Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

I am not a Christian, but Christmas has become part and parcel of my holiday season for the last decade or so. There are lots of candies and cakes topped off with cheerful mood around and sober weather. So our family makes it a point to celebrate it!

We bought a small Christmas tree (from Walgreens, USD 14.99 minus 50% discount) that came with lot of ornaments about 7-8 years ago. Every year we loose some ornaments but the tree is still there, having traveled to India with us.

This year Spurthi’s wish list is very small, just candies and cookies. Surya didn’t even bother to write a list. Yesterday being a Sunday, I had to rush to a couple of shops to pickup some stuff for them.

This morning, having seen a gift under the tree, kids drank their chocolate milk in a hurry (shows up on Surya’s shirt with all those wet patches) and are all set to open the pack.

Opening the bag! What do we find there? Wow! Power Rangers! Show them! Here is what we got! At the tree. Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

What do you do when you realize that you ran out of gift wrap, close to midnight on Christmas Eve? That happened in my case, because I buy gift wraps en masse (like 20 sheets or so) once in a while and its tough to keep track of the stocks. Read on, especially if you think like me: “I can fix anything with duct tape!”

First, scavenge for a plastic/paper bag that has Christmas colors, like red or green. Preferably one that doesn’t have store name. In India, people use wooden frame beds with mattresses on it, so the best place to look for bags is under then mattress, on the wooden frame. Like this:

Once you find a suitable bag, insert all the gifts (in my case, I chose use one single pack for both my kids) carefully into the bag, trying to maintain a cuboid shape. Then seal the bag with tape as if sealing a gift wrap around a box. If there are any gaps in the wrapping, cover them with suitable paper, or ignore them. Now, find another bag, preferably with handles, that presents some decent contrast, yet has holiday colors. Now place this bag under the Christmas tree. You are all set!

Three tests being played simultaneously is a rarity by itself. All those tests producing a result is a bigger rarity. On top of that, all the three tests have concluding on the same day would be unbelievable.

India won on South Africa, the former’s first test win on SA soil.

Australia won on England, to clinch the series with a 3-0 lead, two more tests pending.

Sri Lanka won on New Zealand, to level the two test series.

Interestingly, the team who batted first won in all these tests, bowling out the opposition in their second innings.

Writing this blog at the close of India’s second innings batting in the first test. Its great to watch the partnership of Ganguly and Laxman yesterday. Today, Laxman provided more entertainment by inching to a solid 71 runs.

Ironically, both the batsmen who were considered to be unfit for the series, Ganguly ans Laxman, are the only ones who could manage a half-century in the 3 innings of the match so far. The totals scored by these people, Ganguly with 76 (51*+25) and Laxman with 101 (28+73) top the charts on the Indian side. Hope they continue this form throughout the series, which may spell troubles for SA for the first time against India at home.

So these unfits, Ganguly and Laxman, are the bestfits for the first test! Well played!

On Monday and Tuesday I spent my time in Vizag, visiting Andhra University. We had a decent time given with Vice Chancellor, Principals of the colleges and Heads of some key departments. The entire discussion is centered around the benefits of using Open Source products and Sun’s key role in the opensource community. We talked about OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, OpenSparc, OpenJDK, NetBeans, etc. The preso is well received. However, we had only about 30-45 minutes to talk about the technologies. After that, we opened it up for Q&A and it is a very interesting and inquisitive discussion to some details.

After the meeting, Vardhini and myself spent some time with Prof. Apparao, Principal of College or Engineering. We took forward the previous discussion and talked about some key requirements of the college.

Then we went on to meet Prof. KVSVN Raju and Vallikumari of CS & E. We also met Ramprasad from SRKR engg. college. The discussion is centered around the recently introduced M.Tech. courses and how we can use opensource technologies in them.

Overall, it is a very good trip. Since the place is not well connected by flights, we spent an extra day during travel. Otherwise, it would have been a short and sweet one.

Today, I realized that 8 top cricket playing nations are playing one match or the other.

• India vs. South Africa 1st Test, 2nd Day
• Pakistan vs. West Indies 5th Oneday
• Australia vs. England Ashes Series 3rd Test, 3rd Day
• NewZeland vs. SriLanka 2nd Test, 2nd Day

That makes all sports channels in India broadcast one match or other. Pretty busy day .

I traveled from Hyderabad to Vizag (Visakhapatnam) on Monday and returned back on Tuesday. Flight to Vizag is by Kingfisher Airlines. The plane is an ATR, but the interiors are very well done and the flight is very well maintained. The flight was longer by 30 minutes, but the in flight service is excellent. The food is great, especially the non-veg choice I had.

The Vizag airport is so small that may be around 150 people can sit in all lounges (checkin, security check etc.) combined together. If you consider airports like Bangalore and Hyderabad small, this one is tiny.

While coming back to Hyderabad, we are putup in Indian. We came to airport about 2 hours before the scheduled departure, only to find that the flight is delayed by 30 minutes. Further during the wait, the flight schedule kept on changing. Finally, we got thru the security check even before the flight arrived from its previous leg. The flight which is supposed to start at 11.15am finally arrived into the airport by 1.00pm and we are boarded by 1.20pm or so. This is a Boeing 737, supposed to be much better than the ATR we took a day ago.
What happened later is both scary, funny and irritating. We are taxied to the tarmac and are waited there, with no air-conditioning and all. It was so suffocating that I cursed myself for wearing a full sleeves shirt. On top of that, with engines on, the plane presented a scary picture, moving every part of the cabin. Well, me and my coworker Vardhini resorted to humor, to get past the scary scene presented by the suffocating flight. Finally we took off after about 30 minutes of roasting in the oven-like cabin.

The food was horrible. Looks like there is an attempt to shy away people from eating. They just have a veg-only choice, further killing my appetite. Finally, we reached Hyderabad by 2.50, about 2.5 hours beyond the expected arrival.

Two contrast flying experiences. Vardhini’s observation is that the ATR gave more confidence of reaching our destination than this aging 737.

What we did in Vizag is another blog entry.

Earlier today, I am googling around to find some accommodations in Vizag (Visakhapatnam) and ended up with this list of hotels in Vizag. The the site enthused me more and finally ended up spending quite some time on this site of Vizag Municipal Corporation. This site seems like a very well thought about site for a government institution. Interesting links from main page are the ways to pay the city taxes online, a Suggest and Win contest, etc. Overall, a pretty good site!

On Nov 30th, ISO published the ODF (Open Document Format) as a standard. Traditionally, opensource movement is considered by many as orthogonal to standardization. However, this is a great example of how opensource movement can drive towards open standards.

For a team that scores 500+ runs batting first, that too, after declaring with just six wickets down, it is very rare to loose the test. However, Australia enforced a remarkable loss on England, thanks to great second innings bowling by Warne and good batting by Ponting and Hussey. England declared their first innings after scoring 551/6, yet faced a six wicked loss on the last day. Great test win by Australia!