23 and counting!

Last week I celebrated my 23rd birthday with my family and friends. It was fun having such a wonderful time, being in the center of everybody's attention. Since it was a weekday, the morning was routine, but I had a great time in the evening. Bala and Srinath had come over, they made me cut a cake, but the thing that ill remember is the photo they took of me. It was a front profile, with a sign board saying "I am Madhu, 23 , SINGLE". There was one gift that I had asked of these guys but they disappointed me (although i was not too hopeful of them getting me that). Weekend was more fun. I met with my BMS friends, and school friends. There was lot of catching up done. All said, it was an awesome week! Truly enjoyed it, and all the credit goes to my friends who made me feel great. Thanks a lot guys.

Green Message

We had a video contest in IBM, to mark the Earth Day Celebrations. The theme was to prepare a 1 minute video, which shows how we can make earth a better place to live in. The ideas ranged from personal green behavior to conservation in business (office). I had posted couple of ideas in this contest.

Cousin's Marriage

Its always awesome fun to spend time with family and relatives. The marriage was in my native place (Ramanathapura in Hassan district). This place is on the banks of River Cauvery filled with lots of temples. It was even more pleasing to see everyone in wedding attire, happily moving around, aimlessly, smiling at strangers! I wish the newly weds a happy married life!

Cafe Babe!

I have been working on Java for 2 years now. But I got to know about this kinky side of java couple of days back. Till then, whenever i felt the need to look at a compiled java class i used to use either a Java Decompiler or use javap (disassembler). But 2 days back I used a Hex Editor to view it. And to my shock found the first 32 bits to be 0xcafe 0xbabe. What a genius who wrote java compiler. Relating everything to Coffee, Coffee bars and the beautiful gals who come there. It definitely has to be a man. To my surprise I found that a java interpreter determines whether it is a java class file or not, by looking at first 2 Bytes. So all newbie hackers out there(like me), who want to deal in the world of 0's and 1's can think of this as a humble start!

Accident

I met with a small accident yesterday while coming to work in the morning. It was peak hour traffic. And as usual, there was chaos on the road. I was 50 feet from a intersection which was deadlocked. Some how a goods carrier managed to avoid the deadlock and started to move towards me in the opposite direction. Both of us (me and the goods carrier), where on the wrong sides of the road. We were in a American style of driving. He passed me on my left, and I was watching him all the way through. But suddenly he decided to take a sharp left turn. His carriage part started to scrape my left back door. By the time I realized it and got out of my vehicle he was long gone. The damage to my vehicle was pretty bad. Although there was no dents, the door was pretty badly scratched, and my door handle was broken. I was very disappointed all the way through to the office(which further took 30 mins). But once in the office, I started to think over of what had happened, and realized that it wasn't the goods carrier drivers mistake either. It was just plain bad luck coupled with the congested streets of Bangalore. With the hike in the fuel prices, and worst traffic management system in any metro of the world, working from home would always be a better option. Another problem for the new government to tackle. I'll have to shell out a considerable amount to get my car back to shape. Pretty disappointing day. :-(

Experience with Retroweaver!

Develop With 1.5 And Deploy With 1.4!

For a couple of months now I am using a open source project called Retroweaver. The objective of the Retroweaver is to weave JDK 5.0 compiled java class files to run on a JVM1.4.x. It means that the Retroweaver is a bytecode weaver, that enables us to take advantage of the new Java 1.5 language features, while still retaining total binary compatability with 1.4 virtual machines. Retroweaver operates by transforming Java class files compiled by a 1.5 compiler into version 1.4 class files which can then be run on any 1.4 virtual machine. All the generics, annotation support, Enum, varargs, extended 'for' loops, reflect API's etc. which are all features on Java 1.5+ can be now used in Java 1.4.

Very impressive till now. It promises a lot of thing, and most of them do work wonderfully well. Although the concept they use to weave is pretty simple (they mirror all the java class files that are specific to 1.5 and produce 2 jar files. First one is used to weave the 1.5 class files. This runs through all the class files, finds all the instances where 1.5 features/API's are used and replaces by its own API's. Ex: When it finds the statement "import java.lang.annotation.Annotation; ", it replaces it with "import net.sourceforge.retroweaver.java.lang.annotation.Annotation;". The second jar file is the runtime jar file. This contains all the "replica" 1.5 rt.jar files which are not there/modified in 1.4. Pretty simple ah?

Now coming to the other side of the story. Till now I have mentioned all the good features about this product. So let me mention all the negatives about it as well. It is very depressing to see a dormant open source community. I am not sure if many people are actually using this product. Because I myself have encountered many bugs in it, and when I raise these defects, only ONE person always replies (that too delayed response). There are 2 full time developers, no committers that i know of, and no one who keeps a close eye on the forums/mailing list/bug reports. So if you have a bug, you better solve it yourself than wait for them. I have done this a couple of times now, after painfully waiting for 1 month for a reply from them. The other sad part about this product is the code, which is not up to the mark, in the sense that, a 3rd party user can never understand their code( no comments, no java docs).

Overall I am actually not very impressed by this product. Not a product I would recommend any one. There are similar other open source project like the RetroTranslator, which unfortunately faces the same problems. So 2/5 rating for Retroweaver. Don't use it unless you don't have any other alternative.

New era of Petaflop!

Yesterday, the IBM developed "RoadRunner" supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, broke a historic barrier: one thousand trillion calculations per second -or one “petaflop.” I was really excited to hear this news, and to know that my company is constantly pushing the barriers of innovation, to make the world a better place to live in.