Cars and computers

A few days ago, car company Tesla issued a software update which turns existing Tesla Model S cars into self-driving cars (while Google and Apple are busy designing self-driving cars).

This reminded me of the old joke from the 90s which made a comparison of the progress made by cars and computers – “If cars were like Windows, they would crash for no reason — you would have to close all windows and restart the car”.

A few years have passed, and cars are essentially ‘drive-by-wire’ now – which means that there is a ton of software ‘under the hood’ (literally!). Meanwhile, Windows has improved in terms of reliability, so let’s see how the old joke holds up.

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

Computers still crash – sometimes spectacularly. But it’s not “twice a day” bad like the days of Windows 95/98 etc. . Since Windows 2000 moved to the NT kernel, things have improved. Cars have started crashing for no reason (Toyota unintended acceleration, failure to detect objects by Tesla etc.) Still I trust my car to run without crashing far more than I trust my laptop! Win for the old joke.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

I’m not sure what the joke referred to by repainting the lines in the context of computers, but technology does tend to get obsolete pretty quickly – especially smartphones these days that seem to be designed to last about two years.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the  windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

This happens to cars already (Infiniti EX35 shuts off while driving).

4. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

I suppose they were referring to software crashes etc that would render the computer un-bootable. I would think this is pretty rare these days for typical computers.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.

While Apple is busy with it’s car plans, a self-driving car start-up (probably qualifies as “twice as easy to drive”) called Cruise has a car which can only drive around San Francisco!

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed an Illegal Operation” warning light.

This already happens – the Check Engine Light.

7. The air-bag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.

Fortunately, this does not happen, but there have been cases where the air-bags did not deploy due to software errors.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

This sort of happened to us once while we were renting a ZipCar which uses an app based system instead of keys. We were just not able to unlock the car and get in. Eventually, after some fiddling around and calls to customer care we were able to coax the car into letting us in.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

Car controls can be confusing too – Example : Unusual transmission controls could increase risk of accidents.

Car navigation systems and media centres can be pretty unintuitive.

10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off. “

This has happened already:

Computers have become more reliable over the years, but cars have now become computers on wheels. We can only hope car makers are able to stand up to the complexity of software systems!

Portland

In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. For beyond the islands scattered west roll endless miles of ocean, while north-east at the city’s back jut jagged mountain peaks. With the slate-gray skies of autumn come the cyclone westerlies, raging winds and boiling clouds that sweep in from the sea. In waves these bloated clouds tear open on the peaks, and the rain which fills each gut spills and rattles down.

To live in this city, you learn to like rain.

Funny how sometimes you retain information from the unlikeliest of sources. I was in eleventh (or twelfth?) grade when I asked a friend if he had anything interesting to read. He lent me the novel Headhunter (Michael Slade). The plot is about Royal Canadian Mounted Police hunting down a serial killer in Vancouver. The passage above is how the story begins (after the first chapter which is more of a prologue). People who live in the pacific north-west would agree that the same passage applies to the other two big cities in this region — Seattle and Portland.

I must have been in fifth grade when I was doing a map (marking cities and lakes and rivers and mountains) of North America. One of the items was listed as “Vancouver (Canada)”. I did not know what Vancouver was; and, seeing Canada in parenthesis, I assumed they meant Canada (even though I had a feeling that couldn’t be right). Later, my sister laughed and told me that I was supposed to mark the city of Vancouver and not just Canada. So I learnt that Vancouver was a city and would later learn that it rained there all the time (courtesy the serial-killer tale above). A few year later, a friend of mine was interning at Starbucks in Seattle. “That is where Starbucks started.”, he told me, and “It rains here all the time.”. Just like Vancouver, I thought. It all made sense.

Almost exactly an year ago, I was having a phone interview. I already had a tentative offer (in Boston!) so I wasn’t taking the phone call seriously. I was on IM with a friend, planning to go to a 5 o’clock show of The Dark Knight. The interview went well and ended just in time for me to get to the movie in time. It was pouring. I got wet just walking across the parking lot. A couple of weeks later, I was in Portland interviewing for the job. It rained the whole day, almost exactly like the day I had been in Seattle, on another interview a few weeks back.

I never made it to Boston – not even for a face to face interview. I ended up taking the offer in Portland – a town that came close to being named Boston.

And that’s how I live in Portland now. In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. … To live in this city, you learn to like rain.

Writing

This is one of the criticisms about the recently deceased writer John Updike(about the book Terrorist from Wikipedia):

In the case of Ahmad, however, it is arguable that an American high school student, even one of Ahmad’s intelligence and principled views, would possess so sophisticated a grasp of the world and (English) language as Updike seeks to impute to him.

Well, if Updike was susceptible to such errors, we might have to cut the likes of Arvind Adiga and Vikas Swaroop some slack.

See also: “Terrorist – John Updike”

Slumdog Millionaire versus Q&A

In my experience, movies based on books rarely live up to the promise of the book. But as I started reading Q&A by Vikas Swarup while comparing it to Slumdog Millionaire I found it hard to unequivocally decide which was better – the book or the movie. So I decided to do it the quantitative way!. I wanted to compare the two and assign points as I went along. Eventually I gave up because it turned into a no contest.

First of all we have the issue to of language/medium. I am okay with everyone talking in English because that is the language of the movie (and the book), but the movie is inconsistent with it’s usage of language. It is as if the director couldn’t make up his movie whether he wanted to use Hindi or not. In the book, this problem is not there but there is another, more serious, problem. The author dumps thoughts and experiences on the narrator that the narrator could not possibly have ever had. I don’t have the book with me right now and I read it a few weeks ago, so I do not have an example, but if you have read The White Tiger or A Fine Balance you would know what I am talking about.
Book: 0 Movie: 0

In the book, the show is called Who Will Win a Billion or W3B. The protagonist wins the jackpot before even the first episode is aired. The producers don’t have the revenue to afford a billion rupee prize until the first eight months. They offer the commissioner of police a cut of 10% (of what?) to prove the protagonist guilty. The police have a confession almost signed before a young female lawyer mysteriously appears and rescues our guy.

I thought that the book was more irreverent and cynical (a prize of a billion! the biggest prize ever!) and the producers have a more credible motive of denying the prize. Book wins.

The first question in the book concerns Armaan Ali (and not Amitabh Bachchan) who is the next big superstar in the tradition of Amitabh Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan. It is the hero’s friend (not brother Salim) who is a devoted fan of the film star, not the hero himself. The whole episode is quite silly in the book but handled pretty well in the movie. Movie wins this one.

In the book, the protagonist is abandoned at a church. He is adopted by a Christian family but his adopted mother runs away and his adopted father returns him to the church where he grows up without realizing the difference between father and Father. The church undergoes the danger of being attacked for “conversions” so the boy is renamed Ram Mohammed Thomas (after a brief debate over the merits of names Ram Thomas and Mohammed Thomas)

The movie turns him into a Muslim boy orphaned by rioting Hindus. More dramatic but I like the book version (even though the book character sounds like Anthony Gonsalves). Book wins.

At some point the stories in the movie and the book start to diverge. A point to note here is that, unlike the movie, in the book the order of the questions does not chronologically align with the incidents of the protagonists life. Thus, the narration jumps back and forth making you do the guesswork to fill the gaps between the different story fragments. I find is hard to understand why the director would throw out this interesting non-linear narration in favour of the straight line and predictable story line in the movie. Book wins again.

In the book I kept waiting for Latika to show up. There happens to be a girl on the train though who Thomas rescues from a dacoit but she is quickly forgotten. There is no mention of the three musketeers. Should the movie lose a point for being too lovey-dovey? Was Danny Boyle attempting a “Bollywood” take on the story here? Not so sure here.

Book: ? Movie: ?

Okay, so after a point, the book loses it completely. No point bothering with the scores because halfway through the story, the book becomes too *fantastic* using too many coincidences and doesn’t even pretend to be realistic. Given that the movie itself is fantasy-like, you have to imagine how worse the book would be.

Last night on TV

Frieda Pinto (Latika from Slumdog Millionaire) was on The Tonight Show (with Jay Leno) last night.  She seemed to be a little nervous but carried it off quite well. She was talkative, funny and looked great. Definitely not the car crash that Aishwarya Rai was on Letterman.

*

On the Big Bang Theory show yesterday, Sheldon likens Ashwarya Rai to a poor man’s Madhuri Dixit and then says to Raj, “Clearly you know nothing about Indian cinema”. The goof there was that when Sheldon points to the TV and says “Isn’t that Aishwarya Rai?”, the song playing was from Kaho Na Pyaar Hai.

*
Quote from Scarface: “Nothing exceeds like excess”.

Car trouble

Tuesday morning. I had to be at work by 8:30. I get out in the morning and it is dark and foggy as hell. And I am in a hurry. So while getting out of the parking lot I scratch my car against the pole. I note the damage, curse a little and try to get to work on time. I drive through the dark and foggy morning, drop my friend and eventually I make it just in time.

At lunch time, I go out to get something from the car. When I try to lock it using the little button on the door nothing happens. I have to lock it with the key. I come back thinking that the car is falling apart. First the scratch then this.

It’s evening and I am ready to go home. As I get into the car, it occurs to me that the button on the passenger side door might still work. I try that. Nope, not working. I sigh and turn the ignition. No lights come up. Nothing. Oops battery is gone. The car is really falling apart. But wait! The button is battery operated. So that is probably still alright. But why is the battery out? It was alright in the morning. Face hits palm. Remember the fog in the morning. I must have left the lights on in the hurry. Sure enough the light switch is on. I switch it back. Sigh again.

I call AAA. Wait for the guy to come and give me a jump-start (It occurred to me after calling AAA that I could have asked someone in the parking lot). About 40 minutes later the guy arrives. The car starts. I ask him if there’s somewhere nearby where I could get the battery charged. He tells me that most places would be closed at the time but suggests a place nearby that might still be open. I leave work, pick up my friend and get to the battery place. It’s closed. At this point I’m considering leaving the car there overnight.

Yes I’m dumb enough not to know whether the battery gets charged when the car is running. I call a friend and ask him this. He recommends that I drive around and let the car run for some time which will charge the battery enough to get it started the next time. I drive home and drop my friend. I think I should let the car run a little more. I drive around aimlessly for about a minute. I start hearing (or imagining) all kinds of weird sounds. I think I should better drive back. I park the car at the apartment parking lot but let the engine be on for a bit. I get out of the car and close the door.

Oops! I have locked myself out. Remember the little lock button? Well, I had toggled it a fair bit to test that it was indeed related to the battery and it was set to the “lock” position when I get out. Well, maybe the passenger side door is unlocked – was the the rattling sound I heard? Nope. locked as well as it can be. Wait there’s a spare key in my laptop bag. Aargh, there’s the laptop bag inside the car. A little bit of backstory – the rear door window in my car was defective. The window used to slide down as the cable that connects the motor and the glass had broken. I had secured it using superglue but that didn’t hold it too well. If it was still held by superglue I might have tried to pull it down. But no, a week ago I went and had the mechanic put in a nut to hold up the glass permanently.

I call AAA. They send a locksmith. I have never seen anyone do anything as fast as the locksmith is in getting the door open. I switch off the engine, lock the car and take the spare key into the house.

email etiquette 1 – do not misspell names.

There are so many things wrong with that.

Europe adventures

Kos, Greece

Last month, I attended a conference in Kos. I took the airline shuttle from Kos Airport to get to Kos Town intending to take a taxi from the town to my hotel. I almost got down at the wrong stop but a fellow passenger stopped me. This guy, named Lavis, told me where to get down, walked along with me to the town center from where I could take a taxi. Along the way he told me he was visiting his ailing grandmother-in-law and that his wife and daughter were already there.

Five days later, I was at the Kos airport in the bus which took passengers from the airport gate to the airplane. In the bus, standing right across me, was a guy with his wife and daughter who looked very familiar. “Someone from the conference”, I was thinking when we made eye contact and I suddenly remembered! He was the guy from five days ago – we took the same flight from Athens to Kos and the same flight again from Kos to Athens. “I hope your grandmother is doing okay”, I asked them. “Oh yeah, she says she became 20 years younger upon seeing here great-granddaughter”, said his wife. There were a few other people with me who I met during the conference. They were really confused with this conversation!

***

“Is the conference in Kipriotis?”, Lavis asked me.
“No, it’s some conference center in Psalidi.”, I replied.
“Yeah, Kipriotis is a big convention center in Psalidi.”
“No, I think it’s named Kos International Convention center”.

Later, I found out that it’s acutally Kipriotis Resort – Kos International Convention Center.

***

I stopped by the supermarket to buy a bottle of lemon ice tea. The store owner started talking about what I was doing on the island and where I was from etc.

“There was someone else here last night?”, I asked him.
“No, it was me.”
“Oh.”
“You came looking for a plug adapter.”
“Yeah”, I said sheepishly.

Once I’d told him that I was in computers, he asked me what the latest thing in computers was. I tried to tell him about the petascale supercomputer at Los Alamos which was announced the day before, but that didn’t excite him much. “Can I make my computer type what I speak?”, he asked. “Sure”, was my response.

In the next half an hour, I tried to set up Speech in Microsoft Word, but failed because the menus were all Greek to me (literally!). And there was no Office CD accessible to us. I did try some google searches to find a way, but all my clicks were hijacked by the various toolbars and spyware on his laptop. So I spent some time installing AVG 8.0, scanning his hard disk, installing Firefox 2.0 and setting it as default browser. He thanked me with a Mars bar – pity I’d already paid for the lemon ice tea.

Meanwhile he told me he was from Egypt, hated flying (said he could never go to USA because he couldn’t spend more than 5 hours in a plane), used to be a swimmer from age 8 till 26, was now married to a Greek woman and the wallpaper was his kid.

I friended him on Facebook before leaving.

***

Greece seemed a lot like India. I saw cow tied to a peg, plenty of blue/green polythene bags and most remarkably bougainvillea and shoe flowers (hibiscus). People eat at 9 or later unlike USA where 8 is late for dinner.

Munich, Germany

In Munich I was talking to the person at the tourist information office.
“As you can see the weather is good today”, he said wiping enormous beads of sweat from his brow. He didn’t even blink when he said that.

Rome, Italy

“Parla Inglesi” is Italian for “Do you speak English?”. In Bari, I’d spent the previous 15 minutes asking people this very question while trying to figure out a way to get to the train station. I reached the right bus stop and while waiting for bus number 53, I decided I should confirm with the guy standing next to me. He did speak English, but we didn’t pursue that language for much longer. Reason? He was from Mauritius and spoke Bhojpuri! (which he admitted was a little different and anyway I couldn’t speak more than 2 sentences in that dialect). We talked in Hindi about Italy, India, London, passports, immigration etc till the bus took us to our destinations. Getting down from the bus, I headed to the train station while my gold jewellery and fancy sunglass wearing co-traveller headed to the bus station. “Thanks a lot! Bye!”, I said, replying to his “Dhuko station mein!”

***

In Rome, the Sun Moon youth hostel is located on the 6th floor. The lift, as in most such places, is tiny. I was returning from dinner and there was another backpacker in the lift with me – her friend and the hostel staff were taking the staircase. As I pressed 6, the girl said, “Is it on the sixth floor?”, in (Italian?) accented English. “Parla Inglesi?”, I was quick to respond. “I asked in English!”, she said, with irritation. “Um, yeah, sixth floor”, I said, wishing that tiny little lift could go faster!

Salzburg, Austria

“Are you eating?”, someone asked me in an Aussie accent.
“I’m 28, actually”, I responded.
“No! Eating!”, was the reply, accompanied by some sort of sign language.
“Um, no I just had a pizza outside”, I said, and sat there for a few awkward moments while the others looked at me and smiled, trying hard not to laugh.

***

In Salzburg, I met a guy who was from England but had lived in Melbourne (or the other way around). He told me how he’d seen Bob Willis, Viv Richards (and I forgot which other names he mentioned) live during Boxing Day Test at the MCG. He had just climbed 2 mountain peaks near Salzburg and was resting for a few days. He told me that he’d once travelled from Beijing to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway – a journey which took seven days to complete.

Funny Google.

The picture speaks for itself :-

Big blog!

Today
I had an exam today. I didn’t know what to study for the exam as the material covered was quite simple. Naturally, the exam was simple too and it wouldn’t be surprising if every one gets full credit. But then, I have a tendency to goof-up (hopefully this semester would amend last semester’s bad grades!).

Due to the exam, I was able to catch an earlier bus back home – exams days are better than classes!

There’s this guy in my lab called Chao – he happened to be on the same bus today. When I reached home, I was about to say Ciao when I stopped myself. It would have sounded weird if I said Ciao Chao!

Yesterday
My roomates and I have almost developed a habit of eating out and having coffee every weekend evening. Last night we had dinner at Subway and then some coffee (Grande Chai, actually) at Cup-a-Joe’s. While returning, we had some time to kill before the bus came, so we went to the library and my roomies borrowed a few books. One of the books was this :-
The book is about a guy who left his job to work amongst the poor people in Nepal and India. It almost inspired me to the point that I am thinking of contributing to some ngo-type organisation. I googled and found a few organisation which help children and women in and around Ranchi, but the problem is that I don’t know which one deserves help and which one doesn’t. And then, just donating money isn’t as satisfactory as real work – I mean, every penny helps, but other people are already donating (and probably donating enough). I want to contribute with something that I’m good at, but I doubt if they require any software related help!

prasun.info
In other news, I found this amazingly cheap webhosting deal at dreamhost.com ($22 for a year’s hosting : 175GB storage).
So I have a shiny new website : http://www.prasun.info/. And I plan to blog more regularly.

The importance of sleeping well before exams

I just finished my one and only end-term exam. I tend to finish exams earlier than most people (irrespective of whether I do well or not) and I was back home before 10:00 AM (the exam was from 8:00-11:00).

Midway into the exam, one guy went to sleep and started snoring. The TA had to wake him when people started turning their heads in surprise.

What’s “mister” in Hindi?

Funny thread

cddweller My new boss is Indian so I want to call him mister So-and-So.
nastoute san
…..
Ashes if hindi is anything like japense that sounds like jiji which means old man. I’d stick with san because in japanese san means sir with respect.

Stupid stupid people

This person is (in)famous for a video resume that he made for a job application. Apparently he has been featured on some TV shows too.
Aleksey Vayner (video resume)

Before Vayner had even begun his freshman year, his tendency to exaggerate was discussed in an article in Rumpus, a Yale humor magazine.^[17] He apparently had visited as a high school senior and told unbelievable stories about himself. Among his claims to people on campus, or to the public, starting with this initial visit to Yale:

• He claimed that he “is one of four people in the state of Connecticut qualified to handle nuclear waste“.^[16]
• He was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA during his childhood.^[17]
• He gave tennis lessons to Harrison Ford, Sarah Michelle Gellar^[17], and Jerry Seinfeld^[11]. He further claims to have won two games in a tennis match against Pete Sampras.^[11]
• He is a specialist in “Chinese orthopedic massage.”^[11]
• The Dalai Lama had apparently written his college recommendation.^[11]
• He must register his hands as lethal weapons at airports.^[11]
• He has killed two dozen men in Tibetan gladiatorial contests.^[11]
• He claimed to be “an action star, an espionage expert, and a professional athlete. He would be on the C.I.A. firing range one day and at a martial-arts competition that took place in [a] secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York.”^[11]

Cracking safes “encrypted to 512 thingies”

Go read the latest BOFH story from El Reg:-

“It is! I had to take my laptop to the dealer to get it setup for this safe, and it would apparently take ALL the computers in the world over TEN YEARS to break into this safe.”

“Well, no time to lose then!” I say, making to leave.

“Are you suggesting you could break into this safe?” the Boss asks. “They use these to store Government secrets!”

“You mean secrets like how the Weapons of Mass Destruction disappeared?”

आवाज़ की दुनिया के दोस्तो

These days I use my computer as an alarm clock. Today the alarm did not go off. When I woke up, I saw that the video that I use as an alarm was playing, but there wasn’t any sound. I thought that probably I had muted the sound by mistake.

Later, I tried to run Winamp but there wasn’t any sound – or rather, there was a feeble sound from the left side of the speaker. I tried maximizing the volume, but the volume did not change! I though I had somehow blown my speakers. I uninstalled a few programs that I had installed recently – no change! I did a System Restore – no change! I went to the HP site and downloaded the latest drivers. As I was about to install the new drivers – I noticed something lying near the left side of my laptop – earphones !!

The earphones were plugged in and of course the sound was feeble and from the left side! I plugged them out and there was sound. Now I know what mghatiya must have felt!

You know you are getting old when ….

You know you are getting old when ……you confuse the names of people junior to you

Americans

I was coming to office, and there was this gentleman in the lift today. He made some joke about Mondays being awful or something to that effect.

Half-deaf that I am , I did not comprehend most of it. Just smiled and nodded like a monkey!