Progress....

Blogging this technically after the weekend and feeling generally bored about Monday mornings . Spent the weekend catching up on some movies which was a good way of spending the whole of Saturday night. Watched Blood Diamond , Crash , Mistress of Spices, Walk the line , Dor and what not . After a long time stayed up till 7 in the morning. However the result of that activity is that I slept through the whole day getting up only for meals and more sleep . Listening to the music of Pachai Kili Muthucharam streaming over the internet on totem on ubuntu . Now thats really progress as far as Linux goes. It used to be a pain to get sound working - you needed to know myriads of options and what not to get it working - alsa - oss and some other black magic . Currently its just a simple install and everything works like magic. Now now like my uncle says that a computer is useless unless it makes food for him , I wouldn't be surprised that very soon we should have a linux powered robot which doubles up as a cook . The day such a product is made - I'll gift it to him.

Comfortably Numb"ed"....

The Sunday was spent in driving down to Bombay for the big Roger Waters - Dark Side of the Moon concert. Wow! it really was worth every picometre covered in the drive . The concert started bang on time and finished on time too. In the middle was all the fun - quadsonic sound, flying pigs, a number of taunts at the war(s) in Iraq and above all fantastic music. It was worth every single second spent there and every single drop of sweat spent in standing in a huge crowd which was bent on crushing every person standing ...

By the time he got to the Dark Side of the Moon the crowd was totally primed and roaring. Shine on you crazy diamond was received with absolute adulation and then once the band finished playing the Dark Side of the moon . they disappeared ...........only to make you feel cheated ... Then they reappeared to play the all time classics - Brick in the wall, Vera , Another Brick in the wall leaving the audience comfortably numbed...

The unexpected vacation draws to a close.

Hardly expected that I wouldn't be hacking into GCC despite sitting in the city of sweat (Madras) but then it turned out into an unexpected vacation . Here on a private visit for some functions in the family it turned out to be a lot of work in terms of running around , meeting relatives getting some decent photographs, visiting a village our so called ancestral village of Vengalathur . It was certainly a hectic trip. Today looks much better as I have to pay my yearly visit to Landmark and hopefully obtain a few books. Ah Monday Morning approaches and with it a flight at 5:30 in the morning back to what is home these days. Long week lined up but then ......

theppamcloseup

DSC_0680
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

The actual theppam close up . This was shot from nearly 50 meters away with a whole bunch of folks standing between me and the theppam. Its the closest shot I could get to the theppam.

The theppams or the floats of Madras

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The weekend has been spent in the city of sweat (Madras) and in the middle of all the rituals and festivities I found the time to go and see the Theppam (Float) festival on Saturday in Mylapore (Madras) .

This was organized for the first time in nearly 2 or 3 decades because of the simple reason that there was never enough water in the Mylapore tank for such events. Some stunning photos were as usual the order of the day - Links will be available tomorrow as I upload some of the pics - The advantage of carrying the D50 is that the policemen on duty here mistook me for a Press Photographer and allowed me full access. Some of the panoramic photos make for very nice viewing.

Other than today I need to get back to hacking GCC and finishing a patch that is long long and long overdue ! Its just not working and proves how much of a pain backporting patches can be .

Elections our experiment with Democracy !

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Indeed our experiment with democracy leads to very interesting sights. This morning I was running to catch a train that would hopefully get me to Bombay in time when I ran into a huge traffic jam which enabled me to move nearly 400m in 45 min. Finally getting irritated I got out of the rick to walk the remaining 4 km. to the station lugging a suitcase and the customary uniform of the laptop, the nikon D50 and a smaller bag !

The reason for this was the result of the civic poll that was getting announced this morning near the Pune Municipal corporation . Our leaders were so busy getting elected that they forgot the very purpose for which they were getting elected - serve the people. They served the people well by indulging in squallid vote-grubbing exercises, providing free crap to people and forgetting to remember the fact that folks needed to travel. There was an ambulance stuck behind my rick and there was *nothing* that could be done to free it. There were half a dozen traffic cops who incidentally should get rid of their uniforms and go drown in the Mutha or the Mula which ever is dirtier (Mutha and Mula are the 2 rivers in the city of Pune which I inhabit) . The cops did nothing to free the roads of marauding crowds who had parked bikes and two wheelers on all the footpaths enabling the zillions of onlookers to spill on to the streets causing utter chaos, irritation and a n utter waste of time.


Its a miracle that the public didn't beat them up today. I was ready to jump into the melee if and when it started. What a waste of time , fuel and energy and irritation . Have a couple of interesting pictures which I'll put up once I have my set up going.

Of weekends , south indian movies and games of basketball.

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A movie (Guru), a game of basketball - sleep and good South Indian food is a valid weekend - Somehow have to drag myself out of bed in the morning tomorrow to either go down to Karla / Baja caves or drive down to Panhala to get some decent photographs. In any case I have a trip planned for next week down to Madras via Bombay which gives the chance to get more pictures. A highlight of the coming trip is a chance to visit the old village from where our ancestors are supposed to have migrated to the cities . Its a small village near Madras - maybe around 100 km. and can be visited in a day . Don't expect to be able to take too many photographs there but can atleast attempt.

Noses to the grindstone

Across the pale parabola of joy: "BlogT"

Its been a crazy couple of days at work looking at various things as is usually my ambit :) . Finally finally fixed a major piece of work in GCC . Hopefully now we should have some more improvements in the code generated for a particular piece of GCC that I am hacking on . This coming weekend is a long weekend for all of us ! 26th of January beckons and is good to be off for the whole weekend. However getting even with work is also important considering the amount of backlog that has accumulated over time .

My li'l sister managed to achieve quite a few interesting things like becoming the 10800'th global risk practitioner to be certified by the GARP ( Global Association of Risk Practioners ) . Everyone but her was sure that she'd crack it and as is usually the case with the boss - such things happen .

Nose back to the grindstone eh !

LLVM an interesting project.

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Spent most of my Sunday looking at an open source project and reading up on inter-procedural analysis a bit closer . It's called LLVM and looks rather neat. It gained an ARM port from Apple which fuels my speculation that the iphone is going to have ARM in it and Apple is doing some serious optimization at an interprocedural level using LLVM. But again one never knows really !

I tried getting it to build but it looks as though there are some huge API changes which have broken things just when I decided to take on a weekend project ! Its interesting that one can now think of interprocedural optimizations ... I'd love to lay my hands on that at some point of time.

Some cricket finally.

Across the pale parabola of joy At the place where I work we finally decided that we wanted to play a game of cricket and ended up challenging another company to a friendly game of tennis ball cricket ! Not too bad - we actually managed to get 3 games in the week among ourselves and had to get to a point of choosing a 11 which is a commendable achievement at the place where I work.

The day dawned rather decently and as usual I managed to get to office in time - I was the 5th guy or so in office so it wasn't too bad. We managed to reach the ground to find it totally occupied and jam packed . After a rather interesting wait we managed to throw out a couple of committed cricket teams out of the ground and started our game. Thankfully I didn't have to call the toss having lost all the tosses so far this week and left the responsiblity to A our esteemed captain fresh from a stint at the nets at the Oval. We won the toss and promptly chose the best thing to do on a typically dusty pitch - bat. We batted rather decently, gave a couple of chances and ended up with 112 / 3 in 16 overs - not bad considering our feeling that our batting wasn't up to the mark. We then managed to bowl the opposition out for around 80 runs in 15 overs with yours truly bowling what seems to be a very long 4 over spell on the trot which left me feeling as old as every minute of my existence on planet earth( nearly 14716800 at the end of the year! ). Parts of my body that I didn't know that existed are aching and its with that happy feeling that I am posting this and dozing off to sleep.

Sunset enroute to Bhimashankar.

dsc_0571
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

From the previous post a sunset pic !

Wanderlust.

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After 2 weekends sitting at home taking care of a chest congestion, it was time to break free and run off away to some place. Wandering took me on to the re-done Pune - Nasik road via Chakan. Its 4 lane until Rajguru-nagar after which it turns 2 lane - It reminded me of the Nagar - Shirdi road which is quite picturesque being in the middle of a canopy of trees. It was quite a drive, though only 128 km from Pune I did it one way in 4 hours thanks to a variety of breaks for some stunning photography . The other reason for such wanderlust is utilizing the 1GB SD card in my Nikon D50 DSLR and attempting some photographs.

Bhimashankar is about 128 km from Pune, take the Pune Nasik highway and turn off near Manchar village. You'll get to the Dimbe dam a large dam on the Bhima river from where its around 35 km. That stretch is among the worst in the whole travel otherwise its quite a beautiful drive along wheat fields, paddy fields and some brick kilns here and there. Since I spent more time in driving I ended up in Bhimashankar around 7:30 p.m.- there's a small temple for a jyotirlinga of Lord Shiva. This is supposed to be among 12 swayambhu Shiva temples in India. However because of its religious significance I didn't want to antagonize anyone by taking photographs of the temple by itself.

Left Bhimashankar around 8:20 p.m. and reached home by around 11 p.m. a drive of around 2:30 min. In the process of driving back I managed to make my car fly by going too far to the left trying to avoid a rampaging Indicab and ended up hitting a stone on the front left wheel ! There was a sound , a minute of flight and then an interesting landing. Its left my wheel in a bit of shambles.

The year seems to be the year of long weekends which will only serve to encourage me on more photographic expeditions around Western Maharashtra - some of the places that I want to visit include Raigad - the capital of Shivaji, Kolhapur to see anything of the wide Krishna river and the Panhala fort , Nasik to see Triambak and the origins of the Godavari . All this in the trusty new WagonR with or without company. !

Hello World !

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2007 it is eh ? The day dawns as splendidly as ever with me expunging more and more of fluids which have ended up collecting in my sinuses.

Watched a couple of malayalam flicks over the weekend . Its interesting to note that they are slowly moving towards the Tamil masala flicks also - they are getting there.

Today's another lazy day - Possibly will end up sleeping all day to get rid of my bug !

The year endeth and a new one is born

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The year 2006 draws to a close finally. It looks as though I'll be celebrating the new year sitting at home with a rather virulent attack of the flu / sinusitis. Its a miracle that the body can produce so much fluid out of the face especially with a reduced intake of fluids :P .

Other than feeling miserable, taking Woosterish concoctions of Jeeves fame trying to restore my mucous tissues to normalcy there and feeling generally as miserable as only a cold can leave you, there is nothing much to write about .


The other event of the week has been the amazing drubbing of the poms by the Australians down under - 3 days for a single test match and defeating them by an innings after having won the test series by 3-0 .

The biggest event of the day though is the execution of Saddam Hussain in Iraq - It would be interesting to see the kinds of reactions to this .

Ah sundays !

Across the pale parabola of joy

and watching India play well in a test match in South Africa was a refreshing change over the weekend. The English batsmen have learnt how to play Shane Warne, with Ian Bell actually coming down the track to him a couple of things. Makes you wonder sometimes if you are high on something or in a blue funk over the weekend. Then you pinch yourself and the muscles are still stiff from the game of cricket the other day then you realize that you aren't dreaming :) and all this is for real.

You still think that you are dreaming when South Africa are 84 all out in their first innings - now chasing 400 odd by playing hop step and jump to Sreesanth and VRV Singh and even to the odd cricket ball from one Saurabh "Prince of Kolkata" Ganguly. It was good seeing Sreesanth dish back and not take nonsense from Andre Nel who thinks he can sledge his wickets. The beauty was in the celebration which made you laugh so much and must have really helped us get under the South African skin.

Mickey Arthur ( the coach of South Africa) last heard was asking for the curator of a dust bowl from India to help even the odds for the match at Kingsmead. Bring 'em on.

The joys of playing cricket.

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Ah, the back's stiff - the shoulder's hurt, and the body feels stiff . Just proves that whatever you do in a gym and how much ever you climb Hanuman Tekdi - a game of cricket can still be a tough task . The fun factor is so much better - actually got to bowling on a pretty bad pitch and got some decent balls in. Now batting was another story - got bowled off the first ball and then run out in the second match backing up too far.

It was a typical match played in parallel to another match which was being played by the Royal Club of Nepal in honour of all the Nepali employees in the city of Pune and fielders from one match happily walked across the pitch of the other when the bowler was just about to start his runup . Reminded one of the times on the hallowed turfs of RKMVC ( for the uninitiated thats RKM Vivekananda College where one spent many hours of his wild undergraduate days improving his vocabulary in Tamil and playing the game of cricket. !) and the grounds of MRC. Though our MRC ground has turned into a posh apartment complex and robbed us of many days of fun .

Sunset in Vancouver

Sunset in Vancouver
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

This the photo finally.

Bangalore the city of joys, traffic and pollution

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Any trip to Bangalore a city of many sobriquets gives a vision of the future for Pune. Ostensibly on a private trip I realized how much similar Pune was to Bangalore in the lack of public transport, road infrastructure, traffic congestions .. Log jams well the very definition is in Bangalore. Thank god we are still some way away from being Bangalored !

Other than the trip over the weekend and the last 2 days of last week it was good to talk to a couple of old friends and figure out what they were upto in the grand old profession of being a geek for hire.

James "Bollywood" Bond.

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One fine day - Let the team bond with James Bond was the mission of our new management in the company I work at :). So what do we do , we went for the opening day festivities associated with the new James Bond movie (Casino Royale ) .. We could always afford the tickets earlier, no one really pushed us to go see a movie together earlier !

The movie by itself wasn't all that bad though it was quite Bollywoodish . MIA were Q and MoneyPenny though there was a subtle reference to her in the movie. It wasn't a typical Bond movie though Daniel Craig reminds one of Boris Becker - The usual ingredients were there but missing was a usual noisy Bond exit. Somehow Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery really are the good James Bond's ...

Daniel Craig tries but he still has a way to go .. But then this is the prequel to all the other Bond movies, so maybe he'll be more suave and the complete package next time.

Worth a watch though.

Beryl and Edgy - The revenge of the weenie

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Wobbly windows on your Intel 82865G card... You must be joking was the polite answer at work by the rookie geek at work 4-6 months back when the XGL / Compiz mania hit the geeks at the place I work . The more macho answers ranged from asking me to grow up or drink something stronger than ethanol.

Today I have the cube, wobbly windows AIGLX working on my Desktop with the following.

root@numenor:/home/ramana# lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

And how long did this take me .
Time for an aptitude dist-upgrade to edgy eft
Time for google to find out install instructions for beryl

Figured that AIGLX was already there in edgy. So bye bye XGL .
aptitude install beryl emerald

$>beryl-manager ... .

And now the cube rotates !

You can see it here

Darn! STill can't get xine to play the movie across the edges of the cube. :(