Latest Addition to the Stable!

Hmmm... You guessed it right from the pic :) I recently (on 24th March '07) got a Pulsar 150 DTS-i for myself. Here are some pics of the cool bike. I am in awe of the design and the bike is just amazing. I can just keep going on and on about it as long possible...

The bike has a lot of cool and NEW features. The new features that come with the so called UG-III Pulsar are:

1. The engine is a 149 cc compared to the 146 cc of the older 150 versions.

2. It has a new gearbox with changed gear ratios. The gear pattern is the same as the 180 DTS-i.

3. The bike comes with the new design at the rear with new LED tail lamps. The bike is a few inches longer than the older Pulsar (thats was cool).

4. The bike also comes with a digital console, which is the selling point of the bike. The console display the speed of the bike, the total distance travelled and a trip meter to calculate distance of upto 12 trips! The display also has a digital fuel level indicator. Though the RPM meter is still analog... The orange back light looks cool.

5. The bike has one very great feature for the first time in bikes in India. It has auto-cancelling indicators for left and right indication. The moment you complete the turn the indicators go off on their own as they are in cars!

6. The typical problem with most bikes is that the indicator rubbers are hard and break off frequently. Then you need to fix them up with tape. But this bike comes with flexible indicator rubbers that make the indicator lamps flexible (you can actually turn them around) that don't break.

7. Other accessories are default as is from the previos DTS-i models like alloy wheels, NitroX suspension, front disc brake and electric starter.

8. The front of the bike has also got a bit of a change. The plastic on the previous Pulsar was flat whereas this one has an edged out sharp surface for the pilot lamps which looks cool.

9. The bike also has back lit switches which are convenient in the dark. This is also a first in Indian bikes...

The price difference between the 150 and 180 versions when I bought it was just a mere 1.5 grands. I could have gone for the 180 engine but chose the 150 for its fuel efficiency. There is very less difference between the two bikes except for the 30 cc increase in power and the black look in the 180. Apart from that everything else is the same. The other thing is, looking at the traffic in the city and the kind of roads we have in Pune, a bigger engine is hardly of any use. Where would you actually open up the throttle and race? Thats what I asked myself and the answer was the 150 cc DTS-i.

I also got a remote controlled security system fitted on the bike as an addon accessory offered by the company showroom.
On the whole a nice bike which costed me a whopping 63 grands (On road + accessories)... But I think its worth the price for all the features it has to offer.

HAPPY BIKING!!!

Got a Sony Ericsson K750i :)

I recently bought a Sony Ericsson K750i. The cell is a good combination of features at that price. Well got it for ten and a half grands and additional 1 GB memory for another grand. Totals to eleven and a half grand. Thats a good price for a phone with 2 Mega-pixel camera, Radio, Media Player and Internet capabilities alongwith 1 GB of memory card... The phone sounds good and works smooth as well... The camera can take nice crisp images with 3 different image sizes. Well forgot to mention that the camera sports a 4 X digital zoom. Though not quite good at times but works fine for me. The best part about the phone is that it has a powerful flash light which can also double up as a torch. This is something very handy for taking pictures in the dark. Pictures come out really very well in the dark :) The media player plays a lot of different formats but mp3 is what is recommended. Though the phone does not play wav files and some of the midi files directly copied from the computer. The phone also is unable to play Real medi formats. Well Sony-Ericsson should do something about it... The phones memory is easily accessible once connected to the computer. The phone memory shows up as a drive in Windows and you can just drag and drop files onto the phone memory. As simple as that!

Some of the impressive features include PhotoDJ to edit your photos, MusicDJ to create own ringtones and VideoDJ to create/edit videos. The keys of the phone are sometimes annoying but they are nice. There are a hell lot of free themes available for this phone and the phones looks cool with these themes. I have got some 60+ themes on mine! There are 3 games that came with the phone which are quite amusing and entertaining...

All in all a nice package for a good price. What say?

From the Penguin's to the Windows World...
I am back to the Windows world after working with the Penguin for more than a year :) There are a lot of differences in the two but I love and hate both. While on the Penguin's side, it was just a black console with lots of white characters, here the scene is different. There are a lot more colors to add to my life now :) But I love the simplicity the Penguin offers... I will surely miss it. But I promise I will be back at it soon. I am trying to find a box with the Penguin because I feel lonely without it, I am missing it seriously...

Well for now, I am learning to debug a driver in kernel mode. I say its a very different experience... But a learning one ;)

Back to office after a long time!!!
I am back to a new office after about one and a half months... I had a great time in this long vacation. Travelled a lot of places, bought a lot of stuff and basically spent a lot of money ;)

I have joined Covelix Technologies here in Pune and today is my second day at work. Had a few minutes, so thought of writing on the blog...

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

Have a look at this site here.

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



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


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

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

Any more explanations are welcome.

Gokul On Storage!



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

Have a look at his blog here.

Hans Adventures!

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











































































































































Visit here for more info on this place

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





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

Linux fails to check bounds...

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

Linux:
> ulimit -d 1
> ls -la


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


Solaris:
> ulimit -d 1
> ls -la


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

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

Finding idle CPU cycles to utilize them.

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



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


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

Flirting with my new LOVE!!!


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


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

POSUG Launched

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

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

Light a candle for Mumbaiites

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

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

Lesson of LIFE...

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

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

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

Thats called sleeping in office!
Thats me resting in peace in the office ;)

After a long time (more than a month to be precise!)
April was a great month career wise. Had a lot of stuff to do. I won't speak of all the technical stuff here. So what did I do in the last month? Had a lot of fun and kicked some butt!!! Actually ;)

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

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

Tandoori Chicken. Ummmmm!!!



















Serves 4

Preparation Time 30 minutes

Contents
Chicken

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

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

For basting of butter
½ tspn of chaat masala

For garnishing
Onion rings and lemon wedges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid Horsepower

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

Niagara doing just great!
I read this comparison on the following site. Its really impressive. Have a look at it here.