Vazhai, the liveliness of humanity

The days now down this earth has become so sick, with everybody pushing and pulling every other to pull/push himself up and up above the layers in order to get the feel and the illusive wealth and health through various means. But, even in this worser picture, there does exists hope, light amidst the darkness for the sick, slumber and helpless to guide and lead them to the doors of relief, a satisfaction in the basic components for the survival.

These words seem to be flowery, but truly from heart, NO. "VAZHAI", serving as light over here for few really backward places around here in Tamilnadu is doing a good job. Here is where they operate their mission from:

VAZHAI: Nurturing Generations www.vazhai.org/index.htm

A recent analysis revealed that there are lot more places where people are not provided with proper education, no proper means of basic amenities, not challenging for the survival and they fall to the thrashing of growing needs and greeds. There would obviously exists places where situations has been even worser, blunderous rather, i do agree. Its just the practicality we need to think of in analysing all these.

One small piece of thought, one small piece of favour, could make a few feel happy, feel satisfied down at their heart isn't? There are more in building a nation, its not all about the value of currency, the edge in advancing technologies, or rather in the strength of the security that we have and being proud to ourselves. But, its all like painting your house outside, and spitting inside the hall! We got to improve, its not about the population and the competition that one can argue for all these under developments, its all about taking the situations in hand and moving about to make a change.

One can say, the poverty, illiteracy and other things would be just like this. But why can't one push himself to see what makes all these? Why can't we make a change and try to correct them? If one's house is dirty, he tries to clean it (if at all he is sane) isn't? Is it not same with his country too? Its all in the hands of us, volunteering and coming forward to make a change, to help others, to make them stand as we are now.

Dreaming of a new nation, to serve for the Mother land, to serve for the Humanity! Jai Hind.

Fork Bombing!

Try this in BASH if and only if you are really _free_.

$ :(){:|:&};:

The above command is nothing but in short known as “Fork Bomb”. Looks so cute, or rather so innocent, or mysterical, isnt? It makes your system run out of resources! If only if you’ve let your processess limit to unlimited in BASH (unfortunately!). Here is a good explanation of what it does:

Fork Bombing

Though an old technique, interesting because of its "cuteness" :) Ofcourse, this wouldnt work if you had set limits on the number of processes that could be forked.

HARD time with SOFT drinks

This is a recent story about the analysis done on the pesticide and other compound levels in some of the softdrinks like Pepsi, Coke etc. Ofcourse, the results are shocking indeed. Read the story here:

Pesticide cocktail in Coke/Pepsi

Today's story@The Hindu: Pesticide levels too High : CSE Report

But this is not a new issue indeed! This was raised a couple of years back too. But the amazing part is that after that issue, the amount of pesticides and the carcinogens found in the samples has increased! Why does this happen so? As usual, the manufacturing association claiming that they comply to the BIS standards, why should such an analysis be presented?

BIS standard seems to have been set a couple of years back to standardize the pesticide levels in the softdrinks. But, the problem is that the BIS standard for softdrinks was finalized only by October last year and even now, it's not announced, though the final standards was formally confirmed by the May, this year.

One reason is that the base water that they use for softdrinks is indeed pesticided, and the cleaning of it to the core is going to just increase their investment on the softdrinks. Here are few more links that would give an idea about BIS:

CSE: Press note on BIS action

Pesticide in Coke/Pepsi

BIS Homepage

As a supporter of Softdrinks myself, felt shocked, rather ashamed to see the recent reports. An action has to be taken from our side, the consumers of soft-drinks to control the mutation of the drinks. The best action is to stop consuming so that the manufacturers realize the importance of hygiene. Hope they come to some compromise between the market/money and public hygiene sometime.

Above all, it seems that the new BIS standard for the soft drinks that has been finalized is in par with the world standards. We do realize the work done by the Union of Health and Family Affairs but its also on our part to take an action, to realize that its responsible for us someday to hold the broom to clean up the parts of our place that are dirty.

Dreaming of a new INDIA!

An attempt to create a MusicalOS

"Let there be music." - I wished and there was music.

Here we go:

• 650 MB of code for GUI Applications.
• 100 MB of code for supporting drivers/libraries.
• 220 MB of code for Fonts Servers/Network drivers.
• 300 MB of code for E-Mail clients/SBIN apps.
• 1 GB of code with other XYZ apps.
  

Do one require all the above for just playing a list of songs that (s)he wishes to listen?? There's a lot that could be stripped down! This is how it goes the fantasy of making a MusicalOS from scratch.

MuscialOS :: What is it all about?
Its just a distribution, that has minimal features required to play a list of songs that is stored in a secondary storage. GUI support is not provided. The generic we extend our requirements, the bigger the kernel and the loadable module gets. Hence, to be more specific, the requirement goes like this, we just need a keyboard support and a console support in whose command prompt, commands could be invoked to play a list of songs and nothing else. No USB/Floppy/any XYZ devices please. Spare Harddiscs/CD-ROMs.

Minimum requirements
Though, building from the scratch requires a list of files to be build and other stuff to be decided at length, we just make a jot of what are the necessary modules without which our life would be under serious trouble! :)

1. Sound support - Very Trivial, its where we depend on, isnt?
   
2. Filesystems - Trivial, otherwise, no access to data!
   
3. Terminals, Console drivers - Trivial, else would be a blindman's box!
4. Device supports - Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor, CD-Rom drivers - Required.
5. Anything else??? (Still thinking!)

First Step
As a first step, Kernel v2.6.17-1 is compiled with network support removed and a CRAMfs initrd image is made with modules. And Eureka, the box boots. We've just started :)

From "Sliding Snow Leopard" to "Crazed Snow-Weasel"

This is not some kind of a story or a movie, rather a technical news. Though old, needs to be blogged. The name "Crazed Snow-Weasel" is the codename for the new release of Linux Kernel v2.6.17. The older codename was this "Sliding Snow Leopard". Hmm, interesting!

One of the busiest free software development thread, one can ever find another example, is this kernel development. Three weeks back downloaded a recent kernel v2.6.16-9 (recent then!) and now when i come back, to my surprise, it just rose to v2.6.17-1.

Thanks to all kernel developers, for providing the patches to ascend the throne of the recent version. Finally patched up the kernel downloaded with all the patches (somewhere around 13). Not much changes between v2.6.16-9 and 2.6.17-1. Moreover, this is not a right place to discuss the changes for they are already there in the celebrated www.kernel.org.

A Little BLOGGER Hack!

The NavBAR at the top of the blog was not the one i liked to have. So, did
a little hack into the stylesheet of the blogger page and now, its gone!
Atleast as far i've checked that its not showing its presence in
Epiphany/Mozilla. Didnt checked this out in other browsers though.

The Blogger inserts the NavBAR Code exactly after the "<body>" tag. Hence
if we can someway comment the code out, it should work, isnt. Its not very
obvious at first sight.

Commenting before <body> tag and after that doesnot help. Because the
code inserted has a comment breaker "<!-- -->" which breaks unterminated
comments if any.

Moreover, there is yet another way, it is to wrap up the <body>
within the JavaScript comment using "<script>" block. But this also will
not help much since the embedded code has good amount of "</script>" as
well as "<script>" hence, browser would terminate the comment halfway and
we are into some other problem.

Finally efficient way is to use the "CSS" property. Enclose "<body>"
in a "<div>" with its _visibility_ being "hidden". This finally has worked
out. Stop, but not precisely, i wouldnt want more space before by Blogger
Header. Here comes the help from "Negative Margins", finally, things
worked out.

Eureka!!! Its done. Need another hack to include HTML tags in the blog that we mail!

Shifted to Blogger

Due to space constraints on my domain, i've shifted the Logs to this Blogger.

This is a test blog through mail.

Out into the Space, Are we???

A good news poping out in the nuclear/sub-nuclear science. Scientists working on the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colloider) project at Brookhaven Labs at NY found few remarkable results while finding the "Lost Moments" _immediately_ after the "BIG BANG". Here is a short description about the experiment performed by them.

The Gold ions are accelarated at the rate of 0.9999 times the speed of light in two separate pathways and finally allowing them to go for a head-on collision. The particles splitted and splattered are observed and the changes are noted with micro-second precision.

The remarkable finding is that, at the horizon of collision, the particle gets ripped off all its constituents to form more fundamental particles. All Quarks are stripped and they collide and the group of nucleons thus collected at the horizon behave as though they are fluids with a property to change shape with a constrained motion.

The expected intuitive result is that the shattering might have caused those particles to have dynamics similar to that of gas atoms that blow up. But this new state of matter is really intriguing. This has opened new doors to further research and a new vision into the secrecy of "FIRST FEW MICROSECONDS" after the "BIG BANG".

Get the full news here: RHIC Center

Feeling good that we are proceeding to find the secret behind the evolution but only thing is that the assumptions that we had used to build this huge empire of thoughts/experiments should hold to be true at the end.

Keys Mutated

A mere continuation of the previous post. This had to wait for many days since i was a bit occupied with the work at hand. Here goes the layout of the part of keyboard that is not working.

|Esc|
|~||!|
|Tab ||Q|
|Caps||A|
|Shift||Z|
|Ctrl||Start||Alt|

And interstingly, here is the outcome of certain experiments done on this part. Under normal circumstances, "Caps" works fine. Here goes the crazy output of experiments.

First Attempt: (Assuming Caps is off initially)
 Caps + Tab + Q = W
 Caps + Tab + A = S
 Caps + Tab + Z = X

Second Attempt:
 Caps + Tab + Q = w
 Caps + Tab + A = S
 Caps + Tab + Z = x

The above shows some kind of shift in the circuit. Another experiment with surprising results, generally when the keypad works normal, and we press two keys at a time, one which has got the connect first (ofcourse we couldnot press two keys in sync.) would be printed or one/two characters would be printed and it stops there. But the three keys, 'Q', 'A' and 'S' behave differently.

Assuming Caps lock is off initially,

Caps + Tab + Q + A + Z = WsXwsxWsXwsxWsXwsxWsXwsx

Oh! What has happened? 'A' has got some real trouble and there is a short as expected before in the keyboard circuitry and so that it connects 'S' with 'A'.

No idea, will be debugging this issue i guess this end of week.