I know it is rather late to be wishing Onam, considering that the day just has another few hours left in it, but then, I thought better late than never so here it is: A very happy Onam festival to all the Mallu friends, faculty and seniors of mine at NCST and elsewhere. Whether NCST ever will get to celebrating Republic Day and Independence day with the tricolor flying on the campus is something that I don’t know, but Onam certainly is a colorful event on the campus. Last year around, Messrs Rahul Upakare, Hari, Sreekanth and many others had gotten together to create a magnificient masterpiece of Rangoli. I wonder what they did this year. Would anybody clue me in?

Today was also a festival called Upakarma, for Brahmins, especially those hailing from South India and belonging to the sect that follows the Rig Veda. Today was the day to change the sacred thread and while I’m not very religious, this is one occasion in the year that I do follow the rituals. I had all the required materials, including my new sacred thread ready and had even told my roommate to wake me extra early, but apparently the wake up call was not required. I received a spate of messages from the cluster room at NPSF, alerting that the nodes of the cluster had gone down. Let me elaborate. The server room at NPSF which currently houses two 16 node clusters, is equipped with a special error monitoring device, the software for which has been developed mostly in-house. Any variance is the presribed values of voltage, temperature or failure of services or nodes will instally trigger the alarm mechanism which even activates the SMS server, which then proceeds to inundate all the people on its recipient’s list with messages about the failure and its details. So when I woke up, I saw something like 16 messages! I had seen a couple of messages now and then and that too, most of the time followed by All-Ok messages, but this was the first time it happened on such a scale. I called my boss and seniors but none of them seemed to be accessible. I rushed to the campus on my bicycle, all the while working the phone. My boss responded soon and said that he would look into it. By the time I reached the campus, my boss had already diagnosed that the SMS deluge had been brought on by a software glitch. The monitoring software had used up all of the available disk space and hence had gone crazy! And here I was, at the campus at an unearthly hour of the morning (6 AM is pretty unearthy according to me!!) with my hopes of emerging as an unlikely hero totally dashed!!!!

Anyway, I was happy that there was no serious problem and went back home, took a shower, performed my pooja and came back to work, embellished with the traditional religious war-paint called Chandan! We Madhva Brahmins wear what is known as a ‘mudra’, the insignia of the conch and the Chakra, on the sides of the forehead. While many asked me whether there was a special occasion or a festival behind it, some were just gawking and the canteen supervisor even went to the extent of asking whether I was suffering from a head ache and had applied some ointment!!!! Sheesh!!!!

Today, three new members joined our team and after the boss briefed them, they were given a tour of the cluster room. It was later decided that they required a crash course in Linux, including the basics of the shell environment. I gave them one and left them to practice. It seemed like I had gone back to the teaching mode and it brought back memories of the time I was a lab instructor at Surana College, Bangalore, teaching C and Datastructures to the BCA and BSc students. Back then, I used to think that I was somekind of a hot-shot programmer and all that, but NCST really put things in perspective for me. NCST and the people associated with it have taught me a lot and I’m still learning.