The joys of insomniac hacking.

You know you should be sleeping ,
You know you are not that young anymore ,
When you start nodding off looking at code,
And writing verse that is such a bore.

On such a note my friends
I introduce to my friend insomnia
the poor cousin of amnesia which
all the big ones said lead to being comfortably numb.

Ok enough of this bs ,
Let me actually quit this insomnia business so soon.

Saar bondaa.

It was late at night and a friend M caught me on yahoo messenger. She's sitting in the US having fun making such yummy looking bondas. Now that I had asked for some of them and this is what I got at 2:52 a.m. this morning . Ain't technology wonderful.
Person makes bondas
Broadcasts on yahoo
Requests given for bonda
Yay ! half an hour later its ready to be served. Too bad its in a continent some few thousand miles away .

Programming Languages

Spending the weekend over at my sister's place I got a very interesting question - Hey can you teach me C++ since I need to do some programming for some of my financial derivative work - Now I particularly don't like C++ for the sheer number of concepts and sheer number of options to do the same thing in a C like dialect. Personally as a programmer I prefer the simplicity of C and on occasion have had to use shell , sed, awk to get most of my work done. Thanks to my own love of languages and never shirking from writing custom parsers and custom languages for some of my own projects either they be during my time at the university or during the course of my professional career I figured there had to be a better way than getting her senses damaged by the whole thing with segmentation faults, runtime errors, dynamic casting errors . Much easier with an interpreted language.

So I did some googleing to figure out what kind of libraries she needed and for what . I discovered that open source did have some kind of financial libraries and something available for the kind of stuff that she needed and that it had interfaces in languages simpler than C++.

The pain with programming in C / C++ for non-programmers is the steep learning curve with the whole jargon of CS, memory management - the absolute pain of looking up APIs and trying to make sense of doco that makes sense to other computer science programmers but not to programmers who want to do a bit to get their basic tasks done. Exposing APIs in simpler languages like python, ruby etc tries to improve the footprint of users and allows the users to solve the problems they want to rather than worry about other problems not specific to the problem domain. Also playing with an interpreted language rather than a translation system allows for interactivity and quick testing of functions along with development and reduces the pain of setup and attempting to do things differently.

So I am trying to now set up python so that she can get going with simple programming and free her mind off issues related to low level details. The library I am trying to use is quantlib
and see if we can get the relevant exposure in the corresponding languages. I wonder though if there could be a way of generating stuff or link this up with Excel or openoffice so that she can remain with her favourite tool. Interesting stuff for a weekend eh ...

Kashid Trip Slideshow.

This is a slideshow of photographs taken at Kashid post the trip to do the river rafting.

Left Forward Right back.

Regular readers of this blog would realize that this is quite an odd title . But that's my new mantra today for existence ! Read on.

It was Gandhi Jayanthi and instead of spending time sleeping at home all day doing nothing 11 of us from office decided to do something adventurous beyond fixing compiler bugs, optimization issues, graphics issues, widget and manager worries.

Something adventurous for us was a 380 km drive across Western Maharashtra starting from

Pune -> Mulshi -> Vile -> Sajad -> Sutarvadi -

The drive is exquisite , waters in the dam are full with the copious monsoons this year and the drive through roads nestled by hills of the Sahyadris left one speechless with the beauty and the impunity with which waterfalls sprung from every place. We had a raft to catch and hence I couldn't stop and take photographs there . One should go back over the weekend just to get some cool snaps around sunset especially with those amazing waterfalls just on the road.

The Kundalika River is where we decided to do some such things in life.


So at Sajad it was decided by the powers that be , that we'd end up doing something known as white water rafting on the Kundalika river. This is one of those small rivers fed by dams in the Western Ghats and irrigating the Konkan area. However from where the water is released till the time it reaches downstream there are a number of rapids intermittently created by the flow of the water over such beautiful terran. So it is possible to raft through some of the rapids , there was 1 class 4 rapid that we had to worry about. I was however separated from the rest of the gang as we could fit only 10 people in a boat and went on another boat not so surprisingly filled with more Software Engineers. One of them seemed to be a keen ornithologist and one got to see a Golden Orion and other such exotic birds on the trip downstream .

Rafting seems to be an interesting activity as long as there is enough current to pull you through the rapids. The job of the guide / steer is the most important as he gives orders to the rest of the team - we actually had a crash course in rafting for 20 minutes prior to the actual work and amazingly self preservation has a way with people obeying orders from the guide without any questions asked and practicising with utmost seriousness because of the risks associtated with the sport. I would have usually expected some smart ass to make some wisecracks there but surprisingly the crowd in my boat was rather silent.

The rapids were in increasing order of complexity-it was too bad that I couldn't photograph any of it - there was only space in my hands for a T grip on the paddle and nothing much else. The rowing commands while in a raft seem to actually be pretty simple - Forward , Back, Get Down (Means get into the raft! and not into the water ) and Stop. Pretty efficient state machine if you ask me - however it has interesting combinations like Right Forward and Left Back which means paddlers on the right side of the raft row forward and those on the left row Back. There's a technique to rowing - but its so tiring in still water that one gets really hit with the lack of exercise that epitomizes every software engineer's life.

There was one class 4 rapid John Cary as our guide called it - In all we had the following rapids

• Laughing Buddha - The easiest of the lot, we got our real life training sessions here for implicit obedience to the guide.
  
• Pumphouse - Little more complex - was a series of class 2 rapids , pretty simple in comparison to some of the others but after the serenity of Buddha was an interesting and long drawn affair.
• Morning Headache - It should be renamed to Monday Morning Headache - This was a class 3 rapid that was also managed pretty well. All the while the guide was taking us into the rapids in the best possible way and giving everyone a fair and thorough drenching.
  
• John Cary - A class 4 rapid. The only place where we had to "Get Down" . Get Down in rafting is to get into a defensive position holding a line that runs around the raft and brace for life and hope that you don't get thrown off. This was v. interesting . There were a number of times when one thought that you'd get hit .
  
• Rajdhani Express - Am not sure of the class of this rapid though one thought it would be a class 4 rapid. This was long and drawn , the last one but pretty fast and long like the Rajdhani Express.
  

The rapids got covered in about 30 minutes of the whole trip down though the remaining time was spent in just floating through with the current till we reached a point downstream where people could swim pretty safely. Yours truly was reminded of a certain incident regarding swimming in the Mulshi Dam where there was a rebirth - so i kept my counsel and decided against getting into the water for a long time. The will was finally broken by the sight of friends of mine who'd never swam before in life swimming merrily in the water and I jumped in promptly to disappear under water for a couple of seconds. I surfaced but it felt as though it was time to call for the lawyer, bequeath my car to my parents, wonder about my tax refunds . Just when one wondered if this was it - the end one realized that he could breathe and got in a few scoops of Oxygen instead of water . This was when the fireworks display inside my head started reducing - and I was able to vaguely make out shapes on what we call Planet Earth. Things got even better, the sun was shining merrily, folks were enjoying their lazy swim in the river , the birds were flying , the vultures disappearing when a pair of hands actually pulled me up using the 2 straps of my life jacket. I didn't know that these things were so strong and pretty well maintained and got back up. I also realized that K my cubicle neighbour wanted to get back at me for all her troubles I had previously caused her in life, by pushing me into the water. Give me land and I am good , push me into water and I am worse than a baby.

In any case after this got done one got to participate in a mini regatta for a couple of kms involving 4 boats. After a spirited race where the left side paddlers in my boat decided not to row in sync with the folks on the right side, we caught up with the leaders who incidentally were my office mates in the other boat. We did give them a tough fight, though ingenious last minute matchfixing by yours truly let us reach second to the final destination.

P.S. This doesn't end here, what's not mentioned is a 1 km climb up a hill with sore legs and hands , resolves of more visits to a gym and the badminton court.

Nasik Triambak Shirdi Bombay Shani Shinganapur Panchvati

3 cheers for the roads and the beauty of Western Maharashtra. If anyone would have told me that I could do this in 1 weekend with hardly any effort I wouldn't have believed them . The fact of the matter though is that I've managed to in one fell swoop cover stretches of Western Maharashtra that have been on my wish list for ages now. Its my 9th year in Pune and only now have I managed the trip to Nasik .

Nasik is about 200 km from Pune and boasts of the origin of one of India's mightiest rivers, the Godavari. It derives its name from the Sanskrit word Nasika which means nose. Legend has it that this is close to Panchvati where the nose of Surpanakha the sister of Ravana in the Ramayana had her nose cut by Lakshman . The Godavari or the Ganga Godavari as it is known here flows in a merry stream maintained rather well by the Nasik civic authorities. However I wonder what would happen in Jan or feb when the monsoon rains would have stopped and the dams would no longer remain so full.

The places to visit in Nasik are Panchvati, kala Ram Mandir, Seeta Gupha, Triambak, Godavari Khund. if you are a pilgrimage fanatic then this be the place.

The Seeta Gupha is among the most interesting places to visit. Psychologically this is the place where you realize how much thinner you need to become and the dangers of that last piece of dessert and that one last ice-cream and that one small spoon of sugar in your coffee. Now for the literal story - its a small little cave with idols of Ram, Lakshman and Sita but the approach to it is so small that only one person can enter and that too on their knees or on their haunches. You literally crawl down have your darshan and get back up in a similar undignified position. Thankfully I had a friend to push me down in case one got stuck but then he just had 2 small school going kids who'd have had struggled to pay him the same compliment.


Anyways the story ends with me not having to be pushed out of the cave and making it back safe and sound to write this one.

The Ganesh Festival- Pune's time in the sun.

Its the middle of the Ganesh festival here in Pune and as usual the streets are rocking to Himesh , AR Rehman, Anu Malik and who ever the latest as we say in Hindi "dhinchak dhinchak" music star is . The great Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak started this in the late 19th century as a way of national integration , introspection and a way to unite our disparate masses. But now in the name of tradition and culture we are carrying this a bit too far with all the extravagant spending, the extortion in the name of the pandals, loud music from walls of speakers and drunken dancers in the middle of the street even at midnight.

Its fun for some but its definitely not my cup of tea. Ofcourse the pandals by themselves make for fantastic photographs at night but when there are suicides by farmers in the countryside and powercuts and black-outs for nearly 12 hours in the rural areas of Maharashtra it seems quite hypocritical to indulge in such forms of fun.

Having said all that however the amazing energy, the crowds , the sheer joy of watching different plays, acts and themes for the idols of Ganesha is an experience worth having. As usual I suspect I'll be going along with a group of Swedes and explaining the stuff having not done this in ages. Its time to bring on the D50 .

Tosegarh and Thos waterfalls.

[Enter home at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning after a long week's work . ]

Roomie : What's up for tomorrow ?
Me: Nothing much - gotta get back to office and work on some cool optimization. What are you upto ?
Roomie: Me am off to Tosegarh, Sajjangarh and the valley of flowers at 5:30 a.m. Wanna come
Me : What the heck - lets go .

And so began an amazing journey worth 250 photographs all shot on my magnifique Nikon D50 . Tosegarh and Sajjangarh are located off Satara in Western Maharashtra on the beautiful 4 laned NH4. Getting there was easy, we'd hired a Scorpio to drive us all the way around . It was interesting though with the driver providing us anecdotes about gruesome accidents on highways and driving at maniacal speeds on narrow mountain roads that I thanked my stars for reaching back to Pune in piece.

Tosegarh is nestled in the hills behind Satara reachable on an amazingly picturesque drive. The monsoons have left the hills with copious amounts of water which comes down in the form of a huge number of waterfalls which end up forming the river Krishna which flows through Andhra and 2tmcft of which reaches Madras through the Krishna water scheme. He he all you madrasis watch out for water that we bathed in yesterday ;) . Getting around in the waterfall is an amazing experience. The water was icecold and was gushing along at a merry pace . Getting inside the water was like getting a full body massage albeit by cold water with 15000 masseurs. The scenery as most parts of Maharashtra in this time of the year was awesome and made for some amazing photos. It sure as hell beat working on a Saturday and made for a nice break .

Come September

What do we remember September for - Ganesh Chaturthi , Gokulashtami, 9/11 , friend's birthdays , OSIM ?

I would remember September for the Pune Festival associated with the Ganesh Chaturthi. In as much as I hate the noise and the ruckus they create - (after all Ganesha didn't ask for the walls of speakers with Himesh Reshammiya blasting away at the top of his nose (err voice) ) , the grandeur and beauty of some of the pandals make for an amazing walk through the most crowded areas of Pune and excellent photographs.

Its been an interesting week or so. Rediscovered that the College of Engineering has a boat club from where you can get some amazing pictures. I need to cart my camera along the next time I go just to photograph the birds (of the winged variety). Just watching the egrets and the Eagles swoop over the river in an amazingly tranquil environment is rather neat. I have done some work on addressing mode generation for GCC that seems to improve performance a bit . It would be interesting to see the benchmark results that should be out tomorrow.



So September bring it on ....

Mazes, Traffic Jams and Obstacle courses

Travelling or driving in Bangalore is an amazingly arduous task. Wild horses cannot even drag me to stay in Bangalore. The fact that almost every road in central Bangalore is one way and there is absolutely no way you can make any geographic sense about where you want to go . I had to drive a couple of times across Bangalore and needless to say this was a very different experience. You can't make a mistake in terms of direction and not spend another 20 minutes rectifying it because everything is one way and there are no u-turns available . The circle is possibly a favourite of the road planners in Bangalore - since you keep going around in circles thanks to the one-way's as well as in various junctions . Also the typical rule of thumb according to my friends is 7 minutes per km, so if you need to travel 13-14 km its atleast an hour and a half . The most funny sight though on my trip was this flyover from "Double Road" to Richmond Road which has a signal on top - So you climb up the flyover and drive "American style" (of driving on the right side of the road) for around 500 m and then stop on the top of the flyover to get back into Indian style of driving. For the unimaginative imagine this to be a large X with traffic moving diagonally. Woe betide any learner stuck on the incline in first gear and my sympathies for the car stuck behind.

Driving in each of India's cities is a different art - Bombay is fast , has wide roads , better planned , well co-ordinated and generally very disciplined. Delhi is chaotic but the wide roads are a life saver inspite of indisciplined drivers. Hyderabad is the epitome of lawlessness on the road. People go on the wrong side as though its a right of way. Pune is chaotic too but Hyderabad is possibly the worst traffic I have seen since there is absolutely no logic to driving there as well as wide roads and folks having the most powerful vehicles :) . Bangalore is slow , crawly , confusing and is basically a collection of vehicles that like to imitate the snail. Madras is ok , better disciplined than either of Bangalore or Hyderabad with decent enough roads. However at the end of the day if you can drive here you can drive any obstacle course or navigate through any city in the world with far better co-ordination thanks to manual transmissions in most Indian cars.

Bengaloooruu ... Hello World.

In Bangalore this weekend on a whirlwind vacation of sorts. Its good to be in the garden city of Bangalore and as I blog this after a redeye flight to Bangalore, 2 cups of authentic tamilian filter coffee, 1 plate of ven pongal and a trip on the streets one does start feeling the effect of lack of sleep for a week . It has spectacular effects on my eyes, they start turnign totally red, irritated, and then it moves into what I call the migraine zone where every part of your head starts aching with pulsating and shooting pains . Wow ! sounds interesting doesn't it ? Anyways migraine shygraine aside- it looks as though there are a whole bunch of family and friends waiting to be met in Bangalore - a 14 year old nephew and a 4 year old cousin being the more interesting of the lot .

Looking forward for a tyrst with the infamous Bangalore traffic. Morning wasn't too bad but then no one wakes up in this city till 11 , do they ?

Ottawa Sunrise finally

Finally sunrise in Ottawa. A collage of shots from the hotel window showing sunrise on a day that I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and had nothing much to do.. 3 cheers for my D50 and amazing skyline shots ...

Of television serials and a lazy weekend.

Its been an interesting week . One of my friends P became a father on Thursday and it was an unexpected sight to see him holding the baby when we entered the hospital room to greet the new dad . So now 3 cheers to the big daddy. Ofcourse this leads to a new domain of jokes about the new dad (oops should we say kid) on the block which I'll save for another time.

Spent Friday sick in bed with a sinus attack but later in the evening felt better to run through all the episodes of Heroes to How I met your Mother. One's a sitcom while the other is a supernatural thriller.

Ofcourse being a pretty big fan of sitcoms I managed to finish both seasons of How I met your mother in a couple of marathon sessions neither of which can be said is very good to my health . But as cliches go .. .what the hell, you only live once. I somehow relate to Ted in How I met your mother - too much planning and not doing can never do you any good in any relationship . If there's something to be said or done one's possibly better off saying it or doing it as soon as one gets the thought. Sometimes its good to be impulsive or you just miss the bus or the moment as the case might be. The gang in How I met your mother consists of Robin Sparkles Shebarski, Marshall Eriksen, Lily Aldrin, Ted Mosby and ofcourse the irrepressible Barney "suit up" Stinson. Interesting combinaton of characters and they do make quite a good combination. I can't wait for the 3rd season to get under way. I believe we should be able to see it on Star World in India. Atleast that's what Wikipedia suggests...

Ok thats that .. Nice internet break and now its time for 2 and a half men.,

chak de india.

Its been 1 hour and 42 minutes into the 61st year of our Independence and I just got back from watching the new SRK movie Chak De India. While watching it at ESquare in the 1030 p.m. show last night there was an event that quite astounded me. In the movie a small clip of our national anthem was played and everyone in that particular hall stood for the duration of the clip. Bowled me over totally. Maybe it was to do with the Independence Day spirit and all the media hype but whatever it was due to that one moment made me think about the probability of a hall full of people actually standing up for a clip of the national anthem out of a population of a billion.

Of an English Summer...

What an interesting English summer it has been so far. The Indian cricket team pulled off a series win after 21 long years with a bunch of players some of whom would never travel again to play in England. It was very interesting that the man of the match, a certain Mr. Kumble known more for (the absence of huge) leg spin in his bowling, ( but the presence of the top spin and a veritable googly) to receive the award for his batting (the only century by an Indian in the series in the presence of the demi-gods of Indian cricket) .

Its been raining here continuously for the past few weeks and we are quite fortunate to see the sun on a couple of days. Tomorrow is our veritable independence day and yours truly is celebrating in office today listening to patriotic songs and mulling over wearing a dhoti in office. Ofcourse the problem is that wearing a dhoti in office means the risk of indecent exposure (albeit inadvertently) and the fact that the air conditioning would make me feel very cold in my legs. Being from a tropical place which has only 3 seasons (hot hotter and hottest)such impulsive acts are not so good for an old man like me.

Of Time management and what not.

After the trip last week to Canada, the body clock is still misbehaving and pushed me into a wake-up at 9:30 a.m. and sleep at 3:00 a.m. routine which ends up with me reaching office either having over slept or under slept or at an hour later than what I usually try and maintain (well ,at times :)) .

Time management and splitting time between office work and personal projects is an interesting piece but something one has managed to do well over time . Personal projects on some new topic provides one with an escape mechanism from the drudgery of work or a way of getting out of a problem that one can get stuck on for a long long time . Fixing bugs is also a good way of spending free time and ends up giving the author an extra fillip towards spending some more time in sorting out other bugs of his creation :) .


This is a random posting and do ignore it ....

Of a Canadian sojourn

Its been an interesting couple of weeks thanks to a sudden trip to Ottawa for the GCC summit and work related activities. It was a good trip to Ottawa, meeting for the first time, names that are so active on a mailing list and figuring out that everyone looks so different from what you expect them to be . Travelling to North America for an Indian Vegetarian is quite a daunting task since vegetarianism has been stretched to include fish and chicken in certain cuisines. However this time was rather interesting as one met an alumnus from my school and also working on compilers. Now take that for a coincidence. Incidentally he had the same teensy weensy problem that I had which was that of being a vegetarian :) So there was company to try and explore cuisine other than that provided by Subway or Starbucks or Tim Hortons ..

There's this Moroccan place in Ottawa that claims to serve the best vegetarian food and they certainly lived up to their expectations. So we survived on whatever they served us as vegetarian - the bread was a cross between an aaapam, a dosa made of Ragi something that tamilians would understand and the side dishes were made of lentils (dal) , sundal (black peas ?) and a chutney that would make the gonghura tear up because of the heat generated :) .

The dinner next day was spent in visiting a place run by Chinmaya Mission in Ottawa a 100% vegetarian joint ! (WOW!) Take that all you carnivores who sneer at vegetarians travelling to any place outside India ! In the middle of all this one managed to attend the lectures that were on at the summit , quite a few interesting ones at that .

Roaming about the malls looking for stuff strangely left me less lighter on the wallet than I expected thanks to the appreciating rupee. I bought a MP3 turn table for my parents, a Wii for the kalculator , a number of small little things here and there which were special requests from folks back in India. Last but not the least one did manage to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and finish it on the flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Enjoyed this book , she's tied up all the loose ends in this one and almost *everyone* involved in the series so far has a reference . No more school boy stuff but lots of stuff where it gets like the lord of the rings / return of the king . There are many people dead but one death makes all the headlines and that sparks some interesting reactions among people ...

Pure Magic.

Its been one of those really really good days. The day dawned with me waking up late for my trip to Mahableshwar a hill station about 100 km from Pune. After that what followed was pure entertainment and enjoyment. The drive to Mahableshwar, lunch at Mapro , drive through the clouds, good music , visibility = 0, Humidity = 100% , temperature = very low made the day extremely beautiful. Got a number of photos which I shall upload at some point of time pretty soon.

Once we returned from this long long drive I managed to catch the Federer Nadal match from the 3rd set. For the first time in his life, Nadal seemed to believe that he could beat Federer on grass and actually gave the champ a good marathon for his prize money . The other thing was Federer suddenly gave up in the 4th set where Nadal simply ran him to the ground. The 4th set actually had Federrer rattled and shaken like he had never been before. A couple of hawk eye calls left him non-plussed and irritated. The number of unforced errors went up dramatically in that set too. Finally it all came together in Federer's 3rd service game of the 5th set. It was scrappy, it was dramatic and it was entertaining. Watching Fedex play was like watching a beautiful act of synchronization between limbs, the racket and the ball. It was sheer poetry and it left me incredulous about how he managed to return those serves with so much power and panache !

Shakespeare and Wodehouse.

As is evident from the title of this blog I am a great fan of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. I didn't realize that the bard from Stratford on Avon (Shakespeare for the uninitiated ) also had certain qualities similar . Statements like "That is a custom more observed in the breach than in the obeisance" show his humourous side too .

The particular quote that I was quite impressed with was not one that would tickle your funny bone . I am not sure about how true this is but anyways here goes "God in his infinite wisdom chooses to ignore some of our prayers while we in our ignorance choose to blame him for it. "

This particular piece of prose was conveyed to me by my mom after a particularly interesting day in life when something that I wanted didn't occur. However both of us were pretty curious of the origin of the particular quote , she couldn't remember if it was Hamlet or Macbeth. If there are interested readers who see this , it would be good to know if you have come across this some place on your other literary quests. Quite refreshing and interesting one must say.

Monsoons, rains , near floods and crumbling roads.

Its monsoon time again ! Rains Rains Rains, its grey dark, cold and raining all the time here at Pune. We seem to be breaking all records this year. The last weekend of June was enough to make up the seasons average for the month . The Mutha, Mula, Indrayani , the Pavna and the river on Paud Road are all flowing and are in spate . The net result, roads laid a week before the monsoons started have started disappearing or in the process of developing great big craters .

On a more serious note, its been a long time since I updated my blog . Was busy with helping out in a GCC workshop at IIT Bombay, lots of work at office travelling to Madras and Bombay through out the last month on weekends and one week . Phew its been quite a while .