World Cup T20 14 Final Post Mortem

I am also one of the millions of ardent fans of Indian Men's cricket. And yes it was very disappointing to see India lose the finals. It's not like the team crumbed under pressure (remember WC 2003 Final); but the team was out-witted by some perfect execution of skills by the hungry Sri Lankan side. It doesnt mean that we should question the hunger of the Indian side, I didnt mean that.

Since last 24 hours I have seen a lot of posts, jokes, memes targeting a single player Yuvraj for the team's loss. I understand that the fans get emotional about cricket in our country but I wanted to shed some light on the actual statistics.

Last 4 overs analysis.

Kohli 7 in 8b (S/r 87.50)

Yuvraj 4 in 9b (S/r 44.44)

Dhoni 4 in 7b (S/r 57.14)

Ext 4

True it was disappointing and frustrating to see the Indian team getting strangled; but we should not target Yuvraj. Sri Lankans executed their plans perfectly. Give credit to them.

Also, one other observation is - Sri Lankans added one more left hander to their squad, strengthening their batting and also to mitigate the impact of mishra and jadeja in the game. [both turn the ball into the left-handers making it easy to slog]. I think we missed a trick in our bowling combination. But all credit should go to the Sri Lankan think-tank, again. Stop taking out the frustration on Indian players. 

This team can only spiral upwards. In the form of Kohli we seem to have a strong candidate for heir-apparent of Dhoni. At the same time Rohit sharma also seems to be gaining the confidence to perform consistently at the international level under the shadow of Kohli's performances. These are encouraging signs for Indian cricket. I get a feeling that this defeat will make the Indian team and Yuvraj singh hungrier and give them one more reason to prove the critics wrong at the WC 2015. Fingers crossed!, as always an optimistic Indian cricket fan.

Finding head word in a Noun Phrase

Recently I came across this problem of finding head words in phrases. This problem assumes significance in a coreference resolution setup. (More on coreference resolution in another post). I was trying to do a simple string match on two phrases after stripping each of the phrases off closed-class words (or stopwords) and punctuation marks. Upon analyzing the results I realized that a simple string match may not solve the problem.

For example: matching "a glass bowl" and "glass of milk"

If we follow the heuristic of matching them after stripping them off stopwords and punctuation marks, we would end up saying that both the phrases are a match. (as there is a string match of "glass").

That is when I realized the need for identifying the entity being talked about in a phrase. The head words for the 2 phrases listed above are "bowl" and "milk" respectively.

It turns out that in NLP literature, it is called as the head word. Prof. Michael Collins, around 1999², seems to have come up with some heuristics (rules based on syntax tree path etc..,) to identify these head words. Upon further research, it seems to me that this is the state of the art and the heuristics are implemented in the stanford CoreNLP suite¹. 

Here is a sample code below based on Stanford CoreNLP to identify head words for NounPhrases³:

1:  public static void dfs(Tree node, Tree parent, HeadFinder headFinder) {  
2:    if (node == null || node.isLeaf()) {  
3:     return;  
4:    }  
5:    if(node.value().equals("NP") ) {  
6:     System.out.println(" Noun Phrase is ");  
7:     List<Tree> leaves = node.getLeaves();  
8:     for(Tree leaf : leaves) {  
9:      System.out.print(leaf.toString()+" ");  
10:    }  
11:    System.out.println();  
12:    System.out.println(" Head string is ");  
13:    System.out.println(node.headTerminal(headFinder, parent));  
14:   }  
15:   for(Tree child : node.children()) {  
16:    dfs(child, node, headFinder);  
17:   }  
18: }  

References:
[1] http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml
[2] Prof Michael Collins' thesis has description about head finding rules here http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~mcollins/publications.html
[3] More details on StanfordCoreNLP HeadFinders here - http://stackoverflow.com/a/22841952/1019673

Passers-by classification

Often times we end up thinking, why is this guy wasting my time; when will this conversation get over; how can I escape his gaze, while passing by; and so on. I am pretty sure that we all have had these questions flash across in our minds at some point for one reason or the other. After taking my evening tea, this thought crossed my mind and I sat down to classify different people that one deals with on a day to day basis. 

1. Obnoxious, self-centered, gloating Prick:

I am sure everyone can quickly recall such a person in our environment. For no reason that person will talk to you about how others think how smart the person is, how successful the person has been and so on; and talk to you when you were not even considering talking to him. The person would be least interested in listening to what you have to say or want to say. Easy thing I do to deal with those persons is think of a joke, a PHD comic that I read for the morning, or a nice song and pose a smiling face while that person is yapping away :). I am not talking about the person who is excited about sharing good news with you; this is someone who has kept his/her trust in you; I am talking about someone who always does this, no matter when/where/how you meet the person.

2. I am superior to you:

This group of people have an air about themselves and when you cross their path, they simply turn their gaze away, in a dis-respectful way. I am not even talking about people who turn their gaze away out of shyness, busyness or anything; those people you can easily separate from this group. I am talking about the group who do it purposefully every single time, as if we don't belong to their so called superior world. I wonder what goes through their minds! sigh.

3. Recluse:

Not a lot to say about this lot. This is just the way they are.

4. Random Gibberish:

This lot is sometimes good to talk to; sometimes they can be a real pain in the neck. This is the kind of lot that has no agenda but talk; and so they talk gibberish. Give them any topic, they will be able to yap about that for any length of time. Even it means repeating themselves, they wont stop, until somebody stops them. This lot can be annoying almost always. But once in a while, one would always want to be involved in such a gibberish, I guess. I think this mostly happens with close-friends with mutual participation and involvement from either side. But when somebody else out of your close-friend circle is trying to engage you in such a conversation, then you are in for pain until it lasts. 

5.  Calmer group:

This group just wave and sport a nice smile and show respect to you. People in this group are a confident lot, respect other people and are the best of all the classes given here, according to me. 

Seems like the tea has lost its effect now. I got reminded of the pending research work on my desk. That is all for now. 

Finally I would like to leave you with a few thoughts of George Carlin on people.

If you would like to extend this list. Please add it in the comments.  

On Startup Engineering Courses

Of late I have seen a lot of online courses about Startup Engineering that have the agenda of helping the class-takers bootstrap their business. Also, there are a lot of philosophies about Lean-Startup, tips to run a successful startup and so on. I seem to see a pattern in all pieces of advice given in these courses and articles.

Aside all the common instructions like Start early, Fail early and so on, people tend to be dramatic about this whole idea of start-up and that they don't offer practical realistic advice.

I am starting to wonder if taking all these courses is worth taking them at all ? - Somehow I feel that we are missing the point by giving importance to these courses.

I don't know why, but these days I am beginning to say no to classes and lectures; may be the reason behind this post. 

Different ways of setting up a repo on github

Its often the case that we would have worked on different projects and never really uploaded our work to github. There are 2 different scenarios that I often found myself in. 

1. .git repo present locally that is not yet added to github 
2. code that is not yet added to github

Effectively I am going to talk about solving 1 only. I will point out a way in which scenario 2 can be reduced to scenario 1 and therefore the solution applies for both the cases. 

Scenario 1: .git repo present locally

Firstly we need the repo to have a github remote. To list the remote destinations for a git repo,

$> git remote -v

[Remember to type this command from within the git repo directory - as git command looks up .git folder in the current directory for its operations]

Secondly, create and initialize an empty repo in github and get the Clone URL for the repo. Here I will talk only about HTTP clone URL, for simplicity. [Note that it is actually https:// URL]

Thirdly, do the following:

$> git remote add <remote name> HTTP clone URL

$> git push <remote name> master  #for pushing master branch on to the remote

We are all set. We have uploaded our git repo onto github. 

Scenario 2: code (without local git repo) that is not yet added to github

To create a git repo locally, we can do the following:

$> git init

$> git add required files

$> git commit -m"sample message"

Now, we have reduced scenario 2 to scenario 1 and we will be able to upload our code to github.

References:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10573957/how-to-push-from-my-local-repository-to-my-github-repository
http://caiustheory.com/adding-a-remote-to-existing-git-repo

Formalism in Network Security and a note on WEP's limitations

Initially I had not chosen Network Security as one of my courses; but I had to pick this course because the other course turned out to be uninteresting, to say the least. There I was in the Network Security class and I had to deal with different perspectives given by people about how difficult the course can be and how difficult it is to follow the instructor's lectures.

I thoroughly enjoyed this course and the lectures turned out to be really interesting; true that it was different from the courses instructed in a conventional way - All lectures involved a lot of discussion and the instructor took great care in explaining the required aspects within the scope of the course, very clearly.

One of the interesting topics I liked to read in this course was the Indistinguishability test introduced in formalizing the definition of security. It draws parallel from the Turing test and talks about distinguishability between truly Random world and the real world. The idea behing Shannon's perfect secrecy (One-Time-Pad), transitivity of Indistinguishability, building an Attacker for a given system (Proof by contra-positive argument), Rabin Miller primality test (Randomized algorithms - Monte-carlo algorithm for Primality test), Fermat's little theorem, Modular arithmetic ... the course when I look back looks very impressive and I will highly recommend this course for anyone, just to listen to the instructors lectures. [To give credit and to avoid confusion for those who would read it at a later point of time - the instructor during Spring 13 was Prof. Rob Johnson]

All the topics that I listed in the previous paragraph was merely the first section of the course; the second section was when the course became even more interesting with Protocols, PKI, DNSSEC, Secure-BGP, SSL, XSS, XSRF, HTML 5 POST message, Same Origin Policy - and the icing on the cake was the final exam. It was a short paper and it required us to apply all that we learnt during the semester, aptly, to devise best-possible solutions in a practical scenario. Not to forget the cool project that we got to work on - building an apache module that would add CSP1.1 script-nonce support as part of apache itself. source

And now I move on to the second part of the post:

WEP : I have come across many house-hold routers making use of WEP, still. There is even a documented demo about how aircrack-ng can be used to break a network using WEP.

For those interested in theory behind how WEP is insecure, I referenced a post written here

- Well written, brief and to the point.

The bottom line is we should never configure WEP in our wireless router setup. And I think by default all the routers are using WPA or WPA2 by default to secure the wireless network. I wanted to throw a word of caution about WEP! - RIP to WEP!

GT

One more about Love!!!

What is Love ? 

One moment you tell me to stay strong

One moment you tell me to yield

One moment you tell me to be weak

What exactly is Love, God!

One moment it feels everything is together

One moment seems everything is torn apart

One moment all the memories come back and haunt you

Where exactly is Love, God!

One moment I decide to move on

One moment I feel all alone

One moment I feel the desire to get back

Why is it so confusing, God!

One moment I believe that I can

One moment I feel that I wouldn't 

One moment I think that I shouldn't 

What do I do, God!

After all the questions, I persist

Only to realize that all the persistence 

Is only making me weaker, by the day

Wishing I have shoulders to lean on! 

Aargh! Not again, God!

So many people have written so many times about Love, but yet it is so important to being Human, that people keep writing about it.

This was written in 10 minutes. It is short and sweet, I think; not a kind of work that will make people ponder over the content, but that which people will love to read at times, for its simplicity.

GT