I wrote this post roughly 4 years ago, charting my personal computing evolution. I have now been a professional computer engineer for the last 4 years, and I have 2 degrees in the field. I help design graphics chips for a leading semiconductor technology firm. It seems like an unlikely end for a kid who used to wonder how the various chips on a motherboard worked. I used to think that someday if I become really smart I'll know exactly what all these chips do, and what the numbers on them mean. I could have never predicted that I would end up here 20 years ago. I still don't understand what these chips do btw. ;)

Somehow it feels strange to think that computers and I came of age at roughly the same time... my height increased as processor speeds increased. What's even more uncanny is that processor speeds stopped increasing, roughly when my own stature stopped growing. :)

Computers consume my entire day now. I sit in front of one for most of my waking hours... if I am not at work on Linux/Windows machines, I am at home playing on my notebook. I bought three computers in the last 7 years... the first was a Dell Inspiron 8600, the second a Macbook, and the third a Dell XPS. My iPhone is full-featured to the extent that it would outdo the desktop machine we bought 10 years ago. What's more now is that computers are ubiquitous... the Wii console, the DVD player, my iPhone, my LCD TV, my car all have some semiconductor chips in them. What will the world look like 20 years from now?

About life, the universe and computing

If you have heard/read/seen the H2G2 series, you'll love this speech by Douglas Adams on Youtube. I have to confess that much as I'd like to be one of the people who have read the H2G2 series, I suffer from a severe case of attention deficit disorder. I am very rarely (read once in 10 years) able to sustain my interest in a book long enough to read it cover to cover. It is a shame really, because I miss out on a lot of brilliant thoughts that people have had over the ages, unless someone has distilled them into TV shows, radio shows or movies. It is a debilitating foible when it comes to examinations... As an engineering student I always had trouble completely reading chapters, with the effect that if something you skipped appeared in the university exams, you were done for. Anyways I survived... I used to do two passes at chapters, one from the front and another from the back, so the rough center of the chapters were my Waterloo.

Anyways the Adams speech makes you realize how gifted he was. He travelled very widely (mentions trips to Madagascar, China & Galapagos in an hour), he was able to see the humor in everything, and he is able to connect history, biology, astronomy, computing and many other sciences. And to top it he was able to use all his skills to weave a fantasy world that was tremendously funny. It is a pity that he died at age 49...

Somehow I started thinking about things I read in the past week. So in the 1980s people made microprocessors by drawing large schematics that defined every gate in these processors. In time people realized that we could utilize computers to design more complex computers, and a new field called Computer Aided Design (CAD) took birth. Moore's law allowed us to quickly increase the complexity of these machines exponentially for the last 3 decades. But an essential feature of the computing world was our ability to use the fruits of our past efforts to build ever more complex devices. In a sense it relates to the statement Newton is said to have made on his deathbed, "If I have seen further, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." With Moore's law each new generation of humans stands on the shoulders of the last, forming a Totem Pole of sorts to see further. In a way we are all standing on the shoulders of Newton, Einstein, Shockley, Moore, Moresby and others...

I'm a PC again! : An ode to my new Dell XPS

A few months ago I switched to a Mac. At the time I felt like I was moving up in life... I indulged in Microsoft hate-speech, I loved the Mac vs PC commercials. My Mac was a bottom of the line 13 inch Macbook, bought on a student discount with an iPod Touch for $999. For a few days I was raving at how sleek it looked (and its charger looked and its packaging looked), and appreciated how Apple spent so much time and attention on making things really pretty. But that soon wears off... When it came to doing office work, the Mac is a complete pain. I work on chip design and connecting to remote Windows & Linux machines at the office is something I do very frequently. Also some people may be able to get by without the right & middle mouse buttons, but I truly can't. Carrying an external mouse is really cumbersome if you're watching TV on a couch. Quite honestly not supporting some of the very basic things we all assume on a PC is not something I want to compromise on. Home, End, Page Up, Page Down buttons also have two-key short cuts on a Mac... but why do I need to use two hands to do that?!

My experience with a PC was with a Dell Inspiron 8600 that I bought when I was in grad school for $1400 about 6 years ago. I never bought a new machine because it just worked fine. I replaced the keypad myself and also the battery once. My impression about Windows Vista was really negative, based not just on the reports I saw in the media but also based on first-hand impressions from my friends.

Today I've been playing on my Dell XPS M1530 all evening and I truly love it. I spent about $1250 on it:

- TV Tuner Card : Amazing! It works so well. It caught all the digital TV stations on a tiny antenna and now I can even record Jeopardy, or Leno, or Charlie Rose. What's more I can now watch TV in the kitchen or in the bedroom? And Media Center also allows you to watch TV shows or movie trailers synced from the Web.

- Biometrics : Logging in with my fingerprint... Now arguably I don't know if my wife can cheat the system yet, but so far I like being able to use my fingerprint instead of typing.

- IE 8 : Accelerators... yeah I know Firefox had all this already but IE8s text rendering is so much better.

- Gadgets : Amazing superb! Just what the doctor ordered. I wonder whether third-party gadgets are allowed.

- The Design : Black and Metal design... this PC looks really sleek! The touch-sensitive keys are great too.

All in all, I love this machine. It even has an NVIDIA GPU that I worked on. I know it only gets used when Aero is ON and when I am watching DVDs for most parts, but hopefully someday I could code using CUDA on this baby. Great job all you engineers! :)

Pictures from Home in Billerica

Here are some pictures from our place in Billerica. Billerica is a suburb of Boston, around 30 minutes from the heart of Boston. We moved here 5 months ago. As such apartments give you a blank white canvas, on which to paint with your furniture. Most of ours is the furniture we acquired in the Bay Area, from IKEA of course. One of the pictures of Sai is from Thanksgiving. This was our first Thanksgiving together, and we kept it non-alcoholic (that's a bottle of Martenelli's Apple Cider) and vegetarian (veggie pasta) too.

Postcards from Boston : The Freedom Trail

I moved to Billerica 3 months ago, but the general busy-ness of life prevented me from doing the touristy things in Boston until today. So I headed downtown armed with my iPhone to take walk down the Freedom Trail. Billerica is a 30 minute drive from Boston. First stop, the Boston Common. This 50 acre park is the oldest in the country.






Next the Massachusetts State House. I don't remember if I saw this on Ally McBeal a long time ago.



The Freedom Trail is marked with red bricks or red paint and it is easy to follow it, unless you are too distracted with all the sights and sounds. Next I stopped at the site of the old Boston Latin school (the oldest public school in the country from 1635) where Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Sam Adams went to school. Here is a picture of the Ben Franklin statue outside the school:



Do you know where the Boston Tea Party started? The next monument takes you to something everyone remembers from the history books. The Old South Meeting Place.




Next a statue of Sam Adams outside Faneuil Hall, which hosted the first town hall meeting in the country.... In Boston all things are about being first, the oldest and other superlatives.


One word of advice on trekking the Freedom Trail. Be sure to wear your most comfortable shoes. I learnt this lesson the hard way today... Still nursing some shoe bites from the oldest parts of America. I headed to North End next. This is the Italian section of town, and it is lined with trattorias and stores. Eventually you reach the Old North Church and this beautiful statue of Paul Revere. Paul Revere was the important messenger who warned the freedom fighters about the impending British attack in April 19th, 1775.




If you are ever in the Boston area, give me a call. We could explore the Freedom Trail again. :) Next time I am planning to visit the Paul Revere House, among the oldest houses in the country.

"That One" won that!

Simply amazing! I still had my doubts 24 hours ago, about how this election would shape up. I won't be cynical about the world any more. America has chosen a truly inspiring leader and his acceptance speech rivals some of the best I have read to date. I feel like I have found a role-model in Obama today.

I don't really feel sorry for John McCain. He didn't run an honorable campaign, and surprisingly the Truth did succeed. If John McCain chose to emulate the George Bush he met in the 2000 primaries, he really chose unwisely. Sad for him that he was beaten by the worst and the best that America has in the last 8 years.

Everyday fractals

I am sure you have heard of fractals. It is a structure in which a part looks like the whole. It relies on creating structures with repeating patterns. Did you know that we rely on fractals for one major application everyday in our lives? Which application uses fractals?



I found out after watching Nova tonight that cellphone antennas are called fractal antennas because they use this property of self-similarity. (The image above is an example of a fractal antenna) So if you were wondering how the cellphone makers managed to make antennas so small that they fit inside your pocket, fractals are the answer. In order to achieve a high surface area in a small space, they decided to use this property of self-similarity to achieve it.

Beautiful and useful! Do watch NOVA for the many other examples.