Train station indicators show platform directions

One of the main problems (complaints) that (new) Mumbai suburban commuters often have is to know which side of the car the platform would be on. In a crowded train, knowing this can immensely help a commuter by informing the commuter well in advance which direction s/he should proceed. Too often, commuters new to Mumbai train travel / stations have to ask other commuters which side the platform would arrive. Although in most cases the sides on which the platforms appear are fixed, in certain cases the trains do arrive at platforms other than the ones they usually do. This sometimes results in a shift of the platform side. A sudden surge of people from one side to the other ensues, and this is a big hassle in a crowded train. Commuters hanging out the doorway are usually the ones to spot that the train is changing its tracks, and hence also notice the shift in platforms. They announce this to fellow commuters, who then head to the other door.

Some years ago the local rakes (especially the MRVC ones) have been fitted with a LED display that displays the next station as well as the final destination of the train. However, it was only recently that I noticed that these displays also show an arrow indicating the platform direction. I also double checked to make sure that these arrows are not present in all the indicators. It maybe a part of a trial or part of a new rollout.

Here are two photographs (sorry for the poor quality - mobile cam) from a recent train trip. Note that the indicator for Diva is on the left, whereas Kopar (a relatively new station) is on the right.

 

Hope this is installed in all the locals, and that it functions correctly.

Thoughts of a car finally hit the brain

After years of not wanting to own a car, thoughts of have now started emerging in my brain. All these years I couldn't even differentiate between the various models. But a learning session with a co-worker now makes sure that I know a Maruti Swift from a Hyundai i10, or for that matter what is a VXI, ZXI or a VDI.

One of the things I realized I was missing out was on being able to travel with family on weekends. That meant that I was missing out on visiting places on the outskirts of Mumbai. I am also close to being convinced that the Maruti Swift is a broad compact car (it has the same width as a Maruti Swift Dzire) which means it can accommodate 5 people with ease.

I have driven extensively in the USA, including dense cities such as Boston. This experience also includes a 10 hour drive from Massachusetts to Akron, Ohio. I was not sure whether I could drive in the crazy Mumbai traffic. But if the intention is to drive on the weekends, then this is not that big a problem. Plus a realization that if others could, why couldn't I.

I am also clear that the first car should be a pre-owned car - one that should be ready to receive scratches and dents - a common experience for a new driver in Mumbai.

Science experiments on YouTube

Read elsewhere that some schools in the UK / USA are planning to introduce the Apple iPad for their students. Apart from the general replacement for paper notebooks, what caught my attention was the claim that the  students could actually view dangerous or hard-to-reproduce science experiments on the iPad.

For some interesting science experiments on YouTube, once just has to search for those keywords. But here's a sampler:

• The top 10 science experiments on YouTube
• Sodium in a trash can of water
• Rocket powered by Diet Coke and Mentos

IRCTC website timings changed for online railway reservation

It seems that sometime in July / August 2010 IRCTC has changed the timings for its online railway reservation system. Whereas earlier, the reservation was not allowed from 23:30 night to the next day early morning, the reservation is now closed only for a period of 1 hour (from 23:30 to 00:30).

The 90th day reservation timings are different: That is, if a ticket is booked on the 90th day (the first day advance reservation begins) from the travel date, the reservation only begins at 8 a.m. This is only for the 90th day advance booking.

The new timings are especially convenient for people wanting to book tickets from another timezone (read NRIs), but I think it would put the people booking at the reservation counters at a huge disadvantage. The counters open only at 8 a.m.

I recently tried booking a ticket during the peak Christmas vacation. 37 seconds after 8:00, I was already wait listed.

Dabbling with iPad

Had the chance to take an Apple iPad for a spin. The FSF (Free Software Foundation), of course, is against such "closed" devices as reasoned out in this article "iPad is iBad for freedom".

The iPad out-of-the-box itself is a pretty useless device. If you have a WiFi connectivity, then you could use it as a device for browsing. But a very limited number of useful apps are actually installed on it when you pick it out of the box. As soon as I could, I installed a large number of whatever free apps I could onto the iPad. Most of the iPhone apps can also be installed onto the iPad, but by default they show up using a smaller part of the screen (iPhone size). There's a control (called "2X") that you could click to make the app full screen, but then the images seem to be a bit pixelized.

Only those apps that are mentioned as being "designed for iPad" appear displayed correctly. Thus, even though an app maybe available for both iPhone and iPad, only those that say "designed for iPad" are actually the ones that appear more pleasing on the iPad.

Most of the free apps are games. And tons of games I did install. Some of the games were actually pretty cool. Most of these games had a free version for certain basic levels, and the more advanced levels would require buying  the games.

There were useful informative apps too. Such as the ones that described the various yoga poses.

I only had the iPad for a few days, and it did seem that Apple had finally hit the sweet spot between the portability and the usability. It could also make for a good device for kids - especially on long boring journeys. I could well imagine this being the replacement for those puzzle books that people buy just before a journey.

The iPad has not yet been launched in India, but even if it does, it would be priced quite high to be a casual entertainment device.

Easy computations for the new Mumbai autorickshaw fare

The old tariff for Mumbai's autorickshaw was quite easy to  compute mentally. At least for the regular fare - the late-night fare (after midnight was a different matter), but at least it was easy with the regular fare. So a meter reading of 3.40 could be translated into the fare by multiplying the meter reading by 10  and subtracting 1. Thus, 3.40 on the meter reading would be (3.40 x 10) - 1 = Rs. 33. That's it. No need to carry copies of tariff cards.

The new tariff which came into effect some time in 2010 is a bit more difficult to compute mentally. The official computation is as follows: Rs. 11 for the first 1.00 on the meter, and Rs. 13 for every 1.00 thereafter. A little common sense (read maths) shows that it is still possible to translate this to a formula that can be used to compute the fare mentally. Of course, one needs to know the 13 multiplication tables quite well.

Here is how I do it. Once you get the hang of it, its possible to do it quite fast. I usually try and pronounce the fare before the rickshaw driver can check his tariff card. A couple of rickshaw drivers were surprised by the accuracy of my calculations. I try to practice this quite often now just to check my computation.

The rule is quite simple: Multiple the meter reading by 13 and subtract 2.

• So a meter reading of 3.00 would be (3 x 13) - 2 = 37. And so on.
• Things start to get tricky when we do not have whole meter readings. For example, 3.70. Its still doable, but requires some addition as well. Here's how  to do it:
• First multiply the non-factional  part by 13. This gives 3 x 13 = 39
• Then, multiply the fractional part by 13 and divide by 10. This gives 7x 13/10 = 9.1
• Add both rounding off the resultant. 39+9.1 = approx 48 (rounded off)
• Subtract 2 to get the fare. This gives 48 -2 = 46

Try it out.

Toys and stuff ordered

After regularly keeping track of products at ThinkGeek's webshop for years now, I finally decided to take the plunge and order a few items - some simple toys - those that fascinate both older kids (the ones with gray hair) as well as normal kids. At my first attempt, I was quite taken aback by their order verification process - and in fact, I canceled my order. However, a little bit of Googling revealed that this was a normal process. And after mustering courage, I ordered again. And went through their order verification process.

Of course, I am paying through my nose for the delivery to India. Even though these might be available in India, I did not have the patience to spend time looking where it might be available. It made sense to pack as many items into a single shipment as possible, since the DHL Express shipment to India is itself about USD 35.

And, as some study recently pointed out, online shopping probably results in more environmental hazard than brick-and-mortar shopping. So, the items manufactured in China go to the USA only to be shipped back to India (via an airplane).

It remains to be seen what shape the items arrive in. A couple of decades ago, anything shipped to India had the reputation of being opened up and flicked at the arrival port. Not to mention taxed to death.

Onto the interesting items actually: Apart from a few silly items, one of them is a mini remote-controlled drone  and the other a doodle track car. Check out the interesting videos here and here.

And since DHL offers a web-based online tracking mechanism, its quite easy to see where the shipment is at any point in time.

Can't wait to get those items however worthless they may be.

Amazon.com amazes

I had this question first about 3 years ago, and its still unanswered. Does Amazon.com deliver to India? They sure have software development facilities here in Hyderabad (and maybe 'Luru), and they sure conduct campus recruitment from Indian universities, but it beats the hell out of me to know they do not have a local Indian warehousing from where the items could be shipped.

The story I had heard then is still the same now: They do ship to India, but they charge international shipping rates, and the credit card is charged in USD.

The interest in buying Yamuna Devi Dasi's classic cooking book "Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking" was rekindled when Kurma Dasaji started running a series of recipes from Yamuna Deviji. And, this book shows on Amazon. But can we order locally? We don't know.

A good idea would be to check some Indian e-stores such as indiatimes.com or the more popular one for books flipkart.com. That's what I'm going to do next.

Painful disk recovery

Learnt the hard way that storing information on a DVD is less probable to  failure than an external hard disk. I was using DVDs for storing important information a few years ago. Then, it came to a point where the number of DVDs were too much to store large folders. So, I had switched over to using an external USB disk. While I was using these disks on Linux, I had encountered no problems at all. The trouble began soon after I plugged one of the important disks into my PC running Windows 7. It went bonkers trying to handle the data.It could be  that the Linux file system drivers for FAT32 were storing data in a way that Windows 7 didn't like. All in all, the disk stopped working on both Linux as well as Windows (unformatted disk was the only error I got from Windows).

Then started the desperate measures to recover. First, of course, was the use of Linux tools followed by chkdsk on Windows. No avail. Then, went over to commercial tools such as Handy Recovery. Though the data was not that important, it was not the first time that I had encountered corrupt file systems on disks. A full weekend wasted on recovery, and only about half of the data has been recovered.

It makes me wonder if those disks are more reliable than DVDs. With DVDs, of  course, the probability that all the disks fail is quite low. With a hard disk, one corrupt partition table is enough to get rid of the entire data on the disk.

Exciting weekend at XThrill

Last weekend, I had an enjoyable and unique experience at Lavasa's XThrill. There were a lot of activities that included accommodation in tents (air-conditioned). Other experiences included trekking, rappelling, and rowing across a lake. Not to mention the lovely weather.

Mumbai Suburban Railway ATVM fails test of public

Okay, the title is probably a bit harsh. But, wanted to just say that I observed at a few stations that the ATVM kiosk screen was completely smashed up, and the ATVMs were non-functional. Kanjur Marg and even Matunga (CR) had  their screens completely destroyed. Fortunately, I came across these non-functional ATVMs only at the smaller stations, where the ticket queues are also smaller.

Wonder who smashed the screens. The general Indian public certainly has an apathy towards things that they cannot use. The standard Mera kya jaata hai attitude.


I have even  observed a few guys who just keep touching / hammering the screen even though they do not have a card. They perhaps think it would give them some information such as the fares between stations. But that ignorance is certainly not a reason to smash the ATVMs.

Will certainly post photos the next time I observe this.

Update (11-Oct-2010): Here's a smashed and out-of-service ATVM. This one at Kanjurmarg railway station on the Central Railway. As usual, sorry for the poor quality (mobile cam).

Sunset over Powai lake

An old photograph with a now-obsolete camera. Thanks Nikon.

More ebooks bought

Following my new found interest in e-books coupled with good "deals" on e-books, I have bought a host of "new technology" books. More on this later.

Shuffle db for iPod Shuffle

I never was impressed with the way iTunes used to handle the syncing of songs; that had led me to use "gtkpod" for uploading music to my Shuffle. Though I had discovered "shuffle_db" more than a year back, I never had the opportunity to use it. I got that opportunity today.

After uploading new music to my Shuffle, simply running the Python script did the trick. The script hardly took 5 seconds to run, and I wasn't sure whether the song database (the .db) file was updated or not. But, the log file created did a mention of the folders and the number of songs it had found. Sure enough, the iPod was updated and ready to go.

Apart from the ease by which one can easily add new songs,  there is the added advantage that the songs can be copied to any folder on the Shuffle. In any addition, the the songs itself need not be renamed (like the way iTunes or gtkpod does so automatically). That has the added advantage of being able to plug-in the Shuffle and locate songs in the folders.

The project, "shuffle_db", itself is pretty old, and it looks like a dead project on SourceForge - one reason might be that the Shuffle itself might hardly be the player that people buy today. Of  course, the other disadvantage is that the latest version of the script requires a Python installation, but that's hardly a problem on Linux (especially Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu).

A brand new PC, a brand new post

After years of pulling along with upgrades and "hardware patches" to my dear old assembled PC, I finally buckled to the pressure from folks at home, and bought a branded new HP Desktop Pavilion (HP Pavilion P6373IN). The new PC arrived today. This new post is being typed in from the new PC.

Though there were several features I did not want, I decided to still buy this one. For some reason, I felt it looked quite good. Here's a list of features that I might never use:

• TV Tuner card
• Audio with 7.1 support
• Built-in wireless networking
• A 720 GB hard-disk (always a pain to backup such a huge disk; also its better to have several external disks to minimize the risk of a single point of failure)

On the other hand, below are some of the features that I though might be useful:

• A 20"monitor (useful for my parents)
• Wireless keyboard / mouse
• A nice CPU (Intel Core i3) and RAM (4 GB) configuration (but I guess this is pretty standard config these days)

Next steps:

• Install Firefox, Linux, and other essentials
• Install programmer tools

Will post updates to this blog.

Discovering the joy of eBooks

Until recently, I used to prefer the printed books. That way, one could refer to them anywhere even where there would be no access to an electronic device. Probably this also had to do with the lack of widespread use of personal computers we grew up. The problem with printed books related to computer technology is that most of them become outdated very quickly. These also tend to take up a lot of storage space (a premium in Mumbai).

I had recently ordered a newly released book for which there was no Indian reprint. In it, I found that they (the publishers) had offered the buyer of the printed book, a free download of the electronic version (PDF) of the book. I found it to be quite handy, for I could start reading it anywhere I had access to a computer (work or at home) without needing to lug it around.

I also realized that publishers now actively encourage readers to buy the electronic versions of their books (of course, not all books are available in their e-versions yet). One reason is the "go-green" effect to save paper (forests / trees). I also found that I had another very good reason to buy these...one could get the newly released books immediately (no need to wait for it to be shipped - all one needs to do is to download them).

With these enticing reasons, I have just completed buying 3 e-books today. Not only are the costs lower, but also I have these books for reading immediately.

Vox AmPlug: my return to the guitar world

Just bought a Vox AmPlug AC30 from Furtados' (suburban outlet). With this handy battery-powered device, one just needs to plug it into an electric guitar, and plug any standard earphone jack into the device. That way, one can practice with very little setup without disturbing anyone else. Great for trying out all those weird training books without inviting any sarcastic remarks.

Felt like buying the DigiTech RP 90 guitar effects processor, but was way too expensive around Rs. 7K.

Back to blogging

The home PC had an Internet connection that kept getting slower over the years. This year it was so slow that I had to wait for eternity to even load the blogging website. The workplace anyways does not encourage blogging on public websites. I had to almost give up blogging. The final nail in the coffin was when the home PC hard-disk conked off. Of course, I have a laptop, but the connection was so damn slow that I had to give up blogging for a while.

Now, I am back online. I recently bought the Reliance NetConnect Broadband which has at least acceptable speeds from my home (the speed is location dependent). I also used the USB modem while I was in Goa in October. The speed wasn't Broadband levels, but at least I had connectivity.

Hopefully this will re-activate my online life.

Back from Goa

A vacation to Goa with the family was a good way to end the Diwali festival this year. There was precious little to do while in Goa. Temples, churches, and beaches are the best way to describe Goa. And since I've been to Goa many times earlier, these places no longer beckoned. Instead, a quiet vacation at the company's holiday home was planned. Of course, 5 full days of not doing anything would bore any city dweller because of the habit of leading a fast-paced life. So, almost each morning and evening there were visits to specific locations, returning within 3 hours back to the holiday home.

I had thought of trying out some of the activities at the H2O water sports center. Some of the activities that interested me were the under-water walk, the glass bottom boat ride, and the dolphin cruise. Unfortunately, it seemed that they had not yet received licenses to start operations after the rainy season (during which the activities are closed). Fortunately, there were other places where the dolphin cruise was on. And, although it was nothing compared to whale spotting near Boston in the icy climate, it was still one of the better things that we did in Goa.

Other activities included a visit to the local science center; this had the usual stuff like at Mumbai (some displays not in working condition), but it had also had a short 3D film screening on underwater creatures. The river cruise on the Mandovi was boring (partly because I had been on it during earlier visits).

Other disappointments included not getting to visit the Dudhsagar waterfalls and other wildlife sanctuaries around Goa, and not being able to travel the scenic Konkan Railway route by train (no tickets available).

Thinking of starting a new blog

I am thinking of starting a new blog for posting technical (IT) things...still to decide on the blog name. Hoping that it'll be useful to me to keep a record of things learnt. It might also hope someone or the other looking for information.

Keep looking.