LINDEC 2004

Spetember 25th, 2004 was the day we had the first ever Linux Desktop Conference in India.

We had a massive work schedule listed down for this, as this was the first thing of this large scale that our team was getting involved into. I was assigned the job of looking over the overall proceedings of preparing for the event. Parag and Nicel were also part of the supervising team. It was good to actually take care of where things were moving on, and pushing things when they were stuck. I was also looking after having a stall for Evolution at the event, where people could have a hands-on experience of Evolution. The main idea was to educate the student community about the various ways in which they could start contributing to Evolution in the open source way. We did a lot of publicity about GNOME bounties . The money aspect of these bounties attracted many people. The idea of this venture was mainly to make people aware of how easy it is to get involved into hacking code in the open source world.

This event was organized at PESIT college, Bangalore. More than 1000 people had registered for this event. It was good to see close to 500 people actually attending the conference. The main feature of this conference was definately Nat Friedman. He gave a very inspiring talk [ this was the feedback i recieved from the students whom i talked ] on how a person starts hacking. He gave his own examples, about how he started with a printf statement and then went on to create terminals with transparent background and further on to make a typo error correction tool. He made people aware of the shyness factor that is associated with all, and how one could overcome it, especially when one is involved in chatting in a channel on xchat or while mailing posts to a mailing list. This talk actually inspired the students to take part into NOSIP. Students had a chance to actually play around with the things at the stalls, that would be later on involved with in NOSIP.

I was also involved with the compering for this event. Shreyas and myself were looking after how the PESIT students were getting on with the compering. Arun, Pratibha, Nagma and Divya [ or was it Vidya ?? ] were selected for this. These people were showing great progress while preparing. They had a very tough time with the material not being available for them. But, it is the final performance that matters, and these people did a great job !!! There was hardly any hiccup and everything went on nice and smooth.

I also created a presentation that would run continously on the main screen while there was no event in progress. This was some nice playing around with OpenOffice. I put up information about all the talks that were scheduled that day andafter some twidling found a way to actually make this presentation run continuously. We had been to PESIT the night before the D-day to setup all our demo material and i was shocked to see the characters in my ppt, all broken !!! Luckily, there were some OpenOffice hackers and they said this was a known bug in the latest development version and that there was already a patch available for it. But how would that help me !!! I didnt have time to build OpenOffice .. no way !! Fortunately, Thanika had an older working version of OpenOffice on his laptop and we used his laptop to display the ppt. There still were some hiccups on the D-day with this ppt, but we managed to fix them just before the event started.

One talk that i attended was the talk on cross platform porting my Jaimon Jose.The slides for this talk are available online here. The main high light of this talk was its simplicity. The guidelines given at the last slides are very informative.

Home Sweet Home

Just back from a wonderful trip to Hubli, my home town.

Its always such a pleasure to be home, especially after a long period of three months [ yeah, i usually visit my home once in 2 months ;-) ] . This time, since i did all my last minute preparations, i had to book my ticket in a VRL-Volvo bus for Rs.325 !!!, instead of my usual train. Yeah, it was a very comfortable bus, with a/c in it ... but it definately lacked the comfort of a train. To top it all, we had one person snoring in full force right behind our seat. One surprise, was that Nagaraj was also in the same bus, so there was some good company. Nagaraj is now a married man, so its quite natural for him to visit Hubli quite often, as his better half is trying real hard to concentrate on her studies and complete her final year.

My parents had no clue that i would be coming home this weekend, and were delighted and surprised to see me there. The first change that i saw in my home was that the fencing was all cut and new braches were sprouting. And yeah, there were some more new flowers in our garden [ I have taken a few snaps of them. Shall update them sometime soon ]. I was dead tired with a neck pain, and slept the first half of Friday. Afternoon, watched "Kabhi Haan, Kabhi Naa" on cable and slept again. Went out in the evening and brought some snacks for a change, and we had a nice time eating those heavy dose cakes.

Saturday, my sister got her certificate for completing her diploma course in Aptech. She secured 78.5 %, which is a great achievement, and she has been consistently scoring above 75% all through the tests in the past year. Its a very good performance. There was some problem with the name mentioned in the certificate, but keeping in mind the past experiences of fiddling with the names at Aptech, we opted not to go ahead with the correction this time. In the evening, i had a nice chat with my dad after his office. Government offices have very rigid hierarchies, and people behave like rulers, or rather dictators i should say. Its not so flexible as in a private firm. I hope my dad gets his transfer soon, for which he is very much eligible and is pending since many months.

Apart from sleeping all day long at home and starting to get irritated about "Yeh tara, woh tara", from Swades, i enjoyed some nice baddy with my sis. She has really improved a lot in baddy, and is playing great these days. I spent some time watching the ICC trophy matches. My disregard for Flintoff has now turned into an admiration, especially after seeing how well he played against Sri Lanka. He has matured a lot, and is now planning his innings quite well. He doesnt go in for any childish slog shots, but is playing some real good cricketing shots. Every team now seems to be having a very good all rounder in their teams, and Flintoff is now the backbone of England's batting. Hope India finds some good all rounder quite soon.

Super Saturday

Its been a day full of great sports events. I am glad to have watched them [ on TV ] . First there was the US Open 2004, Women's Semifinal match between Jennifer Capriati and Elena Dementieva. It was one hell of a fight back match. Dementieva made a mockery of Capriati by beating here 6-0 in the first set in just about 15 minutes, and Capriati had to wait till the eighth game to win her first game of the match. But then, she fought back well and won the second set 6-2. The second set lasted for about 25 minutes. The third set was when the match started picking up pace. Every game was going to the wire and the first 8 games in the third set went to deuce. Both the players got breakpoints in all the 8 games. Dementieva was struggling with her serve. There was hardly any pace in her serves. They barely touched 60mph, and it was more of a spinning serve than a fast paced serve. It was very funny to see her serve that way. Capriati actually didnt take much advantage of her opponents weak serve. The main attraction of the match, apart from the straight nosed Russian, were the long hard hitting rallies from both the players. Dementieva's cross court baseline shots were just amazing. It was but, very heartening to see Dementieva struggle and limp sometimes on the court [ she had a bandaged left thigh ]. The match went into a tie breaker, and Dementieva got some crucial points and finally beat Capriati in this 2 hours 15 minutes match. The final set actually lasted for more than one and half hour !!!

The next sport event of the day was India playing against Kenya, in the ICC Champions Trophy. It wasnt that big a match, but India had to gain some momentum here and get some good batting practice. Sehwag showed some good signs of getting back into form, but again played a very careless shot and gifted away his wicket. Ganguly and Laxman played sensibly and steadied the ship. But, it was Dravid and Kaif who finally played some real good cricket, with some quick singles and doubles to get the India to a respectable total of 290. Kaif was unlucky to remain unbeaten on 49, when he faced the last ball, but couldnt score a single run. Pathan and Bajji bowled very good and put the breaks on Kenya. The worst part for India was that they just couldnt cleanup Kenya and they managed to take only 7 Kenyan wickets. This is only place where India needs to improve. They somehow find it very difficult to cut off the tail.

Arsenal carried on their winning streak beating Fulham today 3-0. Reyes, kept his record of scoring in all the 6 matches of Arsenal. It was once again some great and unselfish passes that helped Arsenal win today. Arsenal are now leading the Primiership table.

There was one more tennis match going on between Hewitt and Johansson [ who happened to be Hewitt's sister's boyfriend ], in the semifinals of the US Open. But this match turned out to be a piece of cake for Hewitt and he won it in 3 straight sets. Tomorrow is the finals. Hewitt will be playing the winner of Henman and Federer.

Ajja aala re ...

My oldest friend, Ajay, came to my house this weekend, on his way back to the US of A. It was good to meet him face-to-face [ we keep interacting a lot through e-mails ] after a period of 2 years !! We spent the whole of the Saturday evening shopping, till our legs could no longer bear our own weights.

Earlier in the day, we spent 2 long hours of TT. It was great to be playing against him again. The last time we played, it was in our final year at KREC, and we were nothing more than amateurs. He definately has improved a hell lot since those days in TT. Its good to know that there is someone whom you can beat, or that there is still someone whom i need to beat ;-). We were completely exhausted by the time we finished playing around 15 to 20 games in those 2 hours. We did have a few close matches reaching deuce too. It was none-the-less great fun.

Lunch was at our very own "Dimpy's Punjabi Dhaba" :-), our usual paratha and egg burji :p, followed by a sound sleep in the afternoon. It was only in the evening that we realised how much tired we were after playing those TT matches. In the evening we went to Music World. Ajja has now started a new interest in VCDs. We searched a lot for our great Jaggesh movies, and we actually found 2. But, we were disappointed to not find, "Bal nanna maga", his superhit movie in Kannada. Well, may be we can find it some other time ;-). In the same old vein of trying out new things, we tried a new restaurant at Residency road for the dinner. It was a good gujju/rajasthani restaurant with a nice "Jee bharke khao" punch line.

On Sunday, we had a get together with our KREC friends, Nagya and Amar, though Rajya could not come because his silly bike got punctured in the heavy rains that lashed Bangalore. We met at Amoeba for a game of bowling. It was my first try at the game, and i was quite impressive with 116 points !! I dont know if it was more of fluke and luck, but i somehow managed to score the highest :-) Later we went for another round of purchasing, buying a "butterfly" TT bat for Ajay.

And, well the day ended watching the sweet victory of India against England at Lords. This Indian team seems to be having a great liking for Lords. The matches here have been very inspiring for them. Hope this victory yesterday, gives them the proper impetus that they need to boost up their spirits and win the ICC Champions Trophy starting this week.

The Invincibles

Thats what ESPN called the great team of Arsenal while they were playing against Norwich in the Barclay's English Premiership match, to create history this weekend. Arsenal is the only team in the history of the tournament to have an unbeaten league record to 44 games !!! Another site pointed this piece of information


"Arsenal look a good bet to remain unbeaten for some time but Wenger will be mindful that game number 50 is against Manchester United at Old Trafford."

I really wish that Arsenal remain unbeaten and claim the 50th match with a victory over MU. That would be one hell of a match to watch.

Well, apart from this, there seems to be a pretty bad scene going on in the city with around 80 theaters deciding to stop screening of movies, if the Karnataka government does not roll back its ridiculous decision of "not allowing the screening of any non-kannada movies for the first 7 weeks of its release". I wonder if this move was really being backed up by the kannada movie producers organization. There is no logic in this move to help promote kannada movies. They should stop making such ridiculous demands on the government and let their movies do the talking for a change. I am sure, the piracy industry and the VCD/DVD shop owners are gonna have a blast this month in Bangalore.

Zero bugs ...

It is just one of those rare days today when i have come to office without any bugs to work on ... we just cleaned up all the bugs we had for the current evolution-exchange 1.5 release. [ Ofcourse, we applied all the project management techniques a couple of weeks ago and pushed the normal bugs to the next release and limited ourselves to the most critical of the bugs for this release ]. Its good to have achieved this goal three days in advance. We are now brazing ourselves for any last minute surprises.

While discussing about these bugs with my friend Harry [ no .. he is not a potter :p ] yesterday, he reminded me of the famous quote by Djikstra

"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, never to show their absence."

Isnt that sooo true of the code we write ? You invariably always miss out atleast one scenario where most probably your code would fail. But then, there are millions of dollars earned for just having patches and fixing these very own bugs. This may be fine for small enterprises, non critical applications or even less critical desktop software, but have you ever wondered what would happen if the NYSE comes down even for a few seconds ? Its a huge loss of money, ranging even to millions of dollars. Well, one of my friend introduced me to this highly reliable family of systems called Nonstop which help in such highly mission critical applications.

Coming back to the desktops, and GNOME, here is one link where one can search the Gnome cvs repositories to collect the data on the frequency of commits done by the authors. That link actually gives the data on the commits done by me.

Need to get back to some reading now. More here later .....

Busy man ...

Only a busy person can enjoy his leisure

Thats so true ... This statement is actually a corollary to the Perkinson's Law which says that

"your work expands to fill the time alotted for it".

I have actually seen this happen in my recent 2 projects [ ICE and Evolution ] i have been working on. So i think, the corollary should also hold good. Ironically, the reverse of that need not necessarily be true ;-) ... People do enjoy their leisure, but that does not define them to be busy ... but yeah ofcourse, its upto the person to define what he means by being busy. What if he is busy in enjoying his leisure ... hehehe ... ok lets stop this non-sense here.

I have been very busy for the last couple of weeks and never found anytime to update my blog. Hmm, not just a couple of weeks, but one full month !!! ... Well, a blog is not necessarily to be written daily, so i dont mind updating it here sooo late ... We have been cracking down a lot of bugs in Evolution Exchange Connector, and we hope to have a bug count of zero by this weekend. I shall write here some more details that i had been planning to write all this while, but may be in some new posting later.

Apart from work, i have been enjoying some real good fun on orkut these days, with a nice fun game about asking and answering questions about Amitabh's dialogues. Basically you have to guess which movie the dialogue is from and you then have to post another question for others to crack. Its really funny and bringing alive the orkut community there.

Back at office, we are planning another event in Bangalore, called the "Gnome Bangalore Conference" .. its mostly about having all the Indian hackers meet for a day and spend sometime together. Ofcourse, there would be the usual propaganda of some cool technical talks and demos and stuff like that. I have been assigned the job to overlook all the activities and see that things get done on time. Its kinda fun to keep poking at people time and again, reminding them about their deliverables. :-)

Funny Snippets

Last weekend my parents visited my new [ rented ] house. Not that they wanted to see the house, but they came to collect the goods and chocolates that i had bought for them from Norway. Unfortunately i could not purchase anything significant for them in that expensive Kristiansand. But, then i had the numerous pics that i had collected there that made them very happy.

We visited quite a few shopping complexes, Bangalore Central, Forum and also spent good 4 hours roaming on that small Commercial street, just because my sister did not get some "chicken design" clothings. Well, all that time spent ended well with she getting what she had started out to purchase.

We also went to a new restaurant in Koramangala. Its called "Hyderabad House". We decided to have some good biryani there. The half an hour we waited for a table was worth it with we getting some real authentic Hyderabadi biryani. But still, it was nothing to beat the biryani my aunt prepares in Hyderabad. :-) Thats a class apart !!!

There was one funny incident that occurred at Hyderabad House that i wanted to write about and then thought why not write about all the small funny snippets that i came across in this week, and hence this blog. [ All that you read till now was just the prelude :-p ]

Hyderabadi biryani is always served with a curry [ usually made of brinjal or chillies ] and some chutney made from yogurt. When the bearer was serving us the curry and chutney, his supervisor was unhappy with he serving us a huge quantity of chutney since the crowd that day [ on a Sunday !!! ] was more than what they had expected and the chutney there could not suffice for all the customers. So he asked the bearer to dilute the chutney and serve it later to us. Unfortunately for them, i saw this :-) Once we started eating, the bearer brought us the diluted chutney and i did not agree to being served with that diluted chutney. He asked us to adjust for which i replied that he would have to adjust with the money and that i would be paying him less. He couldnt help it and said that he would talk to the manager. After we finished the lunch with that diluted chutney [ it actually spoilt the fun of having some authentic Hyderabadi biryani ] the bearer brought us the bill. I paid him 20% less. While we were leaving they asked us to talk to the manager who after hearing the episode agreed to give us a rebate and was ok with what i had already deducted. After all this, i did fill bad about it, but if i did not do it, then probably they would repeat this again. I hope they dont repeat it again !!! [ I am eager to go and have a look at that restaurant again to see if they would repeat this thing again ;-) ]

Yesterday, sush came across a situation which gives us one more reason to stop using Winduhs. Sush was playing around with Active Directory and kerberos authentication for some customer solution. She ran some kerberos utility and rebooted the machine as was indicated in the documentation for that utility. Unfortunately for her, the machine could not start AD services since the domain for that machine was not set properly. [ The machine was also a Domain Controller ]. And so she had to reboot the machine in Safe Mode to debug and fix the problem. After trying out a hell lot of things suggested by our friendly google.com, we decided to call up the IS people to help us out with this. After they also could not find a viable solution to fix the problem in hand, we decided to uninstalling AD from this machine. That's when the fun started. Winduhs would not allow us to uninstall AD when we were booted in safe mode. We had to boot in normal more to uninstall AD. And it would not allow us to boot into the normal mode since it could not start AD services. Great ... now thats what i call a deadlock !!!. We finally had no choice but to reinstall the whole OS !!! One more lesson to be modular :-)

I just remembered some funny exchange of dialogues between our very own Michael Meeks and Harish. Michael is a great C/C++ programmer and Harish has newly ventured into C, after being a great Java developer in the past. On our way to Agder University in Kristiansand, Harish was talking about his current and previous work experiences.
Harish : I am new to C programming, i have been working a lot in Java before moving into Evolution.
Michael : What ! what did you say ... go wash your mouth

[ You would really laugh as we did, if you hear it from the man himself. ]

Today evening, while travelling back home, i was surprised to see a poster about "Basha beedies" sporting the smiling face of Aishwarya Rai !!!

An advertisement in Radio City ... "Malaysian Airlines .. taking you beyound expectations" ... If i would travel in that airlines, i would definately expect to reach my destination, and i hope they dont take me beyond my expectations :-)

Disgusting Bangalore traffic

Reaching home now-a-days from office feels like eternity. Bangalore roads are being flooded both by water and vehicles. Just a couple of days of continuous rain in the evening and we can see complete chaos over the roads. My drive from office to home took a cool 90 minutes yesterday. I remember reaching home in 30 minutes in the early days of 2001.

Yesterday, I noted down the time we spent waiting for the traffic signals to have mercy on us and i found that we spent close to 30 minutes just waiting for the signals to flash green. And to add the morning delay of 10 to 15 minutes, gives us a nice 45 minutes of wait/delay daily in the Bangalore traffic. So, on an average, we Bangaloreans [ ok, not all, but just the few?? unlucky ones like us ] spend 22.5 hours a month just waiting for the signal. And if extended, this means about 270 hours a year !!! This sums up to spending more than 11 days a year simply waiting for the traffic lights !!! This is 50% in excess of the world average of 7 days. [ Yeah, on an average, a person spends one week every year waiting for the signal to splash green :-) ]. But then, Bangalore is all set to shift that average towards a higher number.

The only good thing that i could do while waiting for the signal was to close my eyes and doze off and think of such silly calculations as above, listening to any damn song that plays on Radio city ...

Firefox rox !!!

Found a cool new feature in firefox 0.9 .. Open all links in tabs

Daily when i logon to my machine, i usually visit the same websites. Firefox helped me remember those sites more seamlessly now. I created a folder called "Daily visited sites" under the "Bookmarks toolbar folder". So next time when i bring up firefox, i click on this "Daily visited sites" tab and in the dropdown list showing me the list of websites bookmarked it also gives me an option to all the bookmarks in this folder in separate tabs !!! This is just awesome.

To add to this, i browsed for some more cool features and came across a sleek toolbar shortcut for gmail notifications !!! You can download it from this link. Once u click on this shortcut and login with ur gmail user name, it keeps refreshing and tells you the number of unread new mails u have in your inbox. Oh boy, things start getting better and better on firefox. I would love to write some xuls to extend this feature to access my other imap accounts and have a sweet mail notification shortcut right in my browser.

Home Alone ...

Well, its been a very very hectic week all along. Came back from Norway on July 4th. Was a very pleasant trip in all. I have to write a blog about all this trip before it evaporates from my volatile memory. [ For a quick report on the trip you can read my report ]

I have been spending quite some time on catching up with the things going on in office and fixing some bugs. We also had a gnomebangalore meet [ gbmeet ] on July 10th, which was very good. People [ basically graduate and post graduate students ] from various parts of India had come to attend it. It was a good start. We are starting off something like a revolution here in India with the "nosip" chapter at gnomebangalore.org. Hope this helps in leveraging the huge amount of programming potential we have in India. [ What good is this huge population if we cant contribute to a noble cause as open source :-) ]

Well, apart from all this, on my personal front, i have started my experiment of staying alone. But, i am making a conscious effort to not to ever bring the thought of me being alone at home. I havent found anything boring till now. Lets see how long i can survive like this. Well, i just realised that there is life even without television :-). Its strange, but if you know how big a TV fanatic i am, i myself cannot believe that i have stayed without seeing the television for 10 days !! [ well a week ] ... Thanks to my cable operator, i still do not have a cable connection at home.

Ok, for those few trusted people i have already sent my photo album i collected at Norway :-). If you also have the time and patience to watch my pics, you can mail me and i shall think if i can send those pics to you ;-)

GUADEC 2004, Day 2

I took a hell lot of pics yesterday .. totally around 240 pics till yesterday night. Dan and JP had a blast at night, and reached home pretty late [ about 3am i suppose ]. Woke up early today and was ready to go for the talks by 8:30am. We walked our way to the talks. It was a very clear day with lovely blue sky with nice and chill breeze.

Attended some very good talks today. The first one was by Federico [ who was the third person i was sharing my room with ]. His talk about GTK+ APIs was awesome. It was a good walk-through to all the important APIs in GTK+ and GNOME. Federico along with Miguel was the founder of GNOME in Mexico, way back in 1998 [ or is it 1999 ?? ].

The next talk was something very interesting. It was about typography, by Liam Quinn, from MIT [ a professor ]. He talked about the human visual aspects and gave some lovely anecdotes too. I shall add them up here once i find some good time to write down the notes i took. One funny anectode that comes to my mind now is the announcement at the British airport, where they ask all the wheel chair users to "stand up" as it was time to board the flight now. Though, they actually meant "to queue up", it was quite funny way to ask that. Another one, was by a sports commentator, speaking about snooker. He says "for the benefit of our black and white television viewers, the red ball is just next to the pink one" ... :-)

Its almost 4pm in the noon now, and i think i will go attend Michael Meeks talk now on "GNOME and Open Software" ...

GUADEC 2004, Day one

This was the first GUADEC i attended and it was real awesome. The intial talk was so different from any other talk. It was a welcome message by Nat. We all [ about 300 people ] had to introduce ourselves about what we hacked on. It was very interesting to know what other people are contributing towards. Meeting all the hackers here, and talking to them and getting to know their ideas is just one experience you cant afford to miss. I am really happy that i have got such a lovely opportunity to meet these wonderful and cool people.

We now have another 2 more sessions remaining for the day. Its alreadt 5pm now, and we should be having sessions till 7:30pm. But then, it hardly matters since the sun keeps shining almost all round the clock !!

More later ....

Now in Norway !!!!

Just reached Kristiansand, Norway .. its around 5:30pm local time here ... The weather is just awesome out here .. with lovely bright sunshine and chill wind and cool temperature of about 15 degrees celcius. I am now typing this from a Debian box, in the hacker's room in Adger University. Waiting for the registration counter to open, so that we could get our room keys.

This machine that i am using is the smallest one i have ever seen .... The CPU is as small as a CDman !!! could hardly believe that it was the CPU ... Shall take a snap of this to post it here

The trip was awesome , but tiring too. The Lufthansa flight from Chennai to Frankfurt was the best flight i have had till now .. luckily, towards the end of the trip, i got a chance to peep out of the window for the last one hour, before the plane landed. I just cant forget the beautiful scenaries i saw there. Shall sit down more peacefully and write down a lot about it later.

Just met Luis, Dave and Nat too !!! Sent out mails to all friends and home. Got to go now for the registration and my head is already starting to spin now.

Oh wow .. Luis just now sent me an invite for a gmail account !!! Coooooolllll

On board to GUADEC 2004

I am now in Chennai :-) after my first ever flight ... was an awesome experience. I got the seat in the last row, which reminded me the strict conditions we would be having in buses to *not* take the last seat [ though i guess, it was nothing different than going in a bus ]. The best part was leaving Bangalore in the day light, just around sunset and then landing in Chennai, seeing it dressed in beautiful lights below. That was a real wonderful sight, i would not be able to forget it ...

It was amazing to feel the plane start off in full speed dragging you back a bit ... and then lifting you up .. and up and up ... We did get some jolts or may be mild turbulence, but then that was also an experience. It was an Indian Airlines flight ... :-) ... But then, it took the plane about 10 minutes to go high up and another 10 minutes for us to finish off the light snacks and in just about 30 minutes, we touched down at Chennai, at 7:30 pm ... [ We started from Bangalore at 7pm ] ... Looks like its now time for me to board the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt and then on to Stavenger and then on to Kristiansand, Norway !!!

The quest for Quantum Computers

Last week i read an article about scientists being able to successfully transfer physical characteristics between atoms using some phenomenon called "entanglement". Some links on this are here

1. CNN News Article
2. http://cfmx.physicsweb.org/article/news/8/6/10
3. http://cfmx.physicsweb.org/box/news/8/6/10/kimble

The article predicts quantum computers to be in use by 10 years from now. Guess, we are nearing the days of Matrix :-) Wonder who would be "the one" ...

Hectic week

This week was undoubtedly one of the most hectic weeks for the past 2 or 3 months. Almost every evening i was meeting my house broker to see various houses. I finally decided on one house this thursday. Its pretty much sufficient for one guy ;) .. with a good bedroom, hall and kitchen and ofcourse the bathroom. Its on the first floor, near a park, in a very silent lane [ except for a couple of dogs i guess ;) ]. The only thing new for me now, is to learn to stay alone :-(, with my earlier room-mates shifting to separate houses. It was such a pleasure living with them. I hope to keep meeting with them often even after we start living separately.

Every eveving, I had to rush to catch hold of this broker since he usually is not available otherwise. They are so much in demand these days in Bangalore. On the weekend, when i actually met my new house owner, the broker had another customer literally sitting on his head asking him to show him some house he promised. The owner seems to be a nice guy and i hope to not have much problems. The best thing about this house is that the owner stays about 25 kms away from my new house. I am sure its one real good thing that made me decide on this house.

As if this was not enough, our test engineer for Evolution Exchange connector, suddenly woke up from his slumber and started filing bugs left right and center. The bug count dramatically rose up [ which was quite expected if anyone tested the component ;) ]. But, unfortunately, most of the bugs were very rare case scenarios or negative test cases and not so interesting to fix apart from a few good ones. I have started working on those interesting bugs for now. One very interesting bug is that, if i get a task forwarded as an ics file and i accept it, evolution hangs. Well, that was what the bug said, but my RedHat 9 box, had a pretty different story to tell me. Whenever, i tested this bug, it was just not evolution, but the whole machine that was getting locked up. I could see the CPU being hogged [ the CPU red light was glowing continously ], and no keyboard inputs were being accepted. I tried a ssh to my machine from another test box, but that also timed out. Was very annoying to have to reboot my machine after it being up and running for a month :-(. To gather more info about this bug, i left it hanging in the evening and came back in the morning and saw that the machine had reached some sanity and was recognising the keystrokes, but was nevertheless damn slow. So, i have decided to debug this on the tester's machine itself ;)

Before i forget to mention, there are a few very nice blogs written by fejj which i would like to mention here. One is on profiling tools, another is on effective searching and a follow up of this on binary search trees. These are all quite elementary in nature, but i liked the approach in which he explains this. And as he later points out, there is a wealth of knowledge on different tree implementations at http://www.msu.edu/~pfaffben/avl/

This week is gonna be another busy week, and i am planning to do some reading too :-) Hope i am able to balance my time between hacking and reading.

Yahoooooo

Yahoo has upgraded my mailbox to 100MB storage limit from today. This is amazing news. Guess, the free mailbox storage capacity now is 100MB and the paid service is whooping 2GB !!! This is definately in retaliation to the great gmail accounts of 1GB. Thanks to google i now have a better yahoo service. I am not feeling like deleting any mails now :-) ... Yahoo also has added the "search mail" feature, again inspired by gmail. But then, so what, the users are gonna have a real good time now ... Hard disk space has really gone cheap ... Hail to the silicon storage devices, that have made this possible. I just cant imagine the amount of compression being done at yahoo and also the amount of hard disk actually being used to store the mails of millions and millions of yahoo users.

Looking ahead for greater days of storage bliss ...

Pathetic Italy

It was a shocking performance by Italy against the Danes. Italy just lacked the attacking edge. Though Vieri had some good chances, he failed to convert them into goals. Toti was also disappointing. I was expecting Italy to be the team that could give France a fight for the title, but i seriously doubt they qualifying for the semis too now. We need to see how the Czechs perform. They have been winning in the recent tourney's and they are very highly rated for winning this tourney. Apart from this, I felt sad for the Danes though. They had great chances and came very close to scoring goals. Danes were more convincing than the Italians.

But the day belonged to the goal-keepers. Both Buffon [ of Italy ] and Sorenson [ of Denmark ] made some breath-taking saves. Dont misout the replays of this game just for the wonderful saves these goal-keepers made. Italian defense was also very strong. Ball bounced back from the defenders atleast half a dozen times. The game was attacking and i wished Danes had scored a much deserved goal. It was a pity that the match ended in a goalless draw.

My evening house hunt was also not that fruitful, except for one very funny incident. I went to see a house for rent and the owner came down to show me the house. There was a lady with her son and her father-in-law staying in the house. The lady was veryyy adamant on not letting us see the house till her husband arrived !!! The owner pleaded her for about 10 minutes and she was just saying sorry, i cant help it. She even came out and said sorry to me that she couldnt show the house ... Was really funny to have been met with such restrain.

Woke up early and came by 8'0 clock bus for a change. Got some breakthrough on a bug. Found the error being there for some cache sync issues. Now need to fix it and also find out how a gtk druid would take "Enter" key as a default operation to proceed ahead to the next page. Time for lunch now ....

Powerless

Yeah, its a sweet song by Nelly Furtado, but no i am not gonna write about that. Powerless is just how i felt this weekend.

Saturday, i just had no control on when i could go and search the house. The broker was having all the power for it ;). He never turned up. My room-mate has bought a new DVD player, so we watched a comedy-horror movie called "Evil Dead - III". I really dont know how they could call it a horror movie. Anyway, we enjoyed watching the comedy part of it [ Mind you, there was no horror part in it at all :p ]. Now that EURO 2004 has been flagged off, we spent our complete evening and half of the night watching the 2 initial matches. Greece winning over the hosts Portugal was the biggest surprise of the day [ oops, it was the first match, so it was the only surprise till then ;-) ]. Spain had to struggle a lot to win their game against the Russians. I watched just the first half and gave into my sleep.

Sunday, we were all planned and ready for the biggest match of the year ... France v/s England. France being the reigning champions, this was ought to be a killer. After watching Rambo I and Rambo II in the noon time, we spent the early evening searching for houses and found one very spacious single room with a huge balcony, the balcony is actually bigger than the total room size, and its on the third floor, having a beautiful view of Indiranagar and most parts of Bangalore. But, i want to keep my options open and have not yet finalised on this luxurious balcony-cum-room. :p

The first match was between Crotia and Switzerland, which eventually turned out to be a goal-less draw. We could not afford to watch this boring match till 12 midnight and be awake for the biggy. So we bought another DVD [ Master and Commander ] and spent the night watching it and waiting for the clock to strike 12. This movie was damn good. Watching it in the DVD added the much needed flavour. Luckily we had the subtitles to our help, with Russel Crowe eating up most of his words. But, we still hadnt seen the biggest surprise of the day, I should rather say night. Just before 5 minutes for midnight, our rooms turned dark, with the BESCOM authorities deciding to switch off the power for the night :-(( .. We were sooooo Power-less :-(( .. We waited for another hour, but to no vain. We finally called it a day, and slept. To our dismay, the morning news showed that the France v/s England match was a damn thriller, with Zidane scoring 2 goals in the final 120 seconds of injury time to beat England 2 - 1. Earlier, in the first half, Becham took a free-kick and gave a beautiful pass to Lampard in the D, and helped England take the lead. Now in the 90th minute, Zidane took a breathe-taking free kick right on the edge of the D, to level the scores. The English goal-keeper did a blunder by bringing Henry down while going to save an attack in the very next minute. This was just the right occassion for Zidane to score from that penalty in the dieing moments of the game. So France scored in the last 120 seconds of the match to win this thriller. Earlier, Barthez made an amazinging dive to save a Bechkam penalty kick. This really cost the Englishmen the match.

Apart from writing this long post, today has been a real colorful and manic monday as usual. Had to create a very colorful bug-report, to show the progress made on Evolution/Connector. Time for some TT now ;-) and more house hunts ...

Linux training ... part 2

This weekend is going to be all about house hunting. We need to find one by this month end. Hopefully we should find a good place to stay.

Yesterday was a very boring session of Linux training. It was all very theoretical and text book knowledge, most of which we already knew a lot and were hardly using. It was all about processes, process stack, threads, and IPC mechanisms.

We did have some nice fun in the afternoon session though. The instructor, who has spent most of his time working with the kernel and device drivers, demonstrated the abstraction of the file i/o calls [ open/read/write/close/ioctl ] using a live device. He called it a toy. It connected to the comp using a parallel port. The toy had 8 LEDs [ something like the 8 bits in a byte ] which glow in binary format when a decimal number is fed on the port. He had a kernel device driver written for this, that implemented the file i/o calls and initialised this module by giving the device a major and a minor number. After inserting this module into the kernel, he showed a user-level program which just did a simple "open" on this device and did a "write" onto it. The program prompts for the user to enter a decimal digit which is written onto the device. The LEDs were glowing, based on the decimal number entered. The binary equivalent of this number could be seen in the LEDs. This was cool to watch. Really looked like a very nice toy. Need to try it out sometime building it on my own.

One more thing which i got clarified in this session was the fact that "linux kernel code is non-preemptive" [ ofcourse, some parts of the 2.6 kernel a pre-emptive, but thats a different story ]. I had been confused about this, since I also read that linux was a multi-tasking OS. The funda is that the pre-emption happens *only* in the user space and *not* in the kernel space. So the scheduler only schedules the user level tasks. Once the process enters kernel space [ by calling a int 80 ], it now cannot be pre-empted, unless it makes itself "idle" [ or non-runnable ]. And interestingly, the scheduler [ apart from other 2 scenarios ]is invoked after a return from every system call.

Oops, its already tea time here now... need to go catch the broker for the houses ...

Linux Training

I am struggling to find the right way to post here ... Is the blog title like the title for a book and the postings equivalent to the chapters in a book ?? I tried creating another blog but it didnt quite seem to be what i intended to do. So here it is .. i am now gonna just keep posting articles to my "first blood" blog.

It has been real tough since yesterday for me to get up early in the morning at 7, to be on time in office for the 9:30 training. Yesterday was the first day and it was fun. The trainer was finding it difficult to understand our questions, but then that added to the fun ;)

Few cool snippets i got from the training ...

1. The symbol table in a binary is used at compile time [ to resolve symbols ] and debug time, but *not* at runtime.

2. You can a strip a library of its symbols, create a symbol table file and then recreate the original file by combining the stripped library and the symbol table file using "nm".

3. The C convention of passing variables onto the stack is from left to right, and the Fortran convention is to pass it from right to left. The advantage of the C convention is that it enables us to have variable number of arguements.

4. The keyword "volatile" [ a storage class ] is used to tell the optimizer [ this is part of the compiler phase ] to always fetch the variable from RAM and not from the [ L1 or L2 ] cache [ This is the hardware cache ]. This feature is commonly used in the kernel code for device registers.

My one doubt on point 4 above is that, if reads happen first from cache and then from RAM, why dont the writes happen first in cache and then in RAM. We saw an example yesterday which was writing to the RAM and not the cache. Hopefully, this should be understood today :)

Time for the training now. .....

Hello World :-)

This is the first time, when i felt trying a "Hello World" program actually makes sense ;) Trying to see how this works. More talk later ...