Foss.in 2005

Me is in bangalore, for FOSS.in 2005....

Watch this space for frequent updates directly from the venue (If it has a net
access).

Following two religions...... KDE Vs. Gnome,

OK i am back to KDE.... more because i need to get acquainted with qt. With my
prime development platform being QT based, i need to get to know the inner as
well as working feel of QT hands on.

But now, my mind is again split between the two desktops. Make no mistake, i
still in my heart an enlightenment fan. Unfortunately Gnome and KDE are the
two things we must live with. Without having more time to spend on config,
fixing and bug reporting i don't see a point in trying to use enlightenment
right now........

Comming back to the debate, KDE still is irritating while Gnome very
peacefull. Kde is however easier to make it your own taste... well
somewhat ...
The eyecandy is better in KDE, eye relief is better in gnome. Both things get
the jobs done quite well.... Most of the stuff works out of the box now and
both the desktops have a strong foundation.

I am totally split and it makes me be unfaithful to both the desktops :).
Lets see may be after FOSS.in 2005 i will have a strong reason for chosing one
over the other.

MS To Launch Internet Versions of Office And Windows

MS To Launch Internet Versions of Office And Windows: "daria42 writes 'In a press conference this morning, Bill Gates said Microsoft plans to launch Internet-based complements to its core products, dubbed 'Windows Live' and 'Office Live'. Windows Live is a set of Internet-based personal services, such as e-mail, blogging and instant messaging. It will be primarily supported by advertising and be separate from the operating system itself. Office Live will come in both ad-based and subscription versions that augment MS' Office suite. The programs won't replace the paid software but instead seem aimed at diminishing Google's ad revenue. Windows Live already appears to have 'gone live' in a preview format on the web.'"

Google DVRs and TV Advertising

Google DVRs and TV Advertising: "Ray writes 'Google may be creating their own branded digital television DVR / satellite service. A DVR that lets you 'Log In' with your Google Account before you begin your television watching would allow Google to serve up relevant ads based on: the program you are watching, your search history, the type of emails you have received in the past 24 hours (excluding spam hopefully), or anything else Google can track. Imagine the possibilities... You are watching Google Satellite TV through your 'internet ready' Google DVR.'"

The life, Universe and Everything

42,

Simple isn't it?

Ah!! well you wish!!!!
Unfortunately it isn't that simple, or may be it is but the consequences are equally more complex. Regardless all the three terms are mere specializations of one fundamental concept. Existence!!

Existence is so fundamentally integrated with,... well everything, that we take it for granted. In my opinion the concept of existence is the most ignored, but the greatest features of the known Universe. I could never understand why anything has to exists. All the entire history, sciences, literature, applied threads, mythology, psychology .... you name it, deals with a fundamental assumption of existence. The very basic fundamental of any theory, a 'proof', is all about existence. We prove it or we move ahead. No theory is orthogonal to existence.
Even the religious theories , the most crappy ones as far as theories go, might i add, can't get free from that fundamental fact of life. They all start and end with existence. Hell having a start and an end (even if you prove that the end won't be possible) is necessary and sufficient part of the existence assumption.

So what my challenge to you is..... find a existence wise orthogonal theory.... I scratched my head for a long time and haven't been able to do it so far.....

And yes this post is _very_ crappy... don't worry about it too much.... i _am_ crappy weird guy.... 

Changing sides....

Yes it finally happened !!! i outcasted myself ( no no i still do use emacs).

I recently installed Ubuntu Hoary on my notebook, with an intent of upgrading it to kubuntu and then migrating all my knoppix configs to it. But after spending few days in gnome, i am now an experimental convert. I always said KDE doesn't feel right, and i keep struggling to get it the way just i like it. Don't take me wrong... its not the KDE's lack of functionality or configurability thats a problem here. Its just that i can't find the right combo that i like. It just doesn't satisfy me. It gives all the bells and whistles and a lot more, but still that empty feeling creeps in.
But with GNOME i started feeling home right from the beginning. The fact that adding few applets is the only thing i have changed in the whole desktop setup is a good testimonial to the right things the GNOME usability group is doing. I think all  the research and effort that went into creating the ui guidelines has finally paid off. In the end the clean and simple usability that has won my appreciation.
I am going to stick with gnome for a while now...
For some reason i just feel this is not going to be a short lived affair.

Miracles and god

Why do people give existance of miracles as a proof of existance of god?
In my view that should be exactly opposite....

Had god existed no one would need a miracle.
Assuming gods existance, offhand i could think of only two uses for miracles,
1. To leave a proof that god exists.
2. To remedy a mistake.

here 'god' means any entity that created and maintains the universe including the laws on which it runs.

I couldn't think of anything else..... (any takers?)
But even these two are mute. Had god existed there would be no need of proof. It wouldn't matter if miracles happened. God could have just embedded his existance into the very fabric of universe and then no one would have had wondered.

The second one is probably a tough one to refute... but i did it. But before falsifying it let me explain the concept in detail first.
The miracles (if at all present ) are a way to patch things up. To defy the underlying rules and just get things done. Sort of like using 'gotos' and 'break' statements in 'c'. But case study of any such situation, be it in software or any other descipline in the engineering, has shown that such a patch up either results in deteroiration of the system, and thus is known to be a _bad_ practise. Or it gets accepted in the fundamentals as a only known solution and the next generation of the engineers just start taking it for granted.
So if god used miracles as a way to patch things up (may be cause he felt lazy and didn't fix the real bug), the miracles will be actually the bad things happening to us.. (sort of like granting everyone's wish, turned out to be a disastor in the movie "all mighty") or it won't be a miracle anymore, but just a practicle solution that never was found before, and will be explained in very short time and won't remain a miracle anymore.

So basically if god existed, he would in no way require or allow for miracles. So when people talk about miracles happening, they are actually arguing that god does not exists, not the other way round.

[LIGHT BULB]: Whosh i am so clever!, now i am going to attempt to prove that "black is actually white", but let me have a motion to convert all the zebra crossings into yellow/red bands first.

How to get hang of the Tuesdays

Q: What do you do? when on one particular tuesday, you have woken up late to
realise that a meeting was suppose to start 10 mins. ago, You feel miserable
to read a message from your girfriend saying she forgot to call you
alltogether. then finally in the three hour long meeting find out that the
desing you worked on for last two weeks is a piece of crap and the client
wants you to start from scratch, and even your cdrom drive has failed for
some misterious reason. When you think that world is about to end What? just
what do you do?

Ans: Yell YIEEPPEEEEEEEEEEEEE and go shopping !!!!! (you got to spend that
first paycheck of yours don't you?) FOR HARDWARE .......
Just when i though i can never get hang of tuesdays, i found a way to do just
that.This is an account of this particular tuesday when world (thankfully?)
did not come to an end.

[11:10am] you wake up by a ring of your cell phone. Its a message actually
asking where are you..... Crap i need to hurry up to the meeting.

[11:30] read your girfreind had forgotten you..... :( ah well this must be a
tuesday.

[12:30pm]19 mins into a meeting starts a realisation of a grave fact of life.
It aint fair, infact it aint even close to fair.

[2:30pm] give up. simply give up.... Belgium!!!

[3:30pm] start planning on a new design. Its a huge repeat of two weeks work
and you now have two days for it. am convinced (or rather hoping) that a
vogon constructors fleet is heading this way.

[4:30:01pm] Light bulb moment, you see your dad struggling with getting the
dsl to work on a long ethernet cable.

[4:30:02:01pm] You realise you are yet to touch the first ever payment you
received.

[4:30:02:02pm] You start envisioning a grand network infrastructure, the fears
of vogon fleet are lightywars away.

[4:45pm] Yaaaahooooo!!! you prove your geekerdom and spend the money on a
hoopy neat Wireless hardware.

[5:00pm] hook up the gear and realise that there is latency issue with dsl
connection. Scratch head.......

[5:30pm] forget about the design we still have two days for it. Start
designing a neater network.

[6:00pm] config a m/c as a gateway, and run a trial for the connectivity.
Everything works just smooth, pat yourself and thank linus+debian. Now you
need a dedicated gateway, go to office to fetch some gear......

[7:00pm] come to realise you don't have a cdrom.... to car again to get a
cdrom drive.

[7:30pm] start installing knoppix(what else?) on to a p4 machine, leave to
meet a a friend.

[11:30pm] your are half way drunk, get to the machine. Install is complete.
Put down few scripts to enable masuerade, firewall, auto dsl connection and
ssh setup.

[11:45pm] done you machine reboots with everything setup perfectly well
without manual intervention....... strip the machine off the
keyboard/mouse(yieks)/monitor.

[12:00am] with everything on your local ethernet, boot hte machine wifi and
the two laptops. What a frood you are...... everything is working perfect....
just perfect.

[1:00am] spend few more hours configuring a vpn and securing the wireless leg
of your network

Yahhooooo!!!! tuesday is long gone........
And i am a proud owner of neat network.

Dataone<<==>> DSL MODEM
^
||
\/
Ethernet HUB
^ ^
|| ||
\/ \/
Wifi AP Gateway
/ \ M/c (Masq. +
/ \ Ip forwad +
/ \ squid +
Latop 1 Laptop2 mail server)

More OS rant......

I was just thinking.... (what the f***???)

How come after 15 (may be more) years of development and so called reasearch,
no os in the enitre world supports non rectangular windows?
Well to be honest all of them do.... i mean i have seen weird skins for xmms
and noatune...... but still, nobody inherantly uses the nonrectangular window
in the gui interface design.

I mean i am sure if people think about it carefully enough they can def. come
up with a really good uses for these. First of all its so obvious step
towards saving some desktop space. right now i can see the space between a
toolbar button and the right edge of the window being just wasted. the
address field also contains only one address right now ( its a email compose
window) and most of the right side is just wasted.

Intellegant use of arbitrarily shaped windows and gui design will solv the
problem i am most certain. Alas!! don't we have intellegace left in this
world anymore????

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net/
http://abhijit.adotout.net/blog.php

Os innovations or lack of those.....

This sucks!!!!
I mean it reallllllyyyy ****___SUCKS___*****

What am i talking about?
Those stupid pieces of shit underhood my desktop or "Operating
systems" as they are called.

I mean they were quite a sensation once. When i had a 386 and took
hundreds of milisec to display a three line directory content, i was
amazed to see them make things actually easier in life. The new GUI's
being invented were a greate leap towards usability. I thought at this
pace, i will have lot to see in my youth.

but after almost a decade and a half...... i am thoroughly
disappointed. The interfaces haven't changed for as long as i can
remember . Sure apple is best one to use right now, but it still isn't
good enough.

Here are the few things that really irritate me....

1. For gods sake dont make me bother about saving my work :-- We have
hundreds of mbs of ram, gbs of storage, and GHz of processing power
and yet.... i still have to save my files manually if i don't want to
lose my work. I mean commmonnnnn !!!! it was ok to have me save things
when saving actually meant few seconds of a frozen machine. but its
totally unacceptable today. If you can't split 2.6 GHz into a saving
job and still keep the interactive UI alive its a real shame!!!!!!!
Its very simple expectation..... When i spend hours working, more
often than not i am not doing temporary stuff. I want things i do to
be done!! Don't insult me by asking weather the report i spent 2-3
hours on is worth saving or not..

2. Get rid of those god damn menus:--
Hierarchical menus are the worst parts of the ui on my desktop. I have
to spend time actually navigating through them. I have to remember the
pathways and mazes inside all the applications i use.
And all for doing a simple task of adding a table or adding one more
row to my table. ****___SUCKS___****
I want things need to do to be there at once. Right now it feels like
a government building. I have to go through ten different counters to
get a simple job done.

3. Get rid of thy mouse :--
Apples one button mouse is far better than 3-4 buttons of pc. Why?
cause mouse while unavoidable still sucks a lot as an interactive
device. Its slow, its sluggish, it doesn't give any feedback, it simply
isn't good enough to input anything else but clicks and in the end its
too limited use of a powerful architecture of a human hand.
For gods sake find something else.... move to touchscreens, hard to
learn keyboards or anything else you can think of. i don't care, just
get rid of that annoying arrow on my screen.

4. System startup and shut down:--
slightly related to the first point, it was ok to have os's boot and
shutdown slowly because of limited power of the processors and disks.
But its totally insane right now. Why can't they just put in a battery
backed up system ram to speedup the boot? i neways spend a lot adding
on to Ghz in my box, i sure won't mind spending on out of the box
solution which boots the damn thing like my tv (which essentially
doesn't let me know if its booting at all.....).

5. Get rid of files et all. :--
Again it was ok when we had less space and processing power, but now i
want a letter i write, to look like a letter i wrote and not some 8.3
or 256 long string. I don't care if you use a database or a fs or a
text file as back end. Don't make me think about which program to use
to right my letter. And don't make me think about sending it to
somebody as an attachment, i don't want to attache a file to my mail
i am sending. If I want to send a letter to my sister then i "send a
letter to my sister" end of story. Don't make me fire up an editor,
then a mail program and then make me save it all and attach and then
connect to internet and send PHEW!!!.

There are lot many more small irritations but these are most annoying
to me......
I don't see them getting solved any time sooner... alas...... sigh!! :-((

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Copyrights, DRM, businesses and the future.

Just go and ask "Why DRM and copyrights are bad?" on /. or similiar crowed and
you will be burried under countless reasons.
Today i am just going to add one more to the pool.....
"Future"

The reasoning goes something like this. Today everyone copyrights a material, which basically means you can not reproduce it. There is an unmentioned diversion to the above restriction, which is for now quite obvious, that is you can reproduce it in you brains. You can veiw the movie you, can listen to
the music and you can see the paitning without much problem. You are also not restricted from recalling it ofcourse. Although brain is a form of an electronic storage, preventing reproduction inside brain will be just stupid. The business model works quite well right now mainly due to volatile nature of our memories.

The problem I spot however begins sometime 40-50 years from now. Biophisists
are already very successfull in interfacing brain paths to the electronic
circuits. Many blinds are being given expreimental vision by hooking a CCD
on to their visual neuropaths.Very soon there will be a stadardisation in
nero-tronic interface making it possible to manufacture tons of different
brain-aids. Its not too long before the braincap implant envisioned in
the SPACE ODESSY 3001 is brought to reality, atleast a striped down version
of it inside few MIT labs or something.

So when we finally get a few terabytes of memory sitting to aid our brains in
a seamless fashion, when we can recall what we have seen, heard or
expereienced in the exact same way again and again and again without needing any external device but only a few implants. How the hell are people going to enforce copyrights? all one will have to do is just watch a video once and be done with it. And furthermore if a communication is also aided by some addons to our brains the distribution of such material will be unstoppable. Its going to spread through the oldest p2p protocol existent on earth namely personal contact. What are they going to do? ban freindships and social networks? In short, soon (well that about 100-200 years but still) copyright is going to be a thing of past. So MPAA, RIAA watch out, your time is about to end. And no lawsuit is going to stop that.

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net
http://abhijit.adotout.net/blog.php

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Hurra!!!

Well while i was trying to build the directfb stuff, i also kept working on
Xorg. Well finally i have it all....

DRI now works under Xorg, and i even have SATA driver up and running in the
kernel, after i installed hybrid of gentoo and debian and kernl.org
kernels :-)).

I will write a full report on linux on ACER travelmate 4151 once i get the
modem and wifi working again (the hybrid kernel is not (yet) configured for
those)

One disappointment though,.. although xine now can render fast it still can't
play dvds, ide driver is too slow and SATA driver doesn't (yet) support
ATAPI. Unfortunately this means i will have to wait till 2.6.13 or atleast
get the mm patchset once the libata-dev is finally put on for merging.

Actually 2.6.13-libata-dev is already posted on to lkml, i will try it
sometime but now now. I am still feeling very happy about almost all parts
working on my laptop..

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net
http://abhijit.adotout.net/blog.php

I am depressed......

This is frustrating....
What i have here is this,

SATA is fully documented open protocol, linux kernel has the driver
and yet a custom compiled driver is failing to detect my drive, HOW
RUDE!!!!!!!

Neways more on that later, if i care enough, for now i am stuck with dmaless PIO mode in ide emulation.

Now on to real frustrating part....
Both XFree and XOrg have i915 drivers, kernel is latest and has dri driver....

None of them work... i have in my hands three codes which basically do
the same thing on the same chipset as in my unit and yet none of these
are working,
i am going crazy and franatic over this, so much for being a linux person.
Neways i give up , i am now going to do it the old way the real way.
Let once again men be men, who write their own device drivers.

I am going to take the daunting task of writing a Directfb i915
driver, time to go underground for next few weeks......

See you then if i survive
--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Ah!!! ACER travelmate 4151 NLCi

I just got myself a shiny new acer laptop.....
Now trying to get everything working under linux....
The major annoyance is that none of the dstributions right now suport
both SATA drive _and_ i915 graphics card on board....

Ubuntu fails with SATA cdrom and does not detect it in install, so
does mandrake
Knoppix installs well but fails to detect i915 and XF86Config-4 does
not help even with the kernel driver loaded .... :-(( so i am stuck
with Vesa mode

Will try gentoo now that being the last option, i really don't want
Redhat based Fedora, cause as everyone knows, Redhat is crap. Sigh !!!

Note: Wifi, ethernet, sound and acpi are working on knoppix

Managers and leaders

I just read a quote somewhere,
"Great managers do things right, Great leaders do the right things."

I see a very robust and unparalleled implementation of the above
statement. But before we do a case study lets analyse it. If you want
to do a thing you have to do it right in order to succeed. If you want
to succeed you not only have to do the things right but you also have
to do the right things. But doing right things does implicitly means
not doing the other variety. And unfortunately a Great manager in most
of the examples has very little choice about this. Ten years ago there
would have been no examples for the situation where Great managers
were also great leaders.

But as always now we have Linux..... (am i getting toooo damn
religious about it? i mean i find all the good things as linux
parallels!! but what the hell, its only because they are, you know? )
Take a look at linus or his bunch of lieutenants. These people will
strive to do the right things. And will boldly reject all others. This
way they also happen to do the things right automagically? so does
this mean doing the right things implicitly makes you do things right?
well!! no. but only because not caring about doing things right....
the bsd way for example , these people manage to do the right things
in right ways.

Whoosshhhh!!! i am too messed up in my mind so if you didn't
understand the above please ignore. I don't think i do either.
--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Come Again?

Thats what i said when i heard about apple's new anouncment.....
What a shocker.... Apple switching on to intel platform. This must be
on hell of a spin for all the 'Mac'ers. I don't think even pakistan
turning away from taliban measures up in front of this :-))). My
sypmathies lie for all the poor soles who now have to try and invent
new reasons for why CISC is better than RISC within two years and how
we were just fooling around for last 15 years.

Neway does this impact me right now???? well for starters i might be
downloading Mac OS Xii in couple of years instead of Ubuntu as i am
doing right now, or will i? it _will_ hackishly run on my hardware,
but will the ffort be worth it? is apple gui so unbeatable that i the
die hard linux franatic will still use it? i don't know but the point
is atleast two years from now i will have a chance to know, and thats
a GoodThing(tm).

Linux cult is dead, long live Linux enterprise.

Take a look at this. An article by Stuart Cohen, CEO OSDL.
"Take Torvalds' key lieutenant overseeing the Linux kernel, Andrew Morton. He's no amateur hacker. Morton worked for 10 years as a development manager at NortelNetworks building carrier-grade global telecommunications software. Carrier-grade systems must meet service availability requirements in the range of five 9's -- 99.999% uptime. So he knows all about business hardening of enterprise software.Make no mistake, Linux is in professional hands."

Sad? or good? in a way its little sad as the OSDL CEO is not in his heart a believer of a hacker's cult. In a way its good cause it mean Linux the enterprise is becoming stronger and stronger.
The observation he makes is however wrong in my view. He says a professional is handling linux not the hackers anymore. Well, who the hell told him hackers cant be professionals. All these people he gives examples of are pro hackers. Till linux was around the only way to survive for these people was to have some other day job, or join some research institute like MIT AI labs. Linux just opened up a way for hackers to remain hackers even in their day jobs. And who is he kidding? this industry is pioneered by hackers like K&R and Unix guies. No wonder Linux seems to follow the same software process as enterprises. There is no other way weather you are a hackers or professionals, and linux combines both. It not linux inc. sir, its still a linux cult. Alan Cox is still fighter, rude and arogant. Linus is still a bully, as big as a bully can gets. They still do write their own SCM :-)) when they don't find the right solution and don't settle for a sucker like clearcase/cvs. They are still Just Men(TM)* :-)).


* : For all the feminist people, i won't accept the argument of men and wemen being equal untill wemen start contributing to Linux. And i mean not just those few exceptions where a female is stuck with writing ldd. And there are no barriers no opportunity problems. linux has so far been developed and architected by people accross borders, continets and language barriers. The process and the community is truely open. There are more or less uniformly distributed statistics accross all catagories of human race in linux community. Except for the female catagory.

Free* fonts under GPL

I remember a thread on scribus mailing list about usage of GPLed fonts. While
bathing today it struck me suddenly, that its a non issue. Basic problem
somebody raised was that, if a document is prepared using GPLed fonts they
are linked into it and thus the document itself becomes a derivative work and
then it must be distributed under GPL.
I for one don't have any problem with that. Only professional documentors
which right now get paid against a doc layout and content liscencing are in
trouble and the issue is parrallel to the issue of free software. Hence i
will like most of the fonts to be in GPL domain making most of the documents
in that domain too.
Think about it how many times i have made a document which i didn't send in
its original source form or as pdf and sent it in a bitmap or othe non
recoverable format? how many documents i don't want people to modify when i
give it to them?
But GNU is slipping this thing under the rough and waiting till the fonts
become mainline then they can charge on... this is bad GNU is now using the
same corporate strategies they so stressfully protest.
Neways i dream of the day when the society potrayed in Star Trek becomes a
reality**, then people will fight to keep their documents under GPL

Wishing you a free second quarter :-))Abhijit

* : Free as in free speech not as in free beer.
** : I know i am afreak, you don't have to remind me.

Bainback (sad slashback mod )

Today its been 5 days since the Bapu passed away. I am still not in shape to
write about him. But i am well enough to try and start to move on. So as a
first step i am updating this blog. Lot !!! i mean lot has happened within
last two-three months. The lack of updated entries in my blog is not without
reason and there has been lots happning in outside world too... the world
outside my life, the world of slashdot, formula one and lkml that is.(Nothing
to do with _real_ outside world.) This blog entry will be mostly about the
later one. The other events demand their own blog entries if not blogs
themselves. But more on that someday later.

First and foremost Ferrari is at the bottom. This is perhaps the most
significant moment in formula one history. Ferrari is known to make a
comeback. They are champs for 6 consecutive years. and the fans are waiting.
This time we will find out who are the real Ferrari guies and who is just a
bluff. I for one am sticking with Ferrari. They have the most beautifull car
and i can't take my eyes off it.Unfortunately the rule changes have taken
their toll and Ferrari deciding to just modify the car rather than bring in
new one early is at clear loss. The last two races however they did launch
the new car and Schume was back on podium starting from 13th place ... i
think THEY ARE BACK !!!! lets just wait and see. As i said before only time
and the checkered flag will tell.

The second significant thing to happen was the launch of Mac OS X 10.3
"TIGER". This has been very hyped up thing. Lot of good reviews and quite
frankly an admirable creation. Unfortunately the noise about Apple and OSS
relationship is a sour spot in this whole OS X saga. Darwin is nothing but a
PR stunt as far as i interprete it. KHTML people just declared to stop
talking about the wonderfull Apple-KDE cooperation happening in the browser
front, "it does not exist" they said. Overall apple looks stronger though. OS
X is something i really feel good about, and gets my praise, which is a rare
occasion. Although i am not likely to use mac any time sooner, i would ask
people to switch to it untill linux gets good enough.

On linux front the demise of bitkeeper is something significant. But more
ashtonishing is creation of GIT. A home grown source management tool.In the
end i wonder if linux will end up being a full operating system on its own,
all we have to do is stop producing good quality desktop and somehow make
linus want one :-)). Anyway, immediate action item is : LEARN GIT.
Long time no see SCO stories are now popping up again. Basically its a lost
battle and a war for SCO. I remember the times when my company director was
surprised and was talking about linux troubles. I never felt any. As
always :-)) i was right :-))>>.

Lot of other things happened in these months too but thats all that i care
about and i can recall right now.
To heighlight other stuff in my own personal life...well
1. i found the girl of my dreams :-)).
2. i quit my job and found something to do for myself :-||.
3. i lost my grandfather :-((.

Wishing a happy second quarter to everyone...... (boy!!, i have started using
corporate terms :-(( )
Abhijit

In memory of Bapu (my grandfather)

I write this as we break the news of my grandfather's demise to my
grandmother. Its been hard two and a half weeks in the ICU for him and
for everybody. Bapu as we called him, lead a very peaceful life. He
earned his reputation amongst the Ahamdabad University community,
raised a family of two daughters and a son (my father) and then
satisfactorily retired to settle in pune.
I am too depressed right now to express my true feelings, may be some
other day. Right now i just wanted to mark this moment as one of the
important ones in my blog.

The good old days !!

I almost gave up on a piece of really complex dma/interrupt code yesterday. All the failing scenarios were eating up my mind for the whole day and then through the night.
Then it hit me in the morning right after i wonke up. And whola!!! i was back in action. Suddenly there it was my interrupt handler in action doing asynchronously the things i commanded it to do. Hmmm.... where have i felt that warm feeling before????
Well i am so surprised to see myself at the same place i was in 7th grade. Surely its the same warm feeling that i got when i first saw my MS DOS tsr code in aciton. This lead me down to trip in a memory lane.

Ah!! i started with simpel IBM BBC BASIC. Soon we had a 386 at home and i was all set to do my coding mistakes. Created my first sort of blogging/journalling application in QBASIC. Nothing much but it was publishing my daily notes into a root directory. Well i spent more time coding it than using it. My academics will show a steep downwards curve that time which never went up ever again :).

But i was not happy with the interpreter. And i actually didn't know about compilers, (hey i was just in 5th grade). I started digging up the exe codes. Spent months trying to decode them without a 8086 manual (this was teh pre internet era may be 1994-95) i remember i actually managed to run a modified exe. I think i had some dissassembler from sombody i absolutely don't remember. Unfortuantely i had a disk crash (i didn't tell my father but i had tried some crazy stuff with disk IO). Neways by now i was also learning VB and getting frustrated by lack of flexibility.

After two years in windows world i turned towards my first c compiler Turbo C ++. Everything happened at twice the speed since then :-)). Learned how to write TSRs ported my favourite NIBBLES game from basic to C, half done port of GORRILLA.BAS was never completed. Built my own equivalant of NCURSES library.

Then came the internet era, we were one of the first 50 internet users in INDIA. had free internet shell access for about 6 months. Dad had not given me access as it was my Final year at highschool but i cracked the password with my keyboard monitoring tsr anyway and spent most of the time browsing the infant yahoo direcotries and the good old gopher (anybody remember the once popluar protocol?).

By now i was in Junior College and there came the first issue of PCQuest with slackware 1.0 CD.

Rest is the history :-D.

At each step there have been number of occassions where i felt the same warm feeling i got today. I wonder how many other people can relate to their childhood hobbies in their jobs.
I think i am just one of few lucky ones.....

Autocommenter updated

I ditched the cproto based earlier version of my automommenter. It was just ugly and too hard to maintain and fix.
Today i managed to upload the replacement based on unix shell script. Its been around on my desktop for a while and is working on atleast most common scenarios. It is a bit over engineered though but given my nature everything i do usually is :-).

Neways give it a try if you like. You can find it through my home page link at right hand side.

BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Homebrew glider anyone?

Take a look at these ....
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000573027090/
http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/

For several weeks now i have lingering thought about actually trying
my hand at something like this. Last week i actually made some
progress on the design side while i was visiting home.
I got the basic requirements jotted down and a rough grand plan.
Feasibility is still a question as lot of things aren't available
easily (and more essetially cheaply) in india.

Lets see if this turns out to be doable.

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Will F1 it be more interesting this year?

Just heard the news that all the regulation changes this year are
final and all cars are conforming to it.
This means the engines will need to last three times as much as
before, the tires will have to do the same and the downforce is
reduced by whopping 25%.
This should put ferrari right back on the place where all teams were
till now, thats on the edge of their capability. Unfortunately with
maclaren's record last year i have no speculations to make about them.
Hopefully all other cars don't have much to lose, they were already
streched to their limits and were fighting on the same aspects.
Will this counter the Ferrari might? or will Ferrari once again will
be proven to be,... ummm well, Ferrari!!. Only time and checkered flag
will tell.

Boy i feel like living in stoneage!!!

Just read this!!

"Are we becoming irrelevant? Is it time to give up? I don't believe that
either is true. I see our competition facing challenges of their own. Linux
keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has stability issues. It
now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and make stable releases of the
code. FreeBSD took over the huge task to implement fine grain SMP and after
two years of effort they still don't have a production quality system.
OpenBSD is still touting its security features but lacks the manpower to
integrate major kernel features such as UBC and address performance problems.
Instead it focuses in supporting and re-implementing major userland
utilities. The Windows release cycles keep getting longer and longer and
promised features keep getting postponed because of the increasing complexity
of the operating system. Sun is trying to keep Solaris relevant by
open-sourcing it, but nobody is certain of what is going to be open-sourced
and when. Apple's Darwin effort does not seem to be producing any useful
results, possibly because it is not complete, and the open-source version of
the tree is always behind the commercial version."

This is quote from NetBSD president, trying to encourage the netBSD community.
But hell he managed to find out disastrous view of all the other operating
systems. None of them are spared. Reading this feels like computing as we
know it is comming to an end. Ha ha ha!!! i hope this does not put of few
instead of getting them on to do something. :-))

His interpretation of linux cycle is a bit off the road btw. Its not that
linux is becoming unstable and community is fighting it and can't do it so
vendors have to do it.
Its rather a calculated change made by linus and the gang. The process is
being put there by design and not due to desparation as the above makes it
sound.

Screw Ferrari, i am for Jordan now

Why?

They hired Kartikeyan !!!!!
Finaly a possibility that an indian anthom will be sung at the podium.
(hey i can dream, can't i?)

Neway lets hope this brings the F1 racing closer to india and possibly
one day even a race will be held here.

Ferrari is here to stay

Just read the news that last week Ferrari concluded the final deal
with FIA for the year 2008 through 10.
I just wish it will be Alonso who takes over from Schume, whenever the
time comes. The end of the daced will be lot interesting then.

On a related note, last weeks meeting was total desaster, only Ferrari
turned uup all other nine teams simply chose not to show up, ha ha ha
!!! :-))

Read more about that here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/4217409.stm

Can't wait for F1 2005 to begin.
--
BAIN

Kontact is cool....

Today I managed to set up my colinux kmail IMAP/exchange account. Just minutes
after that i got a meeting request from my collegue, and to my pleasent
surprize the request was now followed by Accept, Reject link.
This must be newest addition to Kontact, the request was an ms exchange
request. To make things clearer i closed the kmail and fired up kontact. And
from that i opened up my inbox and clicked on accept. And hurra!! a new
meeting was added to Kalendar.

So this makes aditya's KMAIL/Calendar how to obsolete i guess.

This is knoppix 3.7 kontact 1.0.1 kmail 1.7.1

Fighting the patents threat.

I was just thinking (again). The main argument made during the petents
debate is that only the big companies get to have the large petant
portfolios. And with that they get secure cover using crossliscencing
arragements. In effect nobody can sue them because they can counter
sue them right back.
And the small little individual developer is left stranded. He might
barely be able to get one or two patents but getting 500 of them
isn't possible.
But i have a solution. Why not each of the OSS groups start filing for
patents. This will definately generate a large collective patent pool.
Time and again we have seen OSS tends to be lot more innovative and
radical than anything else.
And then each OSS groups should get together under some umbrella
group. This way anyone belonging to this group will have not just
access but the pseudo ownership of all thep patents.
So if somebody sues an OSS company for some stupid patent like jpeg or
mp3 decoder. They counter sue with everything they got. That will
basically mean about 1000 or so out of million or so at their
dispence. Microsoft will never even think about claiming any software
as their inteelctual property.
Big OSS players like Novel, IBM and Sun can kickstart this by
extending their current patents pledges to this umbrela group.

Coincidence

Just after one day of my post on memory, This article"Making Memories Stick"[scientific american] shows up on slashdot.
It quite covertly supports my thoughts , i think...

Swappiness or forgetfullness?

I was just thinking about the linux vm swappiness algorithm. High
swappiness has a bad effect on some systems and although the kernel vm
is very well tuned these days the solution is more practical and not
theorotical. In extreme cases the situation _could_ render system
unusable for atleast few seconds.
Neways so i was just trying to fugire out what will be a theorotical
way to prevent swap thrash or atleast its ill effects. So that i will
be garunteed of responsiveness at all times. I kept bumping into
endless loops and complex algorithms.High complexity would defeat the
purpose of making things responsive. Then it struck me. I should just
use a watch dog and just halt the things if i try to use too old pages
and make it artificially costly to have things swapped in based on
thier last swapped in timestamp and total use count. (this is not a
discussion about the algo per say, after a little thought i did reach
a conclusion that this is as impractical as other hundred or so ideas
i have,)
What struck me the most is the human memory like behaviour this end
algo will emmulate. The more the memory is accessed the more hot it
will become. The less it is used the colder it will be and longer it
will take to recall it and eventually some memory will be just too
hard to recall. It will be still there and theorotically it will be
recallable if the system goes blank for enough time.But it will be
impossible to recall it if system is not totally relaxed . Is that how
our brain works? Think about it. Its exact behaviour we encounter.
Sometimes things just can't be recalled no matter how much you try.
Then suddenly after waking up or after a relaxing bath you recall
them. So may be our brains just work like the modified swapping VM.
Preventing swap thrash by denying the recall unless enough resources
are available. Allowing critical and interactive things to be always
hot and responsive.
Another implication is that we never forget anything we just lock it
out and we might train ourselves to do it volunterily. Sort of hacking
out the brain's vm. All we have to do is to make it expensive to
recall something. One very easy and wellknown way is time. Don't think
about it for long time and you are done. But there might be other
quicker ways. Like associating long banks of information with one
thing. Just associate too much info to the things you want to forget
and it will become expensive enough that you will not recall it even
if you want it to.
It should work other way round. A common technique used to keep things
hot is to associate the thing you want to remember with already hot
memory meaning never to be swapped out. But to make it long term one
of the ways could be remembering things in bits. Rather than storing
large pices glued together split it up and try to remember each bit
separately. The swap cost will be drmamatically reduced and so will
the recallability. (important note here: the practial pc swap is more
efficient when there are large data swaps, mainly becasue of the
characterstics of the storage media i.e. harddisks seek times. I
beleive brain has random access or some sort of radix scalable
indexing so that effect won't be applicable)
So what do you think??
Heh i can't even remember what the first line said as i have scrlled
passed it :(. May be some VM's are just bad no matter what.

KNOPPIX + CoLinux howto

Following a long battle to get some kind of modern linux system
installed on my work pc, i succeeded in installing CoLinux with KNOPPIX
rootfs.

This is a short description of steps involved which can be treated as
a crude HOWTO

Software to be downloaded

1.Colinux latest release from colinux.org.
2.KNOPPIIX ISO image or a CD.
3.QEMU for windows,you can get it at freeoszoo.org. (needed if you don't have a CD and don't want to burn one then you will also need or for some reason can't boot from the cd.)
4. Cygwin + X (or any other x server for windows)

You will also need atleast 2000 MB of harddisk space on windows
partion _and_ atleast 512 MB more for swap image.

Also please read the documentation available on coLinux site before you begin.
TODO : add links

STEP 1: prepare KNOPPIX rootfs image.

The single large problem with running knoppix with colinux is that
colinux kernel does not contain the cloop modules. cloop is the
module used by KNOPPIX to compress its root file system. This makes it
impossible to mount the KNOPPIX fs directly under coLinux.

So you will need to get the rootfs decompressed first before you can
use it under coLinux.

There are two ways of doing this.
1. If you have the cd and can boot into it.
a. Just boot into knoppix and be root.
b. Mount a windows drive
c. use dd to copy /dev/cloop0 to to knoppix_rootfs.img on you disk

dd if=/dev/cloop0 of=knoppix_rootfs.img

the img will be about 2000MB so be sure you have enough space.

d.Once the copying is done you will have to loopmount the image.

mkdir /mnt/rootfs
mount -o loop knoppix_rootfs.img /mnt/rootfs

e. go to /mnt/rootfs/dev directoy and add follwing devices

mknod /mnt/rootfs/dev/cobd0 b 117 0
mknod /mnt/rootfs/dev/cobd1 b 117 1
mknod /mnt/rootfs/dev/cobd2 b 117 2

f. go to /mnt/rootfs/etc and edit fstab to add following entries
/dev/cobd0 / auto defaults 0 0
/dev/cobd1 none swap defaults 0 0

remove any other entries for '/' and swap

g. unmount /mnt/rootfs

2. If you don't have the cd or you can't boot into it
a. Get the ISO or rip the cd into an ISO
b. install QEMU from freeoszoo.org
c. Configure QEMU to mount the knoppix iso as cdrom (instructions can
be found at freeos zoo.org)
d. Create an empty file of 2000MBs, you might use something else from
windows world, i used cygwin dd to do that

dd if=/dev/null of=knoppix_rootfs.img count=4000 bs=512

e. Configure QEMU to mount the empty rootfs as hda.
f. Fire up qemu this should boot into knoppix cd.
g. Boot knoppix 3 to go directly to commandline.
h. once booted make sure you are root and the copy /dev/cloop0 to /dev/hda

dd if=/dev/cloop0 of=/dev/hda

i. Once the copying is done mount /dev/hda onto /mnt/hda
j. go to /mnt/hda/dev and create following nodes

mknod /mnt/hda/dev/cobd0 b 117 0
mknod /mnt/hda/dev/cobd1 b 117 1
mknod /mnt/hda/dev/cobd2 b 117 2

k. go to /mnt/hda/etc and edit fstab to add following entries
/dev/cobd0 / auto defaults 0 0
/dev/cobd1 none swap defaults 0 0

remove any other entries for '/' and swap

l. unmount /mnt/hda

Thats it, this will get you to boot knoppix over colinux.

Running Colinux
1.Install Colinux using the setup programm.
2.Make sure you have the N/W driver installed.
3. Install some kind of X server, best one to use is cygwin X
4. Change your configuration file to point to the rootfs we created
5. create a 512 MB file to be used as swap.
6. Change your configuration file to point to the swap we created
Important part is to match the cobd numbers to the ones we entered in /etc
Also make sure you passing

My config looks like this,
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<colinux>
<!-- This line needs to point to your root file system.
For example change "root_fs" to the name of the Debian image.
Inside coLinux it will be /dev/cobd0 -->
<block_device index="0" path="\DosDevices\d:\scratch.img"
enabled="true" />

<!-- This line can specify a swap file if you wish, or an additional
image file, it will /dev/cobd1. Additional block_devices can
be specified in the same manner by increasing the index -->

<block_device index="1" path="\DosDevices\c:\swap_device"
enabled="true" />

<!-- bootparams allows you to pass kernel boot parameters -->
<bootparams>root=/dev/cobd0 lang=en 3</bootparams>

<!-- image allows you to specify the kernel to boot -->
<image path="vmlinux" />

<!-- this line allows you to specify the amount of memory available
to coLinux -->
<memory size="64" />

<!-- This allows you to modify networking parameters, see the README
or website for more information -->
<network index="0" type="tap" />
</colinux>


Thats it done fireup Colinux
This should boot into knoppix root shell
There is one glitch here, the hwsetup will screwup and lots of errors
will be output for not finding modules, ignore them for a while
The hwsetup will keep outputing gree blocks on console,
type
killall -KILL hwsetup
And you will have stable prompt.
Not first thing to do is edit /etc/fstab and remove some errornous
things appended and restore it to point to right '/' and swap devices
i.e. /dev/cobd0 /dev/cobd1 in our case
Rest of the things will be setup correctly,
Give
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.197 up
to start communicating with X server
set DISPLAY and then give startkde you should have a kde session started on your
windows x server.

export DISPLAY=192.168.0.1:0 (assuming the address given to windows pc is .1)
startkde

Problems:
The knoppix is not properly installed on the system but is just
copied, this leaves lots of settings undone, most annoyingly the
permissions are set only for root and knoppix user. If you try to use
a normal user you will have to constantly fiddle with permissions to
get things working.
The solution is to install the knoppix to the disk image instead of
copying it. But in my case the knoppix installer won't install to an
image file for unkown reasons.

The glass should be half empty

I was wondering, why do they call people who see as the galss being
half full as optimistic? In my view it should be exactly opposite. The
people who see the glass as half full are actually missing out on the
potential of the glass to accomodate the whole double of the water it
already has. Any one who is having a glass half filled is just going
to sit there and not do anything about it cause, hey! he _has_ a glass
half _full_. So basically if we have more and more people who see the
glass as half full, the economy will just go on degrading, inflation
will drop down, and bascially everything will come to a grounding
halt. And besides economics such an attitude will hamper social growth
as well. Half a freedom is never a freedom but then again with half
full people may be no one will notice.
So basically i think seeing a glass as half full is being passimist.
Seeing that the glass is half empty, seeing the potential to grow,
acknowledging that there exists a problem, in the end casuing the
problem to be solved and not just sit there it is true optimism.
But then again i have many other weird opinions too....

Cool mail to blog feature

I have never used mail to blog feature before. Gosh this is convinient......