Regexes For Life

Young cousins are a hyperactive lot. In an effort to keep the runts engaged, I improvised a game played with marbles (the only props at hand at the time that could pass for toys). It was a two-minute affair, and the game was chancy, full of loopholes and not likely to amuse anyone for over a few minutes. So I was surprised to see them playing it with religious fervour two years from that boring afternoon.

I mentioned to them in passing that this has happened before, with a classroom game now known as Penfight. The expression on their faces led me to believe that I’d said something profound. I confirmed to their flabbergasted countenances that yes, I did indeed invent this game- at school in Delhi sometime around the latter half of 1997, although I was not the one who named it so.

Apparently, it has grown into something of a phenomenon in Indian high schools- venues otherwise known for inducing ennui, encouraging overt passiveness and for their deadpan deliverance of useless infodumps. As a somnolent sixth grader, I possessed not the enthusiasm for flinging paper balls tied with rubber bands around the classroom, which was what most boys in the class got around to in the absence of a teacher. Watching a classmate trying to attack a half-hammered nail on his desk with his pen, I realized there was pastime to be had here. Soon we were trying in turns to knock each others pens off his desk by flicking them.

Penfight in its original form is a simple game. There are two or more pens on the surface of a table, one per player. Players take turns trying to knock all pens except their own off the table by flicking their pen with their forefingers, much like one propels the striker in Carroms.

As a competitive sport, Penfight was perfect. In retrospect, I realize that it had all the elements of a classic- it required skill, and a fair knowledge of the playing surface’s irregularities. It was easy to get better at, but hard to be really good, as luck was a terrific equalizer. Knocking pens off a table was addictive. There was room for strategy- many of us could gang up against a strong player and then fight it out amongst ourselves. (Facing a much stronger opponent by yourself, you could attempt a kamikaze charge and end the round in a draw.) It required no time to set up and not much energy to play. It was short, perfect for that three minute interval between classes. It scaled well; a single desk could accommodate up to five players (and pens), and you could join adjacent desks to make more room. Most importantly, it was fun!

I didn’t have a name for it- heck, I didn’t know for sure what we were doing. Soon everyone in the classroom was playing it. Tournaments were held, and whatever advantage I possessed owing to an early start was lost. In a few months, everyone was playing better than me, and by the end of the year, people were gambling on the pens themselves. By this point I had given up on the game and taken to reading comics in class instead. (I think this marked the birth of my introversion, a characteristic that’s remained with me since.)

1998 was a different time, and I was at a different place. More boredom struck at my new school in Bangalore, and I decided to try my hand (fingers) at Penfight again. (I still didn’t have a name for it.) I caught hold of a couple of classmates and got them to play with me- and boy, did it catch on! Once again, I lost whatever advantage I possessed in a few weeks. Apparently, everyone had a better intuitive understanding of angular momentum and centers of mass than I. This time around, people started bringing in heavy duty pens to aid their cause- metal dreadnoughts, relics from bygone ages with plenty of ballast; I was well and truly out of the game.

I lost track of what happened to this phenomenon after my tenth grade. By then, I’d heard the name Penfight being tossed around. I’d lost all interest in classroom pastimes, and I’d all but forgotten about it until my cousins (who attend a different school) informed me, twelve years from the first time ever (probably) a round of penfight was played, that their school has had notices put up stating “PENFIGHT DURING SCHOOL HOURS IS BANNED”. Ha! It’s part of the high school student’s, and better yet, the school’s vocabulary now.

It’s not a hard game to cook up- any sufficiently bored enterprising schoolkid could invent something of the sort, so it is quite likely that Penfight was invented at several places around the country at roughly the same time, and that this reminiscence is one of many histories of Penfight. I’m not proud of it- partly because I don’t find it particularly clever, and partly because I’ve always been rubbish at the game.

But yeah, for the record, I (co-)invented Penfight.

If you’ve been through the farcical ordeal that is high school in the past decade, perhaps you have engaged in Penfighting. If you have, what is your Penfight story?

Cryptonomicon is bat-shit crazy.

It’s compressed hyperbole described in such deadpan overtones you have no choice but to run with it. And boy, does it run. It runs a skein across generations and across genres, romping through at least one country every fifteen degrees in latitude, spanning descriptions of hacker culture, the origins and evolution of crypto, fantasy role-playing, the pacific in WW-II (culminating in General Douglas McArthur’s curb-stomping of the Nippons), Tolkienesque metaphors, Haiku, digs at venture-capitalism, mafia machinations, number theory, an irreverent deconstruction of Greek theology, treasure hunts for war gold, and the first ever digital computer with mercury columns in thirty-feet lead pipes serving as RAM.

There’s more of this, but Ares himself couldn’t drag me back to that tome in search of better examples.

If the outrageous awesomeness isn’t getting through to you, consider this: The lead characters are (i) A gung-ho marine in the hobby of reading Japanese poetry who runs halfway across the world engineering fake accidents for the Germans to discover, including ramming a battleship bow-first into the Norweigan ice shelf (ii) A UNIX system administrator who fools an entire battalion of high-tech eavesdroppers by reading text files by flashing the LEDs on his keyboard in Morse, and (iii) A clique of world war II mathematicians headed by Alan Mathison Turing. Yes, Alan Turing is a lead character in Cryptonomicon.

Cryptonomicon isn’t recommended reading. It’s the kind of reading required when you think the world is not crazy-awesome and need someone to bash in your ill-conceived preconceptions with a sledgehammer, which for me is admittedly most of the time.

Several browser cache wipes later, this is all that remains define:’d.

Volume IV

Aboyne (…)

Anthology

Eugenic (It troubles me to see smarter nephews around.)

Exegesis

Gulag

Knaves (surprisingly, phonetically similar to naive)

Obscura (not a word.)

Oleaginous (cognate)

Petulant (campsite, insect bite)

Simulacrum (similar, not)

Cassandra (Aren’t we all?)

Nihil (-ism.)

Scion

Suzerain

Tenebrous (murky. No wit this time.)

Interesting side note: I encountered three of the above words in Anime fansubs. It’s a paradox of sorts- Terrible-to-mediocre translations with surprisingly precise obscure wording. I suppose Japanese is embedded far too deep in the context of its culture to lend itself to meaningful literal or semantic translation.

It is instructive to compare the amount of time spent learning the tools of a trade to the time spent practising the trade; You’re almost certainly doing something wrong, in the short term, if the former is disproportionately longer than the latter.

Case in point? I spend over two months looking for the perfect blogging client, nitpicking things like keyboard shortcuts (and their absence, thereof), GTK dependency bloat and ‘Movable Type’ support. I don’t even have a movable type blog. The search for the ultimate blogging client has been more-or-less consummated, but at the expense of an indelible fallow period.

My drive to learn the tools of general PC frippery far outweighs that to engage in the frippery itself- it’s the ultimate malaise. Two years on a Linux box have been witness to five desktop environments, six window managers, five (or more) terminal emulators, two text editors (yeah, Vi and Emacs), three content publishing systems (with little published content)- even three metadata taggers- and while we’re at it, several distros. It’s a wonder I got any work done.

A conservative estimate of the number of application keyboard shortcuts/commands I’ve memorized over the years (excluding Alt-Tabbing and other Windows keys) suggests a figure between six and eight hundred key combinations and commands. If that sounds unreal- here’s the Ratpoison (window manager) cheat sheet. That’s one of several.

The truly egregious excesses, though, have been the misadventures in the murky depth of scripting language hell. What began as a simple mass renaming requirement led to a whirlwind tour of Bash scripting, Sed, Perl, Scheme, Emacs-Lisp, Python, and for reasons baffling in retrospect, GNU-Octave and GNUplot. The Sisyphean task of writing the mass renaming script was carried out over a period of sixteen months, culminating in four lines of code, at the cost of losing the ability to code in one scripting language without involving the syntax of all of the above- a rosy state of affairs.

In the long term, versatility in fooling around might be a good thing- I haven’t been doing this long enough to become blindingly proficient at it- but clearly, taking sixteen months to rename three hundred files rips apart the threadbare argument.

No matter. A near perfect lightweight blogging client is now at hand, and fittingly enough, the inaugural post is a reflection on the tendency to value the tools over the trade.

A resolution of sorts, then. Fewer tools, more work.

Volume III

Volume I, Volume II

“define:” searches for the past two months:

Ablative (Ab, from)

Apotheism (A-ha! I’ve been looking for this word)

Bellcross (of the Greek hero cult; despite the name, sadly not a demigod)

Causative (Causative for? Causative of?)

Chortle (Is too close (phonetically) to choke for my liking)

Concubinage (You can figure this one out)

Dongle (D-R-M. Hehe)

Enamored (Yeah. Like Fallout 3 and me)

Facetious

Fandango (Hence the GRIM!)

Heathen (Pagan. I think)

Indelible (Like your presence on the Internet.)

Lentil (I’ve never seen these)

Maw (Maw-th)

Overture

Punitive

Regale

Regent

Rodomontade (Talk about obscurantism…)

Semiotic (Symbol-wise)

Slovenly

Verdant (Don’t say Vista)

Virtuosity (I have no idea)

Wino (It’s an actual word!)

Volume II

Volume I is here.

I’ve listed this month’s “define:” searches below. Same format, word followed by comments in parentheses:

Celerity (Think Acceleration)

Censorious

Conglobation

Denouement (French is weird)

Frisian (Neal Stephenson giving an analogy.)

Germane (NOT Teutonic! That association wouldn’t be germane.)

Judas Cradle (Eh?)

Lye (Fight Club!)

Patternless (It exists! Apparently, saying “Random” doesn’t cut it anymore)

Perdition

Posit (Opposite of Deposit?)

Reductionist

Travail

Trilby (Fedora, now Trilby. Any more hats I should know of?)

XY problem

Baroque (17th century art, type of pearl, stained glass, and more; Meanings overload!)

Callused (Eww)

CMB (Yeah. Of the “Science. It works” fame)

Collude

Diddle (Um, yeah. I thought it was a musical instrument.)

Homounculus (Full Metal Alchemist)

Indictment

Prosaic (as opposed to esoteric?)

Recondite (is itself recondite)

Seditious (as opposed to subversive)

Trenchant (Trenchant? Trenchant?)

October, then.

An interesting indicator of what I’ve been up to during any given week is the “define:” history of my Google toolbar. As an experiment, I’m posting snippets from every week’s history to see if a pattern will emerge over the weeks. The entire definitions history for this week has over a hundred phrases (and this week was a slow one, too); This is my primary way of picking up new words as I encounter them.

Below, the most recent ones with comments in parentheses:

Copacetic (Seriously?)

Consortium (no plural)

Pugnacious

Symbolise (s vs z)

Initialise (s vs z)

Scilon

Google bomb

Artifice (Ruse; why art?)

Shoestring (more to it than meets the eye)

Eclectic (shades of meaning)

Rhizome (Biology vs Philosphy)

Ostentatious (As opposed to ostensible)

Autocracy (vs. monarchy. Apparently, there’s no difference.)

Talos

Precocious (Adj. used to describe the young Feynman)

August (Knew all the meanings, for a change)

Co$ (This one’s hilarious)

And I can never get past level 48 on Freerice. Not even when I cheat!