I saw "Dhoom". I knew that it was gonna be BAD. is knows to make romantic movies with SRK. I knew they are gonna fail miserably in their attempt to make a "paisa vasool" movie. And I knew its gonna be a flop.

But it turned out to be GOOD entertaining movie. It was fast paced. It was polished. Performances were good. This is definitely inspired by movies but that doesnt make it boring. Uday Chopra has done well. That was a shock rather than a surprise. Jr. Bacchan fits in the role. Only once, when he tries to do a drunk big B, he is pathetic. But that can be forgiven. John Abraham, with his six-packs, is not bad either. Esha Deol and Rimi Sen do what they were there to do. There are loopholes in the movie but it is interesting.

Go watch it.

I am back in Hyderabad today. Catching up with news and mails. I'll post about my trip later. You can safely ignore this post (just like any other post on the blog) ;)
Tonight I'm leaving for Pune. I will also be going to Mumbai. Planning to come back to Hyderabad on Tuesday. Happy days are here again.. Thumsup! :)
A couple of days (weeks) back, blogger added a small navbar to all the blogs. Its the small gray strip you see at the top of this page. It has a google search bar in it. That kinda made the big google search bar below the title on this page a stupid idea. But I will keep it there anyway. Another thing is the "Next Blog" button in the right hand corner. This button will take you to some random, recently-updated blog. After this, I could see many people visiting my blog. Good for me :).

These blogger people really "think"!
Yesterday I wanted to test SOS. But due to "some" problem I was not able to setup the test environment.

This led me to write some kernel module that hijacks some system call. This was easy in 2.4 kernel because was exported. But in 2.6 kernel, they are not exporting the table. Finally, I came up with a (rather good) idea. I used my recent knowledge of cryptanalysis and found the location of sys_call_table in the memory. The thing is. in sys_call_table, there are multiple entries for "sys_ni_syscall". So if you search for that pattern, you will get some idea about the sys_call_table location.

This is very similar to frequency analysis. I was on the cloud #9 when I thought of this. :)

Tonight I will test SOS! :)
I saw "Kyu .. ho gaya na" on Monday. And I was really glad that finally "ye khatam ho gaya".

Plus points are:

• Vivek Oberoi. He has done a decent job. Doesnt look out of place when he acts like a kid. ;)
• Amitabh. As usual he has done a good job. His role is not that great but its different.
• Sameer Karnik. This director is gonna go places. I am betting my money (even though I dont have any) on him. His camera angles are really fresh.
• Music. Shankar, Ehsan, Loy has done it again. Songs are really good (I am planning to buy the CD even).
  

Negetive points are:

• Ash. She looks old and tries too hard to look young. I think its time for her to retire.
• Story. Its a boring love story. And it drags a lot.
  

All-n-all its boring. But somehow it looked different and fresh. Good in parts.


No! wait! I dont use these bad words very often but there is no other appropriate title for this post.. really!

Try this and you'll know what I mean :

• Go to google and try searching for "bastards" and press on I'm feeling lucky.

This is hilarious! Beware of open source community. They will hit you back! :)

Yes, I am talking about Larry Wall, the creator of perl. A couple of days back he delivered his address. Many people talk about many things these days and I just skip through most of it. But when Larry talks (or writes), I listen (or read). Just being a great designed or programmer is not enough. The way Larry communicates is awsome. He is out of this world and at the same time very humble and down to earth. This sounds like, since I'm reading about quantum physics these days, a wave-particle duality kind of thing. Well.. that metaphor I used there was "limp" unlike many of them Larry used in his address. :)

In his speech, he talks about screensavers. This is typical Larry. He takes two totally different (or so it seems) topics and makes a connection. There was one address where he talked about chemistry. Just superb. And the one where he shows the universal design diagram. Very cool.

While at it, just go through .

Yesterday was a sad day yet again for Indian sports fans.

We lost in hockey against New Zealand thanks to the controversial decision to award penalty corners (four of them) after the end of time whistle. But that is not an excuse. We played badly, Baljeet especially. He missed a couple of very simple chances and thats the reason we lost.

We lost against Pakistan in tri-nation cricket tournament in Holland. It was jus pathetic. Tendulkar was not playing in the match and batting collapsed, as they say, like a pack of cards. This shows that we still need him and hes still the backbone of the team.

Lee-hesh are out of the competition. I was so sure about a medal from them that I still cant believe that they are out. But they tried their best. The last score was 6-7 (5-7), 6-4, 14-16. Yesterday I saw "Fida" starring Kareena, Shahid Kapoor and Fardeen. I will talk about the movie later. Before that I want to talk about the theatre in which I saw it. It is a theatre called "Sensation INSOMNIA". The ticket is mere 60 Rs. And they dont have seats. Instead they have big huge leather cushioned coaches. I have never seen anything like that before.. not in India, not in US. The sound system is impressive too. Only thing is they play LOUD random disco music in the interval and thats pretty annoying. Even then, surely, this is gonna be my favourite theatre so far.

Now the movie. Movie is pretty good.. thanks to the surprise ending. But dont take my word for it 'cause I am known to give good reviews about any Kareena movie. Watch it for urself. I enjoyed it but you might not :).
This is crazy! I cant believe I just did it. I cracked of the crypto challenge. When I started it felt like impossible and it was tough!

I have found one amazing on the web. I ran the cipher through it. It was a homophonic cipher so that dint help much. But there were some clues. Most important thing I found from the frequency analysis is that the cipher is in Italian. Italian is Greek to me. After a couple of perl script and couple of hours on I could crack it! This was simply amazing!! Damn exciting and making me proud of my gray matter! :)

Here is the message:

o frati dissi che per cento milia perigli siete giunti a loccidente a questa tanto picciola vigilia de nostri sensi che del rimanente non vogliate negar lesperienza diretro al sol del mondo senza gente considerate la vostra semenza fati non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza li miei compagni fecio si aguti con questa orazion picciola al cammino che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti e volta nostra poppa nel mattino dei remi facemmo ali al folle volo sempre acquistando dal lato mancino tutte le stelle gia de laltro polo vedea la notte e l nostro tanto basso che non surgea fuor del marin suolo cinque volte racceso e tanto casso lo lume era di sotto da la luna poi che ntrati eravam ne lalto passoquando napparve una montagna bruna per la distanza e parvemi alta tanto quanto veduta non avea alcuna noi ci allegrammo e tosto torno in pianto che de la nova terra un turbo nacque e percosse del legno il primo canto tre volte il fe girar con tutte lacque a la quarta levar la poppa in suso e la prora ire in giu comaltrui piacqueinfin che l mar fu sopra noi richiuso la parola in codice e equator

I googled for this message and found that it is . One day I will read the translation!

I feel like dancing now!!!! :)


We were hoping a gold from Lee-hesh. But they are out in the semis. Now lets see if they can get a bronze atleast. Very sad day indeed. Just now I successfully cracked .

The hidden message is: faber est suae quisque fortunae appius claudius caecus dictum arcanum est neutron.

I dont know what that means. Looks greek or latin to me. I, initially, assumed that the message is in english and that was a mistake. Next time I'll be extra careful. Bring on the next stage! :)

Heres a question for you.

And the question is..

Guess what I had for dinner tonight?

Its ok if you call me predictable. :)


This is like a routine now. With Mahesh and Anuj, I first went to Hyderabad House, a restaurant famous for the biryani, and had.. well.. chicken biryani and then we went to Prasad's and saw in IMAX. I dont know if the movie is really good but I really like it. I have read the book but couldnt remember any of it. The movie is well done and pretty entertaining. Do you also think like that or was it just the IMAX effect? Today is a proud day for every Indian. became the first Indian to grab a silver medal in the Olympic Games in Athens. He scored 179 points, one more than the chinese shooter, in double-trap shooting event. Well Done! Hopefully this is just a start and there will be more to follow his foot-steps and even to better him. Today I went for a movie without any planning. A friend just called and I stepped out of the office. Just liek the good ol' days. Last couple of months in Bangalore have denied me these simple pleasures of life. But here in Hyderabad its very much possible like I found out today. What movie I saw dint really matter. But for the sake of completeness I will put it here that I saw .

The movie is decent. I have not read Asimov but my friend said that movie is not that bad. One thing is that its fast. FX are good but nothing great about that. Storyline is OK. And mine was a free ticket + I got two free Cokes. I liked the movie for sure. :)

Today is Smriti's Birthday. Many Many Happy returns of the day! :) In "The Code Book", Simon Singh has a . This book has inspired me to crack it. I am gonna attempt all of them. And today I managed to crack the first stage. I wont put a spoiler here. But its pretty easy. I took 15-20 mins to crack it. Feels good! :). I am officially a code breaker now. Bring on the second stage.. tomorrow. Weekend was spent mostly in a bus but some part was spent in my home town, Pune, and some was in Mumbai. I left for Mumbai on Friday and reached there on Saturday morning. In the bus I mostly slept and read The Code Book. This is damn interesting.

In Mumbai I went to InOrbit Mall, Malad. This is another mall in the lines of Forum, Bangalore. Slowly but steadily, malls in India and getting comparable to the malls in US. They have a Sony Story in the mall. I saw . Pretty cool. Then bought by Tom Robbins. I have read his Jitterbug Perfume and quite liked it.

I reached Pune at 2 am. Slept. Got up in the morning. Whole day I spent at home with the family. It was nice. Today morning reached Hyderabad again. I was trying to configure my system here in Hyderabad office according to "One-True-Way" (vim, evolution, xfce, firefox, multi-gnome-terminal etc.). This is Fedora Core2 and was not installed by me. When I tried installing , I found out that tk was not installed. Same thing happened with . I tried compiling from source, source rpm, binary rpms and was about to give up. Then I remembered about and . These are the tools for package management.

I thought I would give it a try. Yum takes an awful lot of time to get the information about the packages. I was using an http proxy. So I had to set "http_proxy" environment variable. But after that I could install MGT as well as AMSN without a problem. This rocks.

Next problem was mail client. I have been using evolution for some time now and I'm impressed. In our office we use MS Exchange server. I usually configure my evolution to POP mails from exchange. But since I am here for a few days I dint want to do that. I remembered reading about being open source now. This is a plugin for evolution to connect to exchange server. I installed the RPM, configured the exchange server and now I can connect to our exchange server without a problem. The last barrier between a full linux corporate office has been crossed. Way to Go!

My favourite news paper is . As you can see they also have an online edition. This uses marathi fonts and unfortunately I could not configure my RH 9.0 in Bangalore to show the proper fonts. I had tried before but with no luck. There is absolutely no help available on this.. or I was just looking at the wrong place. The info they have on that page is so wrong that its not funny. Notice the last instruction? It says "REBOOT YOUR MACHINE".. to install a font. Its Bulls!@t with a double capital B!

Here in Hederabad, I have a Fedora Core 2 machine. And now, after some tweaking, I was able to configure it to show the proper fonts and it was amazingly easy.

Heres the step by step guide:

1. Download SUBAK0.ttf and SUBAK.ttf
2. Create a directory ".fonts" in your home directory. (mkdir ~/.fonts)
3. Copy the downloaded files in ~/.fonts
4. Rename SUBAK0.ttf to subak0.ttf and SUBAK.ttf to subak.ttf
5. Restart your X. (maybe you just need to restart xfs or browser).
   

Enjoy!
Like the Book Tax, We also have to pay Movie Tax on the same lines. Last night I caught up with old Calsoft friends and went for a movie. The theatre, they told me, is the best in town and possibly the best in India. certainly lives upto it. Its built along the lines of Matreon in good ol' San Fransisco. Before the movie we had chicken biryani there. It was not "the real thing" but still was better than most other chicken biryanis I have had.

The movie we watched was "Mujhse Shaadi karogi" (Will you marry me?). Its a David Dhavan film. And that says it all. It was pretty funny and enjoyable once you fill the space between your ears with vaccum. Akshay Kumar has done very well. Salman is ok. And there is a chance that Priyanka Chopra might replace Aishwarya Rai as "Ms. Beautiful". Well... on second thoughts.. naaaaaah. Ash will always be the best! But Priyanka is sizzling in the movie in a non-vulger sort of way.

Conclusion? The movie is recommended if you are looking for entertainment and fun.
While at the Bangalore Airport, I saw a book shop. I could not resist the temptation. I was a small setup but the collection was good. I hadnt payed my book tax for some time. Book shop is the worst kind of addiction. Usually when I go to a bookshop, I come back with a lighter pocket. I call it Book Tax, the money that you have to pay because someone is writing a book and someone is publishing it.

Bought two (hopefully) excellent books.

• by
• by John Gribbin

I usually dont go for non-fictions but I had heard so much about these books that I had to make exceptions. Started with the first one in the flight and it turned out to be very intersting book in a fiction kind of way. Wonderful. Cant wait to finish it!

Posting this from Hyderabad. Reached here.. that too safely. Journey was anything but uneventful. Heres the full story :

They booked me on flight to Hyderabad. Air Deccan is popularly known as poor mans airways.. or flying coffins. The roumer is they use all phased out planes to cut the costs. I boarded the plane on time. The plane was a small propellar driven 24-seater. It backed off and started on the runway and suddenly it came to a stop. As there was no onboard crew (another cost-cutting thing), we dint know what was happening. We were stuck there for more than half hour and we dint have a clue. Brain started doing over time and the fact that couple of Arabic speaking passengers were onboard, dint help the poor little creature. There was a (pretty cute looking.. i must say) air hostess on the flight. Even she dint know what was happening. Finally the pilot (I am assuming he was the pilot since he came out of the cockpit) said that the propellar (right one) is not working properly. So we got off the plane and passangers were pretty agressive by that time. Some of them asked for their money, got it and went home. Some of us, who were brave and who dint care about their life, boarded on the SAME plane after half an hour. It was almust funny and I was laughing and making wise-cracks about the situation till that time. All I could think of at that time was "This will be a great story for my blog!".

But when we started on the runway again fear came down upon me in a flash. IS IT WORTH IT? WORTH MY LIFE? That was the question on my mind as I was wiping the sweat off the brows. Throughout the flight each one of the passangers had their fingers crossed. When we landed at the Hyderabad Airport everyone clapped. Seems funny now but we were really scared :)
Tomorrow I will be leaving for , the City of and , for a few weeks. That means I am gonna put on some weight and I am gonna see a lot of movies. I will also be working very hard on the project and it also means that I will be going to Pune and Mumbai on the weekends. All-n-all it will be a nice change from routine life.
A couple of months back there was a story on SlashDot about a (the only?) FreeBSD LiveCD distribution called . I had downloaded it promptly back then. But never got to burning a CD and trying it out. The major problem was that it needs a reboot and being a linux user, I simply refuse to do that (as a part of "my uptime is better than yours" routine.. currently 3 days because they took down the system on Sunday. At one point of time it was more than a month on 2.6.4 kernel.. cool, isnt it?).

For some reason, today I was browsing and read about the new Gentoo 2004.2 LiveCDs. This made me think about the freesbie ISOs peacefully sitting in ~/downloads. And I have been using VMWare for some time now on my desktop. Didnt take much time to put 2 things together and in a couple of minutes (literally) I had FreeSBIE running in VMWare. Worked like a charm with full X support. This has all the things I like and use.

• My desktop environment ()
• My favourite filer ()
• My favourite mail client ()
• and Firefox (it was called Phoenix when FreeSBIE was released)
  

I was very comfortable with system. I think it is a must for every unix geek out there. Enjoy!

*Self-bragging mode on*

Today Some Random Thoughts reached another mile stone. The word count has now reached more than 20,000 words. I just did some research (read: googling) and found that average words per page for a printed book is about 250. That means if someone wants to publish this blog as a book, it will have some 80 pages! Way to GO!

*Self-bragging mode off*
After a long time I,m posting an SOS update. Its not that I had abandoned the project (which is impossible) but the software multitasking support did give me some sleepless noons ;). It practically drove me crazy. Debugging stack problems without debugger is no joke. But finally I, persistent as always, cracked it. Now I have 2 tasks and a round robin scheduler. Working like a charm. Its still spaghetti code that I have to re-write but main part is done. Tonight I will sleep peacefully :)
Some days back I was writing a program to generate anagrams. It started with this post.

While it was a partially successful attempt (basically brute force which takes a lot of time) I was also searching the net for the same. And then I came across . Today I spent almost an hour trying out different names in that. One of the best one is for "Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar". Go try it out :)
On sunday, three of calsofts dude got together for lunch. Mahesh came from hydrabad, Sumit was here in Bangalore all along. It was fun. Talking about old times and whos doing what. We had gone to a place call Three Quarter Chinese. A little expensive but food was good. Even Sumit, whos the food-pundit liked it and thats something. After that had Ice-Cream at Corner House. A nice re-uniun.

Like they say, "Form is temporary, But the class is permanent".

One of my all time favourite tennis player, Andre Agassi, (another one is Johnny Mac) is back with a bang. I used to be a tennis follower in Agassi and Sampras days. Lately, I have lost interest in the game. Everyday some new 16-year old (could be 12 by now) is on the top of the charts.

But this weekend, the unthikable happened. Agassi, at 34, showed the world that you cant win just with powerful serves, when he won against Lleyton Hewitt in

This man is a genius!

I have been very very very busy for last 2-3 days. Havnt slept properly, havnt eaten properly, havnt played Table tennis, havnt worked on SOS also. SOS has been stuck for some days now. Today I am going to promise myself that by monday it will have the multitasking support or else.

C ya!

Monsoon is here. And looks like its here to stay. In my hometown, Pune, its been raining non-stop for a couple of weeks. There are three dams on Mula and Mutha, the rivers in Pune, and all three are flooded. Same is the case in most of the coastal Maharashtra and Gujrat, including Mumbai. Traffic towards and from Mumbai is stopped.

Here, in Bangalore, its not that bad. It rains in the mornings and nights. I have observed that it almost never rains in the peak hours when people are coming home or going to office. Thats one well-behaving rainy season. :)

My school in Pune was very close to the river. I remember in the rainy days we used to stand in top floor gallery, next to the huge drawing hall, to see the water flowing under the bridge. There are markings on the bridge walls and they are supposed to be Danger Levels. We used to talk about the water coming up to the danger levels and all. Good old days.

Even before the school days, I remember going and standing on the lakdi pool, that is "Wooden Bridge", which used to be wooden in olden times but not anymore. There used to be so many people standing there looking at the water. And we used to wonder what is so interesting in water flowing under the bridge :). But in some weird way it was interesting.

I miss Pune Monsoon! :)
Last night what I thought was a bug but not the only bug. I fixed it but multitasking support is still not complete. Clearly its a case of currupt stack and I am finding myself going through the gcc generated assembly code and doing the stack calculation manually. This is something I have not done before. Its time consuming but interesting. I am sure that eventually I will make it work.
Multitasking is NOT as easy as it looks. I have some basic framework ready for it. I can create new tasks and schedule it also. But something somewhere is gong wrong and .. HEY!! THIS IS AWSOME AND UNBELIEVABLE! As i was writing this, I suddenly realized whats happening and the solution also. Cool! I will test it and post the result in some time. Cant wait!

I realize that this blog needs more color. Thats why I have setup an account at

After that I went to hunt some nice snaps that are worthy of this blog ;).

After some research, I found this one. Ironically its B&W. Wont add much color to this page.

But surely, this is one of those snaps which mark a "moment" in history. Its not everyday when you see two gods standing next to each other. Just Great!

I use firefox and I use gmail. Today I found a small Firefox Plugin that checks gmail. Ideal for people like me. Heres

Enjoy!

Update: Now that we are talking about GMail, heres and interesting thing I found when I was browsing the web using, what else but google.

If you have a mail id like "firstname.lastname@gmail.com", like I have, then following IDs will also work :

• firstnamelastname@gmail.com
• f.irstnamelastname@gmail.com
• FirstnameLastname@gmail.com

Actually Google will tolerate the "dot" anywhere in the username. Weird.
Looks like Google is going after now. Check out new . This is pretty convinient and better than old Google Groups. Now you can get the new messages in a newsgroup as a digest. You can also mark ("Star" as they call it) some import threads. For someone, like me, who spends a lot of time searching for information, this is a blessing!

While I am on it, let me just put it down in writing that alt.os.development is THE place for OS Devel related information. It, as they say, just rocks. On Saturday, I implemented a basic physical memory manager. The was I have designed it (which is far from perfect and eventually I will redesign and rewrite this code) is like this:

I partitioned the memory in some sections. And each section is divided into small units. For example, section one is divided into units of 32 bytes, section two into 64 bytes and so on. There is a bitmap for each section that represents the units.

Whenever memory is allocated dynamically, the size is converted into the nearest unit size and first free unit is allocated. The corresponding bit in the corresponding bitmap is set to mark it used.

Currently I am not using virtual memory and handling physical memory only. Once I enable paging, I will manage the physical memory in terms of pages, ala Linux. Then I will design a slab allocator to create small objects and so on.

Next big item is multitasking. It is gonna be in RING0 and non-preemptive for now. I am going for the software multitasking rather than using TSS (because of the limit on number of tasks etc). Its gonna be FUN! :) Yesterday's Asia Cup final between India and SriLanka was simple unbelievable. We lost the toss and thats when we lost the match. Indian bowling performance was good with Sachin and Sehwag doing well. Everyone chipped in and Lankans made 227 in 50 overs.

This was definitely gettable. But something was messed up in the batsmen's mind. Sehwag dint fire. And after that, for some strange reason, noone wanted to make runs. Sachin did ok in the batting. He made 74 in some 90 balls. Noone else stood on the crease to support him. The next highest was Zaheer Khan with some 20 odd runs. That was simply pathetic. I could not believe my eyes. Seven batsmen and we still couldnt chase this small total? DAMN!

I also lost the bet.
On Orkut Alogorithms community someone posted this :

1) Given 2 strings A and B with 'm' and 'n' characters respectively, whats the best algorithm for seeing if all the 'm' characters of the first string are present in the second string. The characters could be at any location, dont make any assumptions(there could be no ordering, repetitions etc)...what is the worst case complexity in asymptotic notation?

The guy managed O(mlogn) on this. Heres my take on it:

int main()
{
char a[100];
char b[100];
char c[26] = {0};
int i;
printf("Enter first string:");
scanf("%s", a);
printf("Enter second string:");
scanf("%s", b);

for(i=0; i < strlen(a); i++){
c[a[i]-97]++;
}

for(i=0; i < strlen(b); i++){
c[b[i]-97]--;
}

for(i=0; i < 26; i++)
if(c[i]){
printf("All the characters from B are not in A\n");
return 1;
}
printf("All the characters from B are in A\n");
return 0;

}