When should a kid start using computers?

I didn't use a computer until I was 18 years old. But now-a-days, kids demand to use computers as soon as they are 5 months old. The first thing that my daughter demanded in all her life was not a toy or a food, but my laptop. Tough days ahead for me!

What have YOU won in all these years?

Now-a-days, there are a number of programs on TV where they ask you to either send SMSes or make phone calls for various reasons. The most common of these, of course, are talent shows where you think you are deciding the winner of the competition by sending lots of messages and your mobile service provider walks laughing all the way to the bank! The other kind is where they give out 'prizes' to the callers. One such program runs on a Kannada TV channel in the afternoon. It works like this: You basically send as many messages as you want/can on the previous day to 'register' for the program next day. The program is run live, where they call the people who have sent highest number of messages. They show a sari and ask us to guess it's price. If you guess it correctly, or if your guess is closer to the actual than others on that day, the sari is yours. Simple?

One of these days (18th March), my wife got the crazy idea of actually competing in this event. Off she went, sending a few messages, but she sent it in my daughter's name. The next day she was in front of the TV in the afternoon, to see how she fared. Unfortunately, the number of messages she had sent was nowhere close to the highest numbers that day. There was no way they were going to call her. However, as she sat there watching the program, it turned out that a number of people who the TV anchor called either did not pick up the call or were unreachable or busy and so on. As a result, the last person to be called for the day turned out to be my daughter! As the anchor announced the name of my daughter, there was a lot of cheering in my home from all. Celebrations had already begun. We didn't get the sari, but we got the consolation prize - cosmetics worth Rs. 1000. But my mom and wife didn't mind that. They were celebrating as if my daughter had got the first rank in CAT exams. My daughter, meanwhile, being all of 5 months old, was blissfully unaware of her achievement(!) and was thinking exactly what most babies of her age think, that is, "Should I cry now or later?" and "Huh?"

Now, winning the prize is one thing, actually going to the office of the TV channel and getting it from there is totally another. Considering that we were only going to get a box of cosmetics, most of which may be unusable, I was not even close to thinking of actually going and getting it. But my mom and wife had other ideas. "What have you won on TV in all these years? Nothing. She is just 5 months old and she has already won something in her very first attempt. At least for that reason you must go and get the prize". It was only then that the importance of my daughter's achievement and the gravity of the situation started sinking in to me. I quickly realized that I had no choice.

The office of the TV channel was right in the middle of the city, with no parking available anywhere in 2 Km radius of it. Finding the office was an appropriate job for Indiana Jones. Further, I had to make two trips to their office because of their restrictive timings. Finally, there was a little shocker. They wanted the person who had won the prize to come and claim it! We convinced them that the 'winner' was a 5 month old baby who won't claim anything in the world as hers for another few months. Finally, the prize was ours! It was a package of various cosmetic items from an obscure Japanese company which mostly sells in Sri Lanka. Not bad. Hey, my daughter must now be famous in Japan and Sri Lanka too. What an achievement!!!

Human alcohol meter

A few days back, I was at the Kempegowda bus stand, a.k.a "Majestic", at around 11PM. I was dropping off someone for a late night bus. I started heading back and was at the first traffic signal, near Sangam, where a traffic policeman stopped my car by literally standing in my path. When he approached me I rolled down the glass of my car, wondering what this was about. He then put his head _into_ my car, so far inside that it seemed as if he was going to kiss the steering wheel. Well, I too like my car quite a bit, but not so much as to kiss it. While I was wondering whether this guy is drunk, he said "Your good name please, sir?" I quickly answered and he said "Okay okay. Just checking", took his head out and asked me to carry on. I was still surprised, but I carried on. Only after a couple of seconds did I realize why he did that: He was checking if I was drunk and he wanted to smell my breath to confirm. He was a human alcohol meter! I left pretty amused, but impressed. I ho
pe they take all drunk people out of roads and make roads safer for driving in the night.

How cpu frequency scaling can affect applications

I have seen a very interesting problem while playing "Cricket 2007" game on Windows. The problem is probably caused by cpu frequency scaling and it gives an interesting perspective on how power management in operating systems and hardware can affect application writers.

My laptop runs at around 800MHz when it is on battery and at around 2.1GHz when it is connected to the mains. Lets say I boot the system running on batteries and connect it to the mains after it boots up fully. If I run Cricket 2007 game on this now, it runs way too fast. The game is almost unusable at this stage. The only way I have found to rectify this is to reboot the system while it is connected to the mains. Alternatively, if I boot up the system while it is connected to the mains and later switch to battery before starting the game, it plays too slowly, far slower than a typical slow-mo replay. It is not the problem with the battery, because if I boot the system on battery and continue to run the game while it is on battery, it plays correctly.

The problem is pretty interesting. I suspect it is because of cpu frequency scaling because I can't attribute it to anything else. However, whose fault is it? application's? operating system's? I have some thoughts, but I have no idea of Windows internals, so I can't be sure.

The application has no idea that the cpu frequency has changed before it is started. It must be doing some calibration for timing when it is started, by reading the frequency of the cpu from the OS. It is quite possible that the OS does not provide correct information to the application. Lets say the system was booted at 800MHz and the OS stores this value somewhere. Later the system could be running at 2.1GHz, but when the application queries, OS still says it is running at 800Hz. The application does it's calibration based on this number and it goes horribly wrong because the cpu is running much faster.

On second thought, it is not correct for the application to depend on cpu frequency being constant. This frequency could be varying all the time on modern hardware, so any application that depends on this value for it's timing calculation could go wrong. The same holds for any application that performs time calculations based on TSC. Depending on TSC is an even bigger mistake on SMP systems.

What is a .docx file?

Today someone sent me a MS Word file in an e-mail. Being a Linux user, I don't quite like working with MS-Office documents. However, I have accepted it as a reality of life. Also, Openoffice is now good enough to handle most MS-Office files.

The file I got today in mail had a .docx extension to it. I initially thought the sender had saved the file with wrong extension, but soon realized that Openoffice doesn't know how to open it. "file" command on the file says it is a zip file. Hmm... okay, let's unzip it. It contained a bunch of xml files among other things. I wasn't sure what was happening. The obvious next stop was google.

Google told me that .docx is an ooxml file, which is the latest standard for office documents being pushed by Microsoft. Openoffice doesn't support it yet, so there was no way (that I know of) to open it on my Linux. I booted to my Windows partition and showed the file to MS-Word. It too refused to open it. Hmm... some more googling revealed to me that the ooxml format is the default on newer MS-Office versions, whereas older versions don't support it. There is an update available from Microsoft that makes old versions of MS-Office handle ooxml files. The update was 26MB in size, so instead of pulling it down, I asked the sender to save the document in older MS-Word format and resend it.

A couple of things that surprise me are, a) MS-Office has been using ooxml format as the default for a while and I don't even know about it. b) Users of new MS-Office will typically save their files in new format because that is the default. That means all users of old versions will need to pull down this 26MB update to see these files. 26MB is not a very small size for low-bandwidth users.

I hope ODF benefits from all this.

What makes software great?

As time goes by, I have started appreciating usability much more than any feature in software. For that matter, anything. Using a well-designed product is so much more fun that using a feature-rich but difficult to use product. Did I hear someone say "The GIMP"?

Today I was in a well-known hospital who had their registration and billing software custom-made by one of the biggest software services companies in India. I am not going to call names, but lets just say it is the company that is largely owned by one of the richest persons in India. They charged me registration and consultation fees upfront and everything was fine until I was about to leave, when they had to charge some more fees due to the doctor. The software raised an exception that consultation fees cannot be charged two times. There was no other category to put the fees under that would allow the money to go to the doctor and not the hospital. Further, the consultation fees was fixed by the administrator and the lady handling billing system could not change it. After a number of phone calls, she caught hold of the administrator who provided a lengthy workaround to the problem. No wonder, she was cursing the software and the company who wrote it :-)

I wonder how much of actual field testing is done before deploying such software. Do they hand it over to real-world people to try it in actual day-to-day scenarios or just sit in the offices, think of possible scenarios, write the code based on their assumptions and roll out the product.

How much is the cricket commtary worth?

It was not like I had a lot of respect for cricket commentators to begin with. Except when something very special happens in the game, what they say in a particular situation can easily be predicted. Lets say the batsman comes out of the crease for the very first ball he faces and hits the ball over the head of long-on fielder for a six. The commentator will say something like "He has decided to take the bull by it's horns, take the fight to the opposition. It is his natural style and it is a good idea to play your natural game while chasing such a total" Lets say the batsman was not that lucky and ends up sending the ball 'down the throat' of the fielder at long on. The same commentator would now say something like "This shot was absolutely not needed at this time of the game. The need of the hour was to consolidate and go for shots only towards the end of the game".

Recently I played Cricket 2007 game on Windows. This is a pretty nice game, but I admit I am not a game junkie, so it is easy to impress me. The game has pretty good animation, realism and gameplay. But what is commentary without the commentary? So the game contains pretty interesting commentary. They must have analyzed what typical commentators say in various situations in the game and made some voice snippets for each. Lets say it is a six. The commentary is one among "That is huge, he hit it right out of the ground" or "It doesn't matter when he hits it in the air when he hits it so far" or "Oh, I don't think it was a bad ball either" or "The bowler can't really complain, because it was not such a great ball. I am sure the captain won't be very happy with that" and so on. They play one of these randomly depending on the situation. Sometimes they play 2 or 3 together. However, what surprised me is that the commentary doesn't sound too repetitive/boring/unnatural compared to the real one! It sounds pretty alright.

This confirms my suspicion that commentary is not such a great skill after all. If you just collect a bunch of things to say in every situation and play them randomly, that is good enough! Even games can do a pretty good job of it. When I watch cricket matches, I don't mute the TV, because I like to hear the noise created by spectators in the ground. I am not that particular about the commentary.

How valuable is a life?

Today, Bangalore's newspapers had reported the news about a 'techie' killing his wife and committing suicide as the prime news on the first page. I could not understand why all newspapers thought this was the most important news of the day. FM radio stations, not to be left behind, were asking the listeners to send their opinion about the incidence through an SMS to them.

Don't get me wrong. I definitely feel sorry for the young couple and wish their lives had not ended tragically this way. However, this is not the first time entire families have ended their lives in such a tragic way in this city. If you sift through the newspapers, you could find at least one incidence in a month where a mother poisons her children and ends her life, a farmer, not being able to bare the burden of loans, kills himself and so on. Such news gets reported somewhere deep in the internal sheets, hard to find even if you are looking for. However, this incidence gained so much of importance only because the person involved is a 'techie'. (a unique word coined by Indian media which could mean anything from a people manager in a software company to a call center executive in a BPO company.) My thoughts when I saw this were, is the life of a techie more valuable than that of, say, a Government employee? If not, do the newspapers do this only because the readers are more interested in reading about the life of a techie than that of a more humble person? Or is it because.... I don't know...

After all, the families of the deceased would hate nothing more than media glare on the private lives of their
dear ones after this tragedy. I hope the media leaves them alone.

White collar 'crimes'

When I have a quick water cooler chat at work or when I meet people over lunch, one of the favorite topics of discussion is traffic problem. I often hear my friends/colleagues complain about a truck/auto/cab driver driving recklessly and causing danger to everyone on the road. Sometimes the discussion moves on to other related areas of public nuisance. I hear people complaining about the behavior of parking lot attenders at work, cafeteria crew, traffic cops, apartment construction companies, the Government, etc.

If a total outsider, like a foreigner were to join such a discussion, he/she would get this picture: The lower strata of the society, where there are less educated, poor/lower middle class people, is what causes *all* of the problems in Indian society. Bangalore is a better place because it has a large number of software engineers, who are a much better breed. Because hey, you don't hear complaints about other software engineers or other such white collar people. If we were to only look at the English language media, the same opinion will be cemented in our mind.

So in my opinion, software engineers, being the most educated, creamy layer of the society, should be setting examples for others to follow. But are we really doing it? Do we always behave on the road, following all road rules? Do we all stick to lane discipline while taking U-turns? Do we treat the parking lot attenders with respect? Do we thank them for their help in parking our vehicle? Do we thank any support staff at our office? If we ever did, do we do it with a smile on our face?

Whenever I see a silly traffic jam being created by a well heeled, sophisticated type of person in a Corolla, I get doubly angry than seeing a call center cab do the same mistake. Other examples are my colleagues spilling coffee in the microwave and not bother to clean it up, jump queues at the cafeteria, spit chewing gum in the rest room wash basin and so on.

The way things change and the way they don't

I visit my native place (a small village right at the sea coast in Udupi district) once or twice a year, for a couple of days. My visits were much more frequent when I was a kid. Hence most of my memories of my native place are from my childhood. This often makes me blind to the changes that have happened there and I continue to think that the place is as it was a couple of decades back. However, when I see carefully, the changes are vast. Modernisation has swept the entire district and changed it forever.

I clearly remember walking 2 kms from the nearby town Saligrama to reach my grandfather's house, because we would have to wait 4 hours for the next bus. Now, people in the village don't depend on buses which ply every 30minutes. All auto drivers in the town have cell phones. People in the village just call them up and within 15 minutes, you have the auto at your door. People don't mind shelling out 50Rs for this. Also, walking those 2 kms to the town is close to non-existent now.

There are innumerable things that have changed rapidly in the last decade or so. People are eating chaats, buying expensive cars, sending their children to English medium schools, are already tired of Big Bazaar, just like their counterparts in Bangalore. Seeing all this, it is often easy to conclude that everything has changed.

The last time I was in my native place, it was for the annual religious ceremony at the village temple. I had not attended this event for a very long time. I have fond memories of this ceremony from my childhood, when the entire day would be filled with fun and frolic for us. It ended with a grand puja in the evening, followed by distribution of 'prasada' that was extremely tasty. This time, I was observing to see how this has changed in the last couple of decades.

First and foremost, I observed that I was the _only_ one in the entire gathering of hundreds of people who was wearing a trouser, everyone else was in a dhoti. There is no restriction that one should not wear trousers at this event, so I was very surprised to see that even teenagers had worn a dhoti. Later, I observed that the process of the puja had remained virtually unchanged since my childhood. The same procedure, the same puja, kids having a fun time running around the place, elders trying to bring them to order, nostalgic senior citizens... Everything was just the same. For a few hours, I was transported back in time by 20 years.

It is my gut feeling that things will change here too. Eventually, young people will attend the puja wearing cargos or even shorts and eventually there will also be jeans-wearing girls. But for now, the place has resisted the sweeping change and has clung on to an era gone by. I wonder for how much longer.

What's in a name?

When I became a father 3 months back, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to find a name for my daughter. After all, I have succeeded in giving wonderful (I think so) names to other's kids in the past. How difficult could it be to name my own kid? From what I have learnt in the last few months, a lot. I and my wife had a clear idea of the kind of name we wanted for our baby. However, her idea was completely different from mine :-)

These days, there are a number of avenues available to search for names. There are the good old books, there is the Internet and of course, there are relatives. Relatives suggested names from various places. Some worked as teachers and they remembered the names of all the kids in their class, some suggested names from TV serials, some suggested names they had heard, names of kids of their friends and so on. We read through a couple of "Baby names" books and went through a number of websites.

One of the main problems in reaching a conclusion is that we want a name that has a nice meaning, or at least not have a bad meaning. These days it is easy to choose a cute, sweet name for your baby, having heard it somewhere among your relatives and later realize that the name actually means "lunatic". Most baby name websites publish meanings of the names. However, the meanings are either whatever was given by contributors to the website, or given by whoever among their employees was free when the name was added to the site. It is not uncommon to see a name that doesn't mean anything, but someone in some website says it has some meaning in Hebrew. Or Icelandic.

It was very difficult to find names that was acceptable to both me and my wife and also had a nice meaning. We have not even bothered to get a consensus from other stakeholders. After a lot of effort, we have narrowed down to a small list of names. Next weekend is the deadline before which we need to narrow it down to just one name. Wish me luck please. And never underestimate the complexity of the process of naming your baby.

Beach trek!

Probably the biggest adventurous thing I do on a day-to-day basis is driving through the BTM ring road between 9 and 10AM. However, every now and then, a deep voice within me instigates me to to something really adventurous. I usually ignore it as an indication of indigestion. However, once in a while I lose my sense and decide to indulge in something like going on a trek. December 15-16 weekend was one such time. It was going to be a 'beach trek', which meant, instead of climbing mountains, we were going to walk tens of kilometers along a beach. Not that it is any less insane.

We were a bunch of software engineers at different levels of physical fitness. There were some who had done a Himalayan expedition in the last couple of years, whereas there were some whose most physically strenuous job in the last few months involved a walk from a distant outdoor car parking lot (gasp!). My own glorious trekking past had ended a number of years back. Hence it was like putting Schumacher and a M-800 driver in the same car racing team.

We set out to Bhatkal in a bus, from where our trek was supposed to begin. It is a town approximately 500Kms from Bangalore, along the western coast of Karnataka. Our journey in a KSRTC bus lasted just about 14.5 hours at an impressive rate of 35Km per hour. By the time we reached, it was 9:30 in the morning on a hot and sunny day. By the time we were at the beach, it was what experts call the right time to walk on a sunny, hot beach for hours: 12 in the noon. Our plan was to walk till Byndoor on the first day and on the second day, walk till Maravanthe, which is probably one of the most beautiful beaches anywhere in India.

It took approximately 30 minutes for our initial euphoria to dry up and realize that the day was going to be harsh, hot and sticky. We quickly learnt a valuable lesson that walking a long distance on a surface that inclines from left to right can be bad for your left ankle. There were hardly any people on the beach, leading us to wonder if the population density of coastal Karnataka had come down drastically in the recent times. (I thought Tsunami hit the east coast of India, not the west!) We stopped at a coconut grove for our lunch, the best planned activity of our trek. After a while, we stopped for a dip at a fresh water lake right next to the beach. The vast sea seems like a powerful salt water empire, against which the little fresh water lakes seem to be trying to hold on to their own identity. Some more rigorous walk ensued and we eventually reached Byndoor. Success for day 1.


(Pic1: Sripathi, Chandra, Hariharan, Bharadwaj, Prasanna, Naren and Bharata. Pic2: Same folks + Chandru)

On day 2, after carefully considering all the factors, like the heat factor, the sweat factor, the strain factor and the i_prefer_AC_rooms_to_beach factor, some of us, specifically the M800 types, contemplated skipping the beach and catching a bus to Kundapura. After all, the road runs close to the beach, so we could still enjoy the beach from up close, without actually interacting with it's 'factors'. However, Bharata, our team lead for the trek, dangled the carrot of doing most of the walking early in the morning, before it got too hot. So we set out on day 2 and by 8AM, we were at the beach. The weather was quite pleasant and the beach was much flatter than the previous day, giving our ankles much needed support. Within the first hour, we had walked almost 5 kilometers. By noon, we had pretty much walked the entire distance.

We saw a lot more people on the beach early in the morning. It confirmed our suspicion that the area was in fact pretty well populated, but the native people had much too common sense to be walking on hot sand in the noon. Tens of children were playing on the beach and _all_ of them wanted us to take their photos. It left me wondering "These kids are not going to see these pictures _ever_ in their life again, why do they still want to get their picture taken?"


We had to cross 2 river mouths in these two days. We took help from local fishermen for this. What surprised us was that on both the occasions, the boatman refused to take any money from us for his efforts. Especially on day 2, a boatman invited us to use his boat, did 2 trips across the river, but flatly refused any money. All I can say is these people have not gotten in touch with the auto-rickshaw drivers of Bangalore.

By around 1PM, we had entered Maravanthe. Bharata proposed that, since we had met the objectives of the project, we call the trek over and and travel onward to Kundapura in a bus. Not surprisingly, the proposal was approved with 100% votes by the team. We checked into a lodge in Kundapur for the rest of the day and took the night bus to Bangalore.

PS: The 'official' travelogue should appear on Bharata's blog soon.

Ironies of life

Recently I became a father of a baby girl. We were in a hospital in Jayanagar and there were scrores of my relatives and friends visiting us, to see the baby and wish us. We had kept some sweets ready in our hospital room to offer to the visitors. What I observed was that most of the visitors were reluctant to pick up a full piece of sweet, either because they were diabetic or because they were trying to lose weight. Most just ate a small piece, that too after mentioning that they should not really be eating it.

Later, I went around the hospital floor to offer sweets to the staff there. Their approach towards the sweet was in stark contrast to our visitors. While nurses picked up a full piece of sweet without any qualm, some of the the cleaning staff (ayahs) actually asked me if they could take a second piece as well. I saw one of them preserving the second piece which she said was for her son.

This had a profound impact on me. While we go around offerring something to people who already have too much of it or don't want to have it, there are others who want to have it, but probably won't even be offerred. I then took out a box of sweets and left it at a desk where the hospital staff can take from at will. At the end of the our stay in the hospital, the box I left at the desk was empty, whereas the one I had kept in my room was not :-)

Controversy about honoring sports persons

When India won the T-20 world championship, everybody, including the state Government, PSUs, BCCI, media and private companies showered the winning team with praises, money and endorsements. This was widely publicized in the media and the Governments which did not reward crickets from their state (TN, Gujarat) were hounded and criticized until they too succumbed and announced cash awards. This resulted in other sports persons raising serious objection about the step-motherly treatment they are dished out. Hockey players had recently won the Asia cup, others had won world championships in snooker and billiards. The media and eminent persons of the society joined the uproar. Hockey players wondered why Sahara group, which sponsors the cricket team as well as the hockey team, treats these two differently when it comes to shelling out money. Quickly, the state Governments were in defense mode. Some of them hurriedly announced cash awards to these sports persons too. The controversy is not dying down fully yet. Vishwanathan Anand, after winning the world chess championship, has wondered what kind of reception he is going to get from the people back home, considering that they showered their love on the winning Indian cricket team.

As I think about this episode, some things are clear in my mind. First of all, it was wrong on the part of the Governments to go over the top in honoring the cricketers while neglecting other sports persons. In fact, the Governments could have done away with giving any cash to the cricketers, because they are getting a good amount of money from Sahara, BCCI and endorsement deals. They could have instead spent the money on other sports and that would have been a genuine encouragement to these sports. Finally, rewarding sports persons does not make our politicians any great. After all, it is the public money they are spending, not money from their own pockets.

Secondly, corporate sponsors like Sahara. They are a company engaged in making profits. They should and do think of their profits all the time, hence they are going to spend money only in places where they believe they have a good return on investment. It is not that they have a special interest in cricket. If hockey (or, say, Kabaddi) was the most popular game in India, they would have spent the money on hockey, not cricket. Hence, why blame them? We don't care to even watch a hockey game on TV, so how can we expect corporates to shower money on the game? There is no use forcing anyone - Governments, corporates, media to give more importance to other games. If we watch these games, these things will happen automatically.

Third, some games are inherently not as enjoyable for the general public as others. For example, there is no way whole India is going to sit at the edge of their chair and watch Vishwanathan battle it out for the chess world championship. So Vishy, please don't expect a massive gathering of people along your victory parade from Chennai airport to the city in an open bus.

Why thank (just) Muslims around the world?

At the presentation ceremony of today's Twenty-20 finals, Shoib Malik said: "First of all I'd like to thank people back home and the Muslims around the world." I really don't understand why he has to thank people of a religion particularly. Does he think people of other religions never support Pakistan? Why is that so? BTW, India is home to nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan itself!

South Indian = Madrasi

North Indians have always been poor at differentiating between the people from the four southern states and appreciating the difference between their languages, cultures and ways of life. Any south Indian is referred to as a "Madrasi". With the vast movement of North Indians to cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai in recent times, I was expecting that the situation would have changed by now. I was expecting that at least TV channels would be able to make this distinction very well.

A few days back I was watching a discussion on CNN-IBN. English news channels live on hype and they had a mouth-watering topic that day - the controversy related to the Sethusamudram project. One of the participants was a historian from Tamilnadu, I don't remember his name now. The discussion was moving on the lines of "Is Lord Sri Ram only popular in the North India? Is he relevant in the south?". The anchor asked the historian if he could elaborate. The historian said something on the lines of "Ram is not worshipped in Tamilnadu. There are hardly any temples for Ram in Tamilnadu. In fact many believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fate" At this stage, the anchor concluded something like this: "So worshipping Ram is limited to North India. Since South Indians don't worship Ram, we can't say that Ram is an integral part of Hindus in India." These are not the exact words she used, but pretty close.

Now, I really don't know whether Lord Ram is worshipped much in TN. This is a far too controversial topic to write about. What irked me is, how can Tamilnadu represent South India completely? Of course Ram is worshipped in Karnataka. Of course there are temples for Ram in Karnataka and AP. We surely don't believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fortune. Ram may not be as popular a god in South India as he is in the north, but saying nobody worships Ram in the south is too much of stretch. Come on folks, South India is not just TN. While at it, every South Indian is not a Madrasi!

My ADSL modem and router configuration

I bought my Linksys WRT54G wireless router in the US. It is a bit sensitive to voltage fluctuations. On some days the quality of power supply in my area is poor, which results in the router rebooting all by itself. When this happens, I am forced to remove the router and connect directly to the ADSL modem. The modem, having been made for Indian conditions, is much better at coping with voltage fluctuations.

Typical modem-router configurations recommend setting the modem in bridge mode and using the router to talk PPPoE language. However, in my case, when I remove the router and connect directly to the modem, I will have to change the modem from bridge mode to PPPoE mode. This is a surely extra work and is not nice. So I needed a setup in which I could either connect to the modem or to the router without making any change to settings anywhere (except of course restarting networking on my laptop).

Now I have got a setup that does exactly this. This is how I have done it:
As you can see here, I have my modem in the default PPPoE configuration. Modem's IP is 192.168.1.1, which is the default. I have enabled DHCP server on it, giving out IPs between 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.33.


Moving on to the Linksys router, I have configured it to be in "Automatic configuration - DHCP" mode. I have set it's IP to be 192.168.1.36. This can be any IP outside the DHCP IPs provided by the modem. I have disabled the DHCP server on the router, because I don't want to have 2 DHCP servers in my network.


I have connected the ethernet cable from the modem to the one of the router's 4 regular ports, not the "Internet" port.

I have enabled DHCP on my laptop. It gets it's IP from the modem. The router acts just as a router, forwarding all packets to the modem. When I disconnect the router and connect directly to the modem, it still works perfectly fine without needing any configuration changes anywhere.

About Twenty-20 cricket

I watched parts of the first ICC Twenty-20 match yesterday. I believe it is in line with the trend of the time and is bound to succeed. It is good that ICC has formalized the rules of T-20 to make it a mainstream game. I don't know if the dresscode of cheerleading squad is 'official', though :-)

As batsmen get used to the T-20 format, they will learn that it is possible to score runs of many balls that they used to just defend all these days. This will have an impact on the one-day cricket as well, just as the one-day cricket had an impact on test-cricket. More and more one-day games will see scores above 300 now.

The idea was simple. People don't have patience to spend a whole day watching a game of cricket, so the game has been shortened to meet people's tastes. Purists obviously don't like this experiment. They argue that T-20 makes the game lose it's character, skillful batting becomes irrelevant, the game is demoralizing to bowlers and so on. However, when one-day games were introduced, a lot of people opposed this 'dilution' of the game, but slowly got used to the idea of a game that finishes on the same day as it begins. Of course, there are people who still believe test cricket is the only 'pure' form of cricket, but such people are bound to be extinct in a few years.

Been a long time

It has been four and a half months since I blogged. I don't know how it started, I guess I became very busy for a few days and slowly blogging ceased being an important activity. However, I have started missing it, so it is surely time to get back to it. Hopefully I will keep up to it from now on.

Demise of Poornachandra Tejaswi

Poornachandra Tejaswi, one of the best known Kannada writer and novelists, passed away on the 5th of April. I have read some of his books (Jugaari Cross, Karvalo, Abachoorina Post Office, Chidambara Rahasya come to my mind immediately) and thoroughly appreciated them. I liked the suspense that used to be a part of his novels. He came out of his illustrious father Kuvempu's shadow and created a unique impact on the Kannada literature. It is unfortunate that we won't get to see any more of his writing. May his soul rest in peace.