Warn Yourself!

Warn yourself that you shouldn't assume you can walk in the dark just because you got a few steps right. You ought to mind every step or you fall.

When I solve a problem, or hear for a job interview is when I get an adrenaline rush. I hope I keep in mind, I'm just walking in the dark, and that I should mind every step, lest I fall, to remind myself that the best is yet to come, and I'm far from complete..

ಆಟ ಮುಗಿದಿಲ್ಲ, ನೀನಿನ್ನು ಸೋತಿಲ್ಲ!

ಹಸಿವಿರಲಿ, ಬಿಸಿಲಿರಲಿ, ಕರಗದ ಕಗ್ಗತ್ತಲಿರಲಿ,
ದೂರುವವರೇ ಗೆಲ್ಲಲಿ, ಹೂಡುವ ಪ್ರತಿ ಯತ್ನ ವಿಫಲವಾಗಲಿ,
ಗೆಲುವು ಮರೀಚಿಕೆಯಂತೆ ಕಾಡಲಿ, ಕಷ್ಟಗಳು ಕರೆಯದೆಯೇ ಬರಲಿ;

ನಿನ್ನ ನಡತೆ ಕೆಡದಿರಲಿ, ಮನಸು ಧೃತಿಕೆಡದಿರಲಿ,
ಮುಖದ ಮೇಲೆ ನಗು ಬಾಡದಿರಲಿ; ಒಳ್ಳೆಯದೇ ನೀ ಸದಾ ಬಯಸಲಿ;
ಆಟ ಮುಗಿದಿಲ್ಲ, ನೀನಿನ್ನು ಸೋತಿಲ್ಲವೆಂಬ ನಂಬಿಕೆ ಇರಲಿ!

ದೇವತೆಯೋ, ಮಾಯೆಯೊ!

ಆಕಸ್ಮಿಕವಾಗಿ ಕಂಡ ನಿನ್ನ ಕುಡಿನೋಟ,
ಕಂಡು ಕಾಣದಂತೆ ನಕ್ಕ ನಿನ್ನ ನಗು,
ಚಂದ್ರನ ಅಚ್ಚೆನಿಸುವ ನಿನ್ನ ಮುಖ,
ಹಿಂತಿರುಗಿ ನೋಡದೆ ಹೋದ ನೀನು,

ಕಂಡಿದ್ದು ಕನಸಲ್ಲೊ, ಇಲ್ಲ ನನಸಲ್ಲೋ!?

ನೀನು ನನ್ನ ಪಾಲಿನ ದೇವತೆಯೋ, ಇಲ್ಲ ಮಾಯೆಯೊ!?

The Positivity

It appears to me that things as simple as a song that is close to your heart, or matches your inner feelings; or a monologue from a movie that you can relate to you the most, or how you want to live; a friendly conversation with a person you are comfortable with; fancying that everything will just fall right in place; thanking someone for all the good they have done to you; praising someone, genuinely for the way they are; wanting to help someone beyond your limits and taking measures to really help; working on something you like the most; among various other aspects, DO increase the positivity inside you.

2 Months Of Efforts

It has been nearly 2 months since I started using the gym facilities at my new office. It has been good so far. I think I'm able to hold on to it as a serious hobby, and I will  continue.

It reminds me of those days when math was intimidating back in the school, and I wished that I become as expert as my teacher was, overnight. It took a lot longer than overnight, and we did learn math decently well, and scored well.

I'm mature enough now, and don't want to get good physique overnight, because, I like the taste of the physical exercise.

Birthdays And Facebook

I wonder to what extent people depend on the reminders on the top right corner of their Facebook pages to wish those in their circle for birthdays.

I stopped using Facebook a few weeks ago. And _nobody_ wished me for my birthday this time which was earlier this week while my fb account was inactive.

Well, to me, birthday is just another day. And quite honestly it doesn't bother me if people don't remember it. But it did bring me some strange feeling and it is an unexplainable thought that we are so badly dependent on these internet sources to remember these so called special occasions. :)

It's a personal preference on how one organizes and memorizes these special days and special people. But, those wishes that reach us without the top-right-corner reminders reminding them are perhaps the wonderful ones. That need not be the case always, too. Example, My little sister wished me today for my birthday though. And I replied with an upset face, 'you keep them. I don't need your belated wishes'.  :) She smiled. I think I still kept those wishes. I wouldn't want to give them back contrary to what I said.

Parting Ways

I left Nokia for Cisco last week. It was 4yrs 6months of tenure. I'm a lot confident than I was when I joined, I made some good friends, learnt new things, and above all, I got to know myself more.

I'm missing my team, and new office is a little boring now. I'm still juvenile. I wish to grow up and growing up sucks. I think I will get busy with work next week, and I'm sure it is all going to be fine. I don't recall any such feeling of going away from people from the last 2 companies I left. I felt nothing. I was happy to leave those places. This one was tough probably because I stayed longer, and I had many people. May also be because I'm probably going through the terrible phase of the quarter life crisis! I cried during the farewell and I can't explain what I was going through. The farewell was such overwhelming. For some time I feared if I deserved all that good treatment. My team was so nice.
Gone are the days we miss. A lot of people walk in, and out of our lives. It is matter of staying happy with the moment that should be practiced. Tough at times though..
Anyways, I'm waiting eagerly to get my access rights set so that I can start working on things. I took the new job hoping to experiment a new tool in real time as I think it solves the problems here at the new assignment. I should wait and see how it works for me. I'm excited. Cisco is a big organization, and the environment looks very encouraging. Hopefully I will be able to bring something valuable to the table.

Jyothi Lakshmi Movie

I watched a Telugu movie today - Jyothi Lakshmi

It's about a prostitute named Jyothi Lakshmi who's sought by a decent man who's in love with her, that wants to marry her, and how he stands by her after convincing her to marry him, supports her with her wish to rescue her friends who were forced to work at the brothel as one of her friend from the brothel commits suicide after being humiliated in a police raid at a hotel she was forced to go to, for one last time before she wanted to leave the brothel forever, to look after her father who has fallen sick. This friend was actually cheated for a job at Singapore and forced to work at brothel. Eventually, Jyothi Lakshmi succeeds in making sure the villains that run the brothel are all killed, and the movie closes. The message that is attempted to be conveyed is that no women wants to be a prostitute. It is only the circumstances which are mostly created by men that are forcing her to turn to prostitution, and the media should not exploit the misfortune of the prostitutes as they are caught in raids, while protecting the pride of the rich men who seek them.

A good part of the movie is quite emotional, and there is a particular scene when the married Jyothi Lakshmi asks her husband why he loved her. He explains that when misfortune stuck him, and his sister by killing their parents, they were looked after by a prostitute, who is like mother to them, and she dies in an accident. And that made him decide he wanted to marry a prostitute, and to care for her. He goes on and says, Jyothi Lakshmi, whom he married reminds him of his mother. To me, this is the favorite scene.

While I did not like a large commercial, and unwanted aspects of the movie, it was not waste of my time, as, to me, it was a decent love story with a good message.

The New Environment That Performs Like "Wow!"

We are again stuck with hellish build time problems. Our ccache solution is suffering and I think it is because of the underlying infrastructure limitations. I hate to say "I think" because it kills me not to know what exactly is wrong with the infrastructure. I'm not an expert in network, storage, linux administration, and it made me handicapped. We have to resort the IT support for help all the time, and they are at my organization not up to our expectations.

We thought we are in trouble. Luckily, and strangely, the new cloud environment that we recently got, where we are run our build farm and evaluating our builds on RedHat 6.5 is performing very well. The first impression is that this new environment is 6 times faster! Very surprising results.

I verified a few basic differences between the old and new build farm, and the differences/improvements are:

1. RedHat 5.5 vs RedHat6.5


2. 16 cores hyperthreaded vs 16 cores hyperthreaded
   
   
   
   • I studied a few articles on if hyperthreading helps speed up compilation, and from what I understand, it does NOT help compilation. As far as my experience goes, hyperthreading will be a performance "loss" for compilation because compilers are not multi-threaded.
   
   
   • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4430001/which-x86-c-compilers-are-multithreaded-by-itself
   
   
   • http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20640193/why-is-parallel-compilation-performance-with-ht-worse-than-without
   
   
   • That said, although the machines in our build farm are 8core machines(with hyperthreading, 16cores), and one may run make -j16, it slows down the compilation because of multi-threading. So, we default to running "make -j8" on a 16core.
   
   
   
   


3. 16GB RAM vs 80GB RAM
   
   
   
   • This seem to have improved the compile-times. I'm not sure to what extent.
   
   
   
   


4. Disk storage type:
   
   
   
   • The storage used by the build comes from epeheral. I don't know what benefits this gave.
   
   
   
   


5. Network Connectivity between machines in the build farm.
   
   
   
   • Our builds run using a comerical make flavor called "ElectricAccelerator" Builds are distributed, and they share the intermediate build results across the build farm.
   
   
   • That obviously needs connectivity across the build farm to be fast.
   
   
   • My observation is, the old and new infrastructure differ a lot with the way they are connected to each other.
   
   
   • ping showed some visible difference.
   
   
   
   

I'm happy with the preliminary results with the build times, and hopefully when we are in production with this setup, our developers will hopefully spend less time waiting, and we can spend more time on some quality topics than monitoring the environment all the time. Comments are welcome.

Blogging - My Beloved Companion

It has been 3 years since I started writing this blog. My blog is not the best among any categories. It is not hosting wonderful poetry. You do not find eloquent discussions on politics or nation building here. I do not write very technical, "How do I hack ethically" sort of jargon. I just rattle my keyboard every time a weird, pointless, "nobody gives a damn" sort of thought comes to my mind, and I share it with my very special companion, WordPress.
Writing here has been a hobby I pursued successfully, and persistently and I will, I can tell with confidence, continue for a very long time into my future.

Writing here has always been like talking to a person, who listens to anything and everything I say, patiently, and persistently. I wouldn't mind if I don't hear anything back. My blog has not attracted many visitors or active readers, yet I pour out my thoughts, and it feels good.

Writing here has been relaxing and it gave me confidence that I'm capable of sticking to a hobby for a long long time, and that I won't give up on myself that I cannot write. Writing here has convinced me that it can be profoundly expressive. Writing here made me appreciate the amazing gift some people have in expressing themselves, or someone else's thoughts like nobody else could. Not even the very person who felt that feeling.

I may no reach anywhere with my writing. I wouldn't mind that anyway!

The Earnings

It appears to me that the more you are being criticized that you earned things by wrong means, which to the best of your knowledge, are not by wrong means, the harder you should try to earn respect from those who criticize you and the harder you should try to find your faults that trigger the criticism.

On the similar lines 'what others think of you is none of your business'.

I suppose when we strike a balance between the two, there is very less mental stress and harmony inside the heart and you start becoming a better man.

The 2.5hr journey back home

It usually takes 30 minutes for me to drive from my office, manyatha tech park to my home at yelahanka new town where I currently live. Today I left office at 5.30pm and I had no clue that the heavy rains would have blocked the drainage system so badly that it took literally 2hrs to drive a distance of 1km! The roads were jammed completely and there was no chance to drive back and take different route.
It just was a surprising day. It is when you least expect that things go wrong, or fall right in place. Isn't it?
For some reason, I did not feel exhausted at all stuck in traffic, standing still, only moving a few inches here and there now and then.
There was a school bus beside my vehicle and the kids inside were singing randomly and not letting the slow traffic piss them off.

Isn't that how we should be handling things? Making sure we make the best of now, this very minute and don't give a damn about the troubles around? Well, I hope to do so. It's a little tough task for an ordinary man like me though.:)

Workshops, Collaboration, Many Unknown Topics

There was a workshop at my organization this week. The focus was to eliminate/minimize the quality problems in one of the software component delivered by my team to the business lines. Between business line who consume the end software, and my team, there is a platform services who deliver the LFS(Linux From Scratch) This software component built by my team is having interfaces that are common between LFS, and us, which create problems at times, and the potential solution was to develop, build and test our component along with LFS. I think it is a right solution.

I'm a Build Automation engineer and I'm rewriting our software component's build system using CMake. Rewriting is necessary as this component cannot be built by just running "make my_component". Our build system is way too old, and inseparable from the other components that coexist. I like this task as it is challenging. Ensuring the accuracy of build, to match it to the legacy build system is reasonably challenging! I'm enjoying this work so far. There are some organizations where people are asked to do too many things at a time. That is suffocating. It happens with us some times.

As much as the workshop was inspiring, it was discouraging too, that I do not know most part of this software component, the development, and testing aspects in particular. That went in two entirely different directions. I sort of concluded it that I think I get discouraged rather quickly when I don't know things. There perhaps was no need for discouragement. It just isn't my area of work perhaps. But it is always good to know a little bit of everything.  I think I will go forward in that direction; to know what this piece of software does, and then, how, and then even try some hands on.

The fragrant second

The tree you are seeing in the picture blossoms some sort of flowers. I don't know their English name. Their fragrance is heavenly.
This tree is apparently an old one and I guess it just might die soon :(. I come across this fragrant tree on my way to home and as I ride across her, the fragrance lasts for about a second. For that second, it really is very pleasant. It brings the same soothing, comforting effect as that of say glass of water you drank when you are dead thirsty, or the meal that you had when you were starving.
It was so compelling a feeling for a few days now that I wanted to write about it and I drove back to take a picture today.
The tree, the flowers, their fragrance doesn't last throughout my way. But I prefer to take that road for the sake of that tiny second of time. I hope the flowers keep blossoming.

Another Tiring Day

It was yet another tiring Monday. I was actually pretty pumped up to go to office this morning as I wrote down some actions for us, my team, during the weekend which I thought we can execute this week. As I woke up, I got a call and I had to pick a neighbor from my hometown and drop them to their destination as they don't know Bengaluru much, and it was exhausting drive in the car. There was one hell of road traffic, and I was pissed. I dropped them when the destination was almost 3km away, and returned to office.

It was very unfortunate for me that some changes I made to the build system broke the system. They are using autotools, and our build environment is not uniform, and this autotools is very fussy, and complicated. It failed sporadically, making the whole thing look wrong. I got busy in this talking to people, and fixing things up. Although I got sufficient support from people, it just was another tiring day, and at this moment, I'm done preparing an undo of my changes from trunk. This is the last option.
I'm exhausted. So exhausted that I just cannot take this anymore, even if it means I will be considered incapable. I think I don't want to solve these problems anymore. It is here that I don't want to call it quits, but that thought is slowly reining over me.
At the same time, I see a lot of people from the developer community, who are so seamless and seem to take more pressure than I can. Now that makes me think I just should do things right and everything will be fine. Or I just really want to call it quits as I know I can do things right, but I just don't want to anymore..
Well, to those strange readers who stumble onto my blog, sorry to disappoint. I hope to put some good interesting reads here, than my boring routine rants.

Reunion At School

We had a wonderful event back in my school on the republic day, the 26th January. Quite a few of my school friends showed up, and I'm glad that many of them settled well in their lives. Some are teachers, some run business, some are politicians, some are into jobs in private sector, and many girls are homemakers.



Kudos to those of my friends that itched the idea of reunion function, main agenda being remembering our old time school teachers. Many of our teachers gladly accepted; our invitation to take part in the function, our small gesture, and our thanks. I'd the pleasure of picking and dropping three of our teachers from their doorstep.
Just the way they felt nostalgic about the school, and their job, I think, we equally felt nostalgic about our childhood, and the wonderful school days. I wish I could erase all my memory, turn the time machine to the past, and go back my childhood. I'm selfish; I need everything to just go backwards not just me alone, well but time machine is just a fictional thing.:(
We had the pleasure of talking on the stage again on which once we orated very proudly the mugged up speech on the Independence Days, Republic Days, Teachers days, that got interrupted occasionally to be picked up from the beginning.
The pleasure of listening to those teachers that tried hard to teach us the basics of everything. It was wonderful.

Unluckily, the school, and time has changed things badly. Although the facilities are good these days, the quality isn't that good at school, or with the education system these days. We had nice experienced, and disciplined teachers. Not now.

All in all, it was a nostalgic day, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I noticed that I'm a changed man, since my childhood. Changed in good ways with some, and bad in others. Isn't that what makes us; the terrible human beings?!

Another Year Gone - 2014

Time flies. As I write this down, I recall how I spent my Dec 31, 2013. Nothing much as changed for me with my personal life since then. I'm happily what I'm. In fact, I think I got better during 2014 personally. I tried to be sensitive to others. I tried not to hurt anyone deliberately. I tried to be nice and kind as much as possible, as long as possible. I thanked a few people that helped to me to be what I am. I tried not to lose my nerve. I tried to understand my family more and more although I lived my life on my own all these years. I tried to figure out what exactly I want for myself, and what not.

On the professional side, I tried to ensure that my team at office that I lead is growing with their ability to do good job, as much as I tried do it myself; and I tried to ensure that they are more engaged with stuff they are doing. I tried to communicate openly to ensure that we do what the team, and company really wanted. I tried to be rational enough to judge people at office, when judging them became inevitable. I hated certain decisions inevitably, and it was evidentially the wrong decision with unfair motivation despite the confrontation from me. We reduced software build times reasonably well. We are trying to rewrite our build system using "tup build tool", and we will finish it before Jan'15! I read most part of two wonderful books, "Who says elephants can't dance", and "How Google Works" and I digested them reasonably well, and trying to improve myself accordingly.

On the failures part, I failed to hold on to a few activities at office until their closure. I've improved since 2013, but there still was more room for improvement. I failed to find a mentor for myself in somebody. I failed to criticize, and apparently, had I communicated more openly, I would have done more good than I did by keeping quiet.

For this year, 2015, my objective is to make at least one useful contribution to open source software(I have 2 ideas in my mind on how I can contribute); to exercise as regularly as possible, to eat at least one fruit per day, to make it to my dream job, and try to become a better person, and to fall in love.

I'm hopeful that I will make most of 2015.