Two days in heaven..

Ok, I was going to name this post 'do din jannat me' or something on those lines, but some hindi films have distorted the word 'jannat' so much that I decided not to use it. But seriously folks, last weekend was literally a trip to heaven. Almost two years after graduation, we relived our engineering days.

It all started when Paresh informed us that he'll be in Pune over the weekend. Calls and mails at once began to flow. RaTo's room was decided as the meeting place. Saturday afternoon was dedicated to the 'Taang Kheecho' ceremony. This tradition has a long and colorful history and everyone was just waiting to participate. After enough was enough, we decided to go watch a movie and fitting with our Perfect Approach to Management, 'Westend' was selected as the destination. But when after hours of sweat and soil we finally reached there, we (to our horror) realized that it was showing 'Taare Zamin Par'. So the movie plan flopped. But one good thing (among others) about the camp area is the Landmark book store, found 'Metamagical Themas' there which I could not find anywhere else.

After spending most of the Saturday night in mandatory 'Taang Kheecho' and fights for bedsheets, it was decided that 'Mulashi' would be a good place to spend our Sunday. And after RaTo spoiled my tea with too much sugar, we headed off to Mulashi on Sunday morning. And as we approached Mulashi, we (Mukul, myself and Onkar) discovered that we did not had enough petrol to go ahead in Tamheni ghat (another example of our Perfect Management Style ;-)).

Mulashi is a stunningly beautiful location, any season you go there, you return re-energized. Just sit back and listen to the flowing water and you will listen to the secrets of the ages. Onkar clicked some beautiful snaps, ekdum pro-estyle. In the evening, watched 'Hyderabadi Bakra' on Pramod's room, which proved to be big disappointment. These guys have undone everything they got with 'Angrez'.

All in all, this was the best weekend in many months, much awaited and now much anticipated.

Hum rahe ya na rahe kal,

Pal, yaad aayenge ye pal..

P.S. You can read Onkar's post about the trip here.

A walk down the memory lane

In a curious turn of events, after reading Richard Dawkins' Essay "Sanderson of Oundle" (from A Devil's Chaplain) on Friday night, I went on to watch "Taare Zamin Par" on Saturday. Both are touching stories of great teachers. And it made me take a walk down the memory lane and think about my own teachers.

One name that immediately comes to my mind is Mr. P.K.Patil, affectionately known as PKP, a teacher of great repute from Kolhapur, from whom I had the fortune to learn HSC physics. He has been teaching physics for past 32 years, and has taught literally to generations of students. His students have gone to fame and fortune in a variety of fields.

Maybe you can tell a great teacher from a mere good one in just one lecture. One thing that struck me immediately was his boundless enthusiasm for students. He not only introduced us to the marvels of physics but successfully imparted his enthusiasm on us. He also helped ease the transition of many of us from a 'marathi medium shala' to an 'all english college'. Now physics is a highly mathematical subject and you had to solve tons of numerical problems, but his captivating illustrations never let you get bored. Consider this, while teaching about heat, he placed a book on his head and moved back and forth on the dais in a demonstration of a molecule carrying heat, or consider his demo of circular motion with door and chair. And here is the best part, he could churn out an approximate answer to a numerical problem in just a couple of seconds. This useful technique of 'back-of-the-envelope calculations on-the-back-of-your-mind' has remained with us ever since.

He also taught us to value what is really important and ignore the rest. Unlike many other teachers he never encouraged wasting time to beatify your notebooks, what was important was physics (As a side effect of this, our notebooks resembled something written in hieroglyphs plus Linear B). Sometimes his talk ventured in philosophy, like the question of existence of god from the point of view of a physics teacher. But whatever be the topic, his exposition was always enriching.

Thank you, Sir.

A bit of folklore..

Along with the technology, I have always been interested in people who made things actually happen. The computing field is rife with folklore surrounding these influential personalities. Here I present some of the legends I have come across. (I am writing this from memory and don't remember the exact links, sorry).

As we all know, linux began as a project on a minix machine. So the story goes, one day linus' (creator of Linux) filesystem crashed taking with it a few days work. Linus being the uberhacker he is, fixed the minix superblock by hand, and recovered his data.

Seymour Cray (the creator of Cray series of supercomputers) once entered an operating system of his design, into a computer of his design, in octal, by hand, without error. So much for the Real Programmers.

As you might know, there is one particular 'make' (a Unix utility for building complex projects) feature that has bitten many of us. It is that the 'commands' line in a Makefile must begin with a tab. Now you can't just look and say this is a tab and this is a collection of spaces and it causes much pain. But when the original author of make, Stu Feldman was asked to fix this feature, he refused because he already had 10 users.

When Microsoft launched Windows 95, they paid a lot of attention to backward compatibility. As it happened, there was a bug in Simcity's (a popular simulation game) memory management code. It did not manifest on Windows 3.1 but caused Windows 95 to crash. Insted of making Simcity guys fix their bug, the Windows 95 memory manager switches to a different mode if it detects Simcity, so as to allow it to run without problems.

When Steve Jobs purchased a Cray Supercomputer and announced it will be used to design the next Macintosh, Seymour Cray replied, "This is strange because I am using the Macintosh to design the next Cray".

You can check folklore.org for more Macintosh stories.