FOSS.IN list of talks announced

Check out http://foss.in/2007/shortlist.php

The list of talks looks really good and I know a lot of people presenting at FOSS.IN. I am co-presenting on one topic. I'd say this year FOSS.IN is going to rock, so make sure your there.

India vs Australia (quick analysis)

India won the T20 world cup and became champions! The 50-50 games seem to be a different playing ground for the Indian Team. Have you been wondering why India did not fair so well, so far. Here's a quick layman analysis

1. India have not been batting first, in all the T20 matches we won, we batted first!
2. The team has changed and so have the rules. Instead of a powerplay for 20 overs with catch in fielders around, T20 has restrictions for just 4 overs. This makes a big difference to players like Sehwag and Gambhir, who I think are more suited to the field being well spread out (survive longer)

Here's some advice for the Indian Team (given that Dhoni reads cricinfo, you never know if he might read this blog as well :-) )

1. Convert the 50-50 match to a 20-20 match, by keeping wickets in hand till the 30th over
2. While batting second, get Dhoni in at #3, followed by Yuvraj at #4
3. Get Dravid to Open the batting while chasing
4. Tendulkar should come 4/5 down while chasing (when there is a mandatory ball change)
5. Don't ever get Yuvraj to Bowl :-)
6. While bowling first, attack aggressively, even if it means that more runs will be conceded
   

Memory Ordering (Recommended Reading)

I just finished reading this wonderful report on memory ordering. I highly recommend reading it. If you have anything to do with multi-core, multi-processor, parallel programming, you'll find the paper very insightful.

Other good to read papers/articles on memory ordering from Paul Mckenney are

1. C++ Data-Dependency Ordering. May 2007.
2. Overview of Linux-Kernel Reference Counting. January 2007.
3. A simple and efficient memory model for weakly ordered architectures. Makes case for weakly ordered primitives in programming languages. Updated May 2007.

Doing the simple things first

I've always been lost trying to understand and do the complex things. I just realized that I miss out on doing and enjoying the simple things in life. Note to self, remember this and change.

India are Twenty20 champs

No one expected it, but secretly hoped for it; and it has happened. India are twenty 20 world cup champions. Boy, has this been a good time for sports. For those of you who do indeed know that hockey is our national game, spare a moment for this picture as well


Spare some time and visit http://www.bharatiyahockey.org/ and http://www.indianhockey.com/.

Now shifting back to twenty20, India beat Pakistan twice and the second win won us the cup. Both matches were close, nail biting (warning: watch your hygiene) finishes. Surprisingly, India got extremely lucky and batted first in almost all their encounters which they won. The statistics show a remarkable quality, that has been missing before, this was a true team effort. Everybody chipped in; in the batting department, we had contributions from Gautham Gambhir, Virendra Sehwag, Robin Uttapa, Yuvraj Singh, M. S. Dhoni, Rohit Sharma (who incidentally is yet to be dismissed in this form of the game). Karthik was a weak spot in the team, but boy did he keep well in the game against South Africa. In the bowling department, R. P. Singh, Irfan Pathan, Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth were the key contributors.

India's fielding has been quite good, thanks to the absence of Saurav Ganguly, V.V.S. Laxman and Munaf Patel.

I am sure Dhoni is thinking मै तो युहीं चाला था बिना जाने मंज़िल मगर लोग आते गये और कारवाँ बंता गया |

Well done, keep up the good work boys!

Containers update - more photos

The containers team - catching up in Cambridge

There is a containers update at http://community.livejournal.com/openvz/17964.html

More interesting math

I came across the The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and the really interesting web site on Mathematical Constants. I am currently reading A Passion for Mathematics by Clifford A. Pickover .

Ramanujan's work online

I found this interesting website containing works of Ramanujan.

Knuth finally sells out

Really funny, I ran into it today.

Kernel summit 2007 group photo

Posted at LWN.net

Kernel Summit Photos - taken by Evgeniy Polyakov

Peter Zijlstra, Ingo Molnar, Venki Pallipadi and Balbir Singh in discussion

More photos will follow, including the group photo. Meanwhile, there are other photos at Evgeniy Polyakov's gallery.

Kernel summit day 1 updates

Gerrit has some wonderful updates in his blog Linux and Open Source. LWN.net subscribers can read the summit update at 2007 Kernel Summit article right away or wait for a week for it to be available to public.

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.