Thermal Noise

Robert Lee Frost Magnum

(more…)

The Da Vinci Code released in India today. (more…)

Its not rare for me to face the question “So, How do you make money ?” when I say that my company gives away its operating system for free. Yeah, Sun did “sell” Solaris a few years back but how many people do you think would have bought the OS alone without buying the Hardware ? That just let me wonder as to why people think you need to sell software at a price to make money.

(more…)

For the past two weeks, work became more fun than usual. Anything other than what is classified as work you are normally expected to do, falls under the “fun” category. I was busy doing my favorite job of “talking” (about Branded Zones) to Sun Engineers across the globe. It was a terrific experience ! And the last two days were even more fun - we conducted a hack-fest/trouble shooting contest at the RV college of engineering, Bangalore. I cooked up some interesting unix problems and with the help of the solaris geeks, gurus and geniuses here, we came up with ten moderately tough problems for the students to crack.

One of the simpler problems that we had was this:

(more…)

There were tears the day you went,
But I knew not what for to repent.
It was a loss for the best I knew,
Yet it was tough to bid you adieu.

(more…)

I have been hopelessly out of touch with Java, Perl and Python these days that I decided to take a look at it this weekend. My “Java - The Complete Reference” based on JDK1.2 is so backward in time that I was wondering left how quickly you need to keep learning things to stay on top. I learnt Java, J2EE and Web Programming around 4 years back in 2002. If I write code the same way I wrote it 4 years ago, I would almost certainly be out of employment (Unless someone wants me for some offshored maintenance work)

(more…)

It has been tight going for sometime now. But, I somehow managed to finish off the new site for BeleniX.

Link: http://www.belenix.org/

Moinak, a Unix Guru (and a sort of Hero for many of us out here) has been doing quite a bit of work with his first love, BeleniX. The results speak for themselves. Knoppix - a Linux live CD which has been around for 5 years just boots in about the same time as BeleniX does ! Download the latest Belenix LiveCD, boot OpenSolaris on your x86 box, play around with it and report the bugs and feature requests back to us.

Follow Up: We had a massive increase in traffic to the website since the launch of the new release and the website. Here is a peek at the google analytics data !

(more…)

AMD DevCon 2006 happened today in Bangalore at the Taj Residency. This was the first time AMD was conducting a developer conference in India. It was somewhat similar in objective and organisation to the Intel Developer Forums (IDF) that happen every year. System Programmers ranging from BIOS Developers, Device Driver Developers, Operating System developers (yours truly), game developers, enterprise application developers - particularly those concerned about the 64 bit phenomenon were attending the show. To be frank, the morning session was mostly crap. Just some marketing junk spoken by some CXOs who have no clue about technology. But the afternoon session was excellent.

(more…)

For muggles who cannot read OS code, there is a starkly stunning piece of graphic art, that I think is a must see ! A syscall can traced by enabling a hook for the syscall trap handler and writing out the syscall number to a trace buffer. With a global stack, you can not only trace the syscall numbers but their call flow. The call flow graph of the syscalls in any OS is what you call the syscall graph (to make it sound deceptively simple). On Solaris you should be able to generate a syscall graph by parsing truss or dtrace output in a perl script and using a graph library. Same-thing should be possible with strace on linux.

(more…)

Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Phillip Pirrip, Huckleberry Fin, Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer, Snow White, Cinderella, Heidi, Jane Eyre, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins …

(more…)

This was the best birthday gift I got today …

(more…)

I am tired of seeing endless biased stories on Slashdot, Google Sci/Tech and Wired which claim to be "Tech News" feeds and stuff that "nerds" care about. Slashdot in particular has badly detoriated with time and become a Glitz and Glamour - populist news feed. Whenever Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds sneezes, it makes the headlines on all news feeds and if Scott McNealy or Theo de Raadt die, they might be lucky to gain some attention. Today for example we had headlines saying "Apple wants to port ZFS to OSX". I don't remember any previous instance where they ever had some headline that said anything about ZFS. If Google suing Microsoft for making MSN the default search engine on IE7, demands to be the top headline, then something as revolutionary as ZFS should be a screaming bold, center, h1,#FF0000 formatted tag on every news site that claims to provide "tech" news.

(more…)

The world has suddenly became a more knowledable place after the advent of the Internet. The average intelligence of humankind seems to have risen multifold. Oops ! Did I say Intelligence ? I meant "Knowledge". Well, "Information" to be precise. This sudden mania for Information Overload stems from the fantasy of John Doe finding his way to nuggets of information on the net that constitue no broadbased knowledge but just a few facts from here and there. That ain't something bad ! Wouldn't you say ? Well, I will agree for the most part except that I cannot stand the side-effects of the Information Overload era.

(more…)