Thanks to all readers who have followed me on this blog. Please do follow me on my new blog.

A couple of weeks back, I started working on this task of creating a tracker application for the Patches/Hotfixes that our team releases. This tracker app would have the list of bugs being fixed, the QA engineer testing them, and the current status of the release/HF.

It was suggested that I use Perl since everyone else in the team is a full-time Perl programmer. And so started the journey.

I am not new to web programming. I, with my friends, have done everything from raw PHP-everywhere to decent apps with Django(python). Though I am very bad with the UI, web programming(including templates) is something that I have done repeatedly, whether I like or not. This time, since the language was Perl, it was something new.

So, I decided to take a look at the frameworks that are available for use. There was Catalyst that a lot of people suggested. To me, it looked scary. And then, I hit upon Dancer. For those of you who have use Flask, this is the Perl version of it. This is a micro-framework, which works with Template::Toolkit and has a lot of plugins(For eg. the Database or the Upload plugins). The configuration is through a yaml(config.yml), and that’s  where you say what type of database, the DB credentials etc, the template engine to use etc. and all other configuration. The code layout has a lib folder into which the app’s perl modules will go and a views folder into which the templates go. It has a public folder that has the static content – images, css, js and a environments folder which holds a bunch of yaml files for each env – Dev, Production etc. The actual app is a script named app.pl located in the bin folder. I will  create a separate “HowTo” blog post. But here is the basic idea.

You create a bunch of coderefs that process the requests. Your application can across a bunch of Perl modules, that get called from these code ref. A typical coderef would be

<HTTP VERB> '<ROUTE>' => sub {

};

A simple code would look like.

get '/home/' => sub {
    my $name = "Bala";
    template 'home.tt' , {
        'username' => $name.
    };
};

Kiran from Hasgeek gave a detailed overview of Aaron’s contribution to the society. Before I attended this meet, I just knew him as the creator of web.py and a co-founder of reddit. Only after listening to Kiran did I understand the true level of Aaron’s contributions. And what’s surprising is he did all that in just 26 years of life!!

Aaron was not just a tech-savvy child prodigy. He was an activist who believed on open access to data. No wonder, he spent his money, got the catalog of books from the Library of Congress (you need to pay to get a copy), put up his copy on the open library for every to access free of cost. Since that was a public document, it was not copy-righted and so he *DID NOT* break any law there. He attempted the same thing with PACER – the digital version of court room proceedings. And that cost him really a lot, but being a activist who had money as well, he paid,downloaded close to 20% of all PACER data and put it up for everyone to access free of cost. And of course by then, the US govt found it out and stopped him. He created massive awareness programs against the ills of SOPA, and in 3-4 days his campaign garnered enough support to make the congress shelve the SOPA. Then came the JSTOR incident, which was blown out of propotions, and eventually led to his suicide. Imagine – A public prosecutor suggesting 35 years in prison for Aaron because he attempted to make academic knowledge accessible to public!!

All the arguments about the huge expenses involved in research and subsequent publishing of journals, and hence what Aaron did is wrong may/may not be valid. But there are 2 far fundamental question to be answered.

1) How ethically and morally valid is it to lock up academic journals and grant access only to the rich and mighty ? Or, of what use is such knowledge that is not shared with an curious and enthusiastic, but economically poor student ?

2) What should be the intention of lawyers – To win at all cost, Or, to fight for justice to the society ?

For question 1, the answers vary widely. I am myself a free software enthusiast and hence naturally someone who things all data, (except personal info and those related to national security) should be made public, and granted free access. Copyright and patents are already a big menace to the society. If we add paid access to knowledge and information, we are going down a path of destruction.

Question 2 is more of a self-pomdering. Laws were formed to protect the public from one another, and mainly to protect the common man from the rich and powerful. And when we apply laws, we shouldn’t blindly go by the book. The circumstances and the intentions should be looked at. Additionally, lawyers shouldn’t get into courts with the intention of winning at all costs. Their arguments should be towards establishing a better society.

So, in this case of Aaron, all he did was attempt to make locked up academic data available to public. And again, he agreed to return all downloaded data back. Mind you, JSTOR themselves did not accuse him of anything and suggested that charges against him be dropped. And yet, these public prosecutors, are going for his throat. The reason – Aaron had caused a few embarrassment for his government, by freeing up Library of Congress data, PACER data, and more importantly, fought against SOPA. In just over 3-4 days, he made enough noise and stopped SOPA. To avenge for all that, the lawyers suggested a 35+ year prison sentence when he should have actually been praised and eulogised.  

Aaron’s is a case in which the law failed to protect the good samaritan. And there sure have been many other such cases. Let we, as a species with common sense, think about the society and its well-being, when enact/use laws.

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.

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.

I know well that I don’t have a great readership, but in case there had been any, I apologise for not having posted anything for well over a year. So, in a few brief words, the year that was – The year started off pretty ok. Work at office was tight, quite tight in fact. Despite the great support offered by friends there, there were a great many deterrents. And as the year progressed, work load increased to the extent that I had to put in at least 12-13 hrs a day. So, when this announcement was made, I decided to have that as a trigger for job hunt. Thanks to a friend I got into my current company, joining it on 8th November, 2010.

Now to the topic of this blog. Being a market leader in its domain, my company keeps releasing newer, updated and more robust versions of its major products every year. And in December 2010, the company saw another such release from the team that recruited me. And to celebrate that, a few members of the team planned well and came up with this trip to river Kabini and the Nagarhole national park. Thanks to them, the whole trip was beautifully organised, thoroughly enjoyed and ended without the slightest trouble.

The whole team, a really cohesive group of about 18, assembled at our office on the morning of Friday, 11th March. And people started to joining slowly from 06:30 to 07:15. We left our office in Bangalore, and proceeded along the route to Mysore. For reasons unknown to me, we didn’t take the NICE  road. We halted at the Kamat restaurant for breakfast, at about 09:30. For the first time, I saw a buffet breakfast. They served “kotte kadubu”, masala dosa, puliyogare, vada, kesari, upma  and the regular chutney and sambar for side dishes. They were also serving grape juice and papaya as desserts. Had a couple of dosas, a scoop each of kesari and upma nad a kotte kadubu with vada. (A mighty heavy breakfast indeed!). We did not stop any further and reached the Kabini River Lodge resort, of the Jungle Lodges and Resorts, on the banks of River Kabini near Nagarhole national part at about 13:30 hrs. We were welcomed with cool lemon juice and were guided to our rooms in the resorts(Forgot to mention that we were about 18 ppl and booked 10 double-bed rooms).

After dumping our bags, headed straight for the dining hall, named “Gohl Ghar”, which is situated just on the river banks. Had a sumptuous, healthy(?) lunch of Ragi balls, Roti, dal and the usual sambar, curd with carrot/peas for the side dish.

Then started the fun and merry. We all spent about an hour idling on the huge hammocks there. We had fun with the hammock by “pulling the legs” when people tried to climb up the hammock. Then came the tea/coffee at about 15:30, just a little over an hour after lunch. After that, we departed at about 16:30 hrs for the boat safari though river Kabini. It was a good two and half hour ride on the river, where we spotted a variety of birds, a few elephants and the Indian goar on the river banks. We also had a glimpse of the sun set at about 18:30 hrs. Though a few people thought that it was a boring ride, I felt it refreshing with wonderful unpolluted breeze and the cool air, somethings that simple don’t exist in Bangalore.

After the boat safari, we were shown a documentary that explained the present state of tiger population in the world, in general and specifically in India. The various tricks adopted by the hunters/poachers were explained. It’s indeed sad that such a majestic animal is on the verge of being extinct. We, as the citizen of the nation(and the world) have a duty/responsibility in the safe existence of all living beings. We don’t own the world. We just share the place with millions of other species. The human race is just one species.

After the documentary, we had a sumptuous dinner and then headed straight to our beds. The 5 hour journey from Bangalore and the safari and the food would have cured even the strongest bouts of insomnia. Despite that, we had lengthy chats of various things, and nothing in particular. Slowly, as sleep over came our strong will to stay awake, we drifted off to the dreamland.

The next day started “early” for many as we had to wake up at about 05:15-05:30 to get ready for the jungle safari. We had our morning coffee/tea and left out in 3 jeeps, hoping to dare the tigers/leopards etc. etc. But despite being a two and half hour safari, none of us(the three jeeps took different routes through the forests) spotted any of the famed beasts of the forest. All that we saw were elephants, a herd of the Indian goar, wild boars and a lots of deer pf different variety(Spotted, Sambar, etc.). The closest that we came to spotting a tiger was when all of a sudden all three jeeps stopped(it was at the starting of the safari before deviating to different routes) and the guides told that there had been a “warning call”. The “langur”s at that spot made some kind of sound that would sound as a warning to the deers in the surrounding area that some carnivore is approaching. But didn’t see any carnivore, other than the humans of the three jeeps.

On returning from the jungle safari, with some disappointment for having failed to spot any wild beast, we had our breakfast at the Gohl Ghar again. This too was wonderfully prepared. I had kesari, idly, vada and a ragi dosa. People really enjoyed the meal there, all three times. After that, as the final leg of the trip, we all went for a coracle ride, on Kabini. It was a ride with 4 members(+1 oarsman) per coracle for a short distance into the river. After that, we all vacated the JLR resort and boarded our bus back to Bangalore, only to find that the “famed” Indian middle order was utterly useless(or maybe helpless) against the SA bowling and we successfully managed to lose the match, Thanks to Dhoni’s wonderful captaincy skills.

Well, a blog post way too long for anyone to read fully, but sorry, something to compensate for having left it dormant for more than a year.

PS: Will check with my team members before I can link to the photos. Not everyone likes to share their photos on the Internet.

This time it was more of a relaxation trip. I didn’t want to travel much since another travel awaited me later in the week. I took lots of rest and regained some spent energy in doing so. While at Guwahati visited a couple of temples(I had visited Kamakhya the last time I visited Guwahati and so didn’t go this time). There is a relatively new south indian style temple dedicated to Lord  Balaji constructed on the outskirts of Guwahati. The temple is really nice and well maintained. And since it is on the outskirts, it quite calm and peaceful. Also, more importantly, the priests in the temple are from Srirangam Apparently, they are taking turns(3-month terms, IIRC) in maintaining the temple and perfrming pooja there. It was good to listen to ‘Mangalam Kosalendraya‘ being receited with the proper pronunciation and the trade-mark unrivaled Srirangam diction.  Later in the week, we visited a small temple dedicated to Lord Ayyapan. It was the day of ‘Thiruvannamalai Deepam‘ also known as ‘Karthigai Deepam‘ or simply Karthigai and so there were special poojas being performed there.

Then, on Thursday, we left Guwahati for Calcutta in a flight. Thanks to my father’s friend working in one of the communications company in Calcutta, we had a nice cab arranged for the two and half day trip. At Calcutta, we visited the Science city, which is quite nice and small children would really love it. We also visited the usual places like Birla Mandir, Kalighat temple and Victoria memorial.

The Birla Mandir, located in the heart of the city is a sight to behold at night. It has a real splendor and  beauty about it. The temple is really calm and quite, despite the numerous devotees inside the temple campus at any point of time.

I also made a visit to the mecca of Indian cricket, the Eden Gardens. In Calcutta, we travelled by tram and by the underground metro railway system. It was a funny, but nice sight to see the trams negotiating their way through the busy roads of Calcutta, where you would finds cars, buses and autos going right over the tram path and right in front of a tram. I heard that the tramway system of Calcutta has been declared as a heritage symbol that would be maintained as long as possible. The good thing to notice about Calcutta is that despite the huge population and traffic, we don’t find the roads as congested as Bangalore. The roads are triple the width of a big Bangalore road and so the traffic flows smoothly. Also, in a way somewhat similar to Madras and unlike Bangalore, the city has not lost its old-world charm completely yet. So, I would prefer Calcutta to Bangalore(Of course, I would prefer Trichy to that).

As a part of the Calcutta trip, we also visited the Dakshineshwar Kali mandir and the Belur Math, the head quaters of Sri Ramakrishna Math. Later on that day, we also visited the Nicco park, one of the oldest theme parks in India. The temple at Dakshnieshwar was somewhat crowded and yet we were able to offer our prayers there. The temple is located right on the banks of river Hoogly and it is situated in calm surroundings, despite being suburban Howrah. Also, the Belur amth is located on the banks of Hoogly and there are daily ‘Guru poojas‘ being performed to Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa at the math.

As a whole the trip was quite good and gave me the satisfaction of visiting Calcutta and Guwahati yet again. It was also a much needed break from the office work schedule.

The turn-out was even lower than the last time. We had about 10 people, including the Moinak and Anil. Moinak started off with his talk on filesystems. He opened up OpenSolaris source and initially went through the way it is organised before jumping into the fs/ directory. For the sake of simplicity, he took up a read-only file system, hsfs that is used in CD-ROMs(iso9660 formats). He went to the code at a higher level, without going into too much of specifics. But still, covered most part of hsfs and explained all operations defined for that. He also explained how the code handles simultaneous device request for same data, by uping a semaphore and then directing the second of the requests to the cached copy of the data in the memory.  Only now I understood that even for a read access, if it is to a device, it does a lock and unlock, so that other processes accessing the same data need not access the device, even if the requests are simultaneous. They can access the memory location to which this data has been stored by the process that had read it from the device. The reads from the memory are of course simultaneous. But the coolest aspect was when he took  Sriram’s laptop and wrote an  DTrace 1 liner and generated a funcation call flow text output for doing a “ls” command on a iso9660 type device(in this case, an opensolaris CD) and explained why all thse calls were there in brief(for most of the calls that were made. After a long time, realised that I should have learnt that great, cool stuff called DTrace. It is really amazing.

Then, Moinak spoke about spec files and how they are used for generating packages. He also pointed out the that they were used both by Fedora’s RPM and by Belenix. He opened up a few spec files and went through them. They way to add CFLAGS and LDFLAGS were also explained by him.

Then, Anil explained the debian version of the “spec” files. He explained how Debian packages were built and that  sources  would also have a folder named “debian” in them and that would have all the necessary files. The files that he went through were the “control” file and the “rules” file. It is in these  files that the sources to be built from and the packages that would be obtained are defined. From a single source, many packages can be built. Anil also explained the basic difference between the Debian’s type and other “spec” files. In Debain, we need to do “apt-get source pkg-name” to get the source and have it locally before building the package. But in the other “spec” files, we can also specify the site from which the sources are to be downloaded.

Anil then spoke about CHDK, a firmwire for cannon cameras, that can make the camera do wonders. The image that he showed were really breath-taking. Effectively, what this project has done is that a new firmwire that can boot from the SD memory card has been developed. With this, the camera even allows users to write small scripts to automate tasks. We can make the speed as great as 1/60000.. Something that is really amazing. He showed images that we captured using that camera that had captured a droplet of water rising from the surface of a cup of water, if its surface was disturbed. He spoke about a lot of other great features, that were really hard to believe.

In all, it was an excellent evening, well spent with a lot of technical “chit-chat” with the other guys at the end. But, it got very late by the time I reached home though.

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.

I have only heard about those places from my friends from North-East at college and I was happy to go on a vacation there. More so because, for the first time I boarded a flight. A direct one from Bangalore to Guwahati, with a stop at Calcutta. Guwahati welcomed me with a fierce thunderstorm and after that day, it was scorching days until I left the place. Again, on the day I left, there was heavy rainfall .

In all, I spent about 10 days there with my parents.  Before I dump a heap of information on the places I visited, I wish to share a piece of infoMay be I might be a little late in knowing this, but just to let others know, the NE India has a great many beautiful places to be visited, and only a few of them are popular outside of those states.

Guwahati, the capital of Assam, is the most popular city in the North East and the last Rail link in that direction. It is as much developed as any other city and has everything from Mainland China and Cafe Coffee day to a nice Cricket stadium. Guwahati sits on the banks of river Brahmaputra, the fierce river, being a perennial one, always quenches the water needs of the city. The city and the state as such is popular for its tea and you can find every other shop selling good quality tea. Academics and It professionals might be interested to know the existence of an IIT and TCS in Guwahati.

Places of tourist importance are mostly religious. The Kamakhya temple being the most important. May be people of TamilNadu can compare it with MelMaruvathur(near Chennai) or Samaya puram(near Trichy). It is a very important temple dedicated to Goddess Shakthi. And as is common with many important shrines, it has a story attached to it. The other important temples are the Uma Nandha temple, located right in the middle of Brahmaputra. You will have to take the ferry available there. Cost per ticket is Rs.10. Bashista is another place of religious importance.  Apart from these, a stroll along the banks of the river is also enjoyable. More so now, since the river is at its maximum level now.

Then, I visited Shillong and Cherrapunji. Shillong is about 3-4 hrs drive from Guwahati. There are lots of shared cars/Gypsies available from a place called “Khana-Para”. Also, it is worth noting that Guwahati houses the inter-state bus stand of the seven states of NE India. We hired a cab and went on the journey. All along, the route was surrounded by hills, since the NE India is a part of the sub Himalayan terrain. May be some thing of a custom, every body going through that route(apart from the regulars) stop at a place called Jorabat to offer a a prayer to lord Ganesha there. Jorabat is at the Assam-Meghalaya border. From there, we reach Shillong, capital of Meghalaya, via Nongpoh, the major town en route. Also, mid-way, we stopped to take a few snaps of “Bara Pani“(Should be understood as Bada Pani in Hindi. And it essentially is a sort of very large lake)

The moment we enter Meghalaya, we can realize why it was named so(Meghalaya => Megha(clouds) + Alaya(abode) => Abode of clouds). Though it was officially the peak of summer, the temperature was about 25-27 *C. And there was always an occasional drizzle. No wonder why the British choose Shillong as their HQ for Air Force. Even now, the Govt. of India has its Eastern Air Command(EAC) at Shillong. Actually, it is not an overstatement to mention that EAC forms half of Shillong. And not really surprisingly, found a Trichy guy running a hotel providing pure Madras style food. Learnt from him that there is considerable size of Tamil population in what he calls the Upper Shillong, where my father heads a BSNL office at Lite Kor.

Places to see at Shillong are mostly “View points”. The view point at Lire Kor, which you would reach by driving along the entire EAC region, is the highest point of Shillong. There is always a mild drizzle thre and from that point, you can practically view the whole of Shillong. For those interested in geography, the state of Meghalaya has three major hills, with one maor city atop each of them(IIRC). Shillong is at the East Khasi hills; Then we have the Gharo hills and Jaintha hills, with WilliamNagar/Tura and Jowai as the major places. Other places at Shillong are the Air Force Meuseum, en route from Shillong city to the litekor peak and the lake at Shillong. Went for boating there.

Then, visited Cherrapunji, officially called Shora. It was the place with highest rainfall untill recently. Now, that record is held by Mawsynram, a place a few kilometers from here. Cherrapunji also has a great deal of view points, one being very famous for you can see the villages of Bangladesh from there. All along from Shillong to Cherrapunji, there are lots of places with breath taking scenic beauty. The govt. of Meghalaya has done a good job by creating/constructing “view points” where ever possible.

A few places of importance en route Shillong to Cherrapunji and in and around Cherrapunji are: “The elephant falls” and the “Mawsmai caves“. A visit to the Mawsmai caves will really test the flexibility of one’s body, if we are to take the 100 m walk inside the circular cave. The beautiful sight of the Elephant falls where we can see the water rushing from the heights of mountain peaks and falling into the abyss of the gorges is really breath-taking.

Over all, it was a great trip that I really enjoyed. Also, at the same time we should think something really serious. At least, in these parts of India, we still have the nature and its resources intact and undisturbed(They have already started to bulldoze some parts of hills to lay roads). We need to preserve them. In these days, where there are equally loud cries both for infrastructure development and for “Going Green”, we need to be very careful. Natural resources are really a gift and we should preserve them for an eternity.

Will upload pictures soon.