The show was yesterday evening – Ice Age 3 – 3D at PVR Ambience Mall on NH8. I booked the tix on Wednesday for this show and got relaxed. Its always very comfortable to book tix on the net and reach the theatre seats directly from the parking lot.

So I reach the theatre 10n minutes before the showtime and hunt for that kiosk machine which swipes my card to print my booked tickets. there were six tickets and to be printed. I reported that I cannot print tickets here, please use the counter. WHAT! I just managed to walked pass that counter crowd and now its telling me to go back there! Ok ok.. not the first time. I go to the Gold members counter and ask for tix. They say, since its not Gol tix, get back in line of other counters! Dude! show starts in 4 mins, and I have to get in the line!!!? Ans :- I can’t help you in this. Nightmare is started already! I wait for the line to crawl and watch my clock tick every second! Damm! Firstly they are selling 3D tix at 250 each! is already a huge premium and now this queue!

By the time I reach the counter, Im already aware that most of the people are debating with the counter guy for why the had to stand in the queue though they did an advance booking. Ok, so im not the only one. So now I get the 6 tickets and rush for the entrance as its already T-1 minute left!

Oh boy! The counter is a No-Entry. The counter guy says the show will start after 15 mins. And there are like a hundred people standing outside just to enter PVR lobby. such a crowd was only for the spidey flicks I remember. But not like this! after another 10 mins they allow entry to the lobby and now, even a dozen of people are expressing anger to any one with a PVR batch! Same point. How come is this a online booking or a convenience charge that you tag along to your tickets when people are to wait standing for 10 minutes outside and another 15 mins in the small lobby! Showtime was 1805 while it was 1820 when entry to the theatre started. It takes another 10 mins before you reach your seats though.

Anyway, now everyone is seated and pain in a let-go mode just as we see the first 3D. Disaster! They even screwed up here! The whole movie has started and its still blurred with the polarised glasses! This is nuts! Its not like I enjoyed my last flick in this same 3D theatre but now I’m pretty sure I WILL NOT WATCH ANY OTHER 3D MOVIE AT PVR – EVER!. Half an hour is gone and eyes are painting. You can’t make sense without the polarised glasses and with then you can’t understand much. this was the peak of my chaos theory.
After 15 mins the projector staff probably realized a projection blunder so they do their first adjustments on a running movie. No change after they try aligning 3 times. At about 30mins on the movie the screen is blacked and the hall light glow. Everyone wondering how come its a intermission already! It wasn’t. The alignment exercise is tried again but off-screen and now, finally, I can see 3D. Its looks lot better and now its definitely 3D.

I’m a regular to PVR theatres. I always enjoy the movie, the cleanliness, the generous staff. When bookmyshow started and with PVR tickets, I use that site. But 2 months and PVR come out of that alliance . Their site those days was completely hopeless. Very complicated for me. I tried movies on other theatres then and finally when the latest version of their site came, I was back being a regular. They always charged a convenience charge to tickets.

So makes me I wonder. Probably the crowd was far too much for them to be prepared for -  a weekend 3D flick. Probably a primary staff member was MIA – these were answers given by a staff members to the angry crowd. Probably this hall has a history with chaos – no clue. Anyway, movie did go fine after that and there were no more troubles.

PVR is known to learn from their mistakes and therefore they should make sure they have better planning and handling in place.

Just few minutes back I finished resizing an LVM partition. The history if you must read starts like this, I installed Fedora 9 using default settings (i was crazy that day!). Then I liked what I saw as this was my first personal Fedora install. Then fedora said to update, so i did. Then I said, I wanted to install VirtualBox for few other OSs. Getting virtualBox to run is another story. Anyway, after enjoying openSUSE for 2 days, I wanted to install it in real partition. Now was the question, where? I had no space!

Every site around said you can easily resize  and get space. My fedora was taking under 10G on a 100G partition. I installed GParted and tried. It reported /dev/sda3 as a unknown type and so won’t resize it. Damm! Then after digging I realize that Fedora installed LVM2 on my partition. I never know what was that!  Then some other site confidently said, Gparted was very good and even could handle LVM partitions. So I download ISO and burned to a bootable CD. It started and reported the same error. My target partition was still unknown! Now, I had given up of any easy way out.

So I start to learn the LVM funda. Redhat had docs and lots of links about resizing LVMs. Everyone said, LVM was made to be easy. It was made to handle changs without even reboot! Sounded great. Then I came to Mr. resize2fs. This guy said he was expert in rewsizing many partitions including ext3. He also said, he could resize on the fly which is called on-line resize. Any kernel past 2.6 can handle on-line resize. So I tried. And tried. and failed! resize2fs kept reporting that “/dev/sda3″ is in use therefore it should try on-line resize. Then the next line said, on-line resize from NNN to NNN not supported! I went crazy for those 15 mins hunting why did it fail! Anyway, everything love to fail. Finally, I reach a good blog which told the process in slow motion. I understood more about LVM and what do each of the steps to in a LVM resize job.

1. LVM is simple a seperate partition table system that linux internally supports. That is also why it allows chaning LVM without reboot.
2. LVM creates a main single partition in the disk with a filesystem flag as lvm or lvm2. These are no filesystems so they are only parsed by LVM itself. We know fat32, ntfs,ext,ext2,ext3 etc are actual filesystems while lvm is a wrapper file system.
3. LVM resides on a real disk partition and could contain multiple Volume Groups.
4. Volume Group itself could contain Volumes.
5. Volumes are the ones which are made up of a readable filesystem such as ext3.
6. LVM at boot time will scan for lvm partitions on the disk and later parse everything inside to create new devices such as /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00. These will then be mounted just like any normal partition.
7. So now we know its not very easy to resize a basic disk parition which itself holds a Volume Group and which then holds multiple Volume which are real filesystems.

Now you know little bit about LVM itself. Everything about LVM is here. My explanation will have minor bugs but the LVM system. As I understood and explained here is more or less correct. How did I resize is now been shown in the following steps.

1. Boot using the Fedora 9 ISO cd what was used for installing, choose resume mode
2. Do not mount any filesystems when prompted by setup, and jump directory to the prompt.
3. start vlm
4. here, do a vgscan do verify that vlm can read all your volumes.
5. Now to work on volumes you need to activate that volume. This is NOT the same as mounting. Activation will call LVM core to parse lvm partitions and create a virtual devices. These devices themselves won’t be mounted but made available to any utility who needs them in an exclusive mode. To activate, call

   vgchange -a y my_volume_group

6. Now the volume device will be ready to resize2fs.
7. some explaination: resize2fs kept reporting last time when I ran it within the session of my target fedora that the disk was in use therefore it will do a on-line resize. Therefore, I knew I have to give him the disk when nobody will be using it. The hurdle is that the disk itself is a virtual lvm volume. Therefore I had to struggle more on understanding how to activate a volume without mounting any filesystem and that too in a rescue mode.
8. Now we run resize2fs –physicalvolumesize NNG /dev/VolGroup00/Logvol01
9. Amazingly it ran without any complain.
10. explanation: Resize is a two stage process. Its the same even in the LVM context. You can’t just go to and resize the partition. The data units will also have to placed within the new boundries before the resize is done. Otherwise, you will simple have many  bad files reported from your disk check utility. therefore In windows, filesystems are defragmented before being shrunk. Defragmentation moves all the chunks of the file to the start of the disk and the tail of the partition becomes clean. Now after resize, no data is lost. In linux ext2/3 context, as far as I know, linux keeps its file chunks spread all over the available space. This trick saves the requirements of frequent defragmentations requests from the disk. Since all chunks in a file are contigous a file itself gives good read/write performance. But files themselves are never contiguous  and have large chunks of free space when written on disk. This property allows the filesystem space on the tail of every file which may expand. At the last point when no further expansion is possible the chunk is broken and continued some place else. In percentage terms the fragmentation of ext2 file system is under 5% after a very long use compared to ntfs or fat file system.
11. So resize2fs moves all the chunks within the limits of the suggested boundry but unlike windows, does not defragment everything.
12. Once, resize2fs is done, call lvresize to change the volume itself. It will report that data might get lost. Since we alreadt called resize2fs, it has already done the shifting job to prevent a data loss.
13. Then you need to resize the entire volume group using vgresize.
14. In my case, it failed cause there was already a volume at the end of the group. Since it was swap space, I simply vlremove it and went on.
15. The next step is to resize the physical volume using pvmove.
16. Finally, to use fdisk and delete old parition, create a new one with smaller size and save changes. Make sure the system id is 8E for lvm flag.
    
17. I did a reboot and saw my freespace.
    

Phew!

Amazing morning it was. My bro calls at 630am to connect to Doordarshan 1, our National Television channel for a live broadcast of India’s first moon mission Chandrayaan I from the Sriharikota, INDIA . After USA , Russia, Japan, China and now its the turn of India! We are reaching there with our own big bang. The technology used for the mission is completely indigenous. I have always known the PSLV lauch vehicle used in the project. It was first launched in 1993 with a payload. Later it also started servicing other countries with their payloads. The Chandrayaan project asked much more perfection and as was delivered.  We will all be excited and watching the next 15 days of our journey to the moon. Planned for a month orbit aound the moon. Equipped with hitech infra, X-Ray and topography sensors to map the entire of the moon (i have no clue of whatever that is :p).  Also to be noted, PSLV also carries 6 payloads from NASA and ESA and this time for free. And even better, a Moon Impact Probe will carry another set of sensors along with our National Flag. We will become the fourth country after USA, Russia and Japan to place a flag on the Moon. Check out the the links and keep reading on. Congratulations India!

November 18, 2008: Chandrayan 1 had sent the Moon Impact Probe a few days back and now is busy orbiting the scanning the moon terrian 24 hours of the earth day. As per the today’s morning news, the second unmanned moon mission, Chandrayaan 2 has been approved by the Government just yesterday. So we now know, the fun will grow lot more.! There is very little official ISRO matter about the next moon rover mission at this point.

14 Jan, 2008: This is all so very new to my eyes. The dense cloud cover been here for like years i’d say. Darkness that spans like eternity. And a strong belief that it stay that way for a longer time. And in one of those days, you see a ray of bright light escaping the clouds. Hold The Horses. I’ve been there already. So was not falling for the jokes any more. And then its seen, the winds taking the clouds away so very softly. Dude! Light does not come by accident! This is sure the sunlight breaking the day. The sun itself has yet to be seen. That I can only hope in the days to come.

31 Jan, 2008: We have a clear sky and the shining sun. The horizon seems like has grown so big that it may take a very long time even if any darkness plans to return. At mid-day height, the plans for a great day have started. I can’t believe it took years in the waiting for this bright day. My shadow has become an important part of me. And it will stay this way for eternity. Its not just a hope. Its beautiful. Two weeks and i’ll find myself celebrating with me and my shadow.

The track by Puddle of Mudd from the album Come Clean (2001). The lyrics of this track are somewhat neat.

The music videos now getting hosted on youtube from the music companies themselves. The quality ain’t lovely but with the easy access on a regular bandwidth connections, the convinience factor plays a important role. Liking Park and a few others have a special official page hosted for all its past the forthcoming albums. Not sure which money changes which hands but it better be BIG(oogle as,). The bands which bycott exclusive music contracts with companies find this platform a better alternative. Recently was suggested that youtube is working on better quality video playback. It is taking time for various reaons. Primarily, mainting some kind of bandwidth balance. Secondly, amateur videos themselves are in not best of quality for a bigger screen and frame rate. My cam gives 15fps of a VGA resolution or eats space with a 640×480@30fps mode. A bigger resolution are a little harder to embed in blogs due to their size. But again, im sure they would keep the classic player intact as well. The nice thing is that a higher resolution player does not effect the upload time. We anyway have to upload in our raw formats now and even then.

I still dislike them. They are the best way to spoil one’s habits. Thought they were no more than suicidle in nature. All the power thou have is misused with no stopping you. Here or there, you may go every way but satisfaction is what thou shall never find. The heat within should be left untouched. Farther you do without rest is what defined them. MOTOR BIKES i meant. So this is what i say about bikes and their riders. Just a while back had a close encounter with one of them in a showroom. I’m no guru in bikes with no knowledge even how to ride one of them. Having said all that, that machine still was Japanese Engineering. It was Honda Unicorn. No its not against my religion to think otherwise. I wear a Casio Edifice. I click with Casio Exilim EX-P505. I ride on Kinetic Honda model 1988. And over that わたしは すこし　にごんごが　わかります　ぢす。 I am learning Japanese and know little too. So well, its allowed to have a crush on another of the Japanese artworks. 60kmpl is not the best since my scooter also give 40 though it may be near 2 decades old (really). So I am now contemplating over the new found affair. I need a motive to get convicted.

After a bit long time the newest of their unique clay based ads were seen on indian television. i liked all they had released up till now. They always have a good music and neat voice overs. I’m also the consumer of that very product incidentally. No problems in their batteries since I installed them for my invertor near 3 years back. I had taken their maintenance free 2 batteries. Nobody on airtime has done clay advertisements as far i remember. The sequence also has been longer then 20 seconds at times.

He will serve the seas for a hundred years and the black pearl went missing again! Wola! Pirates3 – End of the world, Shrek The Third and Oceans 13. Never before do I remember watching the movie on the first day. And this time were two! Shrek3 did not get the first day but just the first week! Extremely fantastic very each of the movies. Johnny Deep was not so much of active this time but still had his style. Long time no see Al Pachino! The guess of who’d be the thirteenth went all wrong. No ladies this time to rob another casino. Justin was really a surprise! Rest we still had our Antonio accent and this time with a ‘D’ee logo. PVR rose its rates and so followed every one else. But look at the crowd!!! Spidey (3) lost big time baby!