The Blog

I don’t see chrome OS suceeding. Google is making the same mistake we have seen others make in the open source world.

The main complaint I have is that it stinks of NIH. From the google blogpost

And a bit later on

Now the first statement makes me wonder what is it that they are doing which is so special. At least on the LKML I have not seen any discussion on the redesign of the security features we have. And just the idea that the OS would be able to protect the user from malware is absurd. It puts unnecessary pressure on the developers and promotes unsafe user behavior (the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that google wants all our private information so unsafe behavior is good for them).

The second statement makes me wonder. What is it that the current windowing systems do NOT provide. There are tons of them out there. Why is it so hard to take one of them and modify it and contribute BACK to the community. And what is it so special that google engineers can do that open source developers cannot do.

This leads me to the reasons why I believe chrome os will fail. I have some idea of what happens in the open source community. They hate being given a big chunk of code and then expected to maintain it. And IF google expects they will start a project which does something similar to something out there already and expect open source developers to flock there just because Google started it, they are mistaken.

Unless Google expects to spend a lot of money on chrome os to maintain it, the project is going to die. And guess where the money is going to come from. I am not sure (that) the shareholders would be very happy with Google spending a lot of money on basically free software. And more importantly, one that can be exploited by another vendor to undermine Google’s presence.

And LJ shows another very interesting perspective of it here. Tell me Google, what is it that you are doing which is new?

One of the best I have heard in a long time

“I will kill you. I will clone you and kill you and all your clones”

The author, well you know who you are

I was going through a post by Uttaran and it reminded me of some incidents.

1. I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai in a Kingfisher Airlines flight. Generally when I fly, after sitting at the airport, I want water. And I want lots of it. So I finished something like 2 bottles before I got dinner. And at dinner I asked for another bottle. Sometime went by, and I finished the bottle they had given me with the meal, and I wanted more water, and so I hit the call button. And the air hostess came back, and while she was handing me one bottle, she suddenly decided to hand me another saying, “I am sure you will want one more” with a smile I treasured for the rest of the flight

2. The flights in europe. The one from Hamburg to Paris. Sripathi was sitting at the back, so I don’t he knows this one . I don’t like tea or coffee. And the thing I loved about Air France was that they had a hot chocolate option. But it is just that. Hot water and chocolate powder which is a bit on the bitter side. I wanted to add some milk in it and they forgot to give me milk and I asked the air hostess for some milk. There was a lady next to me (no clue from where) who did not speak english (probably german though) and she gives this really nice smile (now, somehow I got the feeling that she was mothering me, but then I just wanted the milk ), and hands the milk she had and then air hostess comes back and gives me milk with a really nice smile. (OK, I seem to have a weakness for nice smiles..)

3. The flight from Paris to Lyon was even better. I wanted both a pepsi and hot chocolate. And the flight was empty and the air hostess was really cute with an even better smile (yep, that seems to be a trend)

4. The flight from Bangalore to Paris and back was similar. Both times I had the window seat and the person next to me went to sleep so I could not get out. And the air hostess used to give me stuff and then give me the expression, “Don’t be a naughty boy now. You should also go to sleep now”.

Now the thing is that while I do realize it is part of the service to be nice, and to be polite and to always smile, what I did notice was the smiles were nicer to a set of few people (which included me). This baffled me since I am not any model material or something. When I mentioned it to smartie, she was sceptical and told me I was only imagining stuff. Then I thought about it, and I realized one thing. Most of the passengers in the flight don’t treat the air hostess humanly. They  order her around, don’t ask her politely, don’t smile. Basically I could go on. And my parents have brought me up to be nice to people. To treat them like you would treat yourself. Smile, be polite, don’t order. Gets you better service, and hopefully keeps them happy as well.

Then again it may just be that my smile is a killer . There was this one awesome evening I had in Goa. I was travelling that night, and mom had given me list for her shopping. It involved me going ot the pharmacy which is probably the most crowded place in vasco. And to think of my luck, it was one of the crowded hours. There was this cute girl inside who was handling customers, she caught my eye, and I smiled at her, and 10 seconds later she was right next to me asking me how she could help me. And bam, 2 mins later thanks to her I was on my way. That led me to temptations and it had to be really crowded again. I thought what’s the big deal, let’s try the smile trick again, and it worked! I was out in 2 more mins and back home in time to relax before going back to Bangalore.

When I mentioned it to smarty, I also realized, if it is a woman hostess, I tend to get things happening a bit more easily (such as the table I want, faster service, I could go on). I guess it all happens when you are polite and smile.

Now if only I could charm the pretty girls so easily.. But well.. that’s life

Random events…

The sighing friend’s college had an exhibition, and since I was doing nothing that saturday I decided to go over and checkout what these artsy types do. Turned out to be an eye opener. It was interesting to say the least, and some of the posters were strong, and while I am sure some of the reactions they evoked in me were not what their authors (or is it creators?) intended, they sure did evoke a response in me. My grateful thanks to the sighing friend for being so patient and explaining to me what every thing was about (and it was hard, because I am clueless about all this stuff).

–

I got a new phone . The first time I have bought an electronics item on impulse without having done adequate research on it. It was love at first sight (don’t worry, enough girls are doing it to me these days as well ). And once I played around with it, I was sold. It has everything I wanted except wifi, but then with the GPRS working out so well, I don’t really need it. Ah, I am in love .

–

Well, the new phone is a nice toy as well to play with. I had loads of fun catching people sleeping at office and clicking those photos and uploading them to facebook.

–

I just realized. I don’t have the patience for folks who are dumb. Dumb being very subjective. This lack of patience is really shocking, but at this stage I am not sure how/why I have become so impatient. Time to work on patience. (And yes, it was another pretty girl for whom I fell for till she opened her mouth..)

–

Kaajal called up the other evening. She wanted me to come over the weekend. The conversation that followed was hilarious

Dhaval (whoops. This is now going into dangerous territory. Time to think quickly): Kaajal, you should ask Mummy. She will tell you (and I hope forgive me for putting her in such a situation )

Anyway, my aunt tells me that Kaajal expects me to be there every sunday. Now that is going to be really interesting.

–

The other night at Raj’s place we all played Uno. That was one hilarious game which lasted forever with Raj and Jason being at it for about half an hour. But that has to be the best game of uno EVER! Thanks guys!

–

I have become a big fan of The Big Bang Theory. What is scary is the way I can relate to the show and how many of those habits I have. I am quite obsessively compulsive about how I do some things. Like the way I like my computer to work, the way I eat my food, the place I sit, the way the kitchen has to run.  And doing it any other way irritates me so much that I feel like exploding. Or maybe the utter inability to speak to pretty girls (there are a few exceptions to that, but mainly because I have sorta become comfortable with them.). Or the ability to dress up. Man, my dress sense sucks utterly. The joke goes on that my share of fashion sense went to my sister and (I like to think) their share of intelligence came to me . But oh no, I am becoming a big bang theory character.

–

Speaking of big bang theory characters, I did not really like Penny (she is attractive, yes). She came about as a shallow person, with very standard girly tastes. But the last episode (where the new tenant, Alicia comes), we got to see a totally different side of her. Made me feel ashamed for having judged her the way I did. Now Penny is my second favourite character from the show. (Of course Sheldon remains the favourite )

–

One of the best evenings ever. Gooba came home and we gamed. We gamed like mad. Those few hours on Need for Speed: Carbon were just mind blowing. I don’t think I have had that much fun racing in a long long time . Dude, you rock! Now if only I can get Pankaj over and kick his ass!!

–

Another awesome evening. Wandering Tuna at Little Italy. It was the first time after you know what happened with you know who at you know where . (And you know who is the same person who got bugged .)

You guys rock absolutely!

–

The chef has left the kitchen. Bid farewell to him on saturday early morning. Will miss having a room mate, but good riddance dude. My house is mine again . Seriously though, awesome two months, the only regret being we did not game enough. I will always remember “The Only Place” where NG brought about so much entertainment. And also “Previously on Autowalla”, the series that will feature on this blog sometime soon . Memories will always remain and a few photos as well

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tglx told me that kernel hackers are supposed to have a life. peterz thinks its silly expecting kernel hackers to have a life. I’ve been doing all silly userspace stuff for the past 2 months. Does that mean I am supposed to have a life?

–

I managed to confuse akpm the other day. Excerpts at the Quotes of the day section here. Don’t worry. I made it all fine as well.

I guess that’s it for this edition. More the next time I blog .

Thanks to tglx

1. The whip is one of the important maintainer tools. If stinking trout does not work, use whip

2.  A good maintainer never rejects his own patches.

3. A maintainer is good by definition

4.  Maintainers are lazy and therefor delegate the ugly work to contributors

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

–

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!

–

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.

–

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)

–

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

–

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