Bangalore Volvo - YI

You all might be knowing that few Volvo Buses are in the bangalore-BMTC fleet.
You might know that is comfortable to travel when compared to the travel in the normal, crowded BMTC bus.
But, Do you know that BMTC also provides a "where is it?" service for those volvo buses. Since there are quite a few volvo buses in the fleet, "where is it?" service helps you to take a decision whether you can wait for the volvo bus or you need to find out the alternative as you missed the bus.

Ok, Now, let me tell you the usage of that service. If you have an airtel service, this is free of charge, other providers charges I think.

You need to send a SMS as mentioned below.

To: 9945634666

YI U/D
YI - Yelli Ithe - This is a sentence in Kannada, which is the language of karnataka, India.
Meaning - Where is it?
U - Upwards(From Majestic), D - Downwards(To Majestic).
Example: YI V335E U

Volvo Bus Route Details

Hope this helps you to travel better in Bnagalore :)
Atleast you can listen to good music even if the Bangalore traffic is standstill.

Priority

She has her own priority
He has his own priority
You have your own priority,
So, I do have my own priority.

Kids priority is to play rather than study.
When they move on to high school,
Somebody's priority slowly changes towards studies,
Somebody's priority changes towards love, and
Somebody's priority changes towards life,
Whoever it may be, Priority doesn't remain constant,
Priority keeps changing to one or the other.

After the schooling,
somebody's focus changes towards the passion of life,
Somebody's focus changes towards the work,
But, still, Still, still...
Someone's focus is on studies, and
Someone's focus is on love.

After few years or When they move out of college,
Somebody's priority becomes the family,
Somebody's priority becomes the work,
Somebody's priority becomes the travel,
Somebody's priority becomes the money.
Whoever it may be, Priority doesn't remain constant,
Priority keeps changing to one or the other.

(Note: Priority varies from one person to another,
Priority changes from one phase of life to another.)

Sharpen the Axe...

How to Stay Young :)

Received a mail from one of my friend. The content was good, so I have posted it as a blog entry.

1. Cherish your health
If it is good, preserve it.
If it is unstable, improve it.
If it is beyond what you can improve, get help.

2. Keep only cheerful friends
The grouches pull you down.
(Keep this in mind if you are one of those grouches!)

3. Keep learning
Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening, whatever.
Never let the brain get idle.
"An idle mind is the devil's workshop."
And the devil's name is Alzheimer's!

4. Enjoy the simple things

5. Laugh often, long and loud. Laugh until you gasp for breath
And if you have a friend who makes you laugh, spend lots and lots of time with him or her!

6. The tears happen
Endure, grieve, and move on.
The only person who is with us our entire life, is ourself.
LIVE while you are alive.

7. Surround yourself with what you love
Whether it's family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever.
Your home is your refuge.

8. Throw out nonessential numbers
This includes age, weight, and height.
Let the doctors worry about them.. That is why you pay them.

9. Don't take guilt trips
Take a trip to the mall, even to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is

10. Tell the people that you love them, at every opportunity

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!

Bangalore <-> Ooty on Bike

One of my colleague, Elango, floated his interest to make a bike trip from Bangalore to Ooty. That looked interesting to me, and I have never drove such a long drive on bike, although I had drove almost 25,000 KMs... We are planning to go for this trip on the first weekend of the next year (2008).

I got some time to check about the trip on the net, and found some interesting blog entries...
Let me share the links here.

A Blog entry about their trip…. You must read this one before you make up your mind for such a trip. Are you brave enough?.. really???, tell me after reading this blog entry...
http://bendekaaluooru.blogspot.com/2006/02/to-ooty-on-2-wheels-part-1.html

One more blog entry by ThoughtWorkers
http://skizz.biz/blog/2007/11/27/biking-to-ooty/

Good to see the someone’s trip album before you start, which gives the motivation :)
You need it really….., Because, There are 36 Hairpin curves on the way….
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisstevenson/sets/72157602872876582/

Triceps Brachii

Although I go to GYM regularly, my triceps is not becoming bulky.
I was just exploring about it in the web, got some knowledge about that muscle and found some interesting articles.

What WikiPedia Says

Nice Article - Add serious size to your Arms

Triceps Workout Plans
These guys at BodyBuilding.com have videos, which are very usefull :)

Most importantly, all the articles talks about the protein intakes.
Although I am not interested to take any Protein Supplements, I'll take more natural proteins from Eggs, Nuts, Fish, etc.

Excercise - Brain

We are doing exercise thinking of Reducing Fat or Build Muscles, etc...
I just came across that it increases the efficiency of the Brain to get maximum out of it :)
Among all exercises, aerobics has been found to be most beneficial for the brain.

You can read more about it @ ThinkQuest

Qooxdoo - Web Framework

I Spent couple of days to explore about the open source qooxdoo framework. Firstly, I thought why do they keep the weird name for the framework?...
Their official site has lot of demos. Among all, The showcase demo is quite comprehensive demo to look at all the widgets provided by the framework. I like the look and feel. It is not flashy... but it looks good.
The framework is javascript based framework. They have pretty good API reference for the framework. When I explored the API, I could correlate most of the classes to Java Swing classes.

If you still want to develop the web applications with the Java Swing skills, they provide the qooxdoo web toolkit.

I am not sure about the performance. I have to try developing some applications.

Overall, I liked this framework.

Adobe AIR

I spent few hours to check the Adobe AIR platform. Looks like they are coming up with a platform to leverage the web developer skills to develop the desktop applications. You need to install the Adobe AIR software on the client machine and it has the webkit engine in it without much of the browser securities.

In my opinion, I prefer to use Java Swings/Java Web Start to develop the desktop Applications and go for other web frameworks for the web development.

Child Labour

People talk about the child labour on different occasions. But how they missed this?

Normally people point out the poor kids working out some where to earn few bucks for their daily breads and force them out of their job. This might make their life more miserable. Why those folks look at the above advertisement. All the actors in the above advertisement are kids. Is this not a child labour? Why nobody argues against this? If we stop this kind of child labour, it will be better instead of stopping the child labour that is required for running the life.

FireBug is a must for web-development

FireBug is really a cool Addon.
You can inspect the web pages and debug the javascript with breakpoints within the Mozilla browser. I have been using this addon for an year so far...
It shows even the html source code for the objects created dynamically through javascript. You cannot see the dynamically generated code through View source of web page.

You get download the addon from
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/
If you develop any web applications using javascript, FireBug is a must...

Medical Profession

Medical profession is one of the valuable profession and at the same time, it is one of the profession that cannot be validated by the end user...

When I go to a doctor, I cannot figure out how good he is in his profession.
We can come to know only when we recover back from the illness.
We never know whether the doctor prescribed right dose of medicine or prescribed over-dose of medicine...

There are viral diseases which takes long time to recover...,
There are life time diseases which needs continuous medical treatment...,
There are diseases which needs surgery with 50% - 50% chances of success...

Whatever the level of the treatment, quality of the treatment, or outcome of the treatment, the money reaches the pockets of the doctors...

Which button to press?

While waiting for the lift, I have seen quite a few people pressing the wrong button.
When you want to go up (say from ground floor to 3rd floor), you need to press "^" button.
It means that you want to go up. For the same, I have seen few people pressing "v" button, which is wrong.

Indian Rupees Vs US Dollars

In the recent days, Value of Indian rupee is rising over the US Dollar.
It is good one way - Indian currency value is going up :)
It is bad one way - Lots of traders, employees getting affected because of the decrease in exchange rate :(

Whatever the consequences are, Should the government support this and appreciate the rise of Indian currency value or should it act to stop the rise?

Indian Provident Fund Organization...

Last week, I received the PF statement, which was distributed by the office Guys.
You know what, that PF statement is for the 2004-2005 Financial year.
Today's date is Nov 8th, 2007. They are distributing this statement almost 2.5 years late.
It is very shame to see that it has not changed yet, can we still say that India is a developing country??? If things are like this, when will this country become a developed country???

At least the PF organization should cope with the attrition rate in the Indian IT industry... sigh...

I am surprised to see a site for the PF organization (http://epfindia.nic.in/)
I clicked on the "Know your Claim Status" link and selected Karnataka as state, it thrown an error "

The resource cannot be found.

Unreserved Travel in Train

Last week I traveled from Bangalore to Arakkonam for Eid. The train normally leaves Bangalore at 10:45 PM. I had reached the station at 9:30, got the ticket and waited for the train. When the train entered the station, every one fights to enter into the train to get a seat for him. I somehow, got into train and got a seat to sit on the top tier. When I got into train it was around 10:00 PM. Till the last minute crowd keeps entering into the train. Their was 1 or 2 unreserved compartments only and around 20 reserved (Sleeper and A/C coaches).

Only 2 trains are available in the night time, so the reservation gets over 2 or 3 weeks before the journey date. If you decide to travel 1 week before the journey date, you have to travel by unreserved compartment. Check out the first picture, that is not taken anywhere in the middle of the compartment, that was the entrance of the compartment. Crowd keep coming and trying to figure out some place to stand in any of those 2 unreserved compartments.

On each of 4 people seats, 6 or 7 people were sitting, on each of the upper tier, 4 people were sitting, and few people were lying down on the luggage space. One guy was fighting with people to move, so that people can come inside. Few people supported him, few people were against him. The person who got the space to lie down is happily watching the fight and few guys were busy on their mobile...
Just imagine the women travelers on this crowd. They were having big troubles...



Questions to Railway Ministry:
1) When we pay the tax, rather when you detect the tax at source, why don't you provide us the facility to travel?
2) Why can't you analyze the travel frequency and schedule the trains effectively (more trains on friday nights, more unreserved compartments, etc)?
3) Why don't you travel once in unreserved compartment to realize the pain of others?

Anyhow, tips to travel in unreserved compartment:
1) You need to be there in platform before the train arrives the station.
2) To follow the first tip, you need to be their in station 90 minutes before the scheduled time.
30 minutes will be spent to get the unreserved ticket.

India-Aus 2008 - Future Cup Series

Looks like BCCI strategy is different this time...
Guess what, they are trying to encourage the bowlers to become all-rounders,
All the batsmen are supporting the bowlers and giving chance to them by loosing their wickets early.

Irfan Pathan, Zaheer Khan, and Harbhajan Singh are making use of that effectively :)
Although Indian team is not winning the matches, the bowlers are learning to hold the bats and stay in the wickets for more time...

Right to Emergency Care - Supreme Court Verdict

Right to Emergency Care:
Date Of Judgment: 23/02/2007.
Case No.: Appeal (civil) 919 of 2007.

The Supreme Court has ruled that all injured persons especially in the case of road traffic accidents, assaults, etc., when brought to a hospital / medical centre, have to be offered first aid, stabilized and shifted to a higher centre / government centre if required. It is only after this that the hospital can demand payment or complete police formalities. In case you are a bystander and wish to help someone in an accident, please go ahead and do so. Your responsibility ends as soon as you leave the person at the hospital.

The hospital bears the responsibility of informing the police, first aid, etc.

Please do inform your family and friends about these basic rights so that we all know what to expect and what to do in the hour of need. Please not only go ahead and forward, use it too!!!!

Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technologies for IT in 2008

Gartner analysts presented their firm's list of the “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008” at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. Gartner "is urging IT executives to think about the risk of not implementing each one." The technologies are as follows: green IT; unified communications; Business Process Management; metadata management; "Virtualization 2.0" (which "simplifies the installation and movement of applications, makes it easy to move work from one machine to another, and allows changes to be made without impacting other IT systems"); mashups; Web platforms and Web-oriented-architecture ("a version of SOA geared toward Web applications"); computing fabrics (server designs that will "allow several blades to be merged across a 'computing fabric,' in which they will appear as a single server to an operating system"); the "real world Web" (which will "augment reality with universal access to information specific to locations, objects or people"); and social software (blogs, wikis, etc.).

Read more details at networkworld site

Client driven load balancing

Recently, I was discussing with one of friend about load balancing.
My friend: How do you do load balancing?
Me: Either you can do at the hardware level or configure and setup the clusters in the application servers?
My friend: If you do at the hardware level, how do you do it?
Me: 1) A separate Load balancer hardware will take all the requests and direct the requests to one of the servers in the list.
2) Have multiple entries in the DNS server with different IP addresses for the same domain name
My friend: In the second option, what is the dis-advantage?
Me: DNS will not check whether the server is in a responding condition or not, it just picks up the entry in round robin fashion and returns it.
My friend: In the first option, what is the dis-advantage?
Me: Single point of failure at the load balancer unit. But we can have the High Availability by having the primary and secondary pair for the load balancer.
My friend: is their any other way to handle this?
Me: there are services like Naming and registry services. But again we need to handle the fail-over for that point.
My friend: Do you think of any other options?
Me: We can move the load balancing to the client side.
My friend: So, do you want to move that load balancing layer to all the layer till the client side?
Me: With the client side load balancing option, their won't be any single point of failure and we can avoid the secondary server that does nothing other than waiting for the failure of the primary server. So, with this option, we can have load balancing with high availability and low cost. And the high availability is always in nines (99.99...). It is all depends on how many nines do you want after "99."

Some days later, when I was searching something on the web2.0 stuff, I found an interesting article related to my point (moving the load balancing to the client side). People are using this technique already.

You can read that article at digital web magazine.

Easy Vs Difficult

I received this content in a mail from one of my friend Imran. This is absolutely true... You would have come across at least few of them in your life...

EASY DIFFICULT

Easy is to judge the mistakes of others Difficult is to recognize our own mistakes
Easy is to talk without thinking Difficult is to refrain the tongue
Easy is to hurt someone who loves us. Difficult is to heal the wound...
Easy is to forgive others Difficult is to ask for forgiveness
Easy is to set rules. Difficult is to follow them...
Easy is to dream every night. Difficult is to fight for a dream...
Easy is to show victory. Difficult is to assume defeat with dignity...
Easy is to admire a full moon. Difficult to see the other side...
Easy is to stumble with a stone. Difficult is to get up...
Easy is to enjoy life every day. Difficult to give its real value...
Easy is to promise something to someone. Difficult is to fulfill that promise...
Easy is to say we love. Difficult is to show it every day...
Easy is to criticize others. Difficult is to improve oneself...
Easy is to make mistakes. Difficult is to learn from them...
Easy is to weep for a lost love. Difficult is to take care of it so not to lose it.
Easy is to think about improving. Difficult is to stop thinking it and put it into action
Easy is to think bad of others Difficult is to give them the benefit of the doubt...
Easy is to receive Difficult is to give
Easy to read this Difficult to follow
Easy is keep the friendship with words Difficult is to keep it with meanings

Eclipse Plugin - Quantun DB

If you are looking for a opensource SQL plugin for Eclipse,
you can go for "Quantum DB".
I have just installed it, It is good.

This plugin requires another plugin as a dependency.
You can download that from GEF website

Install GEF plugin and Quantun DB plugin, you are ready to use the SQL/Quantum DB Perspective from Eclipse environment.

Added my LinkedIn profile Link

I have added link to my linkedIn profile in my blog.
You can as well do it, by following the steps mentioned below.

1) Select the format of display from the following linkedIn link.
(It requires the login into the linkedIn site)
LinkedIn site for the profile link

2) Edit your blogger loayout and add a page element of type "HTML/JavaScript" and paste the content that you get from the linkedIn in step 1.
Save your layout changes.

BCCI 2007 Contract

I am surprised to see Irfan Pathan in Group C instead of Group B.
He has been with Indian Cricket team for quite a long period. He was over used sometimes when there were no proper bowlers and He is a only one perfect all-rounder in indian team. Indian team exhausted him and sent out of the team in the middle of a series. Anyhow, Irfan Pathan took that positively and he relaxed a bit, got the energy back, got feedbacks from experts and practiced well to come back into the team and proved his worthiness. He was one of the bowler in T20 world cup series who had great economic rate and He was the man of T20 world cup final match. I appreciate his great attitude. He work very religiously when he is in the ground and he does not just stare at the batsman for each of the ball as Sreesanth does. Irfan Pathan rarely bowls any extras and he is very accurate and consistent after he is back to the game.
Considering his long association with the team and his accuracy & consistency, He should have been in Group B.

BCCI Contract announcement

Video on Javascript

I had a chance to see the video on javascript delivered by Yahoo JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford in a developer day. He just shares his experience on javascript.

Google Org....

I know that all of you visit the google.com atleast once a day. The developers sometimes rely on google to find resolution for many problems. If the internet is not accessible, the productivity goes down by some percentage...

So, you all know about ".com" domain of google, have you ever visited ".org" domain of google? I don't think so...
Yesterday, I accidentally visited "www.google.org"
They have been doing lot of philanthropic activities out there. I am quite impressed with this. How many companies come forward to do some activities like this?
Check out their latest "RechargeIT" project...

Wanna be online reseller?

You can become an online reseller for free and get your part in the profit.
I haven't tried this site, just found it today while browsing the profiles in my linkedin network.

Check the following links for more details...
Bravisa

Improve your Presentation Skills

Today, I found the site of GARR Reynolds. He has lot of stuff on branding and presentations. Following link will take you to his presentation tips...

Presentation Tips

Write, Rate, Learn, Earn

I just came across a site today, where you can write your articles, rate others articles, learn new stuff, and also earn in the process...
Check out the following link to know more about it.

Here is the link

Booch's site

When I was searching for the software architecture on the web, I found the Booch's Site.
If you are an architect or an aspirant to become an architect, you must register on that site and read the resources over there...

How India is going to handle the travel population?

Recently, I travelled to Theni, Tamilnadu, India.
Purpose of the visit is to attend a marriage and to meet a friend on the way.
I travelled with one of my friend from bangalore.
We planned to meet a friend of ours in coimbatore.
Luckily we got the train reservation from bangalore to coimbatore.
We got down in coimbatore, got a chance to see the movie, Sivaji.
Later in the day, we all had dinner and we two departed from coimbatore at 10:00PM.
There are 2 bus stands in coimbatore. We took a local bus to reach the other bus stand to get a bus to Palani. There are buses every 15 minutes to Palani, but the crowd waiting for the bus is almost triple whenever a bus comes into the busstand.
I carried our bags and my friend tried hard to get seats for us, but it was a vain attempt.
Then we decided to goto other bus stand, took a local bus and reached there.
There we saw more crowd than the previous busstand. We waited there for another 45 minutes and the time was around 12 in the night. Finally a bus came, this time we rushed into the bus and we got our seats.
We got down at Palani. from there we need to travel in Madurai bus, get down at a place called "Mattu Thavani" and catch another bus to reach Theni.
Around 2:30 AM, there are lot of people waiting for the bus at Palani.

This time we know the strategy to get a seat in the bus, we waited at the entry of the bus stand.
After 30 minutes, we could see a bus to madurai, we rushed into the bus and got seats for us. We got down at "Mattu Thavani" and got a bus to Theni. We reached early in the mornning at 7:00 AM.

Education...

Few days back, I saw a message on the backside of a school van. It says
"Education is for life, not for living"
In India or any developing country, education still changes the living of many people.
Lot of people are moving out of the poverty line by educating their children.
Those who don't educate their children remain at the same level.
So, I would say that "Education is for living and then for life".

ExpenseView

I found a Free and simple online tool, to manage and analyze your expenses.

Check out more at expenseview

You can also include this utility in your www.google.com/ig