Greener grass

I really want to write a long post about this, but sometime this semester I became a quickfix-junkie, and seem to have lost whatever patience I had for long things: long conversations, long walks, long posts.. So I'll just say what I want to say and keep it short.

By and large, most of the students here at BITS complain about how most of the professors suck, about how courses are not handled properly, about how the exams are more focussed on learning formulae and solving problems than about actually testing what the student knows. Needless to say, most of these complainers are people in the 6-8 CG range, but what they say is right for the most part.

I downloaded a couple of video lectures from Berkeley's site last semester when I was having trouble with the Microelectronic Circuits course, and I was simply blown away by the professionalism shown by the professor. He was teaching, answering doubts, talking about stuff that was going on in the industry at that time, urging his students to read papers, attend conferences, and a lot more. What I found the most striking was that he seemed to be in absolutely no hurry to complete the course. He had no qualms about clearing doubts which were only remotely related to the topic at hand. At one point, he talked on for about fifteen minutes about processors and their clock speeds, while the lecture was about frequency response of circuits.

Contrast this with professors here, who teach only that which is there on the handout, and skillfully skirt around doubts which are unrelated to the topic being taught. I always naively believed that this was a shortcoming on the professor's part, but now I think I know better. The reason why professors here seem so bad is not because their knowledge is limited, it's because of the restrictions imposed upon them by the administration. They HAVE to finish the course on time, no leeway allowed. While I don't know what'll happen if they don't finish it on time, I'm pretty sure that it won't be anything good. And then there are professors who have done PhDs in specific courses, and are being forced to teach Probability and Statistics to first yearites. Can you really blame them for their disinterest?

The source of this enlightenment on my part in the course Analog and Digital VLSI Design, handled by prof. Anu Gupta. It is, without a doubt, the best course that I've done here. We had regular lectures, we had two assignments (one analog, one digital), we had vivas on those assignments. In each assignment, we actually did stuff that engineers designing chips do. We created the circuits, generated layouts, extracted parasitics, minimized power consumption, and a whole lot of stuff besides. We had seniors who cleared our doubts. And anyone could enter Prof. Anu Gupta's chamber at any time during the day, and she would entertain their doubts instead of shooing them away. This is the only course in which I have not fallen asleep during the lectures. There is just so much to learn, and she manages to cram so much stuff into one 50-minute lecture, that even I, despite my hatred for electronics, found myself wide awake and attentive.

And at the end of the course, she did something that no other prof has done so far for us: she asked us for feedback. She stood in front of the board, and she asked us to suggest ways in which the course could be improved. She explained the problems that she faces while handling the course, the problems associated with using the bright and shiny software available at Olab (our vlsi design lab), and she asked us to put across to her anything new that we learnt about the course or the tools so that she could improve the course accordingly.

And I believe that almost every professor here would like to do that, but they find themselves, as I said before, teaching probability and statistics to first yearites.

What a waste

Google Summer of Code

Well, my proposal for WorldForge got accepted for GSoC. I guess that means that I'll be "flipping bits instead of burgers" these hols...

Home

After ten years of searching, I've finally found a place where I fit :)

Haunted

I heard your voice through a photograph
I thought it up and brought up the past
Once you know you can never go back
I've got to take it on the otherside

Centuries are what it meant to me
A cemetery where I marry the sea
Stranger things that changeed my mind
I've got to take it on the otherside

Scarlet starlet and she's in my bed
A candidate for a soulmate bled
I push the trigger and I pull the thread
I've got to take it on the otherside

(parts of Otherside by RHCP)

Untitled

They say that one picture is worth a thousand words...

Daemon

Well, as you might (or might not) have gathered from my previous post, I've recently had the good fortune of reading "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez. Those interested in finding out more about the book can either visit its official site, or they can go to the trouble of googling for it. The book has got some awesome reviews, and it's the best geek-book I've read (although I understand that it's very easy and interesting for non-geeks as well) since Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, but that's what this post is about.

Apparently, the last page of the book mentions something about something, and points the reader to the About the author page for further details. On visiting the said page, one will see a rather strange picture of the author. One that fans of ASCII art might find familiar. However, what is different about this particular sample of coloured ASCII art, is that the text itself hides a message in encrypted form.

Now, it seems that not many readers are aware of this, because on googling for it, I only found one relevant link: the one at Ethical Hacker. The people there have given a long and rather complicated guide to decoding the code by writing a program in C#. After which they've given rather vague and cryptic hints about writing a script to scrape the webpage periodically, as the author suggests. After several attempts (and several failed executions), I was about to hurl my keyboard across the room in frustration when I saw the "Forums" link at the top of the page.

There I saw that one of the users had had success in decrypting the code in merely 10 lines of Python code (excluding "include" statements). However, his code was rather incomplete (at best), so I set about writing my own.

And so, after two hours, I've written a script that checks the page, gets the RegexDate from there, compares it with a date stored in a local config file, and if the two are different then it proceeds to decrypt the web page and creates a text file containing the decrypted message on the user's desktop. And to top it off, it also uses gnome's libnotify to pop off a permanent notification announcing that the page has been updated.

To run this script, one will need to install pyDes, a python library that allows the user to decrypt base64 DES encoded strings. This library can be found here. It's a small download, just follow the instructions given on the page to install it on your system.

Windows users will need to modify my script to save the location of the config file. I believe changing sys.path.expanduser('~') to sys.environ('home') should do the trick. And you will also need to comment out the lines in which I call upon the notification system to display a notification. If you want something similar, try calling up dialog boxes from win32.

Oh, and the Ethical Hacker people have tried to ensure that only readers of the book will be able to decrypt the message by putting the encryption key as "Gragg's key" in their code. I have no such qualms, and hence have put the actual key in my code. The reason behind doing this is that only readers of the book would actually be interested in my script, so there seems to be little reason to stop them, or to force them to rack their brains trying to solve the "little riddle".

Irony

I find it mildly amusing that Daniel Suarez, the author of Daemon, the novel that's captured the imagination of every geek worldwide, can't make his home page in such a way that one part of it doesn't overlap with another.