India Vs Australia

Right... the time is just perfect. Its a Friday evening and I've been stuck into analyzing a core dump for the last few hours. What better time could I get for writing a blog!!

India take on Australia in what would be the most interesting crciketing battle in the last few months. Remember India did exceedingly well in their last trip Down Under. Will the Aussies hit back with a vengeance? Or will the famed Indian middle-order rise to the occasion and deliver a splendid performance? Only time will tell...

For starters, all the talk about India giving a red-carpet welcome to the Australians is certainly not good. Yes, the Aussies would certainly benefit from practicing on Indian pitches and Indian bowlers. But a true match is when both the sides are equally competent on a certain type pitch. So this practice to the Aussies will only make the actual contests interesting.

The other worrisome part is the media going hell-for-leather against the likes Ganguly, Dravid, Kumble and sometimes even Tendulkar. Agreed that all of them are well past their prime, but the real question is are there replacements with enough capabilities? The selectors could certainly do with a better strategy. For example, they could have each of these being made to sit out of a match so that some other youngster gets a chance. That should keep everyone happy (yeah.. provided all of these seniors are the same kind of form).

Keeping Ganguly out of the Irani Trophy was pretty sad. Right since the outset, I've had a soft corner for Sourav. He just had that attitude where one felt he'll back you through out. I really really hope that the selectors do select him in the 14 for the Tests against Australia. Its fine if he cant make it to the playing 11. He could play the 2nd test when some other senior batsman sits out. If he's not selected, I would feel bad :(.

I'll write more about this series as and when I find time...

The "VMware" experience

I've been wanting to write about my time at VMware for quite sometime now. I thought I should write when I have plenty of time so that I could do justice to it. But that just never happens. So I decided to write now ... when a build (compiling and linking) is going on.

There have been very few instances so far when hype and huge expectations have been matched by the end product. The two most recent ones were the Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa and the IPL. But there has also been one more such instance, one from a completely different league ... VMware!!

Learning about and yearning for system software has been something I've done for years. Right since the first time I was introduced to it (Big Big thanks to a visiting professor in my undergrad college who taught us Microprocessor Based Systems), I've been in awe of it and have wanted to know more and more about it. I have to say that working at VMware has not just made me learn much much more, but has left me craving for more. To say that working in VMware has been an outstanding experience would be a gross understatement.

The idea behind the formation of VMware was pretty simple. I like to put it this way: "Why would you have just a sigle operating system running on a computer at any given point in time? If I can have Firefox and Internet explorer running simultaneously on a computer, why can't I have both WindowsXP and Linux?" ... {I hope I am not totally wrong here. It would be really embarassing to praise the company you work for only to find out that your basic understanding about its fundamentals is totally incorrect ;) }. To achieve the above, VMware introduces the layer of virtualization between the actual hardware and running operating system/s. This layer allows running multiple operating systems (called "Guest Operating Systems") to run simultaneously on the same hardware.

So as one can make out, VMware's work is very close to the hardware on one side and the operating system on the other. Thats precisely the reason some of the biggest geeks from around the world found this idea to be awesome and have been working hard on it. It feels special to be in the company of some of them.

Quite a few people here eat, sleep and breathe technology. Discussions about Operating systems, drivers, processors, instruction sets, etc. are very very commonplace. The two most commonly heard words are "VM" and "Guest OS". In a span of just about a decade, its amazing what VMware has achieved. From being a company with an outstanding idea to being the 4th largest software company in the world, VMware has had a fine run for the last 10 years.

I still remember the first time I saw a "virtual machine". It was simply amazing. The fact that you could see an OS inside a small window, just like you see any other application was really really special. I did harbour thoughts of being in VMware then. Today its a reality and I feel proud of it.

I hope VMware keeps doing just as good as it has been doing (not lately... but over the last 10 years) and scales new heights. A few millimeters from that height might be because of me ;)