Krypton Korner

Case insensitivity on HFS+

2009-11-10T20:54:00.011-05:00

As most of you (I have limited readership on my blog and I'm pretty sure I know all of you) know, I've moved away from Linux to the Mac world a couple of months ago. I have an ancient PowerMac G4 for my home desktop and I use a MacBook Pro at work. Of course, I still use Linux for most development; Linux laptop at home and a server at work, so I haven't found the need to do any hardcore dev work on OS X till date.

This weekend, I decided to try my hand at porting Java-GNOME 4.x to OS X. I'm blogging that effort in a different post, but to cut to the chase, I was burned by case insensitivity on HFS+ for the most part of the weekend. It turns out, that despite being a UNIX, by default, OS X chooses a case-preserving but case-insensitive configuration for its filesystem. While you can choose a case-sensitive configuration (You'll have to select at format time!), you're likely to break third party non-Apple apps such as Adobe Photoshop.

Consider the following piece of code:





public class Test {
public interface CLICKED {
 public void perform();
}

public interface Clicked {
 public void perform();
}

public static void main(String[] args) {

 Clicked myClicked = new Clicked() {
     public void perform() {
         System.out.println("Inside interface Clicked");
     }
 };

 CLICKED myCLICKED = new CLICKED() {
     public void perform() {
         System.out.println("Inside interface CLICKED");
     }
 };

 myClicked.perform();
 myCLICKED.perform()
}
}

I'm sure you'll agree that this is a reasonable piece of Java, by most standards. We create two Interfaces and define two objects by implementing their methods. Now, we invoke "javac" and get this piece to compile. We typically expect a class file for each Outer class and a qualified class file for each Inner interface/class as Outer$Inner.class and so forth No sweat:


[pendyals@fermi:~/test/Test] $ javac Test.java
[pendyals@fermi:~/test/Test] $ ls
Test$1.class       Test$CLICKED.class Test.class         Test.java
[pendyals@fermi:~/test/Test] $

But what's this! We only have Test$CLICKED.class! Evidently we're missing a Test$Clicked.class! Where could it be? How about we look in the Test$CLICKED.class?


[pendyals@fermi:~/test/Test] $ javap -c Test\$CLICKED
Compiled from "Test.java"
public interface Test$Clicked{
public abstract void perform();
}

Evidently, the only interface compiled in, is called Clicked and not CLICKED. As you'd have guessed by now, attempting to run this class will result in a Exception:



[pendyals@fermi:~/test/Test] $ java Test
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Test$CLICKED (wrong name: Test$Clicked)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:675)

...

If you haven't guessed what happened: Javac created a Test$CLICKED.class file and put in the byte code for the CLICKED interface. Then, after compiling the byte code for the Clicked interface, it wanted to write into its corresponding file. Before writing, it checks to see if the file exists and if it does, just overwrites the file. HFS+ of course, dutifully returned a handle to "Test$CLICKED.class" when asked for "Test$Clicked.class" and this caused javac to silently overwrite it.

As is painfully evident, the case-insensitive nature of HFS+ has repercussions far beyond naming files correctly. Since languages like Java require you to name files with class names, an incorrectly designed application could fail silently and not alert you of the fact that a class file has been rewritten.

While the "typical" UNIX response would be to dismiss OS X and HFS+'s behavior as absurd or "immature" (yes I've heard that one), it would seem to me that a prudent design shouldn't require case-sensitivity in any form. I use the word "prudent" in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, because there's no requirement for Java apps to run on OS X or Windows if the app designer didn't want it to.

Fingers burnt. Lesson learnt.

Bird brained

2009-04-24T07:45:00.006-04:00

On my way to the Twin lakes Java (an amazing Coffee shop at Twin Lakes, MI), I was overflown by a rather satisfied looking Bald Eagle. Satisfied, since he'd just finished off what looked like a rather large carcass of a rather unlucky hare. I screeched the car to a halt, jumped out and took a few pictures of him as he circled (!?) and flew past. Mighty pleased with myself for having bagged a good picture of a Bald Eagle, I looked through the pictures to realize to my horror, that I'd been shooting with the ISO set to "HI1". In Nikon's terminology, for the D60, "HI1" == 3200 and also "Avoid using". So there _was_ a reason I had to shoot at 1/4000 and F11 to get the correct exposure.

Feeling pretty silly, I returned and plonked down on the couch with the Rubik's cube in hand. Deciding that I had to get through the silly cube in better than my usual 1:20-1:40 minutes, I started trying to learn all 41 algorithms of the Fridrich method. Then, I came across one of the most useful webpages I've seen in recent times: http://www.freewebs.com/sirshazaam/f2l.htm
The guy has most painstakingly listed out every one of the algorithms for the F2L and has pictures of the cube, for each of them as well. Brilliant.

Having had enough, I attempted hitting the sack at about 6:45 AM, when I heard what sounded like a Warbler. Deciding that I couldn't sleep any more, I picked up the device of photographic expression and walked out. After stalking the fella for more than 20 minutes, I finally caught sight of this brown feathered chappy, chirping away in a brown tree. Perfect. Getting a clear line of sight of the guy was a tough job.

Having shot what I thought was an okay-ish picture and double-checking to make sure the ISO was not an obscene value, I walked around for a little bit, coming across another magnificent sight. Somehow, just somehow, I get the feeling that today's going pretty well for a start.

The gear

2009-04-23T21:23:00.002-04:00

Pictured, is my new D60 along with a bargain Soligor 90-230mm F4.5 manual, I got off eBay, for $20.
The other glass (not in the picture), is a humble Nikkor AF-S 18-55 DX VR.

The Soligor has been my lens of choice, ever since I began understanding the concept of exposure better. Shooting without any metering whatsoever and with a manual focus is a little daunting at first (especially so, for someone new to D-SLRs), but certainly not a major hurdle.

The remote control on the right, is a Phillips universal remote, that I've programmed to use as a remote trigger for the D60.

Web widgets

2009-04-20T00:41:00.002-04:00

So, the intarwebs is filled with these "Take the pink ponies quiz and see your score now!!!" tests. I normally avoid these abominations. The Political Compass however, is one of my favorites. The Political Compass's theory is, that the traditional Left-Right line, in itself is insufficient. Political orientation, really is a two dimensional plot, with the other axis being the Authoritarian-Libertarian line. Intrigued? Try them out at politicalcompass.org.

Also, I score as

Economic Left/Right: -1.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.79 . To see it on a graph, click here

Also, in order to ascertain bragging rights (Slackbot, this is for you):

80 words

Typingtest

Deer chase!

2009-04-07T01:15:00.002-04:00

Deer chase!
Originally uploaded by Srichand Pendyala

I was driving up to Copper Harbor on a bright beautiful Saturday, when this Whitetailed deer running alongside the road, passed me from the left, crossed over onto the right lane and then sprinted along the road for a good half a minute.

Not wanting to confuse the Deer any further, I kept a good distance away from it, but stayed right behind it, while a friend dug my camera out of the bag. During those few seconds, my speedometer read approx 35 miles an hour and the Deer was almost always a constant distance from me.

Finally when I got my camera, I flipped the wheel to "P" mode, let the camera choose everything, zoomed to 55mm and fired off a burst of shots, trying to capture the chappy, while the sunlight was still on him.

Having had enough excitement and thrill for the day (its white tail up, indicating fear and alarm), the Deer decided that discretion was the better part of valor and vanished into the woods in a blitz.

Removing quizzes from your Facebook feed

2009-03-31T13:09:00.003-04:00

Here's how you remove annoying Quiz updates from your Facebook feed:

If you haven't already, install the Greasemonkey add on for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748), then install the Greasemonkey script to remove the Quiz updates

You can find the Greasemonkey script at http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/44459.user.js

Louise Attaque

2009-03-23T15:10:00.005-04:00

I recently re-discovered Louise Attaque, a French Folk rock band. I first heard them live at the Alliance Française de Bangalore sometime in 2005.

Not surprisingly, that was also the first time I'd heard rock in a different European language (I'm fairly accustomed to English!). Although I barely understood a word, I didn't feel lost or out of place. They say music doesn't have a language; perhaps they're right.

Regardless of the genre you listen to, I highly recommend giving Louise Attaque a listen. They've got catchy tunes, with interesting guitar, harmonica, violin and accordion pieces. I don't understand French, but I've been told that their lyrics are pretty interesting too.

The French are a friendly people (see note [1] below for an exception), particularly so at the Alliance Française of Bangalore. If you're in the area and you feel the parisian touch, you might want to stop by.

[1] Overheard at the Aéroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle : "Why do you presume I speak English?"

Incoming Ice Age?

2009-03-22T18:16:00.004-04:00

Lake Superior, almost froze over 100% [1] again this season. The accepted theory, is that the Lake has a massive ice cover once every 20 years. The lake was last frozen over in 2003, nearly 100% in 1996, 96% in 1994, 100% in 1979, 95% in 1972, 100% 1962[2].

The Lake seems to have frozen over again, over the 2008-2009 winter. Between 1962 and 1979, 17 years elapsed before the lake completely froze. It took another 17 years before it froze in 1996 and another 7 years before it froze in 2003. Its only taken another 6, before the lake frozen over again in 2009.

If this statistical correlation is to be trusted and extrapolated, then we are looking at a scenario where the lake will begin to freeze over with much shorter cycles, possibly resulting in the lake freezing completely each year.

Is this a sign of the onset of an Ice Age? Most scientific bodies tend to think that this is just an anomaly and that we are in a global-warming phase. Technically, we are still in an Ice age, as Ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica exist.

[1] Its difficult to define "completely freeze over". Its accepted that "very little open water areas" is what is "completely frozen" could mean.

[2] Data from http://climate.umn.edu/doc/journal/superior030603.htm

One year...

2009-03-16T11:28:00.002-04:00

... since JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns for $2 a share. I hope someone's learnt a lesson.

The iPhone camera

2009-03-12T02:49:00.004-04:00

Originally uploaded by Srichand Pendyala

The iPhone's much maligned camera, with a 2 mega pixel "resolution" sensor is actually capable of taking good pictures.

The controls on the camera ("Click") certainly don't rival even the closest point and shoot cameras. But it certainly has its charm. For one, it takes all the technicality out of taking a picture and lets you concentrate on composing your picture and just your picture. The downside of course, is that you don't get to choose any aperture, speed or focus settings. But seriously, its a camera on a Phone!

Picture on this post, is from the tram at the Minneapolis airport. Post processed with the Camerabag application, on the iPhone itself. Click on the picture to see my Flickr stream, with more iPhone pictures.

New photo gallery

2009-03-09T19:49:00.006-04:00

It turns out, Flickr's 200 photo limit [1] for their free is actually quite measly. Especially if you're the type who likes to put up every mediocre picture online! To be fair, Flickr has a paid account, called Flickr Pro, which removes the 200 photo restriction.

I could create another Blogspot, or get a Tumblr account, all of which would let me upload pictures without restriction. Sure, searching and previews would be a pain, but then again, what in life is painless? Alternately, I could jut dump all pictures into a folder and let Apache just display a listig. Or I could add all new photos, to the already existing http://srichand.net.in/photos page. Or, I could just get a Flickr pro account...

Except of course, I already pay for a webhost, for http://srichand.net.in/ . I see little reason to pay up twice the amount I pay for it, just to host some pictures. Of course, the problem with http://srichand.net.in/photos is that, I'm running an ancient version of Coppermine. The thing I do not like about Coppermine, is its Album centric approach to photo management. Every photo needs to be in an Album, requiring me to create, learn and know an entire hierarchy of photos. I'd much rather prefer to have a "bunch" of photos and tag some of the pictures I like and mark some others as favorite. Of course, the ability to create "sets" (Similar to Flickr and Adobe LR2) is an added bonus. The other problem with Coppermine, of course, is its complexity. Somehow, just somehow, at first glance, its interface looks more complex than useful.

And so, I feel the need to move off Coppermine into a simpler gallery system. What do I need? The ability to preview _lots_ of pictures on one page (Certainly not a massive waste of whitespace, the way Coppermine does). A detailed "picture" page, that shows a picture, along with its EXIF data. And the whole AJAX thing, which I've shunned so far, is probably the ideal implementation detail here. It'd be awesome to move between pictures without reloading the page. The same goes for editing the Title, Description and the Tags of the photo, without going to an "Edit" page, for each picture. And yes, batch tagging!

I'm certainly going to look around some existing systems for a bit. I am already beginning to like the Plogger system a good bit. It might need some hacking to support what I want. If not, I'll probably just go get myself a Flickr Pro account anywho.

Image viewer for Linux

2009-03-01T04:16:00.004-05:00

Terrible. That's the only word I'd use to describe my experience with F-Spot. Any image viewer that moves files around on the filesystem, without my explicit permission each time, is just terrible. F-Spot's instability is legendary too.

Google's Picasa 3 for Linux is okay for the most part. Except of course, Google's choice to override my Alt+Ctrl key binding for full-screen mode is irritating, to say the least. Anyone who uses multiple desktops on GNOME knows my pain. And of course, you can't upload to Flickr from Picasa directly.

KDE's Digikam has most of the right components in place. Except, that it wants me to look at my entire collection in a Folder centric view. I can't view all Folders at once.

Is there any other image viewer I should try out?

Also, WHY cannot image viewers standardize on tagging formats? I have to tag and retag my pictures each time I change image viewers.

Enough of ranting for today, time to get some sleep.

Mood: Arrr!!!

Extra topping? Black olives please!

2009-02-26T22:54:00.018-05:00

Everyone has their own personal favorite straw man argument. Some realize that its a straw man, most don't. Here's mine.

Human-Computer Interaction is all about intelligent interfaces that feel "natural" to a Human user. We would want the computer to figure out what we want to do and do it with minimal fuss. For instance, I would want the "Computer" to be able to understand exactly what I mean when I say "I think I want to watch a movie". It would also be really nice, if the "Computer" would guess exactly what mood I'm in, figure out what movie I'd like to watch right now and play it right away. While we're at it, figure out that I'd like to eat a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut and order it online.

Notice something missing from the above story? There was the "Human" (me), the "Computer" was right there too. Oh that's right, no "Interaction" ! But the "Computer" did guess what you wanted and did it too, you say.

The "Interaction", that seems implicit in the above story, really is a one way street. The subservient "Computer" does what it been statistically trained to do. In technical terms, the "Human" emitted a signal, which was processed by the "Computer", interpolated it to figure out what movie I wanted to watch and extrapolated it to figure out that I might want a pizza and ordered it. Notice the absence of any affirmation or negation. The "Computer" has just been transformed to a fancy glorified signal processor.

Interaction is a two way street. Interaction , in the technical sense requires more than one participant (entity) , to receive, process, understand and emit signals. Imagine the same scenario as before, but replace the "Computer" with another "Human". The outcome, is no longer influenced just by the sheer observation of one participant : "I think I want to watch a movie". The outcome, is now the result of an Interaction, between the two participants. This Interaction, will likely entail speech, hand gestures, facial expressions, discussion of similar events from the past ("Oh that Spielberg guy can't direct for nuts, remember ET?") and possibly, a compromise on choices. It is very possible, that at the end of this scenario, both our participants decide to ditch the idea of watching a movie and play a game or go out on a drive.

In the first example, one participant generated a single verbal signal while the other participant was only passively involved in the Interaction. The passive participant only processed the only signal received and acted. In the second example, both participants were involved in active interaction. Both participants generated a wide range of signals, processed each others signals, analyzed them and emitted a reply signal.

Clearly, the second form of Interaction transferred a lot more information. We could model two-participant Interaction to be a control process (Disclaimer: I don't know enough of control theory or signal processing to be certain though). It could be said, that the choices and opinions of both participants in the second example, were different at the end of the Interaction than before. Some would even use the adjective "enriched".

In either case, it can be certainly expected, that this Interaction would have a very strong influence on future Interactions. This is a critical difference between modeling HCI as signal processing, versus modeling HCI as a control system (see disclaimer above). The essence I'm trying to capture, is that for HCI to be successful, we should expect and _demand_ that the "Human" actually interact with the "Computer". Every software that incorporates AI in some form, has a "training phase", where the explicit interaction is the "Human" teaching the "Computer". I would argue, that this really isn't HCI.

[ I work on "intelligent" [1] Sketch recognition systems, with a special interest in collaborative sketch interfaces. I'm certainly no expert though.]

Brandon Paulson and Tracy Hammond of the Sketch Recognition Lab at Texas A&M argue in their paper, [2] that forcing users to learn the system, rather than the system learn the user's intentions places constraints on the user. I would think that both extremes are undesirable, but a balance between the two is important. When both the user and the system are able to understand each other, the equilibrium achieved is termed "natural", in the sense used in the very first line of this post.

Do I have a straw man? I don't know.

[1] I wish I knew what "intelligent" meant, with respect to sketch recognition. I suspect no one knows either.
[2] This isn't an attack on their work, but an example of the sentiment I seem to encounter in many HCI publications. To add, the SRL at Texas A&M produces some awesome sketch recognition work.

Coercion, bribe or ... election promises?

2009-02-12T13:54:00.010-05:00

A big problem, in any election (electronic or off line), is the problem of coerced or bought-out votes. In general, no elections system or electoral authority can completely eliminate voter-coercion. If a voter chooses to sell his vote and actually carry out his end of the deal, then it must be considered part of the due process of election and his vote must be honored. If on the other hand, the agent of coercion is unable to convince the voter , then a forced vote is anomalous in the process.

Although not evident at first, the line between a "valid and freely chosen vote" and "invalid and coerced vote" is very thin. Finally, how does one different between coercion and campaigning? Try the following two statements:

"If you vote for me, I will pay you $100."
"If you vote for me, I will cut your taxes by $100."

Are they different? If so, how?

Steve and Barry's closing out

2008-10-20T11:34:00.002-04:00

If you look carefully, you'll see a "Store Closing" banner on the left, and a "New Styles Arriving" banner on the right. They're the same store, mind you!

Java and Scientific Computing

2008-10-09T05:01:00.016-04:00

Lately, I've been using Java for something I never imagined I would: Running time bound simulations and collecting statistics. This started from an Advanced AI homework, which required us to evaluate different strategies for solving the 8 Puzzle.

Depth First and Breadth First search -- the most brute force of them all -- are real processor hogs. They take a good amount of time to get through solutions. I set up my simulations to try 8 puzzle combinations in groups. Each group had members which were an equal number of moves away from the solution. I'll call this the "distance" of a group from the solution. I started looking at groups with distances 1 through 10. The idea was to see how depth first search scaled with distance, while using multiple boards to average out the time (since boards were randomly generated). The simulation started out fine, but somewhere half way through, Java ran out of heap space causing me to lose half an hour worth of simulations. Terrific. So I fixed the heap space with a JVM switch to allocate 768 M. This time, Java didn't seem to die on space, but for some reason, started halting randomly. Here's a section of the simulation output. The first column is the distance of the board and the second is the run time in microseconds.


4 4.265305
4 0.399163
4 8058.812957
4 0.495941
4 4.762955

Now, the simulation is set up, to repeat a given run 5 times, to average out run times. So, the same board configuration is run 5 times for a given algorithm. The numbers above are the run times of the same algorithm on the same damn board! What gives!? A 4 microsecond difference is probably justifiable, but a full 8000 microseconds?

Now, I'm not sure if Java / the JVM is entirely to blame for such random spikes. In order to validate that, I'd have to rewrite this simulation in C++ and post similar numbers. Somehow, I doubt that the deviation in run times will not be this high. As of now, I'm treating this as an open problem. I'm certainly not assigning blame to Java, but its definitely complicit!

More to come.

[And no, there were no other CPU hogging processes running on the box at simulation run time. Certainly none that would cause such spikes.]

Are you a wanna-be Buffet?

2008-10-06T16:05:00.003-04:00

Buy low, Sell high.

a.k.a Buy now.

Open Letter to the United States House of Representatives, 110th Congress, 2nd Session

2008-09-29T23:34:00.006-04:00

My Dearest Representatives of the people of the United States of America,

I write to you, in regards to the post-noon session of the House Floor on September 29, 2008. On vote, was a 110-page bill, titled "LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL FOR TREASURY AUTHORITY TO PURCHASE MORTGAGE-RELATED ASSETS". As you will doubtless recall, the formulation of said bill, was a culmination of seemingly bipartisan action over the weekend preceeding said date, at the White House, the offices of senior Democratic and Republican Senators, the campaigns of Presidential hopefuls, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain and the studios of leading television news channels. Official Statements and press leaks confirmed to the nation and the world at large, that a deal had been brokered and that salvation to Wall Street's woes was nigh. The country slept the last night of the weekend in the firm belief that its elected and chosen representatives had found a solution to the economy's woes. The solution supposedy had protections in place to protect the tax payers and impose punitive actions upon those responsible for this debacle. The bill in question was scheduled to be passed, providing relief for the millions whose 401 K and IRA accounts were in dire straits, to those who were in danger of being evicted from their homes upon foreclosure, to those whose life savings (in the form of shares and derivatives) were being eroded by constant bank failures and clockwork stock market crashes.

However, events on the morning of the 29th transpired rather differently. The bill in question was debated on the floor of the house, as it should be. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech, tagged as partisan some Republicans cast a looming shadow of doubt over the rest of the proceedings. The call to vote was finally made and the voting process led to a shell shocking defeat of the bill 228-205. As is the case with any such incident in the House, the blame game duly started, led by House Republicans, followed by comments from House Democrats.

The bickering throughout the day, by members of both parties only serves to rub salt in the wounds of the people affected. House Republicans alleged that Speaker Pelosi's speech was partisan and caused them to vote against the bill rather than for it. Other House Republicans allege that they alerted the Democrats that they did not have sufficient numbers, but did nothing otherwise to stop it from going to vote. In the midst of such finger pointing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index -- which have been pointed to us time and again as a sign of the economy's weakness and an argument for the bailout -- crumbled.

Representatives of the People, I put it to you, that you have failed the very people you were elected to represent. By placing party politics and partisan bickering above the will and need of the people, you have engaged in deceitful and malfeasant behavior. Your actions on this day, reflect an utter lack of governing will, total collapse of any form of leadership and a breakdown of the system of checks and balances.

Notice, that I do not argue for or against the bill. Your individual decisions to support the bill or vote against it, should reflect the opinions of your constituents. Not your party diktat. By choosing to devolve yourself and your constituents, to the colors of Red or Blue, you have chosen to divide the people. The Great Bipartisan Sham of 2008. Your choices and votes on the floor of the House are required, by law, by the oath you took to be a direct representation of the people you claim to represent. This choice, cannot include objects as squalid as your ego nor your power nor your party affiliation. Your votes today reek of corruption of the worst kind.

As you are doubtless aware, your approval ratings are hovering around 15%. I would certainly be interested in investing which 15% of the country approves of your bickering. Perhaps its the crowd that mistakes C-SPAN for Comedy Central. Such performances as today, do not serve to improve your ratings.

Representatives, this crisis is an economic crisis. Not a partisan one. Your indecision and callousness has already cost millions of Americans their futures and their children's futures. You are complicit in the very crimes you accuse Wall Street of.

Representatives, your choices are fairly clear. You need to evolve a consensus on this issue promptly. You need to exhibit an appropriate level of leadership and put a final decision on this bill. The consensus can be in either direction, as long as it is meaningful and is the best available option for the people of this great country. Either that, or you will face the wrath of the people in due course. You are elected officials and you are going to seek re-election in the time to come. The memory of the people may be fickle, but days such as these are firmly burned in the minds of those affected.

To simplify your decision making process, I offer you a quote from the 3rd President of the United States, President Thomas Jefferson

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

This statement, issued in 1802, to the Secretary of the Treasury, has more foresight and more wisdom than is evident from any of your statements over the period of our current
crisis.

To conclude, I implore each one of you personally, to put aside your partisan issues and political bickering and constructively contribute to the solution of one of the greatest economic disasters of modern times.

With regards,
Srichand Pendyala

Cubaholics Anonymous

2008-09-22T16:41:00.004-04:00

Lately, I've been involved with a 3 dimensional species of puzzle that involves moving square shaped tiles around. Also known in technical parlance as "The Rubik's Cube". Up, down, right, away and right inverse goes my head. My fingers accordingly flex, extend, adduct, abduct and rarely circumduct (If you didn't understand those terms, go look up a kinesiology book (no I'm not a kinesiology major (and no, I do not like Lisp))). Such motion is usually accompanied by the creaking sounds of my aging cube.

Recently however, said creaking sounds have been replaced by their more intellectually acoustic cousins, called "speech".

"Hey, look at that guy. Think he's he okay?"
"You think he's gesturing at me?"
"Oh gosh, the poor fellow must be suffering from one of those diseases I heard about on TV!"
"You keep doing that son and next time, even if you have a cube with you, I'll give you a ticket." [1]

Yes, I am now a victim of Imaginary Cubesolveritis. To cut a long story short, if my fingers aren't already solving a cube, scribbling equations on a sheet of paper, typing away at a keyboard or stuffing food down my throat, then they're restlessly trying to solve an imaginary cube.

Its almost as though the urge to twist and turn faces and slices in a cube, is a wholly natural and evolutionary response to huge stacks of work lying right in front of me. The larger my pending work gets, the more I want to solve the cube. Till now, the only levee that deterred me from expending large swathes of time on the cube, was the fact that I did needed the cube to work on it.

This Saturday however, disaster struck this little home in Houghton, MI. The levee broke, releasing large amounts of solution attempts at my fingers. Who would have known? Katrina, Gustav, Ike and then ... Rubik. Tragedy I tell you, Tragedy.

... to be continued.

[1] The comment therein, is a result of a wholly unfortunate interaction between me, an imaginary cube, my car, a police officer and a stop sign (in that order) late Sunday night.
Note to self: Never take the stop sign overly seriously again. Not serious enough to wait a little more than a minute anyway.

Perhaps...

2008-09-16T23:01:00.000-04:00

... I should just continue blogging here? Yes, all previous attempts of mine to work on my own blog scripts have been a terrific disaster. I hardly ever remember any of them leaving pre-alpha stages even.

Just perhaps.

Cluster for Coffee?

2006-03-26T14:46:00.000-05:00

Came across this link which explains how to build a cluster in your drawing room in minutes!
Got to try it out sometime!

6000+ page views in 20 days!

2006-03-26T03:07:00.000-05:00

That's right!
My photogallery views, and bandwidth consumption have gone through the roof!
6000+ views, and nearly 1000 MB of bandwidth!
If you haven't already, then check it at http://srichand.net.in/photos !

Free from Mukthi!

2006-03-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

Finally!

Mukthi 6.03 was a grand success!
I've captured it in pictures at http://srichand.net.in/

Over 250 participants from in and around Bangalore and Mysore took part.
The overwhelming response should have finally silenced some critics...

My talk went pretty well, or so I think. I gave a very short talk (we were behind schedule by over an hour!), and gave away cds to the crowd at the end of. I asked 10 questions, and those who could answer them, got the CDs.
Its a lot of fun talking to an interactive audience!

I've also finally managed the time to throw a CMS onto my main page. Using an interesting javascript based theme with menu rollups and things for the main site now. Head over to http://srichand.net.in/ and check it out for yourself!

I've also added some resources useful for Computer Networks and UNIX system programming at the same site.

2006-03-18T02:30:00.000-05:00

Mukthi 6.03 is finally underway!
Yesterday Swaroop's talk was a *big* hit! Bigger than anyone could have imagined!
Typing from the Hi-Tech seminar hall, even as the Manojit Majumdar from IBM, the Premium sponsors is speaking.
Atul Chitnis' talk was outstanding as usual, Biju Chacko enthralled the crowds with his knowledge of FOSS Licenses.
The crowd did start getting a bit un easy as Biju was talking, thanks to the 5th semester results, which came around at a very wrong time!
In any case, I got 66%, and passed all subjects! :D

More when I can post from here. My talk is at 3:30 PM. But will mostly get delayed by about half an hour.

Pictures come on Monday!

New website!

2006-03-05T02:49:00.000-05:00

Yay! I've finally got my new website!
Head off to http://srichand.net.in/ right away!

Just the photogallery is up right now. Next thing to put up is drupal for the main page.
Then a class scrap book.
Other apps like CodeView will come soon.

Java Web Start a breeze?

2006-03-02T13:08:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to get Java web start working on Breezy, but no dice...

srichand@krypton:~$ javaws
Java Web Start splash screen process exiting .....
Splash: sysCreateListenerSocket failed: No such file or directory

!!??

Its the DPI silly!

2006-02-25T09:31:00.000-05:00

Finally got the brochure printed. (More like, vatsa got it printed for me.)
Two major boo boos.
One glaring blunder was the fact that we got an older draft version printed, while a newer improved version lay aimlessly on NAND gates in a plastic enclosure...
The other one was, that we (I!) made it at 72 dpi, all the while not realising that print demanded at least 96 dpi!
The result: Something that we're not quite happy with.

Mood: Contemplative

Sponsorship?

2006-02-23T09:04:00.000-05:00

Mukthi 6.03 is in urgent need of sponsors! Know any company willing to sponsor Mukthi? Let me know too!
You may download the event brochure from http://srichand.net/mukthi.pdf

Mukthi 6.03

2006-02-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

This I would guess is the first of many "official" announcements of Mukthi 6.03
We're still in very preliminary stages of planning, but trust me when I tell you its going to be *big* this time!
Slated for 17th and 18th March (tentative)

For those of you who've just joined us, Mukthi is a FOSS event aimed at students, by students.
The numbers after the name indicate the month and year. 03 for March, and 6 for 2006!
Last time's event was Mukthi 5.11.

Want to know more?

Wait a bit. ;)

Krypton Fuzz!

2006-02-13T12:10:00.000-05:00

Introducing my own brand of Guitar Distortion Fuzz boxes!
The picture you see on the left is my first polished (literally) prototype of a fuzz box, and I must say, it sounds good!

Construction details are quite simple: Just put in a two level hard clipper circuit (silicon diodes are good) in the negative feedback loop of a 741 op-amp! That's it!

And when they tell you that the 741 produces very little noise, believe them!

This also marks my transition from transistor based preamps to op-amp based ones. Op-amps are so much easier to use, and have *much* lesser ambient noise!

The toughst part of it all was to cut the stainless steel box! Nails barely made a dent in it, while my hand drill couldn't even scratch it! I finally gave in, and chopped out an entire vertical section using shears (a wire cutter actually).

The metal box has two main advantages. Firstly its stable. It doesn't get thrown about too much even if you're the Kurt Cobain type. Secondly, and more importantly, it eliminates effects of interference from the surroundings.

Do we need mods?

2006-02-08T09:04:00.000-05:00

Complain about the moderation system, and what do you know? You're a mod next!
So, is moderation good for a mailing list? In theory, its against free speech, so it can't be. But then, spamming and virus attacks leave us no choice.
So, should the solution be total and absolute moderation? Not in my opinion. I believe a more useful approach would be to allow certain trusted members, to post their messages through unmoderated. Got something to say about it? Say it!

Two decades

2006-02-07T13:02:00.000-05:00

This is going to be one long post folks, so you may want to get your fish and chips now!

Twenty years.
Thats the time I've been around on this little planet of ours.
Thats twenty birthday parties. Twenty (at least) cakes cut. 210 candles blown (summation i=1 to 20).
Never mind that.

Utter turmoil.
That describes the past week. My return from Hyderabad was uneventful. I can't say the same for the days following that though.

Firstly my college has promised us 50% (5k in absolute amounts) of the money we asked for, towards sponsorship of our trip to Kolkata for the ACM ICPC. Which basically means, we run around for a couple of weeks, going from pillar to post, at the end of which, we hopefully get our money.

I've now officially started reading up on Data Mining. All I know of Data Mining, is that its a misnomer.

This week also marks my GRE preparation. I scored a 1200 on my diagnostic test. Which means an improvement of 300+ is in order.

Additionally, February is the FOSS month. On the 17th, Neel and her gang are holding a FOSS event at MCC. They seem to be doing this with a level of unsurpassed professionalism. If you're an FOSS enthusiast, you *want* to be there!

And while we're in the FOSS month, I'll tell you about Mukthi 6.03 thats coming up. Its tentatively planned for 25th March. Its going to be bigger and better than last time. Watch this space for more details!

And then there's our college alumni website that requires working on. The initial template designs are more or less designed. The backends are ready. We only need to glue up the whole thing and most importantly, document it all.

In addition to all this, there's my pet personal project: The LED interface board! The idea was initially to write an XMMS plugin using the parapin library, to get the LEDs to dance to the song. The board has only 3 for now. I need to buy another 5. Now, I just hope writing an XMMS plugin is easy...

Added of course, the personal turmoil that I've been through, but I'll let that pass.

College reopens 20th. Exactly two weeks from now. Nothing accomplished yet.

Live from Hyderabad!

2006-01-29T07:48:00.000-05:00

This place is *cold* ! There, I said it.
I am back at the old cyber cafe that I am used to. I introduced Firefox here a couple of years back. And guess what: All systems here now use the latest version, *exclusively* !
I haven't used a windows system in a while, so it suddenly feels very funny on this win98 box.
The newest Y! messenger I've been told so much about, is here. It doesn't seem very different. Just a lot slower and bulkier. And I just made my avatar too!

FOSS-EDU

2006-01-28T04:06:00.000-05:00

The FOSS-EDU group in Bangalore met yesterday, at Coffee Day, Cunningham road. The idea that the events have to be interactive, in some form or another, dominated the whole meet. Arky was there and shared with us some of his experience.
You can read more about the FOSS-EDU project here.

And thanks a ton to Praveen for putting in great efforts to make the whole thing happen!

I'll be leaving for hyderabad today, so the planet is going to stay stagnant till the morning of the first. At least.

FOSS month meet

2006-01-25T12:19:00.000-05:00

A few of us working towards the FOSS month idea are meeting on Friday evening at 6 PM at Coffee Day at Cunningham road. If you're interested, contact me, or praveen or just be there!

vrlinug portal 0.0.01 released!

2006-01-25T03:15:00.000-05:00

Yes thats right! The vrlinug portal is finally out! Its still in its nascent stages, so any feedback is very welcome!
Also, its running from my home system, with a small pipe, so be gentle...

New host needed!

2006-01-24T03:59:00.000-05:00

I just realised, my webhost doesn't provide me with shell access!!! WTF !?
I urgently need a new host. I need

20M+ of Linux hosting
Python
Perl
PHP
MySQL
One email account.
Decent bandwidth limit (ie *not* 100MB!)
Shell access --> *very important*
FTP access

Know one? Let me know!

vrlinug planet

2006-01-24T00:28:00.000-05:00

Vrlinug needs a planet, among other things..
If you are a member of the mailing list and have a tech blog of sorts, then let me know, I'll add you to the planet, as soon as its up and running.

BOF anyone?

2006-01-22T07:27:00.000-05:00

vrlinug has been dormant for over a couple of months now. Maybe we should all get together informally at a coffee house or something of the sort?

2005-12-29T04:51:00.000-05:00

I've finally laid my hands on the Solaris Express CDs and Belenix 0.3
Thanks a ton to Moinak Ghosh.

STSH is now feature complete as planned earlier. That done, i'll be starting a rewrite in a while to make a *real* shell!

Project Syl:
The idea is to make a UNIX clone, starting with the linux kernel (version not decided yet. Maybe 1.2 or 2.0).
Things to do:
cross compiler
libc (!!!)
shell (stsh)
a text editor (vi?)
Port binutils, textutils and coreutils.
self hosting compiler
...

Eventually we intend to replace the kernel as well.
The "we" for now, is Nikhil V, Anuj B and myself.. If you're interested, then shoot me an email or leave a comment here.

BeleniX

2005-12-21T03:13:00.000-05:00

The BeleniX project made their third release (0.3) yesterday. The new release has a Perl-Curses based hd-installer which is apparently much better than what it was earlier.
This i've got to try out!

C350 with linux?

2005-12-20T08:38:00.000-05:00

I need a phone managing software. There's Motorola Manager for windows, a free (as in beer) software that does most of what I want. I still haven't found a decent enough phone manager on Linux.
It needs to:

1. Download the messages from my Inbox and Outbox, Keep my address book updated from the one on the phone. Synchro the datebook on the phone and on my system.
2. Keep all that info in a MySQL database so that I can query it as I like.
3. Have both a command line AND a gui interface.

I've started out with Python for the backend. I've still not figured out how exactly I should communicate with the serial port (USB actually).
Just writing and reading to/from /dev/ttyACM0 isn't working very well, as I can't extract the stuff that the phone throws back to me easily and efficiently enough.

Guess I first need a library to communicate with a serial port more cleanly..

Keep watching this space for more!

So laris?

2005-12-19T12:48:00.000-05:00

Solaris has been giving me hell over the past week..
Formatted my entire drive (82.3G!) thrice, rewritten the entire partition table an equal number of times and I finally have a decent partition table to triple boot.

First create your paritition table with the Linux fdisk (use knoppix or slax).
Make sure you have a partition with FAT32/NTFS to install windows, a partition with EXT3 for linux, and a Solaris partition (type 0xbf) as primary partitions. Then make your /home and other windows partitions within logical partitions. This is important, as Solaris only installs to primary partitions.

Then go ahead and install windows on the FAT32/NTFS partition. Then install Linux on the EXT3 partition. Check to see if windows still boots. (You shouldn't get the ntldr missing error!).
Then install solaris.
Solaris allows you to partition things nicely, so if you already have a solaris partition ready (which you should), then it'll install directly to that. If you're not sure about the slices concept, then let the installer handle it for you.
Technically, the installation should complete, and the solaris boot manager gets installed on the MBR. It works fine here, except that the JDS now doesn't have Nautilus. Nor does anything else work!

And the Solaris driver support is PATHETIC! It refuses to detect my network card and my sound cards!

At last...

2005-12-19T12:25:00.000-05:00

my connection is back!
A week without a proper pipe left me in a big mess.
My shell is coming along beautifully.

For those interested, the following lines will do a good part of the shell's backend.

Wildcard, shell variables, the works! wordexp will do all that for you!


 wordexp(input, &result, 0);
        strcpy(p.cmd, result.we_wordv[0]);         i=0;
        while(result.we_wordv[i]){
                strcpy(args[i], result.we_wordv[i]);                 i++;
        }

Easy as pie!

External hard disk case

2005-12-05T03:08:00.000-05:00

Bought myself an external hard disk case some days back. Its currently working with my ancient antique 1.2 GB segate hard disk, thats about 9 years old now! And guess what, it still works!

The USB 2.0 connectivity is pretty nice, as I get some decent transfer speeds.

The hard disk currently has RHL7.1 installed on it. Too bad my motherboard can't boot from USB, or else I would have given it a try..

More on it as I play with it.

SrP

Back on Breezy

2005-12-04T08:37:00.000-05:00

I'am finally back on ubuntu, but not before some hand-to-hand combat with the solaris fdisk and the solaris installer. The Belenix install system needs some work!
So, no Solaris yet, but even as i type, I'am downloading the Solaris 10 ISOs. If you don't already have them, you can download them from here.

On a more sombre note, my internals start tomorrow, so i'am back to Machine-Dependent Assembler Features for the SIC/XE architecture...

SrP

Whats been happening

2005-12-04T03:25:00.000-05:00

I'am back after a long haitus.

Just got over with FOSS.IN/2005, an absolutely amazing linux and open source conference.
I've got my hands on Belenix, a live Open Solaris distro. It isn't the greatest of live cds (it takes about 20 minutes to boot up!).
All attempts to install it have been in vain so far. Solaris, like other UNIXes (unices?) requires to be in a primary partition, which my partition table isn't going to allow. So, as of now, i have to restructure my entire partition table!
That means, i'll have to backup my data (all 80GB of it!), and clean up the partition table and then proceed to install Solaris, and then Ubuntu Breezy.

Its already past midnight and i'am still searching for data to backup.

Yawn!!

2004-02-18T01:29:00.000-05:00

this is my first post on my webdiary, come back for more action !

DISCLAIMER : I am not responsible for things i say here, for all you know, i may be drugged or drunk !