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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Went to the meeting a bit late, because I had trouble identifying the building. Then took Sriram’s help and reached Sun’s office, just in time to attend Max’s presentation. At least, I was not too late. Max gave a talk on wrting a module for wacom tablets and told how they need to be treated differently from mouse. Well, to put it simply, in a mouse, you need to move the mouse pointer on the screen for delta x and delta y. But in a pen tablet, it is always absolute.(I understand my simplification is misleading though). He spoke about streams and the issues in integrating the module into the solaris OS. And I didn’t really understand the part on streams very much, the effect of attneding a meet without any background on the topics. The good thing about his presentation was that he put most things in a nice manner that could be understood easily, if we know some basics about the topic and he didn’t make it look very technical.

Then Sriram spoke on his experiences from CommunityOne that he had participated. He gave a brief update on the various events and incidents at the conference. Learnt that Belenix had a good following in South Ameraican nations. Also learnt a lot of other things for the first time during the various conversations that took place during his talk.

Then Moinak gave updates on the current status of KDE 4.2.4 integration in Belenix. His talk was really in a casual manner and really liked it. Also learnt a lot of things during his talk.

And above all, they provided nice snacks in between (No, please don’t tell I went only for that )

In general, the meeting was really informal in its approach and though it was my first meet, the people were really nice to me. Had a chat with Moinak, Anil, Shriram and others after the meeting as well. Hmm, time well spent

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.

The GSL provides a rich set of functions that can be used in C/C++ programs. They provide support for almost all the fundamental mathematical operations. And the good thing is that if  we are working  on Mathematical topics involving a lot of calculations, we save a great deal of time by using this instead of implementing our own functions to solve them. Moreover, a very basic knowledge of C is sufficient to use this. So, even someone without a sound computer science background, can start using this with a minimal knowledge of C/C++.

A subset of features supported by the GSL includes Complex Numbers, Roots of Polynomials, Physical Constants and Differential Equations. They of course support a lot more and the full list can be found at the official site.

And for me the good thing is that this comes packaged in Debian.

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.

         Hello folks, It was the greatest test match I have followed in recent times. What a thrill it was. Not even a 100 Twenty20s can equal the thril of this first test betwwen India and England at the great MAC, Cheapuk, Chennai. 

       It was thrilling right from day one and it should be said that India pulled a victory from the jaws of defeat. Or Englad lost very badly from a great advantage that they had at the close of ay 4 and the beginning of the first session of day 5.

      Thanks to the start by Shewag and Gambhir and the firm partnership between Sachin and Yuvraj, that was unbeaten till the end, India now has the fourth highest successful 4th innings run chase, worth 387 runs.

      Hope this develops an interest in test matches among the Twenty20 loving poeple.

          Hello folks, Having joined Moto, I am getting in touch with the latest developements in the mobile phones and wireless communication sector. And the news of the World’s first ever LTE mobile phone chip is a positive sign.

          LG has announced that it has created the world’s first ever LTE chip. For people who or not in this domain, LTE is the abbreviation for Long Term Evolution, a 4G technology aimed at high-speed wireless broadband and AIPN(All IP Network). It has promised really high data rates and the chip has not disspointed with 60Mbps download and 20Mbps upload rates. Also, theoritcally, mobile handovers are possible even while travelling at a few 100 kmph!!!

          Good time for movie addicts. Once the phones are out and the service is in, no more full night downloads are required. Theoritically, a 700 MB movie(one Compact Disk) can be downloaded in less than  a minute. Well, technology is fast developing and lets grab it with both hands.