I had kind of forgotten that this blog existed. Back in college I had the habit of deleting old blogs once I'd gotten tired of them, so some part of me just assumed that I had done the same with this one. And then Ninad tartly mailed me saying that I'd left a NULL pointer here, so I figured I'd make another post to leave a non-NULL pointer once more.
For the past two years I've been blogging (among other things) over at http://wirywolf.com/blog. And I don't see that changing for the foreseeable future.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Migration
Well, I'm moving this blog to http://ameypar.co.cc. I haven't posted anything in a while, so I doubt that anyone will care, but just thought I'd leave a non-NULL pointer...
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The Sieve of Eratosthenes
Sift the Twos and sift the Threes,
The Sieve of Eratosthenes.
When the multiples sublime,
The numbers that remain are Prime.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Atom
Blog authors usually put a lot of effort into the look of their blogs. And then their readers, ungrateful ingrates that they are, go ahead and just use a feed reader to scrape posts off the blog, thereby making the author's efforts an exercise in futility.
Ok, nevermind that. My point here is that Atom and RSS have really changed the world we use the web. Instead of periodically visiting hundreds of sites regularly, we just import their feeds into our favourite feed-reader, and sit back and enjoy the periodic updates, never understanding the true marvels that feeds are.
For me, till five minutes back, a feed was just this magical thing that pulled new stuff from my favourite site(s) and showed it to me at one central location. I had only a vague idea as to how feeds work, and as long as they worked as intended, I didn't really care how they managed to do what they do.
That is, until I set about creating my own Atom feed.
Our college compres are going on right now, and, as usually happens during a series of tests, I felt the urge to try out something cool and new. So I went over to Google sites, and spent the past three hours making my own site. And then I discovered that I can create a mini-blog there, and post updates and stuff. So I created a page that would allow me to post updates on my progress on my GSoC project, and I looked for the familiar radio symbol that appears in the right corner of Firefox's URL bar to indicate that the current page has a feed, and found that none existed.
So... I set about creating my own.
I always thought that feeds work by some internal logic by which they automatically update themselves whenever the page that they are monitoring changes (yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, live with it). As it turns out, however, feeds are simply XML files that the feed reader parses and extracts data from. So, everytime something new is added to the site, the feed has to be manually (as in manually, not by hand. A script can be written to take care of this) updated to reflect the changes.
And, thanks to a very helpful guide found here, I have created my first Atom feed!
(I picked Atom over RSS because RSS is old, and Atom is supposedly newer, better and shinier)
Next, I'll write a simple Python script that'll scrape my website and update my local feed xml file, which I will then have to manually (yes, by hand here) upload to the site.
Now, however, it's time to study a bit more of OR and then sleep..
Ok, nevermind that. My point here is that Atom and RSS have really changed the world we use the web. Instead of periodically visiting hundreds of sites regularly, we just import their feeds into our favourite feed-reader, and sit back and enjoy the periodic updates, never understanding the true marvels that feeds are.
For me, till five minutes back, a feed was just this magical thing that pulled new stuff from my favourite site(s) and showed it to me at one central location. I had only a vague idea as to how feeds work, and as long as they worked as intended, I didn't really care how they managed to do what they do.
That is, until I set about creating my own Atom feed.
Our college compres are going on right now, and, as usually happens during a series of tests, I felt the urge to try out something cool and new. So I went over to Google sites, and spent the past three hours making my own site. And then I discovered that I can create a mini-blog there, and post updates and stuff. So I created a page that would allow me to post updates on my progress on my GSoC project, and I looked for the familiar radio symbol that appears in the right corner of Firefox's URL bar to indicate that the current page has a feed, and found that none existed.
So... I set about creating my own.
I always thought that feeds work by some internal logic by which they automatically update themselves whenever the page that they are monitoring changes (yes, I know that sounds ridiculous, live with it). As it turns out, however, feeds are simply XML files that the feed reader parses and extracts data from. So, everytime something new is added to the site, the feed has to be manually (as in manually, not by hand. A script can be written to take care of this) updated to reflect the changes.
And, thanks to a very helpful guide found here, I have created my first Atom feed!
(I picked Atom over RSS because RSS is old, and Atom is supposedly newer, better and shinier)
Next, I'll write a simple Python script that'll scrape my website and update my local feed xml file, which I will then have to manually (yes, by hand here) upload to the site.
Now, however, it's time to study a bit more of OR and then sleep..
Monday, April 27, 2009
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
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
Monday, April 20, 2009
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...
Sunday, March 22, 2009
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