Posts filed under 'General'
Last weekend I had some work in a bank and parked my car just outside the bank. It was a service road and generally cars are parked on the service road in Bangalore. After finishing my work in the bank and coming back to the car, I saw a parking ticket on the windshield of my car. It was supposed to be No Parking area but as always, there was no sign mentioning it. The cop who gave the ticket was still there and on the ticket it was mentioned that I have to pay Rs. 100 fine within 24 hours. So, went to him to ask where to pay and he said I can pay it to him.
He then took out his blackberry 
, entered all my details and then took a print out of the receipt from the mini printer he had in his hand. The whole process took just some 3 mins or so and no bribes nothing. The money would go straight to state exchequer and not into his pocket. Though I heard sometime back about traffic police using blackberry’s in Bangalore, never got a chance to see it for myself. Was really surprised (and also a bit happy inspite of getting the ticket 
) to see how hi-tech our Bangalore traffic police have become.
I hope they would show the same amount of seriousness in managing the traffic as well 
.
August 23rd, 2010
Rakesh/raki/rocky…..turns 26 today . Another year older and when I look back at the 25th year, it has been one of the most eventful years in my life. There have been many developments both in my personal and work life. But today what made me to actually make this post is not those events but this feeling of mine when I got up this morning……..I was still not completely awake and I heard some activity going on in the kitchen already. It’s my mom in the kitchen who started off with her daily chores. Its been 26 years today and every day….every single day, she has been there for us irrespective of how she was.
I still faintly remember how she used to walk me to my school bus stop when I was a kid….of course I also remember how she used to beat me when I refused to go to school 
. She gave up her own career so that I can have a good future. Its been 5 years since I left Hyderabad….2 years in IIT and 3 years in bangalore, I was having fun but back in Hyderabad she was always thinking about me. Even now when I go to home, she says its better not to come as she doesn’t like it when I go back to bangalore.
So, this birthday its to my mom because of whom I am what I am today. All I can say is thank you mom .
August 1st, 2010
Thanks to Amith who took me to Alibaba Cafe & Restaurant for the first time. I must say, it’s the best place to have mutton. Yes!! this post is all about where and how I ended up in finding this Arabian restaurant….though the name has cafe in it, its definitely not one of those Irani cafe’s in Hyderabad . This place is known for the Arabian delicacies and the mutton served there is really tender. My favourite is sukhe maas (mutton) along with gawapolis. They have a special biryani made only during weekends called khuboos. Also the tea served here is also great.
I like the food there so much that I take the pains to drive 45 mins (one way) in bangalore traffic to eat mutton . The route to this place is a confusing one and consistently I have always gone through the same wrong route but somehow ended up reaching the place. I would definitely suggest this place to any pure non-veggie visiting Bangalore.
April 19th, 2010
After 2.5 years of stay in Bangalore I finally decided to rent a 1 bedroom apartment for myself…and that is when the problems started. My requirements were a decent sized apartment for a single person with car parking in a good locality……don’t think it’s asking for too much but it was not that easy to find one.
Even after a month’s search I could not find a decent apartment that I could rent….and in the process of my search (sulekha was the only source of my searches) I found some really interesting houses…….one guy posted an apartment for Rs. 7500 with 10 months advance that did not even have doors for bathrooms, the kitchen which was actually an extended room into the veranda with some asbestos sheet as the roof. Then there was this house that was not even big enough to accommodate a 6′x4′ bed…and the owner says, a software engineer who was staying there until recently moved to US now and even got a citizenship there . So, does that mean, I have to squeeze myself into that matchbox like house in the hope of getting a US citizenship 
!!!
Though I was completely against going with agents, in desperation I finally thought of contacting some and none of these people charge anything less than a month’s rent 
. So, was back to sulekha again.
Finally after many shocking experiences I could find an apartment suiting all my requirements but for a slightly higher rent but I had no other 
option….and it was through an agent (good part is he did not charge me one month’s rent as commission). But now after a month and a half of stay in this apartment, I must say it was a really good decision. I am enjoying every single moment here especially the amazing view of the lake and coconut grove from my balcony. Its so refresing and worth every paisa .
The other good part about this place is this being a big campus, even at 
midnight you can safely go down for a walk (which I rarely do ) which reminds me of the good old IIT campus days. I am eagerly waiting for a good rain during the day to see how it would look…..will post some more pics then.
April 18th, 2010
I am not going to whine here about the present Telangana movement. Was actually watching American History X movie and that was the initiative.
Has anything you have done made your life better?……… This is the statement that made me write this post. Professor Sweeney in the movie asks Derek this question in prison and that makes Derek to really look back at all his actions against the Afro-Americans. This guy Derek was actually influenced by another person (Cameron) and joins a radical organisation against the Black people. The above question really makes sense. If only people would start thinking rationally and ask themselves such questions before blindly doing/supporting anything, this world would definitely have been a better place.
In the current situation I can correlate this to the on-going Telangana State movement (and that’s the reason for the title ). Instead of people just saying we have been fighting for a separate state for the last 40 years and we want it now, why can’t they just think for a moment in what way is that going to make their life better. In my opinion, oppurtunities be it education/job or whatever it be should be based on talent and not just because you happen to be from some region in a country and so have got more right than someone else from a different region. The sooner people would realize this the better would be our future.
Ofcourse, this applies to whatever we do in our life and its just a coincidence that the Telangana movement was going now and found it to be apt.
And towards the end of the movie, liked the conclusion of Danny in his paper……..Hate is baggage. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time. It’s just not worth it.
A good movie with a good message.
January 3rd, 2010
Had I known before about internet connection sharing in windows xp, I would have saved some time today. But anyways it was a good learning experience.
I initially connected my laptop’s ethernet port to my pc’s port and on my laptop, gave the default gateway as my pc’s usb connection’s ip address. My idea was to direct all outgoing packets to the pc’s usb interface. But this did not work. Then after a little bit of googling came across the internet connection sharing feature in xp (not sure if the previous windows versions had this). That worked like a charm for the first time itself. So, I had the following setup working now -
Laptop’s ethernet to pc’s ethernet and then bsnl modem’s usb interface connected to pc’s usb port. And on my pc, I enabled the option Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s internet connection. This was the easiest solution but it only solves half of my problems. I will now have to sit near my pc to work which is pretty bad. I somehow wanted to get my wireless also working in this mode .
For the wireless to work for me, the WRT54G2 had to be brought into the picture now. Now instead of connecting pc’s ethernet port to laptop directly, I connected it to one of the lan ports of my router and then the laptop’s port to one of the other lan ports. This works fine and I was able to access internet over both pc and laptop. Now the final issue was to get the wi-fi working.
Because of a few failed attempts in getting the wi-fi connected, I thought the access point mode was not supposed to be used. So, tried the client mode, client bridge mode, repeater mode and repeater bridge mode though knowing that these modes were for a different purpose all together. I already had a client bridge mode setup back in my flat in bangalore. But I was so frustrated that I started exploring all the available options . Finally when nothing worked I thought of getting back to AP mode and bingo…..it works!!!!! . Was so happy to get the wi-fi also working. Ofcourse, all this has eaten up 2.5 hours of my time but atlast got what I wanted.
So, here is the final setup just in case some one needs a similar thing to be done -
Scenario – One pc with spare ethernet card and connected to ISP over some alternative interface like USB port or another ethernet card. And need to get wi-fi access and other systems in the lan to be able to share the internet connection along with the host pc.
Solution – Enable Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection under the Internet Connection Sharing on the host pc. Connect the host pc’s ethernet port to one of the wired ports (not the WAN port) of the router. Have the router in AP mode and that’s it. The wireless can now be shared among any number of laptops just like any normal connection and also other systems can be connected to the remaining wired ports of the router.
Update – Jan 4th 2010
Though the wi-fi setup works fine in the above scenario, I noticed that initially when my laptop’s wi-fi gets connected it shows the speed of the connection as 54Mbps but within few minutes it drops down to 1Mbps. And then the speed you get is worse than my reliance datacard. Also one point that I noticed was that when the desktop’s internect connection was being used, we can forget about working on the laptop over wi-fi . Looks like it works by statically alloting specific bandwith to each of the interfaces. Need to explore further. Will keep posting my findings here……
December 28th, 2009
Like last year, we have an year-end shut down this year as well and amidst all the telangana struggle, the bandhs and protests, reached hyderabad safely yesterday morning . And the first thing I checked after reaching home was the internet connection. Switched on the desktop here and everything seemed to be fine and was quite happy.
Later when I switched on my laptop and connected my WRT54G2 router, I realized that my modem’s ethernet port was not up. Only the USB port was working and that’s how the desktop’s internet was fine. And I can’t even use the USB port with my laptop as this has some strange issue with it. The internet stops working after a few minutes of browsing and when I pull out the USB cable, the laptop just hangs and I have to do a hard restart. And this is 101% reproducible . Now tried with other cables and tried connecting the modem’s ethernet port to laptop & desktop directly. But nothing seemed to work. Finally decided to give a complaint as I was strongly suspecting that the modem’s ethernet port was having some issue and the modem may have to be replaced. So, called up the BSNL customer care.
Took a while to actually find out the customer care number itself. And finally was happy that I got the number and the phone was ringing on the other side and some non-human response was heard. And after a few button presses, got to talk to a human and this is how it went.
Call#1 -Â Some lady picks-up and after the routine greetings from her, she says she can help me out in resolving my issue. Was happy that BSNL customer care also works and thought that things are improving with BSNL as well (this is ofcourse proved to be wrong later ). Now she asks me to check if I have dhcp/static ip settings and then asks me to ping to the router’s ip address which would not work. I was telling her that the modem’s ethernet link itself is not up and its definitely not going to work. But she won’t understand it and finally she says its some issue at their end and it will work in 2-3 hours . Now come on, what is it got to do with their end when the modem’s port itself was not working. That’s when I understood that she never understood what my issue was. This is how the tech support of the BSNL customer care is .
Call#2 – Then called up again after some 30 mins hoping to get someone else on the other side now. This time it was a male voice and I explained to him the whole situation. And the way I explained to him, he understood that there is no point in asking me to check ip address or any other routine settings. He puts me on hold for 5 mins and then comes back saying that it could be some hardware issue and I have to get help from some technician. Now that is what I called them up for and this guy in turn expects me to get some other techinician to check the port. After insisting that it was the bsnl modem that has an issue and someone from bsnl has to come and maybe replace the modem, he says some techinician will call me back in an hour and he does not even register a complaint.
Call#3 – More than and hour passes now but still no sign of phone call. So, thought of contacting them again and this time a lady picks up and says a complaint was already registered and it actually takes 24 hours for someone to respond back and she happily gives the complaint number and hangs up. And its almost 40 hours at the time of writing this post and no sign of follow-up from them .
It was only today evening I realized that I had to work on something very urgent and was supposed to complete it by the weekend. That’s where my problems started again. Thought I have a datacard, the response on vnc would be so slow that one can hardly work on it. The other backup plan was to go to a cousin’s place but somehow got busy with some other work at home and it was already midnight. So, finally thought of coming up with some solution using whatever I had with me (a desktop, bsnl modem with working usb connection, linksys wrt54g2 router, laptop with integrated wi-fi & a few cat-5 cables). More on the solution part later………….need to finish up my work now ……………………
December 28th, 2009
Got a new Asus WL-500GP version2 and I am extremely happy with this. Now I have a 24×7 download rig without the need to continuously power-on my laptop. I just start my downloads by logging into the router’s transmission torrent client once and that’s it….. rest of it is taken care of.
Here is how I got this setup done……one of my colleagues was actually using this and posted details about this router. Liked it by looking at what all one can do on this router and got one from US. Btw, though the asus website shows many dealers in bangalore who sell this, none of them actually have one. The only way to get it is through an agent in Mumbai who gets stuff from US that is generally not available in India. We just have to give him the link to the product (amazon, ebay, etc.) and this guy ships it to us with some additional charge ofcourse.
Here is how my setup looks like now:
  I kind of started loving dd-wrt firmware too much. My secenario was I had to put my two routers in different rooms and had to get them connected wirelessly. This requires the client bridge mode which is very easy to setup with dd-wrt firmware. Neither the linksys stock firmware nor the asus stock firmware support this natively.
Now coming to flashing the firmware, the Asus router comes with a restoration utility on the CD which comes in handy if we brick the router. But somehow the restoration utility never worked for me .So, I had to flash my new firmware using tftp. Initially flashed the oleg firmware (in the second attempt ) but setting up the client bridge mode seemed to be complicated. So, decided to move to the DD-WRT firmware and after another 2-3 attempts of firmware download I got it working finally.
And from here, setting up the client bridge mode and getting the USB disk to work was pretty straightforward. Installing the transmission torrent client was also simple. One more advantage of this router is with the USB disk connected to it, you have a NAS server that can make this disk to be shared in the local network. So, my problem of having a NAS device also got solved. In fact, few months back I was looking to buy a NAS device but did not find a suitable one for me. The stable ones were priced too high and the cheaper ones were not good.
Now, I connected a 160GB 2.5″ laptop hard disk to the router and I have a startup script saved in the router that restarts the transmission client once power is resumed after a power cut. So, apparently the downloads go on 24×7. There are quite a lot of other features as well on this router but did not explore them all. Will keep posted here if I play around more with it.
November 23rd, 2009
What a movie it was!!!!! As far as I remember this is the only movie in which I was laughing from beginning till the end and even now 
. These days I reduced my movie watching a lot and am really happy that I watched such a good movie after a long time. Just like the way I used to watch movies randomly before, was just sitting idle in the evening after having worked from home and was feeling bored. All of a sudden came this thought to my mind to watch a movie and that’s it, me and Karthik went to forum and watched the night show. It turned out to be really really good one.
About the movie, I think there must be tons of reviews already on the net and I don’t want to repeat here again. Only thing I would say is it’s a must watch for all the guys out there 
……..and very much true as they say What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
July 21st, 2009
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