I will be going to pune and mumbai this weekend. Monday is a id holiday. Will watch the Tull concert ! :)
Its a long 18 hours journey and I am taking "Porterhouse Blue" by Tom Sharpe. Lets see how he is!
See you then! It was a long weekend. 26th Jan is India's rupublic day. This time it was 55th year. I grabbed the opportunity and saw "Master and Commander". I dont understand why the movie was made. It is very hard to catagorize this movie.

There is one "Bose Store" on MG Road, Banglore, THE happening place in town. Had gone there and watched the demo one more time. I had already seen in twice or thrice in US. I was amazed to see all the sound systems there as usual. They also have multimedia speakers. I think I might buy them.

And YES! I am going for the Tull concenrt in Mumbai next week. Booked the concert tickets and the bus tickets. Its gonna take me 20 hrs by road in a bus but its worth it! On my way back am planning to get my bicycle here.

Sunday was the chicken day. :) One more reason to look forward to sundays.
Yesterday's march between Ind and Aus was on of the closest battle I have seen (well.. not really.. there is a history of close battles between these two teams). We should and would have won it. Indian team is good but it needs a fine tuning. Thats what it needs, fine tuning.

I am reading up on PCI and SCSI these days. Thats something I have never tried to understand. This new work is taking me to places. Good! I have been trying to install Linux 2.6 on my office Dell machine. Its almost ready. Mouse scroll wheel wasnt working but not it is. Its an optical USB mouse. I compiled "USB UHCI" and yes, its working. Just won the ODI against Zim. In the end, it was too close to comfort. A look at the scorecard shows Ganguly's name everywhere, bowles, catches and even runouts. It sure was his day.

Some things i noticed about Bangalore : There are hundreds and thousands of south india fast food joints with a name xxxx-sagar. I have seen sukhsagar, shantisagar, this-sagar and that-sagar. Today I went for lunch to a place near the office called "udipi something". I did a mistake and ordered chinese stuff, veg obviuosly. Yes.. that is my new resolution. Non-veg only on Sundays! So I ordered chinese and it took 30 mins. On the other hand those who ordered "South Indian Meal" got it in 3 mins. The cook made Manchurian in front of me. It was kinda fun to watch him tossing and catching stuff. Its a job that requires a lot of hard work, skill and ability to handle high temperatures.

Work has started. Thank you. Posting this from my new office, Adaptec. I joined today. They took me out for lunch, gave me a lot of goodies, my visiting cards are ready, my PC was ready. Nice! Hmm... so thats how things are suppose to work.

Anyway, I have so many things to write about.

I left Pune on 16th noon and reached here on 17th morning. Bangalore, the city of gardens, looks nice. First thing I did was to watch a movie. Saw "The last samurai". The film was boring. Nicely visualized but it just drags on. Goes to peak and comes down again. I was bored but some people might like it.

Yesterday we crushed Aussies. Well.. ok.. not crushed but we won. Everyone played really well. Only problem is Sachin got injured and might not play in the next match. That makes him the 5th player who got injured after Harbhajan, Zaheer, Agarkar and Sehwag. Rohan Gavaskar had a surprisingly good debut.

Banglore. Nice place. I am planning to learn "kannada", the native language. I used to make fun of all those in calsoft who were from outside Pune and couldnt talk Marathi. Now I wanna do what they couldnt.

Some things i noticed about Bangalore : All shop keepers and house owners wake up early and put "rangoli" in front of the shop or house. All houses are built such that they could rent out an entire floor.
Just came back from "Shopping!". I had everything planned and everything went well. Mission Accomplished!

Last night I had decided to watch "The last Samurai" but it was housefull and ended up watching "Chameli" .. again. Its ok. I really dont care what I am watching these days.. I should though.

Missed almost all the action in 2nd ODI, Ind vs Zim. Saw last four overs. It was too easy for us. Only team that can beat us is Australia, noone else comes even close.

Alright then! Two more days and am off to Bangalore. Will start packing tomorrow. Give a geek programmer a book to write and trust him to turn it into a programming assignment! :) I started this blog to keep track of interesting sites i browse. But I am too lazy to scroll down or look into the archives for the links. So I hacked some javascript, tweaked the template and found a way to keep all the links in the right-hand box. Neat, isnt it? :)

Just to show how it works, can you see this in the right-hand box? :) I came back to Pune last night. They were showing in the bus. I had always seen that movie in parts. So I thought That I will get to see it without any interruptions usually caused by my excesice-your-thumb-channel-surfing habits. It has an interesting thriller plot. By the time it reached climax my stop had come and I had to get off. *Sigh*. Maybe next time :)

I also saw in Mumbai. This movie is surprisingly smart. This movie, inspired by "Patch Adams", is one of the best hindi movies I have seen in a loooong time. Come to think of it, its the best movie I have seen after "Dil Chahta Hai" maybe and I have seen most of them. It is not comparable to "DCH" but definitely a movie worth watching. "DCH" was made for a certain type of people (urban cosmopolitan crowd) but this movie should appeal to almost everyone. Well done!

This blog is becoming movie-and-cricket blog all the way. "Some random thoughts" are not so random when you think about it. :) Posting this entry from Mumbai. I will be back in Pune tomorrow (or maybe day after). "Reaper Man" is almost finished. This one was definitely better than "Moving Pictures". (I want to link all these things in double quotes to the websites but its slow and painful. And if anyone is genuinelly interested, there is Google :D).

I also watched "Chameli" on 9th (First day First show). Its almost crap. Could have been worse though.
Plus points : Cinematography, background music , songs and hard work done by all the performers.
Minus points : No story, Kareena is not good enough for this role.
I am really impressed by the music. Have to download MP3s. Anyway, it is definitely better than something like "Kal ho na ho". "Chameli" ends in 2 hours which makes it bearable. So in simple words "Could have been better, Could have been worse!"

India lost the first ODI in VB series by 18 runs. Played well though. We gave 27 extras and missed some runs by slaggy running between the wickets. We will come back, no worries.

I have got 8 new Pratchets. Gonna take a long and nice time to finish all :) Last test match is over and India retain the trophy. We had a chance to win but it was always difficult. "Tagga" played well and resued his team, something that he had done so many times. What a player! Steve Waugh is optimism personified. His Never-say-die attitude would inspire people around the world. And we are talking about the attitude and not the skill. Attitude makes you what you are. It shows what you are made of. If you have the right attitude, rest all comes easy. Hats off to a great warrier.

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Yesterday some b******rds broke into Bhandarkar Institute and smashed almost everything. This is disgusting. The issue was that some stupid american author wrote something (dont know what exactly) bad about Shivaji Maharaj. Most of the attackers dint even know the author's name. I simply fail to understand why someone would do this. Its like someone says something bad about my friend and as a reaction I go and beat up my own friend. Why???? Noone is THAT stupid. There has to be some political thing behind all this. Today I am totally ashamed of calling myself a Maharashtrian.

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I have downloaded the iscsi draft 20. Its bloody 200+ pages. Have to start reading it. Talked to Mahesh on MSN. I would probably go and share a flat with him. Anu had messaged asking about the Kerala trip on the 24th weekend. Lets see what happens. I would probably leave on 16th or 17th.

Tomorrow I will be going to Mumbai.. just the routine visit. And planning to come back on 10th. Then the real work starts. Have to go to bank and buy clothes and talk to the cell guys about transfering the cell to Bangalore. Looks like the end of happy days. :) Match Update

It took a session and another 100 odd runs to dismiss the Aussies but that is all past now. Katich played a good knock and Gillespie was really annoying. Anil Kumble, India's man for crisis and the only real bowler, took 8 wickets. After that, instead of forcing a follow-on, India batted again (In my opinion, this is a correct decision). Viru, Sachin and Rahul "The Wall" Dravid got together and smashed 211/2 in 40 overs. Now the target is 443 runs in 94 overs. It is very unlikely that India would lose from here. In that case we will retain the trophy. And we might win and crush the Australian ego. I hope Kumble and guys are sleeping well right now cause tomorrow is a BIG day for them. Best of luck boys!

I must say, that I wasnt very enthusiastic about posting an entry today. But every time I have posted one, Indians have played well. I am very superstitious about these things when it comes to cricket (things like sitting in the same chair for hours when things are going well for india). :) So I have done my bit (posting a blog entry) for the indian team. After all "Hum bhi to hai team mein!".

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Checked out samba4 sources from samba cvs. Traced a lot of code. I dont know about the correctness or the performance of samba4 but code readability and general cleanness in design has definitely improved compared to samba3. Match is getting interesting. India finally declared at 705/7. Sachin 241 not out and for once the tail wagged and wagged in style. Aussies started off well but at the end of the day the score was 342/6 with a real chance for India to win the series. Way to go guys! Actually I am feeling a little sorry for Steve. He shouldnt have declared his retirement before the start of the series.

Kaif is not fit for the ODIs and the jokers have sent Rohan Gavaskar to replace him. This is plain stupid. If I had a choice between Jr. Gavaskar and an orangutan who can say nothing but "Oook", I would have gone for the monkey! Parthiv Patel is anyday better than Jr.G and he proved this today. I think he should play in ODIs too.

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Today I found out how linux kernel handles the bad addresses passed from userspace through a syscall. A bad address will always raise a page fault. There are three cases here :

1) the address is in the process address map but the corresponding page is not present (demand paging) or the page is read-only and process is trying to write (copy-on-write). This is handled in the vm subsystem.

2) Its a bad address resulting from bad programming (e.g. null pointer dereference). Kernel oops in this case.

3) Its a bad address passed in a syscall. There are certain well-known instructions in the kernel that are used to access the user memory (get_user() etc). If the faulting instruction falls into these well-known intructions, certain "fixup" code is executed.

In this third case, if the adress of the fixup code is changed (by writing a module), we can easily execute any code in the kernel by passing a non-existant pointer to the system call.

Amazing stuff. If you think I have come up with this idea on my own then you are over-estimating me. I read this in a phrack article. I am amazed.

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All I can say is Oook!

For those who dont understand the "Oook" language, here is what it means in English :
"Today i finished 'Moving Pictures' by Terry Pratchett and started with 'Reaper man'. As usual the book was ok. Most of the discworld books dont have interesting plots but the way he writes is fun to read. And sometimes there is a philosophical touch which makes one think."
Came back from Mumbai just a few hours back. It was a nice trip although we all were a bit cramped in the car. Had to get up at 3:30 AM (that's right.. 3:30 in the morning!) and rushed to airport to receive Shishir. Came back and watch the match.

And what happened today in Sydney is simply indescribable! Sachin is back in form and showed that "Form is temporary but class is permanent." He is still there on 220 not out. Very Very Special Laxman was killing the Aussie attack with his wristy and classy shots. It was a treat to watch. Simply amazing.
It was the first day of the final test match between India and Australia at Syndey. I badly want India to win this match and so the series. Its about time. Tendulkar is playing well. I hope his bad patch is over. My fingers will be crossed for next 5 days for sure.

Finally I had gone to Calsoft to collect my bike which was there for almost 2 weeks. I was expecting a hard time starting it but surprisingly I dint trouble me much. On the way back I aslo payed the cell bill. They said my outgoing calls will be activated in 2 hrs. Lets see.

I am off to Mumbai in a couple of hours. Shishir is coming back from US tonight. We all are going to receive him. Will be back in a day or two. Amey was online. Told him about the deadlock we found in his code. Classical recursive spinlock. Just came home. Had a nice time with Ajay and Prashant. People on the streets were just crazy. We kept wondering why so many people were out on the streets and where they were going. We just chatted and chatted. Cool stuff.

Btw.. I am posting this using the BloGTK on linux 2.6 desktop. There is some DNS problem and new.blogger.com is not accessible. I am using 66.102.15.100 instead! :)
Looks cool.

Again, Happy 2004 everyone :)