Talk about humour ..

This is what the geek world is all about.

Do an egrep -ir "( fuck)|( shit)" * in your distro's kernel source.
Be careful , dont spill that coffee/beer into your keyboard while you're laughing.

Writing funny comments makes the reader chill, sip his/her coffee and carry on.
Its good for health, no seriously.

Even I write funny comments, in my code... its better than just //Ashwin

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Comprende amigo ?

Got this fwd in my mail a few weeks back ...

>> For those in their twenty-something's...this puts it all into words

>> perfectly. They call it the "Quarter-life Crisis."



Some things seem to match, but some dont, read on ...



>> It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that

>> there are a lot of things about yourself that you didn't know and may or

>> may not like.

I'd agree.. I am more inquisitve than before...however.. i get answers to most of my questions.

>> You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two,

>> but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.



Umm. I'm not insecure, but I've grown to be more ambitious

in my professional life and proven to myself that breakthroughs

however big or small dont happen all that infrequently if the job

is done passionately. So, I'd say, I'm getting more confident, but

 will never be blase or over-confident.



>> You look at your job. It is not even close to what you thought you would

>> be doing or maybe you are looking for one and realizing that you are going

>> to have to start at the bottom and are scared.



Exact opposite ! I'm really lucky with my job, I know the

state of some of my buddies, who still dont have work. I'm

invariably challenged with tasks, that prove my competency,

and earn me some well deserved respect and satisfaction.



>> You miss the comforts of college, of groups, of socializing with the same

>> people on a constant basis. But then you realize that maybe they weren't

>> so great after all.



True, that I miss the comforts of college, but back in college I dreamed of

 being where I am today, so its all good.



>> Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find

>> yourself judging a bit more than usual because suddenly you realize that

>> you have certain boundaries in your life and add things to your list of

>> what is acceptable and what is not. You are insecure and then secure.



True.



>> You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and

>> scared and confused.

>> Suddenly change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with

>> dear life but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further

>> away and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward.



I'd take it more gracefully.



>> You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such

>> damage to you or you lay in bed and wonder why you can't meet anyone

>> decent enough to get to know better.



Oh so true.



>> You love someone but maybe love someone else too and cannot figure out why

>> you are doing this because you are not a bad person.



err. no comment. : )



>> One night stands and random hook ups start to look cheap and getting

>> wasted and acting like an idiot starts to look pathetic. You go through

>> the same emotions and questions over and over and talk with your friends

>> about the same topics because you cannot seem to make a decision.



first line : no comment ;) But rest of it is very true.



>> You worry about loans and money and the future and making a life for

>> yourself and while winning the race would be great, right now you'd just

>> like to be a contender!



As long as I earn the respect, and give my task my best shot, I'm satisfied.



>> What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We

>> are  in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can

>> to figure this whole thing out.



Im sure this is true.

Like, Ouch !?

The pain, the migrane, aah unbearable , this one !
I can understand the haiku amongst geeks, general IQ tests I mean, code challenges and the like. But this ! I cant look at it, although I wish I could someday achieve that apotheosis.

Take a look at this ..

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/11/give-up.html

then this ..

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/news/2004-10-13/google/

Mathematica !!??

A few days back, I was begining to feel better that I could finally answer "whats the coolest hack you've ever done ?" in the GLAT
and this just spoils the fun, doesnt it ?

Mailing list flame wars ..

There's no end to this ! It all started the day I started my job, and was giving a task of writing some snippets in an LCD driver; in linux of course. I had to find out some ways of getting hold of memory allocated by the kernel cache pool, for ARM ( Advanced RISC machines) architectures. So I posted this query on the ARM mailing lists, from my hotmail account. Little did I know, every mail I sent from hotmail to the list, was getting duplicated as a new entry ! Russel King , the _dude_ who wrote and maintains the ARM linux kernels, got pissed off and started to abuse. He said " and wtf (why the fsck) do you think you can post it twice everytime !? ", to which I retorted " htf ( how the fsck ) do I know that its comes twice through hotmail !?" ... and it continued from there on .. However, I had many people to my defense,.. someone there said to Russel that he should cool down, coz everyone knows how hard he works and etc etc .. At the end of it , I didnt get the answer to my question at all ! later on , of course I got the job done.

Again, on the linux LVM (logical volume manager) mailing lists , I wanted to know if the RAID 1 driver could be done on 1 disk with several partitions on it... coz so far we've read from texts that RAID <> needs more than one disk and so on ...

Now, the reason why I asked about RAID 1 on one disk was, to find an alternative to hacking the kernel IDE subsystem and obtaining the same functionality of RAID 1 ( mirroring).
History repeated again, only this time , my mails didnt repeat, but people started asking me the same question over and over again , as to why would anyone be as silly to have RAID 1 on a single disk !

Im like " tere baap ka kya jara" , I just need to know if its possible or not , simple. Although I got the answer to it, some really inquisitive chap found it hard to believe that I could hack the kernel IDE subsys to get RAID 1 functionality and so wanted to know how its done. I told him that, and yet again , the dude ,wonders why I was trying to do it, when "md" ( multiple disk) modules were part of the kernel these days ! Again "tere baap ka kya jara" ...

So, moral of the story, expect uber-geeks to act really stupid once in a while.

But still class Geek : public Earth {

AKA The geek shall inherit the Earth.

PS: Just in case you're still wondering why the IDE hack ? ( im sure most of you arent) ..well, RAID needs to have "formatted "partitions with filesystems mounted on them ... So the IDE hack , will eleminate that need , all I need is one formatted partition , be it any filesystem, the rest could very well be unallocated space ! , kewl in'nit ?

Hello me , its me again ..

Its been a long time since I wrote anything here. Since its _my_ blog and I tap into myself when I begin typing anything here .. hence the title. So, there hasnt been much on my mind, except buffer cache's and IDE controller device drivers. The last few days made me switch onto a totally workaholic track.

Come friday next week and I shall be the proud owner of one of these WiFi babies !
802.11g WiFi cards. What will I do with it !? .. the USB dongle driver for linux is kind of incomplete, so I hope to contribute there. What does the driver do ?! It'll make my computer work like a Wireless Access point. I've worked on this for 802.11b and on the PCMCIA driver before, so I think I know what Im doing.

Meanwhile, one of my buddies got his X-Box... now I'm convinced .. _there_is_a_God ; ) Now, we just need to get that thing modded, coz the games are ridiculously overpriced otherwise.

I was just talking to my friends about how we've changed after we graduated. It all happened soo fast, it seems like not too long ago, when we struggling through our semester exams, cramming up loads of text and writing a million sheets of submission work... and now suddenly all this freedom ! Sometimes I feel like those days were much better than now! But then, schooling days seem even better .. almost no worries, didnt even know what real freedom was like ! But yet we enjoyed like crazy. hmmm

What would be a perfectly balanced life, at this stage? In my case, my work life is going pretty well, social life .. not bad at all, then why do I feel like somethings missing ? Is it just the ambition from the work life thats intruding in the other aspects of life ?

Now you know !

Child like curiosity is the best ! Its even better when the "big brains" give it a serious thought and get the answers. Here's a cool one : Why doesnt paper ( or any flat, thin thing) fall straight down ?
What d'ya know ! Cornell gets the answer :

While college students suspect the answer is known to lazy professors -- the ones who allegedly grade essays by throwing them down stairwells to see which sails the farthest -- the so-called falling paper problem has long intrigued scientists.

As Wang explains, "Leaves and paper fall and rise in a seeming chaotic manner. As they fall, air swirls up around their edges, which makes them flutter and tumble. Because the flow changes dramatically around the sharp edges of leaves and paper, known as flow singularity, it makes the prediction of the falling trajectory a challenge."

Im sure we being engineers were on the right track guessing the answer to this ( atleast I was ) but to put it in words *sensibly* is always tough :p