Science is fun!
On my workstation, which is one of two machines I use:
[muks@jurassic ~]$ uname -a
Linux jurassic 2.6.24.4-64.fc8 #1 SMP Sat Mar 29 09:15:49 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[muks@jurassic ~]$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
326 ls
168 cd
92 git
74 clear
66 joe
30 grep
28 svn
15 ssh
15 cat
13 cp
I seem to use clear a lot!
Touch my body has hit #1 this week on the Billboard 100. She has all of my 99 cents. The song is a tune and it seems we’re the demographic (you’ll have to watch the video for that).
What the heck is 802.11n? You don’t want me to compile your kernel? 
Try Sparse to analyze your C code. Unlike Splint, it works well with the GTK libraries and reports a wide range of issues. It also neatly fits in with the autotools build system, so you can basically run your autotools and prep for a make, and then call:
make CC=cgcc
cgcc is a wrapper which invokes sparse first, and then gcc. Then go through the warnings and fix them. 
For the last 9 months, I’ve been working on a SMB/CIFS virtualization product at Brocade. We announced this product to the world yesterday.
FME lets sysadmins migrate open files (holding rangelocks and oplocks) that are being used by client applications in a DFS namespace, from one filer to another without disruption. Hence the name virtualization. Client applications don’t know that files are being moved at the remote end. My work has been in the CIFS datapath, tracking and restoring open file metadata such as rangelocks and oplocks, and also helping migration processes track changes in a file’s data while it’s being migrated. It’d be very cool to a network filesystem developer or even a sysadmin, to see a Wireshark packet capture of the orchestrated steps.
This work was, for various reasons, done in Windows land, as a driver. Yes, I know.. ugh yuck bleh, but I got to explore a bit of Windows land :).
The last maintainer of tinyproxy transferred over maintainership of the project yesterday. So the fork nanoproxy is now obsolete and has been removed. The tinyproxy project will keep its old name, because existing users know it as that.
Visit the tinyproxy project!
I forked tinyproxy to create nanoproxy today.
I’ve been a regular user of tinyproxy for the past 2 years, as it allows me to masquerade as a user in another country/university pretty easily through a SSH shell account. Unfortunately, tinyproxy has been unmaintained for about 3 years now and is marked as inactive on SourceForge.net. There are known bugs in it. I also want it to be a part of my Linux distribution. So what’s better than to maintain it. I tried to contact the last active author to ask for access to maintain it, but didn’t get any responses so I forked it to a new project called nanoproxy. There’ll be releases after a few things are fixed.
Here are some cool scripts found on the web:
Make Magazine has a nice list of items that gadgets should conform to, so that they are user friendly. Most of them are reasonable and should be required. Here are some more that I want:
I’d asked on this blog for hosting after Nerdfest’s demise. While some kind folks offered to pitch in free user accounts, I needed a full server as there were many web applications to run. After a lot of careful evaluation, I decided to go with The Planet for hosting. At $69/month, they provide a dedicated 2.4 GHz P4 server with 512MB RAM, 80GB disk, 750 GB bandwidth and most important of all, remote reboots and support. It’s real money and expensive for someone living in India, but all in the name of a free software company :).
FWIW, I had evaluated several options including SFCCP, Blue Linux, Jump and Server Beach. I can only say good things about the former three options and the nice people behind them, but they ended up as either expensive or not a good match. Now I have to contact them and let them know.
After about a week of moving in, things are good so far. There is no upstream firewall which is a great thing. I have moved many of Banu’s web applications and services over in the past week, and hope to finish it off this week. This website and blog have also been moved.
After the demise of Nerdfest, I was/am looking for a dedicated server setup to host projects and other assorted websites such as Graphics Planet. The trouble with popular hosts such as ServerBeach and Layered Tech is that they filter useful ports such as IRC to achieve a false sense of security. Blue Linux seems to be a great place to go to, but I’m facing trouble getting a Dell server out to them as Dell UK will only accept UK registered credit cards. Other options are far too expensive.
If any company in UK is willing to donate a used 1U rackmount server (x86 P4, 1GB RAM and 80 GB disk - or higher class), please get back to me (muks at mukund dot org). The server will be used to host free software and open media projects, and we can add a link in the footer back to any website of your choice. It will be a one-way transfer though and the server will not be returned. It will be put to good use.