Recently I found myself in a situation where I felt that I have more things to do than the time available in hand. The number of unread e-mails and pending tasks were growing in a faster rate day by day. I missed to act upon a few important e-mails. This new situation had increased my stress and caused a sense of unaccomplishment in spite of being reasonably productive. My positive sense of being in control was going down day by day. That is when I started to realize that there is something basically wrong in the way I handled things.
On the other hand, I see some of my manager’s activities through his Twitter updates and blog posts. The wide range of stuff he does is mind-boggling. He might have ten-folds of things to do than I have. However I saw a sense of completion in most of the things he did. I discussed with him about this in one of the 1-1 meetings we had. From his answers, I realized that instead of trying to manage my time, I should try to manage the things that I do. He recommended to read “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I promptly bought the book. However due to bad management of things I do, I was not able to start on the book until a couple of months later.
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My employer (Sun Microsystems, Inc.) has announced another round of layoffs, which will eliminate as much as 18% of Sun’s workforce (around 6000 jobs), will save the company $700 million to $800 million. We have also announced the departure of the head of Software Group, Rich Green. With this we are restructuring the Software Group into Application Platform Software, Systems Platforms and Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms. The recession of world wide economy is putting enormous pressure on technology companies like us. We would hope that this downturn would end soon before causing irreversible damage to many companies. However I feel that we have just entered into the difficult stage of the slowdown and we will be seeing more challenges awaiting us.
Disclaimer: All the views expressed herein are mine. I am not talking for my employer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
For a while now, I was not happy with the speed my Debian GNU/Linux booted. It was taking approximately 1:10 minutes to drop me in the GDM prompt. Today, I decided that I will try to probe into what exactly is happening. I have already heard of bootchart a few years ago. However I never had a chance to use it. So, I installed bootchart. I am not going to talk in detail about the installation. It is available in Debian and Ubuntu repositories. If you are using some other distribution, you can either find it in the repository or compile it from the source.
After installation, reboot the system and add 'init=/sbin/bootchartd' to the 'kernel' command line arguments in Grub. This will use bootchartd as init and bootstartd will in turn start the original init. If alternative init environment like init-ng is used, there might be additional arguments needed. Please consult the bootchartd man page for more information. Once the systems boots, the data collected is available in /var/log/bootchart.tgz. Run bootchart to generate bootchart.png from /var/log/bootchart.tgz.
After doing this, I figured out that udevadm is taking almost 30 seconds. I later figured out that the udev rule that tries to rename 'wlan0' to 'eth1' is the culprit (search on Google). Then I commented the 'eth1' line in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, rebooted and did the bootchart thing again. I was happy to see that a portion of around 30 seconds is now removed from my boot time. That’s great!
| Before udev fix |
After udev fix |
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I have pre-ordered Apple iPhone 3G from my neighboring AT&T store last Sunday (Jul 20). I have done this as purchasing from the Apple Store wouldn’t let me to apply my FAN discounts on the plan. Applying it latter would reflect only after a couple of billing cycles. Also I don’t wanna get into the crazy line. I didn’t join the true Apple cult yet. I was just curious about the status of the pre-order and I checked the status online and found that the status query mechanism can be exploited to post automated queries. Here is a small ruby script that I wrote to check bulk statuses. This would also give you a clue on where you are in preorder line.
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On my OpenSolaris. What could be more exciting than this?
praveen@athena:~$ /opt/sfw/bin/emacs
Fatal error (11).Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
praveen@athena:~$ file core
core: ELF 32-bit LSB core file 80386 Version 1, from 'emacs'
praveen@athena:~$ gdb -c core /opt/sfw/bin/emacs
GNU gdb 6.3.50_2004-11-23-cvs
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-pc-solaris2.11"...(no debugging symbols found)
Core was generated by `/opt/sfw/bin/emacs'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
Reading symbols from /opt/sfw/lib/libXaw3d.so.5...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /opt/sfw/lib/libXaw3d.so.5
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libXmu.so...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libXmu.so
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libXt.so.4...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libXt.so.4
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libSM.so.6...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libSM.so.6
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libICE.so.6...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libICE.so.6
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libXext.so.0...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libXext.so.0
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0
Reading symbols from /lib/libz.so.1...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libz.so.1
Reading symbols from /lib/libm.so.2...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libm.so.2
Reading symbols from /opt/sfw/lib/libungif.so.4...done.
Loaded symbols for /opt/sfw/lib/libungif.so.4
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libXpm.so.4...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libXpm.so.4
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libX11.so...Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
praveen@athena:~$ file core
core: ELF 32-bit LSB core file 80386 Version 1, from 'gdb'
Since I started using Emacs, I started using the Control key more than I had used it before. That is when I started using my Caps Lock key as Control key. In the beginning, I swapped the Control key and the Caps Lock key. However while doing pair programming on my computer, my colleagues found this setup a bit unfriendly. So, I decided to give up my Caps Lock key and started using Caps Lock as an additional Control key. Under Linux, Gnome has an option to do this using the “Keyboard Preferences” application. However I was not able to find this option in OpenSolaris Gnome. So, I have to take the old xmodmap way of doing this. This works under Linux as well. I hope that this would work on all UNIX variants that uses xmodmap. But I haven’t verified it personally.
To make Caps Lock key as an additional Control key, add the following to .Xmodmap file in your home directory. This configuration is automatically applied when you restart your X (Gnome) session. For the first time, you can manually apply this by running xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap.
!
! Make Caps Lock as an additional Control.
!
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Caps_Lock
Please note that ! is the commenting character for xmodmap files.
But if you want to retain the Caps Lock function and swap it back to Control key, add the following to your .Xmodmap file.
!
! Swap Caps Lock and Control.
!
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L
The site of Regional Passport Office of Chennai has a page to inquire about the passport application case status. If you just enter the passport application file number, the status of the case is provided. The output has information about the full name of the applicant, passport number, date of birth and the date of delivery of the passport. Please note that the input that is needed to fetch this data is just the application file number. No other verification information needed. This is a serious privacy issue. You can’t let your passport number and date of birth to be seen by random people. On the worse side, one can write a script to go through a list of file numbers and collect a database of these valuable information.
If I am correct, when I used this facility in 2003, I had to enter the application file number and my date of birth to fetch the information about any case. This was providing some level of authentication before disclosing the information about a case. Maybe this feature was broken and nobody noticed it. I have sent a mail to the Regional Passport Officer about this issue. I hope that they fix this issue soon.
Lately I was encountering segmentation fault with one of our processes and found that it was not dumping core file even though we asked it by using appropriate ulimit setting. It was set-UIDed root. Then I discovered that the default behavior of set-UID, set-GID processes is not to dump core unless explicitly asked by prctl(2). In order to dump core, the following has to be done.
prctl( PR_SET_DUMPABLE, 1 );
I haven’t dealt a lot with set-UIDed processes. This was a valuable information to be leaned. Here is more information about this option.
PR_SET_DUMPABLE
(Since Linux 2.3.20) Set the state of the flag determining
whether core dumps are produced for this process upon delivery
of a signal whose default behavior is to produce a core dump.
(Normally this flag is set for a process by default, but it is
cleared when a set-user-ID or set-group-ID program is executed
and also by various system calls that manipulate process UIDs
and GIDs). In kernels up to and including 2.6.12, arg2 must be
either 0 (process is not dumpable) or 1 (process is dumpable).
Between kernels 2.6.13 and 2.6.17, the value 2 was also permit‐
ted, which caused any binary which normally would not be dumped
to be dumped readable by root only; for security reasons, this
feature has been removed. (See also the description of
/proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable in proc(5).)
I have been using GNU Emacs for programming for nearly 9 years now. It is exciting to keep discovering new extensions to Emacs throughout. I have heard of Ange-FTP before that can be used for remote file editing using FTP. However, I have never tried remote file editing on a local Emacs session. In most of the scenarios, I was dealing with editing files on the remote machines by invoking Emacs locally on those machines. But this time, I felt that invoking GNU Emacs (22) on my tiny VPS would be an overkill. So, I decided to try out remote file editing from a local Emacs session.
Even though I knew that I can do this with AgneFTP, I didn’t really care to read the info about it as I don’t run FTP on my server. The first hit on Google when I searched about remote file editing on Emacs was TRAMP (Transparent Remote [file] Access, Multiple Protocol). I am using GNU Emacs 23 trunk snapshot. TRAMP is included by default in GNU Emacs 22+. Configuration of TRAMP was quite simple. I had to load the module and set the protocol for remote access. Just a two liner in my .emacs did the trick.
(require 'tramp)
(add-to-list 'tramp-default-method-alist '("praveen.kumar.net.in" "" "ssh"))The three entries for tramp-default-method-alist element are host, user and protocol. You can fill in the host, the user or both. Another interesting use of TRAMP is editing files as root on local machine. This can be quite handy as well. Take a look at TRAMP user guide for full configuration options. Once I added these lines, I was able to open /home/praveen/.bashrc on my server using the file name as /praveen.kumar.net.in:~/.bashrc in the normal find-file (C-x C-f) function. Happy remote editing!
I have been a highly inactive blogger these days. It doesn’t mean that I have too many things to take care of. For some reason, I felt that I lost interest in blogging for some time now. Every week I would have found at least a couple things to write about. I would also start a new post. However, I would end up canceling it after I had typed a few lines. Maybe I turned too lazy to write something. But not anymore! I decided to break the long period of inactivity.
As a part of the new start, I have just upgraded my journal to use Wordpress 2.5. I have also decided to throw away my old clumsy theme. I temporarily use the “Wordpress Classic” theme. I am planning to tweak the same theme to match my color preferences. I am also thinking if I should try modifying the “Wordpress Default” theme to use fluid width and use it. But I won’t be doing it before next weekend. I would reserve a couple of posts to talk about Wordpress 2.5 and my thoughts about Wordpress theming.
What it means is that you (looks like I have at least 10 regular readers of my blog still) would be seeing regular activities in my journal from now on. I am also curious to know about the ones who are subscribed to my feed. If you don’t mind, please leave me a comment. Thanks for your support, readers!
