Random Walk of Life

It’s simply wonderful how a combination of sights and sounds can unlock some of the memories hidden deep inside!

It rained today evening. The evening air was cool. As I was bicycling back home from work, Lucky Ali’s Sunoh started playing on my iPod. And all of a sudden, I was imagining an egg-roll and a hot cup of tea!

A few years back I remember in my first year of engineering, we had holidays before the end-terms. It was sometime in May, when monsoons had already begun. The smell of the earth wet with the first showers was intoxicating. To top that, I was listening to IndiPop on Adarsh cassette player. It was a “Hits of Lucky Ali” or something like that, I was listening to , that night. Since it had been raining all evening, I skipped the mess dinner. Well, I also had some Strenght of Materials lessons to revise.

And thus, by the time it was 12 in the night, I was really really hungry!

So I strolled out in search of food. Saw a whole batch of seniors walk towards this tiny little place which used to be called The Night Canteen or NC, located behind the PG block. I followed them to that place and ordered an Egg Roll and a hot cup of Tea. That was when I told myself “You will never go to bed hungry again. There’s a place that’ll feed you no matter how late it is in the night. So let the night outs begin!“

And today, the same smell of wet mud, Lucky Ali’s composition brought those memory alive!

Opening Mood: Hungry..
Opening song: Hamesha tum ko chaaya - Devdas

Got the official mail today morning. The “Power Aware Scheduler” Birds of Feathers Session Proposal that I had submitted for this year’s Ottawa Linux Symposium has been accepted. The rest of the BOFS can be found –> here

A couple of days back, Vaidy got confirmation that the paper “Energy-aware task and interrupt management in Linux” of which I am a co-author, has been selected! So it’s great news on the work front!!

The rest of the papers for this year’s OLS can be found –> here

OT, it has been a pretty silent day in my mailbox. I was wondering if everyone decided to take a mass-vacation or something! Only later I came to know that vger.kernel.org is down.

With only a few weeks left to turn in the paper, we should start writing soon! The data is pretty much there with the many experiments that Vaidy has been running for quite some time now.

And me, I am have started using qgit to track the CFS development from it’s inception to it’s present magnificent form! The latest qgit-4 which uses qt-4 looks pretty cool! Much better than the earlier 1.5.5 version

Until next time,
Ciao!

Closing Song: Laree Chooti - Xulfi, Ek-Chaalis ki last local
Closing Mood: Really  hungry!

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: 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: 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.