Obsession with twngan

It's been a long time since I posted the last one, but I promised you I'll put them here. Here we go, ITT Delphi.

Dear Sir,

I am a fourth year student currently pursuing my Integrated M.Tech. in Mathematics and Computing at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India ( www.iitd.ernet.in ).
I am writing to express my keen interest in doing my summer internship ( i.e mid may to july 2006) under your able guidance. As my resume will outline in more detail, I have gained a wide array of technical and interpersonal skills through my education and last years summer internship.
I have gone through your web page and your areas of work and would be very glad if I could contribute in any of your researches or projects as a summer intern. It would be a great learning experience.
I am sending my curriculum vitae for your kind perusal. I am confident that if given the opportunity to showcase my skills and enthusiasm, I would make worthwhile contributions as an intern.Looking forward to a positive reply from you.
Sincerely,
Xxxxx x Xxxxxx
4th yr Integrated Mtech.
Mathematics and Computing
IIT Delhi

Not as fun as the ones before, if you ask me. He's too lazy to even put down the titles of some of my papers, like others did. Apart from the fact that he didn't bother to explain his degree or expected graduation time, there are still some interesting lines, as highlighted.

Oh, BTW, he highlighted five words in his resume. Three of them are "implementation in Java."

Ok, enough is enough. I hate those departmental reminder spams so much that I figure I would do something about it. But what could a powerless non-prospective graduate student like me do? At the very least, I can negate part of the effect of the reminders. You heard me right, baby. From now on, I am going to boycott all events that I receive more than three emails about. Even free food.

Because of those hateful reminders, I am already forced to pass an interesting talk on code generation and optimizations as well as several faculty candidate talks.

Really, this is the only reaction I could come up with seeing this video, otherwise speechless.



How come a baby can be this horny? Almost comparable to Neil Patrick Harris^#!

I don't think I can forget about this video for the rest of my life.

^#See the movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle to see what I'm talking about.

Apart from the horrible weather, do you really need another reason to leave Texas? Ok, here you go: you could be arrested for being drunk in... a bar!

Accepting the fact that no top school wants to hire me as a professor, my focus shifts to research labs.

The way research labs communicate to candidates is, however, equally weird as others. People scheduled for a "chat" but then forgot to call. People calling me on a Saturday morning at 8:30am. Glad that I woke up at 4.

After suffering all these, I finally get a two-day interview with The Colored Giant in (some say the second best place in the world) New York! I guess I'll look for a White Castle while there. I have been craving for their slyders since seeing the brilliant movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.

Labels: work

Sweeeet!

Already a second complaint, this time it is enough to shutdown my server. The complaint is from the country I couldn't leave from to go to the country I didn't get to go to. The complaint wasn't directed to me either. Last time was the IT staff, but this time it is even better — it went to Rice's lawyers. The charge? "Unauthorized Distribution of the Copyrighted Television Program."

Goodbye DDoS, hello DMCA!

Everyone in US should know by now that DMCA sucks and is only for abuse. However, just the phrase DMCA suffices to freak many people out. Say, "we have legal obligations to remove offenders from the network in this situation."

My school is asked to do two things to me:

1. Disable access to the individual who has engaged in the conduct described above; and/or
2. Take other appropriate action against the account holder under your Abuse Policy/Terms of Service Agreement.

Security research has come to a point where legal threats is already part of it. Anyone not getting one of those doesn't look like a real security researcher. Now I finally feel like one.

Reading back my blog, I guess I've been a bit unreasonably harsh on Tor. We are talking about a program that requires a large amount of (processor and I/O) resources, particularly on my 7 years old desktop machine. After I have given it more resources, it has now been running solidly for two days.

When it starts to really run, the actual fun begins. The first is a complaint from the country I didn't get to go to. They have some web sites hosted in Germany that were under a distributed DoS attack. Apparently they have received expensive queries over the web "that costs money" and emphasize, in their email, that "We haven't valued how much this attack will costyet" [sic].

But the best part I like about their mail is that "As this ip is owned by Rice University , Rice University is responsible of the attack." Oh, don't sue me, I'm scared. I'll need to pay for their "damage!" Yeah right. Of course, the reason that I can enjoy receiving this kind of emails is that I'm behind a tenured professor. I don't even need to response.

I am shallow. My car stereo plays a Kelly "American Idol 1" Clarkson CD.

In one of the songs, I always hear:

Here I am, once again
I'm Torred (torn) into pieces
...
Broken up, deep inside (seg fault in a library used by Tor)
But you won't get to see the tears I cry

Which is not very far away from the truth.

Lately I've been fighting with core dumps on the open source program for my research. I was told that I would see more meaningful data if I had the program running for more than a week, but it's hard to do that when the program crashes within a day.

Speaking of cores, I remember the little fun I had in my undergrad days (good times!). I was doing a little class programming project with another dude TT. Not knowing any better method then, we cooperated by sharing a directory in my account. In the early phase, TT had a lot of core dumps and generated many cores. One day, I decided to have some fun by moving the cores into another directory that he had no access to, making it impossible for him to delete them. (I could do that because I had the write permission on that directory.) Since those cores were created by him when he ran the program and encountered core dumps, they were counted towards his disk quota. I even wrote a script to automatically detect and immediately move the cores. Note that, at that time, disk space was not as cheap, so we had only a quota of 10M. Very soon after, he consumed all his quota and could not do anything about that...

You are obsessed with me. Admit it. Why else would you check this site so frequently and religiously? As a gesture, I have something new for your consumption.

Look at the left. Now it features a snippet of my calendar. Of course, this is just yet another feature from 30Boxes. And, of course, this is just the public part of my calendar.

Shoot. Just at the time I started getting used to 30Boxes, there's this news about Google Calendar. From the description, it is providing the same level of convenience of adding events. Probably without 30Boxes' nasty bugs, too. Looks like I'd need to switch my calendar soon...

Having nothing interesting to do on a Lazy Sunday other than revising c-exam materials, I was just thinking about what would happen if I joined the nonevil company. They, like most other silicon valley companies, sponsor a lot on tuition reimbursement (eight grands a year!). So I would probably want to get a masters on some interesting things like mathematics. But I didn't take any maths classes since high school, other than a useless "engineering maths" and a not too related discrete maths class.

So, just for fun, I tried the test from the practice booklet of the GRE subject test on mathematics. Interestingly, my high school mathematics is pretty sufficient for most of the questions. It is nice that half of the test is on calculus, which I still mostly remember, but I realized that I forgot most of the stuff on trigonometry.

At the end, I found that I would get right just above 70% of the questions. That translates into a score of around 700, definitely not enough for the two great schools around the bay area.

Maybe I should go for a management degree instead. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I thought its over. I mean, I should be done with the c-exam crap already since passing it. I was wrong.

I was, among two others, asked to hold a mock c-exam for someone. This is going to be as formal as a real one. This means holding a straight face for one and a half hours.

But worse, I have forgotten most of the stuff. Given the expertise of the two other "examiners," I guess I need to ask questions on security and, sadly, architecture. So I need to spend some time reviewing the stuff and prepare some questions for the exam. Just like I don't have enough to do. Well, actually, that may be true. Its been a while. I haven't done much lately.

When I looked for jobs, none of the anti-virus companies was in my target list.

Lately, I've been contacted by one of those, which is also one of the largest software companies. Turns out, they are trying to build a real research lab (i.e., publishing papers!) with locations on both coasts. Given that the colored giant has not had contact with me for a while and it seems that the stock price of the nonevil company is probably not going to go up much, maybe it's time for me to seriously look at other options.

Interestingly, it seems like they also want to lure away my boss. Too bad he is pretty happy with his present job. Perhaps this is why they are now going for the next best thing...

Today's phrase: déjà vu.

Definition: An impression of having seen or experienced something before.

As in: Today, I walked out from my apartment. I looked downstairs on my left, and saw a black cat walking away. Then I looked downstairs on my right, and saw a black cat walking away. I shouted, "déjà vu!"