Rakesh Reddy Kandula

Getting locked out

Had it not been for the third time in 3 months, I wouldn’t have written about this . In my 25 years, I barely remember forgetting stuff like this. This is about how I got locked out of my house twice during the night and once during the day and how I managed to get back in .

The first time it was around 9 PM and I went out to get some stuff and when I came back realized that I left my keys in my room itself and it got locked. The good thing was I do have a duplicate key set in my office drawer. So, called up another colleague of mine and went to office. I was requesting the security guys to open the drawer in my cube to get my keys but they say all the keys are in some safe and a seal has been put and it can’t be taken out . Only when I said I can call the campus security head they said they will call their incharge and see if something could be done (and in fact they could get the keys but you know people are not always ready to help so easily). Finally they broke the seal and got the key to open my drawer.

I told to myself that I will never again be so careless but that’s what exactly happened for the second time. But this time it was just after I got ready to leave to office. So, luckily I had my drawer keys in my pocket. So, called up the same colleague and asked him to stay at my place until I get back with the key and lock the house .

And today yet again I got locked out during the night . I went out for groceries and came back home at around 9.30 PM only to realize that I didn’t had my keys with me. And this time I could not recollect if I left my keys inside or if I lost it somewhere on the way as I was on my bike wearing shorts. So, it was the same routine again…. a colleague….campus security…..but this time I really had to call up the campus seurity head and only when he told them to help me out, they let me in and got the key to open my drawer. But this was not the end and I was really tensed until I reached my home as I was still not sure if I lost the keys or forgot to take them. And finally I found them safe in my room .

So, now I decided to keep this duplicate key in one of my friend’s place because I am pretty sure the campus security people are not going to entertain me for the third time . I hope I won’t forget stuff like this again….but this is seriously not a good indication . Anyways will keep updating here if it happens again…….

Add comment December 18th, 2009 at 01:31amIST

Got a new car

Just got my new Hyundai i10 delivered. Its i10 1.2 magna, silver colour. Don’t have a camera right now……will upload a few pics here later. As of now I am restricted to drive only in and around the city . No long trips approval received yet . Hope to go on trips later but for now its only bangalore . More to come later……

Add comment December 17th, 2009 at 06:02pmIST

The Alchemist

I had a list of books that I always wanted to read and The Alchemist was one of them. But somehow never got a chance and today read this book and now I feel like I learnt a lot or rather I knew all those but needed something/someone to help me re-discover and here it was in the form of this book.

It was such a simple story yet reveals the facts of life. One thing that I would always remember is to never give up and keep trying to realize our dreams no matter whatever comes in the way. Like in the case of Santiago, though during his journey to realize his dream he could have settled with what he achieved, he never gives up his quest to realize his actual dream. He could have gone back from the crystal shop with all his savings and settled as a shepherd with more sheep or he could have settled in the oasis as a counsellor and lived with Fatima for ever. But he never got distracted from his ultimate dream of going to the Pyramids inspite of all the hurdles and the riches he made during his journey.

There were a few points made in the story that hit the nail straight on the head and will never forget them.  Most favourite one was “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it“. And then the story that the king tells Santiago about the boy and the wise man. The boy was given a spoon with few drops of oil and then the wise man asks him to have a look at his castle. But the boy was so engrossed in taking care of not to spill the oil that he could barely look at the castle. And when he was told the second time to have a look at the beautiful castle, he comes back with all the entire oil spilled. That’s when the wise man advices the boy – “The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon“. And then what the Englishman says to Santiago – “It was the fear of failure that kept him from attempting the Master work for 10 years and he is happy that at least he didn’t wait for 20 years”. And finally what the Alchemist tells Santiago – “You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his destiny. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love……the love that speaks the Language of the World”.

In fact there are many more such instances that have appealed to me but of course cannot write them all here. In short its a very good read and yeah that’s the reason its transalted into 67 languages winning the Guiness World Record and sold more than 65 million copies in more than 150 countries (Source: Wikipedia).

And digressing from alchemist now, thanks to my Asus router, I have started watching IMDB top 250 movies and hope to complete most of them soon .

Add comment December 6th, 2009 at 03:05pmIST

Paa….

Watched this much-awaited movie today and Amitabh Bachchan has proved it again. Amitabh’s  performance as a Progeria kid Auro was brilliant and also an excellent work done by the make-up artists.

But the movie as a whole wasn’t that great as expected. Definitely it wasn’t as good as Taare Zammen Par (TZP).  And it could be partly because of the kind of subject choosen in Paa. The disease Progeria that the movie is all about has no cure and Amitabh had to die at the end. But more than Amitabh dying at the end, I didn’t actually see much about Progeria being dealt with in the movie. At least that is something basic expected from these kind of movies. If we compare TZP with Paa, TZP is entirely about dyslexia in children and how they could be helped rather than being neglected. On the contrary, the director in Paa was trying to address many issues like bad politics, irresponsible media and of course the bringing together of Abhishek and Vidya Balan. But as the disease Progeria itself has no cure, maybe the director had to come up with these extras to keep the movie going. Maybe a different subject could have been chosen and then showed how it could be handled. In Paa, it was like Auro was just left to die and nothing could be done. To me it looked like another routine Bollywood story with a slightly different touch.

But, Auro’s comedy was something really good and also some of the touching scenes in the second-half were good. More or less it was just Auro driving the whole movie as our Big B always does .

Another point that I didn’t like was the titles being read out by Jaya Bachchan when the movie starts. Though it was just about for a minute, somehow I really felt irritated with that idea. Was just waiting for her to stop . Instead they could have had some background song.

On the whole, I would definitely suggest watching this movie at least for our Big B’s performance.  But point to remember is not to go with TZP’s expectations. Big B definitely rocks but its no match to TZP. Lastly, though initially many thought that Paa was a remake of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, its definitely not. Paa definitely deals with a real disease where as the other one is just some work of fiction.

Add comment December 5th, 2009 at 02:27amIST

Asus WL-500GP…..I am loving it

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.

2 comments November 23rd, 2009 at 10:55pmIST

The Hangover

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.

2 comments July 21st, 2009 at 02:49amIST

Bungee Jumping results in tragedy

Its been a long time since I posted anything. But never expected that I will have to start with something bad. This is about the bungee jumping event organised by CARE and facilitated by BMC India in Bangalore on April 10th, 11th, 12th.

Few days back, I got a mail forward about this bungee jumping event being organised by CARE adventures and headrush bungee. I was interested in it but could not go because of some work and a friend of mine, Karthik registered for the event. He went to the event on 11th April. His serial number was 31 and was waiting for his turn. In the meanwhile he went out for lunch and after coming back he notices that nothing was going on over there. Then he came to know that there was a mishap and a guy got injured seriously. So, the event was cancelled. Just after five or six persons had done it, the hook was broken and resulted in the accident.

So, this post is to warn anyone who would like to register for such events in the future. Be sure that enough safety measures are taken before taking part in any such events. Later on when the news about this incident came on news, we came to know that the guy has succumbed to death. There wasn’t even an ambulance at the venue which is supposed to be a very basic safety measure. And as it always happens after such events, the organisers were absconding. So, people be careful…….all the adventurous people out there, this should be an eye-opener.

12 comments April 11th, 2009 at 09:02pmIST

Miscelleneous Sessions

Attended a few other sessions like Mobile Applications for Indian Population, Open Source Development, Build Your Own Brain(BYOB), OpenStreetmap, etc.

The mobile apps session was sort of a discussion about what kind of mobile applications can be developed specifically for the needs of Indian Population. Some of the ideas discussed were like apps for farmers to send updates about power cuts, daily updates about the cost of commodities, etc. Issues like what kind of UI would be required, affordability, etc were discussed. The other app was to have an Indian calendar and also something related to horoscope, etc. Then came an app for commodities trading. And then was the most interesting one…….apps for traffic updates. There were quite a few ideas about this. So, this was more about different ideas but not about how to actually implement them.

Open source development and BYOB sessions did not seem to be very interesting.

The OpenStreetmap one was slightly interesting. These people were taking the existing maps and then trying to make them accurate by ground verification and then updating them. They had already mapped a few places around chennai and were quite accurate when compared to google or mapmyindia maps. They were calling for the support of everyone to make use of their tools to update the maps. Basic concept was to have a community effort to update the maps.

Add comment March 7th, 2009 at 02:36pmIST

Session on voice php

Was initially apprehensive about how this session is going to be. But it turned out to be a really interesting one.The guy who was presenting was from TringMe. He was talking about how to power your php apps with voice. This was something new for me and I really liked it. The best part about this was its just any normal php script with just a few more additional functions provided by them. We can have an IVRS based app, a media player or just any other voice app that we can think of using voicephp. We can access our app from anywhere like through web, phone, etc. For developers who would like to test this out, we can signup for free and every user gets a unique phone number as well. So, we can basically access our app by directly dialling that number or even from the web. Looks to be a really good stuff and easy to implement as well. I am definitely going to try this out. There are a number of sample apps put up by them at http://code.voicephp.com/.

The same guys had another session from 2-3 pm but that was more of selling TringMe. It was basically about setting up your own voice portal using the tools provided by them.This didn’t seem to be very interesting.

Add comment March 7th, 2009 at 01:56pmIST

Sessions kick-off

Here starts the first session on personal branding by altius consulting and I see almost all the people just attending that one single session……these people have got a well prepared ppt and it looked to be more of altius people conducting a seminar and not like a discussion……

Moved to Track#3 and here is the discussion going on change we can believe in (using social networking sites to cleanse politics)……..this initally started with just 5 people and slowly people started gathering….but the presenter didn’t seem to be very interesting…. he says with the help of social networking sites, get people’s support and go ahead to start a party……he says language barriers can be eliminated using social networking……all the while the discussion was about advantages of social networking but at no point I heard anything from him talking about how to change politics using social networking platform…. this guy says lets first have sufficient online presence by forming a group and someday he dreams of this community transforming to an actualy party ……..I don’t think this session was worth at all……moving on to another one

Add comment March 7th, 2009 at 10:26amIST