Social Networking- The good side

There have been (often debatable) reports that facebook sort social networks prevent people from making friends in the real world. I am not really convinced with these reports for 1) Facebook is not there to make new friends as much as it is to maintain already existing friendships 2) I often find my friends providing me the same level of comfort on facebook as they would if I probably called them.. meeting them in person is most often out of the question for logisitical reasons. Well, no matter what people say.. i find it useful to know what my friends are doing in their life.. call it stalking if you may. But knowing what they are upto besides keeping me updated, helps me to focus on things i seldom forget and would have been reminded of if they were around. In a way, it brings back memories, and interests that one often forgets in the daily grind, in a new country, in a new job, in a new circle of friends or whatever that new thing may be that happens to you. I have always found that during my long stretches of boredom, browsing through facebook often gets me charged up and interested again in things I lose focus on generally. I am not here to say facebook is a susbtitute for your real friends, but there are times one gets bored with the current circle, not necessarily the people as much as the monotonicity of seeing the same people and doing the same gig..at those times... facebook may be the right place to look beyond your immediate circle of friends and keep moving..

From on top of the world

I am writing this blog post on board the plane from Phoenix back to baltimore. If you are wondering what took me to phoenix in the first place, I was presenting a poster at a infocom workshop which was held in phoenix this year. The conference itself went well, but the events preceding it were a bit painful to say the least. First, as usual i booked my tickets really late, around 3 days before the actual flight. I was using farecast to decide when to buy, and it kept predicting the price would go down. And yes it did, just that it went down on the exact same days that i was not checking, and sky rocketed after the dip. So i ended up riding the market on a high, and managed to buy a reasonably priced ticket, although for normal standards, it was pretty high. Anyways, i would leave baltimore at 8 am, stop over at atlanta and omaha, and finally reach phoenix at 3 in the evening. My conference was the next day, so i had enough time to catch up on missed out sleep and prepare for the session too. Atleast that was the plan. Everything went fine till omaha and Delta took good care of me, till they handed me over to the evil hands of US Airways. I was supposed to fly US Airways on my final leg from omaha to Phoenix after a two and half layover at omaha. My flight from Omaha was scheduled to leave at 225, and thats around when US Airways announced that they found had a mechanical snag and would have to cancel the flight. They were going to accomodate us on other flights out of omaha, atleast that was the claim. So i waited in line at the ticketing counter hopeful of getting to phoenix without much trouble. I finally got to the ticketing agent and asked her my options, and was shocked to hear what was in store.I basically had two options, if you may call them so. Either I fly through Denver and Las Vegas and reach Phoenix around 1 am, or leave the next day at 9 from omaha. The second option was no choice for me. My conference starts at 9, and no way was I in a mood to trust them not to cancel a flight the next day too. So i took the first option and clarified if there was a quicker way to reach Phoenix, either a direct flight fron denver or through houston. The answer from the agent was on the negative. About 8 hours in to the journey, I am already tired and decide to take the flight (operated by United) to denver. I reach denver and figure out that there was actually direct united flight to phoenix, and a couple of seats were still available. However, as I am already checked-in on the Vegas to Phoenix flight (run by US Air), United cant book put me on standby on the earlier flight. The united agent asks me to go to US Air and ask them to confirm me on the direct flight, which she said they can, as it was still undersold. I take a train to the other terminal and finally reach a US Airways counter. Now comes the horrible side of US Airways. I ask the agent to confirm me on the United flight, and she says she cant. All US Air flights had left for the day and she was going home and there is nothing she is going to do. I am mighty pissed now. Not only did they cancel their flight to start with, they put me on an unnecessarily circuitous route to reach phoenix, so that they could hold on to the money for the Vegas to Phoenix leg. Cheapos.Evertyime US Airways is involved, something or the other screws up. I am now convinced they are the most unprofessional of all the airlines out there.

Catching up with time

I am going to cut the crap about not having blogged for a long time..damn.. i did it again.. Anyways.. coming to the matter.. I am growing restless and afraid of the future in store for me. I am thinking i am doing my phd just for doing time pass, quite contrary to the long held view that phd is ground breaking and time strapped. I am wasting lots of time on insignificant things and this is going to bite me at the wrong moment. I need to focus on my research more and get some ideas going. I am totally out of ideas that are long enough to sustain. In other related events, finished a trip to charlottsville with Sriram and Mukil, on Game day between UVA and VT. Man.. i miss football at UMBC now.. damn it..

Pervasive Networking

Today, the field of computer networking has made remarkably commendable progress towards robust data delivery, that there is an ever growing need for a new direction to provide a much awaited thrust to explore unexplored frontiers. My guess is that the vision of human pervasive computing has a lot in store for the networking community to look into for innovation. Traditionally, networking has dealt with moving packets along, and umpteen optimizations to improve the QoS delivered to the end user. In these scenarios, the end user has never been considered at any of the layers below the application layer in the networking stack. The implications are that the network is expected to merely transfer data to the end host machines, and the user is expected to hook on to one of these end hosts. Today we are surrounded by numerous computing devices which are inter networked, that the above service model is an under utilisation of the networking services practically available. By interconnecting personal area networking technologies like bluetooth with the WAN technologies such as the internet, we can expect data to be delivered to the end user directly without the need for them to log into their static networked machine. For e.g let us consider the following scenario. Grad Student X makes slides for a presentation and mails them to his advisor late at night and crashes. The next morning, the advisor looks at the slides and decides to have a meeting at a time which can be considered a bit early for grad student lifestyle, and sends a mail to X. However X is fast asleep, and doesnt wake up to see the mail until its too late. Consequently X misses the meeting and decides to blog how his networking field could have helped him in such a scenario. Now, if the mail instead of sitting in his inbox could have rang his bluetooth phone about half an hour before the scheduled meeting time, then probably X could have made it to the meeting. The key message here is that there needs to be an integration of the services available in the wire area network with those available in the PANs such that the network can transfer data to the real end points.

On ideas and advices

This is my second rambling in what I could call a series of pseudo-technical gibberish. I am kind of perplexed on how I react to peoples' ideas, their views and above all, their advices.

Starting with ideas.. I am now convinced that I dont look at the merit or novelty of the idea as much as I look at the person professing the idea. Many a great ideas have probably fallen on my deaf ears just because i didnt take the person serious enough. At the same time, I have fallen prey to many a marketing tricks of the great wizards when they impose their abyssmal-thoughts-lacking-clarity on me just because somewhere in my head i have a great opinion about them and their ideas. Anything that emanates from their mouth seems to be the next biggest thing, only to be found out later that they were BSing all the time and I had all long turned off that one characteristic that differentiates us from the animals.. reasoning. I think there is always a need to decouple the idea from the person to justfully evaluate it, else we end up judging the person and not the idea. I hope this sinks into me forever.

Now coming to advices.. its the same sad story. I tend to look at the person, not the advice. The first thing which comes to mind, is to rebuff the advice, mentally rationalising that the person giving the advice is no grand pupa standing on a high moral pedestal, and hence lacks the authority to advice my bloated ego. I am not sure how many people I have offended by my reckless behaviour, but if any of those are among the readers of this blog, my deepest apologies are indeed to you. It s an extremely silly act, given why people would advise me in the first place.. probably because they share a care and concern for me. And to rebuff such people amounts to the highest orders of blasphemy, if not absolute stupidity.

All these remind me of an obscure sanskrit verse-"Focus on what is said..not who said it"

Readers Indigest to Writers Consummation

Ever since i bought my car last week, things seem to have changed for the better. I am no longer bound to the shuttle timings, and I can plan to stay longer at school. However, I am just figuring out that staying longer at school isnt helping me much. Instead of watching youtube at home, I am ending up watching it at school. And the mornings are getting worse.. I am getting in school at the time most people are heading out for lunch. Anyways, this post is more to provide a current-state-update on how my life is proceeding so that aeons later the aliens would be able to have a glimpse of what it took to be a member of an extraordinary species called the GRAD STUDENT. The one word that best describes my current situation, is stagnation. I am completely out of ideas.. The more i read, the more i feel the need to read more to get a better grip of the field. There is always this constant thought at the back that i need to go back to the basics and read it up. SO most of my time these days is spent in re-reading basics, which i should have been theoretically comfortable with right now. I am not sure if this is the right way to go ahead to do something new. Going back to the basics, in addition to providing the fundamentals, i think, also indoctrinates one to some extent that the mind is now stuck to a framework to reason with in. May be this is good for the theoretical guys, or ones who look at things from the first order, but I am a bit skeptical if this is the right way to go for people in experimental systems. My guess for experimental research would be to initially get a hang of things by reading a few fundamental papers which get to the meat of the system, the pure vanilla system without bells and whistles, and then just go ahead and implement something new. If it works, great. if doesnt, still great. I think research is not about building systems that work, but understanding why some systems work great under some conditions while some dont, and trying to apply some of the working-principles to the non-working ones.
Unfortunately, there is a subtle boundary here, between hacking a system together by integrating multiple working components, and actually building a working system motivated by research. My opinion on that is one must go both ways. Build a system that works by integrating multiple components and analyse its performance, bottle neck, correctness etc under different conditions, as well as the vice versa-- analyse a system and postulate improvements to it and build it. I dont think the two approaches are competing, but rather are complimentary. I am also intrigued by the camp that says, "write code and eventually you will get going somewhere". Although i completely believe in the statement that we will get somewhere, but I am not sure if that somewhere is where we want to head towards.

And for the curious readers of this blog (if any), I am working (atleast.. thats the claim) on wireless network adaptation based on application requirements, and as I read more, I am being sucked into multimedia delivery over wireless networks, and as I read more on that, I am being pulled into MAC level QOS, which in turn is the motivation to write this post.

Moral: Stop reading.. and start writing..

The importance of sports

Although the title might sound like one of those compositions we had to write through classes 6-8 in three different languages with essentially the same content , having gone through the writing and passing the classes stage, i now think its like one of those shakespearean works which are eternal and worth a read at all ages. So, why the sudden interest in sports you may ask..Could nt you spend all that time in something useful.. like research one may wonder. To which I would reply, All work and no play make jack a dull boy. Neither am i jack, nor do i work all the time. Yet i have found the time i spend on the tennis courts pretty interesting for a different reason, besides that i get some good excercise and fun out of playing.. pretty obvious isnt it??

When you play tennis, and like me, when you arent playing for a living, the mind seems to go into this observing mode. You unconcsiously start to think about what you are doing on the court.. Not at the granularity of deciding whether to run left or right, forward or backward, but at a more metaphysical level. You start thinking whether your approach to the game is right.. are you playing to win.. or just to have fun??

Its also the time when all those great quotations that adorn many great walls, and recently my gtalk status mesg, come into live action. I was recently playing with my friend, and it was a tight game. It was hot and sunny, and we were sweating like pigs. He wasnt the kind to give up, and i hadnt the energy to put up. I was going down, and thats when something struck me. You dont lose until you stop trying. I decided to put up a fight, stuck with a pretty painful ankle, and i had the next two games in the bag. But yeah.. he won the match.. he put on a much better fight.

I have found playing tennis quite useful in getting an inner picture of the workings of my mind. If Feynmann could analyse his dreams, i can atleast attempt to analyse my game..