Off to VM and Kernel Summit

I've been invited to the VM (Virtual Memory) Summit in Cambridge, U.K. I will also be attending the Kernel Summit which is being held along side LinuxConf Europe 2007. Hopefully, I'll have interesting notes and pictures when I am back.

Algorithms dictionary online

http://www.nist.gov/dads/terms.html is a wonderful dictionary of terms and concepts in Algorithms. It's a wonderful dictionary and the references are excellent. I wish they made the content available as a book or a PDF document.

Perl module for taskstats

Way back last year, we developed the taskstats and delay accounting interface for the Linux Kernel. There is now a CPAN module to extract the same information using perl (all our example programs are in C). It's called Linux::Taskstats::Read. It can read the binary dump of taskstats information and interpret it.

Here's the module

I hope to be able to write a python interface for taskstats as well and do it quickly. I am sure someones already done the work.

Celebrating 50 years of IBM Technical Journals

" Since the first publication of the IBM Journal of Research and Development in 1957 and the IBM Systems Journal in 1962, these Journals have provided descriptions and chronicles of many important advances in information technology and related topics ranging from atoms to business solutions. To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the IBM Journals, this report highlights a selection of significant papers published in the Journals, along with brief commentaries. The Journal editors chose papers which were very highly cited in the technical literature, described technologies of historic significance, or provided an important overview of a field"

Get the articles at 50 Years of IBM Technical Journals

An LWN.net article about my work

LWN is covering my memory controller work this week. The article is subscriber only, but I've managed to get a free link (legally of-course). Please do view the article, the work and consider subscribing to LWN.net

Here's the article Controlling memory use in containers

This week from the Wikipedia

I've just discovered my favourite Wikipedia page for this week. It's the page on problem solving. Don't wait, go ahead and read it!

I highly recommend glancing through the external links and reading them later at leisure.

Balbir's Blog: OLS2007 Proceedings Available

Balbir's Blog: OLS2007 Proceedings Available

Jon Corbet was kind enough to mention my presentation in his slides. Check out http://lwn.net/talks/ols2007/img44.html

Thanks, Jon!

OLS2007 Proceedings Available

You can download them at

https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/

Download both the volumes, my papers are all in volume 2.

OLS presentation

I just finished my first OLS presentation on Containers: Challenges with Memory Resource Controller and Its Performance

The presentation went well, it's all been recorded. Hopefully the proceedings will show up soon.

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