Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

Dr. Eric Ackerman, director of MS program at NSU was able to capture some amazing images of total lunar eclipse today. Check out the photos here especially the ones with the ray of green light; this is what he had to say about it.

"You can see a couple of images where I caught the momentary ray of green light from the Southern pole of the moon which is extremely difficulty to catch.  I was shooting at 6 frames per second during this exact time and the images with the rays of green light were caught in a couple of frames out of 300 images taken"

Great work doc!

Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit.
Constant practice devoted to one subject often outdoes both intelligence and skill.

So after grueling 18 months, I've just graduated with degree of Masters in Computer Science from Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southestern University.

I've taken the following courses taught by these fine individuals; have learned a lot and can't thank them enough for their time and dedication.

CISC 0670 - Artificial Intelligence - Dr. James Cannady
CISC 0680 - Software Engineering - Frank Mitropoulos, Ph.D.
CISC 0647 - Advanced Computer Architecture- Dr. Jerry A. Smith
CISC 0685 - Human-Computer Interaction - Dr. Maxine S. Cohen
CISC 0630 - Compiler Design Theory- Dr. Amon Seagull
CISC 0660 - Database Management Systems Dr. Junping Sun - Compiler Design Theory
CISC 0615 - Design & Anal. of Algorithm - Dr. Jerry Smith -
CISC 0620 - Modeling And Simulation - Dr. Jeffrey D Kane
CISC 0640 - Operating Systems - Dr. Greg Simco
CISC 0681 - Computer Graphics - Dr. Michael Laszlo
CISC 0650 - Computer Networks - Dr. Wei Li
CISC 0610 - Programming Languages - Frank J. Mitropoulos, Ph.D.

Now I'm applying for doctoral studies in Dept. of Computer Science from University of Idaho as well as GSCIS Nova. I'll be starting PhD in Jan 2008 إن شاء الله

Many thanks for my family and friends for their support during this time. Thanks for my wife for the surpirse party, my parents for the call and my in-laws and Ken Nign for the gift card to the lovely place that is Borders where you can read books and drink coffee, my two favourite things to do.

And here is Zakariya with his glasses :)

For more, please visit www.ZakariyaMasood.com

Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers.

Adnan, Lorry & Zakariya Masood

Thanks to my director, Andrea Kim, who got me this plant as a holiday gift.



I decided to name it Euler's plant after Euler's identity and now counting how many people who walk into my cubicle can answer what underroot -1 is, so far the count hasn't been too great.



This is where it currently sits on my desk, right next to Visual Studio and Team System minions.

Possibly the best animation I've ever seen.

"Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson "

Passion is the element in which we live; without it, we hardly vegetate."
-Lord Byron
 

Why, why, why! Because it's all logic and reason now. Science, progress, laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me.

-Baron Munchausen

Eid Greetings

If it walks like a duck, talks [sic] like a duck, it must be a duck.

-Neal Hardesty on Duck typing

Do they sell food at grocery store?

-Tim Oliver

“It’s my pet peeve but why do people get all hyped up when Google does something? Code search for example, Koders has been doing it all along and much better!”

-Kim Greenlee

“I’m in coma”

-Richard Trinh when mentioned that Tim is in band-aid and Jeff is in panic mode for fixes.

So the story goes as Se Choi, one of our distinguished network engineers among the bunch of very smart guys I work with, and some other friends were sitting together at a 'Thank You' lunch from our director couple of weeks ago. The discussion went from Tom Hanks to cryptograms and then to Einstein and Anna McGrail’s daughter Lieserl. Se suddenly proposed an idea for a new movie which should better be described in his own words (almost).

“So, the movie would be like, Einstein actually found a more sophisticated and better explanation for the theory of relativity but for some reason, his life was in jeopardy if he releases this new set of equations immediately. Therefore, he encrypted the equations, hid them in his daughter’s diapers and put her up for adoption. Hence the quest of our modern day hero to first search for Lieserl, her adoptee parents and then search for the diapers for the special theory of relativity.”

As bizarre as it sounds, Se might have the idea of the next summer blockbuster for Hollywood,

The Einstein’s Code!
The Quest for Lieserl & Equations in the Lost Diapers.

Rest is left for your imagination. Was that the ultimate theory of unification? Or a proof that c is not a universal constant? Summer 2008 in theatres near you.

References
Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl

Dr. Altamash Kamal’s excellent photography; subjects vary from machar colony to TCF Schools, street vendors to celebrities like Kowasjee and Peelu.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/altamash/

Quote of the day

"I wasn't trying to break anything, I was just exploring!"
-Tim Oliver

Today on Slashdot Netflix Sues Blockbuster for Patent Infringement

Like I said about two years ago. But what about the Netflix patent?

Told you so, told you so.

In lue of passing the PCI audit, the IT folks were awarded a team binding event, which turned out to be Dromo Racing on Thursday night. It was very much fun! we had three races and even though Bill Rodgers and Scott Buckwalter kept taking the lead, I had good lap times and I get to beat Se Choi.

I didn't like f(x)—that looked to me like f times x. I also didn't like dy/dx—you have a tendency to cancel the d's—so I made a different sign, something like an & sign. For logarithms it was a big L extended to the right, with the thing you take the log of inside, and so on.
-From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard P. Feynman

“I saw pirates of the Caribbean and pulse one after another and had nightmare that pirates are coming through Wi-Fi channels and attacking. I got both movies mixed up in my dream.”
-Andrea Kim

 “Just hard code it into stored procedures!”
-Vince Chan

“Ruby is spiftecular[sic], I tell you”
-Neal Hardesty

“Why don’t we do it like,
if <retailername>
{
      Fee = 3.35
}
-Tim Oliver

She has just finished reading the Algorithms CLRS and now eyeing Eric Sink's Business of Software. A very well read cat shall I say.

"I want a baby. I want a baby which can pass the Turing Test so they believe it's real!"

-Jeff Bergman contemplating to get a baby shower for himself

It's like an outlook with an MBA.
-From Linkedin website about LinkedIn Toolbar

So, LinkedIn is like myspace for Dilbert crowd, huh?
-Jeremy Myers

Yes, the Ping method in this API will be a two way Ping; Ping Request and then Ping Commit.
-David Gullett

I hit over 500m with my driver today, threw ball on the other side of the fence. Oh wait, ball might have actually come to our parking lot, did you see it?
-Jeff Bergman bragging his golf skills

Well, if Adnan is not going, I'll be the only one who doesn't know how to play golf!
-Joon-Shim Chua

There is one issues [sic] remaining.
-Antony Chhan

Poison cupcakes – mmmm :)
-Joanne Siegel

I did get a chance to read The Da Vinci Code, in early 2004, long before the hype built up. Since I've also read Dan Brown's lesser known books Angels & Demons, Digital Fortress and Deception Point and knowing his writing style in prospect, I don't think movie did much of justice. It might have had some interesting artifact displays and flashbacks but yet the movie failed to deliver what made Da Vinci Code a definite page turner. I still hold that Angels and Demons is a much more interesting and well woven than Da Vinci Code but again, whatever invokes the most controversy gets to be the best seller.

During my European backpacking tour in 2003 (France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium), I took some pictures around the Louvre Museum which is shown and much discussed in the book and the movie. Especially the symmetrical pyramids. Not knowing one day they will be part of a best selling book and movie.





 


Now also, compare the cover of ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook with the picture below. Do you notice some similarity?

deeda e tar ka ab to akhgar ek sa alam rehta hay
nala e shab say ahe sehar tak, ahe sehar say agay bhee...

My grandmother, Mehmuda Begum, passed away this morning, 3/14/2006 - 14 Safar, 1427

inna lillah wa inna 'ilayhi raji'un
to Allah We belong, and to him We will return'

She was a wonderful woman; a great mother and even a greater grand mother. She migrated with her husband from India in 1947 and raised her 5 daughters, my aunts and my mother with immense struggle and hardships in a newly founded country.  Naani Jan,  you'll be very much missed.