Random Walk of Life

Opening Mood: Fresh!
Opening song: Innocent Man - Billy Joel

Okay, for the past three days, I have been wearing formals to office. Yes, you heard it right, formal shirt (not a smart-comment T-Shirt), a pair of formal trousers (not faded jeans) and formal shoes (not my black puma!).

Before you start reading too much into it, let me tell you why!

I cleaned my wardrobe this Sunday, and I found that I had seven pairs of formal clothing, which I hadn’t seen in the past one year or so. Well, I might have seen them, but I conveniently turned a blind eye towards them. And most of them are in such good condition, as if they were new. That’ll tell you how often I must have worn them! So, I just decided to try them on for a week before putting them off again

And then, this funny incident happened.

One of the managers in my team asked me today, “what’s the matter with you? For the past few days I’ve been observing you in formals. What’s going on?”

I told him why I wore formals.

And he quipped, “I don’t believe it! One cannot go through a transformation like this all of a sudden. Something must have happened that must have prodded you to dress up like this! Is there something happening in your life?!”

Okay, that must have meant that I’m getting serious and all that. Or probably more! But lemme assure you, it’s nothing of that sort. Wearing formals was a simple mindless action.

What I find funny here is that, people believe everything must have a reason! Well, should there be one? I don’t think so. At times you want to do something just for the heck of doing it. That’s precisely what happened.

So, I guess, I’ll have to blame Aristotle for biasing human thought like this

Closing song: Scandinavian Skies - Billy Joel
Closing Mood: Cpu-hotplug lock issue is back. Again!

“One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone”

Lindsay Ford, from Shantaram

Opening Mood: Balancing stuff
Opening Song: Bitter sweet - Beckoning Hills

Check out http://www.twitter.com if you haven’t already. It’s a microblogging site which allows you to update the micro-blog from GTalk/cellphone

You can find mine here –> http://www.twitter.com/rand0mwalker

Closing Song: Bitter Sweet -Beckoning hills.
Closing Mood: Back to work at hand

Opening Mood: TGISunday!
Opening Song: Dhoom Again - Dhoom 2

We had been to Parika yesterday night for dinner. It is a restaurant on the CMH road, which serves mangalore cuisine. If you love neeru-dosas, sannas, kori-rotti, tangy and coconutty fish curries, this is a place you should visit. The food is excellent. We had Kori-Rotti, Bangde-Masala (Mackerel curry) and Neeru Dose. Both the fish and the chicken curries were beyond par excellence. Only my grandma’s curries could top these. And the place is not very expensive either.

However, the biggest let down was the service. It was a bit slow, I found the waiters a bit too grumpy. Probably they had a long saturDay. Oh yeah, the price for the fish curry mentioned in the Menu Card differed from the price on the bill. The explanation given was that the price depends on the size of fish, which we thought was outrageous since it wasn’t mentioned in the menu card.

From our prior experience, we suggest Sunday afternoons to be the best time to visit the place. They have additional mangalorean delicacies on Sunday afternoons. And ask about the prices before you order. Else you might be in for a surprise

PS: After dinner, we went to Corner House for a trial DBC test. K and I ordered DBCs for ourselves with chocolate scoops instead of vanilla scoops. While I finished mine, K struggled to finish his/her first one, cursing the cake! However, he/she still claims to have confidence in his/her digestive system and wants to go ahead with the bet. So keep watching this space for updates

Closing Song: Aaja Ve - Sona Mohapatra
Closing Mood: Hungry! Breakfast time.

Opening Mood: This is insane!
Opening Song: None.

Like I mentioned in my previous post I was out for the whole of last week and am catching up with the happenings. One of the hilarious things that came to my notice is that one of my friends, lets say K, who usually boasts of his HUGE appetite has claimed that he/she can eat 4 Death By Chocolates in a single stretch.

I love chocolate. If something can keep me awake a whole night after a night out is a bar of dark chocolate. But I have my limits and last time I checked it was 1.5 large cups of Death by Chocolate (DBC), a popular ice-cream offering at this joint named Corner House. So naturally I was very much excited about this claim. So we had a bet:

• If K can have 3 DBC’s at a single stretch, we shall sponsor the 4th one.
• If K can finish the 4th one, we will reimburse all the four and any subsequent DBC that K might want to have (owing to his large appetite) and K wins a cool thousand bucks for his/her feat!

Subject to following conditions:

• K should have a normal diet for the earlier part of the day, i.e no skipping breakfast or lunch.
• K should be in a perfectly healthy state after consuming 4 DBCs for atleast 2 hours. No, puking is not allowed.
• Should K give up in the middle, we’re entitled to two big treats on any days at Corner House of our choice from K.
• Should K withdraw from the bet, we’re entitled to a big treat on any days at Corner House from K.

Just out of curiosity, I created this poll on what people think is their DBC limit. and what they think is any person’s maximum DBC limit.

You can find the poll here -> http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=lo073kc9y2xif4g394813

The Poll responses when I last checked were as follows :

A) None, I hate chocolates.
B) One, but thats it.
C) Two, I am feeling sleepy now.
D) Three, I like chocolate.
E) Four, Burp, i am full!
F) More than Four, I am superhuman

A) Yes
B) No

I will be updating these results as and how my time permits. So this is not real time

Please do take the poll since there are only 2 questions and it hardly takes 15 seconds of your time.

Hey, being a good friend, I think it’s my duty to let K to know what he/she is attempting after all

Closing Song: None
Closing Mood: Waiting for your responses.

PS: K prefers to remain Anonymous. So even if you want to take a guess on his/her identity, please don’t mention him/her in the comments.

Opening Mood: I’m back!
Opening Song: Romantic Piano - Chopin

Spent the last week at this place called Kudremukh. It used to be one of Karnataka’s famous mines before the operations were shut down in 2005. So now it is just a nice little place with lots of greenery and very few people to bother an occasional guest. Which was me

I started from karkala on 4th Feb at 8:00 AM to Kudremukh. I had booked a room for myself at the Sahyadri Bhavan lodge for five days through some family contacts. Reached the place at around 9:30 A.M. The ride was very good, and one could spot a lot of trees and forests on the way. Once you cross the Mala outpost, the weather becomes quite pleasant owing to the trees around.

The room where I was put up was really a big one. It had three beds, a balcony, and an attic! All for an extremely cheap then of Rs 200 per day! The guest house has a small restaurant which serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. Again, at very affordable rates. I liked the food there. But then, I also stayed for four years at NITK Surathkal and survived the mess food. So I really shouldn’t be talking about how good the food at any place is . The place also has a very nice town park where I used to go in the evenings for a stroll.

The purpose of the vacation was to do stuff which I had always wanted to do, but never got the time. Starting problem you can say . Over the past couple of years, I have been accumulating quite a bit of technical stuff to read, and the list was only growing. So I wanted to take some time off and get started on some of those items.

Thus I had five days at a place with very little disturbance and an awesome climate. Really, I couldn’t ask for more. The working style was simple. Start with one work item, when you get bored, move on to the next one. There were no other rules. No hard deadlines to finish this or that by the end of 5 days. Just have fun

So, in the five days, I read through parts of Linux Memory management. Two years of programming the kernel, and I was still not aware of how Linux manages the memory across the various platforms it supports. So I had to go back to the very basics, starting from the 386 memory management model and then how Linux represents it using a 4 level model. After that, I read up on the Zoned Buddy Allocator, the Slab Allocator and a part of Process address space. I was using “Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3ed” and 2.6.24 kernel code as reference.

Other than that, RB-trees was something I read about and implemented during this time. It reminded me a lot about AVL trees, which we had studied in our data-structures classes. RB-trees was actually easier to implement (atleast the deletion part).

Also, read the first three chapters from Ulrich Drepper’s “What every programmer must know about memory”. The paper is true to it’s name. Especially the chapter on caches. The paper gives a very clear picture of the implications of having different levels of caches, how the cache size matters, through various well designed experiments. It should be read by anyone who is interested in doing any kind of system programming.

Other than these, did a whole bunch of fun stuff, like wrote a ascii visualization tool for trees. One of the problems I had with the Data structures lab assignement was that we had to show the output through an inorder, or a breadth order traversal. And that was not always very easy to visualize. But then I was one of those who did the class assignments when there was only one or two days left for the deadline. So I guess I am doing all the supplemental things now

Oh yeah, spent a whole evening reverse engineering this obfuscated C Code which prints the poem about the various gifts given by the true love on each day of Christmas. Am planning on writing a small article on that. How recursion was used in place of loops and how the ‘,’ operator was used for statements. It’s a code when you see, you’ll go “This hurts my brain!” . Check it out here.

And when I had time to spare, I read some chapters from Jon Bentley’s “Programming Pearls”. Another book which I would recommend to anyone interested in serious programming. This book sure is fun!

So, now that I am back, the first thing to do would be to catchup with a week of email. Oh well

Closing Song: Marriage of Figaro - Mozart.
Closing Mood: Anxious to catch up with last week’s happenings.