Daily Life and thoughts…

A brief Conversation

2009-05-30T01:17:00.003+08:00

Its not usual for me to be back home after work on a _friday_ by six in the evening. There's a usual
round of beer that do with a bunch of my friends.

Today was different, i got home, spent time watching _Oceans Thirteen_. Sad movie.

By about nine, when i watched the news, watching the way the _politicians_, reacting to
what happened to Indian's in Australia, was really a very disappointing feeling. What if the same thing had happened to a chinese, the Govt of China would have made it a point not to send a single kid from their country to Aus.

From this, the thought of how horrible this Human race has become kept disturbing me, which unfortunately did not die, the conversation extended with a cousin of mine, who went to say humans are _sick_, while i was thinking this world a fuckin sick place to be in any more. Can anything be done about this.

A book that i recently read, had this wonderful line,
its not more children we need, but more chances for the ones already on earth --> A heart is a lonely hunter by Carson McCullers. Was a good read.

Pope and Red Hat :-)

2009-05-21T00:25:00.002+08:00

Write in C

2009-05-18T22:03:00.000+08:00

An Homage to the Beatles "Let It Be"...

Write in C

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
Write in C.

As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
Write in C.

Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, oh, write in C.
LOGO's dead and buried,
Write in C.

I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.

If you've just spent nearly 30 hours,
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.

Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
BASIC's not the answer.
Write in C.

Write in C, Write in C
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
Pascal won't quite cut it.
Write in C.

Bug Fixing --XKCD

2009-05-14T21:06:00.002+08:00

10 tips

2009-05-13T00:30:00.002+08:00

Its been long since i have posted. I haven't been busy, just lazy :-).

_10_ tips for programmers....
A good read

I have been working on OMAP + Android. Thinking of getting a bunch of
guys who could come under one roof(Foss.IN) to talk and contribute. I
haven't thought about the way we should go about it, i should work on it
this weekend and post it.

Any suggestion would be helpful.

Its been a wonderful time with @mitch in the last three months. we'll definitely
miss you.

Devanahalli Fort

2009-03-28T03:59:00.003+08:00

One brilliant idea....and yes!!, 2 morons, a car and a camera, we took of to this wonderful place: _Devanahalli_ fort.

couple of shots from the place.

...

2009-02-22T14:38:00.001+08:00

its been a while since i blogged. who cares....

i am sick and tired of every shit that's been happening to me and this
very stupid _artificial_ life that i lead.

I have decided to kill my _sane_ self.

2008-10-15T01:27:00.003+08:00

Ah...there's quite a list.

Moved back to *Bangalore*. 6 months of Malaysia was a lot of fun. Thanks to @ditesh and @aizatto.

Couple days in Bangalore, and it was *peter's* Engagement. I am looking forward to be in Dubai for the wedding. Peter if your reading this...make sure our trip for your wedding is *fun*.

Day after the Engagement, i started my new job @ Sasken Communication Technologies. Am really looking forward to get my hands dirty asap. Its been a fun filled week so far. I really don't enjoy driving to work. Mr Chief Minister....find a solution for this asap. On the same lines, i think *NANO* launch will be a bigger traffic disaster.

Met Nat Friedman (@natfriedman). Thanks to @sshreyas. It was definitely fun talking to him. I wish he could make it to Foss.in.

Oh yes, Foss.in, dates are out, much awaited CFP is out. Looking forward to the new format. Just over 30 talks. Lots and lots of hands on. yes, i am there again.

Surprisingly many other friends of mine are getting married....i particularly don't like the news of wedding coming from someone whom i thought would not get married atleast for another year or two. Very very strange.

Manish another close pal, getting married in Nov.
Close friend Pallavi getting married in Nov.

i can't take this anymore. I am definitely gonna skip a few.

.......

CELCOM BiG FAIL!!!!!

2008-09-10T21:31:00.002+08:00

missing Jammu and Kashmir in the MAP. FAIL FAIL FAIL

TM NET, place were i work!!

2008-08-15T15:00:00.004+08:00

Am like a kid with a new toy(55-250mm canon lens). I have been spending quite a bit of time experimenting with it. This morning i decided to get some shots around *cyberjaya*. I came up with this one. TmNet, my company yay!!!

*click on the snap to check the _clarity_.

More snaps will be uploaded to my Flickr!!.

Currently reading: English Patient. throughly enjoying every bit of it.

For the Love of Bangalore.....

2008-08-13T09:13:00.002+08:00

Support the city, go here http://bengalurubleeding.com/petition/

recent clamp down on the city is very upsetting. Sign in and
let the Free Culture continue to live in Bangalore

New words and Erin Mckean

2008-07-23T22:45:00.001+08:00

I have been following @emckean for quite a while on twitter, new words are always great to know, this one was the best in recent times.

neologisophilia: a love of creating new words

wow!!

Chance to Win a Nokia Communicator!!!

2008-07-23T11:47:00.003+08:00

Just two more days and excitement at @barcamp Malaysia awaits.

I have been receiving series of mails from the organizers regarding the event,
one of them contained this subject,

"Win a Nokia Communicator and other stuff at BarCamp Malaysia"

If your, reading this and want to win one, this is what you have to do....

1. Blog and Twitter about BarCampMalaysia

2. Scoring : Amount of Post 20%,
Quality of Post40%,
Creativity(using pictures video (20%),
Using Twitter.com (microblogging) 20%

3. Link back to www.barcamp.my/blog

4. must include barcamp logo in one of the post

5. must include barcamp badge in your blog (you can get that at www.barcamp.my/blog)

6. blogpost and pictures must be tagged barcampmalaysia

7. Twitter must be tagged #barcampmalaysia

8. The judges will be following your post via http://blogsearch.google.com/ and http://search.twitter.com/search?q=barcampmalaysia

Its worth a try. More than winning, is being at the event, seeing it happen. Haven't registered yet!!!, no issues, walkin @ 9 on 26th, details here.

Barcamp Malaysia!!!

2008-07-22T09:25:00.000+08:00

Be there, see it happening!!!

What is so critical about Critical Sections

2008-06-25T15:03:00.001+08:00

I have just started reading *Essential Device Driver* book by Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran.
One of things that really impressed me was the coverage of topic *Concurrency in Linux Kernel*, which even talks about *Preemption* and *Real Time* scenarios. Consider these four situations....

1. Critical section present only in process context on a Uniprocessor (UP) box running a non-preemptible
kernel.

This is straight forward situation, where one does not need to worry much about concurrency.

2. Critical section present in process and interrupt contexts on a UP machine running a non-preemptible
kernel.

In this case, Interrupts are of higher priority and than process(common sense)...mechanism required for concurrency ...very simple...

unsigned long flags;
local_irq_save(flags);
/* here goes your critical code......*/
local_irq_restore(flags);

3. Critical section present in process and interrupt contexts on a UP machine running a preemptible kernel.

This get interesting, just by disabling interrupts here wont solve concurrency issue. An example stated in the book is "multiple threads may enter the critical section simultaneously in the process context...." so concurrency can be achieved by,

spinlock_t my_lock;
spin_lock_init(&my_lock);
unsigned long flags;

spin_lock_irqsave(&my_lock, flags);
/* your critical section code ....*/
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&my_lock, flags);

Note: spin_lock_irqsave(), internally calls preempt_disable() and spin_unlock_irqrestore calls preempt_enable()......explicitly disabling/enabling preemption is not required!!!.(look at kernel/spinlock.c in the kernel souce).

4. Critical section present in process and interrupt contexts on an SMP machine running a preemptible kernel

This is the most complicated situation, where in protection of data structures in the kenrel needs to be handled with utmost care.

For this, you'll need your kernel compiled with CONFIG_SMP and CONFIG_PREEMPT.

From the book "....In the presence of SMP, the locking logic gets compiled in, and the spinlock primitives are rendered SMP-safe...."

Here's what you do,

unsigned long flags;
/*save interrupts on local CPU
disable interrupts on local CPU
lock the section to regulate access by other CPU's
*/
spin_lock_irqsave(&my_lock, flags);
/* critical section here */
spin_lock_irqrestore(&my_lock, flags);

This book is a wonderful read. I can't wait to explore other chapters.

Image test using Scribe....!!

2008-06-18T12:29:00.001+08:00

I am beginning to like *scribe* more and more now....uploading images....works!!...
..*do u wish to upload using ftp or blog API*....even better..!!!

publish time.

** i did edit this post.....i had forgotten to resize the image......

ScribeFire

2008-06-18T10:13:00.001+08:00

...this add on to firefox makes me even more lazier......

...now blogging is matter of pressing *F8*......i so much love such add-on's.
...nother one i use is *twitterfox*....
...thx Ankita....
back to working...

Fuel Prices!!!!

2008-06-06T17:01:00.003+08:00

Hike in Fuel prices .....effect global.....:(

A small accomplishment bring immense happiness to me....reason....i get to celebrate it with loads of *beer*.....this evening....*beer* will over flow.

off to the party!!!

Firefox!!

2008-05-30T09:54:00.000+08:00

I need a Holiday

2008-05-29T17:12:00.002+08:00

Reached office by 9 today and since then till now(half past five)...nothing achieved....amazing. I have been browsing about *lenses* for my Canon to actually looking to picking up a new Canon digital camera(T-300)...then to looking into new gadgets in town to Laptops....etc.

It just has been too much of work(monotonous)....and its prolonging ....i can't concentrate any more....else...most of my day at are gone wasted just like today...

Finally, by lunch i was on many airlines websites looking into holiday packages. Lots of places shortlisted.....but i am again not sure where i end up.....it all began from

1. Langkawi ( Malaysia)
2. Phuket ( Thailand)
3. Moscow ( Russia)
4. Rio De Janeiro ( Copacabana actually, Brazil)....
5. Shenzhen (china)....

and now...i think....i should go back to *Bangalore*.....now...more likely i will be going to back home some time in coming weeks......i hope i really stick to this completely uncertain travel plan.....

Any suggestions would really be helpful.

Ridiculous!!

2008-05-26T13:10:00.006+08:00

Just out of curiosity (not political at all).....wanted to know what happened to the election results of Karnataka. This is where i found out *BJP* has won the elections. Congratulations to them!!

But something that i came across really was so ridiculous....i wonder how people can even think of such non-sense towards their brethren.....are we still living amidst such crap??

*Click for the bigger Image

Knight Riders all the way!!

2008-05-26T09:52:00.004+08:00

Just was an amazing game. Not sure why i even was watching it initially. But since it was the _last_ game of the Knight Riders, i stayed up late to watch *Gangully*(dada)....hit a few sixes.

What the hell was Yuvaraj Singh thinking off!!!...

Amazing

2008-05-22T15:15:00.006+08:00

Picked up from Bangalore Metblogs.....all credit to them!!!! Watch out for the drain pipe attached to *hero's* heart!!

You are a F1 fanatic.....this is a must read article....

Hello World!!!

2008-05-15T16:37:00.002+08:00

Pressure!!!

Hello World!!!

For all you programmers, here's what i think we all began with Check!!!. Credits of the find goes to technofreak.

Happy B'day

2008-05-15T16:03:00.002+08:00

Happy B'day dude......

This guy has taken a decision of getting *married*.....ah.

Creative

2008-05-13T11:03:00.002+08:00

very interesting !!!

Flooded!

2008-05-13T09:44:00.002+08:00

Time just has not been good for us @home. Last afternoon tap breaks open cause of the pressure and floods the entire house. Ah...took us nearly two hours to get all the water out and now i have a terrible cold. I hate when such things happen to me.

Apparently, the water has flown down through the walls and damaged television and other stuff of the lady below our house.....This crazy *bitch* turns up early in the morning asking for settlement for the damages we have cause.....I can't believe these insane people.....they don't understand accidents......as if we have done this act on purpose......pisses me off.

Our carpets which were put out for drying are missing...:(...this just has not been my day. I wonder what more is in store......

Annoying....i have to see that *bitch* again...this evening....damn!!

_cramped_

2008-05-12T11:14:00.002+08:00

There was a feeling of being *tied* up.....something within me wanted to break free last night. Could not quite understand what i was going through. It was difficult....later i drifted into much needed sound sleep. I feel fresh and full of energy right now.....am not burning anymore.

It took me sometime to make a decision to move to new Blogger template. I always have been impressed by HemmingWay template(cos of its simple design). Now, yes....i love this template. Added to that i have my Twitter widget on it, much easier for you readers to know what am upto.

Besides this, i did really enjoy watching the game(cricket) between Kolkota Night Riders and Deccan Chargers.....*Gangully*....goes on the be a hero again.

/allen

Fear

2008-05-10T18:45:00.000+08:00

The silence between the past and future is so very *scary* right now.

!!!

2008-05-04T23:21:00.003+08:00

Well, life has been pretty much the usual, writing this post late at night, need to get to work tomorrow after having enjoyed four days *off*. Looking forward to spend sometime hacking on the *media gateway*....actually i haven't dived into the source of *astersik* yet....but i believe...it should be fun ....for what i have heard about asterisk being modular and well written package. I really love the way *astersik* functions and how easy it is to configure it. I am getting better at it....

*kernel* front ...i haven't been doing much.....just been looking at *2.6.25*...reading documents on Real Time in Embedded _Linux_.....there still so much to learn....

couple of parties....should be getting my car soon here....i'll soon have license to *kill* ....:-)...yes...have made good use of my *Canon 350D*.....

2008-04-18T11:37:00.002+08:00

What have i been upto?....

load of things actually, not sure if should be mentioning this, i have started to work out(My Fitness). Believe me, i wont be talking about the experience here!!.

Work has been interesting, have come a long way in understanding Asterisk and OpenSer. Couple of demo's completed using these two, everything just work!!....

_kernel_ front, just started to look in to UBIFS(Unsorted Block Images), the code looks great, this weekend i am looking forward to dig more into the internals of it.

My sister delivered a baby _girl_....unfortunately i haven't yet received any snaps of the new born, will for sure post on it sometime soon.

** ....Call Of Duty 4, i don't think i should be even talking about it, _just_ go ahead, grab it and play....i am really enjoying it to the maximum, my laptop actually handles the game pretty well, only unfortunate part is the _sound_ and _smaller screen_...

Rest's the usual, there's still beer!!....code, well miss a few friends.

Try this,....

A new toy

2008-03-31T13:40:00.002+08:00

This is what i was given today. What A!!! beginning to the week. I can't refrain myself from playing with it.

Love it!!!.

Chennai Airport!!!

2008-03-26T00:08:00.003+08:00

Well, its time!!!.... i will be gone from India in a couple of hours from now.

Cause i had to hurry for this un-scheduled travel plan, the only option i had to reach Chennai was by _bus_....which looked descent enough when i boarded it, unfortunately brushed a truck close by to chennai which knocked the left side mirror of the bus. aah!! the movies too were horrible.

Now at Airport, cheers!!! to BSNL for having provided pretty fast wi-fi here!!....

More once i get where ever i am supposed. :-)

What have i been doing??

2008-03-06T12:54:00.002+08:00

1. Taken break from work. Wont be back for altleast a month.
2. Been reading.
a. Real Time concepts for Embedded System --> good for beginners.
b. Wordpress complete. --> Good book, i know Word Press now!!
Currently reading, Mother Teresa - A Biography.
3. Working on _kernel_

I am always free for _beer_...get in touch!!!

You are only as strong as your weakest link!!

2008-02-20T18:15:00.002+08:00

its been a while since i came here, reason being..... _looking_ into kernel source code, just to figure out how many things have changed since i last had a peek in to it. Thanks to blog post by Anikita, which actually pushed me to look into a few things, cos of which my progress on the work front has been reduced by 80% or so....

First of all: Kprobes,

I have been using this feature quite a bit, this time i decided to actually dig into it a bit deeper to try and understand the layer in the kernel, _main_ reason being, kprobes is still not supported under ARM arch. Quite frankly, i should actually congratulate IBM and its folks for having done great job with Kprobes, i haven't had much luck trying to digest the whole part, but i have been steady going atleast.

The features i like most are pre function(a function that is executed before the probe address is executed) and post function(function after the probe address is executed), this actually together gives a developer most of the required debug information, which makes it a lot simpler and obviously faster to nail the bug.

After having looked at the code, i quite impressed the way its been hacked, especially register_kprobe function_.

if (p->symbol_name) {
if (p->addr)
return -EINVAL;
kprobe_lookup_name(p->symbol_name, p->addr);
}

if (!p->addr)
return -EINVAL;
p->addr = (kprobe_opcode_t *)(((char *)p->addr)+ p->offset);

if (!kernel_text_address((unsigned long) p->addr) ||
in_kprobes_functions((unsigned long) p->addr))
return -EINVAL;

p->mod_refcounted = 0;

/*
* Check if are we probing a module.
*/
probed_mod = module_text_address((unsigned long) p->addr);
if (probed_mod) {
struct module *calling_mod = module_text_address(called_from);
/*
* We must allow modules to probe themself and in this case
* avoid incrementing the module refcount, so as to allow
* unloading of self probing modules.
*/
if (calling_mod && calling_mod != probed_mod) {
if (unlikely(!try_module_get(probed_mod)))
return -EINVAL;
p->mod_refcounted = 1;
} else
probed_mod = NULL;
}

the code path considers every aspect, ......if you're a kernel developer, _you_ already know about it, if you aspire to be one, Kprobes is something that you should look into, google for more, there are some wonderful docs as well as examples which can help you get started with that.

second RT_PREEMPT:

This is another aspect i have been waiting to play with. Over the years Ingo Molnar and other have spent time and effort in giving Linux the feature of RT_PREEMPT, if your not sure why, here's why in brief,

All cause of Latencies, like
Interrupt Latency
Wakeup Latency
Scheduling Latency
Priority Inversion
Interrupt Inversion etc....

The patch i download is really very huge, i have started to go through the source, but its gonna take while for me to actually understand it completely, but, its interesting.

A few things that kept me hooked are,

Threaded Interrupts:
Interrupts do not run under Interrupt Context anymore, they run as normal threads, which means they run as normal processes, which implies, Process Context, so the next time there is an interrupt, no context switch, basically these are threads with pre-defined priorities which generally are higher than normal processes. So, this feature actually reduces interrupt latency(time the interrupt occurs to the time its serviced) drastically, this may lead to many question. So lets consider an example,

_suupose the code path in the kernel generated an interrupt, a thread is created to service this interrupt line(one thread per interrupt line, even if its a shared interrupt, look at the code for more), after which do_irqd is woken up and interrupt exits. Here the interrupt is only masked, the interrupt is yet to be handled, which i suppose you know how it happens.

Something that actually got me facinated to work on the _kernel_ source was what you can do with Linux at runtime, atleast i started by writing _hello world_ linux kernel module, this feature of passing runtime information to the kernel image is still the most interesting feature for me, so when i looked the Preempt code, there i found it again


int kernel_preemption = 1;

static int __init preempt_setup (char *str)
{
     if (!strncmp(str, "off", 3)) {
             if (kernel_preemption) {
                     printk(KERN_INFO "turning off kernel preemption!\n");
                     kernel_preemption = 0;
             }
             return 1;
     }
     if (!strncmp(str, "on", 2)) {
             if (!kernel_preemption) {
                     printk(KERN_INFO "turning on kernel preemption!\n");
                     kernel_preemption = 1;
             }
             return 1;
     }
     get_option(&str, &kernel_preemption);

     return 1;
}

__setup("preempt=", preempt_setup);

There's a lot more to it than i have understood it, next is probably spin_lock implementation and Priority Inversion. Will have more to talk about.

There is a document that found, which even mentions about the complexity _priority inheritance_ algorithm, and it actually having problems, since the priority to the threads are pre-assigned. I haven't the read the doc completely, so willl not talk much on it, may be next time.

Interesting --> Fear of long words _is_ Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobi i seriously have this phobia!!

Farewell....!! /AruL/

2008-02-05T01:28:00.000+08:00

Identify this **human**

A reason to Eat and Drink, and this time it was cause _Arul_ is flying to Australia for over two months. A farewell, ofcourse paid by him**. Never mind. Some snaps of the evening......!!

Chacha, i wonder how i managed to get a snap like this one!!

Chacha was getting pretty good at using my cam.

Here's the man!!....good luck dude!

/allen

IRC TodaY!!!

2008-01-28T21:18:00.000+08:00

nebM0f: is there windows.h for linux/unix ?
Saparok: nebM0ft: feel free to make one.
nebM0f: Saparok: i have better things to do with my life.
musty : nebM0ft: then why ask?
Saparok: nebM0ft: reading the docs isn't one of them, apparently
for example, you might implement your own WinMain(), that displays "what are you, a fucking moron?" on stderr.

SEGFAULT

2008-01-18T01:22:00.000+08:00

Online Again!!

2008-01-09T22:28:00.000+08:00

I am now back online with new Web Link of mine. Since the time [allenpais.org] down, I really did not think I would come back to having a site of my own, unlike peter, I am too lazy to maintain it.

But now I am on google pages. Things are much easier to maintain for me, I hope to keep updating it with something atleast once in a while. Not sure though.

Well there are couple of things I wanted to blog about,

one : As we know Christmas just past us, there is this usual routine of getting a Christmas tree decorated and [Crib] made at home. This Christmas my schedule at work did not allow me to spend much time at home to get any of this kind of things done. I managed to get the tree up with decorations and lights, on the [crib] front, I just could not put up a good show. The point is not that, as we know _Christ_ was born in a manger, like its said,

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped
him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger;
because there was no room for them in the inn.
--Luke 2: 7

it always is funny, yet I appreciated the creativity and the efforts behind making a crib which had [buildings], [cars], [neat roads] etc... Well after all progress is important from year to year.

Two : this drove me crazy for a while. I stumbled on this in the process of searching for some _algorithm_. Lemme introduce to you, [MIT Hackman Count].

This is a code snippet to count the number of bits set in a unsigned integer int bitcount(unsigned int n)
{
/* works for 32-bit numbers only */

register unsigned int tmp;

tmp = n - ((n >> 1) & 033333333333)
- ((n >> 2) & 011111111111);
return ((tmp + (tmp >> 3)) & 030707070707) % 63;
}

Back to working!!!

Merry Christmas

2007-12-26T02:41:00.000+08:00

Merry Christmas!!

Its been a while since i visited this place. Not sure what kept me away from blogging, i suppose laziness. Since the time i have come back to India, life has changed so much for me, most important would be my _health_. I look a lot better, gained good weight, yes found my self a _job_ . Well all this is not important.

Here is what i wish to share, for the first time i volunteered at FOSS.IN, it was an experience of a kind. I am there again next year. Here are a few snaps...

A few talks that i managed to attend in bits and pieces were,

Talloc : power of c by Russty
Bring your own hammer - I have the nails ! by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
How to Contribute to GNOME as an Artist or Designer by Mairin Duffy
ZeroConf Networking with Avahi by Lennart Poettering
Clutter: Fun with opengl interfaces by Shreyas Srinivasan
The challenges and opportunities of properly writing multi-threaded GTK based GNOME programs by Andrew Cowie

Using OpenEmbedded to power Open Devices by Holger Hans Peter Freyther
The State of SELinux by James Morris
Hacking the Fox by Myk Melez
User to hacker in 90 minutes: the tools and techniques needed to actually contribute to Open Source by Andrew Cowie

If you missed this year, get the slides from the Foss.in site, and most important, make sure you make it to the event the coming year.

Being at the event is great, you get to meet the people who are involved, get to talk, share the experience, its just wonderful. Additionally, i did get to meet the _team foss.in_. Overall, great conference.

Code....

2007-01-19T13:33:00.000+08:00

The whole of last week, plus this week, i have been just doing co-ordination between various people in the organization. I have just been doing the talking .......no coding!!....all that i wrote in the last few days are....

  char *getlogin(void) {
                         return getenv("LOGNAME"); }

 static void to_little_endian(uint32 *dst, uint8 *src, int len) {
                               while(len--)     {
                                                            *dst = (((uint32) src[3]) << 24) |
                                                                             (((uint32) src[2]) << 16) |
                                                                              (((uint32) src[1]) << 8) |
                                                                               (((uint32)src[0];
                                                              src+= 4;
                                                              dst++;
                                                         }
                                                }

have to get back to serious work soon......

Life De-values day by day.

2007-01-11T18:09:00.000+08:00

I have been so busy with work, i haven't had time for myself since i have come back from India. Could not handle this. This is what i did the whole of last night.....spent time listening to all my fav numbers which i never heard in the last two months.

" Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters "

J Depp, and people's fav award. I have enjoyed every movie of his so far. I hope to see more of him soon.

LCA begins this week. I initiall had plans of making it to sydney, but not with my current work schedule....even if i did try and get out of work, i don't think i can manage enough funds to make the trip. Hopefully next year i should be visiting Australia.

This world has lost its Glory........

2007-01-03T14:41:00.000+08:00

A very happy new year to all. This is one of those years, where in i don't have to think of "quitting smoking" as one of my new year resolutions. I do feel great about this.......

...the year 2006 for me, ended in a rather disappointing manner, with the new of Saddam being executed. Most of them, whom i have spoken to, are happy about the fact that he was executed. But i am not. Mr Bush, has killed more people than Saddam has actually killed. I am not denying that Saddam was a culprit, he is....but he should not have got the punishment that he got. This is very disturbing. More interesting news was, people in India opposing the hanging by taking a march on the streets......this is indeed a surprise for me.

Anyways, moving on, i did get a much needed break from my work. My Christmas vaction in Bangalore was just the perfect one in very long time. I spent most of my time at home with my family members. Christmas was nice and cold. The weather in Bangalore was just perfect for christmas. Just that my system could not take it well...i fell sick the very next day in Bangalore. I am sorry guys....i really could not meet any one of you this time.

Now back in Kuala Lumpur, and 2007 does not look to ease on me. The work just has piled up, which has taken much of time in these three days of my new year. Lots more to be planned and executed.

the worst thing to do after a holiday, is to check you inbox to find more than a thousand mails.

a bit of a extra work

2006-12-05T13:48:00.000+08:00

Well..i never thought i would have to do something other than my usual development work. Firstly, i had to make a big enough project plan(Project's gonna take about 3.4 years), which i had never done in any of my pervious organizations. For this to actually come on paper, i had to sit and understand the whole project requirement, which is very time consuming and painful. I underwent this whole big session called project meeting and brain storming sessions to make this come on paper. Now..i am ok with that...i just hope it executes.

Now once this activity is completed, a approach document has to be made, a design plan and lot more. This is very tedious...but its a good learning. Am getting better at this nice new profile i have had to act on. Is this by any chance as a whole called Project Management?...

vacation: In bangalore on 22nd for a week of christmas holidays.

" A Project is complete when its starts working for you, rather than you working for it"

Drunk!!!

2006-11-27T16:48:00.000+08:00

Not a planned party, but just happened to go to Bangsar on saturday with one of my friend to grab few beers!!!....did not go as planned. I got drunk with few beers, whisky...and lots of sembuka shots and one shot of B52. I was very much in control till i walked out of Fashion Pub...the next moment...i don't remember much of what happened next....All i know is i got back home...thats..it...no more drinking.

I can't just understand my luck. This is second year in a row, i am missing foss.in. I wish i could make it to meet these kernel dudes. I heard the keynote from suparna B from IBM was great. More updates on foss.in on planet.foss.in.

With great difficulty, i have managed to get a week off during christmas to make it Bangalore. Now, availability of tickets to Bangalore on Malaysian seems impossible. I am not sure how pleasant will my trip be if i choose to take either Thai or Sri Lankan.

“It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.”

-by George F. Burns

Ten ideas about ideas

2006-11-08T09:34:00.000+08:00

Which has more leverage in the marketplace — A) disclosure or B) secrecy? Which is more supportive of growing markets — A) public infrastructure or B) private platforms? Which is better for inventive entrepreneurs — A) sharing one's great ideas to drive development and adoption, or B) patenting and keeping secret one's "intellectual property" link

Kuala Lumpur again.

2006-11-07T12:27:00.000+08:00

Will all that problems that i ran in to cause of the delay in visa and my whole travel schedule, i finally made it into Malaysia yesterday. The place looks the same. not changed much at all....did not look like i did miss much.

I have been relaxing since yesterday, will be getting to work on the POWERLINE BASED GATEWAY tomorrow. I just can wait to start to work on this.

This trip to KL, wasn't really great. Just did not enjoy any bit of Malaysian Airlines.

process and procedures.....

2006-10-09T16:27:00.000+08:00

i do understand it is very much required to follow a process and have a approach built towards getting work done...but at times, this process especially in India, is so fucking slow. Now, i don't understand a few things with the Malaysian embassy at chennai. As most of us might have read, Malaysian govt has announced on entry visa's to Indians and now since i am moving on employment visa, i need to visit the embassy at chennai for certain formalities, which i think should be eliminated. Fine, i convinced myself to go to chennai for a day and be back with the visa....but today when i got in touch with the embassy guys....i received the information stating that the whole procedure will take three working day.....what the hell??....they don't have passport's to process for social visa's....and i don't think millions are flying on employment visa's every day...i don't really understand the delay.....three days for the visa...is still fine...but i have to stay in chennai for three days and do nothing....awesome...

AAAAAAARRRGGG.......

i hope to drink in Kuala Lumpur the coming weekend....

that is all..:-)

Finally breathing fresh air again....

2006-10-05T18:45:00.000+08:00

The post that carried information of me smoking more than 50,000 cigi's was not the last time i smoked. I really could not stop smoking then. i had to smoke a few hundred more to come to a final stop. Now that i have finally quit, it does feel nice.....:)

but my suggestion to people who smoke, is not to quit....the transition is not an easy phase...i am not sure if this would happen with every one, but i did fall sick....i suppose it was lack of nicotine in my body...it was bad....it would be better to smoke rather than suffering.....

but now...i am free...:-)

I am sure....90% of the people reading this post will still find it hard to believe....:-)

Compile kernel with -fwhole-program --combine

2006-09-13T16:48:00.000+08:00

came across a nice article on lwn....

"`-combine'
If you are compiling multiple source files, this option tells the
driver to pass all the source files to the compiler at once (for
those languages for which the compiler can handle this). This
will allow intermodule analysis (IMA) to be performed by the
compiler. Currently the only language for which this is supported
is C. If you pass source files for multiple languages to the
driver, using this option, the driver will invoke the compiler(s)
that support IMA once each, passing each compiler all the source
files appropriate for it. For those languages that do not support
IMA this option will be ignored, and the compiler will be invoked
once for each source file in that language. If you use this
option in conjunction with `-save-temps', the compiler will
generate multiple pre-processed files (one for each source file),
but only one (combined) `.o' or `.s' file.

`-fwhole-program'
Assume that the current compilation unit represents whole program
being compiled. All public functions and variables with the
exception of `main' and those merged by attribute
`externally_visible' become static functions and in a affect gets
more aggressively optimized by interprocedural optimizers. While
this option is equivalent to proper use of `static' keyword for
programs consisting of single file, in combination with option
`--combine' this flag can be used to compile most of smaller scale
C programs since the functions and variables become local for the
whole combined compilation unit, not for the single source file
itself. "

I recently picked up Nokia N73....i haven't made the best use of it yet...looking forward to do it once i reach Kuala Lumpur...

A quiet week!!

2006-09-02T15:11:00.000+08:00

Over the last week, i haven't done much....just been very lazy...I still haven't received the hardware i am supposed be working on...so, i decided to hack on a small how-to for the internal purpose of the organization on how to program device drivers in Linux...this is for sure been helpful for the beginers in my organization....some thing productive atleast....

Feel free to mail me to get this Document...

This is a nice quote i came accross on one of my friends(colin) blog...
" * My hands shake, because I’m a functional alcoholic. My name is Wil Shipley, and I like rum. "

while reading through on the net, came across this article which says..." Three things that make a great computer professional."...

1. The first is a good memory. The ability to recover instantly any facts.

2. The second is a way with words. Being able to easily and simply express your ideas so that others can understand.

3. Change. The ability to be able to recognize and adapt to change. --> adaptibility...

i found most of these aspects missing in many computer professionals that i have met, the only thing that they most like is the money that these engineers make out of showing their presence in the big organizations....and yes...M$ is always a good operating system... Eeee!!

Tattoo :

i am preparing myself to get a tattoo done on my shoulder....its a Dragon....really looking forward to see how it shapes up....Just a piece of advice that i received from one of my friends... " Dragon tattoo's or anything of such sort...may bring evil influence on you. "..beware of me!!!!

Lord of the Rings :

Yes aizatto...i do agree that i am sinner....but the next time...i will watch the movie without fast forward....

And yes..i am coming to Malaysia.....:-)...there's been a delay, cause my admin dept misplaced my mark sheets....but will reach KL some time soon.

Bangalore or Malaysia???

2006-08-28T14:50:00.000+08:00

With the way the things are going in the organization i am quite not sure if i will be flying to Malaysia or not....its been quite a confusion the Management has .......

The whole thing started off cause i had an idea of staying back here and building a Embedded Linux team which can cater to many projects from all around the world, but its been difficult to decide on the that. There have been many commitments. Hopefully things should settle out as soon as possible. Now....i dont think i will be flying on the 1st of september...:-)

I have been quite lazy off recent. Haven't been doing anything. Just work....ah..yes...believe me...working with SPI, CAN and MCP251x...has not been easy...the idea of sharing technical information is always appreciated....but with the people (team), which refuses to understand...is even horrible....Now the next assignment for me ...is to get Linux running on TMS320...wow!!...i need a holiday..

Nothing read in the past few weeks...but there have been a lot of movies....
1> Lord of the Rings( all three in one day....but fast forward mode..)
2> Road to Perdition.
3> The good, bad and ugly..
4> Lucky number selvin.
5> Dude where's my car.
6> Pirates ....both parts..
7> Da vinci code.
8> Garden state.
9> Man on fire.
and yes...
10> Sharabi....:-)

/allen

IMPRESSIVE........

2006-07-24T16:34:00.000+08:00

And some stickers...Wow!!

I smoked over 50,000 cigarette's in my life.....

2006-07-24T13:36:00.000+08:00

no joke, but now i have decided to end the saga....

i have really enjoyed the Ubuntu 6.06. I received the cd's yesterday, i still havent't found a reason to be disappointed. Initially i had problems running them on my Desktop at home(memory constraint)...fortunately for me, the laptop which i have does run it well...i am impressed with Ubuntu as well as Kubuntu...both are really nice distro's to use...i can harly find a reason to say no to such a beautiful distro....

here's some new thing that i got on the net..............

Your EQ is 133

50 or less: Thanks for answering honestly. Now get yourself a shrink, quick!
51-70: When it comes to understanding human emotions, you'd have better luck understanding Chinese.
71-90: You've got more emotional intelligence than the average frat boy. Barely.
91-110: You're average. It's easy to predict how you'll react to things. But anyone could have guessed that.
111-130: You usually have it going on emotionally, but roadblocks tend to land you on your butt.
131-150: You are remarkable when it comes to relating with others. Only the biggest losers get under your skin.
150+: Two possibilities - you've either out "Dr. Phil-ed" Dr. Phil... or you're a dirty liar.

What's Your EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient)?

Now since i have said no to smoking, i am thinking on working on my stamina. Running is the only thing that i can think of now....so here is where you can find what i am upto.

back in bangalore

2006-07-11T17:46:00.000+08:00

now that i am done with the work in HYD, it time for a break in Bangalore....

Now that i find time to do the stuff that i wished to do, first thing that came to my mind was to have a look on the my website...i dont work for eact technologies anymore...so there is loads of work to be done....

I was planning on picking up MAC PRO, but after spending good enough time checking things related to it, i dropped the idea of buying it. Many reasons involved....

there is good article on Red Black trees and its implementation on lwn. Anyone who wants to learn more on kernel and its datastructures, this is really a good one.

/allen

Question...?

2006-06-23T13:56:00.000+08:00

on one of the random websites, this is what i came across

In a Universe of 100 billion galaxies and 100 billion trillion stars--why were you born ?.

huh??

nerd test

2006-06-18T18:00:00.000+08:00

sunday at work...this is what i end up doing

/allen

Geek Test

2006-06-18T17:43:00.000+08:00

happened to come across this geek test..

here are my results

some interesting geek pOrn here...

/allen

busy.....!!!!

2006-05-31T18:46:00.000+08:00

Writing code is all that i have been doing over the last few weeks.....i have really enjoyed it.....but ye....its kept me quite busy....

There was a strange problem with 'cpp0' that i hit into over the last two days....and today...before closing at work, one non-technical person...just discovered it....huh....i am still not convinced with that.....does the the cross-compiler have to reside in /usr/local/. I usually copy it to my working kernel folder and have the $PATH exported.....and this is what was the problem for the last two days.....i still cant believe it....

currently tripping on SINGHA....beer..!!

Flaming week....!!

2006-05-13T16:53:00.000+08:00

When the Nazis arrested the Communists,
I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats,
I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat.
When they arrested the trade unionists,
I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist.
When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew.
When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest.

Martin Niemöller

its been quite a week at work discovering new problems in the project. One of them were rather very obvious...it took me two days to figure this out. I regret spending so much time on such a stupid bug. All that i had to figure out was why the serial initialization code (written in assembly) was hanging. The solution to that was ....no return instruction for the processor we are using.

Now i am kind stuck with a blizare problem. I havent been able to print strings. The kernel implementations looks to quite different. I suppose the problem is the cross-compiler. Its been generating huge amount of assembly junk...

Another bug that i have to solve is even better. I cannot using global declarations. why?...cos this initialized data goes and comfortably sits in the data section rather than rodata(read only). i have been working with the linker script for quite some time.....i havent got a clue to go about solving this now. But i will some time soon.

I have been having a pretty stressful time at work, for which i have compensated well this week. Its been parties all this week, which i suppose is gonna end today. Its been loads and loads of beer plus good flaming tequilla shots. In this happening week i did meet qutie a few jerks. Localites obviously, but i was there just get my self relaxed. People here actually play boy band songs in the PUB...huh?

Last, but very interesting. I have started hacking on a bootloader, which i am looking to open source it. I want volunteers who can test my code on various architectures and get back to me on the behaviour...so that i can fix the bugs. Currently i am still on the ethernet driver. I am looking to support ARM, MOTOROLA and i386. Its working with bugs on the hardware i am using for project. But i have to be running U-Boot on that. Any one willing to contribute, please get in touch with me for the code.

I miss being in Bangalore...!

These are the snaps from the latest Canon D30. I want it.....

Hammond Castle column

Gargoyle's Abode

Phoenix

I want a machine for myself now....it sucks without it.

Currently reading Deception Point - Dan Brown

Can't keep up ..

2006-05-03T19:46:00.000+08:00

Don't feel like I can keep up with blogging right now on top of all the other things that are happening in my life. Been a seriously busy couple of weeks here, only with loads ofwork. There's been a lot of fun staying up late at work, just to get the modules in the project working.

Over the last few days, i have had great fun hacking around with U-Boot. This is one boot loader which i really did not wish to work on. But the experience has been fun. We had to get the processor support as well as a new board support for our processor in to U-Boot. It did take us quite some time here to figure out the whole process of implement new code into it. With almost least amount of documentation, almost nil, we got the bootloader working. Its one of the best things i have hacked on off recent other than usual kernel drivers part.

There has been qutie a lot for me to learn in this organization, as we are into a complete development lifecycle, ie the hardware as well as the software development happens in this place. So there has to be great amount of co-ordination between the two teams to move towards the delivery of the work. This is one of the reason, i love being here. There is so much of infomation that flows between the two departments, that developers as well has hardware engineers get filled with information of stuff which they are not working on too.

I have been actually hacking on the harware built by them. Well the processor is some thing that has a very unique design. It runs at 50MHz, and starts off with a delay of 400 ns. I wonder why anyone would want to desing some thing like this...rest of the stuff was designed in house. Now we are on the testing phase of the board. By the way, there's FPGA too on this guy...and i have been looking into verilog code for some time now....it resembles C a lot.

Its my cousin's birthday today.....Happy birthday Fiddo...

just found this question yesterday.....

"how can we laugh in French?, in English we use "ha ha ha" or "he he he". what about French?"

..through the heat...

2006-04-10T18:22:00.000+08:00

nothing to soften the sun’s glare, and the dry, yellow landscape.....everything seems lifeless and still. life in Hyderabad....amazing.

with all the problems of high temperature around the state, i have just been with loads of beer to cool my body which tends to heat up fast. Now that i have spent close to a month in this place without visiting Bangalore, i find myself to be quite lost. Hopefully i should be in Bangalore during Easter with my family.

since i dont have a laptop now, status of hacking at home is zero. i need to look for one as soon as possible and get back to work. i have been wasting time watching the idiot box...and working on sundays too. Since i had not much to do at work yesterday, just came up with this for kernel that i am currently working on...

# create a copy of original elf vmlinux image for removing .text.doc section
echo cp vmlinux vmlinux.doc
cp vmlinux vmlinux.doc
echo cp vmlinux vmlinux.text
cp vmlinux vmlinux.text
# sleep 1

# create a binary file of only .text.doc section
echo objcopy -I elf32-little -O binary -j .text.doc vmlinux.doc
objcopy -I elf32-little -O binary -j .text.doc vmlinux.doc
# sleep 1

echo objcopy -I elf32-little -O binary -j .text.head vmlinux.text
objcopy -I elf32-little -O binary -j .text.head vmlinux.text

# create a copy of vmlinux for creating a (binary vmlinux - .text.doc section)
echo cp vmlinux vmlinux.raw
cp vmlinux vmlinux.raw
# sleep 1

# remove .text.doc, .text.head, and .bss section from the image
echo objcopy -I elf32-little -R .text.doc vmlinux.raw
objcopy -I elf32-little -R .text.doc vmlinux.raw

echo objcopy -I elf32-little -R .text.head vmlinux.raw
objcopy -I elf32-little -R .text.head vmlinux.raw

echo objcopy -I elf32-little -O binary vmlinux.raw -R .bss
objcopy -I elf32-little -O binary vmlinux.raw -R .bss
# sleep 1
cp vmlinux.raw vmlinux.ok

# gel the files together
echo cat vmlinux.doc vmlinux.text vmlinux.raw > vmlinux.bin
cat vmlinux.doc vmlinux.text vmlinux.raw > vmlinux.bin

#scount is a tool..
echo Copying Total sector count into vmlinux.bin
./tools/scount 0x20302000 ramdisk

dd if=vmlinux.bin of=/tmp/vmlinux.bin.le bs=512

# combine kernel with Ramdisk image
cat vmlinux.bin ramdisk > vmkernel

dd if=vmkernel of=/tmp/vmlinux.bin.le bs=512
# sleep 1

_allen_

Big Oh !!

2006-03-27T18:52:00.000+08:00

This is what i spent doing for the first one hour of my work time today.

given g1=O(f1) and g2=O(f2)
there exists x1, x2, c1 and c2

g1)x) < c1*f1(x), x>x1
g2(x) < c2*f2(x), x>x2

now x3 = max(f1,f2), c3=max(c1,c2)
therefore g1(x) < c3*f1(x), x>x3
g2(x) < c3*f2(x), x>x3

g1(x) + g2(x) < (f1(x) + f2(x)), x>x3
g1+g2 = O (f1+f2)

given f1(x)+ f2(x) < 2*max(f1(x), f2(x))
you have your lemma as well.

f1(x) + f2(x) < 2*max(f1(x), f2(x))

All considered functions mutually are monotone non-dcreasing functions and moreover their second derivatives aer non-negative. so there exists large enough x3>x2 such that

either f1(x)>f2(x) or f2(x)>f1(x) for all x>x3. with out loss of generality assume that f1(x)>f2(x). Then we deduce that,
2*E0*f1(x0 < g1(x) + g2(x) < 2* E1*f1(x) forall x>x3

if f1(x) > f2(x) which is equivalent to g1+g2 = O(f1)
iff1(x) < f2(x) forall x>x3
then g1+g2=O(f2)

Saturday was too much of alcohol. we were celebrating Birthday of one of my friends in Hyderababd. i should seriously check on my alcohol intake.

U-Boot has been fun to work on but its equally been difficult for me to digest most of it. the whole of last week i spent on getting the new cpu support into U-Boot. With lots of cross refrencing and google help, managed to get the flash drivers and ethernet drivers working with U-Boot. Most of the Cpu related work has been done. But i have been completely stuck with board side. Since my project involves a new board, built from scratch, i have been having a terrible time understanding the whole thing. currently hacking on early initialization part of the board and i have just two more days to get this whole stuff running.

Which ever organization i go to(not many, this is my third now) i always get the USB related work assigned to me. long back in the project i spent about a week hacking on the USB stack and back porting it. Now the managers want me to take over the rest of the USB related development work, which is not my responsibility. Plus have to still hack on the framebuffer driver and write a driver for the graphics controller.....i need a holiday....

currently reading The Bell Curve

Products face death too....

2006-03-23T12:42:00.000+08:00

its not been a lazy time for me, which is precisely not the reason for not blogging for over a month now.

down from Malaysia now to India, job which includes to hack the kernel and build embedded devices, its been fun. especially hacking the kernel has been an awesome time.

now that i am in HYD for some time, i really do miss bangalore and ppl around there. this place is just not a place for Bangaloreans. every thing around here is strange.

My cell phone (k750i) just died couple of days ago. and here i have been very lazy to even take it to a service centre to have it checked and breath some life into it...hopefully. the only cell that i really did maintain well died...as of now i dont know the reason for its death, but i think its just another software crash i have had on the cell phone...

has anyone hacked U-Boot..?

Another year!!!....another valentine's day.

2006-02-14T12:24:00.000+08:00

forced my body out of the bed this morning to check the time....i was late...by 30 min. thats when i saw a message on my cell from my cousin which read,

...irrespective whether we believe in valentines or not.....
have a great day..lets just say that its just another excuse
on just another occassion to say i care

do i understand this?..

it was better off reading 10 things about yourself that would suprise you....it was a suprise.

door to hell......:-)

Nice _one_

2006-02-11T23:22:00.000+08:00

_allen_

Do not stand at my _grave_ and weep

2006-01-30T18:02:00.000+08:00

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die. !!

_allen_

Pure hacking!!

2006-01-27T20:36:00.000+08:00

now that i have quit my job in Malaysia.....i am having a great time hacking the kernel source code.

currently hacking on the USB stack for 2.4.07 with just ISA bus on it...voila...its been fun.

linux conf.au....--> planet Gnome

Ubuntu on my Laptop, without dev tools

2006-01-10T02:50:00.000+08:00

finally got Ubuntu running on my laptop after three months of rough time with Enterprise Linux. And its midnight now....not happy with Ubuntu.

error: root@kryptic# sudo apt-get install build-essential

i need to fix this before i make it to bed.

its our time to shine!!!

2006-01-08T03:01:00.000+08:00

A delurking...
untitled

It's not the pain, I told him.
No- I hate the pain.
The fire in my skin
that
always seems like more
than I can take, and is
always just a
little less
than too much.

Needle, knife-edge,
licking flames
of
crop and cane
and cat.
It's not the pain.
No.
Not the shame

upon my knees, it's
not the words
that put me there,
Not the
bite,
the claw,
the wheel,
the arcs of purple
lightening tracing

whelts and stripes
of yesterday,
the clutching straps,
leather,
rubber,
chain and steel-
It's not the pain-
It's how it makes me
feel.
I told him-

the look in your eyes
that fills my soul
like
nothing else... to know
that you care so very much
exactly what
I'm
feeling.

just did have a good time today.....!

*Note: Studies can stand as pieces of art or love, on their own. However, these are only preliminary feelings for someone or something different and I view them as such, the real work and magic comes after. There is a process involved where I try to make me look real, and by doing a study first, this is almost possible.

For those who communicate mainly by text rather than verbally. This could be either by necessity or choice.

its been a while....

2006-01-07T17:12:00.001+08:00

it has been a good time all the way till now in Bangalore.

la presento.. Memories!!.

Plans{....}

2005-12-19T18:08:00.000+08:00

instead of preparing for the talk tom, i spent the whole day on how i should make the best use of my trip to bangalore.

this what i came up with

Get really drunk.

Go to my friends house, drink more.

Get even more drunk.

Go to a bar.

Get drunker.

Come home.

news...

2005-12-19T10:58:00.000+08:00

SUN SEE'S A GRID FUTURE....

i read this article on of the local papers of singapore, which gave me a glimpse of Sun's vision for the future.

the concept of using thin clients running on utility grids will help companies save on energy costs. with a sun ray thin-client workstation, users can view "display over internet protocol" and use the utility gird for services.

And Sun's plans are to have the hosting done at singapore(which wud be the Hub) and have a backup or alternative at scotland....Damn neat!!.

This is what i totally agree with Scoot McNealy, " The real cost of any technology is not in acquiring it, but the cost of moving away from that technology when it becomes obsolete..". Rather than worrying about how much it costs to acquire technology, one should ask how much it costs to get away from it.

Kernel news:

with all the latest talking happening on the kernel side, one that interests me and which i have been a part of it for a few days now is regarding the current stack size in the Linux Kernel.

there have been debates and arguements where lots of hackers have been voting for varied stack size. But why change the stack size??. The need is not absolutely necessary. Some came up with a "play-safe" concept of giving the user the option to pick the stack size during the compilation time. This is a good option, but do we ..actually need to go do the changes cause every other operating system is doing it. currently there are talks about having 4k and 8k stacks.

But one has to test for the stablity("throughput" and "latency") in the kernel once these changes have been done. Adding these feature is just a few lines of code, but the changes in the environment of the kernel is what matters.

Anyway CONFIG_DEBUG_STACKOVERFLOW is not enabled in 2.6.14.4 i386 defconfig. Don't know about vendor kernel kernels though.

Solaris is moving towards having 16k stacks for their 64-bit os. wow wow!!

i was looking for a smarter way to achieve a way to restrict the size of the files being written by the kernel to a hardware device?
if(conf & 1) {
idev->smart = 1;
hwif->atapi_dma = 0;
/* Long I/O's although allowed in LBA48 space cause the
onboard firmware to enter the twighlight zone */
hwif->rqsize = 256;
}
i finally found it in the kernel itself....!!!

cool thing with LIBUSB

2005-12-18T12:41:00.000+08:00

this is a cool thing that i came across when i was checking for some open source projects on developing better USB support for Linux operating system. for a developer who know how to work around with the linux subsystems and kernel modules, this is a fairly easy thing to do...

void print_endpoint(struct usb_endpoint_descriptor *endpoint)
{
printf(" bEndpointAddress: %02xh\n", endpoint->bEndpointAddress);
printf(" bmAttributes: %02xh\n", endpoint->bmAttributes);
printf(" wMaxPacketSize: %d\n", endpoint->wMaxPacketSize);
printf(" bInterval: %d\n", endpoint->bInterval);
printf(" bRefresh: %d\n", endpoint->bRefresh);
printf(" bSynchAddress: %d\n", endpoint->bSynchAddress);
}

void print_altsetting(struct usb_interface_descriptor *interface)
{
int i;

printf(" bInterfaceNumber: %d\n", interface->bInterfaceNumber);
printf(" bAlternateSetting: %d\n", interface->bAlternateSetting);
printf(" bNumEndpoints: %d\n", interface->bNumEndpoints);
printf(" bInterfaceClass: %d\n", interface->bInterfaceClass);
printf(" bInterfaceSubClass: %d\n", interface->bInterfaceSubClass);
printf(" bInterfaceProtocol: %d\n", interface->bInterfaceProtocol);
printf(" iInterface: %d\n", interface->iInterface);

for (i = 0; i < interface->bNumEndpoints; i++)
print_endpoint(&interface->endpoint[i]);
}

void print_interface(struct usb_interface *interface)
{
int i;

for (i = 0; i < interface->num_altsetting; i++)
print_altsetting(&interface->altsetting[i]);
}

void print_configuration(struct usb_config_descriptor *config)
{
int i;

printf(" wTotalLength: %d\n", config->wTotalLength);
printf(" bNumInterfaces: %d\n", config->bNumInterfaces);
printf(" bConfigurationValue: %d\n", config->bConfigurationValue);
printf(" iConfiguration: %d\n", config->iConfiguration);
printf(" bmAttributes: %02xh\n", config->bmAttributes);
printf(" MaxPower: %d\n", config->MaxPower);

for (i = 0; i < config->bNumInterfaces; i++)
print_interface(&config->interface[i]);
}

int main(void)
{
struct usb_bus *bus;
struct usb_device *dev;

usb_init();
usb_find_busses();
usb_find_devices();

printf("bus/device idVendor/idProduct\n");

for (bus = usb_busses; bus; bus = bus->next) {
for (dev = bus->devices; dev; dev = dev->next) {
int ret, i;
char string[256];
usb_dev_handle *udev;

printf("%s/%s %04X/%04X\n", bus->dirname, dev->filename,
dev->descriptor.idVendor, dev->descriptor.idProduct);

udev = usb_open(dev);
if (udev) {
if (dev->descriptor.iManufacturer) {
ret = usb_get_string_simple(udev, dev->descriptor.iManufacturer, string, sizeof(string));
if (ret > 0)
printf("- Manufacturer : %s\n", string);
else
printf("- Unable to fetch manufacturer string\n");
}

if (dev->descriptor.iProduct) {
ret = usb_get_string_simple(udev, dev->descriptor.iProduct, string, sizeof(string));
if (ret > 0)
printf("- Product : %s\n", string);
else
printf("- Unable to fetch product string\n");
}

if (dev->descriptor.iSerialNumber) {
ret = usb_get_string_simple(udev, dev->descriptor.iSerialNumber, string, sizeof(string));
if (ret > 0)
printf("- Serial Number: %s\n", string);
else
printf("- Unable to fetch serial number string\n");
}

usb_close (udev);
}

if (!dev->config) {
printf(" Couldn't retrieve descriptors\n");
continue;
}

for (i = 0; i < dev->descriptor.bNumConfigurations; i++)
print_configuration(&dev->config[i]);
}
}

return 0;
}

The above program should be compiled as

(cryptic$)gcc -o usbdevice_details testlibusb.c -I/usr/local/include -L. -lnsl -lm -lc -L/usr/local/lib -lusb

(cryptic$)./usbdevice_details (enter)

cool eh!!.

buggy drivers!!

2005-12-18T12:22:00.000+08:00

most of my driver codes just don't compile well for the first time. other than a few typo's there are a lot of other things which i keep coding upside down. so i decided to kind of put it clean on the paper, so that in the future i dont end up with the same errors. i am sure i will....

the usual trouble i hit up is on semaphore...

the down() goes this way....
1) disable interrupts
2) load semaphore count into register
3) decrement register value (remember if it goes negative)
4) store register value to semaphore count location
5) enable interrupts
6) if the count went negative go to sleep

The up() goes like this:

1) disable interrupts
2) load semaphore count into register
3) increment register value (remember if it remains < 1)
4) store register value to semaphore count location
5) enable interrupts
6) if the sem count is still < 1 then wake up someone

i hope not to hit the same error in the near future....

Hackers vs Painters

2005-12-18T11:57:00.000+08:00

So, if hacking works like painting and writing, is it as cool? After all, you only get one life. You might as well spend it working on something great.

while i was lying back browsing my hard drive, i came across this article "Hackers vs Painter". i had downloaded it long back. while i was reading thorugh it, i felt, the generation today is very fortunate for having the exposure of computers at a very early age. but will these kids write better programs than the hackers today?. some how i dont see that happening. looking at a lot of college going students, i dont have the feeling that they are not interested in writing code or doing bug testing.

i remember the days in my college when i used to wait for more and more information on the programming, since it was a whole new world to me. with the programming experience of just over 3 years now, at times its still difficult to get a complete hang of some of the new codes that i come across. added to that, the programming that i learnt or anyone for that matter learnt in our masters, never had a chance to master even a single language or even spend enough time with one of the programming languages. but indeed they got me started off towards programming.

Had been to sentosa on friday. after the renovation, the place looks much much better than what i had seen two years back. the sky tower was the one of the best things. 131 mtrs above sentosa, from where one can see the whole of singapore. the musical fountain is still the same. which i found to be boring ...

Things that i have been doing !

2005-12-16T12:20:00.001+08:00

Christmas Tree.

Every day I did get thoughts and words to update my blog, but cud not … lack of time. Well there are many things that I have to be talking about.

Starting off, with what I have been thinking of writing, I had a small upsetting time when I bumped into my previous employer (Dr Pande) in one of the shopping malls close to my house. He could not digest the fact that I was being paid for doing my own bit of hacking as well as development, which he could not manage when I was working under him. And this is probably a reason why he provoked me to quit my current organization and concentrate more making more riches through what I was interested in.

Ditesh ..../* */

This phase was nicely covered by the Malaysian open source meet up the same evening. I was looking ahead for this opportunity for quite some time. Finally there I was moving through some vegetable market to find the place where the hackers where roaring to begin. Soon the evening began with lightening round of talks. I extended the memory disk talk from Khairil to embedded side to give the hackers a clear picture of the development environment. Met a lot of new ppl including Collin, Ditesh etc. The evening had a lot of talks on various topics ranging from my sql to programming Ruby. It was a fun evening with them. We moved on for Mamak (I suppose I got it right. Mamak == food) talking about various different aspects of open source, and how the team here could make more contribution towards open source and help Malaysia grow. This is where the talk by Robert Flurry (JBoss guy) ran through my head, HOW TO MAKE MONEY THROUGH OPEN SOURCE. Since I was off for the weekend with not much work left for me to attend to, I decided on beer, and four of us took off, Aizat, Collin, Ditesh and me. I was just getting to know Ditesh and Collin. As usual we hit bangsar, and since it was a Friday night I did not expect much crowd around, but to my surprise, I did see better crowd than the usual Saturday night crowd. The girls out there were awesome. We drank lots of beer and there were lots of talks. Then we were joined by Dinesh, Free BSD hacker. Amazing dude, I think I was lost, or looked as though I was on cloud nine enjoying my beer, Dinesh had this real crazy conversation of he working for Microsoft and Open source was like a crazy idea. This went on for quite some time until all of us started to kind of dose off. Then as usual these guys were deciding to move on to a diff place. Girls!! Is what Ditesh came up with, and I was against it. So we decided to catch with some more alcohol. But since it was already past two, we cud not find a place for more beer other than a usual 7/11. So we hit brickfields for great Dosa's talking about open source and various holiday spots in India. Over all it was an amazing time that I had with these bunch of new hackers that I met.

Dinesh

Collin and Ditesh

With all that good time in Kuala Lumpur, I had to get ready to leave to Singapore. Since it was time of vacation for kids and a weekend too, getting a Bus turned out to be a very difficult. I wasted close to thirty bucks calling various travel agents to get me at least one seat for Singapore. Finally thanks to the Malaysia railway, they had introduced a special train during the weekends to Singapore.

Noisy Train

Hoping that my journey would be good since I was traveling by train, it turned out to be the opposite. I wonder why I keep bumping into strange circumstances all the time. The whole night the train made so much noise, that I could barely close my eyes. The AC was killing me, and I had no cold clothes with me....and for some strange reason, they did not switch off the lights. Except for me, every one else was sleeping. I had to kill time; got my laptop out to do some bit of reading. When I was done with my reading, I was too tired to keep my eyes open, so decided to knock myself out. But no sooner I closed my eyes, I was at Johor Baru, and a few minutes from there were Singapore.

Managed to get out of the train with all the stuff that I was carrying around, to immigrestation, with all the checking done, I took a taxi to Bukit Batuk central. Reached my Boss's place and the servant there refused to let me in. She did not understand English and I cud not understand Tamil which is the only language which she claimed to know. Infact she was so strange, she agreed to let my luggage in, but not me. After waiting for a good half hour, my boss woke up to let me into the house.

The place that I live in Singapore is quite off the city. But it is a very silent, peaceful place except for a cranky lady at 7/11.

So over all the journey to Singapore and the time in Singapore was not as I had expected. I thought it was end of it, no..Some how things don’t turn out to be nice when it comes to me. I had got a 14days stamp on my passport, stating that I cud not stay longer than that period in Singapore. But since I had a multiple entry and I have conference coming up, I had to go the embassy yesterday to get an extension. After waiting for a good one hour, I submitted my passport expecting to get a stamp immediately and then leave. But the lady refused to do so and asked me to come and pick the passport later in the evening.

I had to kill time till evening. I moved towards Sim Lim towers to look for a Canon D350. And then when I walked passed the hotel Golden Landmark where I had stayed on my previous visit to Singapore. It was like walking down memory lanes, the same hotel, the same Bugis village, Burger King opposite to Bugis village, the Reddang (beef) burgers. I remembered the good time me Peter and Asher had during our visit from college.

My Fav beer!!

With a good time doing window shopping in Sim Lim, I headed back to the embassy to get my Passport. And when I finally did, the lady said YOUR EXTENSION IS REJECTED...I was kind of surprised, but could not do anything. Never such a thing had happened to me.

Dollars !! on my laptop..
This morning I went again, with the invitation letter of the conference and with no further questions I was granted extension. This was very strange but I was happy that I got it.

Now that Christmas is almost there, I was planning a trip back to India depending on my work schedule. Now that I have sorted out things, coming to India is not a problem. But the way I am flying is slightly a complicated thing. I will be flying from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, the whole night I will spend at the airport drinking beer, because I have an early morning flight to Chennai and from Chennai then another flight to Bangalore. I cannot imagine the journey that I have to go through. I hate flying. I do...I really do.

And this is what i came across yesterday, To live, to literary live alive...one has to be psychic..

Thought!!!!

2005-12-09T09:23:00.000+08:00

lost in time
thinking
yes!!! lost in time
aahh, i dont like it this way..

interesing weekends

2005-11-29T13:04:00.000+08:00

the trek plans for the weekend did not work out cos of lack of information and planning. but things ended up nice. had a good time out to Klang port with my new friend(Thina). was a nice drive down. did enjoy the tender coconut after long time.

i like this boat

it was the Birthday of Biju(monday). so we decided to make it Bangsar for a small party. The night was hot and happening. i wish i cud get some snaps of the girls dancing on the bar counter.

the FOSS.IN has started today, i wish i cud be there. some of talks that i am interested in are:
1. Builiding embedded x86 systems by jaya kumar.
2. Both the talks from Alan cox.{ use the source and A modern Linux driver }
3. Google and Open source by Zaheda
4. Linux kernel road map & A guide to Linux mutual exclusion by Jonathan corbet
5. High availability in Linux by Sulamita Garcia
6. NSA security enhanced by James Morris.

i hope to get more info on these talks. this has to be the best so far in india.

i miss running Ubuntu on my Laptop....

schdule->busy;

2005-11-18T15:50:00.000+08:00

had a very busy time all this while. was at the microsoft event in Kuala Lumpur Convention centre(massive place) for the launch of Visual Studio 2005. the suprising part was the amount of people who turned up for the event. so many Microsoft users.

couple of days back, when i was about to sleep, a thought ran in my mind, a day has 1440 minutes, is this one of the reasons why we have 1.44 MB floppies ?.

mono 1.1.10 released. need to have a look at it.

Happy Birtday Dad

just forgot the good one-->

2005-11-10T14:47:00.000+08:00

just received a mail from Asher, telling me about missing the best snap on the blog. so i decided to get another pic of him in here. indeed this one is awesome.

thoughts!!!!

2005-11-10T12:03:00.000+08:00

"i'm living life ...inside a bubble". this line has been running on my head since morning.

A day has 24 hours, which is equal to 1440 minutes. Is this where guys got idea to create floppy (1.44 MB)...???

Asher sent me some images of him in US. i am jealous of him now.

Holiday season...

2005-11-02T19:31:00.000+08:00

well most of this week here in Kuala lumpur is closed. Diwali first followed by Hari Raya (id for us in India). since my office is closed i have to be sitting at home to kill time.

have been looking into the new ktimer implementation in the kernel. They run on the Red-Black tree algorithm. Its quite an interesting one.

struct t_red_black_node {
enum { red, black } colour;
void *item;
struct t_red_black_node *left,
*right,
*parent;
}

the whole algorithm is beautiful. do a google if some of you find it interesting.

i found this new website. it has good information on Ghosts. Its nice reading them.

Age of Empires has been one of my fav games for long. Off recent i haven't been playing games. But today i picked a copy of Age Of Empires 3, best thing to do when one has holidays.

finally turned -->25

2005-10-29T21:44:00.000+08:00

long and silent was the day, finally turned 25, thanks fella's for the wishes..

wish i cud make this happen...

static int ALLEN_AGE = 25;

Oh dear Bangalore

2005-10-27T11:02:00.000+08:00

as usual on my tour of internet today, i found it hard to digest what rains have done to Bangalore city. peaceful and silent was the place during those wonderful days ( 5-7 years back ), with the boom in IT and education industry, Bangalore started attracting morons from all over india, which today is a disaster.

on my recent visit to bangalore i could not find a parking space for my two wheeler. the amount of people in the city have increased beyond imagination. Added to that is our very near and dear politician. what the fuck are they upto?? i dont understand the problem these bastards have with the IT industry, who have been begging the govt for better infrastructure.

but i suppose bangalore is still going ahead with IT.com, thanks to infosys and Mr Murthy. and this time FOSS.IN is big. they are expecting about five thousand odd participants. Alan Cox is one of key speakers, unfortunately i am gonna be missing it. the others are Jonathan Corbet,Andrew cowie, harald welte, jeremy zawodny,dave phillips....

these are some of the things that i found, i pity the garden city.....

DOWNPOUR OF WOES

* Floods kill three in Bangalore on Wednesday.

*Gastroenteritis breaks out in the City.

*Affected people in rented houses moving to other areas.

*In Bangalore urban district, 8,802 houses have been inundated, while 374 collapsed. A total of 2,122 people have been rehabilitated.

*In Bangalore rural district, 3,500 houses collapsed.

*Rs 70 crore is the estimated damage in BMP area.

*Loss to crops and property in Bangalore rural Rs 30 crore.

this is part of an article i read. but for sure its funny

Water is yet to recede in Mangammanapalya, Vajpayeenagar, Ayodhyanagar and HSR Layout under Bommanahalli CMC limits. Two schools – Image English School and Royal English School – in J P Nagar 7th Phase still remain inundated. Hosur road remains flooded.

the best

Politicians including Governor T N Chaturvedi, Chief Minister N Dharam Singh and Mayor Narayana Swamy, made a beeline to the affected areas. After the inspection at the Silk Board Junction, where knee-deep water has accumulated, the bus carrying the chief minister did not start. It had to be pushed to some distance before it got on the wheels.

walking down memory lanes....

2005-10-26T15:30:00.000+08:00

a strange thought runs in your mind when ur all alone having some beer, how you wish if some one u had known or some one you are closed to is by ur side. difficult it is, but the thoughts in you mind takes you to a whole new world of memories u have had with all the friends and relatives, how i wish, how i wish they were here.

the time, friends with beer around the table, smokes lying every where, talking, laughing, teasing, why dont they last long or happen when you want them.

fuck it, let me go back and live my life. can i afford to do this, should i do this? oh lord, where have i come?. land of party houses, all alone, life seems to have taken a bad shape.

walking down memory lanes....how i wish i was lying on my own bed back home, waiting for the sun set to open my eyes. those days of in school, i had nothing to worry about, lying on the grass, staring at the sky ..... i have grown with time, "life" just has taken a big turn...

memories of college days, the fun, the trouble, the perception of life being easy once you are out of college fading away now, wish i had a time machine, i would make my self come back to the day i was born.

can i write a script to automate my professional life....??

am i gonna quit soon?

2005-10-20T14:28:00.001+08:00

just when i thought i was out of smoking, i met a stranger who offers me a cigi from india. how could i disappoint him by saying no.

when i had thought i was done with it. i was just saying it..i suppose..

wish i could own one of these

2005-10-19T12:53:00.000+08:00

these are called cryptex. the used to store secrects. they are hand made and are useful to those people who have secrets. but this is an amazing piece of art created long back in the 15th century by Da Vinci. try cryptex

9 shopping days to go for Allen's birthday. there is some confusion with my birtday every year. i have altleast one person wishing me ten days in advance.

i should be getting a new laptop today. its on the way from singapore. i am not sure of the model number yet. its a HP based machine. being in the field of Embedded Development, having a serial port becomes so important. I wonder why most of the laptop manufacturing companies have stopped selling laptops with serial ports.

i am planning a 350 Mile in 24 hrs bycycle ride some time in December. i need my fitness back.

back in Kuala Lumpur

2005-10-12T16:54:00.000+08:00

with all the shit that i had with the malaysian embassy in chennai, they did give me the visa last evening. and added to that...the rains. reached Kuala Lumpur this morning and had to rush for the conference. it was nice talking about the debugging to a lot of programmers, who want to become hackers some day.

Jegan from Wind River systems spoke on using workbench. the demos were great.

then i slept in the meeting this afternoon. cud not keep my eyes open. now i am off for dinner with this sleepy face. i need a good sleep.

aaahhheee....!!

Allen VS Peter...web fight....KDE VS GNOME

2005-10-10T19:37:00.000+08:00

dude....i believe no one can change u from using KDE...but we never asked u too...but performance wise let me tell u....KDE cannot beat GNOME...this is what i have to say....

""KDE is written in C++. While this is not necessarily a problem, it can be when Visual Basic reject programmers (which the KDE project is overrun with) do not know enough to avoid important pitfalls that plague C++ software projects; KDE suffers badly from stupid use of autoincrementing operators and iteration with C++ objects and masses of unnecessary allocations and deallocations of memory -- two of the most comon problems in C++ software.

Perhaps the most cretinous of all problems is blaming the extremely slow startup times of KDE apps on GCC. The GNOME 1.x releases were hardly svelt (2.x fixes many of these issues), but GNOME is a fashion cat-walk superwaif when compared to KDE's 500lb fat-momma cheese-burger scoffing trailer trash.

One need only look at the recent fuss over ugly KDE hacks (such as prelinking) used to bandage up the design and coding flaws in the decrepit KDE architecture to see the truth. ""

and lets not get too much abt this...ha ha...there is some thing that i have for you here to cheer u up....

FuNnY Malaysian embassy in chennai

2005-10-10T19:22:00.000+08:00

the malaysian embassy refused to issue my passport today, cos of which i cannot be leaving india today. will be taking off tomorrow night.

the security guy at the gate was having a fight with me. he was threatening me of cancelling my visa.....i was zapped...security has so much influence in the embasssy....hail india.

met a new person today on yahoo....its seems i had spoken to him before regarding web development. considering my memory of remembering ppl on the internet ....i dont know who this person is. but he was a nice guy to talk to.

finally recieved a mail from Asher...dude seems to be having a blast in US. this is what he wrote for which i am jealous of him....

""Have been on the road since the 29th of Sept and been really busy travelling from city to city, first was at Niagra Falls, then hit Toronto, got there with family as we rented a car, then I shifted to Chung's sis's place after being with my family for two days (1 at Niagara and 1 day at Toronto at my bro in-law's friend's place), then was in Toronto for a day and then went for a 3 day tour to Kingston, 1000 Islands, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City, man this was really hectic but awesome, Montreal and Quebec City are really beautiful, feel like u r in France...really as its a french speaking state of Quebec and quite close to France. Well I went to a nice Club the night I shifted to Chung's sis's palce. Flew to Boston on the 7th and have been here for two days. Its just been so hectic travelling from place to place.
""

read a comment on my blog for the post ""leaving INDIA""....who ever you are...pls do leave ur name in the future.

peter paul crasta...i did not know ur name meant ""little rock"" ...trying to guess what ARUL cud probably mean in hebrew...-:)

Mono on nokia

2005-10-10T10:30:00.000+08:00

this has been there for some time....but i forgot to put it in here. i am looking to run mono and some gtk applications on arm now....wish me luck and patience.

nat has a some nice stuff about being a hacker...if ur not then follow the instructions. dont ask me the same question.

leaving INDIA

2005-10-10T09:21:00.000+08:00

its been one of the shortest visits to india being a indian all through my life. these two weeks i spent in india was like a flash of time for me. there are so many of them whom i wanted to meet but cud not.....but it was a fun time.

from the day i landed in bangalore, the dinner at coconut groove, the drive to my uncle's town, meeting my relatives, a very small trek there, the journey back to bangalore, me and my nephew playing around with the crazy car, drinking beer, Maddy's wedding....all of it has been so nice.

its been short but full of new things. food was some thing that i will continue to miss as i leave india. its work time now. conference on the 12th in Kuala lumpur, i will be talking on the traditional debugging tools available in linux for the application programmers and will touch on the procedure of kernel debugging. in case you want to see me, do mail me before reaching there.

hey peter nice to know that you have a blog. try and be nice there.

back in india

2005-09-26T19:00:00.000+08:00

home sweet home....i have only been eating and meeting people..

traffic in bangalore is stinging my eyes. i dont like riding in this city anymore....but its nice being back home after a long food less season.

death rally

2005-09-19T23:47:00.000+08:00

i have been trying to relax myself. so to do this i came up with an idea of playing games. i decided to play some old dos games which i loved playing when i initially started using computers.

i downloaded prince...but got bored soon. then downloaded death rally ....one of my fav game. can some one tell me why i get this divide overflow error when i install it. i want to play that game....waiting to bomb all the cars...

i hate ants

2005-09-18T19:56:00.000+08:00

its been a bad time for me. while i was sleeping, i think an ant bit my eye. its turned red and looks like a football...its painful.

it was a great time last weekend in penang. met a lot of ppl there. it was really nice to see my old friend andrew....we did have a lot of beer flowing. i was invited to a moon cake festival celebration....food was great....and i was kind of lost since i cud not understand the local language.

hooked on to some new ppl. ivan a chap like one of us( into beer) ..was really nice to be with. he was the one translating things for me. he has a lot of the snaps of the evening's get together. Ivan i am waiting for the snaps...

then we had a nice jam up at the pubs there...great time drinking. the group that we went it looked a little amazed at me. anyways a great time there. cheers !!

i even drove in penang without a license...i think manual grears are better...

kartina effect

2005-09-08T11:56:00.000+08:00

this is one of the worst things that has ever happened to United States...but at the end of the day its not bush who is home less its the people.

miguel has a lot of things mentioned about katrina on his site. there are a lot of snaps about the whole katrina effect. you can have a look at it here.

today being the nativity feast, woke up early to make it to the church for the service. since i had started the day early, i spent some time talking to deepak on some issues..the one that caught both of us...was the fight between microsoft and google...it was interesting to read Bill Gates mentioning.."china and its people have fucked us"...well microsoft..start counting your days.

plus there is some news on the FUSE(filesystem on user space) on kernel trap. i think its kind of cool. Andrew Morton has interesting comments on the whole thing.

i am not a religious fanatic...i am saint

2005-08-30T17:39:00.000+08:00

On my way to the seminar...

it was out of the blues i got the information about a seminar on free software and patents by Richard Stallman. i jumped to it. it was one of kind.

rms...with his halo.

peopled loved him, when he stated "...people call me religious fanatic, i am not even religious...i am saint.."

the FSF man...

Solved another puzzle in life

2005-08-26T00:38:00.000+08:00

..on my usual browsing of the net..i found another complicated puzzle( my initial perception)...but it was half past three in the morning and i did not want to crack my head on that. Instead i spent one hour thinking and building new opensource software stratergies which can fetch my company cool business.

i woke up early. i dont know why i did that. i am still wondering about that. i think i need to sleep.

had a couple of good productive meetings today. i never did expect to get the work right after thirty min of discussion. my first full blown interaction with the client from the time i have joined the new organization. i feel..good.

did some window shopping after that. currently i am interested in two products...they are howling all over my head...i think of them even when i brush my teeth....so thats twice a day...one is the IBM t43 laptop and the other is canon 20D camera...

oh boy..i wud need 14 k RM on this. 1.4Lkhs indian currency.

donations are accepted. will pray for the donors.

when i was doing all these things, thinking abt the laptop, the camera, why i woke up early....i had even enough processing space in my brains to think about the puzzle. i did solve it at Mc Donalds at 7:23 PM while i was munching finger chips and Mc Chicken. the puzzle is indeed a puzzle, confusing and all that you are trying to find out till the end is the length of a BANANA. now i have the solution. mail me in case u need the puzzle.

kernel hacking is going great. was sloppy yesterday. back on track today. cos of the meetings i had today, there will be more work on the network side...i love it when it comes to security....hacking gets better.

i love...the schedule ( ) function.

2005-08-23T23:23:00.000+08:00

i love the 2.6 scheduler...been looking at it daily...

array = rq->active;
if (unlikely(!array->nr_active)) {
/*
* Switch the active and expired arrays.
*/
schedstat_inc(rq, sched_switch);
rq->active = rq->expired;
rq->expired = array;
array = rq->active;
rq->expired_timestamp = 0;
rq->best_expired_prio = MAX_PRIO;
} else
schedstat_inc(rq, sched_noswitch);

idx = sched_find_first_bit(array->bitmap);
queue = array->queue + idx;
next = list_entry(queue->next, task_t, run_list);

big O notations... there is lots to still know....