On weekend of July 5th-6th, we started on a trip to 'places' around Bangalore with a vague plan which was jotted over a group chat of 15 minutes :). Out of various options that came up, Wayanad, Bandipur, Ooty etc Majj came up with a good plan which made everyone happy. The plan was Start from Bangalore to Mysore, stay overnite, Bandipur next morning, and then Ooty and drive back in the night.
The journey for Sachin and I, stated on a interested note, when we boarded Kacheguda-Yashwantpur exp which departs form Kacheguda at 9:15 PM at just about time it was departing in such a situation that we had to walk approx 8 boogies to reach ours. The MMTS train from hitech station (scheduled departure 8:24 PM) turned out to be a risky choice to catch this train.
As we started on Saturday afternoon from Bangalore, there was a suggestion to consolidate the plan, overruled :). We decided to have the trip as ad-hoc as possible. We started for Mysore and decided to spend some time at the famous Mysore Palace, which thanks to the guide turned out to be very informative and interesting tour compared to one that I had some 2 years back without a guide. After this we went to the famous Church. Which is beautiful, though I found big similarities to one I have seen in Medak. The Vrindavan garden trip came a little too late so we could only see the Light and Sound Fountain show. Which is okay for one time visit.
Next morning we started for Bandipur on the decided time of 4 AM to reach Bandipur by 6 AM for the first Safari tour. The tour started at 6:30 AM and ran for one year. Before the tour even started we had seen at least Deers and Wild bores. The extra animal seen on the safari were Elephants, Bisons, Spotted Deers and some birds including Peacock and Eagle. All these animals were also seen while we drove back from Ooty.
Ooty trip was short and quick, we would spend around 8-10 hrs of the day before returning back at around 5 PM because they seemingly close the city gates after that time.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Bike trip to Bhongir fort and Medak Church
Last Sunday turned out to be a full day biking event. We were all waiting for the Monsoon season to begin so we can have some nice weather for such a trip. Almost as planned we(I ?) started at 5:30 AM from my house when we were supposed to start from Shopper's stop towards our destination. With some delays picking up ppl we eventually were all set to go at around 6:30 or so.
The first destination was chosen to be Bhongir fort as the only seasoned driver amongst us Kannan suggested that we go there first. Bhongir fort is pretty close to Hyderabad it would have been around 50 KM from shoppers stop on NH 202 towards Warangal and the road and traffic didn't trouble us much, as a result we were at the fort in around an hour. After a quick bite at a restaurant we started climbing up the fort which seemed like being composed of a single rock all the way up to top(which indeed is the case). The fort has very minimal remains and it was more like hiking on a mountain than anything, the good part was the strong and nice winds which were awesomely refreshing. We would stop every once in a while and enjoy the winds and the nice view of the town from top. The weather was pleasant all the while.
At around 10:30 we were already down and discussing about weather we should go to Medak or Warangal. Medak as I figured out on the previous night while collecting maps was on the opposite side of the city and would have required us to go back through Hyderabad. Warangal was on the other hand 145 KMs from the place where we stood. After lots of discussion we decided to go to Medak Church and postpone Warangal trip for some other weekend.
Medak Church is on HW 97 around 100 KM(at least) from Hyderabad. While we came back from Bhongir fort and were enjoying our lunch at the Pickles restaurant near Paradise, we wondered again if we should go to this place, Aditya and I were in favour of dinning heavy and going back home as the destination was definitely more than 70 KMs away(various sources of information were not maching :)). Gene had "her" race to watch. But Kannan, Jhinuk and Ajay convinced Aditya and me to go.
After driving out of the city for more than 20 minutes, I saw a distance board mentioning the number 90 KM, but we had already come far enough to think about going back. We continued. The route is almost straight except forward except for a turn at a Gandhiji statue, which even after being warned one of the bike missed. The whole wrong route backtracking turned out to be pretty costly as we lost around 30-40 minutes and reached the Church only when it was 5 minutes from being closed. Kannan's information about the closing time being 6:30 went wrong again. It was 6:00 PM.
The short inside visit of the church was breathtaking the Church is indeed very beautiful. The paintings on the walls are simply one of the best piece of art I have seen. We so wanted to take photos but weren't allowed to and we soon ran out of time. The outer structure of the church is a monumental piece of architecture. The Church definitely happens to be biggest I have seen till now. From wikipedia article "With its massive dimensions, 100 ft width and 200 ft. length, the church can accommodate as many as 5000 people at a time."
The ride back to Hyderabad got pretty bad due to the darkness and very frequent diversions on the road which is under construction. The dinner was again at Pickles. My advise to Vegetarian folks don't expect much from this restaurant and don't by any chance order their veg sandwich. My Non-Veg friends did like the non veg sandwiches though.
More Photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/vardhman/BhongirFortMedakChurchBikeRide/
Some more photos from Aditya : http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/aditya.sahay/BikeTripWithGooglers
And some more from Ajay: http://picasaweb.google.com/ajay.vg/MedakBikeTrip
The first destination was chosen to be Bhongir fort as the only seasoned driver amongst us Kannan suggested that we go there first. Bhongir fort is pretty close to Hyderabad it would have been around 50 KM from shoppers stop on NH 202 towards Warangal and the road and traffic didn't trouble us much, as a result we were at the fort in around an hour. After a quick bite at a restaurant we started climbing up the fort which seemed like being composed of a single rock all the way up to top(which indeed is the case). The fort has very minimal remains and it was more like hiking on a mountain than anything, the good part was the strong and nice winds which were awesomely refreshing. We would stop every once in a while and enjoy the winds and the nice view of the town from top. The weather was pleasant all the while.
At around 10:30 we were already down and discussing about weather we should go to Medak or Warangal. Medak as I figured out on the previous night while collecting maps was on the opposite side of the city and would have required us to go back through Hyderabad. Warangal was on the other hand 145 KMs from the place where we stood. After lots of discussion we decided to go to Medak Church and postpone Warangal trip for some other weekend.
Medak Church is on HW 97 around 100 KM(at least) from Hyderabad. While we came back from Bhongir fort and were enjoying our lunch at the Pickles restaurant near Paradise, we wondered again if we should go to this place, Aditya and I were in favour of dinning heavy and going back home as the destination was definitely more than 70 KMs away(various sources of information were not maching :)). Gene had "her" race to watch. But Kannan, Jhinuk and Ajay convinced Aditya and me to go.
After driving out of the city for more than 20 minutes, I saw a distance board mentioning the number 90 KM, but we had already come far enough to think about going back. We continued. The route is almost straight except forward except for a turn at a Gandhiji statue, which even after being warned one of the bike missed. The whole wrong route backtracking turned out to be pretty costly as we lost around 30-40 minutes and reached the Church only when it was 5 minutes from being closed. Kannan's information about the closing time being 6:30 went wrong again. It was 6:00 PM.
The short inside visit of the church was breathtaking the Church is indeed very beautiful. The paintings on the walls are simply one of the best piece of art I have seen. We so wanted to take photos but weren't allowed to and we soon ran out of time. The outer structure of the church is a monumental piece of architecture. The Church definitely happens to be biggest I have seen till now. From wikipedia article "With its massive dimensions, 100 ft width and 200 ft. length, the church can accommodate as many as 5000 people at a time."
The ride back to Hyderabad got pretty bad due to the darkness and very frequent diversions on the road which is under construction. The dinner was again at Pickles. My advise to Vegetarian folks don't expect much from this restaurant and don't by any chance order their veg sandwich. My Non-Veg friends did like the non veg sandwiches though.
More Photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/vardhman/BhongirFortMedakChurchBikeRide/
Some more photos from Aditya : http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/aditya.sahay/BikeTripWithGooglers
And some more from Ajay: http://picasaweb.google.com/ajay.vg/MedakBikeTrip
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Back to KDE/OSS development, new interesting dev environment
After a long break interest in OSS contributions came back. Basically Caulier Gilles has pinged me couple of times asking if I was gonna work on upgrading Flickr/Picasa exporter kipi-plugins I wrote earlier to support the new KDE4.
KDE4 is obviously something I was waiting for long back when KDE evangelism used to be a major timepass :) but that changed over time as most ppl I worked with used Linux lately. KDE 4 does however seem to be a step ahead of the older version and the difference is visible not only in the interface but also in the development libraries. As expected things have been cleaned up and better interfaces have been developed so much that running KDE on Mac and Windows has been made simple.
For long I have not used my home Linux workstation and the default choice for working turned out to be my laptop which is a Mac Book and however enthusiastic I would be about developing my plugins I would probably never want to even experiment running C++ compiler on a macbook forget about QT and all other deps. So I had to look for other options. Thanks to the world of Virtual OSes, I am now running Linux virtually on my macbook and its almost as good an experience as developing on Linux natively.
The added advantage was that I could easily install two different Linux version one for KDE3 and another for KDE4 instead of hacking my way to get both of them to work simultaneously on a box. (I have earlier had the nightmare of compiling QT and KDE libs from scratch, downloading multiple libraries and dependencies as the list never ended and I finally gave up :()
Virtual Linux worked liked a breeze except for some minor tweaks/retries which I needed to get networking to work. My conclusion of the whole exercise is this:
1) Try using bridged networking whenever possible. This gets you the network settings from your Host OS, using DHCP in my case.
2) For Kubuntu 8, where I ran in to problem of the default network adapter being identified as ipv6 and failing consistently in assigning an ipv6 address (because of lack of ipv6 routers around), I had to go the /etc/modprobe.d/aliases file and disable the line containing ipv6 module entry. Followed by a service network restart and then it works like breeze.
3) I also noticed another issue where my eth0 adapter was not recognized at all, the fix in this case was to add it in the /etc/networking/interfaces file and then restarting networking.
Right now my dev enviroment seems to be fixed and the real struggle lies ahead the real porting work :)
KDE4 is obviously something I was waiting for long back when KDE evangelism used to be a major timepass :) but that changed over time as most ppl I worked with used Linux lately. KDE 4 does however seem to be a step ahead of the older version and the difference is visible not only in the interface but also in the development libraries. As expected things have been cleaned up and better interfaces have been developed so much that running KDE on Mac and Windows has been made simple.
For long I have not used my home Linux workstation and the default choice for working turned out to be my laptop which is a Mac Book and however enthusiastic I would be about developing my plugins I would probably never want to even experiment running C++ compiler on a macbook forget about QT and all other deps. So I had to look for other options. Thanks to the world of Virtual OSes, I am now running Linux virtually on my macbook and its almost as good an experience as developing on Linux natively.
The added advantage was that I could easily install two different Linux version one for KDE3 and another for KDE4 instead of hacking my way to get both of them to work simultaneously on a box. (I have earlier had the nightmare of compiling QT and KDE libs from scratch, downloading multiple libraries and dependencies as the list never ended and I finally gave up :()
Virtual Linux worked liked a breeze except for some minor tweaks/retries which I needed to get networking to work. My conclusion of the whole exercise is this:
1) Try using bridged networking whenever possible. This gets you the network settings from your Host OS, using DHCP in my case.
2) For Kubuntu 8, where I ran in to problem of the default network adapter being identified as ipv6 and failing consistently in assigning an ipv6 address (because of lack of ipv6 routers around), I had to go the /etc/modprobe.d/aliases file and disable the line containing ipv6 module entry. Followed by a service network restart and then it works like breeze.
3) I also noticed another issue where my eth0 adapter was not recognized at all, the fix in this case was to add it in the /etc/networking/interfaces file and then restarting networking.
Right now my dev enviroment seems to be fixed and the real struggle lies ahead the real porting work :)
Friday, May 09, 2008
Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park
We had a trip to Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park during weekend of 26 April. What a trip. I had a vague idea of what the Sequoias would be like having seen the Muir woods forest near San Francisco but the sequoias in these national park are much taller compared to the Redwoods in the muir woods. Here are some numbers:
1) Largest tree in the world (by Volume): The General Sherman: 275 ft, ...
2) One of the widest tree in the world : The Grant Sequoia 40 ft wide
Besides the talls trees which are seen in both forest, there is also a high probability of spotting some wild life, yes we did see it. We spotted two baby bears, a wood pecker, some wild cats, a wild lizard and also some other birds I don't know the names of.
The oneway journey is approx 5 hrs and you have to drive quite a bit inside the parks so though the earlier plan was to get back the same day by afternoon I was pretty sure I can't drive back all the way, as we kept seeing various points and did some trails we also figured out that the sequoia park itself takes one full day to have a good tour and then the kings canyon would need another full day, we cud only complete the tour by Sunday evening 7 PM (instead of earlier plan of leaving for Mountain View by Saturday 9 PM or so :P). Lodging was at the Snowline lodge on the way to Fresno, If you are prepared with camping equipments however you may easily find other places to stay for e.g YMCA or some camps in either of the parks.
Lots of beautiful spots and nice trails, waterfalls, lakes and awesome views of mountain ranges besides the big tall trees which were there at all places, is the best way to describe the place. I hope the photos speak themselves.
1) Largest tree in the world (by Volume): The General Sherman: 275 ft, ...
2) One of the widest tree in the world : The Grant Sequoia 40 ft wide
Besides the talls trees which are seen in both forest, there is also a high probability of spotting some wild life, yes we did see it. We spotted two baby bears, a wood pecker, some wild cats, a wild lizard and also some other birds I don't know the names of.
The oneway journey is approx 5 hrs and you have to drive quite a bit inside the parks so though the earlier plan was to get back the same day by afternoon I was pretty sure I can't drive back all the way, as we kept seeing various points and did some trails we also figured out that the sequoia park itself takes one full day to have a good tour and then the kings canyon would need another full day, we cud only complete the tour by Sunday evening 7 PM (instead of earlier plan of leaving for Mountain View by Saturday 9 PM or so :P). Lodging was at the Snowline lodge on the way to Fresno, If you are prepared with camping equipments however you may easily find other places to stay for e.g YMCA or some camps in either of the parks.
Lots of beautiful spots and nice trails, waterfalls, lakes and awesome views of mountain ranges besides the big tall trees which were there at all places, is the best way to describe the place. I hope the photos speak themselves.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Weekend trips, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Point Reyes, Uvas Canyon
A short post about the four weekend trips:
Santa Cruz: Just 40 minutes away from Mountain View, SC offers a beautiful ride along the coast and a whole lots of beaches to stop by and the most important of these is the Santa Cruz beach broadwalk, an amusement park next to the main beach where you get to pay per ride, which makes it good to visit any point of day.
Monterey: Is another such place to go along specially famous for its 17 miles drive which is one of the things in my list of must not miss things. Monterey also includes a set of famous beaches including the Carmel beach and the Pebble beach. This time we tried dinning at the "Indian Summers" restaurant in the downtown, which was pretty good in ambiance and taste too except for the spicy level being very high (4/5 was too high, yes he asks you how much spicy on a scale of 0 to 5 and we over estimated ourselves :D).
Point Reyes National Seashore: Its another national park close to the SF and just ~1.5 hrs of drive. We started at around 4PM and it turned out to be not so great trip as by the time we reached it was already dark, cudn't see much of the place but just a beach which was pretty good though. The other group which reached some time earlier also missed the sunset (which seems to be pretty famous) but cud spend lot of time on the beach and also cud see the lighthouse.
Uvas Canyon State Park: This is a close by hiking trail close to San Hose. The only strong reason we had for going there was the Waterfalls section of the San Francisco and Bay area travel guide enlisting it. Turned out to be pretty good trekking experience with almost 4 miles overall walk.
[Photos only of Uvas canyon will upload others later]
Santa Cruz: Just 40 minutes away from Mountain View, SC offers a beautiful ride along the coast and a whole lots of beaches to stop by and the most important of these is the Santa Cruz beach broadwalk, an amusement park next to the main beach where you get to pay per ride, which makes it good to visit any point of day.
Monterey: Is another such place to go along specially famous for its 17 miles drive which is one of the things in my list of must not miss things. Monterey also includes a set of famous beaches including the Carmel beach and the Pebble beach. This time we tried dinning at the "Indian Summers" restaurant in the downtown, which was pretty good in ambiance and taste too except for the spicy level being very high (4/5 was too high, yes he asks you how much spicy on a scale of 0 to 5 and we over estimated ourselves :D).
Point Reyes National Seashore: Its another national park close to the SF and just ~1.5 hrs of drive. We started at around 4PM and it turned out to be not so great trip as by the time we reached it was already dark, cudn't see much of the place but just a beach which was pretty good though. The other group which reached some time earlier also missed the sunset (which seems to be pretty famous) but cud spend lot of time on the beach and also cud see the lighthouse.
Uvas Canyon State Park: This is a close by hiking trail close to San Hose. The only strong reason we had for going there was the Waterfalls section of the San Francisco and Bay area travel guide enlisting it. Turned out to be pretty good trekking experience with almost 4 miles overall walk.
[Photos only of Uvas canyon will upload others later]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)