All for this One Moment

 

 

Four years, Hundred miles, Countless nightouts, Three takes..
All for this One Moment.

 

Thanks Naveen for the snap!

The road less travelled

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Life is all about choices. At every turn, life throws a decision to make, a decision that once taken cannot be undone. One you will have to live with, A decision which you will look back and rue or be thankful for – and you dont know which. Some times the choice is between a conventional, safe route and an adventurous route with an empty signboard.

The path that everyone expects you to take- the safe route- will take you the way a lot of people have taken – *so many* people that, nobody remembers any of them. They don’t do anything groundbreaking. They lead safe, predictable and boring lives. They might even think it could be worse had they taken the new path!

The risky route is, well, risky. Mind you, it might later prove to be a huge success, making the decision a masterstroke. But most of the times the decision turns out to be plain stupid and the whole world says “I told you so”. You know that you have to take the unchartered way to be a creator, to do something significant. But it is not just you that is going down the dark lane. Do you have it in you to drag your near and dear through a passage that only you believe is a better one.

What do you place your trust on, when you make the plunge. It cannot be fate. You create your fate through conscious decisions and you cannot expect fate to clean up your mess. It cannot be luck. You cannot leave life changing decisions to matters of probability. It cannot be God. You have to take responsibility of your actions.

It can only be on your realization of your potential. You look inside and find that you have the spark that will leave a trail long after you pass the track. You understand your life is too short to play safe. You say to yourself “I better start the trek uphill soon if i plan to reach my destiny” . And then you step confidently..

But are you ready to risk losing it all and looking like a fool five years down the line?

P.S: This is not an attempt to summarize the Robert Frost classic. I am staring in the face of such a choice. I wish i could tell u more but i am bound to non-disclosure. If you read between the lines and think that the choice is something between pursuing a technological career in a financial company and becoming a co-owner of a startup on Search Engines, you wouldn’t be wrong *grin*. This blog is to keep a record of my struggle.. and hopefully down the line , i would look back at this page and remember with glee ” ..and i made the right choice”.

2007 – A roundup

Happy New Year! Yes, I am talking to YOU.. you being all 8 of you subscribed to my blog in Google Reader! What with my erratic blogging schedule, we are out of sync now 😦 When i look back at the year that was, here are some break points i wont forget !

December 2 : was the first day of on-campus placement season. I got an offer from DE Shaw and Co, Hyderabad.

September 20: I turned 21. Much love to all the friends who made it memorable.

September 12: The day my paper on Representative PageSet got accepted for ICTIR 07. This is a moment i will cherish for a long time!

.. Alas, i lost track of what else happened this year. Going through all mails of 2007 did not help too. This is what happens when i dont blog often. Let me sign off with wishes for a happy and successful 2008 to all of us! This will be the year when hopefully this blog comes to life!

A misunderstanding.

I attended the USC’s Information Session on Masters Program at Taj Banjara yesterday. After a long uneventful presentation on why one should join USC, the hall opened for questions. A student from a local college had a doubt which bothers every ‘typical indian student’

Student: Sir, Can you tell us about the on-campus jobs we can get.

Dean:    Well, there are a lot of opportunities.. you could set up a tea-stall, work at the library, …

The student was shocked, then a sudden realization dawned, this then
gave way to a suppressed laugh. The dean failed to understand why!

Cheeky Job Offer!

Was coding a simple web browser for the Middleware lab and found this easter-egg in the http response of WordPress .

Excerpt from the header

X-hacker: If you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.

So the next time someone tells you that learning sockets can get you a job pay attention 🙂

AAPL – 146.69*

and counting. If you haven’t heard this already. Apple Inc declared an alltime high Q3 results riding high on the iPhone wave. Rumors that the iPhone might not have done as well in the market as it was touted brought down the stock 6% earlier. When confirmation came that Apple sold 270,000 pieces of the Jesus Phone in less than one and half days before the quarter, the thing really took off.

Love it or hate it but you cant just ignore the iPhone phenomenon. The way the release has been handled is a lesson in management. Right from the keynote, to the commercials, to the no leakage of any information, to the carefully planted news everything was spot on. It was a gamble to take, Raise the expectations too high on a non deserving product and your credibility is in serious danger, Underadvertise and lose your audience. And boy, did the gamble pay off ! It is estimated that the iPhone got 400 Million Dollar worth publicity for free! People who followed the countdown to the release of the iPhone will never be able to forget the lead up. The feeds from the 3 day queues, the never ending buzz , the skeptics shouting in frustration to shut up about the iphone already saying Hitler’s invasion of Poland didn’t get so much publicity, the joy of the first customers to lay hands on this beauty , Fake Steve’s post 29 June 2007: The Day the World Changed , the news after the release that the iphone actually lives up to the hype. It is the rare sight of a virtuso giving his perfectly orchestrated masterpiece. Steve Jobs, take a bow! It definitely restored a sense of childlike wonder in us.

* as of 02:49 am

Why you should read Slashdot!

You cant get much better than this. Found this exchange on a ” Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” thread at Slashdot. Major Spoilers ahead. Close your eyes and do a ctrl-w if you haven’t finished the Deathly Hallows NOW!

Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him?
I understand not screaming, since the pain can be resisted somewhat. But not even twitching?

Obviously, Harry was still semi-transparent and flickering with immunity after having cashed in a +1UP, and didn’t feel the pain.

And I thought Slashdot was only geeky stuff with nerd comments!

I am alive

..and kicking. In case you were wondering whether i have abandoned my blog altogether, Fear not! Its merely a phase when whatever you begin to write doesnt just seem right. The long list of drafts staring at my face is proof of this.. I missed out on some major fun blogging about a lot of things in the last 3 weeks. I shall surely dig out some of those drafts soon. I would do myself injustice if I dont blog about “The Deathly Hallows” experience. All in good time..

I read a lot of shitty mails but a mail sent today to the life mailing list takes the “Most Retarded Mail (debut)” award. (And that is saying a lot. As my friends will testify, I read every spam that ends up in my mail box).

> respected sir

> many of us have problem with the serving of non-veg in obh.
> what is the need of non-veg in a mess when there is already a canteen for
> that?

This dude has definitely not seen anything non-vegetarian from a distance closer than a yard.

> moreover students have to pay extra 15/- for the non-veg in the mess.

Huh? you of all people should have no issues. I dont hear the people who pay complain!

> if non-veg will be served in a mess then there will definitely be a
> degradation in hygiene because if there is a crowd in the mess then how
> will they manage hygiene?

I managed to scrape through a classical mechanics course without much trouble and I have trouble understanding this leap of logic. Lot of people eating at a place ‘automatically’ implies no hygiene!? Yayy thanx to this Einstein, I figured out the most unhygienic place in Hyderabad. Mc Donalds!

> Some people are saying that if you can’t eat in the obh then there are
> other 3 mess where you can eat but i have a question that non-veg people
> also eat veg so they have 4 mess but we have only 3 . why this partiality?

Are you kidding? You are sullen about non veggies having more options on a day’s dinner? Are you usually this stupid or are you making a special effort today?

> also think this from the view of humanity.

For the love of god what was this supposed to mean? I actually looked up humanity just now if there is some hitherto unknown meaning which fits here.

> regards

> xxx 

Sometimes I am tempted to make my blog public. But then such a post would be a flamebait. Been there, done that 🙂

Nuances of Live Blog Search

Ever wondered if the “Published Last Hour” link of the Google Blog Search works? Let me tell you.. It works and it doesnt take an hour for your updated post to come up in results. After my last post, i did some ego-searching on Google Blog Search. The query “pramodp” brought up this blog as expected but the unexpected part is – a search for the blogs with “pramodp” published in the last hour brought up my post on “Snapshot of the web” which I had published less than 10 minutes ago!!

To really appreciate the wow of this , we need to consider the enormity of the task. Blogs are the most active part of the web (apart from news sources). You may call it the “everchanging surface” of the web. Here freshness is of huge importance. According to Technorati – which is the authority on all things “live web” – there are over 175,000 new blogs everyday! The number of new posts every day is 1.6 Million !! That makes it 18 posts per second. How do you accomodate this torrent of content? How do you return a post that was published 5 minutes ago for a search query?

Here is how I would do it. I might be wrong. There might be more efficient methods to do it. But here it is. First task, How would Google know that you have written a blog entry? Simple, Just like your Google Reader knows when your favourite blogs are updated, the Google spider knows through feeds when a blog is updated. Clearly the most difficult task would be to rebuild the index for every post update (or every few minutes). Even if you do a very efficient incremental indexing, how would you rebuild the index containing Millions of blogs every minute?! The answer is “you dont”. Maintain a separate index for the blogs published in the last hour. There is an Indexer that takes the content from a store server populated by the crawlers. It parses the searchable terms in the document and puts the documents in the reverse index which maintains the ranked list of documents for every term (Example: pramodp :: http://students.iiit.ac.in/~pramodp -> pramodp.wordpress.com -> …) . What is missing is the rank of the post which we are trying to add. Note that this recent post that we are trying to accomodate in the index is not competing with all posts ever written for a rank. Its competition space is limited to the blogs written in the last one hour only. Normally ranking of a page would require the information about the distribution of the terms in the whole search subspace of the web (in this case the blogs published in the last hour) along with the distribution of the terms in the page to be indexed. We might not afford to calculate this for every blog update. So we might add the post to the reverse index with the page rank of the blog initially. In other words, take the post on the face value of the importance of the blog and worry about the actual ranking later. You might setup a process to rebuild the Last One Hour Index once every 10 minutes in which time there will be 10K posts (according to our estimate of 18 posts per sec) to rank the posts based on the statistical distribution of terms. A cleaning process retires posts older than an hour from the index periodically.

It might turn out that Google does have the raw computing power to actually calculate the PageRank of the posts on the fly. We know they have the most fine tuned hardware there is. What is for certain is that the indexing process would be more frequent than the regular web indexer and there would be greater stress on the freshness factor of the content. Let me publish this post and see if it comes out in the “Published Anytime” Blog Search.

Update: Damnit! Google upset my little theory and showed up this post in the Search alltime blogs category within 2 minutes of writing this blog! Now is the time when you put to use the “learn, unlearn and relearn” lesson you heard so often.

Snapshot of the web!

Yesterday I badly needed a pdf file which shows in the Google Search results but is a broken link. The text only version was not good enough (the research paper was figure-heavy). Googling for alternate locations of the pdf did not help. Finally I figured out what i wanted. If there were sites which took snapshots of the web at regular intervals, I could acces a previous edition of the pdf. Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine is exactly that, a time machine for the web. The WayBack Machine lets you “Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago”.

Apart from the need to retrieve a broken link, you can use the wayback machine to do some funstuff. How about checking how the Google homepage looked at 1998? Surprisingly the first archived version of the www.google.com is very simplistic (too simplistic for one’s liking because it just has two links). Another funny page is this one , a collection of the initial Google stickers .

3 posts in 5 days! Not bad! Not bad at all!!