and still counting…

People with PhDs live longer than people with master’s degrees, who in turn live longer than people with only a bachelor’s. A study of census data by Robert Erikson at Stockholm University in Sweden found that men aged 64 with a basic tertiary education had a greater rate of mortality than men with doctorates. In the years between 1991 and 1996, the less educated men had a 9.6 per cent chance of death, versus a 6 per cent risk among those with PhDs. Those with a master’s had an 8.5 per cent risk of death.

[Source: New Scientist]

The Indian Prez on Yahoo! Answers

Real or not? At least Yahoo! seems to endorse it.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Abdul Kalam

The Kurukshetra OPC was finally conducted successfully last sunday (14th Jan, ‘07).

So, The official stats! (Server stats at http://prashblog.com/files/report.html)

Total No of Registered Teams: 633
Total No of Active Teams: 547 (Teams who confirmed their accounts)

Now, The number of submits by language:

The OPC was conducted by using a product that Ravi Shankar and myself designed — Hackzor. If any of you would like to use Hackzor in your college/organisation, please feel free to contact either of us in helping you deploy it. And of course any help in developing it further is most welcome. Hackzor is a Python application which uses the Django Web Framework.

Many thanks are due for Ravi Shankar, Rajiv Mathews, Anjan, Venkatanathan, etc for helping us make this OPC a huge success.

Questions in the OPC:

• Three Brothers
• Names in a Database
• Travelling Fisher Man
• Festive Change
• Nikhils cake
• Father and Son

Technorati Tags: Kurukshetra, Hackzor, Anna University, CEG, OPC

The Kurukshetra Online Programming Contest has been rescheduled for the 14th of January. The timings will be between 14:00 IST to 20:00 IST. The rules will be the same was earlier. We regret that we have to disappoint you last time. The 2000 USD is still up for grabs. Please visit http://opc.kurukshetra.org.in for more details.

If you had already registered for the OPC, you need NOT register again. However, the registration page is still open in case you have not yet registered.

Location: http://opc.kurukshetra.org.in
Date: 14th January, 2007
Time: 14:00 IST - 20:00 IST
Prize Money: 2000 USD
Languages allowed: C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP

Thank You,

The Kurukshetra OPC Team

Technorati Tags: Kurukshetra, Anna University, OPC

It was a world that is now extinct. People don’t know that vi was written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore - unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you’ll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. — Bill Joy

[Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/]

Technorati Tags: vi, emacs, editor

Today was the Programming Contest of Kurukshetra:

For those inclined towards puzzles and logic try solving them:
[Question Paper] [Solution Set]

Technorati Tags: Kurukshetra, Logic, Puzzles

Dear Mr. Vernon,

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. But we think you are crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms with the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is:

a brain, a athlete, a basket-case, a princess and a criminal.

Does that answer your question ?

Sincerely yours,

The breakfast club.

From The Breakfast Club (1985)

The price for freedom is not paid by those who are free, it is paid by those who wish that others were a little less free.

[Source: http://gaia.ecs.csus.edu/~laned/ (One of the authors of PC^2)]

The College of Engineering, Guindy is proud to announce Kurukhetra ‘07 Online Programming Contest. The contest is open to EVERYONE (If your dog’s name is Max he can participate too!). Yes you don’t need to be a student to participate

The contest is to take place on Dec 31st i.e. Sunday from 14:00 IST to 20:00 IST. A set of problems will be posted on the website. And what you do is to write programs to solve the problems and submit to the server. The server will evaluate your program automatically (so make sure your output formats are right!).

And whats the motivation to the contest? A simple sum of 2000 USD

Register yourselves at http://opc.kurukshetra.org.in/accounts/register/

To summarise:
Members per team: 3 (maximum) - Lone wolves are allowed too
Languages Allowed: C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, C#
Prize Money: 2000 USD
Time: 14:00 IST - 20:00 IST on 31st December ‘06 (New year’s party ;-))

UPDATE: We found that the mono compiled binary was forking too many processes (or threads?) upon start. Moreover the number of forks could not be deterministic. Once it was 15, next time it was 16. I could not give 1 permanent value for NPROC in setrlimit. Does anyone know how to solve this?

Technorati Tags: OPC, Programming Contest, Kurukshetra, CEG

MapMyIndia is an online effort to map all the streets in India. A much needed utility I seem to have been ignorant about all this while. Services like Google Maps dont offer as high resolutions in the Indian context.

Update: Google maps seems to have improved tremendously since I last checked (which was quite some time back)

[Source: Technospot]

Technorati Tags: Maps, India

Excellent tutorial and screencast on using OpenID to log into blogs and websites:

• http://simonwillison.net/2006/Dec/19/openid/
• http://simonwillison.net/2006/openid-screencast/

Technorati Tags: OpenID

So I have been away for the past 1 week. First stop was the Amrita Engineering College where the ACM ICPC Asia Regionals were conducted. This College has some AWESOME scenery around the college. The coding competition itself was not as eventful. We (Vijay, Venkatnathan and myself) came in 10th place. But then I guess thats not all that bad a position for a regional level competition

Ahh.. and the trip from Coimbatore (where Amrita is located) to Bangalore is worth mentioning. We missed the train because of this huge traffic build up due to the President’s arrival. We had to catch a car and travel 2 stations ahead to catch the train, which too was just by a brush for that matter. And as bad luck would persist, Someone stole my shoes on the train.

Bangalore was an amazing experience. The whole CEG gang completely enjoyed ourselves at the HiPC conference. I presented 2 posters at the conference — The first was SemFS, which is also my Final Year Project in College along with Venkat and Raghu, and the other was RepoFS along with Aanjhan (who couldn’t make it to the conf). Incidentally topa was there at the conf too. So it was a lot of fun for 4 days. Enjoying life at a 5 star hotel ;-). So now back in Chennai and back to work

HiPC 2006

ICPC

Technorati Tags: ICPC, HiPC

Back from foss.in. Whee it was fun meeting people in person whom I have chat with daily on IRC. The list? Viyyer, sp2hari, taggy, T3, tazz, shres, nags, baks17, vamsee, f3ew, _Abhi_, kartik, spo0nman, Karunakar, koolhead17, jony, and lots more

foss.in

I learnt more about how not to do a presentation than how to do the presentation

UPDATE: jony posted a short clip of my talk on youtube

MIT seems to be discarding their SICP course. here and here

Technorati Tags: SICP, MIT

Ahh… the treachery of exams keeps me away from blogsville.

Why does a Webinar on Linux say that Linux is not supported? :-/

The Indian Railways website has this crazy script. They Disable the `Alt’ Key!

It seem GOOG now supports this cool feature. I got a message on Gaim saying someone scrapped me. This seems to be a new feature after they added gmail integration to Orkut.

Last but not least. My friend, Gaurav alias tazz ’s interview was published on Hindustan Times

I finished reading a few interesting Articles/Papers/Talks/<whatever-you-call-them-here> that have been lying in my bookmarks for too long. I thought it would do good to mention ‘em here.

• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming. Definitely a must read. Very very motivating.
• How to Read Mathematics by Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea
• The Humble Programmer by Edsger W. Dijkstra
• A tale of two programmers by David Wiseman. Thanks to Roshan for sending me this very interesting story
• A Student’s Guide to Startups by Paul Graham. Again another must read!

Technorati Tags: aritcles, papers

Well… the title says the story. I have nothing to blog about. Just a summary of the last few drab weeks.

• My tutorial talk on LDTP was selected for foss.in. Many thanks to shres for motivating me to put in an entry. However like all good things there is an ugly face to it. My exams get over on the 25th. I have requested the foss.in co-ods to see if they can schedule my talk on the 26th. By the way, would someone attending foss.in this year be willing to lend me their laptop for the demo?
• Well Exams play spoil sport again. IITK is conducting the ICPC OPC on the 11th from 09:30 - 13:30 and I have an exam scheduled at 14:00. Now this is going to be tight (and arrgh just before the exam I am not studying!)
• The other ACM ICPC OPC conducted by amrita finished successfully. Our team came in 14th. So next stop — On-Site contest at Amrita.
• The professors at college are driving me mad! Projects, projects and more projects. And I just found out that some of them can be acutely lazy!
• Created a Mock up of an Online Programming Contest Judge — Hackzor. A very very early edition is hosted at http://prash.one09.net:8000. The app is programmed using Django. Ravi Shankar and myself were to demo this as a project in our college. But as luck would have it, our prof wont accept that it is our work. Lessons? Don’t use linux (or rather use only windows). Don’t think out of the box. Don’t do anything useful. (All this has been reinforced on me from sem 1. How come I never learn?)

/me stops ranting…

Yesterday was a fine day. A day after Diwali, the festival of lights. It turned out might fine indeed. I log into my mail box and I see acceptance letters from the HiPC poster selection committee. One of the projects is my Final Year Project at college, a File System which adapts to the semantic nature of the files i.e. the Files can be accessed using it’s semantics rather than only based on its location (The File System is similar to BeagleFS and GLS3, however there are difference that I will elucidate in another post). The other is another File System which we call RepoFS. This file system will allow Version Control Repositories to be mounted to a local directory. Aanjhan and myself are working on this project using GNU/Hurd translators.

If there is one person that I could thank for all the help and advice, it is none other than Toufeeq alias topa. He has had an immense impact on the above said posters. If not for his critical views and knowledge of the latest what is what, this could never have been possible.

Technorati Tags: HiPC, posters

I must be getting Important. I got my first hate mail today. And only important people get hate mail. Just for the record, I wrote a small script called doufs to find the usage of a broadband service called DataOne (in India). It is by no means a desktop based account management system. And snooping on users!!! Does this make me an eligible candiate for the RAW?

<place-removed> DATE : 20 / 10 / 2006
<place-removed> - 600 107.

TO
Mr. Prash - mohan

Sir,
I downloaded a program called “Dataone Bandwidth measurement 2.5″ - OR something to that effect.
Now, I am not able to follow the purpose of it and when I want to change the password, I find it extremely difficult ; there is a Time-out that has been incorporated at your 10.240.0.195 , through which, the user is made to abort his attempt repeatedly. YOU HAVE WON IN TORMENTING AT LEAST ONE AMONG THE PUBLIC- GREAT!

Kindly relieve me from all these troubles.
Let your Blogging go on without putting me into trouble please.
I am not at all an expert programmer to go in to the Nitty- gritty of LDTP or GNOME or other such RIGHTS OF USERS to snoop etc.. Alright. You do have right to snoop among your close ones. Just free ME from all these…..!

–
WITH BEST WISHES,
<name-removed>

P.S: No part of the email was edited other than removing the OP’s name and place.