The Chronicles of a Happy Life

Participated in Codecraft today. I wasn’t able to get even a single problem right :((. I was able to code an optimal solution to one, but for some reason, it is giving ’segmentation fault’ error. Another has such complicated I/O that I gave up after two hours of non-stop frustration. For the rest, I couldn’t come up with anything better than brute force. I feel terrible losing so horribly :((

I just finished reading the book - ‘The Street Lawyer’ by John Grisham. It was quite boring. I can’t believe I actually read the whole of it on a computer screen!

I watched the movie - Alexander yesterday - what a letdown!

Felicity starts in less than a week from now. I really have very little Felicity work to do. In the last two years I was eye-deep in work around this time. This time I decided to stick only to the high-level work of maintaining finances. I couldn’t have asked for a better responsibility but now I’m missing the tension at the grassroot level. It is so simple to be happy, but so difficult to be simple!

I’m now reading ‘Nancy Reagen, the Unauthorized Biography’ by Kitty Kelly. A line from the book said - “…Nancy was reared as an only child and displayed the self-possessed characteristics associated with only children, who are usually more mature, more advanced and more ambitious than children brought up with siblings.” Hmmm..

I spent a lot of time reading a senior’s blog today. It was quite interesting. Most of the time he writes about Linux sysadmin stuff and his gf, but the rest of the stuff is good. I especially liked the posts where he deliberated about whether he should go for MSBR or job, and where he describes picnics with his IIITian friends.

I got an internship in Microsoft :)
It feels awesome. I wanted it more than anything else and I finally got it.
It’s been three days since I came to know, and I can’t seem to stop smiling :D

I met an old friend today. In some context, he said to me - ‘everybody is a topper’s friend, a 5 pointer has no friends.’ Is this true? Point to ponder. :-?

Finally, found a better browser - Avantbrowser. It’s lightweight compared to Firefox as it uses the IE engine. Also, I installed the robo-form plugin to automatically fill forms. Unfortunately, I deleted the ‘firefox bookmarks toolbar’, so I will have to bookmark everything all over again :(.

Today, after a long time, I wrote some programs just for fun. My C++ skills were getting rusty and so I decided to write some code.

I also wanted to check out this site - www.topcoder.com. It’s a pretty cool idea - combining the best parts of professional and linux software development processes. At the risk of being boastful, I must say that I had thought of that idea first. While working at Novell, I realised that the linux development model had a lot of advantages but also a lot of disadvantages. The same is the case with professional software development model.

I also liked the concept of ‘arena’ at topcoder.com. Neat!

I wrote two C++ programs at a practice ‘arena’, then I got bored. The algorithms were just too easy to get. I was going to participate in a proper single round competition but the timings were really inconvenient. Some other time…

I usually don’t get upset. I have a high tolerance to practically all kinds of irritating things on this planet - from a boring teacher who won’t stop teaching, to a computer monitor that misbehaves all the time except in front of the Samsung technician. There is only one thing that can really get me. I get really, really pissed when I anything happens to my email. I don’t know why but I’ve been missing a lot of mails lately, many important mails too - mails from friends who I thought had forgotten me, replies which I had been anxiously waiting for, a mail from my institute’s placement officer!

Maybe it’s because of the so many email filters I have set up in pine. A few months back, some spammer got hold of my email id. I’ve been getting tons of spam since. From a lot of mortgage incentives, to loads of porn and ways to improve my sex life, it just kept on coming. So, I set up about 20 or so filters to combat the mess. I did check to ensure that I didn’t miss any genuine mail but I guess it didn’t work. I will have to do some research to find a good solution to this problem. *Sigh*

I just checked out the Maxthon web browser. I need tabbed browsing, and plain vanilla IE does not provide that. Firefox does but there are some pages it does not display and I think it eats a lot of RAM. I figured that since Maxthon uses the IE engine underneath, it will not require a lot of extra memory. Unfortunately Maxthon is hungrier than Firefox :(

Memory utilisation before opening any browser - 159 MB
Memory utilisation after opening only Mozilla Firefox - 172 MB
Memory utilisation after opening only Maxthon - 175 MB

Plus, it’ll take me time to get used to all the keyboard shortcuts and stuff for Maxthon. The software doesn’t even offer a facility to import bookmarks from Firefox. What were they thinking?! Wouldn’t most users who want tabbed browsing already have Firefox installed? Seriously dumb.

I just watched the movie ‘The Thirteenth Floor’. I loved it. It’s based upon an idea that’s very similar to the one in ‘The Matrix’ - the idea that our entire world, the entire universe is make believe. According to ‘The Matrix’, artificial intelligence has taken over the world. The machines are using us humans as batteries. To lower resistance and basically to give us something to do, our brains are plugged into a virtual reality - the present world. In ‘The Thirteenth Floor’, they actually describe a method to see if the world is real or not - go to the end of the world and look back. The end of the world here means a place you would not normally go to. It’s based upon a programming optimization. We actually learnt about it in Computer Graphics. The program only renders that part of the world which is visible. Further, it only creates that part of the world that matters. So if we go to a place that has not been created for our simulation, weird things will start to happen. In the movie, the hero comes back to see the world rendered by a skeleton formed by green lasers. It need not be as dramatic as that. It is a good programming practice to take care of boundary conditions; but there are limits to every system, even the system that houses our virtual reality.
    Now. all of this may mean different things to different people. To the hero in ‘The Matrix’, Neo it meant that he had to fight a war against the machines to ‘free’ humanity from slavery. To Douglas in ‘The Thirteenth Floor’, it meant a feeling of hopelessness, nothing he ever did would ever matter to anyone. To me, it really is a very interesting idea. We have always heard the saying ‘The entire world is maya’. Now. it acquires a whole new meaning. We can now think of God or Gods as programmers!! Maybe they programmed using DNA instead of C, but it is still code that we are only now beginning to understand - and we are not even sure that it IS code!
    Am I worried that whatever I do does not matter because it is not real? Of course, I don’t. It doesn’t matter what is real what is not. The only thing real to you is what is in your head. There is no absolute truth. What we know today to be hard solid fact, might turn out to be completely wrong sometime soon. The only thing that really matters is, how we live our lives. That doesn’t change even if we are a simulation. It would be very interesting to see what lies outside the simulation. Maybe that’s what happens when we die. I guess I’ll know only when my time comes.
    Oh and one more thing.. Gretchen Mol is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Sorry Alizee, I guess you are only a little girl after all :P