Photography

I bought my first SLR, a Cannon Rebel 2000, in 2000 with a couple of Amazon gift certificates. Sharad had graciously given me his $100 Amazon certificate ( imagine $100 for simply submitting our resumes !!!) -- and so began my tryst with photography. Since then I've shot over 350 rolls of film -- though I've been plannning for an online gallery for the last two years I've never gotten over the inertia to scan my favourite photos in. My favourite live subjects have been Medha and Mugdha ( though neither of them like being the subject). Nowadays I concentrate on black and white still life and many of my photos are displayed in my living room. The photo on this page was taken at Sabino Canyon.

Though I really like the Rebel, I'm a big fan on Ravi's Nikon N-65. I'm convinced Nikon optics are an order better than the Cannon lenses I use while the focussing and automation on the Cannon is better. Though I'm totally averse to Photoshop touch-ups, I'm waiting for Medha to get her digital SLR so I can play with a digital camera.

Cycling

I got a K2-Mach3 bike for my birthday this year. Its an amazing bike and weighs about 20lbs. To find out more about this bike click here here. This bike is now my preferred mode of transportation and on weekends the 30 mile rides (with the complementary spectacular sunsets) are my favourite pastimes. For a bike map of Tucson follow this link.

I bought my bike at Supergo and think they are a great bike shop. If you are looking for economical bikes I strongly recommend Cycle Spectrum, great bikes at great prices.

Astronomy

Ravi and Medha bought me an 8" Newtonian for my birthday in 2002. This has been my most prized possesion since then. I was a regular star-gazer when Mugdha was here and our favourite spot was the Sabino Canyon parking lot. Infact this hobby has been my most expensive and had resulted in parking tickets. I've seen over 50 Messier objects through my telescope and my favourites are M-57 ( ring nebula) and M-13( Great Hercules Globular Cluster). My favourite constellation is Cassiopeia and unsurprisingly Saturn and its rings are my favourite in our solar system. I bought my telescope from Starizona and definately recommend their laser viewfinder ( a $70 add-on).

Radio Controlled Planes

Thanks to Mugdha,Radha et al. I got a Hobbyzone Aerobird for my birthday last year. To find out more about this plane click here. I plan to put up a video with some fancy flying soon.

Sports

I have played several (Badminton, Tennis, Racquetball & Squash) racquet sports at competition level but now play for the fun of it.

Hacking

Being around binaries has taken its toll and occasionally I like to hack. Among the first masochistic things I did was in my second semester in grad school -- Porting Linux onto the iPAQ H3600 in Fall 2001/Spring 2002. Nowadays there are dedicated web-sites that serve as very useful references. I also don't like the way coding conventions and rules change for the Linux kernel. for example the system_call_table structure is not exported in the recent Linux kernels claiming to be a security risk, here is a trivial hack which locates the system call table and overrides the security acheived by hiding it (assuming you have permissions to load kernel modules). This spring(2004) I was doing research on ways to increase systems security so needed malcode to evaluate the robustness we could impart. To my surprise, while plenty of exploits were published on the internet, relatively few succedeed in breaking into our target machine (Pentium IV-3Ghz, Linux-2.4.22) -- it was easier for me to break the systems by crafting synthetic attack code than tune available exploit code. While writing attacks was fun, the scary part was that the simple attacks we came up with were orders of magnitude more complex than what is seen in malcode we got from the wild. At present my two pet projects (which have taken the back-bench) are to get Darwin to compile and run on an old Toshiba Pentium II - 266Mhz laptop and write programs for my cellphones (Sony Ericsson T-68i and Sony Ericsson T-610).