Harpreet Singh

Little Schemer in Clojure

2011-12-09T15:50:00.001-08:00

Recently I decided to brush up my completely rusted knowledge of Scheme. I was in the process of reviewing it when I came across Clojure and figured why not try to run these in parallel. Two birds with one stone - a JVM language if I needed to fall back into the warmth of Java and Scheme syntax to get away the boredom of Java's verbosity.

With that in mind, I will go through the Little Schemer book and attempt to do the exercises in Clojure.
So here is chapter 1 from the Little Schemer:

Concept	Scheme	Clojure
Define a list	'(1 2 3)	'(1 2 3)
Set list to a variable	(define x '(1 2 3))	(def x '(1 2 3))
Get first item from list	(car x)	(first x); or (define car [x] (first x))
Get second to last items from list	(cdr x)	(rest x); or (define cdr [x] (rest x))
Are two lists equal?	(eq? x y); where (define y '(2 3))	(= x y); where(define y '(2 3))
Add an atom to a list?	(cons 0 x); will return (0 1 2 3))	(cons 0 x); will return (0 1 2 3)
Is this an atom?	(atom? x) - returns #f; where (defun atom? (x) (lambda (x) (and (not (pair? x)) (not (null? x))))))	(atom? x) - returns #false; where (defn atom? [x] (not (coll? x)))

I am using MIT-Scheme & Clojure 1.3 versions.
Setting up Scheme is easy, run MIT-Scheme.app on Mac, it brings up Edwin - the scheme emacs interpreter. Running commands requires C-x C-e on the REPL.

Clojure is easier do a java -cp /PATH/TO/clojure-1.3.0/clojure-1.3.0.jar clojure.main

- Harpreet

Jenkins User Conference Ringside Report

2011-10-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

The last four weeks have been bit crazy for me. I was speaking at Liferay West Coast Symposium, speaking at JavaOne and kicking off the Jenkins User Conference (JUC).

Of these, I was really really looking forward to the JUC kick-off. Namely because I was kicking off the user conference. How often does one get to kick off the first conference of an incredibly exciting piece of technology? When I (and others at CloudBees) talked about this idea in March - we had no idea what the interest level would be. There was uncertainty in the environment. Since then Jenkins has kept marching on - its an animal ;-) (check Kohsuke's slides on Jenkins adoption).

The second reason for the excitement is that I have been associated with Jenkins for quite a while now. Back at Sun - I was the first product manager for Hudson and actually worked on offering it as a product. At that time, I was fairly concerned that in the acquisition to Oracle - this project might be killed so to see the tremendous the project thriving (inspite of Oracle ;-)) was gratifying.

The last reason for the excitement was to see Kohsuke's labor of love get to the next level. You often hear people talking about doing what you love - Kohsuke exemplifies this ideal, so it is great to see something he has been working on from 2004 doing so well.

Ok now to the ringside report...

June:

Hey you know the crazy idea of doing a conference for Jenkins? How about we actually do it? Getting the community to congregate and meet would be really really cool.

July

Lets do it (from CloudBees perspective aka we will have someone from our team spending time and resources setting this up if the community is interested)...
Reach out to the community to see if they are interested.

Ok - the community is interested. (Good - we @CloudBees are not smoking something ;-))

Lets do it (from everyone's perspective)

When do we do this? How about JavaOne? Jenkins users will be there? Sounds good!
Really are we doing this? You know this leaves about 10 weeks to organize this?

Form a basic organization committee with CloudBees members and the community. (formed!!)

August:

Make the idea public. (Couple of community members join the committee). How many do we anticipate? say about 150 people, 1 track and about 10 submissions and perhaps 1-2 sponsors.

Holy cow! there is tremendous interest.

Open for call for papers... (opened!)
We need sponsors to keep this free. (AI - find sponsors)
Where are we holding this? (AI find location)
Okay seems like we need to have two tracks. Harpreet - please proposed an agenda!
Ok. Agenda proposed
Abstracts submitted for CloudBees talks.
I propose two contests (Bring me bugs and bug bounty) for even greater community participation. (Heidi has the unhappy task of making sure these can be done...)
We should do a newsletter for Jenkins and a survey too. (Lisa gets to it)
Alyssa handles all the logistics - finding a place and booking it and food....

September: Everything from here on is hazy now

We have 7 sponsors (yay!)
We have 400+ registrants (yay!)
We have 30 submissions (yay!)

Review the submissions. Too many good ones. (feel terrible rejecting some :-()

I need to do opening keynote introduction (moi?)
Build slides...
Heidi, Lisa, Alyssa & Andre in complete overdrive mode. (Side note:I should ask them to blog for this month)

October

Conference is packed! 250 people show up. Lines start at 8am on sunday.

Commonly asked question: Can we have one in Europe as well?
Congratulations all around!!
Emotional moment for Kohsuke - after all that he has been through this year.

Opening to the keynote done (whew...) some people actually liked what I presented...
Hit all sessions...Network...
Get the videos from the videographers. (in process)
Post slides (in process)
Do a retrospective or a ringside (marking this as done ;-))

Other retrospectives: Sacha, Kohsuke

Round of thanks to

Kohsuke (for Jenkins :-))
CloudBees Marketing: Alyssa, Lisa, Heidi, Harpreet and Andre
Sacha for supporting the crazy idea
Community Members: Andrew Bayer, Michael Hutterman, Tyler for helping with the organization
Community: For making this so successful

Meanwhile my slides are here.

Jenkins User Conference Kick Off

View more presentations from CloudBees.

3 Quick Steps to run Jenkins on uberSVN

2011-09-16T15:29:00.000-07:00

WANdisco recently launched a beta of their uberSVN application. As part of this application, they have launched an uberApp store. The first application available through uberApp is your friendly neighborhood butler - Jenkins.

On Sept 14th, I was a panelist on a training webinar hosted by WANdisco. In the webinar, we showed users how to install and use Jenkins through uberSVN.

uberSVN brings in social experience to the SVN repository. It aims to bring additional development related tools into this experience, centered around the repository. uberSVN is extremely easy to install. Suffice it to say that I had a fully running SVN server with Apache front-end running in about 5 minutes (sweet).

Setting up Jenkins is super easy to do as well. For the visually inclined – look at the picture and skip the rest of the blog. These are really the 3 main steps that you need to do:

Download Jenkins: You go to uberApps within the uberSVN, choose Jenkins, enter your email information and password and hit install. uberSVN downloads Jenkins and starts it. (1 and 2 in the image)
Associate Jenkins to a repository: Creating a repository is as easy as pressing an add button. Once you setup the repository a Jenkins instance is associated with it. The Jenkins SVN plugin is pre-installed. (3 in the image)
Create and run the job: Go to the Jenkins tab and create a new job. The SVN configuration is already done for the particular job. Go back to the repository tab and kick-start the job from there. Of course before you start the job – you will need to go to the Jenkins job configuration screen to tell it how to build your particular job. (4 and 5 in the image)

For folks using SVN, uberSVN provides a very easy and consumable view of the repository and is worth checking out.

- Harpreet

Liferay, Redhat join as sponsors for Jenkins User Conference

2011-08-19T13:45:00.001-07:00

Greetings Jenkins Users!

Things are coming together nicely for the Jenkins User Conference (JUC) that will be

held on October 2, which is the day before the start of the JavaOne conference in San

Francisco. I am excited about the value of this conference for the Jenkins

Community. It will bring together Jenkins users from all over the world and will be a

great forum for all of us to share best practices, tips 'n tricks, and other expertise -

all with Jenkins as the common denominator.

As the conference takes shape, I am extremely excited about two additional

sponsors who have stepped up to join CloudBees in sponsoring JUC. They are:

Liferay and Red Hat.

Liferay is one of the most popular open source Java based portals in the market.

They have a huge developer community and user community. Liferay makes

extensive use of Jenkins as their development platform. Expect to see a session from

them describing their use-case and the lessons they have learned in setting up their

Jenkins environment.

You can read about Liferay's Jenkins environment on one of Brian Chan's blogs.

Liferay runs about 800 backend and 200 Selenium tests on every commit (you need

an account on their system to view it). For Liferay users, here is another blog that

lists how to run Liferay jobs on Jenkins.

As an aside, not many know that Paul Hinz, CMO of Liferay, was at Sun Microsystems

and was a pivotal decision maker in funding Kohsuke's hobby project called Hudson.

Paul was also pivotal in releasing Hudson as a product within the now defunct

GlassFish Portfolio, which I worked on. Considering the legacy Paul has with Hudson

- and by default, Jenkins - we should all feel honored to have Paul and Liferay

support JUC!

The third sponsor that has stepped forward is Red Hat. What can I say about Red

Hat - is there anyone who doesn't know them? Red Hat has been running

Jenkins/Hudson for years and has made their Jenkins QA page publicly visible. A

funny personal note is that when I worked at Sun and was managing marketing for

the Glassfish Portfolio, I used to show this page to potential Hudson clients and

mention that Redhat JBoss uses GlassFish Portfolio :). Sometimes it's a small world

- especially in the development space - competitors become friends and friends

become competitors! Along with CloudBees and Liferay, it feels really great to see

Red Hat endorse JUC, as well.

However, what is most exciting for me is that these two companies are leaders in

their respective markets and are also hard-core users of Jenkins. To have the

established user community endorse JUC - and actively participate in it - is

significant.

Watch the JUC page. Over the next few weeks as we fill in session content and round

out the agenda, there will be lots of new information posted. More sponsors are in

the works and we have some other exciting plans for you!

So if you haven't already, be sure to register for JUC. Thanks to sponsors such as

CloudBees, Liferay, and Red Hat, it is FREE!

See you at JUC!

Harpreet

Jenkins User Conference

2011-08-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

CloudBees Motivation:

At CloudBees, Jenkins is everywhere - from people to our products. For example, Kohsuke is in the virtual office next to me, I talk with Ryan (Jenkins as a Service guy), Stephen (weather icons guy) and Paul (Jenkins on private clouds guy) daily; we have built Nectar (our supported version of Jenkins) and DEV@cloud which takes Jenkins into the cloud. We actively contribute source code and encourage Kohsuke to continue in his endeavor of making Jenkins even better.

Internally, we have talked about doing something more than supporting Kohsuke and contributing code - contributing directly to the Jenkins community. Over the past few months, this taken the shape of trying to do a"Jenkins User Conference" - giving the community an opportunity to congregate, present the latest thinking and share some beers.

Details:

We approached the governance board early this week with a proposal to do the conference. The governance board has given us their approval. We would like active engagement from the community. CloudBees will be sponsoring a part of the conference (and we will actively look for others) - any surpluses from the conference will be given back to the community for future events (or infrastructure!). CloudBees has dedicated a few folks to help make the logistics of the conference happen.

Where & When: San Francisco, Oct 2nd 2011.

The idea is to do this on the Sunday before JavaOne (October 2nd).

Why JavaOne? Given that a number of Java developers and Jenkins users will be flying into San Francisco - it just seemed natural to do it at this time.

What's Next?

Given the extremely tight deadlines (8 weeks) to set this up. We have setup an Organization Committee made up of couple of members from the Jenkins governance board and from CloudBees. Alias is juc-oc-ext @ cloudbees . com.
We invite other community members who want to actively contribute to join the Organization Committee.
One of the first things that we want the OC to do quickly is determine the agenda and format. (My follow up blog will indicate a proposed agenda)
We will be opening for sponsors soon - we are currently working on sponsorship details. Please let me know if you or your organization would be interested in helping to sponsor this event. We would like the event to be free to attendees.
We are immediately opening for a Call for Papers. Talks will likely be 30 minutes in length. We are considering doing a lightening talk session for plugin developers with talks that are 10 minutes in length as well. Email alias for submission: juc-cfp @ cloudbees.com
Naming the conference? Suggestions are welcomed! I propose JUC (pronounced juice) :-)

Last words:

I was the Product Manager for Hudson at Sun Microsystems and pushed to offer Hudson as a product while at Sun. I now handle DEV@cloud and Nectar. I have always felt that I needed to directly contribute to the community and I am very excited to see this taking shape. The Jenkins product and the community ROCK (Kohsuke you do too ;-)).

Please shoot me an email - if you want to contribute or have questions and concerns.

- Harpreet

CloudBees Webinar: Authentication and Authorization in Jenkins on July 27th

2011-07-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

One of the most-often asked questions we get about Jenkins is "How do I put the right authorization mechanisms in place for securing Jenkins?"

There is usually an implied question in there, which is, "Which authentication plugin should I be looking at and how do I set it up?"
Our next webinar focuses on the Authentication and Authorization plugins available to Jenkins users. Jenkins veteran developer Stephen Connolly will...

Look into the top authentication plugins like "Active Directory", "Crowd", and "Unix password".

Dive into authorization plugins like the "Role Strategy" plugin and others.

Showcase Nectar's Role-based Access Control plugin (Nectar is CloudBees' pro version of Jenkins).
This plugin has been the most often requested feature for CloudBees as it provides users a higher level of sophistication that is not available in the open source plugins.

He will wrap up with some use-cases, walk-throughs and Q&A.
This webinar is a followup to Kohsuke's "Securing Jenkins" webinar that we did in March. You can view that webinar here.

Who is Stephen?
Stephen is an awesome guy who happens to be one of the top committers to the Jenkins project and is on the Maven PMC. Here is a link to his bio on CloudBees. I could point you to his LinkedIn bio but then I run the risk that you may try to hire him ;-).

Sign up Information:
When: July 27th, 9 am PT / noon ET

Where

If you are busy, sign up nevertheless as we will send a video of the recording and slides.
- Harpreet

JAX Hackathon: CloudBees dev-to-deploy steps

2011-06-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

1.0. Setup

 
     Create an account on CloudBees
          https://grandcentral.cloudbees.com/account/signup     

     Download Bees SDK
      curl -L cloudbees-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/sdk/cloudbees-sdk-0.7.0-dist.zip > bees_sdk.zip
       unzip bees_sdk.zip
       rm bees_sdk.zip
           cd cloudbees-sdk-0.7.0    
     export BEES_HOME=~/cloudbees-sdk-0.7.0
     export PATH=$PATH:$BEES_HOME

     Setup Bees Config
     Install CloudBees Deployer Plugin
          Jenkins->Configure screen

2. Check out repository

    git clone git@github.com:vivek/samples.git

3. Deploy App to the PaaS

 bees app:deploy  -a yourdomain/jaxdemo target/myapp.war

4. Show Jenkins settings

  - add repository location to "Repositories"
     - Root POM: myapp/pom.xml
     - Goals: clean compile install

3. Show Continuous Deployment Settings

   - Configure CloudBees plugin
     - CloudBees Site: your account
     - Application ID: youraccount/myapp
     - Filename pattern: myapp/**/*.war

4. Make change to the code and commit

5 steps to take local apps & continuously deploy in the cloud

2011-06-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

As you start building your new applications or perhaps maintaining your old, you soon find that automating as much part of the development lifecycle makes for faster and more robust development. We are now moving to the next phase in the “Continuous Integration” lifecycle, in which development is moving to “Continuous Deployment”. In continuous deployment, applications are deployed straight to production systems after they have been successfully built. A successful build would include steps like testing, staging on a production system etc.

This article shows you hot to take a simple application that is built on a local system and move it to the cloud (in this case using DEV@cloud SaaS and RUN@cloud PaaS). The article takes you through the following steps:
1. Local App -> manual build -> manual deploy -> Local Tomcat
2. Pull app from SCM -> build on local Jenkins -> continuously deploy -> Local Tomcat
3. Pull app from SCM -> build on local Jenkins -> continuously deploy -> RUN@cloud PaaS
4. Pull app from SCM -> build on DEV@cloud SaaS -> continuously deploy -> RUN@cloud PaaS

This article will help take your application (wherever it fits in the above lifecycle) and move it to the cloud. Check it out.

Webinar: Climbing the CloudBees "Stairway to heaven" to take apps to the cloud

2011-06-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

I am a Led Zeppelin fan and was wondering if Led Zeppelin were building a cloud platform what would happen. These are some things I could think of:

1. We would'nt have any of the kick-ass songs from them - no "Stairway to heaven" - that would be a tragedy!
2. Would the CloudBees team compose music instead. No disrespect to the CloudBees team (myself included) but I think we would suck making music. Also as software engineers - would we release versions of songs. "Please upgrade to Stairway to Heaven 2.0 - it fixes some issues with the guitair-ing in version 1.0" ;-)
3. Led Zeppelin making software would even be weirder. Would forums be called "Kashmir" - a perpetual stalemate of complaints and responses between users and the Zepplin coding team :-D.
This is turning out to be a slippery slope :-).

However, what if you (software developers) really wanted to be in the heaven when building and deploying web apps in the cloud. Is there a cloud nirvana? I think there is!

CloudBees Platform can be appropriately named as "Stairway to heaven...in the cloud" and you can climb the stairway to cloud nirvana (I am a bit biased - so sue me ;-) )

Join CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey and the Bees as they demonstrate the ease of building and deploying Java apps in the cloud, using mature, rock-solid technology that's already running 4000 applications. The team will do a complete development-deployment walkthrough of building a web app in the cloud using all the instruments at CloudBees' disposal. Sacha acts as the orchestrator as we "Rock and Roll" and climb the stairway of solutions to build an application from scratch and deploy it to the cloud.

(Note: for a more detailed, serious ;-) description and registration, GO HERE :-))
It's much easier than you think to achieve cloud nirvana!

- Harpreet

GigaOm gets something wrong ...

2011-05-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Today Dotcloud acquired Duostack and was covered in a news article by GigaOm.

The article mentions that “It’s a similar move to what we saw in December, when the newly minted Java-based PaaS CloudBees bought the competitive Stax Networks in order to integrate their technologies into the best-possible Java platform. That move was inspired in large part by Red Hat buying PaaS startup Makara a few weeks earlier and instantly becoming the biggest player in public Java PaaS.”

GigaOm gets some things right and some wrong. CloudBees did acquire Stax Networks however it was not a reactive move. Makara news hit Nov 30th while we were in the final stages of completing our acquisition of Stax Networks. Infact, we were having engineering meetings to discuss our next product steps post-acquisition when the news hit.

I would like to take credit for the fact that “CloudBees is awesomely nimble” and have been releasing great software ever so often (read the previous blog by Sacha) – however we are not so super-awesomely J nimble that we saw the “Makara” news, turned around and bought another company in the next week as a reaction to market changes. CloudBees does not work by knee-jerk reactions to build it's kick-ass PaaS.

Thought I would take the opportunity to set the record right.

- Harpreet

Squeeze more juice out of Jenkins

2011-05-19T13:51:00.001-07:00

Following up on the release of first version of Nectar in October of last year, CloudBees has released the next version of Nectar (version 11.04). This release includes features targeted towards large deployments, managing users/roles.

In addition to fixes to the core, we have released four premium plugins:

Folders: Organize large number of jobs into hierarchical folders, much like how you organize files in directories in your file system.

Role-based Access Control: Define roles, groups and tie them into your underlying authentication mechanisms. Define white-list and black lists for projects. Folders plus RBAC allow you to define roles at jobs level – bringing an unprecedented flexibility for managing a large number of jobs.

You can see a detailed video here.

Throttle Builds: Throttle build executions on virtual machines that share the same host. Useful if you have executors that share same physical resources underneath. This feature is useful alongwith the “VMWare vCenter auto-scaling” plugin available since Nectar 10.10

Wiki-syntax for decriptions: Lets users write project descriptions in wiki-syntax instead of raw-html. This prevents users from mounting XSS attacks.

You can find more information about Nectar here.

Learn more in upcoming webinar:

Stephen Connolly, a core-Jenkins contributor and a CloudBees architect will be giving a webinar on 5/25 talking about all Nectar features.

You can register for the webinar here.

Finally, we are presenting a webinar called “Stairway to Heaven” that describes how the CloudBees platform can take you to the cloud and beyond on 5/18.

- Harpreet

Ayahuasca

2006-03-02T23:32:00.000-08:00

Wow!!
Interdimensional journeys, fighting your Gremlins! Where do I sign up?

Guilty goes free - yet again.

2006-02-25T02:45:00.000-08:00

It makes my blood boil reading news like these. Especially 4 days after I marked my sister's 10th death anniversary - a drunk driver killed her.

Sanjeev Nanda (21 years) grandson of Admiral SL Nanda (now an arms dealer), killed 7 people including 2 cops when driving drunk in New Delhi, India. Our fellow was on vacation from a management school in Philadelphia and was test driving his new BMW totally drunk. Apparently not drunk enough, because he had the wits to try to destroy material evidence (he hosed down the car to remove the blood marks).

Well Sanjeev has just walked free today (Feb 25th, 2006).

Varsha Bhosale from rediff has captured what I wanted to write in an much earlier article. Hers was written in 1999 much before the court result. I guess she knew that this would happen. Varsha asked a question whether Sanjeev would have driven drunk in the USA. We all know the answer to that - he would not have.

Rot in hell Sanjeev!

Feb 10th 2006 - 10 years

2006-02-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

February 10th 1996 9:30 PM IST, a group of friends get into a car to celebrate a win at an inter-collegiate competition and head out to Lonavala (a hill station) from Pune(near Bombay) in India.

By 2:30 am, four of them have died in a car accident, over-run by a drunk truck driver. One (my sister) dies 10 days later.

The Bombay-Pune road has been notorious. It is called National Highway 4 (NH4). From 1996-2000, the Indian Government estimated that an average of over 4100 accidents per year happened on this 170km stretch of the highway, of which 3300 were headon. My sister's accident was one of these. The highway has some switchbacks, 2 lanes turning to 1 and 1 lane turning to two. This is hard to negotiate during the daylight hours. It is deadly when a drunk driver is negotiating it in the night.

The police officer dealing with this case told us that he got tired of complaining to the road officials that this crazy mess of switchbacks should be done away with. He dealt with almost 1-3 accidents a week.

The problem is compounded as this highway is used to transport vegetables to the Bombay markets. The vegetables have to reach Bombay by 5 am or so in the morning. The owners give the truck drivers a bottle of hooch and tell them to make the journey in 3 1/2 hours. The normal time was about 4 1/2 hours from Pune to Bombay.

So there we have it, 5 kids killed due to some vegetables and stupid switchbacks.

The accident made it to newspapers for a couple of days.

I tried looking up for the articles on the web yesterday - nothing. Life moves on, just another accident on another highway and another set of people who are dead. Let's all move on.

Though, life does not move on for the family. It is in a strange sort of way - paused. It is like one person in the family stopped growing, forever paused in memory, forever young.

The brain works around all painful memories. For me, it has reworked itself such that I have a hard time filling in the details that I knew, even the names are very hard to come by. I have to struggle to get their names, I can get the faces but not the their names. Suddenly they pop up out of the blue, just like that. It is surreal.

So 10 years after their deaths, remembering :

Pratik Dalal,
Chandrasekhar,
Ashish and
Amrita Khatri.

And posting Amrita's picture.

Wondering what they would be doing today, if they were not snatched away at the ages of 18.

Sending warm thoughts their way and to their families.

Obituary of the Marathon Gremlin

2005-10-13T22:32:00.000-07:00

With a heavy heart we would like to announce the demise of Harry's Marathon Gremlin. It took its last breath at 2:40 PM October 9th, 2005 in Chicago. The death was rather sudden, it was alive and kicking till about 2:39 PM. Post mortem shows that it died of a heart attack due to being kicked violently in its gut. It seemed it had a premonition of its death especially in the last few hours. Though, we must say, it did live its life to the fullest in the last couple of days.

About 3 weeks before it died, it made a new friend. The friend was called "Tendonitis". Tendonitis lived between inner side of Harry's left foot and ankle and it gained tremendous strength due to the fact that Harry seemed to have changed shoes to get rid of Gremlin's best friend the ITB. Harry seemed to have no idea of how to deal with Tendonitis. Knowing this, made the gremlin much stronger. Harry had to take 3 weeks off his training. Two doctors independently gave the Gremlin a shot in the arm when the told him to try running - if Tendonitis "pops", they will fix it by surgery.

Harry, thus arrived as an underdog in Chicago. He seemed intent on garnering sympathy support and encouragement by repeatedly showing a hideous ankle brace to people. Harry's family, coaches and mentor did seem to have worried looks on their faces. If we were betting people, we would never have bet on the Gremlin's demise. Ah...but the vagaries of nature.

The day of the marathon arrived. Cold, but not too cold. Asha tent was a boon for Harry - if we had paid careful attention, we may have detected that the Gremlin was showing slight discomfort... but alas we did not do so.
Coach Rajeev Patel (aka the talker) gave a last minute pep talk. We know Harry did not remember anything of the talk except he knew that it was supposed to be motivating and he got motivated. His motivation took an upward swing when he reached the start area and he saw the sea of people (44 thousand people!!) - he seemed to forget that he lost track of his mentor, who he was depending to run with. We were quite worried for the Gremlin and alerted Tendonitis about this.

Harry shot off from the start area and was going strong, he detected his mentor and started tracking her. But Tendonitis came to the rescue at mile 1.5 ~ 2. The plan seemed to be that Tendonitis would come in and the Gremlin would take over. Though Harry seemed to be made of tougher mettle, he kept going ... mile 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. He was doing his best times ever!! He missed seeing his family at mile 7.5 who seemed to be travelling in Chicago trains to get to various mile markers along the way. Even missing his family did not stop him. The Gremlin was clearly distressed and he sent an SOS to Tendonitis. And boy did Tendonitis come in like a knight in shining armour. Boom by mile 10, Harry was clearly distressed, everyone seemed to be overtaking him and the Gremlin fought back.

Mile 13 was clearly difficult, till Harry got a phone call from his family saying that they are at mile 17 with one of his best friends (Sudeepto who came in from Detroit). He picked up, though Tendonitis just totally stopped him on mile 16 - he could not walk, he got the ankle brace out and now he could not stand. Brace back on, he made it to mile 17. Aaahhhh family and that meant muffin. This is where we believe the Gremlin was in clear danger and we were worried for its survival. (We would have spent more time with it, if we knew this was the last time we would see it).

The Tendonitis kept fighting on. He knew that if it had to save the Marathon Gremlin, he was the Gremlins big hope. Mile 17, 18, 19 were good for Tendonitis, but the cell phone brought in the Gremlin's death knell. Harry's family called him up and showed up at mile 21. His wife walked with Harry as Harry attempted to run. Gremlin and Tendonitis could not call up on their other friends (typically nauseau and dizziness) as Harry's wife gave him stuff to eat on the run.
The Gremlin knew its end was near when Harry saw his parents and friend at mile 24. All of them walked with him. Knowing that his wife and mom were walking behind him, Harry took off with renewed vigor. Though Tendonitis gave a new meaning to taking off - there were people over taking him with brisk walking.

Finally @ 2:40, 6 hours and 40 minutes after the start, Harry finished the marathon. Gremlin breathed its last, completely broken and shattered. A good thing was it did not live to see the medal around Harry's neck.

Harry's behaviour has been shocking ever since. He was at the Asha party that night and did not even spend a few days in mourning. All we can say that our friend the Marathon Gremlin is in a much better place.

Where does Harry go from here? We do not know, he has been toying with doing a couple more marathons, now that the Marathon Gremlin is dead, he should not have a problem with that. He is even toying with idea of triathlons. What worries us that he no longer seems to be worried of Gremlins. Seems like we Gremlins now have our own Gremlin.

- Report prepared in memory of the Marathon Gremlin by the Association of Gremlins

PS: Harry would like to thank the following people: Ramya - the teacher, Rajeev Patel - the talker, Rajeev Char - the Iron Man, Tony Fong - the Mr. Lee, Deepak, Arun, Mala, Swati, Aruna the Captain, Anil Rao, Anu, Pavan, Ram Babu for their constant words of encouragement week after week, run after run. Harry would also like to thank everyone who showed up in the Chicago Marathon namely Shekhar, Charu, Lily, Selvi, Kalyan, Uma, Sreeni, Dhananjay and lots other who we are missing naming here due to short memory :-). Harry would also like to thank people who show up run after run waving and shouting words of encouragement, people like Niyati, Neeraj, Nandini, Deepa, Purnima Jandi and lots other again missed out due to short memory. Harry would like to thank Sudeepto, Sebonti who came in from Detroit to cheer him. Harry really loved it when his parents flew around the world from Kuala Lumpur to cheer him and support him!! Harry wants to thank Liza and Amit for being one of the first few people to believe in him :-). Harry would love to thank his wife - Natasha without whose support along the way through the run and through out the training program, this would not be certainly possible.
Harry also wants to put in the last signing off words "Asha Rocks"

2005-08-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome

Marathon Training - Fisticuffs with my Gremlin

2005-08-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

Ever since I have started training for my marathon, people have asked me to write about my training experience. A multitude of reasons have held me back. Time is at a premium and I rarely get time to do anything else apart from running. The second reason is my "Gremlin". If you have'nt heard of a Gremlin before, everybody has one and I introduce you to mine today.

When I started my training - I hated running. Yes, I have said it - I hated running. One of the reasons I am running the marathon is to honour the memory of my sister. The other is that I itched to fight my Gremlin. I expected my training to be nothing short of a massive struggle. I hated running, my knees hurt when I walked for more than a mile. I could not get up in the morning. There were more than a couple of reasons not to do it.
I viewed myself as a gladiator with a small knife being circled by a huge beast with no chance of survival. Actually that sounds too grand. I viewed myself as someone being fed to the lions in the Roman arena. I knew that I had it in me to fight the marathon beast for some distance but would eventually would be devoured. My estimate was that I could not go over 10 kms.

Couple of years ago, I read a book called "Taming your Gremlin" by Rick Carson. It talked about a nasty creature that sits on our shoulder, whispering to us in a sinister voice that we are going to fail, that we can never succeed, that we are weak. Gremlins are funny creatures, they come up when you least expect them. They may come in negative thoughts or they may decide that they need to be stronger than just thoughts and come to you as injuries, flu or just tiredness. They are very adaptable creatures - you know!

I have found that my gremlin has become all powerful, dictating everything that I do. Its got a life of its own, it seems like it is a 100 ton monster, beating me down. It is, I decided, time that I put up a fight .

Training for a marathon gives plenty of oppurtunity for your gremlin to show up: "Why are you running?", "Your feet hurt!", "Why getup at 6am on a weekend, when you never got up for anything else?", "Why are you running even though you are not feeling well", "You are not feeling well", "Here, you loser, take a stomach virus". These thoughts almost come up everyday.
The pain is there most times. There are days that I think that quitting is the smartest thing to do.

Thats what makes training fun, it is as much mental as it is physical. There are punches and then there are counter punches. The boxing match continues. Lately I have been landing some, last week I ran my first half marathon in San Francisco and this week I ran a 15 miler. It is not that the fight is over, but it does seem to be getting intense as my weekly runs are becoming longer. Training has become a journey within self and without. I have learnt that I have oodles more determination than I gave myself credit for. I have learnt that though my body may complain, it still will get up and do what I ask it to. I have learnt that though I can fight, it still is great to have support of family and friends. I have learnt that there is my ego that I need to be aware of and ignore. This fight is living upto what it had promised me. It is a great journey to know myself, physically, mentally and spiritually.

After the 13 miles run, the marathon beast has been reduced to half. David feels taller in front of Goliath :-) . The momentum of the fight seems to be shifting towards my favour. With momentum shifting, I feel, it is time to look inside and introspect. It is time to restart writing my blog. Time to document words of encouragement to self to keep going through the final weeks of training.

I recently read a comment that is attributed to Lance Armstrong: " It may pain for a day, a week, a month or a year. But if I quit it lasts forever. "

There may be a day, that I will quit. But today is not one of them.

Hoping to post many more...