IITM - life updates

Yesterday, I went to a temple inside campus with my friend Sunil. It was a small, quiet temple. There are 3 temples inside the campus. One in hostel zone, one in academic zone, and one in residential zone. One of those is home to a white-colored deer. It's called "meetu maan" by senior malayalees (and now by us).

IITM - life updates

The quizzes (Just another term for sessionals) are over, and shaasthra, tech fest hosted and organized by IITM, is coming up. Life's pretty busy here. I remember the days in GEC. They were so different. I mean we could get away by not studying for 51/2 months (or more) in a semester. It kills if we relax for 1 week here.

Nowadays, I am spending a lot of time watching "The big bang theory" and "Bones". Both very different, but goes well with "wannabe geeks".

Joined IIT-M

Yesterday was my first day at IIT-M. I've now completed all the usual admission formalities. I'm a bit surprised after that experience. I expected the thing to be simple and smooth. Instead, it was like every other college. I had to fill in my name and address in a million forms (, and I thought getting through GATE was tough).

Life Update

I have decided to join IIT Madras for M Tech. It's funny, the only thing I can think of is "I'm gonna miss living in kerala". I'm getting homesick already.

Today is saturday. Got to help my friend here to cook. Today's special: stew (pronounced "ishtew")

"The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne"
- Geoffrey Chaucer

Don't know what to name this

That time is not far away, when Internet and phone will be free.

That time is not far away, when water and air will cost you a fortune.

Habit

The most basic fact of life. Every action is influenced by habit.

23

It's Jan 23, 2009. It's been 23 years of travel through this strange loop.

"I don't know"

still remains one of the hardest things for me to say.

X'mas n 2009

Now @ office waiting for my friend to finish his "Bug fixing" activity. So thought I would blog about things I did for X'mas and New year (which almost every time sums up to sleeping, sleeping and more sleeping.., but not this time).

This X'mas I (actually we pullazhians [would need to start another blog to describe all of them:)]) had my X'mas wine 'n' cake at Shine 'n' Sherine's (pullazhians, ofcourse). Then on 26th (or is it 27th, man.., I have poor memory) we went to Athirapilly, Vazhachal, and some other dam on the way. The tour was fun and *free* (as in free beer) as one of our pullazhians's father works in forest department. We were 8 (me, raseel, vc, hiranchettan, kuttan, kunku, shine, and sherine) in 2 cars (raseel's and kunku's). The tour was fun (I was assigned to the job of taking snaps of all the cool things they do :)), security shouting at me for going too near the waterfall, shine stepping on crap...(sorry dude).

And guess what I did on New year's....

slept from 9 to 7 (C'mon, I was tired after all the action).

With that, a belated Happy New Year to all my readers, keep smiling :-)...

Google is insane!!!

Just started using google reader for my favourite blogs. And when I started checking the "recommended links" section. Obviously it matches my profile with other bloggers's profile to "recommend" links. And these are the links that showed up

Three of those links were blogs of my college-mates

Life Revisited
Cool Raindrops
Free as in freedom...not as in free beer...

and the other one was that of "malayalam reality shows" or something like that.... thankfully, there is a "No thanks" link for it.

PS: Sorry for the title, Google. I love google (we all do).

First drive after driving test

I drove all the way from mannuthi to palakkad (1 1/2 hour drive). The drive was OK, but I've got to get lot more practice.

Driver's license

I got my driver's license today.....now I've got to learn to drive(properly)..

"I can only ride in 8's and drive in H's.."

- balu

PS: - This post should be dated 3-Sep-2008

Life update

I should start practicing for my driving license test...(breakevide... :-P)

back blogging....Feels like heaven

I'm back. Somehow got my system up and running after a long time.

Some very interesting LJ articles for your reading pleasure...
inside linux packet filter I
inside linux packet filter II
these articles describe the path of a network packet up the Linux kernel protocol stack.(And also describes how packet sockets are implemented).

Oh..and my new years resolution was - "Atleast one blog/month" ;-)

Training @ CDAC

currently we are having training at CDAC, vellayambalam. Vellayambalam is about 15-20 kms from our place (A long distance considering the fact that rust-age machines of state transport take a gozillion hours to reach here.(Yeah, I'm publishing this from CDAC :-) ).

ps :- I can't believe I forgot to close a paren in the above post after doing so much LISP programming.

First days after joining Tata Elxsi - TVM

It's been a long time... I joined Elxsi on 8th August. We (ME and 9 friends) rented a house near technopark. It's a very nice place. Really enjoying the training sessions @ TEL.

Random Walking

What is the probability that two random walkers starting from a point meet each other during their walk?

We consider random walks in 1, 2 and 3 dimensions.

A 1d random walk can be thought of as a random walk along a long street(Similar to number line), where at each point he may choose to proceed in the same direction or reverse his direction.

A 2d random walk can be thought of as a random walk on a 2d grid, where at each point he may choose any one of four directions(forward, backward, left and right).

Similarly a random walker walking in 3d space has 6 options at each point(Four directions of 2d walk plus up and down).

I wrote a python program to simulate random walks in 1, 2 and 3 dimensions.

The function randwalk simulates a random walk in any dimension. The dimension is determined by the parameter update which is a function which returns the new position of a random walker given his old position. The limit parameter limits the no: of steps taken by a random walker(Random walkers won't walk forever:-) ).


I obtained the following results.

Two 1d random walkers meet about 95% of time at an average of about 1 move before meeting each other.
Two 2d random walkers meet about 60-70% of time at an average of about 20 moves before meeting each other.
Two 3d random walkers meet about 30-35% of time at an average of about 10 moves (This is surprising) before meeting each other.

The above simulation is not very realistic. It assumes that both random walkers walk the same distance at the same pace.
Also, in real life, random walkers don't choose directions randomly. Instead, they may prefer one path over another according to their tastes and preferences.

References

Introduction to probability, Charles M. Grinstead and J . Laurie Snell

Stages of knowledge

The four stages of knowledge

stage 1 : The stage where you don't know and you know that you don't know.
stage 2 : The stage where you don't know (the whole thing) and you think that you know.
stage 3 : The stage where you know and you think that you don't know.
stage 4: The stage where you know and you know that you know(This stage is purely hypothetical).



"
The path of the righteous man
is beset on all sides...
by the inequities
of the selfish...
and the tyranny of evil men.
Blessed is he who,
in the name of charity and good will,
shepherds the weak
through the valley of darkness,
for he is truly his brother's keeper
and the finder of lost children.
And I will strike down upon thee with
great vengeance and furious anger...
those who attempt to poison
and destroy My brothers.
And you will know
I am the Lord...
when I lay My vengeance
upon you.

....

maybe it means...
you're the evil man,
and I'm the righteous man,
and Mr. 9-millimeter here,
he's the shepherd...
protecting my righteous ass
in the valley of darkness.

Or it could mean...

you're the righteous man,
and I'm the shepherd,
and it's the world
that's evil and selfish.

Now, I'd like that.

But that shit ain't the truth.

The truth is,

you're the weak...
and I'm the tyranny of evil men.

But I'm tryin', Ringo.
I'm tryin' real hard...

to be the shepherd.
"


- From Pulp Fiction, Jules Winnfield to Ringo