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".

Just how tough is NLP?

I got this while auditing an introductory class on natural language processing.

A colleague recently told Roger Gould, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, about a lecture, place uncertain, referring to double negatives. Every language, the lecturer observed, has a construction in which two negatives make a positive. But in English, he said, there's no construction in which two positives make a negative.

From the hall came the perfect, anonymous response: "Yeah, right."

About chennai

I have been in Chennai for only one week. So this post is basically my first impression of Chennai.

The first thing that comes to mind is temperature. I am very lucky to be living in IIT-M campus which is 2-3 degrees cooler from Chennai. Water seems to be another big problem. The water that we get in the campus is fine. But outside, even packaged water has a weird taste.

The Chennai sun reminds me the sun (Can't quite remember which ad) which drains a kid using a straw.

First class week at IIT-M

This post has been delayed for quite a long time for various reasons. I was actually going to post my first day experience. Since its been delayed for a week , I'm going to summarize my IIT-M life, first week (Everything I saved on first day in italics). Some interesting things I found out about IIT-M classes: -

The software engineering paper has a lab. Remember, this used to be one of the most boring theory-only paper during B-Tech. More info about experiments in the lab once it starts. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss the first one on monday.

The lab has started now, we have to form a "company" of 5 people and prepare a presentation about the company.

We had an introductory class on cryptography. My view on cryptography is that, no matter how strong your algorithm is, it's all going to be broken when user chooses the password (which is one part of every algorithm, I think). We know for a fact that it is simply too difficult to make people (myself included) to choose strong passwords. The company that I worked for had very strict rules for password.It required us to use letters, digits, and special chars. Also it had to be atleast 10 chars or something, and we had to change it every 2 weeks or so. After faithfully following the system for sometime, I just found it too difficult to remember my password. So I started using the approach most people followed, maintain a common prefix of letters and numbers, then cycle through all special chars each time you have to change your password. In other words, passwords are easily guessed and your cutting-edge cryptographic algorithm looks stupid(period).

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

I'm pretty good at cooking

Pazham pori is one of my favorite snacks.

Here (Technopark) it costs about Rs. 4/-. Pretty high considering the fact that here pazham pori is just pori without a pazham. So just like Linus Torvalds decided to make Linux getting sick of all crappy OS es at that time, I thought about doing the unthinkable - make pazham pori myself.

I tried it out for the first time about 5 weeks ago. It turned out to be a big hit. Then I tried it out at my kazhakoottam home with two of my friends manu and renjith. They helped me a lot too; they ate about 25 out of 40 I made (Nah..they helped me cook too). Yesterday (Apr 29), I took a shot at making pazham pori for the third time. It was a big success too.

Planning to make it a few more times because a lot of ingredients (except banana) are left over from first buy.