Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

Out of all the financial news from overnight, this headline attracted me:

Yahoo, Sun Lift Nasdaq Over 1 Percent

It has been more than 6 years since I have seen such a financial headline involving Sun. Reminded me of those late ninties when any positive news about Sun lifted Nasdaq. Is Sun back there, fuelling Nasdaq again?

Thanks to Niagara, Solaris, Open/Star Office, Java and armed with Connection driven Services, Sun is the best bet to fuel Web 2.0 era! It will be up to the market to make the best out of it!

Wanted to play with Mercurial a bit. Have a Sparc Desktop that runs with Solaris 10, so wanted to use it for this. When I checked the home page of Mercurial, the binary packages of Solaris-Sparc are downloadable from BlastWave. This particular Desktop was not setup to work with pkg-get earlier, so I followed the instructions here to set it up. Once setup, with a simple command:

pkg-get -i mercurial

I could get Mercurial and all the dependencies downloaded and installed in less than 15 minutes. Simple and smooth!

Once installed, I religiously started following the tutorial for Mercurial. During Step 2 (TutorialClone) I stumbled a bit. I am behind a firewall and need to use a proxy to get to the external repository on http://www.selenic.com/. A quick read of the hgrc manpage suggested that I need to have a temporary hgrc file with right configuration.

I initially started with a ~/.hgrc file. Here is a snippet of the file:

[http_proxy]

host = mycache.india:8080
no = jamesbond007,jamesbond007.india

The configuration is very simple. I added the last line because I wanted to serve a repository off jamesbond007 and didin’t want that traffic to flow thru a proxy.

Once I created the clone, I moved the contents of ~/.hgrc file to /MYREPOSITORY_DIR/.hg/hgrc file so that these configurations are localized to that particular repository.

Cool and Simple start!

Played with NetBeans and its version control plugins for CVS and Subversion. Cool! Looking for a NetBeans plugin for Mercurial.

Yesterday my right shoulder is dislocated. I was down with cold for a couple of days and fatigue from last night’s late meetings made me drowsy. I took a nap in front of the TV in the living room, using my right hand as a pillow. A sudden burst of sneezes  moved the body and hand in different directions and led to the dislocation.

No one was at home and kids are expected back in another 40 minutes. I tried to set the shoulder joint back to the socket, but couldn’t succeed. Putting on clothes looked like a big feat . Finally managed to wear jeans and walked to the casualty ward of nearest Maitri Hospital, about half a mile away.

An orthopedist was in casualty luckily. He didn’t believe that it is a dislocation, because I haven’t expressed the right amount of pain in my face . A quick x-ray confirmed it and they set it right after giving me an IV to relax my muscles.

With my right hand closely  tied to my torso with a sling and a belt, my movements are very limited. But I am doing fine now.

Last week, a key event passed by quietly during my vacation. It is the 10th anniversary of me joining Sun as a full time employee.

Some time in 1993, I was asked by my the then employer to install an evaluation software from Sun on a Tatung Sun-clone, running SunOS 4.0.x. When I started the installation (that is my first formal installation of a software package, before that, all I did is untar the binaries in /usr/bin etc.) and the install script said something to this effect:

The installation script runs a program that requires super user privileges. Do you want to continue?

I got curious, aborted installation and started reading (yes, literally reading) the script. That was one of the best scripts I read till date, that covers checking for some prerequisite binaries, directories and few others. Until then, I knew about Sun as a company that makes SunOS and Sun workstations, but my respect for Sun engineers grew with that incident. I spent a couple of nights studying the script (yes, I took home a printout from dot matrix printer) and concluded that the script doesn’t do anything intrusive on our system. In those days, we never trusted software delivered by someone, even if it is Sun.

Most of that year is also spent with a printed manual from Sun, called “Streams and Networking Guide.” That book became the bible for everyone who wants to learn about networking in the company. That guide was the practical side of Douglas Comer’s 3 volume networking books.

In addition, when I started teaching C++ afterhours in 1992, I used to recommend Sun’s compiler suite as opposed to Microsoft’s MFC C/C++ compilers, mainly for two reasons. First: It is very easy to create and manage student accounts on SunOS than on Windows 3.0 or DOS or NT 3.5. Second: Sun used a C++ preprocessor called CC, which generates the C code and then compiles the intermediate code using regular C compiler. There were options to generate C code and leave it there, rather than generating the object code. That intermediate C code is the best way to learn the C++ language internals. During later years, with ARM (Annotated C++ Reference Manual) and CC, I could really look into how an object oriented language could be implemented using a procedural language like C.

In all these 3 cases (that unforgettable install script, Streams and Networking Guide and CC) one thing planted deep in my mind: 2550 Garcia Avenue, Mountain View. This was the postal address for Sun until late 1990s and this address was there on the software CD, Streams and Networking Guide and the license/copyright of the CC compiler. By 1995, I was so fascinated by this address that I wanted to visit this place at least once in my life.

In late 1995, when I went to US, I got a consultant job with Sun. What else would I ask for? But I was located in Menlo Park campus and it took me a while to go visit this unforgettable address.

In 1997, I joined Sun as a full time employee. What started as a Fascination in mid-1990s has evolved into a Passion for this company in all these years. Despite the bad run at stock market in recent years, this company still delivers the state of the art software and hardware (look at Solaris 10 and Open Solaris for a sample.) Spending another 10 here wouldn’t be impractical at all!

This Sankrathi is the first one after the death anniversary of our grandma, so my mother’s family wanted to go for a family reunion. We invited all my first cousins and my mother’s siblings. 4 of my mother’s 5 sisters and her sister-in-law attended this reunion at my parent’s place. My brother and nine of my first cousins attended along with their families. So its a gathering of about 50 people for the 3 day festival season.

The Godavari districts of AP go into a different mood for this festival. Rooster fights, Card games, gambling, food and booze top the charts during this week. Rooster fights, card games and gambling are banned in the area for this season, but people find their ways to make them happen.

On 14th of this month, we called for a luncheon for our 50+ visitors and 100+ relatives in the village. I started with preparations for this luncheon around 08th of the month. This includes getting the right groceries at the right time (for example, fish soup tastes better if it is prepared the previous night and milk should be boiled the previous day to get curd for 150+ people) and getting the best quality stuff during this high consumption season. For example, best quality prawns which cost about Rs. 80 a kg during normal days are sold for about Rs. 140 a kg during these days. You should consider yourself lucky if you manage to get the best quality in the first place. Frozen shrimp doesn’t taste good enough for the kind of biriyani we make.

We wanted to make it a home cooked luncheon, so we had to go thru lot of pains to make it happen.

On one of those days, I traveled 25km to a seashore village called Mogalturu by 5.30am and bought the overnight catch directly at the fishermen market. For almost every item, we had to take such pains to get the best quality. Here are some numbers of meat and poultry: 14 kg of shrimp, 15 kg of chicken, 20 kg of fish, 100+ eggs. Add vegetables to the same tune, 15 kgs of rice for shrimp biriyani and 6 kgs of rice for vegetable birityani and it makes this home cooked luncheon a mouthwatering one.

Over 150 people attended the lunch at our home on that day and it was a smooth affair.

In addition, I managed to take the entire family for a movie, took them to beach for a few hours and visited relatives in Bhimavaram one of those days. On most of those days, I had to eat double the number of meals, one at home and the other one at the gathering in the village where we all hang out for food and booze. There is a common place setup with rented chairs and tents, where food and liquor is served for all the visitors and they often play card games too.

For the entire visit, here is my typical schedule: Wake up at 4.30am, make arrangements for the big lunch till 2.00pm, step out occasionally to the gathering between 2.00pm and 5.00pm, spend time with family till 8.00pm and spend at the village gathering till 1.00am. Quite interestingly, I took only one serving of the alcohol based cooler during the entire trip. My tummy was quite full with excessive food!

This hectic schedule made this Sankranthi break more memorable than the previous ones I had. Both Surya and Spurthi wrote trip reports for their school, along with printed photos. May be I can encourage them to make online versions of those reports.

Based on my most recent phone bill, here are the longest work related calls I made during the month of December. Since incoming calls are not billed, this list includes only dialed calls.

• 04 Dec, 22:34, 2594 seconds
• 05 Dec, 14:32, 2325 seconds
• 05 Dec, 23:31, 9735 seconds
• 06 Dec, 08:27, 3513 seconds
• 07 Dec, 21:37, 6542 seconds
• 08 Dec, 07:42, 6347 seconds
• 12 Dec, 21:31, 3760 seconds
• 12 Dec, 22:35, 1572 seconds
• 12 Dec, 23:30, 2840 seconds
• 14 Dec, 09:00, 9134 seconds
• 15 Dec, 13:42, 1031 seconds
• 19 Dec, 23:30, 3303 seconds

Well, I was on vacation for the entire seconds half of the month, otherwise the calls would have been more.

Phew!

Back from a 10 day vacation. The Sankranthi festival season, celebrated around 15th of January, is a big festival in Southern India, especially the West and East Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh. This is more of a family reunion season and people travel back to these districts from rest of the state/country.

Once I am back from this vacation, I have 100+ personal emails, 1000+ work related emails several other things to attend. One of the key things for the last month or so is the low number of posts on this blog. Hopefully I will be back to regular frequency by the end of this month.

More about the trip and other stuff later…

Quite a few of us gathered at Padma’s place for the new year party. Only four families (Padma, Sekhar, PSN/Rani and us) stayed there till the dawn of the new year, rest of them heading for fulfilling their other commitments.

Our party started at about 5.00pm. The starters included Mirchi Bajji, few chicken items and other stuff. Dinner is potluck. I managed to taste only the Chicken Biriyani and Chicken Curry. Spent good amount of time listening to music, watching kids dance to some songs and playing cards. When we started playing cards, kids resorted to DVD of Krrish.

The celebrations included cutting the cake (actually, its the apricot pudding made by Vani, but kids don’t mind calling it a cake) and opening non-alcoholic Champagne. Those kids who managed to stay awake cut the cake with eagerness and almost finished it off. Honors of opening the Champagne bottle is given to the mothers in the gathering. The bottle is intentionally stirred, not shaken, to protect the furniture of the host. Here they are. Here is me and Latha, a little sober and enjoying (to be honest, most of the folks didn’t like the taste of it) this non-alcoholic Champagne. While heading to the parking lot, we lit some fire crackers. Here are some evidences of it, in the form of those traditional Indian “Snakes”. Thats how our new year has started.Happy New Year and Best Wishes to you and your family.