Why don’t we ever get the number engaged if its a wrong number we’re calling?

Well, maybe its Murphy’s law, but if we think about it, if the number is engaged, we consider that its the right number we’re calling that is engaged. It is only when the wrong number rings and someone picks it up that we find out that it is a wrong number.

Just a small thought out of the blue, thought of jotting it down.

I hope you remember this ad. Don’t you? Ah, well, at least the ‘elite’ people know. By elite, here, I am referring to the privileged few who happen to own a television. For me, my membership in the elite class has been a discontinuous graph, it remained fairly close to 0 since the last 14 years now.

Often, the elite have mocked the general public by talking about new ads on the television, of which the general public has no idea. And in such conversations, more often than not, the elite cannot explain in words how witty or hilarious or wonderful an advertisement is. So the ‘general public’ feels left out, and so the distinction of being ‘elite’ exists.

Today morning, the gods descended upon our home, and gave Bhavik the responsibility of passing on a message from God himself to me. Thereafter, taking the oath to fulfil what God had ordered me to do, I setforth a journey, long and tiring, through the heavy unrelenting traffic of BTM layout, risking my life by believing in Bhavik’s bike riding skills, climbing up to the 8th floor of an unknown building (using a lift;)). There, so high in the sky, near the heavens, was resting the treasure that would enlighten our lives for as long as we continue our stay in Bangalore.

With great difficulty, we all picked up the glowing relic, shining black in color, put it in the chariot (car) of its caretaker, and returned home. A flash of cosmic ray eminated from my bare hands (which were holding the remote) that started a chain reaction in the divine body that we had just procured, and a blue screen of godly colours lightened up. This was the story of our tryst with our new (second hand) television.

The heavenly gods have finally blessed me, and I thank thee in rejoice, and cry in happiness that God considered me worthy of joining the elite.

Hail LG!

Adios.

…. competence intention trust stability happiness uncertainty fear rejection responsibility doubt myself ….. Whenever I read Devansh’s (aka Deboo) blog, I feel that I am drowning in a tag cloud of these words. As if each and every word screaming at me, urging me to understand the depth of things, the undeniable truth. Still, I let myself argue in disbelief and objection to these laws set forth before me, that define and guide the life of all human beings.

I may be wrong, I generally am, but it is hard to digest that all human race can be described by generalized rules and characteristics that Devansh describes so aptly in his writings. And it is amazing how most people, including me, can relate themselves with his thoughts and ideas.

my happiness - my responsibility

According to Devansh, only a person himself/herself is responsible for his/her happiness or unhappiness, not other people. Yeah, we expect from people, we desire for certain objects, we do actions which might compromise our physical or mental security, this is all true. If we think deeply, for a lot of things that we get frustrated about, like someone not living up to our expectation, the fault can be found in our wrong estimation of the other person’s intentions and capabilities.

A safe way of living in such a situation is to not expect anything from anyone, or to always underestimate the capabilities of others, to doubt their intentions. Pessimist is the word that comes to my mind. This is similar to advocating that we build up a wall around us, so that no one can penetrate our stable and happy state.

probability experiment

Take a glass full of water filled to the brim, and keep it in front of you on the table. Then, by what probability can you say that you will be able to drink it without spilling? Go to the terrace of a 20 storey building on a windy day, sit on the boundary wall and put the same glass on the same table in front of you. What is the probability now? Certainly the probability in both cases was not 100%. Nevertheless, the former one was much more higher for obvious reasons.

The tasks, responsibilities that we carry out everyday have many more steps involved than the number of steps in the previous experiment. Each of these smaller steps has a probability of success attached to it. It is very similar to a sequential computer program. A good program has fail-over mechanisms to handle failures and exceptions.

approaches we can take

It may be best to be detached from the world, to not feel pain when it hurts by reasoning in your rational brain that it was your own fault, to not blame people for what you have suffered by reasoning that they were not competent enough, to take up a collective responsibility as one of the individuals within the society for reasoning that society creates robbers when you get robbed.

I am no saint, no revolutionary, no philosopher or such. I feel hurt when it pains, I get angry when someone screws up, I get frustrated when things don’t work, I am heartbroken when relationships break. What keeps me going on? Faith. Belief. Expectations. Hope. You can call it all these, but all these are mere probabilities of success of a future event calculated by a network of billions of neurons by applying hardwired and experimentally determined thresholds on the output of non-linear functions computed over the billions of inputs that I receive every moment.

fail-overs within us

anger, pain, sadness, tears, shouting, violence, frustration - all these are my fail-over mechanisms. Signals to my neural network that things aren’t going the way as planned. Hints that there is something wrong about what I assumed before, that I need to readjust my thresholds, change the functions that I use. Just like it is inevitable to pursue happiness, it is inevitable to call these fail-over mechanisms when they are needed. They are hardwired, built into the system, they come “on-board“, Read Only Memory.

Happiness isn’t a complex thing. It doesn’t take a philosopher to explain how to feel a moment of happiness. Why do we have to put it under an electron microscope and find the probability of finding a happitron in a certain dumble-shaped orbital around ourselves? I prefer to keep it simple and stupid.

By realizing the deeper truth, by learning how to bypass the fail-over mechanisms, one can get closer to being ideally stable and robust. Such a person might feel happy, might not. I don’t know whether that person will still have the parts of brain that are responsible for emotions and feelings, they’ll be more like appendices. As for me, I choose to remain human.

When you think about wine, what comes to your mind? Maybe some of these thoughts,

• Intoxicating
• Delicious
• Smooth
• Elite

Well, the open source Wine software isn’t very far from these definitions either. People in the Windows world have always hesitated to give up GAMING just for the sake to switching to Linux. And this gap, this barrier has forever seemed to shrink, but never made close enough.

A big majority of Linux users simply put forward arguments which are valid but not convincing enough for a comfortable Windows XP user. Though, still Linux remains what it is, not-for-laymen, some useful softwares such as Firefox, Pidgin, Konqueror (rather KDE), Thunderbird make it less so.

why windows software ??

Technically, open source formats and technologies such as OGG, OpenGL, etc. are much more superior than proprietary technologies such as MP3, DirectX, etc. This reminds me of the dialog in the movie “Pirates of the Silicon Valley”, where the character of Bill Gates is dancing in front of Steve Jobs for having released Windows 3.1 prior to Macintosh. Steve Jobs is angered by the whole thing and retaliates by saying “Still, our product is much better” and Bill replies “You see, that doesn’t matter!”.

In a world that uses Windows based platforms and API in majority, whether good or bad, the availability of software specifically made for Windows is much much common than that for others. Hence, a lot of effort is being put in to be able to execute “Windows based software” on Linux. Some of the strides in this direction are Wine, Code-weavers and Transgaming Cedega. While the latter two are paid software, Wine comes for free.

my experiences

With a combination of Wine, Cedega and Code-weavers, Linux users are able to run most softwares and games written for Windows. I have myself used Wine to play Age Of Empires II Expansion 1.0 and Cedega 4 to play Counter Strike Condition Zero.

problems with wine

The spectrum of support for Windows software on Linux is growing each second. The worst part about Wine is that its interface still inherits the not-for-laymen tag of Linux. It is really too painful to tell Wine where my Windows folder is, which DLL to use from Windows and which ones to use from the Wine built-ins. There are specific issues around each software that you want to run using Wine. Though Cedega 6.0 tries to provide a better interface, but the problems are similar.

layman’s perspective

A layman doesn’t understand what is Wine. Why do we have to configure it in order to make it work. Which DLL files will be required to run his game using Wine. He has a setup CD of WoW and all he expects is that when he double clicks ’setup.exe’, it will install his software by pressing next-next-next-finish and then when he double clicks the game icon, it will start running.

I am a Linux person if you ask what I prefer. I like to fight through problems and make things work on my Linux OS rather that rebooting to Windows XP. But to put it in simple words,

Windows is like a Maruti 800, slow, fragile and un-powerful, easy to drive, can’t take much load and needs a mechanic once in a while. Linux, on the other hand is a train engine, fast, powerful, robust, unpolished, not presentable and it takes an expert to drive it ON track.

The other day I was discussing ‘what is love’. First thing I did was ‘define:love’ on Google (Ok, well even Yahoo! Search is good, but I wish it had this ‘define’ feature). It gave various definitions ranging from ‘affection’ to ’sexual intercourse’. And then I looked up Wikipedia. It described all the types of relationships like father-son, brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-child and their bonding.

requirements for love

So, what is love? Do we need two living beings for love? I love Indore, though a city can be attributed to a living creature, in this case where is the second living being? Then again, you could say bikes love some xx engine oil. Can a bike love? Or are we just misusing the word here?

Love is affection, attachment, sense of belonging, attraction (both general and sexual) and so on. So is love a superset of all these different emotions/feelings/situations? Can we define a ‘degree of love’? Why do people say I don’t love him/her THAT much? And if the weaker relations are just ‘infatuations’ or ’simulations of love’, what is the threshold above which a relation becomes real love?

finding out whom we love

A dear friend told me, she loves everyone! She says, every human being she meets, she loves him/her. She reasons that it doesn’t have to do anything with sexuality or attraction in that sense. Its more about loving the human being within. I doubt her claims. Can someone love everyone? Yes, definitely there are good people, worth appreciating, but do we LOVE their goodness? We appreciate that they are good human beings, or for that matter, we appreciate the innocence and beauty of animals sometimes. But do we love them?

I don’t want that there is a bomb blast in Bangalore which kills many people. Does it mean I love half the population of Bangalore? I barely know them to love them. We all feel that we’re attached to all Indians (or if we think globally, we’re attached to all humans), but do we love them?

criterion for loving

First off, it is too difficult to find out how many of the 6 billion plus people we actually love. So lets try to put some criterion on loving.

1. We should know about the existence of the object we love. (Do we love god?)
2. We should have felt that person once (including but not limited to seeing, hearing, online communication, reading his/her book, hearing their music) (We all have communicated with god, through his creation, this wonderful symphony of nature that is around us.)
3. There should be some characteristics of the other person that we like in our own way (and they might not necessarily be characteristics that are liked by everyone)

I know that the 6 billion people in this world exist. I know animals and plants exist. So ‘everyone’ fits in criterion ONE.

I’ve read about, talked to a wide variety of people or known their ways of life through television and internet. Lets say with my knowledge set, I cover around 2 billion people.

Everyone is unique, everyone has something different about them. And if you pay attention, you can find something about everyone that you like. But, unfortunately I haven’t being paying attention to each and everyone of the 2 million people in question.

my story

I only pay attention to the ‘currently active’ people in my life. My attention span is a sliding window, when I was in school, I had a different set of friends, and now I have a different set of colleagues. And I seldom try to catch up with old friends (except a very special 3-4).

So at a point of time, I care about a set of 10 people among friends and 20 people among family members. And my affection towards others fades as their memory fades. Does that mean that my love towards anyone is just their presence in front of me all the time?

Then again, there are certain people you seldom talk to, but still whenever you talk to them, you have a deep bonding with them. Even though you haven’t talked since 2 years, you still feel the same when you talk next.

If all people in the ‘active set’ (around 30 people) were to suddenly disappear, my life would get an unbearable shock. I fear losing the active set. But when someone slips out of the active set gradually, though sometimes it pains a little, but my life still goes on.

some instances of love

Seems we’ve drifted a lot from the topic, but seems all these don’t define love. Maybe because love cannot be calculated or understood. It can only be felt.

When you are with someone who is not very well accepted by people, and it would degrade your reputation to be with him, you fear about what you are doing. But when in a certain moment, you feel that seeing him smile, making him happy will give you such fulfilling satisfaction that nothing else matters, I think in that moment you are in love with that person or thing.

At certain times, you feel it doesn’t matter that the other person is happy or not, whether you are rude to him or not. What matters is that you both exist, and talk sometimes. And the distance between you is filled with some cosmic fluid that keeps you attached wherever you are. You are never one of their best friends, but in your heart you know that no one could care more about you than him. Its rare though, have you experienced it?

conclusion

Love is a mutual state shared between two or more objects(living or non-living, real or virtual) that have experienced each others’ existence in any possible manner at least once. The parameters of this shared state can be fully understood only by the objects in question and no one else. No words, no music or any form of communication is sufficient to explain to a third party the nature of the mutual shared state. In this mutual shared state, none of the object(s) involved have any control over the state, rather the state itself drives the actions of the two objects.

Hope it made some sense

When I typed the last few posts, all I had to do was place my hands on the keyboard and lo, the words started coming out automatically. But now that I can see a handful readers, I am hesitating in beginning this post. Human nature you see, the more people watch you, the more uneasy, more prone to error you get.

This happens in many things. When you are just typing, you are just typing. When someone mentions that you type so fast, just then you’ll fumble four times to type a small ‘hi’ on messenger. When you are alone riding, you are riding. When someone unwilling and afraid sits on your bike, you’ll give a million jerks and your bike will stop in the middle of the road a couple of times.

People generally do things better when they are casual. When they are left unnoticed. In the limelight, even the one who practices a lot makes mistakes. I guess that is why these days, companies are stressing on an informal atmosphere in the offices. Even if you want to do something very very official for example, a chat can suffice, with the flexibility of including all shorthands and chat lingo! People accept people using ‘hindi’ words to explain in between the usual english, rather than sticking strictly to english and making no sense.

What I feel is, the whole world is getting more into the motto of Keep It Simple and Stupid.

Paralysis

I am paralyzed by the emotional overload which this movie has given me. It ‘pings’ so many ‘ports’ of my conscience, so very effectively and deeply. And this song is the representative of the whole package. It goes like this,

Main kabhee batlata nahi, par andhere se darta hoon main maa,

Yoon to main dikhlata nahi, teri parwaah karta hoon main maa,

Tujhe sab hai pata hai na maa, Tujhe sab hai pata meri maa.

(English literal translation :

I never tell you this, but I am scared of the darkness, oh mother,

Generally I don’t show it, but I care for you, oh mother,

Do you know it all, oh mother? You know it all, oh my mother. )

Thoughts
I was thinking how emotions can paralyze a person, both mentally and physically. The first symptoms of this can be seen in the eyes, where you can’t control your muscles to stop the salty fluid from flowing out of the tear bags.

A greater impact can be seen mentally, when all day you just keep swinging here and there, and are not able to concentrate on your work, or do something else except being in that pathetic mental state.

If emotions are so harmful, then why do we need them anyway? If through evolution, only the best traits of all living beings get boosted and the useless ones get deprecated, how have we, humans, supposedly the most developed species on earth, retained this ‘defect’?

What good do emotions do to us that their shortcomings can be ignored as minor round-off errors? When a person is acting emotionally, it is less likely that he/she is doing things practically or rationally.

But if we look deeper, emotions can create revolutions, emotions can boost the morale of an entire army by a thousand times in magnitude, emotions can help people keep going on even when its gets tough, emotions can make someone achieve that practically and rationally seems impossible.

Conclusion

Emotions are a reason for misery and sadness in the world,

Emotions are behind revolutions, discoveries and inventions,

Emotions make us behave worse than animals sometimes,

Emotions are what makes us human.

I feel that my brain is heating up from inside, too much thinking going on lately! I wish there was an ‘off’ switch which I could press so that I leave all worries and thoughts. Well, there is this ‘die’ option, or ‘drugs/drinking’ option, but then I prefer neither. The first option, well, of course is like a permanent solution, but there is no ’switch on’ after it. The second option … well I decided to never use it.

I am going home on this 31st evening. A lot of wrapping up to do, I want to buy presents for my family members as a token for the first money I’ve earned (that comes under ‘taxable’ income ;)). And then, I’ve this OS thought process going on, and I need to plan in advance for the coming holiday, how will I utilize the time as well as give enough time to people there.

Office work is going on as usual, but the workload since TODAY has been unusually low. So, all day I’ve been reading articles about operating systems. Most of which say that Linux is a clone of a 30 year old system, UNIX. And a lot of them say that most OSes are based on the three tier thing, kernel, files/folders and processes. We must change this to something that is shown in hollywood, no windows nothing, just some vague interface to get the information we want. This thought is influencing me a lot.

Another thought that comes to me is the ease of use of the existing systems. If we were to shift to a vague system with no “Firefox”, no “Windows Media Player” (eh, “MPlayer”), no “Start menu” (eh eh, “K Menu” (eh eh eh “Gnome’s whatever menu”)), and whatever application you used to like! Well, it might take a decade for people to finally accept (if ever) such a thing.

Then there are people who ask to ‘do-away’ with GCC. Does that mean we need to implement another compiler? How can anyone not port ‘GCC’ to their OS (except Microsoft)? And people ask us to do-away with C! Imagine coding a new OS with D, and writing a compiler for it along with the OS! If we do port GCC, then how will GCC run if we’re not basing upon ‘kernel, files and processes’? Yeah, the C code we write can work the way we want, but GCC needs to run on ‘files’ and write ‘compiled binary files’. Also, the gcc executable and shared libraries are also ‘files’ stored in a specific ‘directory structure’. And all the C code which we write is ‘files’. How can the compiler survive in an environment that gives up this basic structure?

A way of doing it would be to create ‘emulation of kernel/files/processes’ in the new OS. The compiler will run in this emulated environment and spit out binary ‘files’. There should be some way of running ‘files’ created by GCC on the new OS, which supposedly wont support ‘files’?  The idea seems wierd, apart from creating an overhead of an emulator for the existing structure of computer systems. Maybe a little more pondering on it can give some clearer picture. Rather, the method should be, what will be the new structure? And then later we can answer other questions of compatibility with existing structures and porting applications.

I know I am talking really wierdly these days, but then, my knee injury has really damaged my ‘brain’ (My wound has fully recovered now!). Anyways, I’ll keep posting more on this. For the ‘conventional’ OS development talks, which I keep writing as and when I read more and more, I’ve created a wiki, http://myos.scribblewiki.com/Main_Page. Do visit to read more, and all wierd thoughts will find place in this blog, hehe.

Ciao.

Anyone who is remotely related to programming, internet and such has a dream to create something of his own. Often this dream is of creating a new Operating System of their own. An operating system that will be faster than any other, will support everything and will have so many features that it’ll outnumber Windows XP in its user-base!

Yes, its close to impossible to outnumber Windows XP user-base or even Free BSD for that matter ;). Yes, its close to impossible to make something faster than them and still support as much as they do! Yeah, you can make a ‘hello world OS’ which is zillion times faster than any other, but whats the use?

Ok, all this was to build up a platform to talk to you. Well, just like ‘everyone’, even I have dreams. And they never become concrete, only day-dreams of all that I said before :D. But then, I realized that I wasted some 8 years in just dreaming! I didn’t take the next step which generally ‘human beings’ take. Thats how the human race has progressed from apes to what we are now, ‘mobile apes’ :D.

Anyways, so basically, till now I was a dumb day-dreamer like a couple of million more, when this angel came and told the golden words in my ear, … “IDIOT! START TOH KAR” (means, Idiot! Stop dreaming and start something). And then, me, following her words began to look in the world around me.

Coming to the point directly after all this drama, the straightforward deal is Tanu asked me to do something in this regard, and I began reading about OS development, and trying out ’something’ ;).

Ok so the next FAQ looks to be, ‘So have you begun your own OS?’. Dude, chill, Microsoft Inc. took five whole years before they could change these lines
printf (”Welcome to Windows XP\n”); to printf (”Welcome to Windows Vista\n”);

So, its not that simple as it sounds in the dream world. At least the 80X86 processor is not as simple as it should have been. And then there are other mental blockages for me. Here is a list,

1. Why make another *nix clone? Why not something new?

2. Everything is a file, umm.. *nix concept, I want something original, WHAT?

3. Copy windows? Uh, not even in my dreams
4. Why C? Why not my own D or E or F or G? Do I need to write another compiler :O

5. Why OS? What happened to web-dev and python scripting? And eh, computer vision?

6. My own filesystem or new? Why old? Why not be ‘readable’ by others? Linux also did ext2, why not me do my own AFS or something?

7. Ok, so if I use C, how do I write my kernel? I don’t even know much about it!

8. Uh, all this GDT, IVT, IDT, Page table, Multitasking, PCI, A20 line, and every damn thing has a hundred configuration settings. Am I enough or I need help?

So, basically I didn’t reach all this just by beginning. First I encountered Viral Patel (http://www.viralpatel.net), who is a anti-ME. He actually made a fully functional ‘CLOSED SOURCE’ OS, called Taj OS (named after Taj Mahal).

Then I reached www.osdev.org, which is a whole portal dedicated to help people like me try their hands on some OS development. It lists more than hundred hobby operating systems developed by people, many of which are open source and closely resemble *nix or DOS. The site has extensive tutorials for all aspects of OS development, with some holes left, which I might fill up one day.

I started using ‘nasm’ compiler to write initial bootable code in assembly. Using ‘vmware’ to keep it ’safe’, I booted the first few experiments, and with the help of Fedora Core 7 rescue DVD, I installed the bootloader onto the ‘virtual vmware hard disk’. So, now my small bootable assembly program can boot from a disk, read the keyboard and display messages! Cool for a start, at least I can feel that :D. Ofcourse, that hard disk will be able to boot my OS (rather boot code) and nothing else, even if we try GRUB.

Now, my next tasks are to read this book, THE INTEL MICROPROCESSORS (750 pages :() by BARRY B. BREY and C. R. SARMA (Rs. 299 only :D). And then I’ll have a better clue of the things that are happening. Then I might decide to begin some design of an OS, if I still have interest left. I also read the source-code of Ace OS (1.0 and 2.0), DEX OS 1.1, which are small operating systems, written in C and are somewhat understandable. Viral’s OS doesn’t run on my vmware and I don’t have a floppy drive, :D.

Ok, maybe I am thinking too high, but if I make one, I won’t make a ‘floppy OS’ for some DOS work, I’ll make a real installable OS with a CD setup and a hard-disk GRUB compatible install. I might not remain compatible with *nix, so maybe it’d be difficult to port Linux applications to it, but I’ll maybe write some of my own!

Right now, all this is a distant dream, but gladly the first bricks have been laid. And soon, when I am on the same level as other OSdevers (term for OS developers), I’ll come up with some concrete thing to write here.

Created a new page to log my knowledge and status on this issue.

Any comments are welcome. Any people interested in development can discuss with me, learn and share. But right now, as there is no ‘development plan’, there is no ‘development team’. Though, I will need more people by my side when I really go into doing it. And as you know, that there is no plan, YOU can affect the plan, and YOU can make it your plan. So, like me, you wont have hesitation in joining me when we actually begin work, because it’ll be YOUR OS too!

More information soon. Cheers!

PS: I fell from the bike, injured my knee, so maybe some cells in my ‘brain’ have been killed or altered, so I am thinking wierdly these days. Operating system and me, really huh?

PS2: Am perfectly fine guys, just an injury on the knee, so thanks for being concerned, but don’t worry, I’ll be ok.

PS3: HA HA HA, ok fine so you are not concerned, neither am I concerned about your concern ;).

PS4: Someone ask me to shut-up yaar!

Ok bye then. Take care.