Ramayanam in 30 seconds

I was talking to my niece paddu over weekend .. My Anni and Annen hinted to her and she started saying something which i could not understand fully in the beginning. Then she said
" ....
Lord Rama broke Shiva's bow and married Sita. King Ravana kidnapped Sita and Hanuman helped Lord Rama to find Sita. Lord Rama fought and killed Ravana and brought Sita back.
Moral of the story .. ....... "

End of Ramayanam !! The shortest version of Ramayanam i have heard.

The moral of the Story only paddu understood .. nobody else could comprehend what she was saying .. :-) May be i will be to understand it clearly the next time i meet her.

Vaio recovery

Prashant got a sony vaio recently and one fine day it stopped booting up and started to give a blue screen. He and Mahesh tried to recover it using sony vaio recovery center but it failed with a mysterious error 320/330. The restore of C drive was happening and in between recovery fails leaving the windows o/s files in unusable state (cant boot into vista). Mahesh tried to do a XP installation as well which did not succeed.

I took the laptop and tried the same recovery and also tried to recover using windows vista recovery CD. I had to download SATA drivers and load them initially for the disks to be recognised. The recovery using recovery CD failed as the vaio recovery had left the windows o/s files in a unusable state. I tried to launch the vaio recovery process after loading the recovery CD but could not.

Then i tried to install ubuntu linux from CD. The copy kept failing then installed it from USB drive. This worked and the installation went fine. So atleast we can have linux running if nothing else runs as well.

Next option we thought of was to install XP. To have XP installed (which by default does not come with sata drivers), i got a XP home CD. Slipstreamed sata drivers and SP3 using nLite. Then tried the installation using BartPE cd with sata drivers loaded. The XP SP3 installation copied the installation files and when i booted back , it did not copy the sata drivers so the installation never began after pre-installation copied the files. So was thinking of copying the driver files and modifyig the txtsetup.sif to load sata driver on startup while installing.

Sumit also bought same laptop. So another option was to reimage prashant's laptop using sumit's laptop. The partitions occupy whole disk. If i had to copy partitions, i will have to shrink Sumit's partition first and then use g4u or gparted live cd or other tools to copy the partiiton to temporary USB drive and then copy it back to Prashant's laptop. Instead i tried to copy all files from Sumit's laptop (arond 30 GB) to USB drive and then copy it over to Prashant's laptop and try booting. I used live gparted CD and then mounted the two disks and then started to copy everything in C Drive to the USB drive. The USB drive has a fat32 filesystem where as Sumit's hard disk partition was ntfs.

I initially tried the copy with vista running. It did not copy OS files. Then i used gparted and mount and the copy failed. I tried the copy by booting into BartPE. It failed as well. Both failed due to errors while copying files from winsxs directory which holds the manifests and .NET related files. The problem was the directory in FAT 32 filesystem seems to have a limit on no of files/dirs - ~7500. This caused the copy to fail. So had to zip the winsxs directory and unzip in Prashant's hard drive after copying rest of the files.

Then after a startup recovery with the vista recovery CD to set the windows folder and boot partition , vista was up and running in Prashant's laptop. It has been a good learning exercise.

Still i do not know fully why the XP slipstreamed drivers did not install even though it worked with BartPE.

Totally three full days of work and finally we have vista running in exactly the same way it did.

Resources used: BartPE/PE2USB , GParted , Vista recovery CD , nLite

Back from vacation

I came back this week from a nice short three week vacation to India. Spent time with family, friends and had a good time. Travelled a lot - bangalore , chennai , tirupathi , devakottai and kumbakonam. The temperature variation was huge -20 to +27 when i left from montreal and +27 to -11 when i returned back. Most of the snow has melted since i left and not much of fresh snow.

I went by Emirates to bangalore. The new bangalore airport is nice and big. liked it though it is far from city and actually 90kms from hosur. The flight from JFK to dubai was almost full of indians. The journey on A380 was nice. It carries 800 passengers. It is spacious and the 13-14 hour journey on it did not feel so tiring. Surprisingly did not have much of jet lag this time when i returned back. Generally when going to a diff location, i dont have jet lag. But almost always i have jet lag for a week when i return back to my living place. It was different this time.

Back to regular routine in montreal.

Resumed tweets

In Jan, i resumed to tweet after i was not updating my blog regularly. Both of them took a pause during my vacation to india. In Jan, we had lot of fresh snow and driving was tricky at times. Tried cross country skiing.

Visited New york and caught up with Sujith and Ashuthosh. It was nice to meet Ashuthosh after a gap of 6 years (after college). We played in the fresh snow. Had a good time in New york.













Also met my old colleague Ahilan in NY.

Welcoming 2009

Yesterday night we went to place jacques-cartier for the new year countdown. There was music and lot of people despite the cold of -18 with a wind chill which made it feel like -25. We joined the crowd and some bit of dancing on the ice to welcome the new year. There were nice fire crackers at the old port. We were there for an hour. By that time, the face got cold and kind of froze due to the cold. Then came back and dozed off.

Today it is pillayar nombu. So went to temple today to pray to Lord Ganesha. I saw that the temple was crowded and i came to know that special poojas were happening on the english new year. I was a little surprised.

To celebrate pillayar nombu, i went to Prof. Kannan's place. After the pooja and ellai ethi eduthukuradu, we had the nice soft vadas and idli made by his wife. I had prepared gajar ka halwa as prasadam and everybody liked it.

Then i started to update the blog after returning home. sleeping now. That brings the first day of the year to a close.

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

Todos: 2009

I generally dont make a resolutions or todo list every year. But i want to pen down this time and see how it goes. I will keep posted how the todos are progressing during the year.

I plan to do the following this year
- Being more in touch with friends
- Organize and upload pictures taken since beginning of 2005. This has been a long pending task and photos keep getting clicked and piling up.
- Organize my contact list into one central and keep it updated. I want to maintain a centralized one online.
- Learn Swimming and Ice skating
- Improve on skiing
- Improve in photography. Take good pics with DSLR.
- Back to active hacking
- Work more on andhramahabharatam and close it

Update: Added the missing ones.

Looking at 2008

Just jotting down about the year so that i can read it later. It was a busy year which just passed by fast. It was an important year.

- Moved base to Montreal after first two months in cyprus.
- Did sky diving and River rafting
- Made another attempt to learn swimming with some success
- Very little of hacking this year except for few small tweaks
- Workwise, new project , new people , new location - got comfortable.
- Back to skiing after a gap
- Visited Quebec city, Niagara falls , Toronto , Montreal.
- Got out of the laziness in cooking induced in cyprus

What i have been up to

It has been almost 2.5 months since i last posted. I have been busy with work , visiting friends , visiting quebec city and mont royal and other places around montreal and doing much needed winter shopping. I completed my swimming classes.

It is good to see snow back again. After a kind of active summer, looking forward to a good winter. 

Feeling tired afer swimming class today. Hitting the bed. 

Snow in montreal

This is my first full winter in montreal. I arrived in march here during the end of winter. 

The first snow fall of the season was on Diwali (it was a mix of snow and rain). Then it really snowed on 25th November.  It was a nice walk on the fresh snow and a slow drive back home. All of that got washed away. It was cold. The winter is here.  It is going to be white for the next 4 months. 

Last week (09 Dec), we had the first real snowfall of the season. Lot of snow, i guess more than 10cms of snow. Then the temp dropped and all the snow froze and there was freezing rain. We did not venture out in the morning as we did not have winter tyres (mandatory in quebec starting this winter) and stayed at home. All the snow froze and we had around 1-2 cms thick ice on the car. We had to scrape the ice from car. It was a tough job lasting for over an hour. If freesing rain happens daily, then it will be too much of work than i can take. Lucking freezing rain happens only once or twice during a year which is good to know. 

After that we have been brushing away the snow on the car daily. Today the temp rose and there was rain and then in the night, the temp start to drop again. Due to this the melted snow became a layer of ice and all the roads had a glossy look on them. Hard to walk but too nice to enjoy. 

The temp has varied from +6 to -18 (+ wind chill) till now. 

Coming to the winter wear, we are coverted from head to toe except for the face. Once you wear the full winter wear, you dont feel much of the cold. Only the face can feel how cold it is out there. Only ice and melting ice makes it hard for driving and also walking on it. Sambhalke walk on ice. 

Never fill air in the car tyres with bare hands at -12 degrees centigrade even if you are going to be out for under a minute or two. I learnt it the hard way. My hands were red and numb for a good 10 minutes. 

We also went to ski bromont. We were there on the opening weekend and as bunny hill was not there to start practicing, we took to the top of the mountain and came down the green trail. The snow was being groomed constantly but the ice was becoming ice. This was making it hard to stop with the skis. Lot of screeching and not much grip to cut through the snow. We went up and came down twice. The first run took around an hour. I was skiing after a gap of two years. The second run down was quicker even though i got too tired. There  was lot of pressure on the knees and the legs as it was hard to stop to slow down. We had fun. It was good being back on skis. 

Last swimming class

Today was the last class for the swimming beginner's course.  I still am gonna drown if thrown into a deep pool but will go down after a few kicks and few bubbles. Despite the very slow progress and low motivation due to that, we still kept going.  I have got better than when i joined. I kick more relaxed now than i began with. 

The instructor told me to continue kicking relaxed and more longer kicks not fast short ones that i currently do. Then i will move to do some breathing and then moving arms and then all of these in synchrony ..  to fultoo swimming. Not sure when that day is going to come :-D 

The last day at swimming was eventful. After the class and the shower, i come back to see my locker is locked by somebody else. We had to call the civic center people who came promptly and broke the lock with a cutter. Then i got my clothes and shoes which are for sure needed for the gusty winds which were waiting for us outside the civic center. 

Till advances in technology happen, i would be joining my beginner's swimming class next season as well :-)

Had an interesting thought on the way back. In future there will be programs which can be loaded to the brain (like in Matrix)  which give you the knowledge of swimming. All you need to know - keep kicking relaxed , longer kicks , breathing out , breathing in etc.. We capture all the information related to swimming from the best swimmer around and store it and be able to replicate it onto any brain. Everybody will be expert swimmers. 

Skiing was easy to learn. Swimming is not so easy to learn.  But liked the experience. I will continue to learn to swim. 

10 years since we began

On 15-Sep-1998, we (Vamsi Krishna KVS , Xavier Pulla and me)  travelled by the Golconda express to reach Kazipet to join RECW.  We belonged to the 1998-2002 batch of RECW consisting of 324 students who came from all over the country. The next 4 years we would spend together shaped our future and the bonds we made will last forever. The fun times we had will always be in vivid memory. Those 4 years were the best years of my life. 

Thanks to everybody who has been part of this journey. It has been 10 years since it all began. 

I spent whole day chatting with some college friends.  I stay in real good touch with a few. The others - an occasional chat , a scrap on orkut or a mail.  Some i have lost contact. Need to get back in touch with as many as possible and do have an occasional chat. 

Happy decade of friendship. 

Google chrome

I have been using google chrome right from day one. It is simple and brings the search like interface to browsing history / bookmarks / downloads.  The isolation provided with the multiple processes for the tabs is nice. You can kill a tab and still keep the browser running. It is cool. 

It has not crashed any time but has got hung multiple times when i have opened multiple flash videos. Sometimes the pages do freeze. 

I have not verified if it uses more memory than firefox with no extensions for the same number of tabs. I have stopped using firefox with extensions for my day-to-day browsing. I do have a different profile which has extensions which i use occasionally. 

It will be interesting to see how the chrome evolves as it is just a new entrant in the browser market and has made it's presence felt. 

Yahoo mail considers mail from google as spam

I have seen mails from @google.com going to spam folder in yahoo mail even though the header has the Domain Keys signature which yahoo can verify. Yahoo brought this anti-spam standard which google has also implemented. It is kinda strange. However my mail from my gmail id goes fine into my inbox. 

I dont know the reason behind this peculiar behavior of yahoo mail.