Some of my longer and shorter thoughts, all faithfully written in Org Mode.
Something I enjoy doing, for both time-pass and "broadening my horizons" so to speak, is reading a variety of blog posts. I source a number of them from lobste.rs and end up branching out by keeping a reading list of referred blog posts that also look interesting. Anyway. While catching up on a number of entries in my reading list, particularly those that were published in 2025 or earlier, I found…
Earlier this month I went camping in the North Cascades with my undergraduate roommates. Extremely, extremely happy with how that trip turned out – basically ~3 days of not worrying about research and resetting my brain, and it's been fairly positive for my productivity and mental health since I've gotten back. Importantly, we visited a camera store to get a tripod as part of the preparations for…
Last semester, I took Parallel Computer Architectures at UIUC. For a term project, I (with the help of smart friends ) set out to investigate exactly how much scheduling decisions mattered in the Linux Scheduler, specifically as it related to picking between different cores available in a CPU (or multiple sockets). Background The classical advice goes that you prefer to keep processes on the same…
In Spring 2024, I took ECE 513 . To this day, I consider it the hardest class I've ever taken, and also the most rewarding in many ways. I'd always wanted to take a hard math class, and somewhat romanticized the notion of agonizing over a difficult problem set. Rest assured, I no longer romanticize math classes as such, and am indebted to the (very) smart classmates that endured many nights of me…
TL;DR I'm a fan! It's light, it's got a nice screen, it's got good battery life, and it reads EPUBs natively. More details below, in case the hyper-descriptive summary above wasn't enough for you. Screen size/resolution hasn't been a huge issue for me, though that may be because I'm fairly partial to small font sizes. Kobo's operating system also natively supports uploading and using custom fonts,…
This note started out in May 2025, when I first tried to install Vivado on my NixOS machine. I'd tried all sorts of random things. Below you will see some bullet points from the original draft of this post, which was intended to be much longer, as a triumphant victory after wrangling the mess of scripts and dependencies that is Xilinx packaging. Dump installation image with web installer (SFD not…
We discuss the motivations and principles underpinning Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and the naive construction of one. We then transition to a more in-depth review of the drawbacks of older ORAM constructions, and how modern implementations like Path ORAM and Ring ORAM address them. Finally, we close on applications of these more efficient implementations, and their relevance to modern research in…
I tend to be rather outspoken about my opinion on any movie, but particularly Indian movies. Indian movies (primarily Telugu) have been my primary source of media consumpion for most of my life. As a result, it's one of the few things that I feel comfortable forming relatively well-based opinions about. It's 2AM and I'm waiting for my bedsheets to dry, so here's a dump on how I like to judge…
For some inane reason, nearly every editor and formatter out there defaults to 4-space indents. Which is fine if you're a psychopath, I suppose? I mean look at the difference between the same snippet with 4 spaces and 2 spaces. for stream in listener.incoming() { let mut newconn : MyConn ; match stream { Ok (s) => { newconn = MyConn { stream : s, name : String ::new() }; }, Err ( ref e ) if…
Over the years one of my pet peeves has been seeing different fonts across my system. Feels jarring almost, especially considering the lengths I went to to make my system colors coherent . This has led me to attempt to standardize typography across the different applications and documents that I maintain. Usually I like to use Outfit for headlines and title text, Crimson Text for any serif/prose,…