Rangaswamy Betta trip

Last weekend, i happened to go to a couple of places around bangalore. This being despite the serial bomb blasts that ripped apart bangalore.. After much consideration, me and my friend Bharathi decided to go to Rangaswamy Betta near kanakapura village. The inspiration got from the ever reliable dreamroutes.org description on this hill.

We started around 12 noon and took the kanakapura road on my super splendour. The blog had mentioned to take the harohalli road and get around from there to the particular hill. Harohalli village is around 30 odd kilometers from JP nagar. After taking the diversion there, missing the route twice, i thought this was the hill we were going to climb.



But then, after enquiring with some locals over there, we found that the route described in that blog was actually meant for trekking. You would need to go to the base of the hill and then trek up from there.. Since it was a fairly big trek and it was drizzling on and off, we decided to take the proper road up to the hill.

To do this, we had to catch kanakapura road, get back to kanakapura and then take another diversion from there.. Even though we lost time in this process, we did manage to get a good feel of rural bangalore..



Amazingly, roads in this part of the state are incredibly good barring a few minor potholes and the ride was smooth. After reaching kanakapura, you need to take a left immediately after the bus stand. After that, you just need to close your eyes and follow the well laid road (atleast as of july 2008). The best thing if you are in doubt is to stop and ask for directions. This hill spot is very famous among vilagers and every one will be more than happy to help you out.

We had reached a point in the hill where there was a small temple and some kids playing around. After that point, the good road ended and the path after that was very muddy with stones.. Also, the drizzle added to the complications and we didnt want to risk going any further with our two wheeler. Apparently the peak is about 4 kms from that point.




We decided to return since it was already 4:30 and light was beginning to fade fast. So after taking some quick snaps, we stopped by the temple again. We had a small photo session with the local kids who were more than excited to see a digi cam and some one interested in shooting them.











By the time we returned back to bangalore it was around 7pm and we found that some savages had bombed out ahmedabad..

Yet another search engine (YASE)

We should seriously start considering hosting a site called yase.com which lists a list of available search engines, link to their sites and what differentiates it from the rest of their peers. There is a new search engine around the block called cuil (http//cuil.com). Initially i thought it was the tamil world "kuyil" spelt in a cool way, but apparently its supposed to be pronounced as "cool" in a much cooler way.

This site, launched by ex-googlers is supposed to have indexed through a much larger set of pages than google currently does and also faster than google. I tried out a couple of searches though and i found that google gave me much more satisfactory results than cuil did.
Maybe its still catching up with the search algorithms and in the future would be considered as a serious competitor with google.. But for now, i am satisfied with googling for stuff on google! ;-)

The process

No words at all to describe this hilarious video!

A complex Hello World

Every one likes to start off learning new technology with a simple hello world application. It is a quick and easy way to get your hands dirty.. My first C program was an hello world 3 line code and my first JAVA program was an hello world program too.. with a simple static void main() function.. I have started looking into mule now.. And the tutorial mentions about a hello world program to start with. Well.. i took a look into it.. a couple of java files with tons of complicated xml configuration.. Looks like i am going to have a whale of time getting used to the enterprise world!

My new blog

As i venture out to seek wonderful opportunities in a different company, i realize that i cannot continue blogging in my corporate blog. So, going forward, i have decided to blog here. Hopefully i can post interesting things over here as i have done in the past.