If you have a Mozilla based browser and listen to music as well, get FoxyTunes. It's not merely software, it's a piece of art!
And if you don't use a Mozilla based browser, I tell you that you are missing a lot. Get Firefox.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
23rd March: The Resolution Dayُ
میرا خون پانی جو بن جاۓ
اور زباں بھی میری جو بندھ جاۓ
پھر بھی ذرہ ذرہ میرا کہے یہ سدا
" تو ہی دلدار ہے، تو ہی میرا پیار ہے"۔
میرا سب کچھ سجن تجھ پہ نثار ہے۔
تو جیوے وطن، قرباں تجھ پہ تن، میرا من ، مرا دھن۔
تو بدن، تو ہی روح ہے،
تو ہی دل، تو ہی جاں ہے۔
تو ہی دلدار ہے، جواد احمد)۔)
اور زباں بھی میری جو بندھ جاۓ
پھر بھی ذرہ ذرہ میرا کہے یہ سدا
" تو ہی دلدار ہے، تو ہی میرا پیار ہے"۔
میرا سب کچھ سجن تجھ پہ نثار ہے۔
تو جیوے وطن، قرباں تجھ پہ تن، میرا من ، مرا دھن۔
تو بدن، تو ہی روح ہے،
تو ہی دل، تو ہی جاں ہے۔
تو ہی دلدار ہے، جواد احمد)۔)
(Click here to listen online if you have IE and Real Player).
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Levels Of Awareness II
[This post is partially inspired by the definition of life on Wikipedia.]
The heuristics commonly employed to categorize something as living include:
1. Growth
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability to create entities that are similar to itself
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions.
Amongst other things, fire fits very nicely to this definition. It can grow. It consumes paper, wood, etc., and leaves carbon behind. It has motion in its flames. It can reproduce (like plants, it requires some external agents for reproduction). By moving a piece of wood close to the flames of a fire, an exact replica child fire can be created. It responds to stimuli (e.g., it extinguishes/ dies when proper living conditions are not available).
So, what's the problem with the definition? Or does fire really has life? There are two ways to proceed: One way is to change your definition and the other is to accept that fire has life. Changing the definition means adding more properties/ heuristics for the classification; for example, by requiring a "delineation" (like cell membrane) around the "body" of the living organism. Or to change the definition completely, such as, "Life is a system converting entropy to negentropy, using flow of energy." (taken from Wikipedia)
As you can see, there are more troubles with changing the definition, like delineation around what? entropy to negentropy? - What do they mean? What is body?
I am not going to negate any of these definitions. What I intend to do is to describe my idea of levels of awareness. The elementary biological definitions differentiate between plants and animals by telling us that plants have chlorophyll in them, i.e., they produce their own food. Yet, we find carnivorous plants that eat insects and some other animals. Biologists have taken another easy way out. They no longer classify things as plants and animals. The say that plant is a very vague concept and doesn't mean anything; according to them, somebody interested in understanding types of organisms should study the detailed taxonomy.
But then they get trapped again because of the fact that they fail to define what is carnivorous and what is herbivorous. Some plants are at the brink of being carnivorous and non-carnivorous. Things within the taxonomy do blur into each other. The taxonomy itself fails to delineate things in black and white.
No matter how hard you try, there is a dead end. Or rather, there is a counter example to our understanding. So, why are things so complex? What I would say is that these are ayaat or identifying signs For Men of Understanding.
Being very simple, my intuition says that there is just one property that differentiates plants from animals, namely desire. And there is another property that differentiates human beings from animals, namely self control. Just as plants gradually blur into animals, there are gradual levels of awareness: there are levels of desire and furthermore, there are levels of self control.
More on these later...
The heuristics commonly employed to categorize something as living include:
1. Growth
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability to create entities that are similar to itself
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions.
Amongst other things, fire fits very nicely to this definition. It can grow. It consumes paper, wood, etc., and leaves carbon behind. It has motion in its flames. It can reproduce (like plants, it requires some external agents for reproduction). By moving a piece of wood close to the flames of a fire, an exact replica child fire can be created. It responds to stimuli (e.g., it extinguishes/ dies when proper living conditions are not available).
So, what's the problem with the definition? Or does fire really has life? There are two ways to proceed: One way is to change your definition and the other is to accept that fire has life. Changing the definition means adding more properties/ heuristics for the classification; for example, by requiring a "delineation" (like cell membrane) around the "body" of the living organism. Or to change the definition completely, such as, "Life is a system converting entropy to negentropy, using flow of energy." (taken from Wikipedia)
As you can see, there are more troubles with changing the definition, like delineation around what? entropy to negentropy? - What do they mean? What is body?
I am not going to negate any of these definitions. What I intend to do is to describe my idea of levels of awareness. The elementary biological definitions differentiate between plants and animals by telling us that plants have chlorophyll in them, i.e., they produce their own food. Yet, we find carnivorous plants that eat insects and some other animals. Biologists have taken another easy way out. They no longer classify things as plants and animals. The say that plant is a very vague concept and doesn't mean anything; according to them, somebody interested in understanding types of organisms should study the detailed taxonomy.
But then they get trapped again because of the fact that they fail to define what is carnivorous and what is herbivorous. Some plants are at the brink of being carnivorous and non-carnivorous. Things within the taxonomy do blur into each other. The taxonomy itself fails to delineate things in black and white.
No matter how hard you try, there is a dead end. Or rather, there is a counter example to our understanding. So, why are things so complex? What I would say is that these are ayaat or identifying signs For Men of Understanding.
Being very simple, my intuition says that there is just one property that differentiates plants from animals, namely desire. And there is another property that differentiates human beings from animals, namely self control. Just as plants gradually blur into animals, there are gradual levels of awareness: there are levels of desire and furthermore, there are levels of self control.
More on these later...
Thursday, March 17, 2005
One More To Go!
I am done with exams! Surprisingly, Concurrent Programming went worse than Real Time Systems. We had a question on writing MPD like pseudocode for a Bittorrent like P2P client on paper. I don't know what happened to me but I read the question as if we were asked to write a GetRight type download manager (of course, they just wrote the description of intended behavior and not the names of these tools). You can well imagine what I would have done with that question.
So, there is a very short brake before the last term starts. It has been extremely fast uptil now. Except for a few courses, they were all of basic nature and only now we are getting some real mature stuff.
I intend to take Semantics of Programming Languages and Distributed Systems II. I have dumped Language Based Security, mainly because of the teacher; otherwise, that course was also very good. The best thing is that all this is free! One can go and attend lectures in any course; all the material is available on the web; there is so much activity going around; it's hard even to keep up-to-date and time seems too short to absorb all of this. I just checked my list and found out that there is public defence of a PhD thesis tomorrow. It's about
Formal Development of Safe and Secure Java Card Applets.
A few days brake means re-alignment and re-planning. This term has been disastrous as I had predicted.
So, there is a very short brake before the last term starts. It has been extremely fast uptil now. Except for a few courses, they were all of basic nature and only now we are getting some real mature stuff.
I intend to take Semantics of Programming Languages and Distributed Systems II. I have dumped Language Based Security, mainly because of the teacher; otherwise, that course was also very good. The best thing is that all this is free! One can go and attend lectures in any course; all the material is available on the web; there is so much activity going around; it's hard even to keep up-to-date and time seems too short to absorb all of this. I just checked my list and found out that there is public defence of a PhD thesis tomorrow. It's about
Formal Development of Safe and Secure Java Card Applets.
A few days brake means re-alignment and re-planning. This term has been disastrous as I had predicted.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Exams!
It's snowing like cats and dogs, or buses and trams, or whatever one has to say when it's snowing a lot. It's interesting that sometimes we just want to convey our meaning with least interest in the words we choose and some other times, it's just the beauty of the words that we want to share. Consider, an excerpt from Faiz' poetry:
وہ لوگ بہت خوش قسمت تھے جو عشق کو کام سمجھتے تھے
یا کام سے عاشقی کرتے تھے،
ہم جیتے جی مصروف رھے، کچھ عشق کیا، کچھ کام کیا۔
کام عشق کے آڑے آتا رہا اور عشق کام سے الجھتا رہا۔
پھر آخر تنگ آ کر ہم نے، دونوں کو ادھورا چھوڑ دیا۔
See, what a beautiful combination of both the worlds!
So, I was talking about the weather. After a few days' fluctuation between -3 and +1, the temperature is back to -5 today and I had thought that it's over! I have seen -13 so far and I hope that it doesn't go back to that point.
And the words "so far" remind me of the temporal combinator Sofar in Luke. Actually, I just came back from my first exam of third term: Software Engineering Using Formal Methods and I guess that I did pretty well. Also, I received an email from Reiner Hähnle that they do have some thesis work for students. Good news, indeed!
I had been doing voluntary teaching of Formal Methods to my own class this term - real, formal lectures where students sit and listen to you when you draw diagrams and write equations on the board. I really love Mathematical Logic and the ideas - consider Sequent Calculus and Tarski's Definition of Truth, for example. I got very good feedback and some even claimed that I teach better than the course assistants, Angela and Philipp.
Next is Concurrent Programming and then Parallel and Distributed Real Time Systems. I know that I won't be able to do that good in the Real Time Systems course - it was a very tough course dealing with Mathematical Analysis of Scheduling Algorithms. I am confident about Concurrent Programming but the graded assignments of Real Time Systems have been a killer. There were two assignments of 7 questions each and for answering each one you needed to read research articles and papers with theorems and proofs regarding schedulability. Now, one can manage that as well if that is a single point agenda but we had other courses in parallel. Still, if I manage to get a 5 in that one as well, it would be a record, I guess.
وہ لوگ بہت خوش قسمت تھے جو عشق کو کام سمجھتے تھے
یا کام سے عاشقی کرتے تھے،
ہم جیتے جی مصروف رھے، کچھ عشق کیا، کچھ کام کیا۔
کام عشق کے آڑے آتا رہا اور عشق کام سے الجھتا رہا۔
پھر آخر تنگ آ کر ہم نے، دونوں کو ادھورا چھوڑ دیا۔
See, what a beautiful combination of both the worlds!
So, I was talking about the weather. After a few days' fluctuation between -3 and +1, the temperature is back to -5 today and I had thought that it's over! I have seen -13 so far and I hope that it doesn't go back to that point.
And the words "so far" remind me of the temporal combinator Sofar in Luke. Actually, I just came back from my first exam of third term: Software Engineering Using Formal Methods and I guess that I did pretty well. Also, I received an email from Reiner Hähnle that they do have some thesis work for students. Good news, indeed!
I had been doing voluntary teaching of Formal Methods to my own class this term - real, formal lectures where students sit and listen to you when you draw diagrams and write equations on the board. I really love Mathematical Logic and the ideas - consider Sequent Calculus and Tarski's Definition of Truth, for example. I got very good feedback and some even claimed that I teach better than the course assistants, Angela and Philipp.
Next is Concurrent Programming and then Parallel and Distributed Real Time Systems. I know that I won't be able to do that good in the Real Time Systems course - it was a very tough course dealing with Mathematical Analysis of Scheduling Algorithms. I am confident about Concurrent Programming but the graded assignments of Real Time Systems have been a killer. There were two assignments of 7 questions each and for answering each one you needed to read research articles and papers with theorems and proofs regarding schedulability. Now, one can manage that as well if that is a single point agenda but we had other courses in parallel. Still, if I manage to get a 5 in that one as well, it would be a record, I guess.
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