I reached Singapore (20 days back)

Yeah, its been exactly 20 days since I reached Singapore. Its not that I was waiting for Jan 26 to write this blog, its just so happened that I was not able to write it any sooner.

Yeah, I landed here on Jan 6th morning. I was expecting my friend. He came by the time I had some currency changed and we took a taxi to the place where I was going to stay. It was a nice ride, as the Changi airport was in one side of the country and the place where I was going to stay was on the other side of the country. My friend explained the places while we were going through there. This place really is clean. And almost all the places you look, you can see the country growing upwards. Lots of sky scrapers.
In 20 -30 minutes, I reached the place where I stay - yes, that’s the time it takes for you to travel from one end of Singapore to the other end. My apartment is on the 21st floor of a building, and it is not every day, till now, that you will find yourself in the 21st floor of a building. The view is awesome.

View from My Place

By the time I started settling down, another of my friend who is my roommate came. We are both from Kerala and we had some initial talks and we concluded that our first priorities are to bath, get something to eat, get a mobile connection and call home and open a bank account if possible.
We bathed and dressed and got out to the nearest mall. The weather is almost the same as that of in Kerala, humid and warm. We found a place to get a tea/coffee and then started looking for a mobile shop. From our friends we knew that SingTel is the service provider we had to look for. I really was worried about how much time will it take for the connection to get activated as I had several experiences from India. We found a SingTel shop. Within 10-15 minutes, me and my friend was calling home to give the new number and updating other details. The process was very simple.
The next thing for us was to open a bank account. We knew the names of the banks we had to look for, POSB (Post Office and Savings Bank) or DBS (Development Bank of Singapore). I didn’t want to do this on the first day of our arrival since I was really tired and opening a bank account requires so many formalities and all. But to our surprise, we finished all the formalities and I had a bank account, with ATM card and internet banking within 20minutes.
Here are some facts about Singapore. Everything about Singapore is EFFICIENT and CLEAN. There is no ethnic group as a Singaporean, and the ethnic groups here are Chinese, Indians (8%), Malay and Eurasians. Out of the whole population, around 25% are foreigners. Since there are so many familiar Indian faces, you won’t really feel that you are in a foreign country. As compared to India, cost of travel and living are high here. But the standards are equally high here.

Roads in Singapore – View from a sky pass

The next day, we went to university and registered. And so we officially became students in National University of Singapore. This time we didn’t even have to go to the embassy to get our student passes, they were there in the university and we just had to go and collect them. By the time I completed my registration, I had made some friends here and one of my best friends was here on transit. We all had a nice time. Since Singapore is a small place, it will take only around 3-4 days for you to explore the whole place.
I think I have visited almost all tourist places in Singapore, except for the ones which require entry passes, ‘cos they are really costly. I have been to Little India - its small India, you’ll really fell like you have reached India and I met some mallu people there, China Town - since the Chinese new year was due, that place was awesome, Sentosa - An island theme park, Clarke Quay, Raffles Place - The place where there is a giant Mer-lion, Chinese/Japanese Garden - very near to the place I stay etc etc. I even made it to the republic day celebrations here in the Indian embassy today. It was nicer than most of the celebrations happening in our places.
I want to write a blog about every single one of those expeditions and my experiences in singapore. I hope I will be able to make it. Since the classes have already started, I have lots and lots to study and work on. Still I am pretty sure that I will find time to update about my experiences here to bug my readers…
Here are some photos..

Chinese/Japanese Garden

China Town

Underwater World - Sentosa

Raffles Place - Merlion: With my friends

Near City Hall

Gaint Wheel near the Mer-lion Statue

Farewell Bangalore

Dear Bangalore,
I still remember the day I first set my sight on you. Little did I know that you will play a crucial role in my life. It was in 2002, during my engineering days. I was on my 5th semester tour. I can still feel the cold climate and the smell of the fresh flowers. Those big shopping malls, the pubs and the ultra modern folks (chics) here instantly made you one of my dream cities. All those stories about software professionals making a nice living here, oh! man, I had decided that you are the one city I want to be in.

Fall 2003
I came again for the 7th semester tour and by that time me and my friends wanted to spend some quality time here with you and that’s one main reason we chose to do our final year project here. Those were the days, when I started loving you – fall 2003. I think I loved everything about you. The New Year (2004) celebrations in Brigade road – I don’t think I will ever forget it. Even I loved the journeys to and from my native to you.

Again
Again, you crossed path with my life even if not for long in spring 2005 in when I started ‘hunting’ for a job. But fortunately or unfortunately, I got my job in Trivandrum. Then again, I knew that someday I am going to come back to you. And that’s why, when I got an offer from here, I was really excited. But before coming here, I heard many rumors about the pathetic traffic conditions, the slowly disappearing cold climate etc.

Expectations
What I expected was not what I saw in here. A city which is so polluted with dust and garbage, roads filled with vehicles and dogs, malls and shop keepers who wanted to grab the money in my pocket to theirs, auto rickshaw drivers who will kill if they get a chance etc. I really got scared at first seeing the changed you and because of the change in climatic conditions, I was having fever, cold etc on a regular basis. I even thought about leaving you. My regular readers are aware of my attitude towards you, I guess.

Time is a healer
Getting used to things we confront daily is a quality (good or bad?) of the human race. Slowly I started liking you. One important thing I like about you is the personal space you gave me. Also the technological community here and the exposure I got from you were simply amazing. I realized there is a world like this. It totally changed my outlook towards life itself. I had a very good team and work environment, a new circle of friends, lots of parties to attend, all those nice hotels where I could try different variety of dishes, the beautiful climate which helped me maximizing my artistic talents and so on.

Farewell
Finally the time has come for me to move on. In this journey of life, I have reached a point where I have to part with you, my beautiful friend. I have no idea what is there in store for me in the future. May be I will fall in love with the next city I am moving to. May be I am never going to come back to you. But looking back now, I can see vividly, the influence you have in my life. With so many challenges, experiences, happy times, sad times, you have a very special place in my heart. And that place will ever be there, no matter where I go or what I become. I really hope I will be able to come back some day to you and I know, if that day comes, you will be here with your warm welcome, just like you welcome anyone who comes to you. Farewell Bangalore.

With warm love and regards
- Manu

Aliasing an Ethernet Interface in Linux

For the last couple of weeks, I was busy with my work. I’ve had a really good time and I thought I will share something I learned during that time here.

My work was related to some thing of the client-server model. For testing, we were simulating multiple clients and servers in the same PC. First we were using the same IP address and different ports. Later, before moving to the real world scenario, we wanted to test with different IP address. Since the number of clients was huge, we couldn’t run the tests in single PCs. Thats then we decided to bring up multiple interfaces in a single PC and test it. This helped in testing one more level deeper before moving to the actual hardware. [Even then, we had to use different TCP/UDP ports since there is only one TCP/UDP stack in the system]

For this purpose, I was doing some research on how to alias and bring up multiple Ethernet interfaces in a Linux system. I couldn’t easily find any help on how to bring up aliased interfaces using C [I found many references about aliasing using Ifconfig command]. So, I wrote a generic application which can bring up multiple aliased interfaces. Here is the code. I believe I have made it as simple as I can and you can modify and try experiments on your own. To start with, you can try changing different members in the ifreq structure.

When I showed this to a colleague of mine - who happens to be a scripting guru - he wrote a small script which can be used to bring up multiple interfaces. This may also be useful I guess. Anyway, you are free to take this and do experiments on your own.

For more info about the structures used in the program, here are the links.
struct sockaddr_in
struct ifreq
Please share your comments and thoughts so that I can improve the ways I do coding. Special thanks to Bala who wrote the script and Adil, who provided me with the code to start off with.

ps: I am really sorry that I have put the code as an image, I don't know why, but I was not able to put the code as it is, it was giving me some problems.

The Lake House

I’ve always wondered how they make such beautiful stories about love, capture it in the film so perfect that you never want to come out of the magical world, the movie has taken you to. I’ve stumbled up on one such movie recently.

It was a rainy day. I love to simply sit in my house, look out through the glass window, and see the rain. I was alone in my home. The mood was getting on to me. I felt lonely. I selected the movie “The Lake House” as a pass time, just because of my love towards buildings by river/lake sides. But it turned out to be an amazing movie.

The movie had all the elements I would love spending all my time for. A ‘seductively beautiful’ house by the lake side- a glass box - which gives you a gorgeous view of the lake, almost like one which I always dream of building myself, a gifted architect (a profession which I admire) who lives in the house, a really scenic place – something which I long to own one day, those sunsets you can enjoy from the lake house, and a beautiful story of love which is so impossible and mysterious, where there is no place for logic, but one which make you wish that it is real. And a magical mailbox, which makes everything a reality.


“What if you found, the one you were meant for? But you lived two years apart?” What if the one person who walked right in to your life, turned it around, is two years apart from your life? One person whom you can never meet, but the one you want to give your whole heart to. Even though its clearly impossible, it’s amazing to see what love can do to us, all of us.


Yeah, that’s the theme of the movie. Sounding absurd? It sounded the same way to me when I saw the trailer. Now it’s another fairytale which I like to keep very close to my heart.







Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/thelakehouse/small.html
Site: http://thelakehousemovie.warnerbros.com/

Guilty as Charged

Here is the reply I got from the Mr. B Krishnamoorthy Bajaj Regional Manager, Bangalore about my complaint (previous blog).

Dear Mr Manu,
Noted the contents of your mail and we sincerely apologise for the experience which you had with our service centre.

Your feedbacks are very valid and would help the dealer to improve on customer service
We are taking up the feedback with the concerned dlr and we assure you better experience during your future visits.
For any future service assistance pl contact me or my colleague Mr Manoj Manoharan, from our Bangalore Regional office.
Assuring our best services.
Regards,

B Krishnamoorthy
Regional Manager-Service
Bajaj auto ltd
Bangalore

Atleast I got the satisfaction that I had done something to resist customer exploitation. After I got this mail, I got a call from another guy (forgot his name) on behalf of Mr. B Krishnamoorty apologizing for the incident. He said it’s good that I submitted the feedback, so that they can improve customer service. He also assured me that there had been some internal action taken and the corresponding person from Amba Bajaj will call me. As expected, Mr. Hithranjan Kumar from Amba Bajaj called me and we ‘discussed’ about the incident for some 15-20 minutes. Finally he concluded that, its their mistake and he apologized for that and he assured me that I can contact him anytime for any assistance. He also wanted me to reply to the regional manager’s mail about our discussion. Anyway, I now feel that there is some customer service after all, and some one will reply to the complaints of a customer, if you complain at the right place.