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“The Rose Field”

2025-12-31T00:00:00+05:30

I was eagerly waiting to read “The Rose Field” by Philip Pullman after having read “The Secret Commonwealth”, which had ended on a cliff-hanger. This is the third book in the “The Book Of Dust” trilogy of books, which followed the “His Dark Materials” trilogy of books. I have been a fan of this series of fantasy fiction books, so I was a little disappointed in how this book ended this trilogy.

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The book follows the heroine Lyra Belacqua (now known as Lyra Silvertongue) on her quest to reunite with her daemon Pantalaimon, who in turn is on a quest to recover Lyra’s “imagination” from a mysterious red building in a far off desert. Their world is in turmoil as the head of the religious body Magisterium seeks to tighten its control over the world while unknown forces are “destroying the air and the seasons” and money is losing its value. Several openings have been discovered across the world by the Magisterium that are gateways into other worlds and the Magisterium is intent on blasting these openings into oblivion to stop them from corrupting their world (as they claim it).

Lyra and Pantalaimon (separately) go through several adventures in their respective quests, aided by several characters and creatures while being pursued by several others determined to thwart them. They have overcome the disappointment and the distrust that caused them to go their separate ways. The book is the saga of these adventures and the eventual reunion in the climax.

The book is paced well and explores the complex personalities of several of the characters. Since it has been two and a half years after I read the last book, I initially found it a bit hard to recall names and events. However, this confusion lasted only a short while as the book does well to fill you in on the details that you might have forgotten. At 500+ pages, the book still keeps you engaged and keeps advancing the narrative.

The book ties together several narrative arcs from the previous books. Some of these get closures, while some are left open. In particular, the ending of the book seemed a little abrupt and somewhat incomplete to me. I still have so many questions that remain unanswered after I finished the book. It is almost as if the author got tired of writing this book and decided to just wrap it up. This is why the book was a little disappointing to me as the final book in this trilogy.

If you are a fan of this series of books and the fantasy world it builds out, you owe it to yourself to read this book. If you are not such a fan, I would recommend to stick to the “His Dark Materials” trilogy of books. That trilogy still remains fantastic.

ICFPC 2025

2025-09-08T00:00:00+05:30

I just finished taking part in ICFPC 2025 over the weekend. This was a nice contest with a deceptively simple task that turned out to be quite hard. It did not require any familiarity with Functional Programming concepts. I had a lot of fun during the contest, but did not have any breakthrough in actually solving the problems. In other words, I continue the glorious tradition from past years.

The task this year was inspired by the novel “The Name Of The Rose” by Umberto Eco – William of Backus and Adso of Milner travel to the monastery of St. Kleene, where they would like to map out the renowned Library Of Lambdas despite the machinations of the jealous librarian Alonzo of Curry. (Yes, there are so many references to famous people in Functional Programming.) They must map out the library during surreptitious expeditions at night based on planned traversals through its rooms and only partial records of the room-labels. They had to minimize the number of such expeditions, as each expedition incurred a risk of getting caught.

I chose to solve the problem this year using Go. I was able to solve the sample problem both manually and programmatically in a day, but only because it used distinct room-labels. The complications of distinct rooms having the same room-label, doors leading back to the same room or even back to themselves, the randomization of the problem during each attempt, etc. meant that the task was quite difficult to solve reliably. In the end, I committed a broken implementation because I could not continue beyond the contest-end due to the server being turned down (probably to limit AWS bills for the organizers). That was a bummer. Despite that sorry end to the contest, I had loads of fun trying to come up with heuristics to solve this task during the given time.

For each attempt, I just generated a single plan of the maximum allowed length comprising traversals through random doors of whichever room I found myself in. If I was lucky, I would get enough information back through the recorded room-labels to reconstruct a map that was equivalent to the original map of the library. To reconstruct the map using the recorded observations, I initially marked each observation as a potentially distinct “phantom” room. Then I turned each exit discrepancy into a “real” room (e.g. if you see that the door numbered x in a room labeled A leads to a room labeled B in one instance, but one labeled C in another, they must be distinct rooms). Then I tried to find common sub-paths of a certain minimum length in the overall traversal that strongly hinted at a the same set of rooms being visited (e.g. you see A2B3C2D1A once and then again the same pattern a while later). I wanted to use these findings to reduce the number of phantom rooms by clustering more and more of them together, but I ran out of time (and access to the server).

One of the weird things about this year’s contest was that initially there was no limit on the lengths of the expedition and the number of attempts to solve a given problem. This meant that several teams got “perfect” scores during the Lightning Round by just trying out different route-plans until they got lucky in making a correct guess. The organizers then put a limit of 18×n on the length of the expedition (where n was the size of the problem), which made it harder to get lucky. For the problems in the General Round from the Addendum, the limit was further reduced to 6×n and they could only be solved by employing additional markers for the room-labels, which made it even harder to get lucky with the right guess.

Another weird thing about this year’s contest was that there was a single person who was the primary organizer of contest, but they had some obligations during this period that made them take at least two long-distance flights (about 15 hours). This severely limited their availability, although there was a secondary organizer available to address contestant queries. Thankfully there were no major issues during this period.

Continuing my experiment from last year, I once again tried to see if ChatGPT, Gemini, et al could help me come up with a better solution. The models were a bit more helpful this time, but I ended up having to do the bulk of the work myself. More than a year of progress, but their utility on such problems has only improved marginally. (Or maybe I just have not improved in my prompting skills – I am still “holding it wrong”, as they say.)

Interestingly, some of the contestants reported success with using a SAT Solver (including multi-year champions Team Unagi, who uploaded their Rust-based solution here. Others tried to use random walks with Simulated Annealing (including regular participants and winners like Wild Bashkort Mages and Frictionless Bananas).

As a sign of the times, Discord was once again the primary mechanism for communicating with the organizers and with other contestants. There were a few announcements and teasers on Twitter and on BlueSky for sure, but nothing substantial beyond that. The /r/icfpcontest sub-Reddit has sadly been effectively dead for the past couple of years or so. There were no mailing-lists set up this year.

The source-code for my attempt this year can be found on GitHub, on GitLab, and on Bitbucket.

HTTP Yes

2024-12-28T00:00:00+05:30

At long last, I have somewhat grudgingly enabled pervasive HTTPS on this web-site. I do not agree with the scaremongering around HTTP-only personal web-sites, but I was tired of having to constantly fight an uphill battle against the penalties on vanilla HTTP-only web-sites imposed by the current web ecosystem. As another one bites the HTTPS dust, please do let me know if you face any issues with accessing this web-site over HTTPS.

While I appreciate the enhanced security provided by HTTPS for web-sites that deal with sensitive information, I think the current overzealous push towards only HTTPS by browsers, search-engines, “thought leaders”, et al even for personal web-sites is an overkill. If you have an HTTP-only web-site, browsers scare off vistors when they try to visit your web-site, search-engines down-rank your web-site (making it harder for you to reach your audience), etc. HTTPS comes with additional costs and maintenance-burden for personal web-sites and provides disproportionately little in extra benefits. You only get encryption, but not identity-verification, from HTTPS by using the commonly-given suggestions for enabling it for personal web-sites.

The usual reasons given for having HTTPS, even for personal web-sites, is that otherwise someone malicious in the middle can tamper with the contents (e.g. change it or inject advertisements) or inspect the web-traffic. First off, you should never trust a rando like me on the Internet, whether they use HTTPS or not. Second, I am not publishing anything sensitive here “for your eyes only” that no one else should see. Third, you can still see loads of advertisements and trackers on web-sites, even if they use HTTPS.

On the other hand, until recently the shift from a static HTTP-only web-site to an HTTPS-based web-site meant an increase in the costs and maintenance-burden. For a static HTTP-only web-site, you only need to upload a bunch of HTML and other files to a shared web-server, usually provided for free by many web-hosts, and then forget about it. Having to acquire, publish, and update SSL certificates for an HTTPS-based web-site increases your costs and drastically reduces your choices. It creates an additional hurdle for regular people to have their own web-sites, going against the goals of the original World Wide Web.

Thankfully we now have Let’s Encrypt to provide free SSL certificates to everyone. However, even they are moving towards ever shorter certificate-validity (from a short 90 days to just six days, because moar security), which means you need to have reliable automation in place to keep updating your SSL certificates. This is not easy for ordinary folks, or even for regular software engineers.

Luckily in my case, I discovered that 50Webs, the free web-hosting service that I have been using since 2008 (thank you folks!), now provides an option to integrate with Let’s Encrypt and to auto-renew it before expiry, even in their Free Plan. This is really nice of them. This was enough for me to finally make the switch to using HTTPS on this web-site, since 50Webs has managed to keep the maintenance-burden low even for freeloaders like yours truly. Kudos 50Web!

As an aside, I wanted to use pervasive HTTPS (redirect HTTP to HTTPS) and canonicalize the bare domain (strip “www” from the URL, if specified) on this web-site. The only way I could reliably do this was to use the following mod_rewrite configuration in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://%2%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,L,R=301]

This seems ugly, but this is what I cobbled together based on trial and error and by reading the documentation.

“Crucial Conversations”

2024-12-27T00:00:00+05:30

“Crucial Conversations” by Kerry Patterson, et al, was recommended to me by a former boss. It took me a while to get around to reading this book, but I finally did and am glad that I did. The book teaches you how to engage in conversations at work or in personal life that are difficult, but important, and that most of us do not handle well. Even though the book is firmly in the self-help mold, it actually has useful information to give you if you can set aside your cynicism for this genre of books.

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So what exactly is a “crucial conversation”? The authors define it as a conversation or a dialogue where people have opposing opinions, the stakes are high for one or both the parties, and strong emotions are involved. For example, this could be about giving difficult feedback to a colleague, a life-partner, or a child, discussing a hike in your pay, negotiating with striking workers, etc. Even conversations that start off as regular conversations can turn into crucial conversations when someone makes a hurtful remark, for example. The authors want us to develop the skills needed to recognize when we find ourselves in such a crucial conversation and to conduct ourselves in a way that makes it a productive conversation that strengthens mutual trust.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with how to prepare for such a conversation, including choosing the right topic, identifying what you really want from the conversation, and keeping your emotions in check throughout the conversation. The second part deals with how to have such a conversation, including making it a safe environment for both parties, how to talk persuasively without being abrasive or condescending, how to listen properly, and how to stay in control while absorbing feedback. The third part deals with how to make such conversations actionable and ensure that you get meaningful results as a follow-up. It also talks about how to apply this framework to really difficult cases, since it is perfectly valid to be skeptical of the broad applicability of such self-help advice. Each part is divided into focussed chapters that tackle a particular aspect. Each such chapter starts by providing an overview, gets into the details (with several interleaving anecdotes sprinkled throughout), and ends by providing a short summary of what we learned in the chapter. I admit that this is the usual template for self-help books these days, but it is actually quite effective here. (That said, the anecdotes seem unreal and the dialogues do not sound like how normal people talk, once again just like in other self-help books.)

One of the nice devices that the authors use is a “path to action” model. You see or hear something, you tell yourselves a story based on that (even if it happens in an instant and you are not aware of it), you form emotions based on that story, and finally you act based on those emotions. The most important skills in having crucial conversations is being able to identify and control this path in ourselves and in those with whom we are having such a conversation. Of course, this is much easier said than done, so the authors provide you various techniques to help with that. Even after that, I remain a bit skeptical on how ordinary people can muster the self-awareness and discipline required to master these skills.

What I didn’t like here is the irritating “pool of meaning” metaphor that the authors keep using throughout the book. The authors also fall prey to the usual self-help book trope of using cutesy acronyms (“CRIB”, “STATE”, “AMPP”, etc.) that immediately make me suspicious of what they are leaving out or shoving in so that they could get these acronyms. I guess authors want to provide mnemonics to their readers to help absorb their message, but I always find these more irritating than helpful. However, yes, this definitely is a book that merits reflection and possibly note-taking, not something that you just read cover to cover and never revisit. I will surely come back to this book like I plan to do with Getting Things Done.

As with many popular self-help books, the authors have courses and spin-off books based on the “crucial” theme. You can find these and other additional resources referenced from this book on their web-site. Even if you do not use those additional resources, you can get something useful out of this book (if you can set aside your skepticism, if any, for self-help books). I am grateful to my former boss for having recommended this book.

ICFPC 2024

2024-07-02T00:00:00+05:30

I took part in ICFPC 2024 the past weekend. This was a really nice contest that combined the best elements of the classic contests from 2006 and 2007. As usual, I had a lot of fun during the contest, but did not have any breakthrough in actually solving the problems.

The task this year was to decipher programs written in a functional programming language in order to solve problems of increasing difficulty. You begin by implementing a parser and an interpreter for this language and then use it to communicate with a web-server hosted by the organizers. You pretend to do an on-line course to learn more and more about an alien civilization by fetching documents associated with different keywords. When you solve problems, you unlock more and more of these special keywords.

I chose to solve the problems this year using Python, simply because it was easy to get started and iterate from there. Its “batteries included” standard library contains almost everything I needed to get going. I implemented a simple REPL that allowed me to decode the alien language and poke around the remote server. That said, I kept running into efficient evaluation issues in the interpreter that made it crash on certain degenerate problems. Unfortunately, I could not solve these by the end of the contest and I did not get the time to follow up after that.

An experiment I tried this time was to see if ChatGPT, Gemini, et al could help me create the basic evaluator faster, so that I could concentrate on the core problems. As has been my experience elsewhere, these LLMs spewed plausible looking solutions that actually contained some blatant and some subtle bugs. Finding and resolving these bugs took more time that the initial saving in creating the program. On the whole, the experience was a bit promising at the begining and frustrating in the end. I do not know how others find LLMs so useful for coding, since this has consistently been my experience with them so far. Maybe I am not prompting them properly.

Shortly after the contest ended, the organizers kindly shared a repository containing everything related to the contest (task-description, problems, server-implementation in Haskell, etc.). Technically, this allows you to continue to play with the problems by running your own server, tweaking things, etc.

The source-code for my attempt this year can be found on GitHub, on GitLab, and on Bitbucket. You can find links to some other write-ups here on the contest web-site. Weirdly, /r/icfpcontest was quite quiet during the contest this year. I wonder if that sub-reddit is dying out. Sad.