Random Walk of Life

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: 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: 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! Gosh, it’s already Good Afternoon.
Opening Song: Swadesh (title song)

After spending two consecutive nights going through the implementation of Read Copy Update (RCU), both classic and preemptible, and trying to find a flaw in vain, I am kind of exhausted. And very impressed. RCU is twisted, yet so simple. I read elsewhere, that maybe the human mind wasn’t cut out for designing parallel algorithms. We tend to think in a more sequential fashion. (Probably which is why folks back in college, find linked list algorithms simpler than an RB tree!!)

I guess RCU is one of the exceptions to this theory!

Anyway, recently I came across this blog which I highly recommend. Especially this post.

Cheers to a Happy Weekend ahead!!!

Closing Mood: Memory barriers… they’re for real!
Closing Song: Bin tere kya hai jeena (Woh Lamhe)

Opening Mood: Refreshingly Satisfied.
Opening Song: None.
Time : 2:30 A.M, 21st Jan 2007.

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”

These immortal words of Andy Dufresne that are ringing in my ears right now after watching “Shawshank Redemption” for the umpteenth time.

I don’t think I am qualified to review this masterpiece. No, I don’t even wanna
think of the dissection knife . This movie is best left untouched in one piece.
Instead I would wanna talk about the reason why every time I watch this movie, love it more than ever before.

I have vivid memories of the January afternoon of my 6th Semester when I sat in Thamie’s room trying to choose between “Shawshank Redemption” and “Requeim for a dream” to kill the afternoon. Yes, kill is the word because, I was a day-scholar that year, and every lab cancelled was equivalent to a matinee show, courtesy the hostel LAN. I decided on “Shawshank Redemption” because it was locally available on Tuka’s comp.

To tell you frankly, I didn’t think much of Andy’s character from the way he behaved in the court. Silent, icy, slightly apathetic, despite the fact that he had not committed the crime. I felt he had no chance; Till the roof top encounter with Hadley, where he advises Hadley to gift the inherited money to his wife to escape taxation. The simple manner in which he went about the whole thing made me stand up and bow. He struck the deal like a man.

The other incident is when Andy play’s Mozart’s “Le Nozze de Figaro” to the whole prison. In Red’s words -

“I have no idea to this day what them two Italian ladies were singin’ about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singin’ about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared. Higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away…and for the briefest of moments — every last man at Shawshank felt free.”

I guess, the same can be said about the movie too.
And boy, the relaxed and satisfied look on Andy’s face when he sits on that
warden’s chair with his legs propped on the table, cooly ignoring the warden’s
warnings can bring a smile on anybody’s face.

The movie always gives you the unexpected. I expected the Warden to change
after all the dirty work Andy does for him, but he remains stiff as ever. Well, he gets a fitting reply. When it all ends Red aptly voices over,

“…I like to think the last thing that went through his (Warden’s) head…other than that bullet…was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.”

No second thoughts there!

However, the part which I love the most is the part where Andy describes his
after-prison life plans to Red.

“Tell you where I’d go. Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Little place right on the Pacific. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I’d like to finish out my life, Red. A warm place with no memory. Open a little hotel right on the beach. Buy some worthless old boat and fix it up like new. Take my guests out charter fishing.”

Can you too see that ? The never dying flicker of hope. Two months in the hole would have killed the man in anybody. But Andy kept dreaming, kept hoping. While hope can be such a torture to those who have been betrayed by the very folks they loved, Andy never lost hope on hope. They may have broken every bone in his body, but they couldn’t touch his ability to hope.

We’ve all encountered people, both in fiction and in real life, who have charmed us with their thunderous speeches, aggressive actions, or their larger than life mannerisms. These men have come, shone in the limelight and gone. They all were great men. Men whom we admire and probably worship.

However Andy was different. He showed that silence ain’t cowardice, that
patience ain’t a waste of time and that revolting against the situation ain’t
gonna take you anywhere till the right time comes, and when that time comes, you don’t wait to do the right thing.

Andy Dufresne may not have been a great man in usual sense of the word.
Yet, I can’t help admiring this character, because he was something much more than a great man - Andy, was a good man.

Closing Song: None.
Closing Mood: It’s quite late in the night. Should sleep now.

Ok folks, I have started experimenting with WordPress now. The transition, if at all is gonna happen, will take some time. I wish to make it a smooth one and slowly migrate over.

Here’s the link to my latest post http://rand0mwalkoflife.wordpress.com/ (Note the ‘0′ in rand0m)

Cya there, but keep watching this space for more.

Thanks and Regards
Randomwalker.

Nice heading. I like it. K&R began with this one line which greeted the world like never before.

Oh, btw, I am tryin out wordpress. Just following the crowd now, just for a change.

The image on the header is a result of 15 minutes of google image search + 5 minutes of Gimp. Suits well.

If all goes well, randomwalker might permanently shift to this new abode.

Time will tell… So wait

Opening Mood: Merry Christmas
Opening Song: She will be loved - Maroon 5

Santoor! What an instrument. Listen to it and you begin to imagine the ripples in the clear pond. Slowly growing in size but at the same time, fading away. Slowly. Steadily. Wonderful Experience.

I first heard this wonderful instrument when Pt. Shivkumar Sharma came over to NITK in my second year of Engineering to perform for Viraasat. I loved that performance. So many strings vibrating in tandem, but vibrating in perfect harmony.

Earlier this week, I went beserk shopping some instrumental music. Bought off Desert Rain by Indian Ocean (truely earthy music), Krishna by Pravin Godkhindi and Maya by Rahul Sharma.

Maya is extremely soothing. It’s a compilation of ten tracks, based on the theme of Maya, the godess of illusion in the Indian Mythology. The title track features Sunidhi Chauhan her volcals suitably complementing the santoor. Each track is a fusion of Santoor and some techno beats. All the tracks are good. My personal favorite is the one titled “Permeability”. It sounds happy and light as compared to others which are sound slightly more complicated.

Wonder how would it be to play the tabla for these compositions. Should try it out sometime.

Closing Song: Kandisa - Indian Ocean.
Closing Mood: Extremely hungry imagining all the christmas cookies and brownies.

Opening Mood: Relaxed
Opening Song: Soona man ka aangan - Parineetha ( What a song! )

A week back, I went on a trip to Nagarhole with my colleagues. It was a lot of fun. We stayed at JungleInn resorts which is very close to the Nagarhole forests.

That night, the resort folks had organized a tribal dance around the bonfire. A bunch of people from the Kuruba tribe sang tribal songs and danced around the fire. They used wooden sticks as props for their dance which was a tribal variation of the popular dandiya.

However, we didn’t quite enjoy it. Standing there like fools and watching the tribals sing and dance was definitely not our idea of fun.At least not mine. So we started clapping and shouting, in order to have our share of fun ( It’s only been a while since I’ve been out of college, so it wasn’t unusual for me ). On seeing us behave like one of them, the tribals invited us to join them. Bharata and myself, we joined the tribals for the dance, and boy! I must tell you, we enjoyed it a lot. It wasn’t very difficult or very artistic or something. Just a simple rhythm and simple steps to go with that rhythm.

This must have been the favorite pass-time of these tribal folks since ages. After a hard day’s work, just get together and have fun singing and dancing. Their idea of socialization. What’s important here is that, you won’t really have a lot of fun unless you participate. Just sitting on a chair, sipping beer and trying to *find* beauty in the song/dance might not yield as much fun as participating in that dance might.

That’s exactly the case with culture too. Unless you participate, it is very difficult to understand a particular culture, let alone appreciate it. True, these things are not invented by any one particular person. It has contributions from almost everyone. But what makes it work is the fact that no one bothers “who” contributed “what”. The bigger picture is what matters. And this is the bigger picture which prompts people to take part and contribute.

So what about the ego?! Well, I guess it gets dissolved in the social spirit of participation. After all, ego is of any use only when left alone. It’s utterly useless and predominantly pathetic in a social gathering

Closing Song: Lakshya - Title track.
Closing Mood: Hmmm.. Vacation. Smells sweet despite the bad cold.