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