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EE6902 Computer Communication Networks Qn. Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:52:00 +0000

Subject: EE6902 Computer Communication Networks

Department: ECE Dept, NUS
Semester I, AY 2009-10 Question Paper

I wanted to do this from last semester onwards. There are some modules for which the previous question papers are not released by the department. I wanted to write down the questions and publish them. Maybe it will help someone in the coming semesters. Since I had back to back exams last semester, I was not able to do it. This semester, I have taken the module called computer communication networks which comprises mainly the fundamentals and concepts. The previous year question papers were not released and I and my friends wondered how to prepare for the exams or how the pattern of the questions may be. That’s when I decided this year I am going to write down and publish the questions as I remember them. I and my friend made small notes of the questions after the exam itself and now I made it to a better form.

If you are reading this for your exams, all the best and perform well. If you have attended this exam and know the missing questions or if there is anything to add to this blog, please do so by leaving a comment. If you find this ‘venture’ helpful, do leave a comment. After all, it feels good to know that I have helped someone. Special thanks to my friend Dana, who helped me a lot for my exams, without whom I would not have made this blog possible or even study well for the exam.

Some Notes:
1. There is no guarantee for any of these questions to be exactly the same as seen in the question paper. I simply wrote down what I remember after the exams.
2. Even though I answered most of the questions, I am not sure about the answers and also I am too lazy to write down the answers. As our professor says, give it a try.
3. I am publishing this the next day of my exams and so I don’t know the results, yet.
4. In the end of the questions, the symbol © doesn’t mean copyright. All copyrights are with the professor or the university (or with whomever it is). It just means ‘courtesy’. ;)

Newly Added
I am posting the answer for the question 2 here. This answer has been sent by my friend Ganesh. Thank you very much Ganesh :)

Google: The real Skynet?

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:49:00 +0000

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I hear Google has taken over the world or is going to be the ‘Skynet’ or the ‘Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’ of earth. I have heard stories about identity thefts or conspiracy theories like the CIA tapping personal information like bank accounts, phone records and not to mention the number of movies on this theme. Till recently I believed this is possible only for a high profile security agency or for an expert hacker. Only till I saw Google dashboard.
I read about Google Dashboard in a technical article two days back. It says “I already knew that I use a ton of Google services and they know a lot about me, so seeing it all in one place was more entertaining than scary”. I too didn’t expect it to be this scary. When visited the page, I felt like discovering me all over again and found out many thing which I never noticed doing before. Dashboard contain all the information about my Google account, Gmail account, Blogger account, calendar, contacts, docs, finance, social networking, latitude, search/web history, wave and the list goes on and on. Any person who can log in to my Google dashboard can easily get to know me, even more than I know about myself, like my account details , my schedule, my contacts, the documents I was working on, my financial portfolio, my friends, my location and even I do daily in the internet.

Video about Google Dashboard

I also knew that Google ‘knew’ many things about me. But seeing all of it in one location is scary. I know people who store confidential data like their bank account numbers, passwords etc in their Gmail account because they ‘know’ it’s safe and globally accessible. But, all one need is a simple password for your Google account and the consequences can be disastrous. The extra level of protection offered by Google is asking your password, one more time.
On the positive side (for Google lovers), dashboard is one big help. There is now a single place where you can manage all your Google accounts with easiness. Also, it provides a simple solution to find out what we are doing in the internet.
No matter whether you think this is a boon or a curse, it really made me think how much personal information I can safely put in the internet, if I am concerned about my privacy.
Links
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/transparency-choice-and-control-now.html
http://www.google.com/dashboard

Designing a logo

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:41:00 +0000

I do bits and pieces of painting/drawing once in a while and I love almost everything that had anything to do with computer graphics. Electronic games are my weakness, but that’s mainly from a user point of view. Other interests are graphics programming, designing etc. Creativity has its own advantages. You can create, destroy or modify almost anything you want. More than that, I like playing God. So I jumped right in to the opportunity to design a new logo for our organization and my logo is selected as the new official logo.
Our organization - ARL - was on the process of revamping its website and the employees were given the choice of coming up with a new logo. We were free to come up with anything. No bounds were there. But it had to be agreeable to others in the lab. The main factors I had to keep in mind when designing a logo was that it should be easily printed on paper (in color, gray scale and black & white) as well as clothes (embroidery), stationery items like mugs, pens, plastic etc. Also the colors should stand the test of time and space (stretching, different media etc).
In the beginning, I was not sure whether I could do it. Finding the starting point was my main challenge. I had to formulate and idea and then start off from there. I kept thinking about it for some time and decided that I will start from where my predecessor stopped - the old logo. My plan was to rebuild the old logo first, may be with minor modifications in phase 1 and then add any new ideas as it comes along my way.

Old Logo

I looked at the old logo and asked myself, what are the key elements in there and what can I do to make them look better. After some thought and discussion with my professor, I decided to concentrate mainly on the following.
1. Make a new earth with glossy surface and a good reflection (inspiration: windows vista aero interface)
2. Make the bubbles, bubblier.
3. Decide whether to retain the waves or not. If retaining, try a different look. (The shell & waves are adaptation from the TMSI (Tropical Marine Science Institute) logo, to which ARL is affiliated to.)
4. New fonts for ‘ARL’.
I started with the earth part. The only tool I have used for the whole process is Adobe Photoshop. (Both ver. 7 and CS4). I searched the net for tutorials for a glossy globe and found this one.
http://www.denisdesigns.com/blog/2009/06/create-a-glowing-globe-icon-in-photoshop/
And that’s from where I started. The result of my first experiment looked like this.
Ok, now that I have a place to start from, I started playing with other factors like the bubbles, fonts, waves etc. Some of the tutorials I have used are given in the reference section. I downloaded custom brushes, fonts etc. My reconstructed logo, with new bubbles and font, but without the waves looked like this.
Ok, phase 1 is over. Now for the next phase, I wanted ideas, something that everyone will notice from the previous logo, at the same time, retaining the key elements of the old logo. That’s when I noticed the color combo of NUS website. Orange, blue and white. That’s from where I got the idea of using different colors. Ok, orange and blue, one of my favorite combos and at the same time, a theme which goes along with NUS website theme also. I had to start the logo all over again. The result looked much better than the green one (from my point of view).
I also had to create the ripples that originate Singapore. For that I found many methods/tutorials, but none was getting close to what I wanted. Then my professor sent me a link to try and voila! It worked. Also it was he who suggested keeping a simple font.
The result of my earlier experiments looked like this.
Another of my experiment with waves and without ripples resulted the following.
I ignored the idea of waves in the beginning itself as I was not able to do a nice work and it’s a bit difficult job and I was too lazy for that.
The above logos were used to collect feedback. Some of the main feedbacks received were, the ‘ARL’ text is not proportionate to the size of the globe, the gradient color scheme is difficult to do embroidery on t-shirts, the ripples are too small, since the ripples are there in the land, it given an impression of tsunami (We wanted the ripples to represent acoustic waves - showing the relation to our research domain) etc.
I redesigned again and came up with the final logo with bigger ripples explicit to the blue region (water) and a bigger single color ‘ARL’.

Final Logo

And that’s how this logo was born. Different versions of logo were made with different sizes, background (alpha channel), color/gray scale etc.
I never thought I will end up with this logo when I started. But when looking back, I feel great about this project. Special thanks for my professor who helped me from the starting point till I finished this project, with valuable advices and suggestions.
Along with the logo, I have also designed a simple map to reach our facility which you can find in the ‘contact’ page in our website. It was real fun making it.

References and tutorials which helped me in designing the logo
Glossy Globe
Bubbles
Text Effects
Ripples

Additional references and tips
Layer Masks
Custom Brushes
ARL
http://arl.nus.edu.sg/twiki/bin/view/ARL/Contact
http://arl.nus.edu.sg/twiki/bin/view/ARL/People
I am not an expert in photoshop, but drop in a comment if you think I can help you with photoshop.

CHOKe - A stateless active queue management scheme for approximating fair bandwidth allocation

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:27:00 +0000

I had to do a literature/paper review as part of one of my courses (EE6902 Computer Communication Networks). I selected a queue management algorithm for internet routers which is R. Pan, B. Prabhakar and K. Psounis, “CHOKe: A stateless active queue management scheme for approximating fair bandwidth allocation”, IEEE Infocom 2000. It is a very interesting paper considering the fact that it was published nearly a decade ago. This is one of the very few ideas I have come across and thought, "Why haven't I thought about this before?" I am not attaching the whole paper here (it’s around 20 pages), but the summary part of my paper review. In a nutshell, I my review is “This is an excellent research paper in all aspects such as the organization of the contents, quality and quantity of the content. One can easily deduce both by reading the paper and by looking at the later works that are based on this paper, that this paper is the result of an extensive and painstaking research and also an important milestone in this field.”

1. Introduction
Congestion control has always been a topic of interest among network designers and engineers. This paper proposes a simple and elegant method of implementing congestion control in internet routers which incorporates both fairness and simplicity. The main motivation behind this work is the need for a simple stateless algorithm that can achieve flow isolation and/or approximate fair bandwidth allocation for internet routers.
The authors start off by presenting the difference between responsive and unresponsive flows and different models for congestion control. During the time of congestion in a router, a responsive flow (TCP based) adjusts its rate automatically where an unresponsive flow (UDP or a bad TCP implementation), will be impassive to the conditions in the router and aggressively use up more bandwidth than responsive flows. This shows the need for fairness while choosing a packet to keep/drop during the time of congestion.
The models for congestion control fall broadly in to two categories. 1. Scheduling algorithms and 2. Queue management algorithms. The scheduling algorithms drop packets depending on the state information of each flow stored locally and therefore results in a fairer bandwidth allocation. But they are expensive to implement in terms of computational complexity and storage required and naturally doesn’t scale well. Various implementations are Fair Queue (FQ), Core Stateless Fair Queuing (CSFQ), and Stochastic Fair Queuing (SFQ). The queue management algorithms are stateless and are simple to implement at the expense of fairness. The main algorithm in this category is Random Early Detection (RED) [2]. Even if RED solves some of the issues with drop tail mechanism, it doesn’t provide fairness among responsive and unresponsive flows. Other variations are RED with penalty box, Flow RED (FRED) etc which requires partial state information and Stabilized RED (SRED) which identified misbehaving flows but doesn’t provide a mechanism to penalize them.
CHOKe (CHOose and Keep for responsive flows, CHOose and Kill for unresponsive flows) proposed here incorporates fairness similar to that of scheduling algorithms while keeping the simplicity of a queue management algorithms. When a packet arrives at a congested router, CHOKe draws a packet at random from the queue and compares it with the arriving packet. If they both belong to the same flow, both are dropped, else the randomly chosen packet is left intact and the arriving packet is admitted in to buffer with a probability of p (calculated in the same way as in RED). 2 main ideas drive the usage of this technique. 1. The likelihood of the randomly chosen packet belonging to a misbehaving flow is high. 2. A packet belonging to a misbehaving flow is more likely to trigger a comparison since they arrive more frequently.

2. CHOKe Algorithm
CHOke marks two thresholds in the FIFO buffer, minth and maxth. The algorithm is self-explanatory from figure 1.

Figure 1: The CHOKe algorithm

In general, one can randomly choose any number of packets from the buffer (drop candidate) for the comparison (m ≥ 1). CHOKe’s performance will increase as m increases especially when there are multiple malicious flows. The selection of value of m can be automated by having any number of intermediate thresholds and choosing different value for m depending on threshold (linearly).
The implementation details are also discussed and showed verbally that only a small overhead is associated in implementing CHOKe as compared to RED.

3. Simulation Results
A standard network configuration is used to test the performance of CHOKe and compare it with RED and Drop Tail mechanisms as their complexities are close to that of CHOKE. The simulation results are presented in 3 parts: single congested link, multiple congested links and multiple congested flows.
As expected, CHOKe outperforms RED and Drop Tail in UDP throughput comparison where the latter 2 doesn’t discriminates against unresponsive flows. The throughput per flow of CHOKe is also shown where the TCP throughput reaches near the ideal fairness values. Other simulation results presented include performance under different traffic loads and queue distribution under different loadings. Similar simulation results are presented for other 2 parts.

4. Analytical Models
In this section, the authors analyze 3 different versions of CHOKe. 1. Original CHOKe, 2. Front CHOKe (drop candidate is always the packet at the head of the queue) and 3. Back CHOKe (drop candidate is always the packet at the tail of the queue). The second and third variations are used because of the difficulty of analysis of the original model.
Both the models assume independent Poisson arrivals and independent exponential service times with a FIFO queuing discipline. The models depend on the PASTA property to arrive at the results. In the case of front CHOKe, the throughput with 1, 2 and 3 flows are calculated from the analytical models and are presented along with the simulation results which are almost identical. In the case of back CHOKe, they use Markov chains to find the stationary distribution, πi. The throughput for various flows calculated from the mathematical model is presented.

5. Conclusion
The paper proposes a packet dropping scheme which is simple to implement and also maintains fair queuing among responsive and unresponsive flows. Simulation and analytical models and results are also presented to support the claims.

6. Reference
[1] R. Pan, B. Prabhakar and K. Psounis, “CHOKe: A stateless active queue management scheme for approximating fair bandwidth allocation”, IEEE Infocom 2000

Airline Maintenance

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:30:00 +0000

Here is a nice old joke I dug up from my funny mail forwards collection. I was searching for some old mails and saw this. Couldn’t stop laughing.

Qantas is an airline company based in Australia. After every flight, Qantas pilots fill out a form called a gripe sheet, which conveys to the mechanics problems encountered with the aircraft during the flight that need repair or correction. The engineers read and correct the problem, and then respond in writing on the lower half of the form what remedial action was taken, and the pilot reviews the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews and engineers lack a sense of humor. Here are some actual logged maintenance complaints and problems as submitted by Qantas pilots and the solution recorded by maintenance engineers. By the way, Qantas is the only major airline that has never had an accident.

(P = the problem logged by the pilot)
(S = the solution and action taken by the engineers)

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

P: Something loose in cockpit.
S: Something tightened in cockpit

P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent.
S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.

P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
S: DME volume set to more believable level.

P: Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.
S: That's what they're there for.

P: IFF inoperative.
S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.

P: Suspected crack in windshield.
S: Suspect you're right.

P: Number 3 engine missing.
S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.

P: Aircraft handles funny.
S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.

P: Target radar hums.
S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.

P: Mouse in cockpit.
S: Cat installed.

P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
S: Took hammer away from midget.

Finning with the fishes

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:17:00 +0000

“It feels strange the first time. Your mask. Your awkward gear, a bit heavy. You ease into the water and your face slips below the surface, Inhale; the air comes with a reassuring hiss and for the first time, you breathe underwater. In moments you forget your mask. Your equipment transforms to light and agile and you’re free like you’ve never experienced before. With that first underwater breath, the door opens to a different world. And your life will never be the same again. You can see more different species in ten minutes there than in ten hours in the most unspoiled wilderness above water” – excerpt from PADI OPEN WATER DIVER manual intro.

I don’t think I can explain the way I felt when I first descended down to the ocean more accurately. It was on the second week of august that I went for my diving certification trip with gill divers to Tioman islands, Malaysia. When I enrolled for PADI certification, all I wanted was to get to know the sea and after my theory and pool session, I really was looking forward for the dive trip. The only downside was that, I didn’t have any friends to come with me. But, I made some very good friends during that trip and that weekend turned out to be one of the best till date in all aspects. When you dive, you enter a completely different world. There were people from all parts of the world with me for diving - US, Canada, Korea, Indonesia, France etc and everyone was really cheerful. After my first dive I promised myself that once I reach back Singapore, I am going to enroll for the advanced course, and yeah, I did. Officially, I am now a PADI certified open water diver.

As always, this is another photo blog and I believe pictures tell stories in more details than words.
We started our trip on Friday august 14th from Singapore by around 8pm. We crossed Malaysian border, had a nice and long dinner and set out for Mersing to catch our boat to Tioman. (Tioman is an island in Malaysia, one of the most beautiful ones, I will say) Usually we are supposed to be starting from there by 11pm, but that day, there was some problem with the tides and we could start from there only by 1:30am. Reached our resort in Tioman around 3 and fell asleep immediately.

The next day, I woke up to see a beautiful resort which overlooked the sea. But the weather was not that good, it was drizzling. We had our breakfast in the resort in nice cool weather. I didn’t want to go out though. Just wanted to stay there lazing around and enjoy the weather.
The resort we stayed is called the Island Reef Resort and it contains small cottages build around a hilly area.

Finally, we got on our boat and started towards the dive sites. Our instructor, Monica told us to streamline our equipments and get inside our wet suits. Since we were trained all these during the pool session 2 weeks back, it was relatively easy for me. Also I was fortunate enough to have the same buddy – Raline – from my pool session. She is a cool and funny person.

Briefing Session - That’s our instructor – she is one of the coolest teachers I ever had. She told what we were going to do and also the possible fishes and corals we may find there.

After the boat came to a stop, other dive master/instructors – Vijay, Johnny and Gray – went in the water to tie the buoy and rope for us to use for our first dive. Even though I had my underwater camera with me, I didn’t want to take it during my first dive. Also I hadn’t cleaned it properly and Monica showed me some hair strands in the O-ring of the casing.

We descended one by one and had to equalize frequently and I was a bit scared about equalization. But once I was down, it looked awesome. We were holding on to a rope and looking around in amazement. Since it was our first dive, we were in a reasonably deserted place. But there was a small anemone and a couple of clown fishes were there. Also there were some sea cucumbers in the bottom and some corals. A variety of fishes were coming and going from all sides and I was not sure what to do there. After everyone was down and we familiarized with the environment, we demonstrated a couple of skills and by that time our air were running out. We went back on deck.

Lunchtime!

Even if there was not much of moving around, we all thoroughly enjoyed our first dive. We had our lunch in the boat itself while our gas tanks were refilled.

Since I loved being in water and also wanted to try my underwater camera, I simply jumped to water and took some random snaps. Someone was feeding the fishes.
The next 2 dives were the most awesome ones. We finned along corals and rocks, up and down, through schools of colorful fishes and I cursed myself for not taking the camera. By around 5, we were all tired and we back on boat and set our journey back to the main island.

Tioman Island, Malaysia

The beautiful Sunset from the dock. We all became friends by evening and we were happily chattering about all that we have seen on our first day. Before we got to our resort, we stopped at a nearby shop to eat and they made tasty food.
After that the leisure divers who were going for the night dive, left and me and my other open water diver friends left to our cabins and took a bath. Then we came down for the barbeque dinner. By that time the leisure divers were back.

We came down to the beach by 9pm and got ourselves a couple of beers and some snacks and talked for around 2 hours about the first day. The seasoned divers shared their experiences.

The first thing I did next day was to clean up my camera properly with the help of Monica and made sure I am not going to miss anything this time I dive. Thanks to Johnny for taking this shot.

That’s Monica, our instructor. I wonder how she manages to control her buoyancy that well.

That’s a Bridled monocle bream. I had to chase this guy for a bit to get this shot.

I spend some time studying the fish charts after my first 2 dives as I didn’t know any of them. With the help of Monica, I managed to remember the most common fishes. Still I have not find out the names of couple of them.

That’s Raline – my buddy. She was funny, all the time making funny faces when I tried clicking a snap. She was trying to smile or show me something when I was clicking this snap. According to Monica, we both made a good buddy pair. Since I was consuming air fast, she had to check my air regularly.
This little guy was furious at me when I was trying to take this snap as I was interfering with his home. I got lots of shots of clown fish; even one brave clown fish came out of his anemone and danced in front of my camera. When I change the camera direction, he stayed in front of the camera without allowing me to focus on him. I guess he wanted me out of his domain.

A pack of sea urchins. The first day, I didn’t notice the blue color inside the spikes, which looks like their eyes.
A large table coral. According to Monica, this is around 70-100 years old. So we were very careful not to go near them, we didn’t want to destroy them as our buoyancy control was not that good.

That’s an eight banded butterfly fish. I saw all sorts of butterfly fish there.

We finned through rocks and narrow paths

Even through schools of fishes

That’s Astri, I guess she spotted something in the coral. She was also helping me with the photos, whenever she saw something interesting, she called me.

That’s Morgan and Laetitia from France

That’s Raline again, trying to hug a coral.

And that’s me again, thank you Johnny…

Check this out, a car wreck in one of the dive sites. It was a change; you expect some ship wrecks and see a car wreck instead.

That’s Johnny, our dive master and he was the one who kept track of me when I was wandering off to take pictures of everything I saw. Also he helped in controlling my air consumption.

Time to come up!

Took a snap of the dive comp when I was doing my safety stop.

Up up, there you go!

Our boat coming to pick us out!

The diving team! Uh! I miss them already.

That’s Vijay with his summersault from the upper deck to water. We all jumped in to the sea when we were waiting for our air to be refilled. We had all the fun in the water.

We even took some photos under water. That’s Monica and Raline, I am not sure whether they are trying to smile or scream or threaten me there, ha ha.

Finally, after our five dives, we had to pack up and get ready to come back to Singapore.
I don’t know about others, but my mind was stuck in there with the island of Tioman and the underwater world. It was more like a dream, swimming with the fishes and touching the corals with my own hands. (I am pretty sure it’s the same way everyone else felt). Anyway, by 2:00pm, we started our journey back to mainland of Malaysia. During our journey, we filled out our dive log books and I spend some time matching the unknown fishes in my camera with the ones in the books. Then I went out and simply sat on the side of the boat, with my legs touching the waves and enjoying the moments. After we reached Mersing, we took our bus back to Singapore and we reached back around 8pm.
There are still a lot of things for me to learn and practice especially buoyancy control, breath control, proper equalization etc. It was an incredible experience and something that I can cherish for a long long time. I am looking forward for my dive trip for PADI Advanced Diver course soon. Thanks to all my friends for giving me such a good time. Hope we can all dive together soon.

Over Enjoyment!

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:25:00 +0000

Usually when I don’t write blogs for long time, it means, either there are not many happenings in my life to write about or I am having so many things happening that I hardly get enough time or mood to even think about writing. The latter seems to be the reason for last couple of months. Even those blogs I managed to write was more of photos and less of content. The reason being, I was determined to enjoy my vacation to the fullest. And I did it.
Looking back, I can easily say I just had the best vacations ever and I don’t have track of the things I did. By the time I was back from India, I promised myself that, no matter what I do, I’ll write all about it. I somehow managed to do it for one or 2 things. Every time I do something new, I think about blogging. But then again, I managed to microblog (twitter) some of them I guess. And I really wonder now whether I have lost the grip of writing.
I am not that sure why I am writing this blog now. May be as a desperate attempt to get back in the track of writing or like I read in one of the blogs, it’ll be fun to read about this vacation after 10years or so.
Ok here comes the list,
Places we changed upside down - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
In Singapore (The ones I remember) - Singapore Zoo, Science Centre, Labrador Park, Sentosa, Chinese Garden (which used to be in the back yard of the place where I stayed last time), Clarke Quay, Clarke Quay, Clarke Quay…
Bottles we finished! (Outings & Parties) - numerous, I have no idea about how many, on an average, 2 - 3 parties per week.
Others - PADI open water Scuba Diving Certification. Sea diving at Tioman, Malaysia next week, Marathon 2 weeks from now.
Movies I watched in Silver screen (The ones I remember)
Angels & Daemons - Great one, loved it
The Taking of Pelham 123 - Good One
Transformers - Crappy
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - I liked the previous one better
Ice Age 3D - loved 3D, but not the movie
Luck - I thought this was the worst movie until I watched…
Love Aaj Kal - Great Movie if you want to waste your money, time and peace of mind
Hangover - Excellent, the best part is, we went for this movie after a party, really drunk and I want to watch that movie one more time
UP (3D) - Awesome movie in terms of both the story and the 3D, loved that one
Paintings - The Lake House
Games - Tomb Raider Underworld, Crysis Warhead
Books - Around 5 I think, now reading Harry Potter series, again
And many other things which I don’t remember now…
Above all, I made many new friends.
Finally, the vacation’s over. New semester is starting from today. At this point, I feel drained of all the energy, exhausted from over enjoyment, but with the satisfaction of having the best vacation, ever. I used to wonder whether I’ll even get tired of overdoing the things I love. Guess I got the answer. Tired to the end that I am promising myself that there won’t be any more parties and outings, (atleast for a month). I wish I get to ‘execute laziness’ like I did some time back and get back my writing ‘grip’ so that I can be back to my regular blogging and blog about atleast some of the items in the list above. Hopefully I will, let see!

A day with the Animals

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:58:00 +0000

Singapore Zoo, Bird Park and Night Safari were the places I wanted to visit first, after getting my SLR. The animals and birds would make some excellent subjects for my photographic experiments. I got that chance when my friend took a package (for all the 3 places) ticket for 2 - he and his cousin - and could visit only 2 places. So, I set out for one of my first photographic expeditions with my Canon EOS 450D.
We started by collecting the map from the information counter. There were colorful parrots to invite us at the entry point.

The next was the beavers. They were really cute. They looked at the visitors and made noises all the time. I guess they were looking for food.

A field full of flemingos. There was no cage or no restrictions, they were free ranging ones. They could fly off whenever they want to, but I think they hardly did.

“See what I am writing”

Orang utans are one of the primary attractions of the Singapore zoo. Most of them are free ranging ones. By the time we visited them, they were enjoying the afternoon nap after their lunch. This guy here was concentrated in picking something from inside that iron pole. First I thought he (or she?) was writing something.

“Do not Disturb!”

“Say Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssseeeeeeeee!”

“I don’t like you, I am going”.

(Check out closely, can you identify whether he is hanging upside down or straight?)

“Where is my mom?”

(This young chap was trying to catch up with his mom, it was fun to watch him jumping and running around to catch up with his mom)

“Don’t worry son, I am here, lemme be a model for this snap!”

Then came our first feeding session, the polar bear - Inuka (means silent hunter in Eskimo language). There were 2 polar bears there, Inuka and his mother Sheba.

We started at around 11:30 which is the feeding time for most of the animals. In the information brochure, they had marked the times and that’s the time when they will be the most active. They had organized the feedings in such a way that, if we plan a bit, we could cover all of the feedings one by one. Believe me, the zoo keepers are really serious about their animals’ wellbeing.

“I am getting ready for my meal”.

When we made our first pass, before the feeding time, I felt they are quiet animals, simply lazing around in their air-conditioned caves. But the moment the food started coming in, Inuka turned out to be more active than a kid with his favorite toy. He jumped in to the water and splashed the water all over. What more to say, he IS a messy eater as the narrator put it. He even chased a live fish in the tank and ate it.

There are so many facts we don’t know about the polar bears which they narrated. Their fur is not white, but clear, it’s the light reflection that makes it look white and their skin color is black. Their milk contains 46% fat which helps their young ones to stay warm in the ice and so on.
I couldn’t get good pictures because I was in the back of the crowd.

After Inuka’s feeding session, it was time for our feeding session. We went to the nearby hotel and there we saw a wedding. They allow wedding ceremonies, other functions, corporate parties etc to be conducted in the zoo and arrange the animals to be near you. These newly wedded couples were taking pictures near the elephant.
Since we didn’t get a close look at the feeding of the polar bears, we went to the white tiger feeding by 2pm even when the actual feeding was at 2:20pm. I got a good spot in the front of the crowd. That gave me more than enough time to play with my SLR. Also, the tigers were getting really hungry it seemed and they were restless and running around the whole place. There were 3 of them.

“I am tired of waiting for my food, where is the foood?”

“What are you looking at?”

I guess the tigers were annoyed by the crowd that they sometimes stared at us. Also whenever they see someone who they think is their trainer with food, they came near the crowd in a hurry.

“Here I go!”

They caught their food in mid air when the trainer threw the food. Sometimes the trainer threw the food to the water and the tigers knew exactly where it’s going to hit.

“Finally, I got my food, I am happy”

This is the place I enjoyed the most in all aspects. I could take all the snaps I wanted and I spent lot of time enjoying the big cats’ activities, first being restless and then enjoying their food. Cats are my favorite species of animals. I simply love their company.

“Ladies and gentleman, meet Carlos, the naughty sea lion”, the narrator started during the Animal show and there came a big black sea lion and he stood steady in his paws first. He is a very well trained Sea Lion. Also he is naughty, funny and splashes water all over the place.

He even talks to pelicans

And see this, he can leap high up the water and get the ball. He swims very fast, he claps along with the audience.

He even kisses you on your cheek

After the show, when we came out, there was this colorful bird, waiting for my camera.

Here is another beautiful bird with a crown on his head. I got this shot while I was on the tram and so I couldn’t catch its name. I guess this one is from Africa.

Then we visited the fragile forest. There is a giant dome inside which many animals, birds, butterflies even bats freely roamed around. It felt like a real journey through the woods.

I was fortunate enough to capture a battle between an unknown rat like animal and a big chameleon. The brown animal wanted to cross the branch towards the right side of the tree and the chameleon wanted to go the other way. As soon as the crowd noticed this and came near them, they stopped their fights and went back to their own ways.

There we are, Charles and me, inside the tropical rainforest.

On our way back, we just passed through the lion’s place. This lady was up after her nap.

By this time, it was almost 5pm and we were very tired since it started as a hot day and by the end of it, it started raining. But we were nowhere near covering the entire zoo. I think we covered around 20-40% only. We couldn’t continue as we were tired and my camera was full with photos and its battery, almost drained. So we decided to stop for the day and promised ourselves that we will come again to continue our expedition to the animal world. All in all, Singapore zoo exceeded all my expectations and in my opinion, it kept the reputation as one of the best zoos in the worlds.

p.s. There are more photos, its just that I cannot put all of them here.

Movie Review: Transformers 2: Revenge towards the Audience

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:17:00 +0000

No, the title of this post (movie name) is not a typo, I mean it. It was revenge from Michael Bay, at least from my point of view. I would consider the film in the romantic comedy genre than action genre . I will give a max of 3.5-4 out of 10 for the move since the only thing I liked in the movie are the action sequences.
When the first movie (Transformers I) was announced back in 2007, I was thrilled since I used to be a fan of the transformers cartoon series. When I saw it in the silver screen, it felt great. All the cartoon characters came to life through the movie. And it was a great experience and the movie was above my expectations.
From what I have written so far, you might guess what my reaction was when they announced the sequel (Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen). From the day I read about it, I was waiting for the movie release date. And above all, most of the reviews seemed good and Wikipedia said this, “Revenge of the Fallen achieved the highest Wednesday opening gross in history, bringing in $62 million in North America alone and close to $100 million worldwide; this is also the second-highest opening day gross of all time, behind only The Dark Knight's $67.8 million.” (I know the crew created the wiki page, still) One of my friends told me that this is the first movie to become house full in all theatres at the same time in Singapore.
I couldn’t wait to watch the movie and I tried last weekend and I was not able to get the ticket. Finally I or we (some of my unfortunate friends who came for the movie upon my persuasion) made it to the show yesterday. We got only the second row seats from the front. Still I was thrilled to watch the movie.
Before even getting through halfway, my friends started looking at their watches, and wondering when this is going to end. I am a fan of transformers and even I felt that the time is not passing. I think Mr. Bay tried to make this movie everything for everyone. There was comedy and romance (I think so) and action. The comedy was ok, but the romance was pathetic, even worse than a 3rd rate Hindi movie (my dear Hindi film fans, please forgive me, I couldn’t get a more decent term to compare). I noticed one thing in particular, the heroine spend most of her time running in the screen in short tops - one of the oldest tricks in the book, just like putting a heroine in rain. But I have to admit that she is hot. The emotional scenes in the middle of a battle were suicidal. After some time even the remote possibility of an emotional scene made me sad thinking that I could have done something better with this time. and the movie turned out to be quite lengthy, 2 hrs and 30 mins of ________ (you fill in the blanks after you watch the movie)
I am not adding many spoilers, but here are some facts for you to think about before going for the movie,
1. More than half an hour of the movie is spend showing how the heroine and hero gets to a rendezvous point
2. In my opinion, never bring parents in to the middle of a military/robot fight, and have long scenes of emotions in between a fast paced action sequence
3. Don’t make too many robo-comedians
And so on..
All in all, the movie was much below my expectations. After the movie, my friends have told me to kiss goodbye to their share of the tickets which I bought for them.
Lesson learnt: No matter how great a director is or the reviews are, don’t risk buying someone else’s ticket for a movie you want to watch.
p.s. Guess what, Transformers 3 is coming, its listed in imdb. I wonder what they have in mind for that one.

Slow Internet!

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:14:00 +0000

One of my friend asked to me once, “What are the two things you don’t like about computers?” I said, “A slow computer and a slow internet connection, they really piss me off”. And the latter seems to be ‘stalking’ me all the times, no matter where I go or what technologically advanced the ISPs are.
Back when it all started, there was only one speed available - 56Kbps - the dial up. At that time, I didn’t have any choice but to wait hours and hours for a page to load, sometimes even to get connected. Even the internet café’s offered dialup or sometimes ISDN, which was not much better.
Then came the cable. The first cable connection I used had a speed of 64Kbps. It wasn’t much better either. But the best part was the fact that it was unlimited. I read somewhere that broadband means both high-speed and seamless connectivity. The cable belonged more to the ‘seamless connectivity’ category (Don’t get confused, there were lot of outages also, but as compared to the speed, there was connectivity most of the times). Still there was one problem – the download limit. I never was a cable subscriber myself, but I really hated (and still do) the idea of putting a download limit on the connection. It’s like giving something you like and telling don’t use it. (This is applicable only to power users I guess)
Fed up by all this, I promised myself that if I am ever going to take an internet connection, I’ll get the one with max speed with no download limit. That day came when I moved to Bangalore. I subscribed the 256Kbps Home ULplus plan from BSNL, which was the max speed unlimited connection offered at that time. (Most of my readers are familiar with the story of getting that one). When they came up with the 512Kbps plan, I immediately switched to it. But it doesn’t matter what speed they offered in their ads, always the speed was intermittent. I had no choice but stay with the same connection as there were no other providers in that area. I felt jealous about my friends who had Airtel connections because of their stability. They gave a constant speed (at least when I used them). Whenever I heard about the stories of connections abroad (from my friends), I wanted to experience it myself. Then again I reminded myself, I am still in India, and lucky to have a decent internet connection.
Then I moved here. And one thing I was very optimistic was that I will be able to browse as much as I want with the broadband link speed not being a bottleneck. I was proved wrong the first day itself since the place I stayed had a wireless (3G based) internet. It was worse than the one I used to have in Bangalore. I couldn’t stand it, the next week itself, I subscribed a new 3Mbps unlimited broadband (ADSL) from Singtel. They said that the first week will be a bit rough as the traffic has to adjust and some crap. But as they said, after one week, I started getting steady high speed internet. I really enjoyed using it. The internet speed never became a bottleneck for any of my normal routines. I thought that the bad days are over.
But that thought didn’t last long. For last one month, I am continuously calling my service provider’s customer care centre about the intermittent connection. I have a 3Mbps connection and sometimes it even takes up to 30+ minutes to download a 1MB file (based on the speed test suggested by the customer care executive). Sometimes I have to wait for long times even to load the google.com. Think about that. It’s not consistently slow also. And guess what, a technician came last week and did something (what he did, he didn’t reveal) and for 3 days the connection was fine. Again I have to start calling the customer care. As things currently stand, there is another technician’s visit planned for the coming weekend.
Its really pissing me off. Is it so hard to provide a consistent broadband connection? I am also familiar with the data networking and related fields and based on what I know, if you have the right equipment and if they are under the correct permitted load, it’s not that difficult to provide a good link. It’s not that they are doing a charity but I am paying the internet bills promptly every month. What would they say if I started paying the bills intermittently? I wonder sometimes, Is it just me or is every broadband consumer faces similar experiences?

A Wonderful Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:40:00 +0000

One week, its been one week since I have started writing this blog and more than one month since I wanted to write a blog. And its amazing how many things can happen in that period. One month back, this day, I was happily packing my bags to go home, to India, to my family. After a long struggle with my assignments, projects and finally exams, I was free on May 5th - the day my exams were over. Some I did well and some I did ok. But I didn’t want to think about exams. I packed my bags and started my journey. And what more I can say, those three weeks can be described in two words, simply incredible. I had one of the most beautiful vacations in my life.
I landed on 7th night itself, but was in Chennai and had to spend the whole night there before going to Kochi. I sure will be explaining that ‘wonderful’ experience in a full blog. Anyways, the next day morning, I reached Kochi airport and was so anxious to meet my parents that I almost forgot to wait for my check in luggage. And when I was out, they were there standing anxiously looking for me. Just by seeing their faces, all my tiredness was gone. I was full of energy and excited and I hugged them right there. And that’s how I started my vacation.
I believe spending time with family is the most important thing in life. The next day itself, I and my parents went to Munnar – a hill station in Kerala - for a 2 day trip. It was the perfect getaway place from the hot summer. I had one of the best times I had with my family and both my mom and dad enjoyed it too. We did sightseeing, some small trekking, boating etc etc. We all missed my sister and brother-in-law. I really enjoyed the long hilly drive.

Its always nice to spend time with family

One of the high priority items on my TODO list was visiting all my cousins and relatives and I started it by visiting my grandmother the next day after my trip. It was fun, spending time with her brought back all those old memories of me and my sister spending most of our mid-summer vacations with her. Time goes fast.
After 2 more days of roaming around, it was time for me to pay attention to the next priority in the TODO list – getting my EPF claim settled. There is a big story behind it, but the bottom line is, I had to go visit the EPF offices in both Trivandrum and Bangalore in order - where I used to work before -personally to get something done. Along with that, I wanted to visit all my friends in both these places and also to get some shopping done.
During the exams days, I thought I ll be able to sleep during vacation. But these journeys proved that wrong. I started to Trivandrum on Wednesday morning by 4am and directly went to the EPF office, spend some ‘quality time’ there, had a quick brunch, met some friends, had snacks with them and started to Bangalore by 4pm.
I reached Bangalore the next day morning. I stayed with one of my best friends. By the time I reached, they had breakfast ready for me. Even though, the time I spend to go to the EPF office was a complete and utter waste, I did enjoy my time with my old team mates during lunch. It was one of my friends party and since I was visiting, he wanted me also to be there. After that I visited my ‘ex’-office and met all colleagues there. They were more of my friends than just colleagues. I didn’t even feel that I don’t work there anymore. I guess 5 months is not that long time. I joined my team mates with the usual afternoon coffee/smoke break. By the time I was leaving, I was missing the good old days at Nortel.
The next thing I did was straightening my hair. And the next day was dedicated for shopping. I was on a shopping spree and I spent almost half of my bank balance I saved for this vacation on the commercial street and the nearby places of Bangalore. I was supposed to leave that day, but I still had many friends to visit and I didn’t want to leave that fast. So I cancelled my ticket and extended my stay for one more day. The next day, I had breakfast at a friend’s place and lunch with a bunch of my friend. There were still more of my friend I wanted to meet, but time was not enough. Hope they will forgive me.. ;)

By the time I was back home, I had my SLR with me.
Canon EOS 450D with Canon EF-S 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 IS lens

Even though I didn’t have much time, I did spend some time doing experiments in photography

The Next generation: My cousin’s kid, Aby. This guy was so excited about the school opening on June 1st and was showing us all the new stuff he had for school, new bag, new cap, new umbrella, new books, new shoes etc. Made me miss my school days

My aunt’s house. A perfect subject for my photography experiments, especially during a rainy day

Spending time with my mom,

and my cat,

and its cooking time. I wanted to learn some cooking tips and tricks from my mom before I left India. I tried some puddings, cake and some curries. Hope I can reproduce them again. The main problem is, I still don’t understand how my mom simply touches a mix or reads a recipe and instantly knows whether something is wrong or whether there is anything more required.

Soon, it was time for me to say good bye to my place. And I didn’t want to do that. Just before the day I had to fly back, my exam results were out and I felt good seeing all my efforts, rewarded. I thought about postponing my tickets, but I had to be back here on the first week of June. On May 30th, I boarded the flight back to SG with lots of memories to cherish about a wonderful vacation.
ps: There are a lot of things I have not written both because there is not much space and also some are too personal. And all those friends I was not able to meet or contact, see ya, next time.

Susan Boyle - A Real Life Fairy Tale! Go Go Susan Boyle!

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Once up on a time, there lived a poor girl in Scotland. She was chubby and had a weird sense of humor. Not many boys wanted to get acquainted with her. She loved music and she loved singing. She lived alone with her cat. She didn’t marry. She grew old and she was unemployed. No one had heard about her.
Then, one day, by the time she became 47, the Her Majesty, the Queen wanted to find the best singer in whole country. Many singers competed. Some were good and some were bad. Then our poor lady came to sing. By the look of her, the audience was thinking “what in the bloody hell is this lady doing here?” Some of them even laughed at her. She told that she wanted to become a professional singer and she hope she might be able to get some attention after her performance. All the audience laughed and boo-ed. Then she started the song “I dreamed a dream in time gone by - Les Miserables”. Everyone’s jaw dropped hearing her voice and the song. The audience all rose to their feet and applauded. With one performance, she brought all the country and the world at her feet. She became an overnight star.
Felt like reading a fairy tale? Meet Susan Boyle. The overnight celebrity from the show “Britain’s Got Talent, 2009”. Watch the video here or here. The embedding disabled due to heavy rush.
She is 47, have never been kissed by anyone, stays alone with her cat in a remote place in Scotland, and she is unemployed, never sung in a professional concert before. She walked to the show, with her funny walking and a weird confidence - her unique style. The audience boo-ed and shoo-ed and laughed at her when she said she want to be a professional singer like Ellen Page. But everything changed at the moment when she opened her mouth. Everyone was shocked by her voice and singing. I myself personally was in that shock for a long time. I always liked fairy tales. And I couldn’t believe it was real. Truly inspiring is all I can say. Nothing else! The biggest wake up call, something that made me believe, fairy tales do exist on Earth.
Here are the judge’s comments.
“Without a doubt that is the biggest surprise I have had in three years of the show," said judge Piers Morgan, "Everyone was laughing at you - no one is laughing now.”
"I know that everybody was against you, I honestly think that we were all being very cynical and I think that is the biggest wakeup call ever”, said Amanda.
And when Susan started singing, Simon Cowell's eyebrows shot up so high and so hard they almost hit his hairline. He even broke into one of the biggest, widest and whitest smiles anyone has ever seen.
3 million hits on the youtube video in 24 hours and Susan had been an overnight celebrity. A number of sites have sprung up in the net about Susan.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Boyle
• http://www.susan-boyle.com
• http://www.susanboyle-bgt.co.uk/
• http://susan-boyle.britains-got-talent.co.uk/
• http://www.susanboylefansite.com/
• http://www.fansofsusanboyle.com
• http://susan-boyle-talent.blogspot.com/
• http://www.SusanBoyleWeb.com
Here are some of the things various media wrote about her. “The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell”, “Miss Boyle, from Blackburn, West Lothian, left judges almost speechless with her rendition of "I Dreamed A Dream" from Les Miserables” etc.
For me, she has become an instant hero. One of the sites said “Do you like fairy tales? 'Cos Disney missed one and its here, Susan Boyle” And I think it is true.

I flied!

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 09:15:00 +0000

“Einstein was right. Time is relative to the observer. When you're looking down the barrel of a gun, time slows down, your whole life flashes by, heartbreak and scars. Stay with it, and you could live a lifetime in that split second.” - Max Payne

It was then I understood what Max Payne meant when he said the above sentence. It was 1 am, and I was staring at the grass. It seemed like the time was standing still, just like we see in movies. I could hear my heart beating. Thud, thud, thud… I looked to my sides. I saw my friends talking and screaming. But I couldn’t place anything they say. Our pilot was asking me to take a look at the view. I tried, but all I could think of was the green lawn. I felt like its staring at me. Things flashed in front of my eyes. But all I remember now is the sound of my heart beating. It was fast and heavy. I felt its going to explode. I wish for it to be a dream. After all, I was hanging upside down at around the height of a 4 storied building, from a pod with 3 of my other friends. There was a seat in which I was sitting at the beginning, but when we reached the top, the only thing which was holding us were the seat belts. Since we were hanging down, all we could see when we looked straight was the lawn, long down.

We were in the Giant Swing in River Side, Clarke Quay, Singapore. It was the birthday treat of one of my friends and the program was spontaneous. We had a great dinner and some cocktails and were relaxing at the River Side steps. That’s when the idea came to our mind, let’s do something crazy. There was a Reverse Bungee and Giant Swing. Since the bungee tend to turn around a lot and a lot speedier and we had a nice dinner, we settled for the Giant Swing since none of were in a mood to puke on such a nice day. I really regret not having my camera that day. Still I managed to get some images from net which I have posted at the end of this post. It is a pod attached to a swing where 5 people can sit, the only thing is that, its huge, ‘cos when you are held just b4 its released (at the highest point), it’s around the height of a 4-5 storied building.

Suddenly I heard someone screaming my name. “Are you there?” I looked to the side. It was my friend who was piloting the pod. When we reach the highest point, we could stay there for anytime we want and the ‘pilot’ had to press a button under the seat to release the swing. “Shall we press the button?” she was asking. I wanted to get this over with somehow. We all screamed “yeah!”

She pressed the button. The world stood still for a moment. Then it turned to move fast, way too faster than anything I have felt before. I felt the weightlessness of a freely falling body. For a split second, I thought I was going to ‘touch down’ soon. I tightened my grip on the frame of the pod. I didn’t want to close my eyes. But I did it for a moment just before reaching the lowest point. I closed my eyes.

When I opened it, I was flying. Flying very fast towards the sky. I started liking it. I wanted to move faster. But the speed reduced and reduced and we reached the topmost point when the pod stood still again for a moment. I could see the whole Singapore in night lights from that point. It was beautiful.

I realized I was silent till then. The only one thing the person who fastened out seat belts told us was we were allowed to scream. But I had forgotten that. Then again the pod started its journey back. We all screamed at the top of our sound. “We are flyyyyyiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing, woooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooowwwwwwww!!!!”

We were swinging back and forth. It continued for some more time. But it was the starting swing which took our breath away. What else can I say, by the time we had to get out from it, I was in love ‘adventure’. All of us wanted to get more of it. But then again, we were not rich enough, at least at this point in life. The feeling was awesome. Wind gushing to your face and you moving so fast without any obstructions. I had heard that the original bungee jumping is really an experience and New Zealand is famous for that. If I decided anything when I was flying, it was this. Some day, I will go to New Zealand and do the original bungee where you jump from top of a bridge between 2 mountains to a river. Hope that day will come soon. Till then, I think I have to settle down for the adventures in Singapore.

Reverse Bungee - The towers near it is the giant swing

Another view

Once in a while…

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:43:00 +0000

There were times when I dreamed about spending my life with someone I really felt like spending my life with. I don’t know when, but somewhere along my life, I realized it’s just another dream. And I thought it will exist only in my dreams or in my imagination, where I meet a true friend, who understand the real me, even better than I know myself, with whom, I could be the real me.
Life started becoming silent. Time seemed to stand still. No matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find a reason to move on. I had everything I wanted. I couldn’t even find any dreams or hopes about future. Too much silence in my life, and even in the middle of a concert, I felt alone. Life is ironic. You don’t get what you want when you want. There was a million times when I longed for a friend, with whom I could be comfortable by being silent. And when I expected a lot and nothing came along the way, I got accustomed. Hope had no place in my life, not anymore.
And suddenly one day, I noticed my life changing. I didn’t know what the reason was, but things began making more sense. Even the wind or the trees began making sense. I started noticing flowers. I had no idea, what was happening. I simply sensed some change, or I felt life’s getting exciting. I liked walking alone in the rain. I longed to be in solitude, the same loneliness that I hated the most about my life. Even songs started making sense to me. World started becoming more and more colorful for me.
It was her. I met her at the coffee house. First I felt she was too noisy, she was talking all along. I wanted to get rid of her so that I could finish reading my book. But, she came to me and asked, “Beautiful book, can I have a look?” I was a bit surprised. No one asked me anything anymore. The next day I went to the coffee house at the same time to get my book back, she was there. We talked for some time. I went back home. The next day, she wanted some help with her work, and we did it together. I felt good. The next day, I got there early, she was there, and we spent a lot of time together. I sensed that she was able to read my mind or she said the things I wanted to say. She felt it too. By the time I was about to leave, she hugged me and told me she liked me and I am like an angel to her. I hugged her back. I didn’t know what to say. She looked like she was glowing and she was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen.
I had this feeling that I was at the tip of a mountain, so tall, even taller than the clouds, where I always wanted to be, but the weird part of it, I knew that I was about to fall. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. I wanted to get more time with her. I took off from my work the next day and I waited there for her. She didn’t come. I was sad, but somehow I expected this would happen. I didn’t know how to contact her. All I knew was her name. I was there at the coffee shop every day, waiting for her. But she never came.
My life had changed forever. I wrote to one of my close friends,
“Dear friend,
You know me long enough to know that I was always too choosy about friends. You used to tell me that someday, I will come across a person, a person who simply walks in to my life from somewhere, who will turn my world around. Yeah, that happened to me. It was good, better than anything I have ever known. But, she just walked away, leaving behind her footprints. No good bye’s, no see ya’s, she simply walked away. Now the only thing left for me is hope, a hope that someday I will get to see her, and if I am lucky, I get to spend some time with her, even If I know for sure that I will never be able to even hear about her. Why are all these things happening to me?”
His reply contained only one sentence, “Life is tough, my friend”.

EE5903 (RTOS) Assignment 1: Implementing M/M/1 queue using POSIX message queue

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:48:00 +0000

Since I spent around 2-4 days in completing this assignment, I thought maybe someone might find this useful in the future. Its not just the code for this problem. I had to learn other features like timers, signals, fork, and (ofcourse) Linux message queue. I had used some of them before but this assignment helped me in understanding them deeper. And I definitely enjoyed doing this assignment.

Disclaimer: Venture in to this blog only if you are interested, else it may be boring.

Problem Definition
Use POSIX Message Queues on Linux
• Producer produces serial numbered messages with exponentially distributed inter-arrival time (avg. 1s)
• Consumer processes messages with an exponentially distributed processing time (avg. 0.8s)
• Producer & consumer log system time and message serial numbers
• Run the system for 300s
Process the logs to compute the following
• Message loss percentage
• Average number of messages in queue
• Average latency (including processing time)
Fraction of time with more than 10 messages in queue

Design
I didn’t do any specific design, but I had some idea on how to develop this step by step. I started by testing the message queue in a sequential program. The function producer puts messages to the queue and consumer takes it in specific intervals. Then I integrated random intervals to make the producers output exponentially distributed using random number generators, then I made it 2 separate processes using fork and later I added signals, etc. The output is stored in to a log file and later that is parsed using another program called log_processor.c. I would like to add the entire development story here, but that would take up the entire space. So, if any of you have any suggestions or queries, drop a comment.

Code
msg_q.c
log_processor.c

Note: I am not able to post code in blog page (so many formatting errors) and I am looking for various options to upload in some site and give the link here. Please let me know if anyone have any suggestions. Also, if anyone want to have a look at the code, please leave a comment.

Individual Code Snippets

Random numbers

Fork

fork() is something I always had difficulty in understanding. The idea of same code running in parallel was a bit difficult for me to understand. The key point to remember here is, once the call fork is made, there are 2 instances of the program running and both will run the same code. So, in order to make them both do different things, we have to know which is parent and which is child and that's where the chpid comes in. If the chpid has a value greater than 0, we are in parent process. If it is 0, we are in child. And if it is less than 0, fork failed. simple, right? We can use an if(chpid > 0) condition and call different functions. Also, both are different processes and child or parent doesn't share any memory/variables, the advantage is, you can use for both, disadvantage, have to be careful when you use the variables.

Signals

Timers

One important point to remember here is, the function usleep() takes an input in microseconds and in some machines, it will not work for second resolution (for values more than 1000000). It may or may not work for values more than 1 second. Its always better to use values less than 100000 for usleep() and anything above that, split it to 2 and use sleep() and usleep(). The program below, I wrote to test whether it works in my machine. I found it was working, but in the final code, I used both usleep() and sleep().
LOG FILES
I am not putting the entire log files here. Just a small part.

1
302593147
1
2
303410285
0
3
304745777
0
4
305170614
0

Report
Here is the main part of the report I submitted. No fancy stuff, just the facts.

Output of log_processor.out file

Message lost percentage : 0.660066 %
Average Latency : 3.26471 seconds
Average number of messages in queue : 3.06954
Percentage of time with more than 10 msgs in q : 0.331126 %

Explanation

1. Since the producer sends the messages in a blocked state - it waits for the queue to be free, if its full - and also the queue size is almost infinite as compared to the number of messages we send, there is very less chance of a message being lost. However, since we run the simulation for a certain time, at the end of time, there may be some messages which are being processed at the consumer. That is the reason why we see a very small value for the percentage of message loss. If we run the test for a certain number of input messages, there won't be any message loss since the queue won't get full and also since we don't drop a message if the queue is full (blocking call).

2. Average latency is calculated by calculating the individual latencies and taking the average of them.

The implementation is an example of an M/M/1 queuing system.
In theory, the average latency of a message in a system is,
W = 1 / (service rate - arrival rate)
or
W = Waiting Time in Queue + Service Time
W = W.Q + S.T
W = (arrival rate) / (service rate) (service rate - arrival rate) + Service Time (0.8)

Arrival rate = 1/1 = 1 msg/sec
Service rate = 1/0.8 = 1.25 msg/sec

Avg Latency (from theory) = 4sec
Avg Latency (from implementation) = 3.264sec

Since the values are derived by statistical modeling of the system, a small variance will be present. Also, when the test is run for 600 seconds, the values are:

Message lost percentage : 0.34904 %
Average Latency : 4.85368 seconds
Average number of messages in queue : 4.58829
Percentage of time with more than 10 msgs in q : 14.1608 %

The test only will give a value which is approximately the theoretical value.

3. Average number of messages in the queue is calculated by calculating the average of the number of messages in the queue during instants after the producer puts a message in the queue and before consumer takes a message from queue.

Theoretical calculation:
Average number of customers in the system is,
L = arrival rate / (service rate - arrival rate)
L (from theory) = 4
L (from implementation) = 3.06954 ~ 3

In the test with 600sec, the value is around 4.

4. Fraction of time with more than 10 msgs in queue is calculated by finding the number of samples which had a message number greater than 10 and dividing it with the number of samples taken.
Percentage of time with more than 10 msgs in q : 0.331126 %

Details of Test machine
Linux Flavor : Fedora Core 7
Kernel : Ver. 2.6.21-1.3194.fc7
Compiler : gcc Ver. 4.1.2 20070502 (Red Hat 4.1.2-12)
VMware : VMware Server Ver. 2.0.0 Build 116503

Processor : Intel Core 2 T7200 @ 2.00GHz each
RAM : 2.00 GB
Make : Alienware Area-51, m9750

References
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/guide/ipc/mq.html

Back to College Days: Trip to Melaka, Malaysia

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:02:00 +0000

I was going nuts trying to crack my wireless protocols assignment when that mail popped up in my maibox. “Trip to Melaka, Organized by NUS”, anyone interested? I believe in a principle which goes like, “Never say No to friends”. That’s how it all began.
Day: February 28, 2009, Saturday
Time: 0630

No no, its not the time when I woke up to study, but it was the time we gathered in front of the sports hall (our gathering point) to start our trip. I had no idea what to expect or what exactly is this trip about and what is there is Melaka. For me, it’s all about spending time with my friends and taking a break from my hectic schedule. So I didn’t have any expectation about my first international trip except that I knew there will be one more county’s stamp in my passport. But it turned out to be one of the most memorable days in my life and I went through a lot of feelings I thought was lost forever - the feelings and colors of college days - it felt like being back in my undergrad days.

Just like a dream!

A beautiful Chinese Letter carved in a rock in a temple. I have no idea what this means!

Old drawings in the wall of a temple

Our lunch and dinner was fabulous.

There are 2 things I like for a meal.
1. A delicious meal, as usual
2. A good company to start digging in to the task
And this was one of those rare occasions when I had both. For both lunch and dinner, there were around 7-9 dishes, with chicken, crab, prawns, fish, shark, vegetables (I didn’t concentrate in this area much), and dessert. Also, I think they were authentic Malay dishes, but since all of us were Indians, we had not much choice to get clear idea about the names of the dishes. Even if there were some means to get to know the names of the dishes, I seriously doubt we would have done that, ‘cos we were all very busy ‘fighting’ across the table that there was no time to talk.

A busy Melakan Street.

Since the city is kind of an old city, the streets are narrow. The buildings were painted really colorfully and you don’t get the feeling of a city.

In front of the Church of Christ

Who we are? (Click on the photo to read)

From Right
My House Owner : Aniket (My Housemate and a very dear friend)
My Financer : Ashwin (Friends for past 9 years)
Would be Dr. : Karthik (A new guy I met on the trip day, doing PhD in NUS)
Possible Roommate : Sampath (A possible future roommate)
Shashi Sir : Robin (A great friend who is my current roommate)
From Singapore : Girish (He is from Singapore itself)
Classified : Classified (;))
The Trouble Maker : Srijith (Karakku company)
Me : Me (You put your definition in the comment section)

A busy day in the Museum

Stairs to the courtyard or heaven?

F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Melakan Street: A view from the Top

An Ancient church in Melaka

This church - I think the name is St. Francis Chruch - is located on top of a small hill from where you get a really gorgeous view. It really was fun and soothing being there, enjoying the wind, and the songs of the native singers and there were several artists doing live drawing/paintings.

The Native Singers

A View from the Church

Tea Time: A Coffee shop in Melaka

Yeah, The Trouble Makers

No intro needed I guess. We went around looking for a coffee shop and had some fun and got lost from the group. We had to roam around for a while to find the group. Since it was another country, our mobiles didn’t work, we went back to the place where we started and the group was gone. Our choices were to go back to Singapore on our own - The Red Bus - or to go to the police station and ask for help. Before choosing from the above options, we asked some of the pedestrians for their mobile and called one of our friends and somehow got back to bus. And we heard some ‘sweet’ words from the ‘nice’ people who were waiting for us. The poor tour guide went around looking for us and came back exhausted to report he couldn’t find us, and we were there. Since he was a very good person, he didn’t tell us anything.

The End: The GSS group from NUS

I would like to thank all of my friends and whoever else who made that trip possible, because of whom I had one of the most memorable days in my life.
More Photos @ http://picasaweb.google.com/gssmalacca/TripToMelakaMalaysiaFromGSSNUSByManuIgnatius?#

ps: There are a lot more things I would love to write about this trip, but I am too sleepy now. Also, this was supposed to be a cultural trip.

Alienware Area-15 m9750 - A Dream Comes True

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:59:00 +0000

“Just when you thought it couldn't get any better... we bring you this!”
Most of you might be wondering what this things is, something related to aliens, from another world? You are almost right, ‘cos there is almost nothing in this earth which can compete with this bad boy! It’s the most recent edition to my gadget collection, and the most priced one too, my new laptop. I cannot entirely say its brand new, ‘cos I’ve had this baby for around a month.

From a Bad Start
I would say, I added this buddy to my collection at a really bad time, at the beginning of the first semester of my Masters. I had some problems getting right ordering and support and also with the factory installed software and drivers. Also I still haven’t got time to play around with it, the way I want to. But I can’t wait to write this entry for so long. ‘Cos its one of my dreams coming true.

My Alienware Area-51 m9750

The Spec Stuff
You can get a usual round of review from any review site in net, but I am going to present the details of my system. In short, it’s awesome. Better than the best machine I have seen and used so far. (that includes desktops also, since I haven’t used any desktops with the Ge-Force 200 series GPUs). Armed with GeForce 8700m GT GPU - “the world's first Microsoft DirectX®10 supported high performance enthusiast gaming notebook GUP”, after which any serious gamer started to think about gaming on a laptop, with a core clock speed of 625MHz, memory clock of 800MHz, dedicated 512MB video memory and a total of around 1269MB (including ~700+MB shared memory), 32 stream processors, and a 128bit memory interface, this baby flies with almost all the latest games. Other specs of this machine includes a Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.0 GHz processor, 2GB DDR2, a 17” LCD Display with a resolution of 1920x1200 @ 60Hz, 5.1 surround speakers with sub woofer, 160GB HDD, blah blah blah...

The combination of the big display and the 8700m GPU give you the best imaging quality you have ecer experienced. With digital vibrance technology, I have realized that images were this colorful and vibrant. And with that high resolution, you mostly never have to use the scroll function, since a 100% zoomed MS word page will fit in one screen.

As some of you may have already guessed, this is not the newest laptop or the best configuration available in the market. I wanted to have an SLi with the 9M series, a 4Gig RAM, an SSD HDD etc, but I had constraints on my ‘pocket size’.

I have included screenshot of the System requirements Lab Analysis report of Tomb Raider 8 and Halo 2 here. The recommended requirements for Tomb Raider 8 are shown failed ‘cos they expect to have a CPU with 2.2GHz speed and also a GPU which is Ge-Force 9800GTX/ATI HD 4800 or higher. For a DirectX 9 based, previous generation game like Halo 2, this system passes both the tests.

Gaming Gaming Gaming! - “Seeing is Believing”
As I have stated earlier, I haven’t got enough time to play around with this baby. But I somehow managed to test it with Crysis and Tomb Raider 8. I don’t want to explain the experience. Just see it for yourself.

You could see the expression in Lara’s face. Gaming in this machine is not just fun or entertainment, but it’s an experience. [You may have already guessed it, I am waiting to finish Tomb Raider 8 and write an entry on it ;-)]

Best Machine (with some glitches), Worst Support
Event though the laptop is the best of its class, there is no excuse for the continuous bad support (or lack of support) I am receiving from Alienware. I had to wait for more than 2 months to get my order shipped. Of course it was an international order. Even then, whenever I call them, I got overall really bad experience. (Exceptions are there).

I am having trouble with the integrated webcam. When I received the system, the cam was working fine for 2-3 days. Now it’s not at all showing anything other than a dark screen. I have tried updating my driver. No result. I found that others also had the same experience from some forums, but no idea how to rectify it. I have already sent 3 support request mails to the Alienware team, but no replies. Also, my wireless adapter stops abruptly sometime. The problem used to occur frequently in the beginning, but after driver updates, its working fine.

From my experience, I seriously urge anyone who is thinking to go with an Alienware machine to reconsider your decision, if support is of utmost importance to you.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly
Pros
- Amazing graphics, fast gaming performance
- Awesome screen resolution and large display
- Cool, Solid Design
- Best laptop in its class and worth every penny you spend

Cons
- Weight = Min 3.5Kg/8lbs, Portability = 0, Not for travelers.
- Pricing. I went for the relatively low configuration. But it cost me $1716 + my long distance calling charges for tracking the laptop updates.
- Bad Support

Summary - “Neighbor’s Envy, Owners Pride - Onida”
This machine is not for the ‘casual, light hearted’ people, who’s concept of a laptop is ‘just’ another portable electronic gadget. This is the real thing, custom built for enthusiasts or gadget geeks who are performance hungry, who likes to stay in the bleeding edge of technology. Its not all about performance alone, but about the brand also. Most of the people whom I have come across have no idea what Alienware means or which company made this laptop. But for the few who know what it means to own an Alienware machine, I have seen the mixture of respect and envy in their eyes at the mere mention of the term Alienware or when they see that blue eyed alien shining on the lid of my laptop. I can read their thoughts from their expression - which is something I used to have before, “I wish…”

Links and References
http://www.alienware.com/products/area-51-m9750-notebook.aspx?SysCode=PC-LT-AREA51M9750&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3840
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3070
http://laptoplogic.com/best-gaming-laptops/
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8700m.html

Valentine’s Day in Singapore

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:59:00 +0000

This time it’s a Saturday and in the even me and my friends planned a small outing since its really pathetic to spent a valentine’s day, idle at home. The place is called, Marina Barrage, which is a dam in Singapore built across the Marina Channel between the reclaimed lands of Marina East and Marina South. Since we all stayed at different places, we decided to get together at the Marina Bay MRT (Mass Rapid Transit which is the domestic Train service in Singapore) by 5:15 pm.

I got in to the MRT by around 4:30pm. What more can I say, love was in the air. Everywhere you looked, you could see happy couples chatting or hugging or kissing. Most of them had bouquets or gifts or heart shaped symbols with them. I noticed a young couple in particular. They entered from the next station after I boarded the MRT. They were young and really vibrant. They were so happy that soon after the moment they entered the train, they became the focus of most of our passenger. The girl was slender and thin, resembled an angel from fairy tales and anyone who looked at her could easily say that she was in some other world. She firmly held the guys hand as it was her life source. I could read the pride in the guys face, like the king of the world. The atmosphere was so full of love. I felt happy for them. I don’t know any details of anyone in that train, but the way I felt after spending some time in that atmosphere was really different.

Suddenly I thought about a news link my cousin sent me today morning. The news was related to a group opposing Valentine’s day celebrations in India. I discussed it with my friends when I met them and I really felt sad/sorry for the group. In other words, in India, Valentine's Day is not the day to celebrate your love, but its the day to stop people from being happy for their love and conducting protests related to it. The way I see it, a person can have his/her own views and believes and practice them (as long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s believes) and he/she can advertise about their views. And they can advice others to adopt your views. But the moment when it reaches the point when a person forces others to follow some believes, that’s the end of democracy or freedom. Valentine’s is the day when you can celebrate your love. But what if that right is forcefully denied? Also, I feel, the more you try to keep things wrapped up, the more others want to have it.

Anyway, by the time I met my friends, I left behind all these thoughts and worries and we all spend some quality time in Marina Barrage. You can have an amazing view of Singapore’s skyline and since it was a Saturday and a special day, so many people were there and the place was really lively. I am attaching some photos here.

Marina Barrage

A view from the top of Marina Barrage

Happy moments...

Singapore Gaint Flyer

ps: The views I have expressed here are my personal views only.

More Links
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200902141411.htm
http://www.hindu.com/2009/02/14/stories/2009021455541200.htm
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Girl-power-Show-Ram-Sene-whos-the-boss/423115/
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ram-sene-warns-against-celebrating-valentines-day/84398-3.html
http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/27/stories/2009012759890100.htm

I reached Singapore (20 days back)

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:52:00 +0000

Yeah, its been exactly 20 days since I reached Singapore. Its not that I was waiting for Jan 26 to write this blog, its just so happened that I was not able to write it any sooner.

Yeah, I landed here on Jan 6th morning. I was expecting my friend. He came by the time I had some currency changed and we took a taxi to the place where I was going to stay. It was a nice ride, as the Changi airport was in one side of the country and the place where I was going to stay was on the other side of the country. My friend explained the places while we were going through there. This place really is clean. And almost all the places you look, you can see the country growing upwards. Lots of sky scrapers.
In 20 -30 minutes, I reached the place where I stay - yes, that’s the time it takes for you to travel from one end of Singapore to the other end. My apartment is on the 21st floor of a building, and it is not every day, till now, that you will find yourself in the 21st floor of a building. The view is awesome.

View from My Place

By the time I started settling down, another of my friend who is my roommate came. We are both from Kerala and we had some initial talks and we concluded that our first priorities are to bath, get something to eat, get a mobile connection and call home and open a bank account if possible.
We bathed and dressed and got out to the nearest mall. The weather is almost the same as that of in Kerala, humid and warm. We found a place to get a tea/coffee and then started looking for a mobile shop. From our friends we knew that SingTel is the service provider we had to look for. I really was worried about how much time will it take for the connection to get activated as I had several experiences from India. We found a SingTel shop. Within 10-15 minutes, me and my friend was calling home to give the new number and updating other details. The process was very simple.
The next thing for us was to open a bank account. We knew the names of the banks we had to look for, POSB (Post Office and Savings Bank) or DBS (Development Bank of Singapore). I didn’t want to do this on the first day of our arrival since I was really tired and opening a bank account requires so many formalities and all. But to our surprise, we finished all the formalities and I had a bank account, with ATM card and internet banking within 20minutes.
Here are some facts about Singapore. Everything about Singapore is EFFICIENT and CLEAN. There is no ethnic group as a Singaporean, and the ethnic groups here are Chinese, Indians (8%), Malay and Eurasians. Out of the whole population, around 25% are foreigners. Since there are so many familiar Indian faces, you won’t really feel that you are in a foreign country. As compared to India, cost of travel and living are high here. But the standards are equally high here.

Roads in Singapore – View from a sky pass

The next day, we went to university and registered. And so we officially became students in National University of Singapore. This time we didn’t even have to go to the embassy to get our student passes, they were there in the university and we just had to go and collect them. By the time I completed my registration, I had made some friends here and one of my best friends was here on transit. We all had a nice time. Since Singapore is a small place, it will take only around 3-4 days for you to explore the whole place.
I think I have visited almost all tourist places in Singapore, except for the ones which require entry passes, ‘cos they are really costly. I have been to Little India - its small India, you’ll really fell like you have reached India and I met some mallu people there, China Town - since the Chinese new year was due, that place was awesome, Sentosa - An island theme park, Clarke Quay, Raffles Place - The place where there is a giant Mer-lion, Chinese/Japanese Garden - very near to the place I stay etc etc. I even made it to the republic day celebrations here in the Indian embassy today. It was nicer than most of the celebrations happening in our places.
I want to write a blog about every single one of those expeditions and my experiences in singapore. I hope I will be able to make it. Since the classes have already started, I have lots and lots to study and work on. Still I am pretty sure that I will find time to update about my experiences here to bug my readers…
Here are some photos..

Chinese/Japanese Garden

China Town

Underwater World - Sentosa

Raffles Place - Merlion: With my friends

Near City Hall

Gaint Wheel near the Mer-lion Statue

Farewell Bangalore

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 05:26:00 +0000

Dear Bangalore,
I still remember the day I first set my sight on you. Little did I know that you will play a crucial role in my life. It was in 2002, during my engineering days. I was on my 5th semester tour. I can still feel the cold climate and the smell of the fresh flowers. Those big shopping malls, the pubs and the ultra modern folks (chics) here instantly made you one of my dream cities. All those stories about software professionals making a nice living here, oh! man, I had decided that you are the one city I want to be in.

Fall 2003
I came again for the 7th semester tour and by that time me and my friends wanted to spend some quality time here with you and that’s one main reason we chose to do our final year project here. Those were the days, when I started loving you – fall 2003. I think I loved everything about you. The New Year (2004) celebrations in Brigade road – I don’t think I will ever forget it. Even I loved the journeys to and from my native to you.

Again
Again, you crossed path with my life even if not for long in spring 2005 in when I started ‘hunting’ for a job. But fortunately or unfortunately, I got my job in Trivandrum. Then again, I knew that someday I am going to come back to you. And that’s why, when I got an offer from here, I was really excited. But before coming here, I heard many rumors about the pathetic traffic conditions, the slowly disappearing cold climate etc.

Expectations
What I expected was not what I saw in here. A city which is so polluted with dust and garbage, roads filled with vehicles and dogs, malls and shop keepers who wanted to grab the money in my pocket to theirs, auto rickshaw drivers who will kill if they get a chance etc. I really got scared at first seeing the changed you and because of the change in climatic conditions, I was having fever, cold etc on a regular basis. I even thought about leaving you. My regular readers are aware of my attitude towards you, I guess.

Time is a healer
Getting used to things we confront daily is a quality (good or bad?) of the human race. Slowly I started liking you. One important thing I like about you is the personal space you gave me. Also the technological community here and the exposure I got from you were simply amazing. I realized there is a world like this. It totally changed my outlook towards life itself. I had a very good team and work environment, a new circle of friends, lots of parties to attend, all those nice hotels where I could try different variety of dishes, the beautiful climate which helped me maximizing my artistic talents and so on.

Farewell
Finally the time has come for me to move on. In this journey of life, I have reached a point where I have to part with you, my beautiful friend. I have no idea what is there in store for me in the future. May be I will fall in love with the next city I am moving to. May be I am never going to come back to you. But looking back now, I can see vividly, the influence you have in my life. With so many challenges, experiences, happy times, sad times, you have a very special place in my heart. And that place will ever be there, no matter where I go or what I become. I really hope I will be able to come back some day to you and I know, if that day comes, you will be here with your warm welcome, just like you welcome anyone who comes to you. Farewell Bangalore.

With warm love and regards
- Manu

Aliasing an Ethernet Interface in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:45:00 +0000

For the last couple of weeks, I was busy with my work. I’ve had a really good time and I thought I will share something I learned during that time here.

My work was related to some thing of the client-server model. For testing, we were simulating multiple clients and servers in the same PC. First we were using the same IP address and different ports. Later, before moving to the real world scenario, we wanted to test with different IP address. Since the number of clients was huge, we couldn’t run the tests in single PCs. Thats then we decided to bring up multiple interfaces in a single PC and test it. This helped in testing one more level deeper before moving to the actual hardware. [Even then, we had to use different TCP/UDP ports since there is only one TCP/UDP stack in the system]

For this purpose, I was doing some research on how to alias and bring up multiple Ethernet interfaces in a Linux system. I couldn’t easily find any help on how to bring up aliased interfaces using C [I found many references about aliasing using Ifconfig command]. So, I wrote a generic application which can bring up multiple aliased interfaces. Here is the code. I believe I have made it as simple as I can and you can modify and try experiments on your own. To start with, you can try changing different members in the ifreq structure.

When I showed this to a colleague of mine - who happens to be a scripting guru - he wrote a small script which can be used to bring up multiple interfaces. This may also be useful I guess. Anyway, you are free to take this and do experiments on your own.

For more info about the structures used in the program, here are the links.
struct sockaddr_in
struct ifreq
Please share your comments and thoughts so that I can improve the ways I do coding. Special thanks to Bala who wrote the script and Adil, who provided me with the code to start off with.

ps: I am really sorry that I have put the code as an image, I don't know why, but I was not able to put the code as it is, it was giving me some problems.

The Lake House

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:33:00 +0000

I’ve always wondered how they make such beautiful stories about love, capture it in the film so perfect that you never want to come out of the magical world, the movie has taken you to. I’ve stumbled up on one such movie recently.

It was a rainy day. I love to simply sit in my house, look out through the glass window, and see the rain. I was alone in my home. The mood was getting on to me. I felt lonely. I selected the movie “The Lake House” as a pass time, just because of my love towards buildings by river/lake sides. But it turned out to be an amazing movie.

The movie had all the elements I would love spending all my time for. A ‘seductively beautiful’ house by the lake side- a glass box - which gives you a gorgeous view of the lake, almost like one which I always dream of building myself, a gifted architect (a profession which I admire) who lives in the house, a really scenic place – something which I long to own one day, those sunsets you can enjoy from the lake house, and a beautiful story of love which is so impossible and mysterious, where there is no place for logic, but one which make you wish that it is real. And a magical mailbox, which makes everything a reality.

“What if you found, the one you were meant for? But you lived two years apart?” What if the one person who walked right in to your life, turned it around, is two years apart from your life? One person whom you can never meet, but the one you want to give your whole heart to. Even though its clearly impossible, it’s amazing to see what love can do to us, all of us.

Yeah, that’s the theme of the movie. Sounding absurd? It sounded the same way to me when I saw the trailer. Now it’s another fairytale which I like to keep very close to my heart.

Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/thelakehouse/small.html
Site: http://thelakehousemovie.warnerbros.com/

Guilty as Charged

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:37:00 +0000

Here is the reply I got from the Mr. B Krishnamoorthy Bajaj Regional Manager, Bangalore about my complaint (previous blog).

Dear Mr Manu,
Noted the contents of your mail and we sincerely apologise for the experience which you had with our service centre.

Your feedbacks are very valid and would help the dealer to improve on customer service
We are taking up the feedback with the concerned dlr and we assure you better experience during your future visits.
For any future service assistance pl contact me or my colleague Mr Manoj Manoharan, from our Bangalore Regional office.
Assuring our best services.
Regards,

B Krishnamoorthy
Regional Manager-Service
Bajaj auto ltd
Bangalore

Atleast I got the satisfaction that I had done something to resist customer exploitation. After I got this mail, I got a call from another guy (forgot his name) on behalf of Mr. B Krishnamoorty apologizing for the incident. He said it’s good that I submitted the feedback, so that they can improve customer service. He also assured me that there had been some internal action taken and the corresponding person from Amba Bajaj will call me. As expected, Mr. Hithranjan Kumar from Amba Bajaj called me and we ‘discussed’ about the incident for some 15-20 minutes. Finally he concluded that, its their mistake and he apologized for that and he assured me that I can contact him anytime for any assistance. He also wanted me to reply to the regional manager’s mail about our discussion. Anyway, I now feel that there is some customer service after all, and some one will reply to the complaints of a customer, if you complain at the right place.

Thanks to Amba Bajaj

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:51:00 +0000

This is the mail I had to send to customerservice@bajajauto.co.in (and to the regional heads) today. Thanks to Amba Bajaj.

From,

Manu Ignatius

To Whom It May Concern:

Bajaj Customer Service

Bajaj Auto India Ltd.

Subject: Feedback about customer service

Sir,

I own a Bajaj Pulsar 180cc, 2006 model bike (vehicle no). And I love it and I take care of it really well. But I am loosing faith on your customer service and dealers. I bought my bike on <date>. During that time, I had some issues and I had to mail to this same email id and I got the bike after a long time.

I gave my bike for 4^th free service yesterday (October 14, 2008) to Amba Bajaj service centre in Hongasandra. (Bill attached). I could not go there to collect my bike yesterday due to some personal reasons. I called them by around 7pm, and they said, bike is ready, but I can collect it today (October 15^th) morning. You can clearly see from the bill that I collected on Oct 15^th. When I went there to collect my bike, it was not ready. After I paid the bill, they started cleaning my bike. Then I noticed that, the bike was not at all clean. There was mud all over the engine, the silencer and the central stand. I was on my way to office and I wanted the bike fast. But, I told them this issue and they said they will do washing again. I had to wait there for 30 mins. I missed a very serious meeting in my office. But it was ok for me, as long as my bike is good. Even after 30mins, when I couldn’t see anyone responsible for the bike, I went inside the service centre and the guy who washed it said its ready and I can take it. The bike was washed, but it was totally wet. I asked them how long will it take to dry it. He said, its ready, and he is not going to dry it. I felt thoroughly cheated, and it was like he slapped in my face. I wanted to complain this to some one, but I couldn’t find anyone who is responsible there. I felt like, no one is accountable for any work in that service centre. I trusted your company and service centers. But if this is the case, where will I go for service?

I saw a label there about your goals. It said, 100% customer satisfaction – in my case its 0% + loss of time + mental agony. Also I saw another goal which says, no repeat works – if I had checked it again, I would have to tell them to wash my bike again. Because it was not clean as I wanted. By these incidents, I am loosing all the faith in your service centers. The bike is a great one, but I don’t know how long I can take this kind of customer treatment from your service centers.

Yours truly,

Manu Ignatius

ps: I have posted an online complaint also regarding this same issue.

A Toast

noreply@blogger.com (Dragonfly) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:25:00 +0000

I am not entirely sure why I am publishing this in my blog. May I want all those who didn't attend the function and didn't get a chance to hear me saying those words, to read them. Anyway, my sister got engaged on Oct 2nd, 2008. And here is the toast, I presented for them.

"Hi everyone, I would like to propose a toast for Milu and Ginto, the best couple in the world, according to me. She is my one and only little sister, speaking of which I have lots of memories. Some are happy; some are not, some are wonderful, so wonderful that I won’t be able to forget any of them in my life time.

When I look back, I am really amazed at how fast it is that the time flies by. I remember vividly, all those times we spent together during our childhood. All our fights, which ended always when either of our parents – Achachan and Amma – intervened. We even spent much of our college days together. Even now, we are very close. My point is, she is one hell of a person, who has influenced me a lot and left a long standing impression in my life. She has always been there for me, through my hard times to help me out and to share my happiness when I was happy.

You know, when I first realized that they are going to get married, which I haven’t done yet, I was, I was little angry and jealous towards Ginto. The mere thought that he is going to take away this integral part of my life, my little treasure, from me, gave me a real hard time. Later when I came to know more about Ginto, I realized that, not only that I am NOT going to loose my dear vava, but I am also gaining a Big brother, which is something I used to wish for. Along with that, I’ve gained another set of parents – Ginto's parents - and a new brother and friend – Anish who is Ginto’s brother. Now I feel that I am going to be the luckiest person in this world to have the best sister and brother-in-law.

You know, I’ve read somewhere that 'true love is the soul's recognition of its counterpoint in another person'. And I think that that's a very rare thing in this world and something to be valued. And I'm really happy that my little sister's found it. Congratulations, my dear sweet sister and her lucky fiancé, Ginto. I wish you both a very adventurous and wonderful life, together. Cheers to you both."

ps: Most of the last paragraph, I have 'borrowed' from the movie Wedding Crashers. The rest, I have written myself.