साकेत

Late spark that I am, I hadnt managed to do this bit for quite a while... But I am proud of my language and hence this post is dedicated to Marathi (मराठी), the sweetest language there is!

For the uninitiated, Unicode allows Indian scripts to be written and displayed freely in Windows XP and Internet Explorer and many others. Hence my name appears above in the script of my mother tongue Marathi, which is a language spoken in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Quizzing in America...

I miss the BCQC (Boat Club Quiz Club in Pune) a lot. I wasnt the best quizzer in the BCQC and hardly ever even qualified for the final rounds of a good quiz, but it used to be the highpoint of my week.. the Saturday noon QC meeeting. Well these days I love this other kinda quizzing I do everyday. I watch a show called Jeopardy on NBC... and boy do I love it. I guess what gets you hooked on to quizzing is the fact that one seems to get a lot of these questions, at times even when the people on the show dont. In the privacy of my home, I am the superstar! ;-) My knowhow of US Trivia is trivial, but its entertaining and educational nevertheless... The format is a wee bit stupid, cos there is a bit of gambling involved and one can lose all the money that one has accumulated over the show... but maybe it is a money saving device by the show producers! It is no wonder that it is one of the longest running quiz shows ever... "This is Alex Tribeck!"

Play Jeopardy online

Virtual Machine to the Rescue!!

I just took a humongous sigh of relief a few moments ago because finally I found a solution to something that had been bugging me for the past many days. Basically I am trying to work on a project for Advanced Computer Architecture. My partner and I decided to work on architectural techniques to reduce power consumption dynamically. Now this is a very novel concept, where you change things in your processor based on detection of excessive temperatures.... say shutdown some parts of the processor or reduce the amount of speculative execution based on such a temperature reading. Well to test some of the techniques that we had in mind, we needed to use this Power Simulator called Wattch. Unfortunately, Wattch was coded in Princeton in 2000 and worked fine on Redhat 6.0. However if you try to use this code today to run on a Solaris or Redhat 9 machines youd get a bunch of errors because of datatype and function changes in the GCC header files. I spent almost a week trying to find the correct header files for all those teeny tiny functions in the code and took help from some of the smartest people in CS at UW, but all to no avail.

Finally Kai Ting, a friend of mine from GE suggested that I use a Virtual Machine from VMWare to emulate a new machine, install Redhat 6.0 on it and then make Wattch work on this Virtual Machine!! I havent completely tried the idea yet, but it's such a superb idea!! I think this will work and it will finally help save my butt like big time. I was scared that I would do really bad on the course, because my project was going soooo bad but now seems like there is hope! Thanks Kai and thanks VMWare.... Deeper Thought (that's my dumb PC at home) has a Virtual Machine running on it now!!

This one is dedicated to John!!

Okay if you have been to my blog before (that is a set of two people.. mum and dad!!;-)) you'll notice that I somehow managed to lose something on the top of this blog. So how did I possibly do that?! Okay, that is thanks to my friend in Caltech, John! John is one of those really smart kids you'd only see at Caltech. He is a 20 year old but he is a first year graduate student in Caltech CS. (Can you imagine how extraordinary that is!!?) He finished both high school and college at UCLA in 2 years and then his professor at UCLA drove him down to Caltech during their Grad School interviews... and John was accepted without an application or a GRE score... nothing... If that isnt enough he is working for Google and also BLOGGER!! So if you add those things up that tells you something..(that something I guess I shouldnt tell!).