Pradeep Padala's blog
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HP Mini Data Center
Feb 7th
HP Labs has been very generous and sent us 16 C-class blades worth about 150K$. My professor and I were pleasantly surprised when we got the gift. The blades are awesome and are best of the breed. The blades, I am currently using in HP labs are actually older ! These blades are quite powerful and can be totally managed remotely with iLO, once setup.
Obviously, we are being very careful in setting it up here. For past few days, my colleague Howard and I are looking at the power, cooling requirements, rack setup etc. It’s going to take some time to set it all up. We plan to build a mini data center. Yay!
The chic-flick and Super Bowl
Feb 5th
As the Michigan cold hell continued, I dug myself deeper into the warm comforter and was watching NFL previews. Then, suddenly my roommates wanted to see Legally Blonde. I have already seen it and actually like it (duck). I abhor chic-flicks, but this one is not that bad, especially with cute Reese Witherspoon’s acting. I managed to watch only a few minutes of it though. Go chic-flicks 
Then, to manly super bowllllll. A lot of hype, millions of dollars and “the world’s” best football teams. Ugh ! The game was good, but not great. The stunning return of Hester in the first 14 seconds for a touch down was the only thing I really liked. There were numerous mistakes all over the place with fumbles, immediate turn overs. Peyton, obviously getting the MVP award, was initially nervous, but picked up later nicely. Rex Grossman was horrible. I hate to say that he was a former Gator. Some one even suggested that he cost Bears the Super Bowl. I didn’t like Prince’s half-time show, but whatever. A few of the million dollar ads were nice, but again whatever.
I still don’t understand why Americans refer to these teams (in NBA too) as “World” champions. Ooh, I forgot, America is the World.
Bernanke and US economy
Jan 18th
I am trying to learn a few things about investing, so I have been reading a lot and watching US markets closely. I am trying to wake up early and follow all the market news on CNBC every day. Today, Dr. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, appeared in front of a congressional committee and talked about various things related to US economy. It was fascinating to follow the testimony and it’s also politically interesting, as this is the first time he appeared in front of Democrat-controlled Congress.
As one of the CNBC analysts put it,
… He answered all the questions he wanted to and avoided all the questions about political policies … He is a brilliant witness and has a professor way of explaining things …
He didn’t dumb down the stuff, but it was easy to understand what he was trying to say. The key point was that “fiscal deficits” are at record high levels, social security and health care is going to put a lot more burden due to high number of retirees in future. If some thing is not done quickly, Americans are going to face major economic problems. The solution, as he put it, is managing the balance between increasing revenues (through taxes) or some how reducing the burden of social security and health care. Quite interesting stuff.
I lost interest about mid-way through the Q&A session as the senators were trying to pull some political stunts trying to get the Chairman to say what they wanted to hear. One question was quite interesting and pertinent. One of the senators asked: why do we (the US) have such a large trade deficit (of about 800Billion, highest ever) ? Is it because of the free trade policies that cause jobs to go to China and other places ? Dr. Bernanke’s answer is: No, it’s not because of free trade policies. Free trade policies actually improve economy and the reason for cut-down of manufacturing jobs is because of the technological improvement that makes companies to use less man power Interesting !
My conclusion was that Congress has to do some thing drastic like increasing taxes or reduce Federal spending considerably. This probably will happen if a Deomcratic president gets elected to the white house and things (hopefully) will be back to normal.
P.S. I am a Finance/Economics newbie just learning things, while making this grand predictions about US economy.
Bjarne Stroustrup’s interview about C++
Dec 5th
MIT Tech Review has this article about Stroustrup’s views on current state of C++, programming etc. Stroustrup, the C++ inventor, seemed to answer quite candidly.
One particular comment is interesting.
That said, C++ has indeed become too “expert friendly” at a time where the degree of effective formal education of the average software developer has declined. However, the solution is not to dumb down the programming languages but to use a variety of programming languages and educate more experts. There has to be languages for those experts to use–and C++ is one of those languages.
It’s true that C++ is actually expert friendly and is some times intimidating to a newbie programmer. It’s been a while since I did “real” object-oriented programming in C++, but whenever I tried to use it, I felt like it had too much power. This quote from Stroustrup himself puts it succintly.
It’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C. In C++ it’s harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg.
There are endless articles about the power of C++ and how it makes it difficult to use. I think for large projects that are not performance-critical a language like Java might be more beneficial.
On a side note, my favourite language these days is Python. Obviously, it’s ten times slower than C++, but can get the work done with 100 lines written in 10 minutes.
Europe, here I come !
Dec 5th
I am giddy, yes, giddy with excitement at seeing the mail from EuroSys chair that my paper to EuroSys 2007 is accepted. It’s one of the good systems conferences and is considered to be reaching the quality of OSDI/SOSP (the top systems conference). Also, another paper of mine co-authored with HP folks is accepted to IM 2007. It’s a sub-project originated from the main EuroSys paper.
It was a lot of hard work, as usual, but it’s worth it. Next stop is SOSP ! To put it in my HP colleague Mustafa’s words
… doing a SOSP paper with CPU+IO+network would be more important now that we have the genie out of the box
Go go go …
Poderosa: great terminal emulator
Nov 21st
What would I do without a terminal emulator ? God, I probably would kill myself Most part of my research is done on powerful machines in a data center, which is not usually physically accessible. Most of the machines don’t even have a console attached to them. So, the only way to work on them is to connect using a ssh client. Now, you need a good terminal emulator that provides a rich terminal to work with instead of boring black-and-white terminals. On Linux, there’s no dearth of these. You have Konsole for KDE and Gnome Terminal on Gnome. Both are very powerful with a host of features. The most important/useful feature for me is the tabbed terminals. It’s almost impossible to work without tabs as I would need a Gazillion windows otherwise.
Now, working on Windows, I obviously want a powerful terminal emulator that supports ssh and provides tabs. Gosh ! I used to use SSH.com’s client or the minimalist Putty. Both are good, but are not powerful enough. Then I found Poderosa, a very nice program. See what I can do with it.
They go beyond tabs and allow you to divide the screen vertically and horizontally. How cool is that ? It’s very similar to the split windows in VI, which are very useful while looking at multiple pieces of code.
I am always happy when an application does all the things I want it to do. Cheers to Poderosa !
HTML for my fellow non-cs bloggers
Nov 20th
Ok folks, you guys (AB, K …) write some interesting stuff, but you need to learn a little bit of formatting to help people read it with out straining their eyes. No offense, just a few simple things to learn to beautify your posts.
First, you should start using the “Edit Html” tab in Blogger instead of the “Compose” tab. At worst, you don’t use any HTML and it will look exactly the same as you are used to seeing.
HTML is a markup language. Think of it as writing a blob of text and then marking it with different colors/styles. So you write some text and then use tags to mark it up. For example, to bold some text, you would use <b> your text </b> and it will look like your text. Note that every tag has an ending tag and it’s a good practice to end every tag even though some tags don’t have ending tags.
Some commonly used tags while blogging.
Paragraphs: <p> </p> Line break: <br /> Style: bold: <b> </b> italic: <i> </i> underline: <u> </u> colors: <font color="red"> </font> Preformatted text: Usually used for verbatim listing <pre> </pre> Quoting: <blockquote> </blockquote> Try this one, it's nice. Lists: these are slightly complicated, so use the menu available in the compose button to create them.
If you are writing large amounts of text, you can create headings of different sizes with <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> For example, H3 size heading looks like
A heading
That’s all for now, Blog away !!!
Sense of Accomplishment
Jul 10th
An interesting piece by Jeremy Zawodny of Y!: Where do you get your sense of accomplishment?. It’s often unclear, and some might have not thought about it in a while. Personally, I always derived pleasure from doing “solo work”, but that’s a topic for another day.
The interesting thing that got me thinking is: Does Indian culture kill the usual hunger for sucess and accomplishment? Ha, that got your attention, didn’t it? 
I think it does ! From childhood, you are always told what you have to become. A happy mother proud of looking at her son’s excellent Math grades exclaims “Hamara bacha engineer banega” (Our son will become an engineer). I still scratch my head and think “What is it that I do that relates to Mathematics?” May be I should have been a scientist, may be a staistician, or may be drug peddler. Darn, why does every one have to become an engineer or a doctor? Why does accomplishment always relates to one becoming an engineer or doctor?
There are a few lucky ones, who become engineers, and really love what they do. Then, after all those ‘be sucessful’ speeches, no one cares what you do at your work or what you have accomplished. “Paise bana raha hai na, kya problem hai?” (He is making money, what else does he want?). Yep, Indian culture doesn’t believe in really loving what you do. It’s work, it’s a job, it’s a means to make money, and live happily, damn it !
I will close this post with a conversation I often have to endure.
Family friend: Hey, what are you doing now a days? Me: Working on my PhD Family friend: Oh, what's your major? Me: Computer Science Family friend: Why are you doing a PhD? Job mila nahi kya? (Didn't you get a job?).
Learning a New Language: Python
Jun 15th
I have used Perl for my scripting needs for a long time. The first time, I used it, I was totally blown away by its power, and flexibility. The regular expressions, dynamic typing, endless CPAN modules, and of course the geeky (read phreaky) syntax. Later, I got enamoured with it, learnt more advanced features, and wrote a few articles for the Linux Gazette as well.
Then, I wrote a web statistics package in perl. It started with building an innocent counter for my web-site and developed into a full-blown web stats package. I also wrote a some-what complicated set of scripts to build my web-site. Though, I liked the “More than one way to do it” paradigm, the syntax sometimes irked me. Some of the features (like OOP, those funky references) always looked like an after thought rather than good design.
I still use Perl for all my scripting needs, but It’s always a pain to write big piece of software in Perl and maintain it peacefully.
Here in HP, in my group, most of the scripting (for setting up testbeds, running benchmarks) are written in Python. I thought this is a good time to learn a new language. It took me a day to read through the excellent Learning Python book, and I am off to some coding. It’s a refreshing change, especially for someone coming from perl background. The best way to sum it up is that It’s as powerful as Perl with out all the wierd baggage.
I have only scratched the surface, but I am very impressed with its syntax and semantics. Most of the features are very natural, and the consistent semantics for data structures is cool. It has all the usual scripting baggage: dynamic typing, quick coding, extensive libraries, regular expressions etc.
Let’s see a cool, some-what advanced feature called mapping. This feature makes Python a little closer to functional programming languages. Often, when you have large data structures, one thing you want to do is to iterate over all the entries, and do something with each of the entries. Usual way is to use a for loop to go over all the entries. For ex. to increment each number in a list by 2
mylist = range(1, 10) for i in mylist: mylist[i] = mylist[i] + 2
Now, this is all good, but what if you want a different operation, or a complex operation. Naturally, you would think of a function that can iterate over all the entries. There you go !
def add(i):
return i + 2
mylist = range(1, 10)
print map(add, mylist)
How easy is that ! For those who don’t know Python syntax, def creates a function, and the map keyword allows you to apply a function to all entries in a list or a tuple. For more fun, read about List Comprehension and a great use of it to create SQL one-liners.
Why I Hate the New Breed of Indian Songs
Jun 3rd
Ha, the title got ya, didn’t it? Yeah, recently one of my friends got a bunch of music CDs containing every possible song from movies released in last five years. I was really excited, as it’s been a while since I listened to the new music (especially telugu songs). I gobbled up all the CDs and filled 10GB of my disk. Then the pain started. As I listened to the first two seconds of each song, I was like, f*** ! don’t these guys have any shame in copying? Almost every phreaking song that is released in Telugu music is copied from somewhere. Rock, pop, you name it, they copy it. Hindi songs, though to a somewhat lesser degree, do the same old shit.
Is there a remedy for this? Why can’t we produce original songs and original music? Until then, I am going back to my old songs, and rock.