About Coding and Redemption

Mostly at this time of the year with Christmas and New Year around the corner, the mood in office is very laid back, people go away on vacations and there is very little work perse. But not this time. Luckily or unluckily(I am still trying to make up my mind :)), I was literally swamped with work, after sitting idle almost the whole year round (serving the notice period in previous job, followed by 2 months break, followed by ramp-up in new job, followed by the rather dramatic shutdown of our 1.0 project). After a painfully long time, I finally found myself burning the midnight oil at a stretch for one whole week. And the fruit of that labour was of course sweet :)

But this post is about something else. The PoC that I had to work on required building a command-line windows console with scrolling and navigation capabilities. I made use of pdcurses library which is a port of the ncurses library for linux environment. The curses library provides an abstraction over low level graphics related system calls. The best thing about it is that it is distributed with several examples, which can be easily tweaked to fit custom scenarios and hence needless to say, comes very handy when programming under severe time constraints.The pressure point, however, was coding in C which with it's pointer madness did a successful job of giving me countless head banging moments :).

In the process of breaking my head over background and foreground colours and screen coordinates, I inadvertently recalled the Graphics project I had worked on in college. The project implementation and execution was itself pretty smooth, however things got screwed up big time on the final day when we were supposed to present the project to external examiners.In lawn tennis terminology, this would be called an unforced error :). I forgot to place all the files on my pen drive, because of which the project failed to run in college lab. I then had to sit in lab and hand code the missing files with a vigorously throbbing heart and palpating pulses, not to mention that the glaring eyes of the examiners didn't do much to calm my nerves :).I had managed to get it up and running, but the damage was done; the examiner had made up his mind before seeing the project itself and I didn't secure good grades. But oh I passed...what a relief!!!

So in this past week, that college nightmare has come back to haunt in bits and pieces, everytime that something was not working.But the self satisfaction that came from working on this PoC was indeed nothing short of a long awaited coding redemption :).Well done girl!! (pat on the back)

Bigg Boss : The Method in the Madness

Reality shows are all the rage on TV...but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction - Steven Soderbergh

I have been regularly following the current season of the reality show Bigg Boss (the indian equivalent of the UK show Big Brother) on Colours Channel. I had also followed the last season very closely, hence it's only befitting that I dedicate a post to this subject. My interest in this show stems not from the the TRP grabbing content that's aired (it's boring and predictive enough to put you to sleep not to mention that one hour daily is an awful waste of one's precious time), but with an intention of doing an objective analysis of the show purely from the perspective of game theory (not that I know anything about it :)). But none the less, here's my take on it.

Here are some of my observations in no particular order of importance, regarding how to survive in the show

1. Entertain the audience. After all they form the voter base.
2. Acknowledge that the show is actually a game and should be played like one. No point in being swayed by emotions when everyone is busy using their brains. But then don't openly brag about being a mastermind.
3. Apply the concept of "Backward Induction" i.e first consider the moves that are the last in the game and then work backwards by picking the best moves every week.In other words, first choose the final 2-3 people you want to be in the final with, and then keeping this end in mind, nominate the appropriate people for weekly eliminations.
4. Be in the know of all house politics, no matter how insignificant. The more information you have about other contestants and their moves, the better decision you can make to advance yourself in the game.
5. Do not reveal all your cards in the beginning. Make it difficult for others to understand your game.
6. Build an influence over weaker contestants. Peer support is necessary to save your neck from the nominations for weekly eliminations.
7. Don't try to maintain a holier-than-thou image in the house.It's not only extremely boring but also artificial. BE YOURSELF. This will get you the respect not just from the audience but also from your fellow contestants.
8. If on a given week you are up for eliminations (which you will be sooner or later), entertain the audience as much as you can, and try to grab maximum camera footage. If you are not a natural entertainer, then the easiest way to get the cameras to be fixed on you is to pick a fight with some fellow contestant (best candidates for this would be the weaker candidates, nominated candidates,candidates with some negative past, candidates who have been involved in fights before etc.). THE INDIAN AUDIENCE LOVES A GOOD FIGHT.
9. Do not ever say that you are missing home or missing your family. Other contestants will only use this as an excuse to nominate you.
10. Do not try to be overly diplomatic. The audience would consider it as hypocricy.
11. Mix with everyone in the show. A common excuse contestants give for nominating someone is their lack of interaction with that person.
12. Do not shy away from participating in any dispute. Put forward your opinions strongly, but do not try to influence everyone to accept your viewpoint.
13. Even when you are cornered by everybody and everyone in the house has turned against you, do not accept defeat. It might be mistaken for an admission of guilt. AND THE INDIAN AUDIENCE DOES NOT LIKE LOSERS. And for all you know, this might be a joint strategy to chuck you out of the house.So FIGHT BACK and be at your entertaining best.
14. Do not behave like sour grapes at any point. Take everything sportingly.
15. Above all, remember that the show editors will try to stereotype you as a certain character. It's totally your call which side of your personality you want to project the most.

Hopefully, watching this show has given me the practical heads-up I need to understand the infinitely more difficult world of Game Theory :)