The Blog

When I was small, we lived next to Dabolim Airport. In fact it was so close to our house, that if we had someone coming by air, Dad used to jokingly say that, “We see the aircraft land, have a beer and then head to the airport to find no one has come out yet”.

Any how, if there was something about it, well, it was that we would see planes land and take off, and always hear the sound of aircraft flying.

The strange thing though was that none of us ever took a flight from that airport all the while we lived in that house. The first flight someone from our family took from that airport was after we moved. (It was still close to the airport, but we could hardly see planes land and take off now, or even hear them).

—

A few years later, in 2006 when I was interning at IBM, I stayed right next to the old HAL airport and it was back to normal, hearing aircraft take off and land all times of the day.  Yet the first time I flew into that airport (which incidentally was my first flight) was from Mangalore Airport (yes, it is the infamous one) for being interviewed by Google, when I was no longer in Bangalore.

After joining IBM, I used the HAL airport a few times, but I was no longer living in direct view (of either the airport or aircraft flying) any more. And I really flew only after the airport moved to the new one in devanahalli. Incidentally, till sometime I had done more international flights, than domestic ones from the new one . (1 vs 0).

—

Now having to moved to Pisa, the apartment where I stay is right below the aircraft take while taking off. And yet again, I get to hear the sound of aircraft.

I was planning to visit LinuxTag at Berlin, to meet up with Lennart and few other folks, and so was looking at flight options. Turns out the cheapest way would be a train to Milan, followed by a flight to Berlin.

The clincher, I do not use the Pisa airport since it meets the criteria for me to not use it .

I wonder whether I will use the Pisa airport or not .

Lennart has just released systemd .

systemd is designed as an init system replacement and adds a lot more cool features. Some of the cool features being parallel starts, on demand start of services, trapping services inside cgroups (which uses libcgroup, yay!)

Technical minded readers, go ahead, try it out, go crazy and give us feedback!

—

Just noticed that most distros do not enable CONFIG_DEBUG_CGROUPS, so you will need to build your own kernel. The simplest method would be to download a recent *stable* kernel from kernel.org . Untar it a convenient location, and then copy the config from your /boot.

Run

make oldconfig

(select no for each option here, unless you want to select something. Though just hitting enter should work).

Next run

 make menuconfig

and go to General Setup -> Control Group Support -> Example debug cgroup subsystem

Save this config and hit

make -jNR && make modules_install && make install

Typically you would replace NR with 2 * total number of threads on your system. Just hit cat /proc/cpuinfo and see the number of CPU threads you have (count the number of entries). Typically for a dual core laptop, you will have 2 threads (though this can vary if you have a HT system)

Wait for sometime, while the kernel gets compiled and installs itself.

Get systemd down using git,

git clone git://git.0pointer.de/systemd.git

and libcgroup,

git clone git://libcg.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libcg/libcg

and install them. This should have the installation parts of it setup and you can use Lennart’s instructions to setup systemd to run. (You do not need to setup libcgroup since systemd just uses the APIs libcgroup provides)

Just read this. Folks come on. The iPad is NOT a real computer. It is a castrated device. Anybody who really loves a computer cannot call it a computer. A computer in my mind is something I can control. Something on which I can install whatever I want to, on which I can develop my stuff and run it. Not something controlled by a company which thinks that it knows better than me what I want. So get it in your head. The ipad is an abomination for any computer geek. And to the editors of Forbes, understand what a geek is. That article proves that the NSA chief is not your country’s top geek. He is just another grandmother in disguise. Don’t insult us geeks like that.

Don’t get me wrong. The ipad is a great device. Just not for me, or anyone who is even seriously interested in computers. It is for my mother whose only interest in computers is to connect it to the internet in order to chat with me, for my father whose only interest in computers is to connect to the internet and read his emails, surf the internet. It however is not for me, because I want a real computer.

Gah. </rant>

What just happened in the IPL. Mumbai and Bangalore kicking ass. Sachin in amazing form. And KKR losing . To all KKR fans out there, I have nothing against you guys. I just cannot support a team which is owned by a Pakistani sympathizer. Certainly not when so many of our people are getting killed.

Anyway, away from serious topics, this time I have been following the IPL on youtube (since I am no longer in the motherland). First, thank you Google. For once I am happy with Google . Now if only they would also stream it on the mobile youtube app .

While writing a couple of papers, I got bored and so just decided to see what other IPL stuff they have and saw this, this, this and this. Well well well. What is going on?! I wonder if this is coming on the television broadcast in India.

My favourite moments.

- When one of the cheerleaders mentioned that she wished they had more to wear, the first question was, “Do you feel conscious”

- When the former Ms Universe (?) mentioned that she did not know about cricket, the interviewer still had to ask about whether she preferred 20-20 over test cricket. Amazing!

- What about getting name of one of the team owners wrong. And then trying to cover it up by blaming her “beauty” for it :-/. Fun stuff. Count the number of times she calls the Ms (?) Gayatri pretty, and the number of ‘yeah”s

- I saw of one of Vijay Mallya’s which was just amazing. The interviewer was good, and Mr Mallya was pure class.

I am just glad I am not in India to see this. :-/

So Google Buzz has come out. Unlike a certain other blogger, I don’t have very strong feelings about it. I don’t like the idea of buzz creeping up my inbox, but i can also turn it off, and turn off all the other stuff. So honestly, I do not care about it all that much. What does bother me is very different.

<rant begins>

Google really needs to learn about supporting its products better. My problem. Very basic. I want Google Maps to work on my cellphone. It worked for me in India. It does not work for me in Italy. I am on the latest version. I cannot remove google maps from my phone, since its inbuilt and despite my best efforts I cannot remove it.

When I went to purchase a phone, I wanted a few things. 3G, wifi, GPS. I soon realized there was no point to go for 3G since it was not available in India (and looking at the way things are now, won’t be for a long long time). wifi also did not make sense since EDGE was dirt cheap in India, and if I had wifi, the probability of having my laptop around was also very high. So all I wanted was a GPS. Well, when I saw the star I fell in love with it. But no GPS. Till he told me that it had Google maps which located you using the cellphone tower. There, I was sold.

But now, guess what. It does not work. When I start it, I get a “Serious Error. Please exit and restart”. Googling around led me to here. Turns out it has been there for sometime and not yet been resolved. Contacting a few friends in Google did not help. One of them infact, when I compared Google software to Microsoft, told me that since I do not pay Google, I should not expect any support.

Coming from the open source world, I cannot fathom a world where I cannot fix my own software. But here I am. Nothing works, and since I am on closed hardware/software, I cannot even fix it.

Not that Google helps. If you are NOT going to support software, then you might as well open source it, as opposed to leaving users in a limbo.

Well, you want the clincher? Google suggested to checkout buzz on your cellphone. I did so, and guess what. It is only for the iphone and android. Why call it a mobile platform then?!

Google, a lot of people around the world do NOT own/use an iphone or an android phone. Are you going to use microsoft like tactics to bully them onto your platform? Are you going to force people to spend a lot more money, just to be able to use Google applications?

I am disgusted!

So I have moved continents and am now in Pisa, Italy. I see the leaning tower everyday (yes, I do. While crossing one of the roads, if I look right, there it is !). Life is good, and a lot of fun. Made new friends, and had fun in general.

Now, what are my observations of this place.

1. Italy is amongst the warmer countries of Europe. But don’t get misled. Warm means, you go down to only around -2 or -3 in the night. Not lower. So yes, Italy is warm.
2. I am sick of cheese. The rule of thumb here is, if you cannot figure out what something in the menu is, 99 times out of 98, it is some type of cheese. I mean who names a cheese “Gorgonzola”. That sounds like the name of a monster destroying some japanese city in a horror film! But no, that is the name of a cheese.
3. The people are very well dressed. When I start saying things like that, there has to be something. As N found out the hard way, fashion and I, do not really make any sense. But, I am confident that at the end of my stay in this country, I will be more fashion aware than my sister who does that for a living!
4. There are Indians everywhere in the world! I sit down for lunch in the cafeteria, and guess what. There is an Indian to the left of me, there is an Indian to the right of me. And there is a Croat sitting opposite me! Where are the Italians in Italy?!
5. Talking about Indians, turns out the benchmark for your Italian is Mangesh‘s italian. In fact the benchmark for your skill in any language is Mangesh‘s italian.
6. Mangesh’s italian reminds me. I take this moment to invite you to my funeral three years from now. Marko (and he’s the croat) has promised me that if my italian is as bad as Mangesh‘s italian three years from now, he will murder me. Considering my skills in picking up languages, I think its time to start preparing for a funeral and a murder trial. Law enforcement authorities, please note this.
7. Did I mention that Marko sucks at the PS3? (contrary to the rumours he is spreading around in the lab!)
8. The weather. When a Goan finds 6C as warm, you can be sure there is something wrong..

To all my friends on facebook. If you are getting sick of the tower pictures in my album, well, you guys are screwed. There is nothing except the tower (and yours truly) to see in Pisa. OTOH, Florence seemed quite interesting. Unfortunately my camera’s battery ran out that day.

Now I am wondering. Should this blog now move to http://www.thegianis.in/pisa/blog since I am no longer in Bangalore..

(*: If you read Asterix and Obelix, the title should be apparent )

My irc client got disconnected.
And when i reconnected, my previous session had not disconnected yet.
so i became dhaval`
so then i get

in the meantime peterz and rostedt are arguing about schrodinger and his cat and being the sneak I am, I attempt to trap someone in a wikipedia spiral (starting at idly* of course) and making someone feel hungry
sometime later

–

* Noticed the sneaky attempt yet again?

At the risk of being hit over by NDTV’s legal team, let me add a disclaimer. I am not attacking Barkha Dutt. These are questons I have for Barkha Dutt after seeing the “We the people” on August 30th, 2009.

For sometime I have noticed (and this might be a perception I have and if it is wrong, I would like you to correct it), that you seem to be anti hindu. Not directly, but in very subtle sense. Is it something subconscious? Why?

When you were talking about Ayesha (I hope I get the name right), you protected her right to wear a hijab/scarf, but you did not mention that the pressure was brought in by other students who wanted to wear saffron. If she is allowed to wear a hijab, then why are hindu students who wanted to wear saffron right wing fundamentalists?

The next question, why do we not have you looking at real religious problems. Why have a seperate set of laws for muslims and hindus? Why are we not looking at a uniform civil code? Why not look at actually protecting women’s rights? Look at equality, look at progress irrespective of the religion. Why do we want to be held back by religion?

Then a question that I have to ask, which is not aimed at you specifically, but is one that I have had for a number of years. Why is it if I talk about minorities and protecting their right to practice their religion, I am a secularist, but if I talk about my religion (and I belong to the majority religion, but I am not a follower of it to the extent most others are), and protecting my right to practice my religion, it is fundamentalist? Why do I feel that having a debate about religion defending the majority is taboo, and only for fundamentalists? Why has this environment been created?

I am done for now, and hopefully I won’t be forced to take this down

EDIT: Spelling errors corrected. Thanks to tunafish for pointing it out.

guis are great — for multiplexing terminal windows

-Peter Zijlstra