Monday, April 01, 2013

Ajmera Infinity - location review

Went to Ajmera Infinity over the weekend to checkout the property and see if there are flats available for sale. Its been over 3-4 years since I went to that part of the city - Electronics City and that too the road next to Wipro. What I saw amazed me!

In those short years, the amount of development on the road has been extraordinary.  The road next Wipro (which is actually outside of electronics city) is a shortcut that a friend had told me about. That shortcut takes you to Bannerghatta road. At that time, there were no apts but the Concorde apts were coming up. This time, there are over a dozen projects - either completed or nearly completion. 

Its the location that makes the difference. With a huge number of IT companies in Electronics City, this is the ideal place for property development. Hence, the location of Ajmera Infinity is really good esp. if you work in any of those IT companies. Probably that's what's driving the cost - 4100/- for the remaining 2 flats in D block and 4740/- for the upcoming S and T blocks. That means a tiny 1000 sft 2BHK will set you back a whopping Rs. 4700000!

And that's what I'm not sure about. Its likely that Electronics City will become a fully self contained suburb. In which case, the price is really worth it because you don't have to set out of the suburb for anything. But then, I'm not sure if that's really true for someone from Bangalore. Maybe if you are coming in from another part of India to settle in Bangalore, it makes sense. But otherwise, probably not.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Yesterday's Race - Malaysia 2013

Well, I missed the race (more on that later). But looks like there is a furore about Vettel passing Webber despite team orders.

Firstly, I didn't know that RBR gave team orders "against" Vettel. That's pretty amazing to know.
Secondly, you don't become a triple WDC by standing by and watching your teammate win. As Senna once said, if you see a gap and you don't go for it, you are not a racing driver. Looks like Vettel is from that school!
Thirdly, its tough on Webber, but I'm sure he'll bounce back. I don't think he will go down the path of childish "revenge" - the kind we saw between Alonso and Hamilton. Atleast, I hope he doesn't. Because that childishness caused McLaren a WDC and WCC in 2007.

Winners/Losers - your guess. I haven't seen the race, so, no idea!

If anything, I learnt about "multi-21". I guess it means you hold all the Aces, but then the dealer shafts you by getting two Jacks. 

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Yesterday's Race - Aus 2013

Well, its 2013 and its time for another season of "Yesterday's Race".

The winners -

1. Kimi - Won by a mile and made me smile!
2. Alonso - I thought he was faster than Massa in the beginning stint and showed exactly that after the 2nd round of pitstops.
3. Vettel - Well... He can't win them all, can he?
4. Sutil - My word. Where did that come from? I'm not a natural Force India fan, but it was great to see him in front of the other cars. The FI strategy towards the end was a bit strange. They could have gotten him in and out in Mediums once the Super-Softs went off the cliff. That would have been really interesting!

Losers -

1. McLaren - Did they even race? Without Lewis's raw pace, I suspect they are going to be be stuck where they are unless the car has an advantage. I don't think Jenson and Perez are the kind of drivers who can take this car and make it do something it doesn't want to do.
2. Both the Nicos. One didn't start the GP and one shouldn't have bothered. Both DNF'ed

There is only a week before we are at hot hot Malaysia. I expect the RBRs to have better race pace in hotter weather. If anything, I'm looking forward for some Icecream.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Nanda Road - Morning Run

Yup - I got off my butt and did a run. 1 Lap of Nanda road at 7.00 in the morning. Its a 4k Loop; not the longest I have run, but definitely one of the most healthy. The fresh air at 7.00AM is just superb.

Having said all that, there were things that were disappointing - Garbage on the roads esp. where crosses meet the service road. This is where Bangalore needs to really improve. After all, we don't want to become one more Surat, right?

Sunday, March 03, 2013

My first 5K

That's right! I did a 5K run. The event was for Women's day and so, both Kavya and I jumped at the chance. Since, the route was through cubbon park, it was pretty awesome. Speed wasn't the greatest in the world, but then who cares? The important thing is that we finished. 5K.

Next goal - sub 30min 5K. So, its time to do some serious training!

Thursday, February 28, 2013

How to deal with crazy people at the office?

I'm not sure but I'm learning how to right now. Its a real experience! After two months of pain, I finally decided to google for an answer. The first thing that came up was http://www.dumblittleman.com/2009/07/9-useful-strategies-to-dealing-with.html.

Looks like I'm doing everything wrong. Time to take on a new track. As its said in the Gita - focus on work and duty. 

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Wading into a flame

Spent the afternoon building X11, Wayland, Weston etc.. Got past many issues except the last bit - weston. Weston is the reference compositor. It depends on a number of things include libudev. And that's where we run into a big problem. libudev is part of systemd, which for some reason depends on intltool. intltool by itself does not advertise it but requires gettext!

So, basically if you want a nice graphical compositor you need internationalization work.  One more vote for udev to split from systemd.

Linux News - Feb 10, 2013


1 Linux Graphics

1.1 FOSDEM 2013. I'm sharing slides specific to Linux graphics, X11 and Wayland.

1.3 More wayland updates.

2 Linux Distros

2.1 Fedora 18 for ARM released

2.2 So what is a Linux distribution?

  • A Distro is the Linux operating system built on top of the kernel. Wikipedia has a great timeline of how different distros evolved. Each distro has its own goal. In general, here's a list of Linux Distros supporting Pandaboard.
DistroDownload LinkInstructions
Ubuntu (Desktop Image)http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-12.10-desktop-armhf+omap4.imgDownload and flash to SD Card
Ubuntu (Server Image)http://releases.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-12.10-server-armhf+omap4.imgDownload and flash to SD Card
Linarohttp://releases.linaro.org/12.03/ubuntu/oneiric-images/nanoDownload and flash to SD Card
Fedorahttp://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/18/Images/armhfp/Fedora-18-panda-armhfp.img.xzDownload and flash to SD Card
Arch Linuxhttp://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/pandaboardDownload and flash to SD Card
DebianNo direct support but supports OMAP3 (Beagleboard) and ARMv7 in generalUse Debootstrap to create ARMv7 image and flash to SD Card
Gentoohttp://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/pandaboard/install.xmlUse a PC running Gentoo and build image by compiling every software from scratch. Then flash to SD Card
Yoctohttps://www.yoctoproject.org/download/yocto-project-13-poky-80 + Meta-TIhttps://github.com/Angstrom-distribution/meta-tiUse a PC and build image by compiling every software from scratch. Then flash to SD Card
Buildroothttp://buildroot.uclibc.org/download.htmlUse a PC and build image by compiling every software from scratch. Then flash to SD Card
SlackwareNo direct support but supports ARMv5+ -ftp://ftp.arm.slackware.com:slackwarearm/slackwarearm-14.0Port from QEMU to OMAP4

2.3 Phoronix's comparision of 4 distros on Pandaboard