YuviSense: Codin Kid

This year was an extremely, needlessly stressful one for a lot of people, involving myself. The reason being the +2 exams which determine whether you go to a college where the professors think that Windows was written in VB or to one where the professors argue with the students about the advantages/disadvantages of microkernels vs monolithic kernels. However, some fella with a brain the size of a rat’s meal figured out that the best test to see whether you were fit enough for the second category is testing if you can remember enough Chemistry equations with all the speeeling and grammer mistakes in it.

Anyway, I somehow managed to come out alive (though not mentally unscathed), and last week (yes last week. I am lazy), I got my marks. Here they come!

YUVARAJ PANDIAN T ( 675154 )

There you go. Those are the “numbers” which will impact my life pretty heavily. I have ’bout 94% of marks, and a Science Cut off (Physics/4 + Chemistry/4 + Maths/2, used for Engineering Admissions) of 190.75/200. Sounds good on paper, but in reality, it’s not. I could get any college I want, except the really good ones. Sigh.

Hope I get a good college. Wish me luck, ‘coz that’s how lives are decided here.

(If I sound a tad, err, pissed off here, then it’s because I am. I’ll put in a new post ’bout why I’m pissed off at this education system soon)

Crowding over a Jailbroken iPhone - the thing is famous over here. The people in the colored dresses are our Teachers - the best ones in our school This is the second iPhone I am physically seeing, and it belongs to a student here(the leftmost guy on the top-right pic). This one was brought for 30k Rupees, which is approximately $750! A tad too much for an 8 gig model, don’t you think? The first one I saw belonged to Prabhu, one of the organizers of pipesCamp

We were asked to write an essay on “Deforestation”. So, instead of the usual ol’ “Deforestation is bad. Aforestation is good” essay that everyone seems to write, here’s my try. Hope it’s good enough. I’m actually going to submit this thing and check out the reaction….

Introduction

Deforestation is the act of ridding the earth of space eating, moth ridden, water sucking, snake hosting pieces of wood otherwise known as trees. They were once found almost all over the world, but now, due to the untiring efforts of several large organizations dedicated to the preservation of humanity, the prevalence of these pieces of wood is decreasing considerably.

Origins

Despite the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) being created by certain unsavory personalities in the Scientific and Political circles, as well as the media, mankind is not the first to discover the art of deforestation. Dinosaurs raked out so much trees that any attempt to compare human deforestation to the deforestation done by the Dinosaurs would go completely bonkers. And those big lumbering lumbering machines lived 65 million years ago, which is so long ago that if someone were born at that time they would have forgotten their name by now. While it is true that Dinosaurs are no longer alive today (or we would be writing essays about escaping from a T.Rex on a rampage), it was a comet that got them and not the trees. So, to everyone who opposes deforestation, saying that it will ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race, watch out for the comet!

Uses

Deforestation has a multitude of uses that are not being given enough publicity. Like, for example, getting rid of all those damn trees near that Amazon river allowed a lot of people who never knew how to farm to try make a living out of growing crops on a land that never knew how to grow crops. They eventually got frustrated and moved out, leaving the land bare, desolate, even poisoned with the dozen fertilizers they tried, but experience matters, right? They told others, who promptly ignored them and continue the cycle to this day.

Or take the deforestation of the forests of Africa. If not for anything else, the near extinction of the damned man eating Tigers and Elephants (which, while technically cannot eat a man, might try and choke on one. Or might just decide to bore him (him, mind you, not her) with it’s round pointy tusk of a teeth) solely by continued deforestation is an accomplishment in itself. I mean, who likes big yellow striped things which can rip your throat apart on the same planet as themselves? We could have transported them off to Jupiter or somewhere, but deforestation is generally quicker, cheaper and doesn’t cause high noise pollution (We hate pollution, don’t we?) & ugly white streaks on the sky caused by some of the cheaper rockets (the costlier variety just bursts off even without having to take off from the soda bottle).

And the Indonesian forests. The deforestation there killed enough monkeys to make sure that man will never evolve from them again, making sure that us Homo Sapiens have a monopoly as the most intelligent species on the planet, barring species you can’t count because they don’t exist. How cool is that?

Conclusion

So, no matter what everyone else says, Deforestation is good for us. Believe me, despite this poorly constructed essay. If you don’t, you are wrong, because I am right and if you do not believe me, you are wrong. Got it?

For how long can I go on with the same essay structure? Let’s see how they deal with this satire/parody/whatever-technical-name-they-call-this-Rory-inspired-work.

Overheard in class, quite some time ago. Names obfuscated to protect the guilty:

Chemistry Teacher: Hey Student A! What’re you staring at me for? Do I look like an actress you saw in a film yesterday or what?

Student B, aside to Student C: Yeah, he watched Evil Dead yesterday.

Ain’t School funny?

I feel kinda, uhm, well, left out. I discovered this post about this disease called NADD which is exactly what I am suffering from! I can’t study unless some Music (usually Tamil) is playing. My next stop is while commuting in a close share auto with 13 other noisy people. It was written four years ago, at around the same time I “discovered” VB6. The times when you could come back from school and just code….. [sigh]

This photograph has nothing to do with the iPhone. It was done before I discovered post-processing. The guy on the left is Peter Joseph. A nice guy. Plays basketball really nicely. Runs like hell. Fantastic athlete. Could dance if he has to. Good enough on the academic side of things. And, do you know what he was talking to me about yesterday? The iPhone. And the thing isn’t even launching here yet(And even if it did, it won’t quite sell that well due to the cost and the battery life(But it would sell like hotcakes (or panipuris, if you prefer (I just had some on the way out from school. delicious) if it had these features(are you listening, Steve?)))

Personal Joy. Social Sorrow.

Am just sharing it, as it’s not a problem in our all-boys School at all. In fact, it was just around 6 hours ago that around 6 people literally cornered a single guy, pushed him into said corner and made poses of hitting him so that I could take photographs of the whole action. Lots of bodily contact, I must say.

The video below contains a boatload of my friends onstage, dancing. While nothing spectacular in itself, it was cool in that most of them were considered more “studyish” and this was their first time on stage. And the parents of the students were present as well, so it will take a bit more courage than usual.

Another defining moment? I’m playing my first Football Match (Soccer for ye ‘mericans)! I’m playing reserve goalkeeper, since my weaker constitution would prevent me playing any other position. We’re playing against a rather powerful team as well, so wish me luck and faster limbs!

Here are two clips I shot a long time back showing some of the work we did while cleaning up the volleyball court at our school. Memoirs, you could say, as we probably won’t be called to do this kind of work again

(If you are using an RSS Reader, the videos won’t show through. Click through to the site and have a look)

I think I’m getting better at this.

Click through for a better view.

Dictionary.com has this interesting definition for the word Dash:

So, you can use the word dash as in, say, dash that, and it would mean damn that.

In our school, we use the word Dash in a similiar context, but I came to know of the Dictionary.com reference only today, and we’ve been using that for quite some time. Wanna say “F**k”? Just say “Dash”. Wanna say “Fk that”? Just say “Dash That”. It’s the Universal Expletive around our place.It’s got a couple of advantages:

1. You can say that out loud.
2. You can say that out loud, infront of teachers.
3. You can say that out loud, infront of teachers, at the teachers.
4. You can say that out loud, infront of teachers, at the teachers, and you don’t have to worry about getting fried.

So, don’t finch if I use the word dash around here, and also some other places I might be writing(wink, wink[Smilies are getting out of fashion, aren’t they?])

It’s been a long time since the last StatBot post, because of a couple of reasons. First, I spent a long time writing a Wikipedia External Links Dump parser, only to realize after that it didn’t provide enough information for me to draw solid conclusions from. Then, I started working on an Engadget vs Gizmodo StatBot post, and it has been a revelation. I violatedJoel’s laww (Don’t rebuild anything that works) when I tried to do everything from scratch rather than just modifying the scobleizer Scrappr. It didn’t turn out well, since I had to fix bugs I had already fixed elsewhere, and I inevitably introduced more bugs than I fixed. Lesson Learnt:) Not to forget that School kept coming in my way…

Anyway, after a few hours trying to get the Gizmodo Scrappr working(Their Pagination system, truly, really, sucks hardcore), I decided to give up for the day and do something else. That bought me to the First Blog I read regularly: The Old New Thing by uber-programmer Raymond Chen.

So, what did I do? After a hour and a half of hacking around, I had modified the Scobleizer’s Scrappr(PaleRash) into a Raymond Chen Scrappr(RayRash) with one caveat(HTMLAgilityPack seemed to crapp up whenever he used Tables, so I had to skip four posts). And here’s my tribute to the man who’ll forget more about Windows and Win32 programming than I’ll ever know.

But Before that…

Happy Birthday to me! I know this comes some 6 days late, but then, I’m lazy and been somewhat sick, so sorry for the delay. This year has been fantastic for me, with me moving to my own hosting space, interviewing Sriram Krishnan and finally deciding my goal in life is to work at Microsoft, this blog getting famous, me making a lot of friends,me buying a camm, and a camp that’s changed my life. Thanks life, and thanks to all the people who’ve made this possible.

This year, I got my first ever Birthday Greeting, from my friend Abu. Thanks Abu!

My friends celebrated my birthday at school day before yesterday, along with one of my friend’s birthday. My first cake at school, and I have a short clip of it here. Wanna see how afterschool life is here?:D [I’m the ugliest guy you could see in the Video]

[Warning: If you do not like shaky, stupid, non-professional, amatuer looking videos done to be shared with friends and then made public, please skip right ahead]

[Warning: Non-English Language Ahead]

Wishlist? An MSDN Subscription is the perfect gift for a wannabe .net geek!

Also, happy Birthday to David!

General Statistics

I analyzed all of Raymond’s Blog Posts from July 21, 2003 to February 9, 2007, a total of 1,298 days, or more than 3 and a half years. The corpus consisted of 1,490 posts, containing 29,63,695 characters and 9,08,498 words. He averaged 1.14 posts a day, with an average of 609 words a post and 1,989 characters a post. That gives us 2283 characters a day with 700 words a day.

Posting Frequency

Our First Chart for the Day!

Not much of a difference throughout the years, though peaked in May 2004. Been flat and consistent after May 2005.

Is Raymond a Bot?

Note: This section is a piece of poorly attempted humor.

The question seems natural, doesn’t it? (Yes, I agree it isn’t natural). How the heck can one human brain possibly host so much information and remember so much history while still hacking around complicated code? However, if Raymond Chen was actually a bot running somewhere which aggregates all those pieces of information and then posts them….

What could we do to detect such a bot? Regularity, ofcourse!

The 7′o clock syndrome! A whole 77% of all posts were posted at 7 AM. Whassup with 7?:D

I kindly request Raymond Chen to furnish us all with a good photograph of himself. No, Shaky Channel9 Vids or strange pics with you posing like a girl don’t count.

Links

Being an absolutely technical writer, he doesn’t link much. Infact, All those 1,490 posts contain only 640 links, which means that on average, each post contains 0.4 links(:)), which basically means that there are a whole lot of posts without even a single link. To be exact, 1,136 of his posts, or 76% of his posts, have no links in them.

Here’s a graph.

Maybe, Less Links = More Content?

Anyway, here’s our graph of his linking frequency:

After a single link in his opening post, the next link came a month later. Sortof increased from November 2003 to Nov 2004, and has been pretty stable since.

Here are the top 10 sites he links to:

 And, here’s our colorful chart:

No surprises here for me, except the NPR.org (National Public Radio), which is also the top most linked to single url, occuring 5 times in 5 posts.

Code Blocks

Raymond writes Code. He’s a Programmer. How much code is there in his blog posts?

Of the 1490 posts, only 444 contained atleast one <code> block (which he uses for inline code, i.e. Function names, etc) and only 71 contained atleast one <pre> block(which he uses for code samples). This means about 30% of his posts contain Inline Code(<code> blocks) while only 5% of his posts contained Code Samples(<pre> blocks)

Here are a couple of graphs showing the percentage of posts with and without code and with and without Code Sample Blocks.

Also, it looks like his posts are containing less code samples as time goes by.

Does not really matter for me, since that Win32 code is above my head(I was introduced to Windows programming with VB6 in 2003, and migrated to VB 05 in 2005). And, maybe, it is also a good thing for people like me, since I usually scroll right over any Code Samples he has, and many like me read him more for his writing, the trivia, the reasons why things are the way they are than for the Code.

Linking affecting his Code Samples?

The number of links increased at about the same time that the number of Code Samples per post started to come down. Corelation?

Technical Words

I could bore you to death with the list of the top ten words you used, but as I said, it would bore you to death. So, instead, here is the list of top 10 technical words that he’s used:

It is funny how the open and close braces were the most used technical words, outdoing ‘windows’ by around, 500 occurences.

Interesting occurences

Some words can turn out to be funny for the nitpicker. So, let’s pick a few interesting words and see what words lie alongside them(i.e. are used as much as them)

Let’s start out with, well, Raymond? Occurs 92 times, along with ‘discussion’, ‘global’, ‘ptr’, ‘hook’, ’hmenu’, ’simply’, ’solid’ and ‘cpu’ allowing me to claim fame by associating the phrase “Simply Solid CPU” with Raymond.

Vista? 56 times, along with ‘cost’, ’seperate’, ’slow’, ‘apparently’, ‘hardware’, ‘pay’, ‘magic’ and ‘overflow’. Coincidences are funny, ain’t they?

Chen? Just 5 times(I guess he doesn’t use his full name often), along with ‘blew’, ‘poking’, ‘rumors’, ‘movement’, ‘usual’, ’severity’, ‘lacks’, ‘independently’, ‘circuit’, ‘volunteers’ and ‘hacks’, maybe suggesting that the rumor that Raymond Chen is actually a bot built by volunteers independendly hacking together circuits is actually credible.

And, Linux? It occured 10 times, right in the neighborhood of ‘podcast’, ‘forms’, ‘tired’, ‘amazingly’, ‘neat’, ‘acting’, ’suffer’, ‘excitement’, ‘hyperthreading’, ‘cd-rom’, ‘angeles’(;-?), ‘’steve’, ’spare’, ‘plans’, ‘jenny’, ‘assist’, ‘marker’, ‘accepts’, ‘preliminary’, ‘confuse’, ‘illustration’, ‘backup’, ‘biggest’, ‘rundll32′, ‘tape’, ’suddenly’, ‘latency’, and a host of others that’ll get me flamed.

And, Apple? 5 timess, in the neighborhood of ‘cheaper’(ironic?), ‘purchase’, ‘lpparam’, ‘lpwindowname’, ‘legalcopyright’, ‘blocked’, ‘multi-processor’, ‘ chemical’, ‘artist’, ‘adult’(;)), ‘midnight’, ‘corrupts’, ‘distracted’, ‘fancier’, ‘ancient’, ‘cookbooks’, ‘pbit’, ‘lvm’, ‘critsec’, ‘destruct’, ‘mbstate’, ‘misnomer’, and a dozen of others listing whom would be a waste of your time and the speed of the tubes.

Want some more? Leave a comment, and if it’s interesting enough, I’ll post more interesting occurences for you…

Disclaimer

These numbers, while interesting, are just Quantitive. Remember, people, and consequently things they do, are too complex to be reduced to simple numbers. This “reduce to simple number” concept is ruining education, and don’t let it ruin you!

Just remember, there are three types of lies: Lies, School Books and Statistics. Raymond’s writing is priceless, and his writing style influenced me quite a bit. Thanks Raymond, and rock on! I’ll buy your book when I have the money.

And, I am thinking of doing one StatBot post a month, since that will give me enough time for learning more languages(I plan on doing Perl and Ruby) and building some apps(I’m thinking of an RSS Reader in WPF…).

First, some basic info. The ten days camp was to a village called Kosappur, some 30 odd kilometers from my house. I was actually quite surprised that there were places this rural so close to where I am staying. The place isn’t even locateable on Google, Yahoo! or Live maps. It’s a one and a half hour bike ride from my house, and there is a single bus to the place, which commutes 4 times a day. We stayed in a farm that houses some 400 animals of various sizes and shapes. I’ll post about what we did there later. This post is about what I learnt from this.

Happy Leprosy Patient Hosted on Zooomr

One day, we paid a surprise(to us) visit to the nearby Pope John’s Garden, a home for people suffering from Leprosy. This guy is an inmate at Pope John’s Garden. He was the one who recieved us from the van and showed us around. He was practically with us the entire stay. Me pointing the cam at him bought out this smile.

He’s Happy.

How could he be? He’s got every friggin reason in the world to be sad. Disfiguring dreadful skin disease? Check. No Money? Check. No Luxuries(There’s not even a TV in the whole place)? Check. No path/goal for the future? Check. No support from family? Check.

But, he’s still friggin happy.

How? Happiness is within. He’s realized that he can stil be happy without any external dependencies. He could be happy, statically linked, without any external dependencies(which might lead to DLL Hell), standalone, just like in the good ol’ DOS days. That, is what he taught me. Happiness is within. If he can be happy with all his problems, then where on the scale does a powercut or slow internet connection lay?

And, just being with him made me happy. The knowledge that I bought out that smile made me happy. When I visited him, I made him happy. When I made him happy, I felt happy. That brings me to the next point, that Happiness is outside. The fact that I made someone else happy made me happy. By a small act of visiting him, I made him happy, which made me happy.

If there is anything that this camp thought me, then this be it: Happiness is inside, and outside. You are more happy when you make someone else happy.

I don’t even know the name of that guy, but he’s probably changed my view of life, broadened my horizons. Thanks dude!

More photos coming soon. You can check them out here, or subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Analysis of Wikipedia coming soon!

And, thanks to all the people who have encouraged me by posting about me, and another special thanks to all those who helped me buy the cam(especially Rob). Thanks!

And I am considering merging my Zooomr feed with my main feed. Any thoughts?

This is turning out to be one great week for me! First got scobleized twice, then got a lot of friends, and today, one of my contributions was featured on theDailyWTF! Scroll down, and the Fifth Popup is mine. I actually posted about it here, and here it is!

I was supposed to actually post the Link Analysis of Scoble’s Link Blog yesterday, but an untimely intermittent fever and cold are limiting my uptime:( But, the analysis is about 90% finished, and I’ll post it tomorrow(hopefully).

And, here’re some teasers!

• You have a higher chance of getting 10+ links from his main blog than getting 2+ links in his blog!
• But, this comes with a serious caveat.
• He made the first post there in 2003, and to Dave Winer:D
• MSDN Blogs is the most posted-from single feed.
• But, he subscribes to only 5 MSDN Blogs

I’ve got an architecture figured out to support multiple blog platforms, and though it’s not the best, it’s the one that’ll work the most. Stay tuned.

And tomorrow marks the start of School, and I have taken another new year resolution to try my best to act as if my Chemistry Teacher just didn’t exist. Now, if I could show that Google Analytics page to my Principal and get him to be lighter on me or get someone to send a letter to my school….

Thanks for the comments guys! And thanks to all the people who linked to me! I guess analysing my blog would show a drastic increas in the usage of the word Thanks in the last 2 days…

Steve Pavlina on Ten Reasons you should never get a job. Awesome Article. Something in the ninth reason caught my eye, and I was instinctively able to rewrite it:

9. Loss of freedom.

It takes a lot of effort to tame a human being into an employee student.  The first thing you have to do is break the human’s independent will.  A good way to do this is to give them a weighty policy manual filled with nonsensical rules and regulations.  This leads the new employee student to become more obedient, fearing that s/he could be disciplined at any minute for something incomprehensible.  Thus, the employee student will likely conclude it’s safest to simply obey the master’s commands without question.  Stir in some office student politics for good measure, and we’ve got a freshly minted mind slave. As part of their obedience training, employees students must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on.  We can’t very well have employees students thinking for themselves, now can we?  That would ruin everything.

God forbid you should put a plant sticker on your desk bag when it’s against the company school policy.  Oh no, it’s the end of the world!  Cindy has a plant sticker on her desk bag!  Summon the enforcers!  Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training!

Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course.  The only policy they need is:  “Be smart.  Be nice.  Do what you love.  Have fun.”

Truer words of Wisdom never spoken!