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..

Ramayana and computer security

I was reading an article on the sundara-kanda of ramayana and a particular usage of words by the author, which went like "Hanuman had to present his credentials to sita before proceeding further" caught my attention. All these days , i thought the concept of presenting security credentials like certificates before initiating a communication was a comp invention. But now, we had Hanuman doing the same thing, lots of years ago, even before the abacus was invented. May be i was wrong in letting the cs guy in me "assuming" things.. may be there are a lot more ideas in our epics lying out there, just waiting to be put in the right context. Next time i read something similar, I should probly cull out the idea and see if it can be applied in CS.. But wait a minute.. isnt that against the entire idea of our religious works.. Am i trying to tie the meta physical with the wordly and thereby be lost in the ensuing chaos.. I dont know.. Probly time shall tell.. or has already told.. just waiting to be rediscovered.

On a related note, I was surprised to meet someone today who thought Hanuman was a god of the north, and wasnt famous in the south.. And given that, Lord Rama and his entire entourage had to go to Lanka through the south, this was quite surprising indeed.

two talks and a gala time

We had 2 talks this friday.. One by Richard Stallman, the Free software guru, and the other on aware home by Dr Slonim.

The talk by RSM was great, albeit not awesome though. ANybody who had read the wiki article on him probly knew what was coming.. But he is a relly good speaker, and the St.iGNUcius attire really dons well on him. A couple of interesting snippets from his talk,

"When u talk abt free software, think abt it as free speech, not free beer". I think that really captures it all.. free in FS is to be free to do ethically right things in a free manner.

He also ranted about how linux is just a small piece in the big jigsaw puzzle that is GNU, and how crediting Linus for everything open source was not the right way to go abt it.. Infact Linus, made the linux kernel open by mistake. The right way to call a linux distro is to call it GNU+linux..

We got a couple of free stickers, but his autographs meant that u buy his books.. Not sure if that was right on his part.. but if thats the way he wants it.. its fine.. after all, its his signature..

The second talk was the most animated talk here at UMBC i have seen for a long time. Not because of the speaker, but due to an esteemed member of the audience, who also happens to be a prof here. The talk was how they were building an intelligent home for the aged, and how CS meets Medicine kinda talk. The slides looked more like a brochure.. surely not for the techies out there..

Sometime though the talk, the esteemed member asked how would all this improve the state of the art in CS.. a valid question i would say.. and what metrics they were using to see if their solution made any sense. The speaker wasnt happy with the question, and shot back why he dint think about this so called simple idea, when he was at NASA. I liked the reply which went, "I was more concerned with the universe up there than the beds down here". Kindof threw the entire audience into a ball of laughter.

Anyways, during lunch, i was cribbing to anand about how i was getting no ideas out of reading papers. He gave a valid suggestion.. Read papers to understand the problems, not to find solutions. Kindof simple, but to the point i thought.

Had a bad headache... slept at 645 and woke up at 9 in the morning.. God.. save me..

What a life

Lots of things have crossed my mind of late, and this is my vain attempt to pen.. ahum.. type them down..

I am going to begin with my grad life here.. something i am going to be stuck around with for a couple of years to go from now.. I am just not happy with my classes here.. When I applied for the grad program here, I was always under the illusion that every grad class lecture would be enlightening.. enlightening to the state, that at the end of the day, one can sleep peacefully, with a sense of accomplishment of having learnt something new and cutting edge, something beyond the realms of an ordinary mind.. of having had heated discussions dissecting the most minutest of details unaware of the external world as it may be.. of having acquired the skill to analyse any idea to its barest minimum.. but alas.. as i said.. its just been an illusion so far. Grad classes here are boring.. not even the enthusiasm of an undergrad class is to be seen any where close. Lots of hand waving.. and yeah we students.. what can I say.. are the most uninterested bunch in class..No participation unless needed.. and participation when not required, dont expect us to take the first step. I have seen a couple of lectures of OCW at MIT, and i am sure .. its not completely our mistake.. Period.


My research.. aah.. that one thing which has ever been successful in evading my pursuits. I am still unsure on what to do for my thesis. I want to work on ad hoc networks, particularly multi radio ad hoc networks to better deliver network services. But my advisor wants to put it in the context of the medical environment. I am just afraid that this medical thingy would be an engineering feat, no useful research would come out of it..but i am unsure of it.. And as such.. the CS world would be happy with any engineering feat anyways..

The Indian news media.. its really painful to see what the news media in india has done to itself. The indian news media today looks more like an entertainment channel than a serious disseminator of news content. Just look at the coverage of the ash-abhi marriage and prove me wrong if u can.. Not that i have any grudge against them.. but come on guys.. its time to get urselves back in order.. I have no respect for american news channels geiven the way they always monger to sensationalise an albeit isolated incident.. looks like news channels back home are no better than their american competitors... or shall i say..compatriots..

I am really concerned with certain developments in myself.. need to make a serious u turn in life..

I am just not enthused about my work and this is not a good feeling.. I feel like I need to be challenged more.. like prove a theorem kindof work.. but thats not happening in the near future..Hope i can find the right question for my thesis that will keep me engaged with full enthu all through my grad stay..

First one here...

The Genesis of this blog..

I was longing into blogger after a long time, and found that 1) Blogger was no longer BETA.. so the claim atleast 2) You can use google account to log in. Being the ardent googlian that I am, I decided to log in using my GA and create a new blog.. End of story..

My old blog can still be reached at http://monkeyrumbles.blogspot.com .. well.. atleast until the forests survive..

In other un related news.. my research has been stagnating and I am blogging when I should actually be writing a paper.. Well.. thats me..

Easwaro Rakshathu...