Me and the mark of Vishnu

Its time to write something about the sectarian mark on my forehead. I thought it would be difficult to put it in simpler words, however, thanks to google to get this one. The article is written simply that everyone will be able to understand. More details about SriVaishnavam can be found here. You can find a lot of related resources here. I will try to answer all your questions, if you have any. ;-)

Srivaishnavan and Samashrayanam

Day before yesterday was a remarkable day for me as a Srivaishnavan. Yes, the day which turned myself into a Srivaishnavan. The day on which Pancha SamakAram was performed on me by the Acharyan. While I was searching bits and bytes to explain about what it is, I found this self-explanatory link here and ,fyi, the narrator/author is my elder brother ;-) and Yes, we three, including my younger brother, got transformed into a Srivaishnavan, the very same day.

Am I getting popular in orkut?

Orkut, an online friends network is one of the popular web-applications of its kind. They recently added a feature that shows you the count of people who viewed your profile. Two days back, I started hunting for known faces and quickly added around 12+ and still 6 are yet to accept my requests. Now when I opened my profile, voila, see it your self.

Your profile views:
Since Feb '06: 215, Last week: 67, Yesterday: 61

Long long ago...

Its Long break since I wrote my last blog. Things in life has changed quite a lot. No more regular nightouts, dinner before 10:00 PM, commuting through BMTC bus to office and change in my regular diet. Everything happened because of the low-battery-warning raised by my body, which is under rejunuvation now with the help of ayurvedic medicines. Atleast, I am getting good sleep these days. :-)

More than that, a one month medical vacation due to Paronychia on my right-hand-index finger, which costed the entire nail on that finger, changed my weird way of living and brought some Indian-way-of-living (adhering close to IST). I guess, it would take another couple of months to see some nail in that finger as well as a complete change in my timings.

Also, I have got BSNL DataOne 900Plus unlimited broadband and you don't believe it, it is amazingly quite fast and good. If you have type-II modem, it is quite easy to make it work with Linux. All you have to do is to set DNS entries properly in your modem and enable DHCP. If you have a wireless modem, you don't need to configure anything in Linux, it just picks it up and you are connected to internet. BTW, I am using SLED10. :-)

[My fitness schedule is lagging by couple of months...]

Quite a lot of things happening in the F/OSS community that I am currently involved. Will keep them posted, gotta sleep, its 1:27 AM.

Travelogue: NCAC - 2005, PSG Tech, Coimbatore.

It was a dynamic decision to deliver the keynote address on 24th December at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, on the second day of NCAC-2005 held on 23-24 December 2005. Entire journey happened in a hacky fashion. Yes, the topic for the keynote address was Open Source. I was supposed to board the train on 23rd night, but found out that the train was running 1 hr late and fortunately, Saravana Prabhu had a bus ticket booked for himself to participate in YAM (Young Alumni Meet). I boarded the bus, (heh?, yes, I exchanged my train ticket for the bus ticket) to Coimbatore hoping to influence few of the best minds to join the Open Source Hackers league. Due to recent heavy rain, the roads were not in good shape and the journey was (huh?) comfortable.

Arul from PSG was very cordial to me and he took me to their guest house. The event started around 9:30 AM, with my laptop not able to adjust itself to the configuration of the projector. The hall had almost every seat filled with students and lecturers. The presentation was originally targeted for students with a little knowledge about Open Source (assumption was made after the inauguration of Open Source Lab happened just few weeks before). The 100+ participants in the hall were completely Microsoft users and hardly know anything about Open Source. I presented them a different view of Open Source, which left the audience wanting for more. The participants were very responsive and the quality of questions that they asked about Open Source amazed me. It showed their interest and passion towards open source. Also, not to forget, the quality of the content delivered by the speaker, which is me. (The authors views are the authors only !) At the end of keynote, I was presented with a nice memento.

My return train to Chennai was around 9:00 PM, so, after lunch, I met one of the Professors, and discussed with her on how to bring Open Source as a method of Study by Research. Later, to some pre-final students, I demonstrated about few keys to the open source world, viz., IRC, mailing-lists, bugzilla and CVS, with my very own Mobile-internet. At the end of the day, I had few friends which was by far the best thing that happened all day. I bid farewell to those students at 8:00 PM and boarded the train around 8:45 PM which was relatively comfortable.

Kudos and Open Source ki jai :-)

To get through the hardest journey we need to take
only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping

Life - Personal/Professional

Work while you work and
play while you play

Those are pretty common lines but hard to follow. Really, I mean it. Had been planning to separate my work related activities from personal activities for quite sometime now. Never had a success. Finally decided to somehow, restarted the mission of identifying a professional Varadhan (during office hours) and a Varadhan of those Golden college days. A Varadhan with his unique sense of humour, a Varadhan with a great personal value, a Varadhan who is active among his friends and above all, a studious Varadhan.

These 6+ years of my software career has given me lot of Professional values/status at the expense of my Personal values. Today, 2nd December 2005, I have determined to claim back all those personal values before they expire completely.

First things first...

1) Rejoin my TaiChi classes.
2) Restart my Gym activities.

Let me see how this plan goes. :-)

Lovely Love brought back my link in planet beagle

Many thanks to Robert Love for bringing back my blogs to planet beagle. DBera pointed to an article that seems like a comparison of Desktop Search Softwares available in Linux. The page is in German language, an almost complete english translation is available here or here. Anybody out there for a "manual" translation of that page?

Lately, my focus of work in office has almost completely shifted towards evolution, though, I am allowed to work on evolution interfaces for beagle. Planning to wrap up the KOffice filter in a day or two for 0.1.3.

MPlayer and GCC4

I downloaded the clip from Jeyant Joshua Gonringe's blog, a blog of a 4-5 year old kid. By default windows codecs are not supported by SuSE (and hopefully others as well). I like Xine a lot, however, I equally like mplayer as well. Normally, I install both of them as some clips/movies are played well in Xine and some are played well in mplayer. After upgrading my laptop to SuSE 10, I actually forgot to recompile mplayer. So, downloaded their new 1.0pre7-try2 tarball and started compiling.
During configure itself it yelled at me asking for a gcc version that it supports. With their --disable-gcc-checking, I managed to get the configure stage going. However, the compilation borked with an error saying "memory input 4 is not directly addressable". Luckily google got me this patch which smoothened my mplayer compilation. Voila!! that video clip is amazing/relaxing. :-)

Beagle moments

Yesterday was talking to my buddies in #dashboard channel after a considerably long time. It feels really good and don't know why doesn't it happen with any other channel :-(. Well, may be because I know what I am doing in beagle and what beagle is doing. Myself and Joe were discussing about my archive filter hack for beagle. Joe came with a number of good points on my quick hack. Got to grab some time today to fix those things. From the channel log...

Oct 04 20:26:15 joe varadhan: ok, so the main issue I see with the patch is that it uses MemoryStream
Oct 04 20:26:40 joe mediterr: does your mono-web package have the same version number as your mono-core package?
Oct 04 20:26:59 joe varadhan: which is probably not avoidable with how the filtering system works right now
Oct 04 20:27:09 varadhan joe, Yes.
Oct 04 20:27:13 joe varadhan: but it's kind of an issue because files that are compressed tend to be compressed for a reason. :)
Oct 04 20:27:58 varadhan joe, Exactly, but just thinking of how "possbily" can we avoid that.
Oct 04 20:28:12 varadhan joe, one possible way is a .beagle/tmp stuff.
Oct 04 20:29:05 varadhan joe, we extract there, index the files and delete it. When the parent archive file is deleted, delete the sibling indexes.
Oct 04 20:29:21 joe varadhan: a temp file may make some sense, but then we're using a lot of disk space, which is another reason why the files are compressed in the first place. :)
Oct 04 20:29:50 joe i mean, it's a suboptimal situation either way


Well, sometimes we have to temporarily break the original intention of a thing to reach our goal.

Grinding Evolution

Evolution a prestigious mail client for the users of GNOME desktop with integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality, that supports "Microsoft Exchange" and "Novell Groupwise" servers as well. After my series of wrapper work around evolution-data-server, started preparing for another leap of something useful to the evolution community.

Preparing the test-bed took almost weeks together and finally, yes, started gathering details of holes in evolution code that kept leaking memory. Well, evolution behaves nicely when the sampling size is small. Still haven't gathered much, however, will be completing it in another couple of days. Did I mention anything about the tool that I used to watch and report the leaks? I guess not yet.

Valgrind a memory debuggind and threading profiler tool for linux programs. Well, I started using valgrind around August 2002 and since then, it has improved quite a lot. It pre-loads hooks for allocations/deallocations and other threading functions. Will write more about valgrind later. One negative aspect of valgrind is that its memcheck tool will slow down your application to a max of 25 times of its original speed.

Another tool that came very handy is LDTP. With new newly improved LDTP, I can run two tests a day. It is a must tool for profiling Desktop application, though, the actual intent of the tool is different. Just write ldtp-scripts for any operation and run it in a loop. That way, I don't have to manually interact with the application and be relaxed or do any other critical fix. ;-)

Well, just wanted to break my lazyness to blog interesting things that I have been doing since four weeks now. Will be posting a detailed blog soon.