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.