this and that

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo!, these are five things I would be worried about:

1. Flickr, where I have been a “pro” member for some time now. The Photos application on Facebook might be the top photos webapp on the internet in terms of the number of uploads but Flickr is great for, among other things, the ability to search for pictures by camera or by license,

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   for its great API that lets me add pictures to my homepage dynamically

2. Yahoo! Crossword: A new one every day, archived for fourteen days
3. Yahoo! TextTwist: Addictive, plus I’m usually good at it
4. Yahoo! Literati: Scrabble, basically
5. The Yahoo! Developer Network: lots of cool things here for developers who want to use Yahoo!’s services

I have been reading the site http://www.thedailywtf.com for some time now. Its tagline is “Curious Perversions in Information Technology,” and it’s true to both its name and tagline: it’s basically a blog with submissions about technology WTFs, strange error messages and interesting “Code Snippets Of the Day,” like this Java gem (sorry, geek alert):


void failIfNull(Object o) throws RuntimeException {
if (o == null)
{
throw new RuntimeException(o.getClass().getName() + " is null!");
}
}


In general, the site is very entertaining, and sometimes the discussion gets educational as people try to “fix” the WTF in creative ways.

Anyway, I mention this because one of today’s posts, ITAPPMONROBOT on the site was the probably the best I have ever read. It details a sysadmin’s ingenuity in maintaining a web server that needs to be restarted very frequently. The story is not exactly a WTF, as the solution is truly remarkable; on the other hand, the circumstances that led to the need for such a solution definitely is. Read the story for yourself.

A couple of completely unrelated and slightly old, but interesting pieces of news:

• Now that the Nepalese army (hopefully) doesn’t have anyone to fight at home, some Nepalese special forces have been deployed to Darfur as peacekeeping forces. From the International Herald Tribune:
  

  …Thailand would provide the only non-African battalion out of 18 on the proposed force, while Nepal was the only country to offer special forces. Three Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden and Norway — had offered an engineering unit.

  I hope they do well and prove useful, but at the very least, it has earned Nepal a rare positive mention in the international press.

• American-born physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new possibility for a Theory of Everything, or in other words, a theory that tries to unify the seemingly incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model in modern physics parlance), and gravity (in effect, general relativity). Most of the media coverage surrounding his paper has centered around the fact that he is not affiliated with any university and that he spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii (he published his paper on arXiv), so if you really want to look into what the paper says and what the reaction has been like so far, you should first head to Wikipedia.

The annual Progress Prize for the Netflix contest has been announced. The prize was won by Team BellKor, two researchers from AT&T Research who “blend[ed] 107 individual results” to come up with their 8.5% improvement over Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm (Thanks to Dan and Sujan dai for the pointers).

This contest was part of my senior project at college, where we looked at a number of algorithms to try to predict movie ratings using Netflix’s data (and use them to generate movie recommendations), and also generate recommendation of courses for students at Carleton, using historical transcript data.

Wikipedia entry on Tihar, the Nepalese festival of lights (and a lot more).

And from the BBC website, “Nepal dogs honored” (thanks to Rosie for the pointer).

I just realized that they could be talking about our politicians (they’re not).

Stephen Colbert has been in the news a lot lately, especially with his new book I am America (and so can you!) (currently #1 on the New York best sellers’ list, as he just pointed out himself on TV), and with his attempt at running for the president only in South Carolina, on both the Republic and Democratic ballots.

I’ve been watching The Colbert Report on and off almost since it started and while there are some segments such as Better know a district and The Word that I’ve always liked, there was also a period when I found many other parts of it somewhat repetitive and pointless. I’ve started finding it more engaging recently (partly because I actually have a TV and time to watch it now). His supposed run at the president has also been drawing all sorts of opinions, including concerns about the legality of calling on corporate sponsors. I personally think it was really funny and made for great TV, and if nothing else, it at least made us aware that in South Carolina, to run on the Democratic ballot, you need either 2500 dollars or 3500 signatures, while to run as a Republican, you need thirty-five thousand dollars.

Unfortunately, as I write this, he just said on his show that he did not make it on the Democratic ballot. (He decided earlier to not try to get on the Republican ballot.)

Ah well, it would’ve been fun.

Anyway, most of Colbert’s recent media appearances are easily found through Google, including this appearance on Larry King, on which Larry King makes his irrelevance pretty obvious, like he has done before. I thought I would point out a couple of recent interviews with Stephen Colbert on NPR, one of which features the not-too-common appearance of Stephen Colbert the comedian (as opposed to Stephen Colbert the character):

• Interview on All Things Considered with Stephen Colbert the character; includes an interesting discussion on how NPR differs from other radio: “[NPR program] Morning Edition has a measured barbituate vibe….Where’s the craziness? Where is the Mike and the Mad Dog? Where’s Consuela and the Cheetah?” (I really like NPR, by the way. Maybe I’ll post a list of my favorite programs some day.)
• Interview on Fresh Air with Stephen Colbert the comedian; Stephen Colbert talks about his show as himself, and it’s pretty interesting to hear what goes on behind what is basically his facade

And then, there was mention of Colbert’s campaign in one episode of the Wall Street journal morning edition. I really like listening to this podcast, but the anchors are somewhat out of touch sometimes; in this episode, anchors Gordon Deal and Gina Cervetti wonder if Stephen Colbert will ever appear in the media as himself.

Apparently they prefer Consuela and the Cheetah to NPR.

The President’s Last Bang (2005; Korean, with English subtitles) is a dramatization of the 1979 coup in South Korea that removed president Park Chung-hee from power. It is well-acted, stylish and very violent, though never unnecessarily so. I did feel that it was unnecessarily slow in a few places, and although the English subtitles on the DVD were professional and never too awkward, I am sure quite a few nuances of the script were unavoidably lost in translation. In general the movie is very entertaining, and does not require the viewer to have prior knowledge of South Korean 1970s politics to be able to appreciate its satire on political hierarchies and power struggles that subject the fate of a nation to the whims and antics of a few people. Those are, and will always remain, relevant no matter what the place or date is.

Relevant links:

• Movie information at IMDB
• Collection of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes

Youth for Nepal is a non-profit organization started recently by a few friends of mine, that I’m also helping out with. From the homepage,

Youth For Nepal aims to encourage social entrepreneurship in the fields of education, environment and health by engaging young adults. We encourage young adults, especially college and high school students, to come up with projects they would like to work on individually or as a team. If approved, we fund these projects and assist with their administration, at the same time, with the expectation that these young adults will own and be responsible for their own projects.

The organization is very much in its infancy, and it’s going to need a lot of support from everyone. A few ways to help:

• Donate
• Search using GoodSearch, a search engine that donates money to a charity of your choosing every time you use it to search the Internet.
• Contact Youth for Nepal and give feedback and suggestions.

After a very long hiatus, I am back at this blog. I have had long absences before, and I can only blame my laziness and the fact that hardly anybody reads this thing (though I hope the limited readership that exists, appreciates what I write). I am starting with an update on what has been going on.

I graduated from Carleton in early June, with the strange-sounding degree of Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science. Graduation was an exciting affair. My family didn’t make it (half-way around the world), but it was fun to meet other people’s families. I’m also glad to say I managed to graduate summa cum laude, and since they put all the “summa people” alphabetically at the end, I was the absolute last student of the Carleton class of 2007 to receive his degree. A few pictures can be found here and here.

Cap and gown

After graduation, I spent a month with Rosie and her family in Denver at her wonderful grandma June’s apartment. I have visited Denver three times, and I have really liked what I have seen of the mile-high city. Besides, it’s full of people from Nepal. When you walk around certain parts of Denver, you almost feel like every other store is owned by someone from Nepal. They may not look that way: most stores owned by people from Nepal advertise themselves as Tibetan (and sometimes Tibetan / Nepalese) stores, but once you go in, you are usually greeted by recognizably Nepalese faces. Without doubt, the attraction of Tibet as an exotic, mystic destination and purveyor of souvenirs is greater for Americans than that of Nepal.

At the end of June, we also went on a rafting trip on the San Juan river in Utah. It’s probably (in fact, it surely is) the hottest, driest place I’ve ever been to, but the rocks and the river were beautiful, and the fact that the air is dry actually makes you feel less hot, though with cruel effects on your skin. Pictures can be found here.

The San Juan river

On July 1, I came to New York, without really knowing where I would live. I did have a reservation in a hostel and a hotel, where I spent three nights; Chelsea international hotel: cheap, clean, narrow stairs, and the Gershwin: expensive, comfortable, artsy (read “strange”). Thankfully, I found a place to live after just two days, in Jersey City, New Jersey. I’m pretty happy with the place: it’s much cheaper compared to living in New York and it’s really close to the PATH station. It is, on the other hand, on the fourth floor in a building with no elevator, but that only means I’m getting my exercise.

So what am I doing in New York? For the past three weeks or so (and with training since July until then), I have been working as a “Technology Analyst” (read “developer”) at a major investment bank in New York. Apart from work (and TV and movies and dinner and the usual), I have been trying to read as much as possible, so I hope to write here about what I’ve been reading; even some book and movie reviews might be upcoming if I feel like it.