veracity

People who meet me might say I’m quite shy and reserved; introvert is the usual term used by the good folks with a limited English vocabulary, which includes me, by the way, not trying to be snide here. I would hardly speak or mingle with others, even with family living under the same roof. I would avoid socialising with coworkers outside the office and I generally feel uncomfortable or awkward while among (or is that amongst) a large crowd, for example, at a party, wedding or in public places.

Although, I believe, like the Obama (I’m an admirer) campaign slogan read, it’s time for change.

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GemFire Enterprise: http://gemstone.com/products/gemfire
The premier in-memory distributed data management platform now with VMware/SpringSource.

Nokia’s N900: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900 and http://maemo.nokia.com/n900
Runs a 600 mhz ARM Cortex A8 (65 nm, 32 bit RISC TI OMAP 3430) CPU and 256 MB RAM.

After installing mmjre and bash on the N900, let its console output do the talking:

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One-line executive summary: If you face slowness, hangs, filesystem corruption and/or lots of dmesg errors about ata try adding ” libata.force=noncq ” to your linux kernel boot options.

I recently bought a Crucial branded 128 GB solid state disk (SSD) model CT128M225 of the M225 range because they’re the hot new thing to get.
See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

The disk would work well with my copy of Windows 7 RC but to my dismay Linux would spew a lot of disk error messages as you can see here: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/347122/

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The gist:

• Test driven on Sunday October 4th.
• Driven home from the dealer’s on Saturday October 17th.

Bought a new silver Honda Civic 1.8 S MT!

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I voted for the first time a few months ago to elect an MP. On Tuesday October 13th voting was for MLAs and I voted again. The first time I cast my vote for an independent which I now feel was a waste. This time around I voted for Congress. Not because I wanted to vote for the party or for the local candidate. I voted for Rahul Gandhi, son of late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

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I’ve previously blogged about my very brief encounters with open source development here and here.

Recently I came across the following blog posts on Planet KDE which inspired me to write this blog post:

Road to KDE devland Step 0
Road to KDE devland Step 1
Road to KDE devland Step 2

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Ever since Windows 7 and KDE 4.2 were available I started placing my taskbar vertically to the left of my widescreen LCD. On Windows 7 it works and looks great but on KDE 4.2 the running application icons are of a small size and the title text is hardly visible with only a couple of letters being shown as you can see in the following screenshot.

I couldn’t find a setting in KDE to change it and even posted a suggestion to the KDE Brainstorm forum section. But this was really annoying me. What if they reject the suggestion? What to do in the mean time anyway?
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I regularly work with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 on my Pentium 4 single-core non-hyperthreading based PC and occasionally run some builds on an Athlon 64 X2 dual core based PC. I noticed the compiler (cl.exe) is a single process with a single thread running, even on the dual core.

I did some digging around to see if I could enable parallel (multi processor) builds to take advantage of the extra idle core to speed up my builds and came across the following links:

Visual Studio 2005 tour and MSDN multiprocessor project builds

I was glad to find the /Mx  option where x is the maximum number of project builds you want to run in parallel. I dug around the codebase and realised the build script already had /M8 specified as a parameter to the call to vcbuild.exe. I even opened up the project in Visual Studio 2005 and the setting was at 2 (since this is a dual core)  as expected.

But the build still seemed to be running a single thread and not using the extra core

I then re-read the links above more carefully and saw that the option is for parallel project builds so it would only work for multiple projects and not for many source files in a single project.

I did the customary STFW/JFGI and found the new /MP option which is a part of the new Visual Studio 2008 and this option enables source level multiprocessor parallel builds.

But what about VS 2005? I did some more searching and, lo and behold, found this blog entry which says the /MP  option is also available, but undocumented, in Visual Studio 2005!

Adding it to the build script’s parameter list for vcbuild.exe didn’t work, but adding it in the “additional options” window in the Visual Studio 2005 project worked and now doing a build would launch three processes of cl.exe, one which had 45 threads but took very little CPU cycles, and the other two were single threaded and utilised a CPU core each to the fullest! That was my Homer Simpson “woohoo” moment of the day

There was an interesting show on TV’s History Channel a few days ago (which aired in March last year in the US) called “Decoding The Past - Doomsday 2012: The End Of Days”. The show was about December 21, 2012 which has been predicted to be the Apocalypse by various prophets, oracles, holy texts from different civilisations and even a computer program!

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It’s been a while since I visited Microsoft’s Channel 9 website and watched any of the videos. There was a recent video of Mark Russinovich which made me go back and browse for new stuff.

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