Whiz Kid Woes

Faisal's Personal Blog

Friday, August 05, 2005

Galois Fields

I'm writing a research (re-research actually!) paper on AES: Using Rijndael. Cryptography has always been one of my passions and our teacher was kind enough to allow me to change my paper topic from DIP. I'll post a link to the research paper when I'm done with it. I don't believe I'll be able to finish on time for SCONEST 2005.

Revenge of the Sith

Star Wars III is one the best movies I've seen this year. Like Star Trek, the best thing about the movie is the exquisite nature and the solidty of the characters. One of the best thing about the movie was the entire movie plot, it was just awesome! The movie has beaten LOTR 3: Return Of the King in terms of total business. Master Yoda, Windu, Obiwan were great throughout the movie but the most impressive performance was by the young Skywalker. He was young and was easily manipulated to join the Dark Side but the entire idea there was quite profound.

There is a very interesting phenomenon which most of us don't know about. We see only one side of the moon all the time! Although both the planet and the moon are rotating and revolving, but we see only one side of the moon all the time. It was hoped that the other side of the moon will have more deeper craters but the satellite pictures reveal that the back side of the moon is actually flat (flatter than the side we see, with craters), it is like a huge dish-antenna of some extremely complex formation.

The point I wish to make here is that unless one studies all aspects of a subject, one cannot truly appreciate the better side (assuming neither is bad). As good/bad can only be a point of view; no matter much one studies, one's judgements will always be subject to the life experiences and beliefs. I had a small chat with Joel today about this, although he did not share his point of view but he asked me if there were any absolutes and I had to disagree, given my limited wisdom. It seems ironic to me when they say wisdom comes with age and experience; it is correct to a certain extent, but that wisdom could be biased to so many things.

To admit ignorance is to exhibit wisdom. – Ashley Montagu

Monday, August 01, 2005

NED Newsletter 2005

Faraz Naseem (Third year, Electronics Dept.) is the Chief Editor of the newsletter publication. I contributed some news pieces and did some final design touches.


I hate Fedora!

This is the 6th time Fedora's installation has failed on me! My nice friend Muhammad Yahya downloaded the FC4 DVD for me and I was really excited to get FC4 up and running on my spare laptop! After going through the the entire tedious setup procedure, it just terminates abnormally! Bye bye Fedora! I'm installing Slackware on my spare machine!