite of the status of God, given to him by many followers. He accused the decadent west of being morally bankrupt and have given into the evils of atheism and secular humanism and not acknowledging him for what he is - A God. He also lashed out at his followers of being impassive and not forthright as other Muslims in expressing their anger of the insult that the pope had accorded to him by not insulting him. He said “Its deplorable that Hindu India hasn’t woken up to its true potential and the Pope was clearly practicing minority appeasement”. He however has spoken favorably of the government decision to spend money on people who have married people from lower caste SC/ST. He said that “Yes, I applaud the government for implementing such measures and giving money to the cause of inter caste marriages.. I have already put in my claim” .

He also told that the tried and tested principle of the free-market is compatible with core Hindu values and said “the evils of the society are due to socialization and nationalization, especially of the six houses that used to belong to me in Tamil Nadu”. On asked about his future plans he said that he is in touch with the Sangh Parivar to launch a party based on core hindutva principles of capitalism, nationalism, inter-caste marriages and liberation of India and his houses from a psuedo-secular minority appeasing government. He said that all his intentions had the best national interest at heart and should not be painted the communal color.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

Reading through some old articles in slate I came across one piece by Christopher Hitchens about the terrorists (should I say revolutionaries) of the yester year. Many of whom were fighting for a better tomorrow. To them some of these acts were an ideological statement and din’t intend to kill or harm anybody. The most amusing of those is this guy - Hermnio da Palma Inacio.

Herminio da Palma Inácio, the Portuguese revolutionary, was perhaps the first hijacker in Europe. He borrowed a Portuguese plane from Morocco during the Salazar dictatorship, made it fly over Lisbon and drop leaflets calling for a free election, took it back to Morocco, presented all the ladies on-board with a rose, apologized for the inconvenience, and deftly disappeared.

Man, what chutzpah!

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

There is an interesting post by Mark Chu-Carrol about these wonderful calculating devices called slide rules. These are simple devices before the pre-digital calculator age and was the hallmark of every nerd worth his salt. That reminded me of my own experiments with these amazing devices.

I was born into the age of digital calculators and computers and hadn’t heard of the word “slide-rule” before my ninth standard. I came across that only when studying the history of computing devices. And only then I realised that I had been using primitive slide rules for quite sometime during my early school years to cheat in exams. That too, as early as the second standard. Here is what I remember of how I discovered these devices and my experiences with them.

In India, one of the first things you learn in your second standard is this concept called the number line. Though the only numbers we talked about were natural numbers, there was a lot of importance to the number line itself. Infact, undue importance was given to the number line and you were basically scrutinised for not drawing neatly rather than whether you got it or not. The teacher took painstaking effort to make sure every student had a neat and legible number line and drawing it was a mere ritual in itself completely devoid of any purpose or meaning.

During one of these drawing bouts, I noticed that these number lines could actually be used to do mindless addition. Mindless addition is pretty much what you do when you use a calculator and not the boring “3 in the mind, 4 in the hand” nonsense. Infact I had got so interested with discovering that I could do quick addition using a number line that I first used a single number line and marked ruler, which was primarily used for drawing the number line. Infact most of my teachers would think I was painfully measuring to draw the number line while I was actually having fun doing lots of addition. Then I had evolved into using two identical rulers to do addition. Somtimes, during normal exams, when two rulers could arouse suspicion, I usually took a 30cm ruler and broke it into two rulers of almost equal length. It was a matter of time before I got used to looking at the number lines in reverse, that I could even do subtraction.

Infact I had tuned my basic arithmetic so much to this primitive slide rule that I always used two marked rulers (used by everyone else for drawing the number lines) and was calculating things in a jiffy. Since I was pretty much diffident through out my school life, very few people actually knew of this trick.

The Math Olympiad.

Around this time was when my eye-sight was getting bad. I couldn’t read what was on the black board and hence couldn’t be very attentive in class. In concordance with that, my grades in all subjects (except math) had been uniformly falling. My shy nature wasn’t helping either and I was usually regarded as a “not-so-interested-in-education” types in school. And that label, usually meant you lost all respect in the eyes of your classmates. Though I wasn’t particularly bothered with the lack of “social” respect or my falling grades, I was very much interested in things like science and math. By that time I had usually taken to reading encyclopedias and knew a lot about astronomy and basic science by then.

So it happened that there was a sub-junior level mathematics olympiad and it was given to everyone in class, and I had come prepared for this. With two 30cm marked rulers of course. All questions were about adding and subtracting 4 digit numbers and some basic geometry. Infact the toughest question consisted of figuring out the missing numbers in an addition problem (i.e, subtraction - gasp!). I had gotten so good in using my slide rule to do addition and subtraction that I had finished the paper before anyone in my class did. Even before the official “bright” kids.

And surprise, surprise - I had won both by score and by time. Sometimes, its just amazing what a slight edge in technology could do.

Signing Off,
Vishnu Vyas.

There has been a growing sense of despondency in my mind these few years. I am being terrified at what is happening in this world. No, its not Islamic terrorism or radical Christians denying evolution. Its the growing partisanships that seem to have clouded our mind, denying the most basic fact - we are all human.

Every problem is painted as black and white, right vs left, everyone has chosen a side. Divisions growing wider in what could have been an answer to nature’s cold and cruel war that creates new species. Humanity is getting sacrificed over imagined gods, differences in wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation reflected off your skin, differences in ideologies. In confirming our identities and our allegiances, we have failed to embrace our most universal identity - as humans and our most fundamental allegiance - to humanity.

It is sad that, in the 4 billion year history of life, its the dominant species that has been at the receiving end when nature gave the finger. This time, as things go, we needn’t wait for nature. The only time nature could really be trumped, is when there is the ability to think critically and apply reason and rational thought. But now, rationality and common sense has gone into a deep slumber, and given way to fundamentalism of all kinds. The you are wrong , I’m right kind of battles. The worst ones.

There are impending threats to humanity, both from within and from the outside. A small random mutation on an isolated strand of genetic material on a virus could turn into our worst nightmare. A radical meme rampaging the common consciousness could destroy our civilisation. A few degrees rise in global temperature could devastate humanity.

Human race has been vulnerable before, and yet trumped nature every time. Beating the odds, playing its cards perfectly, by applying critical thought and moving from a simple gene propagating machine to a society that could take care of itself. That’s how we beat the genes. But in all those times, the danger wasn’t as clear or as present as it is now. And now is when we need to wake up. We have to move from the simple meme propagating machines we have become to true creatures of reason, objectivity and rationality.

The final war is yet to come. The war to end all wars is yet to come and it will be brought upon humanity by itself. The warriors could be nebulous, unknown, unexpected. For all I know, it could already be upon us. And in this war, as in all wars, there is only one winner. And in this war, as in all other wars, there is only one winning strategy - Reason.

Signing off,
Vishnu Vyas

My life seems like a bundle of contradictions to me. I’ve been everywhere and yet, nowhere at all. It seems strange that clarity could be so elusive. If only we could know everything at the behest of ones will. I am at an important juncture at my life and I need to make a decision. Sadly, I cannot. The more I think about it, the more confused I get.

Oh! Choice, what a cruel master you are. You could have given me the devil or the deep sea and I could have picked at random. My fate would have been same either way. Instead, you ask me to choose between heavenly mead and sweet sweet nectar. I have to chose between two things I’ve always wanted to do. Between being a research scientist at a lab in India and a MS degree from a university in America.

I’ve been at mighty crossroads before, and only rarely has clarity come before the choice was made. Mostly, it has been correct, but not always. I’ve regretted a few intransigences of my past, but all that was well before I could legally vote. When you are a kid, its always someone else’s fault. Now, it could very well be mine.

Signing off (confused),
Vishnu Vyas.