Random Walk of Life

Had been to the inaugural Indian Premier League T20 match today at the Chinnaswamy Stadium Bangalore. The experience was a mixed bag with few highs and lot of lows.

Me and Pradeep reached the stadium at 4:00 PM, though the inaugural ceremony was only starting at 6:00PM. We reasoned out that since there were no seat numbers on our tickets, the best seats would be FCFS. And we wanted to ensure that we get the best seats in our section. And that we did. We got to sit at this place such that line of sight of was perpendicular to the pitch. And to our left side was the Big screen where we could see the proceedings clearly, in case we missed something on the ground.

Kevin, Shuaib and Pooja were just in time for the inaugural ceremony. The atmosphere was electric.

First it was Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, which enthralled the audience by singing popular bollywood songs. Then came the troupe, I don’t know from where, which did Rope tricks, and all kinds of fantastic things. It was as if an opera was going on in the stadium. That was followed by a spectuacular dislplay of Lasers and Fireworks. And after this, came Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar introducing the captains of the different Teams. As expected, Sachin Tendulkar got the loudest cheer of all! Half the money’s worth actually

Everyone knew that the “Royal Challengers Bangalore” was a test team. And one team which we were hoping to be equally bad was the “Kolkota Knight Riders“. So we had gone expecting a close match. And precisely at that moment Balu joined us. So were were set for an interesting game of cricket, hoping to get the rest of our money’s worth.

But things weren’t as expected at all. Brendon McCullum took the match away from us from the second over by slogging Zaheer Khan for 18 runs. And single handedly ensured that Kolkota team was comfortably placed at 222/3 after 20 overs. He scored 158 not-out in 73 balls with 13 sixes and 10 fours. It was a innings to be watched and cheered, if only it was scored by the batsman of the team you were supporting! When he was on facing, one could very well expect for ball to be sent all over the park. Amongst the bowlers, only Praveen Kumar showed some promise in the initial overs, but he too wasn’t spared in the death.

After the Knight Riders‘ innings, Kevin gave his “vishesh tippani” that the pitch was a flat one, so the target should be gettable. All depended on how the early batsmen approached the game.

So when the Royal Challengers’ opening batsmen took the pitch, they got the loudest cheers. Before they could acknowledge it with some sweet willow music, Ishant sharma bowled a beauty to get Dravid out the first ball of the second over. And since then, the team never recovered. Jaffer looked as though he was trying to prove to the selecters how strong his defence was, how good he was at leaving alone the balls outside the offstump, so that they would consider him for the next test match. It was getting so irritating, that we were praying for him to get out. But that didn’t happen. What was worse was, his partners kept getting out! And all of them playing rash shots, or totally misjudging the line of the ball. It came to a point that one could hear loud cheers when wides were bowled or singles were taken. Because there was nothing else that was there to cheer about. Oh, probably we didn’t understand what the advertisement board meant when it proclaimed “Cheers to Life”. Anyway the second innings was definitely not something which one would expect out of a T20 match.

I was wondering if the Royal Challengers had confused this T20 match for one of Vijay Mallya’s Page-3 Fashion shows! The batsmen came to the pitch, stayed for a very short duration, and went back to the pavilion as if they were models on the ramp. The team ended up scoring an abysmal final total losing all the wickets, thereby giving King Khan and his men their first victory in the T20 championship.

Come to think of it, what was going through Rahul Dravid’s mind when he asked Mallya during the Team selection,
“Mr Mallya, do you want your team to be comprised of Stars or Performers?”

to which Mallya replied
“Performers”.

And Dravid said,
“Then you shall have them”

If these we call these men performers, I am very disappointed to say that the home crowd was expecting a much better performance in the inaugural match, after the spectacular inauguration ceremony. Atleast they could have shown some grit and determination instead of appearing so lost, before actually losing the match.

Mr Mallya, I completely understand that in Formula 1, it’ll take Force India some time before we can expect a Podium Finish. We’re still new to the game.

But that’s not the case when it comes to Cricket. You succeeded in securing the second most expensive franchise in the league and look whom you chose as your players. Or is it that you’re not very much bothered about the team’s performance since you’re think you’ve struck a bargain in getting a platform to promote “High Flying” brands with all those surrogate advertisements splattered all across the stadium?

I remember one of my friends’ quotes from one of our cheap “high flying” sessions at college: “McDowells, as the ad claims, is truly mera No.1. It tastes like piss“. I guess it applies to the Royal Challengers as well. Only this time, it is Mallya’s No.1, which, even he hast to admit, has pissed off a lot of fans.

People who know me, know the fact that I like to keep my options open. Simply because it allows the freedom to defer any decision till it really needs to be taken.

However, in the last couple of years, I have observed that this has a common side effect: A totally scattered mind which is trying to multitask between hundreds of things at the same time!

In the process of ensuring that I had my options open, I found myself surrounded with so many options that all the time was spent in hunting for the most favorable one. Irony is that, the same time could have been used to act on one of these hundred options!

Today morning, I read this article titled “Pitching with Purpose” which talks of Focus and Self-Discipline:

“Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”

All this while I thought of discipline as something that bound you or constrained your natural flow. But this article gives a totally new perspective.

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!

At work, I usually have my daily doze of caffeine in the afternoon with the co-workers.

Felt like drinking Cappuccino today instead of the regular Espresso.
However, when I pressed the button, the machine didn’t respond.
Instead, the LCD panel said “Empty Tray”.

We were wondering what was empty!

The coffee beans? No, there were plenty of beans in there.
The milk? Nope, the container was filled with milk.

So, I tried again!

“Empty Tray” again.

We were trying to figure out what the problem was, when kvaneesh, who was patiently waiting for his cup of tea, got it!

The “Empty Tray” was not a status message.
It was a instruction to empty the excess coffee powder that had gotten deposited in the tray.

I guess, I need to learn the coffee machine language now

Okay, henceforth decided to give the opening and closing mood a break!

Anyway, I am currently reading the Linux scheduler load balancing code. And there’s this one function called find_busiest_group() which looks something like this:

/*
 * find_busiest_group finds and returns the busiest CPU group within the
 * domain. It calculates and returns the amount of weighted load which
 * should be moved to restore balance via the imbalance parameter.
 */
static struct sched_group *
find_busiest_group(struct sched_domain *sd, int this_cpu,
 	   unsigned long *imbalance, enum cpu_idle_type idle,
 	   int *sd_idle, cpumask_t *cpus, int *balance)
{
   struct sched_group *busiest = NULL, *this = NULL, *group = sd->groups;
   unsigned long max_load, avg_load, total_load, this_load, total_pwr;
   unsigned long max_pull;
   unsigned long busiest_load_per_task, busiest_nr_running;
   unsigned long this_load_per_task, this_nr_running;
   int load_idx, group_imb = 0;
  #if defined(CONFIG_SCHED_MC) || defined(CONFIG_SCHED_SMT)
   int power_savings_balance = 1;
   unsigned long leader_nr_running = 0, min_load_per_task = 0;
   unsigned long min_nr_running = ULONG_MAX;
   struct sched_group *group_min = NULL, *group_leader = NULL;
  #endif

	max_load = this_load = total_load = total_pwr = 0;
        busiest_load_per_task = busiest_nr_running = 0;
 this_load_per_task = this_nr_running = 0;
 if (idle == CPU_NOT_IDLE)
 	load_idx = sd->busy_idx;
 else if (idle == CPU_NEWLY_IDLE)
 	load_idx = sd->newidle_idx;
 else
 	load_idx = sd->idle_idx;

	do {
 	unsigned long load, group_capacity, max_cpu_load, min_cpu_load;
 	int local_group;
 	int i;
 	int __group_imb = 0;
 	unsigned int balance_cpu = -1, first_idle_cpu = 0;
 	unsigned long sum_nr_running, sum_weighted_load;

Now by the time I reach this point, I am kinda confused asto what variable holds what value and represents what load exactly!
I guess, I need to increase the stack size of my mind to keep track of soo many local variables!

PS: I apologise for the formatting. The [sourcecode] macro of wordpress cannot do any better than this.
Sathya is planning to write a simple script to convert C code into color coded html instead.

Opening Mood: Lunch time!
Opening Song: None

For the past couple of days, I have been crazy about Ambigram. So much that I haven’t checked my mails nor have thought about some of the outstanding todo items in my list.

It all started with Pradeep telling me about tattoos and what would be a good design for one. It struck me then, that an Ambigram would make an excellent choice for a tattoo owing to it’s symmetric nature. I had first read about Ambigrams in Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons” and at that time, I thought, well, may be one needs to be an artist to draw one of these.

But no! When Pradeep said that it would be difficult to ambigrammize some of our names, I somehow wanted to prove him wrong! And the result, two night outs worth of time spent doing nothing but trying to arrange shapes so that they appear symmetric along the horizontal axis. Of every name I could think of! The last time I forgot about everything and spent night outs doing crazy things such as these was way back in 3rd year engineering, trying to come up with Anagrams of words

Anyway, here are a few ambigrams that I made. There are more, but they need fine tuning, and as an how I get time to fine tune them, I will be uploading them here. Below each picture, you’ll find what they mean, just in case the symbols are too cryptic. Well, it’s also a way of fooling your mind. Once you know what the Symbol means, your mind will be compelled to see it that way

All these ambigrams were made using GIMP, the GNU image manipulation program.

Copyrights?! Well, Open Source philosophy applies here too. I grant you complete rights to use them, improve upon them, and if you like the improvement/enhancement, share them with others

GAUTHAM

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

KEVIN
——————————————————————————————————————————————–

MILI
——————————————————————————————————————————————–

SATHYA
——————————————————————————————————————————————–

SAPNA
——————————————————————————————————————————————–

RACHITA
——————————————————————————————————————————————–

And this one. This one is an Asymmetric Ambigram. In the sense that it has two names in the same figure. There’s another asymmetric ambigram that I have made, but it needs legal clearance before it can be posted

CHIRAG

… And when you turn this around, it looks like this:

LEENA
——————————————————————————————————————————————–
Comments, feedback much appreciated. So do drop a message
Also, if you have seen some really nice Ambigrams elsewhere, do share them/pointers to them here.

Closing Song: None.
Closing Mood: Lazy Sunday Afternoon

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!

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: Gloomy weather outside.
Opening Song: Kitni Baatein - Lakshya

Today was one of the “work from home” days since there was some kind of press meet at office. It was to take place on the floor where our offices were, and hence we were told to work from home or work from some other office. Clearly , we aren’t the types that they want to show to the press :P.

So afternoon, I decided to go to KFC for lunch. Had been a long time since I had anything unhealthy.

But this was an extremely bad experience. I ordered a Chicken Snacker. It tasted as if the yellow sauce that they use had nail-polish remover in it. Of course I had bad cold, so I cannot be sure of the smell of it, but it was definitely not the usual snacker. Luckily for me, Dhaval too felt the same and complained about it. They gave him a fresh one, but I had already lost my appetite by then.

I should avoid junk food!

Oh, well, I should probably learn cooking instead of ranting about it.

Closing Song: Kaisi Tanhai - Lucky Ali
Closing Mood: Hungry. Dinner time!