Older blog entries for masood (starting at number 20)

NetEm
Yesterday I tried network emulation for a Intelligent switch product, under development in Linux. It saved my ass from working hours to get a simulation work done.

Strange
There is some thing really bugging me for the last 20 days. I don't have the solution for it other then just to wait and see. The only question I ask, too often, Is there any way to spend life peacefully with every thing going smoothly around?
I lose my temper, not to often, specially when some one deceive me. But my reaction to what happen previously is totally opposite of my nature. I'm just waiting calmly for the guy to realize it himself. It's really hard to smile and talk to a person who has done some real bad to you and you fucking life. Parents only teach to respect the elder but they should also teach us how to treat elder bastards.

XYZ
Finally, It's like my dream come true. I got job in xyz :) and monday would be my first day in xyz (ins). though I'm much happy today but bit feeling sad on Inzamam's resignation and the treatment given to him by Paki nation. No doubt he is a star of modern cricket. Pak won 1992 worldcup because of this Inzi, But how sad we forgot every thing, we now love n believe criticism.
What ever Inzi, this fan of yours will always remember you. You are proud of our nation and I love you.

Finally, I got some time to write my blog. Since the start of this year (2007), the work load starting to grow more and more. Some time I have to sleep just 4 hours to meet the project dead lines. No doubt, working day & night makes your boss extremely happy but at the same time this is not fair with the family. Anyway, my journey with AMD64 is going great. I learned some exciting things in last 2 months or so. And some cool optimization techniques. Also the kernel module for sniffing packet completed as well. Now stuck in sched_(*)affinity, this is some thing which changed dramatically in past glibc version and now I'm facing problem in implementing the right one.

Song of today's blog
http://www.apniisp.com/hindisongs.php?id=2341

Sniffing On Gigabit

Back in my college days, Packet sniffing on Ethernet LAN was suppose to be the easiest task in programming, using socket domain as PF_PACKET. Unfortunately, This old simple trick is of no use when we are dealing with heavy traffic. To capture packets in promiscuous mode on gigabit, Surely, this was impossible to achieve using lame LPF methods. While googling, I seen some advance research and implementation done by ntop's Luca Deri. His project PF_RING for enhancing packet capturing is really good. The good points about his project is...

1) Implementing hook on netif_rx, netif_receive_skb and dev_queue_xmit to copy the packet to mmap'ed space.
2) Use of mmap to directly access userspace memory. Although several Projects out there using mmap.
3) Keeping the records of each packet, dropped or received.

With the introduction of NAPI support in 2.6.x kernel, It looks quite achievable to capture packets on gigabit speed. Pooling defiantly helpful in reducing kernel interrupt load in heavy traffic. To understand the implementation I studied my 3com Lan card driver. The technique is to disable interrupt on the first packet arrival and switch to the pooling mode. After processing all the packets, re-enable interrupt (quite smart).
For the sake of understanding the concept and working, I modified the source code or PF_RING module and removed outgoing packet capturing routine from both kernel core and ring modules. It further improves the the performance but still it's wasting a lot of time in bookkeeping packets information.
Another project by Luca is nCap, which offers 100% packet capturing facility and will be the next project which I'll study.

Mavi (Happy Birthday)

Today is mavi's birthday and I can't even wish her, :( my bad. She is the topic of my blog today. Although she deserve more then just a few sentences in my blog but for me Blog is more reliable then my memory. At least, with the help of this blog, I can guaranty I'll remember her always, otherwise "Banday ka koie pata lagta hai".

We started our friendship in Oct 2006, during Ramadan and ended in Jan 2007. During this short period of time, the only/important thing which I learned from her was the importance of a Friend. And no doubt she was the lady of her words. It was me who thought beyond the boundary of friendship :) and I paid the price in the shape of losing her forever. And Again the decision was mine which she accepted as, for her, it was acceptable as compare to thinking beyond friendship.

It's all started when she gave me some importance and showed care for me. Yes! this is the care which I referring in my previous blogs. Well she was only doing for friendship or in other words, she only had the label of friendship in her mind and I took it completely wrong. And it took a while(1){} to make me realize that "SP your are moving towards wrong direction". I still remember each word we spoke on phone in our last conversation and believe me, In the middle of conversation I felt I'm forcing her make a relation. Although she refused clearly in her words, "My parents will not agree so drop this topic". I heard this typical sentence three time during our friendship period. That was the point which make me dig more to find out what she want but as she used to say "Trust is the only thing which matters more in friendship" and I guess I should have believed her words in first place instead of giving her hard time while digging more and interfering in her personal matters etc...

Anyway, her thought about more often than she probably can guess, and thoughts of her just naturally bring smiles of happiness. Now, that today's her birthday, may each and every warm thought, bring a wish for all the best in life, and all her favorite things. Ameen

As her chapter is now closed forever, the only thing which I regret is that she must have said once thats she likes me and I would have done every thing for her.

Good Bye Mavi you spent some memorable time with me and I'll always remember you as a good friend.

New Year & Eid Celebration

New year started with eid celebration and a sad incidence of saddam execution. Different people have different views about the execution, regardless of whatever it is, it shouldn't be shown on TV like this. I don't think there is any difference in keeping a person is prison and in graveyard, unless you have any personal fear from him/her.

Today is my first day of Eid and as usual spending in front of laptop, reading about different problems in Link List.

Girl Friend?

I'm doing preety well as far as my professional life is concern but as compare to my social life I'm unable to get a true friend willing to give me chance to show my care to her. I know the importance of GF in life and I feel really guilty about loosing some important true friends just because of my own stubborn nature and sachi I'm afraid to live a life like majno. Last few years of my life bring full success, as I did really hard in achiving my goals, but If I look behind It has changed my personality a lot. I learned a lot from my previous experience and had a really bad reputation of falling in initial love without even knowing a person :). The only problem which I can see and I don't have any solution for it is, I expect more from a GF as compare to friend, I know every one do but I don't have the guts to make some one fall for me, whom I like, and if any one do, It just because of my status not me, yes this is true. Anyway I can't say much as I don't have any successful experience in life till now. But hota hai chalta hai, aur haun "I don't give up yet". Let see who is next in 2007 :-).

Email Farewell?

Yesterday, It was my last day in XYZ and it went so bad. I spent 1.5 years in XYZ and guess what? email farewell... I was shocked when I received email of CEO, giving farewell in just a two paragraph email. I seen other employees leaving XYZ and they had given a good farewell in a good respectable manner, with some discussion on what he/she has done for the company. I'm not sure may be they are not happy with my work @XYZ or the way I refused the offer to stay in XYZ. But whatever it was I felt extremely unhappy about it. I was going on a one month proper notice while back in the time of joining XYZ, they forced me to join in 12 days.

New Job

My new jobs is really exciting and it's more toward embedded programming approach. Although I'm not strong in assembly but I guess this is the strong learning point for me also the strong reason of leaving XYZ. My job responsibility includes coding some heavily optimized application using inline assembly and using the feature of AMD's L1 and L2 cache. I was reading some documents on application optimization on AMD opteron platform and looks really exciting to me. Also my job responsibility includes device driver writing skills which is some thing not as new to me as assembly.

New Job

Last week I applied for a job and was succeded, no doubt the job was excellent and I was really excited about it but in the end, I had to appologies for not giving positve responce to the offer letter offered to me. Apart from other good thing, this job did have some assembly level of work along with inline assembly in C. In other words a mature C language programming job.

Naseeb Birthday

On 6th Nov we celebrated naseeb's birthday in Uptown LA. you can check few snaps from here. We had a bowling competition and I never in my life did bowling before this event and had no idea what so ever. One 5th Nov 06 I started googling howto's, And fortunately got some good video tutorials. I did pratice in home with a tenis bowl in my hand :), I know It's not cricket but I was so desperate to learn as I was afraid to lose. Thought we were up against players like me :) and my team mates were asra and shafiq. Mahvi kept telling me it's not that hard game but newbie always do silly stuff :). Anyway every thing went perfect although we were kicked out in first round but it wasn't because of me :). All the credit goes to Asra, according to her she do bowling regularly and no wounder she was the lowest scorer in our team. You can check one of my strike video. That was the coolest day since I'm in lahore and its arround 1.5 years now. I realy enjoyed eating, bowling, laughing and teasing Umar. I would have upload the bowling style of other coliques but i forgot, sorry.

NetMos Serial Card

I inatalled those multi port card yesterday on AMD64 in office but looks as they are, some how, not detected. I have to recheck/redo the hardware installation part.

My BirthDay
Yesterday I celebrated my 25th birthday. As I'm in Peshawar, for eid vacation, I really enjoyed spending my Birthday with my mom, dad, younger sis, aunties and cousins. The other special thing about my Birthday was; Mehvish, coolest friend of mine, sent flowers, choclates , card & cake. She some time really amaze me with her caring talks and actions. I'm really happy to have her in my list, Some one who is willing to listen all of my past stories and addventures :). Still have to share lots of stuff which hardly I can share with any one else.

Asterisk Billing Application

While developing Asterisk billing application, I have to modify asterisk mysql CDR plugin to rate the CDRs before it touches the databases. The experiment worked really great and saved the time of post processing the CDRs. The other stuff which took some time in coding was the best regax matching extension while asterisk call hunting. For this, I break down the numbers in seperate file and extensions which really work out as I expected.

GSM/GPRS Embedded Module

I really Like these Modules. I only worked with g18 but looking forward to try g20. Currenlty, Mostly Asterisk GSM devices using these module in PCI cards to give the support of GSM to asterisk. While reading motrolla Developers guide I figure out we can actually play alot more with it.