Homage to Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Richie(dmr), the father of the C language and one of the co-founders of the UNIX passed away on 8th October, 2011. And that came a few days after the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The news of Dennis Ritchie’s death was a big shock, and saddened me to a great extent. I thought I must pen down a homage to this man who contributed so much to technology as we know today.

To start off with, he gave us the C language. He is the ‘R’ of the famous ‘K&R’ C programming book, the ‘R’ stands for Ritchie. That book has been used over and over by people across the world to learn C.

And, he was one of the founding fathers of UNIX. To make sure that people understand the importance of UNIX, everything from GNU/Linux, *BSDs, iOS(yes, the iPads, iPods and all such stuff), and most likely MS Windows has taken at least something from UNIX.

And the C programming language, which has been in high demand and use since its day one, has been the basis for lot of new languages that were developed in later years. Though it might lack a string API, C, which came it existence in 1969, has almost all features that is needed to create a High-Available, Mission critical applications. C++, Java, PHP, Perl,  and may be Python are a few languages that owe a lot to C. And most parts of the Linux kernel, most UNICes are implemented in C. So was the impact of the creation of dmr. C might be dreaded by many; It might be easy to make mistakes in C; But still, there is a kind of beauty that is associated with the language. And that, is something that I love

Death, be it to anyone from a most wanted criminal to a sadhu/sanyasi is sad and so were the deaths of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. But I have never been a big fan of Jobs. He was a CEO, who ran a company that created products that were bought by a lot of people. And true, the devices from Apple have excellent user interfaces. But what he did was to inspire his team to create such products(either through threats or excellent leadership qualities, I don’t know which). I really don’t know if he personally invented any of the technologies that his company owns. Another thing about Jobs is that he had a mad desire for patents and Apple under him file lots of law suits based on patents. On the other hand, Dennis Ritchie was an out and out technology guy. He wrote a new language, that is among the most popular if not the most popular. He wrote the first ever popular operating system. Yet, he was never after patents. He firmly believed that it should be open(mostly because there was no such thing called proprietary those days). What pained me a lot in Ritchie’s death was that there was absolutely no media coverage. He passed away on 8th October, and the world came to know about it(mostly) from a Google+ message that Rob Pike(his fellow colleague who worked on UNIX) shared. Not even slashdot made a news entry until 13th October. But, for Steve Jobs, there was extensive coverage in all sections of the media. There was a first page article in the news paper that I read regularly. And that paper hasn’t yet reported dmr’s death. I can understand if the common man doesn’t know Dennis Ritchie. But if the media, which tries to go as techie as possible, doesn’t know/report Ritchie’s death, it really is painful.

He gave a lot of things. As Linus once said, it is one the shoulders of giants like Dennis Ritchie that the present day world stands. And he is definitely among the tallest of those giants. He was someone who was at the very center of the changes that gradually has the brought the computer-related technology to what it currently is. If not dmr, someone else might have found another new language, Yes. And likewise, if Ken Thompson and Ritchie had just worked on the “word processor” which was their assigned task, we might not have had UNIX, but someone else would have come up with some other OS. But the world would most probably be much differently from what it currently is. Thanks for all your contributions DMR. RIP.

A trip to Kabini and Nagarhole – office sponsored

Hello folks,

Its been well over a year since the last post and I have seen/been through a great deal of change, as anyone would expect. And again, a great way to get back to blogging. First of all, I am no longer with Motorola, I have moved on to a different company. And that change, though took a while for me to get settled, has been good. And it is this new company that sponsored our visit to celebrate the successful launch of the new version of one of its major products.

Calcutta and Guwahati

Hello folks, it’s been a while since I had made my last post. Work was tight and no time to blog. But, to get away from the routine, took a break in the first week of December and went on a trip to Guwahati and Calcutta(for some reasons, I prefer Calcutta to Kolkata). Leaving on a Saturday morning(28th November, 2009), I reached  Guwahati at about 14:00 hrs, about 4 hrs filght from Bangalore.

An evening well spent – BOSUG meet

Hello folks, BOSUG met after a long time and I went for the meet, again at Sun offices Bangalore. It was again an interesting evening, well spent, learning lots of new things. Moinak and Anil spoke on interesting things that held my attention all through the evening.

An year at Moto :)

Hello folks. With today, I am completing 1 year at Moto. Joined Motorola, one year ago today and time has gone so fast that I realised it just now.

Looking back at it, I have had a great time at my company. Though it has been hectic, got a wonderful team here and a really nice project. Working on LTE(A 4G wireless broadband technology) has been really interesting. Learnt so many thing that I never even knew existed. The lone achievement this year was bagging an  internal award.

I should thank my team for bearing with my extreme forgetfulness and the huge amounts of mistakes that I commit. Mine is a really good team with a great amount of understanding for others. Despite the tight schedule, everyone in the team spent time to help me out of difficult and desperate situations. Of course, those are embarrassing moments and I hope to push them back and improve going ahead.

Guwahati, Shillong and Cherrapunji

Hello folks, this is a post long long over-due. A post about a trip that I made in the first week of May. And, the delay is much more manifested when I announce that it was the first ever air trip that I had made . In the first week of May, I went on a journey to the gateway of North East India, Guwahati. A rare opportunity that I got since my father is now working there. I visited Guwahati, Shillong and Cherrapunji during that trip.

Tributes to a doyenne of Carnatic music

The great D K Pattammal, the senior most carnatic musician  among the women is no more. The great artist, one of the women trinity of carnatic music passed away on 16th July, 2009 due to cardiac arrest. And with that, the world has lost the last surviving member of that great trinity.

Considered to be first women to give a full kutchery(concert), she was also considered  at par with most of very experienced musicians at a very early stage of her career. She has remained the authority not only on the complex and very puritanical Dikshitar compositions, but on the compositions of freedm figher-poet Subramaniya Bharathi and composer Papanasam Sivan as well.

Along with greats MS and MLV, Pattammal created a great legacy of carnatic music, really hard to find in these days, where true classical music concerts are a rare occurrence and the people interested in these great treasures is gradually reducing(Worse that those people are being mocked at by a few “modernised” ??? people).Well for now, salutations and tributes to D K Pattammal. May her rest in peace and Long live her kritis.

My first BOSUG meet

Hello folks, I attended my first BOSUG meet last Saturday(13th June, 2009) at the Sun office(Divyashree chambers).  Though the turnout was less, it was really a nice meeting and learnt quite a bit. And of course had the chance to attend the session of Max Bruning and had a chat with Moinak.

The GNU Scientific Library – Numerical library from GNU

Hello folks, its been a long long time. Just thought of putting this tiny piece of info on GSL here. The GNU Scientific Library is a numerical library from the GNU. This is really useful for those who deal with complex mathematical functions day in and day out.

FOSS and data privacy

Hello folks, A few days back, there was an OT thread in the ilugc, which eventually ran into the topic of data privacy and FOSS. A few people on the list were commenting that data privacy was of supereme importance in FOSS.(The original post).

       I had raised my views over there and wish to highlight them.

File access permissions:

In GNU/Linux, or any other UNIX, the default file access permissions are 755. This means that, the owner can read, write and execute the files. The users in the same group as the owner can read and execute only, and the other users in the system can also read and execute only. (The file access is actually the decimal notation of the bitmask for the r-w-x, where 1 means allowed. So 1-1-1 means read, write and execute and 111 in binary is 7 in decimal).

So this 755 permission by default essentially means that, anybody who has a login in that system can read and execute your files. So the concept of supreme data privacy is lost. Infact, with default settings,any user can read any file in a GNU/Linux system.

There are ofcourse ways to modify the defaul permissions and make it such that the owner can read-write-execute and others can’t do anything, by setting the permissions to 700 using the chmod command. To make this as the default property, the users can also make their umask to be 077. by default umask is set to 022(umask XOR 777 gives the file access permissions).

            There were references to RMS opposing could computing etc. citing that data privacy is lost. In my view,  the probable disadvantage of cloud computing is that data ownership might be lost. But from my understanding, there will be no changes to the privacy.