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.