The Blog

Life is all about suffering or correcting the mistakes one has made. Life is all about feeling the sorrow as much as the joy you do. In this life, I want to feel the sadness as much as the joy, because it is what reminds that I am alive, and that life hangs by just a thin string..

PS: Nothing to be concerned about, just stuff I wanted to get out of my head..

A series of incidents about an intersting night..

The sighing friend had invited me to join her friends for dancing, and my first reaction was, “yeah, right! me and dance! fat chance.” And then we had the sighing cousin who decided that I was “normal”. Nothing hurt my ego as much as being told I am not a geek but instead I am “normal”. Then, this happened..

<dhaval> tglx, did that include dessert?

<tglx> and you still need to take care of the drinks

<dhaval> tglx, does the converse hold true. A meal is equivalent to 5 beers? so after eating, one should be high

<tglx> dhaval:

ah.. back to form

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The evening started and it started pouring! But the sighing friend said that we were still hanging out. So I step out of the house, walk ten steps and before I realize it, I am in ankle deep water. Thankfully I realized it early enough to pull up my jeans before they got wet. half a kilometre of ankle deep water. cold water! and no electricity. Thankfully no traffic otherwise I would have spent an hour in an auto itself!

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Hypnos is the site of yet another adventure we had. And we were back here again. And I had entered a zone I would have never otherwise entered.

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What do you do if you are a non drinker and two pretty girls are convincing you take vodka shots. i said no. Wonder if it was the wrong decision. A word to the two girls, for a non-drinker, a shot sounds quite scary. Maybe if you had tried something a bit easier, it might have worked. What would you have done? (comments appreciated)

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The cricket match was a real treat. Bangalore kicked some hyderabad ass :D. What a game! Especially when one of the batsman scores a century.

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I don’t mind dancing. As long as I don’t get conscious. There were some awesome dancers. All four, sighing friend, sighing cousin, sighing kid and sighing sun were all really good. And that is what made me conscious. (Apparently the sighing group thought that having a shot would have made me lose my inhibitions. For the record, I was just nervous.) And there was yet another girl. What a dancer. Wow!

–

The sighing cousin decided that it was sighing friend’s birthday and so goes and tells the DJ that it is her birthday. The DJ announces it to the room and we start celebrating. The “yet another girl” felt bad that she forgot to wish sighing friend a happy birthday and ordered a cake for her! Some of that cake made it to the sighing cousin’s face as well :). Good job sighing cousin!

–

I am sure I am forgetting some other significant incidents. Once I remember (or am reminded of them), I shall put them up.

It was an interesting night. Certainly fun, but a lot more as well. Hope to do more of it and get more comfortable with it. And hopefully build up non-existant social skills

Since this took place, I have sort of decided real time was a good option, and so ego and I had yet another one of the crazy conversations…

(11:35:18 AM) Dhaval: anyway, the headache got diagnosed as a tension headache by the doc
(11:35:31 AM) Dhaval: so dipankar gave me the “women trouble” talk
(11:35:39 AM) Gautham: ah, okay
(11:35:42 AM) Dhaval: dude. the most embarrasing few mins i have had in a few days
(11:35:45 AM) Gautham: tension
(11:35:52 AM) Gautham: what happened ?
(11:35:55 AM) Gautham: woman trouble ?
(11:36:08 AM) Dhaval: there should be woman to cause woman trouble
(11:36:18 AM) Gautham: well, isn’t there one ?
(11:36:18 AM) Dhaval: (though there is one now, and she ain’t causing any trouble yet!)
(11:36:25 AM) Gautham: i thought you had a multi-queue scheduler
(11:36:39 AM) Gautham: well, trouble comes in various forms
(11:36:41 AM) Dhaval: did you not see my last status?
(11:37:03 AM) Gautham: nope
(11:37:19 AM) Dhaval: it was “scheduling real time now”
(11:37:32 AM) Dhaval was doing fair group scheduling earlier
(11:37:42 AM) Gautham: I can understand
(11:37:47 AM) Gautham: when you have realtime tasks
(11:37:58 AM) Gautham: the other tasks, which are performance oriented and long running tend to suffer
(11:38:01 AM) Gautham: have experienced this
(11:38:07 AM) Gautham: and it wasn’t a great experience
(11:38:22 AM) Dhaval: oh man
(11:38:23 AM) Gautham: so, i tend to run them on different boxes thes days!
(11:38:27 AM) Dhaval: the women troible talk from you as well?!
(11:38:47 AM) Gautham: Just passing on the experience so that human species evolves without repeating mistakes
(11:38:51 AM) Dhaval: yeah. i have started limiting myself to just 3-4 these days
(11:39:26 AM) Gautham: In my case it was worse
(11:39:38 AM) Gautham: the realtime jobs were long running as well as latency sensitive!
(11:39:44 AM) Gautham: which means, they’re going to hog the machine
(11:39:46 AM) Gautham: complete
(11:39:47 AM) Gautham: ly
(11:39:50 AM) Gautham: no time for other interrupts
(11:39:50 AM) Dhaval: dude. see, that is why you do the fair scheduling
(11:39:56 AM) Gautham: well, not for rt!
(11:40:00 AM) Gautham: you simply can’t
(11:40:05 AM) Gautham: i was running a -rt kernel
(11:40:12 AM) Dhaval: i know. you cannot have too many rt processes running
(11:40:18 AM) Dhaval: remember, you have only 1 core :/
(11:40:23 AM) Gautham: i had one -rt long running process
(11:40:46 AM) Dhaval: you need one whcih can take a few deadline misses once in a while
(11:40:47 AM) Dhaval:
(11:40:49 AM) Dhaval: a robust one
(11:40:51 AM) Dhaval: get married
(11:40:54 AM) Dhaval: it will allow that to happen
(11:40:54 AM) Dhaval:
(11:40:55 AM) Gautham: heh!
(11:40:59 AM) Gautham: yeah, true!
(11:41:03 AM) Gautham: which i didn’t want to do
(11:41:08 AM) Gautham: hence changed the kernel back to fair sched
(11:41:10 AM) Dhaval: so then you better get used to the strict latency
(11:41:10 AM) Gautham: no rt
(11:41:11 AM) Dhaval: heh
(11:41:15 AM) Gautham: and interrtups are not threaded!
(11:41:18 AM) Dhaval: poor tglx won’t like that one
(11:41:21 AM) Dhaval: one bit!
(11:41:24 AM) Gautham: well, ingo will!
(11:41:31 AM) Dhaval: i think ingo is preempt-rt dude
(11:41:41 AM) Gautham: okay vatsa will!
(11:41:44 AM) Dhaval: heh
(11:41:54 AM) Dhaval: i am no sure vatsa is interested any longer
(11:41:58 AM) Dhaval: he prefers co-op scheduling
(11:42:04 AM) Dhaval: which would happen after marriage and kids i am sure :/
(11:42:35 AM) Gautham: heh!!!
(11:42:51 AM) Gautham: well, one has to have multiple cores to be able to do that!
(11:42:54 AM) Gautham: it’s advanced stuff
(11:44:19 AM) Dhaval: and you believe vatsa is not advanced enough?
(11:45:27 AM) Gautham: he is! I am not

And after all this analysis, I wonder, why is it that we find rt too hard :/

Today was an interesting day, something I would really not do normally, but did do, and I quite enjoyed myself.

The highlight of the day was meeting a sighing friend (who is quite bizzare), her baby friends and her cousin. It was her cousin who had me a bit uncomfortable for sometime. (I am not sure if she was just making fun of me, or if she was serious), but there were a few questions she asked me, to which the answers I gave did not even convince me. And this made me reevaluate some of my beliefs in life. Turns out in the end, it was because I used the wrongs words that I could not answer her questions convincingly.

The first question was, “Are you one of those who think life is unfair?”. And my answer was “life is what you make of it” (or some other words which I wanted to convey this effect, though I am not sure how successful I was in that endeavour).  To which her response was yet another question. “Do you think life is supposed to be logical or do you look for the logic in life?”. My answer to this was in the affirmative and I got one hell of a lecture. And I had no answer for it. Once I got back home, I started evaluating the question, and my answer and wondered if I was following a wrong belief in life. And here is my analysis.

The first question was misunderstood by me. I for some reason took fairness to be the same as ease. And now that I have this corrected, I would modify my answer to be, “Life is not meant to be easy, but at the end of the day it will be fair. If you do wrong, you will be wronged, and if you have been wronged, you will be righted as well later on”. The other very strong belief I have is that everything happens for the good. Time and again this lesson has been forced onto me and I have started becoming more accepting of things going bad with me, with the belief that it is for the best. Anyway, this question was not the one that disturbed me.

What disturbed me was the second question and the fact that I did not have answer to that. I started re-evaluating my thoughts when I realized that the answer had been there in front of me all along. What is logic? logic is a pattern. What happens in an IQ test, the one who identifies the most patterns and the most obscure patterns is supposedly the most intelligent. Now, however powerful and complex the human brain is, there is a limit to the complexity it can handle. It has to follow a pattern. Say for example, when one gets up, one brushes, then shaves, then bathes, has breakfast and goes to work. This is a pattern. Another pattern is followed during the weekend. Even the so called “non-patterns” can be “patterned” at a higher level. And the moment you find patterns, you have found logic. Voila! I think the high-IQ people find it easier to find the logic since they are trained to find patterns. (Note, I did not say high IQ means smarter. I am not sure about that, and the definition of smartness is up for debate. FWIW, I thought the sighing cousin was quite smart, but more on that later on…). So, the answer to sighing cousin is life has logic, like it or not. You might not just be having a high enough IQ to see it (which is why the previous statement )

Now, you may choose not to find the logic, which is a completely different issue altogether and I might have completely misunderstood the question as well. But at least now I can rest with a clear mind that I did not have beliefs shattered (at least until the comments start coming in!)

Once again, an interesting turn of events on IRC

* peterz` (n=peterz@e53227.upc-e.chello.nl) has joined #linux-rt
* peterz has quit (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out))
<henr_k> tglx: what exactly does 1st derivative of peterz mean? In order for that to mean anything, what does f_{peterz}(X) describe? (where X is a vector describing the input)
<tglx> henr_k: peterz(x) vs. peterz`(x)
<tglx> he’s is around in his derivative form right now
<tglx> x might be awakeness, work hours, lines of code or whatever you put in
<henr_k> so, peterz’(x) is the speed of peterz. I guess then, that his employer would be interested in Peterz(X) (the integral form)
<tglx> hehehe

Thanks to tglx

Rule #1: Pinhead is always right

Rule #2: If for some reason pinhead is not right, see rule #1

There have been some interesting flames I have been seeing on the LKML. These brought me about to the most important rule on the LKML.

Rule -1:  Don’t piss off the big guys unless you have a good enough reason.

And a corollary to Rule -1: No reason is good enough to piss of the big guys.

<peterz> balbir_: think of it as a heisenberg uncertainty rule, the larger your parallel machine, the less acurate you can report on a global state

Its been over 2 years since my first patch was accepted into the Linux Kernel. And even today, having a patch accepted in gives me the same pleasure. Hope this honeymoon continues on for ever and ever.

Some of the random events happening, which I felt like capturing

I finally figured out that by changing a bus at KR Puram, I can go all the way to Manyata in a volvo bus. This comes out to about half the auto fare and is way more comfortable. While returning back one of these days, I was headed out to forum to meet a cousin of mine, who was in bangalore for those couple of days. I was tired, and exhausted as I had just returned the previous night from Mumbai. The bus was not very crowded and midway through a man climbed in with his two kids. The man was noticeably poor, and not someone who would usually climb in the BMTC volvo (fares of which are almost 3 times that of the regular buses) for travel. The kids were on the volvo for maybe their first, maybe one of their very rare rides on these buses. With the bus empty, the kids were very excited and running around. Normally, I would have frowned upon such behaviour, since it troubles the other commuters and after a hard day at work, I would normally like a calm trip back home. But what was different that day was the smiles and obvious joy on their faces. The playful behaviour, as opposed the tantrums I have gotten used to seeing, was a welcome change, and brought about a smile on my face. It just made the long trip on the bus to silk board way more bearable.

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Valentine’s day! I could have never said that I have broken hearts but this Valentine’s Day was very different. Originally a classmate of mine and I had a plan to head out to some movie on friday, but it turned out I had a two hour conference call scheduled that day, so we decided to spend the night gaming. Turned out that he could not make it, since he was in a 1×1 with his manager and it would be late by the time he would get out. About an hour into the conference call, my doorbell rang, and this dude was here, and he had a disappointed look. Once I got through the conference call, I came to know he had a very stressful (and disappointing) 1×1 with his manager. Both of us were in the mood to bust some stress, and started Resistance in co-operative mode. Now, sometime after midnight I got a phone call from person X (for the purpose of this blog and to protect the person’s identity). My first response is “Can I call you later, I am a bit busy shooting aliens”. Person X wishes me happy valentine’s day and i respond back with a “same to you” and hang up. At this point my classmate asks me, “Dude, was that a girl?”. And I respond in affirmative which shocks him. “Dude, what were you thinking? She must have been waiting since eight and calls you up and you respond back, “I am busy shooting!”. You mad or what.”. Mind you, at this point in time, I had still not realized it was valentine’s day. And I reply back, well I am busy, let’s continue kicking some alien butt. This guy was still flabbergasted, and had just a “Dude!” in response. At this point in time I felt a bit bad for hanging up just like that, but it was late, almost 1 am and it is rude to call up a girl who is not your SO (SO acronym thanks to Paul Mckenney) at such an hour (Yes! I still have not realized its valentine’s day) and decide to call her up the next morning. Thankfully for me, she picked up the phone the next day, and talked with me, which was around the time I realized it was valentine’s day

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Valentine’s Day had another set of miseries wrought upon me. (Just kidding!). The next day I was taking out my aunt, uncle and cousins for lunch to little italy. When I reached there, I was ambushed by the girls giving me a present, “Happy Birthday, Dhaval Bhaiya!”. I was taken aback because my birthday is still quite some distance away, and I looked down at the box to see a heart shaped label saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day Dhaval bhaiya! Love Richa and KJ”. Now this was something quite unexpected, and I had a book which Richa had asked me long back which on giving her disappointed Kaajal, who went into tears since she also wanted something. My aunt quite enjoyed all this and parts with, “Dhaval, you better learn to handle all this. They don’t change much when they grow older.”

–

The day continued on, as a couple of girls came and sat on the table next to ours, infact the table right next to mine. Now obviously I was not in a position to check them out, but my uncle was in the perfect position. So my aunt looks at me, and then at the girls and then my uncle, and tells him, “I think Dhaval would love to exchange places with you.”

–

Kaajal finally decided to talk to me, and wanted to show me a magic trick which invovled her hiding me behind her napkin. After a few failed attempts, my aunt started getting embarrassed (or maybe decided to embarrass me) and tells Kaajal that “Kaajal stop doing that. Dhaval bhaiya has friends around, and they will make fun of him”. This took me by surprise since I did not know anybody around, and in any case, I don’t quite care about others when I am playing with the girls, and don’t mind them playing around. Kaajal then asks (and quite loudly at that) “Where?” and to me, “Where, Dhaval bhaiya?”. My aunt looked at the two girls in the table next to ours and says, “They are sitting on the table next to ours. Go say hi” (maybe the “go say hi” part was said by my uncle, I don’t quite remember). I haven’t been so embarrassed in a while!

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Talking about heart breaks, the box Kaajal and Richa gave me consisted of two heart shaped cookies. Now when it was time for dessert, we decided to have the cookies, and they wanted to share one cookie. I passed it to my uncle, who broke it into two, giving me the opportunity to ask my aunt, “Does he do that often?”. (For those who did not follow it, the cookie was heart shaped)

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Talking about bad days, I could do no right on Monday. One really simple patch went through 6 iterations, before it finally makes sense. See here for an example of how bad it was. And to show you how bad, see the reply to that here.