Fundamental Right To privacy

We can have our privacy and that is fundamental too!!

 Last month my 5th grader daughter, Mahie wanted to know about her fundamental rights. Fearing for worse that i would have to comply with her demands which she will for sure map to her fundamental rights, I tried to digress the topic by making her realize what her fundamental duties towards her family and nation were instead. But she was insisting on her rights, and to my reprieve, the EVS chapter on Human rights was due for the class test.

One of the fundamental right listed in their 5th Grade EVS book by Pearson publication is “Right to Privacy". I goggled and the Wikipedia page on "Fundamental rights for India" did not list the Right to privacy explicitly (wiki updated yesterday with new fundamental right) but soon realized by reading more that it may be inferred from other rights and there were various judgments passed which treated privacy as a right. My explanation to her for Right to privacy was the "right to be left alone". She did not take this answer as "alone" is the last thing kids want to be. How could i tell her that very existence of her is facilitated by the Right to Privacy, i looked for alternative example and asked her why she latched the bathroom while taking a showers. I know it was a bad example, but it helped me to bail out.

But frankly, for me till yesterday, Right to privacy was just the literal version of it i.e right to be left alone. No one should be allowed to intrude in your physical space against your wishes. Right of Privacy may have implications on Aadhar and I am a staunch supported of Aadhar, so i was not 100% with Privacy being a right . One of the arguments which government had given for this right in Honorable Supreme Court that privacy is an elitist concept as those wanting to hide need privacy. And guy like me who doesn’t even bother to close the latch of the bathroom, why do i need to worry.

However today, after reading about the whole gamut of "right to privacy" I have realized my ignorance. Reading through today’s paper has educated me to respect the privacy of other which can be anything from what their sexual preferences are to what they want to eat, wear or drink. From the right to be forgotten to right to euthanasia. The Honorable Supreme Court in the judgment has mentioned that body and mind are inseparable elements of personality and privacy provides humans the ability to make choices to pursue the course of development of their personality. I urge you to go through today’s newspapers to read more about our new fundamental right.

"Saying that you don’t care about the right to privacy, because you have nothing to hide, is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. "
Jean-Michel Jarren

Saar Pass 2013

The Expedition
It all started when I had seen one of my friends photo on FB from Himalayas in 2012. On inquiring i got to know that he had been on Sarkundi Pass trek organized by YHAI.
An "organized trek" in Pir Panchal range or the Himalayan ranges of Jammu and Kashmir where I belong is something unheard of, so I never got a chance to do one. And since this organized trek was conducted by reputed YHAI, I immediately fell for it. In the end decided for SAR pass as it is currently most physically demanding trek offered by YHAI
It was a 10 days trek, 3 days for acclimatization with high altitude (6000ft) at the base camp kasol which is necessary for low landers and rest 7 days for trekking through the mountains, the finale being the Sar Pass at 14000 ft.

The Mountains
We reached the Sar Pass on the 8th day and it was out of world experience. Just a week before my expedition I would have never imagined to stand shoulder to shoulder to Himalayas in direct eye contact with the Himalayan peaks

The clear skies gave a crystal clear view of the surrounding peaks and snow around us. It seemed the peaks were in best attire welcoming us and were in awe on seeing us conquering their altitude in a matter of 5 days, the height it took them millions of years to achieve. The snow lit with the bright sunlight was an unbearable sight for naked eyes and we had to wear goggles for protection. While walking through the pass, the snowfall a day before had removed any traces of foot steps from earlier trekkers. We were waking over a 60 degree inclined slope and so could only mange to create space for one foot. There were some scary moments too.

The final accent to Sar Pass was a 50 mtr 90 Degree steep climb. When I was told by the Sherpa that we need to climb it, I thought he was joking. But when Sherpa told me that even 140 kg man had conquered the steep slope, that gave some confidence and I mustered the courage to be the first from my group to climb it with the help of a rope that was put on the slope for assistance

The journey till now had been eventful and climax had to live upto its expectations. The clear sky of the morning now greeted us with a heavy snowfall in the afternoon. Now we had to slide downwards through the heavy snowfall and clouds, and none of us had a clue to which abyss the slide would lead us. . Initially hesitant ,we were literally forced through the slide by shepras. It was a wormhole ride for alice in wonderland which directly took us to a tea point 1.5 km beneath. At the tea point we started to counting of members and it was a moment of great relief and joy on realizing that all of us had safely conquered the Sar Pass.

The People SP7
Our group name SP7 was half of the regular size groups for SAR pass, and this helped us to knit well individually. We came in all age groups from 16 to 50, from all sizes 40kg to 100kg, from chennai down south to JammuKashmir up north. Absolutely loved the company of Mama for his humor, kapoor ji for his one liners and photography, ashok ji for his fitness, Rashmi Deskhmuk for being the gritty lady, for Mangesh and his wife for being the perfect adventerous couple, shivram for his dance and tempo shout, the chennai gang and all other SP7ans.
And lastly the three amigos or 3Ms, Me MasterJi and Munawer who were my tent mates for those 9 days.

At the age when people retire from service and life, MasterjI is taking up the the life head on and was an inspiration to all of us .
"Growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional" and Master ji lives up by this.

And for Munewar my initial prejudices about him waned as day passed and I must say that I liked him even when our interests seemed quite orthogonal . Even though his occasional philosophical lines did not make much sense to me but they helped keep my mind in action which would have otherwise frozen in cold for lack of any activity.

YHAI
This wonderful experience would not have been possible without YHAI. The daily schedule for trekking, the acclimatization program, the arrangements at the different camps and the attention to minutest detail are were done with military precision. I really owe this experience to YHAI and will surely thank them by being a volunteer once for any of their expedition in near future.

The Star
In the entire trip on thing which caught everybody's attention was the one which turned everybody on, was one which first itself needed to be turned on. It was a humble Rs 499 Philips radio.My experience in remote villages in J&K told me that higher we go the better reception the radio will have and I was sure, it would work at high altitude. Before my expedition , I exhausted almost all retail outlets but could not get hands on any radio and had thought it to be extinct, but finally got it delivered through Flipkart.

At an altitude of 14000 ft when almost every modern gadget with Lithium -ion battery failed due to freezing temperature, the good old radio with its older dry cell technology was making us dance to hindi and punjabi tunes. This simple device humbled every modern gadget in the expedition. Thanks to my radio I was called " Man with the Rhythm"

I am in Love again
On the first day of our SAR Pass Expedition orientation, our field director at base camp Kasol had said

If you have a bitter experience on mountains
you will vow never to come again
And if you have a great experience
you will love to come again and again.

And this love affair has just started. In my to do list is now to do a basic mountaineering course from Nehru Institute of mountaineering .

As I headed for my first day to office today, I just could not get the feeling out of my head. The laptop bag on my back felt more like a Ruck Sack, the formal shoes more like the Hunter Shoes, the stairs of the office looked like uphill trek, office floor like a Sar pass and looking at the guys glued to their laptops, I could not help but smile on what they missed !!!

 

 

My First Full Marathon

The remaining distance changed from kms to meters..1000 mts to go. A sudden adrenaline surge had me running again in elation after having been waking for nearly 9 km. But this rush could not last for even 200 mts and I again started crawling. As I approached finish, somehow managed to sprint  the last 100 mts (without doping) and achieve my personal milestone of 42:195 km in 5hrs and 17 mins.

 

The finish line area was empty and none seemed to be there to pat my back. Looking back I saw a guy from western navy command approaching the finish line. I did not want him to have same empty feeling and immediately turned back to congratulate him. We just hugged each other as we both could relate to the pain and glory when mind finally had overpowered the body in mind vs body game.

 

The bruises in the body, the pain in the shoulders and back lasted more than the emotional high gained from the marathon. The after week was devoted to caressing the body joints and eating as much calories as I could without feeling guilty about it.

 

So at the end of it what did i gain? Health, yes that is a big gain considering i was suffering from high BP just a year back. My heart rate has now slowed down from average 80 BPM to 70 BPM which means I have lessened my stress levels. But apart from it nothing more to share as I believe completing a marathon is miniscule feat compare to lot of activities we work towards in our daily life. Don’t believe me, try once  focusing 8 hrs in office for a productive work. I don’t remember if I could achieve this feat in my more than a decade experience in the industry.

 

We all are a running our own marathons daily, be it simple thing like managing to reach the office through heavy rush hour traffic, our wives stressful routine in managing the family back home, our elderly parents health related issues, our kids daily routine with of school home work etc without they even realizing that this still is the best part of their life. And just as the hug from the unknown man at the finish line made me feel good about the entire marathon experience, a simple gesture  like a hug or pat to our daily marathoners at the finish line will go a long way to make them the IRON MAN of ultramarathon called LIFE.

Measuring the scalibility of applications on CPU cores

Often we may be required to access the scalability of the application i.e. how well the application behaves with the increase in number of processors, memory, network bandwidth etc available to it.

Traditionally for example we may have done this by running on a 2 core machine and then run the same application on a 4 core machine with roughly same processor speed and same OS version.

But this method does not give a reliable estimate of scalability as there is lot of other parameters which change when we move between to physical machines.


We can use a muti-chip machine to access the scalability of an application. E.g. on a 2 chip Quad core machine (total 8 cores) we can test the application scalability on a single chip first (4 cores), by disable the all cores on other chip and then test the performance again on both the chips by enabling the already disabled cores i.e on all 8 cores.


Invoke the following commands through “root” user

To disable the cpu core:
echo -n "0">/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

To enable the cpu cores use
echo -n "1">/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online


This way we can get to know how well the application scales using a single hardware box.

However we need to take care of things like which CPU cores to be disabled and which not, by knowing the processor layout of the hardware box under consideration which we catch up next time.

Moving to 64 bit Computing

The 64 bit architectures history dates back to 1970's on RISC based Servers but is relatively new to x86 (32 bit) architecture space.
Intel shipped it first 64 bit processor (x86-64) in form of pricey Itanium Servers but Itanium did not live up to its hype. However it was when AMD introduced cheaper 64 bit Opteron processor for servers and Athlon 64 for workstations and desktop that 64 bit computing finally arrived to large arena. It is only then the 64 bit processors started gaining operating system support to exploit their functionality.

Most of the legacy applications which exist today or even ones which some developers are developing are 32 bit applications. Even though we have 64 bit operating system support on 64 bit hardware, there does not seem to be an urgency in dev community to port their 32 bit applications to 64 bit computing. The main reason which the developers may cite:

• My application is not memory hungry and will fit in within 4 GB of virtual address space.
• I do not use 64 bit data types (long, longlong, double etc),
• Since i use none of the 64 bit features, why unnecessarily burden my 32 bit application with 64 bit overhead.

Apart from the concerns which developers have, one disadvantage of 64-bit architectures relative to 32-bit architectures is that the same data occupies more space in memory due to swollen pointers . In 32 bit the pointer is 32 bit in size while as in 64 bit the pointer is 64 bit in size. This increases the memory requirements of a given process and can have implications for efficient processor cache utilization.

While the concerns of a developer may me valid in some cases, let us look at the advantages which 64 bit has to offer over 32 bit:

1. System architecture on Intel x86 (32-bit architecture) limits virtual memory space to 4 GB, This is not present in 64-bit architectures, which can use 4 GB of memory and more.
2. Memory-mapped files with sizes more than 4Gb are becoming more difficult to implement in 32-bit architectures. However on a 64 bit architecture this is not an issue.
3. Floating-point operations in 64 bit are implemented using a register-oriented instruction set, rather than the stack-based approach supported by x86.
4. In 64 bit architectures (x86-64), the set of general-purpose registers is expanded from 8 in 32 bit (x86) to 16. Hence much of the program state is held in registers rather than on the stack effectively increasing the performance. Some procedures do not need to access the stack at all.

The last two points are very important form the performance perspective and should give you enough reasons to recompile your 32 bit application in 64 bit. Lot of applications when recompiled in 64 bit are often better than its counter part in 32 bit like latency performance tests. The difference is markedly visible in CPU intensive applications (throughput applications).

So there should be an urgency in porting 32 bit application (x86) to 64 bit platforms (x86-64) quickly to gain upon the performance benefit which the 64 bit computing has to offer.

Resurrection

I have woken up from deep slumber after nearly 6 years. Lot has changed in between. I manged to clear my grad studies, started my professional carrier and also got married. In my current role i am a devoted family man at home and a Product Performance Analyst at office.

In between I was pondering about to start writing my mind out, but for past two years I had been so occupied with my professional interests that i hardly give myself a chance to think outside the professional box .

I got inspired by my boss who is very passionate about providing computer education to the 80% of our masses who do not understand english . I also wanted to share my experiences gained by goggling. Also this blog will serve as a repository for those useful information.

I plan to write some about the technical stuff mostly performance related which i encounter as and when. I do not plan to follow any order will write random stuff. So i do not expect faithful followers but random googlers, bingers etc to hit this blog.

My goal for this blog is at least 20+ posts in one year.

weRwinners

In this bloodbath happening between the email service providers we are the real winners. As far as i am concerned i gained a lot from it. My local disk storage space offerd to me is meagre 300 mb. But thankx to those sites i dont have to again forge new excuses to my administrator for getting more space.

Google has been the frontrunner in this race, both in terms of technology and the innovation. Google has mainly gained the advantage by being first in the market of search engine. So it has always been one step ahead of its competitors.
But did we realise why Google's Gmail came so late in the flourishing market of the email service. May be google had not precieved as the things would change so quickly in the comming years. It was happy in gaining supremacy in its search engine business. In the past year or so lot of developments have taken place.

1)Yahoo whose search engine was powered by Google till 2003 has purchased "Inktomi" a search engine technology provider which specilizes in algorithimic web technology . The Inktomi's search technology powers Amazon.com and Wallmart to name a few.Thus Yahoo is starting branding itself as destination for search.

2)Another development in search engine technology is the development of Microsoft's new Longhorn operating system. Longhorn monitors all of your activities Every file, every image, word document, mp3 etc and the information collected from these could make your search more enjoyable while you are browsing. Microsoft plans to ship its own search engine along with this operation system. And looking at the cult following of windows,just like the window explorer which has made most of the other browsers a history, same may be applied to the search engines existing now.

3)Upcomming search engines have learned from the mistakes of the Google, for example "mooter.com". It arranges the search results far more logically them what Goolge does. It has lot more added features along with that.

All the above and lot more other issues have forced Google to explore other areas of business to survive on the web. And inorder to maintain and increase its loyal base Gmail entry in email business has been one among them. And when Gmail offerd 1 GB space others too fell in line. Rediffmail is also offering whooping 1 GB space along with provisions of sending 10 mb file attachments.

This war for providing email storage has been a gift for us. Let us hope some more developments would take place and shower us with some more features.

But google is not giving space so easily. We may have to sacrifice our privacy. Google will be scanning our emails.The advertisers registered with Google would then use key words our private e-mail - and post the advertisemnts accordingly, for example if message mentions something related to computer, you may get advertisemts from the hareware companies.This has resulted the Gmail to get into a legal tangle with some senator of California.So it is better not to put the critical messages on Gmail. I am dumping my files on Gmail for storage purposes only.

But as long as we are getting the goodies I don't give a damm to it!!!