I complete one year at work today! Let me jot it in teemus’s style

learnt a lot . met rasmus. great friends as teammates. shout. cubicle cricket. foosball. cycling 2 office. football. php. pecl. pool. trekking. inox movies. snacks (order). jump. hide & seek. brigade road shopping during office hours. mash. night outs. brindavan hotel. DC vs RCB IPL T20 with team. yblr. emiblr. hackdays. ubuntu. vim. self-cooking. ycore movies, t20. openhackday. unsolicited deal proposal fossconf. #linux-india. vegpuff. missed foss.in. barcamp. bcb. brtff . ymi. tintin. twitter. mokkai. june25.

I am lucky

Gopal says,

PHP programmers don’t really understand PHP.

They know how to use PHP - but they hardly know how it works,


mainly because it Just Works most of the time.

Very true. A level of abstraction is important for the programmer to concentrate on the logic, than handling cases for memory leaks and socket connections. With that said, it is equally important to know what is being done to the code to give the output.

PHP Code is compiled to Opcodes (like instruction codes) and instruction stack is processed. To see your opcodes, you need pecl/vld. Download it, compile it. For compiling, you might need the php-dev package. In ubuntu, php5-dev is the package name. To install :


$ phpize; ./configure; make; sudo make install


It puts the ‘vld.so’ shared object in your php-lib folder. Check whether vld is installed:


$ php -d extension=vld.so -m


Above command should list all the loaded modules, alongwith vld. Now, try it out :

$ cat test.php

$ php -d extension=vld.so -d vld.active=1  test.php
Branch analysis from position: 0
Return found
filename:       /tmp/test.php
function name:  (null)
number of ops:  7
compiled vars:  none
line     #  op                           fetch          ext  return  operands
——————————————————————————-
   2     0  SEND_VAL                                                 ‘MY_BLA’
         1  SEND_VAL                                                 42
         2  DO_FCALL                                      2          ‘define’
   3     3  FETCH_CONSTANT                                   ~1      ‘MY_BLA’
         4  ECHO                                                     ~1
   5     5  RETURN                                                   1
         6* ZEND_HANDLE_EXCEPTION

That gives a lot of opcodes! (Remember 8085?) All these opcodes are C macros .

For now, have a look at opcodes for your code and see how you can optimize your it until I come back with the next.

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself;

They come through you but not from you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For, they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls lie in the house of tomorrow,

Which you cannot visit,

Not even in your dreams!

If you reached here after reading the quote, I appreciate your patience

I read the above lines in Hindu’s Open page. For a moment, it stuck like a lightning. Kahlil Gibran has given straight forward opinion for the parents and students who are victims of the current educational system (Including me).

Taare Zameen Par expressed how parents attribute everything with success. Things are forced upon them or rather they are made to think that what their parents think is the best choice, forcing the kid do what the parent failed to do as a kid, forcing them to walk exactly on their footpath and a lot more.

Being first in rat race may be appreciated by other rats, but what matters is how the person relates the success .

Being able to do is different from wanting to do. Do what you want to do, and show middle finger for the rest.

I’ve been using this since IPL started - setting my IM status as the current Score.

Some even pinged and asked me, “Why are you wasting time updating ball by ball scores?” - answer is here.

It is a modification of the existing DBus example in pidgin. It is a cheap hack, urllib2 - readline - set status. So, you have edit i, change cricinfo url to current match,pick the line number and set your status. Though dirty, it works.

Can you do this in Google Talk?

Another one gone, and another one gone and another!

So after an year, there won’t be any of juniors at college . It seemed to be an alien land when I went for Pragyan, but the presence of juniors made me feel better. I don’t know much faculties other than Pradeep sir, so it would be totally alien when I visit the college after an year or two.

Farewells, sentiments about leaving the college will be there as usual - but the count of LRSL guys is slowly coming down - I would really miss the entire gang. It would suck to visit college without all these guys. Sitting in the last row and shouting whenever someone enters the lab, all those cricket matches in Lab, long time chats with pradeep sir will all be missed. The ones left in the lab would be Suren and Anshu. Suren, just one more year to go and you are out!

Taggy is joining a startup, after ditching several offers - truly what he wanted. Hari will be working in IBM Bangalore, which could be a nice place for him and his kutti hacks. Vijay has chosen to work as a Research Assistant in IISc Bangalore - which he chose after a lot of thinking. PK, Balli are joining Sun as kernel hackers. GC is heading to CMU and Iyer to Microsoft Redmond. Adi and Evo would be working in Microsoft IDC, I guess. Some of them are moving to Bangalore, so there is good chance to get together.

I’m really happy to see what everyone has chosen for starting their career. Good luck guys, and welcome to Bangalore!

PS: We have 2 GSOCians from NITT - Adi and Anshu! Congratulations!

Our office food is giving me a lot of problems, as my doctor says. So, amma taught me how to do lemon rice. Simple and quick to do even after you wake up at 8.

First, get the rice ready. We have an electric cooker. So as soon as I wake up, I switch on the electric cooker, with rice. One cup of rice (with 2-3 cups of water) would do for a person. Just switch it on and forget it.

For the Lemon masala: Fry mustard(kadugu) and Black gram(ulunthu) in oil (Yes, we have gas stove).Add salt for taste. Add Channa Dal(kadala parupu) with green chilli (1 or 2) and fry it for a few minutes. Add turmeric(manjal) for color. Switch gas off and pour lemon in the masala. Mix it with rice.

Have (Fish) pickle along with it. OTOH, how ever worse it turns out, it is better than our office food.

PS:Writing a recipe is so difficult!

PPS: Wrote this post via Scribefire and I likes.

Yea, you must have realised by now. I am not-frequent. (esp when suren is in full form. grr)

I apologize myself, and I will try to resume writing crap over here!

(Blogging from home, cochin)

This is going to be an interesting weekend. I’ll be leaving for NIT Trichy to attend Pengufest - the foss festival by GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy (Yes, after a long time, Glug-T has chosen to come out public) and Pragyan - NIT Trichy’s annual technical festival.

I’m not planning to participate in any of the competitions, but I’m going there for something more exciting - the Guest Lectures. Me, Shashank and Jyotsna along with a team of 10 organized Guest lectures during Pragyan’07. And it was one of the most memorable experiences that I would cherish forever. I couldn’t blog about Pragyan’07 which I regret(But, I did it for Pragyan’06).

I was there with Pradeep for Pragyan’06 where we saw Ankit Fadia. Pragyan’07 saw some real good speakers - Jimmy Wales, Dilip Chhabria, Sivathanu Pillai, Guruswamy Ravichandran and some Nobel Laureates too!

We slept in the auditorium, I was roaming in my 3/4ths during Rudolf Marcus’s lecture and we were an awesome team. There is so much to recall about Pragyan Guestlectures - I’ll save it for some other post(hopefully). Have a look at the Pragyan’07 pics.

Crowd listening to Jimmy Wales

This time, the pragyangl(as we call it) has done an nice job. First - Noam Chomsky. I was literally jumping when Vijayprakash told me that Noam Chomsky has accepted to talk at Pragyan. If you are near Trichy (or anywhere in Tamilnadu) - don’t miss his lecture. Next, Philip Lebrun - the head of CERN’s LHC. We approached him last year, and he accepted to talk this time.yay!(yes, He is coming down to Trichy). And, Mark Shuttleworth - Ubuntu’s founder and first space tourist is speaking at Pragyan.

More importantly, there is an alumni panel - moderated by Sidin Vadukut. And big list of speakrs - all listed here

Ok, now - Pengufest! GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy started by Vijaykumar was almost dead(to the public) after he left college. After a long time there is something happening public with Glug-T(after Hackercrackdown). It is going to be an install fest - as Taggy says. Besides install fest, there will be some talks as well.

See you at Pragyan’08. (Will I have wifi?)

PS:Hopefully, Glug-T will have a Foss Conference soon(But, please not between September and March. There are too many foss conferences during that time)

You wouldn’t have got any more better Valentine’s day gift. So, it is high time you realize what you should love - your job.

Guys, you’ll rock wherever you go.