Yes this is my last post on blogs.sun.com. I have decided to pursue other career options and part from Sun. I have officially quit Sun on 10th November 2006 and got some time today to write about it on my blog. This blog will be soon be removed. So better post something before its gone.

Well my 1 year with Sun has been a great experience in terms of work and fun not necessarily in that order . Sun is a great company to work with and I am proud that I have been part of such a great company for a year. I would like to come back to Sun in the future. Lets hope for the best... What else? Me getting pretty nostalgic now. So its better to stop. People who have been visiting this blog can henceforth visit my other blog. I will try to mirror this blog at the new place. Thanks everyone for all the support at Sun and at blogger...

This site here has come up with a survey of the most popular languages and Java is at the top!


Have a look at this site here.

I was facing a question from a customer regarding ps showing multiple instances of the process which they mistook as to be multiple processes spawned over the 16 processors on the box by the primary process. I have posted a question on linuxquestions.org regarding this long time back but have not got any reply on this. Have a look at it here.

There were several things that I figured out on my own.


1. Linux treats threads as processes. There is no concept of thread in the Linux kernel.

2. ps command has a flag '-m' which shows threads spawned by the process. But ps on some kernel versions displays threads by default. When -m option is specified for ps on those kernel versions, ps gives out a message that 'thread display not implemented'.

Any more explanations are welcome.

This picture explains my friends noble intentions of writing a blog on Storage...

Have a look at his blog here.

The team here in Pune had a company trip to Hans Adventures, somewhere in the lush green areas of Konkan, on Friday 8th to Saturday 9th September 2006. It was a great trip at the right time. I was very frustrated and this trip just energized me. This place was just heaven with a very scenic drive to offer. Its about 105 kms from Pune towards Mulshi. I had great fun on this trip. We played football in the swimming pool! Some adventures offered here include river crossing and white water rafting. We did river crossing but missed out on water rafting . I have some snaps of the trip to share. Have a look.





































Visit here for more info on this place

Yesterday, Byte And Switch announced Sun StorageTek Business Analytics as the award winner in the category 'Storage Management Software'. Other competing products were Brocade Tapestry File Lifecycle Manager and Kazeon Information Server IS1200. Have a look here:





For more details on awards visit the Byte And Switch site here and for Finalists visit here

While I was testing a program for limiting its data segment size on a Linux box, I found something very strange. I specified the limit to the data segment size for my process by 'ulimit -d '. But to my surprise the program's behaviour was very weird, it kept on running without any problems whereas it should have failed at some point. I tried this small test wherein I typed the following commands to see if bound checking is actually done. I did this on both Linux and Solaris machines and the output is as follows:

Linux:
> ulimit -d 1
> ls -la


This seems to run fine and display contents of the directory.


Solaris:
> ulimit -d 1
> ls -la


This did not work. 'ls -la' gave out an error, "Not enough memory".

This means that the limits set through ulimit have no effect so to say on Linux. This site has more details on why such behaviour: http://isec.pl/vulnerabilities/isec-0012-do_brk.txt

I was finding out a way to detect idle CPU cycles to process something, so that my process does not hog up the CPU. Additionally I was trying to do this on a Linux box. After a lot of searching(googling) here and there, I found a link on Google Groups that said using nice 19 to set a processes priority to the minimum would only schedule the process when the CPU is idle. Here is the link

But this was not something I was looking for. I wanted a way to do it through my program. And voila! I found an API call that sets priority of a process. Its call setpriority(). Its very simple to use. And guess what I even experimented with it to confirm it actually works...

What I did was wrote a generic program that takes the priority as an argument and starts the process with that priority. Needless to mention, this API fails to change priority if the user spawning the process is not root. I started three processes with priorities -20, 0 and +19 which translate to high, medium and low priorities respectively. I observed the behavior of the three processes using top command and what I observed was that the process that had highest priority hogged up CPU to the maximum extent and so on with the one with least priority with very less CPU utilisation. But there is still something that I keep thinking. Is it accurate? Because doesn't detecting that the CPU is idle require some CPU cycles by itself?

Hey don't go by the title in the exact sense. I meant I have been flirting with my new love i.e. my new bike. I recently got hold of a used Pulsar 150. Man its so smooth, its just amazing on the road. Well I also own a Yamaha RX100 and the only difference between the two according to me is engine refinement. Yamaha is a class of its own. The Yam that I own is more than 15 years old but still burns the rubber like anything. Pulsar has a much bigger engine with around 50 cc more than the Yamaha. I love both of these bikes....

Hold on for more on my bikes... Till then signing off.

Recently some folks here at the IEC - Pune centre of Sun Microsystems, Inc. launched POSUG. Well if you are wondering what POSUG is, well it is Pune Open Solaris User's Group. You can have a look at it here. We are all working here to promote it to every nook and corner of the city and make people aware of what Open Solaris is all about. We have also checked out Belenix, a distro of Open Solaris from the BOSUG (Bangalore Open Source User's Group). It is really impressive with a live CD bootable that runs entirely from the CD.


I can just say one thing "Solaris Rocks!" and spread the word...

There is this link that I was forwarded by a friend. It's a site hosted by CNN IBN where you just have to put in your name, city, phone number and e-mail address. They will put up your name on the list of people who lit a candle for Mumbaiites. They have also mentioned that they will donate Re. 1 for every candle lit, towards the relief of the victims. So why not do it?

Click here to visit the site and light a candle...

Yeah, thats pretty much true that I have been away for a pretty long time... I have been a bit busy with some work at office and there was nothing really special that I could write about. Well the FIFA World Cup is finally over and I have been hearing a lot about it from friends, colleagues et all. Well, I am not interested in it...

Well afriend of mine who came down from the US, got an Ipod for himself. Well that reminds me that the Ipod is a big hit in the US. 4 out of 5 people have to have an Ipod, thats what my friend told me... Cool. I mean thats just amazing. Ipod is catching up here too. Though not close to 4 out of 5 but atleast 1 out of 20 has an Ipod, I guess . India is one market Apple should be targetting seriously. Well surprisingly they haven't been serious here to my knowledge (coz I haven't seen any ads or publicity of the Ipod here). Well Apple guys pay attention if u r listening...

Well after having a bad weekend, I learnt the most basic fact of LIFE...

NEVER, NEVER trust a stranger, no matter who that person is, what that person says or what promises that person makes, DONOT TRUST anyone...

It was a lesson learnt the hard way but an experience of a lifetime...

Thats me resting in peace in the office

April was a great month career wise. Had a lot of stuff to do. I won't speak of all the technical stuff here. So what did I do in the last month? Had a lot of fun and kicked some butt!!! Actually

Well we have a company trip to a nearby hillstation, Panchgani on 21-22 April. We left the office by 3:40 pm on 21st and were back by 4:00 pm the next day. We were 24 of us packed up in 6 cars

Well I cannot describe the fun we had all night. But I can surely show some pics that we clicked there. Here they are...

Serves 4

Preparation Time 30 minutes

Contents
Chicken

Ingredients
1 (800 gms) of chicken
1 tspn of kashmiri red chilli powder
1 tblspn of lemon juice
Salt to taste

For Marination
200 gms of yogurt
1 tspn of kashmiri red chilli powder
Salt to taste
2 tblspns of ginger paste
2 tblspns of garlic paste
2 tblspns of lemon juice
½ tspn of garam masala powder
2 tblspns of mustard oil

For basting of butter
½ tspn of chaat masala

For garnishing
Onion rings and lemon wedges

Recipe
Skin, wash and clean the chicken. Make incisions with a sharp knife on breast and leg pieces.

Apply a mixture of kashmiri red chilli powder, lemon juice and salt to the chicken and keep it aside for half an hour.

Remove whey of yogurt by hanging it in a muslin cloth for fifteen to twenty minutes. Mix Kashmiri red chilli powder, salt, ginger-garlic paste, lemon juice, garam masala powder and mustard oil to the yogurt.

Apply this marinade onto the chicken pieces and refrigerate for three to four hours.

Put the chicken onto the skewers and cook in a moderately hot tandoor or a pre-heated oven (200 degrees Celsius) for ten to twelve minutes or until almost done. Baste it with butter and cook for another four minutes.

Sprinkle chaat masala powder and serve with four onion rings and lemon wedges.

Chef’s Tip : To make Chicken tikka, use boneless chicken pieces cut into 1 ½” cubes and proceed same as Tandoori chicken.

Excerpts from the November 2005 issue of Digit Magazine. Liked it very much so thought of sharing it on my blog as well.

I read this comparison on the following site. Its really impressive. Have a look at it here.

Bill Gates has said the US tax office has to store his financial data on a "special" computer. "My tax return in the United States has to be kept on a special computer because their normal computers can't deal with the numbers." he said at a Microsoft conference in Lisbon. "So I am constantly getting these notices telling me I haven't paid something when really it is just on the wrong computer." he added in comments on TV.

Gates' fortune is currently put at $47 billion (Rs. 2.2 lakh crore). But quit bragging, Mr. Gates... we all know even a 1982 computer with 48k of RAM running BASIC can handle 47*10^9!

I came across this comparison test claiming the HP servers to be faster than Sun's some days back. Its very surprising that a company like HP goofed up this time. If we look closely at the comparisons made, there are some shortfalls that one can see.

1. They have not been tested for the same configurations. By configurations I mean the softwares on which the bechmarking was done and not the hardware configurations.

2. If we see the figures closely, most of them are pretty close by and Sparc even does well on the "Calculated System Power (Watts)2" parameter.

3. The clock speeds of the processors used are very different. The Sun box has a 1.2 GHz processor whereas the HP box has a 2.2 GHz processor. Oh man !

4. Also the no. of processors used on the HP box are 2 and on the Sun box is just 1.

What kind of a comparison is this??? How can u compare two hardware configurations by running Solaris on one and Windows on the other??? The SAP versions also don't match and the databases are way too different.

Is it a fair comparison?

See it for yourself :

The real story.

I am having a screenshot of the results below in case they close the site on the above link.

Its a pretty usual monday morning. Saw a billboard ad of Sun today. I am showcasing it here as well.

I got a really shocking news that Geoff Arnold has already left Sun. I was taken by surprise by this news. Though I have met him just twice during his visit to our centre. But there was this attachment to him that we could relate to. I had never thought of him leaving as he was a great asset. I always considered him a mentor and idol. Well, I will really miss him.

All the best Geoff for your new endeavours.

We had a great lunch party on Saturday 4th March 2006 at Adeeeeetiiiii's place. It was a great experiment with guinea pigs of all sorts (Me, Vikash and Sandy alongwith his wife)

A great description of the whole party can be found at Adeeeeeetiiiiii's blog

We had a cool party on Saturday, 18th Feb 2006 at a farmhouse some 10 kms ahead of Khadakwasla dam. It was a cool place thanks to Adeeetiii. We started off on our long ride from our places at around 3:00 pm and me and Gokul reached a meeting point (which was decided long back) at 3:45 pm. After a long wait (almost 1 and half hours), Adeeetiii and Vikash appeared and it was a sight of relief. Then it was Mr. AJ and Mr. KJ's turn to have been lost in Khadakwasla. Those two guys went in the wrong direction and drove almost 22 kms. in that direction. To add to our problems the cell phones were not working in that area. Somehow these guys managed to call us up (we got some share of the network!) and figure out that they had gone to the wrong place. We managed to guide them to the place where all of us were waiting and they reached there in another 30 minutes. Finally we completed our 2 hours waiting at that spot.

Then after this long a wait we finally headed towards the Farm house. It was a great place, something that I had not imagined of. It was a luxurios bungalow with a big farm outside. There were coconut, mango, papaya and betelnut trees all around. We then started to play some music in the house and started off muching some snacks. After some time we started off the barbeque by doing all sorts of stuff We got the barbeque up and running in about 30 minutes and started to cook the chicken. Then the veggie guys also started grilling their respective stuff. We were doing all this with a glass of Fruit juice and Coca Cola, courtesy AJ . After some time everyone was busy eating their respective stuff and then we started the bonfire but nobody really enjoyed it. We went upstairs and then Mr. KJ started playing his guitar. Oh man he is an amazing guitarist. After enjoying the music for some time we started with some ghost stories. We shut off all the lights and lighted two candlles and placed them on the centre table. People were speaking of their experiences and Mr. KJ was giving all kinds off weird background music from his guitar. Then finally went off to sleep ending the day but the other guys started seeing the movie 'Madagascar'.

It was a great evening I must say...

It was a pretty good week in terms of work, there was lots to do and lots to learn this week. Though it was a pretty hectic week but I just love it that way Most of the problems got fixed and many of the new ones surfaced I am happy that my learning curve was pretty exponential this week.

I hope weeks like these keep coming forever. Signing off for the day (I have a BBQ party planned for tomorrow. So got to prepare for it)...

The other day I was trying to renew my internet connection with my friend's(actually his credit card) help when I noticed something very unusual. Ths friend of mine had a credit card by C*T*B*NK. First of all he had lots of problems trying to get his card. The main problem with C*T*B*NK is that they ask for debit card xerox copies for identification which is something very dubious. When my friend objected on giving his debit card details, they told him they had to ask it for verification. What kind of verification was this?

Then he finally got his card after lots of trouble. He almost got it after 2 months!!! But after he got it, he was a bit happy for all the pain.

Then one fine day I wanted to get my internet connection renewed and found there were only 2 options to do so i.e. Credit card or pay by cheque. I did not prefer to pay by cheque because I had no idea when the guy would come over at home with the renewal coupon. So I decided to pay using my friend's help. Finally after selecting the appropriate plan on the ISP's site we were redirected to C*T*B*NK's online banking site where we were supposed to enter the card no. and the password. To my surprise I found that the card no. could be entered using the keyboard but the pin no. couldn't be. It had to be entered through the online keyboard provided on the page using the mouse. What was the use? Anyone sitting next to me could see the password. This was ridiculous. The other thing was that there was an option of feeding in the ipin. That means the transaction could have gone through without an ipin. Anyone who gets the card no. can make payments at his wish. I think C*T*B*NK hired some dumbasses to design their online site. Who could think of such stupid things??? I think C*T*B*NK needs to do something about it else its a big security issue for them as well as their credit card holders.

Hey most of you might be wondering where I am for the past 2 weeks. It was a pretty hectic time for the past two weeks. Thought of putting up something on the blog after some time. Its going great with SUN for the moment. Everything seems to be exciting. With people like Geoff and Vish visiting us for the second time, it feels like part of SUN!! Well have nothing more to talk about... So will end up here.

This week was pretty boring and hectic as well. Boring because didn't have much to do the whole week. Was literally not doing anything! And hectic 'coz there were people from the US visiting the office and a lot of meetings and stuff. One good thing we had this week was today as we (Me + my colleague Gokul) attended a seminar by our BIG BOSS Monish Darda on Distributed Systems. It was a very interesting seminar and a very basic one too for the amateur one. The seminar was pretty interesting too as everyone knows how good a speaker Monish is. The start of the seminar was great with some witty and humourous remarks by Monish.

We had our convocation for our Masters degree on 8th Jan 2006. It was a great moment of joy for all of us. And to make it even more memorable, all our classmates had a get together :) It was a great time with friends reuniting after a long time.

It was a great trip and an experience of a lifetime. I am posting some of the pics of the trip along with the blog. We left from the office at around 10:30 am and drove along some really bad roads to reach Mavalsrushti in 2 hours which is merely a half hours drive. The place is really scenic and is located 400 meters above Lonavala!!! The place had some really great flowers and plantations around. We roamed around the place for an hour or so and then had lunch. Ohhhh.... What food!!! Typical homely food. Great food I must say...

Then we were just wondering what next... and then voila Gokul (a colleague) came up with an idea to have a Table Tennis tournament between the 8 of us. Well I forgot to mention that we were a team of 8 people (7 guys and 1 gal). So we played for another hour and I tell you it was great fun. Then we had our afternoon sip of tea and left for Manas Resort.

At Manas we did boating, I, Pankaj, Vidya (team mates) and Sandy (my manager) were in one pedal boat and Vikash and Gokul were in one and Kaustubh and AJ (oops... Aniruddha Jahagirdar) on the other. It was just a dry feeling until Gokul and Vikash got really into action by throwing water on everyone and banging their boats with all of ours. It was great to be totally wet. Everyone was wet from head to toe.

Then we went on for Go-karting. That was the most ultimate exerience of a lifetime. We all just had our hearts out on those cars and drove them like there was no tomorrow. Though I must say Pankaj was the best of all of us. Gosh he seemed to drive like a pro man. His best lap was when AJ was trying to go past a slow dickhead and that guy was not letting AJ overtake and then comes Pankaj from behind in full speed overtaking both of them and leaving them in dust. That was amazing!

I guess there is nothing really special to share after that, as everyone was on the way home and some of us headed for Dr. Paul Clements seminar.