The Roger Federer phenomena

Roger Federer is on his way to the pantheon of greats. He is scaling heights at a never heard before pace. This Swiss poses the ultimate capacity limits in question. Almost 5 seasons without a loss, which is hitherto unheard of! I am not quite sure, whether the quality of opponents positioned a logarithmic scale negative with respect to him. or just that his game made to belittle others by this maestro's impeccable tennis?. In any case, he is confident, brilliant and at times genius, all displayed on tennis courts. I have become a huge fan of him. Ever since Sampras retired, he put tennis to an ever green loving game, with champion performances.

"I mean, look, I guess I'm the best tennis player in the world. You can call me a genius because I'm outplaying many of my opponents, kind of maybe playing a bit different, you know, winning when I'm not playing my best. All of that maybe means a little bit of that. So it's nice," This is what stated by a 'humble' Roger Federer after winning his third Australian Open title, couple of days ago in Melbourne.

...and this is what Sampras has to say about his chances against Federer.

"I think our games are pretty similar. It would have been a great clash to see us in our prime. Roger is doing what I never did; dominate the way he is. He's lost five matches in two years, that's unheard of. But I feel like my game is too big to be dominated by someone. When my game was on, my serve was on, I felt I was tough to beat. I felt unbeatable."

Noncausal systems can be realized!

Thought this is quite interesting! And intuitive:-) (This nice cartoon is found in the old book by Lathi, Signal processing and linear systems, Berkeley Oxford publishers)

Sudoku craze is fast catching up

Much to my surprise, a newspaper regular puzzle has caught avid interest among people of all age. While crosswords remained a riddle for the selected few, that is not quite the story of sudoku. Even grandmothers and children of young age find this simple looking (but not that easy compared to word jumble riddles) puzzle fascinating. It is not that, old people never dared to solve puzzles, but the percentage is what is stunning. Well, the completed sudoku grid will form what Euler (Leonardo Euler) called the Latin square. He wouldn't have ever imagined that, three hundred years later ordinary people (not just mathematicians) would play with it so often! More often that not, you may find kids with little sudoku books, trying to put numbers in the 9x9 grid, while on trains and buses and parks. I for one, was of the early opinion that, it is kids game. But once you get a kick of it, then it is very intimidating and often addictive. Much like crosswords (and another craze in the school and college days was carom, even though that didn't call for anything intellectually stimulating as a word or number puzzle game). Some are very easy (you can fill it in a brisk), some medium level and some hard, when it comes to easiness of solving. There are also 'very hard' category, which takes some serious search and scan to get through.

Well, the popular sudoku is a 9x9 grid. It is fanciful to think of an arbitrary numbered square grid. Interestingly, I found a paper which proves that this is an NP complete problem [1]. Well, of course a 9x9 program can be easily programmed and solved by a computer. Fun of course is solving manually. The beauty of this little puzzle is that, this doesn't require any further background. For the same reason this attract interest from all ages. I heard that there are people buy multiple newspapers just to get that extra sudoku game. Not a bad market idea for newspapers yeah?

Even though Euler did discuss about Latin squares, this puzzle in the current form has a somewhat recent origin. According to Wikipedia, this game in its modern version was invented by Howard Garns, in 1979 and published by Dell Magazines under the name "Number Place". Having said that, the craze spread all over very recently, perhaps one or two years old craze! Once thing for sure. This small riddle is definitely going to simulate some minds locked far from any puzzles for long. For them this is just an appetite to stimulate some portion of their brain, left idle for long!

Well, for details, there is always Wikipedia. The name itself stands for "the digits must occur only once", when translated to English (from Japanese. It is Sujiwa Dokushin ni Kogiru)


[1]http://www-imai.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yato/data2/SIGAL87-2.pdf

Finally 802.11n Moving forward

Looks like (after the London meeting) the 802.11n proposal is moving towards Draft2.0! The draft proposal 1.10 now has got the voting approval by 100-0 (5 absentees as well). I guess this is a good sign after all those funny and at times enthralling debates and fights to get a standard up. Now that this is getting standardized, we could all wait to see the 600Mbps maximum reach (in ideal case, which is not practical anyway) wireless lan soon. It say be very soon, because the solution is almost ready to get into market. I guess you could guess who all have this draft 1.10 solution all ready and raring to the dollar stage!

Today morning I get to hear that apple is ready to give a firmware upgrade to enable 802.11n draft support. They don't give this free however. You got to pay about 2 USD to get this upgrade. Not bad yeah! Do you want to make a guess on whose 11n solution was it? Well you got it right!

Adhoc networks

A very simple illustration of adhoc network (Found it from Prof Andrea Goldsmith's presentation slides). As they say, a picture is worthier than thousand lines:-).

Adhoc networks

Art Buchwald, a phenomenal columnist

Felt a little sorry to hear that Art Buchwald passed away. The first memoirs of his humour columns which used to appear in the last page of "The Hindu" Sunday (and later on Mondays) newspaper, came calling once again. These days, those columns are hardly seen in Indian newspapers, but thanks to internet, I still get to read some of his, very occasionally though. One of the recent one, I found very interesting was in the "The Washington Post" column [1] of his, titled "When the going gets tough, the war gets going". In his own style he could sent the right message to the folks responsible. I thought that was very apt and brief to send a clear message to those proponents of war. Well, fact can be harsh and unpleasant, but the truth is that millions of innocent people pay the price for fault not of theirs. To be courages to tell the truth is wisdom in itself.


Interested by his writing, I was once curious to know his background. My intention was to find out, how and why he turned into writing humorous articles. Often, I hear that comedians and humourists and writers who write such articles have a very difficult life story to tell. In a way Buchwald too had his difficult childhood. His mother was in a mental hospital/asylum for a good part of his childhood. It is heard that he couldn't see his mother for about 30 years or so. My heart goes to a child with such a terrible childhood. Perhaps, his intense sorrows made him to cover up all those and present a brighter spot to millions of readers all over the world, through his columns.

This morning, I came across with the news [2] of his demise. His unique styled articles will be a big miss from now on. But he has made a mark through his brilliant short columns. His death wasn't entirely unexpected (I guess he was critically ill in early 2000), but the news of his sad demise had created an irreplaceable void in the literary circles.


[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/20/AR2006122001680.html
[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/washington/17cnd-buchwald.html?ei=5088&en=fab0a134179122be&ex=1326776400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1169195128-CMCmfOAbP7FKzWef9kPGtA

Gentoo installation: Gnome user cannot do su?

In Gentoo Gnome (not sure whether this is a common problem for Gnome) a user can do su (to login as root from a command line) only if they (user) are included to the wheel profile. This can be resolved (by the root) as follows (login the system as root first)

>> gpasswd -a ratna wheel

Here ratna is the user
I ahve doen the following optional profile add as well.
>>gpasswd -a ratna audio
>>gpasswd -a users

Gentoo on Sony Vaio VGN-SZ120P/B

The architecture of this duo core processor is [1]

Correct (the one which seems to work) cflags should be
a
In the make.conf set the following

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=prescott -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"

a

Processor Brand: Intel
Processor Class: Core Duo Processor
Processor Number: T2400
Processor Speed: 1.83 GHz
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Mobile Technology: Centrino
L2 Cache Size: 2 MB
System Chipset: Intel 945GM Express
Memory Speed: PC2-4200 (533MHz)
Memory Technology: DDR2-SDRAM
Installed Memory: 1 GB
Maximum Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive Capacity: 100 GB
Drive Controllers: SATA-150
Rotational Speed: 5400 RPM
Additional Drives: DL DVD+/-RW
Sound Support: Digital Audio (16-bit)
Video Chipset Brand: NVIDIA
Video Chipset: GeForce Go 7400
Installed Video Memory: 128 MB
Resolution: 1280 x 800
Display Size: 13.3 in
Display Type: Active Matrix LCD (TFT)
Port Connectors: Audio Interface: Microphone jack, Headphone jack
Graphics Interface: VGA out with Smart Display Sensor
1 VGA output
1 i.LINK connector (IEEE 1394) (4 pin)
2 USB 2.0 ports
Port replicator connector

Card Slots: Memory Stick Duo
ExpressCard/34
(1) Type II / Type I CardBus
Network Support: Ethernet (10/100 Mbps)
Wireless Protocol: 802.11a
802.11b
802.11g
Modem Speed: 56 Kbps
Input Devices: Keyboard
Touchpad
Battery Life (average): up to 6.0 Hours
Number of Batteries: 1
Installed Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Included Software: Anti-Virus and Recovery Software:
Norton Internet Security 60-Day Subscription - Norton AntiVirus, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Privacy Control, Norton AntiSpam, Norton Parental Control
TrendMicro Anti-Spyware 30-Day Trial
Sony VAIO Security Center
Sony VAIO Update software
Sony VAIO Recovery Wizard software
Sony VAIO Support Central
Supplied Applications:
Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition
Intuit Quicken 2005 New User Edition (previous Quicken users may require additional upgrade)
InterVideo WinDVD
Microsoft Works 8.5 - Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Calendar, Scheduling, Contact Management, and Database
Roxio DigitalMedia SE
Sony Original Software:
Click to DVD - DVD Creation
DVGate Plus - Digital Video
SonicStage Mastering Studio - Audio Mastering and Remastering
SonicStage - Digital Music
VAIO Media - Network File Sharing
Image Converter - PSP Transfer
In the Box: Sony VAIO SZ120P/B Notebook
Standard Lithium-ion battery (VGP-BPS2C)
AC adapter (VGP-AC19V10)
Memory Card Adapter (VGP-MCA20)
Power Cord
Height: 1.5 in
Width: 12.5 in
Depth: 9.3 in
Weight: 4.1 lbs

a
Well, the power consumption comparisons of intel core Duo processors are as follows (grabbed from intel website)

Featuring Intel® Core™ Duo processor

Processor Number Architecture Cache Clock Speed Front Side Bus Power Dual-core Intel® VT± Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology Execute Disable Bit° T2700 65 nm 2 MB L2 2.33 GHz 667 MHz 31W T2600 65 nm 2 MB L2 2.16 GHz 667 MHz 31W T2500 65 nm 2 MB L2 2 GHz 667 MHz 31W T2400 65 nm 2 MB L2 1.83 GHz 667 MHz 31W T2300 65 nm 2 MB L2 1.66 GHz 667 MHz 31W T2300E 65 nm 2 MB L2 1.66 GHz 667 MHz 31W

Featuring Intel® Core™ Duo processor Low Voltage

Processor Number Architecture Cache Clock Speed Front Side Bus Power Dual-core Intel® VT± Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology Execute Disable Bit° L2500 65 nm 2MB L2 1.83 GHz 667 MHz 15W L2400 65 nm 2MB L2 1.66 GHz 667 MHz 15W L2300 65 nm 2MB L2 1.50 GHz 667 MHz 15W

Featuring Intel® Core™ Duo processor Ultra Low Voltage

Processor Number	Architecture	Cache	Clock Speed	Front Side Bus	Power	Dual-core	Intel® VT±	Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology	Execute Disable Bit°
U2500	65 nm	2MB L2	1.20 GHz	533 MHz	9W
U2400	65 nm	2MB L2	1.06 GHz	533 MHz	9W

a
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel/83870