The Lair

This is an odd post. By which I don’t mean, not an even post, but rather … the content is deliberately somewhat screwy. More screwy than normal. If you haven’t met me in real life, you may not understand any of this. Even if you have met me in real life, you may not understand it. That’s ok. This is my day for wasting your bandwidth. Deal. Normal service will resume once my promise to a cartoon character has been discharged.

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No, it’s not this war that I allude to; but a slightly more topical conflict. The war for privacy and civil liberties. Or the war on it, depending on which side of the fence you’d base your perspective. It seems odd that this should concern me, on a day when Egypt was attacked (ob note: a friend of mine had high praise and recommended that I visit Sharm El-Shiek when I mustered the finances for it. Wonder if he still says the same now. Not that the Sinai peninsula was ever the most peaceful of spots, but anyway, I digress), a day when it was uncovered that the supposed South Asian suicide bomber pinned to the floor by police officers and shot repeatedly in the head was in fact Brazilian and innocent.

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In my childhood; well, secondary school really, I had this really cool subject named Social Sciences. It was a mixture of basic economics, geography and similarly interesting subject matter. It was cool because I like geography, in a see interesting places, if only on a map sort of way.

Today, I basically had to put my money where my mouth is and place countries of Europe on a virtual map. The game link is here. The number of correctly placed entries count, as does the time taken to complete. The average error in placement (computed in miles) also counts. I completely blew at placing some countries of Eastern Europe, incidentally.. most embarassingly, I missed Bulgaria. Of course, there were lots of smaller places (like San Marino, Monaco, Liechtenstein) that I misplaced. To my shock and horror, I actually guessed Malta right. Hmm, so my average error was about 60 odd miles; which sucks a bit.. but I got 39 out of 45 right! Whee.

Actually, the entire site is rather cool with more geography based quizzes covering other continents. Now, where was this stuff when I was going to school ?

Well, it’s official now. Greasemonkey is stuck in a holding pattern for the moment while the developers figure out how to fix some potentially nasty security flaws.

The most recent release, 0.3.5, is a recommended upgrade for all users. It, however, contains no special GM_ functions. Essentially, Greasemonkey now functions as a custom user script injector. Without the special bits. Having said that, quite a few useful scripts still function properly. The question is, would you want to run them anyway ? Mark Pilgrim thinks otherwise, and says so, in fairly blunt language. I tend to agree with him, actually.

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From the introductory blurb, Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets a user add bits of DHTML to a page. I’ve waxed lyrical about Greasemonkey before, so I’m not going to go into how big a fan I am of this extension. I use it for a number of sites and it’s made my web experience far better; to say the very least. It sounds pretty innocuous to say that Greasemonkey injects pieces of DHTML into pages. Accurate, but also misleading in a sense that it gives no hint of the awesome power of this extension. When I first heard of Greasemonkey, the only thing I could think of was it’s utility for blocking advertising on select specific pages. Only, adblock fills that niche perfectly. I have Adblock, so I didn’t need Greasemonkey. Or so I thought. Fortunately, I was pushed into revisiting Greasemonkey by a friend and I discovered the script archive. And perhaps inevitably, I went from being a Greasemonkey skeptic to fanatic. In the matter of a few hours.

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I finally got around to working towards those oft promised, but not yet delivered promises. Well, at least one of them. I started making tiny tweaks to this blog. Bear with me, if you will, while I recount the litany of disasters that was my lot for the day. I swear, someone up there wants me to do real work instead of futzing around with the blog.

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It’s done. I finished it. With a couple of breaks in between; of course.

What’s it ? Why, Harry Potter VI, of course.

It strikes me as a bit turgid at times, but generally, there are compensations to be found in the fast and furious action at the end. I have to admit that the major mystery player referenced in the title was a bit of a surprise. I’m mildly annoyed at discovering the real identity of the Half Blood Prince. Blah. Not whom I suspected. Although – as with any whodunit – the clues were out there, waiting to be noticed.

Yes, the culling of characters before the final showdown has begun. People die in this book too. Some are bit players, some aren’t. I thought I noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies (that’s the anal retentive dorkiness in me percolating to the top) but overall, things seemed to sort of mesh together. There is quite a bit of revisionist writing and historical reference in the middle of the book; which might have added to the slowish pace. Don’t think I agree with this assessment though. (do not follow that link if you dislike spoilers. you have been warned)

So the eagerly anticipated Harry Potter book has been released. At the stroke of midnight last night, bookstores all over the world organized parties and the first eager fans read the opening sentence …

It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind…

I’m a fan, but not quite so rabid as to fight off people and be at the head of the queue, so to speak. My original plan was to saunter leisurely to the city center on Monday (or thereabouts) and buy a copy. But my cube mate, the Chilean chap, is leaving the UK tonight; and he needed his Harry Potter fix. So he had preordered earlier in the week. And this morning, he went and collected not one, but two copies. Obviously, he will become a much sought after person when he returns to South American soil on Monday morning. (Yes, he’s taking a slightly circuitous route out of necessity).

My first revelation: there are two editions. The children’s version and the adult edition. Both are identical in content, there appears to be no difference in language used.. I did a random check of pages on the two editions, and it’s identical. The difference is in the covers. The children’s edition has a crayon/cartoonish illustration of Harry and Dumbledore covered in a ring of fire. The book (Bloomsbury edition, anyway) is blue with green lettering. The adult edition, on the other hand, is far more somber. Black, with gold letters and a photo realistic illustration of a tattered Advanced Potion Making textbook on the cover. And the back of the adult edition has a large photograph of Jo Rowling.

Well, so I wasn’t going to drink the kool aid, but it looks like I must now. I resisted the temptation to speed read the book for all of … 10 minutes or so. Then I borrowed one of the editions and started reading it. That’s my productivity for the week reaching a new low.. can you see it ?

As for the rest, well.. I’m on chapter 10 or thereabouts now. There’ve been a few surprises already, albeit minor ones.. and I can think of a few people on the newsgroups who’ve had their predictions falsified. A huge shock awaits in chapter 2, for instance… No, I’m not going to give spoilers in this post; as and when I finish reading the book, I’ll probably link to a more detailed look at the story elsewhere.

I have returned from a trip on a crowded (as in, standing room only) express train… in a carriage where the air conditioning was broken and ventilation was nonexistent. This is with temperatures hovering around about the 30C mark. I know some people (you fricking fetishists!) may like the smell of beer, several expensive perfumes intermingled with sweat and several other odours which I dared not analyze. I don’t belong to that category. Throw in a hot and humid train carriage into that malodourous mix and you’re pretty much looking at a bad travel experience. In fact, if anyone had slathered butter over me and dipped me in some marinade (hahahaha, incoming imagery alert ? sorry), I’d be pretty much fit for eating about now.

Today is degree day at York. The tradition (in this university and pretty much everywhere, I’d presume) is that students crowd into the common room downstairs and sip sherry and/or orange juice. And then proceed to go out and play merry hell. For the record, I saw my first ever streaker in York. Unfortunately, it was a male streaker, so “Sweet motherluvin’ jeebus. Stow that away, man!” sprang unbidden into my mind.

<Beavis and Butthead mode> I said sprang. Hur hur hur hur</Beavis and Butthead mode>

Anyway, there happens to be a glut of sherry available in those tiny bite sized cups. The degree day is over, so I’m tempted to start guzzling. I’m not even the only one with these thoughts, mind you.

And to errr.. top it all off, it appears that my presence is required for a pub outing with the South American chap and a few others. Looks like I’m doing the roasting first and the marinade afterwards. And jello shots have finally reached the local pubs. Yay.

I’m headed down south of the country tomorrow for a quarterly progress report meeting. This is usually held much closer to home, but in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided to relocate further south this time. This means that a huge (well, around 10) contingent will be braving the UK train service and heading down to Hatfield.. Or somewhere like that.

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It was crosswords last year, and this year, the new craze that’s sweeping the department is Sudoku. It’s a number puzzle, played on a 9×9 grid. The entire grid is also subdivided into 3×3 regions. The objective is to place a sequence of numerals (1 to 9) such that a numeral does not repeat in a row, column or region. And since one can never have too many Sudoku puzzles from the newspaper, here is a great place to try out a few more, WebSudoku.

Funnily enough, a friend wrote a brute force solver for this. The characteristic with most of the Sudoku puzzles; an endless source of frustration for me, is that the solution route seems to be linear. Essentially, one must start at the beginning and go on until the end. This makes it easier to write a brute force solver for the correct answer, since the correct solution set would be much smaller than, say, a crossword solver. Being a masochist he wrote the solver in Javascript, so an encounter with the halting problem essentially hangs the browser. Other than that, it works great.

A few other people (this is the AI group, after all), tried constraints and a rulebased system for solving Sudoku puzzles, but I’m not sure how far they got. For a 81 square grid, brute force seems to work reasonably fast, at any rate

At a job interview. The interviewee really really wants a job
You know, I really prefer your competitor. I’m just waiting to hear from them.
Subsequently, the interviewee got the job.. and turned it down

At a thesis audit seminar
[Presenter: ] You know, this is frightfully complicated and I don’t have time to explain it, so I’ll just move onto the next slide.
[Audience: ] …
[Less polite members of the audience: ] Zzzzzz … wha ? wha ? did I miss anything ?

Previously, at the same audit seminar
This is like… a crappy way of doing it. No one seems to have done it this way, however.

We’re CompScis. We don’t know what women look like, that’s the whole point innit ? Who invented internet porn ? The liberal arts people ? I don’t think so.
We were all in a bar, everyone was moderately drunk and contemplating the bleak fate of a Computer Science student

She looks like someone mugged her with an ugly stick, grabbed her paltry wallet of good looks and then came back just to stomp on her face for good measure.
Some Scots sure have a way with words. Och aye, leddie.

This weekend was supposed to have been an eventful one. It lived upto expectations, but for phospor related reasons rather than the expected ones. That’s like – a grand way of saying I vegged out and watched TV the whole weekend. Good innit ? My flat mate of last year graduated and was due back in these parts to collect the piece of paper. This piece of paper cost him (and his parents) money and taught him very little he found useful, but was like .. a symbol. A talisman to his ability to cope in a strange country without knowing much of the language. Or something like that. It was, in his own words, also a great excuse to get drunk.

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The Chief Exec of Wipro technologies is moving into the VC business. The news link is here. While this wouldn’t be anything significant on the radar ordinarily, an interview with the person in question, Vivek Paul, had an interesting quote.

Paul was curious why an elephant tied to a small stake in the ground did not yank it up and be on its way. The animal’s handler explained that baby elephants tied to similar stakes learn they can’t break free. As elephants grow older and stronger, they don’t test the stake again–thereby remaining trapped by what should be an obsolete restraint.

Cool. I didn’t know that, but it certainly makes sense. The puny iron chains I’ve seen don’t look like they’re capable of restraining many elephants either. Now, here’s my take. Remember that whole deal with an elephant never forgetting ? Ah. There is a downside to this, as is apparent by this story. Forget your screwups from time to time, because a retry may yield better results. Things change. A long memory for failures sometimes hinders the best course of action.

But I still like Homer Simpson’s quote best.

Trying is the first step to failure
(Homer (to Bart): Well son, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.)