Carthik Sharma

This new item made me sad. Whats worse? being rejected by what you look up to as a land created for you, or being rejected by the land you were born in?

Ray of hope for 283 Pak nationals in Kerala
By Ashraf Padanna, Special to Arab News

TRIVANDRUM, 13 January 2003 — As many as 283 ‘Pakistani’ nationals‚ residing in the Malabar region of Kerala would be allowed to stay back if the state government demands so, the federal Home Ministry assured yesterday. Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) lawmaker A Vijayaraghavan said Home Secretary Gopalaswamy conveyed this to him in response to his representation. These Keralites, who migrated to Pakistan after the partition only to be sent back by the Pakistani authorities, and living under miserable conditions without Indian citizenship, were hoping against hope that there would be an end to harassment by the Indian authorities who treat them as foreign nationals. Kerala Chief Minister A. K. Antony had already expressed his willingness to take up the case of these hapless men, most of them in their seventies and eighties living a life a of refugee.

Palash, that strange soul from Bangladesh who was with us(RECians) for four years, reports to say that he has got into the MBA program at the Institute of Business Administration, Dhaka University, the leading B school in Bangladesh.

Quite a surprise, i should say, i mean i never thought guys like me, chippu and palash would ever make a good manager. Imagine having a CEO who does not beleive in the material world! palash, CEO, indeed )(someone, somewhere must be thinking now – 2fargon, professor, indeed!!)

I used to spend hours at his room, especially in the final year, listening to his stories of Thakurgaon, and Dhaka, and Rubina. Rubina got married recently and Palash did’nt. He’s the kind of guy who loves the idea of being in perpetual sadness. More than once he has told me that he wants more sadness, more pain, and so on, and man he used to love waning poetic. His fave hobby was to memorize dialogues from hindi films, especially nana patekar’s and boy, he picked up hindi quite fast. He didnt know any of it when he came to RECW as a fresher.

He took two days to teach me how to pronounce palash. he taught me a couple of lines of a bangla song too. “abar dekha hobe, eko rodiro dinar..” or something like that, “we will meet again, on a red day” i sure hope i meet him again, in Bangladesh, so I can see that tree and the transmission tower I have heard so much about. well, i can never ever write down all that makes me wish to see him again, or better still live in the same city as he does. but then neither can i live in the same city as any of the few good friends i have. Orlando – equidistant from friends, or some such.

He has been working at Beximtex, a textile company all these days, and getting bored doing it.

I should start writing down my college memories. I dont have a perfect memory and without any friends around, i am afraid i will forget at least some of it. Thats what friends are for, to renew memories so you dont forget where you’ve been, and how you laughed, once upon a time…

I am going nuts!! Each time I talk to Dr.Demara, he offers new questions, and totally new avenues for exploration. Being the novice that I am at research, each of these paths takes hours to explore, and at the end, I find a dead end, or more questions. I ask him these questions, and his answers to the questions are more questions that lead to more options, more open roads. This would have been fun had we not been trying to write a grant proposal. Now its been two weeks, and I dont even have an idea _what_ we are going to attack/address in the proposal. From using reconfigurability to enhance security across a network of computer with reconfigurable co processor we have come to, among other things, a system consisting of a single chip that can eliminate insider attacks. Now i have to
1)decide what to do with the old, rejected proposal
2)decide whether to write an entirely new proposal
3)decide which problem to address in the new proposal
4)investigate the options for that proposal
5)write the first draft.
all over this weekend, i promised myself. Now i must be looking like an oaf. Each day i meet him(and i meet him once or twice a week), he asks me what i have been doing with regard to the problem, and i say this is what i have been thinking, what we thought all along is not quite good, this is what i think about it. Well really, what i say i think makes it look like i havent being doing anything, i guess.

absolutely no paper work so far, which is a bad thing. some things happened today, and now its final, he is going to be my advisor, and i pray to God i can think up something original, soon enough.

It is so difficult to come up with anything new. Its all been done before. Implementing an algorithm in a way that makes it run faster by 10% or even 100% is not my idea of a well spent three years. High hopes, are they too high?

Somehow I am stuck to this childhood notion that the best solution is often the simplest, and most beautiful. For example, the only know “unbreakable” crytographic algorithm is the vernan algorithm, which is as simple as using a random string of bits as long or longer than the data to be encrypted and then XORing the data with it. The random string of bits (the key) should never be used again, and the next time, another random key should be used. Neat, but done! If the simplest solution tuns out to be the best, then there is the obvious problem of extracting money from sources of funding. Complex solutions end up getting more funding, since it takes more to build/realise a complex system. I think thats why most research is cryptic.

I am tired, and i needed a break. the perfect break is reading and replying to , say, a dozen emails. But no, today, surprisingly, i havent got a single email.

I have a cookie in my pocket to sufficiently delay dinner.

Take the message direct to Dow Chemical
Join the call Dow day!

Greenpeace’s endeavour. Help , If you think you can.

three whole days stuck in front of the computer. i burnt a lot of cds and did all kinds of usual stuff on the computer. now point is, if i sit in front of the comp all weekend, what do i write home about?
i worked the internship fair today. pathetic scene. very few computer engineering companies, so i tried selling my soul to town planners and theme parks.
sea world was there, and their mouse pad is what it was all about. they had no need for a java jerk, and so i go up and say ” Say, do you need part time killer whale trainers?” and she said ” And so you need a mouse pad, eh?” No, this wasnt the way it went, but it could have been. It could have also gone like …

Me–” Hi I love programming in C!!”
HR manager at Seaworld –” excuse me, but we are looking for whale trainers.”
Me–” Oh I thought you were C World”

All good plans, but in the end, i just walked up and smiled and said ” Say, could you use a computer engineer over the summer?” and she said no, and all that, and at LAST she said ” I think a computer engineer sure could use a mouse pad” so kind of her, now my mouse has a pad of its own. But what beats me basically is, why should sea world be handing out mouse pads , if they arent looking to hire techies in the first place? Is there some other aquatic use for mouse pads that i havent figured out yet?
the lengths i go to to waste time…

I’ll never get to wear a dog collar id badge and work for a firm. i just know it.

sunday morning, i woke up at 11. Lazy. Its a beautiful day. I wish i had been born spanish, or italian, in spain , portugal or sicily. but since there is at least one italian or spaniard who wished he was born a malayali, in kerala, I am fine, for now.

saw goodfellas yesterday. did not like it much. saw godfather the day before, liked it, but still think the matrix is a better movie.

talked to a friend who just got back from India, who wishes he never got back from India, and also, never wants to go to India again. Its like a father-son relationship. You never want to be too close, but you wish you could do more justice to his demands. A few more years here, like this, sans friends, real people, and i will change. i hope the people i love still love me, after all that.

have to play volleyball.

for those of you who know my first name, the url is

http://members.lycos.co.uk/my_first_name_here

i tried to upload my site onto the UCF server, but man, the whole damn server was down. i tried going to http://www.ucf.edu and that was a no show too. thats mighty strange. i want to upload my files and thats the very moment the sever goes kaboom

i havent yet added anything substantial to my site at tripod, i have to add the snaps, and write a bit more, but the skeleton, and the design are in place. feedback will be mucho appreciatedo.

i got my own desk today, albeit a small one, in the corner of room 324 in the engg building. dr.demara is kind. he gave me access to his research lab and the offices. no more worrying about where to stash my papers and books. the best part is , I can put my books in the office, so i dont have to carry 10 pounds to and from school everyday. I asked him about prints. the goons who run UCF just decided that there wont be any free OR cheap printouts, so now we have to pay 5 cents to get a printout at any of the labs. Dr.Demara said, oh yeah sure you can take printouts, just make sure your friends dont get a hundred copies each of their resumes. then he told me, paper is available at the lab, use them sparibgly. oh man, i just needed a printer, i have my own paper, i never dreamt someone would give me free paper. i was amazed that this prof provides paper too. i know that things might be different at other universities, but at UCF, a prof who gives free paper is NEWS! that was a pleasant surprise.
my research is coming along, i am little too excited about it. but its just begun, and there is a long way to go, lots of specifics to figure out, but all in due time.
so, now i have an office, and a home at school. i am glad.

all apologies for being incommunicado for so long.

on january 3rd, i installed redhat 7.2 Linux on my system.

today i got earthlink cable internet installed.

on friday, i got an advisor.

the new year so far seems good.

dr. demara has no idea where the money is gonna come from , come next fall, but he was hopeful of getting some new proposals approved. proposals that i will be working on. already working on one of them, which has to do with cryptography using reconfigurable chips.

played volleyball the day before yesterday from 6 to 9 in the evening. i was feelin kinda feverish then. and now i have a fever, nothing too serious. i could go to class today.

I am so happy to have got paul mccartney’s “little willow” on kazaa today. this was one song i used to listen to, endlessly on harish’s computer at 1-3-4, and again , during the winter i spent at 7-3-14. harish, i miss your world, a LOT. i miss recw all over gain, when i hear this song. the peace it had given me then, the feeling of wistfulness, of hope, of dark nights which never end, when sleep is so far away, and the mind is wide awake!
whoopie!