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.