F1 2010: Bahrain GP – The Most Soporific Race Ever

Published on March 16, 2010 in Sports. View Comments

For all its pre-season hype, the excitement of having 4 champions on track, the eagerness to get a competitive Ferrari back on tract, the season opener couldn’t be a more boring car procession.The front runners, the ones having the fastest cars, just followed each other around the track completing the mandatory 49 laps without trying any overtaking maneuver. And the new regulation of fueling ban ensured that the nothing exciting could even happen during the pit stops.

The qualifying was the first to signal that something is not right. Until the last year, Q2 used to see the cars go zoom-broom at top speeds. Then the Masters of Strategy would work out a fuel strategy to give their drivers the best shot at glory. This did mean that slower cars could end up in front of faster ones, but at least it did mix the grid up a bit, and then the pit stops would become interesting. The new format of having no fuel strategy for Q2 and Q3 somehow reduced the charm of Q3. And when Vettel set the fastest Q2 lap, it was only a matter of wait and watch to see Vettel do it again in Q3. After all, there is no change in the car from Q2 to Q3. So the result of Q2 and Q3 should be the same, unless of course one of our drivers gets nervous and commits a mistake, something we saw Webber do. Or else if you were foolish enough like Adrian Sutil to be the only driver running on Hard than the Super Softs which the remaining 9 had chosen.

After qualifying we knew who the fastest guy was – Vettel. We also knew that Alonso and Massa were strong. But when everybody starts the race with the same amount of fuel, and when you expect everybody to come into the pits at almost the same time, and when you already know that to overtake the car in front you need to be 2-3 seconds faster which you are not, then where the hell did FIA see an opportunity for the drivers to overtake one another?

Another impact of removing refueling was that drivers chose to dive into pits only once, and play it safe on the track to conserve their tires.

For all the talk about reducing cost associated with getting a team ready for a race, and lessening the impact of machinery on race result, FIA has made the race day boring. Perhaps it were the slow corners of Bahrain which wasn’t the ideal place to judge the new regulations, or perhaps I was expecting just too much, but I wasn’t impressed with the show. If the same repeats for a few more races, F1 might face an even greater scare than all the scams, match-fixing and recession of the past couple of years. With a dwindling fan base, they need to do a quick rethinking.

Congrats to Alonso and Schumacher. Is this the beginning of the end of Schumacher – Ferrari legacy? Will Alonso become the next Schumacher of Ferrari? I certainly hope so. And I think the next season will once again be Schumacher vs. Alonso – one last time, and I will put my bet on Schumacher to walk away with the title. That would most certainly be a fairy tale end to a great illustrious career.

Popularity: 5% [?]

My First Bike Accident – Claustrophobia

Published on March 13, 2010 in Anu. View Comments

This occurred a long long time ago. It was before Dussera of 2009. Yet I still remember that moment quite vividly. We were riding from Bangalore to Ooty, almost 300kms long stretch. Having started in morning at around 9, it had become evening when we entered the Madhumalai forest. Immediately after the forest we would get to the steep hairpin bends and reach Ooty.

The accident occurred in the Madhumalai forest. To go to Ooty you need to take a left at a point inside the Bandipur National Park. Immediately after taking the left turn, the road narrowed. I was driving and my brother was the pillion rider. He immediately pointed out that perhaps I was going fast for such a narrow road which had low visibility at corners and turns. I ignored his opinion – something I rue till this day.

It was at a blind turn. The road turned sharply right and I had no way of knowing what was coming towards me from the other side. I turned right to see a Sumo come right towards me. I panicked and tried to steer my bike away from the Sumo’s path. But being a narrow I ran out of road width and skid at the edge where the ground was at a lower level to the road. Instantly the bike tilted to my right and I could not control it. Both of us skid along with the bike.

My first reaction was to check if my brother was harmed. Bike mattered the least to me then.  And how glad was I to know that he was unharmed. Luckily, both of us had escaped with minor bruises. Had it been any major accident, help would have been tough to get.

The more I think of that day, the more I become sure of the reason I think caused the accident. Ridiculous or stupid it might sound, but the reason is that I am claustrophobic. I panicked because I ran out of space, and it scared me. This was the only reason why I lost control of my bike while driving at a modest speed of 40 kmph. All my analysis and logic interpretation of the situation points to that only one possible answer.

My being claustrophobic was pointed out by Rohit Mahapatra. I have tested this theory for correctness.   And I am sad to accept that I am actually claustrophobic. I am always reluctant of squeezing my way through two SUV’s or larger vehicles. I feel uncomfortable when I enter the lift of small apartments, the ones having very little space inside the lift. I sleep with my head towards the corridor when traveling in a train.

But now that I have accepted that I am claustrophobic, I try to be more careful while driving. However, I would like to solve this problem from root. I would like to get rid of my claustrophobia. I know it’s just psychological. And if it is something wrong with my brain, I would like to train to think it otherwise. So here’s a realistic mission for myself – get rid of my claustrophobia.

Popularity: 12% [?]

F1 2010: New Season, New Expectations

Published on March 10, 2010 in Sports. View Comments

I have been watching F1 regularly since 2006 and this is the first time that 4 world champions will be on the grid at the same time! No wonder I am so excited and eager to get the season started. My ears have tired of waiting to hear the commentator say – “And the Bahrain GP is GO“. And just like the millions of fans across the globe, I too have lots of expectations from this season after the boring last one.

What makes the 2010 season fantastic is the return of God of Racing – Michael Schumacher. The seven time world champion is desperate to get started again. His enthusiasm shows his want for F1 racing again after a break of 3 years. And who better to have as team principal than Ross Brawn. The duo have won seven championships. I don’t care if it is not Ferrari they represent now. Schumacher is great at developing the car, and I am sure that if not this season then the next one will definitely be his.

The pre season testing for Brawn has not been as awesome as last years. The last year they had the fastest car and it showed right from the first lap of testing. This year though Brawn has accepted that they might be slightly off the pace. In the longer runs Mercedes car has managed to show consistency and speed, but it is with the lower levels of fuels that they are not sure about. The other cars seems to be quicker than Mercedes when running on fumes.

Speculations and rumors though refuse to die down around Brawn and Schumacher. Apparently Brawn has declared that they have a piece of technology which did not require testing and to design it they went till the limit of rules. Obviously reporters have been buzzing about the possibility of a new design of diffuser which would boost the performance of their car by a second or two per lap. And if this turns out to be true, then the championship is already Michael’s.

The testing though showed Ferrari to be the pick of the lot. They have got the pace to challenge for the championship. And Alonso is a shrewd driver. He is just as good in developing his car and extracting that last bit of performance. People have already tipped him to be clear favorite for drivers title. I just want to see Alonso and Michael battle it all out just the way they used to earlier. I just cannot make up my mind who to support – Michael or the team I have always liked, Ferrari. Michael was the reason I started watching F1, and Ferrari the reason I continued watching it after Michael left. Picking one is tough.

The return of Massa after the tragic accident is being highlighted too. He was quick during the practice sessions. But how competitive he will be compared to Alonso is doubtful. Alonso might perhaps carve out a place for himself just like Schumacher did. Alonso has already declared that he would like Ferrari to be his team when he retires. Also Luca Montezemolo has declared that all great drivers ultimately end up at Ferrari. I think if it comes to choosing between Alonso and Massa, Ferrari might prefer Alonso.

A lot of focus is being put on Hamilton and Button. I am given to understand that the Hamilton-Alonso saga, which nearly destroyed the McLaren team a couple of years ago, has been a valuable lesson for the team in management of resources. However the Hamilton-Kovaleinen partnership suggests otherwise. McLaren has been Hamiltons’ team and I think it will continue to be his. A few measure like shuffling of staff has been made to make Button happy regarding equality of driver, but pretty soon Button will realise that perhaps it was not for nothing that Alonso cribbed so much while at McLaren. How soon will trouble emerge could be an interesting bet.

But the most promising rising star on the grid has been Seb Vettel. The German has won lots of accolades for his driving in the wet. The last season with Red Bull, he did mount a serious challenge to the championship despite his car not having the double diffuser. Horner is a great designer of car, and it was mostly his ability that pushed RBR to the front. This year they have gone a step forward. With refuelling banned for the races, pit stops shall only have a change of tires, adjustments to the wing and a few minor changes if required. RBR has gone on record saying their pit crew has worked hard the whole winter and they have come up with a modified methodology which enables them to complete the pit stop in less than 2 seconds. Less than 2 seconds !!! You got to be kidding me. Thats lightening quick.

Last but not the least, with Max Mosely gone, politics should see a drastic reduction. Jean Todt is more than able person to be replacing him. A joke I read somewhere -

What could be the worst thing that Jean Todt does in the first year of his office?

Cry his tears out when Schumacher wins his first race.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Svn Repository Backup

Published on March 9, 2010 in Tech. View Comments

Ever since I started using svn I have found it an indispensable tool. I have created a local repository on my hard disk and all my personal projects are using this repository. And having had lots of hard disk crashes last year, I fear for the loss of my code files. So, I thought about a regular backup system.

I also have Ubuntu installed as a virtual machine. And Ubuntu has this Ubuntu One feature, which gives you a 2gb space online. So I went ahead to backup my repository to this space.

I have my repository mounted in Ubuntu at /mnt/WinRepository. The following script takes a dump of the repository:

svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --incremental > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo.bak

The advantage of using incremental option is that I can specify revision range to be backed up into different files.

svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --revision 0:100 > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo1.bak
svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --revision 101:200 --incremental > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo2.bak
svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --revision 201:HEAD --incremental > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo3.bak

And since the files are being saved in Ubuntu One folder, they get automatically backed up to the Ubuntu One online space.

This does not compress the files. But since I have 2 gb of space available, I am not really concerned about space.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Parsing XML With Castor XML

Published on March 6, 2010 in Coding. View Comments

After lot of trying I finally managed to get Castor tools working to parse XML files. And now that I have it working for me, I am always going to use it for XML parsing. It makes things so much simpler and easier.

Castor takes in a xml file and unmarshals it into Java objects. There are three ways to associate Java Classes with XML elements.

  • The first one is introspection. Given the class to the Unmarshelar, Castor populates the instance fields from XML.
  • The second is to use bindings defined by user.
  • The third is to use the XML Code Generator tool and have it generate Java Classes.

Of course, I used the third option, and that is the one I am going to mention here.

Castor jars can be downloaded from the Castor Project.It has a few dependencies. So I decided top use Maven. And I am already using Eclipse.

I imported the castor-code-generation jar. Then created a pom.xml file. I added a plugin to it:

      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>castor-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.0</version>
        <configuration>
          <schema>config.xsd</schema>
          <packaging>pba.plgen.xml.binding</packaging>
          <properties>generation.properties</properties>
        </configuration>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <goals>
              <goal>generate</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>

Where the properties file is:

# Specifies whether the sources generated should be source compatible with
# Java 1.4 or Java 5.0. Legal values are "1.4" and "5.0".  When "5.0" is
# selected, generated source will use Java 5 features such as generics and
# annotations.
# Defaults to "5.0".
#
org.exolab.castor.builder.javaVersion=5.0

# Set to true if you want to have an equals() and
# hashCode() method generated for each generated class;
# false by default
org.exolab.castor.builder.equalsmethod=true

# Specifies whether automatic class name conflict resolution
# should be used or not; defaults to false.
org.exolab.castor.builder.automaticConflictResolution=true

# Property specifying whether extra members/methods for extracting XML schema
# documentation should be made available; defaults to false
org.exolab.castor.builder.extraDocumentationMethods=false

Right Click -> Run As -> Maven generate-sources

And all the source code is generated.

Suppose that the root element is plgen. Then a class Plgen is generated. All the child nodes of plgen become instance variables of Plgen. To unmarshal the xml file, 

        public void parse() {
		try {
			m_plgen = Plgen.unmarshal(new FileReader(m_configFilePath));
		} catch (MarshalException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (ValidationException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

Well, I haven’t written this properly. But, its enough to make me remember how to get castor working again. My mission accomplished.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I Hate XMLs

Published on March 5, 2010 in Coding. View Comments

XMLs have never been my favourite. Attributes, Elements, Values, Child nodes … aargh, they are so confusing. And yet, configuring an application using an xml file seems so simple.

I have written my own XML parsers using the DOM. The whole document gets mapped to a tree structure which you can iterate over and get any value you want. But I find it to be very restrictive, and most of my code depends on the structure of my xml file. I would like to make my xml parser independent of the xml file structure.

I came across Castor XML. It has tools to read the schema and generate Java Classes out of it. Then the xml file is parsed and objects are created. Now this is good. I think this should be much easier than iterating a tree. But !! I have spent a lot of time trying to get Castor working. Its dependencies !!! Damn.

Time to get back to xml parsing again.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Adding Startup And Shutdown Scripts in Ubuntu

Published on February 17, 2010 in Tech. View Comments

I have my Ubuntu installed in Virtual Box. The very first thing that I needed to do was to setup my Ubuntu to recognize Windows drives. I setup two bash scripts to run at startup and shutdown. The following is what I have done.

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo vi vboxStartup

#!/bin/bash

# Mount the Win virtual drives - MyDocument, CShared, PidginWin
sudo mount -t vboxsf MyDocuments /mnt/MyDocuments
sudo mount -t vboxsf CShared /mnt/CShared
sudo mount -t vboxsf PidginWin /mnt/PidginWin

# Sync the files from PidginWin/logs to purple/logs
sudo rsync -azv /mnt/PidginWin/logs/ /home/anu/.purple/logs/

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo chmod +x vboxStartup
anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo update-rc.d vboxStartup defaults

This way my ubuntu pidgin logs are in sync with my windows pidgin logs. Next, I also wanted my Windows pidgin logs to get sync with the Ubuntu pidgin logs whenever I log off. So I create yet another script

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo vi vboxShutdown

#!/bin/bash

echo "Anuvrat Shutdown Script -- vbox"

# Resync files from purple/logs/ to PidginWin/logs/
sudo rsync -azv /home/anu/.purple/logs/ /mnt/PidginWin/logs/

anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo chmod +x vboxShutdown
anu@sw:/etc/init.d$ sudo update-rc.d vboxShutdown start 80 0 6 .

The funny thing though is that I haven’t yet tested it. I hope it works.

Oh crap! It did not run at startup. Need to check.

Popularity: 49% [?]

Aardvark Acquired By Google

Published on February 13, 2010 in Miscel. View Comments

This news surprised me just as much as the launch of Google Buzz. I have used Aardvark, and I cannot imagine why it interests Google. Vark has a completely different concept to that of Google Search.

The idea in both the case is to find an answer to a users query. Google uses its advanced crawling, indexing and fast searching technologies to quickly answer the search query typed by its user. Aardvark on the other hand believes that the best way to get a question answered is by putting it across to real people. See, completely different approach.

In Aardvark, you type in your question (it could be quite lengthy), give it a few tags (just like you would select keywords for a Google search) and submit it. The tags are used to find a suitable user to put the question to. When an user answers the question, you can revert back and engage him in a conversation getting more out of him. But obviously, there is a considerable time lag as you have to wait for someone to answer your query.

Here is a screen shot of a question I asked. I got back replies from three people. If I want, I can ask the Aardvark to get me more answers.And of course, it also has a GTalk bot that you could add and ask questions to.

Aardvark Conversation

Popularity: 57% [?]

Confidently Accept Your Actions

Published on February 9, 2010 in Miscel. View Comments

I am a man who values honesty and truthfulness above all else. But unfortunately, the world is made up of successful liars, and their foolish superiors who cannot see beyond the boot-licking, pig-shoving acts. And for this, I hate the latter more than the former.

I realized this only after getting into IIT. I was appalled at some of my friends behavior. A normal bragging would go about like this -

Yaar, I was sleeping in the first row of the class, assuming the the professor will not notice. And then in the end, just to make sure that the professor does not get any doubts, I asked him a few questions. And sadly, the same professor feels that I am a good student and has given me some extra work to do.

Who are you fooling? Everybody can see through your lies. It was always your intention to get the attention of the professor. You wouldn’t have dressed up neatly and sat in the first row if you wanted to hide in plain sight. If you tell me a story wherein you were jumping down the professors neck with your hands raised just to escape his attention, then please, go find a better listener. I am sick and tired of listening to such attention-seeking stories.

Else, do the right thing and actually owe up to your actions. Confidently declare that you truly wanted to get noticed and are pretty happy about it. Grow up. And the professors, please, a good Yes Man is not necessarily the best student.

And if you are reading this post, I hope you realized that IIT, professor and student are just metaphors.

If I ever go on to become a manager, these Yes Men shall live the hardest time of their lives. I shall eliminate them from my department even if it means removing the top best brains and settling with the second best. I am a stickler for my principles.

Popularity: 88% [?]

I Don’t Wanna Go Anymore :: Monish Salhotra

Published on February 8, 2010 in Miscel. View Comments

Oh God!!
what this place has done to me ?
I don’t resemble me anymore.
lemme stay here a bit more,
I don’t wanna go anymore.

Looking through window 4 years back,
I was no-where in this huge human map,

what……………………..
……………

This is the place, where I lived on my own,
principles, rules, decisions all were my own.

what…………………………………..

I had the best and worst days of my life,
challenged the strongest and still I survive,

what…………………………………..

I’ll definitely forget the formulas and derivations,

but never my first sutta and daru party with friends.

what…………………………………..

untill unless I would have destroyed myslef,
I could have never explored myslef.

Oh God!!
what this place has done to me ?
I don’t resemble me anymore.
lemme stay here a bit more,
I don’t wanna go anymore.

–
Regards,
Monish Salhotra

Popularity: 20% [?]