Gops views on Mumbai 26/11

Well worth a read! We've had lot of heros, lets remember and pray for them, the victims and their families and that such things don't repeat themselves anywhere in the world.

Smooth upgrade to F12

My first post after the upgrade. The upgrade sailed through smoothly and I got back the packages I had to uninstall. The first issue I faced was the nomodeset issue. X would not recognize any resolution beyond "800x600", I had to pass nomodeset as kernel boot parameter to get my original resolution back.

I was also happy to see my back for resource counter scalability included in F12
(run rpm -q --changelog kernel | less)
* Mon Oct 12 2009 Kyle McMartin 2.6.31.4-75.rc2
- improve-resource-counter-scalability.patch: Fix scalability issues
on big machines, requested by prarit.

I am all set to sail, kudos to those who helped make Fedora and especially the upgrade path so smooth.

Upgrade Journey to Fedora 12

After reading the ever so useful YumUpgradeFaq, I've started upgrading my system from F11 to F12. I had some scarifies to make along the way, I had to remove about 100 of my favourite RPMS, so that the upgrade starts

yum finally told me...

Transaction Summary

=======================

Install 238 Package(s)

Upgrade 4512 Package(s)

Remove 4 Package(s)

Reinstall 0 Package(s)

Downgrade 0 Package(s)

Total download size: 5.0 G

Is this ok [y/N]:

Wish me luck!

Fedora 12 is out

I use Fedora on my desktop, now more than ever. I am currently well setup on Fedora 11, with 3D graphics (yeah, I can get Secondlife, google earth, etc to work with great speed) setup. Setting up 3D graphics was not easy (but that should be another blog entry. I also have my favourite sound system ALSA setup. I could never get used to Pulseaudio or get it to work the way I like. I am still trying to get webgl to work on my browser. The features in Fedora 12 are too tempting and of course I am already using some of the latest features via rawhide.

I guess its time to plunge into Fedora 12! Do take a look at the release tour of Fedora 12.

Thought for the day (Hindi)

मैं अकेला ही चला था जानिब-ऐ-मंजिल मगर, लोग साथ आते गए और कारवाँ बंता गया

मजरूह सुल्तानपुरी

Great Knock Dravid!

(From: cricket.yahoo.com)

Todays knock by Dravid's got to be the best I've remembered from anyone in a long long time. I've witnessed the record breaking knock with Laxman to help India win against Australia in India, the 200 odd to help India win against Australia in Australia.

I loved this one because of the determination and absolutely wonderful confident stroke play. This knock also got Dravid in the 11,000+ squad (only the 5th cricketer to have that honour). Bravo on the six, the quality of shots and the confidence. Keep the aggression coming Dravid! I love it!

Interesting memory cgroup controller links

Here are some interesting links on memory cgroup that I found online (NOTE: I've not referred to my own papers)

1. http://www.dmtf.org/svm09/presentation/Corset_Service-oriented_Resource_Management_System_Linux.ppt
2. http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale7x/sites/scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/files/openvz-scale7x-resource-management_0.ppt
3. http://en.opensuse.org/Cgroup
4. http://elinux.org/Memory_Management
5. http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWik/ELC2009Presentations?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=celf_mem_notify.pdf
6. http://www.xtreemos.eu/publications/project-deliverables/d2-1-7.pdf
7. http://siena.linux.it/linuxday09/presentazioni/andrea-righi-linux-kernel-hacking-process-containers.pdf
8. http://www.linux-foundation.jp/uploads/seminar20081119/CgroupMemcgMaster.pdf
9. linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/slides/Dave-Hansen-oom-v3.pdf

NOTE: This is just a partial list of references.

Bangalore book fair 2009

The Bangalore Book Fair has started today at Palace grounds and I happened to visit today. With close to 330 stalls, I was awed by all the books and publications present. I had two clear priorities

• Technical books
• Childrens books

On the technical front, I purchased





It was really nice to see a good number of exciting books for children, I even managed to find some interesting gifts for children I know.

I'd highly recommend visiting the fair, the last day is November 15th

Thought for the day

Happiness is when what we think, what we say and what we do are in complete harmony

Mahatma Gandhi

Arguing about OS'es

Gopal and I argued about Linux, Windows and browsing (nothing out of the ordinary though, we kill time in arguments and we've mastered that art). I thought I'd share what the stats look like for visitors on my blog. If you are worried about being profiled, don't worry, no personal information is stored by me! The data is from sitemeter and blogspot (If you are too concerned, you can start using the "Private browsing" or Incognito Windows)

Browser Share

Operating system share

FOSS.IN first shortlist

The shortlisted talks, workouts, project of the day, etc are announced. This year seems to be quite interesting with several kernel talks selected. I am looking forward to the Pulseaudio, security, S.M.A.R.T., kernel, gnome, GSM/Telecom, Haskell talks. I wish to attend them all assuming there will be no conflicts :)

Exponentiation

There are several well known exponentiation algorithms, but this one caught my eye, specifically due to its application in the Rabin-Miller primality test. Here is the math, the algorithm will follow later

Let the problem be rewritten as raise x to the power n. Let us convert n to binary


Where b0, b1, b2.. bk is the binary representation. Now lets rewrite x to the power n as

This in turn is equal to


The trick is to note that we need to compute even powers of x and determine b0, b1, .. bk. A simple trick is to, check if b0 is odd or even, if it is odd, multiply the current temporary value with x, if it is even, skip b0, but keep squaring the current exponent. Note we keep shifting n right, so that b1, b2,.. ,bk move to position b0 eventually.

Here is the algorithm from Sahni's textbook

def exponent(x, n):
 m = n
 expx = x
 power = 1

 while (m > 0):
     while ((m % 2) == 0):
         expx = expx * expx
         m = m >> 1

     m = m - 1
     power = power * expx

 return power

FOSS.IN posters are out

This is some of the best creative work I've seen (in terms of conference posters and getting the message out). All of this is released under CC. Excellent work guys! I am reproducing them below, the original post is at Posters! Posters! We need them, crave them