Film Review..

Amit's articulate 2 paise about the movie Gayab :)

firstRain wake up..

Venetica is going to be acquired by IBM. Venetica offers content aggregation products/solutions. Among other problems they also offer to solve the "empty portal syndrome". I guess firstRain also offers something similar :)

Latest hindi commentary gems..

The Olympics has brought back some well known voices and also a lot of unintended entertainment :) The guy I was entertained by the most was probably Jasdev Singh, who is a recepient of the Padma Shri according to this article. Padma Shri be damned, here are the gems:

1) The long jump is on and me and Megha are watching keenly since Anju Bobby George was participating. A certain Yelena * from Kazhakistan is warming up for her jump...commentator describes it thus..

Yelena..(pause)..Kajakistan ki ..(pause)..apane muscles ko.....(looong pause)....heelaate hue...

This in that oh so familiar voice of his was just too hilarious :)

2) This one is from a hockey match between India and some team X

aur ye X ke khiladi ball ko aage le jaate hue..lekin ye unke saamne Dileep Tirkey...deewar ki tarah...(pause)..sach much bohot hi majboot deewar hai Bharat ki, Dileep Tirkey..

I really recommend you to watch a recording sometime on DD sports if you get a chance so that you can hear it verbatim :)

Little did I know...

that one of my first few p0rn viewings (some time before my 10th std) called Henry & June had Uma Thurman in it. I liked her in Kill Bill quite a lot. Never mind this review, all I was interested in back then was the "scenes" :) and my (and all fellow juvenile delinquents who shared the cost of renting the movie :), I think a VCR used to cost about 60 Rs, an old english movie would cost 7, new one 10, XX would cost 20 and XXX about 30 :) and the cost would be shared amongst 6-8 of us) perception back then was that the movie was real hot!

An atheletes final hurdle

This sums up an atheletes story for a place on the podium.
PS: I now subscribe to The Hindu and it was not easy. The paper bill guy and paper delivery guy aren't the same and either the bill guy is a lossy channel or the delivery guy is highly resistant to change. Two months back I told the bill guy that I wanted to switch from TOI to Hindu. No effect. Then the next time he came I refused to give him the bill. Then suddently the next day onwards I get both the TOI and Hindu. About a week or two from then bill guy comes again, gets a mouthful from me and only then sanity returns :)

Kuro5hin takes a look at Olympic doping..

The Olympic Drug Problem.

Renal constipation..

Harshal has pointed to this doping story Its summary is "Look ma, no pee :)"

How wired is your home?

Grady Booch on his home network setup

Sexy Sexy Sexy mujhe log bole..

This recent story about the case against Uma Bharti in the Idgah Maidan flag hoisting controversy has the following words:

Bharti, then dubbed sexy sanyasin for her ochre robes

..I mean why?? And even if somebody justifies the mention then how on this fucking earth can somebody be so sex starved :))

Disclaimers for Harshal.

Do not read between the <br>s :) I am not thinking at all...If I were capable of "thinking" about it I would be doing a Phd which I am not :)) I am just summarising information gathered from different sources.

Yes, you are right that MS uses such products internally..lots of people do, mostly OS vendors HP/M$ (I am not sure about IBM which is an irony :)) do so for verifying protocols and third party stuff like device drivers. However, they are not as omnipresent as memory profiling, performance analysis tools etc (read as tool usage has taken off in the application development space as much) I mean I wish we had had a tool like this to catch the crazy deadlock between java threads due to some convoluted synchronization code in vS just like we had purify for settling the leaks in the native code.

Connection: smatch -- based on --> stanford checker -- worked on by --> Dawson Engler and others -- founded --> Coverity.

As far as the reason for posting about this lately is concerned, one of my colleagues is doing a Phd around the same topic (he works part-time, I envy him..but he also has a lot of money so he can afford to :) ). He sent me some links to it and I also attended a talk recently on the subject.

You are also urged to try out Rose RealTime. There is a link for an eval download on the right hand side. The product is mainly used for writing software which can be modeled as a set of nested state machines and is heavily used for developing applications for embedded real time systems. It lets you concentrate on the business logic while taking away the state machine coding from you. You code whatever goes on when states change etc. It is based on the philosphy of "Model driven development". One can debug on the model level itself e.g you can put breakpoints on the states rather than on lines of code.

Answers for Amit.

There can only be two aspects when one "masks" some rules.
1) You are intentionally keeping known bugs in the system (both in cases when you know that you don't stand to gain from the fixes and when you want to push stuff under the carpet :) )
2) The tool you are using gives a large number of false positives and hence you end up masking the rule.

The second one is a problem that good tools have/will solved and the first depends on your judgement and integrity :)

Anyways consider that you have a certain constraints in the system where-in some valid code forms a of a pattern that is considered as a bad practice (also called an anti-pattern) under the programming framework (e.g. J2EE, J2SE etc). Such bad practices need not be given as input by the programmer. All such rules can be pre shipped by the tool vendor and maybe extended (if needed) by one of the project members and reused by all.

Unified Sporting Theory.

Instead of holding hazaar different events after building hazaar infrastructure, there should be a single infrastructure to judge the competitors in track and field, swimming and weightlifting. The unified infra should be a lab where people submit blood/urine (whatever they use for dope testing) samples under different event heads and the efficacy of the doping method used will be rated and medals awarded accordingly. Also the Olympics should be renamed "I dope better than you" games.

Static Analysis tools for the uninitiated - 2

Amit: Yes it should be similar to PC-Lint. I haven't used/evaluated any of these two but they are both good examples.

Static analysis tools can understand rules which can be added by the user provided they fall into certain types. More formally they should be some kind of logic formulae. e.g If method X() is called, method Y() should be called at least once after method X() has been called. This would probably (I am bad at logic and maths :)) be a rule that can be expressed in temporal logic. The analysis tool takes in such rules, checks your code for violations of these rules and then reports these as bugs.

Model checking is another technique used for verification. Microsoft uses a tool called SLAM for device driver verification. Protocol designers also use model checking. In model checking the user has to provide an abstract model of the program against which the program is verified. Generally this can take a lot of "ramping up time" if you need to specify the model since it writing a model means that a person has full understanding of the program.

Regarding the comments: I have ditched the haloscan comments now and use blogger comments, but anonymous comments are allowed. In the sign-in page you have a link which allows you to post comments anonymously.

Static Analysis tools for the uninitiated.

We have all used tools like purify for automated leak detection, out of bounds memory access, free memory reads etc (essentially certain types of code patterns which are considered as bugs). These tools are great productivity enhancers and cost savers since we can and fix more bugs before the product reaches the customer.

However, there are a lot of other bugs like deadlocks, race conditions, resource leaks like unfreed sockets, database connections etc which are hard to find and generally can be hit at customer deployments which are costly both for the customer and the software vendor. Such bugs can also be auto-detected using static analysis and dynamic analysis to some extent. There are two hard problems though:
1) The algorithms do not scale well for large code bases, and
2) The number of "false positives" tends to be very high in static analysis.

However several people have now worked on these problems and have come up with usable tools. e.g Coverity. It will be that you run a tool like this from your IDE once you want your code to be checked and viola you get quality bugs reported in a small time.

Hitchens on Mother Teresa's Beatification.

Less than Miraculous. In this article Hitchens talks about the highly unprofessional attitude of the media which reported about the "miracle" needed to be assiciated with Mother Teresa for her to be beatified. He says at the end:

"But our media, so crudely materialistic in so many ways, is also anti-materialistic at just the wrong moments."

I would disagree to this..the media reported what popular belief wanted. Not many people want to buy newspapers that question the religious establishments that one believes it.

So much for separating content from presentation..

I changed my blog template and it is not painless. All the changes that you have made in your earlier template are lost. So I had to redo the blogroll integration from bloglines. I was also faced with redoing the haloscan comment integration but now blogger provides comments so I skipped that one. Why don't I get to choose/edit a css separately from the blog content template? Blogger people must have surely thought about this..what am I missing?

Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa and Michael Moore

I was going through the archives of jivha (unfortunately jivha has been (end-of-life)eol'ed) and found some material on Mother Teresa. And as I crawled from there on I came upon some articles by Christopher Hitchens. He offers some very compelling information about things that the Mother did the wrong way and did it in the name of religion. The whole world according to him accepts it unquestioningly that she did indeed help a lot of people and did it well and selflessly. Very few journalists have actually examined her work and its effectiveness from close quarters. He even alleges that the funds that were gathered in the name of the poor and destitue were mostly siphoned off for building convents in around 120 countries when they could have been used for building better hospitals, schools etc.

I went through the following articles. Most of them are long (and at times repetitive) and going through all of them will take you some time but it makes some interesting reading.

There are about 4 articles at Atanu Dey on Mother Teresa.

Hitchens has written a book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. This is a review of the book.

Hitchens has also criticised the Oscar winning documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 for presenting a misleading picture. Micheal Moore offers some "factual back-up" which I have not yet gone through exhaustively but some of the points there like "FAHRENHEIT 9/11: Nearly seven minutes passed with nobody doing anything." have been questioned by Hitchens as being one edge of an opportunist's double edged sword (Had Bush indulged in frantic activity he would have been accused of acting in haste etc etc..)

All in all interesting reads..especially on one of those days that you get tired of work and want a break :)

GROKLAW

This GROKLAW story is hilarious MS apparently announced that somebody was gonna use their software since their software was cheaper and more secure :)) ROTFL.

Cookies

Not browser ones but real, light, and tasty choco-chips cookies. Ya I made them yesterday with a little help from Megha. Garnishing with dark chocolate peices/powder adds to the taste.

Art, Art, Art.

I guess I am in the art business...just have a long way to go to be in a position to create things of beauty :D

The Art Of Unix Programming, Master of Fine Arts in Software, Hackers and Painters. All these links talk in varying degrees of explicitness about software as an art rather than a branch of engineering.

As I May Think...: Enterprise vs. Consumer Systems

As I May Think...: Enterprise vs. Consumer Systems. Some wise words.

Lemon tarts

The boundaries of my baking skills kingdom have been expanded. Lifting a receipe from a book (LG microwave receipes or something) I tried my hand/luck at lemon tarts. The receipe used was different from the one given in the link. However, in essence a lemon tart is made of 2 modules :)

One is the base and the other the filling. The base is flour-based and the lemon thingy is in the filling or topping. The topping needs to be pulpy or jam like. Lemon and sugar give the taste and the texture is dervied using flour, corn startch/egg. Although mine could have tasted better (Megha did not dislike it nor did she have an overwhelming urge to gobble loads of it and termed it as "interesting") it does make a tasty dessert.

I guess replacing the lemon juice with orange juice should give orange tarts..that's what I plan to try next.

Roti Maker

2-3 weeks back there was a window of time when we did not have a gas cylinder at home for cooking due to some shortage at the gas company. Wasn't such a big problem since we could cook stuff in the microwave oven but making rotis was a big problem. So we decided to buy a roti maker.

So the roti maker has two plates between which you keep the dough and press and once a bit hot you turn the roti and let it puff. Sounded pretty neat to us. However, practice wasn't so perfect. The damn thing did not have a user manual and it seems there is a special technique for kneading the dough. In the absence of a manual we argued and reached a conclusion that we should make the dough wetter than normal. However even that did not work. The problem is as follows:

Both the pressing plates have a non-stick teflon coating. Since it is an electric roti maker both the plates are hot. So when you put the dough in surface of the dough loses all moisture and becomes slippery and when you press the plates the dough just slips out rather than flattening out into a nice roti that the gadget promises to churn out.

Trouble is I can't FGI :((

The maker Jaipan has this stupid flash site.

And while we are at rotis I might as well declare with immense pride that I too have mastered the art of rolling nice round ones :)

ReleaseComObject and peace of mind

don't go hand in hand :) This is a good article about the whole thing. The problem we faced unfortunately falls under case 3 in the advice provided in the linked article.