Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

Google announced a worldwide contest for student community to participate in a set of opensource projects. This contest is an extension of the Google Summer Of Code program. The contest is open till Feb 03 2008. More details and faqs at the project home page. The technologies covered are of wide range, from Apache foundation to GNOME to Python. One interesting fact for me is that the entry level age is 13 years. So if you are a teenage student, then you are eligible. How nice!

I am sure students from India and other countries can make a good use of this contest.

I am down with fever and sore throat for the last 3 days. Today the situation is much worse, with running nose and a very bad sore throat. All I can manage to do is sit in front of my desktop/laptop for 3-4 hours, to check mails, blogs, news, etc. Not much of a productive work. Managed to sit in front of TV for a couple of hours. Rest of the time, I am staying on bed and relaxing those painful back muscles. Hope I get back on track in the next couple of days.

IBM ran a multi-page campaign on its green servers in one of India’s financial news papers last week. Here is Sun’s OpenECO initiative. BTW, here is a recent article on (perceived) greenness of x86 servers from big vendors. It is based on a survey from Gabriel Consulting Group.

Welcome to the Green Rush. (Incidentally, just like Gold Rush in the past, this fever showed its most visible signs in the state of California (you may remember those power outages) and is spreading fast to rest of the globe too.)
Gabriel, Gabriel, who is the greenest of all? .

Sun recently launched Open xVM initiative, which apparently brings together the OpenSolaris Xen Community (read x64), OpenSolaris Logical Domains (LDOMs) community (read SPARC) and related management tools. The project’s java.net arm is up and running and may be awaiting more content in the future.

Here is the list.

• 1 permanent marker
• 8 pencils
• 6 pens
• 5 crayons
• 2 children’s books
• 1 pokemon toy
• 1 piece of cloth
• 2 color pens

This is the list of items found under the sofa cushions during my cleanup this morning. Stuff accumulated by kids during the last 5 weeks.

Sunitha, Nidhi and Nikhil boarded their flight back to California early hours of Saturday. So Friday was a very hectic day. Latha managed to get back home early from work, but is constrained due to toothache. She is going to go to a dentist later today. Sunitha started showing some fever and hope she manages through the journey.
The Friday started a little early. Spurthi and Surya left to school for the last of their unit test exams. We started packing bags for the return trip. I had to go to Abids and pickup a few last minute items. I also made a custom box for a fragile decorative piece. Picked up pre-ordered sweets from the sweet sthop after lunch. There is a constant flow of visitors during the day and we packed bags to the weight limits by the airlines.

Once Spurthi and Surya are back, I ordered some snacks from ChicKing. Nikhil is taking a post lunch nap by that time, but rest of them enjoyed the snack. Then kids started playing with the packing material, especially the cut paper. They spent some time listening to songs and playing with whatever they can.

We had a nice serving of biriyani for dinner. Then I took kids out to a Diwali fireworks session. This would be the last session for Nidhi and Nikhil at least for a couple of years. Nikil refused to accept that and started insisting that he wants more fireworks “tomorrow”.

Due to busy schedule, we couldn’t cover most of the visitors, but here are some pics from the day:

SeeOffSunitha

After the fireworks session, we left for the airport. At the airport, we hired a handyman to get all the luggage to the checkin counter. With Sunitha showing signs of fever, that option turned out to be a good choice.It is almost 11.30 by the time the checkin is done (it took about an hour) and then we had a small chat with Sunitha and kids before greeting them a farewell. Spurthi and Surya are understandably upset to see them go, so are my in-laws.We are back home and put the previous day to rest by 12.30am. That concluded 5 weeks of hectic trip by Sunitha, Ravi and kids.

Most of our cousins came home from the party to wish Latha a happy birthday. The plan is to stay back till midnight and then cut a cake. While the parents kept themselves busy in card games and conversations, kids played some music and played computer games. After midnight, we had a serving of cake.

LathaBDay012007

Kids stayed awake till 1.00am and most of the guests left by that time. RK and family stayed back, so Latha, myself, Sunitha, RK and others played cards till 4.00am. I couldn’t sleep beyond 5.30, so the entire day I was a little drowsy. The day is little inactive because people woke up at different times and the schedules are upset by large margins. We went for a small shopping in the evening. Surya and Nidhi bought some jokes books.Vijay came by at about 7.00pm and after dinner, we cut another cake.

LathaBDay022007

It is past 10.30pm by the time we winded up the day.

We had a get together of the family members on Saturday night. The event is to make sure that Sunitha and kids meet all the close relatives, without the need to actually go and visit them. We initially wanted to do this event when Ravi is around, but his short trip didn’t give a chance for such a planned event.

The get together is at a local club in Film Nagar area. We expected about 60-70 guests and our calculations are right on spot. We started gathering at about 6.30pm and the party went on till about 10.00pm. Kids have enough room to play and they also watched part of the movie being played on big screen.

Nidhi is a little tired earlier in the day, but she did very well through out the party. Nikhil is on high spirits for the entire session. Spurthi and Surya are in their usual mood of high spirits during the party.

It is also a chance for me to try out my new formal wardrobe. . It indeed surprised many guests to see me in a dress other than shorts or jeans.

Being part of the hosting family, couldn’t manage to cover everyone in my photographs. Here are some memories from the get together.

Party

The food and other arrangements went very smooth. The taste of the food is appreciated by many.
Thanks to those who attended the event for a memorable evening.

We took kids to the Hindi movie Om Shanti Om on Thursday night. Since this was the only movie going opportunity for kids in the next one week, we had to forfeit the option of watching the India Pakistan Cricket match.

Kids enjoyed the movie and immediately switched to that audio album in my car. They got all the noise and glitter they wanted in the songs. So it is not a wasted time after all.

How is the movie? Well, you may come up with two different feelings. Parts of the movie are good and entertaining, but the entire movie, put together, is nothing but a patch work.

The script of the movie borrows its theme from Java’s popular tag line from the past: Write Once, Run Anywhere. The script writers have written the scenes and dialogues once and made them repeat many times throught the film. (That word many often refers to a number much more than two.) To sum up the movie, have a really slow and apparently meaningless series of events in the first half and repeat them through the revamped and reincarnated cast in the second half. But the second half offers more meaning and sense than the first half.

Here are some of the things I liked about the movie:

• Dum Tara song, which offers nostalgia from films of 70s and 80s.
• Theme song, which offers a screen full of movie personalities.
• The filmfare awards spoof, featuring Dhoom 5, Phir Bhi Dil Hai NRI, Main Bhi Hoon Naa and Return of Khiladi.
• The Murugan episode
• Interwoven Karz from the past.
• Credits at the end

Here are the things I didn’t like about the movie

• The heroine’s role (both in first life and the reincarnation or whatever) is simply confusing, stupid and ill-baked.
• The costumes from the past are well designed to the theme, but they are too bright to be realistic.
• Too much back and forth from the past and the present in the second half.

BTW, I like Farah Khan’s efforts in this movie. She just told what she wanted to tell, without worrying much about logic. She tried to maintain the tempo, but fails in most cases in the first half.

Overall, it is a good pass time, but I won’t sit through the entire movie again. I may watch the songs again and again when the DVD is out.

I took a UNIX device drivers class to post graduate students at GRIET on Monday. The presentation is done using the new CentOS 5.0 install on my laptop. I briefly talked about the Solaris Containers (zones), Xen and other virtualization technologies too. If you need a detailed class on Solaris Containers or Xen technologies, contact me thru email.
The class materials are available for download now at http://raju.spurthi.com/classes/ under the section “Unix Internals, Module 07″.