My cousin Jana showed me this site. Somebody has dubbed the ending lessons from GI Joe. Some are quite entertaining, the reggae one in particular.

Ahilan has informed me that there is a live action GI Joe film in the works.

The trailer is out for the next Kill Bill film. Frankly, the trailer sucks, but that isn't saying much. I am quite sure this movie will be very excellent. I can't wait to watch it.

Yesterday, I went to Fred's Not Here to celebrate Cathy's 24th birthday. Cathy is my old roommate. I haven't seen her in quite some time, since she graduated last term. The food at the restaurant was excellent, with an asian-fusion twist to all the dishes. Because of the current winterlicous event, the meal was 20 bucks. I had a Sczhewan-Peppercorn Sirloin Steak which was quite tasty.

We went to Up afterwards, which is a lounge above Al Frisco's. The place was quite nice. There was some sort of Hawaiian theme martini night going on. Up was filled with an interesting mix of people. There were plenty of boys for Cathy to mack on, though she declined to do so this evening.

Lien, the other girl I lived with when I lived with Cathy, is in San Fransico. Such a shame that she wasn't around. I'm sure she will be jealous when she sees Cathy's photos.

I wore my peach shirt from Mark's and Spencer's. That shirt is very slick.

Finished watching Better Luck Tomorrow just now. I was impressed with the film, though it really didn't live up to all the hype. The ending was pretty dark, and quite unexpected, which I thought was quite good. My favourite character in the film was Han. You should check the film out if you want to see a movie that features asians as the lead protagonists.

Taking advantage of the extension given to us on our compilers project, I went to Fed hall last night with Shima, Gary, Simon and Matt. Yesterday night was the Lunarfest celebration put on by the various Asian student associations on campus. I have a lot of friends in the Japanese club, KonJa, so I thought it would be a fun night out.

They began the night with a sort of cultural show, showcasing Asian clothing, music and dance. I love seeing stuff like that. The rest of the world is so interesting. My friend Dan's Kung-fu group did a little presentation that was quite cool. There is this one little kid in his group that is wicked. One of the girls in the group, who Shima says also does gymnastics, was also quite good at flipping and kicking generally looking very much like someone out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

They also had some break-dancers. I love break-dancers. There was this one fat guy in the group who you would think couldn't break dance at all, but who could do all sorts of crazy flips. If I knew how to break-dance I would drop out of school and just break-dance on the street for money. Truly it is the greatest form of dance.

There was a 'jam' afterwards, which was alright.

The pages that display an individual entry should now, finally, display properly. If people with browsers of ill-repute could confirm this for me, I would be much obliged. If you don't know how to get to an entries own page, then perhaps it is time I change the layout a bit.

Mezan sent me this link a long time ago. This is a wicked black and white photo. I feel like loading up my SLR and going out after looking at it.

Dave has finally put up morose code again. The newly designed page looks quite slick. You should go check it out. It's definitely a better read then the crap I write. Hah.

I woke this morning this morning at 7:30, hoping that there would be no school. I have my compilers class at 8:30, and I was in no mood to go to class. Normally I wouldn't even bother checking to see if it was a snow-day, but today I decided to hope for the best. Lucky for me, it was infact a snow day. I went back to bed, quite content.

I woke up later and went to the mall with Steph and Jen. Shima and I have been going out for a year, and to celebrate the occasion I wanted to get her a dozen roses. While at the mall, I found a nice sweater for 20 bucks, and a pair of FCUK jeans for 30.

I have been stressing over my compilers assignment for a few days now. It still isn't working, but my partner and I are getting much closer. The assignment was to be due this coming thursday. I say, "was", because my partner informed me in the evening that we have been given an extension till the 3rd of Febuary.

Shima and I made this stir-fry shrimp salad today, and it turned out really great. Shima got me a really nice watch and a book, a persian book called Layla and Majnun.

It has been a good day.

Damn it, I spoke too soon. The parser is a little bit on the broken side. Hopefully I can figure out what's wrong and fix it quickly. Kumar is working on the symbol table now, though apparently another problem is that the huge parse table won't compile for him.

Our compiler seems to be parsing stuff now. We need to do some serious testing to make sure this is indeed the case, but I am hoping that there are no problems. Kumar is supposed to be working on a testing document now.

I used a program called ilalr to convert a determine the states of a DFA that we could use to parse the context-free grammar. I had to write a program that would convert the output of the program into code I could use to make a parse table. The parser implemented is an LR-parser, which people usually refer to as a bottom up parser because of the way the parse tree gets built.

Kumar and I still have to write the code needed to produce a basic symbol table, and I think we need to improve our error handling. Hopefully that isn't too much work.

Documentaries are cool. My cousin was telling me about one he saw recently called "the Corporation". The film describes how corporations, if treated like people, would be classified as psychopaths by clinical psychologists. The film illustrates how corporations behave like psychopaths. It sounds quite interesting. Another film I really want to see is Fog of War, a documentary about Robert McNamara. The film is about his reflections on the things he has done in his life, and the mistakes he made. Watch the trailer. The film looks amazing.

My cousin ended up winning the People's Choice award apparently. Grass roots spam campaigns do work. Nicely done. I'm hoping she wins the contest. She's very smart and pretty, so I don't see why she won't, but you never know with these sorts of things.

My parents 25th wedding anniversary was today. Our house hasn't been packed with people like it was today in quite some time. All my dad's sisters were in town for the occasion, as was his close friend from England, Kum-mama. I must have snapped 160 or so pictures today. If there are some nice ones I'll put them up at We Must Abuse the Broadband.

We were four cousins shy of being all together again. It was nice seeing Ruben, who I haven't seen in quite some time. Vitty is competing in the Miss Canada pageant, and they aren't allowed to go out apparently. My cousin Arjuna will get married this August, so I think that will probably be the first time we'll all be together in one place since my grandfather died.

Shima came tonight as well, and managed to survive the evening, which is good.

I need to get back to compilers tomorrow. Sigh.

Krishna is watching the Transformers Movie as I write this. I find it incredible how much of the film I remember, and with what clarity. My memory is incredibly bad, yet I can remember this film, which I haven't seen in years, so well.

If you haven't seen Transformers the Movie you must do so now. The film is truly a masterpiece. I wait with baited breath for the Criterion Collection to add the movie to their roster of DVDs. I really do hope someone puts out a re-mastered version of the movie, the ghetto DVD they have out now is so lame.

I'm back in Toronto for the weekend. Carvill came over and we watched the first 2 episodes (after the pilot) of My So-Called Life. I think the show is done really well. We have 4 more DVD's worth of episodes to go.

My cousin Supitha works in a bank as a teller. She has been held up at gun point while working this job, not once, but twice! Twice. All in the span of 2 weeks. I don't know what the odds of that are, but I doubt they are very high at all. She is unemployed now. I'm not sure if they shut her bank down, or if her parents won't let her work the job anymore.

The Standard Template Library is freaking crazy. This is the place I go to figure out what does what. I'm working hard on compilers, though I seem to lack the focus I used to have. Our first assignment is due in a week. I am feeling stressed.

The 4th iPod TV Spot is freaking wicked. You should check it out, it's the best one they have done so far. I like break dancing, Apple, and iPods a lot though, so there may be some bias here.

You specify the syntax of a context free language with a context free grammar. Most programming languages correspond to a special class of context-free languages known as LALR(1) languages. I have spent the past few days trying to write a working Ada/CS grammar, only to discover one laying around on the internet that works just fine. After getting rid of all the Yacc-isms I was left with something useful. I can't believe I wasted so much time these past few days.

I am now trying to parse the output of this program called ilalr, which takes as input a LALR grammar and returns information that can be used to build a program that parses the grammar

Compilers is probably going to be a very hard course.

I'm still unhappy with the opening page, but I have no real time to change it just now. Looking through my referrer logs I've learnt that Mezan's site accounts for the most links to my site. I've also discovered that this site links to my home page. I think the girl must have come across it via photoblogs.org. There is lots of interesting stuff in your web log files.

I've been mucking around with my iPod since it arrived yesterday. I've been ripping my CD's for the past few days, and am probably a third of the way done now. Right now my iPod is just filled with my albums. I'm not sure if I can get my entire CD collection on the iPod, but here is hoping. (I'm probably going to rip all my 'fan ban' chinese cd's at 128 bit ACC to save space.)

You've probably read plenty of stuff on people raving about how great their iPods are, so I will try and tell you some things I've noticed that apple could improve on. First, the touch wheel is really sensitive, a bit too sensitive. It seems far to easy to accidently have your iPod do stuff while it is just sitting in your pocket. Secondly, I don't like the way apple has engineered the syncing mechanism. It works nice if you want your iPod to mirror your iTunes music collection, but if this is not for you there are no real alternatives besides manually managing your music. I was hoping that I could upload all my albums, erase them from my hard drive, and then select some play lists in iTunes that I want to iPod to keep in sync with. I am hoping Apple will improve the syncing in a new release of iTunes.

All that said, the thing is very nice. I'm liking it so far.

My iPod arrived today. Well, it actually arrived last tuesday, but it was a long process getting it from my home in Toronto up here to Waterloo. I'm playing music from it now. So far, so good.

Nina got eliminated. Tragedy! All our dreams of meeting Strombo have been dashed.

Shima's friend Nina is one of the finalists in MuchMusic's VJ Search contest. So go to their website and vote for her. I want to know a MuchMusic VJ, so make this happen people.

My cousin Vitty, doctor in training, is in the Miss Canada pageant. She's Miss Calgary right now. You can also vote for her to be the next Miss Canada by sending an e-mail to vote@beautiesofcanada.com with "Vithya Gnanakumar" in
the subject line.

Have you heard the new Britney Spears song, Toxic? If you haven't, go and listen, it's surprisingly good. I never thought I'd ever catch myself complementing Britney Spears on one of her songs. However, I don't think it sounds like her singing at all. Anyone else of the same opinion?

Just got back from a talk given by one of the big guys in the Computer Science community, Al Aho. (He has written a lot of important computer science texts, most notably the Dragon Book.) The talk was quite good. He discussed the state of software today, and talked about his research in to compilers and programming languages for quantum computers. I saw Yang and Phil, Nabeel, Ju-lian and Ryan at the talk. The room was packed. I've never been to such a busy talk.

The Complete Faye Wong Discography. This is the discography I have used since high school to figure out the english names of all the Faye Wong tracks I like. The guy who runs the site, Josh, is also a Scarborough boy to boot.

File I/O with C++ is dodgy at best, though it is much better then the hoops you have to jump through to get Java to read a text file. My problem right now is that if I point an input stream at a non-existent file it does't complain.

in = new ifstream(argv[1]);
if (in->bad())
{ printErrorMsg("Can't open input file for reading");
}

I expect that if argv[1] is the filename of a file that does not exist that in->bad() would return true. Shame that it doesn't.

I seem to have forgotten a lot of C++. That sucks. I will probably know a lot when I am done this project.

I met with Kumar today to work on our compilers project. We think we have sketched out what we need to implement in order to recognize the tokens in our language.

For those who don't know, when you write a computer program, the first part of compilation involves a program called a scanner breaking your program up into individual tokens, which are then fed to a parser and processed further. For example, a C code fragment like "x = x + 1" would become something like "ID ASSIGN ID PLUS INT_LITERAL". Additional information like the name of the identifier and the value of the integer literal would also be stored in the token, to be used later when compiling. So now you know a little bit more about compilers.

It is so cold outside. I am in no mood to walk back home, but will probably do so shortly.

I should be working on my compilers project right now. The plan is to start as soon as I post this message.

My website changes are going smoothly enough. I fixed a stupid bug in Mozilla that would draw images that were links really funny, so now all you mozilla users shouldn't see strange blue borders and off center images where they existed before. I redid the front index page a little more. I am still not happy with the way it looks, and the way it is laid out is a bit of a hack job.

Also, I've managed to make the page look almost identical to Shima's page now.

Well this is it. Blogger has served me well for many months but I have decided to move on. I recommend blogger whole-heartedly to anyone who wants a nice simple blog. It is by far the easiest to set up and use. I'll miss it, but I wanted to do stuff it just can't do now. Please go to my new blog page if you aren't there already.

I have started reading the definition of the language we are supposed to write a compiler for, Ada/CS. Ada/CS is a subset of the language Ada, which was developed for use by US department of the defense. Compilers looks like it will be a bitch of a course.

I'm getting my iPod in a matter of days. I'm trying to decide what format I should rip music in, and at what bit rate. Right now I am partial to ACC (Apple's Mpeg-4 format). mp4 files sound better at lower bit-rates, so you can get good quality music out of smaller files. The only problem I see with mp4's is that they currently can only be played in iTunes and on an iPod (I believe). I'm not sure if this is really an issue or not. I plan to start ripping my CD collection as soon as I can figure this out.

I'm a bit closer to what I want. I've moved over to moveable type. There are CSS bugs I will need to fix but that will be done eventually. The index page at www.funkaoshi.com will also change slightly as I am unhappy with not displaying the full text of a post on that page. Also, I will eventually display a thumbnail of the current post in my photoblog there, but this isn't being done yet. Please let me know of any bugs you find, and what you think. Sorry to the 3 of you who read my blog and find it annoying I can't settle on a place to put it.

I've gotten more of the Moveable Type install working. What is left to do now is write up templates for Comments, Trackbacks and Individual entries. I want to import all my old blogger entries into Moveable Type as well. I'm not sure how well this works, if it works at all. Finally, I want to figure out a good way to generate a thumbnail for the current photo of the day. I could do this manually, and may do so.

I think when it comes to my blog, I am more interested with actually making pages, layouts, and coming up with ideas for presentation, then actually writing blog entries. It seems to me that many of my entries in my blog are about things I plan to do with this web space. Here is one more such entry.

I am thinking of making this domain an about page, and moving the blog to www.funkaoshi.com/immactulate/. This would match up with how We Must Abuse the Broadband is being served up. The other option would be to make a domain abuse.funkaoshi.com for the photo site. I'm not sure which I like more. I don't know if I am putting too much thought in to how URLs look or not. Anyone reading have an opinion one way or the other?

My plan with the index page at www.funkaoshi.com is to take the most recent entry from here, and display that, and take the most recent photo from the photoblog and display that. I think that would make it a more functional index page then simply having links to the other two sites. So, to do this, I may infact switch to Moveable Type sooner rather then later for this blog.

This entry contradicts almost everything I said in the previous post.

Good night all.

I've moved the blog to it's new home at ramanan.funkaoshi.com. It should be here indefinitely. Other changes are the use of blogkomm to allow for readers to comment on posts. I had originally planned to move the blog to Moveable Type, and may still do so one day, but currently it seems that for this site blogger works quite well.

There are still some quirks I am trying to fix. The way comments look and display now aren't too my liking. I think other then that though, the pages here are quite similar to the pages served up by blogger. I'm actually contemplating not doing this at all, because it seems that MT adds a lot of complications to a set of pages that are quite simple. What I don't get with blogger right now is individual archives. I don't know if any of my posts are memorable enough to warrant them anyways. I may scrap this project, and move the blogger pages to this domain.

I have ordered an iPod! There has been much talk on my part about getting one for quite some time now, so I decided with the announcement of the 15 gig model i'd bite the bullet and buy it. (My thinking is that with no big iPod announcements at Macworld that there would be no changes to the iPod for some time.) The iPod is in Shanghai, China right now. I'm waiting for it to arrive here.

What is Mac OS X? This is an interesting article I found linked on Slashdot which discusses the technical details of Mac OS X. An interesting read if you are keen on computers and what not.

School has been pretty good so far. I had my marxist theory class yesterday, and it sounds like it will be interesting. I'm hoping it isn't too much work.

We went to FED 102 last night, we being me and gary. We got there quite early, maybe 9:30 or so, and were surprised to see we weren't alone. I left messages with people letting them know to go, so Gary and I sat around waiting to see who would show. Victor, Rick and Phoebe ended up showing up, which was cool. We spent most of the night with them. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while, which is always nice.

Waking up this morning for my Compilers class was hard. I think I have been to 2 other 8:30 classes my entire university career. The first time was when I was taking CS 251 with Robert Mann. There was another section being offered, and I used to go to that one because it was later. One day I happened to wake up early, and decided I'd go and check out the class I was supposed to be attending. The second time was when I was taking Group Theory. I skipped all the lectures and taught the materiel to myself because I didn't want to wake up in the morning. (Apparently Prof. Ng taught so slow that there really was no point attending class anyway.) We had an in-class midterm for the class, so I had to go to that class.

I'm in the C&D now, waiting for my statistics class to start. I am not looking forward to the class at all.

Tomorrow is my first last day of school. I'm not really excited about it. I have moved back to my old place in Waterloo. My room was bare all of last term, so this term I have decided to fix that. I finally put up the Chungking Express poster that I received as a birthday gift two years ago. The poster is looking pretty damn cool in my room. I have also put up a hello kitty calendar, it's above my bed. Dave drew me a picture of myself for christmas, and that is hanging above the light switch to my room. The picture actually replaces one he had his brother draw of my many years ago, that was stolen when I moved into Cardill Crescent. All in all, my room still looks pretty bare, but this is all a start.

I'm slowly moving this blog from blogger to moveable type. Eventually I will host it from the domain ramanan.funkaoshi.com. I will make www.funkaoshi.com be a sort of index to all the things I have up on the web, for examle my photoblog. Expect to see changes shortly.

I've been waking up well past lunch during the entire christmas holiday. I don't know how I will be able to wake up for class tomorrow. We'll have to wait and see how this goes.

I've finally posted my new PGP public key. My old one has expired, and although no one has ever sent me an email with it, if you have a copy, use this one instead.

This is my PGP key. You can use it to send me encrypted email. People in shady government organizations like to read your email, so using a program like GnuPG or PGP makes it a little harder for them to get at your oh-so-interesting email message.

I have lots of keys floating around that I do not use and can not revoke. I've been using PGP on and off (mostly off) for a long time now, and it seems everytime I start to use it again, I've lost my old key. This key is the one I'm using now. So if you have another key, don't use it anymore.

fingerprint : 2B96 58EB 71D1 6EBE B8E1 15ED 18C1 A19A 1B71 0377

The fingerprint above should match the fingerprint your crypto-program says my public key has. If this isn't the case then something is not quite right. Perhaps someone has tampered with my public key. Though If this were the case, you would like to think they would also tamper with the fingerprint above.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP 8.0.3 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
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=w5W8
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
        

Happy new year to everyone. We are watching 24 right now. It is quite good. We're almost at the end of it all. This season is quite good. Lots of torturing. And putting people in 'the room'.