Rohit Kumar

In the Fall of 2011 I finished my Master's in Computer Science. My Master's comprehensive was titled "Cache Aware Radix Tree Design." I was advised by Prof Eddie Kohler. Rest of this page remains as is was when I left.

I am a first second year Master's student in Computer Science. My interests include operating systems, programming languages, parallel and concurrent computing. I am being advised by Prof Eddie Kohler.

I have been known to drink 4 cups of coffee a day. Drinking coffee is good for your health. It has been scientifically proven ... by scientists! On most days I can be found playing foosball in the grad lounge.

EGSA Social, May 2011

Figure 1: I am not drinking coffee.

Email

Email

Courses Taken

Fall 2011

Spring 2011

Winter 2011

Fall 2010

Projects

  1. SASyLF Vim Syntax Highlighter: Fall 2011. A basic vim syntax highlighter for SASyLF. For the people who use vim in CS 231.
  2. Go Pasty!: Summer 2011. A pastebin clone written in Go using the Google App Engine. Source code on github
  3. Firetrack: Summer 2011. FireTrack is a Firefox extension which tracks time spent on different websites. Source code on github.
  4. Experiments on the Click Modular Router: Cache aware radix tree design, RCU framework for read intensive concurrent tasks.
  5. May Happen In Parallel Analysis: CS239, Spring 2011. Implemented the May Happen in Parallel Analysis (MHP) pass for Featherweight X10 (FX10)
  6. Concurrent Programming in Go: CS239, Spring 2011. A short manual on the concurrent programming constructs present in Go. Example programs on github.
  7. Analysis of Chess Games on FICS: CS249, Winter 2011. R source code on github.
  8. Rabin Karp Read Mapper: CM224 Fall 2010. A short read mapper implementing the Rabin Karp string search algorithm.
  9. PSoC Creator: PSoC creator is a software development IDE for Cypress's PSoC3/5 devices.
  10. SimSharp 8051 Simulator: An 8051 simulator coded in C#.
  11. Sudoku Solver: A python program which solves hard and even ambiguous Sudoku puzzles.
  12. Pacman Clone: Written in C++ using OpenGL and SDL. A not so great clone of the popular arcade game.

Running

Westwood is a nice place to run and the LA weather just makes it better. I run regularly in the evenings. Here are some of my race times:

LA Marathon, March 2011

Figure 2: LA Marathon 2011.

Bombay Bruins

In the Spring of 2011 a few graduate students came together to form a band called the Bombay Bruins. I was one of the guitarists in that band. The band performed at Fowler Out Loud, April 2011.


Video 1: Bombay Bruins -- All 9 of them.

Quotes

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far ...

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

-- Poul-Henning Kamp

We keep lowering the bar for technical prowess, it seems; if something has the potential to be used “wrong”, high-minded designers remove the offending syntax rather than find or train competent programmers. This is why Java removes pointers (among other things) — it’s not that pointers aren’t useful or efficient, it’s that they require discipline from programmers.

-- Scott Robert Ladd

The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

-- Joe Armstrong

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

-- Jamie Zawinski

So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys "newscasters," because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

-- Paul Graham

Unofficial Unsorted CS Grad School Tips

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Mon Jan 23 19:54:09 PST 2012