The year endeth and a new one is born

Across the pale parabola of joy

The year 2006 draws to a close finally. It looks as though I'll be celebrating the new year sitting at home with a rather virulent attack of the flu / sinusitis. Its a miracle that the body can produce so much fluid out of the face especially with a reduced intake of fluids :P .

Other than feeling miserable, taking Woosterish concoctions of Jeeves fame trying to restore my mucous tissues to normalcy there and feeling generally as miserable as only a cold can leave you, there is nothing much to write about .


The other event of the week has been the amazing drubbing of the poms by the Australians down under - 3 days for a single test match and defeating them by an innings after having won the test series by 3-0 .

The biggest event of the day though is the execution of Saddam Hussain in Iraq - It would be interesting to see the kinds of reactions to this .

Ah sundays !

Across the pale parabola of joy

and watching India play well in a test match in South Africa was a refreshing change over the weekend. The English batsmen have learnt how to play Shane Warne, with Ian Bell actually coming down the track to him a couple of things. Makes you wonder sometimes if you are high on something or in a blue funk over the weekend. Then you pinch yourself and the muscles are still stiff from the game of cricket the other day then you realize that you aren't dreaming :) and all this is for real.

You still think that you are dreaming when South Africa are 84 all out in their first innings - now chasing 400 odd by playing hop step and jump to Sreesanth and VRV Singh and even to the odd cricket ball from one Saurabh "Prince of Kolkata" Ganguly. It was good seeing Sreesanth dish back and not take nonsense from Andre Nel who thinks he can sledge his wickets. The beauty was in the celebration which made you laugh so much and must have really helped us get under the South African skin.

Mickey Arthur ( the coach of South Africa) last heard was asking for the curator of a dust bowl from India to help even the odds for the match at Kingsmead. Bring 'em on.

The joys of playing cricket.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Ah, the back's stiff - the shoulder's hurt, and the body feels stiff . Just proves that whatever you do in a gym and how much ever you climb Hanuman Tekdi - a game of cricket can still be a tough task . The fun factor is so much better - actually got to bowling on a pretty bad pitch and got some decent balls in. Now batting was another story - got bowled off the first ball and then run out in the second match backing up too far.

It was a typical match played in parallel to another match which was being played by the Royal Club of Nepal in honour of all the Nepali employees in the city of Pune and fielders from one match happily walked across the pitch of the other when the bowler was just about to start his runup . Reminded one of the times on the hallowed turfs of RKMVC ( for the uninitiated thats RKM Vivekananda College where one spent many hours of his wild undergraduate days improving his vocabulary in Tamil and playing the game of cricket. !) and the grounds of MRC. Though our MRC ground has turned into a posh apartment complex and robbed us of many days of fun .

Sunset in Vancouver

Sunset in Vancouver
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

This the photo finally.

Bangalore the city of joys, traffic and pollution

Across the pale parabola of joy

Any trip to Bangalore a city of many sobriquets gives a vision of the future for Pune. Ostensibly on a private trip I realized how much similar Pune was to Bangalore in the lack of public transport, road infrastructure, traffic congestions .. Log jams well the very definition is in Bangalore. Thank god we are still some way away from being Bangalored !

Other than the trip over the weekend and the last 2 days of last week it was good to talk to a couple of old friends and figure out what they were upto in the grand old profession of being a geek for hire.

James "Bollywood" Bond.

Across the pale parabola of joy

One fine day - Let the team bond with James Bond was the mission of our new management in the company I work at :). So what do we do , we went for the opening day festivities associated with the new James Bond movie (Casino Royale ) .. We could always afford the tickets earlier, no one really pushed us to go see a movie together earlier !

The movie by itself wasn't all that bad though it was quite Bollywoodish . MIA were Q and MoneyPenny though there was a subtle reference to her in the movie. It wasn't a typical Bond movie though Daniel Craig reminds one of Boris Becker - The usual ingredients were there but missing was a usual noisy Bond exit. Somehow Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery really are the good James Bond's ...

Daniel Craig tries but he still has a way to go .. But then this is the prequel to all the other Bond movies, so maybe he'll be more suave and the complete package next time.

Worth a watch though.

Beryl and Edgy - The revenge of the weenie

Across the pale parabola of joy

Wobbly windows on your Intel 82865G card... You must be joking was the polite answer at work by the rookie geek at work 4-6 months back when the XGL / Compiz mania hit the geeks at the place I work . The more macho answers ranged from asking me to grow up or drink something stronger than ethanol.

Today I have the cube, wobbly windows AIGLX working on my Desktop with the following.

root@numenor:/home/ramana# lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

And how long did this take me .
Time for an aptitude dist-upgrade to edgy eft
Time for google to find out install instructions for beryl

Figured that AIGLX was already there in edgy. So bye bye XGL .
aptitude install beryl emerald

$>beryl-manager ... .

And now the cube rotates !

You can see it here

Darn! STill can't get xine to play the movie across the edges of the cube. :(

Giving Thanks !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Thanksgiving approaches and this means freedom from calls with customers on a Friday evening. ! Not that I am going to do much about it. I'd possibly be sitting and watching TV at home or doing some other very interesting task like playing with my computer ! Ah no this year round it means that I get a chance to play with my new D50 that I nearly broke !! On a relatively divergent note I saw a beautiful lens today 80 / 400 zoom got some real good pics with it from within a house. The good part is its worth around 20k first hand and I am getting an old lens for nearly 13K which isn't all that bad.. But to use it I need to get out of office more in the evenings .. Thanks to Benjamin Franklin for Daylight Savings which makes this task even tougher for yours truly ....

Some joys at work !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Spent some time in the last couple of days reviewing some documents in addition to the usual GCC hackery that I do as a day job. However today I discovered a new piece of open source software called Frysk that allows you to monitor and debug multi-processor, multi-threaded applications .

The old head maintainer of GDB has moved over to work on this project and some of the screenshots look real good. If folks want to look at it its available at http://sources.redhat.com/frysk. How effective it will be only time will tell.

Oor Koothu a.k.a Orkut.

Across the pale parabola of joy


It has been reliably learnt from informed sources that Orkut is derived from the Tamil Phrase (Oor Koothu) which literally means Gossip in the Town . It appears to be the latest craze among Software Engineers in the list of "Most Useful Things to do betwen long builds"... Thank God for slow C++ compilers which tend to get slower with every release :) .. Now we understand why Compile time increases irrespective of whether run time decreases or size of the binary generated decreases. :), the GCC maintainers need more time on orkut.

Last heard activists from Amnesty International were working towards removing such recreational sites and creating a Generational Activistic Zoological site which goes by a strange acronym called GAZZAG.

P.S. Orkut is actually named after its Turkish name of people of people to meet. The TamilNadu govt. suspects that Turkish is also derived from Tamil and hence might make Istanbul the next destination for the Tamil Conference for the improvement of Tamil.

Noise pollution

An excuse is all it takes for people to create noise in Pune. It was the Ganesh festival, before which was Janmashtami and now its Navratri. So the celebration is for the devis but it ends up creating such a huge noise pollution that things are totally screwed up . This week they started playing songs all in the main throughfares of Pune causing huge traffic jams which resulted in me taking a 3 hour drive home on Thursday . Its faster to get to Bombay :).
Finally found the time today to get a large number of photos organized and put up online. Phew its such an exercise of patience. Anyways have to take some more good pics soon :) .

Gandhigiri and the story of sequels.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Morning it is on a lazy Tuesday. Have to get into work but am down again with a bug - not the software one but more the viral kinds. I managed to get to watch Lage Raho Munnabhai with the family on Sunday . This possibly is the first case where I have enjoyed the sequel better than the original. A nearly 3 hour movie and not once did I feel it dragging anywhere ! Really a good job. Arshad Warsi again takes the cake in this with what will be an immortal dialogue - 225 kidnapping kiye 260 logon ki haddiyaan todey lekin ek baar sorry bola aur andar kar diya mujhey.

The beauty of the movie for me was the way in which Gandhiji's ideals have been conveyed to the public in the typical tapori language of the average Joe in Bombay. The situations portrayed are all typical to what a lot of Indians face in their day to day existence, right from the son who loses his father's money in the stock market, to the old pensioner who needs to bribe a corrupt babu for getting a signature to receive a paltry pension from the state.The differentiation between the idol worship that we do for Gandhi by naming more areas, streets and setup statues of Gandhiji in every single park and the ideals of Gandhi are the things to be noted.

Thats possibly the reason that so many of us identify so closely with this movie. I am not convinced that Satyagraha will work always , maybe the process is more deterministic I don't know but it did work some 60 years back when we won our freedom. There are already stories in the newspapers of people starting clubs in Pune to follow Gandhigiri . Dadagiri is what usually works on the mean streets of India but maybe maybe after 58 years since Gandhiji was killed there's a chance that his ideals might again gain more relevance and credo among a generation of Indians which is become increasingly materialistic and thinks of his ideals as being irrelevant .

Best of luck to Mr.Kareer the municipal commissioner of Pune, who's the latest target of Gandhigiri with respect to the abysmal state of roads in Pune. To paraphrase the Times - "In India we drive on the left of the road, In Pune we drive on whats left of the road"

Pot Pourri`

Across the pale parabola of joy

Bombay or Mumbai as it is called today is such a huge melting pot for all Indians. You can find people from all over India over here - the taxi drivers from UP / Bihar , the merchants from Gujarat ,the stock brokers from Maharashtra and the general white collar employee from Tamilnadu. This is the 4th weekend away from home, travelling all the time. 1 weekend in Pune followed by 1 in Chennai-Frankfurt-Vancouver,the next in Vancouver and now in Mumbai to meet the parents despite a fever and the horrendous jet lag. The next weekend will find me again in Mumbai and 2 weeks later I need to be in Madras for a wedding .This is serious travel :) . Interesting eh.

Anyways enough of the rant on travelling ,I must say that I enjoy it while I do it and watch all the different people travelling . The trip back from Vancouver last week was interesting in its own right. Vancouver to Frankfurt had a large number of European and North American folk with a number of people of origin in the orient and yours truly representing one of 2 people from the Indian subcontinent. I was seated in an inner seat with an Italian on one side and a German couple on the other side . Interesting people to travel with. The Italian could not believe that anyone could be such a
strong practising vegetarian that he didn't touch beef or bacon. He was extolling the way strangely in which airline beef was served and going into some graphic detail.

I tried listening patiently but after a point decided New York Nagaram , the latest AR Rehman hit was worth listening to in comparison to a discourse on the essence of being a non vegetarian.

Getting off at Frankfurt to take a connecting flight
lead me in a bus across an Air India air plane. Interested readers would note that I have a healthy disrespect for Air India, but that day I must say that I was quite glad to see something Indian and the sight of Air India actually made me happy for the first time.

Finally after the regular duty of buying duty free chocolates I made my way towards the departure gate for my flight back to Bombay. And look what do I find ... More Indians , more people trying to jump the line and making a total ass of themselves in the line on the plane.

But boy was I glad to see some more fellow Indians despite them behaving the only way we really can .

The reassuring sight of the Times of India before boarding the plane was worth it. If in India I don't give it more than a cursory glance but that day I was so starved of news that I read it cover to cover.

Hmmm music.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Other than the joys of dropping your new D50 the day after buying it and creating a nice big hole in it , stress testing the Nikon really works :) ...Played with the soft-float madness for ARM for sometime . Its really a bunch of crap really especially with 3.3.2 . Someone I knew wanted libc built with soft float and it turned out to be a mess worse than I expected.


Spent last nightwatching Jillendru oru kaathal .Interesting movie and some of the songs are rather good. New york Nagaram finally brings back the Rehman of old and his singing has come up leaps and bounds. Its about a guy singing about his loneliness in New York- please note : it seems to be whatever Bollywood can do Kollywood can too . Finally the hero ends up in New York ..

Hmmm interesting ..

A weekend that was and will be.

Across the pale parabola of joy

A weekend that was amazing and that promises to be interesting .. Last Sunday M and Z managed to make me bike nearly 27 km all around Coquitlam. It was further from where I got to and I surprised myself by being able to bike that far.

Got some good shots on the old analog camera and will develop them some time. The next set of things I did this week is managing to acquire for myself a new Nikon D50 camera . The digital SLR is good , gets good photos and I can connect it to Ubuntu and it treats it like USB mass storage. Nothing I need to do . Transferred the photos and voila !

A weekend in Vancouver ...

Across the pale parabola of joy

Finally the weekend arrives albeit 12 hours later than India. It feels odd to be in a place where you wake up when everyone back home is going to sleep or winding down for the day . Finally got used to the idea that it could be close to dusk and the time could be 6:20 a.m. on your notebook (well my notebook still runs on Indian time) :) . Everything is opposite to back home inclusive of the brakes on the bikes, the right brake is the back one and the left one is the front brake. Well everyone can say we in India are exactly opposite.

The first 2 days were spent in just recovering from jet lag and getting better from there on. The temperature is 25 in the day and 10 at night. Early mornings are so cold that if you are out of the house you can see frost coming out of your mouth ..

Managed to half bike and half walk all the way to a place called Rocky Point in a place called Port Moody . It took me nearly 2 hours and managed to exercise my camera finally and that works ! Long needed exercise with just a long walk and a bit of biking.

P.S. If the weekend starts 12 hours later it ends 12 hours later too ... Now thats a thought to bear :))

9500 metres above the sky..

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting 9500 metres above the sky this is an interesting blog before the battery runs out in my notebook . Having utilized a larger amount of my battery time until now nothing much is left but to be left to the devices provided by Lufthansa for all sorts of entertainment :) . Ended up chatting with my cousin while up here in the sky which is good fun.

Achtung Bitte.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting in Fraport (Frankfurt airport) since sometime in the morning german time and catching up with email is quite interesting. The best part has been the ease with which trusty ol' zirakzigil works with Ubuntu Dapper to get the best access point , but paying so much money is kind of interesting. Anyways its in the credit card and we'll catch it sometime..... The thing that hits you is the change in language and despite the efforts to have announcements in English its funny to make out stuff which is written in Yes Prime Minister, (wok upztairzz , take ze train for zerminal B ) . I can now understand the sentiments of poor travellers who visit our country with its Tamil announcements down south, or Hindi announcements up north and the havoc differences in accents make... Was sorely tempted to buy an ipod but decided against it on grounds of fiscal soundness. :) .

So sitting down getting my laptop charged and will then end up boarding the aircraft in the next few minutes or so.

Out of hibernation...

Across the pale parabola of joy


Its been quite crazy the past few weeks getting everything organized and the first weekend since I got posession of a brand new Wagon R . If you want to see it here it is on the Maruti site . The car is awesome despite Maruti and is a testimony to Suzuki's engineering successes ! Fitted it promptly with a Kenwood stereo and Blaupunkt speakers ... The resultant effect is quite worth every penny spent....

Parents are here and looking forward to a trip to Bombay sometime tomorrow. ! Its been good getting good South Indian breakfast and dinner, something that has been missing for quite some time.

If only....

Across the pale parabola of joy

Well the title of this post is rather strange and it comes after a couple of interesting weeks in life. The highs of France reaching the finals, the lows of Zizou being red carded out in the finals ... The lows of not checking stuff before talking to a client and the highs of generating code that run at 184% the cycle count of an earlier release. The scare of 7 bombs in the city of dreams where your sister resides and being unable to reach her on phone ... Phew its been a roller coaster ride to say the least! Ok - now thats the understatement of my life :) .

Ended the week with a re-run of the classic movie You've got mail and realized the disruptive power of the internet. However though not everyone is a Joe F-o-x and you don't run into a Kathleen Kelly everyday though the mind boggles at such a possibility. What would any one do under such a situation ! What would I do ... And yes it all happens only in movies ! But then some of them are a true indicator of possibilities in real life aren't they !

Rain Rain come soon.

Across the pale parabola of joy


The rains are here now in full swing. The Indian Meterological Department after a month of wrong predictions about the monsoon hitting on time has finally got it right by predicting bright sunny weather when it actually is grey , dark and totally dreary. The rains are here and have started washing away the top of every single decent road in Pune. Its good that yours truly has managed to sell his car and is on the verge of a new car. Well however second and third thoughts are peeking up about the purchase of a car at this point of time. Rumour has it that the PMC has commissioned more contractors to make sure that the work started by the rains is completed by huge telecom operators, contractors and the PMC itself. For those who don't know what the PMC is , its the Pune Municipal Corporation.

Sheer brilliance

Spent yesterday evening watching the Netherlands Ivory Coast match . Boy ! what a match it was. Total attacking football from both sides , though it was punctuated by quite a few ridiculous refereeing decisions during the match . There should have been a penalty given in favour of Ivory Coast, play acting by Bommel and Van de Saar should have not resulted in cards for Kone and Drogba . . Anyways that was that. Inspired by this bit of play yours truly decided to go play some basketball after nearly 4-5 months today . Got totally killed in the process. Metacarpal bones that I didn't know were present got exercised, a poor guy walked right into my 6 feet nearly 90 kilo frame (there I go giving my weight away ! ) and came away worse for the wear. He literally bounced off me , was funny to watch but not for the parties concerned in the incident.

Otherwise nothing noteworthy to note . Yet another weekend slideth in and is half way out .... ...

Goal !!!

Across the pale parabola of joy


Its been quite a weekend . Punctuated with food , sleep and all the sporting events. The World Cup for soccer began on Friday and is one of the things that a lot of people have been looking forward to. The second test match between India and West Indies began in St. Lucia and Virender Sehwag's pyrotechnics made up for the lack of pyrotechnics yet in the World Cup . He made 99 of 75 balls and took 21 runs off a Dwayne Bravo over. Was too sleepy to watch Argentina take on Ivory Coast late last night though it was interesting to watch Beckham bend it and Carlos end it in the England - Paraguay match. Later Sweden couldn't overcome their opening match blues against minnows Trinidad and Tobago. Today was good as one watches Arjen Robben star in a Dutch win Serbia and Montenegro . 3 matches in a day would be too much of an overdose .

Back in the land of the monsoon

Across the pale parabola of joy

Ah, its a relief to be back. One week is all that it takes for the weather to change from hot dry and extremely tiring to cool pleasant and windy . Yes folks the south west monsoon seems to be here, though it isn't raining that much yet here in Pune but the weather is very much better. It did rain in Madras on Saturday night but it was punctuated with a huge power cut that stretched the night.

Work is good, normal small fires doused with no real effort . Have a rough bug still to solve which should take up this week.

Vacation bluezzz

Across the pale parabola of joy

Vacation and as usual I am in the city of the sweat. Attended a couple of weddings , a Tambrahm American Maapillai (son-in-law) engagement and then a week of R&R (rest , recuperation!) and clearing up the house which is getting a much needed coat of paint .

Attending the weddings was a bit of a nightmare with quite a few aged R's trying to get yours truly hitched up . It was easy to escape pointing fingers at my sis S and my cousin C . The high point of the wedding was being able to play with my 4 month old nephew A and his twin sister A , yeah they are both A's and getting my shirts chewed off in the process. The other nice part was meeting up with all cousins some old and well known and the others new and met for the first time. It was quite interesting to meet a 70 year old lady who claimed to be my cousin. We are one huge happy Tambrahm family paraphrasing Tom Hanks in You've got mail .

The other few days were spent in visiting a Tahsildar's office for handling some red tape, clearing off old books and getting rid of as many of my old books as possible and looking at old correspondence with the aged R's . I have actually spent a week with minimum interference on the wide wide internet and not responding to many official emails !Now thats an achievement !!

Saar coolie

Across the pale parabola of joy

The weekend was spent in travelling down to Bombay yet again and acting as a porter and a driver for my sis ! Acted like a responsible elder brother for once and surprised the aged R located down south in Madras. Returned to Pune later in the evening. These day trips are getting interesting and I am figuring out stuff about my Zen and handling it is improving. Its doing good by giving me 19 to a litre and allowing me to travel from Kothrud to Kurla in 2:15 min. Not bad at all I'd say . Ofcourse there are certain well-wishers who'd flay me alive for driving like that including a certain reader who's a regular off RSS feeds from this blog.

Of Catalan Devils and the Gunners

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting at home and being able to finish off quite a few issues with work and then to be able to sit back and relax at home in a dark room listening to Floyd was one of the cheap thrills in life . Was up late last night hacking on the monster that the GNU tools are and having fun at that and watching Barcelona come up trumps against Arsenal. Was a pity that Thierry Henri could not finish off the catalan devils but with Arsenal leading 1-0 at half time i thought half the battle was won. It was remarkable the way Barca came back to trump the Gunners from London. Now looking forward to the big thing , the event of this year would be the World Cup which is just around the corner. Parts of Pune don't have ESPN because of issues between the cable operators and ESPN in terms of license fees . My cable subscriber does though provide ESPN so its alright to now look forward to an invasion from friends who can't get to see ESPN in their areas.

Life though is good otherwise but sitting alone at home is slowly losing its charm , and being a compiler geek enables your social life to be a total zero with the result that friends you thought were bosom buddies think that you no longer exist !

A walk on the hills.

It was a good day today. Spent a lot of time in working on some estimates for a project and finished them just a few minutes back. Spent 2 hours in the day meeting up with a friend and later in the evening met a gaggle of friends from my college days.It was good fun especially walking up and down the hill behind Fergie and sitting and catching up on old times. I hadn't done this in the past 6 years so it was worth the climb and must have cost me a few cms off my waistline. .. But it was not to be a peaceful ending. I discovered that I need to drive down later during the day whenever I get some much wanted sleep to Bombay to help Shark figure out some new places. So rough day , week month ahead. Now I start counting days off for my vacation :) . Its now 13 days away . Yahoo.. But as with all vacations, I know I am going to end up writing proposals for projects. :P

Telugu and Gulute

Why are Gults called Gults ?

I have asked so many people this and the most popular answer according to us Tambrahms is that gult is a derivative from the word gulute which is the reverse of the syllables from the word te-lu-gu . I have heard an extension of this which might be rude to all the gults who read this and a good friend of mine, whose name is that of a calculator will murder me for this.

Apparently in the Rayalaseema district the rural folk keep a tokri full of puli rice and gongura (one of *the* hottest pickles that this country has the honour of producing and someting that all gults need to catch up on when they are back in homeland ) which they get up and have first thing in the morning without doing anything else. The next thing they do is to take a shower , walk out on the road , finish your work and on the way use either a twig or a toothpaste to brush. So the day's 3 major tasks are done in the wrong order hence the word te-lu-gu is reversed as gu-lu-te and gult is a short form for that.


I should mention here that this is hearsay and could very well be a tamilians rant against our fellow Indians slightly north of t-nadu.

Of Right Hands and Left Toe Nails

Whats the relation between the right hand and the left toe nail ? Other than using it to clean the dirt or remove the toe nail , there isn't much relation right ? With the result that the right hand and left toe nail don't communicate and end up not knowing each others capabilities.


Its a thing that you expect with bureaucracies as eulogised in the immortal Yes Prime Minister. A minister in the EU had a portfolio to pay French farmers to grow excess wheat, while a German minister in the next building paid German farmers to destroy excess wheat. A story that repeats itself in today's software world time and time again . The moral is the same, the context is different. Its no longer wheat, its u "boot".

Traffic road rage and what not.

Driving down today back from office saw an interesting sight. A bike cut across a car and there emerged a missile which I later recognized as a coffee day plastic cup .( Disclaimer: It was not yours truly :)) Road rage seems to have reached its heights now. Other than that got the car decked up a bit and fixed a few things . Setup a CD player . Now better music while driving.

Sultans of Swing !

Who would that be now ? The latest kid on that list would be Irfan Pathan who seems to end up getting a wicket with his first over . Or would it be Richard Hadlee ... or would it be Kapil Dev India's only all rounder for ages now. Would it be Sir Alec Bedser ? Or the great Pakistani bowler Wasim Akhram , someone that a lot of Indians grudgingly admire. I still remember that one over in Sachins test that he bowled to Rahul Dravid. 5 balls to which the Wall had no answer going this way and that ending up with the last ball breaching the wall and clipping the top of the off stump.

Ok why such a post ? As you can guess I got bored of looking at bugs for the day and spent some time listening to Dire Straits rendition of the song with the same title. The good thing will be to set up my router tomorrow if and when Iqara delivers it and finishing work on my loop bug ! I seem to be bug squashing only loop bugs or bugs that end me in being in loops !

The weekend away .

The news is that I finally got my broadband and cable modem connection @ home from Iqara on Saturday. Now in the motions of securing my Desktop as well as setting up stuff on it. Moved up the desktop from unstable Breezy to Dapper . Now I truly run ubuntu. Its fast , decent and good fun . The speeds were so good that since I had to go to Shirdi overnight and return on Sunday afternoon, I set up a download of the entire Dapper package repository. Timing this gave me a time of nearly 100MB an hour , the whole set of packages got downloaded in 5 hours. Now thats super cool !

The other event in life was travelling to Shirdi and Shani Shringanapur overnight to get some piety into life . The village of Shani Shringanapur is amazing. Till this day and age , no house in that village has a door or windows. Well not even toilets and bathrooms have doors and windows. Its supposed to be a "swayambhu" as far as the idol goes and is supposed to be good to visit if you are having a rough time on account of Mr. Shaniswara !

The new year that was.

Apparently today was a major major day. It was Tamil New Years day , Vishu (The mallu new year day) , Bihu (Assamese New Year) and Dr Ambedkars bday . With the result that there was enough food at home to make sure I worked from home. Well there was vada and paayaasam ( kheer for all ye Northies!) , then rice sambaar, rasam and curds . Not to forget the papad also made.

However the traffic was even more terrible, thought that with the firang masters enjoying Easter Weekend it would be cool on the roads but on the contrary got stuck in a traffic gridlock that ran for nearly 2-1/2 kms. This was a stretch that I usually zip around at 60-80 kph , today I did this in nearly 40 minutes. Terrrible. And why was this ? There was a procession. Whats this city going to ?

Now they have floodlit golf in the Pune golf course. What they forget is the fact that we have powercuts for 3 hours everyday while ppl can enjoy golf !

Ground hog day

The day before the Tamil New Year. Never realized it so much until today when I spent time in cleaning up some bugs in a super expensive super testing suite provided by some folk out of Europe in the 4.1.1 port that I am doing for a wireless soft modem DSP . Also managed to grind out one more bug out of the earlier 3.4.5 version that we have running now. :) .. So can breathe easy tomorrow and start looking at slightly more interesting stuff like why dhrystones are slow !

A method to madness

Life is quite excellent these days. At the end of the day driving is such a pain that one enjoys working from home. When you do that you enjoy the heat in Pune where temperatures are now touching 40 degrees. I pity the English team thats playing cricket now in India and specially in the dusty bowls of Bihar and UP. In such a situation what can one do but relax in a pool in the evenings after the heat goes down. Its awesome in the pool to cool down after a long days work . The only reason to reach office is to sit under the AC to cool down ! Add 3 hours of power cuts daily at home its such a pain to get anything done sitting at home ! When will this great state get some sense and decide to build some power plants !

What a waste !

Tough long day today . Got back home early enough , but can't sleep now . Traffic in Pune is getting really terrible with the amount of vehicles. Took me an hour and a half to get from the airport to home . I estimated it to be half the time. My clients should not hear this or they wouldn't trust the estimates I made with my Software Projects;) . In any case when we reached home , the lights were off. Its amusing to see that people in Pune can play Golf at night when the rest of the city sweats and faints under the heat . There isn't enough electricity for Small and Medium Enterprises to do work , they need to idle for atleast 3 hours a day , but the blasted golfers need to play golf between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. when there is peak demand for electricity . What a waste and what misplaced priorities as a nation. No wonder Maharashtra is going the Bihar way !

What a waste !

Tough long day today . Got back home early enough , but can't sleep now . Traffic in Pune is getting really terrible with the amount of vehicles. Took me an hour and a half to get from the airport to home . I estimated it to be half the time. My clients should not hear this or they wouldn't trust the estimates I made with my Software Projects;) . In any case when we reached home , the lights were off. Its amusing to see that people in Pune can play Golf at night when the rest of the city sweats and faints under the heat . There isn't enough electricity for Small and Medium Enterprises to do work , they need to idle for atleast 3 hours a day , but the blasted golfers need to play golf between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. when there is peak demand for electricity . What a waste and what misplaced priorities as a nation. No wonder Maharashtra is going the Bihar way !

Wake up Kumbhakarna

Ah , Here we are again..New day , new slate ! Time to wake up and blog again. Life has so moved on ... .Summer's here and the heat is oppressive. ! Did 3 trips to bbay since my last one. Was good driving on the eway at 140 - 150 yesterday. Did the drive back from bbay to pune in 2hours flat ! Now that was some heck of a drive . Now figured out 3 routes out of bbay to drive back. One the traditional , chembur -> mankhurd -> panvel route , the second eastern express way -> airoli -> panvel and the final to take the airoli->belapur -> panvel route which is a much better road and skips kharghar.

Spending more time hacking gcc, got a few bugs which are interesting... I hope the new age cells unite and make up for all the existing pains in this world. ! This will be clearer in the next few days !

Bombay and back ..

Across the pale parabola of joy
Drove down to Bombay and back over the weekend and indulged in some serious retail therapy in additions to the joys of driving my car on the express way. Did the onward trip in 2.5 hours and the return in 2 hours and 17 min inspite of a 10 minute petrol cum phone break on the expressway . Driving in Bombay over the weekend was also good fun , with me managing an average speed of nearly 60-70 kph on the Pu Dru Mahamarg ( Its the eastern express highway ) , the highpoint being that on the way back from( Mulund to Chunnabatti , we needed to turn into Nehru Nagar turning near Kurla ) we didn't stop at a single signal . Wow !! The distance of nearly 16 km done in under 18 min. Wow !! Try that in Pune... I travel less in Pune (14 km to office from home) daily and it takes a good 30-45 minutes depending on the time I get out of home :) .

Also caught up with Rang De Basanti again on Sunday and managed to visit my old prof at IIT Powaii. Enjoyable trip overall :) .

The Delhi Metro and Akshardham

2 of the modern Indian places of wonder are Akshardham in Delhi and the Delhi Metro . For the first time in the history of modern India Delhi has organized neat public transport which is dependable, punctual , neat, modern and one that puts Delhiites in a queue :) . Wow ! Travelled on it to get to Ritesh's place over the weekend and getting there from Civil Lines was darned easy . Just buy a ticket, change over at CP and get onto the blue line. Rocking I say . Also train timings between the Yellow and Blue Lines are perfectly synchronized that you can get off a train walk to the next platform and you get into the other train . Wow ! Clockwork and punctuality did you say :) .

The other miracle was ofcourse Akshardham. Having seen some teasing pictures of this on the web I wanted to see it in person, again one can say that the pictures don't give you an imagination of the experience. Again wow , does this exist in India along with the hooligans in Puri , the touts in Kapali temple in Madras or the cheats at the Taj in Agra. You have organized entry, security checks that would do our airports to shame, organization and pipelining to the very best in terms of scheduling for resource utilization. There is a huge temple or meditation centre formed in the name of Swami Narain with sculptures in marble that make you wonder if such art was possible again in India, art and sculpture equivalent to the grand old chola days and something that might be equivalent to Mahabalipuram or Hampi. Also the audio video show was very well organized and a boat ride through the mythical Saraswati river and with information the vedic period etc. Yeah it does bring out the poet in one self but so be it :) ....

Again another time to bid adieu to Delhi though I would have loved to have met a few more of its temporary inhabitants whom one may consider friend.

Bollywood and Linux Asia

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Resurrection ?

Resurrection for zirakzigil, my laptop. After a hurried flight down to Madras due to the untimely demise of my grandpa ( a great man) who is to some extent responsible for me being the kind of hu"man" that I am , I discovered that I had suffered another bereavement, that of my laptop hard drive being slowly eaten up by bad blocks . Other than a couple of things being lost, nothing much since most of it was backed up in office spent the whole of Friday in resurrecting my laptop installing ubuntu and possibly setting up a mirroring system with another usb hdd that I acquired in the past. Also in this I must give due credit to IBM who got me a new hard disk in no time whatsoever.

A tale of 2 minute hands.

A clock in Bristol , UK has 2 minute hands. Why may I ask ? Apparently there exists a Bristol standard time which is 10 minutes behind London . http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bristol-time.htm. That certainly calls for multiple minute hands in a lot of clocks here in India. Very very interesting and truly brit thing to do . I am pretty sure us Indians would also do the same thing considering all that we have inherited from them :)

The deep end can be fun.

Its been a good weekend. Slept most of it thanks to a drill of 2 hours in the pool on Saturday . The deep end usually has been a lot of fun as far as my work has always been concerned, but saturday was literally spent in the deep end of the pool . The feeling of floating with just a tube supporting the many tubes around your waist ;) was real good fun. Cycling across the pool, figuring out how to keep breathing and kicking in turn to get the breast stroke right was also rather good fun.The good part of this whole exercise has been that for a week I have successfully managed to do some physical activity to stretch the parts of the body that I had kind of forgotten totally about for a week in continuum. (Mom are you reading this ?? ) Well I certainly hope so :) ..

Anyways thats that... Sunday is over, spent the evening watching Munna Bhai MBBS a rip off on Patch Adams though Boman Irani, Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi as Circuit were awesome and spent the whole time laughing my head off. Tomorrow's Monday and the day beckons. ...

Hello World 2006

Hello World 2006. The first post in the new year and it has to be a hello world :) . Spent the New Year weekend playing Monopoly which was a classic game replete with diabolical strategies, mergers & acquisitions, meeting threats to the existence in the game. Wow ! it was a blast. Also spent some time watching the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings (ROTK) on a friends HDTV . That was also awesome.

The other things I did was to catch up on 3 crappy Tamil movies, one great Tamil movie by a new director called Cheran who seems to come up with one hit after another. This one was called Thavamai Thavamirundhu and Raj Kiran and Cheran himself essayed among their best performances. I expect this should win some more awards. It really was well made. The other thing I did on the last day of last year was to enroll in a swimming course. Right now learning how to kick in water, and float so that Mulshi (circa 2003) does not repeat itself. :)

Other than that, the same old work in a new year . Nose to the grindstone ....