Email obfuscation is broken

An year and a half back, I was working on some project where I had to parse students' and professors' homepages to mine interesting information from them.
One common underlying pattern I found on their pages, from new grad students' to emeritus professors', was the method of obfuscation of their email ids.
Though they were in the right track on preventing spam bots from harvesting emails and spamming them, the actual way they did it was as insecure as protecting a house by fastening windows but leaving the door wide open. One should remember that people who write spam bots are not foolish. They earn lots of money from collecting emails and selling them to people who do the actual spamming. These trivial ways won't stop them by any means.

There are three popular methods used to obfuscate, each progressively difficult for the spam bot:
1) Just replacing the '@' and '.' characters, like email_id AT server DOT edu.
2) Encoding semantics, like "first 7 characters of last name" AT server DOT edu.
3) Placing the image of the email id.

Any good spam bot can easily extract the correct email id if methods (1) or (2) are used. It just has to have a list of common patterns that people use, and make some string substitution and educated guesses.
Method (3) is extremely secure, but unfortunately it is like a fastened window, where the open door is the URL of the webpage itself.
Typically the students' or professors' pages have URLs with a definite pattern, like cs.university.edu/~emailid or people.college.edu/emailid or emailid.school.college.edu. As you can see, almost all the URLs have email id encoded in them, after all this is how the page itself was created automatically.
From the URL, it is easy to guess the email id. For example, in the third example, the email would be either emailid@college.edu or emailid@school.college.edu.

So, what is the way out? The answer is there is no way out until the schools themselves change the URL naming scheme of the pages they assign to their staff and students.
Till then, the best way is to put the image of the email id and, in addition, route the emails via Gmail, hoping that Gmail will block the spams automatically.

Orinoco

Yesterday somebody from Microsoft gave a talk on a yet-to-be released product, which was codenamed 'Orinoco'.
The name immediately caught my attention, he explained that Orinoco is the longest river in the world that doesn't have a dam built on it. He further explained how their project got this apt name. Theirs is a database product that processes 'streaming' events, that is, certain events like web-page visits or stock numbers come to their servers in a continuous flow (like the river), but instead of storing all the values (the dam) and then processing them, they efficiently compute and return necessary results instantaneously to whoever requests it.
I thought that it is definitely a neat name, coming from a company that names its products as 'Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage Professional Edition Service Pack 2' (or even oxymoronic 'Microsoft Works', as the popular joke goes).

But toward the end of the talk, he revealed that the name of this product would be changed to 'Streamlight' in keeping with Microsoft's newer Web 2.0 naming schemes such as 'Livemesh', 'Silverlight' and 'Autocollage'. I feel these names are still better than the ones Linux community comes up with, which is either recursive acronyms or dotted version number schemes.

PS-1: I found the recursive acronyms to be cool when I first heard about them 7 years back. But now I am just fed up that people cannot come up with creative new names.
PS-2: Microsoft has named one of its products as XNA, which stands for 'XNA's Not Acronymed'.

Two weeks' notice

Today I attended a class by the vice president of global talent acquisition on improving interview skills. I was happy that I already knew most of what he talked about.
Sometimes, to validate yourself that you really know a thing requires to sit on classes that teach those things.
Anyways, so he was giving examples on questions not to be asked in an interview. You know, the questions that pertain to age, gender, family, health, orientation, etc.. In one example, he quoted a line from the movie 'Two weeks' notice' starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock, where Hugh, in one of his interviews, mistakes the girth of a fat lady to pregnancy and blurts "congrats for the baby". The interviewee becomes agitated, and Sandra gets worried that this may lead to a lawsuit. Hilarious scene, he says.
So, he was giving this as an example, and I saw many people in the audience were nodding. Hmm, how come I have never seen this movie, I wonder.
And guess what, by sheer coincidence, in my dinner, after randomly switching channels, I land up on one that airs this very movie and watch the exact scene while having my dinner!
Whats the probability of this happening?
1/8,000,000 I would say.

Disney's Up -- a pot pourri of cliches

I wanted to watch this movie for a long time now. The date it was supposed to be released, 29th May, had got ingrained into my brain, and when I got up yesterday, the first thing I did was to bing for (I know, Microsoft's new search engine will never become a verb like "google", after all, "bing" stands for "but it's not google!") nearby theaters that ran this movie in 3D.
It was Disney's first movie to be made for 3D viewing, and the technology to generate 3D frames was claimed to be state-of-the-art, aimed at reducing the headache normally experienced while watching such movies.
Sure enough, my friend and I found the experience very smooth, often forgetting that we wore 3D glasses (we had the same comfortable feeling with Intel's new 3D technology used in the movie Monsters Vs Aliens). The difference was that Disney's glasses were uncolored and plain, just like ordinary glasses. I always wondered why a 3D projection (or a glass) should be in red and blue, and Disney has shown that it is not always necessary. Now the next step would be to eliminate the need to wear glasses, making the theater screen itself like a giant polarizing glass. After all, that was how the transition from bioscope to a projected screen was.

Pixar's movies are always screened along with a very short animated film. For Ratatouille it was Lifted, Wall-E, it was Presto, and for Up, it is Partly Cloudy. I should say that I was not at all impressed with this lastest short film. The other two were funny and witty, but this was neither. The characters (the clouds) were just cute and fluffy, nothing amazing happened in the film.

Coming to the main movie, I had huge expectations for it. As a hardcore Pixar fan, I was always blown away after watching their movies. Wall-E and Finding Nemo were just classics, and after reading raving reviews comparing Up with those, I had no doubt that I was going to witness something to the effect that of surpassing the unveiling of iPhone.
But no, that was not to be.

The movie starts off good, with a story of a couple, how they are happy with each other even though visibly they are far from being rich. Just like Wall-E had no dialogs in its first half hour, here there is a 15-minute "life sequence" involving only background music. The director, Pete Docter, shows once again that a picture is enough to express thousand dialogs. Nice work, but this form of story telling is not new; Charlie Chaplin was a master in this art, and Wall-E itself was a tribute to his masterpiece City Lights (the utmost love is understood by the woman only later, when the man seems to have gone away).

Then come the cliches. Much of the dialogs are predictable ("South America is just like America... but just a little south") and the events can be easily guessed. Not only can they be guessed, but many of them you would already have seen in other movies (one of the scenes was ditto of a comic scene from the Hindi movie Phir Hera Pheri). The story drags, and suddenly one realizes that there was nothing in the movie that got enhanced by the 3D. In fact, the screen was brighter and more colorful without the glasses on. But still, one should watch it in 3D just to experience a new technology.

One thing that was surprising was how the director managed to include blood, death and mis-carriage in a children's movie, in such a way that the children wouldn't notice.
As in Pixar's other movies, each character is a bundle of emotions. They make mistakes, they fail, they learn, and are faced with problems where they have to take hard decisions. They may not be believable, but they stay with you even long after the movie has ended.

Watch this short animation film called La Maison en Petits Cubes which was last year's Oscar winner, before you go for Up, and then decide for yourself if Pixar's new offering is to be called a classic.

Madison Student Optimizes Physics

N Orchard Street's greatest physicist, Dr Dchongesh, today accomplished an extraordinary thing that will surely change the way we think of the world (and of him).

Dchongesh after pwning Einstein's formula.

Dchongesh, an ardent fan of Djokovich and Deborah Djosheph, today proved that Einstein's mass-energy relation is sub-optimal. When our staff reporter asked him about his latest finding, he replied "When I first saw the equation E=mc², I was like, 'Dude, there has got to be a more efficient equation for this. Everybody know that quadratic running time won't scale for large c's. I then worked all night, constantly referring to my borrowed copy of 'Introduction to Algorithms', and finally derived my optimized equation E=mc*log(c) that would perform 30% better in parallel processors".
But when our unconvinced reporter asked if he could just optimize nature's laws just like that, he replied "Dude, who is taking CS587-Algorithms course, you or me?".

Meanwhile, Nature is unsure how to react to this sudden change in physical laws. But people in 45 N Orchard St are positive that the new optimized physics can help in reducing global warming, controlling weather, increasing TAships, getting dates, and decreasing the frequency of nature calls that they are experiencing now.

Irrational Interviewers

Sometimes knowing too much might be disadvantageous. This always seem to happen to me during interviews, where I almost always have heard of the problem and know the solution. Most of the times I would have solved the problem myself, but then, I cannot give a proof of that to the interviewer.
And most of the interviewers come prepared with only a bunch of questions, and when I tell them that I already know the solution, they are at a loss of what to do, and most of the times ask me to proceed with the solution I know (hoping that I will give a sub-optimal/inefficient solution, and they can take pleasure out of saying "is there a better way of doing this?").

This act of honesty from my part is rarely appreciated. Most of the times it is taken negatively, and I suppose in the feedback they would write "he already knew the solution, and only hence he could solve it" or "even though he knew the solution, his code contained a bug" etc.

In my very first job interview, I was asked the famous puzzle where one person always lies and the other always speak truth, and I politely let them know that I already knew the puzzle (but I dint tell them that I knew it since I was in 7th grade!). Two other interviewers laughed at the interviewer who asked the question, making him look like a village idiot! I don't know why they did this, but this made that interviewer a bit animus towards me from there on. Anyways, I was offered the job next day.

Again this happened to me last month also, and to make it worse, the interviewer did not come prepared with back-up questions (he asked the same question to my friends later in the day, and who, thanks to me, got it right). He then mailed me later, saying I was not technically qualified! If already knowing an answer makes one technically unqualified, then why do we even have exams!

One doesn't even get brownie points for being honest.

Needless to say, it again happened on an onsite interview last week. But this time, I did not remember the solution to the question asked, but I did remember that I had solved the problem before. There I made some mistakes while re-solving the problem (maybe because somehow I felt bored on tackling a tamed beast). Because of these small mistakes, the interviewer asked me to stop there and deviated to talk about, among other things, what I think of their competitor (as usual, I gave him my honest opinion, which immediately made him stamp a "unfit for this project" seal on my resume).

Not surprisingly, it happened yet again two days after the above incident, and here too, I cleanly told them that I already knew the question. This interviewer was well prepared. He had come with three backup questions.
And I knew all them before.

But this time, I was offered the job, and that too the very next day.

As an interviewer, I once interviewed an undergrad who knew the answers to all my questions (even the backups). The questions were very difficult (one that I remember asking is: to compute the Nth Fibonacci number in only log(N) steps), and I was impressed that he knew the solutions for these. This means that he has made an effort to learn more and has tackled hard problems. Doesn't matter if he already knew the answer, the questions were so hard and rare that only a true connoisseur of algorithmic problems would know these. I went one step further and made the problems even harder (like for the above problem, I modified it to find Nth number in a generalized linear recurrence in log(N) steps), and was satisfied that he could solve those even though he hadn't heard of these versions before.
I mentioned this in the 'candidate feedback', and after two days, got a mail from company's Vice President saying "if a candidate already knows an answer, ask a different question!", and the candidate was put on hold for further interviews.
I don't know what happened to him, sad that he was honest, and my bad that I tried to see how deep he understood that problem, instead of moving over to a new one.

Note: the labels for this post are not for stuffing keywords and increasing my pagerank. Those are the companies that interviewed me (or I have taken interviews for them) that are mentioned in this post. They are arranged in random order purposely.

Papers are People Too

This is the poster for a hypothetical movie called "Papers Are People Too"^* that I made for the Earth Day and sent to my friends to make them cautious about the overuse of paper generating machines (printers and photocopiers).
I also sent them a snippet of the story for the hypothetical movie. The response was pleasantly positive, they claim to have decreased the number of printouts they take, and it seems to have given them happiness also.
I am pasting the snippet below:

Papers Are People Too
The plot:
"Our hero GeeBee studies in a college where he is given unlimited supply of paper and free printouts.
So should he care whether all the 100 pages he is just going to print will be read by him later?
Should he strain his eyes to read a PDF instead of just hitting <Ctrl + P>?
He knows very well that decreasing the font size and removing images would print the html content in fewer pages, but is it worth all the hassle?
Why bother placing unwanted papers in the recycling tub when he can just throw them away with kitchen trash?"

The cast: You and me.
Releasing on the Earth Day next month.

One thing that I silently slipped in, in the poster, is the fact that we don't bother to give a name to a tree, even if we have been brought up seeing it in our yard all the years, but we tend to give a name to every other pet that we come across.
This was at the back of my mind, and that is the reason for the lines at the bottom of the poster (you may have to scroll to see them).

^* The title inspired from the blog Papayas are People Too.

The case of self-referring paper

I was just reading a technical paper for my mid-term exam. The image in the right is of the "References" section of that paper. The underlined sentence states that the papers numbered 4, 9 and 14 in the References section are not cited. But isn't this line itself a citation of these papers, making the statement contradict itself? Moreover, what if one of those referred papers is the main paper itself? The statement would mean that this paper doesn't refer itself, but saying so, it has referred itself!
Furthermore, if I write a paper having a list of all the papers that do not refer themselves, should I include this very paper in the list?
I should, because if I don't, then it doesn't refer itself, hence becomes eligible for entry.
But if I do, then I have referred it in itself. Hence I should remove it now... But then I can't because... so on.
Where is the paradox?

Local boy to change his name after shelving PhD plans

From our reporter in Madison, WI -
"I always dreamed of completing my PhD", reflects Sabareeshh, an ardent Himeshh Reshammiya fan and a long-term resident of 45 N Orchard Street. In his continued statement, he further revealed that he also always dreamed of people addressing him as "Doctor Sabareeshh", and plans to file a request with the Office of Name Changes to enable him achieve his aforementioned ambition since he no longer has hopes of completing his PhD and becoming eligible to be called with the aforementioned name. But is it a normal thing to do?

"Why not? If people can have names like 'Major Soundarrajann', 'Padmashrii Universal Hero Kamal Hassann' and 'Slave Mistress Vidhhya', whats wrong with changing my name to 'Doctor Sabareeshh'?", he logically argued his proposition before breaking away to check out the ladies section in Walmart.

Meanwhile another local boy DMaheshh, a fierce fan of both Djokovic and Himeshh, rechristened himself as Chongeshh to match with his Chinese girlfriend Chong, who unknowingly in parallel changed her name to Abhitagujalambal taking it to be a cool Indian name. When we last heard, he was in a dilemma on whether to change his name to Abhitagujalesh to match again or to change his girlfriend.

As per a latest update, an application by the Office of Name Changes to change its own name was rejected by the same office, as it would cause infinite recursion of name changes leading to a stack overflow condition.

Shiver me timbers

Noon in Madison, Midnight in ChennaiIt is inhumanely cold here in Madison. I began to appreciate the etymology of the phrases like "cold as hell" and "hell freezes over" only after experiencing the cold-blooded winter first-hand. My friend gave an interesting explanation that in our cultures we associate hell with a very hot place as we seldom encounter such fiendishly cold climate and are more accustomed to the extreme hot conditions.

After living in hot and humid Chennai for more than 18 years, I initially got cold feet on coming to Madison. But nevertheless I decided on coming because the university here is one of the best in the world, even though it had cold shouldered me two years back. Thankfully, the transition to such a stone cold place was very smooth with the help of three warm-hearted people: Siva, who gifted me all his winter wear starting from the woolen cap to the snow boots, Piramanayagam, who graciously hosted me in his place for more than two weeks, and the doctors at the University Health Clinic who made it mandatory for all students to take a flu-shot (injection for preventing cold and cough) without which we would have suffered from all sorts of diseases due to climate changes.

The picture to the right shows the temperatures of the cities when it was noon in Madison and midnight in Chennai. Madison is creeping cold by more than 40 degrees even during the coldest part of the day in Chennai. The symmetry in the date-time (21/12 - 12 pm) and the temperatures (-23° and 23°) is very striking. Also notice that the temperature is sub-zero in both F and C scales, and being able to endure extreme temperatures from +45° to -25° celcius give me more confidence in reacting to any cold calls from Mother Nature.