Drenched in Dream Land

That was a part of fun yesterday. After installing and using GNU Hurd, looked around my room. Was pretty untidy and it needed a sweep. As usual, jumped into cleaning work and finally called up Mudanna to find if he is free that evening. Fixed up a schedule to freak out at beach.

Thank GOD. It was all cloudy up high above our heads, it was only 3:30pm. Difficult to believe though! We started from here by 4:30pm and was there for 2 hours. Fun after a long time at my favourite spot, the Beach. We dived into the water, no hesitation, no fear, we got all drenched. Remembering those bulls at village ponds, we were literally like that, to reduce heat. One hurdle in that was the saltiness of the sea water. Since its summer, the salt levels would've risen and hence the water was more "sticky" and "itchy", but not much and the reduction of heat overwhelmed all those.

Played a game with a small wooden stick which came from somewhere. Finally, its time to leave, and we were back to home. Only then i found, its better if we were fishes Had a heavy dinner, body still swaying as in the wave. Had a good sleep, to start the next day of this weekend. Here it goes. Scheduled this day to office.

Happy Thing, Sad Thing and In the End

There are few moments that we are happy, and there are few moment that we are sad. At all other moments we are just normal. A casual look at these actions on the long run reveals the following philosophic quote:

Happy Thing about the Sad Thing is that it would END but its the Sad Thing with the Happy Thing too.

So simple looks the quote but so deeper needs the explanations that would say, nothing stays so long over the time. Its a very simple example that most of us would be indifferent to the essence of what it says. Its always difficult to take it to the heart about the philosophy.

Scanning the above quote, some people would feel the second part of the quote to be unacceptable at times pessimistic. But there is no difference, except that they are positively biased or they tend to see the greener part of life.

Can we materialize the above quote into a statement? My vain attempts over it. Didnt involve much of my time into it. Anyways, here it goes.


Lim(Time->inf) H(S) = Lim(Time->inf) S(H)

Where H->Happy Thing and S->Sad Thing.

And, moreover since the happy thing and sad thing could be applied only to living beings that could sense 'feelings', through the act of perspectives and lot other stuff, whatever we define is restricted to the life of the living system under consideration.

An explanation could be obtained if we look into the above limit expression. Consider the life of a person, he would've undergone Happy times and Sad times on his life path. As his life goes on, at the end, which obviously means the end of his life, (if it is natural), he is pushed into such a state that neither happy thing, nor the sad thing could trigger him, meaning, they are indifferent to him, because of lesser pronounced sensory stimuli and the perspective vision that is dusted due to the ageing.

Hence, In the end, the "Happy Thing" and the "Sad Thing" are one and the same. Remembering back the words of Bagvad Gita, (or any other religious scripts that talk about the nature of God), it seems the above things are dual of each other and co-exists and finally at end of life, merge into one, the nothingness.

Debian Hurd - GNU Mach up and running

EUREKA!! Finally, my infactuation on running a micro kernel on my system worked out well. I've installed the Debian Hurd - the true GNU system with GNU Mach kernel and its up and running at home. So, no Hurd now at office, planning to use the 10G available there for someother experiment. Moreover, no progressive dreams, im still on my Debian box while writing this post.

Here is a small HowTo on Debian Hurd installation:

1. Hold your patience.
2. Make a partition on your disk free.
3. If you have the grub installed in the box, it'll be helpful.
4. Time to read the fine manual (RTFM) here: Debian Hurd - Installation
5. Learn about Hurd here: GNU Hurd

Above all, the GNU Hurd comes with 'Nano' and no browser support. FTP SEGFAULTS at times. But its a good experience working with it. Found 'gcc' to be missing with the base installation. This made me a bit annoyed, but, no matter as far as the internet is there. Will have to grab a package and install. Planning to port few packages to GNU Hurd. The next target would be to 'ping' 'Google' and get a positive response from my GNU Hurd box.

Still Deeper into GCC

Bingo... The problem is partially solved. The '.note.GNU-stack' section is added into the assembly by the dear GCC. Here is an article explaining why it is that way and the way to prevent them out.

Executable memory: some apps that work on RH9 don't on FC1

Still deeper to dive into GCC. Only thing left is to do up with its modular design and will have to see how it supports the frontends. Interesting problems at hand though!

Satisfied, though near deadlines.

Here comes, end of yet another day. The network stuff at the boot loader is driving me crazy. Waiting for a solution to dawn and the deadlines are pretty closer. Planning to sleep early (Its still late, now 12:20pm). Between, its horribly hot outside even now. Atleast the AC inside the cabin makes the place comfortable :-)

There are few things that happened today:

• Fixed up my system with 'FC3' (The newest one they had, spare them for not grabbing 'FC5'). Also, came to know 'FC5' is not shipped with few utility programs like tftp and things like that but didnt refer to the release notes.
• The sweet 'GNOME' is running and the BULKY Firefox 1.5.02 with all its graceful looks and themes helping me to blog. As usual, 'EMACS' is the world.
• I have a 10G in the disk running WinXP. Planning to scratch it but feeling a bit insecure since its the only primary partition. My FC3 is in the extended partition. In case if i rub the first my second shouldnt become homeless. Anyways, will sort it out in few days. Plans are there to tryout 'Debian HURD' or few other home-(to be)-made distros.

Its getting late... and let it be a sweet good night :-)

Deeper insight into gcc

The Problem
This is just a continuation of analysis of the "x86 Hello World" written and tested on my pc which is an AMD Athelon one. It worked well and its an i686 arch. Came back to my office and to my annoyment found it didnt work that well, ofcourse it SEGFAULTED. For an introduction, here is the link to the analysis of that code in my wiki:

LINK > x86 Hello World

And the version of GCC is 3.4.2 20041017.

The Discussion:
Me and a few others at the office were discussing (late night! OOPS) regarding this and told them that the linker tends to align the code in the 16-byte segment and this might be the problem. To my surprise i found its not actually true.

The Clarity
The alignment of the code and the block is decided by the compiler/linker depending on the architecture it has. Moreover my analysis on the "16-byte alignment" stuff didnt work that well in my PC at office though they both are the same with respect to architecture. So, it has become clear that dear GCC is playing some trick.

The Observation
Now comes the result, i didnt notice the version of GCC i have at home. But its going to be of no use. So, generated the assembly code out of the C-code and to my surprise found the code below in the assembly dump:


.section .note.GNU-stack,"",@progbits


It was a bit disturbing, coz i didnt get the above line at my home. So, i removed it and tried compiling the assembly code and BINGO, it worked. The code is processed and the "Hello World!" was at my sight. Replacing the above line back made the code to SEGFAULT.

The Result
Im still not sure as to why the above line has to make my code SEGFAULT. What i suspect is that the addition of that above innocent line makes some of the code to offset to a different location and that few things gets offsetted. Im yet to confirm the actual reason and would update the Wiki with this observation.

Yet, its still interesting to find how the compiler/linker could've been constructed by making all these stuff and experimenting, and so i believe there certainly exists "Pleasure in Finding Things out...".

My First Blog

This is my first introduction to blogging. It feels happy to write in words what we had come across or felt. There are few of my friends who has indirectly inspired me in this act of blogging.

Me still in office and planning to make a night out (ofcourse, the night-out for a bachelor not in TEENS would generally mean till 1 or 2 for (s)he wouldnt be up and running till the day dawns, not a generic statement though, applies in most of the case).

Silence has got lots in itself to be enjoyed, particularly when you are working :-) or thinking alone...