Quals (qualifiers) - A mysterious, largely unexplainable, dreaded, and scary exam that lets a graduate student's committee decide in an hour, if she is good enough to conduct research over a period of about five years and get a PhD.
I passed my quals today.
The other really good thing is that as a result of all the reading I did in its preperation, I think I have a much better idea of what exactly I want to focus my research on - both in the short, and long term.
The only discernable immediate effect is that I can now apply for a closed study carrel in the library (so what if there is an eight month waiting list for that)!
I have a bunch of GMail invites. So for the seven and a half regular readers of this blog, here is your chance to finally get something useful out of it. Post a comment here with your email address and I'll send you an invite.
No purchase necessary. Offer valid while stocks last.
Update: I've exhausted my supply of invites. See comments for other possible sources.
Came across this recently. It is still mostly speculation and rumors. See the discussion forum threads for more information including interviews etc. I really hope this gets made...
We predict the future. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.We never gave up, and we never will. In the end, if that's all they can say about us, it'll do.
Firefox 0.9 is out! Faster, less buggy, new default theme (I think it is better now), new extension and theme management (check out this), better gtk+2 support (menus etc look more consistent with the desktop), and a million other things.
The bad thing is that it breaks many of the extensions that I used. Hopefully the extensions should be fixed in the next week or so.
Also, Thunderbird 0.7 is expected sometime this week. So get rid of that bloated, buggy, crappy, dumb IE/OE setup and be a part of the next revolution!
Update: Thunderbird 0.7 also released today. Looks good. I am seriously considering switching from mutt to thunderbird completely...
Found this on gentoo forums. Apparently a bug in gcc 3.3 and 3.3.2 causes a sinple 20 line program to completely crash a system running linux 2.4.2x and 2.6.x. Whats worse is that no special permissions are needed for this - any user on your system with execute permissions can bring it down. Even if this really is a gcc bug, the kernel should never allow a thing like this to happen.
I just tried it and it crashed both my laptop and desktop (running linux 2.6.5). While it makes sense to disable logins all critical systems, many unix mail and web servers dont do this. This is really scary with all the 2.4 installations out there!
Recently watched two pretty decent and off beat hindi movies, 3 Deewarein and Waisa Bhi Hota Hai - II.
3 Deewarein was the better of the two. Extremely good acting, pretty decent story line, a twist in the end, a somewhat open ending, no songs! The story is somewhat similar to Shawshank Redemption, and some subplots are copied almost verbatim. The problem with the movie was the ending. It was interesting, but lacked the punch. The climax came and went by without having much of an impact. A more talented director could have handled the story much better. The movie basically seems to loose steam towards the end, and the knockout punch really falls flat on the face.
I was expecting Waisa Bhi Hota Hai - II to be much better than it turned out to be. The acting was below average, the direction pretty ordinary, the music nothing great, and the story really pretty hollow. Well, maybe I am being a little too harsh here. It was not all that bad, but came nowhere close to what it really wanted to be. In the credits, the director has thanked Tarantino, and Coen brothers for inspiration. He has really tried to make it Tarantino-style, but in that respect has failed miserably. The that makes Tarantino's movies so good are the subtle jokes and great cinematography - both of which were extremely poor in this movie. Well, atleast the intention was there, even if the execution was nothing great!
Had these movies been in English, I might have given them extremely poor ratings (specially to Waisa Bhi...). But this is something very new and interesting for Hindi movies, and the fact that they are different from the typical Shah-Rukh-Khan crap is what makes them worth mentioning. I would love to see more experimentation in Hindi movies, and this is a great start!
Read on for spoilers...
One thing I really liked about 3 Deewarein was the open ending. Did Ishaan (Naseeruddin Shah) really kill all those people, or was it just a story he came up with to save his skin? Both are extremely plausible, and I think this ambiguity could perhaps have been exagerated a little to make a better ending.
This would be absolutely hilarious if it wasnt so serious. Apparently hard drives and CDs containing security codes and other "confidential" stuff were stolen from an unguarded building about eight months back, leaving all defence, IB and RAW vulnerable.
This goes a long way to show that developing better, stronger encryption algorithms is not always the answer to improving security. Dumpster diving and traditional break-ins are probably a bigger threat.
On a slightly different note, I am surprised to see big places like Panera still print the complete credit card information on their recipt. This is a clear invitation for identity theft. Then there is the popular spam that tricks people into handing over their ebay passwords. The best fingerprint/retinal recognition security system is a failure if someone uses a doorstop to leave the door open.
I think the security problem is at a much lower level than Computer Science. It is about educating people about how serious a wrong click of a button can be.