Dream Of The Endless

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What I miss most are the gorgeous sunsets like this one posted here(courtesy of indiamike.com). I am so excited, can't wait to get on that plane and get back to the things that once mattered to me so much. I guess they still do, it is just that I don't take enough time anymore to think of them.. I will be there to catch the Indian spring bursting forth with vivid colors and unforgettable perfumes. The Neem blossoms, cuckoo songs, palm lined fields, the smells of warm evenings, incessant crickets, and the incredibly vast night skies glittering with millions of stars. I am looking forward to taking them all in again..

It is abstract, undefined..by mist and mystery. It is
of the obscure shape of a purple mountain through films of rain
of the dew drops caught on exquisite threads of a cobweb
of the droplets hanging on branches of a leafless black willow
of the turned over leaves in mid morning breeze
of the gray happiness of dimly lit overcast clouds.

I had an interesting exchange of emails with a friend and I thought of sharing it with all of you. It all started out with his comment on this topic I posted a while ago. .

Your comment is very insightful but we keep coming back to one central point. You are still looking for some kind of a system to blame (in this particular case you were linking the bloodshed of the last century with the technology growth). And somebody else blames all the wars happened throughout history on religion. In both cases, people are extremely wrong. We will find a way to fight, kill each other and *not* help each other no matter what the cause is. The central point to my argument is, human achievement or any other man/woman made institutions are not to be really blamed, it is something more primordial to human nature that we are this way. I would even say, being selfish is the very key to survival. But you are right, as an advanced society we should think above our nature and care for the health of the society as a whole (Right, we can dream of a flawless society ).

Also, the kind of disappointment you expressed arises only when you expect a system to do something for you (in this case instilling us with moral values). I think there is an inherent flaw in such expectation. Remember, the greatest change arises from within. The more people look into their own lives and choices, the better the result will be for all of us. Lack of introspection and free thought is the very root cause for most of the issues we are seeing today.

You are right, technology actually increases the chances of wiping out a whole nation in an instant but is that reason enough to stop investing in technical advancement? Yes, I know it sounds a little heartless (and I am a strong opponent of weapon sales) but think of it this way. If humans stopped exploring in the early days, we would not have had these many varieties of grains, vegetables and fruits. Losing one member in a clan must have meant a significant loss but that did not stop them, so why should we stop now? We have still so much more to learn, much more to explore. A poison used wisely can cure incurable diseases. It is up to us, the citizens, to make wise choices, to put our intellect to good use. We can't expect this to happen overnight by overhauling a system. The thought revolution should originate from each of us.

"The inflexible country quotas mean that professionals from countries such as China and India are almost always at a disadvantage, finding themselves stuck in a system -- often for five to 10 years -- in which they cannot seek promotions and raises. Spouses and children count against the quota, which has not been raised since 1990. And even though they count against the quota of foreign workers allowed to come here, spouses are inexplicably forbidden to work, no matter their level of education and skill."

Now, doesn't that ring a 'That is unfair' bell in your mind? It is just not that, he goes on to address the issue of the U.S losing the top talent to other countries which are willing to treat them better.

"The United States, on the other hand, seems intent on driving away the very same talent the European Union is rolling out the red carpet to welcome."

So what should the United States do? Well, that right there is the question for this year!! I'll let all of you ponder over it. Read the full article at Washington Post

BBC reports that Ford has admitted to considering Tata Motors as a potential buyer for its Jaguar and Land Rover divisions of Ford U.K. Both Ford and Tata said they are currently holding talks regarding the deal. It is reported that another Indian automaker Mahindra and Mahindra is also showing interest in the deal. This is very interesting, especially considering the recent economical growth and success of India's top companies. Of course, Tata is by no means a fledgling company, it is a huge, mature and diversified entity with a strong international presence but this deal just puts the spotlight on it and Indian economy for the moment. It will be more interesting to closely watch how the operations will be set in motion if the deal goes through. More details Here.

Once in a while you forget the very fundamental concepts. You think of million other possibilities before you realize it was that one basic thing that you missed. Recently we encountered a bug which was driving us crazy until we wrote a small test case to realize what was going on. Here it is, laughably simple, yet it was not so obvious when looking at thousands of lines of code.

void main() {

pid_t pid;
int rv;
pid_t mypid = getpid();
pid = vfork();

printf("pid = %d, rval = %d\n", mypid, pid);
if(pid == mypid)
printf("if\n");
else
printf("else\n");

exit(0);
}

Shoba Narayan writes about her move back to India after living in the U.S. for 20 years and the struggles involved in making such a decision. She speaks my heart but with more honesty and emotion than I am willing to attribute to these feelings. I may be one of those, who she says are avoiding the question by simply taking the practical approach to matters and the memories are so vivid and too real to disagree with her: I still remember the chilly December night I was standing outside the U.S embassy, practically betting my future on that official sitting behind the counter, I remember the days when my parents couldn't sleep through the night worrying about a daughter in a far away country without any money, without an assistantship at the college(I managed to get one in my second sem.). A shiver still runs down my spine when I think of the terrible winter of '99 in Michigan when I'd walk every morning in the early hours in my open toe sandals with two layers of socks to work at the cafeteria because I could not afford to buy proper shoes.

Now I look back on those days, I think to myself, 'Why and for What?'. I too was pursuing the abstract dream like millions but you ask us what that dream means to us, we can't really explain. It is not defined in simple terms like money, comfort or independence, though all these are important factors in the equation. Why then, we sacrifice everything as we know it to go to a foreign land, to a strange people with even stranger customs? When I think about, it seems to me there is one thing that drives us, the immigrants, to distant lands and vague dreams. It is this inexplicable urge to fly from the nest and explore. This desire somehow is interwoven into our genetic code. The very same quality makes us restless too. We can't fully accept our new home nor can we let go off the old one. We never settle down, we are never at ease. It always feels like a sojourn before we move off to another distant place. Include the longing to get back home and the emotion gets even more complicated.

Here is what Shoba says about what home means to us:

"As with most immigrants, home for me is a mélange of memories that have softened with time
into a happy haze, like an Impressionist painting. There are people in this painting: iconic figures
like my grandmother. There are physical places and wide open spaces. Most delightful of all are
the scents and tastes of childhood — the fragrance of blooming night jasmine, dew wobbling on a
lotus leaf, tinkling cowbells, the taste of cilantro, cumin and ginger — all of which imbue me with a powerful longing for the land that is called India, but which I call home."

She addresses another important problem facing immigrants in this country, the nightmare of going through the green card process. Somebody has to do something about this to prevent the reverse brain-drain.

Honestly, if one more person talks to me about going to prestigious colleges or defines a human being by various titles, I am going to lose it!!! I most certainly can't understand this behavior. Why is it that we all seem to accept somebody who went to a Ivy league school as a brilliant person without even a second thought? Why does a person with a grand title elicit respect from us without having to prove themselves worthy of our respect?

I have held more intelligent, meaningful and engaging conversations with people with little or no education than with some who graduated from top schools. There are many more dimensions to a human being than that one facade we are willing to consider. Is not intelligent, independent thought more important than some random degree that actually teaches nothing about real life? Why are we encouraging this behavior? I hope we start to reconsider some of our beliefs and cause less stress to the next generation.

What Lisi had realised was that if he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points, it might explain, for example, how the forces make particles decay, as seen in particle accelerators.

More Here

The exploding idealism under the canopy of coconut groves,
gathering droplets of moonlight across the valleys.
The diminishing truth afloat the shiny water waves
composing musical notes for the dreams of the fish.

The whispering wind around the rose bushes,
reciting ancient verses to the dragonfly.
The warmth of sweet young desires,
slashing the dark night with abstract hopes.
The secret art of the galaxies, of gigantic collisions.

And I am, ....
the sacredness, the void between two passing moments.

BBC has some of these sounds on their website , you can play them and hear these beautiful birds sing or speak to you and reveal a secret in mythical tones. The sound of their voices just slowed my day and put me in a calm contemplative mood. Have fun!

Makes an interesting lunch time conversation, doesn't it? We live in a world which at the moment seems to be defined by the demand and supply of energy. It has been a factor in defining success, wealth and in some cases, ethics as well. So, given or assumed that we are running at peak oil production rate, this will still be the case in the near future but if the world manages to change its attitude and attention towards resources and alternate energy sources, it will be interesting to see how this translates in the future when emerging economies figure into the equation. Personally, I think whoever controls information will have an advantage.

TLBs on the chip are precious resources and some applications seem to encounter a lot of TLB misses (which are expensive in performance terms) either due to a particular usage of the dataset or poor coding. One of the ways to avoid this cost is to compile the application to use large pages but sometimes this seems not to help and you would still incur the TLB cost. You would try and compile a program to use large pages (-xpagesize=64K or 4M) but still end up with a gazillion 8K pages? What exactly is happening behind the scenes?

The reason for this behavior is that the operating system has to have an address aligned to the page size the program is requesting in order to create these large pages. For example, if you do a pmap on a simple hello executable, here is what it would look like:

00010000 8K r-x-- /home/gv131871/a.out
00020000 8K rwx-- /home/gv131871/a.out
00022000 56K rwx-- [ heap ]
FF280000 832K r-x-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF350000 32K r-x-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF368000 32K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF370000 8K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF380000 8K rwx-- [ anon ]
FF390000 8K r-x-- /platform/sun4v/lib/libc_psr.so.1
FF3A0000 24K rwx-- [ anon ]
FF3B0000 128K r-x-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF3D0000 56K r-x-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF3EE000 8K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF3F0000 8K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
FFBF0000 64K rw--- [ stack ]

Notice that the data section of the program starts at the Hex address: 0x00022000 (an 8K aligned address). So the O/S will keep giving 8K pages to the program until in encounters the first address which is aligned to a 4MB boundary (i.e: 0x00400000). So how do you avoid this behavior? One way is to tell the run time linker to map various sections of the program to your preferred boundary. /usr/lib/ld directory already has some map files that can help you achieve this.

For example, let us link in the file map.bssalign to our simple hello:

cc -M /usr/lib/ld/map.bssalign -xpagesize=4M hello.c

00010000 8K r-x-- /home/gv131871/a.out
00020000 8K rwx-- /home/gv131871/a.out
00400000 4096K rwx-- [ heap ]
FF280000 832K r-x-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF350000 32K r-x-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF368000 32K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF370000 8K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
FF380000 8K rwx-- [ anon ]
FF390000 8K r-x-- /platform/sun4v/lib/libc_psr.so.1
FF3A0000 24K rwx-- [ anon ]
FF3B0000 128K r-x-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF3D0000 56K r-x-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF3EE000 8K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF3F0000 8K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
FF800000 4096K rw--- [ stack ]

Notice that now we do have 4MB pages allocated for the heap and that should reduce the contention of the DTLB. You can also align your text and stack sections using these map files. For more information check out the /usr/lib/ld directory.

Here is my own simple mapfile. Seriously, this is all you need to have inside the mapfile:

more ./map.align

bss = A0x400000;
text = A0x20000;

If you link this in, the text section will start at virtual address 0x20000 instead of the standard 0x10000. Not much useful but just to demonstrate that it works. You get my point.

Source For These Images