Quote- Shantaram
“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
A Geeky Vacation!
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.
23
Opening Mood: Read Read!
Opening Song: I’m shipping up to boston - The Departed
Celebrated a booky-booky birthday last weekend. Got four books as gifts
The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book - Bill Watterson
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Shantaram: A Novel - Gregory David Roberts
Thanks Kev, Shuaib, Dhaval, Pooja, Balu for the books! And thanks Mili for the suggesting them.
Sacred Games: A Novel - Vikram Chandra
Thanks Cheezo, Leena and Varun!
And I happened to step inside Landmark! So, two more!
When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel Of Obsession - Irvin D. Yalom
Just for Fun: The story of an accidental Revolutionary - Linus Torvalds with David Diamond
And while walking on C.M.H road, happened to see this book being sold on the street! Someone must have sold it on a Kg basis after an arduous semester. I paid just two hundred bucks for it!
I say this is an awesome way to start a New Year!
Closing Song: None
Closing Mood: Angrez Sucks. Whatever made it a cult movie!
Magical Objects
Opening Mood: Lazy! Totally!
Opening Song: The God that failed - Metallica.
Finished the Harry Potter series recently. I must say, I am a bona-fide fan of the series now. True, the story is great and the characters are so lively and all that! But what I loved the best was her ability to “invent” magical objects. The names really rock!
Not in any particular order the ones that will be of most use to me:
The Pensieve: Don’t you feel that if you had a device into which you could pour your memories and examine them later on? You can pass them on to others. That way you can describe your experiences in the best possible manner
The Deluminator: Lights out! So many times in the past when I wanted to sneak into the kitchen without being watched while I was nicking a piece of some chocolate or two. This would have been so damn perfect for that purpose.
Time-Turner: Need I say more? Mankind has wanted this since H.G Wells’ time.
Invisibility Cloak: You need this after a late night out in Bangalore so that the stupid cops can’t catch and harass you!
From one fantasy novel to another. Reading the Bartimaeus Trilogy this time. Probably LOTR later. Lets see
And yeah, after a year and a half of various different prototypes, the CPU-Hotplug Locking finally appears to be sorted out! Cheers!!
Closing Song: My Friend of Misery - Metallica.
Closing Mood: Hungry! Dinner time.
I’m Back!
Opening Mood: Relaxed.. It’s a weekend.
Opening Song: None. Been listening to music all morning.
I’m back after a sabbatical . A lot of time has elapsed since I last blogged and a lot has happened during that time. For instance,
- I went on a Road trip to Western Ghats, just before the monsoons and was amazed by the lush green beauty of the Ghats amidst the pre-monsoon rains.
- I mentored a group of interns working on a project of my interest. Funny, since I was an intern in the same internship program a couple of years ago.
- I bid adieu to a great friend, thanks to whom, I discovered some interesting ways to spend my weekends, other than sleeping or reading.
- I bought an iPod Video , 30G and have been bicycling all over the city , listening to some good music, and turning a deaf ear to the honking and other mindless noise on the road.
- I have been preparing like crazy for GRE, mugging the wordlists and all that, without really enjoying it. After a year, it feels like I’m back in college, preparing for a Software Engineering or one of those “talk-out-of-your-a**” papers.
- And, I have been reading Harry Potter. Yup, I keep boasting that I finished the first three books in a single week, and just bought the fourth one.
The fourth book! Yes, a bit of history on that one..
Today morning, after being woken up by Niks, who incidentally called all the way from North Carolina, to say Hello and something more, Shuaib asked me if I was interested in going to Forum, since he had some work at a nearby place. I was exhausted after a marathon wordlist session yesterday, and agreed. The one place, I usually don’t miss when I go to Forum, is this wonderful bookstore named Landmark. I admit, it’s one of my favorite bookstore, since I can spend endless hours there, without complaining. I’ll always have the likes of Archer, Krishnamurthy, and others to keep me company.
After the usual mindless browsing, I happened to sight this book entitled “Surely, you’re joking, Mr.Feynman” by this scientist guy, Richard Feynman. I picked the book, scouted for a chair. There was none. So I sat down at a corner, cross legged ( I did that, since I had seen someone do it last time I was there). As I progressed through that book, I found Mr Feynman to be a very interesting character, especially with the wacky inventions of his, which unfortunately the others could not appreciate. Something like an hour and a half passed, when I finished three or four chapters of the book. That was when I noticed that one of the Security Folks was checking on me from time to time. Dunno why. I don’t think he ever saw anyone read a book for so long, inside the bookstore. I guess, most people just come, pick, pay and leave. Anyway, if he wanted to tell me something, I doubt I would have heard it. One of the advantages of owning an iPod. You can selectively ignore what’s not important
But then, I sensed that my knees were hurting.I had to get up and walk a bit. I kept the book back at it’s place and picked up the “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” . The next hour was spent with Mr Potter and the Quidditch World cup. At something like 2:30, Shuaib called saying he finished whatever he had come for, and was waiting for me downstairs. I rushed out of the bookstore to join him. I myself couldn’t believe I did that. I came out of the bookstore EMPTY HANDED! This was the first time I did that. I still cannot believe it.
Anyway, to compensate, I bought “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” at Sapna Book house at Indiranagar, which’s right next door. So I do have something to keep me busy through the rest of the weekend and away from the boring wordlists.
This is probably the most incoherant entry of mine. Hmm…. There’s always a first time for everything in life
Closing Mood: Eager to resume reading The Goblet of Fire.
Closing Song : None. Just the fan, making the swirling noise, and the wind softly blowing outside.
