Never thought I’ll write another blog entry here. But I had to vent this out!

Have you guys seen the series of books that goes something like “Teach yourself X in 21 Days”? I mean, can someone, honestly learn something like the C programming language in 21 days and still be able to get some useful programming done? OK, looks like that is one way of selling books! If you thought that is ridiculous, just look at how many books are there on Amazon that go something like “Teach yourself X in 24 hours”!!

Now, people who write books, I believe are perfectly sane, wise people. Does the competition drive someone to use these horrid tactics? So, let’s suppose you own a publishing company and the competition comes up with these titles that claim to teach readers stuff in 21 days or 24 hours. How would you react? I believe that if you are worth your salt, you wouldn’t budge. Example: Take O’Reilly, they don’t have a single title that makes ridiculous claims. If you’re good, you’ll sell. This also reminds me of the movie business. It is not very uncommon for movies of one region to be banned by another, so that local cinema does not suffer! The state of Karnataka does this to Tamil and Hindi Cinema. Recently, Bangladesh lifted its 4-decade old ban on Indian Cinema to boost cine-hall patronage and the local cinema industry is apparently up in arms! Guys, just make good movies. When that happens, people in India will watch your stuff!

That brings me to broadband in India. There are several unlimited plans provided by ISPs here in India. Now, these guys have redefined “unlimited”. How creative! According to Tata Indicom, 50 GB/month is supposed to mean “unlimited”. After that, you will be warned! Their “Fair Usage Policy” document does not clearly mention the course of action when you cross that limit. Airtel’s “Fair Usage Policy” (FUP) document claimed that 100 GB/month was fair or “unlimited” usage and beyond that your connection speed would be cut down to half it’s original for the rest of your billing cycle. Now, its got murkier. Airtel’s now has multiple FUPs (clap clap….)

So, how come they have three 4GB “unlimited” plans for different prices? Does it even make sense to have 3 types of the same plan? Here is what they do. They have buried honesty and straight talk in the “Fair Usage Policy”. And to make matters worse, there can be as many FUPs as there are plans! Take a look at this:

This is the FUP for a 4Mbps plan that costs Rs. 1099. After a mere 12 GB you will be at turtle-speed 256kbps for the rest of your billing cycle! Brilliant! As you get ready to pay more(they have the same plan for Rs. 1399 and for Rs. 1799), your FUP will start looking better and better. Airtel, don’t you guys have ethics? This is so sad! Can’t you guys just talk straight? The average Joe will have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth he may need every month and he will end up choosing some plan that will have no correlation to his usage and he will either end up paying more or will get a useless plan.

On an ending note: Guys who are planning to lean a language in 24 hours or even in 21 days(huge difference, there), read this first. It’s called “Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years” and its by Peter Norvig. He is the co-author of the most widely used book on Artificial Intelligence and is a hacker working for Google. Now if he writes a book with that title, I wonder who will publish it!

After successfully testing out the monochromatic 3310 LCD with the AVR, it was time to test  out the color LCDs that I had purchased. Scouring the Internet I figured out that the easiest ones to interface would be the ones from the Nokia 6610 and the 3530. The 3530 and 3510i are supposed to be the same LCDs.

The 6610 LCD comes with 2 different controllers. The Epson S1D15G10 and the Philips PCF8833. You can find some images here. If you got one with an Philips controller, you are lucky. The Philips controller is supposed to be pretty robust, while the Epson is supposed to be very tricky to get right due to its over sensitive nature to voltages and settings. I was not lucky enough to get a display with a Philips controller. Damn it. Nevertheless, I tried to get the display right. After working on it for days, all I got was an orangish display. No true colors. I was able to display whatever I wanted, but in just one color, Orange. This problem was widely reported on the Net.

The good thing about the 6610 LCD is that it has backlight LEDs already mounted. The 3530 LCD does not have backlight and this can be tricky to set up and color LCDs. You need really powerful, tiny white LEDs to evenly light the LCD from the back. Unless you have a support board, this can be tricky to get right.

After having spent at least 16-20 hours trying to get the 6610 display right, I moved on to the 3530 display that has a lesser resolution of about 97×66, but is good enough for most tasks. I got a display within few hours of work. But when I try to execute the PASET command, the one that sets the cursor on a row you specify, it skips a row! For example, if you are trying to draw a rectangle using a line fill algorithm, the alternate rows would be skipped.  I tried various workarounds, but to no relief. So, I have to sadly let go of my experiments with color. I am wasting too much time and soldering lead on this.

Recently on Slashdot, I read an interesting post. Our friends in Surat, Gujarat, were intalling M$ products for their customers free of cost. So, M$ sent a “customer” and caught the vendor. Wow. What one of the retaliers says is interesting:

“Since we are are not charging anything extra for installing the software, it means that we are actually not trading in pirated software. For us this is just a sewa (selfless act) that we are offering to our customers. Besides, the pricing of their operating systems is way too high for the Indian markets.”

In my various talks involving Linux advocacy, I started out saying Linux was a free alternative to Windows and other related productivity tools. The audience never connected well with this idea. Well, the reason was simple. No one bought a copy of Windows or M$ Office – ever. So, whats the point in replacing software that is running well with Linux and related applications? So when you talk about the “free” as in beer, be very careful. Most guys don’t even know that they are supposed to pay for the M$ software they are using. Go into any independent PC assembler’s office here in Chennai and you will see that software is installed free of cost for any customer who wants to buy an assembled PC. It is all done in the open. Nothing’s hidden.

In the advocacy talks, I moved to free as in freedom and this seem to help a lot. First, is to make the people realize how they can get trapped and then to make them understand the merits of FOSS in the area. Again, if you are talking to business people, they are interested in the traps and the snares. But, if you are speaking to students who are busy learning C with Turbo C, VB and VC++, then this trap business won’t make sense to them. They have never been in a “trap” and so they can’t realize the horror of one. Talk to them about code. Ask them if they have seen the code for a real operating system. This will interest them – take it forward from there.

What is a computer without an user interface? And which user interface is better than just LEDs? Well, LCD! Man, it can talk and show pictures.

I have been reading since long about interfacing a Nokia 3310 LCD to many different microcontrollers. There are many libraries available for these different microcontrollers that make programming these devices trivial. But where to get these devices? Luckily for us Indians, it is ridiculously easy to procure one of them. I just went to Chennai’s Ritchie street and got myself one. Not only did I get a monochrome 3310 LCD, I also got a 4K colour LCD that comes with the Nokia 6610!

The shop was in the dingiest of places. You could never suspect that civilization could exist there. But there it was, teaming with activity. Here you could get virtually any replacement for cell phone spares. What’s more, I saw cell phone repair manuals, with complete schematics! I wonder if these came from China, there was markings in a foreign tongue resembling the Chinese language. Every major Indian city must have one of these shops.

I first asked for a Nokia 3310 display. The shopkeeper promptly asked me if I wanted “O.G” or duplicate. The “O.G” meant original. Beware, these are really not the original spares themselves, just two different qualities of the counterfeit spares available in the market, as I later found out. The 6610 colour display came as a separate package, just the LCD, but the 3310 LCD came with a frame, it also had the ear piece. For some wierd reason, the shopkeeper warned me not to remove the earpiece. I ignored him since I needed space to shove in a capacitor. Things are fine. The “original” and the “duplicate” items had a difference of Rs. 25 among them. The “originals” for the 3310 and the 6610 cost me 150 and 350 respectively.

The 3310 is very simple to interface. It can talk to the SPI port of the AVR or any other microcontroller. It uses a Philips PCD 8455 controller that is simple to understand. But why reinvent the wheel for regular tasks? There is a wonderful library written by our friend, Louis Frigon. You can see that here. So I went about making myself a simple AVR programmer as described by Pramode in his wonderful article here. I was previously running off a breadboard. This time around I bought a ZIF socket for easy installation and removal of the chip being programmed. This can save a lot of time and it is also gentle on the chip.

Then came the part of soldering the 8 wires on the Nokia LCD. Well you don’t need 8, but 7, since pin number 7 is connected to a capacitor that is grounded. I normally use a 10W soldering iron that is available usually for Rs. 20, but this time I knew the old guy was not a match for the precision required for the job. So I got myself a relatively expensive one from Goot that came with a sharp tip.

With this iron, it was easy to solder the wires. I also managed to solder the 4.7 uF electrolytic capacitor on the pad itself. But I guess I pulled the wires a little bit, some pads then became loosely connected, internally, as I would later find out. If your soldering is bad, don’t even try it! Get someone who can do it for you. If you are too used to the breadboard, you may find this a tad difficult. Connecting these many flimsy wires to a breadboard can be a pain. So, I decided to use a general purpose PCB.

The LCD requires a 3.3 V power supply. I’m sure that a 3V power supply will work. Some sites also hint this. But I wanted to try out 3.3V, since I have never used components for that before. I called up my hardware wizard friend, Selva, my ex-colleague from Novatium. He suggested either LM317 or LM1086. There are fixed and adjustable versions of these useful chips. I suggest that using the 317 with 2 resistors is a simple way to avoid using the pricey LM1086 that costs Rs. 250. The LM317 costs a mere Rs. 15.

When I connected power and switched on, nothing! Well I rechecked and powered on, nothing again. I got this very familiar feeling of frustration. On closely examining the LCD soldering I saw that I had pulled the wires hard and the pads were not in their natural shape. I pressed the pads down with one finger and then powered on. And there I saw the words “God is Great”. With a line I had drawn from (1,1) to (30,30) just to check out the line routine.

main() {

LcdInit();

LcdStr(FONT_1X,"God is Great");

LcdLine(1,1,30,30,PIXEL_ON);

LcdUpdate();

}

Now is time for something more interesting.

The Colour LCD

Well, working with the monochromatic 3310 LCD was easy and just a few hours work. The colour LCD will be challenging both in terms of hardware(the pads are microscopic) and software. There is no library available.

A few weeks ago, I had posted here regarding OpenVZ tools being GPL. Trouble is, some projects that are LGPL are creating wonderful tools to manage virtualization, but are unable to use the OpenVZ userland management tools code to support OpenVZ along with other virtualization technologies like Xen, QEMU and KVM. In FOSS, you just need to ask. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote on the list:

”
Virtualization is going mainstream and there are several tools being
developed by many 3rd parties that deal with various virtual machine
technologies. Several of these tools are licensed under the GPL. One
promising library, LibVirt (http://libvirt.org) is licensed under the
LGPL. As of today, Libvirt supports KVM, Xen and QEMU. If it needs to
support OpenVZ quickly, it would be great if the userland control code
is available in a library format under the LGPL, whereas the utilities
can still be GPL. Re-inventing the wheel is a waste of time for
everyone involved since it will take considerable time to include
freshly writen code to control OpenVZ based VMs into LibVirt.

Will OpenVZ(SWSoft) be willing to release the userland control code
(most of it in the “lib” directory of the vzctl distribution) under
the LGPL so that other tools can use it efficiently?
“

There was one user, who came forward to do the work, by properly splitting the tools and core functions into and library proper and programs that link to it, if it was agreed that the code be released under the LGPL.

After many days, there seems to have been some consideration on those lines. One SWSoft(the company behind OpenVZ) employee,  has replied to a user who is having problems with the current library thus:

”
current libvzctl imho is brain damaged as it was never actually been designed properly. after the licensing question will be resolved I think it will be greately reworked.
“

If the tools are reworked on, and a LGPL version of the tools is available, then integration into LibVirt will be a breeze and it will save a lot of “reinventing the wheel”.

As of today, EasyVZ has crossed more than 500 downloads. It provides immense satisfaction that a piece of software that I wrote is used by many people. Not that it is a highly complex one. Anyone could have put it together. It is a simple piece of software. But it readily solves many pain points for users of OpenVZ, a container system for Linux that creates virtual machines with negligible overhead. Please have a look at OS level virtualization for further information.

Running traditional virtual machines like the free as in beer VMWare can be taxing if you have an older machine. Running multiple virtual machines with VMWare for development sucks up all resources on my Pentium D system which has 512M RAM. To try out the latest hardware assisted virtualization, I went and bought myself an AMD Athlon based system that features SVM. The Linux kernel, from version 2.6.20 onwards features KVM, that lets you run unmodified operating systems at native speeds! If your processor supports hardware assisted virtualization, that is.

Now running multiple systems is a pain, especially if you have limited desk space. I can’t have 2 sets of keyboard, mouse and monitor. A really nice thing to have now is a KVM (keyboard, video and mouse)switch. This lets you share those indispensable I/O devices among multiple systems. The ones that I have seen earlier provide a switching panel and can handle multiple systems. But I was running only 2 systems. So I got myself a simpler one from Chennai’s own Ritchie street. This neatly designed KVM switch can switch between PCs when the scroll lock is pressed twice in quick succession. This is an incredible tool! I really don’t miss manually switching cables when I needed to install different distributions. For other things, there is SSH.

Many of my friends, when they come visiting plugin their MP3 players into my PC to warm the batteries up. Computers have become so common that the MP3 player manufacturers have wired up the charging mechanism via the USB ports. You may sometimes, however feel the need for a traditional adaptor. During these times, you can make use of Swaroop and co’s ION. This is a pretty useful device providing the much needed USB port, sans the computer. The other end of this device is a standard power cable  that you can shove into a wall socket. Your iPod/MP3 player couldn’t be happier. I think Swaroop and co must put this on eBay, it will give them good coverage. For Rs. 399, this is a neat device.

Intel has introduced signigicant changes in its architecture this time, moving from the NetBurst to the Core architecture. There are also other features like Vanderpool or Intel VT-X that supports unmodified operating systems to run on a host operating system by hooking into a Virtual Machine Monitor(VMM) running on the host.

There is a lot to catch up with, but the PDFs are a pain to read while sitting on the system. So, I ordered printed manuals from Intel. They sincerely sent it by international priority delivery. All for free. Thanks Intel!

Going to the theatre is an exercise that many people follow with great sincereity. It is not only that watching a movie on the big screen is fun. It definitely is. But in the theater, you are present for the purpose of watching a movie alone. Although the cinema hall is a location of choice for several other people who come there for many wierd reasons. Watching TV can also make you feel good. But I do believe there is a minimum screen size required. Some people invented the concept of watching movies on mobile phone screens. That is absolutely absurd. The screen and sound should occupy a significant percentage of your field of vision and your attention, respectively. That is why the theater is most appealing for a perfect movie watching experience.

After day long office work, good TV programs can be very relaxing. But in Chennai and other metros, the CAS or the Conditional Access System is in place. The reason for this nepotism has baffled me. And like most men, I complain, but do nothing. If you get a “normal” cable TV connection from the cablewallah, you will have to watch 10 different Sun TVs and 9 different DDs: A frightening prospect indeed. There is no Discovery, National Geographic, Animal Planet, History or various other movie channels. You have to pay if you need these. The set top box currently costs about Rs. 4,000 and you need to pay up to Rs. 300 if you want to have a decent package. And you are still dependent on the cablewallah. I must say he has offered me a decent service. Well, a decent service I seldom use. So, I really haven’t checked the quality of his service yet.

I decided to get myself TataSky, online from IndiaPlaza.in. They have promised to ship it within 10 days, though I wonder why it will take some much time to deliver. It should not take more than a week to deliver anything point A to point B, anywhere in India.

RedHat’s Libvirt project is very interesting. It has the capability to produce a tool that can target all the popular VM technologies, presenting a single interface that lets users manage their VMs. Of late I have been trying to add OpenVZ support into Libvirt. It is a project of, I would say, medium complexity. Most of the work involves studying the OpenVZ userland utilities and re-coding it in Libvirt. The reason I can’t use code from OpenVZ utilities directly is that those are licensed under the GPL, while LibVirt is LGPL. AFAIK, that should not be done.

I wrote a mail to the OpenVZ maintainers, but these things take time to decide. Or there may be no release at all, since SWSoft, the company that sponsors OpenVZ development, actually sells an improved version with tools called Virtuozzo. If they make the code available under the LGPL, that would mean that commercial , non-open source software is free to link with it and utilize its services.

The approach I used in EasyVZ is simple. The OpenVZ utilities are very scripting friendly with a very regular text output format. So, I used Python to read the output, parse it and used it. This technique I call camera print technique. It comes from this:

You get legal, original DVDs from the market, or you can also get poor quality, shoddy DVDs that are theatre -> handycam -> DVD copies. Well, you can hear the audience laughing when there is a good joke or you can see someone go out to take a piss or a smoke when the director gets uncreative. These illegal copies are said to be shattering the life of many producers, especially with movies riding on crores of rupees.

Executing an external binary and parsing its output is an easy way to avoid GPL-LGPL issues, but there is a cost performance-wise and also resource-wise. The camera print technique has helped me though, and it seems to come in handy once more with Libvirt. I have no clue if the maintainers will be interested in horrible code like this, but only time will tell.

Free Software was proposed by Stallman to primarily protect the user’s right to the source code. He must not have realized the power of peer review back then. Most companies consider source code as intellectual property and miss out on the major gains of open source like peer review and instant popularity. Dual Licensing is a model that keeps the source accessible to the user while charting out a way to earn with certain conditions. An interview with Michael Olson provides insights into how Sleepycat software earns its bread with such a small engineering and a smaller marketing team. You can read it here.
There are so many companies involved with Open Source software right now and are looking at serious earnings and are being backed by reputed investors. I came across this article on 10 leading OSS innovators. Please read it here.