Random Bits

This graph was generated using circo, a tool part of the graphviz package. The legend and the graph were generated separately and merged using paint. The graph represents simulation of a heterogeneous P2P network.

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A Talk given by Ian Pratt in Usenix 2008 on goals and challenges of virtualization and how they are handled in Xen. Couple of interesting snippets from the talk:-

• Live relocation - Mechanism for moving a virtual machine from one physical server to another. It performs iterative memory transfer between machines using an intermediate dirty log file for each iteration. The changes in the log file are transferred in next iteration. This would gradually reduce the size of the dirty log file to a point where it is small enough to make the switch over with negligible downtime.
• Virtualization of mobiles - To provide isolation between different types of applications running on mobile phones. For example we can have 3 VMs on a mobile phone one each for running - core radio services, vendor shipped content and user downloaded content.

Ian Pratt, a senior lecturer in University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory stresses the importance of making the university projects open source and pursuing them beyond an academic paper. He acknowledges the challenges faced in taking Xen from a research project to a production quality software as a humbling experience.

This site now provides GWebCache service at http://gwc.chandanr.net/skulls.php. It can be used to bootstrap Gnutella (Limewire, Morpheus) and Gnutella2 (Shareaza) networks. I am using the Skulls Multi-Network Web cache system for this service.

Related Info:- Gnutella Web cache scan report

The “real” CLI for windows. Unlike our favourite shells like bash where output of a command is text, PowerShell deals with .NET objects. This makes pipe’ing etc very convenient. For example we can do things like:-

• PS C:\Users\Chandan> ps | Where-Object {$_.Handles -gt 1000}

Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName
——- —— —– —– —– —— — ———–
2313 0 0 848 8 4 System
…

• PS C:\Users\Chandan> ps firefox | format-list

Id : 3432
Handles : 883
CPU : 369.8315707
Name : firefox

• PS C:\Users\Chandan> (ps firefox).get_Id()

3432

• PS C:\Users\Chandan> (ps firefox).ProductVersion

2.0.0.12

With the exposure of objects, Powershell scripting is somewhat similar to application-level scripting supported by protocols like DCOP. Another very interesting feature in PowerShell is the concept of PSDrives and Providers which enable use of generic methods for navigating filesytem, registry, environment etc.

• PS C:\Users\Chandan> psdrive

Name Provider Root CurrentLocation
—- ——– —- —————
C FileSystem C:\ Users\Chandan
Env Environment
HKCU Registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER
…

• PS C:\Users\Chandan> cd env:

• PS Env:\> ls

Name Value
—- —–
Path C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio …
TEMP C:\Users\Chandan\AppData\Local\Temp
SESSIONNAME Console
…

Links

Video: Jeffrey Snover talks about Monad/PowerShell
Download PS

Why do good programmer have good memory?

Because they don’t forget to free

Tonight I watched the movie “Vantage Point“. The movie is on a terrorist attempt to assassinate the president of U.S.A. during a global peace summit. This movie is kind of unique as it is shown as a sequence of events as seen by 8 different characters, which collectively solves the conspiracy. Its a good movie but kind of gets boring with same events being played over and over again. It is like sampling a random process over multiple runs. All those boring repetitions could have been avoided by Poisson-like sampling of the events ;-).

Found this interesting article on Justin Frankel - the man behind Winamp, Gnutella etc. It traces the events in Justin’s life around the invention of winamp, release of gnutella and the constant suppression of his ideas in AOL.

Ever wondered what inspired the name Gnutella?

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Video describing idea behind creative commons licensing.

The above link is a MagnetURI, which was listed in MagnetMix. You need to have a p2p client like LimeWire to download and view the video. MagnetURI is a nice way to publish content from your local machine. It is kind of similar to a torrent file, but works across different p2p clients and is convenient to handle URI strings when compared to meta-files.

Having heard a lot about the Second Test between India and Australia, I checked out the highlights and am convinced beyond doubt that bad umpiring decisions cost us the match. Of all those controversial decisions the one that stands out was that of Ganguly’s dismissal. Firstly Ganguly seemed to be in good touch and was very unfortunate to be given out in such a fashion. Watching the replays of the incident and listening to all the expert comments, I am wondering who should be blamed for this poor decision.
Lets play the blame game:-

1. Mark Benson - The man in-charge(well, almost). In this situation he could have called for the third umpire or atleast asked the square leg umpire, when he was not sure about the catch taken. Instead he asked for Ricky Ponting’s opinion and based his decision entirely on that. But the pre-match agreement between captains of the two sides to non-referral of such decisions to third-umpire and instead go by the word of the fielder should have prompted this. And also the incident in first innings, where Ponting had restrained from appealing in a similar situation, when he had not completed the catch clearly, should have also influenced the umpire.
2. Ricky Ponting - The actual man who made the decision. Well we have heard a lot about his credibility, or rather lack of it. But in this case, one thing that goes in his way is that he supposedly asked Clarke if he was sure of the catch and he just conveyed the same to the umpire. Well its a different thing that earlier in the innings he had appealed for a catch that he had not taken cleanly and which moreover seemed to have clearly come off the pads.
3. Michael Clarke - The man who claimed the catch. Going by the “spirit of the game” this was clearly wrong. But given the situation of the game and the fact that we are used to batsmen standing their ground even after “nicking the ball”, he may justify his act.
4. How about Anil Kumble!! - He should not have agreed to the seemingly stupid “go by the fielder” policy, especially when playing the Aussies. As Sunil Gavaskar put it, “Why don’t you trust the batsmen when you can believe a fielder”. Moreover lets put the third umpire to use - he is not paid for nothing. Anil Kumble is no doubt a tough cricketer but he plays his game in the true spirit. Unfortunately many don’t and he should have realized it by now.
5. … we can go on with this list

What amazes me about the game of cricket is the amount of passions involved. Like everything else, here you should be driven to bring out your best. Now that India have won the third test, breaking the Australian domination, they have clearly made a statement.

If you haven’t yet already seen these videos many times over, here are some links:-

All those umpiring goof-ups in the test
Pointing’s interview at the end of the match
Furious Sunny