I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again

The song is pretty nice and relevant. We also played it for our annual western music production.

(shameless plug)
You can watch the video of one of our practice sessions here. It’s best if you watch it on high quality (click the link right below the video). It’s a fun song that came out great when we played it in the final show, though none of us could hear ourselves on the monitor.

DC`s on Keyboards, Arup`s on drums, Sasanka`s on Guitar, Nishad and Srivant`s on Vocals, and I’m playing the bass. It’s one of the most fun songs to play live, though it sounds like crap on the video, but hey! we’re on youtube.

Nevertheless, good going America. If proposition 8 does not pass, I’ll forgive you for hip-hop.

But the bass on songs by The Who blew my mind away. I spent the next three days listening only to the who.

I’m filled with an incredible amount of respect of admiration and respect for the Late John “Thunderfingers” Entwistle.

I have to go to class, but you can read up what you want here:

http://code.google.com/p/diagnosis-helper/

Coming from someone who isn’t American, this might not mean much. All foriegn polls favor Obama, and in my personal opinion, his economic policies on grassroots improvement seem to be better.

I personally hate terrorism. Not because it hurts people, because it distracts you from the real issues. Around the world thousands of people die from disease, poverty and violence everday. There has been one major terrorist act in the US, and nearly hundreds in other countries.

I was in the US in 2000, when the Bush-Gore battle took place. I was incredibly naive, and confused at that time (among other colorful terms I’d throw at my past self but not here), and Bush won due to more electoral votes or that’s what I’ve heard.

Nevertheless, if it were the other way around, the same guy who did An Inconvinient Truth would’ve probably done a lot of change.

These are my views, and you’re perfectly entitled to your own opinion. But all I ask is to think about what’s good for the world, rather than who you like better.

Seemingly a hundred and fifty people read this website, and if I can change a single person’s mind, it’ll almost be like a vote from my side.

Again, ladies and gentlemen, everyone I know online and offline seem to feel that Obama’s a better candidate, and so do I.

Thank you.

Iron Maiden - “Holy Smoke”

Maybe I have been watching too much CNN lately.

The book is called “Puzzles for programmers and pros” (or p-cubed), by Dennis E. Sasha, who is a renowned omniheurist, and a professor at NYU.

In the beginning of the book, he claims the book is useful for people who’re preparing for interviews, as well as for people who enjoy sharpening their skills, and also for people who love puzzles.

As I fall under all three categories, I got the book. It costs around $25(though in India, you can pick up a low cost one for about $2.50) and is a rather small book, but not one that you’d read fast enough.

The first four puzzles, which took me upwards of two hours or so to go through, was extremely enjoyable. All puzzles have a “warm up” which solves a simple problem and shows you an approach angle, and then gets into more complex situations.

The puzzles are really nice, and are quite sensible and mathematical. There’s no major “out of the box” thinking, which most puzzle solvers hate. A lot of it is to do with probability, so you better have your basics right.

A very large portion of the book can be read on Google Books, here (TODO: Add link later), and amazon seems to have other books in mind for me, which I shall go into when I’m done with this.

The problems have pretty interesting backstories, and the solutions aren’t the kind you’d kick yourself over. You either get it or you don’t. You can also find a few other ways to reach the solution, and really gives your head a workout. I never thought I’d end up writing differential equations to maximize the amount of cake you’d eat and so on.

A lot of the book so far revolves around gambling, and risk taking. The author even asks you wether you’d take the risk in a game.

I haven’t seen much programming yet, and I really need to brush up my dynamic programming, so hopefully I’ll be through with this before any major interviews.

If you know any good place to find programming based puzzles for my learning and pleasure, please leave a link in the comments section. I make sure to try out a lot of topcoder and spoj.pl puzzles so that’s out. I really should give the ACM archives another look.

So much to do, so little time. As an aquiantaince of mine once said “Life is NP-Hard”

Is: (wait for it): “Rock Star”

It stands for everything I hate: Lack of individuality, lack of thinking, eager to please, elevating losers who should be gifted

If I hear the word without it being laced with enough sarcasm or cynicism to kill a normal human being, I instantly regard the source as being drop dead incompetent. (also referencens to the holy Rockstar game development studio, which churned out Max Payne, and the Grand Theft Auto franchise, is forgivable)

Here are a few translations for you, from moronspeak to english.

moronspeak: I’m a rockstar
english: I’m a fucking moron

moronspeak: You’re a rockstar.
english: I’m a fucking moron

moronspeak: I’m such a rockstar! LOL
english: no translation available at this time.

moronspeak: Let’s party like rockstars!
english: Let’s try to improve our self worth by consuming questionable quantities of alcohol, dance around and make general fools of ourselves, and try to convince ourselves we’re having fun. Also, please take note that I’m a fucking moron.

moronspeak: Dude, you party like a rockstar!
english: Firstly, I’m a fucking moron. Second: My friend, your disregard for your liver, self worth, and your life is admirable.

Any usage of the word is either in Moronspeak or for obscure 60s and 70s bands. The origin of the word is probably tracable to the Rock-and-Roll culture of the 60s.

Did anyone notice that “my generation” by The Who refers to “their generation” and they’re like fifty years old now.

If rock is truly dead, bollywood and morons around the world are keeping the damned word alive.

http://ninjagod.com

and no. I’m really not into ninjas, and I’m agnostic. But hey, it’s a pretty sweet domain name.

But hopefully, the flow of pointless unresearched complaining will continue right here!

I didn’t like it.

What I did find good was that the folks were spot on accurate. The music was nice, the tones were good, and the actors actually were playing what they were playing the notes. One chap even had a Steve Vai signature guitar, which I’ve heard is fabulous. The songs actually had leads, and was the first Hindi movie since 1997 to probably feature real instruments. To top it off, there were no “item numbers”.

I could barely hear the movie over my little sister writhing in pain over how slow the movie is. In a nutshell, it’s about a bunch of people who used to be real good ten years ago, and how they put aside their differences at the end and play again on stage. It’s largely a sob-fest with characters having to make tough decisions, and strain their relationship to just play six minutes on stage.

What irked me the most, however, was the lack of a Bass guitar (even more that the fact that only the bass players in the world will complain). While a bassline can be clearly heard, the lack of a bassist was purely due to lack of the glamour quotient, and to keep the number to 4. The keyboardist, who’s story is prominent rather lacks the presence in the music itself.

Rest assured, the movie clearly stank in my opinion. There was too much sobbing, confusion and backstory than I would’ve liked. School of Rock, for instance, did a flawless job of keeping the backstory and melding it in with the music.

What would’ve made the movie nice was to educate more people about the music and cut down all the “oh god! playing for ten minutes on stage will change all our lives” philosophy.

In a nutshell: “Rock on” is a soap opera with guitars.