Random Walks

For the last few months, I’ve been working on another small operating system called Tinker. The idea was to make an operating system that could be understood by anyone with a decent knowledge of C and x86 Assembly. The reason for building such an operating system is that I find the lack of interest of many students in systems programming very odd. You could say Tinker is meant to be something of a social experiment in order to see if these students are genuinely not interested or if they are simply unaware of the endless possibilities! So far, the following features have been implemented by me in Tinker:

• GRUB Bootloader bootstrapping
• Descriptor Tables (GDT, IDT, ISR’s ,IRQ’s)
• Screen management functions
• Keyboard, Timer and Hard Disk Handlers
• Very Simple In-Memory File System (RamFS)!
• Basic memory management (Paging, malloc, free)
• Process management with simple round-robin scheduling
• A Partial C Library
• A simple shell with basic commands.

For now, I have left Tinker within the kernel space (I have had trouble implementing the keyboard driver in user space :-/ ) and there is no possibility of loading programs from the file system and executing. Later, I will probably write in ELF support to allow for loading programs into memory. I also plan to implement swap space now that I have managed to write a crude hard disk driver. For those interested in programming one of their own, please feel free to mail me or leave a comment here on the blog! I will put up the sources for Tinker later

I have got a lot of feedback on my post about Richard Stallman over the last few months (I also think a lot of them ended up in my spam for some reason and got deleted before I could read them). People have been getting the wrong idea that I am against Richard Stallman and his views so I thought I’d write this post to clear it up.

Richard Stallman is, without doubt, a brilliant man. Maybe not the best orator in the world (see my previous post), but no one can deny that he has managed to change the world, for the better, with his philosophy. A lot of people, including me, have termed him as an extremist. But it’s important to realize that it is this very extremist outlook and dedication that is responsible for the success of GNU and the Free Software Foundation. The same extremist outlook is responsible for an entire generation of programmers changing the world, without any barriers, even as I write this post.

Would the world have not changed if Richard Stallman hadn’t been so extremist or had not even come into the picture? I think there would still have been many people in this world who would have given out their software freely to anyone who wanted it. I think that the FSF has just provided them with a standardized and simple way to do it in. They have ensured that the people who do give out their software for free get the respect they deserve. This has lead to the development of some brilliant free software by people unlikely to otherwise.

The idea of free software is, in my opinion, a philosophy based on some of the most basic humanitarian concepts ie. sharing, trust, freedom and respect. It is to me a religion and an amazing one at that. The fact that there are so many GNU enthusiasts is proof enough of the permeance of this religion. Just like with any religion, people will tend to dislike parts of it and try to derive their own religions that suit them. The new religions will again find more followers and start developing further. Can you blame Saint IGNUcious for being anything but completely dedicated to his religion?

While his idea of an entire world based on free software might not be appealing to everyone, it is one to imagine and wonder at in amazement. Think about a world where software restrictions are no longer a barrier. Imagine the kind of software we would see being developed. Imagine the entire creativity and efforts of mankind being unleashed as a single community! Amazing to say the least! I think that’s a world where many of us could be happy in.

That being said, I agree that we are definitely not ready for that world yet. There are obviously many things, not related to software, that come into play when thinking of freeing all software and a good lot of work is being done by the FSF to ensure a smooth transition. I don’t believe that they will succeed in their ultimate goal of a world filled with only free software, but I believe, without a doubt, that their efforts will lead to some great innovations and ideas in the future.

As for me, I will continue to watch the outcomes and effects of one mans dedication with admiration and respect. At the same time, as I watch and learn, I will be building up my own religion and set of ideals. When I do, I will be as dedicated about my creation as Richard Stallman is of his.

Until next time!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written on this blog. I’m just going to recap some of the happenings in my life over the last few months. I wont go into details, but you’re free to ask for them by mailing me :-).

Black Beauty

I’ll start with the topics that I left the last post hanging on. I received my beautiful black Fender Stratocaster in the month of February. A beautiful maple fretboard and polished black finish! The first weeks was mostly experimenting with the sounds of the guitar through my effects and amplifier. Between the three there are a mind-boggling number of different sounds that can be produced! After that, I had to obviously get cracking on all the guitar solo’s that I had had to put off over the “acoustic years”! The ones I’m most proud of are Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd, Pulse Version) and Voodoo Chile (The God Himself!). The effects are a real beauty although I haven’t had the chance to test them out in a live concert (sigh!). The amplifier can make my windows rattle at 20% volume, which makes me wonder how exactly it would perform in full blown settings. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see! Lately though, I have been just bogged down with work (and an incident of broken strings) that have kept me from my guitar. If I had one suggestion for somebody to start learning an instrument, it would be to never put it off for later. Do it when you have a chance. If you feel now is not the time, I promise you later on you’ll just wish you had started it back then.

Adventures in Europe

My mother had been working in Italy with the University of Pavia (Italy) for a few months so the family decided to take a vaction to Europe. Our very first! We had about a month to roam around, so we didn’t exactly get to see everything that was of interest, but we managed to see a lot nevertheless.

Italy, France and Switzerland were the countries we visited over the course of the month. To be more precise, we managed to visit Pavia, Milan, Rome, Venice, Genova, Paris and Basel. I wont go into details about the trip (for the sake of my fingers!), but what I can tell you is that I learnt one thing about travelling. You really start to build different outlooks of life and start seeing things in new light. For me, another experience was visiting the University of Pavia and seeing all the work that was going on in their Computer Science department. I met some amazing people there and got to attend some lectures by various people including an extremely interesting and humorous lecture by Cambridge professor Jonathan D. Shanklin on the ozone hole and its discovery, a lecture on the process of accepting genetically modified organisms in India by Vanga Siva Reddy (Yes! I attended my fathers lecture!) and an interesting lecture on the open source philosophy by Allessandro Rubini (albeit, in Italian!). I also got to meet some brilliant students who are working on various research in areas ranging from earthquake engineering to ones where you have to donate your own blood to ones involving Ferrari car’s! I long to go and perhaps work there (which might be possible in the near future thanks to the gracious efforts of Tullio Fachinetti and Allesandro Rubini!). More on that later!

Graduate Record Exam

It’s upon me! I am giving the GRE on the 26^th of this month. I have some high expectations that I’m completely freaked out about. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens! I’ll update my score here once that’s over!

Project Work

With someone like me who’s so into the work he does, it’s hard not hit upon this topic! Luckily enough the number of projects I’m working on aren’t too many at the moment. I have officially stopped working on the Twincling Projects for the sake of my precious time. I have worked on a miniature operating system (yes…again!) for my college project requirement. The operating system now has a working shell, filesystem and swap memory! I tried to keep all the parts as simple as possible and modular so that I could have a working idea of all the components before I started thinking big!

Many of you know about my past addiction to Ragnarok Online! While some may look at it as a bad thing (*cough*mom?*cough*), I think I learnt a lot of programming from my efforts in trying to understand and replicate the game in code. I learnt a lot about game programming by figuring out how things happened in Ragnarok Online and have now started building an MMORPG of my own (Yes…Another one…I know!). While the story is non-existent at this point, I have some ideas that I want to experiment with in terms of gameplay.

This brings me to another point. I was recently asked why I do projects that already have been done before. The answer to that is that I don’t program to do something new all the time. I like programming for the simple fact that it gives me something to really think about. For now, I prefer to rewrite programs to understand how they work as compared to reading a long winded paper on the topic. One thing I realized is that while rewriting and understanding the architecture of any software, I start to get many ideas that can be implemented. So I also tend to rewrite previously written software so that I can truly control all the parts of the software. This gives me the flexibility to implement my own features into it. This is why you’re more likely to find me writing a simple web server rather than huddled over my laptop reading the Apache documentation. Once again, more on all this later!

That’s more or less it for now! I’ll keep this updated from now on

On the 22nd (I think…) of December, Richard Stallman made a visit to Hyderabad, and I got the opportunity to visit his talk!

Richard Stallman is the man who started the entire open source movement. For those not aware of what open source is, just google it or wikipedia it (I just used wikipedia as a verb!). I have  always seen him as somewhat extremist. This man has actually scolded a reporter for posting his interview on YouTube because YouTube used a propreitary video format! Anyone who cares to know more about him can once again Wikipedia him!

So when he visited Hyderabad on the 22nd of December, I was quite excited to go see the man in person. I have to confess that his talk was so unbelievably boring, that me and my friend walked out 15 minutes into it. Listening to him talk made me realize two things. Politics and Coding are VERY different. You cannot mix the two of them up if you want to be successful. Richard Stallman has clearly chosen a completely political view. While I do admire all the work he has done in the past, I can’t say I care much about the work he is doing currently. The Free Software Foundation has, in the past, provided to entire world with some brilliant tools, but their real contribution to the world of open source is dwindling of late. The second thing I learnt is that for someone who is passionate about real technology, none of this bullshit really matters. In the end, it’s about getting your hands dirty with code. Not politics!

For any of you who want to know what he talked about at the meetup, go see this video and one or two related videos. He just went on and on about good vs evil, gods and microsoft that by the end of it, it seemed more of a rant. And this was just the first 15 minutes that I stayed for!

All in all, a great experience because I got to walk a few meters into a Dominos and enjoy a tasty Pepperoni Pizza! It really had been a long time! Earlier that day, I had sent an SMS to Saifi Khan, the founder of the Twincling Technology Foundation, telling him “Richard Stallman in hyd. 5pm. name-of-place-that-I-forgot.”. I got a reply saying “We at Twincling care more about technology than politics. Send me an invitation to Tim Berner Lee’s talk if he ever comes.”! I am very happy to be a part of this community, which just reminded me that I got “promoted” recently! But that’s an entirely different post!

Keep visiting!

I finally got down to writing a post, so I decided to write about my new guitar gear! On December 24th (?), with the help of my uncle, I finally found someone who could get me my guitar from the U.S. With the guitar ensured, I started hunting for a decent amp and effect pedal.

Since I was in Delhi for a few days, I went and gave Darya Ganj a try. Darya Ganj is the area right before the Red Fort in old Delhi where most of the wholesale music dealers used to be. Used to be. This time when I went, most of the shops had moved out or become smaller! Looking around I finally got a good deal on a Randall amp and bought it for Rs. 5000. A little overkill I suppose, but I have very little regrets as it was a Kirk Hammet Signature Series Amp!

The amp features two channels as usual (clean and overdrive) with a 3-way equalizer. It’s pretty much a basic amp with the minimal features I need. For a 15W amp, it’s volume can really blow the shit out of you! At 20% volume on the master volume knob and 20% on the clean channel knob, I can feel my windows rattling! The distortion was comparably better than the Marshall MG series, which has a very buzzy sound to it. The distortion is specially made to sound like Kirk Hammet’s (although I have no idea what that means as he has used a huge range of sounds in the albums) and the amp is very compact in general. The clean channel has a very “classic” sound to it too! You can see what it looks like over here.

Randall KH-15 (Kirk Hammet Signature Series) Amp

With the amplifier set, I started hunting for an effects pedal. Looking around, I found only a Zoom G1x in my price range and decided to search elsewhere. I have to say that I’m highly dissapointed by the state of the shops at Darya Ganj now. They have a very limited range of products for sale, highly incompetitive prices and even more incompetitive salesmen. So the next day, I decided to give Lajpat Nagar a try. I finally ended up where I didn’t want to. Bharat Music House. But it turned out to be a pleasant surprise with a Zoom G2.1u pedal going for Rs. 7,500! Earlier I had planned on a Zoom G2 with an external pedal, but I finally decided against it after trying out the G2.1u. This pedal really is value for money! The build is very sturdy with a metal and rubber body. The pedal is a little sensitive, but that might be simply because I’m not used to it. The manual was pretty informative and figuring it out is quite easy once you play around with it a bit. I wont go into details about it, but you can go check it out here!

Zoom G2.1u Effects Pedal

All in all, I am quite happy with my purchases. Hopefully I won’t have to ask my parents to dish out this much money again any time soon! With the guitar, amp and effects along with the random strings, cables, strap etc. the total spent comes to around Rs. 35,000. But in the end I suppose it will always pay off a lot more later on! Now I’m just stuck just waiting for the day that my uncle calls me and tells me my guitar has arrived!

It’s been a long time since I posted any updates here, so I finally decided to update it with the latest events that have taken place over the last month or so! Since I love having a more organized blog, I’ll post about each of the past events on seperate posts! (It helps the post-count too!)

Keep a lookout for the following :

• Open Source Summit 2008 : A Summary
• My soon to arrive Fender Stratocaster
• Future Projects and my “promotion”
• Richard Stallman in Hyderabad
• My trip back home!
• Ragnarok Online : The Nostalgia Begins
• A New Amp and Guitar Effects Pedal!

Whew! That’s a lot to write about. Don’t count on me to put these posts up quickly. I’ll be taking my time with these Not because of any specific reasons except that I’m back in Delhi and I have better things to do for the time being

I don’t know how many people know about this event, but we have the Open Source Summit 2008 being held on the 13th and 14th of December, 2008. The hosting organization this year is the Twincling Society, which just happens to be the Linux User Group I interact with! I’ve also been made a team leader (3 teams in total) responsible for organizing the event!

What kind of events are planned? Day 1 is going to be a set of talks by some of the people whose jobs you wish you had! We have technical sessions planned by representatives from BeleniX, KDE 4, LDTP, Git, Hadoop, Gentoo, OpenSuSe and a few more that I seem to be forgetting.

On the second day we have an Intel Multicore programming workshop that focusses on openMP and TBB. There is also madHACK (mobile application development hackathon) too, in the later part of the day!

For anyone who wants to attend, you can check out summit.twincling.org. We are looking out for people who want to help organize the event. Anyone interested can contact me on my email (manohar.vanga@gmail.com). The event is open for all and free of charge! It’s being held at the IIIT campus, Hyderabad. Don’t miss it!

Exams are upon me. They’re majors this time, so I have no choice but to study. Or so I thought. The JNTU (my college. Jawaharlal Nehru Technological Institute) system is so unbelievably predictable that one can get through with decent percentages by just attending classes and studying one day before the finals.

In fact, for my Object Oriented Analysis and Design exam, I studied for 3 hours on the morning of the exam. Easy paper, easy answers and good expectations. That brings up the issue of how papers are being checked. Due to (unbelievably) high amount of affiliate colleges of JNTU, checking seems to be getting outsourced to various teachers across colleges. Something like the checking for those board exams we took long ago! Unfortunately, the checking varies wildly every time due to the difference in knowledge of various lecturers. So even if I have great expectations, there is a very good chance my paper ends up in the hands of some unexperienced professor who just had a fight with his wife that morning.

Let’s hope for the best! In the meantime my soon-to-come Stratocaster has me all excited!

Sometime in December, I will be getting a spankin’ new Fender (MIM) Stratocaster! I’m getting it from the US thanks to an old friend showing up! The unfortunate thing is the prices in India for guitars just seem to be getting worse and worse. This has a lot to do with the current economic slowdown and the sharp rise in the dollar value. The guitar I’m getting is costing me $450 in the US, whereas the cheapest I could find here in India was a whopping Rs. 35,000 ($700?). Sheesh!

The government needs to realize that duty taxes on guitars makes pretty much no sense when there is no Indian market to protect with them. The only Indian company making guitars seems to be Givson and, to put it mildly, it sucks. Until companies like Givson (even the name has no ingenuity…!) start making more quality products, the duty tax is just another hindrance for every single musician in India. Very unfortunate.

I’ve been looking around and there seem to be many luthiers running around in India making some quality custom guitars. The quality seems to be very good, even though very traditional techniques are being used to make these. These are still out of reach for most musicians as they tend to charge quite a bit for a quality guitar due to their expenses in getting good parts imported!

I wonder how long it will be before companies like Fender or Gibson set up factories here in India. Their reasons seem pretty obvious though. I myself will not prefer to buy a Fender made in India. India just seems to have a completely different meaning for quality control at the moment. Marshall has set up factories here in India and seems to be making decent products although prices are still uneven.

Well, I’m just happy I’m getting a Fender Stratocaster! So who cares it’s made in Mexico and not America? The quality still seems unbelivably good for the price. The only problem might be the vintage tremolo that might go out of tune. I could’ve shelled out another $100 for a Floyd Rose, but I’m not expecting to do any serious vibrato work. Anyway, I finally decided on the Black one with a maple fretboard! Looks something like this :

How hot is that? I’m still deciding on a decent Amp and effects. I’ll probably cheap out on the multi-effects for now and go for a Zoom 606 or 707-II. If anyone reading this has any good suggestions for a budget amp, let me know!

After reflecting on why other students at my college are not as excited about programming and computer science in general as me, I have come up with the following:

1. They don’t have the basics down because none of the teachers managed to instill a sense of wonder about the possibilities of programming to them.
2. I’m really good at stating the obvious.

When I look back to my last two years at school and computer science classes I took there, I realize that we were a highly motivated bunch of students. I can honestly say that the five of us(small class…I know) who would sit everyday in computer science classes required nothing but a little push in the right direction. Luckily for us, we were in the class with a very open minded teacher, very excited peers and close bonds between all of us.

So to recreate a similar environment for those who missed it, I am planning on starting a programming club in the coming semester. I will be holding them after college hours probably thrice a week and it will be a rapid learning club where I’ll be moving through the basics in high gear.

What have I got planned for it? Here are some of the things I hope to cover in one semester:

• Basic Programming Techniques with Python (Know your own limits before knowing those imposed on you by others!)
• C programming basics and basic data structures
• Object oriented programming concepts with C++ and Java
• Linux basics for programmers
• A lot of programming assignments

Later on, I will probably be delving into some or all of the following subjects for students to gain some exposure into some real world programming:

• GUI programming with Qt
• Web Programming basics: HTML, CSS, Basic PHP and SQL
• Intermediate Linux programming
• A look at some popular languages: Perl, Ruby, Scheme, LISP etc.
• More basics related to our undergraduate syllabus: Computer Architecture, Advanced Data Structures, Introduction to Algorithms, Operating Systems etc.

The above is probably the roughest sketch of what to expect! I will be setting up a website for managing the students and materials. I don’t even know if I’ll still be around in college to finish the entire syllabus planned, but like I said it’s a rapid learning club where I’ll be zooming through most topics leaving the gory details for you to pick on with your peers…

Anyone who wants more information can mail me at manohar.vanga@gmail.com!