The Miller Melting Pot

Summer Strawberry Cake

2013-05-12T22:32:00.000-04:00

The joys of being a mother! My kids and Beau baked this for me this morning. It is a Mother's Day surprise.

My 4 year old A told me about it yesterday. Then added that it is going to be a surprise that they are not going to tell me about until it is ready. In the morning my 7 year old N told me I am to use the master bathroom and not leave my bedroom. He even brought me his boombox and told me I should dance in my room to keep myself busy while I wait.

There were a lot of excited squeals anytime I tried to move or go anywhere. Secrets are so much fun! When I was finally allowed to come downstairs, the cake was cooling, and Beau was staring at it holding the meat cleaver wearing several frowns and a confused look. I gently inquired and found out that he was wondering how to plop it out and slice it into two even layers so he could add a layer of frosting in between.

I negotiated a deal with the kids, and got "digital rights" on the cake in exchange for providing decorating services for the cake. So I got to slice it, frost it, decorate it and then snap a picture of it for my blog. It was a sneaky win-win deal! I turned the cake inside out, because the inside was interestingly pink while the outside was just baked brown. You can see the unfrosted pink top. The strawberries were from the store, but the mint and dandelions I picked from my garden. For some reason, while decorating this cake, I thought of the cake Little Red Riding Hood took to her ailing grandmother. Maybe because in the story she picks flowers to decorate the cake.

The Mommy Review

2013-05-12T18:40:00.002-04:00

For Mother's Day I decided to write about my full-time job as Mommy. Yes, I work outside the home for pay as a full-time computer scientist and engineer, but I'm still mommy full-time. Its like one of those things that you do, no matter where you are and what else you do - like breathing. Motherhood is a challenging, intellectually stimulating and rewarding career, remarkably similar to the one in engineering I have. It comes with long hours, late nights, solving complex problems in logistics, interpersonal and technical domains. It comes with making tradeoffs to execute on and deliver short-term goals while making forward progress towards more long-term visions. Sometimes there is frustration when you feel like things are not going as they should. Often there is elation in knowing you and your little team have done a good job, whether or not it is recognized and acknowledged.

A good manager is committed to the career growth of the people she manages more than her own career growth, the reward being in making it possible for those she manages to attain their full potential and contribute their part to the success and growth of the larger organization. So too, is a mother, happy to see her child grow into a happy, loving, trusting, caring, well-rounded human, so confident and secure in herself that she can be her natural best and give the world her best. Yesterday I had a little conversation with my 4 year old A. The conversation epitomizes the rewards of being a mommy. I was getting A ready for the pool - swim gear, water wings, sunscreen. When we came to the sunscreen, she protested.

"Ma, I don't like sunscreen on my face."

"Yes, neither do I. But you do need it still. It will keep your skin protected from the sun." And I added with a smile and wink "And many years later, you may thank me for it."

"Why many years later?"

"Because our skin looks different as we get older. Mostly because of the sun. And many people feel good if they can have skin that looks like they used to when they were younger. Also, because the sun can cause skin cancer, which is a very bad illness I would want you to never have."

She smiles sweetly and wraps her sunscreen-slick arms around me.

"But why will I thank you later, Ma? I want to thank you now."

Mommy is a word full of responsibility as well. I learn about myself through the eyes of my children. They help me see who I am. And they inspire me to be a better person today than I was yesterday. I strive to serve as role model, mentor, advocate and confidante, and whatever else is required of me. For every move, every choice I make, for every rule I break, I know there are two pairs of eyes watching me, internalizing and learning from me. That makes me think before I act or speak. And yet, there are those surprising moments of discovery, like the ones I am about to share now.

Little A came up to me holding a tortilla like a mask over her face, with holes that she chewed out of it for her eyes. A is fond of pretend-playing Halloween, making "costumes" out of sandwich bags and toilet paper for her bears and dolls, and butterfly wings out of cardboard for herself. So I assume this is something like that and ask,

"These are my bread glasses."

"What is that? Are you Batman today?"

"No Ma, these are my bread glasses."

"Bread glasses?"

"Yes, like you. When I am older, can I have real glasses?"

"Uh, sure, if you want to. But why do you want glasses? Your vision is just fine."

"You wear them. I want to wear glasses just like yours."

"I wear them because I can't see well without them."

"You look nice, Ma. I want to look just like you. I also want a silver laptop like you."

I do notice that A wants to dress like me and comb her hair like mine and use chapstick when I do. She writes and draws, imitating how I twiddle a pencil when I am thinking. Sometimes she suggests that she and I both wear dresses, or pants, or shirts of the same color. Sometimes, she likes us to write letters and numbers, and draw cartoons together. But eyeglasses, which I have worn since I was a toddler and grew up with the notion of being a negative in my culture and environment, is an attractive thing to her, came as a surprise. For a moment I feel stumped and at a complete loss for words. What is the right thing to say? I quickly regain my tongue and blurt out,

"Thank you, sweetie. To me, you are wonderful just by being who you are. If you want glasses or a laptop, you may. You do have sunglasses for the beach. And you already use my white laptop, you know."

And with that I realize what a tremendous job lies ahead of me. I hope that I will succeed in helping A grow into a wonderful confident person and help her build self-esteem and positive body image. I hope I will inspire her to explore many different interests and find what fulfills her the most. I realize that I had not really given any conscious thought to these things and how I will have to learn some of this myself so I can successfully teach. The best way to teach and lead is by example. So I will have to be some of the things I would like her to be. At least for a little bit, while she still idolizes me.

I heart IRS

2013-05-09T10:43:00.000-04:00

I have been our family accountant so far. Every year I did the taxes myself. It started out real simple from when I was a single grad student gal and became incrementally complex each year with out-of-state internships, marriage and filing jointly, kids, full-time jobs, FSAs, investments, etc. And as life goes, the time I had to devote to doing my taxes got scarcer and scarcer.

This year the balance finally tipped. With one weekend to do our taxes before the deadline and a list of new things I haven't had time to research, I bit the bullet and gave in to Turbo Tax. In the last two years, the IRS has redone my taxes and given me back money that I overpaid, from not knowing about something I could claim, and from not knowing that certain things get taxed at different and lower rates than other things. My concern this year was that somehow the tax numbers from the software might err on the side of underpayment and we would incur a world of hassle and penalties.

I checked the "money back guarantee" on the box -- the highest refund than any other tax preparation method, it claimed. My uneasiness did not go away when I found out that there are no guarantees around audit protection. You can purchase additional products, but even then they only say that they will provide trained legal help, and not that Turbo Tax will take responsibility for discrepancies. So after the kids were tucked in, I sat up in my home office and checked and double-checked the numbers, recalculating through deductions, AMT and matching up my own calculations to the software's at midnight on a Sunday. (Yeah ok, you got me -- part of the reason for this is not paranoia but that I indeed have fun with that kind of stuff...the momentary high from doing money math. A gal's gotta do something for herself sometimes, right?) This year we also owed the IRS and calculating penalty was the part I finally gave up on. The tax instructions said that I can leave it to the IRS to compute penalty for me and then just pay it. So I accepted the penalty numbers Turbo Tax produced without further scrutiny, digitally signed, e-filed and went to bed.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when I receive a check in the mail from the IRS with a 3 digit amount that they figured we overpaid. Three years in a row now, the IRS has been correcting our taxes to give us money back.

Turbo Tax guarantees the highest refund, but what does that mean about lowest payment? Can I get my money back because the IRS tax preparation method came up with lower numbers? I am about to find out.

One man's trash that's another man's come up: What I learned about Chez Scheme garbage collectors

2013-05-06T00:13:00.000-04:00

I wont be talking Macklemore. But I will be talking in somewhat non-jargony terms about getting thrifty with mutators and garbage collectors. So if you would like to know a little bit about what goes on under the hood for automatic memory management in your functional programming language, then linger a while.

Recently, my compilers guru moved to his new house in town from his old place a few states away. The new house is considerably smaller than the one he moved from, requiring him to process and toss some of the junk he has been collecting over the years in all his storage spaces. A colleague - a completely non-compilers-minded person - was advising him on making boxes of stuff labelled with what is in them; that way he need not open a box unless needed; and if a box has survived two house moves without ever being opened, it can be safely donated to the thrift store. It strikes me that there are several analogies to be made with garbage collectors and I leave those as a thought exercise for my blog reader.

When does memory location that is allocated by an executing program become garbage? When program execution reaches a point after which the object at that memory location will never be referenced again. What happens to this garbage? It gets reclaimed and available for allocation again. In functional programming languages like Scheme, the runtime does this periodically and automatically and frees the programmer from having to manually manage memory. This is unlike languages like C++ which in many cases, such as for arrays, leave it up to the programmer to deallocate memory. (One reason why programs in such languages may have memory leaks and dangling pointer deferences.) This is not to say that the programmer has no explicit control over when garbage collection happens in languages like Chez Scheme.

Functional programming languages have first-class functions, meaning functions are treated like any other value and can be passed as arguments or returned from other functions. This means that a function f2 could be defined within another function f1 and reference variables in the local scope of f1. If f2 is returned as a value from f1 and "escapes", then those local variables may need to be kept around to be referenced when f2 is invoked later. It is often not possible to statically determine when memory is garbage and can be reclaimed. Automatic memory management is a necessity. Hence the garbage collector.

Garbage collection takes up time and CPU cycles. So there are important decisions to be made around how often to collect and when to do the work of collection so as not to stop the world while collection is in progress.

Memory locations are like wine or a good marriage, they get better with age. Chez Scheme implements a generational garbage collector. Reclaiming garbage is implemented as retaining non-garbage. Memory locations are maintained in generations. The garbage collector determines what objects in memory in the generation being collected are still "live" i.e., not yet garbage, and promote them to be copied to the next generation. Higher the generation index, older the generation, longer the memory location has been around. Memory locations that have persisted across generations are less likely to get discarded. So older the generation, less frequently it gets subjected to collection. Typically, there are 3 or 4 generations (and one static generation that once allocated never gets collected - this holds objects that are known to persist across a program lifetime.) So what happens to memory locations that survive the oldest generation? They continue to persist in the oldest generation.

Be accurate, but not precise. As you have already guessed, there is work and time involved in collecting and copying non-garbage to the next generation. It is not a good idea for the runtime to periodically "take a break" and garbage collect. So garbage collection needs to happen as swiftly as possible with minimal pause time. Which means that some of the work of marking storage as garbage and non-garbage gets pushed back to the mutator which creates objects on the heap. A naive way of marking (by the mutator) followed by sweeping (by the garbage collector) would be to mark every location and later scan every location. There are various ways in which compiler implementors try to control the overhead involved in scanning every location. One way is to mark blocks of locations as "clean" or "dirty" so that while scanning, the garbage collector can scan in big steps at a time instead of having to scan individual locations. This can be extended to a hierarchy of blocks of blocks, and so on, but that means that when the garbage collector does need to process within a block, it has to go through several accesses to get to a memory location. Another way is to not try to get too precise about what needs to be kept or discarded, and maintain a superset of what is really "live". Copying takes time, so don't be a packrat and maintain everything either.

Chef Supercomputer coming soon to an Iron Chef near you

2013-04-30T22:26:00.001-04:00

What do chess and cooking have in common? Yes, they are both on the list of top 10 things I enjoy. They are also areas that IBM has now attempted to apply AI to with seeming success. Not that long ago, I did a late night thought dump in this blog post about automating skills involving imagination and creativity that are considered generally easy for humans and hard for computers, using cooking as an example of something I consider to fall into that category. So imagine my delight when this article showed up in my LinkedIn feed today:

IBM's Supercomputer Chef

Although I am a little skeptical of the recipes featured in the article, I am very excited to see the attempt to computationally simulate creativity in the kitchen. IBM put Watson on Jeopardy as the ultimate test. I look forward to when Chef Supercomputer will be put to the test in an Iron Chef challenge.

One thing I find interesting is that Supercomputer Chef does not specify ingredient measurements or cooking times, mimicking the "intuitive chef" who puts together a bit of this and a bit of that and is considered far more creative than the "rigorous chef" who measures things and follows recipes with accuracy.

Another interesting bit for me is the kind of data used:

existing recipes;
what kinds of flavor compounds people "generally like";
what ingredients contain what flavor compounds;

The first of these is very similar to how a human like me does things -- I like to browse recipes from which my brain tries to "infer" patterns. The second and third are essentially intuition built on experience -- humans know these things based on extensive experience eating several meals a day or getting feedback from cooking for others.

Top chefs often have others do the work of executing a recipe so the lack of measures, cook times and robotic arms is pardonable. However, the missing element that keeps me from awarding full chef status to a supercomputer like this one is the aesthetics and presentation of a recipe. The makers of Watson did request two categories of questions to be excluded from Jeopardy when Watson competed, one of which involved contestants looking at image data. So perhaps the supercomputer iron chef challenger will be granted exemption from having to plate and present its culinary creation.

Self-host or What I learned about porting compilers from Baron Munchhausen

2013-04-18T09:51:00.001-04:00

One of the memorable stories from my childhood years was of the adventures of Baron Munchhausen. While I do not remember very many details of his exploits and adventures, the full color illustration of him pulling himself out of a swamp by his pigtails has stuck with me. And has often been reinforced by references to a similar concept. One such is in the field that I have been dabbling in most recently - compilers.

Self-hosting or bootstrapping is an important concept in compilers. It is the idea that a compiler for a language can be implemented in the language itself. For example, a Scheme compiler can be implemented in Scheme. So why self-host? For one, it is a very good test for the compiler, and one of the first important ones when a compiler is cross-compiled and ported from an existing platform to a new platform. Also, newly implemented compiler optimizations potentially benefit not just all the application programs written in the target language, but also the compiler itself, written in the same language. And this way the compiler writer need know just that single language - the target language which is also the development language.

If you laughed heartily when you read Baron Munchhausen, then you are already on to the critical question. If a compiler for Scheme is written in Scheme, how do I compile that compiler for the first time? Surely, there has got to be a compiler implemented in another language involved. Sometimes you can get away with an interpreter implemented first in a different language. Sometimes this first compiler could be for a subset of the target language, and subsequently be bootstrapped to build a series of incrementally better compilers. A few lines ago, I mentioned the importance of bootstrapping in porting a compiler to a new platform. The challenge there is that there may be little by way of existing software on this new platform. For such situations, both source code and byte code versions of the compiler are distributed. You use the byte code to compile the source code and voila! Self-host!

Cash or card?

2013-04-12T20:35:00.001-04:00

At the cafeteria at work today, the little machine they use at checkout malfunctioned and got stuck while processing my transaction. This inspired a discussion with a friend who was behind me in the checkout lane on whether cash or credit/debit is faster. And each of us intuitively, or perhaps based on experience, had differing notions of which is faster. I also realized that while time was an important factor, it was not the only factor that mattered to me.

Back in the country where I was born and grew up, cash was the only means of payment. There was no plastic. You could get things for credit, which meant that the shopkeeper noted down in his registry (a big notebook) the amount you owed on each transaction and at about the end of the month, presented you with the accumulated amount which you then paid off. This was a way of creating customer relationships and trust. It also brought a personal touch to regular business transactions. Sometimes the shopkeeper may ask for an early payment because he needed it for travel, an upcoming festival or something like that. Sometimes the shopkeeper might ask for an advance payment, too, for some of those reasons, in which case it was credit in reverse. Sometimes, the customer would inform the shopkeeper that he was going to be away for a few weeks and would not be buying for that duration, or that his daughter was going to get married off or that his son was going off to college, so he would be buying less, or that his in-laws were coming to visit so he would be buying more. In all cases, these conversations helped build a human bond which was crucial to conducting business, getting repeat customers and establishing a steady clientele. It helped determine regular demand and fluctuations in demand and therefore react with supply and inventory management, minimize wasted supply of perishables (like fish or ripe fruit) and not miss opportunities for increased business.

Then I came to the US. Everything seemed impersonal and superficial. The salespeople had exaggerated smiles and people said "Have a good day" like clockwork. I also quickly learned that it was important to build up "credit history" which is a way of saying that you can be trusted by a financial institution that lends you money to pay it back. I learned that the economy is boosted when people spend according to earning potential rather than present earnings. That is, people spend the money they will earn tomorrow, thus generating more business today, thus bootstrapping the economy.

Credit was a concept that took getting used to, and perhaps I never did fully. I never carried a balance, never felt comfortable buying something that I did not already have the money for, even though it went on my credit card, always paid every utility bill on time, except for the one time I misplaced a bill under a pile of notes. And despite every attempt by the financial institutions to offer me a line of credit that far exceeded my actual monthly income, I stuck to a limit that was just under my graduate school stipend. Now that we are not in school anymore, I still stick to a limit that is less than a fraction of our monthly income.

One of the places where I found credit cards to be really useful was online transactions. I used to buy international phone cards to call my family back home fairly regularly, and it was not uncommon for the charge to get billed twice. With a credit card, all I had to do was inform the credit card company and "dispute" one of those transactions as a duplicate billing error before they billed me for it, and everything would get taken care of. It was simpler and less hassle than trying to reach customer service for the phone card company. And then there was the convenience of not having to deal with lots of loose change or carrying cash every time I went to a store.

Then there is the debit card, which is like paying cash with plastic. It is my least favorite option for payment because it opens up my entire checking account to a transaction. With cash in my wallet, I know the limit of how much I can pay at the store, even if I have more in the bank. There is also just that bit of paranoia of someone hacking into the machine or software to get my debit information and cleaning out my bank account. That is not going to happen with a credit card.

So now coming back to the question of what is faster. In my experience, plastic is on average faster, debit slightly faster than credit. And either is faster than cash. When I go grocery shopping, I can swipe my card as soon as the checkout clerk has scanned my first item. For credit on purchases up to a certain amount and debit, no signature in required. There is a slight latency for the transaction to go through, and then I am on my way. For credit transactions above that amount, I still need to sign in the end, either on a piece of paper or an electronic signature pad. Of course, there are variations of this at certain stores where the card swiping is done by the clerk only, in which case, it happens after the scanning and adds to the time spent in line. With cash, you always wait until the end of the transaction, the clerk rings up the amount, you hand over the cash, he keys in the amount, opens up the cash register and hands you back the change. You do a bit of mental arithmetic if you are like me, or just pocket the change without checking if you are like Beau. In case you are thinking that Beau is not a financially savvy consumer, I ought to mention that it has more often been the case that the clerk made a mistake and gave me back more money which I then returned rather than the other way round.

It has always seemed to me that the process of waiting until the end and doing a cash transaction takes longer. However, it could just be a matter of perception. With a plastic card transaction, I push the time for accounting over to the once-a-month-ish session of checking through my monthly expenses in my financial software which pulls all the information from my financial institutions and does a fairly accurate job of even categorizing my transactions into food, gas, entertainment, utilities, etc. (Back where I grew up, my mother used to do this by writing things down in a notebook, which she tallied at the end of the month.) While at the checkout counter, I do a bit of socializing and engage in smalltalk with the clerk, something I can not do as well when I have to work with cash. So it does not seem like a long wait, or at least not an unpleasant one. Once in a while, like today, there may be a scanner snafu, which costs a little more time. But if I'm not a hurry, then its a chance to engage in conversation with another fellow human, an experience you will find interesting in its own right, if you are like me.

Plastic seems to reduce transactions to a transfer from one system to another, without involving any printed currency. That alone, in my mind, seems faster because there is a higher level of automation. Its like how I never write and mail checks for utility bills or taxes or daycare any more, but set up online transactions for everything. The amortized cost for expense accounting is also lower, because I do not have to save paper receipts and note them down anywhere, my financial software pulls it all automatically.

Of course, this means that I am laying a trail to enable others to do this kind of analysis on me as well. My transactions can be tracked and mined for actionable information. I am not sure how I feel about that. I read an article on predictive analytics the other day that conjectured how someone's frequent visits to fast food places may mean higher insurance premiums in the future for that person. While I do not think that would necessarily be a bad thing, because I believe in people taking personal responsibility for their choices, I do not know if this would be the right way to implement that concept. Then again, I would not be averse to the idea of my data being mined to create personalized offers and discounts for me; similar to how Harris Teeter e-mails me a personalized list of what is on sale this week based on my regular purchase history, instead of the generic list of sales that I would have to look through to find things of interest (and therefore, I might ignore, because it takes more time.) In the end, I buy what I have to buy, and I may buy a few more things because they are advertized and marketed to me. The latter may change a little based on how they use my information. But what changes in a big way is my perception of how satisfied I am. If a business makes me feel like I am being catered to in a special and more personal way, it creates greater consumer satisfaction for me. And while the numbers are tangible and analyzable and what really matters to the business, the intangible element of satisfaction is what drives my business to them. I may forget what I shopped for, and how much it cost, but I will remember how that made me feel. Because at the end of all the automation and analysis, I am still a human consumer with human emotions.

I, Yogini - Strength training with Urdhadhanurasana

2013-04-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

The literal translation of Urdha-dhanur-asana is upward bow pose. Why the pose is named so may be self-explanatory. How to get into it may not be. Lie on the ground, and lift up, rather than bend backward and attempt to touch the ground. For a complete how-to or to see someone demonstrating this quite a bit better than me, go here.

An example of strength training with yoga, Urdhadhanurasana is every bit as hard or easy as it looks to you in this picture. This is an epitome of advanced backbend poses. It is also quite a workout for your arms and legs to support your own weight in that pose. Typical duration for holding a pose ranges from 15 to 45 seconds. You will likely feel every one of those seconds in this pose. If you are new to yoga, you will want to build up to this pose very gradually with other poses first to enhance your suppleness and strength. Perhaps you have strength trained and weight trained with equipment in the gym, and you may already be capable of lifting your own weight or much more; but keep in mind that your body may not be used to the flexibility required to achieve this. So go easy, go slow, and don't hurt yourself. And enjoy it at all levels - physical, emotional, spiritual.

Statutory Warning: It is best to practice yoga on a mat, soft floor or carpet rather than brick tiles as shown in the picture.

I, Yogini - Vrksasana

2013-04-07T20:52:00.000-04:00

Spring time is here. Sunshine to lift the spirit. Glorious weather for some rejuvenating yoga in the great outdoors. Soak up the warmth of sunshine and stretch out those muscles. Breathe in the crisp cool air. Connect with your inner nature and become one with the trees in nature with Vrksasana or the Tree Pose.

Vrksasana is great for mind and body. Close your eyes and focus on your balance and your breathing.

Frees the mind to soar above the world towards the limitless sky. Like Tagore's Taal gaachh, standing tall on one foot, stretching up to the clouds, peering at the sky; feel the gust of wind and believing you can fly. Feel your inner peace.

Translations:
Vrksa - Sanskrit for tree.
Taal gaachh - Bengali for palm tree.

Free association of images

2013-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Tonight I'm craving phuchka. Juicy, drippy, tangy morsels of goodness. This picture I stumbled upon today on Facebook. Phuchkawalla on a Kolkata street. His mound of phuchkas covered with plastic and a big green bunch of cilantro on top. Wish I could remember what phuchka on the street tasted like. The picture is complete with minibuses in the background. All these names of destinations came to mind as I looked at those minibuses. Garia, Bijoygarh, BBD Baag. And then I remember the 206 (dusho chhoy) and the fancy S 15 with the little ringer rope you used to signal a stop request and doors that closed. (Boy was I surprised to find all the buses in Chapel Hill like the S 15, with air-conditioning to boot!) And then Minto Park, the little lake and park outside our school, next to the Bellevue clinic, I think. And oh, those delicious sandwiches made with sliced white bread, butter and curried chicken, crust cut off -- such a rare and special treat. Walking down Gariahat holding my father's hand, the nauseating smell of over-fried eggs and humanity. Engulfed by the crowd, unable to see anything but waists and knees all around. And back to the phuchkawala and ice-cream wala outside our multi-storied housing complex. Walking back home licking that fast-melting chocobar. The only time I had a chocobar from the ice-cream wala there. And walking back home with a sal leaf piled with chur-mur -- same deal as phuchka but all smashed up and sans the drippy tamarind water, a lot less messy. Sitting by the window as a Kalbaisakhi storm raged outside, watching the leaves and dust swirling around in the dark, nose pressed against the cool windowpane as big drops of rain start coming down thick and heavy. Feeling happy that the summer was over and the monsoons were on their way, with a few days of no school because of rain and the anticipation of wading knee-deep through the waterlogged street. Sticking a pot out the kitchen window and watching it fill fast with "distilled water" (yeah, rainwater) like from a faucet. To use in the battery that operated our emergency lights when the power went out for the regular bouts of load-shedding. And those kerosene lamps with chimney for when the emergency lights were used up. Turning the knob to raise and lower the wick and watch the flame grow and shrink. Making "tracing paper" by rubbing kerosene all over a sheet of paper. Holding up the paper to my face and inhaling deeply. Why did kerosene smell so good? Tracing maps from the atlas on the paper made translucent with kerosene, while sitting on the floor of the kitchen. The boti (sickle shaped giant knife attached to wooden platform) stowed next to the LPG cylinder in the kitchen. And the narkol boti that was used to grate coconuts for Laxmi Puja. Yummy prasad -- loochi and alur dom with naru and chandrapuli sandesh. Drawing the little white Goddess footprints with ground up rice and water outside our doorstep to help her find her way in. Leaving the light on all night to welcome the Goddess of wealth to stay in our home and shower us with wealth and happiness. And now I look over at my wealth - the softly snoring bundle pressed up against my side as I type. And I feel blessed by the Goddess.

Retelling The Little Match Girl

2013-03-11T22:56:00.000-04:00

As a child, I had a special book of fairy tales. It was a unique book - written in high-quality English, with very thick pages and colorful pictures. It was expensive too. Twenty-five years later the pages had not even yellowed, unlike most other books I had from that time. There were about twenty or so stories in it. They included the common ones I encounter now with my own children - Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Goldilocks, etc. It also had a few uncommon ones that I haven't come across here like Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, Foolish Jim and Clever James, The Little Match Girl.

The pictures were realistically drawn, with rich color and lots of detail, they kept me busy for hours. The pages were crisp and on very good quality thick paper unlike any other book I had. I loved to run my hands over them slowly, carefully feeling their matte texture, feeling their weight as I turned each page. I wondered what it would be like to crease a page like that, but of course, that was forbidden pleasure with dire consequences.

The story towards the middle of the book was Cinderella with a center fold of her in her shimmery white ball gown. Yes, white, not blue like the Disney version. Most of those two big wide pages was her gown, drawn with textures of heavy silk underneath and diaphanous tulle on top with an intricate design running down the center of the bodice. And then her tiny feet sticking out from beneath all that fabric with one famous spun glass slipper. How uncomfortable it must have been to dance in slippers made of glass! And on the very top, her tiny face framed with brown hair, with a jeweled tiara on top.

And then one day, I was in an impatient state of mind and hurriedly turning those big fat pages when I accidentally tore right through the middle of the centerfold with a loud skrish. A big diagonal gash in Cinderella's gown, revealing what lay within the mysterious thickness of those pages - layers of white flakiness. Like pastry. (The American kind, not the British kind.) Or the innards of a ripped cotton ball. There was a feeling of strange satisfaction to hear and feel that ripping sound, followed close behind with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, my heart growing heavier like lead, my throat choking with tears of a little regret and a lot of fear. I sat paralyzed as that skrish replayed and echoed inside my mind, feeling like how only the little Match Girl must have felt.

The Little Match Girl was the least favorite in my book of Favorite Fairy Tales. A few stories were fun all the way, like Goldilocks and Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Most were about hardship and varying degrees of bad things happening at the outset that changed to good things by the end, like The Ugly Duckling. The only exception was The Little Match Girl. It was sad and dreary from the get-to and got worse and worse as you read and it always made me cry in the end. It was the last story in the book with the picture on the last page of the wispy little girl standing in the cold snow in her tattered coat and bare feet, satchel slung across her shoulder, holding that last lighted match. Spent matches strewn about her blue toenails on the white snow, like iron fillings surrounding a magnet on a sheet of paper. It has taken me years to realize how that story, too, followed the formula of hardship followed by a happy ending. And that is how I am going to retell it today. The original was just about 5 paragraphs, the shortest story in the book and fit on all but one page with all that snowy landscape covering the rest of the page and the adjacent one too. I have kept the original plot. But I have taken considerable poetic license in my interpretive retelling.

The Little Match Girl came from the lowest crust of society. The only love she had known in her short life was that of her grandmother, who was now dead. She lived with her alcoholic father, who sent her out to sell matches because that was the only means of livelihood she easily qualified for, or at least, the only one that can be mentioned in a book for children. No wonder then that she was out on the snowy streets trying to get some business on Christmas Eve, too scared of the beating she would get if she returned home without any money. But no one was buying her matches tonight, everyone in the wealthier part of town that brought her business was enjoying holiday cheer with their families in their warm and cozy homes.

The Little Match Girl stood on the cold snow, and in an attempt to keep warm, she opened up a pack of her unsold matches and lighted one up. She enjoyed the flash it lit up with, and the soft warm glow it momentarily brought her, and the glimmer of effervescent hope it raised in her heart before it died away, singing the tender tip of her finger.

She tried to recreate that fleeting moment of joy by lighting the next one. By the end of the box, she had perfected the timing - she would let the matchstick burn right down to the teeniest bit of wood, dropping it right before it got too close to cause her pain. Addicted to that feeling of joy and hope, she powered through the boxes in her satchel, lighting one match after another. Each flash was like the dawn of a joyful day she would never see. And in the glow of that little flame, she saw the images of one happy day she would never live. Tables laid with splendid feasts she would never taste, gorgeous warm clothes she would never touch, friends and family she would never know, laughter she would never hear, love she would never experience.

Now there was no turning back. Its not like she had a choice. After what she had done, her father was going to kill her anyway. So she might as well live a little. And so she lived her entire life through all those matches, each one a day of her make-believe life.

Until she got to the very last one. And in the glow of that one, she saw her grandmother. And this she knew was for real. For her grandmother had come to take her. To lead her into the journey that lies beyond mortal existence, of which, death is but the beginning. Where everyone lives happily ever after.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the story.

Proud to have lost

2013-03-03T23:50:00.000-05:00

Today my first-grader beat me in chess, fair and square. The only help he had from me was in sometimes increasing his look-ahead. Typically, he only looks ahead one move, and I show him the various possible plays of up to 5 moves resulting from the various options he has. He decides independently what to do with them.

I did not deliberately let him win, as I have done before in the past to keep him motivated and from giving up. (Everyone needs to know what it is like to win, and what it is like to lose. I observe that he is not fiercely competitive, and has good sportsmanship.) I did not play for both sides, as I used to do when he first picked up chess more than a year ago.

Between his school and afterschool, my work schedule, homework, mealtime, sibling time, cuddletime, various forms of screentime and sleep, there is precious little time for chess. We've played quite infrequently. All the more reason for me to be happy to see the blossoming of his interest and skill in chess.

What more joy could a teacher feel than to see her student outdo her? What more joy could a mother feel than to see her son outshine her? Little N, I am so proud of you.

Avocado egg biscuits - breakfast on a leisurely weekend

2013-02-26T19:50:00.002-05:00

For my wonderful husband - blackforest chocolate cake

2013-02-26T19:39:00.001-05:00

Chocolate

2013-02-26T19:30:00.000-05:00

Chocolate chocolate chocolate. Dark, milk, bourbon-vanilla, espresso, pistachio, caramel. From A Southern Season. A divine indulgence. An aesthetic pleasure. A symphony for my taste buds. Thank you to my wonderful friend and manager.

The Social Aspect

2013-02-19T14:10:00.001-05:00

A reader's response to last night's post:

What Data Can't Do

Imagine knowledge

2013-02-19T01:01:00.001-05:00

Imagination is more important than knowledge, someone famous somewhere has said. Vision is often more powerful than reality when it comes to predicting and shaping the future. But what are imagination and vision, really? They are some of those things we like to think set us apart as humans, superior from machines. But are they really?

What is imagination, if not the power to harness vast amounts of data and make new connections out of them? Is it not the same as predictive analytics, only at a blazingly faster speed of making those connections?

I have always liked collecting. Picture postcards, Kolkata bus tickets, fortune cookies, restaurant menus, memories, ideas, visuals, sounds, smells. Everything gets stored away in some recess of my brain. And in ways I don't understand, they get retrieved to make new connections. This makes me an imaginative, creative person. Its how I do most things, like cooking. I browse recipes, ingredients, read labels. And when I stand at my kitchen counter, I create. Retrieving various bits of data and connecting them, without being conscious of the process.

Automating imagination is akin to automating intelligent decision making. Its the stuff of science fiction, yes. In an increasingly connected world of people and their data, more and more of what is inside people's heads keep being pumped in and accumulated into the vast data reservoir of the world each day. Through every Tweet, Facebook post and Google search term. Through every scientific paper, popular entertainment article and every personal blog post. It may not be possible any time soon to understand or emulate in the mechanical world the imaginative processes in the human brain. But it is no stretch of science fiction that the world's reservoir of data will eventually surpass what resides within most human brains. A predictive analytics tool may never be able to operate with the speed of a human brain. But it has the advantage that it will not age and die. It can keep processing indefinitely combing through more data than a human brain can hold in a lifetime. Until one day, hopefully before the universe has ceased to be, it hits on a gem of knowledge that no human has imagined yet.

When we think of these kinds of things, we start talking about technology becoming self-aware and robots taking over the world from humans. Although, self-awareness is not a criteria for exhibiting products of intelligence. I do not know how my brain works, I may never experience the transcendent truth and attain nirvana. But I can still think, learn, solve problems, imagine and create. And so could a technological tool. It wont be self-aware. It wont transcend the limitations of Goedel's incompleteness theorem and prove every truth about itself. But it just might imagine something no human has.

TFS meets OSS

2013-02-04T10:29:00.003-05:00

Git from the open-source community has swiftly created its presence in distributed version control, something that did not exist in Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) offerings. And TFS has recognized that there is no point reinventing the wheel.

TFS is incorporating Git for distributed version control alongside its own centralized version control system. While Microsoft has contributed to the open-source community in other ways, such as hosting Codeplex or contributing to open-source software, this is the first time that Microsoft has made open-source software a part of its own software. Thats right, this is not a Microsoft Git rewrite.

The move is apparently designed to offer the best of both worlds in TFS, "to have the best available centralized version control solution and the best available distributed version control solution" in the words of Brian Harry, Technical Fellow and Product Unit Manager of my former group.

An implication of this is that now Microsoft will contribute towards maintaining quality for an OSS project, such as fixes for bugs discovered during integration of LibGit2 into TFS.

For details etc. from the horse's mouth, check out Brian's blog post Git init VS.

Funny Banana Conversations

2013-01-21T17:25:00.000-05:00

As kids we often used upside down paper cups, a novelty and rarity in the place and time where I grew up, as pretend telephones. Little red baked earthen cups were the disposable biodegradable container of choice for hot tea purchased from the roadside tea sellers, and for rosogolla and mishti doi from the sweet shops. My family got its first telephone, a rotary dial one, when I was in seventh grade. Long before that, my brother and I were saving our precious Kwality two-in-one paper cups, carefully saved and brought home, then washed out and dried, to play telephone.

My own children have only experienced telephones in the form of push-button dialing and smartphones with touch-screen graphical user interfaces for dialing. While I was driving with them chattering away in the back, with bananas for a snack, much to my amusement they started playing telephone with their bananas. Being seven and four, they are also at the age where N tends to pick on A, and A is quite good with funny retorts of her own, so much that I rarely step in to intervene. There was a brief exchange immediately before this conversation which required me to provide one kid with a banana that was intact and the other with a banana that had the peel broken for easier peeling.

N: This is N speaking on the peeled banana phone.
A: This is A speaking on the unpeeled banana phone.
N: Hi A! You are just a baby.
A: Hi N! You are just a cow that can press buttons.
N: This phone has no buttons, only a screen.
A: Then you are just a cow that can press pictures.
N: Baby.
A: Cow.
N: Waah-waah.
A: Moo-moo.
N: I'm not a cow.
A: I'm not a baby.
Me: Ok guys, we're there. Now who wants to go bowling?
N: Baby and cow.
A: Yeah!
(General laughter from all three of us)

Graph Search: What Facebook learned from Google

2013-01-15T23:55:00.001-05:00

Facebook announced today its Graph Search beta release. Looks like they took a page out of Google's book of success.
All your user bases are belong to us. Google continues to lead in search by bootstrapping its superior algorithms with a large user base. Good search algorithms --> good search results --> more people use it --> more search data captured --> better search results. So how has Facebook decided to leverage the data from its 167 million strong US following? Search.
I know you want it, so let me hear you ask. A model of publicity and promotion that has worked well for Google is the exclusivity of some of its beta releases. Remember when gmail accounts were by invitation only? Its like the nightclub where everyone is lining up at the door but only a few can get in at a time...everyone else is craning their necks to catch a glimpse. If you are a Facebook user in the US, you can now join the waiting list to use Facebook Graph Search Beta.

The Business of Convenience

2013-01-15T11:51:00.000-05:00

A lot of hue and cry is around beefing up security in all kinds of infrastructure. However, often overlooked is the human element. And by overlook, I do not mean that we forget people are fallible - because there are all kinds of process guidelines around human fallibility. But what about the perception of inconvenience? How easy are these guidelines to adopt and practice? Can they be circumvented to avoid inconvenience?

I hear a lot of buzz around moving things that are traditionally administered directly in hardware up into software layers, such as network equipment. And then I hear about vulnerabilities from things like weak logins as in this network world article.

I suppose there are enough guys that "want to fix things at 3 a.m. without driving three hours in each direction. It's worth a lot to them to put it up on the Net without thinking hard about the potential consequences." So somebody needs to go in there and make a killing, selling all those guys "security and convenience" as a package deal.

I, Yogini

2013-01-06T17:56:00.002-05:00

What is yoga? Is it the getting into simple, elaborate or intricate postures on the mat? Is it the cool new way of strength training with your body weight? Is it the ticket to improving muscle tone and flexibility? Is it all the breathing techniques that go with the sequence of postures? Is it a way of boosting self-image and self-esteem?

It is all of those. It is also a way of living, with which I strive to find peace within and get acquainted with myself and the world around me. It influences how I regard myself and those around me, how I interact with others, what I eat, what I drive, what I do for work, what I do for fun, what role I play in the community and on this planet.

Every day we experience life as it unfolds. Some life experiences stay on our conscious minds for a while as we process them with rationality, with emotion, with head and with heart. Then it sinks deep into the subconscious, creating an imprint that manifests in our everyday life in some form or other - a habit good or bad, how we perceive the world around us, an irrational fear, a joyful memory, an unexplained anxiety. These trigger repeating patterns of behavior sometimes without us even being aware of them. And they get deeply ingrained into what we are led to believe are our inherent personalities. Changing those patterns of behavior seem to be like changing who we are. So we may think carefully and consciously about how we can change ourselves, carrying out certain well-thought-out actions, trying to retrain ourselves with our brains. But what about that Samskara deep in our subconscious, far away from the surface where our conscious thoughts dwell?

Yoga helps me turn off the thinking and analyzing that goes on in my head. It quiets my mind so I can better see - who I really am. It helps me gain control of my emotions, instead of letting my emotions control me. Yoga creates in me self-awareness and an ability to intuit and sense without conscious thinking. All the thinking, all the analyzing, all the cloaks we wear around society are peeled away revealing to myself my own innermost self. In theory, at least. Once I see who I really am, I will probably not be writing blog posts. I will have experienced the transcendent truth, and found the path to Nirvana, and simply be content in being. In fact, I or Swa-aham will even cease to exist, so I've heard, having become one with the supreme knowledge of the universe.

Give yoga a chance today. Turn off your conscious thoughts. And allow your heart to let you see.

Translations of the Sanskrit words, and these are really loose literal translations, look them up if you want the deeper semantics.
Yogini: Female practitioner of yoga; female spiritual mentor.
Samskara : Patterns or habits.
Nirvana: Peace of mind and freedom from suffering, a state of mind often associated with spiritual salvation.
Swa-aham: I myself.

Security and The Hive Mind of Technology

2013-01-05T17:40:00.000-05:00

Over the holidays, I committed what could have been fatally dangerous for us. I left the kitchen burner on (on Low) while we were all gone out for a few hours. Over the last year, I have forgotten to close our garage door before going to sleep at night a handful of times. One of those times, I was in bed checking my various frequented sites (e-mail, social networks, blogs, news feeds, tomorrow's weather) minutes before turning in for the night, when I got a message on Facebook from my neighbor across the street informing me that she sees my garage door is still open...are we expecting someone to come home still? This was really bad of me, esp. since there was a break-in through an unlocked garage side access door a few houses up the street from us only a few months ago.

The day is apparently not unimaginable when all these things I care about - oven, burner, garage door, porch door, front door, thermostat - will be accessible on the same network as my e-mail, social networking sites et. al. Here is a cool gadget that already offers functionality along those lines.

Sometime in 2009, the number of devices connected to the Internet surpassed the number of people connected. The world became abuzz with possibilities like "The Internet of Things" and more recently "The Internet of Everything" while Hetergenous Networks and sensor networks around the home and office continue to fuel that imagination towards reality. Cisco projects that there will be about 15 billion devices connected by 2015, and around 40 billion by 2020. But it is also estimated that more than 99 percent of all physical objects that may one day join the network are currently still not connected.

What will the world look like when some or most of that 99 percent becomes connected? Is our technological planet going to transform into something like a hive of social insects, the technological equivalent of collective consciousness? Nothing quite that dramatic, at least not in the sense that our devices will become sentient and take over. But the impact of security breaches will be that much more magnified, like the black plague rolling over medieval societies. Instead of bringing down sites like youtube, Reddit or Amazon, they will have the potential to bring down entire neighborhoods, cities, nations. In the middle of the summer, turn the thermostat down by a few degrees in every home simultaneously to create a power demand on the grid that shuts off power altogether - classic denial of service. While we are still at 1 percent for connected devices is the time to start building security into our technological infrastructure.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are my own, and do not represent those of my employer.

Port and chocolate ice-cream

2012-12-31T11:30:00.000-05:00

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup port
2 cups whipping cream
3 egg yolks
3/4 cup (or more or less according to taste) sugar
1 oz semi-sweet chocolate, chopped up
1 oz semi-sweet chocolate, shaved and reserved
more chopped up chocolate and chocolate sauce for garnish, optional
leftover brownies, chopped up, optional

Method:

Reduce port on medium flame to about half its volume, about 5-7 minutes. Whisk in cream, sugar and egg yolks. Cook until its all heated through nicely, about another 5 minutes. Add chopped up chocolate and brownies, if using. Cool and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight. Add chocolate shavings to mix. Then pour into ice-cream maker according to your ice-cream maker directions. When serving, garnish with more chocolate.

Sugar cookie egg nog ice-cream

2012-12-30T16:54:00.000-05:00

Me: What is egg nog?
Beau: hahaha.
(Pauses. Looks at me.)
Beau: Seriously? You've never had egg nog?
Me: No. (Shaking head.) Tell me what it tastes like.
Beau: Its sweet and Christmas-y. We should get some.

So we bought some. I would describe its taste as liquid ice-cream. And that is how this recipe came about. Its the easiest ice-cream I have ever made at home. Poured straight out of a carton into the ice-cream maker.

Ingredients:

1 carton egg nog
crushed christmas cookies for garnish

Method:

Follow ice-cream maker directions, using egg nog as the mixture to churn into ice-cream. Garnish with sugar cookie crumbles, cinnamon, etc. Enjoy.