Very cold

After flying for what seemed like an eternity (we were behind bloody baby row, and some French woman with a dog that kept yelping), we flew over Chicago. Leaving nice warm Bangalore, Chicago sure looked welcoming. The frozen lake Michigan was the icing (literally) on the cake.



Speaking of icing on the cake (or lake), we got home to a very frozen lake, and picturesque icicles. If you like that sort of bone-chilling, mind numbing, snot freezing, ear crunching cold.

Breezing through India

We visited India for a lightning fast trip that lasted about 8 days earlier this month. It was fun, and a little frantic. At Delhi, I really wanted to visit Humanyun's tomb.

This is the gateway to the actual tomb. As we were walking toward it, Steph noticed something that I'd always taken for granted: the six pointed stars. While we might be most familiar with the incarnation used in Jewish symbolism, it is interesting to note that many faiths including Islam have long histories with the same symbol.

The tomb remained as large as my memory had remembered. The grounds have improved dramatically though, and the signs around the place are a lot better. In addition, there's far better handicap access. I learned that all of this was a result of the Aga Khan's interest and philanthropy in the site.

While it is easy to see that the buildings are all very symmetric, the same theme has been carried over to the layout of the grounds and waterways. Symmetry is an underlying theme in a lot of Islamic architecture, atleast from what I saw in Delhi.

Many of the precious stones have been stolen, and much of the color faded in the dome over where Humayun's grave lies. Yet, you can still see the original architecture clearly. Quite amazing even by today's standards, and more so when you consider that it was constructed in the 1500s.

The disparity between the have and the have-not's is always visible in India. Small impromptu dwellings like this slum are common in many Indian cities.

Back in Bangalore, we took life a little easier, and just spent the days eating, drinking and driving around town.

Yes, if only we could all be Java Masters. Baldwin's where we (from MAIS) got whipped at soccer every now and then.

Near Koramangala, we drove past the multitude of marble shops. There must be around 50 of these where enormous sheets of marble lie stacked in the open for people to look and make purchases.

As you might expect, there's a variety in how well these stores do, especially if they are all packed close together. Some manage by specializing in specific types of marble. Others like the Marble Palace evidently have good sales people.

I'd never seen much advertising for CITU. They are evidently, the Center for Indian Trade Unions. More evident, they seem to be a bunch of commies. While communism might not be a common theme across India, public urination is a prevalent across. This gent clearly didn't think much of the "Against the American Imperialism" slogan, and seemed quite content to pee all over CITU's proud notice of a conference. Nifty.

Walls in many cities in India that protect a private space typically have a topping of smashed glass embedded in concrete to thwart would-be wall climbing and scaling folks.

Towards the end of the trip, we got to spend some time with old friends. Alok and Jennifer shared some Hennessey with us at their place, and now I'm afraid that we will be spending some coin on the stuff.

Fine Wine

Domaine de l'Ameillaud 2004 Cotes du Rhone

The premium blend

While my wife was hunting for valuable stuff for the house at a store last night, I wandered around and found a canister of Buck Urine. Who knew that they made such a thing. On closer inspection, I was amazed at bullet point #2 on the packaging: "Proven, premium, blended scent." Evidently, the art of buck urine manufacturing (or god forbid, collection and packaging) has some parallels with the Whiskey industry (Premium, blended McPee?). I just know that Foxworthy (You might be a redneck if..) will get to this soon.

cmus is the bomb

I want to play music from my machine. Simple.

I don't want a running encyclopedia (a'la Amarok) while I play my tunes. I'd like something lightweight, simple, and clean. It doesn't need to make toast, integrate with my browser, or take a shit in my panel. Just play the tunes, Holmes.

Hello cmus. An amazingly feature packed audio player. For starters, you can throw just about any codec at it, and it doesn't get phased. Better still, it's an ncurses application that can pump to just about any audio output schema. And in the cluster of my Linux sound system, it seems to be able to understand (or maybe just intelligently default to) the right thing.



Here's the most freakish part. For a text based program that executes within my shell, it seems to boast more views and a better user interface than any other audio player I've used. Now, I just need to find the rest of my collection...

How many processors am I executing on?

If you're writing threaded code that's meant to be portable, it might behoove you to know how many processors the executing system has.

OperatingSystemMXBean osBean = ManagementFactory.getOperatingSystemMXBean();
int numProcessors = osBean.getAvailableProcessors();
System.out.println("Available Processors: " + numProcessors);

You could also interrogate the OperatingSystemMXBean to gather information about architecture that you are executing on. For those not of the faint-of-heart, you could cast the object returned from the getOperatingSystemMXBean call to the VM specific implementation to gather additional goodies. This dangerous assumption would predicate itself on the knowledge of the executing VM though- so probably not a safe bet.

Solaris, please don't overwhelm me

A few weeks back, I decided to try and play with Solaris. It's from Sun, it has some really nifty analysis that can be done on Java executables, and I had fond memories of it from a few years ago.

Install went great. Kind of. It takes forever, and it comes with all kinds of shit that I don't need. But then, I probably don't know what I need.. I'll say this much: it didn't have any trouble with any hardware at all. And, it even has the courtesy to let me know that my ethernet link is "copper".

Foolishly, I decided to opt for a DHCP setup knowing that I'd be switching to a static IP soon.
Once the box was up and running, changing from DHCP to a static IP was not quite fun. First, you've got to tell Solaris not to acquire an address on boot. From what I gathered, this meant deleting your NIC from a set of DHCP seeking set:

rm /etc/dhcp/nic.dhcp

Then, you've got to reconfigure the rest of the stuff. Which isn't as simple as what I'm used to on Linux. Multiple files, in multiple redundant directories.

ls /etc/net

gives you:

ticlts/ ticots/ ticotsord/

Anyway, lots of googling later, I stumbled through it and made the needful happen.

Then, I saw an ugly. For some reason, root is created with home set as /. And, you log in to CDE as root, as the first thing you do, which means that your root file system now has CDE's turd files for root sitting in it. Of course, there are some other goodies that get dropped in there too from anything you start as root. Quick change to /etc/passwd and this was resolved, but it was mighty irritating.

Pkgadd is marvelous. It's the equivalent of apt-get for Solaris, and it works fine. Until I ran out of space.

The auto-partitioning on Solaris didn't mesh with what I needed. And I seem to have filled it up in the wrong places so bad that I'm pretty much handicapped right now. I could spend some time debugging it and re-partitioning to get the system healthy, but then I remembered why I loved Solaris so much when I used it before. It's because I used it, and I didn't administer it.

If someone is willing to manage and administer it, I'd hop on in a heartbeat. Alas, I just don't have the time to make it my workstation just yet. Maybe at home, down the road.

Hello there xubuntu... Care to dance?

Vegas Vacation

We went to Las Vegas for Christmas. The views from the plane as you head into Nevada and near Vegas are spectacular. Rugged, arid terrain shaped by wind, water and time. Of course, Vegas offers a completely man made perspective. Take this set of circular buildings or a view of Las Vegas Boulevard.

We stayed at the Palms. If you've never been to a Vegas casino (like I hadn't), the following might stick out as they did for me:

• gambling machines everywhere


• indoor air is filled with cigarette smoke


• bright lights, flashing lights, and more lights

Indoor and outdoor exhibits were remarkable. They all seemed to come together to put your mind and body into some sort of surreal snow-globe. Suspended animation, time and reality.

The aquarium behind the check-in counter at the Mirage, and the volcanic display that rumbles, roars and spews actual fire across water. And of course, a mermaid (one of a set of two) that greets you as you enter the hotel.

The Paris casino and the fountains at the Bellagio opposite.

Inside the Bellagio, there's more decadence as evidenced by these Christmas decorations, and the bear in the background- made of fresh carnations. And, at Caesar's Palace, a super-sized statue of a gent with combed pubes and (hopefully, for his sake) a cold package.

The light show in downtown. Tongue-in-cheek proclaimed as the widest wide-screen around. And, Toni Braxton's life story being advertised, in pretty grandiose proportions.

If you're in Vegas, you must see the Hoover Dam. Fittingly, it is close to Vegas since it defies all sense of proportionality. I couldn't even fit the whole structure in a frame to shoot with.

The two sides of the dam.

Note the intake towers- each set sits in a different state: Arizona and Nevada, and therefore have clocks with the time corresponding to the distinct time zones on them.

The generator room on the Nevada side. There are two of these- one for each intake tower. The generators are the original ones installed around 1936- pretty amazing.

The first actual survey marker that I've seen!

Vertical pylons won't cut it for ripping power from the generators up the cliff walls. So, they've angled them as needed so that the wires don't scrape and short over the walls. And, if you're wondering why walls would conduct, think about 230,000 volts. The issues you encounter as you scale..

This monument at the dam serves as a memorial to those that died during the construction.

These two signs seem to epitomize the practicality and simplicity about which the dam was built and maintained. Six companies needed to build it, so they were incorporated into one: creatively dubbed Six Companies Inc. No one was buried in the concrete at the dam. Simple math: the concrete could only be poured into sections at 6 inches at a shot. Hard to get smothered or drowned in six inch increments. More math, and nice: the dam cost, and continues to cost nothing to tax-payers. The sales from the power generated pay for all the operations, and have paid for the construction of the dam. Pretty awesome when a project on this scale is completely self-sufficient.

The dam is home to what must be the coolest water fountain around. And, the original furniture at the dam was pretty awesome.

We went to see two shows: Tony and Tina's Wedding and Danny Ganz, both of which were spectacular. I couldn't take pictures at the Danny Ganz show, but I did at Tony 'n Tina's- where you kind of become part of the show, or wedding rather.

My Jersey heritage (weak though it may be) kicked in and I just had to have a picture with anyone wearing a hood ornament.

Joey Ciccone plays Nunzio, the father of the groom. He never got out of character, even after the show when we got him a drink. Fun.

At some point in the show, Nunzio's wife jumped on the bar next to us and went for a stripper routine. And, I'll end with that.

Combed Niblicks, Fractals, and Immigration

Tucked away in a hall that leads to a men's room in Von Maur, there's a nifty glass fronted mounted on the wall that contains some old golf artifacts. The club head on top caught my eye. It is aptly described as a "Combed Niblick." The golf ball right on top of it is also pretty curious- it has feathers flaring out of it.

Vishal flew into town last week, armed with a presentation on Jini and JavaSpaces. He presented to the OJUG. I think we had the largest turnout since I've started attending the sessions. Vishal's presenting style was novel- not quite presentation zen, but engaging and fun nevertheless.

A trip to Whole Foods on a Saturday night had me staring at the vegetables organized so perfectly in the refrigerated section.

Driving down Dodge St, by the Mexican Consulate, there was quite a ruckus. People were walking around with banners, yelling about immigration, wall building, and the usual rhetoric that accompanies the subject. In the midst of all of this pandemonium, isolated from everyone else, was this woman. Her sign read, "Safe, Sane, LEGAL Immigration. It's the LAW." I rolled down my window, smiled at her and took her picture as she was waving at me.

No more baby teeth for Leela.

GPL and Java

Java is now governed by the GPL. This happened (fairly quietly) around Monday, Nov 13. As with most things in the open source world, nothing monumental happened with this announcement; no big PR blitz, no CEO chest-thumping, just a polite blog post, and a flurry of articles.

A month or so back, Oracle decided that they'd had enough of their partnership with Redhat, and or Suse, and opted to create their own Linux distro. An Oracle consultant at work claimed that this would eliminate the "finger pointing" between the folks at Oracle and the operating system that their database runs on. Interesting.

Java's gone in a polar opposite direction. A GPL license means that it can be married with just about anything else that has a GPL license. Linux anyone?

After mentioning this to Jeff and Vishal over the last day or two, I saw: Linux Mint.

I hope that's the tip of the iceberg. I can't wait to do this:

sudo apt-get install glassfish

So, perhaps like you can download complex perl apps/web-apps (that gently place themselves in cgi-bin, a'la mapserver), maybe something like cruise-control becomes a one line install/deploy; maybe we get a distro geared toward being a Java container running OS?

Apart from that easing installation and packaging via the license, which some apps were already doing (kudos to henplus), there's the sex-appeal of porting some of the work done on Solaris (another little GPL project) to Linux to help with getting a *X system to play with Java under the sheets a little more. I'd love to see a process listing via ps (or top) show me java threads by individual thread name, instead of just showing up as a child process/thread with the command line invocation as the process name. [Maybe this is just a pipe dream, but I'd sure like it].

I wonder what this does for the JCP and the JSR system though. I really do like the way in which there are clear specs laid out for implementation guidelines. I hope these manage to stick around, and perhaps they might remain successful enough to become a good working model for open source projects. In a way though, I suspect that many projects already adopt a similar system, albeit in a far less formal fashion.

It feels good (even better than before!) to work with Java.

Leela's Nemesis

Leela managed to vanquish the old vacuum cleaner. Now, a new contender, born of superhuman strength, agility, and scientific endeavor. Not to mention captain-insano suction power. Behold the Dyson.



Leela has a new nemesis.