I am not a fan of red eye flights. Nobody is

I have one tomorrow. Which brings up the question – do I stay up, or go to sleep and risk not waking up in time?

I am going to stay up. Let’s see how that goes :-)

There has been no power here since yesterday night.

I have a million other reasons to not like Chennai. And scarce few reasons to like it.

I need to get out of here. As soon as I can.

SumaStorm was my desktop computer. She died a slow, silent and agonizing death over the past few months, which came to light only today. Due to my neglect, she is dead today.

I built SumStorm with my own hands, bought with my own money (thanks to several amazing people on the web) when I was 16 or so. It felt amazing when I first booted it up. It felt amazing when I maxed out all its cores running distcc with my netbook. It felt amazing that I could run Photoshop in a Win7 VM on Ubuntu and not feel a stutter.

It was an amazing machine.

I felt horrible when I realized the extent of the damage the rats had done. This must be how kid feel when the pet dog they grew up with dies. When run over by a tank. Which the kid was driving.

I did not know I could be this attached to a machine. It turned out to be a very emotional few hours.

RIP SumaStorm. I’m sorry.

I’m blogging from (one of the many) browsers on this Raspberry Pi. Testing setting it up to do slideshows during JSFoo 2012.

THIS IS SO COOL!

I am now editing this blog post from my new Nexus 7.

THIS IS SO COOL!

I am a few years behind the curve on this. Last year was spent slogging my ass out at a wonderful startup and travelling to a lot of places meeting and working with some wonderful people. Left very little time for staying on the bleeding edge.

Changing that fast – trying to produce useful stuff while also staying close to the bleeding edge. Fun times ahead :-)

We’re the Michelangelos of the great age of machine intelligence which is yet to come. We’re sketching out how it’s all going to look. We’re at the forefront of solving incredible problems and creating magical devices. – DanielBMarkham

If there’s a great age of machine intelligence to come, then one in a million of us may be a Michelangelo. The rest of us are house-painters, and the houses we paint are slated for demolition within our own lifetimes. – Lagged2Death

I’ll try not to be a house painter.

Earlier this month I spent a couple of days as a ‘guest’ at Infosys Mahindra City (district finals for Aspirations 2020 – a TopCoder style programming competition). Interesting experience.

No laptops allowed. No storage devices either. Cameras are okay, but “please don’t take pictures”. Phones are okay too. The usual complimentary grope as you enter. Random security guards ask “Where is your ID card?” at random times. Buses bringing in hordes of people. Couples being couply in food courts. Reasonably good food. Formal clothes, without regard to the weather.  Everyone smiles when talking (unless they’re security guards). Respectful deference to hierarchical authority (with a big smile & explicit announcements of gratefulness). Unlocked cycles to travel around the campus.

A vague sense of order, but no sense of purpose.

This is what people are trying to (and mostly succeeding) in making Engineering ‘education’ resemble. If you’ve made peace with how engineering colleges are, you’ll feel completely at home at Infosys. Accident?

A screenshot from the etherpad used for last week’s WMF Mobile Team retrospective meeting. I could (and should!) fill in several volumes about how awesome working for (and with) the WMF Mobile team is, but that screenshot is a start in explaining the general fun and silliness of the place :)

You increase the time from 1.5 hours to 3 hours and give them another chance, of course!

Keeping in mind the welfare of children and the need for teachers to fill vacancies, the government directed TRB to conduct re-examination for candidates who failed to obtain 60 per cent marks.

The government has directed TRB to increase the duration of the test time from one-and-a-half hours to three hours with additional 30 minutes for blind candidates.

(from the Deccan Chronicle)

What wonderful concern for the future of our country/humanity. I also wonder if there is such a test for College Lecturers, and how the pass percentage for that would be.

**Update: **Teachers now protesting against ‘difficulty’ of test, asking for “Grace Marks”. Oh well.

(via PavadaNada)

I’ve gotten rid of my Vim repo from GitHub, and switched to using Vundle + DropBox to keep my vim environment safely backed up.

You can find my .vimrc file here. With just this and Vundle setup, I find it much easier to port my settings elsewhere instead of using git.

Hat tip to tecoholic for pushing me to switch to Vundle :)

I’m just on a one year break from college doing Interesting Things and growing up. Going great on both counts.

I will go back to college next year and finish. I understand that it will not be easy and that many people would consider it a pointless waste of time. That’s OK.