In the haze of reality, many a truth is lost. Some truths are better hidden for the truth is not always good to know.

The true strength of man’s capability of rememberance is his ability to forget.

If we couldn’t forget at all, we would be badly affected by exceedingly good or bad incidences.

I really wonder why someone has to be either good or bad and how someone defines good or bad. Religions set standards on what is good or what is bad. And we know that there are several different standards. Athiests do what they think is good. And so do many “believers” who pretend to know their religion. Good or bad tends to vary along with religion / belief, age and place.

I once lost my cell phone in an auto while in Bangalore. It was early in the morning, about 4 a.m. I had reached the guest house from the railway station. Upon realisation, I felt as if the palm of my hand was missing. I grabbed my collegue’s phone and dialed my own number. After several attempts, the auto driver picked the phone up. I introduced myself as the owner of the phone and his most recent passenger. He was on the way somewhere, but promised to return the phone to me. He asked me to come down and wait where he had dropped me off. He promised me that he would come in half-an-hour.

After about 15 minutes, I went down and waited. I saw many familiar early-morning scenes. The joggers, people arriving from early morning trains travelling in auto-rickshaws, the milkman, the newspaper boys and the pujari in the temple opposit to me, fully awake after his early morning bath. After waiting for about half an hour, I bacame restless and started calling my cell phone repetedly, but he would not pickup. I was wondering why this man had to return my cell phone afterall. Even if he sold it for a mere Rs.500, that was still cash. I remember I spent that I spend almost Rs. 11,000 on it when I bought it 2 years ago. But I just waited. And after about an hour or more, a half familiar face appeared in an auto. He told me he was late since he had to drop a passenger off at Majestic.

I paid him well and thanked him profusely. He smiled shyly as I appriciated his action. I have thought about for hours what things may be right or wrong, but I knew for sure that the things that this poor automan had done was definitely a good thing, even though he only lost much of what he could have made by returning the phone to me.

I played my favorite ring tone and felt happy.

I have always liked cats. They can sometimes be menacing, and they just don’t show any “love” towards owners like dogs do. Well, that is what I like a lot about cats! I don’t want to get into any mushy-mushy relationship with a dog! Cats have a mind of their own and an ego, which they do not swap for “love”.

Since my childhood, there have always been kittens and cats around in my house in Madurai. The lifespan of a cat is typlically a few years, but life is harsher than the short life span awarded to them. They typically die at an early age due to other reasons. No obituaries are published.

So roughly once a year, there used to be a new cat in the house. I have lot of experiences bringing them up. In fact several times, I have syringe fed kittens that had bearly opened their eyes up, religiously several times a day until they were on their own. Still, no “love”. I like it that way, the cat is itself and I stay myself.

I love the felines for several of their amazing hunter qualities, amazing eyesight, sharp hearing and precision jumps. Unfortulately, my neighbor bred pegions which have several times served as a good mid-day lunch for many a tom cats I have reared. He obviously hated cats and would give one a sound trashing one it turned up inside of his compound. I’d straightaway curse him if I saw my cats come home limping or injured otherwise.

I had an unusual number of friends visit me, and cats never came in the way, because they can’t bark. I really didn’t feel all that good going to houses that had dogs. Above all, cats are completely maintenence free. You just feed them and keep them from eating your neighbor’s pegions, parrots, fish or the neighborhood squirrels. No matter how much you play with a cat, your hands _never_ turn smelley. That is not true for dogs, I have owned a beautiful and strong dog once. They are self cleaning machines. They have salaiva that contains anti-biotics.
I really miss keeping cats now, since I am alone with my family here in Chennai. I do not remember a single day in my whole life when my house in Madurai was completely void of people. Someone used to be there all the while and the cats were taken care of. I rear plants now. The neighbors are happy to water them if we are not here for long. Life forms are beautiful and I like to be sorrounded by them.

A cat feeder would be of tremendous help, but I wonder what will happen if the power went off(Chennai is still part of India) or there is a bug in the software that controls it. Nevertheless, here is one that is very cool and geeky Probably, there is hope, for all is not lost.

My first computer was one based on a 80386 processor clocking 33Mhz. And It had a 80MB hard disk and came with 8MB of RAM. My mother bought me this relic for about Rs.3,500, wondering if this “computer” was worth it. Those were days when a desktop cost Rs. 50,000. It was a very old piece, but I was sure that was all I needed. It came with a keyboard with a phone like winding cable and no mouse. It had a strange display called a CGA. This fits somewhere between the MDA and the EGA cards. VGA came later on. Inspite of the powerful, 16 color capable CGA graphics adaptor, the monitor was monochrome.

The operating system installed was MS DOS 6.22 and I happily played Prince of Persia on it for hours. I was pretty clear what I wanted to do with this PC. I wanted to learn the C programming language beacuse someone had told me that I could write a “virus” with it! Man, I was determined. Being a student of B.A English Language and Literature, I had no clue which book to choose, so I went to a bookshop and bought “C For Dummies” by Dan Gookin. Well, file I/O wasn’t there in that book. For that I had to buy the second volume!! That book sure screwed my understanding of C. I guess if someone wants to learn C, why the hell does he have to be a dummy? And if he were a dummy, why on earth does he want to learn C? But anyways, the dummy there was me. Now, having spent years in the industry, I don’t dare tell anyone how I first learnt C. This is the first time I’m confessing.

As I spent time with C, I realized that it was not a good language to write viruses with. Parallely I was learning digital electronics, since I wanted to upgrade fro being an analog electronics hobbyist. During this phase, I got interested in Microprocessors and thus assembly language. My favorite assembler was A86, due to the lesser red tape it had when compared to TASM and MASM.

I hit the Internet and started downloading source code for DOS viruses. It was a very interesting phase in my learning indeed. I even bought a book on the subject. “A date with Computer Viruses” by Nitin Chandra. It was a funky book with source code in assembly for a DOS .COM file virus and a cleaner for that virus writen in C. Both worked as advertised.

The viruses I liked most were Dribble, Ambulance and Casino. Dribble would make characters on the DOS display dribble down and they would get stuck if other characters were encountered during the “fall”. Ambulance would send a small ASCII ambulance wailing across the screen at random times. The sound effect simply amazed me. This was from the PC’s internal speaker, which is literally unused today. Casino was a dreaded and destructive virus. It would basically encrypt the MBR or Master boot record or the Partition Table. This would render the data on the disk unusable. But that is not all. It would get activated on the author’s birthday, If I recall correctly, and would challenge user to play a slot machine game which it would display. If the user won, the partition table would be restored, or else, the virus displayed a vulgar message and quit! The source code for all these viruses and more is available from here. Be careful what you do with this stuff.

I did manage to write a DOS .COM virus and I was very proud of myself. However, I never managed to write a .EXE virus, which is bit more difficult to write. Dissecting and playing around with Viruses has taught me a lot – this was my first look at programs that others had writen and I had learnt a lot from these wierd programmers. In a sense, these viruses were the first “open source” programs I saw.

I eventually sold off my 386 based PC and bought a 486 for Rs. 6000. It came with SCO UNIX installed on it. It had no compiler and I complained to the guy who sold it to me. Eventually I installed Linux on to it. It was the beginning of a new story. In the honour of my first computer, my cell phone number ends with “80386″.

How further into the past can you remember? For me it gets fuzzy as I try and recollect my kindergarten years. And also the time between my 7th and 10th standards. I seem to have forgotten many faces, except for some pretty girls who were classmates for brief periods of time.

My school experience is pretty different indeed. I have not known another school except the school in which I studied, Jeevana, in Madurai. And that is since I was in the same school from KG to XII. People say that antiques are things that one generation uses, the next throws away and the next after that will restore with great care. Similarly, when I got out of school, I never bothered to maintain contact. After all these years I go around hunting people on Orkut, collecting phone numbers and calling unsuspecting, good old days guys.

Today a few of my classmates came visiting. We also managed to call a teacher and another friend as well. It was bliss indeed. Two of them, Meena and Aruna had visited the school a couple of weeks ago, and they vividly described how it now looks different from how it used to be. They told us about many new faces being there and also informed meeting the old time teachers as being fun. Imagine visiting an IT company after like 8 years. I was joking that you wouldn’t find a soul who’d recognise you! Companies with an attrition rate of 20% display it proudly on their web sites and brochures! While for many other “MNCs”, its much more higher at > 30%. Its like saying “We only suck so much. We are so much better than the other guys who suck really bad”.

To understand TCP/IP in general, I followed TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I. It proved to be a useful effort indeed. Richard Stevens, the author continues to be teach long after he has perished. Someone once told me about learning  and I repeat this to many people. The man, whom I remember as much older than myself told me that learning is kind of a permanent wealth. He told me that if I had money in my pocket someone could just steal it from me and run away and it would be his and no longer mine. But he told me that there was no way they could steal what I had learnt just like that. He had to acquire it the hard way – there simply wasn’t another choice. That was interesting to me. I am unable to recollect who this gentleman is…

After completing that book without skipping much, I now wanted to understand how this stuff was implemented in Linux. Although TCP/IP Illustrated Vol.2 deals with implementation details, that is specific to the BSD code. The Linux networking code base has significant differences compared to that. I once spotted The Linux TCP/IP Stack: Networking for Embedded Systems at Landmark in Chennai. I grabbed it. While in Bangalore for the last 2 months, I had a lot of time by myself to glance through that book. The author has done a neat job, but on the contarary to what the title suggests, this book has got little to do with Embedded Systems. That part was disappointing.

Next, I read somewhere that O’Reilly’s come out with something related and I was very happy to find this one. So I went hunting for Understanding Linux Network Internals at Landmark. There is one near to where I stay, in City Center. They had run out of stock. Well, the salesperson there took down my phone number and after a week I recieve a call saying that he has blocked a single copy for me. I promptly picked that one up. I hope it is worth the Rs. 600 I paid for it. It is a bulky 1050 pager.

Will post a review once I have read this one enough.

There are the four great tragedies of Shakespeare, and one of them is Othello. It is amazing, how after centuries, one of his plays can be turned into a block buster. Omkara is an adaptation of this master playwrite’s piece. All of Shakespeare’s plays have something special in them. They involve a few characters and the story is tightly woven around them. And since Shakespear hardly used any props(he even ridiculed the use of human props in A Mid Summer Night’s Dream by other play writers), the story ever strongly revolved around these characters.

All of Shakespear’s tragic protagonists had a tragic flaw. Othello’s tragic flaw was his suspicion/ jealousy. Othello’s plot is very simple. Othello and Desdemona are in love. Iago constantly tries to cause hurdles to Othello. He is successful in this attempt when he plants Desdemona’s handkercheif on Casio. Othello kills Desdemona while Emilia(Iago’s wife) is witness to this horrid act. Emilia explains the truth and Othello then commits suicide.

Othello is played by Ajay Devgan, Casio by Vivek Oberoi, Desdemona is Kareena, Iago is Saif and Emilia is Konkana Sen. The dialogues are filled with filth, so if you plan to watch this with your parents of your professors, take care. I understand this movie would have been as powerful minus the filth. Unfortunately the human mind links sensation to negative events or thoughts.

The beauty of Othello is that it could have been set in a metro or in a villageish setting as this one. The beauty of this plot lies in its simplicity. Omkara is a neat adaptation leaving most aspects of the original play intact. Ofcourse, how can you have a movie without some masala – which is added by Bipasha. If her role could have been shortened, more justice would have been done to Othello.

Go watch this movie if you haven’t. Get a taste of the master’s mind. I expect soon that other plays of Shakespeare will soon be adapted.

Reading maketh a man. Thus goes the saying. I say writing maketh a superman.

In the course of my life, I have come across many voracious readers and prolific writers. Reading widens the horizons of knowledge and broadens the mind. But it is writing that helps index thoughts and sharpen senses.

One of the very learned persons I have known is Prof. J.C.B Abraham. He is no more. Known amoung his friends as JCB, he had not set age as a criterion to choose his friends. Here is a fitting tribute to a remarkable man. His house looked more than a library than a regular human habitat. He was sorrounded by books all the while. I was in awe for this person even back when I was a student in school, where he taught me select chapters in Biology. He was a expert in Evolution and Genetics. He was a pofessor in the Zoology department of the American College, Madurai and also served as its Vice Principal once. There are two academic awards for excellence in Evolution and Genetics named after him in The American College.

He was an athiest and we would discuss for hours why our views had to be so different. But this man was a very principled person. I remember an incident very distinctly than many others. To get admission into The American College, I had gathered photocopies of all necessary documents. He had come there for me, to help me in the admission process. At the time when he had to attest the photocopies, he asked me for the originals and I had ofcourse kept them at home. Angry at this, he asked me how a person could ever attest photocopies without the originals. He then sent me home to fetch the originals! I was then not a man of wheels, I had to take a bus and run from the bus stop to my house which was quite a distance. And once I fetched them, he never even cared to look at them. He just attested the papers for me! He just wanted to do things right, thats it.

In Literature, there are many schools of thoughts as to why art exists. There are schools that profess “art for art’s sake” or “art for my sake”, etc. I think this blog is the second category, if this can be considered any form of “art” at all.
But if one has to make a living out of writing, the Internet has opened many doors. One such service is LULU.com. Authors can write books, design a cover and sell it here at this site at a price fixed by them. LULU takes a cut. But since books are printed only against orders, there are less overheads involved. It is a wonderful platform for new authors to take off.

Hmm. It seems nothing can be perfect. My Ubuntu installation freezes randomly. Luckily for me, I had a Gentoo installation as well. I edited my grub.conf and booted into familiar bliss. I ‘chroot’ed into the Ubuntu root file system and continued to work. My Gentoo installation never hung, so I assumed that the culprit was indeed my newly installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

In the meantime I even removed the RAM dimms from their slots, used carbon-di-oxide from my lungs to shoo away the spiders which had encroached the chips and put them back on. And my dear friends, just like rebooting the system can solve a hell lot of software problems(now you must have understood why M$ Windows insists on so many restarts), this RAM removal and replacement is its hardware equivalent. It solves many problems. I also checked if the CPU fan was working properly. If it isn’t, it can very well cause random freezes after working well for sometime due to overheating.

I did a google and quickly located similar mounting complaints against Dapper. So just as an experiment, I edited the grub menu upon boot up to include the kernel options ‘noacpi’ and ‘nolacpi’. The system seems to work as of now. Let me see if these options save me from praying while using my computer.

So far, so good.

I have always been a big fan of QEMU

To test software or to learn low level programming stuff, it is an invaluable tool. Till recently QEMU was only an x86 emulator. It was able to emulate a full PC and it could run many operating systems unmodified. Recently support for MIPS, ARM, PPC and SPARC emulation has been added. It runs on both Windows and Linux.

I have examined the MIPS emulation and it works for the given test kernel and root file system provided on the downloads page where QEMU itself is available. Learning assembly language on a real system can be rewarding, but an emulator comes close. And since it is just software, you can be more comfortable and not worry too much about system lockup and crashes. Although there are software tools like SPIM to learn MIPS assembly language, QEMU has the advantage of emulated peripherals. You can program the timer, or the interrupt controller, keyboard, serial port, ethernet card among others. Not only that. You have the opportunity to mix assembly and C, use a cross compiler and ‘run’ real code.

So, lets go about doing it. What I did was I grabbed a standalone program that would run on MIPS processors and modified it to run on QEMU. No operating system, just an assembly and C program was cross compiled and used. This program is called barebones and is provided by Jun Sun of Montavista. This program contains an assembly stub for initialization and a bunch of C functions that implement the ‘printf’ function and UART support functions. This code will start, initialize the serial port, print something and drop into an infinite loop. A Makefile is provided for compilation and I used the SDE cross compiler(GCC) available free from MIPS Inc,. So that is the laundry list. The latest version of Qemu, the barebones tar file and the SDE compiler. Should I tell you that you need to install the SDE RPM? I used ‘alien’ to install the SDE RPM on to my Ubuntu machine.

The Qemu MIPS machine is very qeer indeed. Since Qemu was developed as an x86 emulator, it emulates the common PC peripherals and buses. The MIPS machine that it emulates is just like a PC powered by a MIPS processor. For real MIPS machines, look here. There is something that immediately disturbed me. In the x86 based PC architecture, many peripherals are accessed using the ‘in’ and ‘out’ instructions of the x86 CPU. They are on a separate I/O space. In MIPS, there is no separate I/O space, there is just one flat, 4GB memory space. All the peripherals on MIPS systems are memory mapped, meaning peripheral registers are just fixed memory locations. Just write and read to/from them and you have access to their contents. Then I figured something out. There is a Qemu ports base address after which the ‘I/O’ space starts. For example on the PC, the UART registers are available usually in I/O space starting at address 0×3F8. In Qemu, this UART is available at QEMU_PORT_BASE + 0×3F8. So there is no separate IO space or ‘in’ and ‘out’ instructions. Everything is memory mapped. You need to use the load and store instructions used to access memory for this as well.
The first change you’ll need to do is to the uart16550.c file in barebones. Change the definition of BASE to (0xB4000000 + 0×3F8). Here BASE is the starting address of the UART registers. 0xB4000000 is the QEMU_PORT_BASE and this is defined in arch/mips/qemu/q-setup.c in the recent versions of 2.6 kernels the support the MIPS Qemu target. Yes, there is a build option in the MIPS Linux kernel just to support Qemu!

Next, open the Makefile in barebones. Change LOADADDR to 0×80010000. This is the location where Qemu will load the binary and run it. We need the linker to generate addresses keeping this in mind. I have a big endian compiler toolchain, so I will change CROSS_COMPILE to mips-linux- from the original mipsel-linux-. Next on, add ‘test.o’ to the dependencies listed against ‘barebone.elf’. This will allow us to do some printing. Since I am using a big endian compiler, I will also need to change the value of OUTPUT_FORMAT from “elf32-tradlittlemips” to “elf32-tradbigmips”.

Finally, in test.c, remove the ‘#if 0′ and its related #endif around the Uart16550Init() function. Comment out the entire for loop towards the end of the function. You can even call printf_test() in that function finally. Open main.c and add uart_test() as the first thing in the main() function. Run ‘make’ to compile. You must have barebone.elf ready. I did have some problem compiling test.c and it went away by moving the function printf_test() to appear before uart_test().

Here is the output:

shuveb@nida:~/mionmi/barebone$ qemu-system-mips -nographic -kernel barebone.elf
(qemu) qemu: Warning, could not load MIPS bios ‘/usr/local/share/qemu/mips_bios.bin’
x
hello
hello through printf!
test string: test string
test int: -555
test binary: 1000101011
test hex: 0000022b

(main) Hello, world!
loop forever …

Interesting wasn’t it. Next, you can play around by adding code to support the interrupt controller, which is the i8259A and the timer, i8253, more commonly known as the PIT or the Programmable Interval Timer. And you can extend this small little program to do much more interesting things. For debugging, Qemu supports gdb and you can thus single step and see what your code is doing. Writing a simple interrupt handler for the timer interrupt can be a good exercise. Since you have printf() working, it can do wonders to your debugging

I have also provided the barebone program modified to work with Qemu here.

Just Enjoy.

I have a friend named Malcolm. Right now in France, he is pursuing higher studies. He wrote in one of his recent mails that the university he has joined dispenses education mainly through the Internet and that there are few classroom sessions. He was first not comfortable with this new method of learning, and he explained his anxiety to his prof. Malcolm writes that the professor was surprised that a student from India, an IT super power wasn’t comfortable with online courses! The world is beginning to see India differently, finally.

But wait a minute, If things go on as is the current situation, that image will very well be lost. India has been known for very long as the land of the elephants, snake charmers and poverty stricken children with swollen bellies. As the economic sands shift eastward, things are slowly changing for the better. India and China are becoming the workforce of the world. Due to their sheer numbers, they are literally so. As outsourcing becomes the mainstream model of business, Indians have proven to be good at whatever work comes by in the IT industry.

It is the IT companies back in the United Stated and Europe know the kind of work is being sent to India. They do the innovation and we are left to do the implementation, sometimes worse Indians just maintain what has already been implemented. There are some technologies that are so old that they can’t be run on modern hardware and can’t cope up with rapidly changing technology paradigms. Fixing old rotting code to work better in current software/networking ecosystems or porting them from one machine to the another is the kind of the work that is been done here in India.

There is nothing bad about a job one holds. All jobs have a purpose and they need to be done to keep things going smoothly. All jobs are equal – but remember, some are more equal. It is the jobs that are supposed to be responsible for innovation that beget and create other jobs. If a nation needs to be a formidable force in any industry, those jobs or a majority of them need to be held by it. We Indians need to innovate. It is not clear what the starting point it. I am myself not an innovator of any kind. But I think believing that you can innovate is the starting point. Thats the best starting point I have.

Constantly identifying technologies, areas of research and areas of learning would be a good way to go. Students of Computer Science must be given the right guidance and motivation. They are the ones who will God Willing, become the nations “formidable force”.