Basket Case

.. to go home ! I finally have my ticket in hand !! End of semester is keeping me busy and so countdown will start after the semester is over. In the meantime, I am counting down to that day :-) Powered by ScribeFire .

I guess Jaya has been supplying everybody with a steady dose of what is happening with our startup and all the ups and downs. If not, head over to her blog to read all about it. The only thing I might want to add is that all this is so much fun and it would be even more so if making all these mistakes wouldn't mean losing money, something which is always in short supply in a startup (yes, even when you have landed VC funding ( which we have not )). But it is okay I guess. However this makes me ponder about the issue at a more general level, about what kind of policies and attitude from government can really help out those who are entering this new and strange world of CAs , Company Secretaries, Lawyers. I am sure the things have changed a lot in past few years and more and more processes have been streamlined. Incorporating a company can be as fast as 20 days for somebody reasonably familiar with the system and with small support. But still there remain so many small things t...

I was in DC last week to attend the follow-up workshop on the shared task that consumed the better part of my first 2 months this year. It is quite humbling to go to such a conference. A lot of people in the room had contributed something very significant to the area of MT in last 10 years and it is a pleasure to see them discussing things with each other and talk about the direction of the field. The workshop had a rather competitive tinge to it with Google, Microsoft, BBN, IBM and other companies being there apart from many universities and everybody trying to win the bragging rights for next one year at least. What was funny however that most of the people doing MT at these places are relatively young and so most of them have worked together and published joint papers in last 4-5 years. I can count at least one joint paper between most pairs of companies. There were many advisor student pairs that are now in different competing companies. It is a nice little well knit community. On...

.. that is because we are trying to shift our site to different host. It should be back up soon. We are slowly moving towards having a more functional website before the end of the month. Hope to see you all there !

Who knew I would be playing 'Aashiq Banaya Aapne' ... again .. and again !

..everytime I read another blog post trying to build a case for somebody for staying in US or returning back to India. Someday I will collect all of them and publish them in a book called "A Study in Denial: How our education system is making us all into ostriches". I have read one today (as if you could not have guessed) and fortunately I found something today which quite suits the occassion. Here you go : Fractal Wrongness Ok, so may be that was a little too harsh :-) but doing human evaluations of MT output can do that to you ! Powered by ScribeFire .

पिछले शुक्रवार को तकरीबन १ माह से चल रहे NIST Machine Translation Evaluation का अंत हो गया और बहुत दिनों बाद चैन की सांस मिली। वैसे जो काम चल रहा था वह भी कुछ कम मज़ेदार नही था, काम था एक उर्दू से English मे अनुवाद करने का सिस्टम बनाना। इसी बहाने मैने उर्दू लिपी को थोडा बहुत पडना सीख लिया। इस पर आगे काम होगा कि नही यह तो नही पता पर अभी के नतीजों का बेसब्री से इंतज़ार है। इतने दिन बाद मिले अवकाश का फ़ायदा उठाते हुये मैने जमा हो गये ई-मेल और ब्लाग पड डाले। उसी मे से एक ब्लाग से पी. साईनाथ का मैगासेसे अवार्ड मिलने के अवसर पर दिया गया व्क्तव्य पडने को मिला जिसने पूरे दिल-ओ-दिमाग को हिला दिया। किसानों की आत्महत्याओं के बारे मे पहले भी पडा था और तब भी बुरा लगा था पर उस वक्तव्य को पडने के बाद एक ऐसी बेचैनी का अनुभव होता है कि फ़ौरन ही इसके बारे मे कुछ किया जाये। मुझे पता नही मैं कब और क्या कर पाऊंगा पर अब मन मे ये बात अटक तो गयी है एक लम्बे समय के लिये । आप लोगों के लिये भी ये रही वो लिंक - http://subalternstudies.com/?p=153 और करेले को नीम चडाते हुये आज मैने हल्ला बोल फ़िल्म देख ली। फ़िल्म कई स्तर...

I recently started using delicious and I think I will stop pretty soon. Reason? No space allowe in tags and so every time I want a multi word tag, I find myself thinking if I want multiTag or multi_tag or multi-tag or some other version of it. I see that they have been aware of the problem but isn't this one of the first things that one would have noticed when starting to use the site? And even that post is now almost a year old. I just got in the line for their limited preview of next version, I am hoping for something good enough and soon enough. Btw, any recommendations for online bookmark managment services? Powered by ScribeFire .

Lots of new year love to whomsoever is reading this ! All the nice wishes and all sorts of wonderful things to you ! And now that all the love is done with, here is contempt. I had the misfortune of having to run IE7 because I was trying to test some website. I am amazed by the kind of effort they have put in to make it absolutely unusable. A lot of thinking must have gone into it. They have decided that script generated drop down boxes are bad for everybody. Doesn't matter even if you are a fucking I-write-browsers-over-weekend-who-knows-his-pop-ups kind. If IE has decided something is bad for you, you cannot have it. I have tried every recipe I could find on Google to turn off the annoying pop-up blocker and I am still waiting to see that drop-down menu. Utterly butterly frustrating !

.. and dude too ! While somebody calling me a "dude" is merely annoying, somebody calling me "dear" (like in "How are you dear?" and not "Dear Abhaya, how are you?") feels downright cheesy to me. Of course the previous statement needs to be qualified with the assertion that both the addresses might be ok in some contexts or when used as part of the rhetoric. What I am complaining about is the stock version. It is hard to pinpoint the root of these annoyances. Dude perhaps has to do with the mental images of dudes from college days and the slight negative connotation it carried in college lingo. With dear , things are not so simple. One visual image associated with dear is of nuns or teachers from convent schools or governances calling the children dear . Another one is of Jitender calling his better half as dear as in "tum abhi tak tayaar nahi huin dear? hum party ke liye late ho jaayenge !". It is hard to blame either of them for my b...

I am sure some of these things already exist with a different name or are probably present in those mega expensive enterprise solutions that companies sell and companies buy but here are some ideas I have recently been thinking about. Consider the live chat based support that is present on a lot of websites these days (Examples: lulu.com , backcountry.com ). The idea is that if you want to talk to someone, you can start a chat right then and there rather than call customer support and spend 15-20 minutes on hold. It is a plus for the company also since they no longer need to maintain a call center (or outsource it). This is specially attractive for startups who cannot afford to spend a lot on customer support. So how I imagine it must be working is that there is somebody sitting on the other side of the comp and probably talking with one or more customers at the same time. They would have many chat windows open or many tabs open, one for each customer. I would guess that even a trained...

While walking to the school today, I came across a old lady. She was walking slowly on the sidewalk in the same direction. The sidewalk was narrow and there was not enough space for me to walk past her. So I walked slightly off the sidewalk on to the grass and crossed her. As soon as I passed her by, I heard her say sorry. It was not a sorry that we just hand down to others every now and then. It sounded as if she was sorry that she is old now and cannot walk fast enough. It sounded as if she was sorry that she was walking in the middle of the sidewalk and thus blocking my way. It made me feel very bad. I wanted to stop and tell her that it was alright to be old and to walk slowly, that she need not worry too much about us young people walking slightly here and there because society is not meant for only young and active, it is meant for everybody and she has a right to be old and walk slowly without feeling bad. Instead I said "it's alright" and moved on. Today was a bad...

Randall Munroe of xkcd fame was on campus today. Unfortunately I dozed off at my desk and missed his lecture (but read about it on Wikipedia just now which, surprize-o-surprize, is already updated with a short blurb about it). I discovered xkcd few months ago, through the legendry angular momentum strip and it was an instant favourite. By next morning, I had finished all 300 odd strips and was hooked. As the tag lines says, it is ' A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language' , and physics and computer systems and pop culture. It is full of geek jokes , allusions that only a computer science graduate would understand and a celebration of nerdiness . However the best of the bread for me are those in which romance interplays with geekiness . They are just awesome. Here are some of my favorites. Find many more on the xkcd website. Enjoy and Happy Diwali ! Powered by ScribeFire .

OpenSocial form Google is the new big thing that everybody has been talking about, especially since it is being seen as a major blow back by the Google to the Facebook. It will allow developers to write one application and have it run on multiple social network sites. In other words, a Java for web apps (looks like Java has become too unfashinable since I saw this analogy hardly anywhere else). This is great news for developers. But what about users? Users will now have a choice of thousands of applications since developer can actually spend time in creating new applications rather than try and make one application run across multiple sites. So consider, a flixter application that I found to be very cool and added to my profile page on Orkut, spent 2-3 hours adding all the movies to it and comparing notes with friends. Then I logged in to Facebook and found the same application and now I want to match my interests with my friends here. No problem, spend 2-3 hours, add all the movies an...

I donated some money to the Wikimedia foundation today and then realized that it was also धन तेरस (Dhan Teras, one of the days in this festival season, dedicated to Lakshmi, Goddess of wealth) today. It is a tradition to buy something new on this day, preferably made of metal. You can think this is as our own Indian thanksgiving in that sense but without discounts ! We being Indians, Gold is obviously the first choice but people buy all sorts of new things, cloths, utensils, jewelery, furniture, home furnishing etc. Thinking in that respect, donating to Wikipedia seems like a good idea. I will have to see if this can be my own little way of celebrating Dhan Teras every year. Although it is often said that सरस्वती (Saraswati, Goddess of knowledge) and लक्ष्मी (Lakshmi, Goddess of money) don't go well together, where one lives, the other leaves, times seem to be all changing now :-) !

चलें कूचा-ए-जाना से, शहर को देख कर आयें, तबीयत भर गयी फ़ूलों से, कांटे देख कर आयें। नये मौसम मे सुनते हैं, नये अंदाज़ हैं उनके, बदल जायेगा दो दिन मे, नज़ारा देख कर आयें। जो आयें तेरी महफ़िल मे, ना जायें फ़िर कहीं उठ कर, कुछ आयें नये और कुछ सब ज़माना देख कर आयें। वो पिछले मोड पर जो राह छूटी हमसफ़र छूटा, कसक उठती है रह रह कर कि जायें देख कर आयें। हवा मे घुल रहा है दर्द, फ़िज़ां हो चली गमगीं, सुनाता है गज़ल फ़िर से अभागा, देख कर आयें।

Before reading my post, read this post about the problem of Indian Entrepreneurs not thinking big enough . There was a followup post on the same blog that countered some of those point. It was during undergrad days that I heard this argument for the first time. The biggest problem with people pitching their business plans in competitions, according to one of the judges, was that they were not asking for enough money ! It sounded quite counterintuitive to my middle class trained mind. My instincts told me to borrow as little as possible and to bootstrap as much as possible, the old Indian way of doing business as somebody later put it. But I was naive back then, didn't understand the importance of capital, didn't understand the central premise of running a successful company in a capitalist setting i.e. growth ! Year after year, every year, growth in terms of bottom line, revenue, profits ! Because although we start out with customers, with efforts to solve a problem they are ...

A big reason for my decreased frequency of blogging had to do with Google launching the Hindi Transliterator in blogger. While, like every red blood Hindi lover, I was also very much pleased by the turn of events, the joy was short lived. Very soon, I discovered that on Linux Firefox version 1.5, the on line blogger editor became very very slow. So slow that I can type 1-2 sentences and than sit back and watch as it works very hard to bring the characters in view one by one, at the speed of around 1 character per second. And this is not in transliteration mode but in normal English typing mode. Now being a busy grad student that I am, I spend a large part of my day and night in my office and away from my laptop. So it was a sad situation. Finally I started looking around for an alternative blog editor and after some false starts, landed at ScribeFire from performancing which is an extension for Firefox. From the first looks, it seems to be quite fast and have all the basic facilities ...

These are some heady days in my life. Lots of things happening and at times I get the feeling that everything might just slip away. And often times I remind myself that what you have is not what you hold in your fist but that which rests on your open palm. So the big news is that I am going back to India next year. Things moved fast and there are chances of a startup looming on the horizon, already threatening to block the sun of rationality and rob the clarity out of life. Let us see where it goes. Back from the future, in the present, there are some more things to be excited about. For next few months I am going to work on a Urdu to English Machine Translation System. Now given the state of the art, you can be sure that this MT system will be pretty useless for almost any use. What is exciting however is that it may produce as a side effect some nice tools for Urdu, conversion of Urdu script into Devanagari being one of them, an issue close to my heart . For the starters though, Bhom...

Next week promises to be very special. Kalaam is coming to CMU on 16-17th and then on 18th, I am flying to Boston to attend a one day workshop in MIT and guess what ! Noam Chomsky is going to be there. Exciting Times !