Troy

I had been putting off watching Troy for a long time because of a natural suspicion towards hype. With such lowered expectations, it turned out to be not bad at all. Overlooking the occasional bodybuilder posing and terrible acting by Brad Pitt (as in the delivery of “Play your tricks on me, but not on my cousin” – not very easy to mess up, huh?) and the severely single dimensional characters, it is surprisingly passable. The latter is harder to ignore but then, the movie does not claim to be anything out of the ordinary. On the plus side are the prettily choreographed sword fights, the actress who plays Hector’s wife and Eric Bana, who scores with his gentle, brave, careworn, crown prince. Sean Bean’s Odysseus and Orlando Bloom’s Paris deserve mention too. Odysseus’s sad eyes and friendly laughter make Achilles look like a make-believe human being, and his closing lines add a splendor that the movie otherwise lacks. Bloom, whose dialogue delivery is severely limited to a single intonation, expression and gesture, has played the despicable role of Paris without forcing the audience to loathe him, thanks to the smart scripting of the weak-spirited, dumb, young Paris as a plain, spoilt prince.
The only time when the dialogue took an abrupt turn and became memorable was when Achilles says “The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.”.
On the whole, I wrote a review because of this – the only aspect of the movie that impressed me – the hints that seem to suggest, “This is what haunted these men; these men who lived, loved and died for glory. This is how and why the myths were born. Paris was “spirited away” by Aphrodite because he ran from the battlefield. Achilles’ is physically invulnerable everywhere except at his heel because, he was so damned skilled and marvelous as a warrior, threw spears and wielded swords like a god, and died when a poisoned arrow pierced his heel, when he was not engaged in battle. Achilles’ mother was a nymph because, she was rumored to be a goddess when he was alive.” And so on.

Isn’t that pretty?

I kept away from my blog for so long that I forgot the password. :|

SRM 418 – September 20th, 2008.

I thought of writing reviews after the topcoder matches, whenever I felt like it. The reviews would be personal and may not be of use to you at all. I promise to warn you with the title of such posts.
The 250 was simple but KawigiEdit slowed me down. The return type was double and the answers that my program was producing in KawigiEdit were nowhere close to the actual answers. I do not mean the precision. They were as different as “0.6666″ and “0.3333″. Weird. Luckily, before attempting to debug, I tested the program in the arena and it turned out to be right. It wasn’t a terribly slow submission.
The 500 is why I wanted to write the post. I actually GOT the solution DURING the match. That I horribly messed up the implementation like an imbecile is another story that sadly doesn’t bother me at all. The problem statement is here.
My approach:
Make a graph with the buyers as the vertices. An edge exists between two vertices if they have at least one stamp in common. Since the maximum number of buyers that can want a stamp is two, the maximum degree of every vertex is also two. Hence, the graph is made of components such that every component is either just a path or just a cycle. The maximum total price of a set of vertices in a component such that no two of those vertices are adjacent, say T(i) for component i, can be calculated by dynamic programming, for every component. The answer is the sum of T(i) of all the components.
How I wish I had coded this right! It is not everyday that you get sparks like this one during a contest.
Sigh.

Non-entities #1

How does one deal with one’s peculiarities?
For instance, suppose that you are talking to someone who has just hijacked the conversation and has been explaining for the past hour about how his wife, his colleagues, the shopkeeper and the rest of the world are conspiring against him. Even as he is inculpating half a dozen of your common acquaintances, you see him take shape as one of the non-entities in the book that you might write. You strive to listen to him and make the appropriate sounds but all you see is his first scene, with him telling his friends in a passionate voice that his brother, who is an overbearing ass and who stole his girl (and who is incidentally your hero), had just fired him because he couldn’t type fast enough. You see how his shifty eyes never waver when he feels righteous or when he talks about his brother. You debate between the choices of adjectives and sentences spring to your head. You craft him carefully, highlighting his essential weakness but without creating in him an antithesis of your hero, giving them both straight noses, stubborn chins…

Unfortunately, the number of non-entities in my books seems to be inordinately high. How DO you deal with this?

A bookish movie

No matter with what ingenious ways I try to reform myself, it always comes back to the same thing. Always. Books. Never mind, the post is not a rant.
I don’t relate to movies. I watch them fully only when the alternative is worse; impossible for such a scenario to recur often. Also, the number of movies I’ve watched for half an hour is many so you can’t say I don’t try.
Since I keep up with the dullest books to the end and seldom commit the offence of giving it up unless out of disgust, I do not believe it is boredom that drives me away from movies. I suppose it is that the movie usually ends before I get to know the people in it. I prefer the slowest of books to any movie I’ve seen, as long as I remember a guy from the book after a year.
So what’s this bookish movie I saw?
It just had two people talking throughout, literally, and I’m sure I’ll remember the girl after a year. It felt just like I’d read another lovely book. :)
I must be missing some key aspect in movies. Don’t tell me in the comments – I don’t care to learn. I have enough on my plate already, for whatever time I have.

Screenshot

GRE countdown

30 days to GRE:
“A month to GRE! Ah, only fifty word lists. I can do much more than two per day! Gonna finish them all and spend the last week only in revising. The last weekend alone ought to do for Quants.”

15 days to GRE:
“I DON’T wanna work! I MUST start preparing soon. The most-frequent-words list alone might be good enough.”

10 days to GRE:
“Alright, suppose I do five word lists a day and spend the last day on Quants… She says nobody can get below 1200. Hmmm…”

7 days to GRE:
“Goddamn these cycle tests. Forty more to go. Okay, I’ll mug till 9, study for CT till 12, get up at 5.15… Never mind. I’ll play AOE and postpone GRE. By an year.”

Placed

There’s something very funny about paying a clueless twenty year old so much money. At least, my father says so.

Back to college

I’m back in the land of dusty keyboards and tiny monitor screens. Two months is a big stretch of time. I entered the lab I’ve entered a thousand times before and realized with a stab that I find it more of a make-believe than anything else. It is already hard to imagine the blazing momentum of the place I left two days ago.

Weird kids

Manas: “Trying to make the car run on water :P”
Suren: “My laptop laughs at me “intel inside , mental outside :D”"
Hari: “sunday sanda potta monday mandaya podanum”
Lavanya: “koyembedu market la meenu vaaanginaa scene”
Veena: “Snow on Mars”
Me: “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”

All at a time!

Bored in Bangalore

Today I discovered more things than I do on an average day so I decided to indulge the blog once again, with a list -
1. My GPA graph is trying to stabilize at around 7.4 with my unwilling help,
2. I *could* watch a movie without fidgeting if you starved me in the first fifteen minutes and then gave me enough popcorn (I have come to accept that movies and lectures are almost certainly bound to disagree with my constitution so the movie doesn’t matter anyway),
3. The weekend is pre-screwed up,
4. I have abandoned my unbeloved, boring blog for long,
5. The book Catcher in the Rye that I’d believed to be lost in the wilderness,
6. I shall write a great book someday,
7. I am bored in Bangalore.

PS:
You guessed right, I confess I succumbed to the b-B. I considered “Bored in B’lore” but it agreed less with my nose than the one I’ve used.

Google

Looking from the other side of the ermm.. LCD screen, Google is like an elephant. Well, I suppose an elephant it is, whichever side you look from. You know, elephants seldom fail to fascinate me. :)

The reptile that changes its color

“There was a merchant who had a donkey that could understand English. They used to walk around and talk to each other. Once, they saw a Zebra on their way and the merchant asked the donkey, “What is it?”. The donkey answered, “A Zebra” and his master replied, “Nice donkey! Smart donkey!”. They saw a Caterpillar. The merchant asked what it was, the donkey said “A Caterpillar” and the merchant said, “Nice donkey! Smart donkey!”. They saw a Duck, a Crow, an Ox and they repeated the procedure. Then they saw a reptile – you know, the one that changes its color… It is called a.. hmmm…”
I stammered.
My mom, brother and sister duly burst into a chorus, “A Chameleon!”.
I smiled down upon them indulgently and said, “Nice donkeys! Smart donkeys!”.

The story was an instant hit and since I was voted unanimously to be a gem of a story-teller, I was asked to repeat it to my father. I did that and all went well till the Chameleon.
“they saw this reptile that is called… You know, the one that becomes green or red at will – changes its color and hmmm… remember that day we saw one in that park..”
I faltered, paused, stopped and looked up at him hopelessly. He smiled my smile and said, “The reptile that changes its color? Well well… Nice story. Smart story!”.

Stay surprised :)

Sometime back, a book named Friday’s Child was forced upon me by a friend. After a few pages, I sat down and devoured Friday’s Child, Regency Buck and The Grand Sophy straight. A nice lady called Georgette Heyer has written them. I could not decide which I loved best – The Grand Sophy or The Friday’s Child.
I keep getting surprised at the kind of books I fall in love with. I will not stop reading as long as I stay surprised.

PS: Something in the books tells me that Heyer must have been frequently misunderstood and must have had a considerable fraction of her fan base liking her books for all the wrong reasons.

My CPC HR interview

The interviewer was Vivek Shah, who happened to be sweet.

V: Hi. Tell me about yourself.
I: Hi, I’m yazhini and I study third year comp sci.
V: Hmmm… What is your strength?
*A whole blank minute of Silence.*
I: Er.
V: What, you don’t have any strength at all?
I: (Oh god, that sounds really bad.) Well, er… Hmm… You know, I guess I get quite involved when I like something.
*More questions on this singularly stupid interview pronouncement ensue and I somehow find my way out of them.*
V: Okay, what’s your weakness?
*A whole blank minute of Silence.*
I: Er.
V: What?
I: Well, I think I don’t get quite involved when I don’t like something…
*Laughter*
V: Where do you see yourself three years from now?
I: I suppose I’ll be working…
V: Working as?
I: Software engineer?
V: Where?
I: I suppose, you know, somewhere.

nittians.com

I’m finally waking up and noticing http://nittans.com. A nice site, a cool poster and a GREAT idea! :)

Phoneless for 3 days

Today afternoon, I was filling water in a bucket to wash clothes, messaging and thinking about Asimov, whom I’ve grown to rather like. All of a sudden, I felt a rude shock on my head and a burning chill all over. My first suspect was Mother Earth. An earthquake and a random one of its consequences! Don’t asked me how I worked that out. But no, it was just that the shower got released (I do not know how and I have not discovered yet).

I couldn’t see clearly but the shivers told me that I was drenched in ice cold water. Before I could act, my phone slipped from my hand, hit the floor as I watched, bounced a foot in slow motion and with impossible accuracy, fell into the bucket and sank slowly in the water. A surf packet and assorted things cascaded down, still in slow motion. It was not a bad sight to watch you know. Perhaps all disasters are spectacular. I did not stand stupefied as I have so many times, but plunged my hand into the bucket and took the phone out. I had not remembered that I could move out of the shower so tried to hold the phone away from the water, which was simply everywhere. A few words flashed – wet phones, battery, short circuit, display, critical 10 seconds – I dismantled the phone as much as I could, collected myself together and ran out of the shower (Those words flashed because this is not my first phone in water though it was not such a fine debacle last time).

Once in room, I dried the parts on towels, put some dry clothes on and hurried downstairs to the lab, to google.
http://www.wikihow.com/Save-a-Wet-Cell-Phone
It will be interesting but unpleasant to see how I stay without phone for three days. I’ve already begun to feel strangely vulnerable. :(

CPC’s and Internships

It was when I typed simply spoj in the address bar and found myself processing “The domain name does not exist” for full five seconds that I realized I am not any good today any more. It has been long since I wrote anything really personal in a blog or anywhere else. When I started this blog, the one thing I did not want it to become was a journal on what I do day in and day out. Sure, the relief of typing out everything you do in a day or a week is alluring but a little prudence and a lot of laziness held me back from doing that till now.

This is probably going to be a more personal post but I warn you, I am too tired right now to come up with anything creative. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be blogging anyway. :-)

Last semester holidays: I did a project at IIIT Hyderabad on something related to umm… well.. wait a second.. err…
Yeah! I have it! I was involved in the making of an application that was intended to simulate a physics laboratory environment. I do remember this about the project – A guy who spoke to us (Hari, Vinod, Suren and me) in the last week told us in many words that what we were trying to do was not to simulate nature but to imitate it. That was correct and I told him that we (I and the rest of Homo Sapiens) simply didn’t know enough to simulate the world. He agreed but told me that the college students of the country preferred to take easy jobs at multi-national companies to meeting the real intellectual challenges that lied in projects such as this one. To which I had to say the elaborate, obvious answer and ended up not liking him too.

Evenings: I have cpc’s going on. There isn’t anything interesting about the pre-placement tests except that they have an annoying habit of cutting into your evenings so I have virtually none left for myself.

Internships: I have to get something somewhere. A good internship would do me good actually, now that I think about it. I have been writing a lot of code, mostly to reach yellowness (to which I am pretty close :D). Topcoder and other fine contests are a great source of entertainment or I wouldn’t care for any of them but I would also like to see something solid at the end of the day. Something challenging enough to do and something that I could show to people important to me and say, “See, I did that today”. Great! Now I have come up with a valid reason to look for an internship. :-)

New year

Everyone seems to be making blog entries on this momentous event so I thought I would make one too, so that my blog doesn’t feel left out.
In 2007:
I visited this site called http://topcoder.com and became gray, green and blue.
In 2008:
I want to be yellow.
There are a few things that happened in the last year that don’t happen every year but what the heck, I became blue in 2007 and I want to be yellow in 2008.

PS: I would be very interested in the entry I would post for the next new year, in case I post one, because I don’t think I could have reversed a string in an aesthetic manner, exactly a year ago.

January 10th, 2008

6.30 – 7.00: Wake up.
7.00 – 7.30: Brush and register for topcoder match.
7.30 – 8.45: Coding phase. Submit 250 and 500. Feel anxious about the 500 so go and have breakfast. :P Come back and open 900.
8.50 – 9.00:
while(challenge_phase) {
open summary window;
check petr’s position :P;
close window;
}
9.10: 500 challenged. Yay! 250 passed! It was 300, by the way.
9.10 – 10.00: Check forums, rating, practice rooms, SPOJ, etc. Bunk the 9.20 class. No more class in the morning.
10.00 – 12.45: Check mail, try to prepare for cpc, do a couple of tc problems, browse.
12.45 – 12.55: Prepare for cpc and take a bath.
12.55 – 1.25: Get a message saying “Oh god, I lost my linux.” and sympathize till 1.25 and get late for class.
1.25 – 1.30: Have “lunch” and cycle.
1.35 – 3.00: Computer Graphics double hour. Tic-tac-toe, “How touchy the Americans are!”, “I’ll have a mushroom-roll-vending-machine in my house”.
3.00 – 3.20: Mushroom roll. :)
3.30 – 5.00: Sympathize more with the linux-loser.
5.00 – 6.00: CPC. C was bad and Cpp was easy.
6.00 – 6.30: Sympathize even more. Plan to have dinner at gate to discuss how to recover linux.
6.30: Fsck. (Fits here. :P)
6.30 – 7.00: Files recovered. Ice-cream.
7.15 – 7.30: Dinner at mess.
7.30 – 9.00: Frust. Listen to music, fume, try out all the cpc questions, fume, find an error in the answer key and fume more.
9.00: Roll call.
9.15 – 9.30: Blog.

Not at all my usual day but usual days are becoming rarer.