I grew up In Trivandrum in Kerala and was introduced to some of Kerala's culture. The first house we stayed in was a rented 2 bedroom house with our landlady staying behind us. There was ammachi [hmm, I never knew her real name, guess then that wasn't important] and her son and daughter. Her son in law was in Gulf (!). Neighbours were malayalees and there were some kids, all older than us but we played games together. We [My sister and I] learnt malayalam and learnt to eat non vegetarian food thanks to the people around. Saturdays, neighbours would come home to watch the malayalam movie playing on doordarshan and we would sit with them and watch. And I think we would all cry at the end of all the movies. I also have vague memories of the movie always having Shankar, Menaka or Mohanlal/Mammooty.

In the 3 years or so time that we stayed there I learnt and spoke the best malayalam I ever did in my life so far. It was flattering to see people exclaim in wonder when they figured out that I was a north indian and yet could speak malayalam as fluently as any kid around. I remember beaming with joy everytime that would happen. We would listen to malayalam songs in our neighbours houses and would sometimes sing them without ever understanding any of the lyrics. When I was in my 2nd or 3rd grade we shifted to a bigger house [Our family was expanding] and that put an end to a lot of malayalam conversations we indulged in and a complete end to malayalam cinema. However, one of us would end up singing one of the old songs randomly [We are all big singers in my house, Mornings there would be three distinct voices from the three bathrooms in our house...] that we would have heard on chitrageetham on Thursday evenings on DD. I think the only songs that I remember today are "chembarathi poovey cholley" and "aayiram kannoomaayi" - If not every week then we saw them every other week on DD in the first house.

I end up humming those old songs sometimes even today when I am alone. So a few days back while cooking for some friends, I was singing "Aayuram kannomaan …" and a friend of mine said it is "Aayiram" and asked me if knew what it meant. And sure, I know it means thousands. He then pointed out that it is kannumaayi which means "with eyes" and suddenly the first line made complete sense. In fact its only then that it struck me that the song is so beautiful "With thousand eyes, I longed for you …" It sounds a lot nicer in malayalam and I found it kinda sad. I always thought it was a happy song, but now it comes across as a very deep and sad song. I hope I will find out what the rest of the song means.

Anil pointed me to this video where Mohanlal is bragging to Jagathy and his wife that he has been to America. I laughed endlessly watching that video; boy, these guys are so natural. I could map these characters to real people that you would come across in the country side in Kerala. Mohanlal, Srinivasan and Jagathy - All 3 with their dialogues and expressions make that clip utterly hilarious. I don’t understand some of the things they say, but its the sort of thing you so commonly hear being used, so you kind of give it this abstract meaning wrt context. May be I should have watched some of these in Kerala. But watching malayalam movies here is more fun for me, beacause I get access to subtitles and the jokes seem like jokes. We probably have malayalam dvds in video libraries in Kerala now, earlier that was not an option.

Apologies to all friends I laughed mercilessly at, when you (mis) sang hindi songs especially to the guy who sang "Chaudhari ka chaand ho".

I just finished reading State of fear by Michael Chrichton. It wasn't as fast paced as Da Vinci Code but I kept thinking of it while reading state of fear. Well, it has occured to me in the past but I have let it pass. It is the feeling that you get when you read 1984, about how we possibly live in a make-belief world unaware. And how all the history is what some of us decided should be and the rest of us believe as *real*. It bothers me to think that what we know and are told about things around us are not true, more precisely the fact that somebody [or some bodies] is [are] intentionally making up stuff on a global scale or covering up stuff. I dont know about global warming being an issue or not, but the idea that the whole thing could be a farce is something to think about. And then you start questioning everything around you.

There was a story that I had read in school in my 7th grade or so in hindi called, if I remember correctly, "Akbar ka kila" which was about this woman who let Akbar in to her house on a stormy night when he was escaping wounded after a war or something. The story goes on about how she had saved his life by providing shelter,medication and food.... several years later his son or grandson sent men to find her/her place. They built a fort there inscribing words about Akbar having spent a night there after fighting a war bravely. The moral [Oh yeah, back then we drew morals from everything] was about how history had no record of the lady and about real heros never getting named. My memory is rusty and I may have gotten the story wrong.

Somehow, it feels a lot more spooky in my current circumstances. It appears to me that life here is a little too dependent on the media for information. People know and believe about the world only as much as CNN shows them. One could argue that each place sees other places through media, credibility of CNN etc - these are just my perceptions.

When I read 1984, I knew that things were dramatized to build a world of fiction, but now I wonder if they were that *dramatic*. A lot of it is already there, been there. And well ... will in all likelihood always be the case. I could draw parallels between it and some events captured in the movies 'LA Confidential' and 'Enemy of the state'. That is when I shut myself off so I didn't find comparisons that didn't exist (like Dan Brown does after a point in da vinci code!)

So what is the probability that a century later or couple of centuries later people will know about the past as being like our present today? With all the blogs [now this is new, it hasn't been around in the past. The only remotely similar thing is a personal diary that some maintained and was possibly more subject to decay/destruction] in e-space and electronic media and tapes, there is hope that people will have access to several views. Or like paper in the past, bits in the future will be manipulated...?

I don't know, but its a nice way to spend your weekend by thinking about possibilities.

Well lets see, a whole semester got over, had a winter break for 3 weeks and 2nd semester started. In short that is what happened. Ofcourse, there is a long story version which I shall type rightaway

Matlab is a cool language, the sort of language mathematicians, electrical engineers, scientists etc need. I would have felt like a hero if I knew about matlab when I was in high school. Absolutely no learning curve and comes with rich libraries [and other specific libraries that one can buy]. Most matlab programs span over a couple of small functions. In fact a lot of the code I came across in the last few months is less than 2 pages long. Dynamic arrays, plotting graphs, matrix operations etc are done effortlessly in matlab [compare this with C/C++!]. I built a type inference system for matlab in matlab as a part of my RA work at IU. The research project involves studying high level language operations, finding mechanisms of parallelizing it, increasing the robustness and performance by generating equivalent low level code. We are working together with a group at Ohio State University on this. The type inference engine is done, now we need to use the type information to call the appropriate C library routines before generating C output.

This semester I am going to be working with Stratego to do some parse tree optimizations. Currently I am working on SSA renaming, I should have a public link to this project soon. 

I got to attend the supercomputing conference SC05 at Seattle in November 2005. I saw some similar work and research in the areas of parallelizing matlab and generating C/fortran code etc by MIT [StarP, pMatlab] and Mathworks [Matlab using MPI].  I also saw Bill Gates finally, with 5000+ other people when he delivered the keynote speech.

Besides this, I have finally got accustomed to the winters here. During the winter break I went to California and Nevada, aah the heat never felt so good. I met this 17 year old kid who told me in a conversation that his dad had won 4.7 million dollars on a slot machine in the casino next block. Ever since then, there has been a very similar dream that I have been dreaming over and over again[days and nights].

I am in the 2nd week of the spring semester. I have taken Computation Complexity, Introduction to Applied Logic, Recursion Theory [Math Department] and Practical Compiling for Modern Machines this semester. I am excited about learning a lot of this stuff, Computability, decidability, P-NP hard, Godel's incompleteness theorem etc. My courses are a little heavy on the theory side, but that is what I am here for :)

                Roshan has a comega version.

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism - . I am still shaking my head after reading this. Read it and don't forget to read this and the comments in the discussion forum on the page.

I have been thinking about what courses to enroll for for the past few days. The fall '05 CS subjects that have been interesting me are

1. Independent Study with a professor I will be doing research with

2. Operating Systems

3. Principle of Programming Languages

4. Quantum Computing

5. Algorithms

Practically I can do only 3 of these in a semester and it was easy for me to decide that I wanted to do 1 and 2 for sure. I also decided that I could take algorithms next semester. Now between Programming Langauges and Quantum Computing, I didn't know which to drop. I wanted to take the compiler course (and parallel computing course) next semester, so Programming Langauges would have been a good thing to study this semester. However, I decided I would study quantum computing. Scheme scared me off and I decided to drop programming langauges.

Half an hour before my appointment with my graduate advisor, I bumped into Dan Friedman. I introduced myself, he seemed to remember that I had emailed him. I told him how intimidated I was by him and so how I hadn't met him earlier. I knew of him as this big man who wrote a lot of scheme books. I have never programmed in scheme and do not understand many of the functional programming concepts. I have not understood continuations for example. Roshan and Sidharth often discuss the stuff and I participate in it as long as it seems mathematical and the moment they write scheme on paper [its usually paper napkins in some cafe/restaurant], I shy away from the discussion.

I told Dr. Friedman about my interest and about my inexperience with scheme and he said I must take the course. A 5 min conversation with him and I decided to take the course !
Quantum Computing will have to wait I guess. I am excited about the classes (I can't remember the last time I waited with anxiety for a lecture), they begin on 29th August.