I'm listening to Roobaroo and Kase Sartil songs, the ones which I always listened for quite a lot of time now...lots of sentiments attached with these songs...the smell of AC air of summer in US, snowfall of December, Houston trip, movie night-outs, ... lot of things...its coming to me like a flashback. I'm just a day away from the day I awaited since the past couple milleniums... I know where I should be. I've missed my place like hell, and I now can't wait to see my dream coming true...I want to go home! I hope I hold up myself for these last remnant hours....like one of my friend puts it - its inexplicable and unbelievable I spent such a long time away from my home - and its not been any easy!

Everytime I fly out of KCI, I think, "OK, now its the last time before I fly out for the des." But its just not happening, I think I'm being teased! But now just 6 days to go, I'm now sure, the next time I'II fly it would be for a land far far in the east...where I've been (senti-)mentally all the time. The climax is not far, but the times decided to run slow.

27 days to go :)

I was as awful as I could..it wasn't the stage fear, it was the lack of practice. Can't complain actually, just had couple of days. And was difficult for a newbie like me who never performed in front of more than 4 people and had started self-learning just couple months ago. Played casio on around 4-5 songs in the annual program gathering of around 300 people that Indian Students Association arranged here at k-state on Sunday. I think I should often go to garage sales, from where I picked up this casio :)

OSDI was fun..was a nice short break. Seattle is a nice little place. The return journey took my entire day, this happens when you plan a trip a month before :| After many people insisting, I couldn't afford missing visit to the Space Needle (wikipedia entry is better than the official site ;)) and the EMP (thats Paul Allen's another toy house, Experience the Music Project). Although I had planned to visit both, they are just side-by-side, I could only visit Space Needle and with around 45 minutes left to spare, the ticket vendor at the EMP generously advised me not to rush through it, as it won't be worth it. The architecture of the EMP is as crazy as it could be! Letting the EMP visit go, I wandered around more, collecting sovenirs and stuff.

I thought I was on track and on time. I didn't anticipated the time it'II take me by bus to get to the airport. I had to hop around to get to the airport, and boy, I now just have 30 minutes to take-off, and I haven't even checked-in! The guy making the boarding pass gave me a pale look and said, "Let me see if you're not too late." He checked me in saying, "This is the closest you could ever get! Run, and get checks done." I had to. The line for the check was tooo big (SEA is a small airport, smaller than KCI!) finally I got the checks done and it was 10 minutes to the take-off and I was still outside searching for the right gate. On finding it, the boarding pass checking lady saw me and stopped another guy entering the plane gate saying, "Another customer showed up." So close! Finally I got in the plane just couple minutes to spare, with the officer's words echoing in my ears, "this is the closest you could EVER get!"

Rest of the journey was fun, and now continental is on my "preferred" list of airlines. They screened Little Man!

(originally written a week ago)

Day 3 of OSDI was mostly "all distributed." Ended at around noon, and then continued as HotDep. It had some interesting papers and did put forth many interesting ideas. Chunkfs paper was presented by Val, and was well received. The intention of HotDep was to get the ideas out for discussion and was achieved pretty satisfactorily.

During long lunch, lasting ore than 90 minutes, I managed to wander around the Seattle downtown. The downtown full of steep roads, is nothing but ridiculously expensive. But even though for one shop I had to go beyond window shopping to realize that its sometimes good to skip lunch. It was a grand piano shop.
One (master) piece that I was looking at was made early in the century and was brought from New York. The shop attendant, with the coat and bow attire just like the pianist ready to play in an concert, explained the history of that piano in brief. He, himself, was a great pianist. His fingures just danced on the keys creating pleasant sound echoing throughout the grand shop. I didn't tried to play it myself, respecting the age-old piano and the attendant's piano skills (and his ears too ;)). It was for some $ 84K odd.

OSDI was fun! Operating systems researh is hot as always, and Linux rocks! Its baby of every OS researcher now, its everyone's tools, everyone's testbed. Plenty to takeaway from OSDI and HotDep! Thanks to USENIX.

Seattle is not so different than Boston, both are a typical American metros, both have some waterbody and both are big. Execpt that it rains a lot in Seattle and there are noticeably many homeless in Seattle. Public transport has good connectivity, but its necessary to make sure you have change before boarding a bus. Starbucks is at every nook and corner of the city, unsurpringly enough, since it was founded here.

Here for a conference and Workshop, OSDI and HotDep, by the courtesy of USENIX Travel Grant. The conference is amazing so far. The attendee list is almost who's who of the OS research including Andrew Tannenbaum and many professors and industry people whose homepage I've visited at some point. Its good to have all such people under one roof brainstorming. Undoutably, its motivating to talk and meet with such people and get inputs on the current hot topics in OS and about the filesystems topics that I'm exploring. It feels good when people already knows about your thesis research even before you tell them about it :) But at the same time it makes you feel all the more responsible for putting extra efforts in your work.

Being a premier OS conference, talks at OSDI are always interesting, and this year was no exception. Most noticeable was "Rethink the Sync," which talked about achieving performance closer to asynchronous I/O but with synchronous guarantees. Among others was one describing virtual memory model for garbage collected applications called CRAMM and OS profiling and state monitoring tool called "Flight Data Recorder."

On day 2, most influential talk was about how Google manages its data storage by a storage system called Bigtable. It gave a birds eye view of the work, but was good enough to let the audience know what it is. There were huge questions everyone had about this...and unsurprisingly the first one to question was a guy from Yahoo :)

With a quick lunch I managed to take some time off to wander around the Seattle downtown. Of course after taking care of the homework that I had to turn in today ;) Conference hotel being at the heart of downtown, every area of the downtown was reachable and I could lay my hands on some stuff for the home coming 2006. Its called the "Public Market Center" and is no different than the camp's fashion street of Pune minus the chaos. Most shops also were speciality stores, like having antiques or some having arabic goods, all wooden decoratives or some even having just black magic stuff!

Evening was spent at the Museum of Flight, which is a Paul Allen's own toy room, so the evening was sponsored by Microsoft and turned out that the USENIX luncheon was better than the dinner :| Along being a museum of flight, it also hosts Leonardo da Vinci's museum. It had nice little models that leonardo had thought about during his 67 years of life, making him greatest of inventor ever! His 13,000 pages of written work is incomparable to the all OSDI-like conference proceedings combined ;)

Sleep calling..

The bay area climate is unbeatable..is just too good. Was there for a quick 3 day visit. Actually the city isn't different than any other Indian metro, except that it had many non-Indians too ;) Every taxi I took was driven by an Indian. Surprisingly enough, the driving license test in that area is also available in Punjabi! Being like any other Indian metro, plently of Indian restaurants..the one at which we stopped was relatively vacous, but we had to appreciate the hospitality of the restaurant owner...he got us chicken biryani without us even ordering it (lol!!)...and it tasted good too, so we appreciated it even more.

Last week made me took an exam which was nothing far from awful. Also I got to hear Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, who was here as a guest speaker at the Provost Lecture Series. He empahasized topics such as role of QoS and internet enabled devices in the future of our connected chaos. He also talked about the Inter-Planetary Networks that he is working on currently with NASA. But to my surprise, he didn't touch upon the role of Social Networks in the coming years. This was followed by my own talk in one of the undergraduate Operating Systems class. Was on file systems and things that I am working on recently.

Its blossoming and slowly starting to take shape as a form of numerous hacks in the actual ext2 driver code, but still a looong way to go.

Chunkfs is an application of file system design approach for easy and fast recovery of file system after system crash and is going to be my thesis topic. A preliminary paper, entitled "Chunkfs: Using Divide-and-Conquer to Improve File System Reliability and Repair", accepted at Usenix HotDep 2006 can be found here (once its ready to go public).

Git repository for the prototype implementation in FUSE (File System in Userspace) is at: git://cislinux.cis.ksu.edu/fuse-chunkfs. It requires libext2 and libfuse.

The tools for the same (fsck and mkfs - both unstable) can be found at: git://cislinux.cis.ksu.edu/chunkfs-tools

After a strong recommendations from near and dear ones both far and near, I had to watch this movie..Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Especially when its going for Oscar Nomination.

Its crisp and has a terrific plot. Not that the ideology is new, but its application is contemporary. A good watch :) And its even better after a belly full of Malai Kofta, Aalo Vada, Kadhi and Veg-Pulav :D prepared for the potluck in the apartment after which the movie followed.

My goal is to learn piano chords and its amusing me ever since I bought this casio from a garage sale...much time spend on it as well over the weekend.

It starts from today, but is just one day off on Monday..so not that exciting. But a welcome relief from another hectic week. Exam and lot of TA duties.

I got screwed up on today's exam, I've started enjoying the algorithms class. I wish I had taken it during my Bachelor's, its fun. But I also regret not being able to take AI during my Masters.

Today incidently I bumped into an alumni of my department who graduated in 1990 and was here to show his parents his school. Someday down the line I'II be coming back too..but I'm not able to envision myself after even 10 years.

I wouldn't thank Orkut in particular. Last 10 days or so I met my old school buddies..one with whom I parted way back in 1992, and meeting couple others a decade later. Socializing Networks (SN) are just a fallout or natural extension to the Internet (extension may not be the right word here).

Theres lot of room for improvement in many of these SNs, mainly in the areas of UI, navigability, and importantly integration with the desktop. I particularly hate going on such websites just to read or write a 'scrap' or such. Its difficult for people, like me, who live in their mailboxes. Apart from this there are innumerable features that can easily go into such networks, increasing user participation. Security is particularly flawed and cases of identity stealing are not uncommon.

There are number of such networks out there. And secondary purpose of each network is different, primary being connecting people together. Not everyone can participate in all of those, and arguably its right too. Most don't want to bare with all of their accounts with for example Livejournal, MySpace, Facebook, hi5, LinkedIn, and Orkut. Atleat I don't.

I see a need and room for a generalized standard for any such SNs. This is needed for allowing the compatibility between two SNs. Apart from enabling single sign-in mechanism, such standard would allow to be able to connect to more number of people from various different networks. This could be more intrusive than just having a wrapper around each such network and gluing everything together.

Its just an early stage, though, for such networks and such networks will play a very big role in Web 2.0.

Starting off from jgarzik's fuse-ext2 priliminary code base, this is working implementation of ext2 file system in FUSE. The code is whipped so badly that I'm in no condition to send patches to jgarzik on this. This code is forked from the another file system kiddo prototype that I'm developing, which is based on ext2 and it uses this code. This is part of the reason why this fuse-ext2fs code looks entirely different from jgarzik's tree.

Available here: git://cislinux.cis.ksu.edu/fuse-ext2fs
git tutorial here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/tutorial.html could be useful.

Requires libfuse and libext2fs.

FUSE is a neat way of prototyping a file system and this fuse-ext2fs would certainly be of help if you want to base your filesystem on ext2 and modify it thereafter.

The long weekend took me to the tuttle creek lake for canoeing, and some awesome BBQ :) Those canoes were very small balanced just on a single bar spanning through the length of the canoe. My new casio CTK-411 that I bought out of a garage sale (almost a steal deal) took some of my time. My mom was more happy for me having it, she knew how happy I must be for having it...I wanted to buy it since a very very long time now, but couldn't for some reason.

PS: the title sounds irrelevant after editing the post.

August 16, 2006 (forgot to publish it ;))

Today it took unusually short time for me to paddle up two miles from my apartment to my office (or atleast I felt so). The last day of summer internship here at Red Hat and just a little more than one year in US made me recollect the entire year that just passed by.


The summer was particularly awesome...and I enjoyed doing things more than anything else in my entire year that just passed. I mostly ended up hacking NFS - fixing bugs and adding trivial features, plus upstream changes to the NFS user-space tools. Also I was involved in a cross-functional intern project chalking out future investment plan for BRIC countries for Red Hat. This work was a good exercise of market research and business planning which I did sometime back, and allowed me to interact with almost all the VPs in the company.


Most importantly it was a wonderful experience to meet very very talented people in this field.

All in all, a great motivating summer. Courtesy Red Hat, Inc. :D

Heart throbbing, thrilling, palpitating, exciting, nerve wrecking - all together :)

Exactly one year back (felt like a decade), I landed in US. It was painful, painful to leave your loved ones behind..to come here only to miss them, only to know how much they love you and miss you back home. Its been an year since I saw them. Don't know how many more years I'II have to count :|

Its not that I'm complaining being here, but I'm restlessly missing them (an understatement). Have already got tickets for december...but still its 4 months to go..4 whole months before I see them. When I actually face them I wouldn't beleive its for real...for I've dreamt zillion times about being there (an overstatement). Around 40 days be there...be there, have fun of your life, be a kid and live life - like you used to for the past 20 years of your life...only to come back here again, only to miss them again, only to realize how much you love them and what importance they hold for you.

</homesick>

Back to work.

Just for reference.

1. Download git sources
Grab the latest tarball from http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

2. Extract and do make prefix=. I usually install such things in ~/bin

3. Make sure git binaries are in your PATH

4. 'cd' to the directory you want to start the project in, be it empty or already filled with project source files. Do 'git init-db'. It will respond with "defaulting to local storage area."

5. Run 'git add .', which adds the files in the current directory recursively. If you want to add a subset of files, specify them explicitly.

6. Run 'git-daemon' as appropriate. Use may want to use 'screen' if it doesn't have the --detach option. See http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html

7. Test the setup by executing this or a similar command on a different machine "git clone git://server/git/project"

Alternatively, tools like cogito can also be used which "ease" the use of git. Cogito can be found here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/cogito/

That is all :) Happy Hacking!

2 Comments

Since I-don't-remember-when (or if ever) I slept so much - 12 hours at a stretch! 6 PM to 6 AM :)

Being my regular customer, English Zone, asked me to do a story on open source FOSS free software! Ah there you go ;)

As usual I had to hunt for my interviewees. It wasn't that being in Boston made me decide to interview RMS on his favorite topic. I wasn't sure how approachable he is. But a friend of mine and a former employee of FSF told me that I should talk to him. So I emailed him with my intention and questions. There came a real quick reply, auto-generated of course, explaining emailing habits of RMS, and telling me to expect a reply in 48 hours.

RMS replied. Asking me to focus on free software than on anything else and restructuring my story eliminating any references to IP. I was fine with it. I again replied acking to it and restructuring my questions. He came back with the reply after a day's time.

I'm honored to quote him in my story along with some distinguished hackers in the community :)

Got my camera shipped, its Fuji FinePix A600, a 6.3 mega pixel camera for less :)

How to set a parameter using sysctl for a module thats going to be loaded at sometime after booting?

sysctl? huh?
- sysctl is a method to change the kernel parameters (from userspace of course ;)) at the runtime. It depends on sysfs and /proc filesystems. More here

Typically the init scripts execute the specific sysctls for the specific modules. But sysctl is wasted and pointless when module is not already loaded at "init-script" time, and when its going to be loaded sysctl will still have to be made for parameter values to reach the module.

So how to do it?

Lets take example of sunrpc module and the parameter being sunrpc.tcp_slot_table_entries.

1. An udev rule is handy:

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/23-sunrpc.rules
# udev rule to set sysctl values when
# sunrpc module is loaded
#
SUBSYSTEM=="module" ACTION=="add" DEVPATH=="*/sunrpc" RUN+="/sbin/sysctl -w sunrpc.tcp_slot_table_entries=64"

This rule says - whenever a 'module' called 'sunrpc' is 'add'ed, run the script.

2. Add a line to /etc/modprobe.conf
install sunrpc /sbin/modprobe sunrpc; /sbin/sysctl -w sunrpc.tcp_slot_table_entries=64;

This line says - execute the following command whenever the module sunrpc is being modprobed. And we just insert the module first and then do the sysctl.

3. Or use a method similar to the my patch here, against 2.6.9-42.EL. Its generic enough but there are limitations of this method and I think userspace fix is more appropriate.


Bug closed as NOTABUG :)

Exactly one month left for my internship here at Red Hat to get over, got really accustomed to the work here, and the routine, and the people, and the culture. Don't feel like going back to school and get burdened with the things that at times make me spend my time, which I'd rather spend on more constructive / better things. But being school work, even that will be duly embraced. But I'II miss this culture for sure. Here people don't work for getting paid, but to passify their grey cells...to chase their passion. And thats what I like about people. Almost half the company is working even on holidays and weekends, and you can make it out just by peeping into the IRC channels, (yes, keeping up to the hackerish norms, IRC is used extensively...its the backbone of the company. Am not sure how many other companies exploit this so constructively.) And when you have such like-minded people around you, work is nothing less than just fun!

After a real long time, today I found myself playing tabla in one of the lawns of the company. One of my Russian intern friend here, who not devout but is just a fan of Indian food, music and all those things that Indian sadhus smoke, bought Tabla yesterday and asked me to give him some lessons, and actually brought Tabla in the office. First I had to teach myself how to play it after such a long time...I've had both tabla and harmonium since I was a kid, prolly 9, I had an inclination towards it, but my mom was a real force behind my learning tabla, but never got to it..just the bascis. Both the instruments are still around, but haven't played them since a real long time. Was a good break though playing tabla in the company lawns :) Imparted my friend with couple of tabla strokes..which even me not perfect at ;)

The one on which I'm working on right now is fairly simple to understand and always reproducible. Volumes with minor number greater than 256 are not being mounted. The client process waits for the server response and later dies with EIO.

I started hunting the bug by enabling the available debug info, and it was clear that the client wasn't getting FSINFO reply. A plunge into the code was required to find the reason. For every client, server maintains an authentication cache (export map) and a cache for file handles (expkey map). Since file handles has to be unique within the server, device numbers are used, which are fairly unique. Some client info and device number is used to decide the expkey. However, minor numbers greater than 256 are encoded in a different way, a new encoding logic (which arguably even ethereal doesn't know of, I tried adding it...just added the new file handle version but couldn't do more for lack of time).

After staring at the code for quite a while, I tried lot of debug printing and came to know that fh_verify (file handle verification) didn't succeed. A day later I realized that fh_verify didn't succeed because the expkey cache entry is stale and it never got updated. This was a stagnant phase for some time. Later, after some thoughtful insights from author of original (Sun) NFSv3 and its RFC (1813) (who sits two cubicles away from mine) himself and some more code tracing, I found that the cache should be updated by the kernel when it receives a request for file handle on /proc/fs/nfsd/.getfs or /proc/fs/nfsd/.getfd from mountd.

Then a network trace and a realization that correct file handle is not returned by mountd. This was all due to the different encoding scheme for higher minors. I changed the code which encoded the expkeys of devices with higher minor numbers to the old encoding scheme (as for the devices with lower minor number) and also correspondingly changed nfs-utils. It worked. But I don't know why devices with higher minor numbers are to be encoded differently when we have 32 bits to fit the key into.

This is no way a fix, just a work around, need to lookup where the things are slipping off for the higher minors and why file handle isn't correctly reported.

Right now, time for some weight lifting and biking (which I've started to love) :-)

Recently I've been put into bug fixing apart from the regular chores. Mostly NFS. Last week I was working on a bug in which the locks obtained using fcntl were not gracefully revoked when a process trying to hold the _non-blocking_ lock is terminated abnormally. This was an interesting problem. A very obvious bug, easily reproducible and made me wonder why this bug survived so long? So long that redhat had to hire me to fix this. It is a 2.4 kernel bug. Its even upstream.

When processes died (for any possible reason), locks that are held by the process are revoked while closing the files. Linux kernel maintains locks at two places - in the inode (i_flock) and in a global linked list of locks. Acquiring a lock for any filesystem is easy. Only the conflicts need to be resolved. But for a network filesystem, first call the filesystem lock routine...that puts the stuff on the wire back and forth...and then resolve conflicts, if any. Bug was actually a race between a file close and fcntl, and I bet would exist on any linux network filesystem - for its in VFS itself. This was the scene:

---
P1 requests server for the lock
Server grants the lock
P1 sends release request for the lock
Server grants the release request..

...But before this release response reaches P1 and i_flock is updated, P2 gets
going..

P2 request server for the same lock
Server grants the lock
P2 tries to update the i_flock field, but find conflicts
BUG: error goes undetected
P1 runs and updates i_flock
---

The bug is that, conflict is detected but server is not sent the unlock request, and server thinks it has granted the lock. Remember the locks are non-blocking. Later when you test for the lock, server thinks that the lock is granted and will return the same notification, but in fact the process to which it granted the lock now cease to exist. A fix was to send the unlock in case a conflict is detected after the lock is granted from the server.

Bugs are making me more inquisitive...they increase my hunger and make me desperate to track them down. I'm liking it :)

Time for the paper to go public. Can be downloaded as pdf. This paper was published at PDPTA 2006.

Enjoyed thoroughly while doing the project, its on-going. Am not able to recollect where I read, but its true - the time from the inception of the idea to the actual publication is atleast an year. For me it was 13 months.

Another good paper to read - here.

All Rights Reversed.

Let figures speak. Linux Server Operating Environment (SOE) market is valued at around US$ 130 million, with almost similar figure for end-user spendings. Its cathing up like a forest fire - estimated to grow at around 31% CAGR from '03 to '08. And still theres whole lot of untapped business out there. Its happening. You understand the unabated revolution thats steadily sweeping everyone off their feet when you hear something like Peru and Venezuela decides to go open source. Its happening, and its going to happen with or without Red Hat, with or without GNU/FSF, or with or without Linus Torvalds.

At this point it is important for software businesses to consider their business model and have a thought of how it would be in the open future, future when most software pieces would be open source. It is important to understand that except for few specialized verticals, all applications are likely to be derived directly or indirectly from a community developed open source code. This is a drastic change from the conventional business model, where you sell the stuff that you make or that you knew better. Now its different, now you have to sell stuff which is not yours, you just know it, essaintially better.

Trying to sell things which is not owned by us sounds kind of absurd, but thats the new business model all about. Moreover, it gets trickier when we need to sell a thing and make money out of it, when its already available for free (free as in free food). Companies like Red Hat should be truely appreciated for putting forth an example of how a company should be in the open future. It s this new business model that makes mere 1300 people company threaten the business of many hundred thousand people companies.

Me moved to a new apartment here, closer to the company, just 1.7 miles. Other person to move in is yet to shift...so me alone as of now. I borrowed a bike from an intern friend who apparently had many spare. Theres no internet connection in the apartment, and no wireless to piggy back ;) But theres this mexican restaurant just besides the apartment having broadband connection. This blog is courtsey of that connection :)

Ride to and from the office is adventurous to say the least, especially at nights. Its cloudy, so no moonlight, and theres not much custom here to have street lights. And its hair raising when you know that on your ride during the day you say creatures like toad and even snake (dead, of course ;) on the road. Take away - ride in the daylight.

Works alright, no complains...more about it later.

It was pouring down heavily when I came here. Its been three weeks I'm here for work, for some good work and good experience. Had given a choice even in my sleep, I'd have chosen to be at this place. And I soon realized that I made an intuitive choice, despite of having some tempting options. Now I realize what it feels like for getting paid for doing things you are dying to do.

I hope thats the case with most my other friends who are here, and they must have been all set and doing their best. Abhi got hooked up with Borcade, Vivek carrying on with the RA work, as is Sachin, Vaibhav with NetApps, and something hit Kary (on the head) and he is at M$ :P

Although my PhD plans are obscure, almost nonexistent, my visit to Harvard and MIT last weekend urged me to have a thought on that. Was a good time. I and one of my newly found friend here spend some real good time hiking at the Great Brook's State Park and exploring some real good places in and around the heart of Boston city, along with some Indian food, movies and novels.

Its raining again today. Will rain couple days more...have some work and long pending novels that needs to be completed.

Was just interrupted to read a blog post of one of my friends, who is quitting his job to come here for his MS, and there are many of my friends who'II be here this fall in all great schools. It wasn't long when I was on the other side of the table and doing the things they are doing and planning. But it feels a life has passed within this year...really!

Maajhich laal

Having look at this would simply scare away new investors and new organizations planning to get into Indian market. How adamant and inconsiderate Indian ministers could be? This is a good example. I can't see we going astray like this with the courtsey of such people. Is Rang De Basanti really in making? If I'd have been in such reservation category, even then I'd have considered such decision just an act out of self vested interest given the statistics in the interview above. Theres this joke circulating around for a while now:

Manmohan Singh to Bush – We are sending Indians to the moon next year.
Bush – Wow! How Many?
Manmohan Singh - 100
25 - OBC
25 - SC
20 - ST
5 - Handicapped
5 - Sports Persons
5 - Terrorist Affected
5 - Kashmiri Migrants
9 - Politicians
and if possible
1 – Astronnaut


When I laugh at this joke, I feel I'm laughing at myself.

This is my first relaxed weekend after the exams. Its been all travelling.

I'm hooked up with a guy for sharing an apartment and an another guy for sharing a car to the office. Boston is a big city, unlike my school place Manhattan, KS. Here you are paralized if you don't have a car or cell phone. I have neither :(

RH is a great place to work. The people here are awesome and work culture is heaven. I feel like sitting amidst all the big shot celebrity kernel hackers. Theres plenty to learn from each one of these. I don't think any company is so transparent and open to its employees than RH. It truely breeds the culture of open source community. Its like all the people instead of sitting at their own places and doing work come here, do the same things and get paid. What I really appreciated is that every person out here is so passionate about his work and theres all academic environment with everyone still learning and researching. As of yet I couldn't find sandals, but ya pony tails are many ;)

I'II be working mostly on NFS stuff and if time permits also on GFS. Hope will have a good time and hope I'II be able to cope up with these guys :)

13th May 2006 - 10.30 AM

I completely failed to understand one of my friend's post. I firmly beleive that nature *does* conspire to help you achieve things you earnestly long for, provided you put in your hardwork. I beleive that sincere efforts can surely make things impossible plausible (if not possible).

I have some time to kill here at the KCI airport, while I wait for my flight to Boston. I was just dropped by my school shuttle here. Exams were good, not a big deal at all. Sometimes I feel like double-checking if I'm taking graduate courses or undergraduate ones ;) This semester was a hurried one...more swifter than the one before. Most of time was consumed in exploring some new areas, interviews for internship, projects and in finalizing a paper on one of my projects, which I completed last semester. Its on peer-to-peer networks, titled "A Scalable Search Algorithm for Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks", got accepted at PDPTA'06.

As the name suggests, it talks about a technique to scale the search in Gnutella-like P2P networks. As the network size shrinks and grows the search algorithm adapts itself dynamically and controls the level of flooding (the number of nodes to which a query is passed). It directly influences the number of messages passed for a query and time required to reach the target node (node, which could satisfy a query). The results are as anticipated and our (me and my two professors) algorithms perform good on both - the number of messages required for a query and amount of time required to satisfy a query (either successfully or otherwise). I had a lot to learn out of this project. I won't be presenting the paper for the lack of funding for attending the conference :( The paper is available here (will be linked off here, once the paper is ready to go public).

Other things that I was working on in the spring semester is still in its nascent stages. It involves more of Machine Learning than of anything else. Will continue to work on that over the summer. I also managed to do an article ( which I regret for not doing often, given that it doesn't take me long to do :( ) for a magazine (EZ) which is my regular customer.

I'm excited to have an experience of US corporate culture. Given that even Indian companies now offer quiet a liberty and flexibility in work, I'm afraid if it would be any different in the US (if at all). Especially in the corporate area where I'II be working, where sandal and pony tail is apparently known to be a trademark, I shouldn't find it too restrictive.

Will be heading for Raleigh, NC for orientation for new hires at Red Hat and will be starting my work on Wednesday. I'm excited to be surrounded by all the kernel developers. Hopefully will have a lot to learn. I'm ready for the plunge!!

It always happens. Whenever I'm close to my exams I feel like doing lot of other things...projects and all (and people think I'm busy studying ;)). Though one of the projects definitely needs my attention, others are also getting some over the past week. Lot of things in the pipeline for the coming summer and the semester to follow. All about playing and learning...or learning while playing. Lots of learning.

Oh, ya. This is my first post of my year. I and Shakespeare share same birthday. Lucky him. Gave costliest party ever..got hell lot of bumps.

More on my projects in the posts to follow. Wish me luck...exams in this and next week!

Port25: "Port 25 is open. The people, insights, and analysis from the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab. Send us your feedback and ideas. We want to hear from you."

No its not Mircosoft's April Fool's joke. Its real. The blogs on the site are good, but the comments are hilarious! Being slashdotted already, the blogs are turning out to be a flame war field! Though Microsoft opened up its port 25 (the SMTP port, Did someone say the name is cute?), people already using the site as "why MS sucks" forum. Seems like Microsoft has given out a place for people to rant. I hope filters will be ON soon for the spams, bots and flooders at least (but am skeptical how useful it would be) and such creatures go away from the site in a while so that the site becomes more sensible.

New Trends In Online Traffic: "While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information."

Exciting and much anticipated. In fact, I see this growing to an extent where people's only application of use will be a browser. And all the other apps of daily use would be available online and free. No more paying even for a single piece of software, and there'II be just two things that we'II have to pay for - hardware and bandwidth. I see this happening already with the Web 2.0 (good read: The State of Web 2.0). Things like Ajax are sprouting up fast (just like any other tech buzz) but this time its here to stay, or at least here to leave a significant impact and a ground work for the next bigger things to come. Ajax Office is one such example.

So how would companies make money? For a layman with basic needs, paying for hardware and bandwidth will be enough. But there are things that would require fees / subscriptions. Things like professional support services, online media and sometimes the content itself (specialized and filtered, not the Wikipedia types). But there are things that needs a major revamp, especially the UI and navigability.

So I see it boiling down to the Linus Torvald's principle of life, as he puts in his autobiography - Just for fun. According to him there are three things that have meaning for life, which are motivating factors for everything in one's life and determines the progress path for anything and everything in life. These are survival, social and entertainment, and the implication is that the meaning of the life is to reach at the third stage. Every technology follows same path as well. Initially Internet was limited to defense localities - was a support feature then, meant for survival, now it has become a social thing..and slowly we are reaching the final stage of the game. It has started to become a mere means of our entertainment.

It feels good to be at this stage of the transition and would be awesome if to be able to contribute in any ways.

From one of my friends:

"hi amit, how r u? what about ur studies? rajesh's brothers' wedding reception was on 2nd april, mast majja aali, tuzi khup aathavan aali pan kay karnar, mhanun sarvani tuzya navacha ek-ek ghas kadhun thevala:)). ok what else, take care, keep smiling bye"

Miss you all too :)

I don't falter (for some obvious reasons) to accept that open source philosophy has always motivated me and have provided me with opportunities to learn. It has always been something that pushed me to know things and has put my time in doing some useful things. I thank our senior, Sandeep Sahu, who was the first guy who introduced me to Linux and open source and got me started. It was back in second year of my Bachelors when he conducted after-school lectures for those who are interested, just to spread awareness...and it was inspiring!

It started with installing and getting used to the new operating system. I was having a shell account for internet connection during my high school and I was given a Unix-like prompt with pine, lynx and ircii. I didn't had a clue what system I was using...for me it was just a means of getting on the Internet. (It was a student account with a dial-up connection, and while purchasing one..I didn't had any idea that it will be adding to my phone bill as well ;)) So this was the background I had when I started with Linux, it did helped to some extent but not a great deal.

After tweaking around for a while...experimenting with all the eye-candy stuff (which I still do)...I started user-level programming (gtk, qt, shell, php), and then some kernel-level stuff too. Was fun...there was no one to teach..it was just the forums, online tutorials, man pages and IRC. Once I started that..I felt (as usual) that I started late. But nonetheless at least I got started! When there are lots of things that help you learning new things, you feel like learning. There were/are resources which help in learning things, especially when it comes to open source...they won't spoon-feed you, but will at least provide you with pointers. And many a times that is how it should be.

Am not anti-closed source, but I feel knowledge is there to be shared..that is how all scientific developments have taken place. Without reinventing the wheel, learn what others have done in the past, try to improve it if you can..and if you do, don't forget to pass on what you learned. That simple is the philosophy of open source. It is powerful, motivating and most of all, it works!

I'm glad that I'II be around such environment for some time now. And would be a good summer experience at Red Hat, Inc. *wink*

Time is fleeting fast..already at the end of second semester...will finish off coming fall fast with a pleasing feeling of going back home in December, and then MS almost over. So fast, so swift.... But yet theres lots to learn and lots to earn (apart from money). May the Source (in every sense) be with me like this forever.

And may the Source be with everyone too!

Ok, gotta go...me need to find a place to hang my hat ;)

Seems like world changed today!

China buys Google

UK Government to shut down GSM networks

Google launches Google Roamance

Microsoft buys OpenOffice.org

MY PICK!
New system call - int is_computer_on(void)

Yesterday we had a python in our apartment, a friend of mine got a snake bite and I was fired from my school ;)

Happy April Fool's Day :)

For some reason, I didn't care much about, they showed the movie for less. Was a wonderful one. I like the japanese settings, the one that this movie has. This movie particularly reminded me of a TV serial Osheen (or Oshin? I don't really remember). I have a very obscure memory of watching that serial..it was very long time ago, when I was a kid...watching the serial from my bed (it used to come at nights)..and we had a black-n-white TV set then. The serial was on the same lines as well...a struggle of a girl. But the end of the movie was in a typical bollywood style..but overall the movie was very good...and story on the life of that girl worth spending some time for!

I grabbed one of the movie posters, and now hangs off one of my office walls ;)

The spring break is almost over. From tomorrow it would be the same monotonous routine :(. Don't feel like getting out of this fun week-long party. We partied the entire week...especially the later half of the week was too good. I enjoyed this break more than the break we had between fall and spring semesters. I felt much more relaxed, may be because I jerked off the junk that I was having in my mind for a long time now.

Yesterday we tried making 'kachi dabeli', a Gujrati dish very similar to dare I say burger (?). And surprisingly we were pretty close to it! Bhel and halwa (shira) were there to accompany as well. Plus plum cake, ice-cream, gulab jamun, cham cham and ras gullas. :) For the entire week, we had similar menus. Also we had veg pulav, aloo paratha, paneer paratha and masala parathas one non-veg treat at a friend's place and a 'yippie' authentic south indian treat at yet another friend's place.

Yesterday was particularly damn fun. We played cards like kids...all the games that reminded me of the times of those hot afternoons and colder nights during the summer holidays during my school. Was fun then, we used to play for hours at times. And was fun here too..after cards we played the age old truth-or-dare...and people actually dared! Including me..although mine was a much rewarding one ;) Mostly dares involved calling up people at 2.30 in the morning and talking non-sense. Was taken very sportingly by everyone! And then a movie, until everyone felt asleep. And so unsurprisingly we slept at 6 in the morning. With slight variance, this was pretty much the schedule for the entire week. My day time, as usual, went into studies and work!

The next one and half months would be rigorous in terms of studies and work, I'm already anticipating that. And after that would be much more nicer experience..I'm dying to write about it, but there are things that are stopping me from doing that :(

Some people got confused about the term 'permalink' I used in one of my last post, and I got couple of queries as to what it is. So this post.

Word permalink is not coined by me, I saw it first on Blogger itself. It refers to a permanent link to a blog post, as per the Blogger terminology. If you open a blog, e.g. foo.blogspot.com, it displays first page with recent posts, and this page is usually generated by some server-side script and thus the contents of the page are temporary (Don't get confused between a blog and a blog post). If one were to refer to a particular post, the blog address won't serve the purpose. Permalink is a URL to a particular post. Effectively each post has a permalink. The link above in the first paragraph is a permalink.

Since the webspace I use for my site floats around (fortunecity -> brinkster -> mvhosted -> k-state -> ?), I had to pin it down to an unique URI. Usually I used to do it with a free .tk domain ;) But troubleseome part was that many of the SMTP servers I used, filtered out my emails as spam if I added my .tk domain in my email signature. So, registered a domain name. I just used the word permalink for a domain name. :)

Was talking to my darling niece this morning on the phone, and she tells me that its Rang panchmi (Holi) today. Its just yesterday we had been to Wall-Mart, and I could've picked some colors..but now I had just two colors to play with..yellow and red. One of the turmeric powder and other of a red powder that is treated sacred (kunku ;))..good that I could utilize it some day :) And ya, we had holy this morning :) Painted all of roomies faces right on their bed...and also painted one of our friend's face nicked Pehlwan ;)..and everyone woke up this morning playing colors...I was forcibly taken under the shower by my roomies with color even in my hair! Even now my hands have the turmeric color and odor. Was fun!

This holy was nano when compared to the kind of holi we have at my place back in Pune. We just go crazy! Play all day...and then take a shower and eat puran poli..anything for such a fun :) I'm logging all the festivals that I'II have to (untimely) celebrate once I'II be back home for a limited time...my sis is already planning for all the days I'II be there.. :)

Spring break is on, and its beautiful atmosphere here in Manhattan. Cloudy, but doesn't rain; cold, but not that chilled...just right, and just how I like. And its fun riding bike around :) Its similar kind of atmosphere I have back in my home town during rains, and I remember it wasn't long how I used to sit in front of my computer all day at my cosy place listening to Dina Carol, doing some stuff, trying to learn something new. Today, I'm doing same, though the place is different, time is not the same...but Dina Carol sounds like she used to then and theres same hunger I had - to learn more and more...know things know stuff.

I don't have many special plans for the break..but yes I do have couple of books to read up. Got them loaned from the inter-library loan scheme I came to know about lately. One is Linus' autobiography Just for fun and another Sure you're joking, Mr. Feynman (thanks TNT for the review :))

A good break, much needed one...in all sense, a blessed one!

Now have a 'permalink' to my homepage: www.gud.co.in

Wanted gud.com, but I woke up late...its registered since 1994, probably when I was in 6th grade. I requested them, but no reply :( Should've atleast registered gud.org, its registered since 2002, and I've been registering all kinds of domains since 1999 but this, sick me. Anyways, this one is good enough.

Until yesterday I wasn't a big fan of his...but today I admire him. Its Pt.Hari Prasad Chaurasia. He was here along with other reknowned (although I didn't knew them before ;)) musicians like George Brooks on saxophone, Kai Eckhardt on Jazz guitar, Steve Smith on drums and Fareed Haque on guitar. Also present were Vijay Ghate on Tabla and Kaveri Agashe performing Kathak. It was awesome evening here....a mega event organized by an Indian Heritage and Arts Society. It spanned almost 4 hours..and every moment was celestial!

Firstly the flute maestro performed with tabla..and later fusion was presented with and without the flute maestro. For the first time I felt we highly under-paid for any event...it was worth even with $100! And we paid 100 times less ;) We were sitting almost on the stage..with all the friends around..and was fun! Enjoyed truely...almost got me in trance! Especially the fusion with the flute maestro...where he played a pahadi folklore...was nostalgic! Was surprised to know, San Francisco has declared July 25 as Pt. Hari Prasad Chaurasia Day!

I feel such events should be like twice a semester...and most of all should be appropriately publicized...not many people...suprisingly, even in the Music department...didn't knew about the mega event! They simply missed a blissful journey!

Free snacks, free bowling and free pool....we won't miss such many ;)

Periodically, a small recreation center here in the school opens up their store for poor people like us...to play for free ;) And usually its late at nights, like 11 pm to 1 pm. Has all the cool crowd, disco lights and an ambience filled with energy with ear-deafening music. Yesterday had plentiful of play with friends. Am not good at either of the games...but everytime its just the beginer's luck that I rely on ;) Played through the night, and consequence? Missed early morning class :( No one in the room woke-up.

Right now working on an assignment, waiting for Alloy to come up with a counter example. Alloy is a constraint analyzer tool for software validation and verification course. Its a very powerful structural model verification tool developed at MIT. And its fun modelling real world things into Alloy and specifying the constraints on the model as per the specifications...they have to be just right..not less not more. You got to have the complete idea of the model, and then its feeded into alloy. Its having a structural modeling language of its own in which you specify the model. Along with the model, constraints are to be specified, saying that e.g. marriage is always between a man and wife, and such. Alloy then generates various instances of the model - e.g. 2 men, 2 women, 2 of them married and so forth..Now in Alloy, operations can be performed in which you can transform the present state of a model into new one. Say, a child is born. These operations need to be validated against invariants and alloy tries to generate a counter example if it exists.

There are number of ways of doing things in Alloy and theres no one right answer, so the professor of this course has a tough time to device the assignments which are easy to check for the course TA. And, thankfully, that makes them somewhat comprehendible ;)

Sometimes it really takes long time to generate instances. It really does...

Gnuplot is yet another tool that fascinates me. In fact most of the small tools in Unix have fascinated me with their power - power to express, power to simplify. sed, grep, awk, vi, cscope, ctags, dd, dict are few that I use most or my favorites...and it _does_ simplify things to large extent. Recently wanted to plot a graph of a matrix. I under-estimated gnuplot and thought matlab would be better. It is good, but later I realized gnuplot is much simpler. And got the following in no time:



This graph is for a P2P project I'm working on. More red indicates more traffic. Intention of the project is to create a spanning tree / graph...so as to direct the traffic to most 'knowledgable' peer(s) known.

The other day, I had one of the most wonderfully spent 40 minutes while talking to Simon Crosby, CTO, Xensource. Being novice in the virtualization field with relatively meagre domain knowledge, I had to use more than my intuition to talk. But I felt I learnt a lot in the process, and most of all, it was inspiring.

kewl? wikipedia.

I knew I was going to do something like this. I enrolled into a percussion class into Music department here, with a hope to get into K-State band someday. Actually chords or synthesizer would have been ideal...but second thing after that, percussion, is also of my interest. Its fun learning music formally. It started with music theory..one of the TA in Music Department teaches me percussion theory. And he is really good at both, music and teaching. Right now am learning dynamics of music...it states the loudness of the music. Although it seems subjective, its having a theory behind it I'm yet to digest. Pianissimo is for soft, pianississimo for very soft, fortissimo is for loud, fortississimo for very loud and so on... Is good break from the regular chores.

Most of my time lately is consumed by some of my projects and some into studies...the distribution kinda varies...and I always tend to be biased towards my projects. I think, now am able to utilize my time to things that I always wanted to do. *Touchwood*

Ok, time to catch some sleep...its 2 AM....library is closing....and I've got quiz tomorrow at 9.30. Wish me luck :)

These days I usually sit out here at the DOW MRC region of the Hale library. (Did I mentioned before that the library facility here is huge? Probably not the huge-est...but huge among all I've seen so far. And it has such large boards all over with very witty remarks, like -

     "Share a table, 98% of K-State students don't bite."

) They (DOW MRC) have a pile of nicely arranged books - mostly on social issues, contemporary or otherwise...holocaust and stuff like that. It was a class of students here studying ethnic groups and culture, and one of the librarian was informing students about how to go about researching on ethnic topics, what resources to look for, type of books to go through..and things. So was freaked out of the day's classes...and her talk caught my interest (provided I have time, I'm mostly interested into anything thats off my core area of interest ;) She seemed informative and casual. There were huge number of huge books that she glanced through...felt I was reading the whole book in just a short span. Books on black women, ethnic writers, poets, bibliographies, asian revolutions, contemporary middle east...and more. Good part was I could interact with other fellows and with the speaker, as if it were my class :) Good break!

Ah, the hackers. Other day a friend of mine asked me how the movie Revolution OS (ROS) was and thers this comment by one of my buddies - debu asking about it, so I thought would be good posting it. You'd want to watch ROS if you'd want to have a complete account of the open source movement, right from the inception of the idea...to the making of it into a revolution. It talks about how brainies from Stanford, MIT, and other places came together to evolve upon the idea of open source and free software (free as in freedom). It includes extensive footage of interviews with RMS, Bruce Perens (definer of open source), Eric Raymond and the big tux himself - Linus Torvalds. I expected may be Alan Cox to be in there too..If I'd wish I'd want all the major kernel developers and subsystem maintainers to be in there as well ;) Was inspiring to watch it...must watch! The other day I had a chat with a guy from Microsoft...at first he sounded just like you and me...but later his talk converged into a Microsoftian (no hard feelings and am NOT anti-MS per se!) I know its a capitalist world, I know we have to feed our and our family's belly..but as a student I'd go for the things where I know I'II have most to learn!

I know I write too much at times! But these days I'm feeling much more organized and in control than I ever was since I was here. Whatever happens, one needs to just collect the pieces and move on...for world is not gonna wait for you, and person like me wouldn't want to be left behind ;)

Revolution OS. Starring Linus Torvalds, RMS, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and bunch of other kernel hackers.

Finally watched it..took me over a week to find time to watch it. A documentary worth seeing at least once...and may be more than once for open source enthusiast. Incidently I found the DVDs in my school library (theres huge media collection I didn't discovered until I thought of issuing out this DVD).

I had to watch it somehow. As the starcast suggest, its mainly about the open source philosophy and Linux kernel, the flagship project of the open source community. Its inspiring to see the open source philosophy getting mature over time. It depicts the entire open source movement right from the foundation of GNU. Has good interview footage of the most watched for hackers of linux community.

With this I added a sidebar to my blog of the recent reads and recent watchs. I'm kinda conservative when it comes to reading (non-technical) and watching movies. Unless I get good reviews (plural) from reliable sources, I don't readily watch / read. May not be a good habit, but at least saves time.

P.S.: title of the blog is from the free software song.

One of my friends here came back from India. She brought sweets and stuff..also brought my book and some other things that my sis had passed on to her. Though, it didn't came as a surprise, I was full of joy to see the things..it included a pic of my niece and newphew...and three different letters for me...one from my sis, one from my niece and one from my nephew.

Kids, as they were as I left them half year ago, seemed to have grown up. They wouldn't talk much face-to-face or on the phone...but they wrote such insightful letters like its been heavily edited and proofread. I couldn't stop myself and called them up instantly to say thanks. They are missing me a lot and so am I. They want me to be with them...can't help. All I could say them is that I'm with them always, no matter where in the world I am.

I know, sounds chorny, but such things make me homesick at times :( But at the same time such things motivate me to work harder and better..for I know there are people to back me up and who love me. For world is not a kind place...and you come to know people in the world when you come out of the cozy safe nutshell of your family. I think thats what knowing world is all about...knowing people, how they behave, why they behave such, what are their priorities and like. I'm here to learn, and am learning!

It couldn't have been bigger..US President George W. Bush was here at K-State for delivering 142nd lecture in the prestigious Landen Lecture Series. Its great to see the "world's powerful man" talking right in front of you. He has the glamor and style. He mostly tried convincing the audience about the viability of his decisions that he took after 9/11.

The security wasn't much profound or visible as anticipated, like we have in India when personality of such a stature makes public appearance. Don't know how he came to the lecture place and immediately vanished after delivering the speech...no sirens on the road, no traffic blocks and no traffic-police all over the place making way for the vehicles to go. Surprisingly enough, I couldn't spot noticeable body guards around him. In fact, much seemed informal. I wonder how they manage, especially amidst security threats like the one just a week ago..."...will attack US right in its heart." Was kinda scared...mid point of US lies just 20 miles from here ;)

Nonetheless, speech was good...mostly revolved around political stands, sprinkled with timely humor. Apart from the fact that seeing US President speaking in front of you is itself motivating, there wasn't any exhilarataing eloquence. But was a good experience....and will remember this day for the years to come.

Many of my friends came back from India. Visited each one of them diligently..more for what they got from India..;) Am on the eating spree...having fulsome food for the past couple of days...puran poli, tilachya vadya, tilachi poli, methiche parathe, chakli, shev, ladoos...and what not. Today we decided to make something ourselves....it couldn't be anything but vada pav. Was awesome experience...had twice as much fun making it than eating :D Me did mainly the frying part...was easy ;) Plus sweets from another friend coming from India were there to add to our eating pleasures!

Semester has started, but not in the full swing yet...loads yet to come ;) Till then theres some time to experiment. Ya, we really did excercised our culinary skills today and have been doing than often lately. Some do call me canteen boy (don't I look kinda similar in the picture? Only missing things could be a towel on the shoulder. Sorry folks, will pose with that next time ;), but for other reasons...never take anything of such harshly, as long as I know what I should be and what I'm actually doing ;)

Anyways, had belly ful of vada paavs...and fun too, as always :)

Days went like a flash...everyone felt we should've planned for more days. But couldn't afford...loads of work pending.

Was a memorable get-together...long lasting memories. Yummy food (thanks to Viv's mom), fun, beautiful city and cool buddies around...what more could you ask for? Visited NASA Space-center...had a fun time...ate plenty...exploited the steal-deals at the Old Navy shop...took pictures almost of everything we saw.

Return journey of greyhound was also good...felt shorter than the previous one...again slept a lot and read half of Interpreter of Maladies on the way...good light read..didn't fascinated me with the stories much...but good time-killer.

The pic above is at the Herman Brown park. Such a masterpiece, isn't it?

So, the new year started off pretty well. My new year resolution? Ya gotta be greater than 1280 x 768 ;)


Had a round of fun pics..pictured everyone crazily in whatever position we felt like. This is one of those pics...undoubtably I was good at the lenses..*wink*..J So I snapped all of the boys..but sadly no one had the skills to snap me while jumping the tennis net..J Couldn't resist a haircut..costed just $3 and a dollar tip...naah, not a mail-in rebate..instant savings!

All in all, a terrific week...pepped me up for the coming semester and the workload!

Hope we'II have such quality time time and again :)

 
Having a great time here...all the college buddies getting together...our very own karyzmatic Kary, CucumberCool Viv., and dev-spirited Abhi....at viv's place in Houston (courtsey Viv). Bash time...really...haven't had such time for a long time now..:)

The grehound journey was worth a try...Ricky, a US Army veteran escorted me all the way to Houston...got to see altogether different picture of US..worth seeing at least once...my camera didn't had batteries or would have preserved. Nonethless, it remains in my mind. Slept like a baby...for most of the journey..yeah though I managed to complete one of remaining white paper and Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull while on the way...was a wonderfull read..came at the right time...was much needed.

Started with a blast..right from the first day..saw Steven Speilberg's Munich at the amc...was the first time I saw movie in a theatre here. Then I got to do which I yearned for since my childhood...skating...but somehow couldn't when I was a kid. We ice-skated! Was awesome..even the crowd ;) You gotta watch your ass and your fingers if you fall (others might run over your fingers)...and you cannot learn if you don't fall. I learned the basics, but I had to fall..(courtsey Viv., again).

The pic is at a fountain here..had a good time there too...doing all the crazy stuff. Its late night and we still haven't finished with it. It continues...

(Kary, don't copy my post!)