Off to Ottawa Linux Symposium

I am off to the Linux Symposium in Ottawa, I was supposed to travel to Linux Symposium Japan, but could not (unfortunately!)

You can catch me at the following events

1. Generic Process Containers
2. Where is your application stuck
3. Containers: Challenges with the memory controller
4. Resource Management BOFs

M.S. Thesis

M.S.Thesis available

I've finished my M.S. Thesis and you can find it here NOTE: The thesis might still have errors and I do not have any immediate plans of fixing the errors. The thesis was typeset using LaTeX. Hopefully, you'll enjoy reading it.

The figures require some fixing, hopefully, I'll redo them in MetaPost later.

MS (Software Systems)

I received my MS degree from BITS Pilani today. Wow! I am now qualified to do more, I feel so energized. As I am writing this blog, I look at the pile of books of my M.S. curriculum and the dissertation report of the final semester. Flashing in front of my eyes are my last minute attempts to read up a whole book in a week, my stupidity in believing that an open book examination can be passed by carrying along enough books.

Anyhow, that is the past and I learnt a lot from it. As I sit here and examine the past, I know that the process of learning never ends, but learning the same thing is rarely fun (a.k.a repeating your mistakes). But as my copy of Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming tells me, I'll never learn anything at once, I'll need to learn somethings during the next reading; I realize that I've just completed a small milestone in a long journey.

TUGboat archives

I recently rediscovered the TUGboat archives

There is a really interesting article in the 2007 archives
"A beginner's guide to METAPOST for creating high-quality graphics", the article points to a metapost previewer at

http://www.tlhiv.org/cgi-bin/MetaPostPreviewer/index.cgi

Any newbie experimenting with MetaPost should use the previewer, it's fun and easy and of-course one need not worry about the installation details.

Part of the inspiration for looking up TUGboat came from Kevin Larson's article on the Technology of Text. The article is well written, but it completely ignores TeX and METAFONT. That reminds me, time for a letter to the editor.

Blog in Hindi

अब मै हिन्दी मे भी ब्लोग कर सकता हूँ !

If you cannot see this well, check out

Wikipedia Article on Indic Fonts
and
Blogger help for Hindi

Balbir's Blog: It's prediction time!

Balbir's Blog: It's prediction time!

I am so excited and in pain to see prediction 5 of this years prediction come true! I am curious to see how the others will turn out :-)

Reserving space for my good bye to the Indian Cricket Masters

Dravid, Ganguly, Tendulkar should go now! Dravid and Tendulkar must go for sure and so should Mr Greg C. Let's see how the Indian team responds to this defeat.

Balbir's log 1st March 2007

1. Read a very interesting algorithm called the Ford-Johnson method for sorting. I ended up opening Knuth's Volume 3: Sorting and Searching and reading through his quite amazing illustration and explanation of the method.
• References - Don Knuth, vol 3, 3rd Edition, Page 184
• Horowitz and Sahni, Fundamentals of Computer Algorithms
2. Read through the introduction in the Algorithms book by Papadimitriou, et.al. See my post on a fun way to multiply numbers
3. Played around with the python programming language after a big break
   

Follow up: A fun way to multiply numbers

Here's python code to multiply numbers as mentioned in the A fun way to multiply numbers blog entry.

NOTE: I am not a python expert, so there could be some obvious bugs in this simple piece of code. As always use at your own risk.

print "Input the first number"
a=input()
print "Input the next number to be multiplied with %d" %a
b=input()
res=0
while a:
  if a & 0x1:
      res = res + b
  a = a >> 1
  b = b << 1

print "The result is %d\n" %res

A fun way to multiply numbers

Reading through the algorithms book by Papadimitriou, et. al has been great fun. I learn a great fun way to multiply (apparently known from ancient times). Let's say we intend to multiply 13 and 23, the procedure is quite straight forward. Write down 13 and 23 besides each other

13	23
6	46
3	92
1	184

The first column is divided by two (with rounding) and the second one is multiplied by two

13	23
6	46
3	92
1	184

Strike out the numbers with even numbers in the first column

Now we just add up the numbers in the right column to obtain 299. That's quite easy right? The really cool thing about this approach is that is easy to implement using computers (hint: left shift and right shift multiply and divide the number by 2 (with rounding taken care of))

Balbir's log - 28th Feb 2007

1. Freshly installed FC6 - 32 bit edition, still in the process of setting it up (another blog entry). I hope to get KVM and UML running
   
2. Played around with Linux's Connector interface (kernel <-> user communication)
   
3. Read through chapter 5 (partially) of Computer Systems Performance Evaluation and Prediction

Balbir's log - 27 Feb 2007

1. Played around with Scilab, used scilab for some simple signal processing work, Amplitude Modulation.
2. I've started reading a paper on VM entitled Making LRU friendly to weak locality workloads
3. Added Markov chains to my to-learn list

Using maxima -- baby steps

The use of symbolic computing makes it easy to visualize and solve problems that were otherwise dry and would put you to sleep. To test the simplicity of a freely available tool called maxima, I tried to solve a common problem with it.

The problem is quite simple, remember high school physics? Well I don't :-). Consider a tuning fork, which oscillates and produces a sound (depending on it's frequency).

We start by entering the mathematical model of the fork

'm*diff(x(t), t, 2)=-k*x(t);

Maxima prints


We now request maxima to solve the equation for us by

desolve([%],[x(t)]);

Maxima asks

Is k * m positive, negative, or zero? We say positive

Maxima prints



We ask maxima to simplify the result for us

radcan(%);

Maxima outputs



That's it, we have our solution.

What have I been upto?

I've spread myself quite thin, with a lot of code to write, books to read, things to buy and documentation to write.



For now, I have started reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I've started reading it, don't skip the foreword or the preface. Be patient with the author and go read it, it's fun!

Meanwhile, I hope to get back to productive coding soon, instead of just reading hundreds and hundreds of papers.

One of the hardest problems software faces today

I think the biggest problem is to get users to read the documentation associated with the software.

Try answering these questions and score yourself.

1. How many times have you seen a question about a problem being repeated?
2. Why do you they created FAQs?
3. How many FAQs have you read?
4. What was the last release notes you read?
5. Which book did you read last (not related to your course)?
6. What new techniques did you read and discover in the last two years?
7. What kind of documentation did you write and share for your last project?
8. What was the last software manual you read?
   
9. What was the ratio of comments to code in

• Programs you wrote
• Programs you read

The answers to these questions might not be a simple yes or no, but it will give you a fair idea of how we programmers are lazy and totally ignore documentation.

Some pictures from our New year and Lohri celebration (A Story!)

Me and my gorgeous wife before we left for the new year party

I sparked off the Lohri celebrations

Popcorn and Peanuts in fire
A Lohri ritual

The flames got higher, lohri had now begun

Ritual walk around the fire

The crowd got bigger as the flames got higher

My brother enjoyed the heat

My in-laws got involved as well
(My brother-in-law, his wife and son)

I had to keep encouraging people

The last round

There was only so much firewood!

It was time for dinner
(The chef was ready!)

Dinner was served, the food was awesome!

My wife's nephew, he came, he saw

He bowed!

Happy Lohri

Mufli ki khusbu, gurh ki mittaas
Makki ki roti aur sarson ka saag
Dil ki kushi aur apno ka pyar
Mubarak ho apko Lohri ka thyohar!

If the whole thing bounced over you, see http://www.lohrifestival.org/. We are celebrating our first Lohri

Article: A Conversation with John Hennessy and David Patterson

Read A Conversation with John Hennessy and David Patterson published in ACM Queue. It's one of the best articles, I've read lately. They talk about the challenge with parallelism, the free ride software has had, their new book, new projects and much more.

I highly recommend reading the article

It's prediction time!

It's come a little late this year, but here goes anyway. The list includes technology, business and other predictions for the year 2007

1. Apple will go back to using the PowerPC
2. Intel will gain an upper hand over AMD in the 64 bit space
3. Microsoft (R) Vista (TM) will not be widely accepted, people will expect too much from it
4. Internet Explorer 7 will do well, but will begin to loose out gradually towards the end of the year
5. India, Dravid, Chappel and Tendulkar will have a rather forgivable (we'll loose out before the semi-finals) world cup
6. The world will get ready to move to 128 bit computing, there will be rapid growth towards 1024 bit computing machines
7. Adobe, Google and Apple will continue to do well
8. Open source movement will slow down for this year

These predictions are not very scientific, they are based on gut feeling. Feel free to comment on any of the predictions. I'll try and keep the list up to date or add your predictions if I really like them

Have A Great New Year!

Let's all welcome the new year with a big smile! I hope it turns out to be a great year for us, our families and friends, and all of mankind. There are so many things to do, so let's get started!