When I was just a kid and used to follow the daunting routine of school-going, for most of my early years, my mother used to help me put on my socks and shoes. She taught me how to identify the right side of the socks, since most of the while socks would be turned inside out for a wash. But usually when she put my shoes on for me, she would carefully let her fingers inside each one of them and see if it had become a nightly shelter for any creepy crawly living beings, so they may not harm me. I used to tell her that it was a very strange thing to do, since if there was anything inside, rather that biting one’s leg, it would simply bite one’s hand. I used to suggest that one must tap the shoe on the ground to shoo away such unwanted guests. This is a practice I maintain till this day, eventhough I haven’t found a single insect in all these years.

Recently I was putting on shoes for my 3 year old daughter and I all of a sudden I seem to abandon my practice of tapping shoes on the ground. I instinctively let my fingers on the inside of the shoes and checked if there was anything that might harm her puny feet. I stopped and thought for a second what had made me do this, something that I had ridiculed so much as a child. Only then did I realize the risk that parents take for the child, in matters small and large.

This reminded me of Nissim Ezekiel’s poem, Night of the Scorpion. Where the narrator’s mother is stung by a scorpion. The village backdrop and the rainy night image is drearily brought out by the verses. After a day the narrator’s mother recovers from the sting only to say:

“Thank God the Scorpion picked on me and spared my children”

Intel has always been in the forefront of innovation as far as CPU technology is concerned. It sports a formidable marketing machine as well. AMD and other CPU vendors have brought out Intel CPU clones, providing buyers alternatives, sometimes cheaper than those provided by Intel itself. Intel always provided a single line of CPUs till the Pentium II, and to combat competition in the value segment, it brought out a parallel line of CPUs, the Celeron line. This was a sound strategy, increasing pressure on the other cloners.

Intel was also the vendor who lead computer users into the 32 bit era, by releasing the 80386 CPU, of course other vendors followed suite. When users went shopping for computers, in the old days, they probably asked their computer savvy friends which CPU based system to buy and they answer they got was a ‘386′ or a ‘486′. While the Intel line of CPUs were simply called “Intel 386″ or “Intel 486″, the AMD clones were calles “AM386″ or “AM486″. Life was easy for the salesman, who would sell the user a “386″ or a “486″ depending from where he got better profits, while the users didn’t know (or care) from which vendor the CPU came from.

I first thought that the reason why Intel didn’t sue AMD for using a similar trademark was because I read somewhere that numbers can’t be trademarked. But a little googling reveals that this is not the case. I guess they can be. The issue was really not about trademarks at all. Intel actually shared CPU designs with AMD for the 386 and the 486 processors. Early AMD CPUs actually run Intel microcode. This was beacause AMD was the second source in many tenders for the government and large corporations. So, Intel “needed” AMD. There were several lawsuits between Intel and AMD where Intel tried to negate the design sharing agreements. AMD finally realized that getting future processor designs from Intel would become more and more difficult and thus designed its first architecture in-house, the K5.

Intel wanted to lead the world into 64-bit computing, with its Itanium processor in 2001, but failed. It is believed the primary reason for this failure is its incompatibility with the x86 processors that the whole world ran on. 64-bit processors have been around in quantity since the early 1990s, especially the Silicon Graphics MIPS based ones, but thats another story. AMD, in the meantime, came out with the AMD64 architecture that added 64 bit extentions to the existing x86 architecture. These processors became an instant hit due to backward compatibility. Intel’s 64 bit architecture is referred to as IA64. In a strange twist of events, Intel secretly worked on to include AMD’s extentions into its processors and released them to the world calling it EMT64.

I think this is the first event that changes the path from the MHz wars to wars based on CPU features. So, it seems the wars wil continue anyway. I remember the Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times”.

To be continued.

Far off from here, in the land of date palms and camels, there appered a prophet who would strengthen the faith of his forefathers. He brought with him a way of life, more than just a religion, which as of today, a billion people follow and is the fastest growing religion. Shame on the terrorists – for they do not belong to this great religion. They follow a religion named terrorism, unaffiliated to any other religion that any man may follow.

There are five basic beliefs in Islam.

1. Faith in the one God
2. Prayer 5 times a day
3. Fasting 30 days a year, preferably in the month of Ramadhan
4. Giving alms to the poor and the compulsary tax to the poor (Zakath)
5. Going the Mecca on a holy pilgrimage (The Hajj), if possible

All religions have a way of making its followers start afresh. Islam provides this month – a month of training. Fasting is prescribed literally by all religions, since it clenses the system and teaches discipline. A muslim fasts from dawn to dusk, abstaining from food or water. Just by going hungry, one does not honor fasting. There are other rules like abstaining from sex, remaining honest, etc. But it is sad that many muslims do fast, pray and remain righteous during this month, but continue according to their whims and fancies once the holy month crosses the calendars. When one learns to cycle for the first time, for example, he may do it in a ground where there is no traffic, so that he may pick up the skills. But what if he would say that the training is good enough and the he wouldn’t ride on the roads, in the traffic and use the cycle for its real purpose – transport?

This month is similar. The mosques are overflowing with people, who fast and pray all month long, but disappear once this holy month is over. It is a sad fact witnessed by those who are regular to mosques to offer their daily prayers.

The pathos that this movie evokes is, alarming. The scene where the protagonist is assumed to be killed is the peak of the effect. I have never seen the potrayal of justice failing so badly, so well filmed.

Spoiler, sorry. Tessa is murdered in Africa. Her husband suspects it might connected to the work she was doing. He begins to unearth a nasty tale of a pharmaceutical company whose drug tests are being conducted on innocent victims, using Africa as a testing ground. She prepares a report on the situation along with her doctor friend and both are killed horribly. Her husband, Justin goes back to London, from where he travels to Europe to trace Tessa’s work. He returns to Africa and manages to get his hands on the report she was supposed to be working on. He is finally killed by you-know-who.
This movie has won the Oscar and the Golden Globe awards, among other awards. It was first relased in 2005. I appriciate Sathyam cinemas for playing wonderful movies sometimes, even though many arrive pretty late. Better late than never, right? Now, there is a German movie with English sub-titles showing there, called Downfall. Many who watched it, told me it was good. Who but cinema lovers would like to watch a German movie in Chennai. But this one has been running successfully for a couple of weeks now! The Alliance Francais of Madras does have select French movies screened there during special occasions. And there also seems to be sizeable theaterical activity going around here at Chennai as well.

But coming from a small city-town like Madurai, I still feel the the rate of the tickets are not justified. They still cost up to Rs. 120 at Sathyam. More good news for cinema lovers is that INOX has stepped into Chennai with a few screens(maybe 5 or 6) coming up at City Center. That place is walkable from where I live now.

Coming back to “The Constant Gardener”, I never felt so insecure watching a movie before. It was a wonderful performance by the whole crew indeed. Most of the movie is shot in Africa and some locations are awesome. I think this is a wonderful movie and one should watch it on DVD or go get tickets if it is shown at a theatre near or far from you.

Swaroop has posted an entry on cycling to work in Bangalore. Cycling is very good in many ways. Apart from getting a person from point A to point B, the by-product is very good exercise. Given that my office is just about 4 k.m from where I live, this one is a very good idea to try out. Since I’m very lazy and largely unorganized, I do not (have time to[excuse]) exercise. The only physical activities I am involved are praying almost all 5 times a day and cleaning my car(once a week). The muslim prayer also serves as a good physical exercise.

One thing that stops me from cycling to office is the very high humidity levels in Chennai. If I were to cycle to office, I would be drenched in sweat and office guys I’m sure would run away from me due to some unbearable stench. And moreover, people have _no_ respect for cyclists. And cycles neither have headlights, nor tail lights. Even if you had a dynomo that made this possible, it would only make pedaling more difficult. If other motorists can’t see you, you don’t exist and a short while later, you may have existed only in the past.

BBC aired a documentary “The Code Breakers” in May this year, about how poor countries are using FOSS to get lot of work done. This is now available for download under a Creative Commons License.

Please go here.

I love the many projects that involve the Linux kernel. In th past I have tried openMosix, while I’m now obsessed with openVZ. I will post an entry on openVZ later, since it deserves a better mention than just a passing reference in a rant entry like this one.

CPU power is becoming cheaper by the day. And processors such as the Pentium D are adding to this trend. The Intel Pentium D is one of the dual core processors making the rounds in the market. There are better processors from Intel, however. At the moment they are expensive. The Pentium D is a processor with two Pentium 4 Cedar Mill Dies in a single package. That is a formidable amount of computing power! Its like SMP on a chip! You also must have heard about the Intel Core 2 Duo processors. These are also dual core, but are based on a totally new architecture that Intel has come up with. The Pentium D processor is based on the Intel Netburst architecture that powered processors like the Celeron, Pentium 4 and Xeon. The Core 2 Duo, is however based on the new Intel Core Architecture, that Intel claims, provides that same performace at 40% lesser power!

I really couldn’t wait for Core 2 Duo rates to come down. Currently the processor alone is priced at about Rs. 10,000. The motherboard will cost a heafty Rs.6,700. That is the kind of money I did not have a budget for. So I went ahead, and got myself a Pentium D 2.8 MHz processor, a Intel D101 motherboard, some RAM, a DVD writer and a 160G SATA hard drive. This was replacing my old 1.1GHz celeron based system that was struggling to compile kernels that I was patching and building on an almost daliy basis for sometime.

I started out by installing my favorite distro of Linux, Ubuntu. I had downloaded a later release which came with updated software, so I don’t have to upgrade once I install. This is the case for CDs shipped from http://shipit.ununtu.com. They currently update about 180 packages once they install. I was sure that the SATA drive wouldn’t cause any problems and it didn’t. The installation went on smoothly and I logged into my brand new desktop. I installed mplayer and vlc and then started to play a DVD. The system froze. The display just froze as well. The keyboard wouldn’t respond the so wouldn’t the ATX power button. I knew it was a kernel issue. I rebooted and this time tried to copy files from my old IDE hard drives to my SATA drive. Same problem. I now concluded that the issue was with the IDE driver.
I then installed Debian Etch(Testing) and the issue went away! I was very happy. Then I realized that the kernel that Debian had installed was not SMP enabled. The Ubuntu kernel was SMP enabled. I then installed a Debian SMP kernel and I faced the same issue again! So I reconcluded: the issue was with the IDE driver in SMP mode only. The only difference otherwise was the Ubuntu kernel was 2.6.15 while the Debian kernel was 2.6.16. God knows what other distro-specific patches went into them.

I then passed a command line option “ide=nodma” to the Debian kernel. The same issue. But when I did that to the Ubuntu kernel, the problem went away! But without DMA, I knew that the disk I/O rate would be pathetic and the more CPU would be used, because data has to be copied, word-by word, by the CPU. And it was what I expected. File copying to and from the IDE hard drives is real slow, and the CPU is working much harder. Will I now take DMA for granted?
There is this thing about brand new hardware. Linux dirtros might not work out of the box without glitches. But I think it is only a matter of time before the rough edges are ironed out. A nice thing about this motherboard is that it comes with an onboard ATI Radeon x400 VGA card attached to the PCI Express bus. The sad part is that there is no “Free” (RMS’s Free) driver available for it. But Ubuntu has a restricted kernel modules package that just worked with a little tweaking of my xorg.conf file!

So, who is the kernel hacker who is going to fix my IDE driver problem? I’m no hacker and that ain’t me.

MS DOS is an amazing piece of software. Not because it is a feat of technical achievement, but because it was the most widely used stupid operating system. Is that not difficult to achieve! There have been several instances in history where a particular technology won due to many different factors other than technical excellence. Some examples would be the PC Vs Mac, IE Vs Netscape, VHS Vs Betamax, among others. So my dear friends, technical excellence alone, it seems is not enough to see it through the day. DOS itself was bought by Paul Allen from Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products from a mere $50,000. It was later “licensed” to IBM and eventually to other PC cloners. Microsoft was on its way to global dominance.

I used DOS on my 386 PC to learn C and assembly. DOS can’t run many programs at once, although there are multi-tasking shells available for it. There are however clever ways of running small programs by hooking on to some interrupt routines. These programs are called TSRs, Terminate, but Stay Resident programs. For example to display a small text clock on a corner of the screen, I once hooked to the timer interrupt, and displayed the time by writing the time string directly into video memory. By hooking what I mean is that you replace the ISR with your own routine, and then you call the old ISR routime, which you before replacing. The timer interrupt is called 18.2 times a second, thus I get a chance to run several times a second without being explicitly executed by any user. The IVT or the Interrupt Vector Table (a table containing the addresses of each Interrupt Service Routine), is located at address 0000:0000 in the x86 architecture, and contains the address of the all the ISRs.
Many “resident” viruses use the TSR methodology to do interesting things. The main DOS interrupt is int 0×21. They would hook to it and thus got control every time a system call was made. They then check the syscall number in the AH register. If it was something like the “exec” call, they would open the file to be executed and infect it!

When you are learning about programming hardware at a low level, it helps to have an operating system for several reasons. But robust operating systems like Linux or UNIX come in the way of low level programming if you use user level processes. I see DOS more like a monitor, rather than an Operating System. It provides very primitive services of a file system and rudimentary memory management. When your program is running on the CPU, you are on your own and you were free to do anything. This allows for great freedom while you are learning about PC hardware. You can poke around ports, play around with interrupts, write directly to video memory, etc. It was a stage in my learning process that greatly enhanced my knowledge of PC programming.

Although PCs came equiped with the 80386 processor since 1986, DOS never used its full services. The full power of 32 bit processors was used only after Windows ‘95 was released. Almost a full decade after the hardware was out! There were some utilities like DPMI that allowed the use of protected mode under DOS, not many programs used it. But DOS applications remained so popular that Intel was forced to design in a feature into its CPUs that allowed DOS to be run within a full protected mode operating system. This feature is the vm86 feature of x86 CPUs, that lets you emulate multiple 8086 processors with a single 80386 or better processor. When you start a DOS box in Windows 3.11/95/98/ME, you are using this feature.

I really wonder if people who learn programming now-a-days are exposed to DOS at all. Since it is really stupid, it forces to budding programmer to be intelligent.

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.