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