Out Standing Student

Parallel Computing

2005-05-09T03:24:00.000-07:00

Imagine a large hall like a theater, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe...A myriad of computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of the equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank...From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theater; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the conductor of the orchestra in which the instruments are slide rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand.

Lewis F. Richardson, "Weather Prediction by Numerical Process" (1922)

Are You CEO Material?

2005-03-03T01:50:00.000-08:00

I scored 7/9. ;-) in the quiz on MSN. Try it out:
eLearning Quiz Src=http://encarta.msn.com/quiz_98/Are_You_CEO_Material.html

Now if you want prep for the CEO quiz, check out some very interesting anecdotes below:

For his invention of an automated stock ticker, Thomas Edison received $40,000. He and a business partner, who operated a machine shop, used the money to start a new company to manufacture Edison’s improved stock ticker. In 1876, Edison established a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, the first laboratory dedicated to industrial research in the world.

In 1914, the automobile factory operated by Henry Ford was experiencing a monthly personnel turnover of 40 to 60 percent, largely because of the unpleasant monotony of assembly-line work and repeated increases in the production quotas assigned to workers. Ford met this challenge by doubling the daily wage then standard in the industry, raising it from about $2.50 to $5.

In the mid-1920s, Warner Brothers acquired the Vitagraph Company, which enabled them to distribute their films directly to theaters. In 1926 they formed Vitaphone to develop a sound-on-disk process by which a recording could be played alongside a film and synchronized with it. They first used the Vitaphone system in a feature-length film during several musical numbers in The Jazz Singer (1927), thus revolutionizing the film industry.

In 1962 Sam Walton managed 15 Ben Franklin stores. That year, unable to convince the Ben Franklin Company to start a chain of stores that offered discounts all the time on all items, Sam and his brother opened their own store, Wal-Mart Discount City, in Rogers, Arkansas. By 1969, they operated 18 Wal-Mart Discount City stores (now called simply Wal-Marts).

In 1968, H. Wayne Huizenga teamed with a partner to create a nationwide company for waste collection, a business traditionally made up of small, local companies. The new company, Waste Management, Inc., became the foundation of his fortune.

In 1963, Ted Turner inherited his family billboard-advertising business. In 1970 he bought a failing UHF (ultrahigh frequency) television station in Atlanta, Georgia, and by 1975 Turner had transformed it into the first "superstation," WTBS, by transmitting low-cost sports and entertainment programs via satellite to cable systems throughout the country. This was a highly profitable innovation that accelerated the spread of cable television nationwide.

While attending Harvard University in 1975, Bill Gates teamed with Paul Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. They licensed the software to the manufacturer of the Altair and formed Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies. Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in his junior year to devote his time to Microsoft.

In 1986, Oprah Winfrey formed Harpo Productions to produce her own show and other projects. With distribution rights to her shows, Winfrey used profits to expand her business activities. By 1998 Winfrey was worth $675 million.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos grew interested in online retailing in 1994 while working as a business analyst in New York City. After researching the success of different mail-order companies, Bezos decided that books were the perfect product to sell via the Internet. That year he left New York to establish his new company in Seattle, chosen for its proximity to major book wholesalers and the booming high-tech industry. In July 1995 Amazon.com launched its Web site, and has since expanded to offer many other retail products in addition to books.

Flutter in the Sky

2005-02-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

The three illustrations below are from the article titled "Access to the Terascale system leads to more accurate flutter predictions for the F-16." from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

2005-02-19T20:55:00.000-08:00

Mach contours and streamlines for an aeroelastic simulation at Mach 0.9.
Color indicates local variation in Mach number (increasing from blue to red) at the surface of the aircraft.

2005-02-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

Von Mises stress on the F-16 structure (increasing from dark blue to light blue to red) during an aeroelastic simulation.
Von Mises stress represents a criterion for the stress level at which a material may be expected to fail. From this kind of simulation, it's possible to plot the likelihood of failure for any given structural material.

2005-02-19T20:52:00.000-08:00

Detailed finite-element structural model of the F-16

At Hell with Cleopatra and Helen of Troy !! :-)

2005-02-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished me to the Second Level of Hell!

You have come to a place mute of all light, where the wind bellows as the sea does in a tempest. This is the realm where the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their transgressions. The infernal hurricane that never rests hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. You have betrayed reason at the behest of your appetite for pleasure, and so here you are doomed to remain. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy are two that share in your fate.

That sounds fun.

Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

2005-02-11T02:18:00.000-08:00

STOP this MADNESS NOW!

Ash popukar

2005-02-01T02:33:00.000-08:00

"Aishwarya Rai" is popular search word on MSN Worldwide.

64-bit Steamroller on our way

2005-01-30T02:59:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend I installed and configured a new build [v. 1421] of the Windows XP x64 Edition on my Compaq Presario 3000 Laptop with a 64-bit processor (just in case you have not noticed it on the screenshot above).

Compaq Presario R3000

A question I get asked quite often:
64-bit Keun?(Why 64-bit?)

If you are running an enterprise information technology solution, one of the common strategies for you to adopt in order to scale-up (as opposed to scale-out) your solution would be to throw more memory at your box.

With a 32-bit hardware you will hit the memory ceiling of 4GB = 2^32 bits (the maximum addressable memory space with piddly 32-bits), unless you unleash some tricks like AWE, PAE, etc to overcome the memory barrier. These tricks have their own overheads.

I am sure you have heard of the saying "There's nothing called a free lunch".

With 64-bit processors this ceiling just gets blown away, since now you have a maximum theoretical addressable memory space become 2^64 bits, which is 18446744073709551616 bits. This is about 18 billion GB, or 18 exabytes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte). Now hopefully you will not require more than 18EB of memory anytime soon. But, who can say ;-).

The next question I get asked is, what am I doing with a 64-bit capable laptop. Am I planning to run all the enterprise solution of my company on my shining 64-bit laptop.

No, my dear. The reason you and I (who are power users :-) offcourse) need a 64-bit laptop is because I may decide to take a shot at the GrammyAwards by creating some soul stirring music entirely on my laptop w/o visiting any recording studio. Check out the software: http://www.cakewalk.com/x64/default.asp
Here are some example of music which has been entirely created on a computer. Check it out, I bet you will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of these music:

Or, I might just decide to check out the latest and greatest first action shooter game which is so realistic and thereby so memory hungry that 2GB RAM is not adequate for the unreal experience. Check out how you can lay your hands on a free copy of 64-bit game "Far Cry" http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/0,,30_2252_875_10543,00.html?redir=IEGFC01

Now for the real reason for my possessing this 64-bit hardware; I help Independent Software Vendors write efficient software on 64-bit Windows platform. So, this is my lab where I perform different experiments to check out my ideas before I present them to my audience.

Page 3 - The Movie

2005-01-30T01:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I watched the movie "Page 3" by Madhur Bhandarkar at the Rex Cinema on Brigade Road at Bangalore . I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Read the review of the movie at http://in.rediff.com/movies/2005/jan/21page.htm

Madhur just accentuated the self-centred characters we often come across in our day-to-day lives. Who can say I am just not one of them?

Madhur could have kept the characters a little more greyer. But that would have made the movie less engaging and difficult to reasonably wrap up in little more than 2 hours.

My new BLOG Space

2005-01-27T18:57:00.000-08:00

I have been checking out the BLOG Spaces on MSN: http://spaces.msn.com/members/saptak/.

I still have not figured out how to edit the CSS directly, if it is possible at all on Spaces. But, it has a better WYSIWYG editor than Blogger.com

It's simple once you have figured it out

2005-01-26T18:43:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have been playing with the photo publishing feature of "Blogger.com + Hello + Picasa".
I must say these folks have provided a pretty neat user experience. To start with it takes a little getting used to, as you are expected to click on buttons tucked way on the panes of the main window of the app instead of selecting from the menus or a toolbar as in most normal Windows app.
But, once you have figured it out, it is quite simple ;-).
MUHAHAHA (I picked up this laugh from another guys blog that I visited yesterday)

2005-01-26T18:41:00.000-08:00

Fruit of the Labour of Love....

2005-01-26T18:32:00.000-08:00

I am with Bill Gates

2005-01-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

I am Hobbes! and that's what they say about me

On offering aid

2005-01-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

Here goes the opinion of a friend. I agree with him:

Dear All,

I have not yet read Sharmaji's message and this message is not in response to his but I must say...I was closely involved with various groups who were working towards providing aid to the victims of the Kutch earthquake.At the end of it all I had to ask myself if we were actually doing anything worthwhile at all. I do not want to bore you with and nor do I want to relive all the mistakes that were made, some due to human error but most due to incompetence and mismanagement, in collecting, transporting and distributing the aid which was taken in the name of thepeople who needed it. In retrospect, I ask myself one question: is it more practical to transport aid to the victims or to transport the victims to the aid? From my (limited) understanding of the Kutch disaster, I am of the opinion that:-

1) aid could not be provided, either by the government or the volunteer groups, to the people in the immediate aftermath of the event, which is when it was most needed.

2) getting aid to a region a week or a fortnight or a month after the event is useless because those who are most effected have already either died or have moved away from theregion to a safeer and better place.

3) The conditions of the victims of the disaster who could be thought of as in need of aid is then the same as that of any other person living below the poverty line in India and is not much different from what it used to be before thedisaster.

In conclusion, I would advice anyone who really has the urge to offer aid to victims of disaster to travel a few kilometers away from any metro in any random direction and give away essential commodities to the any of the innumerable below poverty line people he is likely to encounter therebecause these people are in exactly the same living conditions as disaster victims.

Regards,
Niel Hirjee

2005-01-17T01:59:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's Industrial Keynote at the International Conference on High Performance Computing [20 December, 2004]

2005-01-17T01:40:00.000-08:00

Me @ MS Museum [June, 2001]

My good friend Rona touched my heart today

2004-12-31T01:46:00.000-08:00

She caught me on IM to find out whether we were all fine and not hurt in anyway by the recent Tsunami. Not only that, she really quizzed me on how we were participating in the relief efforts and started mobilizing efforts on how our subsidiary at Israel can contribute directly and quickly.

I had met Rona at a technical conference at Seattle. She works for the same company as myself and is based at Israel. She is a geek but does not behave like one. She has helped me more than once out of tight spots on my technical engagements.

On one hand she is beautiful and extremely intelligent. On the other hand she is very kind to everybody and a loving mother. It is hard to find a lady with such a combination of beauty, brain and heart.

I wish Rona and her daughter all the best in life.

If you want to contribute for the relief of the people affected by the Tsunami please visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/citizenship/giving/relief.asp
for a list of NGO's in US.

If you want to contribute to a NGO in India please contact:
S. Senthilkumaran
Informatics Division
M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
3rd Cross Road, Institutional AreaTaramani,
Chennai 600 113
Tel +91 44 22542791, 22542698, 22542699Fax +91 44 22541319
senthil@mssrf.res.in

The other contact person is R Malathy.

Napolean Bonaparte

2004-12-25T22:26:00.000-08:00

the avatar of ambition, describe himself under its spell:

"I feel myself driven toward an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me."

Interesting Take

2004-11-26T04:24:00.000-08:00

"I want to know God's thoughts. Everything else are details" - Albert Einstein.

I think what he means is that once God defines the ToE (Theory of Everything), then God can just relax on the hammock as everything else is just the implementation of the ToE.

In XML analogy, it is like THE schema. Then again extending the analogy, in a real solution it is impractical to have a single schema define every kind of business xml document we require. But, again whether it is a single schema or a bunch of schemas defining the DSL (Domain Specific Language), who cares. It is just details.

Pacing

2004-11-24T01:24:00.000-08:00

I was attending a training on topic "Communication Skills" last week. And the instructor showed us an interesting technique called "pacing".

It seems if you imitate/mirror the person in front of you, you will build a rapport with the person faster. The most important rule of rapport is: be alike!

Can any of you vouch for it or share your experiences?

Just keep swimming!

2004-11-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

In the animation feature film about the little clown fish Nemo, Dori, the blue fish said:

Just keep swimming!
Just keep swimming!
Swimming, Swimming, Swimming.
What do we do?
We swim.