Random Walk of Life

Opening Mood: Looks like a nite out!
Opening Song: Abhi nahin aana - Sona Mohapatra.

Way back last year, when I heard Afterglow by INXS for the first time, I instantly liked it. It has got all the nice beats, and the ethnic and the rustic feel to it. Plus the mood is kind of reflective.

Around sometime in April this year, I heard “Abhi nahin aana” by Sona Mohapatra for the first time at a friend’s place. I thought it was brilliant. This was one of those “complete” songs. Not just the lyrics , but also the way it was rendered. It was a minimalistic song. Just a guitar strumming in the background and bare minimum indian percussion. Again, it had an ethnic feel to it.
Today, while checking for something else on Youtube, I came across this video. Apparently INXS has collaborated with Sona Mohapatra and come up with a fusion version of Afterglow. I think the fusion, like the original, simply rocks.

You can find it here –> http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZxlodoUO4Ds

Closing Song: Bolo Naa - Sona Mohapatra
Closing Mood: About to embark on a quest. It’s named lguest!

Opening Mood: Woke up just now! Good morning!
Opening Song: Girl from yesterday - The Eagles

Watched the movie The Terminal yesterday night. It was absolutely awesome!

A story of a man stranded in the JFK airport because his country underwent a revolution while he was on his way to the US and hence his visa and passport were invalid until U.S could recognize the new government of his country. Which meant that, he was, as one of the homeland security guys tells him, simply “unacceptable”. It’s a story of how he manages to wait for about an year in that same airport doing all sorts of odd jobs , making friends with people in the airport, but never complaining about it. This movie goes right at the top of my best watched movie list alongside Shawshank Redemption and the Forrest Gump. Tom Hanks, is once again brilliant in the movie. My uncle, who lent me the DVD of the movie told me that he loves Tom Hanks because no one else acts as naturally as Tom Hanks does! Oxymoron it is, but nevertheless very true!!

So if you haven’t watched the movie yet (it was released in 2004), rent a copy or better, buy one! It’s totally worth it.

Closing Song: Pretty Maids all in a row - The Eagles.
Closing Mood: Gotta go!

Opening Mood: I’m full after the dinner.
Opening Song: Saawariya (Reprise) Saawariya.

I watched two bollywood movies today afternoon. Dus Kahaniyan and Om Shanti Om. And I liked them both.

While Dus Kahaniyan reminded me of Jeffery Archer’s short stories: Short, crisp and a nice li’l twist in the end. OTOH, Om Shanti Om was a real tribute to the 70’s Bollywood and it did so by being deliberately pretentious!

Okay, the details - In Dus Kahaniyan I liked all the stories except the first two. Matrimony and High on Highway had nothing new to offer. Both were based on the concepts I have grown up seeing in regional movies. But the other stories were very well written. Be it the dilemma that the mother faces in Pooranmasi, the dilemma of hunger over religion that the “shudh brahmin” lady faces in Rice Plate, the sweet story about destiny over decisiveness ,i.e Lovedale, the importance of living every moment in Gubbare, or the cool editing to make up for the lack of a story in Rise and Fall. Zahir was okay okay and Sex on the beach was definitely scary in parts! But I like the concept very much. It’s like buying a full day’s ticket to watch a bunch of twenty20 cricket matches. It’s highly unlikely that you will be disappointed in all parts

And coming to Om Shanti Om, I had heard enough about the movie, and had even been narrated the whole story. So the first half was not very funny or exciting. That’s one bad thing about reading reviews (If you’ve not read the movie, don’t read further! you might get biased). However, as they say “imitation is the best form of flattery”, this movie truly imitated the various different mannerisms of the people in the film industry. If there was one single sequence I would want to single out as the funniest, it would have to be the Filmfare awards where Abhishek Bacchan is one of the nominees for the best actor award! And of course, Shah Rukh Khan ensured that his money doesn’t go waste, by adding an Item number (with himself!! Yuck!!) and the other song with half of the Bollywood in it. The ending I thought was brilliant! I mean it was like saying, “Impossible is nothing! We can better it!!” It’s a fun film. Watch it, but please don’t THINK

To a fun filled weekend!

Closing Song: Tum se Hi - Jab We Met
Closing Mood: In mood for another movie or a good book!

Opening Mood: Good Morning.
Opening Song: Boondein - Silk Route

The last and final Day of FOSS.in had some really interesting talks.

I missed the talk by Andrew Cowie, since we reached the venue pretty late. However, I managed to catch the next talk by Ulrich Drepper, the person whose article on Memory management I thought was brilliant. The talk was on “Contributing to Linux Runtime”. One of the interesting things that Ulrich mentioned was that he is looking for a new malloc implementation, one which is NUMA aware. This would really be a nice thing to work on, but I hope even applications understand the concept of NUMA so that they don’t move the threads around from one node to another.

After the lunch, we had Rusty’s talk on Talloc. Talloc stands for Tridge-Allocator, or Tree-Allocator is a hierarchial memory allocator which can be a really useful thing to prevents memory leaks owing to the programmer’s forgetfulness. There were about 150 people in a hall whose capacity was 120. I sneaked into the projector room to catch that talk and got into the hall only for the Q & A session ( I won one of those caramello koalas!). You can find the Talloc details here –> http://talloc.samba.org/

I chose to attend Amit Shah’s KVM talk over Thomas’s Real-time talk. I was hoping to see some meaty details about the KVM way of doing virtualization. But unfortunately most people in the audience had problems visualizing virtualization in the first place. So it ended up as a demo session. I guess, since the code is available, I will have to just go over it.

The concluding ceremony had “Rusty and a Merry Band of FOSS hackers” (Doesn’t that remind you of some rebel group in some corner of the Sherwood forest?) talking to the audience and sharing their experiences with open source. He showed us how easy it was for anyone to go ahead and contribute to open source projects, by asking one of the volunteers to come over and send a Documentation patch for lguest. You can find that here –> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/12/8/49

I had to leave early to help prepare for Sunday’s barbecue. That however is another story for some other time

Closing Song: Village Damsel - Indian Ocean.
Closing Mood: Power Aware!

Opening Mood: Sleepy.
Opening Song: Walk of Life - Dire Straits.

I couldn’t attend the morning nor the afternoon session owing to some work at office. However, I managed to catch the OpenMoko talk by Harald Welte. It’s a pretty neat stuff and has got an emulator which is based on qemu which does complete hardware emulation. So you can pretty much try out the whole moko-stack on the emulator without having the handset with you. One interesting thing I realized was that OpenMoko doesn’t use cpufreq support yet. I thought that ARM did have some kind of cpu-frequency scaling support. Something reminds me of powerops. But anyway, I am planning to look into it once I get some freetime.

Next, I met with the Mozilla developer Chris Hoffman to discuss a power management related issue on Linux, when we’re running on battery. I was fooling around with powertop the other day and observed that the one application which was consistently responsible for so many wakeups in the userspace was firefox. And that too when the firefox is minimized or is in a completely different workspace than the one which is active. It did seem stupid to do that, when the whole world is worried about the rising energy costs!!! More details on that bug can be found –> here

I also met Amit Shah one of the employees of Qumranet working on KVM. Looking forward to his talk tomorrow.

And at the end of the day a whole bunch of people that included Rusty, Thomas, Harald, Rasmus Lerdorf, Amit Shah, Srivatsan, Ravi my colleagues from office and folks from ABB went out to dinner at Bombay Post. A fitting end to the day I suppose.

Closing Song: Once upon a time in the west - Dire Straits.
Closing Mood: Really sleepy. Good night!

Opening Mood: Amazed would be a good word. Astounded would be a better one.
Opening Song: None. But probably a good time to switch on the Radio.

My first day at FOSS.in was a pretty eventful one.

Me and some of my colleagues had registered online but had not collected our delegate badges yet. So we didn’t want to do it when there was a heavy rush and thus we decided to reach the place pretty early. The registration desk opened at 8:30 AM and we started off from Domlur at 7:45 AM. And how?! Five people in one auto-rickshaw. The last time I did such an insane thing was when I was in my primary school and our auto-driver used to carry some ten kids to the school, but here we had five fully grown people!

Well, we reached in time, collected our passes and had breakfast at the India Coffee House which is present inside the IISc campus (You should try out the heavenly coffee out there).

I attended the keynote speech by Naba Kumar who is one of the main developers of Anjuta, the development studio. I had used this a long time ago, before I used eclipse and subsequently abandoning all IDEs.

The next one was on “How and why you should be a kernel hacker” by James Morris, the SELinux from Redhat which again was interesting for me atleast, since I am relatively inexperienced in the Linux Kernel Community. He confirmed what Thomas said yesterday, that the only person who reads all the mails on LKML is Andrew Morton!

Post lunch we had talks on probably two of the most exciting projects that are active in the Linux Kernel today. The first one was on Virtualization, by Rusty Russel on “lguest: Hacking the the Little Linux Hypervisor”. The talk was very engaging as Rusty “unreliably” took us through the remarkably reliable process of hacking your own little hypervisor. And after the talk, Rusty made sure that the Q&A session was very interactive by offering(throwing) a Koala bar to anyone who asked a interesting question!

The next talk was by Thomas Gleixner on Realtime Kernel, again another hot area with people going really crazy and doing a whole bunch of stuff which Linus would have probably damned a couple of years ago (Priority Inheritance, for one!). Thomas spoke about what exactly is the realtime effort is all about, what it has to offer to a user, and what can we, as users do to contribute to it.

I skipped the last session to check out the demo of lguest at the HackCenter, where dhaval managed to find a problem with Lguest that Fedora8 shipped by default. That was a really cool session where Rusty told us how some of the “intuitive” stuff in the launcher works while it’s starts running the guest bzImage.

And yeah, after the conference we had dinner with Rusty, Thomas, a few people from ABB and a few of my collegues. All in all, it was a really productive day at the FOSS event!

Looking forward to tomorrow’s events! See you there

Closing Song: None
Closing Mood: Sleepy, so good night!

Opening Mood: Good Morning.
Opening Song: Afterglow - INXS

Indias premier FOSS event FOSS.in kicked off on Tuesday, 4th December at the IISc campus. This year’s speakers include

Rusty Russel, Thomas Gleixner, Ulrich Drepper, Harald Welte and a few of my Colleagues Bharata B Rao and Kamalesh Babulal. I am eagerly looking forward to these talks and meeting some of these hackers. Infact Thomas had come over to our workplace yesterday and we had a fun time discussing kernel projects the whole evening followed by a sumptuous dinner!

I am expected to be at the FOSS.in for the next three days. So see you there

Closing Song: Kandisa - Indian Ocean.
Closing Mood: Gotta rush if I need to reach IISc in time for registration.