Random Musings

Some of you may be wondering what the heck happened to me. I’ve never been this quiescent for so long (with one exception, in 2006). I’ve always managed to put up a post a month at least, so what’s been going on?

Well, let’s see now. Many, many things. I’ve been accepted to business school in the US, and am trying hard to get all the various ancillary things done so that I can go there. I had LASEK eye surgery, late in November ‘09, so no more spectacles. This is by far the biggest change in my life. Most of you who read this will know that I wore specs; what most of you don’t know is that I’ve had specs since I was 6 years old. I’m 27 now, so for more than two decades, I’ve have my eyes obscured by two places of glass (later plastic, what with Crisal, and Carl Zeiss, and what not). Not anymore, though.

I’d been thinking about getting the procedure done for a while, but the last straw was in Delhi, when I broke my specs. My high power meant that I was practically blind, and had to somehow get a pair of specs made right then.

I came back to Jaipur, and immediately went to see a doctor. I went on Friday, and had the procedure performed on Tuesday. Zap!

Three days of agony, since LASEK takes quite some time to heal. Unlike LASIK, which is supposed to be pain free within a day, it took me ten days before I was able to sit in front of a computer, or read a book. My eyes healed slowly, but now, almost two months later, it’s simply amazing to be able to play tennis, or fly a kite, or just wake up in the morning and look around and see everything in sharp focus. It’s the best thing I’ve ever gotten done.

I was also in the process of applying to some colleges, and early in January I got the news that I’d been accepted to some. I don’t want to jinx things, so I’m not going to talk about it too much just yet, but keep your fingers crossed for me, gentle reader.

So things seem to be looking up, and getting clearer (literally, even).

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I’ve been figuring some new stuff out lately: Virtualization and Cloud Computing. On the virtualization front, I installed Hyper-V to understand bare metal hypervisors. I’ve used virtual machines before, but they’ve always been running on the OS, ala VMware Workstation and VirtualBox. Bare metal hypervisors are more interesting, cause the computer boots directly into the hyper visor, which then loads up the virtual machines. The advantage is obvious—the hypervisor itself uses barely any system resources, so the virtual machines get that much more overhead to play with. Of course, I loaded Hyper-V inside a virtual machine, just for kicks, so it was Win7->VirutalBox->HyperV->Win7. All very interesting. Next up is ESXi. That’s probably tomorrow or day after.

Cloud computing is the next big thing, they say. All that’s well and good, but how do you actually use the damn thing? Turns out that it’s pretty damn easy. Just sign up at http://aws.amazon.com/. It’s free and easy to register. The only vaguely interesting things about the registration process are the requirement for a credit card, and the phone verification. The credit card is needed since you can’t actually do anything without paying for it, though rates are very reasonable to start with (.085 cents an hour, roughly Rs. 4, according to XE.com). The phone verification is interesting. Amazon actually calls a number you specify, and asks for the PIN number that they display on screen. No illegal stuff here, one can see. Yes, Indian cell phones work just fine. The signup process is fast, but you do need to wait for a bit before you can start provisioning your little fluffy piece of the cloud. I had to wait about an hour before it let me in.

Once registered, I had to create a personal certificate and an X.509 certificate. You can use your own, or use Amazon’s web interface to make a new one. It’s fast and easy. You’ll need these to interact with the machines you make, whether over SSH or directly through the API.

The Amazon Web Services Management Console, or AWS Management Control, is where all the cool stuff happens. Here’s what it looks like

AWS Management Console

This is what it looks like for EC2, which stands for Elastic Cloud Compute (C-2, geddit??). Wikipedia says this about EC2:

“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (also known as “EC2″) allows customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a web services interface through which a customer can create virtual machines, i.e. server instances, on which the customer can load any software of their choice. A customer can create, launch, and terminate server instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers, hence the term “elastic”.”

Think of it as buying a server, plugging it in, and working on it, all within 20 minutes, and you pay by the hour. And oh yes, if you need to suddenly increase servers, just provision more. They take about 15 minutes to come up, so even small business owners can prepare for seasonal spikes in demand with great ease, without buying expensive hardware that sits idle for the rest of the year.

Creating a machine is quite easy. Click the button that says launch instance. This leads to a pop up box that lets you choose your image. The image here refers to the image of the machine that will be loaded. Amazon has a bunch of generic images (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows Server 2003, etc), or you can create your own. In most cases, you can start with a basic install of CentOS or Server 2003, and then directly log into that and modify it to your own needs. After you choose the image, you have to create a key pair—a one-click process. Finally, you come to the last page, where you choose your machine. Basically, you decide the hardware specs of your virtual machine. As you’d expect, more power costs more.

Once you’ve figured out all this, click launch. It takes about two minutes to boot a basic CentOS machine for the first time. The minute it launches, you’re paying by the hour. Every uncompleted hour is counted as a full hour.

After this, you can assign an IP address and talk to your server just like a real server. I’ll go into more details later.

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I’ve been home since the 9th of August, but I was working six days a week from the 11th of August to the 9th of October, so I barely had any time to rest and recuperate. For the past three weeks, however, I’ve been doing nothing.

Doing nothing is really boring, however, so I keep myself amused in various ways. Yesterday, I was crouched on a small ledge, ten feet above the ground, with a pipe wrench in hand, determined to fix the damn geysers.

I’ve also been fiddling about with Hyper-V 2008 R2 and VMWare ESXi. I spent some cash on upgrading the RAM in my desktop to 4 GB, cause DDR2 RAM is going to get pricier and pricier now. 4 GB should be enough for this box. The next one I get will have at least 8 GB of DDR3, and probably much more.

All this is fun, but the downside is that sitting at home is unfortunately not very lucrative. Financially, I’m up the creek. I’m not worried though, since I have one more month of idleness, and then I start working again, so it’s all good. Two months off are enough for anybody, especially when you can get cheese sandwiches made to order and delivered to your bedside (no, I’m not making my poor old mother run around, we have help).

I will fix some more things around the house before I leave. Windows Home Server is already running happily on my old machine, backing up my desktop and Mom’s laptop (she uses a Thinkpad T series.. she knows her hardware).

So that’s what I’m up to. What are all you corporate minions doing?

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I’ve been home for a couple of months now. It’s all good, especially the fact that I have lots of time to get stuff fixed. I’m getting the car fixed, the computer fixed, and pretty much everything else fixed. I even bought TuneUp and cleaned my music collection, all 15,000+ songs.

TuneUP is quite fantastic. It’s not free, but at $16 (it’s $20, but I found a coupon), for a years subscription, it won’t break the bank either. And it works very well—just drag a bunch of songs over to the interface, and watch as it magically gets all the info.

TuneUp cleans up messy media.

It’s not all great—sometimes, it just seems to inexplicably hang, and I have to restart iTunes to get it to work. It works only with iTunes, not as a stand-alone program, so if you prefer another music player, you’re going to have to install iTunes, use TuneUp to clean the media, and then import those songs into the other player. Still, these are fairly minor issues, and I just got an update that seems to have fixed the hanging issue. If you have a lot of songs labeled Track 01.mp3, give TuneUp a go. They have a free version, which has some limitations, but it’s enough to let you know if you need to pay for the full version.

It took me about a week to clean up my collection, but it was worth it. Now I have neatly categorized songs, with proper album art and genres, and this makes it a lot easier to pick songs that I like to listen to.

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it is that day indeed. The day of days. and what a way to begin it. Federer wins in straight sets, and things are looking up
for me.

Will he win six this year?

4 AM as I write this, and I’m not sleepy at all.

YAY!
The power of technology is indeed amazing.

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So it’s been three weeks with the MacBook Pro, and I’m loving it so far. No, it’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but for me, it lets me dive into something that I’ve always wanted to learn about – OS X. Linux and Windows are old hat, so learning this OS is good fun. And I’m running Snow Leopard, so it’s all good.

On that note, the AppStorm.net guys are running a competition where they’re giving away copies of PathFinder to people who link to their site. Since PathFinder is very very good (John Sircusa of ArsTechnica says so!), I’m posting a link:

http://mac.appstorm.net/general/competitions/bumper-giveaway-voodoopad-pathfinder/

You don’t need to click if you don’t want to, but PathFinder is really really good, so you might want to check it out.

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It’s warm and getting warmer. I’ve been back two weeks now, and I’m discovering Jaipur anew. There’s so much that has changed, and even more that’s exactly the same.

The last two weeks went by quickly cause the Shek and sis were here, and we hung out everyday, ate like pigs, and generally had a ball. Too much food, far too much, but it’s so worth it, even though my tummy does groan.

Now though, they have all flown away to far away lands, veiled behind the TSA and the DHS, and we remain here. The upside is that we remain here with MacBook Pro, so it’s not so bad.

Yes, that’s right, I have a new laptop, and it’s a rather nice one. But then, if you’re reading this, you know me, and if you know me, you know that this was inevitable. I bow before your wisdom, O stranger, and move on.

There are a lot of funny stories that I could be writing right now, but I’m too tired to do so. I thought I’d been neglecting you, patient reader, so I came by to write to you a little. I hope you’ve been good, and haven’t given up on me in disgust. Soon I shall write tales of Rajput valour and dinner parties with swords drawn. Pistols in the morning? Almost, almost. It’s a different world here, one that I didn’t think I would be part of, and I’m not (thankfully), but one can’t help but be peripherally involved on occasion.

Oh never mind. It’s nothing that I haven’t seen before, and the food was great, so hey ho for the good life, as the convict said as he escaped in a body bag.

Ah, the most interesting thing is work, but that’s later. Bye bye.

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Yes, I am. Back in the homeland.

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That title is sorta said in this weird accent. Then it makes sense. It does indeed, it does. This may sound strange to those of you who are not familiar with sailing around the world in little dinghies, but

in some cultures such greetings are quite normal.

But no, these are modern times. In these times, there are no more Malbar pirates. The islands all have 3G, HSDPA, WWAN, and GP-f’ing-S. The undersea cables buzz with photon, carrying millions of

conversations, and billions of dollars around and around and around, in never-ending synchronization. Ravens and writing desks are passé.

I’ve also been wondering about the appropriate moment to use the word jejune.

Insipid?

Vapid?

Dull, even.

Honing in on this, I see the potential for an interesting story that comes up. Let’s do this by the book, shall we?

Characters?

A cranky old man who apparently hates everyone, but secretly..hates everyone!

A mysterious stranger who appears at twenty year intervals?

The wise, all-knowing fool?

Sundry beautiful women?

Some good music.

a few food scenes. Nothing like a good food scene. It’s better than a love scene, and you’ll be thankful that you didn’t write a love scene twenty years later, when your teenage children discover it.

Laughter and hilarity will ensue, much hilarity.

We still need a plot. The good ones are all taken. So I shall just randomly string words together, trying to see if things fall into place. Bear with me here. Snow capped mountains, and the silence of ages,

broken by a deep-voiced laugh.. in a land where no one has been heard from for the last twenty years. A struggling musician, composing rock opera by day and secretly dreaming of being an undersea diver, but

is afraid of high-pressure situations. A lamp-post that stands in the rain, and weeps metal tears for friends that are now in scrap yards.Even a mouse, a white one, one with a gray belly. This one does

nothing.

Plot lines are drawing a blank. We need a new line. How about no straight lines in nature? Shall we build space opera on that? Or the upthrust arm of Joan of arc, minutes before the flames swallowed her?

What shape did those fingers trace out in the smoke?

Atheletes wrestling for places in the track team, and tripping on speed. Tripped up by regulation and Le Tour de France. Those pesky cyclists rush through towns with no regard for decorum and dignity. Pah, a

pox on two wheels, nothing but a pox, a POX A POX!

I’m only dancing, try and take away the racquet from my hands. Evil twins with jelly-dripping eyes will invade, screeching out prayers and gouging out eyes. Delhi is safe, you think? HAHA AHAHAHA… thud.

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phew and egad! That was a complete blast, writing all that. Boom and Biff! and POW! ZOINK! too, for good measure. Some flowers for the lovely lady?

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Old French Fries taste like cardboard.

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