They Screw up, We pay?%&#*@

Imagine you have a friend who borrows money and invests it in a venture. If it pays up, he returns the money he owes you. If not he just reneges on the debt. This is a win-win deal for him and obviously a lose-lose deal for you - the sucker. This is EXACTLY what is happening with the Credit crisis in the US.

These companies repackaged extremely risky sub-mortgages and traded them like securities, without bothering about the inherent amount of risk that was being created. During the boom these companies made tons of money on these kind of deals. The corporate management took home huge bonus for their "achievements". Now that the boom is faltering, they are threatening to take down to US economy with them. Enter Fed. It reduces the interest rate by multiple percentage points. So how does this affect you? Simple. Reduce interest rate, and inflation goes over the roof... and what is inflation? - though few people realize it, its just fancy talk for saying - the dollar in your pocket is worth lesser than before.

If you were thinking - "Hmm.. Tough luck US residents, Thank god I am not in the US" - you are missing a very basic point about how the currency system works. Countries whose major trading partners include the US, generally have lots of dollar reserves - so that the balance of trade does not push up their currencies. China is one which has used this to the point of "abuse". India is not far behind. So when the dollar goes down, these countries with their *HUGE* reserves of the dollar find themselves poorer.

So now the world is the sucker. No wonder the saying goes - Life is not fair...

Transit in Singapore

On my way to San Francisco, I had 11 hr stopover at the Singapore airport. Although I heard that they give a 2 hr free tour of singapore, I was not too happy since that would leave me with a lot of time to kill.

Now I know I should have been sad that it was ONLY 11 hrs. There were enough places to see in the entire airport, which would take more than 11 hours. The tour which involved a 30 min boat ride which was very good.

What struck me as very different was the extremely tourist friendly nature of the Singapore Airport. They had free internet kiosks, free local calls etc. Everyone knows that most of the time people would not like to pay for such basic services in airports etc, not because of the cost, but rather the hassle of changing currency etc. Everyone was very enthusiastic to help the travelers. There was no apathy to be found, which is extremely uncommon in India. Monopolies ensure that even the private sector in India is apathetic, and dont even get me started about the govt.

I was told that the Singapore govt arranges this tours to increase tourism as it is facing significant pressures due to the moving of its strengths from hardware manufacturing to cheaper destinations like China. Whatever the reason might be, at the end of the day this approach works. I am definitely doing a stopover in Singapore on my return flight.

The Man from Earth

One of the best films I ever saw... I came across this while looking through a list of Sci-Fi movies, and the concept behind the movie - a man who is 14,000 years old - struck me as interesting. It was an independent 2007 film with a little known cast, and a director whom I never heard about - so I was not having much expectations. How wrong I was!

I started downloading the movie, and read some reviews. Some were positive and others were negative indicating that the entire movie was shot in a single log cabin. I started watching the movie, and it was more like reading a novel. So full of depth. The direction and screenplay was awesome.

The best part was that, you feel like you are a part of the conversations that are going on. You do not feel that you are watching a movie, you get sucked into the world. Five Stars!

TCP Congestion

It surprises me to no end that TCP, the most widely used protocol, has remained practically unchanged from its RFC proposal in 1982. From a time where connections were in hundreds of bytes per second to 10Gbps links now-a-days, It is still used in a more or less unchanged form.

However this flexibility comes at a cost - you will not get the maximum throughput your link supports right away. The "right away" part is important. True TCP can eventually take up the entire bandwidth. But there is an over looked issue - TCPs Congestion control. TCPs congestion control rapidly reduces the connections speed as soon as it starts seeing lost packets, and it does not recover as quickly. This has caused linux to adopt newer congestion control algorithms in TCP in a pluggable fashion.

The default congestion control algorithm is CUBIC which is a less aggressive version of BIC. You have a plethora of congestion control algorithms to choose from. They can be checked by reading from and changed by writing to /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_congestion_control file.

This Linux Gazette article has a detailed description of the remaining options.

Hyderabadi Weekends Suck

Hyderabad has very few weekend getaways for its denizens. For me, Its always going to the movies, malls or to Necklace road. Pubs and Restaurants are not my thing. So it becomes very hard to just go to some place over the weekend and freak out. Complete weekend enjoyment is seriously lacking here in hyderabad. I had been to Anantagiri Hills, NagarjunaSagar. The only nearby place which I did not visit yet is Srisailam, which I am planning in the near future. Once these are over, you are pretty much forced to visit other cities for nearby destinations.

Bangalore comes to my mind all the time. Located near to the Western Ghats and Nilgiris, Bangalore has tons of places where you can be closer to nature and cooler temperatures. I had visited Nandi Hills in Bangalore, and a 650 KM bike trip to Bandipur, Trekking and Whitewater kayaking in Mudigere. The next weekend I am again going to bangalore for a trek in Antaraganga, and later to pune for the Good Friday weekend.

Sigh! If all else fails will just have to go to some resorts - which suck the least...