Gaurav Poothia

Fragile Bits

2008-09-25T05:20:00Z

I am sure like my family yours too has black and white, perhaps sepia toned photographs of people from another time. These might have switched hands a couple of times down the decades and their original keepers are long gone.

I have been wondering about the contrast of this with the longevity of mementos from the life of a digital native: digital snaps and videos.

Couple of problems are:

1.Fragility of storage: I trust paper to be around for many more decades than a cheap CD or any website. But commodity media is evolving to match and will eventually perhaps turn the tables on paper.

2.Inheritance of bits: This perhaps is the more serious problems. Bits don't lend themselves to a messy inheritance on death.
My grandmother's house that my mother rummaged through for photographs and letters didn't have any digital locks to keep her out.(think PGP/BitLocker/website passwords)
To take the analogy further without her ever having to tell us, we knew exactly which house(s) she used to store stuff (on the other hand exactly which websites or even how many websites did the deceased use for storing photographs and email over her lifetime)

And unlike real possessions, digital possessions can be way more daunting to sort through. (unlike the one or two back and white family albums you now have hundreds of GB from which to find that one classic wedding photo)

To make things worse even if you are diligent (which I am not) and archive and index and ensure a smooth handover after you, you still can't help the next exchange.

Any creative suggestions? There might be an opportunity here.

Lesson in candidness

2008-08-18T07:16:19Z

I was driving a dear 10 year old friend to my place and as we approached the house...

He: Do you know that man (pointing to somebody taking a stroll)
Me: Nope. I don't know many people in my neighbourhood
He: (Thinks about it for a second then looks at me straight) Are you lonely?
Pause at the gravity of the question.
Me: (Finally breaking into laughter) No, not really. But hey, thanks for asking anyway.

Published!

2008-06-11T05:13:27Z

Last month a paper co-authored by me (related to my thesis 2 years back) was presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Find the abstract here. Complete paper here.

Don't see myself going back for that PhD so this is probably gonna be it for a while!

Impressions from India

2008-05-31T06:19:30Z

Having recovered from jetlag I decided to pen down impressions from my recent trip.

India Unbound:
Thats the name of the book I fortuitously picked up from my Dad's bookshelf.
It tells the story of the India waking up from the slumber of a mixed economy to a capitalist frenzy.
I gained a few eyeopening insights that deserve another post but here's a single insight that bore itself out in my interaction there.
The "we are a spiritual people, business is for dishonest people" mentality is fading.
The end of the license raj means entrepreneurship is no longer a monopoly of the "cunning" trading classes who can work the system.
If not everybody then many more have a shot at running their own businesses in an open and thriving economy.
Meritocracy is finally leading to a respect for financial success. I'll withhold my opinion on whether that's good but obviously the opposite is worse.
The "baniazation" (baniya = trader caste) of India is well and truly underway.

Traffic:
The chaos and congestion made a strong impression. I have lost ability to track movement all 360 degrees and scratched my dad's car within the first 10 minutes behind the wheel.
To be fair to myself and as an indicator of how bad things are: it got another couple of scratches in the 2 weeks I was home, this time at the hands of competent drivers.
Pretty much the only rules that exist are: red for stop and onward traffic to the left, the rest is a freakin free for all.
Driving in the cities is begging for aggravation.

Hindu marriage:
Surprisingly I was only a child when I last attended a Hindu marriage (the northern version) until this time that is. A buddy from college was tying the knot.
It was very long (5+ hrs), in Sanskrit (Latin to most Indians) and has very elaborate rituals.
Though there are some fun games to distract the guests (stealing the groom's shoes and making him pay some ridiculous amount in return)
I went away thinking to myself: a marriage in any tradition should be like a good movie: hold your attention throughout and have obviously dramatic phases which everybody can connect with. Not like a 5 hour epic in a foreign language with curious antics and little emotion.
No offence to anybody. Peace!

Overmanned public services:
Couple of examples: Our dialup modem broke down, we filed a complaint with the public sector BSNL. Strangely the problem went away with no intervention the next day.
A week later four people turn up to fix a working modem!

My dad has an apartment in the top floor of the institution he works for. There are a couple of lifts with space for 6 ppl. Now get this: each lift is manned by a full time employee!
And of course since we cant expect him to stand all day he gets to sit on a stool that leaves space for only 4 other people. They pay 2 full time salaries to reduce the capacity of their lifts by 33%!

The Golden Retriever haircut:
Apparently I wasnt the only westerner at home. Our golden retriver ("Rexy Sexy" as my dad fondly calls him) is not built for the tropical summer and would pant like no tomorrow outside the air conditioning.
We took him for a summer haircut which means he ended up looking like a sheared sheep while we were left holding a garbage bag full of brown dog hair. He was incredibly well behaved during the procedure, which was surprising because he's fidgety.
Everybody who knew his earlier handsome avatar gave him a sympathetic pat but I am guessing he'll take cool over "cool" at 102 F / 39 C

Entertainment:
Went to the floodlit Eden Gardens to watch Shoaib Akhtar rout the Delhi side in cricket.
I really didnt think I would live to see the day when 100,000 Indians would cheer on a Pakistani against an Indian (arch enemies) with such passion. Amazing!
And I think the whole cheer-leading and blasting music routine in cricket is all too abrupt it caters to a mass attention deficit.
Oh and the soap opera's on TV are beyond terrible. I am not gonna waste keystrokes on them. Somebody needs to break the mold and until then mom please flip the channel !

Criminal Intent

2008-05-03T09:14:06Z

Since I haven't owned a TV in a decade I get my TV series in heavy doses on DVD. I've been pretty hooked to Law and Order:CI and before I was past the first season I started to see broad patterns on how to convert a hunch into incriminating evidence.
You have to be as cool as detective Goren to get that hunch but that really is only half the battle. The other half is incrimination.
Here is "How to Incriminate your Suspect for Dummies". And trust me I've given it very little thought but at the end I suggest a perfect crime nonetheless.

The React Trap:
Detectives casually mentions to defendant something only he cares about as the one who executed the crime (like a piece of critical evidence they need) and if he gives a reaction under surveillance(a covert phone call, a digging session in the backyard) he incriminates himself.

A slight variation is that detectives falsely accuse somebody else thats the real criminal has a motive to protect which provides the stimulus for the reaction (the reaction ihere s usually an anonymous claim to the police with hard evidence of having committed the crime, to let the accused off the hook)
The details here can be absolutely intriguing.

The Verbal Slip
The detective earnestly engages the criminal in a discussion about the circumstances of the crime without giving any hints that he is under suspicion.
The criminal drops his guard and forgets the difference between what he should pretend to know as a casual 3rd party and as somebody who actually knows a great detail about the circumstances of the crime (timelines, place, motives etc)
The first time this happens it seems like a really cool device but heck that's at the heart of what makes lying a hard thing to do! Think twice about everything.

The Prisoner's dilemma:
You pbbly know what this is all about. Detectives play conspirators off against each other. Look up the game theory on this if you havent.

Pushing buttons:
My least favorite technique for its crudeness. Get a confession by confronting the suspect with psychological truths about him that he is very insecure about and thinks are carefully hidden or by placing dramatic artifacts from the crime or past crimes when they are least expected

Predictive surveillance:
Establish a pattern to the crime that lets you predict the next victim or scene of crime and catch him in the act

The Secret Motive:
This is rare but wows me because you leverage out a confession that you know is not truthful yet with the same result.
This involves uncovering that the motive for crime is to keep an important secret (like something very detrimental to a loved one or the criminal himself) and even if it cannot be proven in court by simply making it public on a trail the criminal's original intent is overriden.
He is asked to confesses to the crime on some other fake grounds since the detective's dont really care, the punishment is likely similar.

That got me thinking about the perfect crime and it almost happens in the "Enemy Within".
The idea is to commit the crime without doing anything criminal. In other words, to borrow a cyber security term, socially engineer the crime by creating a situation where you give another person or persons a different motive to commit the same crime. To do so you may have to commit a much smaller crime (to seed mistrust, fear whatever) or just be a manipulative yet non-violent sociopath.

Peace :)

Cry of the snow lion

2008-05-02T03:54:08Z

A powerful documentary on Tibet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trPZs-Nwz_I

In India

2008-04-29T05:36:03Z

I'll be visting the old country in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of May.
Will be in Calcutta and B'lore.
Just drop me a line if you want to meet up.

Listening to the Dalai Lama.

2008-04-15T08:43:24Z

Thanks to a Tibetan friend of mine I got to attend a public talk by the great man in Seattle.
After a warm talk on his topic "Compassion" came the time to take questions.
One went something like "What is the way to make our leaders show more compassion in their policies towards the rest of the world"
The Tibet loving, left leaning, Bush hating crowd which filled the stadium cheered the question while he sat in silence pondering. He spent many seconds in deep thought and you could sense the anticipation.
Then he simply said "I really don't know the answer to that" and broke into a chuckle.

He went on in his light hearted but sincere way to suggest that world leaders should set political agendas aside and take a vacation together with their families, especially children for a couple of weeks. "When they know each other as human beings, as friends", he said, "it will be easier to handle differences when they do come up"

Just listening to him can be a life lesson in humility and simplicity.

Break on through to the other side...

2008-03-21T02:45:05Z

After 1.5 yrs here I am finally coding in Kernel!
You could say I got shortchanged having waited this long (given the job desc) but for now I am a happy camper.

Bring on the blue screens! I am playing with the big boys now :D

Zen on 16F

2008-03-12T04:44:12Z

On my 6+ hrs flight back from NYC yesterday I was seated next to this lady who stitched diligently for the entire duration.
That got me thinking: When was the last time I did anything for half a dozen hours straight. (except maybe a marathon debug session)
At the end of it I told her how impressed I was with her random act of attentiveness and she just shrugged it off with a smile and said "Yeah, my wrists hurt a bit"

Sometimes you find inspiration in the most unlikely places.

100 and counting

2008-03-04T05:52:10Z

It is naive to believe that the Israeli politicians expected to stop attacks by launching into this carnage.
This whole exercise has surely got to be a song and dance for domestic consumption.
Even a child could predict that Hamas would benefit from this.
Or if Israel's end game is more sinister, for Fatah to ride on Israeli tanks into Gaza, then there is a lot of bloodletting yet to happen.

Israel's political attitude that further rocket attacks on it will bring a "Holocaust" upon the Palestinians (says their "Defense" Minister) is all about flexing muscle and utterly short sighted. Its an echo of GWB's "Bring it on". Israeli rage at being challenged killed 50 Palestinians for every Israeli dead. And to think terrorists come out of thin air.

oldpondfrog @ 2008-02-20T23:11:00

2008-02-21T07:36:18Z

People who live in boxes I have left behind to make and discover my own, make me uncomfortable.
They are beautiful men and women who smell of the earth.
But their particular fears and ambitions still resonate.
Their judgments still matter somewhere.

Guess we all seek references and moving the reference is less confusing than simply moving against the reference.
I don't know, maybe the former is realization and the latter is a struggle.
Doesn't matter how you deconstruct it. That's usually a waste of time anyway :)

Sweet speech. The song is sweeter still.

2008-02-10T21:41:08Z

Given that "Yes We Can" is a viral you've pbbly already seen this. If not click through for the lyrics/speech.

Observed at work...

2008-02-07T07:30:25Z

Experiment:
Say you discuss a technical problem you are facing with somebody who is an intellectual peer or worse. Then later that day you discuss the same problem with somebody who is orders of magnitude smarter than you. In both cases let's assume you already have these impressions of the person prior to sharing the problem with them.

Result:
The problem statement (as formulated by you) is more comprehensive in the second discussion with Mr Brainiac. Given that formulating the problem right is half the work done you are already closer to the solution without the other person even having spoken yet.

Hypothesis (not being asserted for all samples but for many if not most):
Based on how positive an impression you have of the other person's intellect you almost unconsciously raise (but not lower) the quality of your own formulation of the problem when presenting it to them.
And of course I am not talking about doing so for their benefit (that is usually simplification of the formulation and is by definition conscious )

Corollary (if hypothesis is true):
You are lazy to not formulate the problem the best way that you can when faced with only a whiteboard or pen/paper in the first place.

Microloans via Kiva

2008-01-31T06:10:59Z

You've probably already heard about microloans. If not then in a nutshell its a small loan to poor entrepreneurs who despite needing the loans most, face the toughest credit terms (interest rates of 3 digits are not unheard of). If you need one read up an introduction here.

So I was doing some research and found an organisation with some great press: kiva.org
It marries the net with microloans so you can loan directly to a person on the site and then track his/her progress.
And if you have a good experience (which from the record looks likely at > 97%) and get paid back you might feel encouraged to reloan that maoney to a 3rd person and so the same money may help multiple people over time.

Here is some info if it interests you:
The site: www.kiva.org.
Premal Shah, the president on Riz Khan's show here.
Column by Nicholas Kristof here (BTW he is a great "feet on the ground" reporter. So check him out too!)
Bill Clinton recommends here

Scrabble Dabble

2008-01-27T08:05:17Z

I haven't played or even thought about scrabble since I was a teenager.
Last week I stumbled upon this neat documentary about the game's competitive avatar and promptly forgot about it afterwards.
Quite a coincidence that a friend, Christopher, decided to ask me for a game on facebook within a couple of days of that!

So I've spent part of today playing away with 3-4 other friends and its such fun!
I must admit what pushed me to post this is that I hit 2 bingos (use all 7 letters) today, one of which used a Q(10 pts) and had a Triple word score to boot for a total of 101 points! Woo hoo! What luck!
Bear with me for gloating but it gave me such a kick :)

To make it worth your while to have read this far let me share my discovery that en, ka, ag, mo, mi, mu, lo, jo and wo are all (amongst many other ) weird but valid 2 letter words!
Next time a toddler is making monosyllabic noises I will probably be thinking: "Wow! A scrabble prodigy!"

Oh and watch the documentary if you like the game (it's on Netflix rental and streaming)

The signpost

2008-01-23T09:23:22Z

"Plot less. Accept more", said the master.
The novice sensed the gravity but not the essence.
It resonated with an imagined lightness but he didn't feel it in his bones.
He seemingly faced a continuum: From plotting to rituals of happiness, to indifference ,to accepting.
Indulging the irresistible urge to calculate, he sat down to do the math.

The master smiled inwardly:
No red pill nor blue pill, no rabbit hole to discover thereafter.
If it seems like a choice then its already made.
An impossible recursion.

Racism rethink

2008-01-08T09:50:30Z

In broad strokes the cricket controversy: Here is a brown man accused of racially abusing a (technically) black man in a white man's backyard.
And we'll come to who is taking offense in a bit.

Does that resonate with any stereotypes you have in mind? Not so with me. The point being that I think that racism is an "ism" that brings to mind historic hostilities and persecution. That's the whole reason why being called a "racist" carries so much more of a stigma than being simply called say "hateful" or "spiteful."

If somebody does hurl a racially motivated abuse at another but it doesn't fit the stereo type then yes he is technically a "racist" but the word carries a charge that the word acquired for different reasons.

So In my opinion, the whole thing has a genuine word play angle to it. The rule book cannot split the term "racism" into the Apartheid strain and the strain that is no doubt racially motivated but the targeted race has no hurt to feed (which in fact makes it a useless barb in comparison to say alleged incest?)

To make that split explicit would unfortunately be both politically incorrect and lead to ugly court proceedings with the history books brought in.
So we are stuck with the same clause governing both and that sucks.

We could ask: Are the Australia Aboriginal community up and arms against this whole monkey business.?
My guess is not.

Life in the slow lane

2008-01-05T08:16:28Z

I've had a lot of time on my hands this past month.
With my love life in the dumps and the holiday season in Dec, I had plenty of time to kill.

So I volunteered to help with the vipassana course halfway between here and Canada for a few days.
I would have liked to to take the course but it was full so as a consequence I find myself in the kitchen with other volunteers cooking twice a day for 100 odd folks. Actually with my limited culinary skills I was relegated to washing dishes and dicing vegetables.
Met wonderful people and did get some time to practice, so time well spent and the place was pretty scenic to boot.

When I got back my workplace was deserted which meant no distractions but an infectious lethargy doing the rounds. Anyway I finished a more or less a good year at Microsoft.

In fact on looking back I think this whole year, more than any other, I have had the time ( past few yrs have been so busy, its been distracting) and sometimes reason to start seriously thinking about the big picture: about my life's purpose, priorities, relationships.

So changing gears has been wonderful in a way!

Hoping you too had a great year!

Discovering Tracy Chapman

2007-11-17T09:23:15Z

So I was browsing youtube for music (which is a fantastic way to while away time) and I had a listen to Fast Car. I remember listening to that song as a kid. It was a jewel in my tiny collection of assorted cassettes. I could never figure out the accent back then but I used to love that soothing riff that plays over and over until it burts into the chorus and back again.

So anyway I clicked on all her other songs and was stunned. Each and every one seemed to come from a beautiful place. It isnt that she is a stand out musical genius (and I know I am going to sound like I am going overboard and I pbbly am :)) but such songs seeem to me to come from a person of immense depth.

I dont know about you but I usually don't connect to a musician, only to the music. With Tracy, listening to her lyrics and her sound I feel the warmth of the person capable of such expression.

BTW if you've ever felt this way about any artist I'd love to know and go back to the art with that thought.

Gujarat, a crying shame!

2007-10-27T05:01:19Z

Who votes for these vicious radicals?
What kind of people our democracy has brought to power in Gujarat.....complete f***ing filth!

Eckhart Tolle

2007-05-04T06:33:46Z

I find myself turning to this man's writings when I feel my internal compass has gone awry.

Here is a random snippet I found.

Chomsky, America's dissenter-in-chief

2007-04-28T09:24:10Z

I was, for the most part, apathetic towards politics until sometime in the year 2005 I saw this documentary in which Noam Chomsky presented a voice that was more sane, more honest than any of the rhetoric and shouting matches that passed off as political commentary on TV . He combines encyclopedic knowledge with acute analysis to make many think about what lies beyond mainstream American propaganda. He is a hero of mine because he did something liberating: helped many people recognize the tint in the glasses through which they are shown the world. With that tint we are puppets, cynics and without it we are activists.

I was surprised to find that documentary ripped on youtube . It is split into many clips. Here is the first and the rest should be easy to find (click through to youtube, look in related videos). I strongly encourage you to see the whole thing.

Also here is a Chomsky treasure chest.

A gust of wind.

2007-02-24T03:11:48Z

This picture grabbed me.

Getting older

2006-12-10T23:35:24Z

A documentary that takes a close look at how difficult it can be as you get older.
Must see if you, like me, had never really thought about being old and infirm.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/livingold/view/