How people feel about themselves...

In a standard departure from my normal posts about vacations/economics/linux, I have started writing about some philosophical insights too which struck me as so true... :)

I have found the weather man movie very insightful... and I liked one quote the best of all... I have modified it a bit, to make it more relevant... It never amazes me how much of this is true about how people feel....

"When we are young, we picture ourselves having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passes, few ever become any qualities that we actually have. And all the possibilities we face and the sorts of people we could be, all of them get reduced every year to fewer and fewer. Until finally they get reduced to one, to who you are. And that's who you are!"

So learn to live with yourself, stop pushing yourself too hard and be happy!

Overcomming blurred images in firefox

While using firefox, I recently noticed that most of the images are blurred and/or having artifacts all over. Initially I could not understand why this was happening even with new tabs. But it looks like when you zoom in, in firefox (using Ctrl +/- or the mouse wheel), it zooms images too. Also firefox "remembers" the zoom settings in some way, so that it applies for new tabs too. This is counter productive for me, since the main reason I zoom in is to read the text better, not for images.

So for those of you who want to disable this image zooming feature of firefox, go to View -> Zoom -> Zoom Text Only.

Its a trivial tip, but it changed my browsing experience for the better!

Waynad - Trip into God's Own Country

I heard a lot about Kerala being a very scenic place to visit, but could never visit it. So, last week, when my friend AJ who stays in Bangalore and is the cornerstone of all of my bangalore based trips like Bandipur, Mudigere, Shivanasamudram etc, mentioned he will be moving out of bangalore shortly, We decided to have one more trip. After throwing around a lot of names, Waynad stuck.

Located around 300KM from Bangalore in Kerala, Waynad is a popular and scenic hill station. So three of us - vamsi, praveen and myself - from Hyderabad booked tatkal tickets to bangalore. The train arrived late by two hours on Saturday morning at 8:30AM. We joined AJ and Balaji waiting in a Qualis, and started off to Waynad. After paying an RTO toll of Rs 600 at the Kerala-Karnataka border - which surprised us completely, we reached our Hotel in Kalpetta at 4:15. We then immediately left for the scenic Pookode Lake. Since we arrived there at 4:55, and boating in the lake closes at 5:00, we could not get a row boat ourselves, but had a tourism employee take us around the lake.


The employee, over chitchat, revealed that there would be treks to a nearby mountain peak daily, and we were tempted to cancel the next day plans completely and go for the trek. But he warned us that there would be leeches, but we did not care too much for them - how wrong we were! After getting off the boat, we roamed around the lake, and at one point my friend balaji and vamsi waded into a patch of water which was overflowing onto the path. Rest of us decided against it, and instead turned back. We went to the canteen and saw a group of people trying to get a leech off a guys leg using a pair of matches... Alarmed we immediately checked our own legs, and sure enough we found two leeches on Balaji's feet. It had sucked a decent amount of blood, and after removing them the blood would not clot, due to some anti-coagulant that the leech releases.

We rushed to the hotel room, and thoroughly cleaned ourselves, and vamsi who was wearing shoes, found two leeches on his sock, but which, luckily, could not penetrate the skin. After this rude jerk, we decided that tomorrow's trek was a lost cause. We then had a beer followed by dinner, and played cards until 12:30AM and then went to bed.

Next day morning at 8:30AM we visited the nearby Banasura Sagar Dam, and then went on a speed boat ride around it. Then we went to a supposedly scenic view point, but it was covered in complete clouds and had a visibility range only a couple of meters - leaving us staring into the whiteness. Finding nothing interesting in the vast whiteness, we started off to Soochipara waterfalls.

After reaching the place, we had to climb down a lot of steps to reach the base of the water fall. It was a very picturesque scene, and the water fall was in full force due to the recent monsoon. It is basically a 3 stage waterfall. After playing around on the rocks for some time, we then took a different set of steps to reach the 2nd stage of the water fall. We could not get close to it, but it was breathtaking. Later we went to another path to a view point. It was almost 4:30 PM by the time we reached the parking lot again. We decided we did not have time to visit the Edakkal caves which close at 5PM.

After buying a couple of souvenirs, We then started back to the hotel and freshened up. Later at around 7PM we started the long journey back to Bangalore. On the way back our Qualis hit a big bump in the road, and one of the tyre's rim got bent, and started hitting the disk brake. So we had to replace the tyre and were back on our way. It was almost 2PM by the time we reached bangalore.

Overall it was a very nice trip, with a lot of interesting experiences. I am looking forward to visit the rest of Kerala some time soon.

Irritating defaults in Linux Applications

If there is one thing that Linux/Unix applications are famous for, other than being open source - it is the irritating defaults they set. And just when you figured out how to disable the most irritating ones, you upgrade to a newer version, and they flood you with even more irritating defaults.

Vim takes the prize in this behavior. Every time I upgrade my Fedora, I get a new version of vim, and while I stopped finding any actual improvements between the vim I used 7 years ago and now, the new set of irritating defaults gets me. After upgrading to Fedora 9, with Vim 7.1, this struck me again.

While writing a piece of C code, the program keeps highlighting matching braces, whenever my cursor passes over them. This is mightly irritating, and I could not think of one good reason for making this the default behavior. I am a hardcore programmer and I know where the F*** match for that brace is!!! And the worst part was figuring out what the offending setting was. I tried googling for it, but it was difficult, since the normal terms like "brace", "bracket", "highlight", "show brace", "show match" did not turn up any results about the offending behavior.

Then it struck me that I was searching with the wrong terms, and put in "vim irritating brace" into google and presto! there were tons of forums where people like me were bitching about that behavior. The answer to turn off the feature is to add this to your .vimrc file

let loaded_matchparen=1

Long way to go... before ppl stop messing around with defaults.. Linux is no longer just a programmer's system, but an end-user system. Not every one would like to spend hours trying to figure out why something has changed since their last upgrade... the sooner the linux developers realize this, the better.

Mallelatheertham Waterfalls - Paradise on Earth

After last week's trip to Ethipothala, I could not wait to go on another trip, and this time it was Srisailam's turn. Although I was itching for a bike ride to Srisailam, I could not get my hands on a proper bike to make the trip (My own resembling a bullock cart more than a bike). So my colleague, Chandra, and I decided to go to Srisailam on a cab. We started inviting friends and soon the number grew to 10 people. So we took a Qualis and my friend Raja's Maruti 800.

We started at 7AM on saturday, and picked up our friend AJ, who was visiting Hyd at Afzal Gunj. It was around 11:30 by the time we reached the Srisailam Dam, it was beautiful, but unfortunately there were no gates open, unlike NagarjunaSagar last week - which disappointed us a bit. But the view was impressive with the river Krishna snaking across the valley. After waiting for sometime, we had Lunch and visited Sikhara Darshanam (literally translated, it means view from the mountain top).

We could not make it to the Safari, since there was little time left, so we headed straight for Mallelatheertham waterfalls. It was 40km from Srisailam dam, on the way back to hyderabad, with a 8km diversion on a mud road. It was almost 3:30PM by the time we reached Mallelatheertam. There were some steps leading to the waterfall in the valley, but we could not see anything due to the dense growth.

After reaching the end of stairs, we saw the waterfall on the left. The waterfall was much smaller than my earlier experiences at Ethipothala or Shivanasamudram (especially the latter). But the scene was very beautiful. With water falling from a very high, almost vertical rock face into the green pond below, and trees all around, It was like paradise on earth. If God gave me a real estate contract to develop a new paradise, I would definitely start with this place!

We were able to get on to the base rock of the waterfall, beyond which is the pond. Getting on the rocks was very tricky since they were covered with extremely slippery moss everywhere, except at places with the most water flow. We made it under the falls and the water was hitting us like small stones. We had to cover our ears since they were the most sensitive part of the body with our backs turned to the falls.

After staying for about an hour under the falls we started back the long ride to hyderabad, and it was almost 11:30 PM by the time we reached home, But the waterfall was the highlight of the entire trip. Smaller than most popular falls but no less exciting, overall the experience was unforgettable. More pics are available here.

Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction - Credit Default Swaps

While Bush was busy searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he neglected to bother about the ones that were being "stockpiled" in his own country. No we are not talking about warheads, but Credit Default Swaps - or "Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction" as Warren Buffet, the most successful investor in the world, likes to call them. Now that they blew up in America's face, leaving the country in recession, and spreading the fallout across the world, we will try to see what these things were about.

So what exactly are these credit default swaps? Lets say Bank X loans a large sum to a lets say Tom for mortgage. There is a chance that Tom might not be able to repay his mortgage. In that case, the bank stands to lose the money loaned - which is a major risk for it. So to offset the risk the bank enters into a Credit Default Swap contract with a counter party. Bank X then starts paying fixed payments to the counterparty. In turn, the counterparty assumes all risk of the person defaulting on the loan itself. Although this looks like a typical exchange, the rotten part of it is simply that - the seller of the contract does not need to have any real assets to make the contract.. and can technically go bankrupt.

So a credit default swap makes everyone happy - as long as Tom is making his payments. For Bank X, it kept a huge amount of default risk off its books, and for the counterparty, it is pure money for nothing. But once Tom does not pay his mortgage payment, as it happened, then the system begins to unravel... Bank X demands money from the counterparty, who might go bankrupt since he does not have enough assets to make good his promise. The counterparty is also unable to raise the cash, as the house value would have fallen in the market. So it declares bankruptcy. Immediately, the huge losses starts to appear on the books of Bank X... which takes everyone by surprise, since it was not "expected".

The market for Credit Default Swaps is Over-The-Counter, and not regulated well. In some instances big firms used to buy CDS contracts from little known players, who declared bankruptcy once the defaults started piling up, forcing many big firms to become insolvent. The notional value of the CDS market grew from a couple of hundred billion dollars at the end of 2000 into more than $40 trillion by 2005.

This is one of the reasons for the US Govt trying to bailout firms. Since if they have lots of CDS contracts, then shutting them down would force some other company to take huge debts onto its books immediately, and itself become insolvent, starting a chain reaction. The govt hopes that this will in the meantime allow the values of the assets to grow slowly, and reduce the impact on the firms.

Windows and the hardcore Linux user

Being a hardcore Linux user is not easy, if you are forced to use Windows, especially by official decree. When I used to work for Motorola, we used to get only Windows machines, and the closest thing to a Linux machine was a Solaris 8 server. I could not get a Linux machine without any official project requirement. In the current startup where I work, Linux is the defacto standard, so my life is much easier.

Recently as part of a new assignment, I had to use a firmware compiler, which unfortunately runs only on windows. So I started installing windows on another machine. After installing XP (after a couple of BSoDs and reinstalls tending from heavy infections), I tried to download the compiler software, and I found out that the network card driver was not installed. I was totally pissed off, and then I remembered that I had a Fedora 9 Boot CD, which made the situation akin to someone asking Salman Khan to remove his shirt, or Deve gowda to take a nap... I immediately installed Linux on the machine, and once it is done, booted into linux and figured out the type of hardware from lspci. I started downloading windows drivers for the network card, and it took me quite a while to get proper network drivers.

It made me realize that I have become addicted to Linux... which although does not have a support group like Linux Addicts Anonymous, is a serious impairment for someone living in Bill Gates's Paradise. Ever since I started using only Linux, both in office and on my personal desktop and laptop, my patience for waiting for stuff to happen was gradually thinning all the time. I became a crazed maniac asking for lower response times to actions - until now. Now that I have to use Windows atleast once in a day, I am back to being more patient waiting for my computer to respond, or taking care of it like a loving father while it throws tantrums like a BSoD or plain stops responding to my pleas or gets sick. Guess with due effort, I can become a WindowsXP certified user soon enough. However to become a Windows Vista certified user, I think I would need a prescription medication like Prozac.

P.S: I am not a Linux Fan, just a user. If there is anything I am a fan of, it would be the Windows OS from a shareholder standpoint.