Diabolical Or Smart

The Diffuser Dispute Ends

Published on April 17, 2009 in Sports. 0 Comments

The Diffuser-Three have it their way ! The verdict of the court is out – and they have decided to uphold the steward’s decision. The diffuser used by the BrawnGP, Toyota and Williams have been declared legal. Its now up to the remaining seven teams to spend millions on a new design to catch up these three, else drop any chances of poduim finish.

After months of speculaitons and arguements, the matter was presented to the court on the 14th of April. 8 hours of deliberations followed. The court announed its conclusion the next day ruling in favour of the Diffuser-Three.

The news must have been a relief to Ross Brawn. It is learnt that he had brought to notice of the officials last summer a few rules which, unless clarified, could be used by a few teams to gain advantage. The officials thought otherwise, the outcome of which is the devision in the field 3-to-7.

As the designer of Red Bull said, it is extremely important to spend money designing the new diffuser without which there are no chances of survival.

And adding a new diffuser isn’t simple either. A lot of aero chances have to be made to incorporate the new design. It will need to be tested too. Needless to say, the teams will have to spare a lot of resources to get the new design. Realistically speaking, the teams might not be able to come up with the new design fitted into their cars before the Monaco GP.

McLaren though have got a head start. They are already racing the Chinese GP with an intermediate-diffuser design. And it seems to be working. Atleast Hamilton managed to stay at P1 for the first free practise. Though the afternoon wasn’t good enough, he could manage only 12 in the second free practise.

We have already seen how quick the BrawnGP is. It is foolish to race against these cars with the present diffuser. All the teams will have to switch to the new diffuser as soon as possible. Until then, Button will continue dominnating the field. We might be able to watch proper races only when the grid moves to Europe. Until then, all the Ferrari fans – hang on.

Tags: diffuser, f1, season2009.

Lull After The Storm

Published on April 12, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Yabba Dabba doo !!! My Grand Viva is finally over. And I cannot express my happiness over it in any definite words. This is the one time professors get to mock at their students, though I must add a few are very helpful, and try their best to point the students to the right answers. Although I did not do as well as I was hoping to, but no regrets over there. As it is, I have never cared for my CG. Marks are for the lesser mortals .

So now with the grand viva out of the way, it is time to resume working on my BTP. But not without a well deserved break for the weekend. Yeah, a well deserved one, really. Only the BTP presentation is between me and my graduation .

The last 40 days at Kharagpur ! I am glad to be leaving this place. Not because I got bored of it, but because I want to start a new chapter of my life – a different story, a different person, a different place. I am eager to move into Bangalore, and start afresh. There was a lot I could have done at Kharagpur itself, but my introversion prevented that. It shall not any more. I am determined to present a new picture of myself, a changed self. I am deviating from the topic.

Well, to sum up, now with the grand viva over, things have really calmed down. There is not much to do, except BTP and chilling out with friends. Its time to make the last few days at Kharagpur memorable. There shall come a day when I’ll feel nostalgic, and wish these days – the best of my life – never went away, but it is not that day yet. Today is the time for party.

Tags: anuvrat, iit, kgp, musing.

My First Impression Of Ubuntu Jaunty

Published on April 4, 2009 in Tech. 5 Comments

I just couldn’t wait for the 24th of April and decided to upgrade Intrepid to the present Alpha version of Jaunty yesterday. After downloading some 1300 mb’s and then taking up another hour to complete all the modifications, my computer restarted.

Apparently Jaunty is supposed to boot up faster. I did not notice any difference though. A possible reason could be that I had installed Intrepid using WUBI, so the disk access are going to be slow. Also I do not know if this speedup in boot time is for all the partitions or just ext4. Unfortunately, I still am running the older ext3. To make a change to etx4 probably I might have to format and do a clean install. I am only guessing. Not much funda here.

The ext4 filesystem is backward compatible with ext3, making it possible to mount an ext3 filesystem as ext4. Not only this, but also the ext4 filesystem is forward compatible with ext3, that is, it can be mounted as an ext3 partition. However, if the ext4 partition uses extents (one of the major new features of ext4), forward compatibility and therefore the ability to mount the filesystem as ext3 is lost. Extents are not used by default; the “extents” option is explicitly required. You might want to have a look at the following two articles: Converting ext3 partitions to ext4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Ext4: HowTo. Thanks to Gen2ly for pointing the way.

Music is what I love the most. So amarok was the first application I tested. Yay, Amarok 2 fired up. But my joy of having the new Amarok was quickly turned into dismay. The new look darker theme of Amarok looked disgusting. Earlier editions had a small left hand sidebar, and a wide informative playlist area. Amarok 2 features 3 bars. The leftmost one lists all the collection and last.fm service and all. The artist info and lyrics are all moved into the mddle bar while the playlist has been compressed into the smaller rightmost sidebar. Also very little information is shown in the playlist area. I liked the earlier Amarok’s feature of being able to sort the playlist by score or last played. It is lacking here. Or atleast, I did not find a way to do that. And the biggest disappointment was incompatibility of last.fm scrobbling. The application fails to scrobble if you are behind a proxy server. I tried everything, using manual proxy settings in kioslaverc, setting system-wide proxy, but with no luck. Apparently there is this bug in Amarok which prevents it from scrobbling from behind proxy. We’ll have to wait for a later release.

Next came on the messenger. Jaunty has implemented this notifications thing. The idea is that all the notifications could be sent to a single application which will display them to the user. Earlier it was a bit distracting. Any friend logs in and a black patch appears on the top right corner of my screen. However, after a few hours, I learned to filter it out. I am not distracted by it any longer. The notification doesn’t interfere with what one is doing though. If you move your mouse over the notification, say to close an application, the notificaion fades into the background. So far, I have only seen pidgin and rhythmbox notifications appear. But I am sure, very soon all the applications will use this feature and start deploying their notification in this manner. I feel options needs to be provided to the user making it possible for him to filter out few types of notifications. I certainly do not want to be notified when any of my friend comes online.

There is this Libnotify Popups plugin which dictates the notifications that is shown on the right hand corner top. You can check/uncheck the events you want to be notified about from pidgin itself.

New themes have been introduced in Jaunty. I love the New Wave theme. It is considerably darker than the customary orange human theme. Below is a screenshot of my Jaunty desktop.

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

I have had no problems so far yet, except a few applications crashing unexpectedly. But those instances were few and rare. One of the main goals of Jaunty was to improve user experience. So far it has been good. Only Amarok has disappointed me. But on the brighter side, my last.fm client is working once again. It wasn’t in Intrepid. Apart from these, I haven’t really tried much. Shall write again if anything comes up.

Tags: jaunty, linux, opinion, ubuntu.

Trulli Reinstated – Hamilton Thrown Out

Published on April 2, 2009 in Sports. 0 Comments

These days the focus seems to have shifted from racing to actually winning law suits and appeals in Formula 1. The outcome of the race is many a times decided by a ruling of the stewards or judges. And this is happening more and more often recently. What used to be one-off differences which needed to be settled off the race track, has now become a regular feature. You can hardly be surprised if you wake up the next day to find out that the guy who was happily spraying champagne from the podium on sunday has been demoted to the 12th position, and everybody else has moved up one place.

As if the start hadn’t been turbulent enough, what with the approaching 14th April date to debate the validity of the design of diffuser by the three teams, we had another row in the opening race of the season. Yeah, Melbourne GP was not spared by anyone. First the official complaint by Ferrari, Red Bull and Renault over the legality of the diffuser design, and then that of Hamilton-Trulli incident.

The incidence was this. With just three laps to the completion of the race, Safety Car had to be deployed courtsey the collision of Kubica’s and Vettel’s cars. Apparently, Trulli spun and Hamilton passed him while the safety car was present on the track. But according to the rules book, this action was certainly legal. However, what transpired next is that Trulli overtook Hamilton and reclaimed his position. Thus at the end of the day, Trulli finished third, ahead of Hamilton in the fourth place.

The stewards immediately summoned the duo to clear the matter. A decision was taken to impose a penalty of 25 secs on Trulli for overtaking another car while the safety car was there. Hamilton got promoted to the third place. There were talks of Toyota appealing against the penalty. Trulli explained that he overtook the McLaren only because he believed the latter to be slowing down, which could mean a retirement from the race. In such circumstances, Trulli’s move would be valid.

However, that was soon ruled out. Recently, the FIA has been very stern when it comes to appealing for a 25 secs penalty, which is equivalent to a drive through penalty. A drive through penalty can be issued only when the race is going on. If the race is completed, a 25 secs penalty is imposed to determine the standings. Now since drive through penalty cannot be challenged by teams, it is almost impossible to get your say in a 25 secs penalty too.

So, as things stood, till yesterday, Trulli was out of luck and Hamilton collected 6 from a race where he barely was quick enough. It was time to move on to the next race, Sepang Grand Prix.

But a well known journalist from autosport.com composed an article which revealed that Hamilton might have perhaps given differing statements to press and the stewards. Apparently, Hamilton did let it known that he had been asked by the McLaren team to slow down and let Trulli pass, thereby confirming that Trulli passed him only because he saw Hamilton deliberately slowing down. The drivers were once agained asked to meet the stewards in Malaysia on the thursday.

The outcome of the meeting is that Trulli has been reinstated to his 3rd position and McLaren have been removed from the results for providing contradictory evidence to the stewards the first time. Hamilton, as iot now turns out, wasn’t so lucky after all. Trulli gets 6 points and Hamilton goes back empty handed.

The start of the season couldn’t have been more un-typical. Neither of McLaren and Ferrari scored any point from the opening race. Both are trying to get even with the BrawnGP’s pace. Exciting season, with lots of drama yet to follow. And I suggest you, if you do not already follow F1, then start doing so. If you need help selecting one driver as your favourite, might I suggest the brilliant young lad from Germany – Sebastian Vettel. He is awesome. I am sure he’ll one day race for the Ferrari and do wonders just as Michael Schumacher did. Watch out for this kid.

Tags: australian, f1, grand, hamilton, jarno, lewis, mclaren, melbourne, prix, season2009, toyota, trulli.

To Bug Is Human, To Debug Divine

Published on April 1, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Debugging is a pretty tiring job. More so if you do not exactly know where you have erred. I spent half the day today debugging my code. Hopefully, it does not have any more bugs.

A day earlier I thought I was done with my BTP coding. I tested the code for small inputs, and the results were as expected. Happy with my work, I wrote a script to let it run a few times on inputs generated following the poisson distribution. When I woke up the next day I was shocked to see the results. They were nothing like what I had imagined. The results had deviated highly from what was expected by theory. Damn! A day’s hard work gone waste.

I sat down to remove any bugs. To elp in the debugging process, I had generated 4 log files – log.xml, run.data, plot.data, miss.data. Poring over these log files and simultaneously running the gdb was a strenous work. I had no idea where the errors were being reported. The aberration becomes observable only after my code has executed for some 10,000 times. It was simply impossible to dry run the code for so long and zero-in on the bug.

I tried a smaller random input, hoping to catch the bug. Luckily enough, this data set produced the error. The deviation was not too obvious, but a hard look at the log files, and I could narrow down the error to a few functions in my code. However, to find the bug, I had to eventually dry run the code for this smaller data set. This took another hour.

All’s well that ends well. I have rectified the error. Basically, I was forgetting to reinitialize an important parameter on the occurance of a particular event. With that done I am hoping to get good results when I wake up tomorrow morning. A good night’s rest is what I deserve. *A pat on my back*.

Tags: btp, diary.

2009 F1 Melbourne Grand Prix

Published on March 30, 2009 in Sports. 0 Comments

Melbourne GP 2009

A day most awaited ! With all the speculations and rumours flying around, McLaren disappointing in the winter testing, BrawnGP blowing away the field with spectacularly unbelievable performances and the diffuser row threatening to divide the teams. There were talks of Brawn using illegal car to impress a few sponsorers, and people claiming that McLaren failing because they did not have Ferrari’s plans to copy this time.

Nonetheless, the qualifying day arrived. The result was not unexpected. McLaren failed to make the cut into the Q3, in fact Hamilton retired after Q1 citing gearbox problems. Hekki managed only 14. Alonso was knocked out too. Only the Diffuser-Three, Vettel, Kubica and Ferrari saw themselves set for the shoot out in Q3. And finally Button claimed the pole position.

The D-Day ! Toyota were penalised for having an illegal movable component in their car, and Hamilton was to start 18th after changing the gearbox in his car. Massa and Kimi saw themselves promoted to the 6th and the 7th position. A hope or so I thought.

The five red lights lit one by one. The droning sound of cars, eager to explode away. And as soon as the red lights went off, the Australian GP was GO. Ferrari made an awesome start. Rubens was slow to take off and was immediately overtaken by Massa. Through the sequence of corners, Massa managed to squeeze himself into the third position. Kimi though could manage to promote himself only one rank to the sixth. Button was leading the pack of cars.

The drama was to begin quite soon. Ferrari were running on the softer option tyres. This did indeed give them extra speed, but the wear out was quick to happen. By the lap 10, the performance was deteriorating already. The Ferrari were beginning to fall back now. Cars from behind were now threatening to overtake the struggling champions. As a result, Massa and Kimi had to pit in the 11th and the 12th laps.

The game changed drastically after that. The Ferrari were no match for the front runners now. They were falling behind. The hope was fading fast. The Brawn were now threatening to destroy the competition. Indeed the pace of Button’s car was such that he was ahead of Vettel by more than 4 minutes. Oh, and Vettel I suppose was the surprise performance. He was quick. He was too quick. The german driver who has risen to stardom with his win in the Italian GP, and is being compared to Michael Schumacher himself, had a great chance to finish on the podium. Second was not so likely as the third.

However, the wonderful performance came to an end when his car touched that of Kubica’s in the latter’s attempt to overtake. Immediately the safety car came out. Only three laps were left to the end of the race. Both the Ferrari had retired by then. Rubens had managed to slip into the second position by then. There was this small matter of Truli spinning and handing the third position to Hamilton just before the safety car, and then reclaiming the position for himself. This saw him penalised 25 seconds and drop to the 12th position. Hamilton automatically got promoted to the third position and grabs lucky 6 points from a race where McLaren had no hopes. However, the penalty was doled out after the presentation ceremony, so Truli got to celebrate with the champagne at the podium.

Ferrari had a forgettable day at office. Once again plagued by technical breakdown. Coming into the race they were certainly expected to put in a race winning fight, but instead they went home nursing their cars. A bad start to the new campaign. They can take heart from the fact that Massa had failed to score in the first two races the last year too, and yet came within 1 point of winning the championship.

It is too early to say who will remain at the top after a few races. BrawnGP definitely had the better pace, but their performance was not as great as was expected. There were predictions of their cars being more than 1 minute per lap faster than the rest of the grid. In the end, they managed only about half a minute per lap gap.

But then, there can be Brawn’s shrewd brain working behind this smaller amrgin. In what I have read from a few sources, Brawn could have advised Button to narrow down the gap, otherwise the whole of the grid would have stood up in union and protested against the diffuser. As of now only Red Bull, Ferrari and Renault are appealing against the double decker diffuser. McLaren’s silence hints at a possibility of theirs already being in the process of getting one ready. Do not be surprised if they roll out a modified diffuser after a couple of races. Ferrari with their fat budget will also be working hard to develop their version of a new diffuser. Only Red Bull with a meagre budget might have some difficulty, and could perhaps be forced to see out the whole season with the same diffuser that they have now.

Either way, I suspect the dominance of BrawnGP will continue for long. The McLarens and the Ferraris will be on top of them pretty soon. BMW will not be left behind either. Though the curtain has been raised and we have had the first look into the season, I refuse to read much into the result of the first grand prix of the 2009 season. The picture will become clearer only after a few races are done.

And I really hope Ferrari come out as the better car. Please, please, please. But I also say -

Kick out Massa and Kimi, I want Vettel in a Ferrari.

Tags: albert, australian, f1, grand, melbourne, park, prix, season2009.

BTP Update

Published on March 29, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Yay !! Finally I have definitely made some progress in my BTP. I have ironed out all the bugs. As I write, a bash script is running my program over and over again with different parameters as input. The loop will execute some 6*3*100 times. And within each program, there is a time counter which counts forward to 30,000 units.

I have left the whole thing to run in development mode, instead of the deployment mode. Printing out details on the screen is slowing down the generation of results though. Perhaps I must go and sleep while the script does its work. I have been awake for more than 24 hrs now, and sleep is very much welcomed.

I do hope to get some pretty good graph. I am making this siulation for a multi-processor system. However, there is this small issue when it comes to division of work between different processors which I need to discuss with Arnab da. Once done, I should be able to wrap up my project in a matter of day or two.

Fingers crossed. I shall put up the result, provided it is what I expect.

Tags: anuvrat, btp.

I Hate Segmentation Faults

Published on March 27, 2009 in Tech. 1 Comment

I have been coding in C for four years now. Any C user knows the segmentation fault error. And trust me, there cannot possibly be anything worse than seeing your program terminate with a seg fault message. It irritates me so much that in my B Tech Project program I have created a signal handler which catches the error and prints a happy message instead of the boring default message.

This is what I have done :

// Include signal.h for signal handling
#include <signal.h>

/**
  * The function which is called upon a seg fault
  */
void SignalHandler(int sig) {
  printf("\n\nHave a happy time debugging. Good luck  \n\n");
  exit(-1);
  return;
}

/**
  * The main function. Declare the signal handler here.
  */
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  signal(SIGSEGV, SignalHandler);

  /**
    * Do whatever you want to
    */

  return 0;
}

. I know this doesn’t do anything, but atleast I do not feel frustrated now.

Tags: c, fault, handler, programming, segmentation, signal.

My Paranoia Self

Published on March 27, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

I’ve always been this paranoid guy who never trusts the people he cannot see. It was the primary reason that I avoided the social networking sites and was reserved while chatting with people I hadn’t met in a long time. However, things changed the last year and I started opening up. I did the most foolish thing of publishing my contact information over online. Contact information includes my phone number and email id’s.

Due to my foolishness, some unknown person has managed to forward all his calls onto my cell phone, and now I am being annoyed by someone I do not know. Damn ! This is the second case of my foolishness, of my letting the guard down over the net. Never again shall this happen.

I have decided to once again revert back to my paranoia self – never trust a person you cannot see. I am removing all my contact information, setting up strict privacy filters and actually pruning the friend list. The whole operation might take a few days to complete as I’ll have to scan all the places where I might have left any information whatsoever. If you are a friend who knows me, then you’ll find some way of contacting me.

Phew ! Some work to do during the weekend.

Tags: anuvrat, diary.

Case Of The Forwarded Calls

Published on March 27, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

An interesting event occured to me yesterday. I do not know if it is the sheer genius of the other person or an honest mistake on his part. Either way, I have had to deal with an angry sales person the whole evening. The whole affair is described below.

It all started in the evening. I returned back to my room after the evening snacks. As I sat down to work, my phone rang. An unknown number – +919334461925. I pick up the phone. The conversation was in hindi.

‘ello. Who’s this?

When will you return my money?

Excuse me, but may I know who am I talking to?

******, when will you return the money you owe me !

I suppose you have dialled a wrong number. Which number do you think you have dialled?

I got a call from you on this number, asking me to recharge the number +9198——– (I do not remember the other number) for an amount of Rs 3500, with your word to repay me today. When do you intend to pay me back.

I am sorry. I repeat once again, I think you have got the wrong number. I am not the guy you are looking for.

*******. I dialled your number +919002341426. This is the number you called me with. Now ****** tell me your address so that I can set you straight.

I hang up. But immediately the phone rings again. The same number. Damn, he redialled

Hello?

******. Why did you hang up. Afraid of telling me your address are you?

So eager for a fight are you, come on. I am in RK Hall of Residence. Wanna set me straight. Come here. I shall be waiting for you at the gate.

Who the **** do you think you are.

Afraid are we now, huh?

Pay back my money and I’ll let you go.

Dial the correct number first and you’ll get what you want. My number starts with 99, not 90.

Smart chap eh? Tell me, how did you tweak the connections of your mobile phone, that I dial your number on 90 and it goes to your phone at 99.

Am I expected to laugh at your joke, because believe me, I’m not in the mood for it.

I’ll complain to the police.

I’ll thank the gods for putting some sense into you. Please go on and do so.

I just want my money.

Can you talk properly first? ‘Coz I do not see this conversation heading anywhere.

[a few minutes silence]

When will you return back my money?

As I have already told you, you have got the wrong person. I am not the guy who asked you for a recharge. Please redial and check with the right person.

How can it be? I dialled the correct number.

May be a cross connection. You might perhaps want to try after a few hours.

Or a simpler solution is for you to return my money, ******.

Mind your language.

I hang up again. He called me again and again, but I let the phone ring.That was all for yesterday. In the morning today, I got another call. A different number – +916542325507. Again the guy was asking for someone else. Something is definitely wrong, I thought. I told him the same thing, that this is a different number and hung up. But something came back to my mind immediately. I thought I had seen an arrow mark on my screen beside the number of the caller. This never showed up before. Something is definitely wrong.

I went to my neighbours room, Rohit. I asked Rohit to call up the 90 number. The call was on my mobile ! But there was no sign of the arrow mark. Was it my mind playing tricks on me? Was I imagining things? All my screen showed was Rohit Calling. Unless …

I went to Dhangi’s room. Now Dhangi is not added in my contacts list. I made him call up the 90 number. And voila ! There it was, the arrow beside Dhangi’s number. And it immediately occured to me what the whole thing was.

The other person has set up call forwarding on his mobile. Whenever you try to call the 90 number, it gets forwarded to my mobile. All the time the sales person was dialling the correct number. I did not know what to do next. Dhangi suggested I call up the Airtel customer service and tell them.

I called up the Airtel customer service at 121, but I managed to get only one reply -

I am sorry sir. We cannot help you in this matter. Airtel is a service provider. All our customers are equally important to us.

Damn it fool, even after listening to the whole story can you not think out of the box and actually do something. I know you have been taught to blurt out the same response and you are doing a pretty good job as a bot. But don’t you see there could be something fishy here. I suspect a foul play. Can you not for a change use your brains and do justice to the money Airtel pays you.

I am sorry sir. We cannot help you in this matter. Airtel is a service provider. All our customers are equally important to us.

Oh my darling, this is India. Why do they even have call centers here, I wonder. The guy on the other side would have done a better service to the nation pulling a rickshaw. And to think that the Americans outsource all their work to be done by these damned creatures.

So be it. I am going to do nothing in this affair any more. If the sales person calls up again, I’ll tell him to go to the police. Let him fight for his money. Let Airtel value their customers so much that they annoy them. If only there was a way to block out all the forwarded calls.

So ends the Case Of The Forwarded Calls. I shall post any new developments below. But I do not think there will be any.