Communist truck

It is leaning to the left!

Fake Steve's speech

I never have enough patience to watch any youtube video longer than a couple of minutes. Hence I was very surprised when I watched all 50 minutes of this video and felt like I could watch some more. Dan Lyons is indeed a very nice speaker. If you have been a regular with The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (which means you like the kind of satire and humour he uses), you will enjoy this too. Agreed, it is more than 2 years old, but it is still very good.

Holding a contest in the age of digital photos

We were holding a photography competition in my office. While forming the rules for the contest we realized how difficult digital photography has made it to hold such a contest. It was so much simpler in the (good?) old days of film.

First of all, ownership/copyright. In the old days, it was easy to say who the owner of a photo was. Whoever has the negative! It was as simple as that. With digital photos, anyone who has a copy of the image has as much control over it as anyone else.

Second, about digitally enhanced photos. We made a rule that digitally enhanced photos are not to be submitted. However, we knew clearly that there is no way to detect it in a fool proof way. It is now close to impossible to spot simple enhancements (color/brightness/corrections) to photos. Also, should cropping be allowed? Thinking about this from another angle, most digital cameras can do some amount of processing of the image based on the specialized photo settings used. Ideally that too should be disallowed! Also, some cameras allow you to edit the photo after it has been taken. So is it okay if the photo is edited in the camera rather than photoshopped/gimped on a computer? Where do you draw the line?

Next, we were trying to create various categories. One of the thoughts was to have categories based on camera types. This quickly ran into trouble. Now-a-days it is becoming difficult to correctly classify SLRs and point and shoots. Also, some cell phone cameras already have 12MP cameras, whereas my point-and-shoot is just 4MP. Technically, any cell phone camera (for that matter any point-and-shoot camera without a viewfinder) is an SLR! We would then have to classify cameras based on their cost! But wait, cost in India or abroad? Which year?

We just decided not to worry about any of this and have the contest in free format, just for fun.

"Terrorists" in our daily life

I have not written in quite some time... must be writer's block or something. So I thought I'll just dump something here, though it isn't as coherent as I wish it was.

If you do the mistake of watching/reading any media, you would have realized by now that pretty much everything around us can harm or even kill you. Here I am not referring to things like bombs, guns, etc. Those are so 90's-ish. These days the fad is writing about things that you always thought were benign and telling you why those are the new criminal scum that you should be highly afraid of. "Car AC can kill you", "Chocolate can harm your sleep patterns", "Pesticides in fruits could eat your first born", "Antibiotics could make you grow 10 heads" and so on. Every other day, you learn that one more thing you use regularly in your life could be the worst thing to ever happen to you.

No doubt, there is truth, in whatever quantity, in each of these reports. However, many reports project just one side of the coin, while totally ignoring the other side. I feel the report makes sense only when both the sides are thought about. Also, the reports are decorated with flashy headline and filled with exaggerated claims to ensure that people read it.

People sometimes fail to realize that this 'bad' thing that they are writing about is bad only in very long term or the chances of them really harming you are so small compared to various other things around them. I have seen a lot of people stopping doing what they have been doing for years because they saw one such report. Some examples: a) Stopping eating any rice because that's what makes you fat b) Stop eating apples because they are covered by wax (really, this has happened) c) Stop drinking coffee completely. d) Stop travelling in city buses because there is swine flue threat.

Learn to drive on 'cattle class' roads

To get a learner's driver licence in Karnataka, one should be very clear whether to pass a cow from the front, back or respectfully wait till the cow gets bored and leaves the scene. (Hint: The cow lives on the road. It never leaves). The correct answer? Any of the above as far as you don't tweet about cattle and get into trouble.

Noisy week here

This week our store is filled with bird sounds.

Should we fix it or should we do away with it?

Most of us in India are not perfectionists. One may argue that most humans are not perfectionists, but my hunch is the percentage of perfectionists is especially low in India. While imperfection is very easily apparent in construction/manufacturing projects, it is not difficult to observe this in pretty much any area of life. Yes, software engineers included :-) Road project are completed but some stones and mud are left behind on the road. Lists, like electoral lists are compiled with spelling errors in them. Vehicles are serviced without fixing that nagging squeaky sound coming from it. Metro train pillars collapse. Race conditions in code get 'fixed' with strategically placed sleep() statements.

Sometimes some of these imperfections end up having a big impact. It is interesting to observe how people react when such impacts surface. When something is found to be not working perfectly, the ideal way is to fix it and then ensure that such things don't happen again. However, the easier way is to just remove the facility itself. I see the latter approach employed in a number of occasions. Often the public too find this more appropriate. It is much harder to fight for doing things correctly than not doing it. This is more interesting when I explain with some examples.

Specimen 1: A cement bench in a park collapsed backwards because it had not been constructed with a good enough foundation. Ideal solution: Ensure this never happens again by ensuring quality in constructing such benches in future. Implemented solution: No more benches with backrests.

Specimen 2: Many thermal power plants in our country don't handle flying ash properly. Ideal solution: Fight to ensure power plants comply with environmental guidelines. Implemented solution: Nobody wants a new power plant in their district any more. (They all want 24x7 power, btw.)

Specimen 3: You build a good highway. People want to travel faster on this road and that is one of the reasons to build a good road anyway. However, the people from the little cross roads that join the highway cannot understand that the traffic on the main road is pretty fast. This leads to accidents. Ideal solution: Educate the folks who enter the highway indiscriminately. Implemented solution: Speed breakers on the highway.

Specimen 4: This is quite good. The coffee machine in my office had a steam nozzle. It wasn't cleaned very often, so it would often be dirty. Some of the employees complained about this. Ideal solution: Keep the steam nozzle clean. Implemented solution: The steam nozzle on the coffee machine was just removed :-)

What do you think? Are there even better examples?

No compromise on cushioning

We may not have a wide variety of cuisine, but our sofa is great.

Seen somewhere in East Bangalore.

You know you have been using Linux for too long when...

You see a chameleon, you can instantly remember that it is the logo of SuSE Linux and can even remember that they call it "Geeko", but you just can't remember what the damn animal is called in real life.

It happened to me recently and I am surely not proud of this incidence. As I was driving down NH206 at 100kmph, I came within a second of converting a beautiful green chameleon who was crossing the road leisurely, into a thin layer of green goop stuck to the tarmac. As I swirled the car to avoid the little animal, the occupants of the car were startled. All I could blabber out immediately was "There was a ... suse ... what is it called ... geeko ... on the road" The expression on the face of my relative in the front seat, a farmer from a remote village of Shimoga district, was priceless.

ಜೈ ಕನ್ನಡಾಂಬೆ!

Automation is for weenies

Automation is not such a great thing in Indian context. It is cheaper to employ someone than to use machinery to automate the work. Neither is self service such a favoured concept. Employment generation is what we do.

There are examples of this everywhere around us. BBMP officials once bought, rather imported a few road sweeper trucks, probably influenced by what they saw in some foreign country in one of their educational junkets. However, due to the pressure from everyone, they had to keep these trucks un-operative, left to rust and die unceremoniously so that these don't threaten employment of the road sweeping crew. In my office there is a door that doesn't close properly. There is a security guy stationed at the door, whose only job throughout the day is to close that door if it is left open by someone!! I sometimes think it is commendable that bank ATMs became popular in India. It could very well have been a human sitting in a little counter throughout the day!

Going against this trend, BESCOM, the Bangalore Electricity supply folks, set up an automated kiosks for paying bills at their JP Nagar office. Anyone could pay bills all through the day at these kiosks. Quickly, there were a number of people who either did not want to or could not read the instructions and started getting frustrated that the machine doesn't work. I think we Indians are notorious for our inability to read instructions and maps. Further, the machine does not accept worn out notes. It took a long time for people to pay bills through this kiosk. Usually, a number of people would surround the machine, discuss about the right way of using the machine and curse BESCOM.

I had been there some time last year and I saw a change. Now there was a BESCOM employee whose job was to operate the machine on behalf of bill payers. This was kind of defeating the purpose of automated kiosk, but speeded up the operation for users and improved customer satisfaction.

I went there again last month and I saw that this concept had gone even further. Sure, the operator was there, but now there was another person, a cashier, who sat with a cash bag on a chair near the kiosk. The operator collected cash from us, exchanged old, worn out notes for crisp ones from the cashier and fed them into the machine. This was to ensure that the operation goes on smoothly. Now there are 2 humans to help out with a process that is supposed to be fully automated. Hail automation! Hail self service!!

Contrary example where self service has worked very well? Sukh Sagar, Adigas, etc.

Eighth wonder of the world

Quick: What's the eighth wonder of the world (Even before we uncontroversially finalize the first seven wonders of the world)?
Clue: It isn't Rakhi Sawant.
Answer: It is "Samruddhi Maharaja Bath Stool". Ah, this was easy, wasn't it?
Applications for the ninth and tenth wonders are now being accepted.

This Poori is not very active

I don't mind "Chille Vada" and "Onian Pakoda", but I totally hate it when my Pooris are idle.

There, I fixed it

A flexible rear windshield.

An incomplete trip (Part 2 of 2)

Hampi has improved quite a bit since I visited long back, but I think a lot more can still be done. This is a UNESCO world heritage site for god sake and the main approach road to this place is filled with potholes most of the way. There are no good restaurants and no petrol pumps in Hampi.

The rain was pouring steadily and quickly, low lying temples like the Prasanna Virupaksha underground temple were in 1 foot of water.



Carrying an umbrella in one hand and a hyperactive two year old in the other is not the recommended way of seeing a vast spread of outdoor monuments. By afternoon we had managed to (sort of) see most of the 'highlights' in Hampi. Hampi's temples don't have carvings as intricate as the ones you see in Belur and Halebidu. That's because the carvings in Belur/Halebidu have been done in soap stone, which is much softer than granite used in Hampi. A striking feature here is that while the lower levels of all buildings are done with stone, top portions, including the gopuras of temples have been made with bricks. Hence the top portions of many buildings has eroded in rain in all these years. Seeing Hampi is depressing to me. Nowhere else I have seen such a wonderful place being reduced to ruins by fellow humans at such a scale.



By evening it was still raining and we were at the Tungabhadra (TB) Dam was full to the brim and water was being let out from all it's crest gates. As per my plan we were supposed to drive to Bijapur the next morning. That's when Ananth called. I have accepted a piece of good advice from my close circle of friends from time to time, more often from Ananth than anyone else. He told me the devastation rain was creating in Bijapur and Bagalkot districts and asked me to reconsider my decision to head North. Within the next couple of hours I had received a few more phone calls asking me not to go towards Bijapur. The news being churned out in TV channels clearly showed the horror caused by rains. It was one of the worst floods in the history of these places and I had planned to head straight into this mess. Weather reports predicted more rains on 1st October. Hence it was an easy decision to cancel heading to Bijapur. One other thought that was floated was visiting Mantralaya before heading to Bangalore. I took a close look at my Santro. It neither looked like a helicopter, nor like a motor boat. Considering the amount of water being let out of the TB dam in Hospet, going to Mantralaya was going to be extremely risky, so I backed out. I had to thank my decision later, considering the whole of Mantralaya, including the Raghavendra temple, got submerged in 10 feet of water that day. I only lost a chance to be on the news, though ;-)

I started driving towards Shimoga on 1st Oct. While most of the journey was easy, I had to pass through a stream of water running on the road at one place due to a nearby lake overflowing.


A passer by assured me that it was safe to cross, but he also cautioned me to have my car in 1st gear and accelerator pressed. He then casually mentioned that he had just driven his M800 across the stream, did not take enough precaution, water had gotten into some parts of the engine and was waiting for it to dry!!! While I absolutely did not want my car to get stuck in a water stream in some remote area of Davanagere district, I surely did not want to drive back 20KMs on a bad road either. After having watched the situation for a few minutes and having seen a couple of other vehicles making across safely, I too set out into the water and made it across safely. Rest of the journey to my wife's place in Shimoga district was eventless, considering rain was no more an event by now. It rained non-stop till the morning of 3rd October. I drove back to Bangalore on 3rd and luckily the rain gods finally showed some mercy on me and made my drive easy.

An incomplete trip (Part 1)

I had taken off the entire last week to go on a trip to North Karnataka. I had planned to visit Chitradurga, Hampi, Bijapur, Badami, Aihole, Pattadakal, Hubli and so on.

We set out on 29th Sep to my first destination, Chitradurga. The road to Chitradurga from Bangalore (NH4) is excellent and I could drive at more than 100kmph most of the time. A very pleasant cloudy weather welcomed us at Chitradurga fort. The fort is in a very good condition considering the battles it has withstood centuries ago. Fort walls are mostly intact and the ASI has done a good job of preserving it. Seeing the fort was not an easy task though... carrying a 2 year old around is not very easy.

One interesting aspect of visiting Chitradurga fort now-a-days is watching Jyoti Raju scale the walls of the fort with utmost ease. He has now become famous enough to appear in all news papers and magazines. Here is a video of him I captured.



By noon it was raining cats and dogs in Chitradurga, so we decided to proceed towards my next destination, Hospet. The road from Chitradurga to Hospet (NH13) is in a deplorable condition most of the way. The road has a heavy traffic of trucks from the mid and North India heading towards Bangalore. The 2-lane road is filled with potholes and when it rains it is hard to say how deep a pothole is. Generous scraping of car's under belly resulted.

The next day I woke up to realize that the rains that began last afternoon had not yet stopped. The town of Hospet, while not very nice to tread on in the best of weather, was a terrible slushy mess during rains. My plans of watching Hampi was under serious threat now. The cozy confines of my room in Malligi hotel was tempting me to just curl up in my blankets and sleep off. However, having travelled all this long I was going to ensure I get my money's worth. Armed with umbrellas we set out to see Hampi.

The speciality is that there is nothing special

"Specil", to be precise.
(Seen at a well-known, traditional South Indian restaurant in Koramangala)

Want dinner? comply with the dresscode

The notice reads:

"You are hereby requested not to wear SHORTS, LUNGIES or HAWAI CHAPPALS while dining VISHALA RESTAURANT during DINNER from "

No, this was not found at Bangalore Club. Heck, not even in Bangalore. I found this in Mysore, at one of the older hotels, Dasaprakash Paradise.

Hmm... looks like high end socialites like M F Hussain can't dine here. However, it is okay to wear shorts, lungies or hawai chappals for lunch :-)

Getting used to little luxuries in life

A couple of days ago, it finally happened. My house was plunged into darkness for the first time since we moved in more than 4.5 years ago. Our most trusted inverter finally gave up against constant battering of power cuts we are going through due to some major electrical cable work going on in this part of the city. The house fell dark at around 8 in the night.

We saw it coming, but due to being conditioned by years of easy, predictable life, we were not at all prepared for it. We did not know where (and whether) we kept candles any more, our torches did not have battery in them, our emergency light had long been unused, hence did not work. My daughter, having never seen a dark night all through her life, just could not understand why we were not turning on lights. We did not even have enough drinking water - we had always taken for granted that the water purifier is always there. It was also the worst time to realize that my cell phone was almost out of battery and I had to make a few important phone calls. It was a total chaos for a while.

This incidence made me reflect on my own life. In my childhood I had lived in a place where there was no municipal electricity at all. We only had a diesel generator for the entire village that ran from 7 to 10PM. We did not have a phone at home till I was in college. Now I find it hard to live a couple of hours without electricity. It is easy to get used to luxuries in life. We tend to assume that our life only improves from where it is and not even think about the possibility of degrade. When a difficult time arrives, we are as ready for it as a zoo-bred tiger suddenly left to fend for itself in the jungle.

Head in the belly?

Did this truck eat it's own head? ;-)

Diversity of markets

There is a phenomenon that is common for a sub-species of humans called Engineers, especially the male of this species. They buy the latest and greatest gadgetry and feel a sense of superiority complex over other members of the species. My camera has 12 Megapixels, whereas yours has only 10. My mobile has wifi and 3G, yours doesn't. My computer (on which I only suft the web,) has quad-core CPU. My toaster can do my tax calculations.. and so on. A lot of us are affected by this feeling to some extent. When some of us are face-to-face with people who choose their gadgets based on a completely different set of criteria, according to which our gadgets are inferior to theirs, we are often dumbfounded. I was in one such situation recently.

I was showing off my new Samsung Star to some of my relatives who live in a rural area. I was expecting them to be impressed with the features of my phone on which I had spent close to 10K. However, that was not to be. I was not prepared for the features they desired in a mobile phone and I was surprised about how different our choice making was. The first question they asked me was whether the phone supported dual sim cards. This is a much needed feature in remote rural areas where cell phone coverage is not very good and they would have to use whichever network was available. They cared about playing radio (AM and FM) without having to connect the headphone. About the quality of the built-in speaker. About the ability to work on least signal strength. About the robustness of the phone. About battery life. About having a built-in flash light. About being able to get repairs done in the nearby town. They didn't understand why I cared so much about the touch screen or full qwerty keyboard or ability to charge from a computer's USB port. Many of the phones around them, from brands like Karbonn and Micromax were beating my phone hands down, while costing much less. I learnt some valuable lessons about the diversity of the markets and am now able to better appreciate the jobs of marketing managers, who have to make critical decisions about the features to support and the markets to target.

In search of the perfect IMAP mail client on Linux

This is the story of my search for the perfect e-mail client on Linux. I use an IMAP mail id at work to talk to open source world. I download mails from IMAP server to my machine and view it locally. I subscribe to several mailing lists, hence I use extensive filtering. Like most people who work on Linux, I like my mail client to behave exactly how I configure it, nothing less, nothing more. I like my mail client to be fast and trustworthy and needless to say, not mangle my patches. I keep changing my Linux distro, so I like a mail client that is readily available on a wide set of distros and is being supported actively. I don't like to compile my mail client from sources because of the hassle it creates on a constantly updated machine. Also, the client should store mails in grep-able formats for easy searching later.

None of the requirements above are too out-of-the-world. Most people who work on open source projects, especially Linux kernel, have similar requirements. However, everyone has his/her own favorite mail client and they want you to believe that theirs is the best. When I started working on Linux a few years ago, folks around me told me to use mutt. They gave me a number of reasons to use a non-GUI mail client, even though most of the reasons were invalid or unimportant. For example, it consumes less memory (but I have enough free memory all the time, I never consume swap), it loads up very fast (but I shut down my mail client only once in a week or so), it is fast (is every other mail client painfully slow?) it is text mode (but you use Firefox, right? not elinks/lynx?)

I used mutt for some time. After a while I started wondering if there was anything better. Yeah, mutt was fast and light, but it had a steep learning curve, a few features weren't part of the standard binary that went with the distros, it was easy to make mistakes with procmail filtering rules. Hence, going against the advice by many around me, I set out looking for a GUI based mail client. I decided that I will use mutt only if I have no choice. That would actually be a defeat for GUI based mail clients on Linux.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Probably the most popular mail client on Linux. Though Thunderbird tends to mangle patches, there are ways to make it behave well. However, in spite of doing everything I could, it sometimes mangled some of my patches in strange ways. One of the primary problems in Thunderbird was that it didn't have a native option to "inline" text files. so I set out looking for alternatives.

KMail: I was a KDE user back then, so my next stop was KMail. For quite a few years KMail served as my favorite mail client. It doesn't mess up patches, has enough configuration options to make it behave exactly the way I want, has good filtering that can be easily migrated when I change distros and is generally pretty trustworthy. Unfortunately KMail is part of KDE and KDE4.X is hell bent on fixing everything that is NOT broken. In Fedora11 I hit some ugly problems with KMail. It could not display some of multipart/alternative mails properly, it mangled one of the patch I sent and so on. This, combined with a few quirks I was living with all these years (for example, moving all mails from /var/spool/mail/ to it's internal dirs) made me finally think of trying the alternatives.

Evolution: Evolution has been shipping as the default mail client on Gnome for a number of years. It should have served my purpose pretty well. However, on Fedora11 I hit a number of problems with it. It crashed frequently. It messed up the mail header indexes that it maintained and hence could not read filtered mails. Reading through mailing lists and bugzillas, I realized that Evolution has hit problems like this once in a while. This was a non-starter.

Sylpheed: Sylpheed is a light weight, fast and simple mail reader that is available on most distros. It worked very well for my needs. However, there seemed to be some bugs in it. I could not change keyboard shortcuts, for example. No use.

Claws-mail (Slogan: "it bites"): Claws branched off Sylpheed codebase and is in fact Sylpheed on steroids. It seems to have all features of Sylpheed (and more), but not the bugs. Most distros ship binary for it and it has an active user/developer base. For the last 6 weeks I have been very happy with this mail client. It is _very_ fast, has enough config options to keep me happy, good filtering options, good community of users. It can do everything I want and doesn't come in the way of my work. It has a funny slogan and a strange logo, but it works beautifully. So until I face bad problems on this, I am going to be on Claws-mail.

I now have 6 mail clients simultaneously configured on my machine: mutt, Thunderbird, KMail, Evolution, Sylpheed and Claws! How's that?

Jog falls

I was at Jog falls on Monday, trying to do at least a part of the trip idea I suggested here. Unfortunately the Linganamakki dam, which has to release the water that dances down Jog falls, did not get full yet this year. This meant the falls was far from it's full glory. You can still enjoy it if you are going there for the first time and are willing to climb down the gorge and get wet in the water at the bottom.


Notice the people at the top of the falls to get an idea of relative size of the falls.

Installing Java apps on Samsung Star

As I described in my previous comment, installing Java apps on my Samsung Star S5233A has been a pain so far. It is possible to install Java apps over WAP, but if you have downloaded an app to your PC there is no easy way to install it on the phone. After following spooky procedures described by various people on the web and still failing to install, I decided it was not worth it. Instead, I upload my Java apps to websites that let you download the same over WAP (example: www.davidpye.com). I upload .jar from my PC to the website and then point my phone's browser to the location the website specifies. Works like a charm.

Samsung Star S5233 review

After months of dillydallying about buying a new mobile phone, I was yet to make up my mind, but fate decided to put an end to my dilemma. My old faithful Nokia 3230 conked off again and any I didn't have the mood to resurrect it again by spending more money. After a feverish research on the web for a couple of days and coming within minutes from buying a Nokia E63, I finally ended up with a Samsung Star S5233. Samsung Star must be one of the fastest selling phones in India right now. It is one of the cheapest full touch screen phones of any time (I paid Rs. 9550 inclusive of VAT) and it has enough features to attract the average phone buyer.

On the hardware side, the phone has good build quality and feels quite nice in the hands. It looks and feels like an iPhone to an extent. The resistive touch screen, though not in the same league as iPhone, is not too far behind either. It has actual buttons for volume adjustment, camera, locking the screen and call functions. The camera is 3.2 megapixels, but without autofocus and flash, can generate good photos only outdoors. The stylus is bulky and doesn't fit into the body of the phone, but there is no real need to use the stylus unless you are browsing the web. There is no wifi or 3G. I like the fact that the phone's battery is charged through the same micro-usb that is used to connect it to computer. However, I would have liked to see an independent audio jack.

I don't know what OS it runs. I suppose it is some proprietary one. The UI, though it feels very different for someone coming from an old Nokia, was quite easy to learn. The way to do a lot of things changes significantly (for the better) the moment you move to a touch screen. I think laptops will (and should) start shipping with touch screens soon. The applications provided with the phone are quite good. It has a document viewer that can read pdfs too, google maps, youtube, reasonably good web browser, facebook app, weather app and so on. The phone does a good job of playing music too. I have mostly positives about software on the phone.

Negatives on software side include OS crashes, especially when I had connected through bluetooth. I could not find many applications to download. It would have been nice to have a few more games on the phone, especially the ones that use motion sensing and gyroscope. I suppose the phone is still too new. The software they provide (Samsung New PC Studio) to make the phone talk to Windows computers is absolutely horrendous. They have made it unnecessarily complicated and seems to be quite buggy. The phone did not want to connect to my Linux box through USB until I put a memory card in it.

So I conclude that this phone is pretty good value for money and it deserves the tag some people have given it: "Poor man's iPhone".

Update:
I have one more good and one more bad thing to say about the phone.
Good: Camera. While I was unimpressed by the pictures I got indoors, I was able to get much better pictures in brighter conditions. Here are some proof:


Bad: Software installation. The phone supports Java apps, but there is no easy way to install third-party applications on the phone. I have googled for it and found that some people have installed Java apps successfully, but the procedure itself sounds like black magic and I have not succeeded so far. I wish there was an easy way to install Java apps using my PC.

Update2:
Some of the commenters have asked about the battery performance. I am not a heavy user of the phone. I talk may be 10-15 minutes on the phone every day, take 3-4 pics with the camera, play 10-15 minutes of games and listen to a bit of music. The battery is lasting roughly 5 days for me. Of course, the phone is still very new.

I have not attempted to connect my PC to the internet through this phone. Hence I don't know how well that works. I want to do the other way around, though. I want to connect the phone to the internet through the computer. However, this doesn't seem to be easy. Currently I use Airtel Live connection, which costs real money!

Don't let anyone overtake you

In order to prevent others from overtaking you, you would have to drive very fast. If you can't do that, you may load the luggage in a creative manner to scare away potential over-takers.

Amusing singing

He can't pronounce a few sounds, most notably "L", which makes his singing quite amusing (if you know Kannada)

A trip idea

I don't write many travel blogs now-a-days. And for a good reason. I don't travel much. However, I felt the urge to write a bit about the last trip I did, mainly because it will be a good place to visit during the coming months.

I had been to Honnavar. It is a town on the west coast of Karnataka, roughly 450 Kms from Bangalore. The town itself is quite nice and there are a number of nice places of interest around it. First of all, the road to Honnavar is quite nice. It passes through Shimoga, Sagar, Jog Falls, Gersoppa, which means it is one of the scenic routes. The road is in a good shape, and there isn't too much traffic on this road, so it is a pleasure to drive on this road. In the next couple of months the road is going to turn even more green and scenic due to the monsoon rains.

In my view, mid-August is the best time to visit Jog Falls, because there will be a lot of water and a lot of greenery. Agreed, the rains make it inconvenient, but if you want convenience you should stick to the Forum Mall. That too, only on weekdays. As you approach Honnavar, you will notice that the hilly (Ghat) roads don't end even when you are just a couple of Kms from the coast. That is the speciality of the sea coast in this part. The hills stretch almost till the beach. The beach in Honnavar is clean and neat, but there are few other beaches nearby as well. Depending on the taste and amount of time on hand, there are a number of places of interest all around: Gokarna, Murdeshwar, Dhareshwar, Idagunji, Apsara Konda, Maravanthe, Karwar, Dandeli, come to mind. If you are willing to drive 3 hours, you can visit Udupi, Agumbe or even Goa. So I think this is a good place to plan a trip somewhere between mid July - mid August. One word of caution: the rain here can be extremely heavy. Avoid driving when it is raining heavily. Especially in the night. I made the mistake and I know how hard it is.

BTW, I stayed at Kamat Executive Inn, Honnavar. It is pretty decent and costs around 500 Rs for non-AC and around 1000 Rs for AC. The "kotte kadabu", idly cooked in leaves of jackfruit tree, that they serve in the morning is delicious. There are a few other lodges around this place.

Oh, there are no petrol pumps for around 50-60 Kms before reaching Honnavar. So beware!

Approximately unknown?

I have been enjoying my shiny new Fedora 11 installation so far. Lots of good things to say about it. The battery meter however is extremely... er.. diplomatic. It says "You have approximately Unknown time of remaining battery life" :-)

Let the games begin!

Now that India is out of T20 world cup, the blame game season can commence. Expect anything and everything to be blamed, including Dhoni's ego, media problems, Yuvraj's personal life, Sehwag's attitude, Ishant's hair style, over-confidence, new jersey colour, planetary positions, terrorism and so on. The so called experts will come out with insightful columns which are so easy to write in hind sight. Don't be surprised if there are demands for pulling the captain down. Let the fun begin!

UNIX turns 40!

The OS that most people start studying Operating Systems with is turning 40! I have known it for 13 years. I started off with SCO Unix in one of the computer training institutes. It surely wasn't love at first sight. In those days it was very common to see SCO Unix, because that was the only prominent UNIX that ran on Intel. Remember, Linux was hardly on the horizon back then. Later, at my first job my 'desktop' was a dumb terminal connected through a serial ports to the central SVR4 server. This meant it was complete text mode. We had to go looking for a Windows machine to see image attachments sent in e-mails :-) I suppose most people start their UNIX experience with Linux.

Hell is full!

I don't doubt him even for a second.

Geocities is closing down

Did you hear that Geocities is closing down? Unless you started using the Internet well after the Dot-com bubble burst, you are likely to have seen geocities web pages. If you were considered Internet-savvy back then, you would have a homepage on geocities. Or on tripod or angelfire... That was the "in" thing to do back then.

It appears like a number of people really hated those amateur homepages and are happy to see it closing down. Many of the pages there were made by total novice web-site designers who were doing it to make a statement. Agreed, the statement they made was mostly "see, I too have a tacky homepage." However, I will be very surprised if today's blogs, facebook homes and tweets are considered state-of-the-art after another decade.

If you are guessing why I feel so strongly about geocities, your guess is right. Though I jumped on the Internet bandwagon quite late, I too was among the "in" crowd of early 2000s with a homepage. Tacky floating background images, a guest book, links page, even the uber-geek Javascript. My homepage is still alive. It will be alive until Yahoo takes it down later this year. Until then it is good to visit once in a while and smile at what was considered cool back then.

How's the contrast?

That's my daughter.

How to get thrilled?

If you are like me, the most risky thing you do in a typical work day probably is consuming cafeteria food. The more adventurous ones among us try activities like rock climbing, parasailing and if you are really reckless, to the point where you don't care about your life, bungee jumping. So what should the former type, cafeteria food type, do to get a good rush of adrenalin once in a while? I recommend driving up the highway from Mysore to Bangalore on a Sunday evening. The thrills only get multiplied if you are not familiar with this road. This is not a joke, let me explain how it works.

It works best if you have a small and tall car like a Santro. Alternatively, choose a car with low ground clearance. Make a resolve to drive at at least 80kmph all along. Even more importantly, decide not to let any vehicle overtake you on the way and if for some reason someone does, to take revenge (overtake him/her) within the next couple of kilometers. Wait in Mysore till the sun sets and then, set out.

You will quickly notice that pretty much half of cars in Mysore are now headed to Bangalore. To be fair, it is a pretty nice road. Two lanes on either side with a smooth riding surface. So you will quickly find yourself driving at more than 100kmph. Just when you thought it is going to be a smooth drive, BANG! That was the sound of the new makeshift speed breaker constructed by haphazardly pouring some tar onto the road, hitting one of the vital organs at the belly of your car. That was fun, wasn't it? The impact has switched on the wiper and right-turn indicator. Please turn them off. You see, the speed breaker was created just a few days ago and was placed in a curve, so that you cannot see it from a distance. No, they did not think it is necessary to place any warning signs or paint the hump with a paint. You were driving too fast, so you deserved what you got. When combined with the darkness of the night and glare of high beam headlights from the other side of the road, the recipe is complete.

Did I say high beam headlights? As if there is another type of headlight? While it is not as bad as a median-less road, glaring headlights cause problems because the road has curves all along. There are a number of villages on the road and this means there are various types of cross traffic. Pedestrians (helpfully wearing black clothing, to add to the effect), stray dogs, bullock carts, bicycles with not even a reflector on them, motorbikes with not even a reflector (forget lights) on them, all crossing the road at one of the various cuts in the median. When combined with plants that have been grown on the median and the headlights from the opposite side trying to blind you, you are never sure what is waiting at the next turn. How thrilling is that?

Though the road is a 2-lane on either side, you have realized by now that some of the vehicles, especially tractors, can go on either side of the road in either direction. While it is not so thrilling to come across these during the day, it surely is during the night because either they don't have any lights or have very powerful lights pointing directly at you.

So you escaped all the hurdles and reached Maddur. Now get ready for the next challenge. There are a number of restaurants on the highway between Maddur and Ramanagara. Every car religiously stops at one of these restaurants, as if this is required by law. On a Sunday evening, every restaurant in this stretch is so terribly crowded, there is neither a guarantee that you will get what you want, nor the quality you expect it at. The thrill here comes from capturing a table and eating whatever overpriced food is available.

At least one stretch of the road, a couple of kilometers long, is usually closed on one side, making that stretch a 1-lane on each side, median less road. This means there is a huge congestion at that place. This is when the survival instincts of Bangalore's drivers kicks in big time. They will do anything, with no care for the physical health of themselves or the others, to gain, may be, a couple of overtakes. I won't be surprised if some of them are willing to drive through few sugar cane fields to get ahead of others. Please participate in this mayhem to enhance your fun of driving.

By the time Ramanagara is behind you, the traffic on the road has increased considerably. Add a few slow moving trucks and luggage auto-rickshaws to the mix and it is close to impossible to maintain a good speed. However, remember that you have resolved to maintain at least 80kmph because that is essential to get the thrill that you are looking for. After a high speed, high stakes game of driving for about an hour, you are ready to join the Bangalore traffic, which, to your surprise, is not any less on a Sunday evening than other days. This is when you start thinking "What are this many people doing on the road on a Sunday evening? If all these suckers were at home watching TV, I could have driven so easily and reached home by now". Eventually, you do reach home. The thrill ends. Until Monday afternoon, lunch time at the cafeteria :-)

ಮಹಾರಾಷ್ಟ್ರದಲ್ಲಿ ಕರುನಾಡ ಸೇನೆ?

Which city is MH-13 from? Sollapur?

Vehicle registration numbers

I have this habit of observing vehicle registration numbers. In the last few years, one can see vehicles from various parts of India in Bangalore. I am referring to private vehicles here, not those heavy trucks. While DL, AP, TN, KL are pretty common, sometimes you get to see exotic(!) ones like Nagaland (NL), Sikkim (SK) and so on. I have seen a TVS Scooty from J&K! Recently I saw this one from Lakshadweep.

An unexpected question...

We were having a snack at a darshini. For the Bangalore noob, a darshini in Bangalore is a simple, low cost self-service restaurant with high tables and no seating, just like the Shanthi Sagar or Adigas in your neighbourhood. My daughter was perched on the high table, visibly unhappy with the Rava Idly she was getting to eat while eyeing Gobi Manchurian that we were refusing to give her. An elderly gentleman, may be in his late seventies, walked in. My daughter has this habit of staring at strangers with wide eyes and blank face, not unlike how Mowgli must have stared at the first humans he saw. This invariably draws the stranger's attention, which leads to the stranger trying to talk to her. She then loosens up, ready to give a big smile or even a hand shake. This man, rather than trying to chat up the kid, asked us "ಮಗುವಿನ ನಕ್ಷತ್ರ ಯಾವುದು?" "What is the nakshatra (birth star) of the child?". We had as much expected this question as the shareholders expected the Satyam scandal. A number of people ask us what her name is, never her nakshatra. We somehow gathered our wits and told him her birth star and he said something like "It is a very good star, she will get very good education" and left the scene. While my wife thought it was strange that someone would ask this question, I was quite amused by it. This person did not look like a Purohit, he was just a person who grew up in a traditional environment and doesn't want to change with the changing times.

Most liked feature in web browsers?

What is your most liked new feature in web browsers in the recent times? To me, it was tabbed browsing till some time ago. However, this is not a new feature. It was there when I first started using the earliest betas of Phoenix browser (2002?) and even before that, in Opera. In the recent times, the feature I have liked most is the ability to search in the address bar for URLs I entered in the past. I think this came with Firefox3.x series and is also referred to as "Awesome bar" by some. Currently, Google Chrome has extended this functionality to search using any text in your previously viewed web pages. Even better, I would say, but Chrome doesn't (yet) run on Linux. If you know an add-on to Firefox that can provide this functionality, do let me know.

To lengthen the peak of our happiness...

No, this is not one of those spam advertisements that offers to improve a certain aspect of your life. No sir, this is much more nobler than that. As you know, the success of a certain movie has brought DIGNITY (yes, dignity in capital letters) to our Country. Now I am sure you are wondering "I only wish someone was striking a right chord to lengthen the peak of our happiness!" Worry no more, your prayers have been answered. No idea what that kid is doing there, though.

So who won?

So who won yesterday? Was it the group in favour of Valentine's day celebrations or the one against it? TOI making everyone believe that this was a game with the two opponents clearly marked out and only one was going to win.

Anyway, now that the dust has settled, I picked up today's newspapers. I subscribe to two newspapers, Vijaya Karnataka in Kannada and Times of India. Incidentally, TOI bought VK a couple of years back, so both are now owned by the same parent company. However, there is a big difference between what these two reported about yesterday.

VK version:
"ಬಿಗಿ ಬಂದೋಬಸ್ತ್ ನಡುವೆಯೂ ಪ್ರೇಮಿಗಳ ದಿನಾಚರಣೆಗೆ ರಾಜ್ಯದ ಹಲವೆಡೆ ಅಡ್ಡಿ-ಆತಂಕ ಎದುರಾಯಿತು.
...
ಶ್ರೀರಾಮ ಸೇನೆಯ ಬೆದರಿಕೆಯಿಂದಾಗಿ ಪ್ರೇಮಿಗಳ ದಿನಾಚರಣೆ ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ರಂಗೇರಲಿಲ್ಲ. ಲಾಲ ಬಾಗ್, ಕಬ್ಬನ್ ಪಾರ್ಕ್, ಕಾಲೇಜು ಕಾರ್ನರ್, ರೆಸ್ಟೋರೆಂಟ್, ಪಬ್ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರೇಮಿಗಳ ಎಂದಿನ ಕಲರವ ಕಾಣಸಿಗಲಿಲ್ಲ."

which roughly translates to:
"In spite of heavy security, there was disruption to Valentine's day celebrations in many places of the state.
...
Due to the threat by Sri Rama Sene Vantentine's day celebrations in Bangalore was pale. Lal Bagh, Cubbon Park, college corners, restaurants and pubs did not see the usual level of revelry."

TOI version:
"Love and peace thrived in perfect harmony in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka on one of the most-anticipated Valentine’s Days ever. Bangalore was swathed in red and pink. Thanks to the police which put away potential disrupters, including Hindu Rashtriya Sena chief Pramod Mutalik, behind bars and the civil society which decided to push back hard against moral policing, V-Day came up smelling roses.
...
By evening, the boulevards of MG Road and the sidewalks of Brigade Road, Residency Road and other high streets were chock-ablock with youngsters, out with friends and love interests, in throngs. Pubs began to fill up as the sun came down and restaurants reported brisk footfalls. Star eateries, which had sold out their V-day specials, saw couples — young and old — enjoying their romantic dinners serenaded by romantic music and covered by discreet, high security.
...
The scene was similar in other parts of the state, though the scale and colour of the festivities were a pitch lower than Bangalore."

Wow, isn't that strange? Two newspapers from the same publishing house, reporting on the same incidence, being so different in their reports? One thing that is very clear from all this is that TOI, though it owns VK, doesn't have much control over the contents of it. May be they want to give this kind of independence to VK, but my bets are that with the kind of people who run VK, it won't be possible for TOI to control the contents of VK too much unless they kick out a lot of the editorial folks.

Weather and food habits: epilogue

Recently I had wondered "Why do we like to eat spicy food when it gets cold, but overall spiciest food habits are seen in hottest places on earth". I got two responses from my friends.

Hariprasad said: Its almost as if we are too used to the 'hot' weather and cannot tolerate a deviation from the same. That's our natural state, kind of. So, when the weather gets cold, we are actually 'uncomfortable'. Since we can't do much with the weather, we wear warm clothes and eat hot food trying to 'restore' normalcy, at least in our body."

Ego said: "My Friend wanderlust had the following answer: "it's because in hot climates, food spoils easily unless you preserve it with spices. check it out... the more away from the equator you go, the blander the food.”"

Both explanations sound logical and they are not exclusive of each other. I guess the answer is a combination of these two. Hence I guess I sorta know the answer now. Thanks folks!

Pataguppa bridge

I mentioned a place in the backwaters of Linganamakki dam in my previous post. So where is this place and what is the interesting history behind this place?

The submerged bridge I mentioned is Pataguppa Bridge (ಪಟಗುಪ್ಪ). If you visit the Wikimapia page, zoom out a couple of times so that you get a good idea of how it looks. The place looks like this on Google Earth:


This place is along a road that used to run from Hosanagara to Sagara towns in Shimoga district. Long long back, before our parents were born, this was _the_ road between Hosanagara and Sagara. Later, in 1930s, they built a dam called Madenur (ಮಡೆನೂರು) dam in this area. This dam submerged significant area of land around this place and cut off this road link. Hence they built a bridge at this place to keep the road connectivity on. Remember, this was built during the Raj. It was built completely using stones.

Much later, in 1960s, the Linganamakki dam was built. This was the big daddy of Madenur dam, so it submerged even more land, pretty much half of Hosanagara Taluk, including the Madenur dam. Yes, a whole dam was submerged. In summer when the water level in Linganamakki dam comes down, one can see the Madenur dam even now. It is still intact, even after being submerged in water for so many years! Along with the dam, the bridge too went underwater! Hence the Government increased the height of this bridge, by erecting stone pillars on top of existing bridge and building a road on it supported by iron beams. The bridge was still going underwater for a few months during rainy season, but was usable during other times of the year. This went on till some time in the 1970s, when the top half of the dam, the one built on iron beams, collapsed under the weight of a truck. There were thoughts of repairing the broken bridge, but they really needed a new bridge, one that is remains above the water even when the dam is full. However, the pleas of people who lived in this area fell on deaf ears. The road link was permanently lost. All the buses and trucks that used to ply on this road started taking another, longer route to travel between Sagara and Hosanagara. Population of this area dwindled, only the core residents remained here and rest of the world started forgetting this area.

This is how the bridge looks now. Observe the lower bridge, which is still intact even after more than 70 years.


Now, decades after this bridge collapsed, the Government has finally begun building a new bridge here. It will mean there will be a lot of heavy machinery in what has been a serene place so far. They will huff and puff, pull down a lot of trees, dig out a lot of mud, project will get delayed numerous times and eventually there will be a new bridge. This road will come alive again and the lives of people living here will change forever. Again. All this will probably take 5 more years, but hopefully it will happen.

BTW, I have not visited the Madenur dam so far. I surely want to go there this summer, when the water levels are low enough to explore this place.

Some more photos from this place are here.

The magic of a spectacular sunset

There is nothing like sitting on the ground watching a spectacular sunset slowly taking place. Last week, as I sat near a submerged bridge in the thick of Malnad region, on the shores of backwaters of Linganamakki dam, built across Sharavathi river, mother nature was putting up a great show. Everything was right about that place and time: A huge water body with tree stubs in it, dense forests on both sides of water, a few birds merrily singing along, eager to reach home before it gets dark, a lone boat, doing the last round for the day across the water, a handful of friends sitting along with me, but nobody speaking a word, just soaking in the beauty of the moment. It was magical.

Once the sun sets, the night falls surprisingly fast. Within a few more minutes, it is all over and time to go home with memories. For the sake of memories, I did take a few pictures. I did try all manual settings on my compact camera, leading to some really nice shots. The first one below is in pretty high resolution.

Weather and food habits

A couple of weeks back it was pretty cold in Bangalore. There used to be a bit of wind throughout the day, adding to the cold. The floor in my home - all granite, had gotten pretty cold, making me curl up my feet under me when I sat on the sofa. I was munching on some spicy snack and gulping down piping hot filter coffee, saying to myself: "This is the ideal weather to eat hot and spicy food like pakodas, bhajjis and so on".

I don't know what is it about the cold weather that makes people go after spicy foods. As I started thinking about it, I realized that this is not a universal phenomenon. In fact, just the contrary is probably true. Think of places which are well known for spicy foods and chances are, they are some of the hottest places on earth. Mexico, India, Thailand. Even within India, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan. On the other hand, most people in cold climate, like Europeans, prefer non-spicy foods. Even within India, Kashmiri food is pretty sweet, isn't it? Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. Especially in India, where there are exceptions to pretty much every rule. However, I can surely say, in general, cold places are not well known for spicy foods. So what is the relation between the weather and food habits? I did some googling, but could not spot anything obvious quickly.

If you know, please do let me know.

Spam taking over the internet

I read recently that 95% of all e-mail in the world is just spam. I can readily believe that. I am pretty conservative about giving out my mail ids on the internet. In spite of that, gmail tells me I receive more spam than genuine mail. I used to use a mail id on an obscure website long time back. The only reason for using their mail id was that they were giving me 100MB of storage, whereas everyone else was at 2-4MB range back then. I had not visited that mail id in years. Last week somehow I remembered this id and curiously logged into it. While I was not looking, this mail id was slowly and steadily accumulating around 30 spam e-mail ids every day. Everything from offering me millions of dollars for free to offering me online degrees to selling me the blue diamond-shaped pill at very low cost. Some of the mails claimed that they arrived long before I, for that matter, the internet, was born!

Update: Yes, I know why it is 1969. After all, I have worked on UNIX!

ಡಬ್ಬದ ಹೊರಗಿನ ಯೋಚನೆ

ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಯೋಚಿಸುವ ರೀತಿಯನ್ನು ಊಹಿಸುವುದೂ ಕಷ್ಟ. ಇದಕ್ಕೊಂದು ಉತ್ತಮ ಉದಾಹರಣೆ ನನ್ನ ತಂಗಿಯ ಮಗನ ಡಬ್ಬದ ಹೊರಗಿನ ಯೋಚನೆ (ಅದೇ, "thinking outside the box" ಕಣ್ರೀ!)

ಒಂದು ದಿನ ಶಾಲೆಯಿಂದ ಮನೆಗೆ ಬರುವಾಗ ಒಂದು ಒಂಟೆಯನ್ನು ನೋಡಿದ. ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಗೆ ಸಹಜವಾಗಿ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ವಿಷಯಗಳ ಮೇಲೂ ಕುತೂಹಲ. "ಅದೇನಮ್ಮ?" "ಅದು ಒಂಟೆ ಕಣಪ್ಪಾ".

ಮಾರನೆಯ ದಿನ ಅದೇ ಜಾಗದಲ್ಲಿ ಮೂರು ಒಂಟೆಗಳು ಹೋಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದವು. ತಕ್ಷಣ ಅವನ ಬಾಯಿಯಿಂದ ಹೊರಟೇ ಬಿಟ್ಟಿತ್ತು: "ಒಂಟೆ, ಟೂಟೇ, ತ್ರೀಟೇ" ("one-tay, two-tay, three-tay"). ಹೇಗಿದೆ? ಹೊಟ್ಟೆ ಹುಣ್ಣಾಗುವಷ್ಟು ನಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ನನ್ನ ತಂಗಿಯ ಸ್ಕೂಟಿ ಬೀಳದೆ ಇದ್ದದ್ದೇ ಆಶ್ಚರ್ಯ.

Petrol bunk: part of Bangalore's history?

Last Friday, as I pulled my car into my usual BP Petrol bunk (Yes, we call them petrol bunks in Bangalore, not petrol pumps) on Hosur Road, I noticed something different. I usually fill petrol at Venkateswara and Co, which is on South-bound Hosur road, just before Silk Board fly-over. This place is the most reliable one on my way home. They have never tried to cheat me either by not making the meter zero before beginning or distracting me while petrol is being filled (you know, "Cash or Card, saar?" types). The owner is usually right there, ready to jump in and ensure that the staff don't cheat. This day, the whole place was lit up with colorful lights. There was a little podium made at one end and flower bouquets were placed all over the place, including on the pumps. The owner, all excited, was roaming around instructing the staff to make final moment touch-ups to the decoration. It looked like there was going to be a speech of something.

I picked up a chat with the cashier while my car was being filled. He says "It has been 50 years since this petrol bunk was opened, sir. That's why the celebrations". I can't believe my ears. "50 years?" I say with a lot of exclamation in my voice. "Yes, golden jubilee. The current owner is a third generation owner of this place". The cashier said the news in a matter-of-fact way. I am sure he cannot feel as excited as the owner for this event. After all, he works there for a salary and the owner being strict may in fact be a hinderance for his income.

As I drove off, I kept telling to myself: "Man, 1959. Really? What was there in India back then?" Was Premier Padmini there, at least? This page says NO. Was Ambassador there, after all, it has existed for ever? This page says Ambassador started in 1957, so it was barely there. So there were pretty much no cars at all, except may be a few imported ones. Even Tata trucks hadn't been around for too long. Secondly, this place was well outside the city. Hosur road was probably there, but it wasn't going up to Madras back then. There was no Koramangala and no Indiranagar, forget about BTM. So this place must have been one of the extremely few petrol bunks in Bangalore back then. This is incredible that they have been selling fuel for that long. This place is a part of Bangalore's history!

First rain of 2009

I have this tradition of recording the first rain of the year I see in Bangalore. Today (Jan 8), it rained. Well, okay, it kinda drizzled, but what the heck. This is probably the earliest rain I have seen in Bangalore. Another interesting observation: I have seen it rain in Bangalore in most of the months of the year. Probably all, with the possible exception of February. I wonder how many cities in India can claim this.

Start early!

To ensure the next generation is well versed with Linux, not some proprietary OS, it is important to give them an early start. How early? 1 year olds are perfect.